Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

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I won't dispute whether you think it's a terrible thing to say, but preferential treatment towards demographics categorized as "diverse" is something I've both witnessed and taken part in during my time so far in tech. At least in the San Francisco Bay Area, many tech companies are setting targets of >30% women in engineering roles despite the fact that they make up 20-25% of the tech workforce. Achieving these numbers necessitates discrimination.

Note that you're putting words in the other poster's mouth when you write that "the hiring bar has been lowered". Not all forms of discrimination involve lowering the hiring bar. From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates. The hiring bar is the same for diverse and non-diverse, it's just that diverse candidates are more likely to get a chance to attempt to pass that hiring bar.

>From my experience, the bulk of discrimination occurs before hiring event starts - recruiters extend phone interviews to diverse candidates at higher rates.

How is this different from any other targeted recruiting? FAANG recruits students from CMU while not even visiting my alma mater. Recruiters extend phone interviews to referrals at 100% rate no matter how bad they suck, etc. Diversity recruiting != diversity hiring, and the numbers bare that out. Unless you argue that recruiters should have zero targeted pipelines I'm not sure how it's unique for diversity initiatives

You're right, it isn't. But are people offended when people say that FAANG gives more opportunity to CMU grads than community college grads? Not in my experience. Speaking as a grad from one of the universities mentioned, I can say with certainty that and education from those institutions opens up a lot of doors and that pointing that fact out is fair.

The major difference is that both CMU and your alma is seen to welcome both women and men (and people of different colors, cultural backgrounds, religion, social economical status and so on).

Targeted recruiting from single sex schools or religious universities would be different, but there aren't many such universities in the first place.

However, targeted recruiting for high prestige university tend to create discrimination for social economical status, which discriminate against people who were not lucky enough to be born by rich parents.

It's different because having the preferred genitalia isn't equal to having a degree from a top university.

You can't really blame the companies. CMU has a great track record why wouldn't they go there.

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