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Comment by throwaway007071 | Hacker News Reader

I work at a FANG company and I can guarantee you that there are quotas and no one is willing to speak out about it.

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.

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First time I heard about "minority quotas" I just didn't believe it. But then YouTube got sued for doing exactly that [0]

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...

>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.

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.

It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat.

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.

>It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat.

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.

> Do quotas actually help minorities?

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?

> 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 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.

Well why is that? Wasn’t everyone and there mother going into CS and IT around the dotcom bubble? Not sure why we even have a pipeline problem (which is real).

> If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations.

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.

That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work. Instead, much of it is about access to training opportunities, coaches, having parents who can afford to send you to various camps, drive you to weekend tournaments, and buy you the equipment necessary.

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.

Maybe this is true about tech, but you really must have never met anybody that even made it to pro camp in the NFL or NBA. I was pretty close with a dude that had only one year of football before being drafted and then won the NFL rushing title the next year. On the other hand, I played since I was 7, won a state title at 9, and put everything into it for years afterward, but it wasn't long before I couldn't be drafted to carry water bottles for a real team.

> That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work.

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-...

This is a ridiculous comparison. There are around 500 NBA players during a given season. Amazon alone just passed one million workers. You're going to have odd results if your sample size of society is absurdly tiny.

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.

> > If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations.

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.

Where I am as a lowly IC in a non FAANG company most software engineers are not white. Majority are Indian with white or Chinese second. This has been the case at multiple places. Maybe it is different at FAANG?

Not get into the politics, but this seems like an interesting potential incentive misalignment where a team is incentivized to fill up their budget with non-diverse employees so they can try to hire even more (diverse) help with "overflow" budget.

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