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Comment by theredlion | Hacker News Reader

I know a lot of people. This is based on conversations with those involved in the hiring process at various companies. They are proud of it and see it as not only a plus, but a social benefit, which causes people to be very boastfully vocal in social situations

Very strange time we live in.

I do agree with your second paragraph, but this isn't regarding anything that has happened to me personally

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Oh, we’re trading anecdotes? Well, I know a lot of people, including many involved in hiring at various large tech companies, including myself.

I’m sure they have programs to encourage diversity in hiring, but I seriously doubt they’re telling you they “blatantly discriminate” against white men and that white men have to perform much better in an interview in order to be hired. That’s an incomplete and simplistic story.

Referral bonuses for women and minorities, and especially female minorities, are 5x what they are for white men at my company. They may not say "go discriminate against white men," but they certainly say "we will pay you a lot more to get us somebody who isn't a white man." I'm someone who really likes having diverse engineering teams, but that sort of practice is pretty distasteful and obviously not meritocratic.

This is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. We tell ourselves stories about what’s going on here based on our own biases, not solely on the objective facts.

If you want diverse engineering teams but you have a serious pipeline problem where few minority and female engineers apply, what can you do? One answer is to encourage more referrals for those candidates by paying a higher referral bonus. It doesn’t seem like “blatant discrimination” to me, any more than having a recruiting fair at a historically black college would be.

Also, as a side note, what company is this? And how are bonuses 5x as high for women but also “especially” for minority women. Which is it?

Yeah the indignation is a bit over the top. If we’re going to complain about every little imbalance in the hiring playing field we have to first acknowledge how systematically unfair it’s been to certain groups and realize that there is a huge amount of subjectivity in qualifications for all white collar or creative work.

I’m not making a statement either way about your post. But something that happen on HN with the introduction of Apple WatchOS 5 gives an example of why diversity is importance.

Apple added a feature in the latest version that helped women track their cycles. A few posters here couldn’t fathom why that was important.

That seems like a weird policy. I’m not sure how a company can really justify ‘we made it more expensive for us to hire minority candidates who are referred by our existing staff’ as being a sound diversity practice.

In general referral bonuses are intended to provide a higher quality candidate pipeline at a lower price than a recruitment consultant, so I can see why throwing this incentive in there might seem like a good idea, but you need strong firewalls between the referral policy and the hiring decisionmaking to avoid perverse incentives. In particular it’s important the bonus doesn’t come out of the hiring team’s salary budget.

Do share what your company is, I have a gigantic list of contacts that would love to be treated as white american males, at least once!

Nobody's begging you to believe me. I'm just typing what I know from those involved

You don't need to beg to get us to believe you, simply provide some evidence. You're already disguising your identity behind a new anonymous account, which doesn't help your credibility, so why don't you disclose the name and location of the companies and more specific details, so we will have more information to go on than your anecdotes and personal interpretations?

> They are proud of it and see it as not only a plus, but a social benefit, which causes people to be very boastfully vocal in social situations

If the companies are proud of it, wouldn't they be boasting in the media? I've never heard about anything like this.

What I have heard of is lowering the bar for minorities to be offered an interview and educational opportunities offered to only minorities.

It's not the companies that are proud of it per se. Not directly at least. The people who are proud of it are the ones directly involved, typically lower downs in HR or the public facing department.

The message gets translated when coming from the top down or when going into the public. It turns into something to the effect of how inclusive and diverse the company is. The higher ups especially turn a blind eye (or are in complete denial) of the actual practices which happen.

A handful of low level employees deliberately violating company policy is very far from your original statement of"several large companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate"

Not just violating company policy; violating federal law.

There is little congruence between C-level and workers at a large company. It doesn't take many levels of separation for that to occur.

In this case, the discrepancy lies between people at the top saying that they value diversity and inclusion, then people who doing the hiring acting on that message based on their interpretation of it.

Companies do a LOT of things that are sketchy at best and overtly illegal at worst. The amount of time since the last public fiasco is generally a good indicator of how fast and loose they play (even more for companies which have never had a negative public incident).

What you're talking about would cause a shitstorm of Everest proportions if it came to light in any of the bay area companies I've worked at.

I know a lot of people too.

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