One side-effect of DEI is that I take HR even less seriously than ever. Any HR-hosted event is most likely a hard pass for me. Even if it's something I am slightly interested in (say, company event to celebrate Diwali because we do have Indian employees, and despite not being Indian, I have some tangential interest in it partly because I respect and like many of my coworkers and partly just out of curiosity), if it's hosted by HR, I am not going to bother.
We had an All Hands once where they actually spent 20+ minutes talking about the Genderbread Cookie, which I found especially egregious. Not that I have a problem with the Genderbread Cookie, but an All Hands is the most expensive meeting a company can host. Why are we learning about sex and gender identity vocabulary in that meeting?
Of course, this all matters a lot less than hiring and promotion processes. I don't work at a larger company, so I don't think I've seen the worst of it. Smaller businesses still have to take what they can get, and if that means the pipeline is mostly Asian men and white men, that's who gets hired.
It's sort of weird, I (used to) work at a very large company and saw pretty much none of this, at all, over last 3 years.
Even people ranting anonymously in Blind would admit we had ~nothing extreme like this. Nothing even close. Yet we were famous for it.
For them, the issue was feeling they couldn't share their politic opinions without derision because their coworkers were uniformly liberal.
If you tweeted this and tweeted about DEI a lot I'd say you were making it up completely. You aren't. That's very very very strange. I've never even heard of the Genderbread Cookie.
I've been wondering if maybe mid-small corporation try-hards were ending up doing some distorted funhouse mirror version of "let's try to interview more minorities and champion them more publicly?" and ended up doing crazy stuff.
"Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining"
From a director during a all-hands.
"We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman"
From my manager's manager.
"Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman"
The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things otherwise it is simply too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high.
> Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining"
This is largely analogous to the "Opportunistic Hiring" policies Dropbox introduced in April 2019. We set aside reserved headcount for "diverse" candidates (ostensibly this includes women of any race, and URM men. In practice, almost entirely non-URM women). When a team hired a "diverse" candidate, the headcount was drawn from the reserved pool not the team's normal headcount allocation.
In practice, this meant that women were often hired into roles without much work to do. By far the most common complaints I've heard from women in tech is that the company doesn't have enough work for them and they aren't being given projects. Makes me wonder how many companies are engaging in similar behavior.
To be fair, I've got plenty of white (or white passing) male friends who also ended up in roles with a shortage of work to do. There's this awkward period between someone being hired, and them being familiar enough with the workplace to actively seek out stuff that needs to be done that leaves a lot of people with very little to do.
My sister, though, had been in her role for 2+ years but still only had work to keep her busy maybe 30% of the time. Similar situation with one of my past girlfriends. These were both Product Managers - I think it's less of an issue for software developers, since there's always a backlog to hack away at.
I don’t see why you need legal protections. A diversity of thought can bring value. If the manager said, “We currently only have staff with public sector experience. We don’t have headcount for more folks. But let me know if you have someone with private sector experience. They are extremely rare, and could really open up the way we solve the problem.”
Hmm. I see what you are saying, but it totally discounts the value of diversity of thought.
For example, there is an optical illusion where people see the top line as shorter:
<——>
>—-<
However, they are the same length. (The illusion is more pronounced with hand drawn lines.)
Everyone falls for this illusion across all countries and cultures, so much so that folks hypothesized it is affected by our biology. Well, until some anthropologist showed it to some African tribesman. It turns out they were not susceptible to that form of illusion at all. It is unclear why.
My point is that if something as simple estimates of a length of line can benefit from diversity of thought, imagine how many other “obvious” yet wrong assumptions people make. And that is why it is valuable to include people of different genders, races, abilities.
Just like it is okay to pass on a yet another Python developer, maybe it is okay to pass on yet another person who assumes the top line is shorter.
Look, I don’t like the idea of quotas, either. But I also don’t like working at place where everyone is the same.
The illusion you refer to is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion but the "Variations in perception" section mentions the African tribesmen finding that you are using to support your point was contradicted by later research.
(This sort of thing is why I distrust many statements asserted as fact without citations by posters on HN; too often they turn out to be incorrect, incomplete, or out of date.)
I appreciate that link. It seems subsequent research did not contradict it. I am open to changing my mind, but in the section about perception, it lists numerous studies that found differences between populations. It does not appear the differences have been definitively explained. I’m not sure how you concluded that either the research or my point were contradicted, but again, I’m open to the being wrong. I often am.
The real problem is the assumption race or gender are not only accurate proxies for diversity of thought (they’re not), but that they’re actually better proxies than just looking for diversity of thought directly.
You want more people from poor backgrounds so that you can take into account lower socioeconomic viewpoints? Well, the modern DEI answer to that is hire a black person. The correct answer is to hire someone that grew up poor.
Yes. You make a good point. I would fully support a system that account for diversity of thought directly. That’s hard to do. Your suggestion of means testing applicants is interesting. Do you have others?
>Everyone falls for this illusion across all countries and cultures, so much so that folks hypothesized it is affected by our biology. Well, until some anthropologist showed it to some African tribesman. It turns out they were not susceptible to that form of illusion at all. It is unclear why.
That was disproven. This is scientific racism/bio-essentialism. Let's not go there, it's an evil path.
Ah. I don’t see where it was disproven. The Wikipedia article about it seems to indicate the difference in perception between various populations was further substantiated.
My contention nor original researchers, so far as I can tell, claimed the difference was based on race or biology. It looks like they thought it had to do with the presence of rectilinear buildings, thus cultural.
Some subsequent research did hypothesize eye pigmentation played a role and that was disproven. However, as far as I can tell, different groups of people have differing abilities to perceive illusions.
Moreover, my fundamental point was that culture affects thought, and a variety of thought is valuable. Do you dispute either of those points?
No, there’s absolutely no proof that racial diversity directly benefits a company. I searched HARD for the evidence. Lots of articles claim it is true but purposely mistake correlation for causation.
People often cite the 2019 McMinsey report as evidence that racial diversity improves company performance. However, when you dig into the details Asian representation is positively correlated with company performance, but Black and Latin representation is negatively correlated. The Asian positive correlation was so strong that on the whole, lower White representation was positively correlated with company performance. That's the supposed benefit of diversity, but media outlets rarely report on the negative correlation of non Asian minorities.
To be clear, I don't at all endorse the idea that Black and Latin representation negatively affects company performance. This is a textbook lesson of "correlation does not imply causation". These disparities are reflective of differences in education outcomes and employment between these groups, not that hiring an otherwise identical Asian is better than an equally qualified Black or Latin candidate.
A thing that scares me in the current environment is that I agree with the idea, but I've seen it fail rather comically.
I think the catch is that diversity of thought itself, tells you nothing. You have to be accepting of different viewpoints. This sounds obvious, of course, but a lot of people seem to be weaponizing their being different as a way to overrule previous thoughts. This isn't diversity of viewpoints, this is replacing viewpoints.
This is most easily seen when a crowd is constantly correcting another. Not seeking to understand. Not adding details. Correcting and admonishing.
To directly answer your question, yes, that phrasing would likely bother me. "Let me know if you have someone that you are convinced could help us." That alone should be good enough. If there is a specific skillset, that is a different matter. (Note, I don't think I'd be bothered to the point of offense.)
If the goal is diversity of thought, why select based on physical characteristics instead of asking question about areas of thought that are underrepresented in the company? If the company has no communists, shouldn't you look for communists instead trying to link that thought pattern with a physical attribute? And does this purported desire for diversity of thought extend to all types of thoughts or just a narrow range? Is an entire rainbow of thought welcome or just some range of shades of purple?
Because the goal of DEI is not to hire based on diversity of thoughts. Else the places in the world where DEI was the dominant philosophy (university professors especially in the humanities) would have the highest diversity of thought. But in reality they are simply echo chambers.
Even though some people would call me that, I've always hated that term/ideology. I wish companies would shift their mindset to, "a candidate that adds to our diversity". E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio so it's more representative of the source population. We haven't done as well with regard to racial and age non-discrimination. As we do better in either of those two categories, the definition of "a candidate that adds to our diversity" will change.
> We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman
This is both true and legal (though I wish it included NBs as well). The more candidates you select from a given demographic, the probability increases that your organization is participating in a discriminatory system. If it makes it more palatable, reword it in your head by tacking on at the end, "... so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination."
> Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman
Studies have shown even women evaluate women more harshly than they evaluate men. Extra justification is warranteed when gender is known or implied and the reviewer is likely to have unconscious bias. That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. (That said, there are a lot of gender implications on many applications, so it can be tough to hide gender completely).
> The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things
Alternatively, guaranteed job placement into one's chosen profession would help everyone indiscriminately. Trying to ban anti-discrimination efforts serves only status quo biases.
> too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high
I agree this is a risk. Surely there are some people who "bring this up" in a bigoted way and are rightfully fired, but I suspect there's a number of people who, with a gentle reframing, can see how their views are problematic and can learn the knowledge gaps that caused them to come to the wrong conclusion. From the company's perspective, they're doing anti-discrimination work, and an employee objection sounds like they're pro-discrimination. It's a bilateral failure to communicate in an at-will employment relationship.
> > We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman
> This is both true and legal
Absolutely not. Using any protected class (race, gender, religion, disability, etc.) in hiring decisions is illegal unless this is a bona fide occupational qualification [1]. You can deliberately hire a Black person to play Frederick Douglass in a move. You cannot deliberately hire or favor someone on the basis of race or gender for software development jobs. This example above is textbook illegal discrimination: "I don't want to select $protected_class_X, it'd be best of the next one was $protected_class_Y". The fact that the previous hire belonged to $protected_class_X does not in any way make it legal to discriminate on the next hire.
Companies do this, but they're breaking the law and hoping they aren't going to be held accountable. And as per TFA, now that they're realizing that people aren't as supportive of racial and gender discrimination as they thought these policies are being rolled back.
> That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor.
Interestingly, all the DEI staff I've encountered have resoundingly shut down calls to anonymize applications. It puzzled me at first until I attended a career fair and recruiters instructed us to mark female URM candidates with two stars, non-URM women and URM men with one star, and Asian men with "ND". Which I later learned stood for "negative diversity". I poked around the onboarding docs recruiters had, and they linked to census data on majority-female and majority-URM names. Recruiters were being given specific percentage quotas for women and URM hires. Of course they don't want anonymization. It all makes sense when you realize DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination.
> E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man
This really struck me as an odd thing to say. You admit that women are overrepresented, and elsewhere in your comment you seem to think that discrimination favoring women is legal. Yet you assume that the overrepresentation of women is evidence that your company isn't discriminatory.
Imagine someone wrote this: "Our company is good at avoiding anti-male discrimination, so we're well above industry average in our men:women ratio." And now imagine that the same person writes that refusing to hire a woman for an internship is legal if the previous intern hire was a woman. Do you think this person's company is non-discriminatory?
The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men [2], so maybe don't assume that your company's overrepresentation of women is because other companies are discriminating against women and yours is non-biased.
The other reason they hate anonymous packets is that whenever that's been implemented by them thinking the result would be more women, the result is a swing towards hiring white men. Because it turned out they were already engaging in discrimination without admitting to it or being aware of it. Word got around and now they know what the outcome would be.
Right. And they're saying it would be best if they weren't accidentally doing that.
> DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination
Why do you think this? All efforts I've seen have been to correct for the discrimination currently occurring in the system.
> You admit that women are overrepresented
I don't. We're still substantially less than 50% of engineering.
> The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men
If this were true, men would be the minority. Women like money just as much as men do, and would leverage that non-existent favoritism to get those high paying jobs.
The fundamental mistake at the root of your argument is the assumption that the demographics of a job should represent the demographics of the total population, as opposed to the demographics of the qualified applicant pool.
> Right. And they're saying it would be best if they weren't accidentally doing that.
"We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman" This is deliberately engaging in discrimination on the basis of gender. The fact that the previous hire was a man does not make it legal to use gender as a factor in hiring the next candidate, this is the gambler's fallacy [1]. I'm truly baffled as to how you think this is preventing discrimination by explicitly voicing preference for a protected class.
Your line of thinking amounts to, "we should intentially discriminate on the basis of gender, so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination."
> Why do you think this? All efforts I've seen have been to correct for the discrimination currently occurring in the system.
Because companies often "correct" for discrimination that doesn't exist. At two of the three tech companies I've worked at, these "corrections" took the form of quotas mandating that 33% and 40% of tech hires be women, respectively. Despite the fact that ~20% of software developers and 10% of electrical engineers are women, and those two fields made up the overwhelming majority tech roles at these companies and women were already above industry average representation. This isn't correcting for discrimination. This is mandating 2-3x overrepresentation of women, this is discrimination. It'd be one thing to anonymize resumes, stripping out names, racially identifying details, and otherwise prevent recruiters and interviewers from knowing the race and gender of applicants. I'd be all for that. But that's the opposite of what DEI strives to do.
And how do you know that women are discriminated against? Do you send mock resumes to your recruiters and notice disparities between men and women? Do you anonymize interviews and notice a disparity? I doubt it. As we'll see, you reach the conclusion that women are discriminated against in a very simplistic way.
> I don't. We're still substantially less than 50% of engineering.
Correct, women make up about 20% of tech workers. Thus, a company that has 40% women in tech roles has an overrepresentation of women. Why are you comparing the demographics of a specific field with the general population? If a hospital institutes a policy that 50% of pediatricians be male, that'd be massively discriminatory against women because they make up well over 50% of pediatricians.
You seem to erroneously believe that equal employment opportunity means each job must strive to match the general population. This is incorrect. The benchmark is the demographics of the workforce, not the general population. Don't just trust me, read the law [2]:
"[Affirmative Action] is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market."
If the workforce for a particular job is 80% women and 20% men and a company has 50% women and 50% men in that role, then that company is going to have a hard time getting Federal contracts because it's probably discriminating against women. Same if the genders were reversed. Equity with respect to the workforce not the general population is what matters.
> If this were true, men would be the minority. Women like money just as much as men do, and would leverage that non-existent favoritism to get those high paying jobs.
Disparity is not evidence of bias. Should the government mandate that women make up 50% of murder convictions? Is this just "correcting" for discrimination? No, that is discrimination. Achieving that quota would involve either convicting innocent women or deliberately letting guilty men go free, because men commit more murder than women. A non-discriminatory justice system doesn't try to achieve a predetermined outcome, it ensures that each defendant is treated equally. Quotas inevitably compromise this equality.
Women make up ~25% of the STEM workforce (software development specifically is a bit lower, around 20%). This directly matches the rate at which they graduate from STEM fields. Which matches the rate at which they say they're interested in STEM in surveys given to high school and middle school [3]. You assume that the only thing that can explain a disparity is bias or discrimination. You totally ignore the fact that women have agency. Sure women like money, but they choose on their own initiative to earn that money in different fields.
Your replies here are excellent in illustrating how DEI is more often than not a dog whistle for gender and racial discrimination. Women are already overrepresented at your company relative to the available workforce ("we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio"), and you've repeatedly insisted that discriminating on the basis of gender is legal. Your justification for this is that women make up less than 50% of tech workers.
But that's not how anti-discrimination law works. The law requires that applicants are discriminated against on the basis of protected class, not achieving equity with respect to the general population. If 80% of the workforce is one gender, then a non-discriminatory company would probably hire about 80% of said gender. Policies designed to push down representation of that group to bring it more in line with the general population isn't correcting for discrimination, it is actively perpetrating illegal discrimination. And that's what DEI is usually about.
DEI is truly division and exclusion. It is a euphemism for new types of discrimination. Hopefully Supreme Court rules on this soon as they did on affirmative action.
You cannot fix the world by implementing new types of bias and discrimination, even if it is being wrapped up and sold as diversity and inclusion or however else it is pitched. This should be unconstitutional and against the Equal Protection Clause in the Constitution period.
We cannot and should not ever judge a book by its cover. We must always focus on merit, ability, and equality first. However, I do think society needs to provide social nets to help people get free education that are not able to afford it if the education has promise to lead to great career opportunities.
From the film Lincoln, 'Euclid's first common notion is this: "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other." That's a rule of mathematical reasoning. It's true because it works; has done and will always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is "self-evident." You see, there it is, even in that two-thousand year old book of mechanical law: it is a self-evident truth of things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to each other. We begin with equality. That's the origin, isn't it? That balance-that's fairness, that's justice.'
We are all homo sapiens and need to be treated fairly, equally. No one should be given structural preferential bias on a public or private level. We have fought so hard for equality in this country, DEI is a step backwards in equality by sanctioning new biases.
How many centuries do you think is an acceptable timeframe to quote people when they want a problem solved? Right now, we're about a century and half out from when Black Americans were first recognized as people, about 3/4 of a century out from when the last slaves were freed, and less than half a century past living in an overt Apartheid state. If you look at the rich and powerful, the vast majority of them started from a position that was simply impossible for POC at the time.
Each generation benefits from the prosperity of the last, giving them a leg up over those without that advantage. Over time, random chance may reduce the resulting advantage to below the noise floor, but how long should those affected be expected to wait?
Or maybe we can try to remedy the situation, now, for the living. Overt diversity initiatives try to solve the problem that someone from a marginalized group is likely to be less qualified than their unmarginalized peers because they've had fewer opportunities to become qualified exactly because of that marginalization. If you don't take corrective action, then you just perpetuate the problem.
So, if you still are opposed to corrective action: How many centuries is enough?
So you can look to the past and present, but don't want to look to the future?
What about the people growing up now who have only ever been discriminated against? What happens to these demographics in 20 or 30 years? We're lucky the backlash is happening now and not then.
Creating more discrimination is never the solution, it just creates more problems.
Implementing new bias initiatives makes the cycle never ending, for all time. We must focus on equality now to prevent preferential bias going forward.
Oof. I bet people are reticent to post any comments here. That's good - it's hard to post about this topic in a way that doesn't detract from the overall tone and quality of HN.
No one wants to post some James Damore screed decrying the longhouse, nor some 2010s style social justice screed.
No matter which side you argue, you'll get a 1,000 very uninteresting comments from uncurious ideologues doing their duty to defend The Good Truth. I don't like to talk to these partisan soldiers, but rather, curious scouts having fun exploring ideas. Maybe that's because I have the privilege to not take these ideas so personally, or maybe I'm a brave hero speaking out against the HR scolds.
Blegh. It's all so tired. Mom and dad arguing in the other room, about things which are surely much more important than my gameboy, but which nevertheless seem much less interesting to me.
By the time I post, others will have gotten here sooner. We'll see if my pessimism is justified. I'm gonna close my laptop, since clearly I'm procrastinating instead of finishing that keylogging article I'm supposed to be writing. I'll write it at home. I miss my babies.
IMO some topics can't be meaningfully discussed between a group of largely anonymous people, especially when the existence of... hostile interlocutors is always present. There are people I know offline who I'd avoid discussing these topics with, never mind millions of people I've never met, who's body language I can't see, and who's sincerity I can't identify.
As you said, it's tiring, and there are other things to talk about online that don't inevitably lead to the worst possible outcomes.
A personal noise filter does not address the problem of instigators. The problem is not that you don't like what they say, the problem is what they say to everyone else and what effect that has.
> No one wants to post some James Damore screed decrying the longhouse . . . .
Did you read what he actually wrote, instead of just the whines of Googlers and the journalists who amplified them? I ignored the whole thing for a long time, but when I finally read it word for word out of curiosity well after the shitstorm, I thought it was one of the most reasonable and blatantly obvious things I had ever read.
Not only was it well written, it was sourced with actual research. The initial public leak stripped that out to try and make it sound less reasonable, it took a bit before the original was released publicly.
Also people forget that he posted it privately to an internal review group, looking for feedback before submitting it, and that internal group was the one that leaked it.
I did, but being familiar with the space helped identify all of the areas where the reasonable sounding prose was hiding shoddy reasoning in service of old tropes.
Here’s a long but useful read if you haven’t looked at the studies commonly cited before:
The section on overlapping bell curves is disappointing.
> if you pull out a random man and a random woman, you have about a 77% chance the man will be taller
> you’d have about a 2% advantage over sheer random chance if you bet on the man to be more invested in achieving
I have no doubt that math is correct, but that's not the point. A small difference in the means becomes a big difference at the tails. And Google does select for the tail.
There are a few sex-linked neuroscience differences linked to innate rather than learned behavior, but they tend to be very low-level skills which aren’t directly linked to high level tasks, much less performance at a job which requires many high-level skills. A slight difference in, say, verbal versus spatial memory doesn’t tell you who’s a better programmer, and in studies it’s consistently been found that top performers mix a variety of skills.
Google employs on the order of 140k people and it’s unlikely that more than a few of those are so dependent on one of those narrow skills that it would dominate hiring, much less that the bias would always run in a single direction.
Literally anything can make "a number" of people claim to be uncomfortable, especially when it involves an examination of discrimination that favors them. I missed nothing, and I award you an F for your non-rebuttal "rebuttal" of what Damore wrote.
Coworkers can get alienated by anything. If someone that looks disfigured makes their colleagues uncomfortable, should they be fired? What about someone that holds a religion that makes their colleagues uncomfortable? Should they be fired?
Firing people because they make you uncomfortable is ridiculous. It's possible to be a grown-up adult and move on with your life if something makes you uncomfortable.
I don't think it would make a difference if he published it on a private blog, and people at work saw it. Cancel culture doesn't differentiate between your work and personal life.
Funny, I suppose, that I'm glad people feel they can post here. While I might legitimately have a couple dogs in this "fight" (using this expression more figuratively than not), I consider myself in the "scout" category. So I'm pleased to read what people feel compelled to write. Thanks - and happy holidays!
Couple of years ago I've excelled at a lead position interview, we've arrived at the part where I get to just spitball questions about their company, team and overall culture.
I just talked about how I think it is important for leaders to have an extra-fine antenna for the psychological well-being of your colleages when in a remote-first environment. The moment I uttered the word "psychological" it triggered the interviewer's DEI-driven buzzword thesaurus and he immediately started talking endlessly about their efforts for "Inclusivity" which of course stands for: if a non-straight, non-white, non-male candidate existed alongside me, they would've of course chosen him/her/... instead of me.
I know that this is what it meant because this were his exact words ;-) (which he confided in me thinking I would see statements like these as a good thing and not a massive red-flag)
Aww, I can't say I'm surprised that this text of mine (an open confession by a major european tech company to have racist employment standards) would be getting down-votes :-)
Or of course that a link criticizing DEI would get flagged on HN. Shocker.
HN Guidelines suggest not going on about down votes btw
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
I agree though it's understandable if a bit sad that this submission gets flag killed. Better to stick to safer tech stuff unless there's a big story I guess!
Personally I don't believe the hype of this "backlash". It smells manufactured.
One great things about the tech industry is that it includes people from many sorts of backgrounds. People from many different countries and many different cultures, especially immigrants. China, India, and eastern Europe are heavily represented, but so are immigrants from other places, and second-generation immigrants.
This is real diversity, and it's wrong to evaluate diversity in a way that ignores this.
I like how this debate never changes. 20 years ago everything I see in the comments was being said about "affirmative action". The only thing that's really changed is the terminology.
affirmative action -> DEI
PC (political correctness) -> "woke"
Can't wait to see what the language for the next iteration of this looks like, because I doubt the debate itself is going away anytime soon.
1990s-era affirmative action in the US was purely a decision made by company management and HR when hiring though, wasn’t it? That is, it wasn’t something that involved the average employee. So much of the frustration about DEI that I have seen on HN and elsewhere, is about all employees having to attend boring meetings or events.
I support merit based DEI. What worries me is that for "diversity" candidates, the hiring bar is usually set low (at least in my company). And nobody is brave enough to talk about the consequences of these decisions. Have lost lucrative projects due to poor delivery, team mates having to do additional work to cover for the lapses, overall team performance pulled down leading to variable compensation impact, etc.
One other observation. Some of these "diversity" candidates seem to have found a way to leverage this DEI 'movement' to advance their careers (at the risk of generalizing, but I'm only talking about extreme cases here). They put in a maybe 2 years of mediocre work, while spending an inordinate time on LinkedIn on relentless self-promotion to build up their profile for their next DEI entry point into another tech company on the DEI virtue signalling bandwagon.
The thing is the hiring bar is never explicitly lowered, but during any such DEI initiative hiring the HR leaders championing the program would informally send wink, wink messages while explicitly saying at public meetings that bar can not and will not be lowered.
> It means you prioritize hiring diverse candidates over regular candidates, but without lowering your hiring bar.
This is still illegal. You cannot, outside of bona fide occupational qualification [1], prioritize the hiring any any protected class (race, gender, religion, etc.) over another.
Also, care to explain the criteria for "diverse"? Answer that question and swap out "diverse" in the sentence above with your answer. Then read it aloud, and ask yourself if that's something that's legal. There's a reason why companies hide behind euphemisms like "diverse".
That never happens. Once you accept the belief that you need fewer "white" men, discrimination and bar lowering always follows. Recruiters are given monetary incentives to discriminate and they find many ways to do it what claiming that they aren't. I've seen it first hand.
If you have enough passing candidates that you can do additional filtering on irrelevant reasons, that means your hiring bar is lower than it could be.
Also, since when is being "diverse" a property of an individual rather than a group?
Gp is making no such assumption of motives. Lots of people actively peddle scams while believing in the product. For a less controversial example, MLMs.
The fact that you’re trying to read the tea leaves on gp’s post rather than discuss them correctly calling out the DEI corporate scam tells all you need to know about the bad faith of this discussion.
What tea leaves? I took GP’s comment at face value that DEI proponents are cynics. I don’t share your belief that DEI is corporate scam.
I am sure some execs institute DEI exclusively to generate goodwill with no belief in it as a program. Most do it without deep thought because everyone else is. Still others truly believe diversity is valuable, and they are doing the best they know how.
To me, that doesn’t equate to corporate scam. To me, it is misguided at worst.
Since we aren’t mind readers and we don’t know what’s in their hearts, assuming DEI proponents are all bad faith actors is itself cynical. Much as it is cynical to assume I am arguing in bad faith.
We may disagree, but that doesn’t mean I am trolling you. I don’t assume you are trolling me.
One thing that's irked me about Tech DEI is that it overwhelmingly benefitting non-URM women, while I really only see the justifications for benefitting racial minorities on Dei grounds.
The justifications for benefitting underrepresented racial minorities seem way, way stronger than gender. Black and Latin students are less likely to go to college, while women are more likely to go to college than men. Some try to justify affirmative action for women in tech on the grounds of ameliorating the pay gap, but that too has reversed and now favors women. The idea that favoring women over men is justified to the same degree as favoring disadvantaged ethnic minorities seems absurd to me.
I'd be way more motivated to spend time mentoring or otherwise helping aspiring high school and college students from underprivileged backgrounds. But instead effectively all of the "DEI" I've seen has been preferences for well off White and Asian women, rather than people coming from underprivileged backgrounds
I want to be clear I don't fault or resent non-URM women. Many (most?) agree that diversity initiatives ought to be focused on ethnic disparities. These women also had no agency over these policies, they are institutions by leadership, often over the objections of the supposed beneficiaries.
This is sadly a reality that is difficult to talk about.
I would even go further and say that we have a tendency to benefit the "least" minority of the minority.
Hiring a black or Hispanic or women from MIT is from my perspectives not really what this work should be about. Those outliers already have enough opportunity, but tend to be the one benefiting from most efforts. I would love to see deeper investment like 3 or 4 year before college in more at risk communities.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a Latin Stanford graduate, from a wealthy two parent household. I'm sure there were some people who escaped genuine poverty among my classmates, but for the most part anyone at Stanford is privileged regardless of background.
I find that companies only care about improving their annual diversity report pie chart, and have adopted a cynical attitude along the lines of "the diverse talent pool is limited so we need to make sure we get more of them than our competitors". Nobody is actually trying to get more underprivileged people into tech as a whole.
A company instituting a DEI initiative where employees take one day a week mentoring students at a less affluent high school would do way more good than a percentage quota. The former actually makes the world have more software developers of underrepresented backgrounds. The latter just increase the share of "diverse" devs at that particular company, doesn't actually shift the needle in the industry as a whole.
Underrepresented Racial Minority. Basically Black, Latin, or Native American. The last is a bit hand-wavy because there's huge rates of intermarriage in Native families, and many ethnically identify as white.
Ideally I'd prefer if there was some mechanism to actually examine people's backgrounds. I'm Latin myself, but had educated parents, went to a top 10 school, and basically not disadvantaged in any way. But aggregate disparities do exist and I see reason to take action on them.
The pipeline problem in "tech" is absolutely massive. Most DEI efforts inside existing firms are doing very little if anything to address this while introducing toxic and prejudiced attitudes of their own, so that part of the 'backlash' is quite understandable. But denying altogether that a problem exists is not.
Sure. That's a perfectly legit criticism. It's not, however, an excuse for the terrible way things have been done.
If you want to fix a problem, you fix the original cause. You do not come along at the very end and adjust the values to where you think they should be.
The problem of DEI is that it creates an environment of what psychologists refer to as 'Secondary Gain'
Secondary Gain
In psychoanalytic theory, the advantage derived from a neurosis in addition to the primary gain of relief from anxiety or internal conflict. Advantages may include extra attention, sympathy, avoidance of work, and domination of others. Such gains are secondary in that they are derived from others’ reactions to the neurosis instead of from causal factors. They often prolong the neurosis and create resistance to therapy. Also called advantage by illness.
I don't quite understand the anger that DEI gets, unless people assume that people are only hired because they belong to a certain group. I'm not US based, so I only see that "safe for UK" view of what $Company blast over to us.
Musk and Thiel see the world in very specific ways. Because they are who they are, and the people that surround them, they will not change their view unless something drastic happens. They simply don't have to, because they are rich enough to weather any storm that requires anyone else to change tack. They have opinion gravity, where anything they say will become true, because people with the same opinions will gravitate towards them (see Taylor Swift & Kanye)
Don't get me wrong, there are parts of DEI that grate my balls: the performative celebration, the "days of action" and the tedious celebrations where we pretend that we've not got a problem with women in the workplace.
However, applying a bit of data to change a few procedures so that we get a better more diverse set of people joining and thriving, is fucking great. Done properly, most people wont notice.
It's not a US thing. If you think it is, you're just not being told about it by the news sources you read. Just a few days ago the head of a large UK insurance company stated directly to Parliament that she insisted on personally reviewing any attempt to hire a "non diverse" person, whilst "diverse" (i.e. non male British) could be hired more easily.
This is by far not the only such example in British life.
So this type of discrimination is rampant and out in the open. If you only read the Guardian you may not be aware of it.
q141 actually makes a fair bit of sense, as its a insurance company who are the generally masters of hiring Henno who went to a good school, not Terry who's talented.
Moreover, its not "we directly discriminate" its "I question to make sure that the procedure is followed". Which is different.
Bear in mind, this is for rich senior insurance execs, who have a fucktonne of money to take people to court, you're sure as shit going to be sure that the policies they are talking about are going to be water fucking tight. Also, as its insurance, there are about 5 women who are that senior, so the CEO is going to be doing a lot of asking if the procedure is being followed.
IMO, an approach to DEI that would be both ethical and effective in meeting its objectives would include the following: primary school initiatives to get young girls and minorities interested in STEM topics, secondary school initiatives to encourage the same to choose (and prepare them for) a STEM major in college, corporate recruiting initiatives to broaden the pool of applicants beyond the typical target schools, employee support initiatives to give them the tools they need to succeed and advance in their careers. It has to start early.
Instead we get quotas for college admission, hiring, and promotion. Then, when the quotas aren't met because the candidate pools are way too small, we tell admissions officers and hiring managers to "stop putting up white males". Like everything else in corporate America, it just becomes a metric to be gamed.
If a young woman was interested in STEM and saw your comment it would be a reason for them not to go into STEM. That is bad. It pushes someone away from what they might be interested in.
Typically people just compare the relative rates of men and women in STEM, but years ago I saw some graphs that used absolute numbers instead of relative numbers. It tells a very different story than the typical one: Up until the 80s (give or take a decade, I don't remember exactly when the inflection happened), men and women were graduating in STEM fields at around the same rate, and both increasing. After the inflection point, women graduates kept increasing at the exact same rate as before, but men skyrocketed.
Women aren't being pushed out, men flocked to these fields.
So a woman is going to see a comment along the lines of "just let people study whatever they're interested in, don't try to socially engineer arbitrary outcomes" and that's going to dissuade them from going into STEM? I don't really see the cause and effect here.
Things that are considered normal in society like women not being interested in it and engineering are self reinforcing. I don't know of any studies that indicate they shouldn't be doing those jobs, just that they are more likely not too. This robs women of higher paying stem jobs and society of more people to do those jobs.
>> Things that are considered normal in society like women not being interested in
it and engineering are self reinforcing.
I'm sorry, but I guess can't follow your logic at all. I haven't used the word normal anywhere. To me it seems you find it normal that everyone should be thrilled to become an engineer. Women themself at large find it more normal to choose other professions when they have an option.
>> I don't know of any studies that indicate they shouldn't be doing those jobs
Me neither. Still if they would exist, they would be about women as group and not about what a single woman can do.
>> This robs women of higher paying stem jobs and society of more people to do those jobs.
Believe it or not some people (men or women) care more about what they do then how much money they make doing it.
The idea that society influences women not to go into STEM is not at all clear. It's essentially just assuming that any disparity must be due to social influence. The reality is that larger male participation in STEM is universal across a wide variety of societies. There isn't a single country in the world where women make up more than 55% of STEM workers, while the vast majority of countries have fewer than 30% of women in STEM [1]. When a trend is present across rich and poor societies, conservative and liberal societies, religious and secular societies, it's pretty hard to say social influence is the cause.
Interesting that different society’s have such different levels of female participation in stem. I’d view that as evidence that society heavily influences these gender participation rates.
This is not at all what is described in the article. They don't have different levels of participation in STEM. Nearly every single country in the world has a majority male STEM participation. Most fall within a relatively tight band between 15 and 35%.
Do you have a substantive criticisms of the paper? Or will you just proclaim that it's questionable without any elaboration?
The possible ranges of representation are from 0% to 100%, but almost all fall within a band of 20%. This is a pretty tight band. Proportionality between the lowest and highest isn't that relevant. A range from 10-20% is still a wider band than 1% to 5%, even though the latter has a bigger proportional difference from the lowest to the highest data point.
More importantly, there are zero examples of countries with 85%, 80%, or 75% women in STEM. But there's plenty of examples of countries with men of those levels of representation. If it were culturally or socially determined, we'd should see women's representation in that range among some societies.
Basically, that response just used a different metric for gender equality instead of GGGI and the negative correlation between gender equality and women's representation in STEM was less pronounced using the alternative metric for equality. Also, the response you linked did not account for women's overall higher rate of attending postsecondary education (and they try to argue that this is somehow a good thing). Stoet and Geary normalized for disparate rates of college attendance, which makes it more useful for exploring men's and women's relative interest in STEM.
My point, though, is still reinforced by your linked study. There is no wide variance in gender representation in STEM. Nearly all countries fall within a band 20% wide (figure 1, page 3). Women's lower interest in STEM is indeed universal. The "wide variation" is from 1/5th to 1/3rd of STEM graduates. Not nothing, but by no means enough to suggest that the disparities in STEM are driven by culture to any significant degree.
> DEI [ensures] a firm or company attracts a diverse pool of talent, hires and promotes people without bias, and fosters positive working environments so all individuals can thrive.
What an incredibly biased take by the author, who clearly has not worked at one of these companies and seen DEI in action. Having actually worked at big tech companies with DEI initiatives, there have been many instances when we have had to lower the hiring bar to meet diversity requirements.
What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit, and in times of layoffs, is often not targeted over engineering functions due to politics and PR. The whole DEI profession feels like a grift on top of the hard work of those that actually drove a company to success.
This is not to say a company shouldn't consider the diversity of users when building a product, UX, etc, but it's absurd when you're hiring a backend engineer and your team has to meet some vague diversity quota.
That quote is not only biased, the "without bias" part is strictly wrong. Treating people differently based solely on their race or gender is a core part of most DEI programs. Just because the proponents think it's "good" discrimination or bias, doesn't give those words the opposite meaning.
> Having actually worked at big tech companies with DEI initiatives, there have been many instances when we have had to lower the hiring bar to meet diversity requirements.
Since we are throwing random samples of 1 on the internet, having been involved into some of those initiative at a large big tech company : Not lowering the bar was pretty much always top of mind, and we always made sure to be fair to ALL candidate.
Most of the initiative where around reaching a larger pool of candidate (for example reaching out to more school than we use too) and also addressing what looked to us like information deficiencies : Someone in an IVY league school for example just by osmosis will absorb a lot of the what/why/how companies look for in an employee and therefore can better show the required characteristics.
Every generation of engineer always feels like the engineer after them are somewhat the consequence of lowering the bar... We used to think this when we started recruiting outside of ivy league, then we started lowering the importance of formal education at all ettc... etc...
You would be amazed at the difference good interview preps makes to someone who was never exposed to it.
> What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit
From experience, those type of feeling are usually a consequence of lack of information and exposure of what actually goes on in the meetings. You mentioned you worked at the companies with those initiative, but i am not sure how many time you have actually been involved in the design of those programs.
Tech jobs in large tech companies is very competitive job. Everything is always framed as a competitive advantage and can sometime wrap one's perceptions. Companies spend a bunch of moneys on all kind of weird stuff.
And finally let me be clear, i am a software engineer myself. I do believe that pretty much anything HR does that's not purely the day to day of employee is a grift. Hell the bigger the companies, the more grift around : from management "training" that somewhat requires fancy restaurant. Team building exercise that somewhat require a bunch of very introverted engineer to go to a concert non of them are interested in etc... etc...
DEI is not different, yes grifter gonna grift and some people are just in it for themselve.
So can DEI be better/ more efficient : yes, is there a lot of virtue signaling and fakeness around yes, are we somewhat lowering the bar because we like having diverse people around NO, and for having witness the difference that those program can be in the lives of young and new people in the industry... i think they worth keeping around even if a better more pragmatic form.
I think this will add context to the discussion. Below are the recently leaked internal Red Hat guidelines.
RED HAT ALLYSHIP COMMANDMENTS
1. Openly acknowledges PRIVILEGE and SYSTEMIC racism exist in trauma
2. Never questions the REALITY of our BLACK friends and colleagues
3. Rejects the idea that race is political
4. Accepts that WHITE people are responsible for dismantling racism
5. Only WHITE people are racist
6. Knows the BLACK community owes us nothing in this work
7. Requires acknowledgment and repair of inevitable MISTAKES
8. Is never rooted in WHITE SAVIORISM
9. Sees the black community as a group of individuals and not a MONOLITH
10. Does NOT seek recognition or praise for a job well done
> a grift on top of the hard work of those that actually drove a company to success
Where does the profits and dividends sent off to the idle class aristocracy fit into this constellation? Your resentment seems to mostly be that some dufferent people might be at the workplace.
I am fine with different competent people at the workplace. I am frustrated with having to forcibly hire a no-hire candidate to meet a diversity quota.
I am annoyed by the fact that DEI is not targeted by layoffs but ostensibly contribute less to the company than engineering. I find it ridiculous that no one can criticize these initiatives without being labeled racist and fired by HR.
I am a straight white male and for 22 years of career I have never, not once, received profits and dividends as a working programmer.
Do with that info what you will.
My resentment stems from the fact that I have witnessed people being hired with 3x more lenient interviews and end up doing 5-10% of what I do while being paid 80-90% of the money. Of course I will resent that. Every working person would be resentful of that.
I feel like you should take some responsibility for your own resentment rather than passively saying another party has "fostered" it.
I'm not a fan of corporate and especially tech DEI initiatives either, I don't think they're an effective way to achieve their stated goals. But the hiring bar thing just does not match my experience at all. Some of the worst teams I've been on have been behind some of the most grueling & "selective" interview processes and some of the best teams have had lax ones. Given how poor we are at actually predicting who is going to be a good coworker we might as well allow some other backgrounds in.
> Some of the worst teams I've been on have been behind some of the most grueling & "selective" interview processes
By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether. But for every team I've worked at, hiring bars clearly worked. We filter out maybe 95% of candidates and none of them would work for our team. Everyone on our team is incredible at what they do.
When I had to lower the hiring bar, it was destructive. We hired a person that was inexperienced and could not keep up with the rest of us. They did not have the domain knowledge others on our team had. They were eager, friendly, and personable, but they required a longer period of extensive coaching get up to a level we would consider adequate.
> They were eager, friendly, and personable, but they required a longer period of extensive coaching get up to a level we would consider adequate.
Did they end up being productive, and hopefully worth the effort?
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As a data point I'm ok when hiring new people with less-than-desired level of experience (within reason ;>), as long as their general attitude and willingness to learn are solid.
Those last two mean they'll get the hang of things given some appropriate guidance, so it works out ok.
> By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether.
I don't think the parent comment is negating the need to hiring bars. IMO two important points :
1 - DEI and hiring bars are not opposed to one another. Actually well designed DEI program are meant to make sure the hiring bar are free of un neccesasary blockers.
2 - I think that mostly what the parent comment was trying to say, "hiring bars" is a nebulous term thrown around. Every team "saying/thinking" they have ha hiring bar doesn't mean that there actually have one. Just rejecting 99% percent of the candidate doesn't imply a good hiring bar... since you might selecting the bottom 1%...
As a guy in Eastern European who has worked 99% of the time in the EU market, I am very happy that I have almost never seen any DEI actions in person.
But the very few times that I did it left a very bitter taste; that otherwise well-sounding initiative was hijacked to hire much less capable people who were commanding almost the same salary as mine or the other team members' while doing barely 10% of the work (vetted via code output and team discussion collaboration; nobody knew what that person was doing, even his direct supervisor who was also their coach buddy).
And it was doubly strange because the company actively went out of its way to look for these people, easily spending times more on hiring even single such person as compared to, you know, posting on several reputable job boards and filtering resumes.
I suspect it was investor pressure. Or the CEO getting a "life-changing experience" after watching a few videos.
Oh and you know what happened to those forced hires? Months later the CTO and two other seniors said "it's me or them" and had their resignation ready on the same day.
Turns out business interests do override some nebulous diversity targets after all. Take a guess who actually left / was fired? Exercise for the reader.
Diversity is good for business. You want people from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking.
But we have had a problem in tech of hiring only people like we already have, whether it be age, attitude, or race. At the same time, the DEI initiatives went too far. I am ok with racial targets that try to bring the company numbers closer to the local geography, but not the national statistics. We also have to be mindful that the qualified candidate pool may not yet allow us to reach parity. We should also be investing in the pipeline much earlier so that the qualified candidate pool has parity with the local geography.
The DEI effort we saw was an over reaction to our self created self similar selection bias. The pendulum is swinging back now, but we should not throw everything away. Maybe we can think about it like we do our software... rapid cycles of iteration and learning
It's not clear to me that it is either good or bad for business. Why is this stated as a matter of fact. And please spare me links to studies funded by special interest groups.
> You want people from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking.
Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?
Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)
If you are hiring the first 5 employees of a company you started, I think DEI will be the last thing on your mind. So why does DEI suddenly become so important 50+ employees later?
In the most broadest sense, along all the dimensions. Including both what bad DEI is talking about and what you are talking asking about.
> If you are hiring the first 5 employees of a company you started, I think DEI will be the last thing on your mind.
100%, as for when, always part of the culture so it never needs to be top of mind. I think it likely sufficient to root out bigots, zealots, and those who discriminate. At some point the scale does grow large enough that you need people who's job is to help standardize and facilitate the process. The bad DEI did not do this well, I've seen it done really well personally.
> It's not clear to me that it is either good or bad for business. Why is this stated as a matter of fact. And please spare me links to studies funded by special interest groups.
Not the poster and going to try to read the last sentence with positive intent.
You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public. The design of products come from the vantage of who is designing them. Historically this has been products designed by men and made for men. From male crash test dummies, to PPE, and even medical treatments. The designers were not looking to exclude women in these cases, everyone simply has blind spots or things that they don't consider, leading to worse/less safe products.
Going back to tech. How many demographic text boxes are designed by people who are not accustomed to long surnames? Security/Admin controls by someone who has never been in an abusive relationship? UX that is unusable by anyone with a disability, or simply not accustomed to technology.
If you don't care about these groups using your product effectively, then it's likely fine for business. Heck, many companies don't see a problem and conclude that their customers are "wrong" or "dumb" when features are left unused or bugs are reported.
> Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?
Everyone is different but I statistically have more in common with a white male 21-35 than any other group (even if he played team sports). Could a particular person be a deeply different 25 year old white man born in Thailand, deeply poor, and raised Jewish? I suppose, but we're all doing heuristics out there. So we use the heuristics that are both good proxies to determine "diversity of thoughts and experiences" and are easy to know.
We all know that a leetcode question, or a system design interview, or a take home project isn't a perfect show of someone's technical skills, why should heuristics around diversity be any different?
> Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)
It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that. You ask most people on the street and few will say they judge people beyond their character/actions/intelligence/whatever. But we know that isn't true, people aren't that logical and detached.
It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us. Let's even ignore gender/race. I know many engineers that view front end code as "beneath them" and "not real software engineering". Are they really going to view me as a hardworking, intelligent engineer if that's what I'm doing?
Heck, am I a hard working, intelligent engineer if I focus some of my time on DEI initiatives? What if I can't invert a B-tree? What if I still got hired, what would you think of me?
> So we use the heuristics that are both good proxies to determine "diversity of thoughts and experiences" and are easy to know.
Who is "we"? I personally define "different background" very similarly to your parent poster, and anecdotally 90% of all people I chatted on the topic (several dozen) do so as well.
So don't act like you represent some bigger group. I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
So let's stop normalizing a thought process that shouldn't even be called that. Would be a good start.
> It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that.
It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
I'm confused why this was focused on so much. I guess "people that use DEI for hiring". Or when I was speaking of heuristics generally that could be "hiring managers in general".
> So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
There are an infinite number of factors that go into a person and there will always be something missed with whatever way we slice it. "common-sensical" criteria in that world will end up as a wishy washy "we hire those with diverse opinions and backgrounds". But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
> I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity. It can be lobbed at literally any position one takes.
> It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
You're blowing by that I was responding to
"Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person"
If we're talking about company culture now, then we're talking about something different.
> Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
The comment I was responding to spoke generally so I spoke generally. I applied it to both tech and nontech with examples though.
> It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
OK. That is true. And? Your point being?
> But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Yes, that happens very often. What's the problem? Are you really having the goal of being able to get inside any company out there and tell them you know better who's a better fit for their specific team? If not, what's your angle / point / goal?
> Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
Sounds like you're looking what to be outraged at, I am saying this genuinely and apologies if it comes across as blunt but I am old enough to stop caring about sugar-coating stuff.
Point me at the exact problem in your quote above and tell me what you want changed?
> Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity.
Indeed, I am not at all curious about what do privileged people are looking to feel guilty about this week. (And yes you and I are privileged, there are no two ways about it.)
It is not your fault that a potential next John von Neumann happened to be born in Bangladesh and only used his wits to steal fruit and bread so as not to starve, for his entire life, and never managed to get educated enough to rise above such life circumstances. You can't be everywhere. Hell, you can't even be at 0.00001% of places. Let go and stop looking for injustices. If anything, our world is 99.9% injustice, if one bothers to look carefully enough just for a few months of their entire life spans.
> You're blowing by that I was responding to
OK, then I didn't understand your point there, which is the case for most of your comment anyway.
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In general, I found your entire original comment super puzzling. It sounded like you are looking for problems where there might be none or they are impossible to fix (yet). OK, women are different and have different lives than you and me... and?
Yes people out there discriminate black people. I'd like that to stop as well. What are you doing to stop it, exactly? Surely you realize talking on a very niche forum like HN isn't going to achieve that, right?
Modern DEI got warped into an unrecognizable mess and nowadays it's mostly weaponized against white males by trying to play on their guilt (kill me if I know where does that guilt even comes from...) in order to gain convenient shortcuts to lucrative positions.
As such, I am neither impressed by modern DEI, nor do I support it. When its proponents chase away the leeches I'll be one of the first people to get on the line to donate and try to help. Until then, I'll just shake my head in disgust at what DEI has become.
I'm going to drop the inline quotes and respond more holistically.
I think you're pigeon-holing me a bit into a spot where you view me taking a moral stance with no external logic. Eg. I am a well meaning but ultimately naive savior-person that wants to create fairness and this doesn't help the company, the product, or the team. I feel like I'm becoming a projection for frustrations you have with those on a moral crusade.
I disagree that there is no logic to DEI. Specifically the idealized version of DEI, not whatever implementation company A has. I think a diverse team creates better products. I think diversity around gender/racial lines are stronger indicators of diverse experience than a wishy-washy "diversity of thought" angle that I see going around.
I also assert that, honestly, from a practical standpoint race/gender selection is easier to select for than most other forms of diversity. We use inexact tools as a heuristic for technical ability (leetcode, take home project, system design, CS fundamentals, etc), why would diversity be any different?
I assert that our interview tools and processes are inexact and consistently leave talented people off the table due to biases. The reality is if I have 10 candidates for a CRUD position I assert I could pick a name out of a hat and they'd be able to do the job most of the time. I think people pretend they can determine person A is 10% better of a developer than person B in an interview when they really can't. The reality is you could have probably picked B and it wouldn't have been a noticeable change once on the job. I think seeing these "successes" lead people to think they are better at interviews than they really are.
DEI to me is understanding the hiring process has bias + blindspots and taking the gamble that selecting in a differently biased way gets me better odds of getting that "Bangladeshi John von Neumann". And even if it's not a home run like that, that there is still an overall benefit to the added diversity to the team vs taking the person that did 10% better on our leetcode question.
Bangladeshi John von Neumann is probably going to be discriminated against by DEI policies because Asians are overrepresented is most tech companies. When I attended a career fair at Dropbox, Asian male applicants were marked with "ND" on their resumes. I later found out this stood for "negative diversity". Asian males are even worse than white males in the DEI policies used by most of the companies I've worked at.
The thing that most people don't like to talk about is, at many tech companies Black, Latin, and white people are underrepresented in tech roles. The only race that is overrepresented is Asians. And if the goal is equity, you can connect the dots.
I can't speak to specific implementations of DEI or Dropbox but if my engineering department was 95% Chinese American males, I would say it isn't a diverse team. The targets should be company dependent. The whole point is to select from candidate pools that your company isn't typically pulling from (due to bias whether in employee selection, type of interview, etc)
I don't really care what the idealized DEI policy is. I care about what companies actually put into practice. If companies submitted test resumes that were similar besides details identifying race and gender, and a disparity was noticed then I would be totally supportive of rectifying that bias. I'd similarly be totally supportive of anonymizing resumes, turning videos off in Zoom interviews and masking voices. But that's the total opposite of every DEI policy I've encountered. The problem is that a non-discriminatory recruiting system does produce an equitable outcome, but it's equitable with respect to the workforce not the general population. And if other companies in the field are engaging in hiring preferences, non-discriminatory recruitment will actually yield less because the diverse talent is siphoned off to those less scrupulous companies.
In the real world, I've consistently seen DEI policies that call for X% URM engineers and Y% women engineers. And these figures for X and Y were substantially higher than the percentage of URM and women in the software development workforce (at Dropbox the gender target was 33% women in spring of 2019). This led recruiters to be much more selective when hiring white and especially Asian men. It didn't eliminate bias, it incentivized bias for the desirable races and genders. We didn't expand our candidate pools, we contracted them. We stopped interviewing non-URM men from boot camps any only advanced URM and women from bootcamps. We did the same with non-engineering majors. Women and URM men who majored in a non-tech field but practiced programming on the side were interviewed, men in the same situation were not.
Pretty much every attempt to make a company more "equitable" that I've witnessed has followed the same arc. Leadership assures people this isn't discrimination, it's just broadening candidate pools. They send recruiters to Grace Hopper, HBUs, etc. But this doesn't yield any change, because there's no untapped pool of women and URM engineers. Then the company sets quotas (under euphemisms like "inclusion targets", "diversity goals", etc.) and turns a blind eye to discrimination.
The whole reason why we use euphemisms like "DEI" is because nobody wants to discuss these phenomenons in concrete terms. We use euphemisms like "diverse" because we'd cringe if we just explained our policies in plain English terms (and it'd land us in lawsuits). If DEI really was about anonymizing applications, trying to identify and eliminate biases, and preventing discrimination then I'd be all for it. But that's to polar opposite of what DEI really is.
> You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public.
I have background as an engineer in consumer products in SV for 10+ years
Indeed the elephant in the room is that the people designing these products often have little in common with people using them (outside of the Bay Area anyway) Financial status, affluent, well educated immigrants from China, India, etc.
I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard.
> It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us.
I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself.
It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
> I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard.
I don't understand DEI initiatives enough to agree or disagree. The poster I was responding to seemed to be speaking of diversity in general so that was what I was intending to address.
> I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself.
It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
I view diversity in general as shifting biases, not eliminating them. It's just not possible to eliminate them.
We already know that certain groups are underrepresented based on historical selection criteria so we're going in with the assumption that they are capable of doing the job but are not given the opportunity.
To make it less open to misunderstanding I'll just use self-taught software engineer as an example. We can all imagine there is a 100x engineer that is self taught. But due to hiring practices (requires college degree, requires unrelated computer science fundamentals, etc) is never hired and given a chance to reach their potential.
Maybe we're not quite sure how to evaluate self taught engineers like we are with engineers that take a more traditional path, it's likely they work and learn differently. All we know is some part of our process is selecting them out.
I view the idealized vision of DEI sort of in those ways. We know there are some set of biases that are leading certain groups to be underrepresented in tech. We also know that our interview process isn't some grand objective measure of engineer competence.
DEI to me is accepting the existence of biases. While you try to address the ones you can, you cannot eliminate them all so you design processes with assumptions of bias.
I don't pretend to know what companies do specifically in their DEI to shift those weights. But let me pretend my company gives everyone score on 100 point scale. Now I'll shift to a genuinely controversial case.
The info I have:
A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.
But if I think they both can do the job reasonably well, is it right to tip the scales? Do I think my company can benefit from underrepresented people in tech? Is there some bias that caused her to get the lower score in the first place such that she is the better engineer? Etc etc.
> A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.
It is funny that all the biggest and most successful companies in the USA became such, before there was something like DEI. Or if you look at foreign successful companies which are basically monoliths in regards to DEI.
Success isn't binary, I'd argue many could have been more successful.
NASA was doing some good work for years before Katherine Johnson came along. Heck, I'm sure people at the time would say that NASA would accept anyone that was hardworking and intelligent. Would NASA have collapsed without her? Likely not, but it was made better because of her involvement. You don't know what you miss out on by not accepting people.
She was given the opportunity to show that she was good at the job. The reason she wasn't given this opportunity earlier was because of her skin color. Others that were not given this opportunity due to their skin color are lost to time.
DEI is not good in principle. It rests on the ultimate conspiracy theory that any deviation from an "ideal" composition of a team or company must be the result of some active discrimination. It doesn't really bother proving this huge assumption before prescribing heavy-handed, costly and humiliating countermeasures. It rarely bothers justifying the "ideal" composition, either.
There IS discrimination in the workplace. The only good way to fight discrimination is to fight discrimination. Find it, prove it and target it. "There are too few women in tech" is as good a proof of discrimination as "There are too few woman in beick laying".
You are describing an implementation, one that is common, at least in the myth. I have not experienced this myth personally. I dislike your take as much as the ones from overzealous activists the have permeated HR.
Both sides need to chill their tone and rhetoric. DEI done right starts by ceasing the demonization of the other side and coming together to talk like adults and find common ground.
This is absolutely not a myth. I have been personally directed by recruiters to discriminate on the he basis of race and gender. And two of the three companies I've worked at set explicit quotas on the basis of gender.
While there are companies where DEI isn't a dog whistle for racial and gender discrimination, they're the minority in my experience.
What I've seen and hate in recent years is HR taking control of pipeline and interview panels so that individual interviewers or hiring managers don't see all applicants or interview feedback. They don't want teams recruiting from their network or discussing openly.
This basically results in a lot of mediocre "diverse" candidates, and many hiring objections being ignored or not shared with others.
It’s ironic, because my teams typically were the most diverse when you look at their economic backgrounds, graduating from state schools, older people, veterans, etc. - while other teams I worked with were very frequently monocultures of young attractive people from good schools and backgrounds. But somehow skin color makes things “diverse“.
Here's the problem: you can't change the hiring rules for more equity unless it applies to everyone equally. Otherwise you're just trading one arbitrary class for another. You need to basically destroy seniority and job protection for all, to make it fair. Furthermore, the people brought into replace the oppressive class must be held to a high standard so they don't repeat the offending behavior.
DEI agendas can only work if the displaced people (i.e. white males), see a genuinely better alternative rising in its place and are not asked to pay the price for their skin color and gender for their entire lives. I suspect white males would be far more accepting of DEI if it wasn't a lifetime penalty they felt they had to struggle against, but just a few years.
DEI is a way to say you did something, without doing the expensive thing that is really required, which is extensive wealth redistribution.
Fixing labor laws, minimum wages, parental leave, cash or securing good housing, etc is way more expensive. And a lot of it is not solvable in a timeline of a few decades, it would be a slow multi generational change.
It's not really fair to call it a backlash when the pendulum is swinging from far in the field of racism/sexism/ism land back towards the normalcy of the center with an emphasis on equality rather than the thinly veiled isms of equity.
DEI as a philosophy is fundamentally flawed. Its whole premise is alleviating racism in the workplace, yet its practical effect is giving certain races a favorable edge in the hiring process, independent of merit. Is this not in itself inherently racist?
I raised this with colleagues on a few separate ocassions and was promptly shunned, yet they didn't have an answer. Most recently when he hired an engineer from one of these "favorable races" even when half of the interview panel recommended a no-hire.
Yes. It's assuming that the non-white person is in some way incompetent or lesser than (soft bigotry of low expectations) and needs a boost from the feigned-benevolence of the white man (or opportunistic "person of color").
FWIW, I'm mixed-race (white/black) and was mouth-agape at how this got as far as it did the past few years.
I don’t think it assumes that the candidate is in any way not as qualified. It assumes the candidate is not as likely to get hired because of bias in the hiring process.
If the pool of candidates doesn't itself have the race or sex proportions that you're hoping to hire, then you intrinsically have to lower your standards at least for the underrepresented group.
Then you end up with a wider range of quality levels among the underrepresented group (because you had to scrape deeper in the barrel to fill your quota, and the overrepresented group ends up being in the higher quality band (because scooping the cream off the top filled the quota).
This has the really perverse effect of creating a true observation (in the context of your organization) that the average quality of the underrepresented group is lower than the average quality of the overrepresented group. e.g. the asian men you hired are all the cream of the crop and the black women you hired are everything from the cream to the dregs.
I suppose you could artificially hire lower quality overrepresented groups to correct for this, but then you're really setting yourself up to be outcompeted by companies that only hire the highest quality employees they can.
"If the pool of candidates doesn't itself have the race or sex proportions that you're hoping to hire, then you intrinsically have to lower your standards at least for the underrepresented group."
This is uninteresting thinking. If the pool doesn't have enough qualified candidates, you expand the pool. That requires more effort. That's good effort that should be taken. It's lazy to do otherwise.
But you can't unilaterally expand the pool. You can't force people to do jobs they don't want to do. At least not outside of forced labor (this is part of why Israel has above average women in STEM, since their conscription forces women to gain technical experience in the military). Some suggest that underrepresented demographics should be attracted with higher wages. But that's illegal, you can't pay people differently for the same job.
And how does that change the demographics of the applicant pool? If I get 80 men and 20 women applying, and I send my recruiters to twice as many colleges I'll probably get 160 men and 40 women. The proportional representation is unchanged. You can get more applicants, but you're drawing from the same pool that's 80% men and 20% women. I could direct my recruiters to exclusively advance women to the interview stage, but that's illegal.
There are a few universities where there are above average proportions in STEM fields like MIT and Harvey Mudd. But these are few and far between, and their graduates have heavy competition for offers. There aren't enough graduates to meaningfully make a dent in representation. Furthermore, these universities have big gender disparities in admissions rates - over two to one [1] - so directing recruitment at these universities is still achieving "better" representation through discrimination, just indirect discrimination.
> I don’t think it assumes that the candidate is in any way not as qualified. It assumes the candidate is not as likely to get hired because of bias in the hiring process.
That's the sneaky part. There's an assumed "bias," but it's rarely rooted in fact or backed by statistical evidence and more of a religious statement. At best, it's admission of a guilty conscience [1].
Most DEI work I've seen at my company was in reducing HR complaints from women, LGBT and different ethnic groups. When it comes to hiring, it was in showing up at recruiting events and other areas to encourage people to apply.
I've done interviews and I think they're more fair/merit-based than other places. I view it as a positive. Also barely any minority applicants.
A lot of DEI was to counterract really annoying people on one side who were very racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. and ruin the environment or opportunities for people. I think this is just the pendulum swinging the other direction where some people are very vocal or unfair in dealing with men, white people, republican, etc. and/or creating an unproductive work environment getting mired in politics.
Also recession creates more economic pressure for results, but I honestly think DEI has barely had an impact in most companies and most revenue loss is hiring consultats or bad hires.
And at two of the three companies I've worked at, diversity initiatives came in the form of explicit discrimination. Both instituted explicit percentage quotas, and at Dropbox we straight up reserved a segment of our headcount for women and URM candidates. Ostensibly, these quotas were for both URM of any gender, and women of any race. In practice, nearly 100% of people benefitting from these policies were non-URM women.
So at least in my experience, DEI == affirmative action for white and Asian women.
Yes, hiring a no-hire engineer to meet DEI quotas is completely unacceptable, but who is going to risk their job to suggest that? A culture of fear has been created around speaking out against stuff like this.
Your coworkers probably agree with you, but conversations critical of DEI efforts in the workplace are radioactive as HR will come down on you for being racist or whatever.
Thus, the DEI bubble in any corporation is completely insulated from checks and balances or internal critical feedback.
> yet its practical effect is giving certain races a favorable edge in the hiring process, independent of merit. Is this not in itself inherently racist?
yes, which is why that kind of thing is illegal in the UK.
Proper DEI is about creating a decent pipeline of people, that includes outreach, or having training programmes for non-traditional juniors.
And, if done properly, its a great way to lower your wage bill, as you hire people at more junior levels and keep them longer. (you need to job hop to get good wage increases.) But that requires a commitment to develop your own team. (regardless of who they are)
It's not illegal in the UK. Go read the Equality Act again. You're allowed to engage in racist and sexist discrimination if you're doing it to achieve affirmative action. That's why executives can say they discriminate against men in parliamentary testimony and nothing happens.
Specifically outlaws having a policy of lowering the bar. You can only choose one protected character over another if they are equally qualified.
Specifically the guidance that comes with this says that its legally unwise to do anything past pipeline stage, once you have reached interviewing, its a bad idea. Its certainly something I'm not going to do.
Now, in the uk we do not have "affirmative action" thats an americanism. We do not need to import american racism issues, we have enough of our own.
I have worked in IT long enough, and recruited enough people to know that the people who complain about the "bar" generally are never privy to the actual data.
Actions outside of parliamentary testimony are not protected .. but these have to be seperately observed | evidenced as the testimony cannot be used to convict.
It's illegal in the US too, but by giving it a special name and playing on peoples' guilt it slipped under the radar for decades. It's a bit of a relief to finally see so many people saying what I've seen for most of my life.
> Its whole premise is alleviating racism in the workplace
No, as a non american living in the US i find american obsession with race fascinating.
DEI is about every characteristic on which human can differ and how those difference play a role in the work place. Race is of course a factor , but so are neuro divergence, language, culture, gender and sexuality. Hell even things like "Don't schedule a meeting before 9 AM" is a form of inclusion for the non morning people.
> yet its practical effect is giving certain races a favorable edge in the hiring process, independent of merit.
Then that's a badly designed program. However the other side of the equation, if there some aspect of the workplace ( such as say every important meeting are at 8 AM) are needlessly preventing certain people of expressing their talent... we should also look into it.
> Most recently when he hired an engineer from one of these "favorable races" even when half of the interview panel recommended a no-hire.
Yeah sounds like a problem. Maybe look into the statistics to see if usually those type of candidate would have been rejected.
> However the other side of the equation, if there some aspect of the workplace ( such as say every important meeting are at 8 AM) are needlessly preventing certain people of expressing their talent... we should also look into it.
This is a disingeuous point of comparison, because this is a behavior that can easily be corrected. Just set an alarm clock like everyone else. On the other hand, I cannot correct the fact that I am from a non-minority background. How is it in any way fair for me to be disadvantaged in the hiring process for something I cannot control?
> Maybe look into the statistics to see if usually those type of candidate would have been rejected.
This sounds like a question asked in bad faith. Rather than analyzing hiring outcomes by background, does it not make a lot more sense to analyze hiring decisions based on interview performance, totally independent of race/language/gender/etc.
If this data is then correlated against race, and hiring decisions are provably equitable across races, then great! But anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case.
> This is a disingeuous point of comparison, because this is a behavior that can easily be corrected.
As someone commented bellow, that's incorrect. Modern sleep science seems to indicate that people have different circadian rhythm, which correlate with different energy and alertness level at different time of the days. Sure it's easy to set an alarm at 8 AM, but it's not easy to be at 100 % for some people at that time. I think there is even a movement to make school start later to combat those effects.
> How is it in any way fair for me to be disadvantaged in the hiring process for something I cannot control?
I can't pretend to understand your experience on DIE but at the risk of repeating myself... this is not what DIE is about... you don't get browny point because your are a minority or get point taken away because you not a minority. It's about providing the best condition for EVERYONE to express their best potential and then select the best one.
> This sounds like a question asked in bad faith. Rather than analyzing hiring outcomes by background, does it not make a lot more sense to analyze hiring decisions based on interview performance, totally independent of race/language/gender/etc.
I do not follow your reasoning here. You mentioned that you witnessed "ONE" case where a candidate was accepted despite having "HALF" of the reviewers no hire decision.
Where i work, those case go to deliberation and usually we would have the candidate come back for a second round of interview, or even depending on the seniority level send him to specialist reviewer. Generally, those case are a result of miss-calibration of the interview loop : like for example having an experience network/kernel specialist ending up in a generalist loop designed for entry level.
I do not know how things work in your company : You are making the case that one experience is an example of DEI gone bad... My point is that if you want to make that point, a statistical analysis of similar case is the only way to know for sure. Just saying that someone with so so performance on half reviewer got in is simply not enough...
to strengthen your argument, you can acknowledge that no system we had was doing what you wish
there are magical criteria like culture fit which is inherently discretionary and biased which should be penalized too
DEI as you have experienced isnt a solution for that either
one reality is that companies dont always need most the cognitively/physically qualified person. they need to tap into markets and revenue, companies that have already reached the peak of their primary market gain perspective by having people of backgrounds more in align with markets they aspire to be in. Many large companies are in that position and should be ignoring employee reindeer games about pedigree and performance.
although one most complaint alteration of DEI is just recruiting from different sources that might have more minorities, like different schools, or even creating the pipeline in those schools, where the goal is more talent that happens to perform as well as existing talent, there is a parallel effort where none of that matters if the organization’s expansion into markets simply relies more on familiarity with that market. Do both, I say
but other organizations that are just metoo-ing DEI should absolutely be called out
all organizations that implemented it for arbitrary reasons should be called out
> there are magical criteria like culture fit which is inherently discretionary and biased which should be penalized too
OK, I have been rejected once -- during the interview no less, not via an email after -- because I said I am not into Game of Thrones. Apparently everyone on the team's pass time was chatting about it. They openly told me I don't fit in because I don't like GoT, even though the interview before that was an exhaustive technical one and I passed with 93% score.
Whom should I contact so they get penalized?
You realize these are private companies and they are not accountable to how they achieve their results as long as the means are not illegal, right?
And you do realize suing them over this will take a huge amount of time and money? Money that most working people don't have?
> one reality is that companies dont always need most the cognitively/physically qualified person.
Whose reality is that? I haven't seen it ever. Business makes money by hiring N people with capability X, and not N*5 people with capability X/5. Otherwise business will go broke paying salaries to incapable people. Common sense.
I get that you are saying that you might need people who understand certain markets better and that's practically their only skill but... on a more general premise the statement "you don't always need the most qualified person" is just confusing.
> on a more general premise the statement "you don't always need the most qualified person" is just confusing.
obviously its paradoxical because the person with the only skill that differs from the rest of the entire corporation would be the most qualified person. I tried to qualify that with other ways. I'm glad that we used language to convey a shared understanding, which is the purpose of language.
Regarding how to hold corporations accountable for hiring bias, I never broached that at all. "Culture fit" likely has a limited halflife, where legislatures or labor agencies will just discourage the word and that kind of discretion. labor agencies use their own budget from taxpayers or the state's other revenue sources to bring action to corporations, you should check them out, they might have found the Game of Thrones criteria to be window dressing for a sanctionable form of employment discrimination, that other people have already complained about. So that suggests your reality is either hyperbole or ignorance, easily remediable with accurate guidance.
> anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case.
Ah, and we all know the plural of anecdote is "data". /s Oh wait...
The fact that you said this, suggests to me that you were the odd-person out on a hiring committee, and because the person got hired anyways, you feel like that means all hiring decisions are made on the basis of race. When in reality, you just didn't like the one candidate, and everyone else was fine.
I don't know for sure that this happened, but I've met people who made these cases, and they pretty consistently overvalue their own opinions.
> No, as a non american living in the US i find american obsession with race fascinating.
Especially super weird is the hiring practises of (non-US) businesses OUTSIDE the US who've blindly copied this US DEI stuff without thinking if it even applies.
Several major Australian universities (and some gov departments) practically don't hire white males any more. As several friends already working at these places have complained about in private.
Sometimes forwarding the "new and updated policy" mass emails from HR about it, just to show how insane things have become.
Specially at the same time when we are seeing gender-ratios going the other way. For some reason we are not working hard to aim it squarely to match general population...
I think the idea that it's "fighting radicalism" has always been a ploy. Take a real moment to look at it and it's flawed on almost every level. I believe it's a candy coated "virtue" shell they wrap around their hatred for white people and white culture.
The color wars have been going on for at least 100 years in the US. Just look at the testimony of Manning Johnson. The communists of the 1920s realized that race was the weakest point in the American social fabric and bent a large quantity of resources on that point (and probably still do). If they figured that out then others have too.
1. You assume that giving a certain race a favorable edge is unfair. If the premise of DEI is correct, that the field is tilted against certain races, then having a preference for those races is leveling the playing field, not tilting it in their favor.
2. Perhaps hiring a no-hire was exactly the right thing to do. Perhaps the interviewers were prejudiced against the candidate for reasons other than merit. Of course, I don’t know the exact situation, so I said “potential” flaws.
Very good point. "DEI" as commonly practiced is nothing more than the soft bigotry of low expectations, enshrined as official company policy. The outcomes are pretty much what you'd expect: Divisive, Exclusionary and Inequitable.
This seems to be happening more often on HN. I wish there were a way to vouch for stories that get flagged, like how we can for comments. As it stands, a small group of passionate flaggers can shut down a lot of articles on a topic they want to block.
This is paywalled and archives are not able to get around said paywall. I am unable to view this article.
This is quite an important topic go discuss because the ramifications of its implementation are everywhere. Does anyone have a link handy so that I may read the article?
We had an All Hands once where they actually spent 20+ minutes talking about the Genderbread Cookie, which I found especially egregious. Not that I have a problem with the Genderbread Cookie, but an All Hands is the most expensive meeting a company can host. Why are we learning about sex and gender identity vocabulary in that meeting?
Of course, this all matters a lot less than hiring and promotion processes. I don't work at a larger company, so I don't think I've seen the worst of it. Smaller businesses still have to take what they can get, and if that means the pipeline is mostly Asian men and white men, that's who gets hired.