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Comment by throwestawayer | Hacker News Reader

Real question: having seen that many good engineers are hesitant to work at a company with very limited diversity, we have endeavored to increase diversity by hiring qualified junior engineers from less represented groups. Is this acceptable?

These are completely qualified folks, for the job of junior engineer. We purposely, from the category of all qualified junior applicants, hired those that also were from less represented groups.

Is this perceived (by “you”, I suppose) as “acceptable”?

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If they are completely qualified, they should and would be hired by a system that completely ignores gender and race. While the morality of your system is up for debate, what is not up for debate is that your system is mathematically disadvantaged in terms of hiring the best engineers...because your system ignores the vast majority of the hiring pool (presumably white/Indian/east asian [straight?] men). A blind system favors/ignores nobody.

> If they are completely qualified, they should and would be hired by a system that completely ignores gender and race.

I can't believe you were downvoted for expressing that merit rather than race and gender should be use for hiring decisions.

> I can't believe you were downvoted for expressing that merit rather than race and gender should be use for hiring decisions.

This is the new world we unfortunately live in. Words and their meanings are transformed to fit within the ideology ("it isn't discrimination if it favors women over men, or minorities over whites...")...

In your company, how much better merit-wise must a white/asian/male applicant be to get hired? Fifty percent better? My gut-feeling is that these well-intentioned policies don't weed out the upper echelons of the "over-represented" groups anyway - they'll just use position/elite network to get in the door. Instead, the policy weeds out the "working class" applicants who must rely on merit, but who have the wrong skin color.

I have first hand experience with this. As a normal working-class white guy with poor parents and no connections (I worked my way through school), I had a hard time even landing an interview at first. As a social experiment, I changed my name/sex from Joe/male to Joanna/female, kept everything else on my resume the same, and reapplied to all the jobs that didn't want me previously. Every single company that rejected Joe was overjoyed when Joanna applied. In every case I got a email within the week wanting to meet and interview me. It was kind of eye-opening. I didn't follow through as "Joanna" because the sexist hiring policies were enough to put me off working at these companies entirely. I eventually found an employer that wasn't sexist and have been happy with them so far...

A similar thing happened to me, although unintentionally. At a previous job I discovered that I was given an interview because they thought I was black (based on my name). They would have otherwise passed on my resume.

Sorry to hear that...

> We purposely, from the category of all qualified junior applicants, hired those that also were from less represented groups.

IANAL, but from my understanding making hiring decisions based on race, gender or religion is a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But I really don't know what I am talking about and would be interested in hearing a lawyer's opinion.

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