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Comment by christiansakai | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the update. It is an interesting read.

I used to think naively that checking these boxes does nothing: - "I prefer not to disclose my sexual preference" - "I prefer not to disclose my race/ethnicity" - "I prefer not to disclose whether I'm a veteran or not"

Anyway, it is a sad read for people like me who don't get preferential treatment. It seems like I'm being salty, but it is just the reality. People like me studied hours and hours doing Leetcode and sacrificing other things, even sacrificing things that should have helped our career better, such as learning relevant skills like techniques, libraries, etc. It is what it is. Naively think about meritocracies.

If I can just write a huge *sigh here, it is what I'm currently doing right now. I don't care about downvotes. I just need to rant.

Anyway thank you for the replies! I really appreciate it.

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"preferential treatment"????? your baseline is privileged. diversity hiring is attempting to negate reduced or lack of privilege.

your competition is not women or minorities. it's other majority groups, because more of them are interviewed and hired.

Well that's generalizing isn't it? Not every Asian male sounding name person actually have a good track record in their family, free of abuse, loving both dad and mom, good education, know how to do math to the point of memorizing the entire Pi numbers.

There are people who are outside of the normal as well. Why not give them privilege by hearing their stories as well?

Or better, why not discard the preferential treatment and do it based on meritocracy? I know this can't be done in today's world, just hoping.

Not every white person comes from a rich, educated family either. I'm very familiar with this being a white, uneducated, disabled female from the Midwest US with an uneducated, abusive, lower-middle class family.

Meritocracy does literally nothing to aid less privileged people to get ahead. It primarily helps those who started with privilege in the first place which is mostly limited to select groups.

I'm not sure why pointing out the fact that this forces members of the same race or gender to compete against each other for a limited number of spots is justification. The fact that we're allocating some hiring slots for certain races and genders, while others have to compete for a more limited number of slots is the problem.

Furthermore, this policy announced when the company's tech workforce was already higher than the industry's representation in the metro area. So they were using discrimination to increase an already existing overrepresentation.

> Anyway, it is a sad read for people like me who don't get preferential treatment.

Yup, we marginalized groups get all the breaks. /s

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