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> I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical challenges.

That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it.

When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other ones. Are they there because of skills? Could be, could also be HR wanting to push diversity? Also possible.

Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech recruiters that's tied to a bonus. So at every "diverse" hire you encounter you have to ask yourself: are they here because of skills or because someone was one hire short of cashing out their bonus?

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We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded auditions.

Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent.

During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than historically comprised their body, but they were from everywhere. It turns out musicians didn't want to be reduced to bigoted demographics, so it attracted many more "non-traditional" candidates when word spread you could make it on merit.

Blind auditions were scrapped when he left, and so did actual diversity. You can include everyone today in a single introduction by mentioning Yale, Juilliard, Paris Conservatory, Royal Academy, etc.

Merit destroys class privilege, which is a big faux pas when your patrons tend to be family of people who want to advance their careers in your institution. Just recently, I couldn't help but notice the timing of the creation of another superfluous position being filled by a fledgling choral director and a $MM donation by his parents to expand the performance hall he'll be using.

Mere dutiful patronage, surely, in these times of austerity.

I've read about this before (some fancy orchestra, not sure if it's the same one as you've mentioned) and I went to one of those "Let's get more X in technology" speeches. They had some crazy complicated ways to solve this (not Occam's Razor thinking).

I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and suggested blind tests for tech recruiting.

i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to subconsciously discriminate and pass their resume to the hiring team. Not perfect, but it gives X at least a better shot.

I was pretty much told it would never work and there were better ways and dismissed with a wave of a hand.

So why don't we do these somewhat blind tests?

Some recent-ish research (I can't remember enough keywords to find it right now) has found that doing this actually hurts women's success rate a couple percentage points.

It's been done. They dismissed it because when hiring is blinded like that the percentage of ordinary men who get hired goes up, not down. Men are discriminated against in hiring and that fixes it, but the type of people who want "diversity" don't want fair or blind hiring. They want to get trophy diversity hires.

this was part of the tech hiring method at one place I worked. The main filter was colleague review of an anonymised coding test. I don't know any details but it seemed to have the desired effect - high quality colleagues with diverse cultural identities.

This is the kind of thing I think of when people talk a out meritocracy. Somehow social studies have warped the perception of meritocracy to mean "anti my group" by selecting examples that aren't meritocratic.

Just look up "meritocracy dead" on a search engine of your choice. It's pretty minds boggling what people want to replace the goal of meritocracy with these days.

merit weakens class privilege but it doesn't destroy it. even on tests of merit like the SAT, higher class students usually have advantages in tutoring, more free time to study, etc.

it is certainly still possible for lower class children to get a leg up, but it's still an uphill climb

Often times it's pretty cheap. Really nice girl I knew at college, her dad dropped $10k on the school. This set her up for life in a town where a $45k per year job was life changing. When I left she was a VP in the college administration knocking down a very easy $85k. (The president made $155k, for comparison)

That's one take. Another take is that people want chums at work. An average person hires someone they see themselves as being friends with rather than the best qualified candidate. Animals such as bees, monkeys, and ourselves are also biased to favor their genetic group (kin selection). In other words, you subconsciously favor people who look like you and act like you.

In that light, the non diverse office might be seen as less productive. Maybe this is a bunch of pals goofing off, rather than people hired to do work?

But the whole point of the diversity hire isn't that you get someone who isn't white and that's it. The idea is that for every job, there are thousands of people who are qualified to do it, and among those, there are certainly people from all sorts of walks of life, and you'd spend earnest effort overcoming your subconscious biases by dipping your hand into the pool of equally skilled candidates, and pulling out the one that this overtly white dominated society we live in has held down since forever.

Thanks for saying and explaining what diversity hiring actually is. Much needed and much appreciated.

So the whole thing is based off of false premises; good to know.

It sure would be easier to build software firms if every job got thousands of qualified applicants. Obviously, that isn't the case.

That has more to do with the lack of marketing of the job opening than a lack of qualified talent out there

I think more generally the issue is being swamped with unqualified talent, such that it's difficult to identify actual talent amongst the mess. A lot of people are not trying to be good at what they do, they're just trying to be paid for what they do.

What's the issue? Look through resumes, see who has worked in this area before, interview and see if they talk the talk, hire and get them up to speed to walk your walk.

If the job is so complex that you have difficulty finding someone who can fit in every required peg, then that job should be broken into smaller, more manageable tasks that can be done by several more common people from the labor pool. It's just good business sense, too. If you require some specialist that takes forever to find and they leave, then you are screwed while hunting for a replacement. If you've instead broken that complicated job into digestible pieces, and someone leaves, you can hire a decent candidate before your employee even leaves, and have your employee get their replacement up to speed in their last few weeks along with the rest of the team.

The general problem, I think, is that talking the talk is not that hard, especially if you're not already well-covered in that domain (e.g. an established department/strong competency in the specific area) -- see all of sales. It's not that hard even if you are well-covered in that domain -- see all of pre-sales, and all of consulting. The fundamental issue is that describing a solution in broad strokes is much easier than in detail, and an interview doesn't give you so much time to even get into those details; and spending time to further evaluate is at least weeks of effort (because it's difficult to differentiate between someone competent getting up to speed on your codebase, and someone incompetent, and someone incompetent but can be made competent, without sufficient time to evaluate).

A lot of time is burned in recruitment cycles, largely because its much easier to say you're competent than to prove that you're not. (not to mention the natural reluctance & possible legal difficulties with firing).

Jobs get thousands of applicants; few of whom are worth considering, and resumes/interviews really don't tell you all that much. They tell you more than nothing, which is why they're used, but it's difficult to be comfortable on those alone, and there's not that much more you can do before it becomes weeks/days of free labor by your candidate.

Anyways, there's more than enough money burned on the subject that "throw more marketing at the problem" is very likely too easy an answer.

That's a potential issue in every job in every field. Somehow, it's only tech interviews that assign candidates unpaid homework. How are bridges not collapsing left and right from all the incompetent civil engineers they've been hiring with no whiteboard interviews?? Because you don't need to assign homework to probe whether or not a candidate knows the stuff they put on their resume. You can just talk to them about there experience and their approaches, like is done in any other discipline. You can call up references. Yes, you can fire the truly incompetent ones like is done in other fields, since California is an at-will state.

> How are bridges not collapsing left and right from all the incompetent civil engineers they've been hiring with no whiteboard interviews??

What? Other engineering fields have certifications and standards processes that actually mean something, and enforcement of it. That’s how they determine the baseline standard.

Software engineering’s closest thing is a 4-year degree who’s so routinely undervalued (per alignment to work requirements) it’s challenged by 3 month bootcamps, which are themselves challenged by garage-living dropouts with no explicit formal education.

And traditionally you had near-decade training with an apprentice/master system, or in a trade school, or expected-lifetime employment & training with the same company.

Software development is pretty new in trying to force feed training in large quantities with little to no verification, standards process or really any legitimate first or third-party trust-rings or evaluation process. I mean shit we’re still running on the assumption that the 20-year old dropout has decent potential to be an expert in his field ala wiz/gates/carmack.

As an industry, I think we’re fairly unique in our general incompetence.

> But the whole point of the diversity hire isn't that you get someone who isn't white and that's it. The idea is that for every job, there are thousands of people who are qualified to do it, and among those, there are certainly people from all sorts of walks of life, and you'd spend earnest effort overcoming your subconscious biases by dipping your hand into the pool of equally skilled candidates, and pulling out the one that this overtly white dominated society we live in has held down since forever.

How did you find a recruiting pipeline where you can confidently say that there are thousands of equally competent potential hires in it? In Software Engineering?

I'm very curious to know where and how you source talent.

I have interviewed hundreds and hired dozens of software developers over the years. It’s always been a challenge to find qualified candidates and I’ve never had a situation where there were 5 similarly qualified programmers, much less thousands.

I think there may be some positions where there lots of people equally skilled, but not aware of any in tech.

Perhaps there are thousands in the entire world, but not that apply to my positions. I think this is a good argument for trying to get more and better applications. But it confuses me to think that of the applicants I get, I can assume many are equally skilled.

I spent some some doing work for a recruitment company and my takeaway from that was that culture fit is the #1 predictor of a successful placement.

> Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech recruiters that's tied to a bonus.

It makes sense if you want to increase diversity to have the beginning of the funnel get lots of diverse candidates in. The recruiter is not a decision maker in most places, so the hiring bar is not necessarily affected by whether the recruiter got more diversity candidates into the funnel or not.

As an example, in my experience there were not a lot of female candidate resumes coming in via normal channels. If the recruiter wants a bonus for increasing gender diversity, they are doing extra work to go and find female candidates and convincing them to apply. That is probably exactly what you want to be happening.

> Some places ... yeah you mean all (~ most) places :)

I've seen this plenty of times. I even heard one manager at a happy hour say, "Thank god I finally hired an ABC and an XYZ, I can finally start recruiting based on talent again". This may be an extreme example, but still.

Unfortunately when you have affirmative action or hiring quotas, you inadvertently to create a culture where the diverse individuals are seen as less skilled and less qualified even when many of them would have gotten to the same place without the quotas.

You can always do affirmative action like Google. Invite the minorities to boot camps, coaching and mentoring programmes and so on... But subject them to the regular interview process and hiring bar.

> Invite the minorities to boot camps, coaching and mentoring programmes and so on... But subject them to the regular interview process and hiring bar.

That's not affirmative action. That's like giving free SAT prep to disadvantaged minorities. Affirmative action is further down the line, moving the bar for test/interview results to hit targets.

Which is not to say Google doesn't do it, just that the programs you're describing aren't it.

Even when I was there years ago, it was common knowledge amongst those of us who did hiring that women had an easier time in the interview process. For example, females could not fail the first phone screens. They would always be forwarded to on-site interviews regardless of earlier performance. The justification was that weak performance at the initial screens would be taken into account later by the hiring committee, however men were given no such second chances.

> however men were given no such second chances.

That is, of course, if your resume doesn't get tossed out for not being diverse enough [0][1]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/new-lawsuit-exposes-googles-desp...

This was my experience at a tech company in the Silicon Valley about 15 years ago. Women who applied were put at the top of the stack and guaranteed an in-person interview, over all other candidates. Even if they absolutely bombed the phone screening. We did end up having one potential candidate, but she was making a huge amount at her previous job and would not 'settle' for what was our sysadmin pay scale at the time. (I can't remember the exact numbers, but she was demanding at least 50% more than the top end of our pay scale.)

I'm still doing this hiring thing (which really slowed down in the pandemic). Inviting people who bombed phone screens on site happens all the time. Some reasons behind that seem to be: gender, ethnicity, nationality, internal references, strong CV, recruiters d20.

They do get filtered later. Over the years only one person who bombed an on site with me got hired. It was a young white man. I believe described this case on HN before.

pffft. Google’s screening process is decisively hostile to people with mobility and hearing challenged persuasion.

Been there, done that. It’s a no go.

> there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other ones.

Wow this is not at all correct based on my experience.

It is so common for "non-diverse individuals" to have gotten where they are based on things like network that I really don't think you can tell just by looking at someone.

The worst developers I have worked with are often traditional "non-diverse" candidates.

> The worst developers I have worked with are often traditional "non-diverse" candidates.

That's generally in proportion to the ratios in the workspace itself, nothing surprising statistically.

Now ask yourself who are best developers you have ever worked with. Even that is probably non-diverse ones.

So why isn't some company or founder dipping into this underutilized labor pool and blowing everybody's doors off?

That's a real question, and I don't have a good answer.

Because that underutilized labor pool is also pretty green. It's hard to build a product with smart, talented developers who haven't spent a bunch of years learning the ecosystem. There's really no good substitute for the apprenticeship young devs get by being exposed to best practices, senior developers who can cut through problems that they've seen before, configure work flows, etc.

That apprenticeship is expensive. It takes a lot of handholding. Not because they're not smart, but just because there's a vast amount of information that's hard to write down. It's a million little factoids, and they're easy to Google ... once you already know that they're there.

It's not impossible to build a company with one really good senior dev and a bunch of fresh-outs. But that's made one level more complicated when you've got a diversity of cultures in the room, and the hiring process ends up coming down to "Well, that guy just seemed like a better fit". So the excluded ones give up, and the process perpetuates.

I'm oversimplifying like crazy, and every real situation is different. But startups don't have the money or time to do better, and established companies just keep repeating their situations because that's what got them there.

Some day somebody may figure out how to change that... and they're almost certainly going to get run through the wringer on HN accusing them of being affirmative-action SJW wokeness virtue-signallers. Which just makes it one step harder, and when they fail (as most new things do) it will further cement for people that Those People just can't code.

> It's hard to build a product with smart, talented developers who haven't spent a bunch of years learning the ecosystem.

And, yet, YC funds these kinds of companies all the time. So why isn't YC tapping that pool?

> But that's made one level more complicated when you've got a diversity of cultures in the room

I don't buy that.

Tech happily on a daily basis deals with people who can barely speak the same language.

... which is exactly why the post points out the need for the applicant to be informed about affirmative action being applied. If you know how much AA was applied, you can actually make a better argument when you're mistreated.

[for the people downvoting: I'm just pointing out what the article says.]

You are asking the companies to divulge that hiring you was a crass violation of labor laws?

That doesn't seem a likely course of action.

Sure. Company wide email: "Careful with these demographics: make sure to re-interview them before joining your team, they might not have had a proper technical screen."

The lawsuit would be hilarious.

as someone who would make a diversity hire myself I am aghast at how this situation isn't taken as a opportunity to show the fools who hired me how utterly wrongly they've judged me. this reads like it's creating the very conditions for not achieving that, born out by the litany of positions held too briefly for making anything out of them at all.

These conversations already happen, they just tend to be more subtle. "So and so has made tremendous progress over the last several months, and I think with a little more support and guidance they could really excel...".

Recruiters don’t make the final decisions on hiring. The bonuses incentivize them or seek out diverse clients, not to lower standards. And your whole argument is, unfortunately, the standard-issue objection to any efforts to change an unfair system by, just to rub it in, once again blaming its victims.

Why don’t you ever suspect that young white guy to just have the job bececause their father knows the CXO from golf? Did that sysadmin use to room with the tech lead in colleges? Empirically, such employment biographies are far more common than your hypotheticals. Gut somehow, they do not seem to provoke this righteous anger of meritocracy.

If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right.

By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.

People always say "two wrongs don't make a right" and then make no effort to correct the first wrong that happens to benefit them.

Never had anything given to me by any connection in my family. Heck, my family dosen't even have any connections I could profit off if I wanted to.

Now, it does annoy me having had to jump-backwards through the modern interviews for tech position and now there are people like the author who get handed the same kind of jobs solely based on the genitalia the were born with and still complains about it.

So save your dollar store philosophy and stop making judgments about my reasons.

You're making the assumption that all wrongs can be corrected or made right, and that's often not true. We want to believe that everything can be magically fixed if we just come up with a clever enough solution. But many things don't work that way, and can't be made right, even if someone wants to do so. For example if you best friend sleeps with your spouse, you can forgive everyone, you can get divorced, you can move on, but there's no "making the wrong right".

If you cheat during a football game, there's a yardage penalty applied that gives the other team an "unearned" advantage. It's somehow plainly obvious there that if you simply say "don't commit penalties" but don't enforce it, people will cheat and commit penalties. And this wouldn't be fair or just.

Yet people lose their shit when it comes to trying to apply proactive equalizers to a historically deeply unfair society.

There's no real mystery, it's just selfishness taking precedence over correcting past wrongs.

That said, to do it effectively, I believe we need to focus on doing it early on in schooling, and the burden and pressure being put on companies is a heavy one because it doesn't align with where the opportunities first diverge.

This is an absurd analogy that doesn’t map to the situation at all. What you’re actually saying is that if a white person cheated at football before you were even alive, all white people playing today should get a yardage penalty.

What is selfish is you punishing someone else with the same skin color, and then upholding literal racism as a virtue.

They absolutely should lose their shit over that.

Sports are one of the few examples of a zero sum game in life. It is impossible to punish one team without giving an opposing team an unearned advantage in their league's standings. This unearned advantage is a negative externality of a game's best solution to prevent bad behavior.

In hiring, which is not a zero sum game, we can prevent these undesired behaviors (acknowledging and correcting for bias) without giving token advantages which undermine meritocracy

Can you explain to me how hiring is not a zero sum game? Suppose I have an open position. If I hire person A, I am not hiring person B, C, D, etc. How is it not zero sum?

So you think countries are necessarily made of teams of extremely cohesive people organized by e.g. skin color? And that all their members shall be jointly punished in case of wrongdoing of other members or even of their ancestors? Some of the results of that policy, if applied in its entirety, could well be not what you seem to expect. And I'm not to say that would be fair, when looking at an appropriate big picture, but let's not fall into infalsifiable hypotheses either. Nor complete essentialisation.

I agree with the need to attempt to correct unfairness by starting early, though. Just also pay attention to confounding factors, and never lose sight of the goal.

You don't have to ask yourself that, you can just accept that the people who you work with will usually be out of your control and respect their skills separately from what they look like. If they suck, then they suck, but don't prejudge because you think diversity hiring is rampant everywhere, which it is not.

> who you work with will usually be out of your control and respect their skills

Unless you're in a small company with a substantial ownership stake, not only should you accept the reality of this but also accept that dealing with it is part of your job. Making the best of the team and resources available is part of the job description.

If given the reins of the hiring process, a given developer could not do a better job filling out company's a roster.

The company has made decisions. Unless you were consulted on those decisions, your opinions aren't desired. Most of the time, your helping of those decisions' consequences will be inline with your responsibility for them: nil (scapegoating happens and shit rolls downhill, but I'd argue both are necessarily rare).

I guess not everyone agrees, since my comment was demolished.

Upvotes and downvotes are two sides to the same coin of passion! I'm used to my stricter "it's your job" comments getting downvotes. I always assume because they come off as hyper-conservative, bootstraps type language.

In this case, I think it's funny because the same mentality results in a more kumbaya attitude in the workplace (it's not my job to pick my coworkers. Whatever their faults, it is my job to succeed anyway). It's the type of thing I'd expect to be a bit of a upvote magnet...but I suppose hating on crappy coworkers trumps warmfuzzies in the HN crowd.

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