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Comment by omar_a1 | Hacker News Reader

If we could quantify the net effects of sexism and racism in hiring and attrition, we could compare whether the incentives mentioned offset the sexism and racism equivalently. But, since we don't have a means of doing so, it's a futile discussion on this site. Also worth pointing out that just hiring a diverse candidate is pretty meaningless if they get bullied or harassed to the point of being forced out in a short order.

But that's beside the point (or, beside the tangent to the point). The context of "diversity hire" above parallels being diverse and getting hired to an acquihire or getting lucky. That's very different than what you outlined above.

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Whether one thinks that discrimination in hiring is justified to offset suspected discrimination in other areas is besides the point. The point is, there exists discrimination in hiring that results in women and URM candidates getting offers that would not have been obtained were it not for diversity status. The opportunities of people categorized as diverse in tech company interviewing is substantially different from those not categorized as diverse. Maybe I'm biased towards the SF bay area, but there's a palpable mismatch between how common and prevalent these practices are and the offense people take when they're acknowledged.

I'm not sure why you think what I'm saying is different. At my company, white and asian male new grads are only given a chance to interview if they're CS (or math, EE, or other tech majors) grads from top universities like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc. Candidates from boot camps, less well known universities, or non-tech majors are only extended the chance to interview if they're diverse. Does that mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp who gets hired is unskilled? No, probably not. Does it mean that a diverse candidate from a boot camp would not have been hired if they weren't diverse? Yes, because non-diverse candidates from boot camps don't get interviewed at all.

Maybe I'm biased toward the SF Bay Area, but the mismatch between the prevalence of these policies and the discomfort with acknowledgement of their existence is concerning.

No, it's not an SF Bay Area thing. I've moved to SF from the Midwest a year ago, and have been called racial slurs more times during my year here than in my entire adult life living in a medium-sized Midwestern town. Shall we assume that because you haven't had a similar experience or personally faced discrimination on the job that no one else has?

Exaggerating the status of "diversity hires" just ignores the harsh reality of rampant discrimination in the tech industry. And not just on the basis of sex and race, but age and disability too. There wouldn't need to be such a hard push for underrepresented candidates if it were a more welcoming, diverse workforce in the first place.

Who is getting the short or long end of the stick is not something I aim to answer, or even purport to be able to answer. This is a matter of perspective. I'm a Hispanic person that attended an elite university and have household names on my resume. I'd have a good chance of getting interviews regardless of my gender or ethnicity - and when you do take ethnicity into account it probably helps me even more. I'm largely indifferent towards this kind of discrimination in hiring. But is the perspective of a white or asian man pursuing a coding boot-camp to try and break into tech going to have the same opinion on policies that greatly reduce or eliminate his chances of getting an interview as compared to if he was a woman or URM? Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

The only thing that bothers me is attempting to equate acknowledgement of these practices as offensive or taboo. The reality is that this is what many companies are doing. Thus, the only way one can avoid offense in that scenario is to deny reality.

Referral candidates definitely get plenty of offers that they "would not have obtained" were it not for their referral status. I think it's more than a bit silly to worry about diversity focus introducing unwanted "biases" in hiring, when it's never really possible for something as random as hiring to be "fair" in any real sense.

There's also the issue of laws that mandate offering equal opportunity on the basis of race and gender. By comparison, I'm not aware of any legislation mandating equal opportunity between candidates with and without referrals.

Furthermore, I'm hesitant to write off discrimination as a non-issue. I don't feel personally impacted by it - but I'm also incredibly fortunate to have graduated from one of the most prestigious universities for computer science, and to have household names on my resume. The fact that my employers don't interview White and Asian men from boot camps doesn't impact me. But what would a white or Asian man think about this situation? The nature of this discrimination is that we don't get to hear the opinions of the people who are impacted by it. We get to talk to the diverse people who were included because of discrimination, but the people who were excluded because of it are absent from our workplaces.

Ultimately, I have no good answer here. Tech companies are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Companies are getting criticized for having "only" 20-25% of women in tech roles, when most estimates put the share of women in tech roles industry-wide at 18-20%. So companies have to choose between either enduring criticism and being portrayed as sexist, or discriminating in their hiring policies to increase their diversity numbers. With the techlash in full swing, public perception is important and I don't fault companies for doing the latter.

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