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Comment by IfOnlyYouKnew | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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