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Note, this lawsuit is being brought by former Google recruiters who say they were ordered to "purge" certain groups from the interview queue.

> YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.

I'd like to remind people of what Denise Young Smith, who ran HR at Apple, said, before suddenly stepping down after the outrageous repsonse.

> “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.

> “Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”

She's gone now, instantly, after working there for 20 years and rising to senior executive VP. What is going on in our industry?

It’s a purity death spiral. Model diversity as a sacred belief with no central authorities. With no pope of social justice to tamp down on the overzealous all actors ratchet towards increasing absurd signaling behaviours, limited only when the enterprise is outcompeted.

She should file a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination by Apple. The irony would be palpable.

> "She's gone now, instantly, after working there for 20 years and rising to senior executive VP. What is going on in our industry?"

Her crime was not having ideological purity...

What seems to be going on, I think, is largely a one-sided story. There are many people with bullhorns who speak, for whatever reasons, but who seem to go largely unchallenged. Whether that's due to unawareness, lack of critical thought, laziness, or perceived distance (e.g. "I think things are still fine with me; I can't or don't see how this could affect me."), I can't say for certain, but I imagine many people are affected by some combination of them all.

What I can say we do need more of, however, is well-engaged, open and honest discussion. Having leading voices speak your mind can be very good, but central figures can be fallible. A better solution would be to have input from humans in the "silent majority", whatever that might be.

From personal experience after having talked to several colleagues about this in private, all of whom feel this is wrong, the simple reason for why people don't speak or engage in open discourse is fear. And after having seen what happens to the ones that speak up it seems like legitimate fear.

We already do live in that world.

If you 'whiten up' your resume, you're more likely to get callbacks. Even if the company indicates that they're pro-diversity or equal-opportunity [1]. Employees with black-sounding names are in general less likely to receive callbacks even when accounting for economic status and skill level [2]. Depending on your name, you will be perceived as being more violent or lesser in status [3]. For minorities, this sort of thing is what they already and commonly experience.

So while we can claim that diversity hiring and so forth has swung too far in the opposite direction, studies and research in general has shown this to not be the case. I'm skeptical of any lawsuits like this brought against Google and while I don't doubt there are instances of terrible hiring managers going too far I imagine people will use this lawsuit as vindication for why they weren't hired.

[1] http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%...

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

[3] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/5494/black-sound...

So what about making it name-blind?

You still end up with all the biases in the pipeline.

It solves a little bit of the issue. But software development in general has been far from a 100% merit-focused occupation; networking and having people that can get a foot in the door for you is often far more important than your explicit skill level.

That entire process amplifies both unconscious biases and discrepancies of economic status. People without economic means to network, made worse by prejudices and expectations.

You are right, however that is a systemic bias in equal opportunity – not representation.

Foot in the door is a huge step, and it's totally okay for companies to push initiatives that allow more minorities to get their foot in the door / exposure to the company and industry. It's not okay for them to push that agenda in assessment to reach better distribution numbers in representation.

> studies and research in general has shown this to not be the case

Not really. It can still be true that this white/asian discrimination is happening in tech, whereas the listed papers appear to test non-technical job fields. Ideally, racial profiling shouldn't happen anywhere! But be careful in applying those specific findings to the entire field of hiring/jobs.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Some people (especially those from outside the USA) may not know the reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_a_Dream

Sure! Except when left to our own devices to "look beyond the superficial traits of a person", we usually end up hiring people who remind us ourselves.

There is a place for consciously paying attention to race, ethnicity, and gender in that case. (Admittedly, the alleged situation in the headline is too far.)

> Except when left to our own devices to "look beyond the superficial traits of a person", we usually end up hiring people who remind us ourselves.

Speak for yourself. Also, like similarity goes beyond skin color. I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race.

That being said furries are weird.

We're speaking to what a large body of research and hiring practices have borne out. It's a bad idea to assume you are immune from unconcious biases.

https://hbr.org/2017/08/what-the-science-actually-says-about...

Some biases are on the surface and you might be able to avoid them. Others are unconscious and without knowing it exist you can't avoid it. Problem is people think they are not bias when they actually are! Let's try something, for the next 10 person that you meet, try to come up with a reason of why you like or dislike them. And those reasons are just coming justification for your feelings, and it is coming from your unconscious!

> I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race.

Is that unusual freedom from unconscious bias reflected in the history of what engineers you have chosen to interview, made offers to, or subsequently promoted? Everyone thinks they're free from bias, until the empirical results show that the majority of them mathematically must be wrong.

I never made a hiring decision.

From what I've seen, the workforce closely mirrors the demographics of CS and Engineering students enrolled at top universities, i.e. the educated talent pool.

I believe what you describe. I believe there are plenty of people who have the problem you describe--to a significant extent. And of course it's not limited to who you hire, but also who you associate with, and how you treat people. Many people, of all walks of life, act based on their assumptions of others, to some degree.

I'm a scientist. I believe in the power of observation, action, and assessment (further observation). If I perceive that a problem exists, then I: do my due diligence to determine the extent to which it exists (if at all), determine if and how I should solve it, and carry out that determination. I believe there are plenty of people that could use an adjustment, at least for the matter you describe.

But I'm an even bigger believer in priorities. Of investing energy and time--of our one, limited life--towards the goals that I think matter the most. The health of our planet and power inequality, for two. There are just some people for whom any such "adjustment" would only serve to (at best) distract them from other endeavours, where they may be sorely needed. Good people, who do truly good things. At what point do you stop this (re)education? Can we hope for a complete disassociation from our biological tendency to observe and encode patterns? Do we even want that? At some point, the energy expended on a perceived problem may greatly outweigh the returns you get from the investment. Energy that could have been better spent.

Right now, I see much energy--mostly talk--being devoted, in a "shotgun" approach, to this problem and other social problems. I see it talked about in mass-consumed venues, and I see others parroting talking points. But for me, my colleagues, and my friends, it just isn't a problem. I interact with individuals all over the world and we are able to work together toward common goals. And I think that's what matters most.

  > try to understand one another
  > ...
  > arrogance, assumptions, and short-sighted thinking

What happened to trying to understand one another? Or should others only try to understand you, without you trying to understand them? The premise behind affirmative action is that it is needed in the present to correct for other forms of systemic bias that we haven't been able to eliminate yet. Practically all of the people who believe this, whether they do so rightly or wrongly, have color blindness as an eventual goal, just that pretending we're already there will never get us there. If you disagree with the premise, engage with it. Accusing others of arrogance etc. because you haven't tried to understand their POV - it's so well explained so many places that if you had tried you would have succeeded - isn't constructive.

Have there been any experiments that stripped all identifying characteristics from resumes (gender, race, age) including things like name, graduation year, college, etc., and recorded the resulting hiring outcomes? A company as big as google could easily do something like sanitize resumes to ensure impartial hiring.