How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

> My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education.

This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity activist" might say something like that, but for a company of any sort of quality to just accept it and implement it, that's unrealistic.

More realistically, what they may have implemented is something like accepting that people without CS degrees from top universities may still be perfectly capable software developers, which is true (being one, I'd like to think so, at least), but if that's the case, the article is grossly misrepresenting it.

This is a strawman that doesn't even attempt a charitable summary of opposing arguments. There is one link to an actual opponent's arguments and it's some random consultant/speaker's blog, not anyone actually being paid to advise on tech hiring diversity.

Here's an attempt at a charitable characterization: Lots of heuristics for quickly evaluating programming skill may inadvertently toss out qualified applicants or give an undeserved boost to unqualified applicants who tick off superficial traits. Instead of leaning so heavily on heuristics that might disproportionately favor white men, let's try to create hiring systems that fairly evaluate people on their merits and give people full opportunity to demonstrate their talents. We should also try to make people aware that humans can make unconsciously-biased decisions based on some deeply-hardwired evolutionary heuristics around race and gender, so they have the awareness and mental tools to recognize when unconscious bias is influencing their decisions.

I'm sorry, but this post seems totally fabricated or at least intentionally misrepresenting what is happening. I spend a lot of time reading about diversity initiatives in tech and I'm trying to set up an initiative where I work. However, I've never heard anyone suggest lowering the bar in the ways listed in this article. The whole thing is constructed as reductio ad absurdum.

For example:

>Stop considering some colleges as better than other colleges because that’s racist

No one says this, because it does not follow. One might say that it is important to recruit outside of the Ivies/Stanford, because you will miss qualified candidates who are otherwise pushed out of the industry despite their talent.

Or:

>Stop looking for people with relevant industry experience because it is sexist

No one says that, ever. I think the original kernel of advice may have been, don't only post listings for people with 15 years of experience. Your crud app doesn't require that, so give someone a little greener a chance.

I could go on, but this post is basically reactionary garbage.

*edit for formatting

I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion, it's simply bad business. What is needed are un-biased assessments and non of these assessments are unbiased. They seem to try to correct the bias meter the most quick fix manner possible. People without skills with only spoil the diversity pool because they will poorly represent. I say this as an African person as well. I would not want this for myself. It's insulting.

I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion, it's simply bad business at some point.

I've actually been given the same advice on HN regarding "not looking for a portfolio" since it excludes women.

I think it's pretty disparaging to say women don't have the time for writing some code outside of work because of childcare commitments (for everyone involved - including the father of the child who's immediately and implicitly branded as off-scene or not pulling his weight).

"Cultural fit" in my experience has been equated to "is this person someone I can see five days a week, 8 hours a day without driving me potty". That seems fairly legitimate to me - and completely inclusive of everyone.

OP is unbelievable.

> I completely agree. I’ve interviewed people from MIT who weren’t familiar with a hash table and the best software developer I’ve worked with never went to college. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, didn’t go to a top CS school. However, it’s still the case that college and experience is an imperfect signal of ability.

In other words: Here's all of these great reasons I've found not to trust someone's schooling as a good indicator of their ability, but I'm going to use it anyway.

OP is what's wrong with tech hiring.

Fascinating. It mostly seems you're company is taking a poor approach to diversity, and doing even worse at communicating and gaining buy-in from existing employees. With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. So perhaps the real issue is that the hiring process allows for "many engineers who are barely competent at their job." And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. But by your own admission, the bar is already low enough to admit false positives so I think you're conflating issues here. On a side note: holding your argument to be true, could the existence of barely competent engineers lead your article to a different title: "How my company is lowering the bar to accommodate privilege." I don't have that data, but could be an interesting followup!

I think I probably guessed which company this is.

But this doesn't smell right. Feels like a real-world version of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM

Some companies will rate applicants in a series of categories. Education and experience are the usual. Lately, "fit" has become extremely important to HR departments. It usually means people with the same culture, race, age, music and sports tastes, etc.

If your company thinks it has a diversity problem, it's probably related to "fit". My suggestion is to continue to filter people out based on education and experience equally and give a boost in the "fit" category to categories of people that are minorities in your company. I think that's perfectly fair to offset internal biases.

EDIT: I get it some people are arguing that, by filtering on education/experience, there won't be any minorities left to be "boosted" in the "fit" category. If it is THAT bad, the company can try to expand who it's reaching out to but I understand that's a bigger problem (e.g. company in SV cannot afford relocation costs and thus has to look for local candidates only will not help with the diversity issue).

Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar."

[points 2,3,4,5,6,7,9]

In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost.

[points 1,8]

edit: and about "open source" contributions; ethnic minorities and women are far more likely to have worked in large corporations rather than in open source or startups, because those companies are held to a higher standard in their behavior towards minorities than the kind of self-assembling social clubs that this article (and site) are focused on.

edit 2: I know (very closely) a woman who has been in IT for 40 years. She was an English major, and has absolutely no involvement with open source. She doesn't know people in startups. Why would someone presume that she doesn't know the job?

The proper way to fix unconscious bias is blind hiring, at least until the final stage. I know a bunch of people with CS degrees in the Unix world and they can't program, I know a bunch of people without them who can.

The only test of skill is a test of skill. Blindly ask them both to make a thing, leave them alone for forty minutes to make it, and see who makes it better.

This article is what happens when you push diversity by fiat and don't extend the initiative beyond recruiting. Even when programs like this are well-intentioned, you can see the extremely destructive fallout: the author and those like him are going to look at all "diverse" employees and think, "You got a free pass. You're not as good as everyone else."

Let's flip all these changes around to show how it's not about "lowering the bar", it's about realizing that a one-size-fits-all "bar" isn't an effective hiring method in the long run.

1. Update your interview scoring methodology to account for non-traditional backgrounds. (Extra points for ethnicity, e.g., are a detrimental hack that shows how your system is broken.)

2. Don't discount candidates because of their degrees. (While a CS degree may be an indicator of qualification, its absence isn't a disqualifier.)

3. Don't discount candidates because of their educational institutions. (While a top college may be an indicator of quality, I'd rather hire the best candidate from a second- or third-tier school than a middling candidate from an Ivy.)

4. Expand your outbound candidate search to non-traditional channels. (See #3.)

5. Don't discount non-traditional industry experience. (A developer outside of the software industry may be just as good.)

6. Don't discount candidates because of their previous employers. (An ex-Googler may rightfully be an impressive candidate, but they also might be a low-performer.)

7. Don't conflate "years of experience" with "experience". (Very often, 15 years of experience is 1 year of experience repeated 15 times. No one has 15 years of experience in Node.js.)

8. Don't discount a lack of "extracurriculars" like OSS, volunteerism, or other factors.

9. Don't rely on referrals. (You can't staff a company entirely with "friends-of-friends".)

All of these statements are focused on broadening your perspective and getting away from statistics. Yes, a Stanford CS major with 15 years of experience at Google and an awesome GitHub profile is probably a good candidate. But a developer from Temple with 8 years of experience in the retail industry may be just as good.

Yes: it will take more effort to find those candidates, and your signal-to-noise ratio may go down, but your reward comes in the form of awesome people you never would have found before. Diversity will be a natural by-product, and a way to measure your progress.

Hiring should be the sum of a "Skill" score and a "Culture Fit" score.

"Diversity" shouldn't be apart of either of these scores. It shouldn't matter what race, religion or color you are.

The author refers to African-Americans as "blacks" numerous times. In my experience, the only people who use that terminology are racists. I can guarantee you the author is a huge fan of "The Bell Curve." This anecdote is clearly troll bait.

Just stop been an asshole, asshole.

Not sure what this author is complaining about? The goal was to achieve diversity and they seemed to have done it by hiring an ex-googler who is female. The author seems to be giving a rant because he had to do more work than calling up his buddy. BTW Temple University is not an HBCU