Ask HN: Is discrimination to promote diversity okay?

I will repeat most of a previous comment:

At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days.

Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect.

Candidate B: Had never worked in the industry, had only a handful of qualifications, barely responsive. Seemed indifferent to getting the job. Additionally, not too fluent in English, to the point where it was more than a little difficult to communicate.

Candidate A was a white man, Candidate B was a recent immigrant and a woman. The immediate supervisor for the position -- a woman -- wanted Candidate A, as did most others. However, the person running the show said, out loud I might add, that our group already had "too many pale males." I would like to repeat that: too many pale males. A significant glance was then cast at me and the guy in the wheelchair on the hiring committee, both being not-particularly-dark men. Presumably by "virtue" of our disabilities we would automatically be down for the Diversity Squad.

Candidate B was hired and turned out exactly as she was in the interview: disinterested in doing the job, lacking even some bare understanding of how to accomplish many things, always trying to find ways to do her grad school homework while on the job and pushing off her duties on someone else, rather than trying to learn her tasks. Her poor English was a significant barrier. She remained a leaden weight until she went off to be someone else's problem. She wasn't a drag due to her skin color or sex, but she was hired because of those things.

This was over ten years ago, in academia. A friend who worked for pharmacy chain was bluntly told that as a white male, he was not going to get a manager job, no matter how long he held on. Something something equity.

I am not even a little comfortable with it, I know it is there. Frankly, now it is part of the calculus -- if I see a white man in a position, he probably had to work pretty hard to earn it. Anyone else? Welllllll ... they might have been diversitied into the position. And so the cycle continues!

A person I know has a similar experience in academia, a summer intern in his/her group was hired because of her sex and skin color, barely made it through the project, and even the supervisor acknowledged (in private) that the hire was a diversity hire to appease some grant requirements.

It is just the exact same racism as the old one. It also very much illuminates the quality of management we have to endure, people without good judgement think themselves as smarter and superior. I would recommend to search for another job because personalities like this cannot ever assume responsibility. Tough judgement but in self defense at this point.

Of course this will also stigmatize anyone that could fall under the label 'minority'. If management cannot look beyond the horizon on this simple dynamic, it is probably very bad management.

This submission is flagged, but it shouldn't IMO. Everyone goes through hiring processes, everyone has been in a team onboarding people, and this of course isn't alien to tech companies.

This submission, from my POV is clearly on-topic.

> This submission is flagged

What a shame that we can't discuss this topic that affect all of us in very concrete ways.

While I'd like to agree, I have yet to see a discussion on this topic on HN ever be insightful, or let me learn something new.

It seems like it always devolves into the same opinions, and people just become more dug in and increasingly vitriolic.

I'd love to see a solution to how that problem could be addressed, but if I had to put in a vote for "lowest quality discussions on HN" it would be on the "DEI battle" topics.

Whether this should be flagged depends on the flagging criteria, and I'm not sure there is general agreement on HN about 'flags'. This seems like a good place to have the conversation described by the OP, but I think that people are just flagging posts from viewpoints they disagree with these days.

At the risk of taking the conversation off-topic, this is probably a reflection of HN's changing demographics. It seems like HN is ever-more plagued by low-quality comments, such as reactions to headlines like: 'the title said rails, so I thought they were talking about Ruby on Rails, LOLZ!'. In addition to that, we have more newspaper editorials and polemics on the front page, and fewer 'nerdy' articles than ever before.

> I'm not sure there is general agreement on HN about 'flags'

Actually, I think there is, at least recently: people flag anything they dislike, they find offensive, they strongly disagree with or simply don't like to see being discussed.

Does anyone have any idea where to actually have this discussion?

The only place you can discuss this openly is 4chan /g/. It is what it is.

No.

Why is diversity an explicit goal anyways? What is there to gain from "diversity" in particular superficial diversity (skin color, sex) vs intellectual diversity?

> Over the last decade I think there has often been an unspoken preference towards candidates that improve diversity, and I don't have a problem with this.

You're part of the problem. Discrimination is always a problem, even if it's subtle. We (the tech geeks) should have pushed against this from the start, not let it fester and spread.

> You're part of the problem.

Not actively pushing back against something doesn't make one "part of the problem". It makes one a bystander, and no, bystanders are not part part of the problem they are neutrals. They could be more "helpful" for our cause if they where not, but they are not part of the problem, they are "untapped potential" if you will.

This kind of rhetoric bullies people into action and even tough I agree that we should push back in this case, this kind of bullying is not okay.

Read the quoted part again. S/He wasn't a bystander, s/he supported the discrimination (probably silently), as long as it was subtle.

Obviously I'm not saying you always have to risk your job/career/livelihood/reputation to take unpopular (but right) action. That's just a nice-to-have.

I don’t like that rhetoric either, but unfortunately certain radical ideologies do not acknowledge neutrality. Maybe we can turn to John Stuart Mill for a more eloquent appeal:

“ Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

> certain radical ideologies do not acknowledge neutrality

So what? Why can't we acknowledge neutrality because some other people don't?

Just providing a nuanced counterpoint, not denying or refuting anything you said.

People have different experiences that may be relevant in ways you can't know because you didn't have them.

The classic example is the video of the black man showing the soap dispenser not working with his hand until he put a white piece of paper under it.

Parents, or people who take care of children (which is still mostly women), will have different ideas about when they may be available for things.

These are just two examples. You say discrimination is always a problem, but if a space is only full of one kind of person there may already be discrimination happening.

Sidestepping the specific, delicate topic:

Once a business starts making decisions based on anything arbitrary (e.g. nepotism, or meeting specific quotas that aren't related to the business), it's a slow downhill slide in my experience.

Practically: There's not much you can do other than quietly exit.

This begs the question of where one can exit to when the arbitrary decision-making extends to every corner of society, including many of its most fundamental institutions.

Start your own business if you can.

As a white male team leader with hiring authority I select the best person for the job who will enhance the team and bring with them the talent to accomplish our goals. Having said that, I believe diversity is a strength and that women and people of color are underrepresented in tech, and use my influence to help correct that as much as possible without sacrificing operational readiness. It has not been a problem. I can't speak for others experiences or biases but I simply do not see the problem that OP is detailing.

> and [I] use my influence to help correct that as much as possible without sacrificing operational readiness.

So racism/sexism is okay as long as it doesn't hurt operational readiness? Or do you not consider this racism/sexism, if so how are hiring decisions based on race/sex not racist/sexist?

how are you equating hiring a diverse team (all skills being roughly equal) with racism/sexism? I think we might be working under different assumptions on the definition of those terms.

To correct for under-/overrepresented groups you need to change your hiring decision based on the groups of the applicants. And preferring hiring based on these groups (sex, race, etc) is sexism and racism in my books.

I would counter that by pointing out that the actual racist/sexist hiring practices are what led to the imbalance in diversity in the tech field, and I'm not excluding anyone due to their race/sex (no quotas, no "I won't hire white guys" etc) but for every job post if there are 200 applicants, 10 worth interviewing and 3 that I am seriously considering, it becomes a judgement call who I want on my team but I I do not use race or sex as the deciding factor

> actual racist/sexist hiring practices are what led to the imbalance in diversity in the tech field

Can you name "actual racist/sexist hiring practices"? I'm not american, but my understanding is that lack of women in tech comes from that fact that more women are interested in people that things. 80%+ women go to nursing schools, 80%+ men go into engineering. If you make society more egalitarian you maximise those differences between sexes, hence 10-15% of women engineers in Norway and 30% in Bangladesh.

no idea if that is caused by biology or social framework (the way you were raised, a lot of software jobs are in contracting, so no maternity leave etc.)

You are treating people differently by their extrinsic characteristics. You also fail to see the dynamic that unfolds if people are unjustly penalized. This is a management error on your part.

Furthermore your behavior is indicative that you would sacrifice your own team to look progressive. Sometimes the rules of PR are harsh, but it is your job to shield employees from that and treat them fairly.

Your perceptions are accurate and you are not alone in your distaste of modern racism.

Somehow "best candidate for the job" translates far top much into "but they can't perform as well so need help" I've found. I do find myself covering myself whenever I have to say no candidate X is just not as suited for the role and I don't care what their name/gender is.

For reference, I work with some excellent people of various combinations of gender, orientation, creed, background (unis are great for this) and frankly i just put together a big table of pros and cons to make sure every hiring I've been involved with the decision is defensible.

Yes, improving diversity is a pro, but so is 10yr+ of database management. But both get a score of 1 on the table.

If both get a "1" on the table, then can you please the explain the comparison you made to reach that conclusion (that they're both equal)?

I'm just confused as to how diversity relates to the competence of an individual/team.

I am myself considered a "minority", which I have always felt quite patronizing (let alone the fact that it's incoherent: I'm a North African arab, the US Census considers me white but Canada considers me Arab...). The last thing I want is for my achievements to be seen through the lens of Race than for what they are.

No that the table would be taking into account many factors.

Even deciding to prioritise say a certain quality or skill work out what the bast candidate is from a score of say a total of 30/40 based on their application. Then shortlist to give the top few a chance at interview.

Performance at interview doesn't reflect the choice of who is interviewed. The choice of who gets to interview can be based on many factors and if it was important to choose a certain attribute then you can base your weighting on that. Ironically the exact equivalent I have is an example of something which isn't allowed because it discriminates, it was many as a very rough example.

This wasn't meant to be exact its a very rough example of a concept and not to be taken literally. Frankly three use of metrics like this are needed to explain brain dead comments like are you sure you're not biasing against certain applicants... To which we have to show no they just don't meet certain criterion.

Actually allowing the team to reach correct diversity ratios would probably only be a "good" metric to the bosses, bosses, boss. Again never has impact at interview as the hiring decision is made by a panel. Just shows were aware our field is dominated by older white males...

Betting this will get down voted too...)

I wish I could answer your comment, but I really had trouble reading half your sentences. Please work out your punctuation please.

What you are doing is breaking the law. You cannot use protected characteristics, at all, in hiring or firing decisions.

As I said the example was maybe written to quickly, bit you'd be amazed at how flexible the rules are when it comes to seconding things like "brings contacts within the field", " helps promote blah" and these are usually code for something close to "nepotism" IMO and something I strongly personally discourage against, but that example is still legal so ...

Is this perhaps an opportunity for some companies to explicitly do blind hiring, or something along those lines? I'm thinking of Coinbase (and others) who have taken a somewhat contrarian approach and said that the workplace is just for work, and not politics. They've taken flak for it, but are also probably(?) attracting people for whom that kind of workplace is a positive. A company that goes out of their way to say "We don't discriminate in our hiring, positively or negatively" and follows through on it could probably pick up talented engineers who are otherwise being filtered out of the hiring process due to their skin color / gender.

France tried it and it had the opposite effect of what they expected (hires became less diverse)

https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-h...

As a male from Eastern Europe I feel extremely concerned about this.

When I was growing in the 90s we've literally had monthly income of around $200 for a family of four.

My family got first PC when I was around 13. Internet, just before I started university in 2009. Being potentially discriminated due to "white male privileges" would be almost laughable if happening in the film and not real life.

> It's unjust to discriminate against a young graduate today, and have them pay the price for bygone injustice.

That implies the price will ever be paid (and perish the thought that you get a discount if your ancestors fought or died for the Union during the Civil War, or were on the "right side of history" in any other conflict).

When those who think remotely like you are driven out of the halls of economic and political power*, do you think they will look at the state of things and say: "You know what, we've achieved enough diversity. It's time to stop discriminating against whites"?

*Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

The argument you point out, about treating well-off groups equally as bad as those less well-off, is a bad argument and not what you should be thinking about. The practices you point out have nothing to do treating everyone equally bad. You are focusing on the unfortunate consequence of attempting to make right past injustices, rather than the effort to right past injustices. The goal is not to discriminate against young graduates. Rather, biasing hiring in favor of historically oppressed groups is an attempt to, in some small way, achieve a society we would have been in without things like racism and sexism. I understand this type of thing is frustrating for a qualified candidate who personally has a minuscule impact on society, yet is feeling the full brunt of a rejection. But I would encourage you to focus on the much more widespread similar feeling felt by those being helped up by such efforts.

I'm afraid that, to my mind, it doesn't matter whether the goal is to discriminate or not. The discrimination itself is a problem, and we'd be better agreeing that this is a place we will not go to, no matter the end.

The problem with this view, to me, is that it takes a really narrow view of discrimination. Why are you only concerned with the hiring process of software engineers? To me, bad-faith alarm bells go off when concern about discrimination only rears its head when the speaker's corner of the world is impacted. There are much more pernicious problems that need addressing than the quality of engineers at your job. How is the need for meritocratic software hiring more urgent and pressing than rectifying major societal problems? Are you OK with permanently setting in place the underclass, subjugated status of entire minority communities so your page loads are quicker?

Somehow many people in this thread are jumping to rebut the idea of meritocratic hiring. I'm with you on that. I think meritocracy is a naive idea and it's actively damaging when hiring teams think they can boil the talent of candidates, and their effectiveness to do a job, down to some objective and comparable score of merit.

I also don't give a shit about making my page loads quicker. That's rarely what the world, or the business for that matter, needs.

What I'm talking about is the specific phenomenon of discriminating against a candidate based on their gender or race, and whether people think this is okay.

I'm concerned with the process of hiring software engineers because it's something I have to do daily, and have done for a very long time. I'm coming here to talk about it (rather than other social issues) because I think others here have experience in the same area.

You can't discuss the topic you raised without discussing social issues because it IS a social issue. Affirmative action in hiring software engineers is not a distinct topic, you simply raised the topic of affirmative action among the tech community.

And I will say, it is fine to broach these subjects. Your concerns are legitimate. I simply choose to take a much broader view of things and feel that until we get much closer to making the world more equal and righting past injustices, we should try and use as many tools we have to close the wealth gap between majority and minority groups.

As soon as you bias based on any trait YOU are the one discriminating.

You think you're helping correct society by helping one group over a perceived disadvantage, but all you are doing is enforcing a another kind of discrimination

You can't correct discrimination by discriminating back or tipping the scale one way or another, the only way to defeat discrimination is to throw away the scales.

Utopian societies are the motivation for all kinds of genocides.

Allowing a company culture that reduces people down to their race and gender during recruiting has a rather significant risk that it may spread to other part of the company.

Do we want a company cultures that operate based on biases and stereotypes? I don't. I also do not believe in collective punishment in order to improve society. The best thing we can do to society to remove biases and stereotypes is to encourage a culture of understanding, by seeing individuals as individuals rather than single bits information like skin color or gender identification. Be the change that society need to be, encourage others to do the same, and culture will slowly change in the same direction.

You are not being charitable with the arguments of those you disagree with. People are not reduced down to their race or gender, those aspects are one factor among multiple. No company is hiring random people matching their desired profiles off the street simply because of those characteristics.

I have a lot to say about your views on this. First of all, I am not concerned about company cultures. There are way bigger concerns in life than company culture. And if that really matters to you and you don't like your company culture, go to a company you like.

Your phrasing of "collective punishment" is really telling. You seem to really focus on the hardship incurred by the candidates discounted a bit because they are historically privileged. I find it very easy not to dwell on the temporary misfortunes of well-qualified software engineers. They will be fine. It's not a big deal. I care much more about fixing the "collective punishment" that has been inflicted on certain groups for hundreds of years.

And to your point claiming you know how to fix these problems: I like what you advocate. I disagree that it will be sufficient. Nothing has worked. We need to try everything, because the problem is so hard. To me, what the OP describes is part of the price society has to pay for the ill-gotten gains we've enjoyed for hundreds of years. It's not a punishment, but it's like tech debt. We backed ourselves into a corner where things are so bad that the only feasible ways to address inequality among groups is hacky solutions like affirmative action. Nobody WANTS to do that. But the problem is just so old and stuck.

If an applicant is being thrown out on the sole attribute of their race and gender, then those individuals are being reduced down to only two bits of information. One can not look only on those not being discriminating. It would be as silly as saying that no university was selecting random people from the street matching the male gender in the 19th century.

The phrase I am borrowing is from Carl Sagan, where he is using the even less charitable argument that discrimination is simply lazy thinking. Instead of evaluating an individual as a full person we reduce them down to single bit of information like gender and race. It is what people do when they are unwilling to do the thinking needed to actually see a person. The result is nothing less than evil, historically and present.

You might not care about culture, but those being hired usually do. A culture of discrimination is a culture of distrust. On HN we see with a fairly common regularity articles where once being happy to have joined a company under those circumstances, the diversity hire find themselves very unhappy and leaves. The experience can so bad that people quit the profession itself, or determine that the only functional work culture is a mono-culture and joins a company with only their gender or race.

Last, I have a rather strong warning against trying to solve the ills of the past with ills of the present. It is less than a century ago that a country in Europe decided to go after a demographic that held a historical strong position in mercantile and banking. Resenting a demographic based on what their grand and grandgrand, and grandgrandgrand parents did is a very dark place to be.

> Nothing has worked

We do know what works, it just people are unwilling to do it. The way to address class differences between demographic is to raise the social support. Gender segregation is effectively reduced through support programs like mentorships, which raises understanding and cooperation. It is hard work. What does not work in both cases is more discrimination.

You cannot undo these injustices anymore. You try to fix these injustices on the backs of others with racial discrimination. This is the objective thing you are doing. If you are white and believe corrections are in order, you have to step back and nobody else but you.

But since you probably won't, your proclamation to fight racism is very hollow. You might just like to discriminate, projecting your anger or vanity on others.

The goal is to reach equality and you are in the way of it. There aren't any metrics that could satisfy the strive to "diversity" anyway.

> But I would encourage you to focus on the much more widespread similar feeling felt by those being helped up by such efforts.

We teach 4 year olds about the problems with compensatory justice, but you are revealing yourself with that comment. Worse, you try to compensate for different generations. People championing diversity call themselves progressive but at the same time espouse ethics from the 17th century. But here racism is primarily a you problem, not a society problem.

It's been my experience as well. I mentioned before on different threads that as a hiring manager I've been told by HR to move all non white male candidates to the phone screen step automatically. Regardless of their resume.

It does not make me comfortable at all, and I'll admit, it actually creates a bias in my mind when I do perform the phone screen for these candidates. It's completely counter productive because even if they are excellent candidates I feel like I'm just being strong armed into calling them regardless.

I do not embrace it. As you mentioned, brushing off concerns by saying "well, it's time for all these oppressors to know how it feels" is dumb. Those who think like that don't care about justice for the future, they just want revenge for the past. And it never ends well.

How is it even legal in America? Can anyone who actually knows a law tell me why they haven't challenged it more?

It is illegal, but i haven't challenged it simply because I would lose my job.

I said "HR" in my comment, because it is effectively what it is, but the real name is "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team". Their mandate is to increase diversity, and since they also deal with HR duties they have a lot of power.

And to be clear, I was never instructed in writing. It was always during conversations. It would literally be "I say, they say".

Effectively its just a bit of waste of my time (and the applicants) since I'm not yet forced to move them to the on-site, or give them a different take home. It's probably coming eventually though.

Of course it’s illegal [1], but it’s also an uphill battle on three fronts. First, you’d probably get fired. Second, you’d immediately get branded as something like a white supremacist or privileged asshole by your coworkers and the online social justice mobs. Third you’d have to get a jury to actually side with you (if you could afford to bring it that far in court).

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/youth/racecolor-discrimination-faqs#Q6

It is not legal, and if the OP has sufficient documentation then an EEOC complaint would be justified. Of course, in doing so the OP would also likely need to find a new career.

I see the desirable state as being two-pronged:

1. From any given candidate’s perspective, I want them to be treated equally and evaluated fairly.

2. From a candidate pool perspective, I think we need to ensure that the candidate pool is opened more widely than to the top N schools or top M companies.

Diversity has actual value, unless you're only making software for educated white men.

I'm sure this ideology gets lost in some departments and it feels like a checkbox exercise, but that doesn't make it meritless.

It's not just who's the best, it's who's best for the team and the company.

So if I understand your point correctly, you're suggesting that all forms of discrimination based on innate characteristics are acceptable, as long as there is advantage to the business?

No. You still hire qualified people, but you take positive action to ensure you're not only interviewing candidates from (eg) white male backgrounds.

A lot of hiring mechanisms involved social ties, and only posting jobs to places you've previously hired from. Shockingly diversity doesn't improve.

> Candidates that are doing well are literally being ejected from the hiring process because they don't help diversity stats. On more than one occasion I've seen a hiring manager with open roles tell a recruiter to not bother them with any applications from white males.

That's illegal per US law. It's also racist, but that particular flavor of racism is illegal.

> The nuance has gone in recent years, and it has become common for interviewers to think nothing of directly and openly identifying "white male" as a negative trait when discussing a candidate after an interview.

I've heard the opposite. The HR rep seemed not to be thrilled by the applicant but the technical team really liked him. Afterward with just the engineers someone said out loud "Hey, and he (the candidate) went to X and he's white so you know he's there on merit".

At first I was shocked but then over the years I've seen firsthand "affirmative action" push for candidates that were less qualified (despite being told that the diverse candidate was only preferred when both were of "equal competencies").

> I will inevitably have to either challenge something, and be labelled a bigot or misogynist, or live an increasingly bizarre existence with things happening around me that I consider to be clearly wrong.

Don't discuss this openly. You'll put a target on your back and get cancelled (just look at the MIT lecturer). These discussions, sadly, will have to happen behind closed doors.

Racial discrimination may be illegal, but good luck getting a supportive verdict on that for a white person unless he/she is applying to a majority non-white organization, and even then it would be tough.

In practice we now have affirmative action all over again. The best summary of my viewpoint on that comes from a guest speaker way back when I was in college: “If you think affirmative action is fair, I want you to look around the room, find a white or Asian person, and say to their face that a black student deserves to be in their seat instead, because they’re black.”

> These discussions, sadly, will have to happen behind closed doors.

Even HN doesn't tolerate the discussion as the topic has been flagged.

No, it's not okay. Unfortunately it is normal. I have been in charge of hiring decisions in the past and was explicitly told to "prefer women and minorities". Because of this, I felt it was my duty to discriminate against women and minorities, to at least balance out the decision-making somewhat (I was not the sole hiring decider).

I would prefer not to discriminate at all. But in the current climate, to anyone with power reading this, giving preference to white men is ironically the right thing to do. I hope things change soon to where I and others don't need to do this.

> I'm concerned that at some point I will inevitably have to either challenge something, and be labelled a bigot or misogynist, or live an increasingly bizarre existence with things happening around me that I consider to be clearly wrong.

This is a hard issue. I have chosen to accept the 'bigot' label if it comes (no one has called me that irl yet). My skills are highly in demand, and I don't care at all if I get fired; I can have another job in a week. If you're not in this fortunate position, I can't say what you should do. But I do believe that once you've "made it" and you can afford to do and say what is right, you have the duty to do so no matter what people will say.

I feel this is almost entirely the wrong way to go about this.

"Balancing the scale", e.g. applying targeted discrimination as an attempt to offset other perceived discrimination, is how we got into this mess!!

Pick the best person for the role, regardless of race/color/creed/sex/... and advocate your peers do the same. This is the only correct answer here.

It's not to offset perceived discrimination, but explicitly stated discrimination policy. When you can't change the policy, you can at least do the right thing and try to go against it. When two people are equally qualified I will advocate for the white male, because I know that the others won't. If I simply say "They are both equally qualified" then the white male will never be hired, and this is wrong.

It is unfortunate that their decisions require me to make this decision, but ethically and game theoretically it is correct. If the policy was meritorious then this would be unnecessary.

You're not really correcting a wrong. You basically propagating the exact same logic they are. using racism/sexism to fight racism/sexism.

Giving preference to white men is the right thing to do because they’re being excluded from the workforce?

From my observation having visited several different/diverse locales these past few years, the diversity isn't as much of an issue...compared to the actual competency of the participants. In Malaysia, the main three races are Malay, Chinese, and Indian. Because they are a Muslim country, official positions in government as well as academic opportunities and positions are limited based on religion, which usually means race as well. How is this relevant? Well, now the economy of the entirety f Malaysia is on par with Singapore, their tiny breakaway neighbor to the south. You see, Singapore has roughly the same demographics as Malaysia - but without racial/religious limitations on individuals pursuing their careers - in the Civil and professional space. The difference between the nations now is profound. I likened it to running a race, both countries participating, yet one nation tying the legs of its two most competent runners together, so that the third runner would be able to keep up - within the realm of his own nation.

Another example I can think of is the race distribution in Latin America, the countries which are more diversified are generally less prosperous, perhaps its the culture in general but the differences between a country such as Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic - infrastructure wise readily observable - are not so nuanced. The inhabitants of these countries acknowledge this as well, even residents of one hoping to emigrate to another - for a better quality of life.

Cancel culture and PC propaganda targeting the youth and conflating emotional senses of fairness and justice have obscured basic observation of measurable facts. The ultimate result of the current policy in the U.S. will undoubtedly result in a lower quality of life - from the top down, as a result of sacrificing competency for an equality agenda of misconstrued tolerance.

I'm not really comfortable with it. I chose the field because it is mostly attractive to stereotypical nerds and few others so I wouldn't be out of place. I suspect the fact that engineers especially get hit so hard with this diversity drive has little to do with actual diversity but also other things.

>To those that say, "Hey, it's just time for white males to find out what it has been like for women and ethnic minorities"

The only people saying that are bitter idiots.

Reading all these anecdotes of disinterested people of color just confirms to me people want to strawman this issue, as they always do.

Nobody is talking about forced hiring of disinterested people. The problematic situation is when several candidates who are perfectly confident, able and willing are not hired, because the hiring manager for some reason just liked that white person better. Every single time. Just... a gut feeling, since they were all pretty much equal.

That practice, where the person hiring always defaults to the white person, even in a mixed group of people with equal skill, is what's problematic, and what needs to be tackled.

Yet people have already begun imagining the most extreme fantasy scenario possible... bad thing is that when you start imagining that, some people actually start doing it because they think they have to. Repeat a lie enough, and people will start thinking it's the truth.

From a more long term point of view, it's also important to increase diversity. Simple from the argument that the more groups you get interested and comfortable with joining a certain industry, the more skill and competition will eventually come around.

Giving more people starter positions and the chance to learn, is exactly how you robustly increase a workforce. But more importantly: having strict rules against abuse.

Here's my time for anecdotal evidence: known several people, perfectly skilled, who just left tech companies because of the casual racism and sexism that HR just decided to ignore.

And when only 1 or 2 people are involved, you can keep the larger workforce thinking there's nothing bad going on. And so when people see a thread like that, they go "I've never seen that". Well yeah, it's being kept out of sight...

> That practice, where the person hiring always defaults to the white person, even in a mixed group of people with equal skill, is what's problematic, and what needs to be tackled.

Yes, I agree this needs to be tackled (an understatement I know). We need to stamp out the racism that non-white people routinely face. As far as hiring goes, I feel a lot of progress has been made on this front, but I don't have any idea if that feeling is correct.

> Yet people have already begun imagining the most extreme fantasy scenario possible... bad thing is that when you start imagining that, some people actually start doing it because they think they have to. Repeat a lie enough, and people will start thinking it's the truth.

I'm not certain exactly what you are referring to here. I was going to comment on it but then realised maybe I have completely misunderstood. What fantasy scenario and lie are you referring to here? And what is it that people start actually doing?

By fantasy scenario I refer to those people who comment one thing and one thing only: the idea that the government wants to force bad hires, as some kind of attack against white people.

While in reality, all that's being asked is to recognize that there's something systemic going on here.

But enough people comment this, some people pick it up and actually start doing it...

In India the concept is literally called "positive discrimination".

Same in the UK.

Please correct me if you think I am wrong (disclaimer, never been to India) but my understanding of the situation in India is "vote banking".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Votebank

» Votebank (also spelled vote-bank or vote bank), in the political discourse of India, is a term referring to a loyal bloc of voters from a single community, who consistently back a certain candidate or political formation in democratic elections. Such behavior is often the result of an expectation of benefits, whether real or imagined, from the political formations, often at the cost of other communities. Votebank politics is the practice of creating and maintaining votebanks through divisive policies. As it encourages voting on the basis of self-interest of certain groups, often against their better judgement, it is considered harmful to the principles of representative democracy.[by whom?]

Not Indian. It's more likely this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India

This is just whitewashing it.

All discrimination is "positive" for someone. That's kind of the point.

In this case "positive" is not something "good". It's not there to soften the word "discrimination". It's similar to "blocklist" and "allowlist": you could argue that a blocklist is just an allowlist for each item that's not on the blocklist. Positive discrimination for a trait is negative discrimination for any other trait, but sometimes you'd like to highlight that you select for something, and not that you select against a myriad of other thing.

This seems to be a extremely common concern based on what I see on HN.

In real life I’m not certain this is the case, but it would seem that white males feel especially persecuted even to the point where it’s not uncommon to see comments suggesting they are the most discriminated against group.

I’ll also point out how common this sentiment has been since the civil rights movement.

Is this just perception or is this reality?

It was not that many years ago where society universally recognized that discrimination based on immutable physical characteristics such as race, gender, etc. was morally repugnant. The counter-argument we're often presented with these days is that the ends justify the means. As someone who paid attention in history class, I find that troubling.

... and the topic only lasted 20 minutes before getting flagged!

A difficult issue with equity in hiring is that companies do not hire the _best_ applicants. People tend to think about hiring like that, but it can't actually work like that. Hiring is not a tournament; you have some (high) bar and just find enough people who can pass it, and then you stop looking! even though there might have been better people out there.

I believe this is one of the very problematic factors that drives lack of diversity in tech hiring; for example, a historically black college might pump out fewer extremely high caliber students as a result of centuries of marginalization (and not as a result of the race of the applicants); this makes going through the new hire application stacks from some schools more expensive, so companies just don't do it -- even though if they _were_ to go through that _entire_ stack, they _would_ find some candidates who meet their bar.

Relatedly, the cheapest way to find candidates are through referrals, but referrals are very likely to reinforce whatever dynamics already exist in the organization (whether that's in education, favorite sports, intro/extravertedness, race, religion, language, school, city, former experiences...)

So if you have, e.g., a referral program, or you go to college career fairs for the colleges where most of your employees went to, etc, there are already plenty of people who you are not interviewing who would pass your interview bar. And that is unfortunately already based, albeit indirectly, on race, religion, sex, etc.

Seeing it happen in the "affirmative" form is kind of like a trolley problem; you can intervene (decline to interview overrepresented groups) and cause a still deontologically problematic but potentially better outcome (intentionally decline to interview potentially qualified candidates, but increase equity and diversity in your org), or do nothing and claim absolution of responsibility, but cause an avoidable worse outcome (by passively refusing to interview essentially entire underrepresented groups).

But in practice, things are more complicated. If you have to look in more diverse places for hires, you might need a more robust hiring system (e.g., less emphasis on coding tests or less emphasis on extensive system design experience and more emphasis on figuring out who can grow into roles, which is much harder to interview for; going to more places; having more avenues for finding applicants), and you might need to interview more people. That makes it expensive, and so the natural impulse might be to lower the bar just so you can maintain your hiring at the same cost.

I don't have any explanation of the perfect way to do it that actually is equitable. It might be nearly impossible; hiring is already a really hard thing to do right. But I don't think its correct or reasonable to think of doing nothing as a "neutral" and purely meritocratic approach.

Are there laws against this form of discrimination in your jurisdiction?

If not, do you own the company or have significant leverage with the owners?

If the answers are "no" and "no", then the answer to your question doesn't matter, and any discussion is at-best therapeutic kvetching.

In the USA, in software, laborers have very little recourse other than finding a new job. We are explicitly carved out of what little labor protections are afforded to most other professions. This means that, from the perspective of tech employees, companies operate as feudal kingdoms and your only savior is a favorable labor market.

Practically, this translates into the following advice for questions on any number of HR-related topics: if there isn't a more powerful king who can step in for you, and you're not willing to challenge the king or find a new one, then go back to the fields and quietly work your plot of land.

I find myself giving this advice more and more often. Software people have been been empowered by excellent supply/demand dynamics for a couple decades and seem to have forgotten how capitalism sans labor power works.

As a white male (and simply as human being who believes in fairness), I would say I'm concerned with this trend. Positive discrimination for some means negative discrimination for others. I think we should give unprivileged people access to good education, but I'm against quotas.

I used to work in academia in computer science. There were no written rules but the recruiting committees always favoured minorities and women. It was obvious when looking at the stats.

I work now for a big tech company. The policy is that the hiring bar is the same for all candidates, but they're actively looking for candidates from minorities to interview. I'm fine with that approach.

Diversity is a stupid thing to target, but people have quite obviously failed to tackle discrimination by just not being prejudiced arseholes so this is where we are

(Aus, white male)

Our (not a tech company) enterprise aims to make hiring diversity match applicant diversity, which at first glance sounds reasonable. (I know there are thorns here, please don't reply just to go down that path)

Does anyone have experience with such a system vs more explicit affirmative action as per OP?

As an guy who otherwise tends way towards the lefty socialist end of the spectrum, I would share OP's discomfort in such a situation.

I choose not to self-disclose, even in places where it might benefit me like sexuality or gender identity. If I get to the interview stage and the person I'm being interviewed by makes it a big deal, I thank them for their time and leave.

Just become an anon and join a DAO. Problem solved.

Why is this flagged?