Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers from Seeing Job Ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/employers-used-facebook-to-keep-women-and-older-workers-from-seeing-job-ads-the-federal-government-thinks-thats-illegal <comment><USER2> There are job boards that SPECIFICALLY make it their business to target women and deliver female candidates looking for tech roles (in organizations that are in need of diversity hires):

      https://powertofly.com/

...and companies pay a premium for those job advertising channels.

Why is it a great business and an initiative to be applauded if it is about excluding men and a scandal if it is about excluding women?

<comment><USER3> I think for similar reasons like it generally being seen as a good thing to give free food and housing to the poor, but frowned upon to do the same for the rich.

<comment><USER4> I have trouble to understand your message behind your analogy...

From what I get is that you are referring to woman as the poor, and man as the rich.

Just because it's a man dominated field, does it mean the others remaining have no chance to get anything in that field?

If so, do you suggest that one half of the world is not allowed to have these jobs at the same condition because some people already do, just because they have a male reproductive system? --- Meaning that all men are representative for all men, the same for women?

This is not equality.

<comment><USER2> I object to the use of "dominated". In a herd, a "dominant" animal will actively work to keep others away from food sources and mating opportunities when those are scarce. This is not what this is.

Strictly my opinion: There are few women in software engineering because few women WANT to be in software engineering, period. ...and it's not a given that this is by definition a bad thing for them either.

<comment><USER5> Maybe one of the reasons women do not want to work in IT is, that the atmosphere is still sometimes sexist?

Or at least arkward. When I started to study IT, I was surprised to see, that the stereotypes were the majority. Meaning, long, oily hair, etc.

So I guess that is still changing, and I really do not believe 50% women should be the goal, but maybe the IT world still needs reflection sometimes, why so little women want to get into it.

<comment><USER6> Sexist -> awkward -> long hair is quite a series of leaps, and I'm mighty curious as to the underlying mental model. You appear to be implying that women might not want to go into IT because the men are unattractive. But unattractive is not the same as hostile. If you _enjoy_ something, ugly people won't keep you away.

Of note is that the percentage of open source programmers who are women is half that of the broader industry, despite open source programming generally involving less face-to-face interaction. Surely, if women were scared away by ugly creepy nerds, the safety from behind a screen and absence of compelled personal interaction would tend to bring them out? It would seem to be suggestive that far fewer women enjoy doing that sort of thing for fun.

Incidentally, we have a nursing shortage. The incidence of male nurses is similarly low to female programmers. I find it amusing that no one hand wrings about this, or would dare make comments like "maybe men don't want to be nurses because nurses are ugly".

<comment><USER2> ...I agree. I find it disturbing, how quick women are to bring up notions like "awkward" and "creepy" in discussions such as this. 80% of "awkward" is about social interactions unfolding in a way that are outside the norm. 80% of "creepy" is about being unattractive. Not being socialized to conform with the norms is mostly a function of your childhood upbringing. Not being attractive is a function of your genes. Both are elements of a destiny that is cast upon you from outside and not within your control, like what gender you are born into.

I don't see at all how an environment full of unattractive and not well- socialized people create an environment that is in any way hostile to women.

But _superficial_ people who, when female, will play the feminism card against people who happen to be unattractive and not well-socialized _do_ create a hostile work environment for the latter group.

<comment><USER5> "Not being attractive is a function of your genes"

No. Genes play a role, but attractiveness is not so much about looks as it is about confidence and self esteem (and smell, of course).

I was considered very ugly in my youth. And yes, I compensated with computers. I did not got much experience with girls in teenage years.

Then I traveled, studied and grew in my mind and confidence.

And today, well, lets just say, sometimes I am still confused, when very attractive women flirt with me, as my old me would have considered them to be way out of league.

Now I know how to play the game, so to say, but in the beginning, I know I hurt quite some feelings and was probably considered arrogant, when I simply did not know how to respond.

So, I got out of the basement. But:

"I don't see at all how an environment full of unattractive and not well- socialized people create an environment that is in any way hostile to women."

many nerds never did. They long for women, but never learned the game and sometimes think, they are too ugly etc. bullshit.

So when you have lots of men with unfullfiled desires and weak confidence or knowledge regarding women ... then yes, they act awkward towards women. They would like to bond, but don't knowmhow and think they never can. So not hostile, but awkward, so quite some women feel uncomfortable and rather leave.

Now to be clear, no, not every IT nerd is like this. But too many. I was one of them once.

<comment><USER2> ...actually, the stuff you are saying is _precisely_ the kind of thinking that will turn somebody who is merely unattractive into somebody who is creepy as hell.

Exhibit A: Physical unattractiveness pairing off with _acting_ like you're not unattractive, perhaps because of some misguided Disney-movie philosophy about how self-confidence makes you attractive. Somebody acting like Johnny Depp when they look like Patton Oswalt is pretty much the definition of creepy, while somebody acting like Patton Oswalt when they look like Patton Oswalt may be perfectly acceptable.

Exhibit B: Up until this point of the conversation, attractive/unattractive was in reference to the presence/absence of factors that make women uncomfortable when being around you, which does not really extend very far into the sexual realm. And all of a sudden you start talking about bonding, longing, unfulfilled desires, flirting, playing the game, hurt feelings, etc. That is _precisely_ what women want men in the workplace to steer clear of, when they look like Patton Oswalt.

I rest my case.

<comment><USER5> You missunderstood most of it, but you are correct:

It is even more creepy, when someone "acts" like looking good, when he actually believes inside, he does not.

But when someone believes he looks good and feels actually good in his body, no matter the weight fot example, then this person does look good. (to most people) But that does not mean, that suddenly everyone wants to have sex with him or her.

You seem to took the hollywood definition, that attractiveness is objectivly measurable on a linear scale. With sexiest woman toplist etc. That is bullshit. There are general things if course, like healthy body and mind, but attractiveness is highly subjectiv. Eastern areas for example love fat women. Weetern not so much (in general)

And I have seen really "ugly" men (by common standard) with very beautiful women in true love. Because the men had confidence amd strenght and knew is way around in this crazy world and the women loved that strength to feel save.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Last year my main competitor went on a diversity hire drive. After hiring a bunch they tried to fire one of them due to poor performance. It ended up as a legal battle that is still ongoing. A number of the the other diversity hires got the message that they were now unfirable and decided to start slacking off as well. Now work there is pretty much frozen and they're bleeding customers. Im told they're 6 months away from mass layoffs.

This company dominated my industry. I always planned on the taillight following strategy where you follow a leading company and wait for them to screw up. I'm now happily taking full advantage of their situation.

I actually have a way more 'diverse' staff. I offshored the work (and myself) to a non-white country where for a weird historical reason this work was mostly done by women. The main difference is that they're not a protected class here so I don't have to worry about lawsuits.

The most lucrative customers will only buy American so once my competitor goes under I'll open up a US office which will mean exposure to US laws but by that stage I'll be ready to package the company off and sell it to someone else to worry about.

<comment><USER8> I want to apply the principal of generosity here, but the fact that your post perfectly illustrates the alleged perils of hiring non-white or Asian men-- from a new account no less!--makes me wonder if anything resembling this story ever happened. Then again, everything in your narrative is so vague it's literally impossible to disprove.

<comment><USER9> Do people really know such detailed information of the HR issues of their competitors?

Plus it just sounds like a shit post - "You can't hire black people, they'll just slack off and sue you when you fire them."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target > based on demographic could do this.

I'd like to point out that specifically you can NOT do this on Facebook any more, or at least not if Facebook find it out. They make you mark your ads as being job posts, and remove demographic targeting from that.

The headline here is irritating, because the headline being shown is two years old. The headline should be the second half of it, which is:

"After two years the Federal Government confirms demographic advertising of jobs is illegal"

<comment><USER11> Seems pointless to me. What are they gonna do, hire those folks they meant to exclude anyway when they show up?

<comment><USER12> While we're at it: why bother with any sort of anti-discrimination effort? Haters' gonna hate after all. /s

<comment><USER5> There is a difference between accepting discrimination, or trying to enforce antidiscrimination. Make such things open, talk and discuss about it, yes! But when you discriminate to counter discrimination for example, than I believe something went wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have mixed feelings about this. I am absolutely aware this can be a means to intentionally exclude specific groups due to prejudice and can be a polite way to do terrible things. I get that.

But the reality is that the modern world seems to seriously suck at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for themselves or help employers find the right people for the job. I keep thinking "Surely, there must be a better way than what we are doing currently."

Maybe if we worked on solving that issue we would see less of this issue. Like if it is a job for writing HTML and you write HTML, there are ways to find you based on that and it won't matter what your gender or age is.

<comment><USER14> The "modern world" sucks at figuring out how to help people find the right kind of job for one of two reasons:

1) they keep thinking about gender and age as qualifiers for jobs for which those factors have absolutely zero relevance (girls are bad at math! Old people can't learn new things!), or

2) They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave! oldster can only do Cobol, they'll never learn Python!).

<comment><USER15> > _They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job > (girls will just get pregnant and leave!_

This is not a delusion, and it's a thing commonly talked about in my country (Poland). It's not just about that girls will get pregnant and leave - it'll be that girls will get pregnant and out of the sudden[0] go on paid maternity leave, which they can extend to a year, during which you have to keep their position open, after which you can't legally fire them even if you've already found a replacement, and there are many women[1] who plan another pregnancy just after the leave period ends, in order to extend their employment period by another two years. The incentive here is that health leave and maternity leave both count as employment, so they don't have a break in years of employment on their CV (and both are paid, too).

Overall effect of our legal landscape makes companies prefer men over women, and/or prefer employment contracts that don't offer these legal guarantees, and there's always noise being made whenever our government (which is currently pro-family) starts talking about adjustments that would extend some protections to those other work contract types.

(Now I'm not saying this to justify the bias in general, but just to point out that there are real economic pressures in play that do get considered by the employers.)

\--

[0] - You don't have a "notice period" on maternity live; if a doctor decides there are concerns about the health of a mother or a child, your employee can just give you the doctor's note and stop coming to work.

[1] - And I've personally heard parents encouraging their daughters to do that. It seems to be a common theme, at least among the less well-off parts of our population. The boss-employee relationship is pretty antagonistic.

<comment><USER13> This is actually a hard problem to genuinely solve. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm not really happy with the current way we typically talk about such things, which often amounts to denying that such issues exist.

You can't solve problems while pretending they don't exist and making it Verboten to speak of them.

<comment><USER15> Exactly.

Beyond inertia of the traditional family model, there are real biological constraints that you can't bulldoze with calls to equality - pregnancy is taxing on the body, childbirth doubly so, the mother needs time to recover, and she's arguably the more important parent in early stages of a child's life. You can't e.g. declare equal amount of childbirth leave for both genders and call it a day.

(Though equal, paid mandatory leave for _both_ parents would probably be fairer _and_ also more beneficial for the child.)

I don't have first clue what the optimal, or "most fair", way of equalizing career prospects in context of childbirth is. But as you write, we can't reach it if people are pretending that the problem doesn't exist. And in context of companies, that means realizing employers aren't discriminating here out of spite or evil nature, but because there are economical considerations in play, and with them comes market pressure.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for leaving substantive and reasoned comments on the topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The simple question is: Does everyone have an equal opportunity to this position or not? If you can't even see the ads then the answer is no, and so it's a violation.

If there were different ads for different groups but everyone still had the opportunity to see, apply and acquire the position then it's fair game.

Perhaps Facebook could improve job ads to allow for more specific targeting but always have a fallback ad in that campaign for any non-targeted users. This would help employers without excluding anyone.

<comment><USER17> I agree. As a female software developer, I would like to see those ads so I can get better jobs. If I don't even see the ads, then I would not even know about opportunity. Without opportunity, I cannot really progress.

If only men see the ads, apply jobs and get interviews, then the employers may think that they shouldn't advertise to women. This is just circular thinking.

<comment><USER18> Not in the steel mill in my town: no woman ever applied in 50 years, why spend money on advertising to them? Nobody rejects female applicants (they don't reject practically anybody), but no woman wants to work there, they can barely find men. Same with any highway construction site: there is no woman in the entire country, the working conditions are too harsh. They accept anyone willing to work (there is much more demand than supply), but no woman applied. Why spend good money on meaningless advertising?

<comment><USER19> In addition to wanting to work in a steel mill, you'd have to want to be the _only woman in a steel mill_ , which adds an additional layer of difficulties to what is already a difficult job. Likewise men in unpleasant female-coded jobs like cleaning.

I was a male typist for a while when I was at university. I found the weird experience of breaking gender roles quite entertaining, but it was definitely an addition to the usual do-work-and-get-paid deal. And secretarial work is not intrinsically unpleasant, so I was already doing better than most people in my position.

FWIW there are women on highway construction sites in the UK. Not many (construction as a whole is very male) but not none. I think the only industry which is entirely male here is mining, and that's because of a 19th Century law prohibiting women and children from doing it.

<comment><USER20> >>you'd have to want to be the only woman in a steel mill

I guess that's the question being asked here. Why would that one woman be the only woman in the steel mill. Why aren't thousands of women rushing to work at steel mills, or in war fronts, or in coal mines, or in any other stereotypical male dominated jobs. And you can't even blame this on some modern world conspiracy. These things have been true throughout history across times and cultures.

The answer to that question is simple. Women are under represented but they are definitely far more cleverer than men. Once you prove you are likely to die from cave ins or lung disease in a mine, or that you are almost assured to get killed in a war, that fact now begins to itself act as a filter as to who wishes to sign up and who doesn't. You have to be stupid and brave beyond belief, to sign up for this kind of stuff. But then what happens is those people who fight wars, eventually dictate politics and positions of power. This ain't exactly a grand conspiracy. But millions of men have to die in battles for a few to be in power and become Generals/Rulers. So the process is largely self sustaining. You can chose to break this, then eventually you face a stronger army and get eliminated.

This is where problems in software show up too. For years we have talked about open source work being unpaid labor. Now which _intelligent_ person man or woman would sign up for this? So now you see if there is no gate keeping, no criteria apart from plain merit, ability to work and contribute code. Then the biggest bottleneck is you yourself. The fact that awkward nerds dominate this area is because you have to be that crazy and stupid enough to work for free building things for others. Eventually some crazy nerds will indeed write Linux or Perl or Emacs. Again its not exactly conspiracy. But it's a kind of brutal filter.

In a way men are stupid, but that kind of stupidity leads to a better positions on the very long term, because last ones standing hold positions of power over whatever is left. But in the process millions of men have to suffer in wars, refugee zones, mines and highway labor to make it happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I understand the reason some people are upset with this, but one issue I find interesting is that this is exactly how 'fair' advertising works, but implicitly.

For instance if I advertise a position in, as some random example, Popular Mechanics, I'm going to get an _extremely_ biased sample. And I'm putting my position there specifically because I want to appeal to that demographic. This is also why, for instance, in times past if you stayed at home and watched broadcast television there would be a disproportionate number of ads for things such as tampons, diapers (adult and child alike), and job injury lawyers. It was targeting the demographic watching television at that time.

Perhaps one fair solution here would be an opt-in demographic profile override. What a mouth full. What I mean is that if you want, you can require Facebook to set your demographics to whatever you like. In other words, imagine you're a woman and you want to be shown ads targeting men, well you can opt-in to require your account profile to be a hit for man or woman.

The curious thing is that I imagine almost nobody would actually choose to opt-in there. It'd probably be more used as a protest tool to destroy the value of advertising (by large numbers of people opting into everything), than a tool to get more ads you're interested in. Can't say I'm particularly upset by that outcome though.

</comment><comment><USER22> All this will do is force companies which are not open to hiring older people and women will have to spend money interviewing them. They will still reject them and waste everyone's time.

<comment><USER23> So the solution is to what, just look away and shrug ?

It's a process, you move goal posts one tiny step at a time and eventually it will become less and less acceptable.

<comment><USER24> Don't even look away. Just accept that people do differ by birth characteristics and that there are often legitimate reasons to discriminate based on those factors. There's no shame in that.

Look at firefighters. To get a female firefighter in New York they had to lower the strength tests. Those tests were calibrated to be able to carry people out of a burning building. Do you really want a 'process' that one tiny step at a time leads to people eventually burning to death because their rescuer was a tiny 5ft girl who couldn't lift them?

[https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny- firefighter...](https://nypost.com/2015/05/03/woman-to-become-ny-firefighter- despite-failing-crucial-fitness-test/)

Or more prosaically, do you think men should be lingerie models? Or people too old to run should be hired to take care of very young children?

<comment><USER23> I Disagree with you on the word "often". There are far many jobs where physical body doesn't matter (and even there, you wont accept fat young guy either, so you might as well just list what do you expect candidate to be able to preform), than those that do.

Now lets look at a story in question:

> In the latest rulings, the EEOC cited four companies for age discrimination: > > Capital One, Edwards Jones, Enterprise Holdings and DriveTime Automotive > Group. > Three companies were cited for discrimination by both age and > gender: Nebraska Furniture Mart, > Renewal by Andersen LLC and Sandhills > Publishing Company.

No firefighters, no lingerie models ( I thought there were male underwear models).

As far as who do I expect to become firefighter ? Anyone who can do the job. If it means only males can do the job (I have no idea hoe true that is), I am fine with that exception. But if there is a woman who can lift just as much as average firefighter, and want to do the job, why would you prevent her from doing it ?

<comment><USER24> _You_ may expect that about firefighters, but people with the same definition of progress as you see that as a problem to be solved by lowering the bar.

I think you're also drawing a rather arbitrary line here, based on assuming the differences between young/old/male/female are purely physical. But that's clearly not the case. If you're looking for a salesperson for your motorbike store, you'll _probably_ have more luck fishing amongst men than women and that's not discrimination unless your job ad literally says "no women allowed".

That said, I do agree programming is not a job where there's any obvious way or reason to do such targeting. But presumably these companies had reasons for making those choices. Why don't we hear their side of the story?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Could these legal arguments be extended to lookalike audiences that are built off of email lists that have a gender imbalance? That is, imagine I go to a university to recruit, and I talk with 200 male students and 10 female students. I then take their email addresses and make a lookalike audience to advertise my jobs to. Could that be challenged on the grounds that I am trying to advertise to male students? What if I don't know what goes into the algorithm of creating lookalike audiences — for example, how important gender is versus interests.

<comment><USER26> The ad must have discriminatory _intent_ [1]. So if you're selecting candidates with a black box ML model and you didn't explicitly include racial/gender preferences...

But "the algorithm was sexist, not me" is probably going to be a losing argument in any court case.

[1] Well, not entirely, but that's another can of worms.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I was asking what the requisite intent is. Is it The intent to knowingly discriminate, intent to do the thing that is discriminatory (a lesser standard), or merely a disparate impact (which does not require any particular state of mind)?

Edited for clarity

<comment><USER27> Disparate impact (without valid justification) and discriminatory intent are both illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A linked article has examples.

[https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising- disc...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising- discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin)

Here's one: [https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-faceb...](https://assets.propublica.org/images/articles/20171121-facebook- judaism.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER29> I came to read "and what about the men? Men are discriminated against too", was not disappointed

</comment><comment><USER30> Posting a job on social media -- and not dedicated job sites -- is already reducing the number of people likely to see the listing. A lot of people don't use social media.

I did a digital marketing course and have met a few digital marketers. When asked if they use social media themselves, most if not all answer "oh GOD no."

<comment><USER31> You can choose whether to use social media or not. You can't choose your gender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> From the comments below on testing one's experience, I don't think that there is a way to actually test one's soft skill experience, and if they are the right candidate for the job, other than leveraging the networking aspect for recommending a candidate for a job.

One important requirement for a senior executive job these days is their Soft Skills. If you can find a way to measure that, well you have solved a major issue.

</comment><comment><USER33> So does this mean that targeted ads are now considered discrimination?

<comment><USER34> Yes. If you are, for example, placing rental or property ads that filter by race, age, or gender that is the official description of it.

<comment><USER35> and yet, by having a profile of the user, it is quite possible to "easily" find proxies for the above traits, and target those proxies instead, and thus dodge the legality issue. For example, using income.

<comment><USER36> Does that really dodge the legal issue?

I thought it had been shown that using proxies to discriminate is still illegal if the intention was to discriminate against a protected class.

<comment><USER26> It dodges the legal issue if you're very careful with your paper trail and get a sympathetic jury.

You won't get a sympathetic jury. People don't have a lot of empathy for algorithms. Maybe empathy for the people who write them, and then only maybe. But you'll be up against a huge slate of expert witnesses explaining how we already have lots of open sourced methods for teasing out these sorts of indirect indicators.

<comment><USER27> The paper trail won't matter if your "accidentally" discriminatory policies are not directly related to the position you are hiring for. It is the effect of the employment policies that matter under US law.

> The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from > using neutral employment policies and practices that have a > disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a > particular race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual > orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a > disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or > practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the > business. [0]

[0] [https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/](https://www.eeoc.gov//laws/practices/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow, I didn't expect to see CapitalOne or Edward Jones on that list. I kind of figured it would be a bunch of smaller companies that were either ignorant of the law or, more likely, used to playing fast and loose without consequences.

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure if there was anything deliberate here. It's possible the companies targeted the jobs ads with factors or attributes that were correlated with younger men by the Facebook algorithm.

<comment><USER39> Being deliberate is not required: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact)

<comment><USER40> > "Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the > necessity of showing intentional discrimination unless the defendant > employer demonstrates that the practice or policy in question has a > demonstrable relationship to the requirements of the job in question.[3] > This is the "business necessity" defense.[1]"

I wonder if you could argue that advertising in a particular way is a business necessity because without doing so, the business cannot maintain competitive viability in reaching necessary candidates.

Just for a devil's advocate example, suppose that travelling to university recruiting fairs to recruit for computer science job listings has a disparate impact against female candidates, because the gender composition of university programs in computer science are heavily skewed towards male applicants.

But university program graduates may be the only qualified type of candidate for the position, so simply not targeting candidates in the male- overrepresented way (i.e. not attending these university job fairs) would be debilitating and hugely damaging for employers who require those qualified candidates to be competitive in the market.

<comment><USER27> You can have an employment policy that favors CS grads when hiring programmers because, while the policy is effectively discriminatory, you can show that it directly relates to the job being hired for.

<comment><USER40> It seems this would easily extend to many more types of job recruitment targeting then too, no? Or at least targeting job ads seems like it would be done for the exact same reasons as favoring CS grads in recruitment, until clearly proven otherwise?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I was younger (unmarried and no kids), I could work 11 hours in the office as a software developer. And that translate to 55 hours a week minimum. But now I just work 9.5 hours a day. I would love to work 8 hours, but based on my experience you really need to work as much as you can get so you can have a "good" daily stand-up report. I wish I could have a better work and life balance … but when you are a software engineer, you can't turn off your programming brain. The problem will be in your mind even if you leave the office, sadly

<comment><USER41> Stop giving your employer free labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Why would employers not target women?

<comment><USER18> At the steel mill where several of my cousins worked there was never, ever a female applicant for positions on the factory floor, in 50 years. Why pay for adds that nobody will care for?

Same for kindergartens in my country, there is no male care taker (not sure what is the right name, it is not a teaching position) in the entire country. Why advertise it to men?

If you want to hire junior developers, for example, why pay adds to people over 50 years old? Chances they will never apply for a junior position in the field.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Facebook studies every details of its users lives, so why on Earth is targeting job are by gender an effective choice? Is all that other behavioral data useless for targeting? Is personalized advertising a fraudulent industry?

</comment><comment><USER44> The dirty secret of hiring is that employers are always thinking about cost, but how many employees out there think of themselves as a cost to a bottom line? Not many.

The most exploitable tech workers are young, single, males on H1-b visas. They will take a low salary and essentially be enslaved to their job because getting fired means getting kicked out of the country.

Old workers and women are more "expensive" because they use more healthcare than young single males. We must totally disconnect employers from healthcare once and for all.

We must also reform the H1-b system and stop employers from having so much leverage over vulnerable employees due to their visa status.

Point is, it's not as if employers think young men are superior talents to women or older workers, it's that they are by far the cheapest and most exploitable. We need to remove these incentives (or disincentives) that distort the hiring process and allow these discriminatory behaviors to bubble up in the first place.

<comment><USER45> Older workers will still demand to be paid more than younger workers, since they have more experience.

<comment><USER14> Well....they don't, per se, _demand_ it. They are worth it because they have more experience. The issue is that even the ones who will accept less than their worth aren't considered because of various biases that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but:

If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but because there's less of them as a percentage of the population. I shouldn't have the government mandating that I can't tune my advertising campaign for ROI, which is basically the only point of running one if the first place.

However, on the other side of the coin that's pretty unfair because clearly there are good software engineers in those demographics and I'd be excluding them to save money.

I think both alternatives suck in different ways, but as a business I'd probably choose ROI over fair. It's all pretty hypothetical though, because Facebook ads are probably one of the worst ways I can think of to find candidates.

<comment><USER47> "It's not cost efficient" isn't a valid reason to discriminate against people, if you ask me.

An analogy to your justification: the most cost efficient thing to do with hazardous chemicals is to dump them down the drain.

<comment><USER48> > "It's not cost efficient" isn't a valid reason to discriminate against > people, if you ask me.

It's literally the perfect reason to do discrimination. It is just like discriminating for having work experience, education, demonstrably market skills, etc.

<comment><USER49> We have decided as nations and societies that some forms of economic discrimination are too damaging to permit. The details vary, but typically the things we can't easily change: race, nationality, age etc. Such discrimination is generally outlawed.

Someone lacking relevant market skills or education etc can go out and fix that.

<comment><USER48> > The details vary, but typically the things we can't easily change: race, > nationality, age etc. Such discrimination is generally outlawed.

Also generally perpretrated, by the same body that bans it.

A great beauty about human beings is that they have a natural tendency to find what is best for them and their communities in spite of legalities that attempt to distort reality.

In any case, what you are ascribing as unlawful discrimination is absolutely lawful and you would be naive to believe that there were castings for white asian geriatric women for the role of Black Panther to abide a law about the positively-discriminated groups you mention.

<comment><USER49> Thankfully for society, countries manage to make common sense exceptions to those laws in a very limited number of circumstances.

Movies and TV tend to be among the worst for discrimination as a result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ga-vu I see ProPublica is rehashing everyone's articles as their own these days.

Didn't Gizmodo prove this and various other abuses a few years back?

<comment><USER50> ProPublica, and in particular this reporter, has been doing a lot of original research on facebook's abuses in the past few years.

For instance, they started this project to collect facebook ads: [https://projects.propublica.org/facebook- ads/](https://projects.propublica.org/facebook-ads/)

See also this joint investigation by the New York Times and ProPublica: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/business/facebook-job- ads...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/business/facebook-job-ads.html)

<comment> ga-vu Hi there, reporter!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based on demographic could do this.

Its not the first example of unethical behaviour using this technology. Alcohol gets targeted to Alcholics, Gambling gets targets to problem gamblers.

Targeted advertising for certain purposes should be illegal, including employment ads, alcohol ads, gambing ads and any kind of political ad. There's just too many ways it can go wrong with these kinds of ads.

<comment><USER52> Or we could outright ban advertising everywhere, for any reason, full stop.

<comment><USER53> When someone says "full stop," I like to wonder if they think that that makes their belief more correct than it otherwise would have been interpreted.

<comment><USER54> I tend to read it as "and I don't intend to have any exceptions". More as a statement setting the limits of their claim/suggestion than "and this is not to be discussed".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> this doesnt seem like a bad thing imo - tech has always favors young applicants

<comment><USER14> You're going to age too. Don't wait until employers say "screw you" before you care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Why force businesses to waste money on advertising to and interviewing people they don't want to hire?

At the end of the day, some person will get a job. Why is it better if a woman or old person gets the job? Enforcing diversity hiring practices is not creating more jobs for anyone (except diversity advisors, granted). On the contrary, it increases the cost of doing business, which is likely to reduce demand for employees.

<comment><USER57> most studies show that diversity leads to increased productivity and innovation. it actually reduces the cost of doing business significantly. this is the only reason big corporates are doing it as they are purely driven by their bottom line

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> it's called ad targeting. If the govt. wants to pay for those low converting clicks/impressions, then i'm sure they, these employers, will be glad to serve ads to everyone.

<comment><USER39> The government doesn't pay for the cost of unleaded gasoline/work safety standards/food safety/building codes - why should this case be different?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is huge, but in a way perhaps not obvious. I am trying to define a thing called a programmable company - it's where all the actions a company can make are scripted / scriptable - and weirdly it's what the law assumes exists right now - that a company has a controlling mind.

I am trying to say that automation and governance belong hand in hand.</comment>


Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued - <AUTHOR> https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ <comment><USER2> A brilliant quote from a Harvard Law School Negotiation Paper on the same topic:

 _" Instead, try to fgure out what pay category someone with your education and experience would receive, then build a case for a salary at the high end of that range. If an interviewer asks you to name your price, how should you respond? In their book 3-D Negotiation (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), Lax and James Sebenius recommend making a "non-ofer ofer," or a statement that could anchor the discussion in your favor without seeming extreme. Suppose your research suggests that you would mostly likely fall into the $70,000 to $80,000 pay range, but the next-highest category seems within reach. Rather than saying, "I think I deserve $80,000," consider saying, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard that people like me typically earn $80,000 to $90,000." Notice that this statement is not a demand. Yet due to the powerful impact of the $80,000-to-$90,000 "anchor"—a reference point that may or may not be relevant to the discussion—it could very well steer the numbers toward your upper goal"_

<comment><USER3> I learned over a decade ago that it's quite alright to ask for the top end of the salary range... And it's quite okay for a company to decline. If you have multiple offers on the table, you're going to be fine. If you have too many offers, and are interviewing too much, you probably aren't asking enough.

In the end, know what your market is paying... know what competing markets are paying too. If you're at the top of Phoenix, Austin or Atlanta market, know what SF, NYC, Seattle are paying for similar roles. Of course, you have to deliver too.

My last job search, I wound up with 4 competing offers near the top of the range... in the end, I just asked for an extra week of vacation, and that became a deciding factor. There's no shame in negotiating, and you will probably mess up, but that's how you learn.

<comment><USER4> I agree and recently used a similar tactic to GP last year. I figured out what Atlanta was paying for the specific technology and found a few similar cities with their salary ranges. It helps if you know a few Engineer managers who can look up pay scales for you.

Next time I will politely push the envelope further. I had two competing offers. Asked for the top end and it worked.

The other suprise question is the "How much are you currently making?" trap. I politely said if it was a condition of being hired I can share my pay but I know I'm very underpaid at the moment compared to the market. Took the job with a 40% pay increase without having to discuss my prior salary.

<comment><USER5> I find it uncomfortable to dodge that question too but the best way I've found is to decline politely and ask for a "market offer". If they know you have other offers they'll usually make it competitive.

<comment><USER6> Or just lie, what are they going to do, ask for a W2?

<comment><USER3> Many places do background checks which can include a financial/credit check and depending on the depth or association to government security, they may find out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never understood the 'don't give a number first' law from all these blogs. If I know the upper bound of my potential salary, why wouldn't I throw out that number (or a bit above) and try to stick to it? What's the negative here? I think it'd be a lot harder if they lowballed you then you come off as somewhat unreasonable by throwing out a much higher number.

<comment><USER8> You might be mistaken and throw out a number well below the lower bound starting offer the company was planning to make.

<comment><USER9> That still leaves both parties feeling happy, if a bit perplexed though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know if I agree with all of this. I'm pretty sure Google, Amazon, etc. have VERY stringent requirements on the hiring process for (at least most) new software engineers. At my own company, there are processes for internal and external applicants, and I personally can vouch that I, the technical interviewer, and the directors do actually look at applicants' resumes.

That doesn't mean I disagree with the premise of the article: candidates should definitely view the negotiations process as a two-way street. But to really have a level playing field and skip most of the "process", as the author suggests, you need to have demonstrable value to the hiring manager at whatever place you're interviewing at. Sometimes that can be hard to demonstrate if you don't have a working relationship with someone inside the company that's interviewing you. Hence the need for some of these processes and resume reviews.

<comment><USER3> There hiring processes for larger tech companies are geared towards knowledge/skill/aptitude. Salary negotiation is often completely isolated at that level. You have to be able to do the job, but salary negotiation can mean up to a 25% or more difference in pay/benefits/vacation etc.

<comment><USER5> More specifically the big companies have salary bands for each level, and you can look up the max for each band on sites like levels.fyi</comment></comment></comment>


SpaceX says 2 have paid for a mission around the moon in 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/NPR/status/836326414156763140 <comment><AUTHOR> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13748302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13748302)</comment>


Facebook's female engineers claim gender bias - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-female-engineers-claim-gender-bias-1493737116 <comment><USER2> As an engineer working in silicon valley, I have definitely seen a lower bar for female engineers interviews because companies are trying to catch up on the gender divide in their company. You can land a job almost everywhere with almost no knowledge if you are a jr female developer, which is not true for men. It is also true that there is a bias in the industry, but I don't think this approach is helping at all, if nothing people think women deserve it even less... I believe men and women are equal in terms of capabilities and skills, but giving away jobs to a minority (women in this case) isn't the right way to make them gain the respect they deserve or block/control the bias against them.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has hired both males and females for junior and senior engineering positions at several companies, what you are saying is not the case.

The coding challenges and interviews are the same. The decisions of hiring committees I have been on have been actually in general weighted toward white men with experience more often than not, because many of the women I'm seeing are just out of school or with a little experience (which says good things about the future assuming they stick around).

However, I have seen race/gender used as the deciding factor between two candidates who are in all other ways equally excellent and suited for the role (that is, pick the candidate who is not a white male out of two whose skills and resumes and interview performance are equal).

<comment><USER4> Yes, the coding challenges and interviews are the same. But they are graded differently even before the packet is seen by the hiring committee.

I've talked to many interviewers at my company, and many people talk about how they bump up the score of "diversity candidates" even though management says that we don't lower the bar. This is talked about openly.

I've only seen this at a Bay Area company. Other companies I have worked at have had a very strong stance against using race or gender as a basis of making hiring decisions.

<comment><USER5> It's also the case that the hiring pipelines can be biased in other ways. For instance if a woman fails a phone screen she may be given a second phone screen anyway, or even on-sites anyway, "just in case", whereas the man would have been canned at the first stage. Was definitely told this was happening by recruiters in the past.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. We have done that for people of any gender in grad programs before when hiring for targeted roles suited for their specialty, but not to my knowledge for candidates by gender.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Engadget summary: [https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding- sexism-a...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/05/02/facebook-coding-sexism- allegation/)

I don't work for Facebook so I can't speak to their particular culture problems, but I am a female SDE working at one of the "big-5" and I deal with this on a near-daily basis.

Examples include: \- having to chase down specific individuals and sit down with them to walk them through my code review \- waiting for approvals on code reviews while other engineers, not wanting to be blocked on my work, copy and paste my code directly into their branches and open new code reviews which have no problem getting approvals. \- getting approvals quickly only on work that can't possibly break anything important (CSS! /s).

If anyone has any suggestions for how to get assigned more interesting tasks that don't take weeks to get through code review, I'm all ears. Forgive me for sounding ignorant, but rather than getting bogged down in statistics and senior engineer distribution (because let's be serious - if women can't get code reviews on important feature work, they weren't getting to senior engineer anyway) let's take the raw data at face value and start with the hypothesis that this is a real problem related to how men and women interact when placed in a high-pressure team situation and focus on addressing that problem first please.

<comment><USER7> > _Examples include: - having to chase down specific individuals and sit down > with them to walk them through my code review - waiting for approvals on > code reviews while other engineers, not wanting to be blocked on my work, > copy and paste my code directly into their branches and open new code > reviews which have no problem getting approvals_

That's crazy! I'd be escalating that shit to my manager in the first day it happened. Management should sort out any individuals that have a problem. I can't understand why a company would hire an engineer _not_ to do work.

<comment><USER8> I'm glad you raised this. You should definitely be vocal regarding this to your manager and if he/she doesn't listen then raise to manager's manager.

This is unacceptable and definitely shouldn't be the norm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tom-_- Is it possible that the hiring standards for women at FB is lower than that of their male counterparts, resulting in a larger number of issues with their code? Maybe it's not bias in the code reviews that are leading to this gap but rather bias in the hiring policy.

I don't work at FB, but it's possibility. I'd like to hear from those that do.

<comment><USER9> I once worked at a "hot" tech company that had a formal policy where HR had to get involved before rejecting a borderline candidate if they were female. It was a shame -- up until that point there were few female engineers but they were all brilliant. After that policy was implemented you had to wonder which were the token hires.

<comment><USER5> The issue is not necessarily hiring. There was a story on HN a while back saying how Facebook recruiters had stopped bothering to target women specifically because even though they were heavily incentivised to do so, the FB hiring committees weren't on board with the whole positive discrimination thing so it wasn't working.

However, the big tech firms do seem to have a problem with firing. I've heard this several times now from other people and saw it myself when I worked at Google. Hiring is never 100% accurate and so even if hiring itself is unbiased (questionable at best), without unbiased firing the quality of that segment of the worker pool goes downwards over time. Even though the engineers often truly believe in a meritocracy, HR in particular is a strongly female dominated profession and unfortunately I do suspect a "sisters gotta stick together" mentality because I saw within the span of a single year at Google a man get canned for merely not being particularly productive, whilst a woman who openly and repeatedly lied in meetings (and lied very badly at that), and who caused her team huge heartache due to her terrible quality work, was not only not fired but in the end promoted into management. It was widely known that women who weren't very good or caused trouble were almost impossible to get rid of and were typically transferred around between teams rather than shown the door.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I initially read this headline as "Facebook's female engineer claims gender bias", which would make a funny Onion headline.

</comment><comment><USER9> Smells like bad stats to me. Do women use the same technologies or work on the same projects as the average male engineers? Do the CR stats reflect their level/experience, and if so are they different from male engineers at the same level? Does Facebook hire female engineers with the same background as males? Seems like this is just narrative building.

<comment><USER11> What about this smells like bad stats to you? Given that the answer to at least one of your questions is in the article (or easily searchable online if you don't have wsj access), it seems like maybe you are assuming it is bad stats because you don't like the conclusion?

To me the engineer's study uses data that should be free from obvious bias (duration at facebook) while the company study uses data that one might expect to exhibit the same bias as that they are intending to study (promotion decisions and code review decisions). While there are undoubtedly improvements that could be done with more data or more time, I would be inclined to take the results at face value rather than assuming something must be wrong.

<comment><USER9> No, I'm saying it's bad stats because it seems like bad stats -- and without the dataset we can't verify. There's a lot going on here and even jumping to a conclusion of sexism is kind of silly. Maybe women are more likely to prefer a collaborative approach to problem solving and therefore are more likely to put up a CR earlier in the process?

Why I wouldn't take it at face value: rejecting CRs sucks. Every round of review takes time away from the reviewer as well as the reviewee. Unconscious biases exist, sure, but it's hard to argue that people are actively making their life more difficult because of them.

<comment><USER11> Tautologies are neither arguments nor explanations - what about it seems like bad stats to you?

I agree that there are many plausible explanations for why code from women would be rejected at a higher rate at Facebook. I don't think that demonstrates bad stats though. I don't think your collaboration suggestion is very likely (given other public large scale analysis of male/female PR acceptance rates that showed them to be roughly equal) but I don't think that undermines your overall point.

I don't think it's material whether it is overt or subconscious bias leading to these results - either one would be a big problem that Facebook should recognize and work on.

<comment><USER9> What I mean when I say "bad stats" is that the article is drawing conclusions based on a particular view of a data set which probably does not accurately reflect reality for a laundry list of reasons.

As an example, I'm sure of you're heard of the 77-79 cent wage gap. I'd call that bad stats -- what the study was actually comparing was the average income of the entire male US population and the entire female population. When you correct for job title the gap is actually closer to 95 cents on the dollar -- and you're still not correcting for other factors, such as the fact that men work more hours than women and tend to be more aggressive negotiators. But people read the study, took the data on face value, and now the wage gap is a cultural meme we can't get rid of.

I think the same thing applies here -- a slice of the data looks funny so people cry sexism. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the difference goes away if you adjust for level, experience, technology used, product, background, etc, etc, etc. Publishing stats like that is dangerous unless you also release the data set and the method you used to derive your stats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's got me confused is the % of men who seem to be surprised by this. It's business as usual for women.

If you see a woman with a 5-10 year long engineerin career, please recognize the determination it takes to make it that far.

<comment><USER13> >please recognize the determination it takes to make it that far.

Why do you say this? Isn't it more likely that many women prefer to take on the role of a mother, and if they've been in a high paid engineering position they likely have a partner who can provide for both of them while they raise children.

Slaving away at an engineering career doesn't seem all that appealing after you've had the rewarding experience of raising your children.

<comment><USER14> Raising kids is rewarding at a high level, but involves a lot of drudgery. I don't want to knock those who enjoy that stuff, but at the same time I feel like it's important for parents to know that you can love your kids while acknowledging that the day-to-day of parenting is often a mind-numbing low- level chore. The idea that it's intrinsically fulfilling for everyone or even most people is one invented by society to placate women who were historically excluded from the work force. _E.g._ My mom and my wife's mom both left professional careers to raise kids, and both are quite bitter about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but it is a valid question.

If Facebook is attempting to meet diversity quotas, which certainly exist, by pulling from a limited pool of qualifying candidates, in some scenarios, they will necessarily need to employ lower qualified candidates.

I'm NOT NOT NOT saying that women in general cannot code, or produce lower quality code, or anything of the like.

I AM saying that there are fewer female developers than male developers and, assuming an equal distribution of skill level between the two groups, there will necessarily be fewer highly qualified female coders than highly qualified male coders.

Thus, if Facebook wants a 50:50 male-to-female ratio, they will necessarily have fewer highly qualified female developers IF the number of positions to be filled by females exceeds the number of highly qualified female applicants, but the number of positions to be filled by males does not exceed the number of highly qualified male candidates.

<comment><USER16> This only matters if the different skill distributions would make it likely that a lesser-skilled candidate does not meet the standards needed to produce good code at that level. In my experience this is not the case. When you are hiring for one of the big-5, the candidates that make it through the first- pass screening by the recruiters are usually people who any other company would hire on the spot. When you get down to making a decision among the top few from any crop of candidates it really is a coin flip.

Every engineer at Facebook likes to think that they are there because they are 'the best of the best', but having sat through far more hiring reviews at Facebook than I ever thought I would have to put up, with the simple fact is that for every person you see walking around the campus there were two or three other people who the job offer could have just as easily gone to were it not for a whole host of non-code/non-dev reasons; these reasons can range from gender to the sloppy handwriting on the whiteboard to the fact that when I came in to do your manager interview I happened to be a little annoyed that the cafe had run out of lox for my morning bagel.

In my experience, the least qualified female engineers I encountered were more qualified than the lower quartile of male engineers and they worked a hell of a lot harder to boot.

<comment><USER17> > In my experience, the least qualified female engineers I encountered were > more qualified than the lower quartile of male engineers and they worked a > hell of a lot harder to boot.

lol, that's so ridiculously sexist, can you imagine making the opposite statement in today's climate. To top it off it's based off your one anecdote, I don't even know how to respond to this.

<comment><USER16> It is quite obviously an anecdote and not hard data (which the claim referenced in the original article provided), but it is an anecdote based upon direct observation rather than a whining response from someone with neither observational data or empirical data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Imagine if the fix for this is to remove the account identity from commits, so you don't know if it's a man or a woman writing the code. Wouldn't that be ironic for Facebook...

<comment><USER19> Most code review is not that anonymous. You often talk in person or similar about code and your identity is going to come out. These engineering organizations are the size of villages at most, it's hard to avoid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Given the presence of studies noting similar issues e.g. STEM faculty rating male applicants as more competent and employable than identical female ones[1], women's performance reviews found more likely to include critical feedback than those of their male peers[2], it is a plausible scenario that female FB engineers receive 35% more rejections of their code than male ones.

[1] [http://www.pnas.org/content/112/43/13201](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/43/13201)

[2] [http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender- bias...](http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I too, am a female engineer at one of the well known companies in the Bay Area.

As a background, I have a masters degree in CS and am in my 5th year of working as an engineer.

Here's the problems that I faced:

1\. Not taking my opinions seriously - I experimented with this one! My manager would endlessly argue over every small opinion I had but the same opinion that my colleague would have, would get noticed and sometimes even praised. Even on silly things. I can't get into project details but for a new project, I suggested that we try out the desktop version of Git to make transition from p4 easier. My manager was absolutely against it and asked me to setup a p4 project for the same and make it work with p4. A coworker(10 years my senior) suggested we use the same desktop version of git and we switched, no questions asked. I figured he changed his mind since both of us said it. This happened 4 times before I once, actually told my opinion to my colleague to convey to my manager and my manager complied with no questions asked. This is how I get my opinions across now. I do understand that I don't have 10 years of experience but I can be right sometimes. And no, the same did not happen to the new guy on the team. I noticed it only when my male colleague pointed it out to me and sympathized with me on being micromanaged. 2\. Growth - I cared less about growth as far as I had a decent salary to live with. I am someone who likes to work for the challenges I can solve and not for the minor salary increases or bonuses. May sound stupid but each person is different. This was fine until I realized that I wasn't given more responsibilities because they were given only to senior engineers. Being promoted to different levels means a salary increase is a must(company rules). I definitely wanted more responsibilities. Each year it was a different story as to why I wasn't promoted and the hardest part? Being told that I work like a senior engineer and if I do more work, I'll get the promotion next year. 3\. Being classified as the 'diversity quota' \- I have as much qualifications as much as the next guy, if not more. I work on side projects during the weekends and am picking up machine learning out of interest on how to incorporate it in my daily work. Being the only girl on the team, people wanting to hire me to increase their diversity numbers but not plan on assigning me good work, being treated as the female-employee-at-work to boost the company's image alone, sucks. Imposter syndrome is real and these opinions contribute to it more.

I took up engineering to solve hard problems. It is sad that the culture of a company/valley contributed to me contemplating want to quit engineering to do something where I'll be treated right.

Not all problems women face have to be sexual harassment to get noticed, these workplace biases are hard to navigate. This is especially to people who diss diversity programs, there is the reason it's in place. I've received so much help from women-focused diversity programs and have even helped fix a problem or two along the way.

Finally, on a funny end note, I'm a big hacker news fan and have noticed how passing constructive feedback that can sometimes come across as negative but useful on a system/product/post is fairly common here. This post is hopefully taken in the same manner and not a female-ranting-about-things comment.

<comment><USER22> "Being told that I work like a senior engineer and if I do more work, I'll get the promotion next year."

My f'ing God, This. A thousand times this.

10 years I've been working as a junior f'ing programmer doing senior (and above) level work and roles. Every review is glowing. Every manager fights to have me on their team. I jave engineers under me. I mentor all the new hires. I am go to for all questions.

When it comes time for a promotion.. Suddenly I need to do more of something. They can never define what that something is, but i can forget ever being promoted.

I'm so close to saying screw it and quitting. Being talked over, interrupted, not having my ideas taken seriously until a male parrots them, being micromanaged, having my accompliahments dismissed while lesser accomplishments by males are lauded.

If i didnt love this work so much, I wouldve quit 5 years ago. Being a woman in tech sucks balls. I was a LCpl in the Marines and faced less sexism and animosity than i have in the tech field.

I completely belive the findings by these women are real and accurate. Too many other fields have proven the same scenarios exist.

<comment><USER23> Im a male junior dev.I go through that too. Its not a gender thing,but a toxic personality thing. The military teaches teamwork but tech is the opposite. Just look at the hype about 10x and ageism.

The focus on superstars and the fear of being outshined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think there is something to this. This is an interesting article showing that on GitHub, female coders have their code approved at a higher rate than men - but only if their gender is not disclosed.

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technolog...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/12/women- considered-better-coders-hide-gender-github)

<comment><USER25> That article has been thoroughly disproven on multiple sites, multiple times.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too- exci...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited- about-that-github-study/)

<comment><USER11> Seems like this does still suggest at least that in the aggregate females should have their code approved at roughly the same rate as males, which is far from what FB showed.

<comment><USER25> Facebook hasn't released any of their data. They have said normalized for experience, the gender bias goes away. So I can't agree with you based on the WSJ article.

Also I personally have a hard time believing a company with Sheryl Sandberg as it's COO would lie about their conclusions. She is a strong positive force for increasing women in tech.

<comment><USER11> They said normalized for rank (aka promotion level), not experience, which one might reasonably expect to also be influenced by bias. The study that showed a bias normalized for FB experience.

If Sheryl Sandberg personally says she looked into this and agrees that the study is mistaken and there is no statistically significant bias, that would definitely impact by assessment. I agree that she is great.

<comment><USER25> I don't seem to understand why you refuse to take Jay Parikh at his word. He is a indian minority who stands for diversity, and yes he often works very closely with Sheryl for many years. Jay Parikh is not a suit or corporate hr person at all. [http://www.today.com/popculture/sheryl-sandberg-speaks- new-g...](http://www.today.com/popculture/sheryl-sandberg-speaks-new- generation-women-lean-graduates-2D79500260)

<comment><USER11> Has he made a public comment on this? The only reporting I have seen has been third hand. I am taking the reporting at its word, which is that he did an analysis using alternative dependent variables that showed no significant difference. I'm also asserting that his analysis is more likely to be flawed than the original study, since promotion level is not clearly an independent variable whereas Facebook tenure is.

If the facebook engineering department is biased against women, they are likely to both promote deserving women less and reject their code more. If you do an analysis using promotion level to predict code rejection, you may not see any evidence of bias in this scenario, no matter how severe it actually is. Do you disagree with this possibility? Can you point me to anything that Facebook has said or done that explains why they are not concerned about it?

<comment><USER25> The research you are trying to dismiss several times in this thread as "suits" was done by Parikh.

After reading your replies to myself and other users in this thread,You clearly have an issue with him, by the rather extreme lengths you've gone to discredit him in this thread.

I don't want to be part of your crusade against an ally of diversity.

<comment><USER11> I had never heard of him before this story. I think it is unfair of you to accuse me of some vendetta merely because I don't take the convenient, proprietary, flawed company study results over the better designed and more open engineering results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's a link to the full research paper: [https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting article title, sad I can't read it. It requires a log in.

</comment><comment><USER27> Paywall removed: [http://outline.com/CF3DMU](http://outline.com/CF3DMU)

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone got a non-paywall link?

<comment><USER29> You can skip the paywall through facebook. Append the article url to the end of this:

[https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=](https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=)

<comment><USER28> Thanks, much appreciated. Especially since I don't have to log into facebook to make it work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I certainly don't want to discount the presence of sexism (by the way you can just call it that, "gender bias" feels a bit euphemistic IMO). But I've had some interesting conversations with female colleagues wherein they are surprised that I share many of the same frustrating experiences they do. (I'm white and male.)

I think this stuff happens if you don't fit someone's idea of what a developer "should be", and that occurs not only in sexist ways but other ways as well. Of course it's rare for a person to just come out and admit they don't respect you, let alone why. But I suspect things like my appearance and my manner of speaking represent me as insufficiently nerdy to people who care about such things, which results in the type of shit they describe.

Again, I don't want to diminish the problem of sexism or other forms of discrimination in our industry. I just suspect that for those who are affected by it, all would not be well even if the discrimination were to evaporate overnight. Sadly.

<comment><USER6> That feeling of being "insufficiently nerdy" and the mild paranoia that arises from being subconsciously labelled as such by your peers is one of many things I've learned to deal with on a daily basis. I'm certain there are many others that can relate. I think part of the problem is that we don't have these empathy-building conversations at work, which is a shame because there is evidence that empathy towards teammates is part of building successful teams[1].

In general, I wish we would stop framing discussions of improving diversity in tech as a zero-sum game in which the collective experience of one group is by default more valid than the collective experience of another group. Bad hiring heuristics and mental shortcuts for what makes a person a good engineer hurt everyone who gets eliminated from contention before being given a chance to do the job, not just the person who checks off the most boxes on the EEOC reporting section of the job application.

[1] - [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google- lear...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from- its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's a copy without the paywall: [http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK- INC-10547141/news/Facebook...](http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK- INC-10547141/news/Facebook-Female-Engineers-Claim-Gender-Bias-24309258/)

tl;dr: diversity hires noticed that they have 35% more code review rejections than the awful meritocracy crowd, blamed it on the oppressive patriarchy

Excellent opportunity to remember the story of Saron Yitbarek - a fresh developer out of a 4 month Ruby on Rails course who was hired by Microsoft for more than a year, but not as a developer, because technical interviews are sexist. The software giant hired her as a project manager for a newly created program to... teach students how to write CVs. The outcome? [https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-dont-belong-in- tech-3d73d...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-dont-belong-in- tech-3d73d8fd6f34)

</comment><comment><USER13> > So, Facebook's argument is essentially that because there are not as many > women in higher-ranked engineering roles, their code is subject to more > scrutiny. But it's problematic that women, which only make up 17 percent of > Facebook's technical department, are not in higher-ranking roles

Think it's time SV faced up to the fact it needs affirmative action for engineers who identify as women. This problem isn't going away, anonymised code reviews would be beneficial too to fight male managers in-built prejudices.</comment>


Commit that changed my life - <AUTHOR> http://egorhomakov.com/post/44506887852/commit-that-changed-my-life <comment><USER2> I was never against Egor, I don't know that he had a lot to apologize for -- but others do. Either way it's very mature of him to offer apologies. Shows personal growth while learning and demonstrating very succinct security POCs. This kid is one to keep your eyes on.

Egor, if you make it to NYC, let me buy you a drink.

<comment><USER3> thanks! i'm already choosing a flight for June :)

<comment><USER4> Awesome. Feel free to hit me up at well when you're in NYC! Stumbling into doing what you really love is .... magical. Consulting is a lot of work, make sure you have your work pipelined far ahead of time yet avoid overloading yourself!

Sounds like you've had a benignly interesting year and learned a lot. What more could someone want?

<comment><USER5> Ill drink some beers in NYC also

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ironically, people said he should have handled the commit differently, and perhaps he should have.

But here we are talking about him 1 year later. I think he probably shouldn't have done it, but on which side of the pg/YC _line of creative subversion_ did his stunt actually fall?

<comment><USER7> Well let's be fair, we're talking about him because he didn't rest on his laurels, he's been out there doing more and more.

Personally I thought it was hilarious, you can hardly _be_ more gentle in the process of 0wning a system like that and as I recall he did try to warn them beforehand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my impetuous 20s I did something similar. I was rather ... well, rude, really in pointing out a major security flaw on the forums of one of the more famous tech sites. Things devolved from there and I ended up being banned, though they did fix the problem rapidly even so. Since then I've learned the value of tact.

<comment><USER3> I agree about responsible disclosure but that problem had many facets, and I was rather trying to point out rails problem, sadly, using github hole.

<comment><USER8> It's a fine line sometimes. I think your commit is mostly defensible. It's really an open question. What do you do when you point out a serious security issue and it doesn't get the attention it deserves? I think your commit definitely proved that the issue was being downplayed far too much. Is there some better middle ground? If proving a vulnerability results in it getting fixed overnight and merely describing it results in it getting fixed never then what's the right course of action?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The Hacker News discussion from a year ago about the original incident: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3663197>

</comment><comment><USER10> This guy keeps popping-up. Very impressive for a years worth of work. We should be lucky to have someone willing to do this so openly, even after the rebuff from the community. He could have easily gone black hat and we'd all be the worse for it.

</comment><comment><USER11> How interesting he ended up in Mui Ne in Vietnam - it's one of the places I've been considering for a quit-your-job-and-focus-on-launching spot.

Mui Ne is a very small coastal town around 200KM East of Ho Chi Minh city. Although tiny, constant off-shore winds has increasingly made it the kite- surfing capital of SE Asia. Living expenses are cheap, and I've calculated a pretty comfortable lifestyle for USD1,200 pm (YMMV).

His post is somewhat testament to a usable internet connection.

<comment><USER3> mui ne is not so cheap because of tons of russian tourists coming. I used to spend $2k/month here. but my apart is in the middle of it and it was winter (high season). Internet is pretty decent too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And here are all of Homakov's achievements this year: <http://homakov.blogspot.pt/2013/03/contributions-2012.html>

Pretty impressive!

<comment><USER13> <3 (y) Keep up such great job, Homakov.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm waiting for Egor to spend some time with nodejs ... would like to see what he finds

<comment><USER15> Heh, been thinking myself of open sourcing an ecommerce site I'm building from scratch in node. Not sure if it would be good or bad.

The benifits of course being; a learning resource for newbs, a good transparent portfolio piece, easy collaboration with strangers on what is best etc. Downsides being; exposing potential security holes, embarrassment due to facepalm worthy pieces of logic in code (really, a plus) etc.

<comment><USER16> do you have any economic reasons to keep it closed? If the answer is no, then push it open source. Full stop. It's a gain for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That consulting site is so MVP. I love it.

<comment><USER3> that design costs $10k, appreciate it!

<comment><USER17> Trust me - as a design student, seeing talented people not care about design can be very refreshing. Keep on keeping on my friend.

<comment><USER3> I really REALLY care about design. I think it matters a lot. But so far don't have much spare time / money to get something decent. too busy these days :/

<comment><USER18> It's just perfect for mobile, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The post links to this: [https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...](https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1fc272b1aa393e6dc57)

And I have a rant about that: I wanted to see the date when that commit was done. But all it says as "date" is: "a year ago".

Why? Why can it not say the actual date? "A year ago", what does that mean? I want to know which month and day, even the time!

<comment><USER20> If you hover over them the full time shows up as a tooltip at least.

<comment><USER21> Adding different resource identifiers to the url can also retrieve different commit formats:

Email Patch: [https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...](https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1fc272b1aa393e6dc57.patch)

Unified Diff: [https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...](https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1fc272b1aa393e6dc57.diff)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I imagine the Internet will be kind and you'll go on to do great things.

We've all done things we regret and deserve apologies. It's not the mistake that defines you but how you respond afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER23> Egor, if you're ever in Singapore, please hit me up. I'll organize a meetup via NUS Hackers at the National University of Singapore. Would be interesting to let other university-level students hear about your experience.

(My email address's on my personal site (which, in turn, may be found on my profile)).

</comment><comment><USER24> This was a fun day of Github notifications being sent to me constantly because I made a comment pretty early

</comment><comment><USER25> I kept a list of the best things I read in 2012. This github commit was near the top of it...everything about it, from its technical insight to how spectacularly (in an attention-grabbig sense) it was executed, to how it spoke about the constant conflict between "read the documentation" and "save the developers from themselves"...fantastic.

I loved the commit from the future :) <https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5239>

</comment><comment><USER26> The argument with security research is how do you responsibly deal with the knowledge when people aren't listening? Well, in this case starting a fire to prove there's smoke wasn't the best decision. It takes a lot to admit you were wrong publicly and offer a mea culpa, and a lot to not get disheartened and stop researching. Kudos Egor, I'm sure I'm not the only person watching your work with interest.

</comment><comment><USER27> I read almost all the notes in the Github page and it lasted for months. There are different sides shown.

BTW, I think travelling cost and need so much money. I wonder what are Egor's source of income. Don't know him that much so I just assumed consulting (Sakurity) is just his source of income. Also, if Egor is in South East Asia at the moment, he should visit the Philippines!

</comment><comment><USER28> What's the backstory on this?

<comment><USER8> He discovered a major vulnerability in github and pointed it out by making a commit to the rails master repository (which has rather obvious serious repercussions from a security standpoint).

<comment><USER29> My recollection (though I don't know much about rails and this is just going from memory) is that he attempted to make an argument to the rails team for more secure defaults in parameter parsing and for the framework to steer apps towards more secure use. When they brushed him off and said it was ultimately the caller's responsibility to use it right, he exploited github to make his point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> you've got a Singha beer in Bangkok too :) I worked a lot of time with a great Russian developer until year. Took him to Mexico to work together (no visa requirements) for 3 months. He came from Siberia and I showed him the ocean for the first time then we travelled by car around the country. So far the russians are the best for me, seriously. Would love to meet you.

<comment><USER3> i know Siberia guys. if you show him the ocean - he is happy for the rest of his life!

see you in BKK

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "I left St Petersburg, Russia. I see no future for myself in my country", Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER3> ugly weather + no prospectives for IT + unsafe streets

I had a decent Rails job there but I have... "ambitions". Just wanna take over the world

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Egor, thanks for your writing about the OAuth 2 standard! I've implemented that a few times in the last year and would be in serious trouble (not immediately, but when somebody notices) without your writings.

</comment><comment><USER33> glad to see you growing, egor.

</comment><comment><USER34> Somebody just hire him, amiright?

<comment><USER35> Why be hired when you can consult?

<comment><USER36> How does that work? I never understood what a consultant does exactly. Offers advice?

<comment><USER3> I have no idea what _other_ consultants do. What I do: try to hack(penetration), propose ways to secure your app, explain risks and steps to be made..

<comment><USER36> Good to know, thanks Egor!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you going to grow your business in 2019 - <AUTHOR> What is your business and what ideas do you have to grow it? <comment><USER2> Run a genome sequencing facility. Here's what we're looking to do or what is top of mind for us in 2019:

Sign a couple of departments that we do a lot of business with onto a sequencing subscription service (recurring rev).

Launch our new bacterial identification pipeline & product for Ear/Nose/Throat doctors.

Expand organic marketing content while scaling paid marketing.

Go as far into automation in our lab as we can.

Start dabbling in RNA sequencing and further our offerings in B/T cell immunology.

</comment><comment><USER3> Focused on learning AWS Lambda & serverless generally and plan to do much more with it (IT noob). Wave of the future for small scale SaaS & microservices.

<comment><USER4> My personal opinion is that it is not worth learning, serverless is not in a good place and i have a suspicion it won't be useful for next few years. it's not as cost effective as they are advertised, especially if you want to do something more complex than serving static files

<comment><USER5> That's not true at all? What?

<comment><USER4> Have you tried doing serverless? I have and my experience with it was quite bad. Here are other people sharing the same opinion [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.03651.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.03651.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm all in on the "1,000 fans". Really focusing on community.</comment>


4 Cancer Charities Accused in F.T.C. Fraud Case - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/business/4-cancer-charities-accused-in-ftc-fraud-case.html

<comment><USER2> It's a shame it took the FTC so long. There were news stories about the practices of these organizations a couple of years ago.</comment>


Visualization of iOS Application States - <AUTHOR> http://koduco.com/2010/11/01/ios-application-states/

<comment><USER2> Cute..., and a good start to a UIKit visualization.

By the way, the methods you see in the diagram are to be implemented by a UIApplicationDelegate. Your UIApplicationDelegate class is usually laid out by default in new XCode projects. There are the methods currently documented by Apple.

Monitoring Application State Changes

– application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:

– applicationDidBecomeActive:

– applicationWillResignActive:

– applicationDidEnterBackground:

– applicationWillEnterForeground:

– applicationWillTerminate:

– applicationDidFinishLaunching:

Docs here ([http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit/...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIApplicationDelegate_Protocol/Reference/Reference.html%23//apple_ref/occ/intf/UIApplicationDelegate))

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone clarify exactly why a backgrounded application would become suspended? Obviously, it's supposed to occur when the OS becomes low on memory, but does the App's icon actually leave the -- for lack of a better name -- double-tap-dock area?

I've never seen that happen, and nearly every app in my full Springboard is also in the double-tap app switcher.

<comment><USER4> The switcher is merely a list of recently run applications, not a list of backgrounded applications, which some people have been mistaking it for.

<comment><USER3> Ahh.. I think perhaps the fact that isn't immediately obvious was somewhat intentional on Apple's part.

<comment><USER5> They want to make the idea of "running" irrelevant: to the user, it's active or inactive. No need to manage a list of running programs if what is actually running is made invisible and unimportant. Makes it simpler.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like they may be headed that way with Lion, too - what's seen so far doesn't have the little lights under dock icons that indicate whether the application is actually "open" or not.

<comment><USER5> Interesting; I hadn't heard that. I feel this trend is good for the future: less things to manage is less that a user can do wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Comparable chart for Android:

[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity....](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#ActivityLifecycle)

<comment><USER8> That chart has been a life saver for me a couple times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is cool – there were two back-to-back one hour lectures on application states at WWDC. Absorbing this graphic is obviously faster and easier.

</comment><comment><USER10> The image kinda reminds me of an abstract human heart.</comment>