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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

normal company business involves recruiting at universities. that person's company business does not seemingly recruit at all "nObOdy ApplIeD?!?!", many companies like theirs do recruit and chose to recruit at certain universities and act just as confused as that person's company, when there are simply more universities that can be recruited from and many of those have a higher percentage of engineers that are black.

you are desperately looking for something that wasn't suggested or said, but if you weren't (despite asking a question and responding with a conclusion you already had) the answer to your first question is "no". it would not be racist to expand recruiting to more engineering schools. and outside of that many existing recruiters have no difficulty reaching out to engineers with skills they like, this person's company does not seem to do that.

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If you recruit from best universities and you decide to recruit from some universities because they have more people of a specific race, that is a racial based decision and it makes it racist. Including based on race is as racist as excluding based on race.

if you acknowledge that the “best universities” dont create better or more productive programmers for what companies in the sector actually do, and those universities’ demographics are perpetuated by socioeconomic disasters then you are simply expanding your recruiting efforts

also this person’s company doesnt do any recruiting so that not a strong argument for them

I fully agree that the best universities don't have the exclusivity on the best output, but the classification of what is considered "best" should be based on the average quality of the output.

Also recruiting in universities is an effort that does not scale, I did that for about 5 years and it was not possible to reach all the universities in my country, so I had to limit myself to the universities in the top 3-4 cities that I could reach. Yes, I left out some that may have some good candidates, but this is a limitation of resources and not an intentional exclusion "I don't go to X because I don't like them". In the old days companies were not putting announcements to hire in every newspaper in every small city across the country, but only in key places to maximize output per cost.

Expanding recruitment won't be racist by itself, no. But going beyond what company is doing now to hire more _black_ devs would be (they didn't ask where to recruit people, so they probably have enough candidates, the question was "where to recruit black devs if we don't have any black candidates").

its not prejudiced

its not harming other groups

expanding recruitment efforts to places that include more black developers is not racist by any definition. maybe you aren't reading this the same way, its places that also include more black developers

it is not racist by any definition of the word. just because they change a practice does not make it racist, even if their reasoning was as contrived as you think it is, it still would not be racist/prejudiced/exclusionary-to-other-groups when the result is simply expanding efforts to places that also include more black developers

Well, if going out of your way to hire people of certain race isn’t racist, this word has clearly lost all its meaning.

1) no definition of that word has ever been that, so once your life long acid trip is over you can join us in this dimension

2) we're talking about expanding recruiting for all races and somehow you still misread that, choosing to focus on the reason that recruiting would be expanded as controversial

1) For me it clearly seems like a case of racial bigotry.

2) That’s a very dishonest framing of the issue. And I am not even sure why focusing on the controversial part is used as accusation of something bad ?

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