Tldr: the claim is that when male managers are faced with stack ranking employees, they will often choose male reports over female reports due to sexist bias.
If I take that at face value doesn't that mean any performance evaluation system would be flawed so long as a man is in charge of it? (Assuming that women don't also rate women higher)
>“This pay-for-performance system is fundamentally flawed,” Tavis said in an interview. “The performance element is very subjective.”
One partial alternative is 360-degree performance reviews where each employee's performance is subjectively evaluated not just by one manager but rather by a collection of other employees they work with spread out across all levels of the org chart. Of course that's not perfect either but at least it provides more data points and can reduce the impact of some biases.
If everyone has similar biases then having more reviewers isn’t going to address the issue. It would just normalize the bias toward the mean of the reviewers. I’ve seen that first hand at offices that do this type of review system and the “cool kids” still end up on top.
At least individual biases being the driver allows a person to find a manager that champions their style of person.
I don't know if the article is too long, but "due to sexist bias" is certainly too short to give it justice.
The specific problem with stack ranking is the one-on-one ranking method. I'm absolutely convinced that I myself would succumb to all sorts of biases when asked to rate people like that: I'd tend to think the silent, introvert guy who stays late and has no fashion sense is smarter than the outgoing jock leaving at 5pm sharp to be with his family. I'd somehow convince myself that the guy I enjoy eating lunch with is more important than the Belgian guy who doesn't speak english well enough to socialise... The article makes a similar point: “My observation was whoever was the best orator got their people ranked higher.”
On aggregate, it's quite obvious that these biases could amount to gender-specific discrimination, even if not a single evaluator had gender on their minds.
One at a time, the reasons given for bias are never[0] gender or race, but collectively, well, I've already mentioned a recent HBR study[1] in the comments here once, but I'll stop at twice.
When managers are faced with stack ranking employees, they will often decide based on factors not purely related to the productivity or value of the employee.
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That, and as an employee in a stack-ranked organization, you know you need to be competitive. Not in terms of productivity but in terms of "in the eyes of your manager"-- Perception is more important than performance.
Studies have shown that men compete more aggressively than women, on average. So it's certainly plausible that men enjoy a gender-driven advantage that isn't purely due to gender-discrimination. Rather, it is the system that is biased.
This reminds me of that "racist algorithm" debacle.
So you're saying it's not the system, or at least not solely the system, and that the managers are almost certainly biased?
I can appreciate that. It's almost certainly true. Most people are biased.
The point of my comment wasn't argue differently, or to defend Uber or their managers, but to show how choosing a sexist system is the same as being sexist, in effect.
Studies have also shown that social psychology is a morass of irreproducible results, so without links to detailed descriptions of their methodologies and hostile verifications, it's reasonable to be skeptical of these claims.
Even if true, why would this be a bigger problem in a stack ranking system? Surely they wouldn’t promote more people in total just because they had some other, more reasonable system? They’d still favour men if they are anti-women.
You are correct, even if you meant to be trolling. It was never the case that suing required iron clad empirical evidence. Civil cases in the United States use the "preponderance of evidence" standard, not the "iron clad" standard you just made up.
Note you need a "preponderance of evidence" to win a suit, not to bring a suit in the first place. Many times the plaintiff doesn't have sufficient evidence for a win when they bring the suit, and get that evidence during the discovery phase, during depositions, subpoenas, etc.
I don't know. They've basically changed the world, made a 60 billion dollar company quickly, and become a brand synonymous with a service.
That's very special.
Just as I think they probably have used some slightly underhanded things on their way there, I significantly doubt anything they're doing is considerably more sketchy than other companies.
As the article states: 1/3 of F100 companies use stack ranking - so how can we possibly call them out for it. Moreover, that someone 'says they are sexist' does not make them sexist.
I think there is a growing problem in our society, or at least what appears in media, wherein any systematic discrepancy is blamed automatically on some kind of discrimination, without consideration of the possibility for consistent differences in merit between subpopulations.
No. He said "any systematic discrepancy is blamed automatically on some kind of discrimination, without consideration of the possibility for consistent differences in merit between subpopulations."
This doesn't factor in which gender is more represented. Parent could have said the same thing about nursing or elementary school teachers but that doesn't mean they're implying men are better than women.
I'm not going to go to great lengths to explain to you how you are missing the message. It's not about "factoring in" anything, or what the specific "subpopulation" at play is.
GP used a lot of big fancy words to literally(!!) say "Whenever cases like this arise, people are so quick to jump to 'sexism' as the answer without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men."
How else can you read "consistent differences in merit between subpopulations" when the context is gender discrimination in employee performance reviews?
Male, female, transgender, white, black, straight, homosexual, rich, poor, country of origin...
Again, this is my point. Any time there is an overabundance of straight white males, and only straight white males, discrimination is presumed, with no actual evidence to suggest that these groups are equal in every task.
You wouldn't argue that there are not systematic differences in physical performance between these various groups, but somehow cognitive performance, which is even more strongly influenced by environment and upbringing, is not allowed to be examined objectively.
This is a correction of the previous tendency, which was to take the default assumption that all discrimination was in fact rational and a reflection of consistent differences in merit between sub-populations. We've gone from assuming that discrimination is probably rational to assuming discrimination is probably irrational.
You could argue that we've over-corrected, but my own subjective experience leads me to disagree. I see constant reminders every day in the media and on the Internet of the persistence of irrational emotionally driven biases against groups of people. Wake me up when Reddit and Twitter are not overflowing with inane frothing at the mouth bigotry.
The pendulum has swung so much further in the other direction that it's become trendy to be a victim. That's a very self-limiting mindset to have.
If you're watching the media then I assume you saw the article today about the bigoted statements that occurred last month at the Air Force academy? Turns out the "victims" were the ones that wrote those messages> Because claiming victimhood status is socially beneficial these days.
Not to say there aren't real problems out there, but we're deep in "boy who cried wolf" territory.
There are still some major irrational points that I see:
- Bias (conscious and not) is assumed to be a problem mainly perpetuated by white men, when reality is that, for example, women may have as much or more bias toward women than men do. I.e. the factor of women enforcing gender roles among themselves is dismissed.
- The success of white men in startups is assumed to be caused by them excluding others, rather than because they share a culture with each other from an early age with a lot of positive characteristics. Saying we excluded girls from programming and chess teams, or from spending long hours alone at a computer instead of socializing, is at least an oversimplification.
- Men being attracted to things and systems and tinkering vs socializing and people is real. It's more than a standard deviation (i.e. differences between groups are more than differences between average individuals), it starts hours after birth, it correlates to pre-natal testosterone levels, it happens across species. Scientifically it's a slam dunk and it is a pretty plausible hypothesis for why women are poorly represented in coding positions, compared to other equally demanding jobs, e.g. doctors and lawyers where women are doing just fine.
Nobody is saying that only white men have bias. However, white men are overwhelmingly in positions where that bias can be used to discriminate against others. Women may have just as much, but far fewer of them are in positions where that bias comes into effect.
I think bias and gender expectations among peers could have a very large effect.
It's striking to me watching my nieces play and how strictly they enforce whether something is for boys or girls. Also it looks to me like groups of women in an office enforce very different norms on each other than men do in terms of fashion, socialization, communication style.
How large is this effect compared to biases down the power structure? I don't know, it's an empirical question but everyone seems to pre-assume the answer.
I think it's more likely that the problem (bias) has always been there, but society is only now willing to even entertain the idea that it's real, despite the studies and data showing it is. I used to feel like you did, when I was a college kid. I liked to believe I had gotten where I was because I worked hard, not because I was a white dude. Then I got out in the real world and saw situations just like the one described in the study quoted by the article:
>For example, in one pair of reviews a female employee was described as having “analysis paralysis.” A man with the same behavior was praised for his careful thoughtfulness.
On the other hand, I'm beginning to think the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction.
I feel I have worked hard to get to where I am. But just because I am white and male, I'm no longer entitled to enjoy the privileges associated with this hard work and skillset I've developed.
I'm all for equality of opportunity. But this equality of outcome is not something I'm going to be shamed into supporting.
"To the privileged, equality feels like oppression."
Change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and what you describe as "a growing problem in our society" feels like the beginning of a long-overdue good start to many others.
>"To the privileged, equality feels like oppression."
There's a fun study that actually measures this effect: "Lay misperceptions of the relationship between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism", by Amy Yeung. The data goes the "other way" though: when men treat men and women equally, they are perceived to be sexist.
Why do you assume that I am a straight white male?
Why do you assume I lived a life of priveledge because of the color of my skin and my gender?
This is exactly what I'm describing. One cannot fight racism with racism.
Now I'm being threatened with a ban for expressing such an opinion. At what point does it become acceptable to discuss this topic? When straight white men become a minority? If we allow threads like these to be posted repeatedly, why is it ok to suppress the other side of the discussion?
Where does “automatically” come from? This has the same ring of ideological boilerplate that we've asked you many times not to post here, so we've banned the account.
We're happy to unban accounts if you read the guidelines and then email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll follow them.
I uninstalled uber when the shit hit the fan. I won't ever reinstall it, and I actively suggest others do the same. I won't support a company that sounds like a sorry mix of aws corporate culture and /r/incels social culture
I know I have but not because of their business practices (which I agree they've done some not good things). Lyft is $3 - $4 cheap, consistently, for me in the East Bay. I know for a ride the pricing of either is pretty decent but some days I need to take several rides so I try to save money wherever I can.
Most of the people I know who use or drive either because they seem them as commodities and don't really care. They just pick the better priced or closest one.
How long until there are so many competing brands that an umbrella app is developed to interface with all of them? It seems the inevitable nature of startup market.
Is this referencing outside the US? I travel very frequently to both rural and urban areas in the US and have yet to find a place where I could not Lyft, but could Uber.
In fact... I have only been to one place where I could not Lyft, and it turned out I also couldn't Uber (very rural).
A lot of my non-techie peers in Seattle are choosing Lyft over Uber due to ethical concerns. Even when they're not making that much money, it's important to them.
The edit wasn't necessary to support the first sentence. There are thousands of tech companies, large and small, and most of them monitor employee performance. Meanwhile: allegations of sexist bias in review processes are infrequent enough to be newsworthy. QED.
A quick google immediately shows pages like this one [] which frets about sexism without including the words "stack" or "ranking." It has the usual citing of questionable concepts like implicit bias, or the Bloomberg article's "unconscious bias."
What I would like to know is, suppose you need to make a system in a large organization in an attempt to lay off your 10% worst employees. It's pretty reasonable to expect sexist rankings, even made by non-sexists, and to also expect beliefs by individuals, wrongly held, that their personal low rank was the result of sexism. How do you determine whether an organization's ranking system is sexist, in which direction, and by how much?
You asked a simple, straightforward question with an easily obtainable answer, which I provided. I'm not interested in the new tangent you're trying to start here, sorry.
Yeah but your answer was so weak, talking about lawsuits that have made the news. I have also seen, personally for example, allegations of sexism regarding employee ratings that didn't turn into a news article about a lawsuit. That means you can't use notoriety of lawsuits to precede the use of "QED."
Translation: “I don’t see sexism so it isn’t a problem.”
On a serious note, tech companies, large and small, have varying amounts of lawsuits and news coverage. I agree that stack ranking and other rating methods make illegal discrimination more likely. I do not agree with your assertion that unreported discrimination based off sex doesn’t occur.
That is not the assertion I am making. You've also shifted the goalposts: you're talking about sexism in the workplace, which I agree is rampant in our industry, and I'm talking about performance review systems that are structurally or endemically biased against women, which obviously also exist, but pretty clearly don't exist everywhere.
You claim the correlation between companies with allegations of sexism in employee review (covered by the news), and companies that do stack ranking are sufficiently strong to declare a causal relationship between the two - in fact, strong enough that the former is universally a consequence of the later?
If you rate employees using objective metrics, then you can avoid sexism. The problem with stack ranking is, as the article said, it forces managers to use subjective measurements to rank employees because they're forced to put the employees in a particular order (instead of saying two employees performed the same). Once you start using subjective measurements, it's almost impossible to avoid having biases creep in.
The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.
But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time, and are they producing code that's up to the quality standards of the team (which could be measured by tracking whether they're introducing new bugs).
You can do that, and it sounds like a good idea as a backstop for subjective evaluations, but if this metric becomes important to the process, then people fight over estimates and game the bug tracker.
But you can rate them by metrics such as are they completing all their assigned work in a reasonable amount of time
No you can't, unless you have a method for dividing a project up into blocks of exactly equal difficulty. The person who takes more time to do genuinely difficult things is probably closing fewer JIRAs than the one quickly cranking through easy ones, which would score more highly on that metric, but which is the more valuable to your organisation?
The metric isn't "number of completed tasks". That would be a terrible metric. The metric is "amount of valuable work completed", which is a combination of number of tasks and how much work (and value) each task is. The manager who assigns tasks should have an understanding of the expected amount of work for each task and the expected difficulty.
Except you can't even do this unless you're managing a team of contractors who never communicate with each other or the rest of the company. Otherwise how do you propose to rate the person who is often behind on their own tasks but boosts the productivity of the rest of the team?
> The problem is you can't rate employees by objective metrics (like, line of code count) without them getting gamed, unless you can tie them directly to company success.
Why would you ever want to evaluate employees by any metric not directly tied to their contribution to company success?
"Makes people on the team uncomfortable by being argumentative", "is condescending during code reviews", "strongly supports team members via mentorship", and "defuses technical disagreements effectively and without bad feelings" are all highly positive and negative contributions to company success, but are inherently subjective since they require evaluations of soft interpersonal skills, not technical mastery. I can't imagine that you'd want to ignore such factors (employees will quit if you let toxic people stay around unchecked), but absent extreme situations where HR complaints are filed, they are also incredibly difficult to measure other than by listening to peer opinions.
Usually from the point of view of the problematic person, everyone else is the asshole. At some point the evaluation has to boil down to a judgement call, rather than an objective measurement. This process is always fraught, for instance when the bosses are the assholes themselves or support them (ahem, Travis), but I don't love the idea of just not considering interpersonal factors when evaluating performance. Bad behavior shouldn't have to rise to the level of an HR complaints before consequences are faced, and good behavior should be rewarded.
I would recommend not evaluating employees if you can't be bothered to develop and validate a meaningful metric, since doing so with a bad metric is actively harmful (even aside from potential liability issues if it adversely impacts a protected class without demonstrable validity.)
This isn't, by the way, an original concept; the dangers of the inappropriate use of micro-level metrics that aren't tied to business outcomes in decision-making (and the individual employee level is about as micro as you can get) was one of the key problems W. Edwards Deming identified.
Young women (20-35) are more likely to get pregnant and take significant time off from work than their male counterparts. What ranking system could negate the difference that results from men working x hours more per year? Is that desirable or fair?
Your comment seems unfairly antagonistic. I'm talking about a well documented phenomenon. Men typically work more hours than women. One of the reasons is pregnancy and maternity leave.
If men work more hours, shouldn't you expect ranking systems to consistently favor men? You can try to pretend like this observation is sexist, but you're just refusing to answer the argument by doing so. Please, explain why I'm wrong and I'll happily change my mind.
I don't think women are inferior. I think they work less, because that's what I've read. One reason they work less is because of pregnancy and maternity leave. Even when equal leave is offered to men, women tend to take more of it, which makes sense as women are the ones who are actually pregnant. So, given the equality of men and women, and that men tend to work more hours, ranking systems that measure by output should be expected to put men ahead of women on average.
Why's it relevant? Why not just judge based on the employee's actual output? It's certainly conceivable that a talented and dedicated woman could both raise kids and simultaneously out-code her male colleagues.
Of course, but unless you think women are innately superior, wouldn't they be at a disadvantage because they work fewer hours? In other words, if your system is based on output, and men and women are equal, men should be expected to perform better because they work more hours.
Of course if a woman produces more output or is better, she should be paid more. My point is about how you should expect the average result to be in men's favor though, unless you think women are innately superior. If you work 8 hours a day and I work 9, I'll probably be ahead of you at the end of the year, unless you're a lot better.
Probably not, but your lawsuit risk is a lot higher if it's sexist against the wrong sex. It's probably easier to just make your performance review system sexist against the correct sex.
At a large enough scale, you can't avoid all complaints of sexism, because job performance doesn't exist in a controlled-experiment vacuum. To some extent your job performance always depends on how well you can work with colleagues, so if your company culture has sexism problem, there will always be a sexism problem whether or not it's openly discussed.
But absolutely eliminating sexism isn't the bar most people are held to. Most people are held to the bar of taking reasonable steps to mitigate the issue and improve culture.
In the vast majority of cases, you can iterate your way to a fair system with a clear rubric that controls for unconscious biases and establishes a substantial trail of evidence to support each judgement of performance. Actually doing that, especially when giving criticism, tends to be a matter of managerial skill.
> In the vast majority of cases, you can iterate your way to a fair system with a clear rubric that controls for unconscious biases and establishes a substantial trail of evidence to support each judgement of performance. Actually doing that, especially when giving criticism, tends to be a matter of managerial skill.
I'm not sure this is true. A system with a clear rubric that will control for unconscious bias will be accused of reducing people to pure numbers and not consider factors that cannot be quantified. It's also entirely possible that the rubric may control for unconscious bias on the part of the manager, but introduce a whole new set of biases against one group or another.
This isn't to say we should make the effort. I actually feel that your point about managerial skill is perhaps the most important. Middle managers, the ones to whom ranking and performance evaluation fall, are often promoted from lower positions and do not have the background or training to be good managers. I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but in most organizations I've worked at this only way up is to management. Good workers turn into bad managers.
I doubt it. At least in the society I grew up in, there are gender differences in social expectations completely outside the job market that lead to different incentives in the job market. Any ranking system will have to deal with the results of two different demographics who have, on average, different incentives.
Trying to build a system where nobody will complain about sexism is like trying to build an infrastructure where nobody will compare about security bugs.
In turn, giving up on building a less sexist system because people will always complain is like giving up on building a more secure infrastructure because people will always complain.
Unless you are extraordinarily lucky at both the humans building what you're building and the inputs to your system (constraints about language and tech stack and problem domain on the security side; constraints about hiring sources and existing culture/public reputation and leadership on the employment side), you're always going to have security flaws in your infrastructure, and you're always going to have sexism in your employment processes. And even if you are this lucky, you're not going to eliminate people poking at your system and suggesting places where it seems to fall short. The important question is what you do about it, how severe the problems are now, and how the severity changes over time.
Just like there are plenty of ways to write software that take it as a given that implementors will screw up and attackers will be clever, there are also plenty of ways to design a performance review system that takes it as a given that some fraction of humans in your organization will have biases (conscious and unconscious) and will treat their coworkers according to their biases.
Honestly, some of the mitigations are the same: the first thing I'd reach for is defense-in-depth and auditing. If your system is consistently giving different results (whether it's hiring, or retention, or promotions, or salary) to people in different demographic groups in a way that seems to disprove the null hypothesis that the demographic is irrelevant to job performance, look very hard at it, add additional reviews to make sure the results are consistent even when different people are involved, and keep measuring. There might be good reasons that the disparity is legitimate (just like there might be good reasons that one of your servers is regularly opening outbound TCP connections to random machines in China), just make sure you are actually noticing that something unexpected is going on and try to find an explanation for it.
Why not normalize the rankings? It seems that at volume, that sexism should be the only remaining factor when looking at overall averages. Unless you really believe that "women are worse drivers". Normalize them to the average for each sex.
This is talking about employees, not drivers, and you cannot "normalize" stack ranking. The whole point of stack ranking is you're putting the employees in order from best to worst. They're not given numeric ratings.
I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be illegal, but somewhat it is still legal.
While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system....
Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common place that stack ranking punishes good performers/employees as well).
It is very similar to the "decimation" system that the Roman Army practiced, when a particular unit or legion performed bad or cowardly in battle, one in ten was chosen (via short sticks), and culled to death by their companions. Very brutal, and can't see how it improves morale even if the unit itself is actually performing well. (which stack ranking is, constant decimation).
This causes rampant politicking and favoritism to the point that systematic discrimination arises from it.
That doesn't sound very similar to decimation. Stack ranking is picking and punishing the worst team members based on some system. Decimation was purely random.
Decimation was a system for BUILDING cohesion. You don't flee battle because you might be decimated. You don't let your comrades flee battle because you might be decimated. It's for when you want to severely punish a collective group of people but can't afford to hurt them all.
Stack ranking is the opposite. You are actively competing against your colleagues. You are incentivized for your colleagues to fail.
You missed the part that in a team of good performers, (i.e. no dead woods in the team), it ends up being a defacto "random" system.... when it comes to actual performance, and that's where politiking and favoritisms kick in.
Both have the "Culture of Fear" as a central point, and yes, stack ranking has its roots on the Roman Decimation system.
It’s such a dumb way of doing business. Like on a surface level it makes sense — if you constantly let your worst performers go, the average quality of your employees has to go up, right?
But five minutes of thought will tell you that people will hate working on that environment and will quit or just not apply to work there.
Stack Ranking seems like it should be a perfectly legal method of performance management. You might choose to not work at a company that practices it, but why should it be illegal?
It is perhaps a natural fear that a Stack Ranking system would lead to a "Rank and Yank", but the mere ordering of employees during a performance management process doesn't give me any particular concern, nor do I consider it a bad faith system.
In fact, it forces people to make a sometimes hard choice, which I believe has more benefits than drawbacks to an organization, else you run the risk of having a massive "undifferentiated middle" and no clear development plans because you have no feedback from rich discussion about why Jane is better than Joe; instead Jane and Joe are simply declared to be equal without any discussion about what Joe could do to improve or what Jane should continue doing, etc.
Microsoft used stack ranking for some time and from what I've read it caused a lot of problems and was considered to be negative overall. It led to a cutthroat environment where employees were competing with each other (and not focusing on doing their best work) so that they would get a good ranking [1]. According to reviews on Glassdoor, it's still used unofficially for their 6-month reviews [2]. Amazon also used it for a time [3] and has since abandoned it.
We also used it in the past (pure ranking, no rank-and-yank) and have since abandoned it.
I thought it was effective in forcing deeper conversations as part of the comparison process, but became unwieldy and unworkable when we passed about 50 engineers which was a long time ago, so I'm not sad to see it go.
Decimation was a punishment for serious offences, like mutiny or desertion- not for performing badly in battle, or being cowardly.
With Romans, specifically, if cowardice was punished, there would be noone left. They were disciplined and had great quality equipment, but their morale was not the highest. For instance, before they met the Germans on the field, having heard of the military prowerss of their enemy, the Romans would spend their time crying and making their will, certain that they'd die in battle - Cesar has written about this.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] thread>“This pay-for-performance system is fundamentally flawed,” Tavis said in an interview. “The performance element is very subjective.”
What is the alternative?
At least individual biases being the driver allows a person to find a manager that champions their style of person.
The specific problem with stack ranking is the one-on-one ranking method. I'm absolutely convinced that I myself would succumb to all sorts of biases when asked to rate people like that: I'd tend to think the silent, introvert guy who stays late and has no fashion sense is smarter than the outgoing jock leaving at 5pm sharp to be with his family. I'd somehow convince myself that the guy I enjoy eating lunch with is more important than the Belgian guy who doesn't speak english well enough to socialise... The article makes a similar point: “My observation was whoever was the best orator got their people ranked higher.”
On aggregate, it's quite obvious that these biases could amount to gender-specific discrimination, even if not a single evaluator had gender on their minds.
[0] For some reasonable value of "never"
[1] https://hbr.org/2017/10/a-study-used-sensors-to-show-that-me...
When managers are faced with stack ranking employees, they will often decide based on factors not purely related to the productivity or value of the employee.
----
That, and as an employee in a stack-ranked organization, you know you need to be competitive. Not in terms of productivity but in terms of "in the eyes of your manager"-- Perception is more important than performance.
Studies have shown that men compete more aggressively than women, on average. So it's certainly plausible that men enjoy a gender-driven advantage that isn't purely due to gender-discrimination. Rather, it is the system that is biased.
This reminds me of that "racist algorithm" debacle.
[0] https://hbr.org/2017/10/a-study-used-sensors-to-show-that-me...
I can appreciate that. It's almost certainly true. Most people are biased.
The point of my comment wasn't argue differently, or to defend Uber or their managers, but to show how choosing a sexist system is the same as being sexist, in effect.
People have good reason to be doubtful of social sciences, and the replication crisis has only gotten worse now affecting biological science.
https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
Studies have also shown that when women exhibit identical "aggressive" behavior as men, they are labeled more negatively than their male counterparts.
Who could have possibly foreseen that?
Uber seems to be full of bad ideas, so maybe it's a good fit.
[1]: https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Gaspode
>is only still alive because the various diseases are too busy fighting each other to kill him
> Microsoft Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have faced similar legal challenges; both firms and, more recently, Uber, have abandoned the practice.
I don't know. They've basically changed the world, made a 60 billion dollar company quickly, and become a brand synonymous with a service.
That's very special.
Just as I think they probably have used some slightly underhanded things on their way there, I significantly doubt anything they're doing is considerably more sketchy than other companies.
As the article states: 1/3 of F100 companies use stack ranking - so how can we possibly call them out for it. Moreover, that someone 'says they are sexist' does not make them sexist.
This doesn't factor in which gender is more represented. Parent could have said the same thing about nursing or elementary school teachers but that doesn't mean they're implying men are better than women.
GP used a lot of big fancy words to literally(!!) say "Whenever cases like this arise, people are so quick to jump to 'sexism' as the answer without even allowing for the possibility that women just actually are worse employees than men."
Again, you're reading what you want to read.
Again, this is my point. Any time there is an overabundance of straight white males, and only straight white males, discrimination is presumed, with no actual evidence to suggest that these groups are equal in every task.
You wouldn't argue that there are not systematic differences in physical performance between these various groups, but somehow cognitive performance, which is even more strongly influenced by environment and upbringing, is not allowed to be examined objectively.
You could argue that we've over-corrected, but my own subjective experience leads me to disagree. I see constant reminders every day in the media and on the Internet of the persistence of irrational emotionally driven biases against groups of people. Wake me up when Reddit and Twitter are not overflowing with inane frothing at the mouth bigotry.
If you're watching the media then I assume you saw the article today about the bigoted statements that occurred last month at the Air Force academy? Turns out the "victims" were the ones that wrote those messages> Because claiming victimhood status is socially beneficial these days.
Not to say there aren't real problems out there, but we're deep in "boy who cried wolf" territory.
- Bias (conscious and not) is assumed to be a problem mainly perpetuated by white men, when reality is that, for example, women may have as much or more bias toward women than men do. I.e. the factor of women enforcing gender roles among themselves is dismissed.
- The success of white men in startups is assumed to be caused by them excluding others, rather than because they share a culture with each other from an early age with a lot of positive characteristics. Saying we excluded girls from programming and chess teams, or from spending long hours alone at a computer instead of socializing, is at least an oversimplification.
- Men being attracted to things and systems and tinkering vs socializing and people is real. It's more than a standard deviation (i.e. differences between groups are more than differences between average individuals), it starts hours after birth, it correlates to pre-natal testosterone levels, it happens across species. Scientifically it's a slam dunk and it is a pretty plausible hypothesis for why women are poorly represented in coding positions, compared to other equally demanding jobs, e.g. doctors and lawyers where women are doing just fine.
It's striking to me watching my nieces play and how strictly they enforce whether something is for boys or girls. Also it looks to me like groups of women in an office enforce very different norms on each other than men do in terms of fashion, socialization, communication style.
How large is this effect compared to biases down the power structure? I don't know, it's an empirical question but everyone seems to pre-assume the answer.
>For example, in one pair of reviews a female employee was described as having “analysis paralysis.” A man with the same behavior was praised for his careful thoughtfulness.
On the other hand, I'm beginning to think the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction.
I feel I have worked hard to get to where I am. But just because I am white and male, I'm no longer entitled to enjoy the privileges associated with this hard work and skillset I've developed.
I'm all for equality of opportunity. But this equality of outcome is not something I'm going to be shamed into supporting.
Change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and what you describe as "a growing problem in our society" feels like the beginning of a long-overdue good start to many others.
There's a fun study that actually measures this effect: "Lay misperceptions of the relationship between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism", by Amy Yeung. The data goes the "other way" though: when men treat men and women equally, they are perceived to be sexist.
Why do you assume I lived a life of priveledge because of the color of my skin and my gender?
This is exactly what I'm describing. One cannot fight racism with racism.
Now I'm being threatened with a ban for expressing such an opinion. At what point does it become acceptable to discuss this topic? When straight white men become a minority? If we allow threads like these to be posted repeatedly, why is it ok to suppress the other side of the discussion?
We're happy to unban accounts if you read the guidelines and then email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll follow them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Most people who use ridesharing see it only as a cheaper, easier option, which it is.
Most of the people I know who use or drive either because they seem them as commodities and don't really care. They just pick the better priced or closest one.
It is a real trend, but doesn't represent 'most' users.
In fact... I have only been to one place where I could not Lyft, and it turned out I also couldn't Uber (very rural).
Problems like this are endemic to zero-sum schemes like stack ranking.
Edit: The parent post was edited.
Are other employee evaluation schemes free of appearance of sexism (or actual sexism), or is it harder to see?
What I would like to know is, suppose you need to make a system in a large organization in an attempt to lay off your 10% worst employees. It's pretty reasonable to expect sexist rankings, even made by non-sexists, and to also expect beliefs by individuals, wrongly held, that their personal low rank was the result of sexism. How do you determine whether an organization's ranking system is sexist, in which direction, and by how much?
[] https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-revie...
Edit: By non-sexists, I mean, like, non-garbage people.
On a serious note, tech companies, large and small, have varying amounts of lawsuits and news coverage. I agree that stack ranking and other rating methods make illegal discrimination more likely. I do not agree with your assertion that unreported discrimination based off sex doesn’t occur.
No you can't, unless you have a method for dividing a project up into blocks of exactly equal difficulty. The person who takes more time to do genuinely difficult things is probably closing fewer JIRAs than the one quickly cranking through easy ones, which would score more highly on that metric, but which is the more valuable to your organisation?
Why would you ever want to evaluate employees by any metric not directly tied to their contribution to company success?
Usually from the point of view of the problematic person, everyone else is the asshole. At some point the evaluation has to boil down to a judgement call, rather than an objective measurement. This process is always fraught, for instance when the bosses are the assholes themselves or support them (ahem, Travis), but I don't love the idea of just not considering interpersonal factors when evaluating performance. Bad behavior shouldn't have to rise to the level of an HR complaints before consequences are faced, and good behavior should be rewarded.
What metric would you recommend?
This isn't, by the way, an original concept; the dangers of the inappropriate use of micro-level metrics that aren't tied to business outcomes in decision-making (and the individual employee level is about as micro as you can get) was one of the key problems W. Edwards Deming identified.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/mobile/time-spent-working-...
If men work more hours, shouldn't you expect ranking systems to consistently favor men? You can try to pretend like this observation is sexist, but you're just refusing to answer the argument by doing so. Please, explain why I'm wrong and I'll happily change my mind.
I don't think women are inferior. I think they work less, because that's what I've read. One reason they work less is because of pregnancy and maternity leave. Even when equal leave is offered to men, women tend to take more of it, which makes sense as women are the ones who are actually pregnant. So, given the equality of men and women, and that men tend to work more hours, ranking systems that measure by output should be expected to put men ahead of women on average.
Your comments in this thread are unnecessary and inappropriate.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/mobile/time-spent-working-...
Of course if a woman produces more output or is better, she should be paid more. My point is about how you should expect the average result to be in men's favor though, unless you think women are innately superior. If you work 8 hours a day and I work 9, I'll probably be ahead of you at the end of the year, unless you're a lot better.
Stack ranking is nothing more than a more aggressive form of regular hiring promotion and advancement.
Moreover, it's just as likely that female managers prefer females.
There's nothing inherently sexist about 'stack ranking' - rather, possible sexism is derived during performance reviews - which are commonplace.
One where no one ever will complain? No, but so what?
But absolutely eliminating sexism isn't the bar most people are held to. Most people are held to the bar of taking reasonable steps to mitigate the issue and improve culture.
In the vast majority of cases, you can iterate your way to a fair system with a clear rubric that controls for unconscious biases and establishes a substantial trail of evidence to support each judgement of performance. Actually doing that, especially when giving criticism, tends to be a matter of managerial skill.
I'm not sure this is true. A system with a clear rubric that will control for unconscious bias will be accused of reducing people to pure numbers and not consider factors that cannot be quantified. It's also entirely possible that the rubric may control for unconscious bias on the part of the manager, but introduce a whole new set of biases against one group or another.
This isn't to say we should make the effort. I actually feel that your point about managerial skill is perhaps the most important. Middle managers, the ones to whom ranking and performance evaluation fall, are often promoted from lower positions and do not have the background or training to be good managers. I'm not sure how to solve this problem, but in most organizations I've worked at this only way up is to management. Good workers turn into bad managers.
In turn, giving up on building a less sexist system because people will always complain is like giving up on building a more secure infrastructure because people will always complain.
Unless you are extraordinarily lucky at both the humans building what you're building and the inputs to your system (constraints about language and tech stack and problem domain on the security side; constraints about hiring sources and existing culture/public reputation and leadership on the employment side), you're always going to have security flaws in your infrastructure, and you're always going to have sexism in your employment processes. And even if you are this lucky, you're not going to eliminate people poking at your system and suggesting places where it seems to fall short. The important question is what you do about it, how severe the problems are now, and how the severity changes over time.
Just like there are plenty of ways to write software that take it as a given that implementors will screw up and attackers will be clever, there are also plenty of ways to design a performance review system that takes it as a given that some fraction of humans in your organization will have biases (conscious and unconscious) and will treat their coworkers according to their biases.
Honestly, some of the mitigations are the same: the first thing I'd reach for is defense-in-depth and auditing. If your system is consistently giving different results (whether it's hiring, or retention, or promotions, or salary) to people in different demographic groups in a way that seems to disprove the null hypothesis that the demographic is irrelevant to job performance, look very hard at it, add additional reviews to make sure the results are consistent even when different people are involved, and keep measuring. There might be good reasons that the disparity is legitimate (just like there might be good reasons that one of your servers is regularly opening outbound TCP connections to random machines in China), just make sure you are actually noticing that something unexpected is going on and try to find an explanation for it.
While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good faith" is assumed in the system....
Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a team of all good performers, it is common place that stack ranking punishes good performers/employees as well).
It is very similar to the "decimation" system that the Roman Army practiced, when a particular unit or legion performed bad or cowardly in battle, one in ten was chosen (via short sticks), and culled to death by their companions. Very brutal, and can't see how it improves morale even if the unit itself is actually performing well. (which stack ranking is, constant decimation). This causes rampant politicking and favoritism to the point that systematic discrimination arises from it.
Decimation was a system for BUILDING cohesion. You don't flee battle because you might be decimated. You don't let your comrades flee battle because you might be decimated. It's for when you want to severely punish a collective group of people but can't afford to hurt them all.
Stack ranking is the opposite. You are actively competing against your colleagues. You are incentivized for your colleagues to fail.
Both have the "Culture of Fear" as a central point, and yes, stack ranking has its roots on the Roman Decimation system.
http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/performance-impr...
But five minutes of thought will tell you that people will hate working on that environment and will quit or just not apply to work there.
It is perhaps a natural fear that a Stack Ranking system would lead to a "Rank and Yank", but the mere ordering of employees during a performance management process doesn't give me any particular concern, nor do I consider it a bad faith system.
In fact, it forces people to make a sometimes hard choice, which I believe has more benefits than drawbacks to an organization, else you run the risk of having a massive "undifferentiated middle" and no clear development plans because you have no feedback from rich discussion about why Jane is better than Joe; instead Jane and Joe are simply declared to be equal without any discussion about what Joe could do to improve or what Jane should continue doing, etc.
But I think it's fair to assume that in most minds stack ranking includes a fire quota, and that's what most commenters mean here.
1: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l... 2: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Microsoft-stack-ranking-Re... 3: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-w...
I thought it was effective in forcing deeper conversations as part of the comparison process, but became unwieldy and unworkable when we passed about 50 engineers which was a long time ago, so I'm not sad to see it go.
With Romans, specifically, if cowardice was punished, there would be noone left. They were disciplined and had great quality equipment, but their morale was not the highest. For instance, before they met the Germans on the field, having heard of the military prowerss of their enemy, the Romans would spend their time crying and making their will, certain that they'd die in battle - Cesar has written about this.