Is Google's process for women different than their one for white men? I only have direct experience of the latter, but the 2017 and 2011 versions were pretty similar. Their hiring process, as I saw it, was dominated by algorithmic college-course-type questions (as if nothing else I'd done in the last 6 years mattered at all) and years-of-experience type stuff (e.g. the message I got was good luck getting a manager job there unless you've got 5-10 years already doing it - don't try it if you're an up-and-comer with less than that). And apparently I was good enough to pass it in 2011 but not in 2017 :|.
All of that is stuff that I think is highly tilted towards a certain profile of devs, and going to be hostile towards anyone who didn't follow the typical CS undergrad route. And that undergrad route is very unbalanced, as is the profile of e.g. established tech managers.
If you're not willing to do much more training than most big companies, I don't see good steps to fix it outside of fixing the high school and college pipelines.
>All of that is stuff that I think is highly tilted towards a certain profile of devs, and going to be hostile towards anyone who didn't follow the typical CS undergrad route.
Having gone through one of these processes (not with Google, but another big 4 company), I'm quite sure this happens. The CS fundamentals might be easy to test for, but they've had very little impact on real world problems I needed to solve in my career. For someone who's a bit farther away from college and doesn't come from a rote memorization culture (which IMHO is inherently bad for problem solving), this serves as a screening mechanism without actually testing for what's useful on the job.
I've been quite successful at interviews where they ask me to solve a little take-home project. In that case the rote memorizers who get through the Google process usually don't shine, because they're not able to put these things together properly. Recent CS grads still do well on those if they're competent.
All of that is stuff that I think is highly tilted towards a certain profile of devs, and going to be hostile towards anyone who didn't follow the typical CS undergrad route. And that undergrad route is very unbalanced, as is the profile of e.g. established tech managers.
If you're not willing to do much more training than most big companies, I don't see good steps to fix it outside of fixing the high school and college pipelines.