I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

I hear you when you say,"the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR platitude.

If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring managers turn away good candidates and get a few duds.

Once you're into real hiring statistics you have to be very careful of confirmation bias and "I just like this guy"ism even after the fact... they look and act like your successful hires. It's hard to even say, unless you're personally looking at their work on a regular basis and know what direction they're being given.

> I hear you when you say,"the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions". It just sounds like an HR platitude. If you know how to do that, I actually think you have a multi-$B idea! Unless you mean "cultural fit", or "went to the same school I did" as the best person, I'm doubtful you have one though. I've done enough interviewing and worked with enough people to know that even the best hiring managers turn away good candidates and get a few duds.

Well, make me a multi-billionaire, I now present to you:

BLIND SOURCING AND HIRING

I should only share the details in private, you say it's a multi-billion dollar idea and I'd hate to tip off the competitors.

In all seriousness, though, I know this is challenging. Especially at Google, there's still an opportunity for trouble after you've been hired but not yet assigned; though I doubt it would be enough of a problem to trash the whole system.

The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.

All fair criticisms. I'm not a hiring manager and my experience with hiring processes is limited.

What I had in mind is the mandate of hiring the best person for the job and any/all other policies are designed with that directive in mind. This is analogous to how the court system is supposed to be designed to be the discoverer of truth and the entire legal process as it relates to court proceedings is to further that search for truth.

What would my suggestion in reality look like? Similar to a company I once worked for. They had an interview process where all candidates were interviewed by at least 5 individuals. This was required to be done separately in one-on-one 30 minute sessions. Each interviewer scores the candidate in a combination of numerical and written feedback which is presented to HR. HR is also required to be one of the interview sessions. HR is also the pre-screener of all resumes unless an internal employee has a recommendation. After that, it boils down to a consensus system where HR reviews the feedback from everyone and determines who has the highest overall rating. This obviously required specific traits and requirements to be detailed in advance prior to the interview that were specific to the position. Some obviously overlapped like "communication skills" and others were very specific to the individual role and required work history and experience.

They also used a very similar process for their performance evaluations (you first two line managers had significant weight in the performance review, but you had to also get feedback from no less than 5 other colleagues. And your manager had to approve who could provide feedback on you so you couldn't just choose your best friend at work who would write a glowing review. That process was super-annoying and time consuming, but I think it did a pretty solid job. I never felt like I was ever treated unfairly or got shafted in any way. And the reason HR played a key role in the process was to make sure the rules were being followed and if there was any discrimination or unconscious biases, it would show over time and HR could take action if they saw fit like restricting a possibly biased individual from interviewing anyone who fit into a certain category (women, racial minority, disabled, etc.).

> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.

Or the fact that it's not really possible. Right now, most software engineering jobs are pretty communication heavy. Almost all company cultures contain a non-trivial amount of verbal communication, so with that premise, it's reasonable to have candidates verbally describe technical things or even make technical arguments.

Once you're listening to real voices, it's difficult to pretend that the hiring is blind.

The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra worked really well because you could hide the person behind a screen and judge an entire work product without knowing anything about the instrumentalist.

Now, if most software jobs include a heavy remote work component some day, it might be more reasonable to throw a somewhat detailed spec at a candidate, have them code up a solution, then show the code (and only the code) to people evaluating the work product. But most devs don't have a day-to-day that looks like implementing textual programming problems for strangers.

You're describing the German court system in which the job of the judge is to search for the truth. The US system is adversarial, the two sides present evidence, the Jury is the finder of fact and the Judge is the finder of law. If the two sides do not wish to search for the truth, it will not be found. This is common when the prosecution refuses to consider alternative theories and the defense merely wants to get off without having the resources to find the true criminal.

Also, fwiw, that process sounds like it would be pretty good at filtering candidates to be good at the job, but broad categories like "communication skills" cover an awful lot of territory. Imagine someone from quite a different culture with wildly different (but effective within their culture) communication styles that people in your company thought was weird. That person would probably be barred from working and integrating into the corporate culture.

I'm not saying you guys are bad people, or that I would have the guts to make that call myself, but I just want to point out that process as a fig leaf for distilling conformity is just that.

You can setup interviews with text chat and screen shares at a large company without including someones voice or picture. Some places also remove names and other details from resumes.

Most companies don't do this in part because text chat introduces other biases, but also because most people ignore their own bias.

> The only reason not to do blind hiring is if it produces results which are indistinguishable from standard hiring.

This will possibly result in less women being hired. See: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

> Companies don't do this in part because text chat introduces other biases, but also because most people ignore their own bias.

Mostly likely it is because it doesn't mirror how they work. (Text chat is SoP for remote-first work, but remote-first is far from the norm.)

Then there's either something wrong with how they introduced the trial, or there are just fewer qualified female candidates. Either way, I really didn't understand why they backed off on the trial.

If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out.

> If you can reasonably assess that your process is fair, I don't think anyone should care how the numbers bear out.

Because it goes against the results they wanted to arrive at.

> Once you're listening to real voices,

Use a voice scrambler.

thats what i was thinking. Everyone should be made to sound like darth vader and now we've an interview process to die for :P

Odd how that Idea never occurred to the person to whom you are replying.

In comment after comment, the possibility that there is no bias is considered literally impossible. The blatant and unrecognized bias in this conversation is absolutely fascinating. (I also notice HN has introduced a throttle, presumably to reduce the volume of incorrect messages.)

Maybe Donald Duck

Double blind. We do it in science, then do it hiring.

HN has always had a throttle for comment threads that go more than a few deep. The deeper the thread goes, the longer the delay gets.

People have tried that... specifically to show that women were being discriminated against, but guess what happened when it was implemented?

They found that contrary to their initial hypothesis, women with voices modulated to sound like men were still not getting hired at the same rate as the men masked to sound like women. Not only that, but they found women modulated to sound like men did worse than unmodulated women, and men modulated to sound like women did better than unmodulated men:

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

One very interesting finding of the study is that woman and men are faring equally once the attrition is removed.

It seemed to me that the natural conclusion was that woman have lower confidence and thus performed worse at interviews.

And this is a deep realization for me, because it pushes me in the direction of current diversity policies. You see, if there is perceived bias against you, then you lose confidence. So we must, for a while, try our best to remove that perfection. That might mean hiring more woman even if they don't seem to perform as well as men, because, once we have done that for a while, woman will feel more confident and the good candidates will appear.

In any case - whether my last paragraph makes sense or not - the conclusion of the experiment interviewing.io did is that only removing gender perception during the interview process isn't enough, for woman may already have been affected by the bias and thus will perform worse than men during the interview.

So we come back to the conclusion that we must invest to bring woman to tech early - during college or even high school - and fight biases there.

It's a long road anyway, isn't it?

> The famous study involving auditions for positions in an orchestra

And even there they had to put carpet down / remove shoes to hide the difference in shoe sounds when they walked to the performance area.

https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...

"the telltale sounds of a woman's shoes allegedly influenced some jury members such that aspiring musicians were instructed to remove their footwear"

Agreed, bias would and does plague us in every field. We can however strive to reduce its influence by being conscious of the bias in our decisions specific to the task. However to completely give up the evaluation on the candidate's aptitude for performance and resort to hiring the remaining women candidates to fill up a quota simply cause the recruiters might've missed some excellent women candidates cause of some sexist bias is analogous to pouring oil on the bonfire. The resulting overall performance of the hired candidates 'may' be worse than if bias was allowed to operate unchecked. Instead one slightly better solution (within the quota system) would be to address this at the grassroots, instantiate more programs/workshops that cater to women candidates during their academic time-period allowing them to showcase their skills and learn how the company wants them to be. At least this way you've the option of choosing from a much larger pool of women candidates thereby increasing the probability of not missing out the better women candidates. The results would also speak for themselves for other future employers who're looking to recruit women candidates for a similar job profile.

From my observations (without access to the code one can only speculate), not in this case - depth is not the cause (nor is recent downvotes, or excessive volume). I've never before hit a limit of being able to participate in a back and forth debate at far higher volumes and depth than today, but now I would be completely unable to have a conversation. Something major has changed, I'd bet money it's a flag assigned to a user by a moderator.

That said, it's not super hard core militant censorship, there's plenty of other people saying politically incorrect things in today's discussion as well, so my censorship may have been due to "not adding to the discussion in a meaningful way", rather than my particular point of view. Hopefully there's an appeal mechanism for when I decide to straighten up my act, I'm working on it.

But as they say, freedom of speech does not require someone to provide you a stage to speak on, and private companies are free to censor whatever speech they see fit.

> From my observations (without access to the code one can only speculate), not in this case - depth is not the cause

It might be depth within a certain timeframe then. I've noticed similar delays previously in non-controversial topics when trying to reply to non-controversial comments.

I don't think there's anything sinister going on here, there's just a mechanism in the comments to prevent people from speaking past each other in quick succession.

Edit: For reference, this comment took 9 minutes before a reply link appeared, and it is the 9th child of a top-level comment. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Try replying to this comment and timing how long it takes before a reply link appears - my guess is 10 minutes.

It was waaaaay longer than that.

An alternative explanation is the universe was punishing me for being a dick, which wouldn't be that unrighteous.

When you are hiring do you really need to know if your candidate is a man or woman? How about further developing non-face-to-face "blind" (written or mediated?) interview methods where the the hiring decision-maker does not know the gender or race (all he knows is a gender-less detailed operational profile) and only the go-between facilitator who relays the information would know such thing. Part of the process could be handled by an AI with no gender/race in-parameters, etc.

Double blind hiring famously does not result in gender balance (and even less in ethnic balance). This is called the funnel problem.

So that wouldn't solve matters.

So because we'll make small mistakes anyway we should

a) switch to outright discrimination in hiring

b) like it

I submit this would not be an improvement.