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You can use this sort of thing as a measuring point; when something like this is overlooked and inconvenient, you can tell they're making statements based on their agenda (the trend in the MSM, which is why you can see public trust dropping in them; they're not all stupid, they know it's not consistent). On the other hand, you've got people that make statements based on principle, and even if you still disagree with them, you feel it would still be nice to hang out with them, like they didn't establish their relationship with you by trying to lie to you through selective truths?

The cost of raising agenda above both principle and truth comes at the cost of a massive amount of people and freedoms, and their pretty statements about caring about any group of people don't hold water. (I'm looking at you SJWs and Aryan Supremacists)

As an Asian male this article also frustrates me. Google has always been a company I've wanted to work for but if this article is true and Google discriminates against Whites and Asians in their hiring process then they're not the dream company I previously believed they were.

I'm here to report to you that unfortunately they are not that company. I hear they used to be everything the nerds dreamed, but as the company grew, the original culture was unable to defend itself.

Go to FaceBook, they still retained hacker spirit, at least for time being. You can meet a lot of previously frustrated Googlers there.

I like Facebook as an engineering organization, and was tempted when I was heavily recruited there. Problem is, many feel Facebook the social media company is making the world a worse place in many different ways, and their leadership had their head in the sand. Otherwise, I'd love to work there.

If you are a $race $gender, Google will hire you. The diverse candidate pool just means you need to work harder on your resume, interviewing skills, etc - since there's more competition.

Oh, and check out their incredibly diverse board of directors: https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/company-officers/GOOG...

/sarcasm

> Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity

As an immigrant who came to the US from a poor Eastern European country just a few years ago I feel the same about being labeled as "white". It blows my mind that for many people a guy of British descent who was born in the US and a woman from Russia who speaks very poor English are both just "white".

Well, it's obviously because as a white slavic person you have never been under oppressive slavery like a wealthy black immigrant from Africa! /s

It's not just between foreign whites and American whites. Take a wealthy, white, highly-educated person from Connecticut, and a dirt-poor, white, high-school dropout from rural W. Virginia.

Both have "white privilege".

And so the poor, under-educated W. Virginian who claws his way up to being a self-educated programmer will be disregarded by Google along with the wealthy Connecticuter.

That simple fact bothers me immensely.

It's because Asian's don't "need" the diversity agenda to help them that they are screwed over by it's policies. You aren't useful to them.

Your last paragraph is an explanation for why "tech" is becoming increasingly under attack by the diversity industry.

As a white Irish guy from New Mexico, this attitude irks me as well. No, I'm not the same as every other white guy out there. (I have far more interesting "gringo" stories than a white guy from Connecticut.)

No one should be judged or labeled by their skin color or ethnicity.

"Hire people not due to the content of their character, but by the gender they identify with and the melanin in their skin" #civilrights2018

Hey, a fellow New Mexican! Don't see too many of those on here. Would love to hear your stories.

As a white Irish guy from New Mexico

But see https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...

No one should be judged or labeled by their skin color or ethnicity

Agreed, and that includes “all X are the same”.

People don’t care about Asian males (and I am one) because they’re the highest earning demographic in the country. In a country where you die if you can’t afford health care, it’s quite reasonable to take the tack that economic challenges are in a different league than dating challenges.

Combatting discrimination isn’t about some platonic abstraction. It’s about money, wealth, jobs, health and criminal justice outcomes.

And when economic concerns are implicated (e.g. advancement into leadership roles), I definitely have seen the media address Asians. E.g. https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202779428743/.

Agreed, and it's a failing of humanity that we lump people together based on their appearances. That ironically includes the people who try and "fix" discrimination.

I would say that only applies to the people who try to fix discrimination by using group-identity-based adjustments. I'd think that attempts to fix discrimination that focus on forming shared identity (replacing the old categories) would not be susceptible to the same problems.

In psychology this is referred to as the common ingroup identity model for reducing intergroup bias. There are indications that the effects achieved are only temporary in nature, and negative outcomes can result from the loss of the overridden identities.

It probably depends on the scale. If you try to form a new in-group identity over a short time in a smallish group against a background that reinforces the existing categories, then I can believe the effects will be temporary. However, if the group is larger, the background identities weakened and de-emphasized, and enough time given, I think it'd work.

My impression is that current "anti-discrimination" attitudes actually reinforce the existing categories, even more strongly and explicitly than had been done before. There's a lot more labeling and "reasoning" through labels going on in places where it seems very counterproductive.

all of what you said is true, and that's why i (asian male) will always run my own business, no matter what the perceived opportunity cost may be, because it's nothing but a mirage.

counting on the white establishment, political right OR political left to give us any kind of a leg up or break is foolish in the extreme. this google episode is a perfect example of why. because we are merely 5% of the US population, we are treated as naive pawns by two sides in a larger game of ideological chess.

i contribute financially to asian-interest causes i deem worthy, but i'm under no illusion of this changing in my lifetime. the american social fabric is configured heavily against us and will be for at least one more generation, likely another 2.

You're conflating issues, and that's fine because you're frustrated. But we are over-represented in tech, and not anywhere else. There are obvious systems-level hiring problems that this company has and they're trying to fix that. It's so strange and selfish to hear "they should not try and fix this".

Well, that's not quite what he's saying. Remember, nobody is even claiming that underrepresented groups are actually applying and getting turned away - the statistics just suggest that they never even show up in the first place. Yet the suggested fixes are always like the ones in the linked article: turn away the people who _do_ show up until some underrepresented people come in to take their place.

google is based in California, which in 1996 passed proposition 209 which essentially ended affirmative action in education.

and how many hispanics, women or blacks do you see in movies or tv?

google is multi-national company with billions of users so it makes sense that they value having people of different skin colors and gender.

with a more diverse workforce maybe things like this[0] would not happen

[0]https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865

Given this (correct) understanding of what "diversity" really means in American culture, why do you think it is that Asian-Americans overwhelmingly vote for pro-diversity policies?

As he says, because they do get screwed in all the other sectors. They do happen to be in the "privileged majority" only in tech, so there they see redressing as a negative, but only there (or rather, here).

The ideal answer is not to completely drop any diversity effort, but on one side (the "revolutionaries") to recognise where they turn into zealotry, and on the other ("the entrenched", of any type) to accept they might have to lose something to gain something.

There's a time dependency in some of this. What "diversity" is, even from a purely left-wing perspective, has changed a lot within my lifetime. I was born in 1978, and when I was growing up, the left-wing diversity perspective focused on "race blindness", MLK's dream about his children being measured by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin, and that sort of thing. Now... well... I know a lot of you on HN are very, very leftist; how does that sound to you now? I'm serious about that question. I'd guess a lot of you, if you were careful and thought about it, would have a hard time answering that question, because it isn't a "right wing" perspective, but it certainly isn't a left-wing perspective any more, which now focuses intensely on looking at people by their identity groups, to a degree that (very, very much no sarcasm here) greatly exceeds anything like the KKK, who merely looked at your race, rather than race, gender, disability status, and all the rest of the intersectional categories. The idea that anyone can be race-blind is seriously heterodox stuff now; grounds to get one instantly accused of not just racism, but subconscious racism.

There's a lot of people still operating under the assumption that the older meanings of the terms are in use, because most people have better things to do than to stay up-to-date on this sort of stuff when they've got lives to lead and their own problems, not to mention the fact that there's some deliberate obfuscation that tends to go on.

There's a very easy answer to your question. It's the understanding that bias/implicit bias exists and needs to be overcome.

The MLK quote is such a red herring. It's a nice statement, but what one guy said 50 years ago doesn't define a culture or society.

This "You were born into implicit bias/racism" shtick sounds an awful lot like religion's "You were born into original sin" shtick. The fix is almost identical too: give us money, attention, and spread the word, or else you're extra double-plus ungood and we'll shame you harder.

So you deny that implicit bias exists? Implicit bias has shown to affect areas as dry as medicine to scientific research, yet racial bias is somehow made up?

My objection, at least, is that I think for both of jerf's eras, the intended end state is still a race-blind society. And it seems perverse to map out a course to that goal that explicitly requires us to be conscious of race.

So you think it is possible to condition people to look at another person and have them never consciously or unconsciously understand them to be white, black, asian, or any other race?

No, and I don't think that's what's sought.

I think what we're looking for is that it's just another attribute, no different from whether the person has blue or green or brown eyes, or what style shoes they're wearing.

In a conversation with my boss the other day, a newly-hired AWS engineer came up. I've met him just once, and helped him get situated because his desk is near my team. I realized that although I'd interacted with him to that degree, I had absolutely no recollection of what his race was (describing him was a logical part of that conversation). I think this is what's sought.

"The MLK quote is such a red herring. It's a nice statement, but what one guy said 50 years ago doesn't define a culture or society."

You misunderstand my point entirely. I am not "advocating" for that position today. Nor am I not advocating for it. I am staying neutral on the "ought" in this series of posts.

I am saying that when I was 10, that was the "left-wing" position. Many people still think it is, because they don't keep up with all this stuff. As you are rather handily demonstrating, it is not today. (I was a bit concerned when I mentioned it that people would just be contrary and deny the patently obvious fact that it is no longer an acceptable left-wing position, but now I don't have to worry about that.)

I will also say that the prickliness you've been programmed to fire back with, as evidenced by the rest of your thread, is a non-trivial part of the problem. You've been left unable to understand what anyone is actually saying, instead of what you think they are saying, as evidenced by your reaction to what I wrote. You may prove me wrong by replying to this without bulldoggedly arguing about whether implicit bias exists. Should you succeed I promise to acknowledge that.

Race-blindness was never the left-wing position, unless your definition of left wing is maybe the feel-good commentary of prominent elected moderate Democrats, who had to appeal to the majority rural white populists. I don't think many or any prominent minority civil rights leaders led on any sort of color blindness platform.

In fact, the 70's and 80's were all about embracing blackness.

If i were prickly, i'd be making insinuations about you personally.

Initially, I said you failed. But that's a bit harsh. You succeeded in the letter, but failed at the spirit.

because the alternative is to vote for an overwhelmingly pro-white party.

Thanks for sharing this. I hadn’t heard this specific perspective before.

Yep. Two former world powers each making up 20% of the world , India and China, are grouped together as "Asian" in the US

Be So Good They Can't Ignore You.

> Be So Good They Can't Ignore You.

That's pretty much the story of Asian Americans (and Jewish Americans, for that matter).

>I've always looked up to tech because it's a realm where we Asians are judged by our skill level and output

Do you think model minority or "Asians are good at math/science" stereotypes have any impact here?

You are entirely correct that despite immigrants being the largest source of diversity in tech, all diversity and inclusion programs in tech misclassify immigrants into US demographic categories from the EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [2] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs.

For instance all of the following are categorized as white Americans; my German colleague, my French colleague of Iranian descent, my Iranian colleague, my white american colleague from Colorado, and my Iraqi colleague.

Silicon Valley recruits outliers from around the world. Applying US demographics to an industry where ⅔ [1] of the workers are immigrants does not make sense.

[1] https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2018.pdf

[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...

Iranians are considered white?!

Yes, according to my Iranian colleagues.

Many of them consider themselves white. Actually, some Kurds are beyond white:

https://aliozturk.deviantart.com/art/Kurt-kizi-Kurdish-Girl-...

The USA is a capitalistic society. We only pretend to look at diversity as something that should be egalitarian. Asian Americans don't have a large enough base to provide capital for any of these areas for people to see them as beneficial.