I was literally CC'ed on an email that said "[...] I want to remind everyone that the hiring season for 2021 is not complete and we are still missing our target for diversity [...]. For those who already reached their headcount for 2021 there will always be more budget for a candidate that brings more diversity to our workplace".
So forget it, it's just a new name for discrimination.
Do quotas actually help minorities? To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. The others who knows? Maybe the recruiter was so close to hitting his incentive that he lowered the bar.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...
I mean, yeah, unless there is a wide-spread feeling that tech hiring is broken and nobody knows how to tell if anyone really is any good through the hiring process which is the feeling that almost every hiring, interviewing, test-taking focused post on HN elicits.
Because I mean all the stuff on HN I read leads me to think we can't be sure about if someone is qualified for a job until they are actually in the job. My own personal experience is that people can even be technically qualified for a job and still not be qualified for all sorts of other things.
They are cargo-culted to death, since everyone wants to be like FANG but won't pay they do the one thing they can afford from their playbook and execute poorly on it.
Truth is, from having conducted interviews, it's a real sink or swim situation where some folks won't be able to complete a simple wordcount implementation in 30+ minutes. A real whiteboard is a toy problem where you have to use an algorithm or a data structure, write a few test cases and some code on the board and explain why/how you did it, not some rote learning exercise.
At the senior band they shouldn't even be used, if the candidate is coming from a reputable company. But at the college level what else are you going to interview applicants about? You know everyone has done an algorithm class.
I generally see take home tests getting the heat, because people are being expected to give up an extra 4-6 hours of their life to the job process without getting compensation. And maybe the person doing 4 hours gets beat out by the person doing 8, and the people with kids are screwed.
It's disappointing to see this kind of comment in 2020.
If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are.
In my experience as a subcontractor for few extremely large corporations (including one of the "A"s), the largest roadblock was usually an incompetent VP. How'd they get there? Well, they had connections, friends or family or both. In SMB world, it's even more obvious. I've seen millions of dollars wasted on projects and POCs that existed only because one of these folks didn't "believe" the research and the vendor specs. And I've seen a room full of VPs all afraid to tell the boss that the product demo isn't going well because the product -- the very idea of it -- was garbage.
So, worst case scenario, there are a few more incompetent people in corporations already brimming with bad hires and waste, and they come from different backgrounds. What's the problem?
In tech, there's the pipeline issue too. You can't really double the percentage of senior engineers of a certain group overnight. You'd have to magically go back to the 90's and try to get more diverse folks to apply! Same way the class of 2021 they are hiring from now can't really suddenly change.
By this logic we should expect the NBA, NFL, NHL etc. to look like a random sample of the US population. If the source subpopulations differ by even small amounts on mean or variance those on the extreme tails of distributions will look very different from the general population. So the ranks of men who have ever run 100m in under ten seconds are basically all black and elite marathon runners are about half Kalenjin, an ethnic group of fewer than ten million.
Tech exacerbates this problem even further. How can you get anywhere as a kid if your parents don't have a computer, and neither does your school? And that's just one example.
That and luck are well over 90%, yes. Otherwise the scions of the wealthy would be vastly more prominent in sports with low entry barriers. In practice the most decorated Olympian ever is the son of a police officer and a middle school principal[1]. The best basketball player ever comes from a less distinguished background[2]. College sports specially chosen to be niches to maximize the chance of being a recruited athlete are so competitive the children of hedge fund managers routinely fail to get in that way[3]. The outer extremities of talent distributions are people who are staggeringly talented, hard working and lucky. Then they complete with each other and the ones who win are better than that .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-...
Also, going straight to comparisons of athletic ability and ethnicity is basically a hundred year old argument made by people you probably don't want to associate with.
Well no, that would be assuming that whatever traits help one be meritorious are equally distributed among all the populations, which seems highly unlikely given what we see literally everywhere else (e.g. athletic pursuits).
What I think is more important than nailing some magical quota or ratio or percentage, is ensuring that the individual is judged as an individual instead of as a subset of a group.
Regardless of how a specific trait is distributed among a human population, you are bound to find individuals within each group that display it. The problem comes when you discard individuals because they don't belong to the group you want, or when you take in individuals without the trait you're looking for just because they belong to the group you do want.
Anyway, it's not as if most of the tech industry cares about strict adherence to the law in other areas, such as Uber running roughshod over many jurisdictions' pre-existing transport-for-hire legislation, Airbnb doing the same for short-term rental/hotel legislation, and the whole "gig economy" bringing their gig workers close enough to the definition of misclassified employee that many rulings say they're past the line.
If this one case of powerful tech companies ignoring the law is working in favor of hiring more suitably qualified members of minority demographics than they otherwise would, then I'm happy they're doing it as long as they're generally willing to violate laws for worse purposes.
Many specific racist behaviors are of course either sometimes or always illegal, but those concepts are individually known to the law, not outlawed as racism per se.
What's more, the ruling you linked did not address the kind of quotas which the FANG company was discussing in the quoted email. The university was setting aside a certain percentage of the total and rejecting white people who might otherwise have qualified to keep room for racial minorities, which was key to the ruling. The FANG company was evaluating white people just as it would have done without the quotas, but it was simply allowing extra hiring of racial minorities beyond the normal budgets until certain targets/quotas were met. Whether this is legal or not is out of scope of that ruling. (Maybe other rulings have addressed this; I'm not sure.)
I'm aware of the specificity of the ruling but the basis on which the ruling was made is much more general. Depending on the entity different laws would be in question; a fully private entity would probably be violating the civil rights act of 1964, while in the case of university admissions and funding the current systems are still in violation of the equal protection clause. Interpretations of the civil rights act of 1964 that advantage groups for no reason other than race are also unconstitutional.
Note this is a lot different than allowing race to be a factor of a multifaceted evaluation -- it's inappropriate to have race at all be part of the evaluation. Instead substitute it for socioeconomic background.
I'm not sure yet how to fully clarify this, so consider the Missouri government's statutory commitment to spend X% of the budget with women or minority owned businesses. In a degenerate case this means e.g. even the most unqualified candidate could be awarded a contract solely on the basis of race, violating the equal protection clause.
(Practically this expenditure law means larger companies have "independent" women and minority owned businesses as subcontractors who might contract the work back to a business owned by the larger company that can do the work.)
My understanding of the state of the law is that race is currently allowed to be considered as a factor in university admissions if available workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice, and that (as of 2016) the University of Texas at Austin's policy of using race as such a factor was found to be constitutional for this reason.
More reading on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...
The viability of this precedent is highly uncertain since it was a 4-3 ruling (one SCOTUS seat vacant at the time and one justice recused), and since its majority was four of the liberal justices of whom one (the late RBG) has now been replaced by the conservative Justice Barrett. But it hasn't yet been overruled, and it was a SCOTUS majority ruling and not dicta, so it's likely to be followed by lower courts unless and until it's overruled by SCOTUS.
Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.
>Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.
Disingenuous. If the law is not agreeable soon it will be unenforceable. I consider the rulings inappropriate both on the basis of constitutionality and on the basis of construction an egalitarian society.
Again, see my example about Missouri statutory expenditures on the basis of gender and race. Many states have laws like this. They plainly violate the equal protection clause. You can try to claim the state has an overwhelming interest to ignore the protection clause, but then can't it just have an overwhelming interest to violate whatever parts of the constitution it wants? Where does it stop?
Lots of awful laws remain enforceable for very, very, very long times. For example, the whole industry of private prison contractors profiting from prisoner labor, with prisoners sometimes being legally required to participate and always being paid far below the usual minimum wage, and with contractual provisions between the prison companies and the states about how full the states will keep their prisons, leading to the creation and proactive enforcement of lots of crimes with prison as a punishment to keep that pipeline filled. Non-inheritable slavery never got outlawed as a criminal sentence, even if states have chosen to limit their implementation of that to prison labor instead of "you but not your family are now literally a slave for the rest of your lifetime."
> I consider the rulings inappropriate [...] on the basis of construction an egalitarian society.
Many people agree with you, and I believe they share your reasons. But many people disagree with you, including me, on the basis that properly crafted affirmative action efforts are addressing an existing inequality in our not-at-all-egalitarian society.
That's not to say a qualified white person should see their application refused on the basis of rigid racial quotas - we both agree that should be illegal, and as we discussed it already is.
But yes, to me it seems fair and egalitarian to take into account something like race that routinely leads to disadvantage and discrimination (or alternatively advantage and privilege) even in today's society when evaluating a person's achievements and obstacles, and in planning outreach and recruitment efforts. People do likewise for other similarly impactful factors like poverty, disability, and migrant status, and rightly so. I view this as appropriate both in university admissions and in viewing success stories like Kelsey Hightower's as even more impressive than if he were Just Another White Guy In Tech(tm) ... highlighting the sad fact that stories like his are so rare is part of the point of the article.
> Again, see my example about Missouri statutory expenditures on the basis of gender and race. Many states have laws like this. They plainly violate the equal protection clause.
I haven't properly thought through the case about state government statutory expenditures, so I don't have a strong opinion there right now on what is either constitutional or appropriate. I think that case's constitutionality or lack thereof is a far less clear question than you apparently do.
But if any such programs are making significant progress toward fixing disproportionate imbalances in government expenditures that come from the systemic sexism and racism in society without getting the government substandard value per dolllar, any invalidation of those programs should be coupled with the adoption of some adequately effective replacements with fewer constitutional issues.
This is why affirmative action as implemented is, to me, a very bad idea: there's no way to tell if it is working.
I'll also note that every team I know of at any FAANG company is desperate to find really great candidates. The idea that a team would willingly refuse to hire an excellent <insert group here> candidate to instead fill some kind of diversity quota slot for <other group here> is so bananas to me I can't even comprehend it. It's so wrong I can't even laugh at it. Every manager I know has a backlog of important work a mile long and is desperate to fill open reqs. I've never once seen or heard rumor of anyone from upper management to HR to execs discussing anything even remotely like a "diversity quota". Not even water-cooler gossip.
Whenever I ask for proof of a diversity quota system there is no evidence. When you look at the stats on who is hired (for companies that publish it) to the degree the needle is moving it is moving very slowly. So slowly if there were a quota system it would mean they're very very bad at it. So as far as I can tell from personal experience and my discussions with my peers "diversity quotas" are by-and-large either made up or being run illegally by a small group that gets shut down immediately once legal gets wind of it.
"Diversity quota" could be an attempt to stir up race or gender resentment: 'you didn't get that job because one of "those" people stole it' or some such notion. Having worked at plenty of other software jobs over the years I've met more than my share of developers who were garbage at their jobs but thought they were God's gift to programming. They were also the same people who tended to have complaints about "diversity quotas". I'm sure blaming "those other people" is an attractive way to justify not getting what you think you deserve. It's an old trope but one that keeps being re-used over thousands of years because it works. Just convince people that "those others" are the enemy and have stolen what is rightfully yours and you can justify anything.
It's also a really cheap way to tear down someone else - just dismiss them as a "diversity hire". You need a certain amount of insecurity, cruelty, or hate in your heart to act out like that. I prefer to judge people based on their job performance but YMMV.