Technology Woman

> I fail to see what "rising up" against an army of random alt accounts on Twitter would have accomplished.

To let women know that they will be supported when speaking out against sexism. To let everybody know we defend our own.

> I don't really see evidence of this having caused more fear among women in tech.

Keep looking, then. I've seen plenty of it.

> And it turned out she had a history of doing such shockingly antagonistic things to anyone who wasn't black and/or a woman.

That claim has been debunked: http://www.technologywoman.com/2013/03/24/digging-beneath-the-surface-that-amanda-blum-article-on-adria-richards-is-not-what-it-seems/

> She handled the situation in a shockingly ridiculous way.

That's a matter of perspective. I hope that I would have handled it differently. But given the thousand-paper-cuts thing, I can't say that I would have. She didn't fire the one guy who got axed. The guys making the jokes are not being discussed by name. All she did was post a conference pic and a summary of what they said in public. I'm not seeing anything particularly horrible. The one negative outcome for the one guy, firing, could have come just as well if she'd complained to his boss.

> A good number of the talks at the con were given by women.

And you know why? In good portion because of the hard work of the people you anonymously denigrate here. Because of decades of effort to make tech, and everything else, less of an old boys' club. Because however much you scoff…

But the "discussion" about whether Richards did the right thing hasn't been a debate - it's been a general piling-on with a generous helping of condescension and chauvinism. There has been only a smattering of disagreement and it has been summarily dismissed with a combination of the most perfunctory hand-waving and sheer shouting down.

The tech community immediately and decisively latched onto a convenient portrait of Richards as an underhanded, incompetent, cowardly, race-baiting, gender-baiting fraud with a manipulative agenda to aggrandize herself at the expense of everyone around her.

No amount of counter-evidence could make a dent in this depiction, a depiction that is immediately slapped onto every woman who dares to speak up about gender issues in the tech industry [1]. Everyone read and referred to the Amanda Blum post [2], but totally ignored a detailed review [3] of the instances Blum cited that cast them in a far more detailed and less sinister light.

No matter how you try to parse it, it's unambiguously clear that our community whipped itself into an apoplectic firestorm of outrage when a woman complained about behaviour in a conference that violated the conference's code of conduct, but at best shrugged and at worst said she deserved it when that very firestorm of outrage turned into an outpouring of the most vile, vitriolic and disgusting abuse, insults, threats and mockery against her.

That says something most disturbing about our community, and the…

From an ex-member of Google's hiring committee in 2010:

Brain teasers? Banned. (Of course, everyone has a different definition of a brain teasers.) If an interviewer were to ask a candidate a brain teaser, despite the policy, the hiring committee would likely disregard this interviewer’s feedback and send a note back telling the interviewer not to ask such silly questions.
...
Now, let’s look at the very widely circulated “15 Google Interview Questions that will make you feel stupid” list. You want to believe these are real questions, given that Business Insider feels like such a reputable source. Except that they didn’t get this list from a direct source. They borrowed their questions from some blogger (I won’t link back here) who was posting fake questions.
...
How can you tell that they’re fake? Because one of them is “Why are manhole covers round?” This is an infamous Microsoft interview question that has since been so very, very banned at both companies . I find it very hard to believe that a Google interviewer asked such a question.

http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-google-interview-myth/

In my experience (10+ Google interviews) there's been a lot of brain-exploding algorithmic questions but nothing that would be called a traditional brain teaser.

Try & find a first hand, non anonymous account of someone being asked brain teasers at a Google interview.

It's funny - when I hear people in the press discussing technical interviews [1] I hear questions like this: "How many golf balls could you fit into a school bus?"

When I attend technical interviews I hear questions like this: "How would you implement an arbitrary-precision decimal number class, like Java's BigDecimal? Can you write out the add function on that whiteboard?"

When Google's Laszlo Bock [2] says "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything." it seems fairly clear to me the idea he's dismissing is brainteasers, not whiteboard coding.

That's consistent with other reports [3,4] from a few years ago saying brain teasers were not used.

The author of the TechCrunch article seems to interpret Bock as saying whiteboard coding is an ineffective practice. I'm not convinced the Bock interview said that.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204552304577112522982505222.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all
[3] http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-google-interview-myth/
[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/us-news-blog/2012/oct/03/google-interview-brain-teaser-myth