Google male engineeer saying female engineers shouldn't be engineers

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I want to hire the best candidates I could care less what race/sex they are. All I know is I have to make sure I recommend at least one woman and one minority for our new class every year instead of the top 10 candidates. Its BS

How are you defining best? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

My experience as an engineer and hiring manager is that women tend to come to the table with less technical experience/expertise for a variety of reasons, but it's still pretty easy to spot which ones have potential. They do tend to be much more focused on producing usable technology, and that tends to make them more productive from the get-go despite maybe having to learn more skills in the beginning. Most men I've worked with don't start to understand how to make their technical work useful until they've been working much longer. It's a good indication that the criteria of "best" is not sufficient to produce good results.

An example is that a few years ago my DH went to bat for a woman candidate who impressed him based not on her technical merits (which were strong but not the "best") but on how much she had accomplished as a PhD student despite some obvious lack of support and resources. She did have a rocky start for about a year, but now she is consistently one of his best junior engineers. He knows projects that go to her will get done, which is much more valuable than the Harvard PhD that he ultimately had to demote because he was always pinning the blame for failed projects on others and refusing to hold himself accountable when projects he was leading did not complete.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As The Washington Post's Jena McGregor wrote in March, just 1 percent of Google's technology employees are black - a percentage that hasn't moved since 2014.

Indians do not hire African Americans, we have seen this at Infosys, Cognizant, Hexaware, TCS, and Wipro

Does it matter if code is written by backs, Indians, males, females, as long as it works

By that logic, there shouldn't be anything wrong with never hiring someone who looks like you ever again for any job as long as the job gets done.

Of course, that PP would be the first screaming "discrimination" if s/he ever were told directly that s/he weren't hired because of his/her ethnicity/race/weight/height/sexual orientation/zip code/HHI/anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I want to hire the best candidates I could care less what race/sex they are. All I know is I have to make sure I recommend at least one woman and one minority for our new class every year instead of the top 10 candidates. Its BS

How are you defining best? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

My experience as an engineer and hiring manager is that women tend to come to the table with less technical experience/expertise for a variety of reasons, but it's still pretty easy to spot which ones have potential. They do tend to be much more focused on producing usable technology, and that tends to make them more productive from the get-go despite maybe having to learn more skills in the beginning. Most men I've worked with don't start to understand how to make their technical work useful until they've been working much longer. It's a good indication that the criteria of "best" is not sufficient to produce good results.

An example is that a few years ago my DH went to bat for a woman candidate who impressed him based not on her technical merits (which were strong but not the "best") but on how much she had accomplished as a PhD student despite some obvious lack of support and resources. She did have a rocky start for about a year, but now she is consistently one of his best junior engineers. He knows projects that go to her will get done, which is much more valuable than the Harvard PhD that he ultimately had to demote because he was always pinning the blame for failed projects on others and refusing to hold himself accountable when projects he was leading did not complete.

Right off the bat lots of people consider the "best" someone who is 100% committed to their job--and they assume most women will eventually take off for maternity leave, so no woman in her 20's or 30's will even seem as good as a male applicant that age with similar technical qualifications and experience.

Which is why some people need to be TOLD to hire women. (And to deal with it if they go on leave for 8 weeks!)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I want to hire the best candidates I could care less what race/sex they are. All I know is I have to make sure I recommend at least one woman and one minority for our new class every year instead of the top 10 candidates. Its BS

How are you defining best? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

My experience as an engineer and hiring manager is that women tend to come to the table with less technical experience/expertise for a variety of reasons, but it's still pretty easy to spot which ones have potential. They do tend to be much more focused on producing usable technology, and that tends to make them more productive from the get-go despite maybe having to learn more skills in the beginning. Most men I've worked with don't start to understand how to make their technical work useful until they've been working much longer. It's a good indication that the criteria of "best" is not sufficient to produce good results.

An example is that a few years ago my DH went to bat for a woman candidate who impressed him based not on her technical merits (which were strong but not the "best") but on how much she had accomplished as a PhD student despite some obvious lack of support and resources. She did have a rocky start for about a year, but now she is consistently one of his best junior engineers. He knows projects that go to her will get done, which is much more valuable than the Harvard PhD that he ultimately had to demote because he was always pinning the blame for failed projects on others and refusing to hold himself accountable when projects he was leading did not complete.

Right off the bat lots of people consider the "best" someone who is 100% committed to their job--and they assume most women will eventually take off for maternity leave, so no woman in her 20's or 30's will even seem as good as a male applicant that age with similar technical qualifications and experience.

Which is why some people need to be TOLD to hire women. (And to deal with it if they go on leave for 8 weeks!)

I'm curious if this actually plays out in most hiring situations. I feel like it's a strawman used to be stingy about maternity leave. It might depend on the level of the hire, but DH's company is looking at employees as at least decade long (if not lifetime) investments. They don't have a lot of turnover, actually, though people move around a lot internally. The possibility of someone taking maternity leave for a few months a year after being hired doesn't ever seem to cross anyone's mind.

I think an over-narrowly assessment of potential based only on technical-skills instead of a broader picture of what the job entails is a much bigger problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From a business perspective, I can't see how it makes any sense to exclude an entire 50% of the workforce from a single job category. Your competitors who figure out how to tap into the talent of women are going to have an advantage.

Top CS/engineering programs are overwhelmingly male. Top companies hiring tech talent would be dumb to not hire the best. I don't think anyone would look at the top 100 engineers who are lets say 90 male and 10 female and not hire the 10 females. What doesn't make sense is why would you hire say 10 more females and only 80 males. Those 10 more qualified/talented males are going to go to a competitor and eat you alive.

This attitude 100% explains why people are so threatened by affirmative action for college admissions. The mistaken belief that where you go to school is the only predictor of success in the real world. As a hiring manager in tech, yes, candidates who attended a top program are likely to be stronger than the general applicant pool. But, no, the best candidates did not all go to the best programs. In fact, the best programmer/engineer I ever had the pleasure to work with started off as a diversity hire of sorts. He was a poor, white, male without college role models, who was hired into a coop program by a big engineering firm and worked through his undergrad and masters, which he received from an average public university (not even the flagship conference). I would hire this guy any day, any time. But without that corporate coop program focused on hiring from non-standard pools of candidates, he would never have gotten the opportunity to shine the way he has.

Today, with H1B and H4 and F1/OPT and L1, the companies that WOULD HAVE TAKEN A CHANCE on someone like this do not. the huge supply of cheap low skilled labor have pushed out any chance of entry level candidates getting jobs. At the large GSE I work at, people like this are NEVER looked at. The jobs are farmed to new jersey bodyshops. I can remember working with Strayer grads, smart people that just did not have the same chance, local US citizens became testers and then developers. Those people are wasted now with the H1Bs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I want to hire the best candidates I could care less what race/sex they are. All I know is I have to make sure I recommend at least one woman and one minority for our new class every year instead of the top 10 candidates. Its BS

How are you defining best? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

My experience as an engineer and hiring manager is that women tend to come to the table with less technical experience/expertise for a variety of reasons, but it's still pretty easy to spot which ones have potential. They do tend to be much more focused on producing usable technology, and that tends to make them more productive from the get-go despite maybe having to learn more skills in the beginning. Most men I've worked with don't start to understand how to make their technical work useful until they've been working much longer. It's a good indication that the criteria of "best" is not sufficient to produce good results.

An example is that a few years ago my DH went to bat for a woman candidate who impressed him based not on her technical merits (which were strong but not the "best") but on how much she had accomplished as a PhD student despite some obvious lack of support and resources. She did have a rocky start for about a year, but now she is consistently one of his best junior engineers. He knows projects that go to her will get done, which is much more valuable than the Harvard PhD that he ultimately had to demote because he was always pinning the blame for failed projects on others and refusing to hold himself accountable when projects he was leading did not complete.

Right off the bat lots of people consider the "best" someone who is 100% committed to their job--and they assume most women will eventually take off for maternity leave, so no woman in her 20's or 30's will even seem as good as a male applicant that age with similar technical qualifications and experience.

Which is why some people need to be TOLD to hire women. (And to deal with it if they go on leave for 8 weeks!)

But its not 8 weeks. Its 12 weeks and then complaints that they need 'more time' and asking for six months. It's ridiculous.

Signed,

a woman

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I want to hire the best candidates I could care less what race/sex they are. All I know is I have to make sure I recommend at least one woman and one minority for our new class every year instead of the top 10 candidates. Its BS

How are you defining best? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

My experience as an engineer and hiring manager is that women tend to come to the table with less technical experience/expertise for a variety of reasons, but it's still pretty easy to spot which ones have potential. They do tend to be much more focused on producing usable technology, and that tends to make them more productive from the get-go despite maybe having to learn more skills in the beginning. Most men I've worked with don't start to understand how to make their technical work useful until they've been working much longer. It's a good indication that the criteria of "best" is not sufficient to produce good results.

An example is that a few years ago my DH went to bat for a woman candidate who impressed him based not on her technical merits (which were strong but not the "best") but on how much she had accomplished as a PhD student despite some obvious lack of support and resources. She did have a rocky start for about a year, but now she is consistently one of his best junior engineers. He knows projects that go to her will get done, which is much more valuable than the Harvard PhD that he ultimately had to demote because he was always pinning the blame for failed projects on others and refusing to hold himself accountable when projects he was leading did not complete.

Right off the bat lots of people consider the "best" someone who is 100% committed to their job--and they assume most women will eventually take off for maternity leave, so no woman in her 20's or 30's will even seem as good as a male applicant that age with similar technical qualifications and experience.

Which is why some people need to be TOLD to hire women. (And to deal with it if they go on leave for 8 weeks!)

But its not 8 weeks. Its 12 weeks and then complaints that they need 'more time' and asking for six months. It's ridiculous.

Signed,

a woman

I am constantly asked at interviews if I have children, which is illegal! But what can I do? If I turn them in, I won't get hired. If I reject them outright, it may take me forever to find a job!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I want to hire the best candidates I could care less what race/sex they are. All I know is I have to make sure I recommend at least one woman and one minority for our new class every year instead of the top 10 candidates. Its BS

How are you defining best? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

My experience as an engineer and hiring manager is that women tend to come to the table with less technical experience/expertise for a variety of reasons, but it's still pretty easy to spot which ones have potential. They do tend to be much more focused on producing usable technology, and that tends to make them more productive from the get-go despite maybe having to learn more skills in the beginning. Most men I've worked with don't start to understand how to make their technical work useful until they've been working much longer. It's a good indication that the criteria of "best" is not sufficient to produce good results.

An example is that a few years ago my DH went to bat for a woman candidate who impressed him based not on her technical merits (which were strong but not the "best") but on how much she had accomplished as a PhD student despite some obvious lack of support and resources. She did have a rocky start for about a year, but now she is consistently one of his best junior engineers. He knows projects that go to her will get done, which is much more valuable than the Harvard PhD that he ultimately had to demote because he was always pinning the blame for failed projects on others and refusing to hold himself accountable when projects he was leading did not complete.

Right off the bat lots of people consider the "best" someone who is 100% committed to their job--and they assume most women will eventually take off for maternity leave, so no woman in her 20's or 30's will even seem as good as a male applicant that age with similar technical qualifications and experience.

Which is why some people need to be TOLD to hire women. (And to deal with it if they go on leave for 8 weeks!)

But its not 8 weeks. Its 12 weeks and then complaints that they need 'more time' and asking for six months. It's ridiculous.

Signed,

a woman

Well sometimes you don't get a daycare slot before your mat leave is over. There is a shortage of daycares in this area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From a business perspective, I can't see how it makes any sense to exclude an entire 50% of the workforce from a single job category. Your competitors who figure out how to tap into the talent of women are going to have an advantage.

Yes, and yet it's very common in education and PR and nursing, for example. Look at most PR firms and it's almost all women. Same with preschools and elementary schools -- nearly all women. Where is the outreach to get more men into those fields?

There is a huge outreach in public schools to hire male talent. Most men are going to get "diversity points" in the hiring process.

Curious - why isn't there a push at private schools to do the same? Is it because at elite privates, the mix is more balanced?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As The Washington Post's Jena McGregor wrote in March, just 1 percent of Google's technology employees are black - a percentage that hasn't moved since 2014.

Indians do not hire African Americans, we have seen this at Infosys, Cognizant, Hexaware, TCS, and Wipro

false - indians do hire AA.

vivek Ranadive's most expensive hires are all AA.

demarcus cousins was making big money under him before he got traded.

vince carter - 8 million US a year

D'arron fox - 19 year old making 5 million

george hill - 20 milllion a year

zach randolph - 12 million a year

In the NBA! Not in engineering. I'm pro-affirmative action, although the thought of it in practice in professional sports doesn't compute.

Why not? Those jobs are a lot better than a cube drone banging out code all day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From a business perspective, I can't see how it makes any sense to exclude an entire 50% of the workforce from a single job category. Your competitors who figure out how to tap into the talent of women are going to have an advantage.

Top CS/engineering programs are overwhelmingly male. Top companies hiring tech talent would be dumb to not hire the best. I don't think anyone would look at the top 100 engineers who are lets say 90 male and 10 female and not hire the 10 females. What doesn't make sense is why would you hire say 10 more females and only 80 males. Those 10 more qualified/talented males are going to go to a competitor and eat you alive.

This attitude 100% explains why people are so threatened by affirmative action for college admissions. The mistaken belief that where you go to school is the only predictor of success in the real world. As a hiring manager in tech, yes, candidates who attended a top program are likely to be stronger than the general applicant pool. But, no, the best candidates did not all go to the best programs. In fact, the best programmer/engineer I ever had the pleasure to work with started off as a diversity hire of sorts. He was a poor, white, male without college role models, who was hired into a coop program by a big engineering firm and worked through his undergrad and masters, which he received from an average public university (not even the flagship conference). I would hire this guy any day, any time. But without that corporate coop program focused on hiring from non-standard pools of candidates, he would never have gotten the opportunity to shine the way he has.

Today, with H1B and H4 and F1/OPT and L1, the companies that WOULD HAVE TAKEN A CHANCE on someone like this do not. the huge supply of cheap low skilled labor have pushed out any chance of entry level candidates getting jobs. At the large GSE I work at, people like this are NEVER looked at. The jobs are farmed to new jersey bodyshops. I can remember working with Strayer grads, smart people that just did not have the same chance, local US citizens became testers and then developers. Those people are wasted now with the H1Bs.

What are you talking about? Co-op programs like the one the engineer I mentioned came through continue to exist and are recruiting pipelines for many companies. The people I'm talking about are not starting out as testers. They are being recognized for their talents and given opportunities that they would otherwise not get.

I'm not going to defend coding body shops, but you are mistaken if immigration policy changes are going to fix that. The work will simply be outsourced to cheaper labor overseas, if those engineers can't come to the US. It's not like building and airplane, code is pretty portable. I'm not wild about our current immigration policies, because by creating a temporary worker status they create and underclass of workers. But immigrants have always been the lifeblood of US innovation, and so allowing them to come to the US to establish new lives is in our best interest long term. You are talking about job scarcity, which employment numbers do not bear out. There are a host of reasons that Americans aren't going into STEM fields to become engineers...but you seem fixated on only one of them, meanwhile also arguing that unqualified Americans are getting job opportunities left and right thanks to affirmative action. Which one is it? Is it unqualified Indians (who, I promise, are not beneifting from affirmative action) that are taking American jobs from white male programmers? Or unqualified women, blacks, and hispanics...oh, and transgenders?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wage gap is a myth (agree)
Diversity for diversities sake is a joke should hire the best (agree)
Women are different than men and are better at certain things (agree)

Anyone not agree with those 3?

But what are the criteria for determining "the best"?

The author thinks that they don't need to spend time training people about unconscious bias. (I guess he doesn't--his biases aren't unconscious at all, he's very upfront about them.) He thinks women AS A GROUP are more neurotic than men AS A GROUP.

If you think "the best" person for a job should be able to handle stress, and you think women AS A GROUP can't handle stress, then you aren't going to see a man and a woman with otherwise equal qualifications as both being "the best." You are going to only see the man as "the best." That's why you need to affirmatively promote diversity.

Get it?

+1

People come in spectrums. So while it is true to say that men in general are taller than women, there are some women who are taller than some men. Therefore it is wrong to act as if all men are taller than all women.

The true danger of stereotypes is that it prevents us from seeing people as individuals and judging them by their own qualities and not that of the "group" they are put into.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
As a fellow woman in tech, this really resonated with my - especially your description of the infantalization of technical women.

My DH is also an engineer, and now in a position to do a lot of hiring. He's been absolutely aghast at some of the comments he gets from people after interviews. His coworkers literally saying "she's smart and can do the job, but we're really technical in this group, so I don't think she'd want to"
WTF.

Agree with you both. I also wish I knew you in real life!! There are days I feel like I am beating my head against a brick wall.

10:26 here. We could set up a tech women community...I'm not sure there are any right now that exist independent of an employer that is trying to build one for the women in their company.

Also, if you've never been, you should try to attend the Grace Hopper Conference. It's amazing to attend a conference of that size that's almost all women.

Join WIT. They have a robust chapter in Northern VA. http://www.womenintechnology.org/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I hope this guy is outed and never is employed again by anyone, anywhere.

the guy is was working on phd in biology at harvard.

so for a leftist leaning organization like google that crushes any talk of sexual differences, image how they treat workers that are over 40?

oh yea, average age is 27

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I want to hire the best candidates I could care less what race/sex they are. All I know is I have to make sure I recommend at least one woman and one minority for our new class every year instead of the top 10 candidates. Its BS

How are you defining best? That's what it ultimately comes down to.

My experience as an engineer and hiring manager is that women tend to come to the table with less technical experience/expertise for a variety of reasons, but it's still pretty easy to spot which ones have potential. They do tend to be much more focused on producing usable technology, and that tends to make them more productive from the get-go despite maybe having to learn more skills in the beginning. Most men I've worked with don't start to understand how to make their technical work useful until they've been working much longer. It's a good indication that the criteria of "best" is not sufficient to produce good results.

An example is that a few years ago my DH went to bat for a woman candidate who impressed him based not on her technical merits (which were strong but not the "best") but on how much she had accomplished as a PhD student despite some obvious lack of support and resources. She did have a rocky start for about a year, but now she is consistently one of his best junior engineers. He knows projects that go to her will get done, which is much more valuable than the Harvard PhD that he ultimately had to demote because he was always pinning the blame for failed projects on others and refusing to hold himself accountable when projects he was leading did not complete.

Right off the bat lots of people consider the "best" someone who is 100% committed to their job--and they assume most women will eventually take off for maternity leave, so no woman in her 20's or 30's will even seem as good as a male applicant that age with similar technical qualifications and experience.

Which is why some people need to be TOLD to hire women. (And to deal with it if they go on leave for 8 weeks!)

I'm curious if this actually plays out in most hiring situations. I feel like it's a strawman used to be stingy about maternity leave. It might depend on the level of the hire, but DH's company is looking at employees as at least decade long (if not lifetime) investments. They don't have a lot of turnover, actually, though people move around a lot internally. The possibility of someone taking maternity leave for a few months a year after being hired doesn't ever seem to cross anyone's mind.

I think an over-narrowly assessment of potential based only on technical-skills instead of a broader picture of what the job entails is a much bigger problem.

We've also had a father take 8 weeks of paternity leave and this trend is increasing. It was painful to do without him since he's one of my big brains, but I am glad to see a father really engaged with parenting. Parental leave is a phase and it's over pretty quickly in the grand scheme of things.

I also agree about the overly narrow views of potential and "best". There's a really old adage about taking really good engineers and making them really bad managers. I think that speaks a lot to how skills and potential can change wildly over someone's career. The soft skills that disgruntled Google guy rants about are in many ways more vital to successful engineering and success in the market than writing the best code.