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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

This is a fascinating and inspiring story! I'm also an African-American in tech working in Silicon Valley. I have a strong interest in systems, and I had the pleasure of interning for Google's cloud division twice: once to work on the Google Cloud SQL team, and another time to work on the Spanner team. It's great to hear of other African-Americans in Silicon Valley.

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You should definitely encourage them to apply to FANGs and not be intimidated by the interview process.

There is a big push and accompanying quota to get more black/latin/native american people into tech companies at all levels.

While I don't agree with this quota system for the inherent racism/unfairness and second order effects[0], possible beneficiaries should take notice and act on it and be a role model.

[0] resentment & hmm, is this person here on merit or on quota?

Would the problem with that side effect lay on the shoulders of the person making the assumption that it's not possible for there to be multiple candidates of roughly equal merit (at which point a quota would then be applied) ?

Seems like it comes more from people making that assumption than the quota system itself, assuming that everyone's held to the same standard of competence (which I would imagine is the case for FAANG companies).

I would describe it as more of a chilling effect on voting "not inclined" or raising concerns on performance.

In my experience, 1) being not inclined on such a hire leads to more scrutiny 2) managing performance is prone to more scrutiny

So: while the standard is expected, it's enforced to a lesser degree in practice. Which means a few bad apples abusing this unfortunately make everyone else (in the group who meet/beat the standard) look bad.

If someone does not say something because of fear of how they will be perceived I’m not sure the policy is the root cause ... and if a whole group of people behave that way (as I would assume often more than one person would have the same reservation) then that points to other issues.

And if a company’s culture uses affirmative action or quotas to hire people who they should not have, then that’s just racism of a different kind, and, I’d argue, not necessarily unique to or always caused by the policy.

There is a statistical property at play here.

Consider a system for selecting for characteristic X from a population. This system considers traits A, B, and C, which each have some (positive, negative, or 0) correlation to X in the global population.

With a perfect selection process, there should be 0 correlation between any of the traits and the desired property. If trait A was positivly correlated with X within your population, then you could improve the selection process by favoring trait A more. Simmilarly, if there were a negative correlation, you could improve your selection by disfavoring A more. This is completly independent from the correlation that exists in the global population.

There is no evidence that suggests that the diversity policies pursued by FAANG companies is being pursued because they found that within their population white and asian employees were less competent.

As a tangent: when did FAANG become FANG? I feel like I missed something.

Typically people saw Apple as hardware then software company. The. FAANG came along because of some business tv program. And now we dropped apple again.

It doesn't matter, it's not used as an acronym anymore (since most would put Apple over Netflix in that list) and is just a buzzword referring to the major tech/software companies.

I'm not sure why dang didn't break off this subthread with this post and did it with one of its children instead, but if you look at the GP and then your comment again, you'll notice they never ask for advice on jobs (seriously, who is the "them" you're referring to in your first sentence?) and the friendly tone is belied by the fact that you're responding to a statement that it's nice to have representative role models by making an association between role models and quota systems. Maybe consider the second order effects[0] of posts like this in the future before making them.

[0] resentment & hmm, is this person posting based on actual relevance to the conversation at hand or wedging in their own biases just because they can?

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