Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

> What happens to these people when full equality is achieved?

What happens to a software engineer when full feature completeness and bug-free-ness is achieved? What happens to a police employee when zero crime is achieved? What happens to a builder when all the buildings that ever need to be built are built?

Even if you get to the point where you can say "there are no problems at all!" (doubtful, except maybe in tiny startups or similar), adding "and there will never be any more and we never have to do anything ever again" is hopelessly naive.

View on HN

Are you suggesting full-equality, like zero-crime, is something that doesn't exist? Or that our notion of what equality is evolves? These are different things, e.g. like the difference between the policing of laws, and changes in the law itself.

For the former, then accept a threshold, "reasonable level of equality" such that differences are within the norms of individual diversity. Then equality is achieved.

Or focus on "equality of opportunity" which is much simpler to gauge, as it only requires that opportunity be similar e.g. a person covered by fire insurance, whose house burnt down; had the same insurance "opportunity" as someone covered by the same policy whose house didn't burn down - same opportunity, if different outcomes.

It's clear that some I&D initiatives exist because of pre-existing issues. At the very least, some of it depends on the notion of "race", and that isn't guaranteed to exist forever.

> Are you suggesting full-equality, like zero-crime, is something that doesn't exist? Or that our notion of what equality is evolves?

Both, to an extent. Avoiding problems in a large company is presumably a constant uphill struggle, and certainly society's view on it does evolve (often quite rapidly; I personally went from strictly speaking being outlawed before 1993 to having employment protections in 2000 to being allowed to marry in 2015, for instance).

> as it only requires that opportunity be similar

Even if you restrict it to that, it remains a huge problem for employers. To take the most basic example, there have been _endless_ studies showing that blinding resume review by removing names etc substantially changes outcomes in the very first stage of hiring (by impacting who gets called in for interview).

Blind reviews and auditions are considered problematic now: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

"What happens to a software engineer when full feature completeness and bug-free-ness is achieved?"

Try working in the games industry all the way to the end of the project and find out for yourself. Your work doesn't even need to be "bug free" but "good enough."

Yeah, the games industry is a bit of an outlier there, granted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com