Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this
> Wilberg’s lawsuit targets Google and 25 unnamed Google employees who allegedly enforced discriminatory hiring rules, quoting a number of emails and other documents. It claims that for several quarters, Google would only hire people from historically underrepresented groups for technical positions. In one hiring round, the team was allegedly instructed to cancel all software engineering interviews with non-diverse applicants below a certain experience level, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.” California labor law prohibits refusing to hire employees based on characteristics like race or gender.
Perception shaping is always unsavoury, but that's pretty dark.
As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.
And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.
Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms:
1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities.
2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women.
3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women.
4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately.
5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men.
6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women".
And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men.
BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.
> But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.
Not my claim that Google is bias free. I am not denying what you have claimed, it is just that I have not come across such incidents and if you are a qualified person it is extremely unlikely that I will not judge you performance properly because of your gender, race or ethnicity.
There is no doubt that Google has gone lala SJW route in last few years but then many of us put conscious efforts in fixing those problems.
Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.
Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.
Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic.
You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.
Many of those things have absolutely happened in the past at Google. I was told so directly by recruiters and had direct evidence of it myself e.g. I was one of the interviewers that one day started being allocated only female candidates; confirmed by recruiters to be an attempt to boost the numbers. I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well. Facebook experimented with much higher hiring bonuses for women for a while but I believe they stopped (this is in the public somewhere).
The unfireable nature of female engineers there was rather well known, at least a couple of years ago. The last I heard on that was from a fairly senior manager who after a couple of whiskeys reported he knew of managers fighting to keep female transfers off their teams. Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour as just "not being a good fit for the team" and constantly moving them around. I had one on my team who was constantly lying to her teammates, as well as being a completely incompetent coder. For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before! Some people left the team specifically to get away from her. But, untouchable because the bosses boss was a feminist who thought this young woman with clear management ambitions was just wonderful. Result: she was rapidly promoted into management where she wanted to be, to the disbelief of her remaining teammates.
Most Googlers were never really aware of these practices. Nonetheless, to believe Google is unbiased requires an incredible suspension of disbelief given the rather extreme publicly stated positions Pichai and the remaining senior management have taken, not to mention the Damore fiasco.
> I learned about the females-go-straight-to-HC policy from recruiters as well
I've heard lots of things from recruiters that were wrong. So much so that I generally advise people I know to check with be before believing anything a recruiter says. But because they lie on purpose, but because they're often misinformed.
This goes for compensation, process, and policy questions where recruiter statements reliably break with policy and practice. So pardon me if I don't find recruiters to be a reliable source for hot corp goss.
> Not due to any innate sexism but because they'd realised that female transfers were far more likely to be troublemakers or poor performers than male transfers, due to HR's desperate attempts to recast unacceptable behaviour
Sounds like innate sexism to me, given that the same thing happens with men. It's really hard to get fired. Ive had to deal with (men) not being fired for ages.
> For instance she was mystified by a CL she reviewed one day that contained hexadecimal, something she'd apparently never seen before!
Depending on the language and background, this sounds reasonable. I wouldn't expect a he java or frontend person to necessarily know hex. So yeah you're making my case for me. Sounds like bias against women.
This line of reasoning doesn't hold up. It's just as easy to flip your conclusion on it's head currently; any given member of a majority group could be viewed as only being hired because of internal biases, not merit.
To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.
There are no internal biases in favour of men in any organisation, anywhere. This is feminist propaganda - an assumption that if women dominate a field it's because they're good at it, but if men dominate it's because of innate sexism.
Showing bias in favour of women is very easy: just quote the executive leadership saying things like "we want more women", cite pro-women policies or present one of many other pieces of hard evidence. No such evidence exists for a pro-male bias which is why this argument always ends up relying on logical fallacies and innuendo.
The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable. Like, jsut, do some basic math. If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender and compound the fact that people tend to not like working in environments where they feel tokenized, hiring women (or any unrepresented minority talent) is just good business sense, no moralizing required.
Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims. I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff.
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If you assume roughly even distributions of talent across gender
Given the differences in the genders of who chooses to study the relevant qualifications, that's obviously a false assumption.
The amount of just unsourced vitriol of your comment is unapproachable
My comments are phrased in a level, factual manner. They're mostly retellings of things seen or experienced first hand, thus I am myself the source. But if you want sourced evidence of similar claims, by all means, go read the recruiter lawsuit against Google that was filed. It has plenty.
Maybe try talking to actual women in the field before making such wildly false claims
If you're going to assert a claim is false you need to pick something specific and show it's false, otherwise you're just blustering. And having direct experience of talking to women about this, I can tell you that many recognise the built-in advantage they have and are quite uncomfortable about it.
I do find it hilarious that there's this overarching "feminist propaganda" and despite all that tech companies still routinely have essentially no women in the engineering staff. [0]
It's pretty ironic that you put citation number in square brackets and then don't actually provide one, given your moaning about unsourced claims. As for "essentially no women" you mean about 15-20%, which is far cry from essentially none. It's this sort of thing that justifies my claim of propaganda; it's normal for jobs to have unbalanced distributions of genders. Very few jobs have exactly equal proportions of men and women. For instance HR has a higher proportion of women than software has a proportion of men, but I don't see much talk of the terrible anti-male bias that must obviously pervade the HR industry. /s
My bad for the previously missing source that's on me. Ive expanded on the thought below with references. (and despite calling me out you still can't find a single source for your claims (short of a vague, go read a document I clearly haven't read for me, which is just, beautiful))
Edited previous comment for the missing source, that's my bad. (and despite calling me out you still can't find a single source for your claims (short of a vague command to go read a document you clearly haven't read, which is just, beautiful))
Let's even abandon, for the sake of argument, any desire to see ratios in engineering even approach demographic ratios and instead just look at the rates graduating with CS degrees. That puts the ceiling closer to between 30 and 40 percent[0, for a representative top tier school] and, by your own admission, we close to half that on average (the numbers fall of faster if you consider technology leadership[1] or look more at smaller companies (which is harder to source considering a lot of places aren't very open with regards to their hiring stats, but in my experience working in nyc I’ve only seen sub 10% (N=3). Sub 10% to me essentially none, since that can basically evaporate with normal engineering churn). If we were to assume there was a grand bias, you'd expect an over representation in relation to the rate graduating at the very least.
“Thing exists” does not imply “thing normal” or “thing ideal”[3]. That’s a common logical fallacy used to justify traditionalism in all forms. Also, as an aside, people are talking about inequality in the HR field, you’re just not paying attention to it (tldr it is weird that there are more women and even with the numerical advantage they’re still underrepresented in leadership which reflects in their comp) [2]. When we look at technology it’s especially strange because there is no clear mechanism (outside of social bias) that might explain why we’d see the ratios present. Despite what men on the internet like to believe there’s no evidence women that go into math or computer science are worse at it than men. Estrogen is great but it doesn’t change your ability to write code. Hell no mechanism to explain why the ratios are more skewed than medicine [5] or law[4] even.
As for women being “uncomfortable talking with you about this”, I’d suspect that has a lot to do with your fear of a nonexistent feminsit boogieman and repeated claims that they don’t deserve their jobs than any kind of conspiracy. Imposter syndrome acts across genders and this repeated narrative plays to a lot of people’s insecurities.
This was far more effort than you deserve, but, I can only hope one day the culture at some of these major tech companies start to change, if only so I don't have to hear think pieces about how hard it is to hire from people that auto exclude 50% of the population.
I can't imagine why women are uncomfortable talking you, a proud sexist that openly claims there's feminist propaganda involved in their hiring. I can't think of any reason short of shame of being involved in such an obvious conspiracy.
To repeat - for most of what I've written I'm the source. Make of it what you want. What I've seen is consistent with similar claims made by others, many times in many contexts. The tech industry discriminates against men systematically, and it's because of the distorted ideological beliefs of people like you!
That puts the ceiling closer to between 30 and 40 percent[0, for a representative top tier school
GA Tech isn't representative. Even your own linked document says that: "Georgia Tech also awards more engineering degrees to women than any other U.S. institution"
GA Tech is famous for having a much higher proportion of women on its courses than normal. I guess someone told you it's a success story and now it's your go-to example.
They "achieved" this by systematically discriminating against men, which has led to a Title IX complaint against them for no less than ten different programs:
They routinely ban men from all sorts of events so if you believe this is an example of an unbiased selection process you're making my case for me. Men are systematically discriminated against and women never are: the disparate outcomes reflect fundamental differences and NOT some sort of non-existent bias against women.
Let's even abandon, for the sake of argument, any desire to see ratios in engineering even approach demographic ratios
You act like it's an absurd position to "abandon", but it's an absurd position to have in the first place. Let's not do for-the-sake-of-argument, let's deal with reality. Nearly all jobs have distributions different to base demography.
You're picking on engineering here, but why not pick on:
1. Kindergarten teachers, 97.% female
2. Dental hygienists, 97.1% female
3. Nurses, 90% female
4. Phlebotomists, 86.% female
5. Insurance claims processors, 85% female
All these jobs are less representative of the population than programming, which at merely 80% male is significantly less far from 50/50 than a huge number of teaching and medical related roles.
If you scroll the list you'll see that most professions aren't even close to 50/50.
“Thing exists” does not imply “thing normal” or “thing ideal”[3]. That’s a common logical fallacy used to justify traditionalism in all forms
Actually this kind of thinking is itself a logical fallacy. You're starting from a base point of assuming you can understand the reasons for absolutely every fact about the world, which clearly isn't the case. To believe you can decide what is ideal in any area of human existence requires a vastly over-exaggerated sense of one's intellect.
What you call traditionalism is really just a starting assumption that when studying complex evolved systems there are reasons for its current state that you may not understand. This is a perfectly rational assumption and made all the time in e.g. medicine. It's an assumption of incomplete information and inaccurate methods, that can lead to creating new problems instead of solving them. It's what led to "first, do no harm" as a medical concept.
When we look at technology it’s especially strange because there is no clear mechanism (outside of social bias) that might explain why we’d see the ratios present.
This is the root of the problem - that belief is pure ideology. The obvious explanation is that women find technology less interesting than men because they're women and women are different to men, in all sorts of complex ways. This statement is like saying "there's no clear mechanism for why almost everyone who works with children is a woman". Of course there's a clear mechanism for it: they're women, they have babies, they evolved to want to care for children as a result and thus women very often enjoy children's company more than men do. The idea that anything other than the base 50/50 case must be bias ignores not only vast amounts of basic evolutionary theory but also common sense.
In the end I'm arguing with you because it's people like you who ultimately argue for and implement anti-male discrimination, on the belief that you're on some grand moral quest to eliminate discrimination against women. But like Animal Farm, the evil you think you're fighting is in fact yourself - the only gender based discrimination I've ever seen in my entire career was done by feminists.
Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.
I used to believe that, when I was younger, new to Google and basically naive about these things.
Having had direct experience of how it works over the years, absolutely, incompetent women are more likely to get through the process. You can't constantly, for years, tell everyone that reducing the proportion of men is a critical priority and not have people bend the rules and make exceptions as a consequence. They're only doing what they're told to.
If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male
Likely the proportion would be higher. But yes, it's hard to change the demographics in areas where hard skills are measurable and where women don't really want to be anyway. Probably that's why feminists are moving on from targeting engineering roles: their current thing is leadership positions where less tangible "soft" skills are more important, comp is higher (the ultimate goal) and it's easier to manipulate the recruiting process. Hence laws enforcing that women be allocated board seats, things like that.
And there lots of men have witnessed women being put into management roles in software they were completely unsuited for, over and over. I think most guys have a story like that by now.
I don't think that people care about how it is actually done, we are all in an in-demand sector. People care about the hypocrisy of companies saying, we only hire the smartest! We don't discriminate! Quickly turning around and saying we need to be more diverse (which is a good thing) so let's throw those CVs out.
And it's always HR... they aren't impacted at all with ok:ish hires.
i've only seen 2 at my workplace. There are positive incentives for hitting women recruit goals but also there are no negative consequences for not doing so.
That's entirely a matter of perspective. The exact same policies can be phrased as "your full comp is not available if you hire men".
Fact is, hiring is in the instant a zero sum game. If recruiters are prioritising women it means they're putting men to the back of the queue in the hope they won't be forced to hire them. It's sexism, it's wrong and it makes a mockery of everything feminists claim to believe.
Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :)
The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources of talent, is not a diverse pipeline. Everyone's network is mostly male and white or Asian. This is even true of engineers from underrepresented groups. If you want a shot at hiring qualified underrepresented candidates, you have to actively recruit them. Your existing workforce cannot help identify them. That's what's meant by diversity and inclusion.
Now whether you agree that diversity and inclusion are worthwhile is another discussion altogether.
> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts.
Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that.
One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance.
that's the definition of "more attempts".
Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity and inclusion" are worth it (actively choosing ("recruiting") someone on race/color/etc to battle perceived racism is... a form of racism itself) is of course another battle...
I can't speak to other companies, but in my experience, inhouse recruiters have no incentive to pass bad candidates past the phone screen. I have no incentive to pass bad candidates to onsite. We want to spend as much time needed to find the right candidate and no more and we don't want miss out on anyone. But we don't want to waste our time either.
I just want to call out that diversity and inclusion are not about battling "perceived racism". Diversity and inclusion measures are to counterbalance the fact that professional (and personal) networks in tech are not diverse. The status quo left alone would bias itself toward white and Asian males irrespective of intent. By actively looking for underrepresented candidates, companies can counterbalance network effects in hiring.
> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts.
Yes they do. They are not subject to the same cool down period on a phone screen failure. Remember, google pitches it as “looking for a good signal” so retrying until the candidate passes isn’t lowering the bar in their mind (even though it is because phone screens are flawed but that’s another discussion).
> If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences.
I have, I worked there when this started several years back. Several got a chance at a phone rescreen sooner than the normal back-off and one got an invite to come back for a second on-site because “the signal wasn’t clear” on the first.
Not sure why this got downvoted. Google publishes some pretty detailed stats (which I applaud), and the "thumb on the scale" could not be more obvious.
Whether or not you feel this is a problem, it's worth reviewing the data.
[And for the record, I've enjoyed every female or minority colleague I've ever worked with, and made efforts to ensure their success, whatever their ability. I don't particularly object to AA hiring, but I don't like wasting my time on "fake" interviews, so I think publication of stats like this should be required.]
