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

It's not very long, and its kernel is an anecdote about how her son is interested in programming and her daughter in photoshop. My daughter is also more interested in art than my son (who is more interested in video games). Both would make exceptional programmers, and both have a latent interest. Both are setting a course for STEM careers, but, like all 18 and 16 year olds --- let alone 9 and 7 year olds --- neither has any clue what they're really going to end up doing.

The piece culminates in a recommendation that we focus our diversity efforts on college admissions and earlier stages in the pipeline. But that's a cop-out. We should work on all stages of the pipeline. It's unsurprising that a Google engineer would believe that gender balance can't be addressed without fixing the college pipeline, but the fact is that virtually none of the software engineering we do in the industry --- very much including most of the work done at Google --- requires a college degree in the first place.

Most importantly, though, the only contribution this post makes to the discussion is to add "I'm a woman and I agree with one side of the debate" to the mix. Everything in it is a restatement of an argument that has been made, forcefully and loudly, already. Frankly: who cares?

Edit: I added "some of the" to the beginning of the comment, not because I believe that, but because I concede that there are arguments in the post that can't be dispatched with a single paragraph in a message board comment (through clearly there are some that can.)

Fascinating how different readers take away different salient points. For me, her main buildup was hiring women to meet a "diversity goal" resulted in pressures to hire some women who couldn't do the work. This creates a perverse feedback loop that unfairly taints future women candidates who could do the work -- which ends up undermining the whole point of diversity. Imo, the biological stuff about her son and daughter is more of a side note.

To restate her text, we could say that yes, there are talented female computer scientists like Grace Hopper and NASA's Margeret Hamilton.[1][2] However, if companies lower the bar to hire women who are not competent like them (because diversity is valued over skills), it will inadvertently make it harder to hire future Grace Hoppers and Margeret Hamiltons.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with her but her Google observation is getting lost in her boy/girl preferences sidebar.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)

Since the cycle of increasing mediocrity has a prominent float in the parade of horribles conjured by the "anti-diversity" (for lack of any better term) side of this debate, I'm left assuming she didn't see that occur. But she could also clear that up easily.

Finally, an obvious point: evaluation of the performance of an individual software developer is one of the great unsolved problems of software engineering. Virtually all performance evaluation done today is at root subjective. Subjective performance evaluations are easily tainted by prejudice; in fact, you have to work hard not to taint them.

If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.

† 99% of what I write isn't well-written either, in case this sounds like a jab at the author, who I am not familiar with.

I don't think it's obvious at all. That an experienced engineer or manager can correctly evaluate a software engineer is one of the ground assumptions that runs through our industry and its thinkpieces. (Though it is borne out by the studies that, e.g., even Google has done).

> If you think that's different at Google, re-evaluate: Google also runs one of the most famously capricious hiring programs in the industry. Despite constant rituals and genuflection towards data-driven decision making, Google continues to thrive based on its status as a premiere destination for new software developers, despite running a hiring process renowned for the quality of the people it has alienated. There is ample evidence of Google having scaled broken processes.

This is a significant point: Google's hiring process is legendarily bad. While I would work for them (I think their ethics are solid, their engineering is excellent, their benefits suitable for adults, and reports of internal culture are generally good - a rare combination), the hoop jumping they ask you to go through is... quite amazing. I just don't have enough of a taste for doing an independent study of my upper division algorithms class to have aggressively tried to get hired there.

It's also evidence, I think, that broken hiring processes do not inherently break a company - or at least a sufficiently profitable one.