Recently, I read this post about Google's hiring practices, where guys were not given an interview chance even with a perfect score in the screening, while girls were advanced to the next round regardless of the score.
I have personally been burned by this both in India (during undergrad hiring) and in the US as a new grad and as an experienced engineer. This is not just an issue at the hiring stage as it manifests time and again during the career progression opportunities. The HR org driving this has been almost all-female in my professional experience (Netflix included), and I feel that there are significant biases and propaganda behind this.
In all this, a male from the lower middle class, who had to fight for everything, has constantly been neglected. Being one of them myself, I want to help. Here are some concrete questions that I have to help the affected folks:
1. Is this practice legal? If not, should we crowdsource some funding and fight it the legal way.
2. Are there organizations/non-profits working on this issue? If so, I would donate to them and urge others to do so.
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Being male or female isn’t a race.
You work for Netflix. How are you “neglected”?
You want to raise funds for men to be treated more fairly in tech hiring???😂😂😂 big jokes.
Unverified anecdotes and Linkedin posts are not enough data to support these claims. The proportion of male to female workers in the tech industry speak otherwise.
And dudes solving 4/4 in less amount of time are many a times not even considered.
Diversity hire should have a minimum bar wherein every candidate should clear it.
This 1/4 thing is ridiculous, but who am I to say anything, I don't own the company, it's them who are going to make a decision.
Think about it this way: no one is ever going to be fully happy. The closer you get to "true" meritocracies, the closer you get to your top colleges, companies, and societies being majority filled (at least at this current point in time) with white and Asian men. You would of course underrepresented minorities present, and you wouldn't worry about their capabilities if they get in. But it's also possible that those minorities would suffer discrimination. Such a company or organization would doubtless suffer from a lack of viewpoint diversity and evolutionarily lack hybrid vigor.
And so we can come up with the general pattern that the whole is more than just the sum of their parts. It is possible for someone to appear to be less than an absolutely stellar IC in a vacuum and still do more for what the company needs "at scale". Big FAANGs need to adequately serve the gigantic global customer base they depend on for revenue. You'll have a hard time arguing that can occur without an employee base whose diversity reflects the makeup of the customer base.
Beyond that, the whole idea of measurement and "meritocracy" is kinda chicken and egg. It's easy to measure achievements, but how do you measure potential? At a large company, how do you measure what someone contributes when many times, the high-value stuff is somewhat intangible and political? When that's the case, you shouldn't be surprised to see policies which reflect the political reality.
Now that was all a very long way to say this: if you don't like the political reality of bureaucratic big companies and you prefer more of a meritocracy, you don't have any option but to join a small firm. That could be a quant firm, it could be a hypergrowth startup, it could be a number of things. But I guarantee you that you'll see less of this kind of posturing there, if only because there's no budget for it.
Think with your head. Don't get upset about these things. Understand the reality it portrays, and accept it. You have alternatives. Make your own decisions. Remember, you have to pay a price to get access to those giant FAANG RSUs. This is part of it. If it's still worth it to you, try to find another team or division or company that does a better job here. There's no free lunch.
Well I just know history. Every single empire in history, from Roman to Ottoman to USSR collapsed due to demographics.
0) Empire is formed
1) Empire expands too much
2) Empire acquires a lot of different ethnic groups within its borders
3) Said ethnic groups are incompatible and they end up in a war with one another
4) Empire collapses
5) Go to step 0
It's nothing new, and we can already see the beginning of this with BLM and other ethnic movements inside US. All things follow this natural pattern, It's kind of like credit boom-bust cycles.
Best case scenario, you might have a country named "United States" 50 years from now, but it will be nothing like today's United States. Just like "United Kingdom" 200 years ago and today.
Beyond that, the USA has been using its military might to crash the global south for fun and profit basically since the end of WWII. And they do it for economic reasons, because no one stands in their way. Maybe the difference today is that now China stands in the way a bit, along with Russia. But that's just a continuation of the cold war. Even if the USA ends up like the UK and it's nothing like "today's United States" it will remain in the top 10 wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world with the largest domestic consumer market. Ethnic nationalists will come and go because people have short attention spans. But, if you really think that Americans have enough energy to go to civil war rather than doom-scroll through the social media that was engineered to hijack their mental energy, turn it into free advertising, and neutralize that very impulse, then you're a lot more hopeful than me.
I think there's a 0% chance that BLM doesn't continue to get co-opted by corporations. 0%. It's just too good of a crisis to waste, and too lucrative a brand to make a profit from. But that very profit will neuter its fangs. And so we will go, in a Baudrillardian cycle...