You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

The big result there is this: <i>&quot;Poor performances in technical interviewing happen to most people, even people who are generally very strong. However, when we looked at our data, we discovered that after a poor performance, women are 7 times more likely to stop practicing than men.&quot;</i><p>On the hiring side, &quot;For the specific case of an online job posting, on average, 1,000 individuals will see a job post, 200 will begin the application process, 100 will complete the application, 75 of those 100 resumes will be screened out by either the ATS or a recruiter, 25 resumes will be seen by the hiring manager, 4 to 6 will be invited for an interview, 1 to 3 of them will be invited back for final interview, 1 will be offered that job and 80 percent of those receiving an offer will accept it (Talent Function Group LLC).&quot; This implies that 80% of interviews lead to rejection.<p>Given that level of rejection, the key here is to get women to know the odds and keep trying.

Indians of Asian descent are a minority in the US, but well represented in Software Engineering. Further, there are plenty more Indian, Chinese, and Russian female engineers, than there are American (of european, aka White) female engineers.<p>I am less inclined to believe there is systemic bias against women, and minorities, and instead a culture difference between groups who are well represented in engineering, and groups which are not.

<i>&quot;We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game.”</i><p>I understand that people here hate technical interviews, but are we going to skip over the fact that the whole premise of this article is that the technical interview is awful for everybody, but minorities are more affected, because their poor little brains can’t figure that out? It’s ridiculous that you’d ever even propose that some &quot;VP of Diversity and Inclusion” has anything to do with hiring of engineers. Why is this garbage being given any thought on HN is baffling to me.

This is because the technical interview has completely degenerated into an arms race. It started with good intentions. It used to be just, here&#x27;s a problem, try to solve it and let&#x27;s discuss. And at first it was fine. But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to &quot;show off&quot; and impress the interviewer. So everyone started to focus on those to impress the interviewer. Then the interviewers noticed and started to state they would only be impressed by more and more obscure algorithms and data structures.<p>And then the real downward spiral began with the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview. More books were published, a whole industry to support this. Then came the sites like leetcode and HackerRank. Now there&#x27;s a lot of money supporting and pushing for continuing this stupid process. And the arms race just keeps getting worse and worse. The interviewers expect more and more obscure algorithms and data structures and justify it with &quot;must avoid false positives&quot;. This just increases the study time for candidates and they&#x27;re willing to spend time and money to do it. And the tech interview industry (all the books and sites) are happy to push this arms race since it&#x27;s more money for them. Now they have enough money to go openly defend the tech interview as the &quot;best practice&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not even enough to get the right answer now. You have to do it fast enough or you fail. And now they care about syntax on a whiteboard. None of this used to be true. It all started as a way to see how you approach a problem and discussing it. No expectations that you would correctly get Algorithm ABC and Data Structure XYZ. No expectation that the syntax is correct, pseudo code was ok. No expectation even on a complete working solution, the point was just to see if you can reason about the problem.<p>All that is gone, replaced by the tech interview arms race. Now it&#x27;s just a massive speed pattern matching contest to see if you&#x27;ve studied enough to hopefully cover the obscure problem the interviewer will pick and if you can correctly pattern match in time based on the hundreds of questions you did on leetcode. Completely useless and against the original intent of tech interviews.

<i>Technical interviews are moving in the direction of more concreteness</i><p>Herein lies the scam. (Disclaimer: It&#x27;s not on purpose, they&#x27;re lying to themselves too)<p>Just because you have a process to produce a &quot;concrete&quot; result, that doesn&#x27;t mean it doesn&#x27;t stand on a house of cards.<p>I&#x27;d have to sit and have a think to make a clearer explanation than by analogy, so here&#x27;s an analogy. This reminds me of the way people with an insufficient anti-authoritarian streak are more willing to question a person&#x27;s on the spot decision than a decision from systematic, bureaucracy or law.<p>Just because more time and process has gone into establishing them, doesn&#x27;t necessitate that the decisions are any better founded than what some rando pulls out of their ass.<p>Because, at the end of the day, taking the technical portion of the interview itself too seriously is the real fraud. There is exactly one way to tell how well someone will be able to contribute to our team, with our technologies, in our environment after a few weeks of getting up to speed. And that&#x27;s to hire them.<p>The technical portion of the interview isn&#x27;t useful beyond a low-bar rule-out criteria. After that, the technical portion turns back towards the softer skills of how the interviewee handles hitting a wall at problem solving in a field where nobody knows everything.

Let. us. fire. people.<p>The current environment in tech is as follow: Someone goes through an interview process. Depending on the result, they get brought in or not. If they are brought in, they accept an offer. Usually it will contain some kind of language about blah blah trial period 3 months blah blah, sometimes in precise terminology, sometimes vaguely.<p>If someone is absolutely useless right off the bat, immediately everyone&#x27;s like &quot;but but we need to coach them, they just started, they&#x27;ll get better&quot;. If after 3 months they&#x27;re still useless, then it&#x27;s &quot;Blah blah it&#x27;s the company&#x27;s responsibility to keep them around and coach them because we hired them and we failed at interview&quot;.<p>That can only happen so many times (and can ruin teams or entire companies) before you start getting downright paranoid when interviewing. Maybe you have a lot of false positive and false negative, but if your interview process is Google-like enough, on average you&#x27;ll turn out okay-ish (source: Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;whatever other company with such an interview process. They have some pretty strong teams in there). But since it&#x27;s so hard to get rid of a bad apple, you can&#x27;t take risks (Im being told Netflix is good at getting rid of people).<p>Change the game a bit: make it easy to get rid of bad apples early on. You know the interview process is bad anyway. Give people a chance. If they&#x27;re actually competent, they have nothing to worry about. They&#x27;ll get hired, prove their worth, and stick around. If they&#x27;re bad, well, bye bye. Then we no longer have to rely on excruciatingly stupid interview processes.<p>A lot of people think this is inhumane&#x2F;heartless. That big evil corporations MUST provide people with jobs and must keep them no matter how bad they are because they have bills to pay. I say its heartless to not give people a chance to prove themselves (or to fail while at least trying).

Notice that according to the very figures cited by the article and released by Google and Facebook, as well as other uncited figures released by Yahoo, Amazon, and LinkedIn, whites are actually <i>underrepresented</i> with respect to the general population of white Americans, not overrepresented, and minorities collectively are therefore actually <i>overrepresented</i>, not underrepresented. This is primarily due to Asians being so overrepresented with respect to the general population of Asian Americans, by as much as a factor of ten.<p>Yet amazingly, the charges that tech &quot;lacks diversity,&quot; is &quot;too white,&quot; or even &quot;overwhelmingly white&quot;[1][2][3] haven&#x27;t let up even as the hard data refuting them has become available, and may even have intensified. In fact, many of these critics, like the author of the linked article, actually attempt to use the very data that refutes their point to somehow support it--an indication, perhaps, of the &quot;post-fact&quot; era leftists so often complain we&#x27;re now living in.<p>Little wonder is it then that Trump&#x27;s white supporters despise journalists so much, considering how deeply so many journalists seem to despise white Americans.<p>1) <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-white-males&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;29&#x2F;technology&#x2F;google-white-male...</a><p>2) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jun&#x2F;02&#x2F;googles-staff-worldwide-still-overwhelmingly-white-and-asian-men" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jun&#x2F;02&#x2F;googles-s...</a><p>3) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;answer-sheet&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;21&#x2F;why-we-should-diversify-the-overwhelming-white-u-s-teaching-force-and-how&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;answer-sheet&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;...</a>

I agree that tech interviews are terrible, and you cannot do any sort of self-reflection on them (especially if they are these q&#x2F;a and or puzzle types where they don&#x27;t give you answers or feedback of what you are looking for, despite being reasonably confident you answered correctly -- even after having requested the feedback -- I had this experience at GitLab)<p>&gt; We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game<p>I just don&#x27;t understand this reasoning. Can someone explain differently?<p>I also agree with a later point -- no firm should have a &quot;VP of Diversity and Inclusivity&quot; but for different reasons.

I consider myself a competent developer, but I have no academic background as I am self-taught. While I have had a steady supply of work, because of this, I will most likely never get to work for a big company like Microsoft, Google or Facebook because I wouldn&#x27;t pass their technical interview. I lack the understanding of core computer science principles and I am okay with admitting that, I don&#x27;t think it makes me a bad developer or inferior to my peers who have computer science degrees. Most developers I know envy the fact I have no student debt and said if they could do it over again, they would go the self-taught route.<p>Technical interviews are broken because they favour developers fresh out of college or with academic backgrounds. Not every development task is a coding problem or puzzle, rarely do you ever need to write your own algorithm implementation in real world situations. The times you do, most developers (even the intelligent ones) will Google. My problem solving ability is decent enough I am at a senior level and always complete what is asked of me, but give me a code golf&#x2F;coding puzzle and unrealistic constraints like only being able to solve it on a whiteboard? I will fail. Ask me to solve problems on sheets of paper as quick as possible? I will fail.<p>Give me a laptop, an IDE and ask me to build something. Better yet, sit me down with one of the developers in your team, give me a simple Jira task and ask me to help solve it pair-programming style. I would rather hire a developer who can get things done opposed to being able to solve a non-real world programming puzzle I found on Google. Interviews seem to forgo the highly acknowledged fact that developers rely on Google&#x2F;StackOverflow than companies care to admit.<p>Problem solving is one percentage of the hiring equation, being a great developer also requires patience, cooperation, understanding and communication. I think above anything else, a developer who is a good communicator is a dream combination. I would take communication skills over coding puzzle solving skills any day of the week.<p>Even the much beloved FizzBuzz test is a scam. Any developer can memorize a FizzBuzz implementation 10 minutes prior to the interview. I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up. Maybe it worked in 1999, but not in 2016.

Honestly, the more I read about all those &quot;diversity initiatives&quot;, &quot;outreach campaigns&quot; and &quot;pushes to increase H1B&quot; caps - the more I wonder about the intent and motivation of the people pulling the strings and funding the groups fighting so hard to further those causes. My comment is only tangentially related to hiring practices.<p>Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously starts to look like an organized campaign to 1&#x2F; increase the supply of engineers in the valley 2&#x2F; increase competition for access to a limited supply of jobs 3&#x2F; maintain engineers as a inexpensive, replaceable and unorganized workforce (in the face of increasing demand).<p>To address the diversity numbers of Facebook, I wonder what are they exactly suggesting when they mean that it is not &quot;diverse&quot;? At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for &quot;too many white people&quot; or &quot;too many asians&quot;. To clear that out and maybe find out that I am mistaken, I want to know with what kind of demographic breakdown would proponents of diversity be pleased. Should it follow the US racial distribution? Or have equal proportions of people from each race?<p>Finally, I think that a breakdown according to class would be much more interesting than this document. Since race is only skin deep, I do believe that having people from all walks of life would be a better optima than having people of different colors (that are all upper middle class).

[Disclaimer: I run <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;Interviewkickstart.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;Interviewkickstart.com</a>]<p>Thanks Aline. Excellent article, as always.<p>Not that any interview process is perfect, but another reason why the current process is not going away, is sheer <i>convenience</i>, especially for the fast growing core tech companies that don&#x27;t have a pipeline problem. When you have hundreds of people applying for any open role, and you&#x27;re under pressure to deliver products quarter after quarter, your incentive is to stick to a process that gives reasonable results, fast enough.<p>e.g. Google has estimated 40K engineers. With a 10 year average time on job (it&#x27;s probably less), G is hiring 40K engineers every 10 years just to sustain itself. That&#x27;s a massive operation and the incentive of any company at that scale, is to design a multi-layer, fast process. They are looking for 40K engineers that pass that process, not necessarily 40k best engineers from their pipeline.<p>Considering diversity with that little attention span is possible, but very hard to do. And like you said, technology is possibly the only way diversity hiring can be encouraged&#x2F;enforced.

I think the conversation about diversity in tech often overlooks a key metric, which is the percentage of tech companies that are founded by and&#x2F;or employ a majority of minorities.<p>For example, if its accurate to say that over 88% of US tech companies are founded by white people and employ mostly white people, then a diversity issue exists in the number of tech companies founded by black people and employing mostly black people.<p>As a black american, it&#x27;s interesting that the approach to tech diversity so often revolves around the concept of hiring minorities to help fulfil the goals of existing (mostly white) companies.<p>An approach that feels more altruistic to me would be to empower minorities to build their own tech companies to solve their own types of problems, and hire people who are a good &#x27;culture fit.&#x27;<p>Instead of diversifying employees, diversify the companies and let them naturally attract diverse employees.

Interviews in general have a lot of problems: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lesswrong.com&#x2F;lw&#x2F;3gv&#x2F;statistical_prediction_rules_outperform_expert&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lesswrong.com&#x2F;lw&#x2F;3gv&#x2F;statistical_prediction_rules_out...</a><p>&gt;Unstructured interviews reliably degrade the decisions of gatekeepers (e.g. hiring and admissions officers, parole boards, etc.). Gatekeepers (and SPRs) make better decisions on the basis of dossiers alone than on the basis of dossiers and unstructured interviews. (Bloom and Brundage 1947, DeVaul et. al. 1957, Oskamp 1965, Milstein et. al. 1981; Hunter &amp; Hunter 1984; Wiesner &amp; Cronshaw 1988). If you&#x27;re hiring, you&#x27;re probably better off not doing interviews.<p>The &quot;make candidate solve puzzles&quot; technical interview sounds like a very poorly designed IQ test. Just replacing it with more objective standardized IQ tests would help a lot.

Why diversity is needed to be fixed in the first place? Pizza business is dominated by italians and kebap by turkish, and nobody tries to fix diversity issues in those industries. Somehow every industry finds its own best people and the balance, I don&#x27;t understand the need of fixing it. Nursery is dominated by women and men are underpresented there, should we also fix it?

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;24&#x2F;perceptions-of-required-ability-act-as-a-proxy-for-actual-required-ability-in-explaining-the-gender-gap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;01&#x2F;24&#x2F;perceptions-of-required...</a>

I&#x27;ve seen a number of tech interviews where the interviewer has played down candidates that were better than them (consciously or not). I&#x27;ve also been a interviewee many times and sensed a one-upmanship from the interviewer(s), and subsequently avoid those companies. I could easily see this also being another factor if someone isn&#x27;t in tune with the norms of the industry to call BS and walk.

It&#x27;s more than fixing the technical interview process. Bottom line is western culture does not raise daughters to succeed in tech. From my own experiences 80% of the chemists I&#x27;ve worked with (including leadership) are female - so it&#x27;s not a total failure in STEM education.

&gt; We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest…<p>Turns out, people who are bad at technical interviews, are underrepresented at companies who use technical interviews to hire employees.

I&#x27;ve been in software tech for nearly 30 years. Never had a &quot;technical&quot; interview, puzzle solving, or anything like that. I would not take a job that screened candidates that way.<p>If references and credentials and track record aren&#x27;t enough, I would look elsewhere.

They have a big figure labelled &quot;People Can&#x27;t Gauge Their Own Interview Perfomance&quot;, which shows that when the interviewer and interviee rated the perfomance on a 1-4 scale, 46% of candidates guessed their exact score, and another 45% were off by one.<p>That seems pretty good to me. Can you really expect any more agreement than that?

The diversity figures could be worse. They could have included a breakdown based on age and compared Facebook vs national norms and firms doing US government&#x2F;military software contracts.<p>Age is not required for the EEO-1 filings:<p>&quot;EEO-1 reports filed by employers with more than 100 employees provide data based on race, color, sex and national origin,but do not report data on age or disability. We are aware that both groups are underrepresented in the tech workforce, suggesting the need for research to understand the causes and potential solutions.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eeoc.gov&#x2F;eeoc&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;reports&#x2F;hightech&#x2F;upload&#x2F;diversity-in-high-tech-report.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eeoc.gov&#x2F;eeoc&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;reports&#x2F;hightech&#x2F;upload...</a>

I think it makes more sense to hire people you like who you think can do the job. Then train those individuals to be the employees you want. That is where your diversity will come in. What happened to businesses and people investing in and training other people? Sure they may walk in a dud in your eyes but there is no reason why they should stay that way.<p>Secondly, many companies can take a good engineer, not use them correctly, run them off or turn them into a bad engineer for your company. There is too much emphasis on what a candidate already is and not enough emphasis on what you can mold your candidate to be after they are hired.<p>Training people on the job is where your diversity will come from. I noticed that many people got in the door with less skill than the people they are hiring.

I believe that the problem with a lot of these tech interviews is that they reflect a deep-seated belief on the part of the interviewer, that there exists such a thing as absolute intelligence, that it is immutable, and it is the most important factor in hiring. When you think in these terms, racism seems almost inevitable: after all, if intelligence is a measurable, absolute, and immutable quantity, akin to height or skin color, then shouldn&#x27;t it also be hereditable?<p>Instead of administering thinly-veiled intelligence tests, interviewers should hire based on two factors: technical skill, and more importantly, the ability to acquire it (i.e., learn). You don&#x27;t want to hire (or be) a person who believes in the fiction of genius. You want to be and hire the kind of person who believes and demonstrates that ability is a deterministic function of practice, not genes.

The easiest way to fix &quot;diversity in tech&quot; would be to reduce the number of H1B visas, which in the tech sector overwhelmingly go to overwhelmingly overrepresented Asians.<p>But in practice, &quot;diversity&quot; is ~exclusively used as an anti-white &amp; especially anti-white-male cudgel, so of course that will not happen.

If interviewing was the problem, it would imply that there are a lot of unemployed female developers (thousands and thousands - if they all were hired, we would expect a huge increase in percentage of female devs, so the number of unemployed female developers has to be a huge percentage of the number of all developers). Is that the case? How many unemployed female developers are there?<p>The other premise, that &quot;diverse people&quot; get less chance to practice interviewing, also seems bogus to me. I don&#x27;t think good developers go through that many interviews and&#x2F;or job applications before they get hired.<p>It may well be that interviewing is broken, what with the unreliable outcome, but it would be broken for everybody in the same way.

What indicates &quot;diversity in tech&quot; is broken? Are there notable examples of wildly successful companies that credibly attribute their success to &quot;diversity&quot;, in the same way they attribute it to low overhead, technological innovation, economies of scale, etc?<p>There have been historical examples of companies that became successful by tapping into cheaper sources of labor (notably in the agricultural sector). Is this what is meant by &quot;diversity&quot;?

There is a significant pipeline problem. Recently there was an article on HN that women are doing reasonably well these days except in the top suite. Again a pipeline issue. Some countries are further ahead like e.g. Scandinavia and India.<p>Pipeline issues are solved in kindergarten, school by teachers and parents. Role-models and incentives can help. Interviewing is too late. Actually considering that almost all CS grads are employed it is totally ridiculous to assume interviewing will fix anything. A woman can only be hired once.<p>Making the hiring process 100% objective is dangerous and I&#x27;m looking at these instrumented technical interviews as a step in the wrong direction. Of course we can reduce all observations to a single measure and then line everyone up against it. Any yes, that is happening in the end somehow in any case. But there is a huge difference in letting machine (or rigid scheme) do it.<p>Letting algorithms decide is convenient. It avoids taking responsibility. It allows avoidance of accountability. And more often than not it allows unaccountable manipulation of the process - as particularly the unscrupulous will know and not stop putting a thumb on the scale.

I don&#x27;t think that first diagram really supports the OP&#x27;s point. If you look at the top performing interviewees, the ones with a mean of 4, you can see that the majority seems to have scored no less than 3, even in their sub-par interviews. There&#x27;s a steep drop in standard deviation at that end of the curve. It seems that the people who do best at interviews do so pretty consistently indeed.<p>The OP makes this point: they say that the tech interview is a game that can be learned, and that the problem is that people may drop out before they have the chance to learn it. That certainly rings true, but I don&#x27;t see that their (scarce) data shows that employers want to reform their practice.<p>For one thing, employers may conclude that if consistency is higher for the best performers that&#x27;s a sign that the tech interview is indeed a good proxy of skill. And if it causes lots of people to drop out, well that&#x27;s probably a bonus: fewer applications to sift through, fewer people hired that shouldn&#x27;t be and overall less uncertainty and <i>churn</i> [1].<p>______________<p>[1] Managerese for not having a clue how to manage.

This is not about rejection and going on about the process. Yes, it is somewhat a numbers game, but what leads to rejection?<p>For a person of color to even get to the interview process, you have to be lucky. Now that you have a PoC in the room with other people, thay same PoC has to prove beyond their subconcious biases and prejudices that they are indeed, better than anybody else in the world for that job, including the interviewers. BUT at the same time, that PoC has to deal with the bias and not be too good, lest they offend the people conducting the interview, and not get offended by the blatant racist, misogynist, xenophobic comments that are going to show up in that interview.<p>Some examples? &quot;Do you know ho to read email?&quot;. &quot;So you are an expert, and you proved solving all these technical problems and your resume, but how exactly can you prove that you are an expert?&quot;. &quot;You have an accent&quot;. &quot;Our clients want someody more like them, white&quot;. &quot;You are too exotic for our group&quot;.<p>Yes, all of those have happened.

some people just aren&#x27;t good at technical interviewing but on the other hand there are a lot of bad interviewers.<p>I work with a guy I interviewed that gave one of the worst interview performances I had done. He couldn&#x27;t answer many of the technical questions correctly or only had a surface understanding of them. But, from asking him the soft skill questions I knew he would work well with our team. Then we gave him two simple programming assignment that many of the more senior developers we interviewed couldn&#x27;t do. He didn&#x27;t know the syntax of the language well, but you could tell from his thought process, the questions he asked, and how we solved the problem that he was as Joel Spolsky said &quot;smart and gets stuff done&quot;.<p>I along with my manager fought to get him hired. We were right about him. He&#x27;s very effective, diligent, and if I ever got my own team at another company, I would fight to bring him on to work with me.

Man. Why not just accept folks who might not yet be so good and train him&#x2F;her. Of course determine if he&#x2F;she is genuinely willing to learn. Looking at hobby projects should be an indicator that he&#x2F;she is passionate on programming.<p>But of course, capitalism compels a company to hire only the best worker to get the most out of the usurped-capital.<p>What I wanna point out is. It would be great if it was common for companies to help out less skilled programmers. Helping others is more important than making profit.<p>The next time somebody asks me for help. I&#x27;ll do my best use any surplus value out of the meager salary I get working here in a third world country.

technical interviews are asinine.<p>they make ya feel pretty good but cmon anyone with half a brain knows it&#x27;s all bullshit. Like seriously this is the best idea we have as software engineers? tell me the big o of an algorithm that can reverse a string? a lil quiz<p>Dustin muskovitz helped build FB he learned php from a perl for dummies book in one weekend. there&#x27;s 1000&#x27;s of these stories all over the world but just replace billions with thousands and millions of dollars but u get it<p>referrals are preferential because we don&#x27;t wanna hire someone we can&#x27;t immediately fire if they suck.<p>how about how badly do you want this job or how eager are you to learn

I found the article interesting and it sync&#x27;d with my experience in one significant way. When I started doing interviews after nearly a decade at the same job I was way out of practice. I blew an interview at Google, I still feel embarrassed thinking about it. But then I upped my game, by taking Coursera classes on algorithms, hacker rank, etc. I really worked on it. I ended up getting so much better. Got a good job. As for the article, it is interesting to me that women are 7x more likely to give up after blowing an interview. Obviously they don&#x27;t realize how much practice makes perfect.

So, you have no evidence that this &quot;problem&quot; is actually a problem. You have no evidence that your solution to this &quot;problem&quot; actually solves it. And in fact, the only evidence you present indicates that the thing you are blaming (&quot;technical interviews&quot; which you present as a strawman of puzzles) has nothing to do with the diversity &quot;problem&quot;. But we should buy your solution anyways?

Why not try unorthodox solutions: cap engineering salaries so men no longer rush to fill the jobs.

diversity in tech is not a problem. The problem is tech attitude in these diverse groups.

I&#x27;m surprised that &quot;people of color&quot; is the preferred term for racial diversity.

This is one of the reasons why I dislike anti-discrimination laws. For example, one of the methods used to enforce them (particularly in things like hiring) is statistics, most of which assumes employees are interchangeable commodities. They were designed back in the 1960s for things like manual labor jobs. I am willing to suggest a compromise to limit them to these kinds of jobs.

The percentage of woman working in Google is actually above the percentage of woman with an IT degree. So there is absolutely nothing to fix in the technical interviews. At most it&#x27;s slightly biased towards woman, not against them.

Or maybe these &quot;diverse&quot; people often don&#x27;t want to go into tech, and we should be so eager to point to the racism spook, lest racism it&#x27;s meaning (if everybody is racist, nobody is)

Article implies that the pipeline isn&#x27;t the main problem. However flawed interviewing is lack of diversity in tech is 99% a pipeline problem. It&#x27;s really easy to see why.<p>All you need to do is look at the number of minorities with Tech degrees. Boom problem solved.<p>(Keep in mind that tech encompasses many things and is not exclusively localized to the software world. While in software many people can get a job without a degree, in general, all tech jobs require a degree. )

Want diversity? Teach diverse people to start companies.

And you can&#x27;t fix technical interview without fixing <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dominant_minority" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dominant_minority</a>

I&#x27;m waiting with great anticipation for the politically correct outcry to solve the problem of not enough women being represented in the mining, construction, sanitation, logging, or deep sea fishing industries, or for there be a popular movement to get more men into teaching or nursing where they&#x27;re also dramatically underrepresented there.<p>Let&#x27;s see if there&#x27;s any intellectual honesty here, or maybe there&#x27;s something else behind this politically correct movement?<p>Gee, I wonder why certain people are trying to pu$h this so hard? You can ea$ily gue$$ what thi$ expan$ion of the labor $upply i$ really about if you think long and hard about it.

There&#x27;s nothing to &quot;fix&quot; here. If there were good candidates being passed up, they would certainly congregate elsewhere and create success. If that&#x27;s not happening, then it&#x27;s a supply issue. And really it&#x27;s no issue at all since people have free will and certain demographics just aren&#x27;t choosing to be engineers. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that, we should stop trying to force them into our line of work.