Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

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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

Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. To eliminate structural sexism, we must remove hiring criteria that favors men. Let's tell our sourcers that looking for relevant industry experience is not important.

For school I've been told that we should look if they have a degree or not, and not consider which institution. This explicitly considers all colleges the same.

Every point in the post is an actual suggestion made on how to improve diversity. Obviously not all the suggestions have been implemented, but I'm afraid the committee for improving hiring might do just that.

It's awfully easy to make technically-true but misrepresentative statements about this stuff, though.

For example, someone might argue that actively seeking out recent graduates of coding bootcamps when hiring for junior positions will help find a more diverse set of candidates. And there's truth here: bootcamps tend to have better gender and somewhat-better racial balance than university CS departments or existing tech shops, and bootcamp graduates on average seem to be pretty good (there are selection and maturity and self-motivation effects there which raise quality compared to the typical randomly-chosen bunch os CVs).

But it's technically correct, so long as you don't mind completely misleading connotations, to describe that approach as "to eliminate racism and sexism, hire people who don't have CS degrees and don't have industry experience" and imply it's "lowering the bar".

And anecdotally, when people make claims like the ones in the OP article, my experience is that it's almost always the case that someone is carefully choosing how they describe things in order to be technically truthful while maliciously misrepresenting the situation in a way that suits their personal axe-grinding.

>Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist.

I'm not saying this wasn't said, but I've literally never encountered this before today. Perhaps your company is approaching diversity the wrong way for the wrong reasons.

To the point about the rankings of the colleges, it may matter less than you think. If you look at salary numbers over the lifetime of graduates, the ranking of their undergraduate has only a small effect for STEM majors. If you consider salary to be at least somewhat tethered to performance, this suggests that in the long run, the institution doesn't matter as much as the individual. There's some research around this, but I don't recall the authors at the moment. And, perhaps I'm wrong. I can imagine the differences are greater for recent grads.

Again, if they're all "actual suggestions," that seem strange to me. I never see or hear those suggestions, and they seem to run counter to the way people who are writing thoughtfully about tech diversity approach the issue.

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