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| I have not personally seen sexism in Silicon Valley by blackwater 03/14/2017, 3:55pm PDT | ||||
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| I've been in Silicon Valley for more than a decade working at more companies than I'd like to admit. Both small and large.
"Diversity hires" are very important. Not having enough women or certain minorities can expose the company to lawsuits. So the scales are really tipped in favor of any woman or minority whose resume comes across the hiring manager's desk. It's just basic arithmetic: 95 male resumes come across your desk, and 5 female ones. But your boss says you need at least 80/20 in the group or else red flags will be raised. So what do you do? You have to lower the standards for the 5%. Make no mistake: companies like Google have quotas for the number of women and minorities in certain groups, and when bosses don't meet those quotas they are punished. I've been on lots of interview panels. At one point I was giving 3 interviews a week. I can tell you that it's very rare for any reasonably competent women to get a no-hire. Having a background in the field or being passionate about the job are very important for most engineers, but female applicants can bypass those requirements. To give a no-hire, you would essentially need "the headshot"-- something they said that was so wrong, that it demonstrates a huge amount of ignorance-- like saying sorting a list is O(1) or something. All the women I know in my age group work. It would be considered very unusual to have a single-income family. In fact, it's nearly impossible for two people to live here on a single income unless they are wealthy. The cost of housing, taxes, schooling, and college are really high. So unless you plan on having a 2 hour commute, sending your kids to a very crappy school, or just not having kids, you need two incomes to stay afloat. People hire Mexican nannies to watch the kids, or have their extended family watch the kids if they're lucky enough to be able to do that. I've known some very good female engineers over the years. Some are really outstanding in their field. Most women tend to go into human resources or marketing, though. Companies tend to use those departments to pad the numbers of women in the company to make the diversity numbers. That's starting not to wash with our political overlords, though, so probably Eng will get more diversity hires in the coming years. I can imagine that women in engineering might get lonely (although I've never heard anyone say that, I can guess it.) Other than that, it seems like they're in a great position (which is only getting better every year.) The people I feel most sorry for when interviewing are the Asians with poor English skills. They're a minority, but not a privileged one, since we have so many Asians already. So they don't have the coveted "victim status." Having poor English is a big handicap to advancement, even if you're a brilliant engineer. It's also an acceptable reason for giving a no-hire, since people need to understand their co-workers' speech I haven't seen anyone express sexism in the time I've been here. It would be considered in very bad taste, as well as dangerous to your career. The most politically incorrect thing I've ever heard anyone say is that Indians write crappier code. This was at an extremely tiny startup that later failed (partly because of the incompetance of that guy...) |
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