Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Starts Drive To Recruit More Women and Ethnic Minorities (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The company behind games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch has started a drive to recruit more women and ethnic minorities. The information is in a leaked internal email from Blizzard's CEO, seen by the website Kotako. It claims 21 percent of Blizzard's employees are women, and although that's similar to the rest of the gaming industry, it says it wants to do better. The company claims the initiative will focus on finding more female employees and getting them to stay on longer. At the moment women are leaving at a higher rate than men but it says it'll fall short of setting "quotas."
why, because they are better programmers? If that's not the reason, your shareholders may want to have a word with you.
... to have some of the men declare that they feel like and wish to be treated as women. Then they could be counted as such, right?
So basically what this means is, "hire less white men"
At the moment women are leaving at a higher rate than men but it says it'll fall short of setting "quotas."
I think "Quotas" are what most people object to that object to hiring more women and minorities. No one wants to feel like they missed out on a job because they were the wrong sex or race. Not men, women, Europeans, or Africans.
Trying to be more appealing to women and minorities is a noble goal because in order to relate to all demographics of clients you need all demographics of staff. It's easy to miss out sometimes what another group might find appealing or offensive without valid representation.
Appeal to minorities and all genders but don't set quotas. As long as Blizzard is really doing this and not just saying they are to look good- they're doing the right thing by my way of thinking.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
She won't even play their games and hates them a shit load. They probably have other issues than hiring.
Gaming is much more mainstream than in the past and there are a lot more female gamers too.
They want their games to appeal to a bigger audience.
Men are more likely to be willing to submit to gaming companies. Everyone knows they pay less and demand longer hours than the equivalent jobs in other industries. Women should consider themselves lucky they're only 21% of that workforce.
This sure sounds like female employees are going to be enticed with better compensation, perks, more flexible hours, etc. - how else could they possibly "convince them to stay longer"?
If being more flexible with hours and giving better compensation attracts more women then everyone benefits. Even men will surely be happier with more flexible hours and better benefits. If it attracts women but makes mens lives easier- that's a benefit for everyone.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Blizzard actually seems to do pretty well for having strong female characters in their games.
Kerrigan (Starcraft) was bad-ass, and Overwatch has some pretty awesome characters as well. Plus SC2 had a nice switch-up from Raynor saving Kerrigan and to vise-versa.
Having female characters that people can *play* seems a good step towards getting females interested in playing games, which is a step towards increase interest in making games.
Coding, however, is a meritocracy. It has quantified metrics and performance tracking by definition.
This would be a great argument if there hadn't been so much shitty product released in the last couple of decades, a lot of it from major vendors. Guess diversity hires won't be that big of a deal to the bottom line or the quality of software released after all.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The games business is notorious for terrible working conditions, terrible management, and a huge percentage of coworkers who are just plain jerks.
Bad management means you have low job security and a high chance your work will end up getting thrown away when the project is cancelled.
And whether your coworkers are jerks because they're misogynistic, or because they're trolls, or because they're SJWs, or because they're divas, or because they're just social misfits, it still sucks dealing with jerks all the time.
On the other hand, it's a growing business, so even a bad job might lead to a good opportunity eventually.
I honestly wonder what management is hoping to achieve here. Is there some deficiency in their products which they hope can be solved by women? Are their current empoyees (men and women ) fundamentally incapable of providing a solution to this deficiency? Why? Or perhaps they find their women to be of significantly higher competency such that they are overworked? Are they further implying that men and women are fundamentally different and that men do not have the mental capacity that they're looking for?
I'm feeling triggered and need to stay home today.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
...women just don't like working at gaming companies.
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
Coding, however, is a meritocracy.
I started integrating external, standardized code checks with Jenkins. I don't think your code sucks. The linter does. Fix it.
It also means people get immediate feedback about how much their code sucks and when merges come along it's a lot less headache.
And none of our linters have fields for gender, sex or race.
Instead of getting the BEST for anything, they will end up watering down their hiring process more likely, just to "look good" in the eyes of the public (and at their meetings). They can say see...see...see...we have minorities working here! Look at us! We are good because we have hired minorities! Just one example of what happens when you water down something, just to be politically correct. In the 70's...Miami-Metro Dade watered down the hiring process for police officers. They wanted to be politically correct, and hire more minorities, in response to the "cuban boat lift" garbage thanks to Jimmy Carter. Ole Castro dumped a bunch of losers, criminals on the Florida coast. Minorities said it wasn't fair to have an all white police force. So, they LOWERED THE STANDARDS, allowed more unqualified people to be an officer. In the 80's the Metro-Dade was one of the more corrupt police departments around. Drugs, murders, extortion, prostitution and on and on. Instead of what most likely will happen, they hire people who are not qualified, or, are not the best & brightest in their field, they should look for qualified people. You watch their business suffer, because of this. Happens every time you water things down.
Are they still in Playa Del Rey?
Let them try to funnel their way into that nightmare.
Coding, however, is a meritocracy. It has quantified metrics and performance tracking by definition.
Except when it isn't? Code by women is 'rated' lower when their name is attached.
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
Why are tech industries different than other industries? You don't see construction companies falling over themselves to try to hire more women. You don't see the healthcare and education sectors launching initiatives to recruit more men. Why is the tech industry unique in this endeavour?
Can anyone name a benefit to diversity that's anything close to compensation for all the bullshit we've had to endure achieving it?
Progressivism: Parasites helping parasites to help themselves - to other people's stuff.
Coding, however, is a meritocracy. It has quantified metrics and performance tracking by definition. You know who's committing what, you know how many bugs people are fixing, and you know how much code they write, what percentage needs review, and how impactful it is.
You know that modern games require a much larger set of skills than just coding, right?
Using past Slashdot submissions, let's track what happened to the GNOME desktop environment project after it started engaging in identity politics, instead of just focusing on software development.
On June 15, 2006, Slashdot featured the story "GNOME Reaches Out to Women". We can see this as the beginning of the troubles to come.
As we progress through the submission titles from 2007 through to just last week, we can see the decline:
The GNOME project went from creating GNOME 2, which was perhaps the most widely used and most liked open source desktop environment ever created, to the GNOME 3 disaster (which was quite delayed), and eventually to the project having trouble finding a maintainer for its text editor!
Some people will misinterpret what happened, and blame women for it. Of course, that's a load of bollocks. As we can see from the GNOME project grou
Except that's fucking bullshit.
Until there are blind resume reviews and tests, the myth of the meritocracy is just so-much garbage spouted by people that are worried they'll lose their jobs to someone ACTUALLY qualified.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh...
This was exactly the same thing that happened at symphonies. When you ACTUALLY care about a) diversity and b) hiring the best people for the job, it turns out that the first thing you have to do is leave your biases at the door, and virtually nobody is good at doing that. So remove the doubt: blind auditions.
Most interview processes are garbage anyway. I've been a programmer for 15 years and I'm still asked to talk about certain kinds of language specific minutia that are super irrelevant in daily programming. (That is, I've answered questions and literally never, ever seen those features used in the games we ship. It's essentially a trivia contest.)
And here's the thing about programming when you're at a game company: AT LEAST half your job has nothing to do with programming—at least if you're any good. You HAVE to play the game you're making, make suggestions, think about the comfort of the player. I would take a junior programmer with a good feel for gameplay than a veteran rockstar programmer that has great technical chops but doesn't have any suggestions to improve the game. Even for engine and graphics programmers.
So yeah, coding can be hard, but I can teach you what you need to know. If you're working with me and I can trust you to make good gameplay decisions, that's a LOT more important to me, and I CAN'T teach you that.
I remember going to a coding school in Canada back in the nineties. It cost about $10k. Lots of pretty talented folks, but this was before the Y2K thing so it was still hard to get a job as a fresh grad.
Except for one person. Native female. Two interesting facts: (1) some federal program paid the $10k for her, and (2) it didn't matter that she was a complete screw up zero. Was barely able to write hello world in C. Had to be helped with everything and I do mean everything.
Surprise, surprise, she got hired by Statistics Canada the day she graduated. No, they didn't even accept applications from anyone else. Everyone else had to scramble for months with high debt and little work. Yep, that's diversity in action, alright.
I guess I'm not a fan diversity. It seems to me more like discrimination.
Does this mean they're going to rehire Randi Lee Harper?
in addition to which, as usual, the overrepresentation of men relative to their population proportion (about 2 to 1) is evidence of rampant sexism, as there can be no other possible explanation because, after all, a woman can do anything a man can do, but better. HOWEVER, the overrepresentation of asians relative to THEIR population proportion (at least 5 to 1) is just evidence that asians are smarter than everybody else, as there can be no other possible explanation. (And to be clear, I don’t have a problem with asians dominating tech. I DO have a problem with somebody insisting that men being somewhat overrepresented means I’m a filthy sexist).
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Curious when they'll start looking for religious diversity.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
All these idiots can do is go "The numbers. NOT SAME!"
Never mind that there are MANY reasons why that could be.
With one of the biggest being "Many (not all) women simply don't want to put up with the bullshit such jobs entail."
But no! They're going to do whatever they can to make those numbers the same. REGARDLESS of the laws they break. REGARDLESS of negative impact upon their company and the quality of their product.
"I have a hammer!"
"I have a screw that needs to be driven in."
*WHACK*
"Well, that broke the screw!"
"I have two pieces of glass that need to be delicately glued back together!"
*WHACK*
"Now I have two HUNDRED pieces of glass!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Thing is, this is socially acceptable discrimination, so no, they won't get in any trouble for it.
Everything they're saying they'll do is consistent with most major companies these days, it's also morally repugnant. Discrimination is discrimination, it doesn't matter which group it's against.
If you think your policy looks good, replace the groups you're favouring and see if it's still an acceptable policy: "We're going to do more to entice white males to join our company and stay longer", if that sounds awful, why does it suddenly sound ok when you replace "white males" with "women and minorities"?
The only way to avoid discrimination is to stop discriminating. Stop even keeping statistics on what percent of your workforce falls in to those various buckets. If asked how many minorities you have, reply "we don't discriminate based on race, so we don't keep those statistics"
When accepting resumes remove the name before passing it to a reviewer to decide, where aptitude testing is required, separate the person supervising the test from the one evaluating the results so all they see is the end product, not the person.
We still cant' completely avoid actual interviews, but conduct them last once you've already narrowed your field, if the people you have left fall in to a certain demographic group, so be it.
if only the wage gap were actually a real thing...
spouted by people that are worried they'll lose their jobs to someone ACTUALLY qualified
It’s funny (but not really in a haha way, just in a “par for the course, I guess” way) how leftists like to repeat this whenever people oppose biased hiring, suggesting that qualified minorities are being turned away every day by a prejudiced elite while every diversity program explicitly insists that qualifications must be relaxed in order to achieve diversity because otherwise you’d never achieve it. It’s the classic “motte-and-bailey” tactic, that’s worked for the SJWs very well for the past decade.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Except that's fucking bullshit. Until there are blind resume reviews and tests, the myth of the meritocracy is just so-much garbage spouted by people that are worried they'll lose their jobs to someone ACTUALLY qualified.
I'm not aware of the breadth of literature on the topic, but there was a study from Australia from just this year that found that using blind resumes had worse results for women then if information about the candidates sex was available. I also recall a study I read some time ago that found large levels of discrimination against job (or it may have been for apartment applications, but the idea is still generally the same) applicants with names that are typically associated with black people. For example Jamal vs. James.
Personally I think resumes should be blind as it does limit bias. You'd probably want to go just beyond name, race, and gender though as there are some colleges that essentially give that information away or perhaps create other types of bias. Sure you'll eventually have to bring in some candidates for an in person interview, but I think at that point it's a lot harder for people, even those who are racist, to fall back on prejudices when they're dealing with an actual individual who probably doesn't conform to their notions. I'm reminded of the story of one black man who has probably gotten more people to leave the KKK than the untold thousands that just insult them on the internet. All he did was go and talk with them and try to be their friends. If you can get people who joined a white nationalist movement to quit just by meeting them in person and interacting with them for a while, I think you can probably overcome any slight racism that a hiring manager might have as well.
Coding, however, is a meritocracy.
This is hilarious.
You can be the best coder on the planet and get fired for incompetence if your manager doesn't like you. Likewise, you can be awful at coding and get big raises if your manger's manager likes you.
And if you feel the response should be: "Oh, well you should work for a better company then!!", then you should go read about the No True Scotsman fallacy.
That's what I did about three years back. I'm my own boss, my customers don't know or care if I'm even a human, and my earnings aren't supporting deadweight like HR departments full of SJWs. My work stands on its own, and enough people buy it to give me a comfortable living.
"CompanyX does not recognize ethnic groups or genders as relevant to any responsibilities and/or duties related to the offered position, as such, we have chosen to interview qualified candidates based on merit and skill-set alone. Please be prepared to highlight any past projects and/or responsibilities that you feel may be relevant to the position(s) you are applying for. Any candidate seeking special consideration based on Skin color, religion, gender, or any other protected class will be immediately disqualified for the position. CompanyX is proud of our culture of anti-discrimination and it will not be tolerated in ANY FORM. With that said, applicant should be aware we are an English speaking company, with a heavy emphasis on teamwork. All qualified candidates must posses a strong grasp of the English language, and be able to effectively communicate with your team members, managers, and peers. Best of luck, and thank you for your interest in joining the world class team at CompanyX"
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
21% of all employees, or 21% of technical staff?
The junior engineer doesn't do things by the book, because he understands the risk. The mid-career engineer does thing by the book, because he does. The senior engineer adds to the book - or he would have, but your linter blocked him.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Today is a good day to be a pastafarian?
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I mean, it's definitely a good step forward.
That Australian study is interesting. I'm just looking at the opening summary of results, and I'm wondering if they're at a point where the people in hiring positions are actively looking to close the gaps on minority hiring, so they're actively working against their own biases, or formed new biases to manage that.
The percentages are pretty small for men and women, but huge for minority ethnicities. I'm looking forward to reading this more, thanks.
But yes, you make a good point. The real trick is to get them in the door, and at least in North America, it seems that the sticking point is unrecognised and possibly (probably?) unintentional sexism or racism.
Never mind that there are MANY reasons why that could be.
With one of the biggest being "Many (not all) women simply don't want to put up with the bullshit such jobs entail."
So run a study and prove it. Not all that hard, and not all that expensive to send out a bunch of questionnaires.
So odd that all the well-funded institutions that constantly write papers attacking diversity efforts can't manage to use a little funding to actually study it and back up their claims....
The rise of the smart phone ruined Gnome more than identity politics. If Gnome had done nothing but chase identity politics, at least the interface wouldn't have changed drastically. Instead, some hipster douchebags got control of the interface and starting chasing after Apple and smart phone designs. The hipster douchebag is the disease. Identity politics and stupid new interfaces were the symptoms.
Oh, you mean the ones that are actually bullshit?
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/...
Its a real thing in the orthodoxy. Post-modernism doesnt require a reality that jives.
"His name was James Damore."
That "refutation" is a bunch of strawmen.
For instance, "single sex classrooms" is not something within the Google memo, but it sure as fuck is part of that "debunking."
Also part of that debunking is citing "books" rather than peer reviewed research. That fact sure as fuck didnt get noticed by you.
What a fucking tool you are.
"His name was James Damore."
Except that's a lie, as Australians have found out, on the opposite, using blind recruitment reduces chances of women and minorities:
Blind recruitment trial to boost gender equality making things worse, study reveals
http://www.abc.net.au/news/201...
GNOME was ruined the day they chose a half finished graphics toolkit because they were precious snowflakes and got triggered by KDE using Qt. In other words, on day one.
Coding, however, is a meritocracy.
Except when the lead developer is a brogrammer who thinks giving out nicknames like "Monkey Nuts" builds team cohesion is deciding who has the merit, then i all falls apart.
It's also funny how people on the right repeatedly insist that the only way to encourage diversity is to lower qualifications, almost as if they have internalized that women and other races aren't their equals, in a manor that could be called bigotry.
Look, stop bringing reality into the OP's John Galt fantasy.
In regards for Asians in tech, perhaps we need to control for "socio-economic status" and perhaps look to see if Asian managers and techs aren't hiring other Asian tech guys because they subconsciously feel "comfortable" around them. And perhaps control for location, since Asian-americans are heavily concentrated on the west coast where the tech companies are. And lets not forget universities, if a tech company recruits mainly from Stanford or Berkely (California) and MIT/Harvard, they're going to get higher than average percentage of upper middle class and up asian guys and upper middle class and up jewish guys than if they say recruited from some state university in Iowa or something.
Aaaand there were more women in computer science in the 80's than there are today...something happened. In fact some think the problem is partly Nintendo's fault for getting retailers to classify the NES as a toy and thusly putting it in the boy-section of toy stores, thusly helping to create a stereotype that love of video games (a big encouraging entry point for many programmers) was a boy thing.
They want to dilute their pool by forcing nature to bend to their will.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
With one of the biggest being "Many (not all) women simply don't want to put up with the bullshit such jobs entail."
Then maybe the working conditions need to IMPROVE for EVERYONE? Maybe aspie code-bros need to stop putting up with "crunch time" and crappy conditions for free cheetos and jolt.
REGARDLESS of negative impact upon their company and the quality of their product.
Have you played modern games designed/coded by the predominately male developers? Quality is NOT something they prioritize. So don't go around saying that encouraging women to "not quit" will have a negative impact.
No one ever said that was how the hiring was going to go. When people say they want a balance it does not mean there will be quotas. Women are equally capable at programming. Get a broad perspective of resumes and start interviewing.
Merit based hiring is a myth. Everywhere I have ever worked there are morons at all elvels. They did not get the jobs through a practice of only hiring the most qualified. Instead you get friends of employees getting recommended; you get a huge boost in employability merely by being recommended, even if the person is a moron. So why not hire the qualified female instead of choosing Bob's college buddy with the C+ average?
Every last one of these SJW-influences mega corps needs to be sued until they get back in line. They are hiring someone based on their gender or color of their skin instead of who is most qualified. That is illegal. Who gives a shit how many white guys work at your company? I care about profitability. Rename applicants anonymously, hide their age and gender and background, and interview them electronically initially. There goes this big, alleged bias everyone keeps talking about.
Note: I am not the grandparent, but your statements seemed interesting enough to respond to.
I don't put up with crunch time, I personally do crunch time because I'm actually passionate about my work and care about my projects.
I have. You know, I never actually thought about this. However, now I am. I played games made by people pre-dominantly identifying as female. I didn't think "Revolution 60" or "Analogue: A Hate Story" were quality at all compared to male developers with even less resources like "Dust: An Elysian Tail" ? Annecdotally, my experience is a flat out opposite to what you're claiming...
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Coding is not a meritocracy. If it were, then I would not see morons everywhere I look coding up pieces of crap. You can indeed fake it, there are people passing for competent every day in every company. If you look around and you only see brilliant people, you may be the exception.
I used to be asked regularly about all the obscure error messages that G++ would spit out. I wasn't even the best C++ expert out there. The messages were obscure enough that it took some understanding of what happens behind the scenes to figure them out. There's a level of the language that you need to understand before you can really make use of the language.
Now I'm all on C, and a lot of the people I've worked with in the area are self taught, or EE, etc. And man, there is a lot of deja-vu at seeing a rehash of code that looks like it's from 1977. I've had someone who was very competent in the job normally, saw a function declaration I wrote for a new project and said "we don't have to use any of that 'const' crap we?" And then suddenly there's an argument with two people claiming const was useless and that it "never uncovered any bugs" (real quote). Wow. Seriously, you need to know the language you work with - you don't have to memorize the standard but at least make an attempt to read it once.
The reason I ask about minutiae is because they're not minutiae. I ask what should be easy to understand for anyone who claims to have worked with embedded systems for 20 years, and to make sure I will not be hand holding the person and giving tutorials on how to program. I ask people with glowing resumes how they can clear a bit in a word and they get it wrong 9 times out of 10. I ask about day to day skills instead of advanced topics because my standards have dropped lower and lower over the years.
Resumes are useless in my experience. They're full of exagerations or outright lies most of the time. To evaluate a candidate you must talk to the person.
So and so company has decided that for ethical reasons, it should preferentially hire one race. This is ok by law because those races aren't white. It should also hire favoring a sex. This is okay because that sex isn't male.
The sweet truth here is that it doesn't matter what you call racism and sexism.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
That "refutation" is a bunch of strawmen.
Discussing the actual experiments cited by the Google employee is a strawman. Sure. You go right on believing that.
For instance, "single sex classrooms" is not something within the Google memo, but it sure as fuck is part of that "debunking."
So, are men not as biologically capable of actually reading? 'Cause the author literally tells you why it's relevant in the article.
Also part of that debunking is citing "books" rather than peer reviewed research
So does the Google manifesto. Gonna throw it out too?
Also, if you actually read a bit more carefully, you'd find those books are discussing peer reviewed research.
What a fucking tool you are.
What was that about strawmen?
Claim is bunk. Speak with A Geek never publish research paper, data,methods and worst of all they tested more than one independent variable at a time. Name,gender,school were all removed and maybe more they didn't tell any more what they did, for all we know they had a calculation error.. It would be really funny if the underlying data was 50/50 ratio and it ended up with a 50% ratio. Finally it is more than 5x increase compared to the blind orchestra study that compared more than 30 years of data. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitst...
Studies have BEEN done you dumbass!
That's why this is currently accepted social science.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Everybody--the employees, the customers and the society as a whole--suffers if Blizzard starts producing a worse product because of more flexible hours and better benefits. There are no free lunches.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Compensation will go down, men aren't happy because they have to pay women's bills
Best way to stop racism, discrimination, etc is to *STOP* it. Not create new forms.
Imagine if there were no racist issues, what would guys like Al Sharpton and so on do for a living? It's in their best interest to keep it alive.
Same here, there's a fake womans issue to profit on.
Actually, the studies were done and the results are it is not accepted social science. In fact, the actual science points in the other direction.
In fact, one of the studies the Google manifesto relies on could not be replicated by the person who originally did it. Kinda a poster child for not a valid experiment, no?
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/...
You are confused if you believe that Gnome 3 was intended to be used on a tablet computer or a phone. Gnome 3 was designed to be a cohesive user experience based on the scientific principle of Fitts's law.
And you're in denial if you think they weren't influenced by smart phone mania. Fitt's law doesn't say you should be removing buttons, or turning a desktop screen into a giant app screen that, coincidentally, was aping smart phone designs.
Given the disparity in the number of people doing it in the entire field, which in programming is about 80/20 currently, the only way that should significantly differ by +-5% points either way in a large company is either astronomical chance or a quota system, assuming that both populations are equally good at a task.
Twenty and thirty years ago the disparity was much less. I also see better representations of female programmers in some fields, like medical systems. It's not an unachievable goal.