
Ask a Female Engineer: Interviewing and Company Culture - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/10/ask-a-female-engineer-3/
======
rifung
> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them
> laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].”

Some recruiters are seriously sketchy. Someone I know joined a company where
the recruiter told her that they give all their employees at that level this
same salary so there's no room for negotiation unfortunately. After she
joined, she asked what other people were making, and found out that even a new
grad had higher compensation than she did despite the fact she had several
years of experience already.

Apparently, they tried to do the same thing to that other employee, but that
other employee had another offer and just said that he would take the other
offer, to which the recruiter apparently responded, "Oh wait, I'm sorry
actually I think we can do something about that. I was looking at the wrong
sheet."

~~~
dominotw
> Someone I know joined a company where the recruiter told her that they give
> all their employees at that level this same salary so there's no room for
> negotiation unfortunately.

Oh wow. this happened to me recently. I foolishly believed that it was true
since I've heard of companies like Reddit that have policies like these.

~~~
__jal
People encountering this need to name and shame more. This is straight-up
using asymmetrical information as a zero-sum weapon. It is hard to find salary
information ahead of time, Glassdoor notwithstanding; and it is also hard to
know how sleazy they are to employees.

It isn't hard to write a comment about it that will show up in a search
engine, and while that is far from perfect, it will allow employees who have
freedom of motion to steer clear of slimy firms and those who don't to at
least be able to negotiate from a slightly less-weak position.

~~~
Mz
This is likely also a bigger problem for women, who tend to be less savvy and
less aggressive about negotiating for salary to begin with.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Tend to be less savvy?

~~~
tf2manu994
The data hints that they negotiate less, yes.

~~~
acdha
There is some data suggesting that but you, and the original commenter, are
jumping to conclusions that it's caused by lower “savviness”.

One commonly mentioned alternative explanation is simply that people will
quite reasonably not risk negotiating aggressively when they perceive their
negotiating power as being lower. Given the number of women or non-
Caucasian/Asian men who've reported being paid less or held to a higher
standard than peers, I would seriously consider the possibility that the data
is showing us a symptom rather than the cause of the pay-gap.

~~~
Mz
Yes, I am aware of that and thank you for saying that so clearly. _Savvy_ was
perhaps not the best word choice, but I was attempting to be succinct and
trying to avoid writing multiple paragraphs. Perhaps _disadvantaged_ would be
a better term here, given that we do not know the exact cause. But I do
suspect one factor is that women have less access to important information via
having a beer and shooting the breeze with the guys type acticities. I have
seen online discussions that suggest to me women have less savvy -- which
comes from the French _savior_ meaning essentially _know how_ \-- because they
have less access to group knowledge of such things.

One of the problems is that when women lack such knowledge, they come across
as less confident because, in the statistical sense of the word, they
literally are less confident. In other words, in an absence of hard
information, you cannot be sure if the figure you are asking for is too high,
too low or just right. But when they evince this lack of confidence, people
usually try to give them pep talks rather than hard data. It gets treated like
a lack of self esteem rather than a lack of information.

I do think you are correct that women simply cannot afford to negotiate as
aggressively and this is a factor. But I also think they lack access to
knowledge that a lot of men are exposed to casually simply because they are
male and this makes it easier for them to hang with the right crowd and get
anecdotes, etc. And that piece is what I was trying to capture with the word
_savvy._

I am a woman. I know a lot about negotiating. I remain poorly equipped to
negotiate on salary because I lack information. Having general savvy about
negotiating technique is insufficient. You cannot play hard ball if you do not
have hard information particular to the problem space in question.

~~~
acdha
I like your suggestion of “disadvantaged” — it covers both the information
asymmetry and the real or perceived differences in negotiating strength.

------
acaciapalm
I am glad she mentioned how awful it is to have only one female employee.

I was the only woman in an office. One of my co workers made a pretty horrific
comment (not about me, but about women in front of me). Someone went to HR and
we had sensitivity training...but everyone assumed it was me because I was the
only woman. Maybe I SHOULD have gone to HR, but I didn't want to because I
feared being the obvious complainant. Which I ended up getting the side-eye
for anyway.

I realized I would much rather work somewhere with at least 2 other women.

~~~
colmvp
I'm not sure how much this has to do with quantity of x as opposed to quality
of x.

I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of
white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism.

I've also worked in teams where it's been highly diverse in ethnicity though
not gender, and again, never noticed any hints of sexism.

Though I have certainly worked in a company with a number of women, including
a female co-founder/CEO who was absolutely sexist... against women. I'm not
suggesting women are bad CEO's or that diversity is bad, I'm saying that from
my experience, it hasn't been about the diversity of the team so much as the
type of people in the composition.

Also from my POV, I'm not sure how having a random % of women makes more or
less sense than a random % of black people or Latino's. Like if a company is
predominantly composed of white men, does adding a white female make it more
diverse than adding a black man?

~~~
r00fus
> I've worked in small teams where I was the only Asian person among a team of
> white men, and I neither noticed any hints of racism nor sexism.

I don't think your situations are comparable. Women are ~50% of the population
and sexual undertones have nothing to do with ethnicity, but everything to do
with gender.

~~~
anon839
I disagree. Some sexual undertones have to do with ethnicity because of
stereotypes of Asian women etc.

~~~
r00fus
Not sure what such stereotypes you're talking about, but regardless where does
your example not have to do with gender?

------
rubicon33
> "As opposed to fox-and-hare looped link lists or implementing a binary tree
> or something else I’ve done a hundred times in an interview and not once in
> my actual job."

This. Interviewers, stop asking questions that only a fresh college grad
should have at the forefront of their mind.

One of the best interview's I've had, was actually for a job I didn't get. It
was for a game development company, and they actually posed problems and
questions one might face in their day to day work. For example, writing an
efficient collision detection algorithm.

~~~
wutbrodo
> This. Interviewers, stop asking questions that only a fresh college grad
> should have at the forefront of their mind.

These aren't questions "only a college grad should know" they're often
questions that are baseline knowledge for understanding programming vs just
having a few rote cargo cult "skills".

I have been on both sides of the interview process at Google, and I remember
when I was prepping to conduct my first interview, one of my teammates gave me
some advice. He suggested I open with something along the lines of "merge two
sorted lists". Someone who couldn't do this with a minimum of effort barely
fits the definition of "knowing how to program" (let alone being a good
engineer). And yet, a non trivial chunk of the candidates he had met with
didn't clear this bar! Starting with an assumption that your candidate can
handle complex questions when they can't even program can just muddle the
issue, and there's very little advantage to skipping over the basic test.

Bear in mind that this was at Google, and these were candidates who had
already made it past the first line filter.

~~~
rubicon33
> " And yet, a non trivial chunk of the candidates he had met with didn't
> clear this bar! Starting with an assumption that your candidate can handle
> complex questions when they can't even program can just muddle the issue,
> and there's very little advantage to skipping over the basic test."

And yet, I'd be surprised if almost all of those who didn't pass his "basic
test" went on to be gainfully employed, and successful, building X app at X
company instead of at Google.

~~~
wutbrodo
That may be true, but I've never been at a company that was desperate enough
to hire cargo cult programmers. Interview jitters aside (that's an unfortunate
artifact of the coding interview), not having a grasp of loops, iteration, and
the most basic of data structures is a low, low, low bar for "knows how to
program".

I'm not even being particularly picky here. Big companies can be notorious for
hiring CS grads from great programs and never having them do any actual
computer science, and I agree that that bar is unnecessary for good
engineering. But this filter isn't _unrelated_ to the job of being an engineer
(or even a code monkey!), it's basic, basic programming. I'd imagine it does a
great job of removing the kind of candidates who are capable of trivially
avoidable bugs that become time bombs down the road.

~~~
uola
Seems almost like your arguing against yourself here. Hiring people based on
things they won't use seems an awful lot like a cargo cult. Many of Googles
products implode shortly after getting released making software quality
irrelevant. Also many successful Google products were originally made by other
companies, presumably with different hiring processes, that joined Google.

That said, from what I've heard it isn't the questions themselves so much as
the overall interview process that puts people off.

~~~
wutbrodo
> Seems almost like your arguing against yourself here. Hiring people based on
> things they won't use seems an awful lot like a cargo cult.

First of all, that's not what cargo cult
means....[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming).
What you're describing (though it doesn't apply to what I was saying) is also
a bad thing, but you can't just use random phrases to mean whatever you want.

More to the point: You seriously think that engineers won't have occasion to
use loops, iteration, and data structures resembling lists? Because as I've
mentioned multiple times, those are the basic, basic skills being tested by a
question like "merge two sorted lists". One might have actually have occasion
to write that algorithm on the job, but the real point is to test for a basic
understanding of control flow and performance. I can barely imagine a
programming job that would never have occasion to use those things, and most
of the actual engineering you do in the simplest engineering jobs involve
tasks of similar complexity. This isn't me blindly defending whatever
interview policy Google happened to have; I'm talking about the adjustments I
personally made to find what works over the course of a couple dozen
interviews.

> Many of Googles products implode shortly after getting released making
> software quality irrelevant.

Now this is just embarrassing. Your argument is so bereft of anything
resembling logic that you have to resort to completely irrelevant asides. I
suppose they should just hire random 14 year olds to do their engineering
since software quality is irrelevant.

~~~
uola
> First of all, that's not what cargo cult means...

Per the definition on the linked wikipedia page cargo cult programming is
"ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose",
"results of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without
understanding the reasons behind that design principle" and "organizations
that attempt to emulate more successful development houses". It's of course
based on the concept of cargo cult behavior, where you try to achieve success
by imitating external properties without the substance.

I'm saying that Google by having things like a challenging admissions process,
predictable career path, stark focus on credentials, all-inclusive perks and
campus environment are trying to imitate an elite school which is an
environment where many people at Google felt successful. By doing that they
recruit computer science heavy coders which, at least when they are
inexperienced, tend to overly rely on CS style programming (advanced
techniques, optimizations, correctness) in favor of other concerns of software
engineering (organizational friction, code flexibility, overall design).
There's evidence that candidates that want to work at companies like Google
often cram these types of questions without necessary having used them in real
world projects. I would say both imitation of academia, over reliance of CS as
a factor in recruiting and the risk of neglecting software engineering in
favor of computer science techniques is relevant to the concept of cargo cult
and cargo cult programming.

> Your argument is so bereft of anything resembling logic that you have to
> resort to completely irrelevant asides.

The whole point of the cargo cult concept is that you do things that in the
end is ineffective. We all know that Google has a lot of smart people, with
credentials and that can write code. Yet, that doesn't always seem to produce
good result as far as shipping products. Yes, one could blame management but
that is also a factor of company culture.

> I suppose they should just hire random 14 year olds to do their engineering
> since software quality is irrelevant.

Why would you accuse me of "irrelevant asides" and then bring up "random 14
year olds". Software quality is subjective. One could argue that writing, both
as part of developing and documenting software, is essential for software
quality. You seem to use a lot of rhetoric that isn't relevant to the
discussion at hand.

> You seriously think that engineers won't have occasion to use loops,
> iteration, and data structures resembling lists?

That's not the point. There are other ways to find out if people can manage
these things that doesn't favor people with a theoretical background. Other
method might be looking up peoples portfolios, having them submit code they've
written, pair programming or reasoning around example code.

Googles hiring process is adopted for how Google works. Having a common
theoretical framework might be important at Google. But that doesn't mean that
people who doesn't fit into that profile can't be good software engineers, nor
that this process is even feasible for other companies.

------
happyslobro
A while ago, I worked with an all male team of about 20 programmers. The odd
thing was, though, that there were a lot of women writing code, but not
officially as production programmers. They were in high level support
positions, mainly working on infrastructure and data, and helping my team work
within in their system. This role is now commonly referred to as dev-ops or
data analyst, elsewhere, and pays very well. But, because their job title was
"L2 support", they were paid less and missed out on a bunch of perks.

I had a friend in "support" who had build a lot of a data normalization system
that I often worked with, and we talked about the phenomenon a couple times
over lunch. Basically, she was a little offended about the lower pay and the
"support" title, but would rather keep her work / life balance and relatively
powerful position within the infrastructure stack, than join the production
team for a raise. In hindsight, someone should have fought for the whole L2
support department to be better paid; there was certainly money for that (we
were in a wildly profitable niche), and the support engineers had the high
ground. But we were both young technical types, and didn't have the business /
legal skills or the confidence to confront management.

I'm not sure how things have played out there in the years since I left, but
if they wanted to, that entire L2 support team could take off and form a
devops / analytics consulting firm, and probably multiply their incomes by
some small integers. Then they could hire from the product team too, if they
needed web/UI ;)

------
chris_7
> Founders can use tools like Culture Amp to do anonymous surveys.

I wouldn't respond to one of those truthfully - I give four or five stars on
everything, and never write any complaints in the free-form text fields. If
possible, I just avoid doing them - especially if it's a small company, but at
larger companies they tend to be per-team, so it works out the same.

~~~
milesokeefe
It's a good idea to have that policy and be careful.

I submitted a comment in a similar office survey service and despite my
submission being anonymous, shortly after submitting it, a superior had a
meeting with me to address what the anonymous complaint was about, having
determined the comment was from me.

In this case I was very glad they figured it out because it ended up being a
low risk way of bringing up my concern, but had I not had such a great
employer, the result could have been me getting fired or something similar.

The comment was only one short sentence and there were 50-100 people employed
at the company, so if you want to be honest on platforms like this, I would
limit what you say and obfuscate as much as you can. It doesn't take much to
identify you.

~~~
josephg
> ... but had I not had such a great employer ...

> despite my submission being anonymous, shortly after submitting it, a
> superior had a meeting with me

I'm glad you had a good experience, but a great employer wouldn't have lied to
you about the survey being anonymous.

~~~
dlgeek
There's a difference between "This survey is anonymous"/"Hey, Bob ranked his
satisfaction with his manager as 1/5", and "This survey is anonymous"/"Here's
a list of complaints from your team"/"Oh, this one is a complaint about how X
impacts Y - I know Bob's the only one who's expressed interest in that in the
past, I bet it's from him".

If my employer told me a survey was anonymous, I would expect anonymity on the
Rank/Rate/True-False type questions, but assume that any freeform comments
would be identifiable to someone as being from me based on style, content or
something else.

~~~
milesokeefe
This is correct. I believe the system is anonymous to employers. My employer
explicitly said they determined it was me based on context.

------
stephenboyd
A former classmate of mine posted on her blog yesterday about some of her tech
interview experiences. She didn't generalize about inclusive culture, but her
perspective is enlightening.

[http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/10/5/a-few-stories-
of...](http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/10/5/a-few-stories-of-tech-
interviews)

~~~
random314
Looks like she really dislikes being asked to code in an interview. She just
wants to have a friendly conversation. She will be a great fit for consulting
firms that bill by the hour.

~~~
ubernostrum
For what it's worth, I hate and am doing everything I can to kill the coding
interview as typically practiced.

Giving a take-home exercise and having part of the interview be a
collaborative review of it? Good idea, works well.

Developing exercises where interviewer and candidate pair on a problem, using
real coding tools and looking things up as necessary? Good idea, works well.

"Here's the whiteboard, here's a problem, code it up" \-- doesn't usefully
distinguish qualified from unqualified candidates, doesn't give you meaningful
information about job-relevant skills, serves only to make people squirm and
serve as a "yeah, but I had to do it to pass the interview, too, so now you
do". Get rid of it forever.

Also, any set of questions designed not to determine someone's programming
ability but instead to act as a proxy for something else, like "went to
Stanford", goes out the window first chance I get.

~~~
hvidgaard
If you cannot write a basic loop and if statement of maybe 10-20 lines on a
whiteboard, you're going to have a hard time in a team of developers trying to
collaborate in problem solving.

This is not implementing van Emde Boa search structure, but simple stuff any
entry level programmer must comprehend for a general programming posistion.

~~~
ubernostrum
If you want a coding exercise you can have one.

If you think the only way to have a coding exercise is to pose a whiteboard
problem, then my advice is get out of this industry, now.

~~~
hvidgaard
I give my candidates a choice of a whiteboard or a laptop and projector. Most
people choose the whiteboard. Some outright say that they need to look at it
at home. The latter will not be able to participate in a meaningful way in a
team, and as much as I want to, I don't have work for a loner.

But my point is that, as a team you need to be able to express ideas in a
format that other developers can reason with you in a live setting. Nothing
beats a whiteboard in that regard. You can use a projector and a computer, but
what if you need to draw a graph or something else?

It's not a tall order to ask them to be able to do this. And please don't
forget that I'm not asking people to implement RB search trees, but usually a
simple loop and an if statement. Reverse a list using a for loop, transform
this string into a palindrome, is this string a palindrone, remove all
duplicates in a list - stuff like that.

------
toomanybeersies
> There’s another side to the equation too, which is being a female
> interviewer meeting with male candidates... it will subtly or overtly turn
> into a situation where the candidate is speaking and addressing questions or
> answers to my coworker. This happens even when I am leading the interview...

I wonder if this goes both ways. If a male was leading the interview, and they
were interviewing a female, would the interviewee tend to talk to the female
interviewer?

~~~
jrnichols
> would the interviewee tend to talk to the female interviewer?

In my experience, yes, this definitely happens.

------
WhitneyLand
Great work doing this and good luck. Have a couple of ignorant questions:

1). Is it correct that there is no consensus on say, the top three reasons
that females are under represented in computer science? It's frustrating that
so many lay people voice just opinions and anecdotes. Is the real research
starting to agree on what are the most important factors yet?

2) Some people say genetics is one reason females are underrepresented. For
example they say, maybe on average females simply tend to be less interested
in the subject. Is there any data that actually supports, or excludes this
notion?

~~~
cauterized
For point 2, that's what they said about medicine, law, pretty much any other
male-dominated field you can name. Even if there's a difference in interest
among adults, why should that difference in interest be due to genetic factors
rather than cultural differences in how we raise boys vs girls and how teens
are peer pressured?

Edited to add: by the way, back in the 50s and 60s, computer programming was
female-dominated.

~~~
tomp
That's actually not true. There is a graph that's often used to support this
point [1]. But using a better graph, we can see that CS is in line with
engineering (CS is definitely more "engineering" than it is "science") [2].

[1]
[https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide...](https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/10/21/womencoding_wide-4b0beb106fe1b4cfabd9799accb65e8ef8097473.jpg?s=1400)

[2]
[https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg](https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/7/005/06b/02d/33fe648.jpg)

------
geebee
Part of the problem here is that I think we, in tech, have really forgotten
how stressful it is to be given a technical exam at a whiteboard, especially
with an undercurrent of finding charlatans who "can't even do basic
programming!" Many people from other professions and graduate programs
describe their oral exams as among the most stressful academic experiences
they've been through, because it's unusually embarrassing to fail publicly and
people are afraid of "freezing". And that's when there's a pretty clear and
well publicized study route, with an ostensibly consistently graded exam, with
professors and/or industry practitioners who are experts in their field, with
feedback and mechanisms to ensure fairness and integrity.

We get all the stress, but none of the protections, in tech. And we never
really get to stop doing it.

I've been through the washing machine enough times that I am pretty resistant
to it, though it does still get to me as well. Early career, I did feel pretty
humiliated after some of these experiences. Sometimes, I think we lose sight
of this. When I described what it was like to "interview" at google and other
places, people outside tech kind of shuddered. Their interviews are more like
conversations - yes, you need to know what you're talking about, but you don't
stand in front of a committee, at a whiteboard, getting treated like a grad
student going through quals (if only!) _every single time you interview at a
new company!_

I've heard some questions about whether this is just an inevitable part of
being a programmer. If it is, fine, but then please, let's stop scratching our
heads about why there's a supposed "shortage" of programmers. If an extremely
unpleasant quasi-hazing is a necessary part of applying for a developer job
(every single time), then let's not be surprised when people decide they don't
want to work in this field anymore, don't want to enter it in the first place,
are reluctant to change jobs, or, alternatively, prefer careers in actuarial
work, law, medicine, nursing, or other fields where they get to take their
exams under conditions that are far more respectful of the candidate and
result in a lasting, meaningful credential, respected in their field, so they
don't have to do it over and over.

~~~
scsilver
Further more, we have legal protections for those with disabilities when
taking these certifications that is not accounted for in the tech sector.

[http://www.americanbar.org/groups/disabilityrights/resources...](http://www.americanbar.org/groups/disabilityrights/resources/biad.html)

[http://ncees.org/exams/special-accommodations/ada-exam-
accom...](http://ncees.org/exams/special-accommodations/ada-exam-
accommodations/)

[http://www.usmle.org/test-accommodations/](http://www.usmle.org/test-
accommodations/)

Are we ok with allowing discrimination like this to continue?

~~~
geebee
Interesting observation about the legal protections you mentioned.

While it's just one case, I think this is illustrative of how seriously
certification, licensing, and other exams are taken in the rest of the world.
Exams can be useful and perhaps even essential, but they aren't trivial. It's
a big deal to put someone through this. It is important to have safeguards to
ensure fairness, integrity, and consistency.

One of the reasons we don't have this in tech is that companies have no
incentive to be transparent about their exams, because they fear lawsuits.
They'd much rather reply "we've decided not to pursue your candidacy further
at this time" than tell you specifically what you did wrong during their
technical exams (they really aren't interviews, they are exams - calling them
interviews just confuses people who aren't familiar with what goes on in
tech).

The thing is, these exams really are formal affairs. My understanding is that
if you applied to google, there is a database entry somewhere with your name,
screen captures of what you wrote at the whiteboard, notes on your
performance, and a score. However, the person who has been through the tests
have more or less no rights to any of this information.

I suppose some people might say "well, that's their business, if you don't
like it, don't apply." My response is, yeah, exactly. I believe tech culture
turns off a huge number of people - these interview exams are a notable part
of this, along with back visibility, open offices, micromanagement, and
concerns about career longevity are other. I believe that people with choice,
those who aren't obliged to work for a particular employer in a particular
field as a condition of living in the US are choosing not to work in tech.
There's a constant drum beat about this shortage, from a field that puts
candidates through this constantly.

I do think that tests without any protections for the examinee is one of many
things tech may need to reconsider to attract people with choice into this
field. I see no reason for government to get involved in helping tech get
workers without while going about business as usual.

------
jomamaxx
"It’s important to me that recruiters and interviewers are respectful. Nothing
is worse than a condescending interviewer."

What does this have to do with 'female'? This is the norm in high tech for
everyone - sadly.

Am I under the impression that this girl thinks that she's being singled out
as a girl on this? Because I got it most of the time during my career. Not
saying it's right, but I don't think it's a gender issue.

~~~
st3v3r
Because interviewers are more likely to be condescending to someone they don't
respect, and many of them don't respect women.

Yes, this stuff happens to many people, not just women. But it happens to them
on an alarmingly regular basis.

~~~
lazaroclapp
That's the extreme case, but there is also the less malicious one where
because of stereotypes and average distributions at a particular company,
people just assume women they are speaking to to be less technical than they
are and try to 'helpfully' explain things at an unnecessarily basic level.
Say, a system's engineer explaining their work to a female college as if she
were a front end developer by default, where they would ask a male college
what their experience was before making that assumption.

This is an easy mistake to make if you are a kernel hacker in an organization
that has, say 20% female developers overall, but where only 2% of kernel
hackers are women. Easy to make, not malicious, but not much less annoying
because of it, specially if you are the 10th person to assume that. From your
point of view, it is a very efficient cache prediction strategy, since you'll
get it right 90% of the time[1], but from theirs, it means half their queries
end up miss-predicted...

[1] Yes, I am assuming 50% of all developers are kernel hackers, you can
switch to something more realistic like product vs infra, front vs backend,
etc. Also, the point is not about "lower-level systems programming being real-
er programming!", but about making assumptions based partly on gender.

~~~
cauterized
Think about what you just said about assumptions and how that dovetails with
lack of respect. GP didn't suggest said lack of respect was necessarily
malicious. Just that it exists and is uncomfortable. How does a perception
being the result of stereotyping make it any more excusable?

~~~
lazaroclapp
First of all, I agree with the GP and I am emphatically agreeing with you here
that such stereotyping is uncomfortable, unneeded and something that urgently
needs to go away. But it is still somewhat different from fully dismissing
someone as 'less than' because of gender, and the later (appallingly) still
happens.

In some circles, you will get people who think along the lines of "yeah, of
course there is sexism in industry, I mean, look at Bob, he keeps cracking
jokes about women and browses The Red Pill at work. But I am not like Bob, I
don't have anything against women, I am trying to help, ergo I can't be
sexist". Yet these people can be condescending without generally meaning to
disrespect or make less on anyone. When confronted with a woman who is very
technical and assertive about that fact, they quickly adjust to treat her as
technical, but their default assumption still goes to 'relatively less
technical than me' when meeting any new female developer (and doesn't when
meeting a male college). I was trying to point out that sort of thing is a
problem too.

------
ryanmarsh
This is why I taught my daughters the four magic words when it comes to
getting paid:

FUCK YOU PAY ME

It's all about an aggressive attitude towards compensation. It's why I make so
much and others whom I believe deserve more than me do not. They just aren't
aggressive enough. You have to be aggressive by default when it comes to
compensation. It's not about the words per se, but the attitude.

------
exstudent2
> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them
> laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].”
> This has happened to me multiple times, most frequently when the company was
> offering a below-market compensation package.

This happens to men and women. Recruiters suck, it's not a gender bias in most
cases, it's that the role attracts a certain kind of person.

A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. The fact
is our industry has a lot of money in it and that attracts all kinds of
jerks/sharks/shady people. Men deal with all of this on a daily basis as well.
I'm just starting to think we don't spend as much time organizing as a group
and instead just put our heads down and take it/fight through it in isolation.

~~~
DanBC
> This happens to men and women

> A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender.

...and so this is one more example of where feminism helps everyone.

~~~
wutbrodo
Not really, because optimizing for the wrong thing means you can make changes
that hurt everybody and mistakenly think you've helped. Take Reddit's move of
banning salary negotiations: control over how the surplus of the employment
relationship is broken up was taken completely out of the hands of the
employee. All employees (including women) are hurt by this, and yet a
blinkered model that sees nothing but gender disparity would celebrate this as
a narrowing of a gender gap. There are smart ways to address disparate-impact
gender gaps, but insisting that feminism is the only lens through which to
view a problem is not one of them.

~~~
chris_7
In a salary-negotiation-banned situation, are you also typically prohibited
from exchanging salary for vacation, while maintaining the same perceived
total compensation?

------
jkot
In my experience distributed company is best if you want diverse team from
start. I worked at company where 70% of engineers were women.

~~~
FT_intern
The percent of female CS graduates is ~20-30%.

Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate %
considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a
degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?

~~~
xenadu02
>Why are companies with female % that is similar to the female CS graduate %
considered sexist but a company that overhires female engineers (to such a
degree as to be suspicious of sexism) is seen as diverse?

Nobody said that except you, which betrays your agenda.

Good engineering talent is in short supply and has been for two decades now.
It certainly won't do any harm to explore alternate recruiting channels.

~~~
ergo14
Go on - tell us what is his agenda?

------
kafkaesq
_In terms of the interview itself – I hate pop-quiz-style rapid-fire
questions. Things like “What is the time complexity of bubble sort? What is
hopscotch hashing? What’s the CAP theorem?” And on and on for fifteen minutes
and twenty-odd questions._

But how else is the interviewer going to prove how smart they are, and signal
their dominant status to you?

~~~
bhrt0
Do doctors also feel hurt when they are being asked questions on "how would
you handle the patients with such and such symptoms" and expected to give a
textbook answer?

~~~
CapitalistCartr
And yet, in spite of their extensive training, computers are better at
diagnosing.

~~~
bhrt0
You think software for those computers that are better at diagnosing was
created by engineers who don't know the difference between a stable and
unstable sorting algorithm?

~~~
donw
There is a massive delta between knowing that, and being able to code examples
of each from memory on a whiteboard during an interview.

Also, it may surprise you, but there are many highly experienced and extremely
capable programmers that didn't study computer science in college. Filtering
those people out because they can't answer programming trivia questions is, at
best, hugely short-sighted.

------
bandrami
This is why I love working at companies with open books. All of our salaries
are posted on our intranet, along with every other expense the company has. It
only works when the company is entirely self-funded, though, so it takes a
little hunting to find them. (We also have 100% open meetings except for HR
issues, which I've come to love too -- it's cool to be able to see what sales
or R&D are up to).

------
sergiotapia
She mentions to make an effort towards diversity at the end.

As a latino, diversity for diversity sake never made sense to me. What am I a
lego piece or something? Meritocracy.

~~~
girvo
Diversity of experiences and opinions are good, in my opinion, because they
allow problems to be approached in ways that I wouldn't otherwise have
considered, if it was a singular mono-culture.

~~~
atom-morgan
But diversity in tech usually revolves around skin color, gender, and sexual
orientation.

~~~
aplusbi
Which is a very, very good proxy for diversity of experience and opinion.

~~~
atom-morgan
Ask Brendon Eich, Douglas Crockford, Palmer Luckey, and Curtis Yarvin.

------
superpope99
It tickles me that they have an Ada and a Grace representing women.

~~~
detaro
The names are pseudonyms

------
_RPM
What's the hidden message behind being late to an interview?

~~~
AlexCoventry
The article implies it suggests that the late employees are inconsiderate or
can't "execute."

------
balls187
Implement bubble sort? That's a terrible question.

