Comment by eezurr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eezurr | Hacker News Reader

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I have an honest question.. regardless of your gender, sexuality, or race; if you are a competitive person and want to work your way up the corporate ladder to lead, how would you feel if this law (and others like it) existed and "othered"[1] you? If you know the amount of work it takes to get that position, yet instead you're brought in to fulfill some quota, would you be satisfied with that?

I'm asking the people who want to lead based from their hard work and experience. Personally, I'm not sure such a disingenuous existence would sit right with me. I also could not imagine walking into work every day mutually sharing the knowledge my presence in the room is to fill a quota. That seems incredibly dehumanizing. I'm sure some people will disagree, and some people take advantage of what they can. But I'm talking about the day to day existence.

I dont need to read reality counter-arguments, I know they exist. I know how unfair the world is. This is a question for the individual.

[1] Meaning legislatively labeled you apart everyone else.

You should survey people who got legacy admits to business schools about the pain of having success made easier, and then survey some members of underrepresented groups about discrimination they have experienced in the current day and the current society.

The issue here is that people from over represented groups have historically and presently received an unearned lift to their prospects of success, and everyone else has the complementary push against them. Trace this back to the families of one taking wealth in the past from the families of the other one or not, your question is very discordant from the reality of our society.

I too have trouble imagining a world where middle management and executives ever stopped to wonder if they were actually any good at their jobs. How terrible for their egos!

This currently does happen, the quota has thus far been in the opposite direction. So how would that underrepresented person feel? The best person to ask may be the people that have been at the receiving end of the existing unwritten quota.

An aspect of affirmative actions policies in practice is that the individual beneficiaries are not explicitly labeled as such, so there is a layer of plausible deniability.

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