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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

And the reverse - did that person get the job because he/she was the most qualified, or because he/she was in a certain class of people?

(And would also make the person who got that job question themself)

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This is literally just a sorting problem. Diversity quotas imply using a candidate's minority status as part of the sorting key, not the only sorting key. You're still picking a highly qualified candidate, not some random dude off the street. Think about it for five seconds, please :(

As soon as you tie a persons bonus money to it, it isn't. You are no longer looking at the highest quality candidates, but the ones that match the minimal qualities. And since race/gender has no impact on performance (my asumption), this is a bad key.

But, as someone that can check the minority checkbox, woo!

Bonuses at a company like Microsoft are typically based on an employee's performance - how well they met their stated goals, etc. Obviously, if a company goal is to have a diverse workforce, whether or not that happens is going to influence the bonuses of the people responsible for it. If this is an unacceptable outcome, you're suggesting that diversity can't be a company goal, period.

Like I've said before, it's a sorting problem - if implementing an algorithm correctly requires sorting some values to the top and some to the middle, you shouldn't get full credit if your implementation doesn't do that.

We're not talking about soviet russia production quotas being exploited here, just about adjusting the way candidates are found and ranked.

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