Facebook Rejects Female Engineers’ Code More Often

Megalith

Megalith

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Why is it that everyone’s first thought on this seems to be gender bias, when it could just be that Facebook has better male engineers who deliver better code? Another complaint is that females don’t get promoted at the same rates, but again, maybe the opposite sex there is simply more talented. I think the real bias will come when the company inevitably lowers the standard for some just to get a more balanced-looking internal review.

Data collected by an engineer in 2016 suggests that code submitted by women at the company was rejected more frequently than men, according to the Journal. Specifically, that female engineers' code is rejected 35 percent more often than men's. The engineer no longer works for the company. In response to the allegations, senior officials at Facebook conducted their own internal review. However, they found that the rejection rates could be attributed to a Facebook engineer's rank and not their gender, according to the Journal. The company also said that its analysis was based on more complete data that the engineer didn't have access to.
 
Just because there is a correlation doesn't mean there is causation.

Israel is the most anti-Semitic country I mean look at the rate they're dying there!
 
Burticus said:
"Get in there and code me a sandwich!"
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Code: 
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`-._~-._                   _..__.-~ _.-~
  /  ~-._~-._              / .__..--~----._
\_____(_;-._\.        _.-~_/       ~).. . \
    /(_____  \`--...--~_.-~______..-+_______)
  .(_________/`--...--~/    _/           /\
/-._     \_     (___./_..-~__.....__..-~./
`-._~-._   ~\--------~  .-~_..__.-~ _.-~
     ~-._~-._ ~---------'  / .__..--~
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Armenius said:
Code: 
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`-._~-._                   _..__.-~ _.-~
  /  ~-._~-._              / .__..--~----._
\_____(_;-._\.        _.-~_/       ~).. . \
    /(_____  \`--...--~_.-~______..-+_______)
  .(_________/`--...--~/    _/           /\
/-._     \_     (___./_..-~__.....__..-~./
`-._~-._   ~\--------~  .-~_..__.-~ _.-~
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Ascii art is not code unless this is the output of a sandwich subroutine. Hold the mustard. :)
 
Anybody want to cross-post Megalith's header for this article to the former Gawker property Jezebel? I could use some cheap laughs from the resulting misandry/misogyny arguments.
 
When you push affirmative action for a sex because you think it is needed, when reality is that there are just less in the field, it means you have to hire more and more unqualified people for those jobs to keep this magic ratio everyone wants, as such one should expect lower quality of work, and when you have lower quality of work/less skill you should expect those people to get promoted less often if at all.
 
lcpiper said:
but the problem is gender bias ...... hiring practices that drive the acquisition of employees where gender is more important than skill and experience.

You get what you ask for.
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Basically. "We need to diversify our hiring practices. Lets hire these females over better performing males to reach our goal. Oh no, the code they're putting out is not as good as the male gender, I wonder why?"
 
The numbers simply aren't in women's favor at Facebook.

They only hold 17% of the technical roles at the company. That's not a large pool to begin with. The men have 83% of the remaining tech roles. The men simply have the numbers in their favor that suggests better code is statistically more likely to come from that larger group than the smaller group.

I don't think this has much to do with any sort of gender bias either when it comes to hiring. Women just don't have the same interest as men in these technical fields. I went through a Computer Science undergrad and each class had maybe, 1-2 women in it. The most one of my classes had was about 4 out of an average class size of 25+.
 
I shouldn't say this as if it's the golden rule. I am sure Facebook has some talented female code hacks. But I think there could still be some validity to what I said even if it doesn't answer for all the rejected code events.

Ask me if there are female devs that are as good as they come, I am sure there are. But if you set hiring quotes to boost diversity ratings there will have to be an impact.
 
People don't fail a code review to be mean. They fail a code review because the code has problems. Occasionally, the feedback will be somewhat frivolous or a matter of stylistic preference. Are the female coders more prone to frivolous feedback or are the criticisms typically valid?
 
cthulhuiscool said:
Maybe instead of coding for Facebook they should stick to coding in the Kitchen.
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And this folks is why women claim discrimination. Let's be blunt. Nobody gets into facebook unless they're solid engineers. Most that bitch on [H] couldn't get a job at FB on their best day (regardless of their position or their sex). The fact that so many guys are so certain that the women just whining shows there's a problem. IME, there's not much difference between male and female s/w engineers. That doesn't mean that some women are inferior to their male counterparts, but the converse is also true. And I've worked with far more horrible male SWE that somehow get promoted than horrible female SWE, much less horrible ones that get promoted when they shouldn't.

What's going on at FB, I don't know, but anyone that doesn't think they can't get plenty of women is nuts. These companies have rigorous technical interviews. And as I've said before, I've got a friend that works in the valley who literally had a manager say in a meeting that he didn't think women should be engineers. This woman has been written up in various tech publications, worked on VR on military research projects long before their was Facebook, much less Occulus, some well known animation studios and one of the big game engine companies. There is discrimination against women. I've seen it more than once in my career. In every case, the typical response about kids/family doesn't apply.
 
nilepez said:
And this folks is why women claim discrimination. Let's be blunt. Nobody gets into facebook unless they're solid engineers. Most that bitch on [H] couldn't get a job at FB on their best day (regardless of their position or their sex). The fact that so many guys are so certain that the women just whining shows there's a problem. IME, there's not much difference between male and female s/w engineers. That doesn't mean that some women are inferior to their male counterparts, but the converse is also true. And I've worked with far more horrible male SWE that somehow get promoted than horrible female SWE, much less horrible ones that get promoted when they shouldn't.

What's going on at FB, I don't know, but anyone that doesn't think they can't get plenty of women is nuts. These companies have rigorous technical interviews. And as I've said before, I've got a friend that works in the valley who literally had a manager say in a meeting that he didn't think women should be engineers. This woman has been written up in various tech publications, worked on VR on military research projects long before their was Facebook, much less Occulus, some well known animation studios and one of the big game engine companies. There is discrimination against women. I've seen it more than once in my career. In every case, the typical response about kids/family doesn't apply.
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That explains hiring practices, but code is pretty ambiguous....you'd have to be pretty daft as a project manager or whatnot to reject perfectly good code from a current employee just to spite women.


And COMPLETELY agree I'd never last in one of those hot box jobs. I'm a IT grunt, anything above that is someone else's problem. My district IT department head is a woman so is what it is.
 
nilepez said:
And this folks is why women claim discrimination. Let's be blunt. Nobody gets into facebook unless they're solid engineers. Most that bitch on [H] couldn't get a job at FB on their best day (regardless of their position or their sex). The fact that so many guys are so certain that the women just whining shows there's a problem. .
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The fact that you are so certain, without any evidence whatsoever, again, without any evidence whatsoever, that statistically, code written by females is rejected at a higher rate because of gender discrimination, shows how eager you are to join into a victimhood narrative because it appeals to the social justice warrior in you.

Is the fact that males are imprisoned at far higher rates than women evidence of blatant gender discrimination? By your reasoning, we should see men and women convicted of crimes at the same rate, because you know, equality, right?
 
Only 20% of teachers in primary through secondary education are male, despite making up approximately 50% of the population.

When will the public demand that our education system embrace diversity that reflects the makeup of the community? What kind of message does this lopsided, female dominated pillar of our society send to male children? "You're unwanted in the teaching profession" is the answer.
 
GlowingGhoul said:
77% of new players hired by the National Basketball Association are black males, though they are only 6% of the population.

Clearly this is evidence of blatant discrimination by the NBA, right?
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Women only make up 1% of all the trash collection jobs.
Obviously the patriarchy is keeping them out of the job market when it comes to collecting trash.
 
GlowingGhoul said:
The fact that you are so certain, without any evidence whatsoever, again, without any evidence whatsoever, that statistically, code written by females is rejected at a higher rate because of gender discrimination, shows how eager you are to join into a victimhood narrative because it appeals to the social justice warrior in you.?
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The OP study is the evidence. Given hundreds of people involved, the odds of an entire group within a company with defined hiring standards is simply lousy while the other is not is highly unlikely. Large groups always revert to the mean. When they don't it's suggestive of something systemic.

Sitting back and yelling "maybe it's something else" is pretty goddamn useless. You're arguing against statistics, provide an alternative hypothesis to test.

Is the fact that males are imprisoned at far higher rates than women evidence of blatant gender discrimination? By your reasoning, we should see men and women convicted of crimes at the same rate, because you know, equality, right?
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That's a pretty lousy red herring. Men are more prone to violence and aggression than women, who tend to have more problems with depression and anxiety. Since anxiety isnt illegal while violence is, one would expect higher male incarceration holding all else equal and fair.

Culture, however, plays a huge part. Social stigmas are why men have higher suicide rates even though women are more likely to suffer depression.

TL,DR: your arguments are bad and you should study a topic before commenting on it.
 
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also

statistics.jpg
 
BlueFireIce said:
When you push affirmative action for a sex because you think it is needed, when reality is that there are just less in the field, it means you have to hire more and more unqualified people for those jobs to keep this magic ratio everyone wants, as such one should expect lower quality of work, and when you have lower quality of work/less skill you should expect those people to get promoted less often if at all.
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It's a terrible social experiment that we're all going to have to pay the price for.
It's now hip to be diverse. Diversity in modern terms has nothing to do about intellectual diversity, but rather things people were born into like color of their skin, gender, sexual preference, religion.
If your hiring practices aren't only focused on getting the best person for the job, then you're not doing a good job in hiring. Eventually your company will suffer because your workforce isn't able to compete with others.
 
STR said:
The OP study is the evidence. Given hundreds of people involved, the odds of an entire group within a company with defined hiring standards is simply lousy while the other is not is highly unlikely.

Large groups always revert to the mean. When they don't it's suggestive of something systemic.

Men are more prone to violence and aggression than women, who tend to have more problems with depression and anxiety. Since anxiety isnt illegal while violence is, one would expect higher male incarceration holding all else equal and fair.


TL,DR: your arguments are bad and you should study a topic before commenting on it.
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So men are more prone to violence and agression, justifying higher incarceration rates, so apparently there is some fundamental difference between males and females you are willing to acknowledge when it reflects poorly on men. As an aside, please name a corresponding negative trait that can be applied to women, as a group. I suspect you can't, because your mind won't allow you to stray outside of your preferred social justice paradigm.

Is it possible that males, on average, have a greater aptitude for the tasks at hand? No, can't be huh? The only characteristics that apply to males as a group are negative, right?
 
GlowingGhoul said:
So men are more prone to violence and agression, justifying higher incarceration rates, so apparently there is some fundamental difference between males and females you are willing to acknowledge when it reflects poorly on men. As an aside, please name a corresponding negative trait that can be applied to women, as a group. I suspect you can't, because your mind won't allow you to stray outside of your preferred social justice paradigm.

Is it possible that males, on average, have a greater aptitude for the tasks at hand? No, can't be huh? The only characteristics that apply to males as a group are negative, right?
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Another fallacy, this time a straw man. I spelled it out pretty clearly. Both sexes have mental health issues. They simply have different mental health issues. The kind that men suffer from just happen to lead to illegal behavior. That doesn't make anyone inferior or superior.

Do not misrepresent me.
 
Solution: When somebody applies for a job their name and gender are redacted from any forms that are brought to HR to be reviewed and simply replaced with an 8 digit alpha numeric string and any personal pronouns replaced with gender neutral ones. Anybody who is given a job is assigned an employee number that number is to be kept secret and only HR knows the relations between names and numbers. Any submissions are to be made and named with the employee number not their actual name. Any promotions that are based on work performance would be done based on the employee number and any promotions based on personal merit could be made based on name. Furthermore the work submitted could be graded in some manner as could the named employees, persons who have favourable ratings in both personal and work merits could be rewarded and those who are unfavourable in both could be dealt with. The biggest issue would be keeping the HR department fair, maybe running it as an election system could work where and the positions are campaigned for on a periodic basis... thoughts?
 
I asked my wife to code me a sammich, and I got boiled bacon instead..... :eek:

Men and women think differently and it shows in how they work.... nothing wrong with that as long as you are doing your job...
 
STR said:
Another fallacy, this time a straw man. I spelled it out pretty clearly. Both sexes have mental health issues. They simply have different mental health issues. The kind that men suffer from just happen to lead to illegal behavior. That doesn't make anyone inferior or superior.

Do not misrepresent me.
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Um. Yeah....when it comes to things like coding, or being adept at music, or language skills they are quite frequently tied to different thought processes. So mental health could have a VERY distinct impact on someone's ability to code. Hence the whole "Aspie" culture in programming.
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
I asked my wife to code me a sammich, and I got boiled bacon instead..... :eek:

Men and women think differently and it shows in how they work.... nothing wrong with that as long as you are doing your job...
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when i say boiled bacon i gag.

then i googled it.

why? why is this a thing?!
 
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