Comment by svloophole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by svloophole | Hacker News Reader

Many tech companies are actively discriminating against asian/white males. Often it is tech companies run by asian/white males. Affirmative action is the default policy.

The main way I've seen this implemented is by controlling who gets recruited through LinkedIn. Obviously qualified asian/white men simply get skipped over, filtered out, in many cases. They never even know they were discriminated against.

The other way is that managers are highly "encouraged" to say yes on hires that they would on the merits say no to.

As a hiring manager, I was told by an HR recruiter that there would be "problems" if my next hire wasn't a "DIBs candidate" (Diversity Inclusion Belonging) after hiring two non-URM (Under Represented Minority) candidates in a row.

All I would receive in the way of candidates to interview were non-asian/white males. And most were obviously unqualified based on the technical screening criteria we had established.

The big question is whether the current policy of tech companies is legal, ethical, and effective in the long-term or whether it's a short-term fix that causes long-term harm.

> Many tech companies are actively discriminating against asian/white males

Reminds me of a saying I heard once: “always try and get an asian male doctor because they are discriminated against the most in med school admissions programs. The asian men who made it past the discrimination had to be so much better than the others to make it.”

This is exactly the problem...distorting employment markets makes the stereotypes TRUE!

Say you have a software engineering team, and it's nine men and one woman, and it's that way because the pool you hire out if is 9:1, and you only hire from the top decile.

If someone decrees that Thou Shalt Hire Women, you certainly can...it's just that the candidates you get will be less than in the top decile. If you go as far as to make it to 5:5, then your average man will now be top half decile, and the average woman will be 2.5th decile.

The difference will be obvious, though costly to talk about, and you have just created a situation where the stereotype "women aren't as good as men at software engineering" is true.

Not true when the problem is outreach, eg companies that rely too much on existing employees' alumni and social networks to recruit. I know of some people from historically underrepresented backgrounds who'd never have been hired where they are now without active outreach on the recruiters' part, and they were definitely in the top decile

You're right that if your search is incomplete the sort of thing you describe can happen. In my industry (academia) search is complete. Everyone looking for a job knows all the job postings.

That said, I think the problem is that overall there aren't enough qualified under-represented minorities to get up to proportional representation. If there were, it would be a very confusing market failure. What's really going on is two things:

1) You can't be both under-privileged and as capable as everyone else on average. Being poor, abused, discriminated against, etc. affects our ability to do things like be really smart and get good at software engineering.

2) For those who are under-represented but not on average under-privileged (e.g. women in mathematics), we are seeing the result of a difference in preferences between men and women. Blue Team elites really don't want to admit that there are systematic differences in who prefers what that correlate with things like gender and race, but it is obviously the case. It's not rampant sexism relative to biology that explains why there are few women in e.g. mathematics, it's because women prefer to do other things on average. And there's nothing wrong with that, and we as a liberal society need to accept it. Of course, this is absolutely not to claim that women can't be just as good at maths.

If these individuals were top decile, why weren’t they gunning it for top companies/salaries to begin with? Why do they need to be reached out to if they have the talent? It has been a STEM job seekers market for a while now.

Lack of knowledge and humility? People look at some of the top companies, lionized as they are for their exclusive hiring process, and don't see themselves as belonging there. All the more so as they don't know anybody there. Meanwhile Jo big-school dude knows, hey my buddy went in and I know based on four years as roommates that I'm smarter than he is, it can't be that hard.

It’s a pretty common sentiment.

“You must be 2x as good as the next [white person] if you want to compete”.

I’m African American and my grandparents, born 100 years ago, would tell me this as a child.

It’s not an uplifting message to hear but just about every non-white person i know has heard a racial or sex-related variation of this statement growing up.

I’ve assume it’s always true because despite all this talk of DEI because to this day - I can count the number of POC and women I have ever worked with on 2 hands.

I work as a machine learning engineer on search & recommender systems, mostly focused on relevancy ranking in the recruiting space. It's unbelievable the pressure I have encountered to give "diverse" candidates a boost across the board in our scoring algorithms. Almost every client's talent acquisition team has asked what we can do to help them meet their diversity goals (which they loosely define as hiring more women and non-white / Asian people). I keep up with what some of the major players are doing (LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.), and they come straight out and say they preferentially weight diverse candidates

> For a given search or recommendation task, our algorithms seek to achieve a desired distribution of top ranked results with respect to one or more protected attributes.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01989

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