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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

If your company has a head of diversity, your company is bloated and this person isn't going to fix diversity. I view these strictly as PR positions because I have yet to see anything useful come out of them.

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I've yet to see anything come out of the PR-driven "diversity" push anyway. Call me back when those above the age of 55 can get jobs in Silicon Valley.

The fact you picked 55 instead of 30 says changes have already occurred in the right direction. Hopefully it continues.

That's likely just their age. Doesn't make it evidence of any change.

Ring Ring...

Hello?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9497721

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412284

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086689

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As for whether or not it's easier or harder than being young, who knows. Isn't being younger an advantage in getting almost any job?

Upvoted because these are great reads. Generally being younger is an advantage, but in how many trades does having more experience make you less desirable?

I've noticed that being over 55 makes getting a new job harder for most industries!

Is this conclusion the result of any kind of systematic analysis or just a momentary gut check?

I would be happy even if someone had anecdotes of success stories where these people fundamentally altered the culture of the companies to make them diverse. I have yet to see one success story that isn't some PR piece about the percentage of female engineers going from 15 to 18% (a.k.a they hired two).

Is this because you don't believe that employees have a problem with monocultures? Or because the initiatives they undertake don't address the problem?

Company culture is set by the leadership, if leadership is in the way any effort by the diversity guy is futile. I have never encountered a single one that wasn't a figurehead and several that were a nuisance.

They definitely don't fix the problem. As the sibling comment points out, diversity is a result of tons of factors - office locations, industry sector, compensation packages, pto, work life balance culture; and, most importantly, the diversity of the candidate supply itself (you're delusional if you expect a large deviation from graduation ratios).

It's sort of similar to hiring a "head of profit". Profit, like diversity, is the outcome of the entire company's operations.

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