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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including:

A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating

> Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups.

Another stating in part

> And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups.

It also tells us that this wasn't the first time the plaintiff had issues with his manager over this topic. He had the same issues with the previous manager, the previous manager was found by internally by Google to have retaliated against him for his complaints, and Allison Alogna was hired to replace that manager.

[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...

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I don't understand how this didn't raise red flags from legal/HR.

From the article:

> In a statement, Google said [...] it has a "clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles[...]"

You can't have it both ways. You're either based solely on merit, or on merit and how non-male and non-white they are. Which is discrimination.

EDIT: Sorry -- Finding pools in "diverse" areas is fine, but dropping resumes in the bin when they are not "diverse" enough is not.

I hate that "diversity" has been politicized like this and I feel like it's one of the failings of the left's identity politics bent that will come back to bite them.

Getting minorities in your company to win some diversity points is great, but missing the actual benefit to society. The goal should be, for society, to equally encourage minorities to get STEM degrees and jobs so that companies don't have to play this stupid "look how diverse we are!" game.

And it won't happen overnight.

Companies should just hire on merit[1]; be completely blind to their workforce's background. They should enforce this neutrality like they enforce neutrality toward anyone's religion. "I don't care as long as you can do your job". If they are concerned about monoculture, then advertise and advocate in areas that they think will improve that. But just leave hiring to merit.

Eventually diversity will trickle-up. It shouldn't just be up to companies.

EDIT [1]: Yes, merit can be an ambiguous term. And I should have also stated they can hire based on "fit", which is another ambiguous term. But sorry, if your devote beliefs restrict you from using any electronic devices, then no, you aren't getting the web developer job. It's not a good "fit".

Good luck defining and hiring purely on merit. Good luck separating merit from unconscious biases related to where you've seen merit previously. And typically most of what you've seen previously is people like you.

I've seen plenty of excellent computer engineers who started out as physics majors, or astronomers, or music majors...but they were universally white men (mostly because I've only ever been around white men in this business).

If a black woman came to me with a background in East Asian linguistics, would I naturally associate her with the success stories I've seen, or would I think she's unqualified and needs to get more experience elsewhere?

I suspect the latter.

> If a black woman came to me with a background in East Asian linguistics, would I naturally associate her with the success stories I've seen, or would I think she's unqualified and needs to get more experience elsewhere? > I suspect the latter.

Really? And you would not think that of a white candidate?

Frankly, I would be intrigued by anyone with a background in East Asian linguistics who taught themselves programming, and would be very careful not to quickly discount them.

Trying to find a diverse pool is fine. You can recruit at historically black colleges, you can offer benefits like family leave or daycare that might appeal statistically more to women. You can try to show that your organization is not racist and will be welcoming to people of color.

It is fine to try and attract a diverse group of applicants, but after they apply, the basis of hiring should be who is qualified.

Yes, I agree. Perhaps I was not clear that this is what I meant.

Completely agree about missing the actual benefit to society of focusing on better education and opportunities for all. Amazing how quickly things can go off the rails when you start evaluating middle management off some metric like "number of diversity hires" which seems like a good idea but then backfires into something ridiculous like this. I hope this sets a fire under Google's management to keep better track of HR

Problem is that leaving companies open to lawsuits from individuals, organizations like the NAACP, and even from the DoJ.

Whenever the demographics of a company do not match the demographics makeup of society at large, then the company is legally on the defensive. And the fines can be BIG

> You can't have it both ways. You're either based solely on merit, or on merit and how non-male and non-white they are. Which is discrimination.

Actually yes, you can. There are 2 steps in recruiting:

1. Find people who want to apply 2. Have them go through a hiring process to select which one you make an offer

You can seek diversity in step 1 and be completely merit-based on step 2.

If your step 1. is mostly ask your (currently overwhelming white male) engineers for referrals, of course you'll get a bunch of white dudes. You have to find other channels.

Diversity shouldn't be excluding people who happen to be part of the current majority, but enlarging your pool of candidates.

Also, the whole idea of hiring "merit-based" is a bit naive because you're not hiring people on a single objective metric. There are a bunch of metrics, most of them judged subjectively: technical abilities, adaptability, communication abilities, person easy to work with, and the list goes on.

So while Google definitely screwed up by trying to take the easy path to a more diverse workforce, you can seek diversity without excluding white dudes.

Yes -- I missed the "pool of candidates" part. I was assuming based on their defensive posture they were referring to the hiring manager dropping resumes of otherwise qualified individuals.

>You can seek diversity in step 1 and be completely merit-based on step 2.

What are your feelings on blocking all non diverse applications in step one and allowing only diversity candidates to proceed to step 2?

I think the challenge is how to correct for unconscious bias (e.g. the classic NBER finding that "black" names have to send in 150% of the resumes of "white" names to get the same interviews[0]) without over-correcting. When people think they're making objective, merit-based judgements, they are actually being racist, sexist, classist, etc.

So how do you fix this? One way is what you suggested: "companies ... should be completely blind to their workforce's background. This is doable in the interview process; for example a test which results in an offer if passed. (Though normal interview processes are not like this.)

But recruiting is more difficult, because right it involves humans reaching out to other humans who they judge to be a good fit. So being truly merit-based there requires some correction of one's own intuition.

I mean, if recruiters were really instructed to "purge the hiring pool" of non-diverse candidates then that's obviously pretty blatant. But I just wanted to note that being 100% merit-based is not easy.

[0] http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

This definitely changes the tone of things. That's pure discrimination. It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all.

Sounds like someone above the manager is responsible for this and the manager is carrying out orders. You don't get a historic paper trail like that by not being told to continue on.

> It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all.

Both of those are illegal.

Affirmative action is definitely not illegal, regardless of whether it should or shouldn’t be.

Affirmative action literally means the opposite of what you think it means. It means that there will be efforts taken to ensure no discrimination in hiring on the basis of race, sex, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246 etc

How do you know what he thinks it means?

That’s a very selective and intellectually dishonest defense. That was the original law, then extended by Johnson and taken in a different direction altogether by future leadership.

The current Department of Labor on affirmative action [0] clearly paints a very different picture that more accurately reflects the current meaning:

For federal contractors and subcontractors, affirmative action must be taken by covered employers to recruit and advance qualified minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and covered veterans.

And here’s the dictionary entry for “affirmative action:”

efforts to make education and employment available to people who have traditionally been treated unfairly, for example because of their race or sex, by giving them some advantages over people who have traditionally been more powerful

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/affir...

[0]: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/affirmativeact

Not for jobs, but for higher education it is in a few states already. So there is precedent.

> It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all.

Any sufficiently low quota is equivalent to exclusion (ie a quota of 1 is pretty much like a quota of 0, which really means "nobody"). The very notion of quota implies exclusion (of those who are "past the quota").

Another interesting thing there is that it's only L3's, which (it seems) are juniors / new people; you could argue that that too is discriminatory and it enables the "white male" stereotype to remain in leading positions while the "grunt work" is done by underrepresented groups.

My guess it that for more senior roles they do not have the luxury to be so selective.

Apart from the difference between not hiring aspirants and driving away old employees, the metrics of diversity are probably based on pure head count, not on having quotas on important roles (which would also be unlikely to be satisfiable).

Whenever there is a panel discussion, it is always a bunch of dudes.

Yeesh. Documentation of quotas and racial/gender discrimination in hiring. This is as clear-cut as it gets.

Thanks for finding this, this seems different than what the article alleges.

This actually seems more likely, since it lines up with what Google has said previously - that they do not alter the hiring bar for anyone, i.e. that interview/hiring committee is independent, but they do ask recruiters to focus on finding diverse candidates, and they have also said they coach diverse candidates about what to expect from interviews.

I think how this will play out depends on whether this applied to all recruiters in the company/all recruiters filling a set of specific roles, and/or if non-diverse candidates could still apply to Google and get into the funnel.

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