Life – Page 12 – Hobbits In Rivendell

Technology Hiring Practices and Diversity

June 7, 2017

3:23 pm

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I would like to talk about hiring practices in the technology field, in particular as those have an impact upon who does and does not get hired to work in technology. This is important because the tech industry talks a lot about limiting racism and sexism in their hiring processes (they’re ignoring age bias for the moment), but then the tech industry also talks about systems designed for interviewing candidates which are designed to result in high rates of false negatives. By “false negatives” they mean that more good candidates will be told that they don’t meet the needs or the requirements of the position – that they will err on the side of not hiring.

There’s fairly solid mathematical reasoning for why hiring this way does not make sense (read the extensive and geeky discussion on Hacker News). So, we have to ask, Why maintain this type of a hiring process if it results in poor organizational outcomes? And, if they’re maintaining this in the face of poor outcomes, we must further ask, What outcomes does this system actually have and are those outcomes the real reason for maintaining this type of a system?

I believe that this type of a system is designed to allow the bias (“culture”) of the organization to perpetuate. I believe that these hiring practices are designed to systemically discriminate, while pretending to be based upon merit. [side note: People are quite attached to the idea of meritocracy even in the face of proof that meritocracy actually results in worse outcomes for the organization (here’s a paper which proves that random promotions yield better organizational outcomes than merit-based promotions).]

When you design a system which yields false negatives, what you actually accomplish is to normalize the practice of making hiring decisions based upon gut feel and bias rather than upon objective criteria such as whether the applicant is really interested in the position or whether the applicant can do the job. That’s a big statement to make, but I think it’s proved out by the psychology.

We can evaluate this in terms of prospect theory and the framing effect, which pretty much describes the landscape of this decision. The framing effect plays a role here because the decision makers approach the interview having been told that it is better to mistakenly pass up a good candidate than it is to mistakenly hire a bad candidate. This framing puts the decision maker into the mindset of loss / risk aversion, which tends to be vastly more conservative than does a mindset of possible gains. When evaluating problems in a risk-averse or uncertain mindset, people attempt to reduce that risk or uncertainty however possible. In this mindset, hiring someone of the same general profile as oneself provides an immediate reduction in risk, so basically guarantees that candidates who are different (diverse) will be excluded.

This is not limited to the tech industry, by any means – I’m certain that these same problems are pervasive in other hiring systems. In tech, though, the big players have all made noises about diversity, and yet have maintained a system of hiring which continues to yield the same problematic hiring decisions. The tech industry is supposed to be the best and brightest – they certainly tell us that they are – yet it cannot seem to figure out how to hire women or blacks or Hispanics (or people aged over 35). This tells me that the noises made by tech are basic cover for not really wanting to solve the problem.

Tech companies are happy being pretty much white (and a few Asian) dudes and do not want to change. Tech companies want to mouth the right words about diversity, to maybe hire diversity officers, but they do not really have any interest in being diverse. They have designed hiring systems which are systematically discriminatory, but subtly so, which is problematic because it is the systemic problems which are hardest to fight.

I’m sure some of my reasoning in here isn’t as thorough as it could be. I don’t think that my reasoning is wrong, though – I think that the hiring systems of big tech companies essentially guarantee a lack of diversity, and that the companies are either uniformly ignorant of this or are happy for it to remain this way. Before you think that they’re ignorant of this, think about where psychology graduates go if they don’t become professors (hint: big technology companies, which is why everything tech is designed to be addictive).

Glasgow Botanical Gardens – Happy Birthday!

by David T. Macknet

May 20, 2017

9:11 am

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Glasgow, In Retrospect

Glasgow Botanic Gardens is turning 200 years old! It certainly looks like they had a fabulous day for it (their Twitter feed has some video and pictures). On a day like today is supposed to be here in California, we’d probably not have visited the Botanics, as they tend to be much warmer inside than out. In Glasgow’s fog and dreich, though, we’ve loved being inside, looking at all the flowers and statuary.

Enjoy your weekend!

-D & T

No to Seattle

by David T. Macknet

May 19, 2017

10:53 am

Seathl City

by TadMack

May 14, 2017

5:30 pm

2 Comments on Seathl City

California, Life

Seathl is a more approximate spelling of the Duwamish/Suquamish tribal chief’s name.

Seattle has changed a great deal since we were last there for more than a stop at the airport – which was about in 2000, when we were sponsors for a class of Seniors who are now approaching their (mid?) thirties and have kids of their own (sheesh). The picture above is from out the window of our very posh (fireplace, footstool, comfy robes, views, and teddy bear, natch) waterfront hotel, where we saw varying sizes of ferries crossing the Puget Sound every half hour or so, and two cruise ships pull up for servicing – which allowed us then to see a close inspection of the external portholes by burly men on mechanical lifts, and what we assume must have been an inspection of luggage and passenger areas by a gentleman from the DEA and their his chipper, tail-wagging drug sniffer dog.

Seattle is sometimes… so very Seattle-y, to those visiting. Moreso than our last visit, we noted the man buns, manly beards, and the plaid, oh, the plaid. Also, the über-woodsy, hyper-folksy, log-cabinesqueness of the place was not lost on us (What. Is. With. The. Antlers.). An epic winter has produced more greenery than usual, to the extent that it’s growing out of the tops of buildings, which reminded us a great deal of Glasgow. T. was most amused at the Seattle-ness of being at the posh hotel restaurant and being served, instead of cedar plank salmon, cedar plank tofu and roasted vegetables. (It was okay.) D. was most amused by the Seattle-ness of the canine cavalcade parading past at the big tech company. Pet friendly workplaces, doggy daycare and coffee shops are all over the city, along with microbreweries and [electric] bike shops. Phrases like “Fur Baby” were tossed around … Both childless and petfree, we felt a little left out. (But, not enough to actually get one of either.) We noted that while Northern California at least keeps its bona fides as a place more easily full of health foodies (there were both a surfeit the of spandexed and lots of pastries and doughnuts on offer all over), we did chuckle that every second car was a hybrid, and certainly every Lyft car was, so well done, Pacific Northwest for that.

Of course it rained during the four days we were there, but there was also a lot of wind and sea and sun. A charming, sprawling green mess of fauna and water, all beauty and art and earnest hipsters, fifty dozen Starbucks stores, loiterers, dog walkers and …traffic. D. was invited to come over for grueling interview (those six hour ‘invitations’ from big companies are a doozy) but T. was looking forward to meeting a blog-friend in person with whom she’d only ever corresponded…. and had the laughable coincidence of dining two nights with her friend, whose husband works for the company with which D was interviewing! Seattle is huge, but the tech world is teensy, in some ways.

Still a great deal up in the air, but it was a nice break from the ordinary.

Meanwhile, God bless those hipsters.

-D & T

“Oh… that’s why.”

by TadMack

May 9, 2017

11:24 am

4 Comments on “Oh… that’s why.”

California, Life

Rarely in life do we get the reasons why behind the way things go. At least, rarely do we get them this clearly. This is a circumstance D was assured, as he interviewed, “never” happened.

We were embarrassed, honestly, when this job – for which we gave away furniture and for which we were halfway packed to leave – didn’t turn out. It shook our faith in our own good sense, for one thing. What did we miss, and how? we kept asking ourselves.

And now we have, if not the answer, AN answer.

Don’t Open Things!

by David T. Macknet

May 3, 2017

1:20 pm

1 Comment on Don’t Open Things!

Miscellany

Dear Everybody: don’t open things you weren’t expecting to receive. This includes links to google docs and not just attachments. Why? There’s a particularly nasty type of attack going around that tries to pretend it’s someone you know sending you something via email. If you weren’t expecting something from that person, why don’t you pick up the phone and ask them if they sent it?

If it’s as suspicious as the picture above, double-check before you click. Thank you.

-D

Fact Checking

by David T. Macknet

April 19, 2017

5:28 pm

1 Comment on Fact Checking

Rant

OK, folks, please bear with me as I go on a bit of a rant about statistics and using data to basically lie (and end with a rant about why this might be happening).

I had been reading an article entitled Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair and happened upon a graph. It wasn’t a remarkable graph, except something about it just didn’t make sense to me, and then I looked at the axis (which runs from 12% through 32%) and I began to question the data.

People put things on a truncated axis like this when they want to emphasize the data more than it actually warrants. OK. So, we can go through and type this into Excel and make up a bit of a graph to show us what it looks like on a more accurate axis.

OK, that lets us see the data a bit better (i.e., that there’s not much of a difference between Pennsylvania and the rest of the USA). But it still doesn’t tell us anything – I mean, there must be a reason the writer is all het up about whatever’s happening in Pennsylvania, right? So, let’s slap a trend line on things and see where they’re going – let’s put a 3-year moving average on both the US and Pennsylvania’s percentages and see if they’re radically different from one another.

OK, so, that one shows us the raw numbers as dotted lines and the moving average as solid lines. Yes, it does look as if Pennsylvania seems to be edging up. But this is weird, really, because we really don’t understand what we’re looking at: we’re looking at an arbitrary slice of the population (ages 25-34) across 16 years. So … what does this really tell us? Well, without knowing how the other age bands behave, we won’t know anything at all. So, let’s go see what the Kaiser Foundation tells us about that. Kaiser Foundation data pretty much says that, yes, this age range for Pennsylvania does, indeed, overdose on opioids more often … but it also says that ages 35 and above overdose on opioids far less frequently than the US population (which could be saying that people in Pennsylvania overdose earlier than the rest of the country, but at about the same rate).

So, is Pennsylvania doing worse than the rest of the country? Well, Kaiser will let us troll through the data, so let’s see if we can put together a chart to tell us just that. If we ask for non-age data (e.g. by going to Opioid Overdose Deaths by Gender and removing Gender) then we see something that paints a different picture entirely.

Looking at the data without including age as a factor, Pennsylvania has historically been a pretty decent place to be, in that their opioid overdose deaths have tended to be several percentage points lower than the national average. This has stopped being true as of last year … except that how do we know that there’s a trend, rather than this just being noise?

Also, there’s one thing that’s missing from all of this analysis: how do we know that it has anything whatsoever to do with race? Because, really, we haven’t had anything that shows race at all in here, and when I try to ask Kaiser about their data by Race / Ethnicity I get some interesting results … in that I get a handful of data that is “NSD: Not sufficient data. Data supressed to ensure confidentiality.” Try it yourself and see what you can make of it.

That last query brings up another problem in the article: the article says that the deaths of a particular age range and ethnic group are different from the same age range for different ethnic groups … but that data doesn’t appear to be readily available, nor does any of the data out there seem to support that, nor does any of this appear to be beyond the range of statistical noise.

Now, what happens if we ask for numbers rather than percentages?

The top line is the total US number, keep in mind. But, yes, there does appear to be a wee problem there in Pennsylvania among white people. Of course, we don’t know how many black or Hispanic people there are in Pennsylvania, so we can’t say what percentage is affected by “the opioid epidemic,” and this is particularly true because when you look at the trend of Pennsylvania it kind of seems like it’s rising very slowly, whereas there’s a jump beginning at 2013 for the national average. So, does Pennsylvania have a problem? We just cannot say. (We also haven’t looked at when the stronger variants of opioids came onto the market, but do know that those are having some effect, as people encounter drugs which are stronger than expected.)

The other thing to point out: we’re talking about some pretty small numbers all along. I’m sorry, but 27,000 white people dying in a year, out of a total population of 320 million people, just doesn’t seem like a huge thing to talk about, to be honest. I mean, sure, it’s a tragedy for the families involved. But how about the 614,348 people who died from heart disease in the same year? The 591,699 who died of cancer? The 147,101 who died of respiratory disease? Or 136,053 from accidents, 133,033 from strokes, 93,541 from alzheimer’s, 76,488 from diabetes, 55,227 from influenza, 48,146 from kidney disease, and 42,773 from suicide?

In case you missed it in those numbers (all of which are significantly greater than the number of opioid deaths): 55,227 Americans died from the flu last year, which is nearly twice the number who died from opioids.

All of this leads me to wonder: why do we place such importance upon this particular narrative? Why is it important to tell the story that poor white people who didn’t get college degrees are getting into heroin? Why are we, as a nation, accepting articles like this one, which are barely supportable by the statistics, and which are looking at a problem which, on the face of it, doesn’t seem to be a significant problem when compared to other things? (As an example: give everybody a flu shot and you’ve likely saved as many as overdose on opioids.)

I would like to have full access to the data set, to see if I can slice it and come up with something compelling about Pennsylvania White People, but I just can’t see it in the available data. What I do see is a story being told without the data to support it, and I wonder why it’s an important story to the nation, at this time.

My answer to that question? We’ve seen that the war on drugs does not work, and this is a narrative which can be accepted (by White People) as a reason to change our national strategy. Spinning the story this way, though, ignores the generations of minorities who have been incarcerated for drug offenses. It lets White People continue to think that mass incarceration of minorities for drug crimes was OK. Making “the opioid epidemic” about Poor Whites allows a change in drug policy without addressing racial injustice.

-D

Well, that was briefly interesting.

by David T. Macknet

April 4, 2017

3:10 pm

1 Comment on Well, that was briefly interesting.

Upheaval

Life is nothing if not full of surprises. A week ago we’d thought we were going to Washington. Now, though … nope, we’re staying put for the time being. In the interest of not burning any bridges, we’ll just say it was a misunderstanding of monumental proportion. Suffice it to say, though, that we very narrowly escaped moving two states away, only to end up frustratated and angry. Let this be today’s lesson: always read the fine print. Carefully.

We were bummed on the weekend, and we’re still certainly a bit confused, as we’re sure you all are as well. On the positive side, we helped out a few college students furnish their first apartment via Freecycle, and cleaned out and sorted many of our possessions, so we’re well on our way to only hanging on to the things we honestly use or care about. Nothing is really lost, except a bit of time, and we had some to spare.

Maybe we’ll take a wee holiday, somewhere ~~warm and sunny~~ dreich and rainy (Scotland, we’re looking at you, with maybe a diversion to Reykjavik along the way), because once work begins again – officially – wherever that will be, holidays will be a bit scarce at first.

In the meantime, having made our way through the last of the fantastic fermented salsa we made in early February (!), we’re off to the Mexican market to see if we can find some more manzano peppers, and to begin the cycle of fermentation again. Next time we think we’re moving, we won’t be letting the batches run this low – or giving any away until we’re absolutely, positively, entirely sure.

Lesson – this and so many others – learned.

Yes – we did make all that salsa back in early February, and it’s all gone as of maybe 2 weeks ago. We shared a pint of the finishing sauce with friends, but we managed to make it through basically two quarts of salsa in about 6 weeks. And it wasn’t hot enough! Back to the market…

-D & T

Representative Democracy

by David T. Macknet

March 2, 2017

11:05 am

1 Comment on Representative Democracy

California

With all of the political chaos going on in the US, there’s been quite a lot of political engagement, particularly with people going to “town hall” meetings between the representatives and their constituencies. Well, I went to one the other day, here in Vallejo, for Congressman Mike Thompson.

I should have brought knitting.

It was like going to the most horrible, boring, irrelevant church service ever, except they didn’t even have singing.

Dear Politicians: do not tell us the same old schtick. We have this thing called “the internet?” It tells us all of these things. It’s how we knew where to track you down. We do not need for you to tell us these things. We know them. We want to ask you questions. We want to know what you are going to do. We want to know that you hear us, which means you need to actually listen to us.

Of course, at least the congressman had the guts to meet with us (in the Vallejo Senior Center, which is why there’s a permanent Bingo board behind him). This is unlike Senator Dianne Feinstein, who apparently doesn’t meet with you unless you cough up a bunch of cash. And I guess he was interesting enough, if you’re used to listening to the radio or watching TV – you know, low-bandwidth information consumption.

To put this into context: I either read my news or I listen to podcasts … and the podcast app I use lets me turn up the playback speed, so I can adjust it so the information comes at me way faster than having to listen to someone’s natural speaking voice. This is me: I consume information rapidly. Listening to a speaker drives me crazy unless I have something to do, and playing games on the phone isn’t quite enough to make me OK with the hard chairs and the repetitive information.

Representative democracy. Bleh. It’s either doomed or it’s entirely irrational. (Go read those articles, please – yes, the author is probably a liberal, but these are about political science rather than policy.)

Lesson learned: politicians are a low-bandwidth form of information delivery, and deliver information which can be easily consumed elsewhere, and they choose places with hard chairs. Oh, and they don’t want you to bring signs.

On a totally different note, we’ll be off to the Tri-Cities area of Washington State next week for interviews. We’ll be off sometime the following week to Seattle for interviews. And my current client has apparently realized that I’m seriously going to be going somewhere, so they want me to come and and do some work and, oh, would I be available to support them remotely through to the end of the year at least.

-D

Santa Barbara … Nope.

by David T. Macknet

February 28, 2017

4:08 pm

3 Comments on Santa Barbara … Nope.

California, Rant, Upheaval

Well, that was one of the stranger interview experiences I’ve ever had! Long story short: I’ll not be taking that job in Santa Barbara!

So, I went down to Santa Barbara to interview with this company after having had a few phone interviews, including a technical interview. Before going down it had seemed like things were really going well, like we were a great fit (albeit with a few things I’d have to get used to). I get to the interview at 11:00, we chit chat, go out to lunch, and then settle in for interviews. At this point, I’m expecting to meet people, talk with people – basically, to see what things are like and have them sell me on what a great company they are and how much of a nice place it is. Hahahaha, Nope!

Instead of selling me on them, they proceed to ask me tricky programming questions. Which, OK, fine, yes, people do this. They usually do it earlier in the process, but whatever, I can roll with it. The questions are usually idiotic, so that’s not unusual, even though I thought we were past this point, but hey, not getting hung up on that. Did I expect each of the three different interviewers to demonstrate odd personality traits that I would find distasteful to work with? No, certainly not. Did I expect to be pushed to answer when I had stated that I did not know the answer? Nope. Did I expect someone to mimic my body language? Like, I was fiddling with an earring while thinking about a coding question and the guy goes and tugs on his earlobe? Oh, no, I did not expect this. Nor did I expect them to be rude to other employees (a lady asked to change the thermostat in the conference room, since it was freezing in their space outside the conference room, to which the interviewer responded that he didn’t care).

After this strange day, wherein I sell myself to them and straight up do not respond to complete rudeness, I go back to the hotel basically exhausted and play some mindless games on the phone (frozen bubble is fabulous for not having to think, by the way). As I’m playing, I’m thinking over all the little things, and I’m adding them all up, and I’m reaching the conclusion that these are not nice people, and this is not going to be a nice place to work.

So, we drive home, and I talk it all out with T, and I write the recruiter a politely worded response to say that I don’t think it’s going to be a good fit.

And then I get a call from the hiring manager, wanting to talk it over.

The hiring manager tells me that these behaviors were intentional. They had intentionally done these things to see how I would react.

Let that sink in for a minute.

A potential employer essentially conducted psychological experimentation with a candidate. Over the course of 6 hours, and by 3 different people, they attempted to see whether I would react negatively to their behavior.

Here’s a little secret, people trying to hire: if you act like someone with whom the candidate would not want to work, that candidate is going to decide that they do not want to work with you. If you later try to tell them it was all a test? Well, that says that you felt entitled to know how the candidate would respond to stressful situations … which says that you intend to subject them to those types of situations, else why subject them to the test? If you do not intend to treat them poorly, why would you need to know how they will react to being treated poorly?

I don’t think there can be any ethical justification of such a test.

In talking with the hiring manager I told him that maybe, if he’d told me what they’d been doing before I left the interview, I might have reached a different decision. Thinking it through, though, I do not think so; I think that even knowing it was a test I would be offended because, again, If you do not intend to treat me that way, Why do you need to know how I will react?

I think I find this especially frustrating because I feel like it was a lie: that I wasted my time going down there because they were not being honest about the purpose of the meeting. Whatever they learned, I hope that they learned that some people react to macho BS by being polite and then removing themselves from the situation as quickly as possible.

I have a few more interviews lined up for the coming weeks, one of which I think looks like it could be quite interesting, the other of which is more “let’s talk more and see what kind of a company you really are.” We’ll see.

-D

Glasgow:
NY:
Grinnell:
Roswell:
Berkeley: