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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't understand why any corporation would spend money on anything other than chasing the absolute best candidates, regardless of race, gender or anything other than their excellence with respect to their positions.

Every minute spent caring about diversity is a minute not spent caring about excellence; every dollar spent chasing diversity is a dollar not spent chasing excellence. Hire the best candidates, no matter who they are.

I don't care about someone's race or gender, so long as he is the best possible candidate for the position. And if he's not, why would I want him?

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I don't understand this either. It's not up to companies to "be the change they want to see in the world". To me, this behavior is nothing but a ploy. No successful company invests money to get the second, third, fourth, etc best return possible.

If anything, it's an insult to the minorities; they only hire them because they are a minority and they fill the minority quota, not necessarily because of their ability.

But what if some of the best candidates aren't getting hired because the system that created the applicant pool is skewed/biased and leads to under-representation of talented candidates?

Isn't it be perfectly reasonable for a company to try to correct that bias in order to ensure they're hiring the best people?

It would be great if gender/race/age bias didn't exist in hiring, but there's a lot of evidence that it does. The good diversity programs acknowledge the problem and aim to fix it in order to get the best talent.

Blind hiring tests can be done.

Oddly enough there is no drive for it.

Curious, that.

Because it's harder to do and people think they're better at judging candidates with more info than they actually are.

Not very curious, that.

I agree with the second proposition but don't see why it should be harder to accomplish. It appears to be largely a matter of requesting some information through a channel that does not permit nonessential observation, like a Turing Test or rather the original Victorian game, a reversed Imitation Game.

"But what if some of the best candidates aren't getting hired ..."

But what if they are and current racial composition just reflects that?

If there are talented minority coders who are overlooked by Google/Apple, it should be possible to exploit this market inefficiency, no need to enforce it.

But what if some of the best candidates aren't getting hired because companies overlooked them while trying to hire alongside racial quotas? Seems much more likely.

It's that for many jobs good enough is in fact good enough, and then the hiring question turns into a quality-of-life issue. Some people really don't like to sit across from blacks, queers or Trump voters.

At some point companies become large enough that they effectively are society and government. For those in charge to put societal interest as a goal beside shareholder profit is to me a requirement for healthy capitalism.

Diversity is an inherently good thing for a company, because a diversity of views and knowledge allow a company to better understand and work with an equally diverse market. And more than that, it seems like a morally desirable long-term goal; companies should generally reflect the racial makeup of wider society, for example, and if that isn't happening it means that something is broken. Promoting diversity internally can help to solve this issue of a society-wide scale.

> Diversity is an inherently good thing for a company, because a diversity of views and knowledge allow a company to better understand and work with an equally diverse market

Are there any studies that provide supporting evidence for this claim? I see it being thrown around all the time but I never see any data to back it up.

P.S: I'm not trying to dismiss what you're saying, I'm genuinely curious to know if there's any truth to your claim

You won't find any, there isn't any. The basic idea is people from different backgrounds will have different views on things and this is a good thing. The concept itself does make sense, but I can't imagine any type of study actually being possible to back it up.

There's a nice Scientific American article that reviews the literature:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-make...

If that is true, shouldn't companies then not also reflect age of society and hire a bunch of +50 married-with-kids people instead of hipsters fresh out of college?

Yes in fact. Age discrimination is a big problem.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3051030/the-future-of-work/is-27-...

The same issue applies to companies that only hire middle age employees and have a bias against "fresh hipsters" based only on their age.

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