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Comment by danielrpa | Hacker News Reader

I happen to be very familiar with Google's diversity efforts and have many Black and Latinx friends and acquaintances in the company.

Google is one of the most racially inclusive tech companies in the world. It really tries hard to fix historical disparities between races in ways that you don't see in most companies, ranging from very active promotion of minorities to programs dedicated to hiring them. The interview process, while not perfect, also tries to erase bias by forcing gender and racially-neutral terms in interview writeups.

I have my own explanation for the problems the article describes, but I think it would be hard to accurately represent it in a HN comment. This is part of a VERY complex situation rivaling the historical Middle East conflicts in resistance to analysis.

For all of its faults - and it has many - Google is trying much harder the most companies to right past wrongs in our industry regarding racism.

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Google's outcomes are pretty weak. I work at a large tech firm that has significantly higher percentages of employees who are black and/or hispanic compared to Google. We are at 2-3x the rates Google publicly reports. At my current company, I regularly work with Black employees, but when I worked at Google, I could go weeks, if not months, without working with a Black person.

You can tout all the sophisticated programs about conquering bias or what not, but the truth is many of these initiatives have shown little actual evidence for improving outcomes. Our company is probably doing 1/10 of what Google is doing with 2-3x the outcomes. One major difference I see between Google and us; we actually have offices in cities with high concentration of black and hispanic talent. While I was at Google, leadership pushed people towards the HQ and in fact they were shutting down offices that were in more diverse areas of America. You can tout all the sophisticated programs Google runs, but I believe that Google misses the most basic steps for how to increase diversity in their workforce.

Our metrics aren't great, but they are a significantly better than Google. We aren't a unicorn, I know of a handful of tech companies that are at the same level, and the common pattern I see is very basic steps towards hiring that Google refuses to consider. As an outsider (and an insider several years ago), my experience is that Google invests in lots of programs that give a credence of caring about diversity, while actively avoiding doing impactful things.

They aren't trying to force outcomes. "The interview process, while not perfect, also tries to erase bias by forcing gender and racially-neutral terms in interview writeups."

Its easy to boost your outcomes if that's what you want. You just specifically hire people of some race.

I'm curious how the interview process at Google compares to other tech companies. I don't mean the text written afterwards but the actual interview process.

My female friend interviewed at a number of large tech companies, not Google due to it's COVID hiring slowdown, and generally there was at least one interviewer that made comments I never, as a white man, have heard from an interviewer. Not outright sexist but things like (paraphrasing) "clearly you must have only worked on part of this project and not do the whole thing." It wasn't a question "which parts did you work on?" but a direct statement questioning her claim to have done the whole project.

I imagine most interviewees hear things I've never heard during their interviews- interviews can be a very divergent experience based on company, personality, and experience.

Sounds like something other female colleagues of mine have experienced. Very normal for them.

I will say - as a man - that I rarely heard this question when interviewing.

This has been my experience as well. There are usually 6-8 men on the panel interviewing me. Most of the interviewers are completely normal and fair, but in almost every interview there are 1-2 men who seem to be trying to figure out what fraud I am pulling.

When I was an employee at Google and did interviews, I was told that for diversity reasons, I couldn't ask where an interviewee "was from" because that would bias my decision.

I'm sorry, but other companies and fields don't prevent this question, and have far less bias (well, employee distributions that more closely map to underlying population distributions) in hiring. Most of what Google is doing is to reduce its legal exposure to class action hiring lawsuits, not righting wrongs, as much as their leaders like to say they are.

Just because other fields or companies do something doesn’t mean they’re not problematic. You might be living off of selection bias.

I know for a fact that people in my area discriminate based upon where people are from. If they know you’re from a certain area, they have a particular disdain for you from the get go. So, don’t rule it out as being a real thing.

If you have a problem with people discriminating on place of origin, telling them not to ask where somebody is from is not the answer.

HR is used to make people fill a series of checkboxes - it isn't there to actually change people.

You're not going to somehow convert these folks to not be discriminatory overnight or even in a few years (as evident from HN). It will be something that will require a lifetime of work and more than just HR doing something.

HR is there to just prevent the assholes from being able to outright do it in the public eye and then the company being held liable for jackass clearly discriminating based upon where the person is from. If you never ask the question and the employee decides to not hire because, "seems like she's from Missouri, never did like those Kansas City Chiefs. Fuck 'em!" Well, employee and company can't be held liable for that decision because only the employee knows they discriminated for that reason and no one else does. But you ask the question - opens the box.

> I'm sorry, but other companies and fields don't prevent this question

I'm pretty certain that if I asked HR about this, they would say what Google said: Don't ask this question as it could be viewed as discriminatory. I don't think Google is an outlier here.

I don't go to HR and ask them what I'm allowed to do.

I see the problem now.

wtf hahaha.

National origin isn't even a relevant interview question. Regardless of the legal issues you shouldn't ask because it's a total waste of time.

How do you know Google is working harder than most other companies? Perhaps taking such an active approach is not the right strategy.

Would be interesting to hear your insight.

I happen to be fairly engaged in the "diversity" space and I've worked in a few large tech companies myself. Google is not the only company trying hard. But Google is extremely data and metrics centric, and I think this aspect of their culture is one thing making a positive difference here. Also, there are more Google employees working on this problem than the entire staff of some medium sized companies.

What I'm trying to say is that this is a hard problem and perhaps this attrition, paradoxically, is an unexpected consequence of trying to to tackle the problem head on - rather than lack of effort and investment in trying to solve it.

I think you may be hitting the nail on the head.

Spending so many resources creates an image or a sense of urgency. This sense of urgency creates pressure within the organization, which also would pressure even more so the employees that Google is trying to help. No quantity of metrics and calculations are going to reach this type of observation. Google is probably one of the least qualified companies to tackle this being that it is driven by a scientific mathematical calculus and is one of the most corrupting organizations in the world mainly due to their major privacy violations and manipulation as it relates to their search products. Other companies particularly those that deal with artistic areas are more likely to come up with useful solutions to this problem.

Google may be better served sending money to another organization to study and research how to achieve the goals of counteracting the under representation.

Why do you use Latinx if the people who actually should go under that umbrella? Let me guess you're a white coastal elite, right?

this is why i'll never work for google. Seems like a bunch of left'ist crowed, that just want more and more, goal post is now changed to effect outcome, when it never comes out.

I’d be interested in reading your hard-to-represent analysis. You can find various ways to contact me, including email, at vinneycavallo.com. Send it over!

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