
How one tech company ditched its brogrammers - mayava
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/tech-start-up-women-brogrammers
======
whack
_" The company replaced the whiteboard exercise with job talks, a practice
that’s common in academic settings. Candidates now talk at length about about
specific projects from a previous gig. The change has had a few
benefits—interviewers now have a chance to query candidates about how they
collaborated in other jobs.

It also turns out that coding tests aren’t as objective as they sound, says
Joelle Emerson, founder and C.E.O. of Paradigm, a consulting firm that works
with tech companies on diversity. By putting candidates in situations that are
outside the way they normally work, Emerson says, whiteboard interviews
increase the likelihood of “stereotype threat,” an anxiety among non-
traditional candidates that they’ll confirm negative stereotypes about their
group."_

So let me understand this. Whiteboard interviews don't reflect a standard
engineering work flow, but giving a series of presentations to strangers does?
Writing code on a whiteboard can cause "stereotype threat", but a extremely
subjective "tell me about yourself" interview wouldn't?

Let's be honest here, zymergen hasn't stumbled upon any great insights. They
just decided that they wanted to hire a lot of women, and people with
experience, and then they did just that. They got rid of any objective
interview style that might get in the way, and they instead used a very
subjective interview style where candidates performance can be reinterpreted
to fit the results they want to see.

Hiring is an extremely tricky thing, and I commend these guys for actively
recruiting a neglected demographic. From a moneyball perspective, it's a smart
strategy. But in terms of interviewing insights, there's nothing new to see
here.

~~~
drewrv
The idea that a whiteboard interview is "objective" while discussing ones
experience on previous projects is not is absurd.

------
joaodlf
Ah yes, a company that doesn't meet the modern % criteria for diversity and
inclusion is obviously just a pack of "brogrammers".

------
metaphorm
I find the term "brogrammer" to be a derogatory term of abuse that ought not
to be uttered in polite company. it is equally as offensive a term as
something like, e.g. "feminazi".

that's not to say that there aren't some male programmers that have the
culture and mindset of dickhead frat boys. those people do exist.

what I'm saying is that when a journalist uses the term "brogrammer" they
generally aren't being subtle or nuanced about it and are firing a broadside
against men in general.

~~~
koverstreet
I don't view it as men. I and my (male programmer) friends use the term quite
freely and derisively, because frankly we're all dismayed at what's happened
to this industry over the past 20 years. "Brogrammers" is a term that sums it
up pretty well - there's far too many huge egos in this industry today who
seem to just be in it for the fame/money/ego stroking.

For those of us who just want to write good code and fix shit and make the
world of software better, it's disgusting and demoralizing and tiring.

If improving workplace diversity helps even a tiny bit with that problem (and
I can't see how it wouldn't), then I am 1000% for it.

~~~
metaphorm
except the article being discussed is focusing on a change in interview
process led to hiring more women engineers. it isn't about how a company fixed
a cultural problem (such as the one Uber has), it's just about gender
diversity in the workforce as it relates to interviewing process. the
implication of the article title is that "brogrammer" just means "male
programmer" but that's not what it means. you and I know that it means
"dickhead chauvinist programmer" but the title of the article uses it to refer
to any male programmer.

~~~
koverstreet
The article wasn't just about diversity, it was very much about how the hiring
process affects the type of personalities you attract. And I don't see where
the article implied that brogrammers meant male programmers in general.

Besides, is it so hard to believe that lack of diversity is one of the
enabling factors for a brogrammer dominated culture? Because I 100% believe
it.

------
danieltillett
Just to play the devil's advocate here what is so bad about a lack of
diversity in a private companies employees?

~~~
LeeHwang
I'd assume nothing as long as there are making money in a purely capitalistic
view.

It seems a vocal percentage on hackernews want companies to have diversity as
part of their "social contract". This is probably a filter bubble.

I'm not sure what the average american thinks though, I'm inclined to think
they don't care by looking at all the democrats losses in the last 8 years.

------
genkimind
I see that tech companies are trying to get more diverse, and diverse is good
without a doubt. Isn't it likely that males are just more interested in
technology than woman?

For example trying to diversify a ballet team.. I find it unlikely that any
significant percentage of males can be reached.

Is tech different than ballet?

~~~
catenthusiast
> Isn't it likely that males are just more interested in technology than
> woman?

Why would that be likely?

~~~
08-15
Because if you give children a set of toys that includes both cars and dolls,
the girls tend to play with dolls and the boys tend to play with cars. Many
boys play with both---they use the cars to run over the dolls.

And that happens even in African tribes where most people have never seen a
car in their lifes, which pretty much falsifies the modern theory that all
differences are due to boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink.

~~~
collyw
It happens in monkeys as well.

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-
pr...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys-
toys/)

------
auvrw
> Zymergen decided to eliminate the whiteboard interviews that are a standard
> part of the hiring process for software engineers and developers

can solve a range of issues

perhaps gender diversity is just one facet of this "Brogrammer" thing where
collaborating to ship clean code and deliver business value breaks down due to
certain social and behavioral patterns

lack of gender diversity in industry is definitely among the most obvious
indicators, but it doesn't even capture the entire brokenness.

are these things unique to software development, or does pretty much every
industry have analogous issues?

------
bigbetsbigmoney
SPECIFIC THOUGHTS: the last sentence of the first paragraph is hilarious...
"We'll explain in a moment how this unsexy company has been able to outperform
Google, Facebook, and Uber....................when it comes to hiring women
software engineers." I totally forgot that the main concern of a business was
to push "diversity" at all costs and not to provide a service/product of value
and make money. My bad.

furthermore, in an era where millions of dollars are thrown around by VC's and
founders at startups (that provide no real value to customers in many cases)
at wildly overinflated valuations, it seems that people have forgotten the key
purpose of running a business. TO MAKE MONEY. The goal isn't to make sure
everyone is represented or to make everyone feel good. No one cares. This
article is complete spin. The real goal of this company is to get engineers at
a discounted price under the guise of, "oh you've been overlooked by these
other companies, we're super female friendly, we're soooo diverse. we can't
pay you as much, but we're just one big family here so it's worth it."

IN GENERAL: diversity of thought is good. diversity of skin color, ethnicity,
gender, etc just to tick a box saying 'yup, we support diversity!' is
nonsensical. there seems to be a large disconnect in logical thinking when
these two things are advertised as the same thing. hire the best candidates,
regardless of the meaningless BS (like gender or race). ok, you think the
hiring process skews against some candidates (I don't know if this is really
true or not), then change the interview process to support that. saying that
female candidates don't do well with whiteboarding exercises, so you're
changing the process to something they are better at is so silly (and quite
frankly insulting to those women who ARE prepared for the whiteboarding
exercises). you're optimizing for female employees, not for building your
business and providing value.

~~~
lifeformed
I think diverse hiring practices is a good thing, even if we ignore the social
aspects of this discussion and just talk about the money side of things.

Think about it like the movie Moneyball. By rejecting the flawed collective
wisdom of baseball insiders, they were able to create a winning team on a
budget by using overlooked metrics. Likewise, job interviews are notoriously
unreliable and inconsistent at finding good employees. The uneven demographics
in tech jobs is likely partly the result of flawed wisdom in the hiring
process. If you sample more heavily from an irrationally underrepresented
group, you would get on average higher value candidates than if you sampled
evenly from the whole pool.

Selecting solely based on merit is only effective if your selection process
works properly. In practice, we see that both conscious and unconscious biases
pervade the selection process, so I think this method is worthwhile.

~~~
moomin
Moneyball is exactly right. We've got a situation in which everyone is chasing
after the same guys. Meanwhile, most of these environments are pushing
qualified people out and often they're leaving the tech workforce. Literally,
you can get better people, for less money, if you can just make it a pleasant
place to work if you're female, non-white or even just plain over 40.

(Full disclosure: I'm only in one of the groups I mentioned above.)

~~~
slededit
You can get qualified programmers for half the price in Canada - and even
cheaper in some European countries. Why so few companies do is a mystery to
me.

------
08-15
> blah... diversity... blah... brogrammers... blah

The usual drivel, but there is one interesting question hidden in there: This
company ditched the whiteboard and replaced it with "job talks". _Does that
work?_

Apparently it does, but only(?) if you measure success in terms of duhversity.

~~~
dang
You're breaking the site rules in two ways. First, "drivel" and "duhversity"
break the injunction against calling names in arguments
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).
Please don't do that; it triggers low-quality discussion.

Second, your account has been using HN primarily to comment on political and
ideological controversies. We don't allow this because it turns the site into
a political battlefield. If users who use HN as intended—that is, for
intellectual curiosity—post occasionally on political topics, that's fine. But
accounts that use HN primarily for politics or ideology are not fine. We
eventually ban those, so please don't use HN this way.

~~~
08-15
> your account has been using HN primarily to comment on political and
> ideological controversies

There is no need to comment if I agree, is there? But it's your site, I'm not
going to tell you how to run it.

------
GoToRO
Women work harder, collaborate better, do not have an ego problem, do not shy
away from boring tasks. Just a few things I noticed in my previous company.

~~~
metaphorm
I would suggest rephrasing your post to "the women I worked with at my last
company..." instead of just "Women..."

~~~
GoToRO
That is already clear from my post ;)

