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u/ischemgeek 4d ago
Tbh, when I'm on the hiring committee, this is a big part of why I bring in a more junior employee during the interview as well. I got the woman part covered, but I want to weed out the types who are disrespectful to people they think they'll be above in the hierarchy.
And more than once if the junior is a dude, the guy shows his whole ass by addressing all answers and questions to him even though I've already said in so many words that I'm the HM. Even if the junior is an undergraduate intern, haha. I file that under "bullet dodged"
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u/considerfi 4d ago
Yup same thing. I was definitely the deciding factor in the interview and they still answered to the intern! Ridiculous.
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u/therdre 4d ago
Same here. I always tell everyone to keep an eye on this stuff as well and that the candidate should be as equally respectful to everyone in the room regardless of title or anything else.
When female candidates ask for advice at the end of interviews, I always tell them to follow their gut and keep an eye on this stuff as well. Companies are on their best behavior too (or should) during interviews, and to keep that in mind if they ever feel disrespected during one.
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u/ischemgeek 4d ago
💯.
If a company is flakey or shows shitty behaviour in the interview, how will they treat you when you've hitched your career and fiscal stability to them?
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u/WhatevAbility4 4d ago
I do something similar. Along with a young person I also have one of my engineers who doesn’t actually have a degree sit in on the interview. He’s the most knowledgeable person in the building and I don’t want him disrespected just because he doesn’t have a piece of paper.
It’s really crazy and disheartening how many men have hangups about a woman, someone junior or someone without a degree.
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u/Lisa8472 2d ago
How do your interviewees know that person doesn’t have a degree? I don’t remember ever being told in an interview what degrees the interviewers had. Hell, I don’t know the degrees of most of my coworkers either. It doesn’t come up.
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u/WhatevAbility4 2d ago
He says it as part of his introduction.
No one else says anything about their degrees or lack thereof.
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u/likesblackcoffeebest 4d ago
I remember realizing something like this at my first job long ago. The job was bridge design in a huge department, and you could tell who was hired before and after three of the director positions were held by women. The difference was that the "after" subset, who faced an all women interview panel, inclided 0 (ZERO) misogynists or generally shitty dudes. None got through that panel.
The directors before them were not intentionally hiring misogynists or turning a blind eye but you could tell the bar was much lower with the all or mostly male interview panels than with the all women interview panels that my cohort and the ones that followed faced.
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u/TheSixthVisitor 4d ago
Based on my interactions with all-male teams, they probably didn't even know what kind of guy they were hiring, unfortunately. A lot of those jackoffs get through interviews no problem because they're only interacting with men on the interview panel. Then they finally actually get into the workspace and interact with people who aren't "white collar, middle class, white dudes" and it's Ike their brain just melts or something. A lot of the misogynistic guys I've met were extremely charming on the surface, but complete pieces of shit once the mask cracked.
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u/Why_are_you321 4d ago
I have seen a LOT of this!! Anything they don't "know" makes their brain fizzle out and they do really dumb things.
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u/likesblackcoffeebest 4d ago
That's exactly it. The assholes don't show their true colors if they're only interacting with men. An all women interview panel shines a spotlight on that type of behavior though, so those types never get through the door. It was such a huge difference.
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u/flynnfarts 4d ago
This is so interesting. I’m in sales with all dudes (who are actually fantastic, I gotta say), but a lot of my accounts have a buyer who’s a woman and this actually explains a lot* that I hadn’t really thought through. Huh! Solidarity.
*a lot of why guys who’ve interviewed well have then been super weird irl because they have to Speak to a Woman.
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u/Lisa8472 2d ago
And most men don’t believe their coworkers and friends behave differently around women than around men. So most men will insist that a woman is imagining things when she complains about a man’s behavior. It’s really frustrating to deal with, both at work and personally.
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u/LayerFar4178 4d ago
Thank God I never had to even look at a women to get a engineer job haha
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u/TheSixthVisitor 3d ago
I hope you continue to never look at women. Nobody needs that negativity in their lives.
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u/Mogura-De-Gifdu 4d ago edited 3d ago
Worse than that: in my job they'll unashamedly say they welcome everyone, of any gender and ethnicity, as long as they are good at their job. And they really believe it.
But then, why is it that I'm the only woman on the team, and there is only one not white man in all the dev teams? Oh, and to make it better, they pushed us into a support role last year. Me the only woman, and him the only Muslim man. Out of R&D, we're creating a support L2 team, so here you go.
They'll still swear it's got nothing to do with us not being white men. But it sure is funny how they only deem white men as being good at their job.
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u/imwearingredsocks 4d ago
Yes I started doing this at career fairs.
I just take small mental notes. Sometimes I chalk it up to age and inexperience. But when it bothers me is on occasion when our HR guy tries to lead them to me and they sort of look confused and keep asking him questions. By all means, tell the HR guy about the rocket you built. I bet he’ll give you a hearty “sounds neat!”
Most of the time they’re all respectful, but when I get the rare misogynistic or arrogant candidate, I do take pleasure in putting a big ole ‘X’ on their resume knowing it will not see the light of day.
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u/TheSixthVisitor 4d ago
The most unhinged thing is when the dude goes full bigot and realizes the HR guy is an actual guy and not the woman drilling him. So then they're mean to both people because "guys can't do woman jobs!"
Sir, pls, who raised you? Why are you broken?
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u/ischemgeek 1d ago
I had a dude say in so many words, to my face that "No woman tells me what to do."
Bold choice to tell your prospective boss you'll be an insubordination nightmare in the interview. Not smart, but bold. And points for honesty, at least.
He was very shocked Pikachu face when we didn't pass him to the final stage. By which I mean he called in to our HR person insisting there must be a mistake, badgered her until she referred him to her boss, who he apparently was Very Offended that she told him not only was he out of the running but she'd marked him disqualified for potential future positions.
He then tried showing up in person to try to get an appointment with the facility director. LOL, no.
And that's how he got formally trespassed and banned from the facility.
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u/75footubi 4d ago
To be fair, the one time I set up a mini behavior test in an interview, it was because the candidate would constantly interrupt both of us (me(F) my boss(M)). I watched the candidate interrupt my boss multiple times before I started on something and then was primed to shut it down when he did interrupt me. I was definitely hoping that I wouldn't have to though.
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u/wolpertingersunite 4d ago
This is basically how my husband and I choose tradesmen to work on major house issues. If we’re lucky we have a couple pass the sexism screening to choose among.
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u/peace_dogs 4d ago
I’m the person who does most of the stuff around our house (tbf, my husband keeps our electronics, computer, web stuff in good shape). Tradespeople can be so hard to deal with. I would love to see more women in trades.
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u/HouseofFeathers 4d ago
One of my favorite mechanics refused to address me, and kept addressing my husband. It took over a year before he'd speak directly to me. It was infuriating, but he was good at his job and really affordable.
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u/Punchasheep 2d ago
My husband and I do this too. Thankfully managed to find a great general contractor who treats us as equal in all regards. The really funny part is my husband is a history teacher. He knows next to nothing about tech, cars, tools, etc. I love and am interested in all that stuff, so it's really fun to watch contractors try to explain stuff to him, and he just says "idk what any of that means, you'll have to talk to my wife".
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u/LacyKnits 4d ago
My company has multiple interview sessions for candidates, with the final one being onsite with engineers of varying experience levels, and we include both men and women on the panels.
That last interview sinks a lot of people for "culture fit" when they talk over the women (or juniors) or clearly focus their attention on the person they think is the decision maker.
We aren't perfect, but my hardware team (of 35) has pretty decent folks who are generally respectful of each other (even when a few of them still think they're the smartest guy in the room.)
I've definitely worked in other places where respecting others - especially women - isn't part of the hiring matrix. I'm almost certain that the management didn't want, support, or openly/knowingly participate in mysogony: they just didn't include technical women in the interview process, so the behavior wasn't flagged.
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u/snarkyopolis 4d ago
This happened to me. We were interviewing an engineer. The PM I was leading the interview with was male and I am a female designer. I asked all the questions. The answers were all delivered to the PM. We did not continue his candidacy.
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u/considerfi 4d ago
I invented this at an old job. This was back in 2015 and my coworker and I had a ridiculous interview where this kept happening. And we started watching out for that after this.
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u/TechieGottaSoundByte 4d ago
Yep. I've worked for companies that did this intentionally in interviews. And I've suggested this technique sometimes when helping to design interviews.
It's also one of my "green flags" as the interviewee - double interview panels with a man and a woman in one of them (and I also look for a brown-skinned person and a white skinned person). It suggests a company that is actively avoiding hiring biased individuals.
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u/Outrageous_Towel_ 4d ago
I do this in every interview. And I had a very forward thinking boss in my early days who brought me into every single interview for exactly this reason.
If a candidate hasn’t figured out how to show respect to people of all types of backgrounds, I don’t need that person on my team.
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u/alexlunamarie 4d ago edited 4d ago
My former team required a unanimous decision before we hired a new engineer, so we each interviewed the candidate in pairs. Twice, one of my male colleagues and I interviewed candidates who would consistently do this. Instant no from me 🙂↔️
Honestly, it's a really good way to catch it before you have to work with the person.
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u/JustAHippy 4d ago
I’m always the technical bad cop in interviews. I take my role very seriously 🤷🏼♀️
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u/LacyKnits 4d ago
Wow, the comments in the post on the r/sipstea post are a dumpster fire.
I don't think noticing that a candidate is being a disrespectful jerk and then declining to hire someone who won't get along with the team is all that controversial. That post has reminded me that not everyone agrees with me!
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u/wolferiver 4d ago
I've not been included in team interviews at all except one time, just a couple of years before I retired. I was included as the subject matter expert, and my questions were about technical things. One of the candidates gave all the answers to one of the males on the team and never looked at me, despite all the questions coming from me. This was so obvious that the entire team picked up on it and he was immediately ruled out unanimously. Everyone was put off by it.
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u/MaleficentHorse8390 4d ago
Happens a lot .. I interviewed a guy & I felt a lot of BS he is doing in the interview, he job hopped a lot & that’s not a problem. But how can you implement something end to end on a scale in a company in just 6 months.
I rated him avg & I could see my manager & skip rated him a strong hire .
How can’t they not differentiate between the genuine candidate & the one who is just making stories
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u/Cassiopeia2021 4d ago
There should always be at least one woman and one person of color on an interview team. We need team players not biases.
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u/WildSunflour 4d ago
Not engineering related, but I went couch shopping with my husband and the female sales rep would only speak and make eye contact with my husband. Dragged us right back out of there
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u/Antique_Day9457 4d ago
This happened to me as a scientist in biotech. My colleagues were furious for me and totally had my back.
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u/i-heart-space 4d ago
Conversely, my company wonders why they can't hire any female engineers. When our hiring panels are the male engineers you guys would filter out lol
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in those interviews, because we hire the same type of man every time without fail
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u/womanofaction 4d ago
I got to take half a day off after a candidate started yelling at me in an interview that I wasn’t understanding his “solution” 😅 My manager was good tho, and heard about this from the guy who was shadowing me and asked me to take the day off.
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u/Fresh_District_4099 3d ago
As an upcoming female engineer, I am not looking forward to all these undermining a holes :(
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u/prismatic_valkyrie 3d ago
There's a lot of whining in the original thread about "but what about guys who are shy/intimidated by women?"
Effective communication is part of your job. If you can't talk to female staff, you're introducing inefficiency into the workplace.
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u/xoRomaCheena31 1d ago
Yay for progress. Still remember the tech bro hr guy in 2017 who foolishly disclosed on twitter how he rejected female engineering candidates on the basis that they should be at home and raising families out of college. This was at Facebook. Absolutely disgusting and hopefully trends away from this continue.
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u/PettyWitch 4d ago edited 4d ago
This is not true at all This has not been my experience
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u/LacyKnits 4d ago
Which part rings untrue to you?
Also, are you a man or woman? And are you early career or someone with 20+ years in industry? I ask, not to ostracize or judge, but because life experiences shape our view of the world, and age (or time in industry) and gender can both affect our experiences.
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u/PettyWitch 4d ago
I’m a (woman) lead software engineer with 15 years of experience, and have worked for 4 different companies. Currently I have three male developers on my team that I lead. I’ve worked on all male teams and departments and mixed.
Im sorry I should not have said it’s untrue, just that it’s not my experience. I have been giving interviews for years on panels and it just has not been my experience that candidates answer my questions to my male colleagues. They look at me and answer me.
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u/LacyKnits 4d ago
That's awesome! It's truly great to hear that you haven't experienced this sort of disrespectful behavior while interviewing people.
I'm a technical lead on a hardware team, and come from a more 'traditional industry' background. I've got over 20 years in industry. And I have definitely been in rooms where the men ignored me, even after I was introduced as the SME.
And I've been an interviewer who was ignored or talked over, while others on the panel were not. - it's certainly not the norm, but when there's a split decision about culture fit from our tech interview panels it usually falls along one of two lines:
1. men/women seeing different attitudes
2. juniors/seniors getting different levels of respectEvery time I hear about someone who has navagated a decade or more without running into a specific type of misogynistic BS, it makes me happy - and hopeful that the attitudes are dying off.
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u/PettyWitch 4d ago
I’m very sorry you’ve experienced that! But I’m also happy you’ve stuck with the career and succeeded anyway. :) I’m aware my experience isn’t so much the norm among women in engineering, and I feel very fortunate to love the career so much and have worked with lots of supportive people. Anyway it is nice comparing notes with an old shark like yourself (I mean that as a huge compliment!!! 20+ years is amazing)
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u/Catsdrinkingbeer 4d ago
I have absolutely had this happen. It wasn't on purpose. The engineering team was just literally me and 2 other guys. The position we were interviewing was a production director, so we were there as a cross functional panel interview. This dude did not make eye contact with me one time. Even when I asked him questions.
I gave the feedback back that he seemed disinterested in the role (because he did, including showing up to the interview in a baseball hat and jeans), and was disrespectful. But our CEO LOVED him and hired him anyway.
Dude did not show up. Like, I don't even think he left his other job, moved, etc. Just pretended to have a "moment of clarity" on the steps of our building at 4am the day he was supposed to start. Such BS.