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Comment by brohoolio | Hacker News Reader

I dislike how affirmative action has a bad reputation. Affirmative action is not about lowering standards. It's about having a diversified candidate pool. Sounds like Twitter wasn't willing to invest the effort to have a diversified pool.

It definitely pays off in the long run, but it takes some effort in the short run. My company sponsors some student groups and encourages engineers to be active in recruiting outside of their circles. It's paid off as we've moved from a monoculture to a company with a workforce that represents our community.

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On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards.

If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit.

But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent, and/or experience necessary for the job. The person was hired not based on merit, but based on some other, unrelated factor.

Hiring based on something other than merit automatically means that standards were lowered, or at best they were merely ignored.

I don't understand this argument, unless you are making an assumption that a company has infinite open positions.

If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit. So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic, and there's a company policy that encourages me to extend five offers to that one-third, I'm still keeping my standards right where they've always been.

In fact, it is precisely because there are more than enough candidates with technical merit that we have other measures like "culture fit".

Are you saying that among those 30 qualified candidates, they're all at exactly the same level of skill/talent/experience, or are otherwise completely interchangeable?

I find that hard to believe, at least for any realistic scenario.

Even if all of those candidates exceed the minimum level of merit required for the job, it's very likely that some will still have more or better skill/talent/experience than the others. There will still be an ordering based purely on merit.

Ignoring this ordering when choosing the 10 successful candidates would be a case of ignoring merit, which would indicate a lowering of standards.

In practice, there just isn't a total ordering among candidates like that. You'll find some who are better at some things than others, but you need a mix of strengths for the team anyway.

And I'm not aware of any company that actually manages to rank all candidates by their exact position relative to other candidates. Interviewers tend to get to say just "hire" / "no-hire", not all candidates talk to the same interviewers, etc.; that loss of information isn't, in practice considered an unacceptable lowering of standards.

So, given that standards have already been lowered in the real world from this ideal, affirmative action is certainly not lowering them any more.

I definitely agree on there not being a total ordering. Part of it for me is the mix of strengths thing. But I noticed two other factors:

One is just the small amount of information gleaned. Last time I hired, I ended up spending ~5 hours with each candidate who made it all the way through. But that's 0.1% of how much time I hope to spend with them, and it's them attempting to put their best foot forward. Any score I might give them would have big error bars.

The other is the extent to which ranking candidates is personal and nearly arbitrary. This time we did blinded reviews of code and it amazed me to see how often each reviewer valued different things. We would eventually converge with discussion, but I don't have a lot of faith that the parallel-universe versions of ourselves would be particularly consistent. And that's without reviewers even knowing the identities of the code writers.

The whole "lowered standards" thing strikes me as built upon a fantasy of clarity that is nothing like my actual experience of hiring.

You're making an assumption here, which is that diversity does not provide value in and of itself. Yet there is ample research that shows that more diverse teams are more creative in problem solving and have better outcomes with tasks that require such creativity. Therefore, picking someone who can't whiteboard quite as well as another guy, but clearly has the skills necessary to do the job and adds diversity, is potentially a net win for the company.

> Yet there is ample research that shows that more diverse teams are more creative in problem solving and have better outcomes with tasks that require such creativity.

Could you point to some of this research? I'd be interested to learn more about research that has been done.

Affirmatibe action means that you take action to diversify your applicant pool. It's back from when you couldn't just apply online.

Not that you hire anyone based on race / etc. you still hire the best candidate.

I forget that the words affirmative action mean something different to a younger generation who mostly have encountered a weird perversion of the original meaning in higher education.

> Affirmative action means that you take action to diversify your applicant pool.

Wikipedia describes it differently:

"Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group [...]. The nature of affirmative action policies varies from region to region. Some [...] use a quota system, whereby a certain percentage of jobs or school vacancies must be reserved for members of a certain group."

Wouldn't using a quota system be lowering the bar?

Using your definition, if I recruit in California, and I expand to begin recruiting in Oregon, then I have diversified my applicant pool. Have I successfully employed affirmative action?

Well, I went to a magnet school that routinely has the discussion around diversity and affirmative action year after year. Certain parts of the county had far more representation than the poorer parts. They diversified by making sure they picked more people from around the county. It did not improve numbers of disadvantaged groups, however.

> you take action to diversify your applicant pool.

Wait I don't understand - how exactly do you do that without letting race influence your hiring decisions?

There are plenty of studies correlating racial and gender diversity with better corporate financial performance, particularly in companies that score high in innovation-seeking behaviors. Whether diversity enables innovation or innovation enables diversity is an open question, but in either case it is statistically striking that diversity-valuing cultures are also performant cultures. Many controlled studies also show that diverse groups are more likely to be better problem-solvers and perform better on tests measuring ethical integrity -- in fact, the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit for combat actually reinforced those findings for gender-mixed combat units.

Whether Twitter needs black engineers to secure its higher-than-average black userbase is, I think, at best dubious (as Gibson tells us, users find their own use for things), but it might want to reconsider its stance as Wall Street begins side-eying its valuation. Meanwhile, as Brian Brackeen of Kairos put it, the unicorns' failure means startups have a lot of potential talent to grab....

> ...the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit...

I'm not sure which study you are talking about, because the USMC has been fighting it for several decades - and conducted many studies to back their position. I wrote a paper on the subject many years ago, it is a very complicated issue - lots of very obvious and undeniable cons, with a few potential pros. One of the funnier cons that I remember was the statistical analysis of female service members' pregnancy rates prior to deployment. For some reason, as soon as deployment time comes up - a great many females find themselves impregnated and unable to go overseas... Apparently the problem is so bad that many commanders don't include females in the total organization count for predeployment planning. Also, the USMC is pretty much the only branch that would benefit from the potential pros - pushing problem-solving and ethics further down the chain of command. I'm guessing that they've done the math and decided that it would still be a net negative.

I was referring to the Integrated Task Force study (which the Corps has yet to release in toto). Though I don't want to litigate the women-in-combat issue here, I'll note that plenty of female Marines (and soldiers) have over the past decade and a half of war operated effectively as light infantry in high OPTEMPO environments; the enemy doesn't care if you're an officer leading an infantry platoon or a logistics convoy. That doesn't means that combat MOSes should become open as a rule, but I'd like to see an analysis of the field effectiveness of units in combat as well as training.

Pregnancy is a stickier issue, and for the Corps is more problematic because they historically have had much higher undeployable numbers than the other services. Unplanned pregnancies are lower than the civilian population for officers and senior noncoms, but are roughly average for junior enlisted when adjusted for socioeconomic factors. Military policies forbidding any access to abortion procedures on-base also makes it harder to terminate unplanned pregnancies and, often when deployed overseas, impossible, which could account for some of the statistical correlation you cite. Actually, if you happen to dig up a citation to that study, I'd love to read it!

Sorry, I've dug through a couple of boxes (like I said, several years ago) and can't find it. I'm pretty sure the pregnancy issue was also covered in a RAND paper, but there were some interesting complications with that specific paper: the study was only included in an early draft... pretty politically charged issue. If you want to look for it, I believe it was written in the mid to late 90s and the final draft was prepared for something going on in Congress.

> ...but I'd like to see an analysis of the field effectiveness of units in combat as well as training.

That would only be an effective analysis if a long term trial were to be conducted, 10 years might be enough. The context of this conversation is kind of funny, because the USMC's success is rooted solidly in homogeneity - the long term impact is the real point of concern.

> ...I'll note that plenty of female Marines (and soldiers) have over the past decade and a half of war operated effectively as light infantry in high OPTEMPO environments...

Not really. I can't really say it without sounding like an asshole, so I won't try :) The infantry experience is very different, and comprised of much more than simply being in a non-permissive environment - not comparable.

> ...the enemy doesn't care if you're an officer leading an infantry platoon or a logistics convoy.

Oh yes they do, it would be totally insane to conduct an attack on an infantry platoon in the same way you would attack a logistics convoy. In 2006 my unit took over a formerly national guard AO, they got direct fire pretty regularly - and so did we for the first few days. After the locals figured out that we weren't national guard, we experienced no more direct fire - just IEDs and mortars. I don't think it is a stretch to say that females would likely be treated differently by the enemy.

> Unplanned pregnancies...

I guess I was too subtle, I wasn't talking about unplanned pregnancy. This sort of behavior is not limited to females of course, I once saw a guy shoot himself in the foot, but the pattern of predeployment medical issues is much clearer with the females.

> There are plenty of studies correlating racial and gender diversity with better corporate financial performance, particularly in companies that score high in innovation-seeking behaviors.

Could you point to some of this research? I'd be interested to learn more about research that has been done.

Well unfortunately the implementation of AA is frequently to lower admission standards. This is extremely commonplace at universities. Then there's the flip side -- too many qualified candidates of a particular race (see, Asians in California universities) and said candidates are turned away. Is it any wonder AA gets a bad rap?

I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of everymen, then you wouldn't need to compel companies to act - through law or otherwise.

The market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.

>The market is remarkably inefficient.

Then why aren't you exploiting this?

Because I don't have the startup costs to start a successful Twitter-competitor sitting in my pocket?

You're doing it wrong, that isn't how you displace a market leader - you invent a new market. The barrier to entry isn't that high in tech, unless your pocket contains a fist full of lint and buttons - you do have enough capital.

Yep. Just like if you found out that probability didn't work, go to Vagas and exploit it.

This is one of those "econ 101 in a vacuum" scenarios that I find entirely tiresome. Look at this graph:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

I'm pretty sure that capitalism wasn't invented in 1970. Was the market totally malfunctioning before 1970, when women were excluded from a variety of professions? Or was there possibly, maybe, potentially some sort of relevant factor outside the banal bounds of commerce?

There are more things, Horatio, etc, etc.

You could just as easily use your own argument to say that the inclusion of women in a variety of professions demonstrates the validity of "econ 101 in a vacuum". This is a different issue though, less to do with market efficiency than social pressure.

We don't have lots of women doctors now because it suddenly became more profitable to hire them in the past couple of decades. Market forces aren't going to magically make hiring practices less discriminatory. We need to make an actual effort.

You could only use my argument that way if you had some justification for what happened in 1970, and why the market failed to sort things out for millennia. My claim is that what happened was "vocal proponents [...] with a strong smell of moral superiority" made it happen in basically the same way that women finally got the vote. That is to say, market efficiency is a relatively weak and gradual force, not something that proves that all current social structures are perfectly optimal.

I definitely prefer a multicultural circle of friends --it's interesting, as they say.

But... does it provide a competitive advantage? Are industries in places like China, India, Japan and Korea at a disadvantage compared to the US because they are more or less monocultural?

Yes they are at a disadvantage at providing services that cater to the entire world.

Which is why Chinese and Japanese sites for example have struggled to extend beyond their own borders.

Well as far as sites go, I think the biggest disadvantage is not focusing on English first rather than the local language.

But then there's companies like Nintendo and Sony that are globally successful in spite of their lack of diversity.

> Nintendo

Most of Nintendo's failings in the past can actually be traced to where they refused to innovate simply because they followed the Japanese business culture too strictly (where, if your boss tells you to do something, you do it. Otherwise, you don't. And so on). If they had a diversity of ideas, they would likely not be in so much trouble right now.

I am not defending AA, the racial/gender/whichever thing; I'm not talking about that right now. This is simply about the diversity of ideas.

Sony has a massive number of employees on every continent.

We'll have to see. China, Japan, Korea and India have world leading companies, world beating companies. They compare very well to more diverse countries like Mexico, Brazil, etc. [Japan and Korea are rather small compared to Brazil and Mexico]

This is separate from the question of providing fair and gainful employment for everyone --I think that's a goal as a society we should strive for _even if_ it puts us at a disadvantage. My question was more geared toward questioning the received wisdom.

One obvious advantage for companies operating in a homogenous society is they don't face the challenges in hiring a diverse workforce.

I'm curious, what do you think of the opposing goal of eliminating the need for all employment through automation?

Asians, according to this article[1], represent 29% of Twitter's workforce overall and 34% of its technical workforce, despite being only 4% of the US population, while whites are significantly under-represented at 59% and 58% of their overall and technical workforce. Twitter's candidate pool is plenty diverse already.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...

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