Ask HN: How has Diversity and Inclusion programs impacted your company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How has Diversity and Inclusion programs impacted your company?

21 pointsjohnpython23 comments

At my current employer, the D&I program has resulted in the hiring of a lot more white women and barely any underrepresented minorities (URMs)[0]. I have experienced myself and heard from colleagues that referrals of URM candidates were rejected in favor of less qualified white women. It seems white women are the main benefactors of D&I programs just as they were for affirmative action[1]. How has D&I programs impacted your company?

[0]: https://diversity.ucsf.edu/URM-definition

[1]: https://time.com/4884132/affirmative-action-civil-rights-white-women/

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Why should we hire anyone based off the color of their skin/gender, versus for their level of competency?

If a company start optimizing on diversity metrics instead of on ability, then they’ll be crushed by market forces from companies who optimize on ability.

Further, isn’t it a bit patronizing hiring people because they fit in a URM group, instead of hard work to sufficiently pass an interview/test/etc?

I think that I agree with your overall point but this

> If a company start optimizing on diversity metrics instead of on ability, then they’ll be crushed by market forces from companies who optimize on ability.

isn't necessarily true. A company's success is only very loosely related to the ability of its employees.

> hard work to sufficiently pass an interview/test/etc?

Interviews are bullshit, arbitrary, and random, as discussed at length in countless HN threads.

Then any time diversity hiring is discussed we suddenly forget that we (collectively, as an industry) don't have a reliable way of measuring competency.

all things considered (i.e. equal performance on an interview/test/etc.) it makes better economic sense to hire more women and URMs. A cynic would say that's because it's more acceptable to pay less. But I would argue that someone who has built a successful career despite the headwinds of racism/sexism/implicit biases is going to be tougher and more resilient in the face of unexpected challenges than someone, who for reasons outside their control, has gone through life on an 'easier difficulty level'.

And in fields where innovation matters, more diverse teams are more creative because they explore a larger space of ideas (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/17/9284).

To give another reason, a team that fits into a narrow demographic is unlikely to make products that appeal broadly or to other demographics. This creates market opportunities for more diverse teams. For instance, the Spanx founder was able to create a billion dollar company BECAUSE her inventions were dismissed by male-dominated teams in the garment industry.

also, I want to share that OP's original point reflects common hiring practice at my former employer, which is a federal Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) in the South (i.e. majority of students are first-generation college, immigrants, people of color) whose faculty is overwhelmingly white and predominantly male. The diversity hires, that I was aware of, tended to favor White and "model minority" candidates over equally (or better qualified) URM candidates, even though it's obvious that the students would be better served by hiring more professors that reflect the demographics of the student body. There are plenty of highly qualified candidates these days, so to me the biggest problem is bias on the part of many hiring and tenure committees.

Well if they’re equally or better qualified then my point still stands. They get into the company based off ability.

The issue is whose determining what the bias is, where the statistical line should be, and how it’s enforced. If this creeps into legislature it’ll be one step closer in the wrong path.

I see the misunderstanding that D&I is about priority hiring based on certain characteristics over and above merit crop up a distressing amount. Every initiative that I have taken part in has explicitly abjured such action; it's illegal in our country and in any case arguably a bad idea anywhere. What it is instead is a forum for trying to identify, discuss and address where existing pratices are unwittingly biased.

For example, do the statistics of progression and departure in our organisation show any areas in which we're failing certain subgroups? Does our publicity reach everyone we want it to and carry the message that we intend? Do our processes inadvertently cause physical or mental difficulty to anyone?

> What it is instead is a forum for trying to identify, discuss and address where existing pratices are unwittingly biased. For example, do the statistics of progression and departure in our organisation show any areas in which we're failing certain subgroups? Does our publicity reach everyone we want it to and carry the message that we intend? Do our processes inadvertently cause physical or mental difficulty to anyone?

This is a fantastic statement of what a program should be. And I'm totally going to us it to describe ours.

Actually, the companies that have made sure they use people from more than one subset of the population have better financial results.

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...

https://medium.com/asymmetries/the-diversity-myth-junk-resea...

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/public-policy-journal/in-prin...

> If a company start optimizing on diversity metrics instead of on ability, then they’ll be crushed by market forces from companies who optimize on ability.

This is only true if the company has a real product that customers pay for. If the company is based on "growth and engagement" then there is no real product and their survival merely depends on investor goodwill for which PR and virtue-signalling is important (this is the main reason companies boast about D&I so much).

I agree, however the companies that have a real product will survive longer on average. A real product has a better chance of enduring hardships (bear market/recession) than investor-funded growth companies. We haven’t seen how today’s tech investments will change during a real economic downturn. Last one we had was arguably over 10 years ago.

But with the top X% having far more capital, we may continue to see investments, even in bad economic times. But I think that’s unlikely.

This is only true assuming your product costs nothing to run and doesn't rely on network effects, otherwise the other side will keep offering its product at a loss until you go out of business. They might themselves go out of business later, but at this point your company is already long gone so that doesn't matter.

In the EU country I come frome, at least two forms of affirmative action are part of employment law.

1) At least 2.5% of the workforce (rounded down) in workplaces not physically demanding must be disabled, or the company pays some taxes. This has resulted in creating job positions that would otherwise be outsourced, in one company I worked in.

Not a bad thing I guess, but the percentage should really be adjusted downwards in 2021.

2) Veterans (a very large group) should be given preference when equally qualified. This does not affect the ordinary software engineers much, but does have implications in management. It is also impossible to fire a veteran. This was one of the factors that created extremely negative perceptions about veterans in the educated sectors of the society.

As for the US forms of affirmative action, I haven't seen that yet in companies I worked in. But we don't have such a skewed gender representation in STEM as the US has, and in 2021 the minorities who work have equal or greater income than the national average.

The way I think of this topic is that diversity should be a metric, not a goal. If the overwhelming majority of the people I'm interviewing, hiring, and working with look like me, then I have to ask, are these really the most qualified people? I mean, there's one of two possibilities -- either in fact there's something about people who are very similar to me that makes them the most qualified OR there's a lot of talent being overlooked and missed and my company is missing out here. Which one is more likely?

That re-framing is the easy part, of course. Actually making changes is hard. On one side we all know that if you make something a metric you run the danger of making it a goal, but on the other side the biases that lead to a lack of diversity are so deep and ingrained they can be very difficult to counter.

But hopefully this re-framing is at least helpful in explaining why a lack of diversity is an issue that matters.

> I mean, there's one of two possibilities -- either in fact there's something about people who are very similar to me that makes them the most qualified OR there's a lot of talent being overlooked and missed and my company is missing out here.

The third and more likely option is that you're sampling from a population that looks mostly like you. If software developers are 90% male and men and women are equally competent, you should still expect to hire 9 times more men than women even if you could pick the best candidates every time.

But where did you get this measure of the population from? I'm skeptical that "population of software engineers I'm familiar with" is equal to "total universe of software engineers." And of course the "equally competent" -- well, if we're already deciding ahead of time that we know who's competent and who's not, I think that might be part of the problem, no?

Why should it be a metric if it's not part of our goals? The problem is there is no language for negotiating the relative weight of values.

For example, how should business success weigh against the social justice problem of black access to technological opportunity?

To reply to both you and the original question, I talked about Goodhart's Law [0] recently with upper management on the topic of D&I. Since metrics become useless as they are used to define goals, there is a constant need to rise above expectations. To paraphrase one executive, D&I is a process and not just a checkbox.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Even if underrepresented minorities are hired, those hired will be the upperclass representatives of those minorities, and a lot has been written on these divisions. It turns out races are not some unified organs. And neither are genders for that matter. There is no solution whereby the owning class can continue exacerbating inequality in a morally righteous manner.

I haven't been in any companies where diversity & inclusion has been a noticeable problem. However I've been at many companies that will try to find problems even where there are none to the point where the whole thing becomes an obvious virtue-signalling exercise rather than addressing any D&I issues.

I've recently seen some great hires at LinkedIn. We've also lost some great candidates because we were too slow (due to covid era freeze). Overall I'm excited that were bringing in talent that looks like the users we're serving.

Maybe not the data point you're looking for (outside US):

There are none, so none.

In fact, a lot of the implicit biases in the process remain the same as the last 50 years, like how it's regularly advised your CV should include date of birth and portrait.

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