Software Engineer Job Summary: Roles and Responsibilities
An Amazon algorithm for evaluating software engineer job applicants ended up discriminating against women. The algorithm could not assess job skills so, instead, it looked for keywords in résumés and—since there were few women in Amazon’s technical-job résumé database—the algorithm assumed that applicants who went to women’s colleges or participated in female activities such as women’s tennis or women’s singing groups were not good software engineers. The more general point is that computer algorithms will have a devil of a time predicting which jobs are most at risk for being replaced by computers, since they have no comprehension of the skills required to do a particular job successfully. ASSISTING HUMANS IS EASIER THAN REPLACING THEM In one study that was widely covered (including by The Washington Post, The Economist, Ars Technica, and The Verge), Oxford University researchers used the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET database, which assesses the importance of various skill ...