>This doesn't mean there is a different standard of performance [for less represented groups] ...
...
>We have had a few cases at Tesla where someone in a less represented group was given a job or promoted over more qualified highly represented candidates...
Which is it?
Suppose we're giving out 100 promotions, and have 1000 promo nominations. You review the 1000 noms and find that there are 500 that pass the quality bar because your company is full of awesome people. So now you have to choose which 100 of the 500 to actually promote. You can do this in a number of ways, ranging from uniformly at random to doing a total stack rank and selecting the top 100. Or you can choose to try to correct systemic under-representation in management, which helps the company on a number of axes (including better recruitment of smart people from under-represented groups, providing a statistical bulwark against lawsuits, etc...).
(edit: It's worth keeping in mind that trying to do a full stack rank of your 1000 applications is going to be noisy as hell and an incredible amount of work, as there will be multiple (individually noisy) promo committees working on sub-sets of nominations. So it pays off to have a clear set of standards for promotion to a given level, even if you don't automatically promote everyone who meets that standard.)
So I don't think that the promotion was necessarily done just because those employees are from underrepresented groups and just to hit some company diversity/equality metric, but I wouldn't know for sure
Promotion is never a touchy thing when you set clear expectations for a persons progression - one that is measurable and comparable to their peers.
The individuals then know, directly or indirectly, if they are on the right path, and which one of their peers is ahead or behind. The incentive there is for them to either up their game, or stay where they are.
The only fear there is that the system / process can be gamed; but one almost always never picks the lesser of the two qualified individuals - you risk loosing the more qualified individual and the team no longer has any faith in the “system” and they too will loose respect and move on.
Perhaps I may not have the experience you do, but it’s something I would never stand for - I would love to hear examples of when and such a scenario would play out though as it’s something I may encounter at some point in my career.
you might have a lot of applicants of which maybe 600 got onto the short list (my boss commented if you get on the short list they know you can do the job)
All the systems I’ve ever encountered are horrible: lines of code, hours spent coding, issues closed, bugs created, and so on.
Not all lines of code are equal. Not all hours are equally productive. Not all issues are equally difficult. Not all bugs are equally costly. And so on.
It's not directly measurable, but you know it when you see it. And sometimes that impact is negative.
There is even a igNobel winning publication suggesting that it might be more efficient to promote people at random... https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455
Of course, no employer (that I have ever seen) is that open. We share a common expectation that the people who qualified but were passed over won't be told. Maybe an open ended promise of "next time". All this does is allow the same effects to be diluted to anyone who might have been impacted. So now even those outside the top 100, even those outside the top 500, consider there is a chance they were impacted by such an action. So while the impact is less than telling the person passed over, you now have more people feeling it.
And this does seem to be a damned if you do/damned if you don't, because even if you did create a top 100 ranking and used it to promote, that would be influenced by subconscious biases and other factors based on minority status and people aware of that who didn't get promoted would also be negatively impacted.