Comment by omar_a1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by omar_a1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

How many times do I have to re-quote your own words to yourself? Did you not say the following?

> Many see getting called slurs as a small price to pay to get a chance to break into tech.

Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words.

> First of all, it is a common practice at least as far as what I've experienced.

Funny, because I've literally never experienced or even heard of this practice at a single place I've worked at. So I guess that makes it a very uncommon practice?

> Studies in university STEM faculty recruiting found a 2:1 bias in favor of women

I'm referring to tech hiring in the private sector. Your citation is about tenure-track academic hiring in STEM, which encompasses a broad range of fields including ones that aren't male-dominated and is a very different can of worms than SV tech. But go ahead and continue to minimize the very real, disparate impact that discrimination in tech has, while insisting that trying to rectify that problem is, in fact, the real bias in hiring.

> Because that's a breath-takingly racist assertion. And I did not say that. I suggest re-reading your post so that you understand that you wrote those words.

Let's reread the sentence in context:

> 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.

Say you have two people in a coding boot camp. One is a woman, the other a white or asian man. They get the same scores and are just as capable. At my current and previous employers, only the former would get a chance to interview.

If the latter looked at this situation, and concluded that they would have better career opportunities if they were a woman - even if it meant additional discrimination in other forms, like being subject to slurs - then they're "breath-takingly racist"?

I'm also confused as to why you're calling me racist for pointing out the fact that many white and asian men feel like the tech industry's treatment towards them on the basis of race and gender is a net negative. Again, these are the opinions of people other than myself. The fact that you're exclusively quoted this sentence without the preceding one suggests that you either forgot this fact, or are deliberately attempting to conceal it.

> I'm referring to tech hiring in the private sector.

Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.

And I've heard hiring managers say racist and sexist comments on prospective employees all throughout my career. And neglect to mentor or promote them. And freeze them out of the team. I suppose the strawman you've set up outweighs the actual racist and sexist discrimination in hiring, which only seems to exist to you as some abstraction, rather than real people losing their livelihoods because of sexual harassment and racist bullying.

> Good thing I cited a source studying hiring the private sector as well.

Ah yes, the highly regarded International Journal of blog.interview.io. How did I miss this groundbreaking research?

What you call a strawman is exactly the kind of discrimination that exists at my current employer and at my previous employer. This is reality. And the discrimination isn't small or subtle. We're talking about aggregate 2-3x times less likely to get a phone interview as a diverse candidate. Is harassment or bullying equal to or greater than the impact of this preference in hiring? There's no right answer to this question, this is a subjective question for which people can and do give different answers. Someone whose diverse in tech might feel like a reduction in harassment or bullying would be worth a significant reduction in career opportunities. Someone who is struggling to get into tech, and doesn't have diversity status to stand out from the rest of the pack could also arrive at the answer that they'd be better off as diverse even if it did mean that they might be subject to additional harassment or bullying.

Calling the latter "frothing", "breath-takingly racist" is an incredibly hostile thing to say, and it makes me question whether people actually want to discuss the impact of discrimination in hiring or want to shut down discussion by making it taboo.

Also interviewing.io actually conducts interviews on a large scale, and is probably one of the best positioned organization to conduct this sort of experiment. Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?

And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism. And rather supports the breathtakingly racist claim above.

> Can you elaborate on why their study should not be accepted?

Forgive me, I didn't realize they were the leading authority on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought a publication by psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts to seek out, not a blog post.

> And you do realize that you're equating diverse hiring efforts with getting called racial slurs on the job, yes? Those are two very different definitions of "actual" racism.

Right, they are different. The latter makes people uncomfortable or alienated at their job. The former keeps people from getting jobs in the first place on the basis of race and gender.

Which one is more serious? Someone who gets bullied for their race at their workplace probably has a very different opinion on this than someone who can't get an interview because they aren't diverse. The proverbial grass is usually greener on the other side. Someone who's non-diverse and can't get a job in tech might look at a diverse worker talking about bullying at their job and think to them selves, "well, at least that have a job.". That doesn't mean they are racist. That means they have a perspective different than your own.

> Forgive me, I didn't realize they were subject matter experts on the nuanced sociological facets of unconscious prejudice during hiring. And here I thought psychology researchers or African American Studies professors would be the subject matter experts, not a blog.

This reads like a total non-sequitur. Interviewing.io compared non-anonymous interview performance of women to anonymous interview performance, and found that there was little discrepancy (in fact it found a slight positive bias in favor of women). Why are you referring to sociology and psychology in a study focused on anonymous vs. non-anonymous interview performance? Also, why would African American Studies relate to studying potential gender bias in hiring? It seems like you just assumed that this study was focused on black candidates, when in reality it was studying potential bias with respect to gender.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com