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Comment by nestorD | Hacker News Reader

That is great! Latin american are still suspiciously uncommon in tech so there is definitely a neglected talent pool.

That illustrates one of the few good traits of capitalism: discrimination pushing you to miss on good candidates (women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, etc) is a drop in profit that can be exploited by other companies and that, thus, should disapear with time (at least in theory, in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists...).

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I would love if more people would see it this way. If the discrimination is so strong they should found a company, hire all the discriminated people and profit.

There was a HN submission awhile back about a Dev in Japan who did this very thing. Hiring people such as college dropouts, or older women, who have higher expectations of being stay at home moms in Japan.

If your hypothesis was true then we'd see all the DEI initiatives and blatantly illegal diversity platforms like Canvas [1] have paid off by now. But that isn't the case.

[1]: https://www.canvas.com/

Yes, that's the "in practice not all companies act as rational capitalists" part.

I mean, Occam's Razor says the simplest answer is that if no companies have shown competitive advantage from DEI despite massive investment in DEI initiatives that DEI doesn't work.

If you've ever interacted with a recruiting pipeline at a big company you know the recruiters spend way more effort trying to recruit the few "diverse" people than everyone else. There's not much talent you're missing out on. If 80% of CS grads at universities are male then your pipeline is 80% male. There's no 30% extra women that are somehow recruitable but missed by every firm out there. Those women don't exist, else they would have been hired already.

That's a good point. A think where it fail is that some candidates are not applying to classical channels (such as latin american) so recruters are not seing them.

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