I think they are missing an incredible amount of talent this way. In my circle of friends, there were 3-4 other people that Google would have been lucky to have, and two of them were women They just don't understand that some people like me, who can get into the (mostly private) elite schools choose to go to a "long tail" school for a variety of reasons (financial, family obligations, etc). There are lots of similar schools all over the country.

I was puzzled why the recruiter wanted to know my SAT score. He also wanted to know the college and high school I went to and my GRE score and my undergrad GPA ... Keep in mind that I have a BS, MS, Phd in three different engineering fields and over a decade of work experience at well know companies in the Bay area. For a 40 something engineer it seemed odd he would ask me information from two decades ago but I went along assuming he was filling in some boxes for HR.

The first assignment in the Probabilistic Graphical Models class was to predict the likelihood that a candidate would be a good fit for a job given prior Bayesian probabilities for ivy league school attended, SAT score, GRE score, all forming nodes of a decision tree.

I looked at the problem assignment and the recruiters questions and realized what was going on. Some Stanford grad at Google had convinced HR that they needed an objective way to evaluate hundreds of candidates and what better way than to use the same methods that they had learnt from Daphne Koller at Stanford.

I quit the PGM class 'cause it seemed like a tool I would never use. I decline interviews at Google since I don't have the right Bayesian probabilities that would trigger a positive outcome for their PGM model.

When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews.

Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day.

I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given.

Then they attempted to recruit me for the same position for the next four years on three separate occasions.

I told them the story of my first experience, and then they'd say "yeah let me check..." then get back to me and say "sorry, we wont interview you for this position", again, no reason given.

Then they called me one more time, for same damn position. I told them "Ill make this simple, just give me the damn job or stop freaking calling me"

They finally stopped calling me.

I was invited to pitch my startup to google startup team twice (For their launchpad AI studio and Gradient ventures).

Got an email two months later that I made it to the next round and requesting more information about the startup.

I sent the emails and then... crickets. Followed up via emails and linkedin and there is just no response. No negative, no waiting, no request for more information. Just a cold dead silence. Very demoralizing.

I know, I know, corporations are psychopaths [1], but a hint of humanity or compassion would've at least kept the façade somewhat up. Actions like these can harm your faith in corporations and humanity, and that might very well be the goal. It can be extremely demotivating, and if Google doesn't buy the startup its generally in Google's interest the VC doesn't get bought by the competitor. So from that PoV it makes sense.

But we are talking about real humans here, with startups, with limited resources, and a lot of stress. Is it too much to ask for a response you've been declined preferably also with a honest mention of "because of reason X or Y"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(film)

So, to the VCs out there, you have a moral obligation to tell people why you don't want to invest/work-with or hire.

Otherwise you stick the idea of "vulture capital" aren't helping people get better.

Look at some from the ashes type teams, like WhatsApp - might find more of them if you weren't to crush them out early.

I was straight out of uni and the interview was a three-part, month-long process.

At the end, HR called me and gave me an offer, "welcome to the team" included and so on.

I was just told to wait a week for the CEO's formal approval, which was to be "standard procedure" for every new hire.

A week became two weeks, then another two weeks, then another. During that I was still assured the job was coming.

In the meantime, I found another job, a pretty good one.

A month later, I got a call from HR at Wikia saying that maybe I should start looking for a different job.

At the time it was a real disappointment for me, but it taught me to be never be sure until I'm holding the signed contract in my hand.

Always this. And don't stop interviewing and applying until it happens.

The recruiter wanted to do a full on-site panel. I had already offers from several companies at that point. Google was just so bad and careless that I decided to there was no point moving forward. I called it off and chose another company with a sane hiring process.

Google is big and has an insane amount of money in the bank. They can have the shittiest interview process but the input to the pipe is so large that their hiring funnel still works out.

Although I am convinced the reason why google has such a bad male:female ratio of engineers compared to Microsoft is possibly due to their hiring process.

Decided to try again a while later. They had me start at the phone screen stage again, then wanted me to do a second. Almost did it, called it off because I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble.

I've been rejected by other places but google just really annoyed me. I think it was the overwrought, slow, unpleasant process which produces high false negative rates but that they are also seemingly extremely proud of. Only place I wen to where they told me multiple times about how common it is to interview 2-3 times before getting in. I'm sure that happens at other places but they seem to treat it more as a flaw then a feature.

Anyway, I hate jumping through hoops. I'm hoping next job I can leverage people a bit more and maybe move through things a bit more quickly.

Google's interviewing process used to be extremely absurd. They have reformed it somewhat since around 2013.

I'll admit I was an outlier - Most people around me had fantastic college resumes (And I was very lucky to have them to learn from to shore up places where I had weaknesses). There may also have been a different hiring track and bar for SREs. I didn't find it a problem then - But, given the known fickleness of HR (At my office, our best recruiter was forced out because she spent too much time hanging out with engineers outside after-hours) and the way Google has gone downhill since then, I'd not be surprised if this was now the case

What might be the rationale for that? At every company I've worked at, the best results came when people worked across divisions between boundaries. I once asked a VC what grassroots indicators they looked at inside of companies, and they said a collaborative environment without a lot of silos. I'd never heard of companies actively punishing this kind of thing, but I totally believe you that it happens. Why would they do that?

It's a sad story, but what can you do?

Agreed--I was accepted everywhere I applied save one and I ended up going to the University of Maine. I've never hurt for work and I paid off my student loans by the age of 25. Google sniffs around now (aside: recruiters, even if it's Google maybe you shouldn't assume I want to talk to you and tell me to sign up for a phone call to talk to your sainted ass?) and I have no interest, but the first time I interviewed, when a guy at Google gave me noticeable shade for my filthy state school degree? They could've made a decent bit of money off of me and now that door is likely closed.

Oh well, the local community college classes were only like $15 per credit hour for high school seniors (paid by the high school), so I started college as a sophomore. Gotta take the good with the bad I guess.

One of the beautiful things about softwars tech is that it has offered people opportunities to self-teach and build a portfolio of their own credentials, by their own determination. This has given ordinary people the opportunity to build things that benefit others.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have privileged rich kids attending Harvard, many of whom go on to work in finance or consulting, and who knows what they produce that is useful in the world.

I would really love to see the idea that we need to open up on the limitations of world-class educations and credentials become part of the mainstream discussion.

There is almost no reason the first two years of, which are often filled with gen-ed requirements often taught in laughably huge lecture halls by uninterested staff, not be open to everyone in the world. We need a new model that promotes this--Harvard classes should be open to everyone and that includes the tests and credits as well.

And why not? The War on Poverty in America has spent trillions of dollars with little to nothing to show for it in terms of reducing poverty. Of all this money spent, one of the first things I would have done would have been to ensure everyone has the greatest opportunities available to them. There's no good reason to hold them hostage, unless you care about profit or prestige more than increasing opportunity and reducing inequality.

Urgh, this a hundred times over. I get a form e-mail every six months or so from a Google recruiter that says something along the lines of "sorry we missed each other! Find a slot in the attached Google Calendar for us to set up a call"

...no. That attitude straight off the bat makes me not want to go anywhere near the process of applying for a job at Google.

UMF has one of the best teaching programs in the country. They even have a CS path that is judged well.

Maybe recruiting at the small State universities is a potential edge?

You get great talent that big tech companies won’t interview!

No insult intended, I would rather they benefit and not you.

Nobody is making the big money that elite engineers make though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball

I don't know what the deal is with some recruiters--I mean, in general. I attended a recruiting event from the US gov near graduation, approached one booth and introduced myself. A friend came over and inquired about a job to which she said "oh, well that's for the creme de la creme" and turned away without asking him anything about himself!? I found that incredibly rude.

Geeze, I wish I had her psychic powers /s.

Personally I think it has to do with the problems of giving people power and authority over others...

(I guess there's always the wheelbarrow of money, but they don't really even do that anymore, at least here in Boston.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever try applying to Google again, especially after landing at one of their largest competitors & the company investing heavily in the area I am working in.

I would have thought that googles Hr would have a better proccess

1. They're only interested in new grads, so experienced people are treated funny; they're outliers.

2. They're only interested in top schools, which act as a pre-filter. Anyone interviewed is probably a good hire anyway, so it doesn't matter whether your process is goofy.

3. We are talking Google. Anyone under the age of 30 is slobbering all over themselves to work for them.

Keep this up for a few generations and their hiring process is permanently wacky.

Think of all the extra brainwashing needed.

It's way cheaper to start with a kernel than expand from there.

edit: to clarify what happens, every 6 months it's a new recruiter, and they always ping me multiple times until I respond and tell them what I've told all of them, and they usually (with 1 exception so far) keep pinging the same way.

The early part of the recruitment process is basically a process to get possibly qualified candidates to interview. What it's good for: if you ever want try interviewing at Google again, you can get an interview. I wouldn't expect anything more from it than that; it's pretty impersonal. :-)

Of course they shouldn't. (I know plenty of people at Google, I've gone through the process a few times, I have an idea.) But...that doesn't mean it doesn't happen and that it isn't cultural.

State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).

School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers.

Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops.

This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.

One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT.

There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching. Going to a merely "most selective" school rather than "Ivy Plus" is an decent solution to that problem.

(of course, there are other reasons to not go to RPI, but that's a different conversation)

EDIT: I just noticed that you referenced RPI as "slightly more selective". At the time I was there (mid-80s) it was ranked as most selective. I'm aware that its reputation has slipped a bit. While it's not that big a deal to me, as my 30 years experience outweighs all that, I wonder what effect changing reputation has on past students.

One of the points of going to good research universities is to immerse yourself in exactly that environment: research. Good students probably don't need good teachers to learn. The reason to go to a top research university is to get involved in exactly that research. Especially in computer science and engineering, this is part of the pipeline to the really interesting jobs in industry.

I completely missed this when I was in school, and I regret it.

There's no guarantee that the less selective schools are any better at teaching. From what I've seen CMU and Stanford both had smaller class sizes and better teachers than RPI, but that was just from quick touring.

There are some schools with a strong focus on teaching (Harvey Mudd), but that seems to be unusual. I think in most cases if you get into a super selective school you should go if you can.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-great-research-meets-grea...

Can't get behind the paywall now, but it was a lot in line with your arguments.

I had professors at my school that taught their pet research topics. They all sucked at teaching, partly because their research areas were utterly irrelevant for undergrads who were still struggling to learn programming. RDF, anyone?

The best profs were the ones who had been working developers in industry. They found ways to make the classes engaging and fun, vs just lifelessly reading their notes out loud (often in impenetrable accents).

1. Actually know something about, and be interested in, what they are teaching.

2. Being able to explain the subject without making a complete hash of it.

3. Being able to explain the subject without leaving me comotose in my desk-thing.

Extra credit for including tips and tricks that don't get covered in textbooks and are only known to people involved in the field. Plus, background and amusing stories about how the goofy nomenclature and such got the way it is.

On the other hand, when and where I was an undergraduate, if you were "still struggling to learn programming" after the first couple of semesters of programming and data structures (taught by aforementioned "CS education" people), then you were pretty thoroughly hosed. (There were, however, 1-course hour classes in individual programming languages, if you couldn't pick up those yourself.)

Mathematical logic class taught by logician? Awesome

Automata class taught by expert in complexity theory? Fantastic

Rudin class taught by PDEs expert - amazing

The worst class I had was an introductory algorithms course taught by someone who specialized in teaching.

Early on in my career I'd get questioned about my CS degree from Tufts, and I'd jokingly mention "I'd gotten into CMU SCS, but I preferred to be a well rounded individual. I can send you the acceptance letter if you'd like."

I think people choose schools for all manner of reasons.

In retrospect, I would have been better off applying to UIUC, Purdue, or CMU, but quite a lot of the decisions I made when young would have turned out differently if I knew then what I know now.

It’s a pretty hostile environment for many people.

I admit I'm heavily biased, but I'd say it is demanding. If universally demanding excellence is 'hostile,' then I guess I can agree with you.

This is not something any diversity program I know of in the big companies is trying to address.

Probably? That seems to be an expansive assumption, to be charitable.

Very much a diversity issue.

Now, awareness of this fact may be not widespread enough, skewing the applicant pool toward the outcome.you describe because of perceived cost, but it's much more likely that a student wouldn't be able to afford a public college than an elite private one.

They usually weasel word the scope of their generosity, treat loans as gifts, etc.

The sticker price is always negotiable, but state schools are usually ahead.

Since I personally experienced it, I'm pretty sure it's not.

Then you should look at the actual university policies outlined on their website. At top of line elite schools (Stanford, Princeton level), if your family income <$65-75K, both tuition and housing are free, and <$125K tuition is free.

I know for a fact that state schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA aren't that generous with housing.

>> Just look at the make up of study body at the top 5 schools.

Students from wealthier backgrounds tend to have more access to academic and educational resources and are thus more qualified and more likely to be admitted.

Not a judgement suggesting that a less fortunate child would not succeed in a similar environment; many of them just don't have one.

The people with some means (aka the "middle class") can stretch their budget to afford state school.

Most states also have transfer programs that let you go from a 2yr at a CC into the equivalent 4yr at state school which takes a huge chunk out of the cost.

I wonder if people realize how rare it is to even understand these things. If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this. If you do have a lot of people in your family who went to college, that's a serious leg up.

Now I work in a fancy startup where everyone went to Stanford, MIT, Harvard. It's a very weird feeling.

Absolutely. The number 1 reason I'm in tech is that my dad was a programmer. The reason he's in tech is that his dad was high enough up at an insurance company to swing my dad a job back when computers were new and nobody knew what to do with them. And that probably worked out because the generation before that was reasonably well off due to some lucky choices.

But I still grew up with little idea how to play the elite educational game. My family valued learning a great deal, but the jockeying for social advantage was never given much consideration. It's a very specific set of knowledge and skills.

The assumption that it's 'obvious' that knowledge of how the system works is widespread is just wrong. It's only recently that I clued in to how the industry works, if I had all this knowledge handy years ago, if somebody told me, I don't know what position I would be in right now.

State school was free with financial, extrapolating my financial aid package I would have graduated from the top choice with ~$60,000 debt.

I didn't understand the prestige differential because literally everyone I knew at best went to that state school. One of my high school teachers even told our class that we should not aim higher than the state school, because everyone who ended up going somewhere better flunked out and at best eventually graduating from the state school. At least he was telling us a state school was achievable?

I started high school at 15 and it didn't even cross my mind (and would not have been financially possible) to look for one outside of my town, while I had a reasonable one 5 min walk away from my place. There was one school known to be the top in the state, in a big city 50 km away, but it had a reputation of people going on meth to be able to keep studying 24/7 - not so great.

Then I started the local university at 18 - I happened to go to CS because I didn't see anything matching my skills better, but I didn't even write a line of C before that (did a bit of webdev and PHP though). No one in my family and none of my friends had anything to do with CS before me.

Since then I moved country twice for study/work, but I still don't see myself changing country or even state back then at 18. (At that time, I barely started having fixed internet connection at home, didn't even know something like MIT exists, and what's all the fuss about Silicon Valley).

No idea.

I can appreciate now that these schools offer stellar educational opportunity in contrast with many others. It's just that this should still be seen in the context that a person attends for a brief time when they're young and that perhaps it's not the be-all and end-all of intellectual ability that cultural attitudes (especially seemingly here in New England) might suggest.

Can you really expect any different from a company founded from within the halls of Stanford, and then staffed primarily from there?

On the other hand, I bet if you sat down and ran the numbers, recruiting from state schools isn't productive. For better or worse, school selectivity is tied with rankings -- for every Anthony topping the charts of state school is a graduating class of Anthonys at the elite schools. Cherry picking your one Anthony per school is likely harder than showing up to Stanford where they picked cherries 4 years ago.

Moreover, Google recruiters are likely already flooded with new grad applicants from non-elite schools, while every year GoogFaceAmaple is pushing forward their recruiting funnel earlier than the competition. Eventually, I imagine they'll simply interview candidates the summer between receiving their college acceptance letter and fall semester freshman year.

An interesting idea: pulling from state schools isn't a problem because they're short on talent, it's a problem because recruiters and interviewers are bad at identifying talent.

Colleges get a transcript, SATs, and essays to make a decision on, then do four years of further sorting. That's far from perfect, but given the track record of job interviews (stunningly poor), picking the best state candidates may not just be time-consuming but basically impossible.

If you simply can't tell who's good, then outsourcing that decision becomes an obvious choice.

This is neither good nor bad. It makes recruiting and onboarding easier early on. But it is a thing which a company will eventually grow out of.

I suspect the same exists in making the wrong first hire from a school.

Yes, I can. The whole point of education is to rise above your biases and intuitions.

Having spent a lot of time hiring over the past few years, I can tell you that the candidates we see from “top tier” schools are almost always “good”, but also incredibly homogenous. I’d rather take the bit of extra effort to find people with different backgrounds and world views that are also “good” at what they do.

I would not buy that for a second.

Compare that to the students I interviewed for internships from top 5 engineering schools. Among them was one of the best candidates I'd ever encountered, regardless of experience level. He came up with a unique (and quite good) solution to a problem I'd been using as an interview question for years. As someone who had done fairly well in state school, I was floored by how much more well-prepared these students were than I had been.

My story is anecdotal, and there are many factors that can explain what I perceived. But I suspect the top companies have figured out that they get best results in hiring based on a) recent grads from top schools and b) great resumes from experienced devs who maybe didn't start out at top schools & top companies.

On the plus side from a diversity standpoint, the students I interviewed from these top schools were both male and female, and from a wider variety of ethnic backgrounds than I usually see in the hiring pipeline.

Definitely nothing at all targeted towards interviews - even the algo courses were very theoretical and they expected us to get comfortable with the code on our own time. In fact they are all about teaching CS and not about teaching you how to get a job or trendy technologies.

What did help me and some of my friends more than anything was just grinding interview questions - going through CTCI 3-4 times until I could solve it in my head, doing random questions off glassdoor etc..

People love to paint rosy pictures of easy lives for top 5 candidates. The truth is college was insanely hard, many people were extremely stressed/depressed, we worked our asses off and sacrificed a lot. Ultimately to learn a lot more in 4 years than someone else, you have to put in a lot more time - there is no way around it.

This was very much my experience as well. A couple classes had "make your own final project!" things that usually encouraged front-end like an app or a website. I bombed those pretty hard because I had no idea what I was doing.

Most of my classes only touched code occasionally for a homework. Everything else was either math, short answer, or running algorithms by hand.

I don't know how all this compares to other schools, but it could be a massive advantage in interviews. Most interviews are asking you to come up with an algorithm and implement it. I can't tell you how many interviews have come down to the "linked list indexed by a dictionary" data structure that I had to figure out for my first CS midterm. Nobody asks about logging stacks or Oauth2 or caching in new-grad interviews.

But it's also infinitely better from the company's perspective than having no data whatsoever on each candidate's current capabilities.

Combine this with the fact that false negatives (good programmers who perform poorly on 45-minute blackboard programming tests) are not a measurable problem for a company, and you end up with what we now have.

At this point I tell them not to bother if I get contacted or I just ignore the recruiter. It's effectively a pretty big waste of time 98% of the time and they're just making some kind of internal metric so that positions can be claimed to have been offered fairly.

I think what really bothers me about this process in general, and it applies to a great many companies, is that they contacted me. In that they sought me out. I didn't apply. So a little courtesy on that front would be helpful.

And how about people who couldn't get into an elite school at 17, but end up learning a lot at the state school? It seems odd to be so preoccupied by what someone's capability was when they were in high school, rather than what it is now.

How many of those schools have you never hired anyone from, vs how many are hired every year from Stanford?

Quality of education itself is mostly irrelevant - difference is small and it's good enough pretty much everywhere now.

My experience is that in any school / college / organisation, there is a distribution of smart / switched on / less switched on / absolute idiots. The difference between the better universities and less prestigious ones isn't that every student is excellent or bad (I have seen enough falling in the last category above in prestigious universities), just that there is a higher concentration of better students.

So it does make sense for companies to target these schools / universities, it's a matter of efficiency for their marketing efforts.

It doesn't make sense for companies to make it hard for non target schools as they are cutting themselves from lots of potentially excellent candidates (I suspect certain companies to automatically reject applications on their websites if the university isn't one of a list).

Don't they have a referral bonus scheme pretty much exactly for this?

Interesting -- can you explain more what you mean here? Referral programs are often criticized for reinforcing biases, since people refer other people with similar backgrounds to them (and, likely, similar resumes). I've held a negative view of referral programs for that reason; do you have data or anecdata about referral programs finding candidates who would otherwise have been missed?

Referral programs will pretty obviously bring your hires similar to the hires you already have, with all the attendant problems. College insularity, but also demographics and even specializations. What I was thinking about was more specifically finding strong candidates from populations that don't look great.

Maybe State University has a weak CS program, but a handful of really good candidates. (This is probably the case for any weak program of sufficient size.) Those candidates probably won't be obvious on paper unless they're hyper-motivated, because weak programs lead to limited opportunities and uninformative grades.

But if Jess from State University does Google Summer of Code and makes something awesome, maybe she gets a job. At that point, Google hands her the referral form and she can pick out her strongest classmates better than any recruiter could, even if they haven't done anything flashy. (My experience, at least, was that the top students are at a minimum aware of one another.)

So it's not going to solve a demography problem; if your direct hires are 50% Stanford, your referrals will be too. But a lot of those Stanford referrals might be people you'd reach anyway, so referrals are valuable in inverse proportion to the ease of other recruiting. The harder it is to spot which candidates are good, the more benefit you gain from asking their peers.

I interviewed with them recently and I didn’t get any condescending comments about my SUNY education like I did a few years ago — from a recruiter who was reaching outbound to me!

Dropping out of that place was still one of the best decisions I've ever made though.

BS = Bachelor of Science

MS = Master's of Science

HR = Human Resources

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_at_Buffalo

RPI = Rob's Pairing Interview

I understanding wanting to avoid the former, but the latter is pretty good.

why stop here though, couldn't you just extend this argument to people who go community colleges or online schools or even people don't go any school ?

Career services at non-top tier schools are shit. Once, as a personal favor, I offered to help a company with a well-known CEO recruit from my state school. When I brought it up with a dean I knew, career services got mad. They said I should have gone through them first. Guarding their gatekeeping function was of greater concern than doing their job. They then suggested this CEO come to their fall freshman career fair. I said no, it's a high-profile company, they'd prefer if you curated a list for them. (MIT and NYU, amongst others, do this.) No response.

Consider, too, that 90% of recent-college graduate recruiting (in finance, at least) is less about finding brilliance than finding someone who won't make dumb mistakes. The Ivy League produces a consistent product. They hold no monopoly on genius. But the variance around others' outputs is too high for a young firm.

All that said, I never turn down an outbound email. (It's how I broke into the industry.) I also think it's important, as your firm develops, to keep an eye on broadening recruiting.

Closing note: in response to recent news, I started thinking about our workplace's gender diversity. It's bad, and it matches that of the schools we recruit from.

Doing my undergrad and PhD at an average large state school, I was really lucky to get an internship (and now job), essentially by word of mouth and my PhD advisor.

Now that I'm doing a part-time Masters at an elite-ish (top 10) school, I'm realizing how amazing career services can be. They send out weekly emails saying:

"James Dimon is coming to speak." "Dir. of Engineering from Exxon will be taking questions." "Bring your resume and chat with recruiters." "Women's Society will be hosting Barclays tonight."

My state school had nothing. All of the leg work was done by individual students.

Interesting, and I can see it. But then again, I have to wonder if there is some degree of confirmation bias at play here?

It's likely the staff in Career Services at $ivyLeague are, on average, of a higher skill than their counterparts at $stateSchool. But by how much? Sending an email isn't exactly a massive technical accomplishment, and even being able to send an email saying Mr. Dimon is coming to speak might say a lot more about the name of the school they work for than it does their ability as administrators.

A school like Harvard has a lot more clout in name, money, and connections, in getting someone like Dimon, Blankfein, Zuckerberg etc... to speak(or even pick up the phone) than, say, New Mexico State University.

It may be organizational skills and capability, but I'm willing to bet it's also about name recognition, alumni connections, and availability of resources.

But the Ivy League schools know that their bread is buttered by their ability to get students into elite positions, so they make sure their career services department gets things right. And have been doing so for so long that these departments do things right on their own.

https://www.joinhandshake.com/

It's founded by 3 graduates of Michigan Tech University, a small but well-regarded school that even other Michiganders think is far north. Their goal is to level the playing field for internships and first jobs.

It was great to meet people so sincere about solving this problem.

We're attached to the marketing team (~80%+ women), but our company is in a very unpopular industry (plantiff's law).

I don't understand this. If you're matching the diversity of the market, that would seem to me that your recruiting practices are unbiased, which is good, right?

If it doesn't match your society or customer base, and you think those things are important (I do), then it's bad.

(The reasons why I think it's bad are complex, so I won't belabor them here.)

The goal isn't to add bias. It's to seek out the source of a bias we think might exist and then remove it.

For example, if we find 5% of top-tier schools' CS grads are women while 20% of mid-tier schools' CS grads are, and find similar quality in both pools (keep in mind, when you interview graduates you get to select for quality), then it makes sense to recruit from both pools. By excluding the latter pool, even if not for discriminatory reasons, we're implicitly biasing our inputs.

I agree with the sentiment, but isn't the situation exactly the opposite of that? Top-tier schools work to balance gender distributions, and many of them succeed well above industry averages. Other schools spend less effort, and get predictably thinner results.

Compare, say, RPI and MIT. (I know RPI is uncommonly skewed, but I wanted to compare tech schools to one another. Otherwise specific stats are swamped by the ratio of tech to non-tech majors.)

- RPI, overall: 32% female

- MIT, overall: 46% female

- RPI, computer science: 16% female

- MIT, computer science, 32% female

As I understood the stats, a company that pulls students at the same rate as their candidate schools will see worse gender diversity as they broaden their pool. (Among CS programs at 4 year US colleges; outside that I don't know.)

MIT's computer science program is 31.7% women. MIT's school of engineering is 39.87% women. I think even comparing tech school to tech school, non-tech majors have a significant impact. MIT especially has a surprising number of non tech majors.

Generally speaking I do see the lack of diversity in tech as a problem and I applaud people making an effort to rectifying that. Unless the universities the OP was pulling from are really out of synch with the industry I have a hard time understanding why being proportionate is a problem. In fact, it seems like the right place to want to be.

Fine--we want more women. Research, and personal experience, shows gender-mixed teams outperform [1][2][3][4]. This is a business, not HR, decision.

We also want more cultural diversity. I don't like pitching in Latin America or the Middle East with zero cultural context on the home team. If you're a B2C company, you probably want socioeconomic diversity on your product teams (at the very least).

[1] http://eepulse.net/include/content/articles/Wall_Street_Reac... IPOs

[2] http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic... Fund management

[3] http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4... Boards

[4] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio_Vera/publicatio... Boards

Re: your papers. I've looked at such research before. I've yet to see such a study that's as conclusive as it's made to sound. Last time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15490501

Randomly picking the last paper you cite for example, we learn that Spanish companies with more women on the board have better financial performance. Seems like an open and shut case! But then buried deep in the paper, we also learn that the Spanish government has passed lots of sexually discriminatory laws that financially advantage companies that achieve arbitrary gender quotas, most notably, only companies with a certain level of female presence on boards can bid for public contracts.

The Spanish economy isn't the best. Big chunks of the Spanish economy is propped up by government spending originating in ECB quantitative easing and it's been that way for a while. If companies with male-only boards are being discriminated against in public procurement contracts, that by itself is sufficient to explain part of the difference.

That's a common problem with papers that argue more women on boards = more financial performance. Invariably they are studying countries that artificially tip the playing field towards such companies already, making it difficult to disentangle the different factors.

Could it not be a business decision to minimize risk?

(I, for one, am in favor of getting rid of all diversity quotas. Companies should be allowed to hire 100% black LGBT disabled women as much as they should be allowed to hire majority males out of elite universities.)

You're saying the opposite, that increasing gender bias will provide you with some economic benefit. At least what you're saying is rational and consistent.

I think many undergrad schools actually positively discriminate based on gender/race for underrepresented minorities.

In universities that don't consider race or gender in admissions (notably the UC system and Caltech), the minority rate tanks (except for Asian-American rates, which double).

In which world is it "individual choice" for a 14-18 year old to pay $100 per exam to take an exam?

Lack of diversity in STEM is a large problem, but your payroll matching the market doesn't seem like a large problem.

Diversity of what? And why is it a problem?

The candidate pool has an artificially inflated number of women due to the success of nearly universal outreach among STEM programs towards women. I'm not suggesting that's a bad thing, but let's not throw shade at universities where it's undeserved.

>And, like I said, 3 schools does not the market make.

If the 3 schools OP was recruiting from have gender bias against women then let's call them out.

Then the college of natural sciences took over. I'm glad I was gone; from what I hear, it sucks.

I've always assumed that open source would be one of the places to go for such telemetry, but have never known where contributing would actually furnish that kind of benefit. It would be good to know if there were projects that are actually fit that criteria, instead of merely being coincidentally worked on by a lot of employees.

All good CS recruiting happened through the student Computer Science association, which organized tech talks, mock interviews, and all kinds of other high-value events.

Companies that contacted the student group directly got reliable, personalized support and no charges until they showed up; companies that contacted the university got billed for the chance to be lumped in an email listing with scammers.

Your chances of being the next cto of google in 40 years is extremely low but your chances of joining a startup or working up the ladder and becoming a cto are much higher. You could be earning a lot more.

I am also all in favor of organizations taking steps to address the various negative experiences that are somewhat typically encountered in various demographics, e.g. harassment, etc. as well as affirmative action as a way to attempt to correct this. Based on the fervor with which it is pursued (which is admirable in many ways), I seem to be convinced that if these measures have a negligible effect on outcomes, the crusade for diversity will still continue, as if to suggest that equality of outcome is a worthy goal, as opposed to equality of opportunity. The latter is definitely an unjust status quo worthy of fighting, but the former seems to completely throw away the notion of free will.

It's almost akin to a scientist who so adamantly wants to prove their theory that they will do anything to ensure the result is consistent with the hypothesis.

Then again I could be wrong and people will actually stop pushing for it after these practices are instituted.

You can tell America's history in terms of decreasing inequality of opportunity. We started with only well-off white men having the vote; black people were chattel and women were pretty close. We have sporadically worked ever since to repair that. One civil war, assorted constitutional amendments, and 8 civil rights acts so far. We try something, see if that's enough, and then try again when it isn't.

Each time people hope that we've done the last thing. The post-Civil War period, the Reconstruction, was supposed to fix things. But then we had the Lilly White Movement. And Jim Crow. And the Nadir, which involved violent ethnic cleansing across the US (mostly but not entirely anti-black).

We certainly aren't there yet. Marital rape wasn't fully outlawed in the US until 1992. Redlining wasn't illegal until the 70s, and the effects on wealth distribution persist to this day. Men and women reached parity in law and medicine degrees a decade ago, but as far as people practicing it's still 2:1. Employment discrimination, as documented by a number of studies, still persists.

So yeah, if some particular solution doesn't fix the problem, then people will definitely keep pushing. Because that's our 200-year history of fighting discrimination: it keeps not getting fixed.

The USA along with many other western nations now discriminates against men in favour of women, in many concrete and very specific ways:

- Family courts

- Rape shield laws

- In the private sector, tech sector programmes handing out money but only to women

- Laws that mandate gender ratios in certain situations, like bidding on government contracts

Society has bent over backwards to try and create equality of outcome for women, thereby simultaneously eliminating equality of opportunity for men. This is not actually progress. Progress would be equal opportunity for all.

No, it's bent over backwards to address a pre-existing inequality of opportunity that disfavors women.

But what both sides find uncomfortable and avoid is the inconvenient fact that in a continued series of interactions over time (like life in the real world) rather than an isolated event disconnected from past and future, every opportunity is a product of outcomes at an earlier time, and every outcome effects opportunities at a later time.

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes are different concerns, but not at all orthogonal concerns. Any attempt to durably effect changes to inequality of opportunity will necessarily effect inequality of outcomes not only as an effect of opportunity, but as a key mechanism.

And, conversely, every attempt to safeguard existing inequality of outcome safeguards (whether it is the conscious intent or not) durable inequalities of opportunity.

As an example, consider the common practice of scholarships that are awarded based on both merit and economic need. A rich dude could be mad that he is being discriminated against. After all, they won't even consider giving him those scholarships! What jerks people are! He worked hard, and should be eligible for everything!

He's wrong, of course. His feelings are real, but his perspective is severely limited. If you're used to things being tilted in your favor, a level playing field is going to seem unfair.

Trying to blame bad things done by historical figures for bad actions taken today is the result of much wrongness in the world. Please don't try to justify it.

Oh, and your analogy to the rich dude is deeply flawed. Rich people can become poor and poor can become rich; it happens all the time. Putting gender re-assignment surgery to one side, gender is generally fixed. If you get discriminated against because you're a man, you aren't going to be mollified by an argument of the form "one day you might be a woman and it may work in your favour". Whereas "one day you may be rich" or "one day you may be poor" is used as a reasonable justification for all sorts of things, like progressive taxation and a social safety net.

Yes, they have, because discrimination against women is still widely practiced. It's true that the scope and extent of discrimination in law has been almost entirely eliminated (one of the last major elements to fall being the military combat exclusion policy, lifting of which was fully implemented less than two years ago; given the significance of combat assignments in military career progression and the practical impacts of military careers on both elected and certain other high-level government positions, there are a lot of men in the military and government office today that are, now, benefitting from the effects of that direct, legally-mandated discrimination.)

I think if that's the best example you can find, it says a lot about my point. There are dozens of ways men are discriminated against in law. As you yourself admit, discrimination against women in law has been eliminated. This is not progress!

I hate to use the T-word but this sort of non-argument you've just presented is exactly why Trump won. It's just racist, sexist self-loathing based on nothing whatsoever. If there was something, that guy would have listed a variety of specific grievances, as would every feminist article in every newspaper (of which there are huge quantity every single day).

You know what the last specific complaint in a feminist opinion piece I read was? An article a few days ago that was upset because the only female shoes in emoji are high heels.

Don't tell people white male privilege exists when you can't back it up.

This stuff is pretty easy to look up. There are books, blogs, studies, and memoirs that I found very useful. If you actually care, you could find things, too. That's how I went from ignorant to having basic knowledge. Maybe you could try that.

No. Trump won through the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, rampant GOP gerrymandering, a terrifyingly complicit and supine media, an institutionally racist and sexist country backlashing to Obama, and an electoral system that vastly overpowers the majority white (and racist) Southern states.

Regardless, I think when your explanation is "the entire USA is racist and sexist" you are - again - making my point for me. I know lots of Americans and I've never seen a shred of racism or sexism in any of them. But if you constantly tell ordinary, hard working and honest people that their whole life is a fraud, that their success isn't really success, it's just "white male privilege", and you can't point out a single reason why ... guess what? They're going to get mad and start quietly voting for someone who fights back against that culture. That's what I meant and I'm sure you know it.

Yes, that explains the overwhelming concentration on the email "scandal" whilst ignoring literally everything that Trump said.

> I know lots of Americans and I've never seen a shred of racism or sexism in any of them.

That's ... not how it works.

> and you can't point out a single reason why ... guess what?

But the reasons are pointed out. They just get ignored because the kind of people who refuse to believe that "white male privilege" exists aren't the kind of people who listen to rational arguments.

It was not entirely undeserved though - the scandal was certainly newsworthy and had many unprecedented events. The Bill Clinton-Loretta Lynch tarmac meeting was highly inappropriate, leading to the eventual decision falling to James Comey. James Comey had earlier, much to the dismay of Republicans, chosen not to pursue Bill Clinton's incredibly dubious pardon of Marc Rich. When he announced that they would not seek prosecution, his reasoning was that there was plenty of negligence but no intent - an interpretation of the statute that had not been used in previous cases for which many have been convicted.

To make matters worse, Secretary Clinton fainted on September 11 at a memorial service for 9/11 and the press was nowhere to be found when it happened. A random bystander managed to get footage of her security detail awkwardly putting her into a van. This is less than 2 months before the election. The campaign response started with "overheating" and then went to pneumonia.

Over the weeks prior to this, there was an all-out media blitzkrieg dismissing rumors of her ill health as a conspiracy theory. She herself lied straight into the camera about her health, to the extent that she went on the Jimmy Kimmel show and opened a pickle jar as a gag. This was a mere 2 weeks before she passed out. Around the same time, John Podesta's leaked emails had revealed the tremendous influence the campaign seemed to have with the press, and the media in general. One could argue that this is simply "how the sausage is made" when it comes to political campaigns, but to much of the general public, this sort of insight was unprecedented. This kind of story is severely damaging to any candidate.

When the footage of her collapsing came out, it served to validate what the right leaning media had been saying all along, plus reinforced fears of mainstream media collusion revealed in the emails were not unfounded, since the left leaning media had gone to bat for her when the health stories came out, and had no cameras present during a major development in the campaign which would have hurt her perception with the voting public. This significantly undermined the perception of integrity in the media. As damage control, the media did more negative stories in the months leading up to the election.

> They just get ignored because the kind of people who refuse to believe that "white male privilege" exists aren't the kind of people who listen to rational arguments.

There is no evidence to suggest that they are being willfully ignored, nor that people are being irrational in their refusal to believe, nor does it flow logically. This privilege certainly exists in several contexts, but to generalize across an entire demographic of people is easily defeated with a large number of counter-examples. The point that the comment you replied to was trying to make, is that people like me (i.e. who have white friends who have struggled against tremendous odds to make it to where they are in life, such as people from Kosovo who escaped a warzone, as one relevant personal example of many) do not appreciate it when the success and hard work of many of the white folks whom we know in our lives, are reduced to mere privilege, when their individual stories and struggles are often unique and heartbreaking. While there may certainly be a significant proportion of cases where "white privilege" plays a huge role, to condemn an entire demographic of people by dismissing their success to be a consequence of privilege, is an insult to their individual struggles, which in many cases, are anything but privileged. There are plenty of people who are quick to dismiss someone because of the color of their skin, than listen to their individual story.

> There is no evidence to suggest that they are being willfully ignored

Check any analysis of the coverage - Trump's was overwhelmingly "oh, this guy!" whilst ignoring his racism, sexism, misogyny, etc.

> to condemn an entire demographic of people by dismissing their success to be a consequence of privilege

You seem to be suggesting that because some white people have struggles, there must be no white privilege. Which is bollocks as you well know.

Secretary Clinton fainted on 9/11 after a long and coordinated media campaign effort to suggest she was in perfect health.

The Wikileaks emails of John Podesta (I have read them individually) show clear evidence of the relationship between the campaign and the press, and that the press routinely sought vetos and approvals on stories they were going to run. I'll be happy to share links to the individual emails.

The Trump campaign has very little access to reach me - I don't get to watch their ads on TV or receive any of their messaging because I live in Mumbai. My knowledge of the details of the election is from the data I have been motivated to find on the basis of my own interest in this subject during 2016.

Me:

> This privilege certainly exists in several contexts,

You:

> You seem to be suggesting that because some white people have struggles, there must be no white privilege. Which is bollocks as you well know.

I think we should re-evaluate what I am suggesting because perhaps I have not articulated other parts of my comment properly, but I am confident in the part quoted above which is fairly explicit.

> Check any analysis of the coverage - Trump's was overwhelmingly "oh, this guy!" whilst ignoring his racism, sexism, misogyny, etc.

This is 100% true of the Republican Primary, but not true of the General Election campaign that followed thereafter. During the Republican Primary - in early 2015, Marissa Astor (Hillary for America) emailed the DNC with the following quote:

"We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to take them seriously"

The Clinton Campaign and the DNC believed the best way to strategize was to legitimize these candidates, as indicated below:

"The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more 'Pied Piper' candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party."

Here's a link to the PDF https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/fileid/1120/251

During the final stages general election, coverage of both candidates was overwhelmingly negative as per an analysis conducted by the Harvard Kennedy Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The biggest victim of the media was Senator Bernie Sanders, who received virtually no coverage during the Primary season, which was largely the result of an orchestrated effort on the part of the DNC under Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, to favour coverage of Secretary Clinton over Senator Sanders. This is a view shared by former senate minority leader Harry Reid, as well as Senator Sanders himself. This view was further the subject of a court proceeding wherein the court dismissed the matter as the question of its legality did not arise since the DNC was entitled to name its own candidate if it wanted to.

Aside from the Harvard Kennedy research, there is ample evidence to disprove the claim that media "ignored" candidate Trump's racism, misogyny, sexism, etc. Here are a few:

- Online outlets like Vox had articles that outright declared in the first sentence "Donald Trump is a bigot".

- A CNN headline from August 2016: "We're Shocked, Donald Trump is a sexist"

- Another CNN headline from August 2016: "Paul Ryan rips Donald Trump remarks as 'textbook definition of a racist comment'". Note that this includes the speaker of the house attacking his own party candidate - at this point the media, the DNC and the speaker of the house are condemning him for racism.

- MSNBC June 2016: "Donald Trump’s overt racism takes 2016 race in a new direction"

- Fox News' Shepard Smith in August 2016: "Donald Trump ‘Trades in Racism’"

To suggest that this was downplayed in any way would also be a bit misleading, since the language here is fairly strong and explicit. There are no subtle allusions to racism, bigotry or sexism of any kind. The media is not using soft language or tip-toeing around these claims in the slightest.

Even if one were to concede that the media was ruthless in its persecution of Hillary Clinton over the private email server, it would simply even up their existing persecution of Candidate Trump as a liar, which was a regular feature of media coverage, particularly surrounding the debates. To the public, the choice would then be two liar candidates, of which one is a sexist, racist, misogynist - as per the media's coverage.

    - Family courts

> ...try and create equality of outcome for women, thereby simultaneously eliminating equality of opportunity for men.

I understand the emotional argument here but I don't think it's valid. Opportunity isn't zero-sum.

For instance, I have one friend whose wife went literally mad (post-partum psychosis). Total psycho breakdown level mad when she was off her meds, which happened a lot. Fortunately the courts awarded him custody of the kids. Unfortunately they are still, years later, dragging their heels over the divorce and he his still not yet divorced. There is no reason for this beyond the fact that family law in his (western) country is designed to benefit the woman to the cost of the man, to a nearly absurd degree.

Re: opportunity. Yes, opportunity is very often zero sum. Most obviously hiring and firing at the company level are zero sum games - if a woman got the job because she's a woman, it means you didn't. Whilst the economy in general may not be zero sum over the long run, it sure is at the moment you're applying for a job. Likewise for cases like this:

https://sites.google.com/site/codejamtoioforwomen/

where tickets to a very expensive conference were reserved only for women. Limited number of places at the conference = zero sum game and therefore, very much unequal opportunity. Note that there's a female only version of Code Jam because women couldn't compete with the men in the mixed gender version.

That proves that it isn't always zero-sum. They've opened up more spots by creating an additional event for women.

I wasn't talking about the competition. Success in the female only codejam led to tickets to Google I/O. It's a conference and a very popular one at that - the sort of conference where the organisers routinely give attendees free phones. Do you really think in previous years there were hundreds of seats sitting empty, hundreds of tickets that could have been sold sitting around unsold?

I can tell you what happened. Conference seats that were previously gender neutral got reserved for women, by the creation of another mechanism that was also reserved for women. Zero sum games.

What would be in your opinion a reasonable way to support the opinion of the poster you replied to? Could you steel man his position? Curious what the counter-arguments would be.

If you get interested, I'd strongly recommend "Sundown Towns", which looks at a conveniently unexamined phenomenon that a) did a lot to shape America's racial history, and b) helped me to see forces in play today. It's been a giant eye-opener for me.

Sorry, but I didn't quite follow your last paragraph. Which particular opinion of the poster were you thinking of?

The underlying assumption is definitely an assumption, but it seems like a good zeroth-order assumption to me.

What seems to be happening (the impression I get) is something analogous to this:

I have a game released on two mobile platforms - android and iOS. The iOS players are disproportionately scoring better than the android players.

Some are suggesting that the server is bugged/programmed to give iOS players better scores. I reject this.

Some are saying that the android user experience has conditioned those players to be satisfied with a low score. I reject this.

Some are saying iOS players are superior because they bought an apple product. I reject this.

My opinion that it is likely that the android release has a lot of performance issues which impede the player's ability to get a high score on that platform. I test this out by doing things like getting an android player to play on an iOS device, and checking if their performance improves. I do the reverse and check accordingly too. I do various tests on fps, input lag, etc.

If my experiment fails to show anything conclusive, I should be open to re-evaluating some of the things I rejected, but I refuse to do it out of zealous belief in my hypothesis. The answer must be optimization, I insist.

If my experiment succeeds, I should tweak the android code till the disparity goes away. Instead, I just hardcode +500 to the android scores and pat myself on the back.

There seem to be cases where the diversity disparity is "solved by hardcoding", and other cases where the data doesn't support the hypothesis, but there is an ardent refusal to accept it, as if it would be blasphemous to suggest otherwise. These are pretty much the only things I take issue with.

So while you are figuring out heads down in a profiler why your Android users could be more challenged, your competitor simply hardcodes the +500 to the score and makes a big PR announcement how they restored the justice to the previously discriminated users.

Guess who's getting more sales next quarter. Unfortunately that's how politics works.

My intent wasn't to strawman - if this is in fact non-existent then I concede that point.

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-t...

That argument has been consistently wrong since women's suffrage, but that doesn't stop chowderheads from hauling it out anew, apparently unaware of its rich history of failure.

CollegeBoard testing statistics demonstrate that in high school, 2-3 times as many boys take the AP Calculus BC, AP Physics, AP Computer Science exam than girls.[1][2]

And as you probably know, AP exams don't discriminate against gender or race - they just need you to pay the testing fee (or the reduced fee if you qualify).

UC Berkeley's EECS major has a department ratio of 4:1 M/F across all 4 class years (CalAnswers - any alumni can check this if they don't believe me), and because of California law the UC system is not allowed to consider gender as part of admissions.[3]

Differences in gender makeup of engineering and computer science come down to fewer girls choosing to pursue the field, and not because the system is inherently biased.

Given these factors, if we are seeing 50/50 gender outcomes in tech at this moment in time, it is the result of a system that undermines the meritocracy by discriminating against males.

[0]https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0006.pdf [1]https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/re... [2]http://i.imgur.com/ZalZhtF.png [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_209

>> to try to preserve the argument that women are biologically inferior

You clearly didn't read, because I made the argument that women are less INTERESTED, not that they are biologically inferior. Get rid of that chip on your shoulder.

This is why conservatives aren't willing to discuss these issues. Because the moment I call you out on using bullshit arguments you call me a sexist despite not having once made a single comment on the abilities of females.

I used evidence proving that even at the high school level (where there are practically 0 bars for entry), girls constitute a significantly smaller part of the classroom than boys in CS/Physics/Calc 2, and then gave an example of a university system that legally was not allowed to consider gender as part of admissions having similar gender representation - because as it turns out most universities practice gender based affirmative action in STEM, and thus girls are overrepresented at schools like MIT and Stanford.

It turns out that the 3:1, 4:1 ratios of the AP exams and Berkeley EECS department happen to be consistent with the hiring makeup of tech companies.

>> we are steadily approaching them in law and medicine.

The same stats I listed earlier show near equal representation in AP tests for AP History (World, European, and US), Government, Chemistry, and Biology. Some of these even skew towards majority female. So 50/50 representation is to be expected.

Again, at this point in time, equal representation in tech would only be a product of discrimination against males.

Perhaps it won't be the case in the future as there are more outreach efforts now than ever to get girls to pursue science.

But I specifically worded my response the way I did for a reason.

But interest is an outcome, influenced for example by the presence or absence of role models or the impression of certain fields as not welcoming to women.

If I remember the state of things correctly, the gender imbalance of interest in science is not present at early ages but develops around junior high ages when kids start picking up on which jobs or fields are "appropriate" for males vs females.

I don't think anyone is saying the gender imbalance is purely a result of hiring discrimination (although it likely plays a role), but there are clearly other biases in force that directly arise from the gender imbalance. How do you propose getting rid of those biases except by trying to "prime the pump"?

Sure it can play a part in the outcome, but that in no way limits anyone from still pursuing the field, and hence there is still equality of opportunity. The latter is what (hopefully) any rational human being wants.

I'm not against more outreach efforts or helping encourage more girls to pursue STEM. I personally volunteer at a science museum and have in the past been a TA for high school STEM MOOCs.

What I am against is accusing the existing system for discriminating against females (unless you provide direct evidence that gender is the sole cause of the outcome inequality, which I will be happy to agree if the evidence is convincing) and then continuously lowering the bar for entry for females (thus achieving diversity but undermining meritocracy) - which is what I see happening right now.