Ask HN: Thoughts on diversity/inclusion efforts in tech? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Thoughts on diversity/inclusion efforts in tech?

4 pointsJCOdom4 comments

Over the past few years, there has been a huge push for hitting diverse hiring (African American / Latin / LGBQT / Female) targets at large tech companies, especially in engineering. I've noticed this phenomenon first-hand in Silicon Valley.

I do believe that these efforts mean well, and come from a good place. Diversity of ideas is very important for building successful products for a diverse audience - there is no doubt about that. However, there are two things that leave me puzzled:

1) I feel that it has become a matter of one-upmanship between companies, with huge emphasis on proudly touting how many black or latinx people they hired last quarter ([1], [2] to name a few).

2) Related to 1), the emphasis on equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity. I think Goodhart's Law is at play here ('When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'). "Diverse people hired" may be becoming a lousy metric that doesn't account for differences in talent pool size, enrolment in schools, number of people interviewed, etc. A very common phrase, especially used at one of my former employers, was this idea of "overcoming a homogenous workplace".

There are diversity teams at most big tech firms geared to drive up these metrics - just like any other team which is driven by ad revenue or MAU.

At my ex-employer, hiring managers were invited by a 'diversity lead' and told to 'account for diversity' when candidates are fairly even; in this case, the other candidate is placed at a disadvantage.

I am not trying to be inflammatory here; I just want to learn how these programs are bringing real benefit - or at least the underlying reasoning/legislation driving them.

[1] https://qz.com/work/1793500/etsy-doubled-its-hiring-of-black-and-latinx-employees-in-one-year/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/how-slack-got-ahead-in-diversity/558806/

I’m not in hiring nor do I have data to back this up. I doubt anyone has data to back up or refute my claim.

I claim that diversity is an inherent good for jobs that involve lots of thinking. My reasoning is that a mixture of diverse ideas and thought patterns are going to come up with higher quality solutions on average, and a if we’re excluding non-white non-males, we’re not coming up with the best solutions.

Of course this breaks down if we’re talking about someone “diverse” with an 8th grade education vs someone with a PhD. I’m pretty sure the PhD is ALMOST ALWAYS going to produce higher quality solutions. But Master’s vs PhD? Bachelor’s vs Master’s? Go with diversity.

That sounds good in theory, but what I’ve realized is that diversity is meaningless if everyone subscribes to group-think anyway. The idea for inclusion is to promote an environment where everyone is heard, and varying opinions and contribute to thoughtful discourse. However, from my experience at a large credit card company, diversity is meaningless for 2 reasons:

1) Candidates are either recruited from Columbia or Cornell only.

2) The large Indian population at the company favors Indians, and thus the new diverse hires look elsewhere after 1 year.

I strongly doubt that the kind of skin deep diversity that people do does any good. The most similar attributes I see in tech is not gender or race, but rather aspects like health, wealth, social status, and age.

As an example, 60% of the total population has a chronic diseases. You won't find many in the technology industry that want to imagine that. Accessibility is an almost forgotten concept, and most people if forced to think about accessability can only imagine concepts like blindness, deafness, and wheelchairs. The wast majority of those 60% does not have either of those and are basically invisible in the thought process when people produce solutions and products.

I think what should be focused on first is getting more diverse people majoring in computer science.

In my graduating class (2017) the ethnic ratio was 80% white 20% Asian. All men. This was a private liberal arts school where 60% of the student population was female, so it's not like it was an engineering school with no women.

Since I've graduated there have been a few women and other ethnicities but still way more white men.

There were a few women my year who started out as cs majors but switched as underclassman.

That being said, I'm not sure why this is. In other hard/scientific (math, natural science, etc.) majors there were way more women then men.

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