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The US definition of diverse is a bit tricky. I am talking about really obvious things as when an indian / filipino / chinese manager hires only people of their ethnicity.

Or in case of Europe in an international company where english is the working language a team comprised of german / russian / french speakers decides to hire only people that speak that language.

Thanks for clarifying. In that case it sounds like the problem likely isn’t a lack of diverse candidates, unless your team lead is sourcing candidates and hiring from their personal network (the demographics of an individual’s personal network often heavily “favor”, perhaps unintentionally, that person’s gender/ethnicity/language).

If you’re seeing overt discrimination, you may want to consider raising it to management anonymously if your company is large enough (or non-anonymously if you’re accepting that there could be a negative knee jerk reaction from others hearing your concerns)

At a company All Hands our company CEO, while talking about diversity, said overtly "we will increase the % of non-White males working here. It does not mean we will discriminate, but we will hire more people who are not White."

So, imagine me going to management and saying "I think person X is showing discrimination against White candidates in their hiring practice." What would you anticipate the outcome of that conversation to be?

Your approaching it from the wrong angle. You need to narrow it down that a better qualified candidate was passed on for being white. The resume/recruiter stage would be the easiest as you have comparable data. But if it’s at the final stage and both candidates are equally qualified, a cultural fit, and can be taken either or, then it wouldn’t matter since it would be up to the hiring managers preference either way.

You are recklessly conflating willful inclusion and willful exclusion, either as a debate tactic or perhaps revealing something about yourself.

You are using hyperbolic language (recklessly), either as a debate tactic or perhaps revealing something about yourself.

Since you appear ignorant to the modern definition of apartheid, hence considering its usage hyperbolic in the context of race-based hiring practices, I offer you the Cambridge definition, unaltered straight from the dictionary:

"a system of keeping groups of people separate and treating them differently, especially when this results in disadvantage for one group"

Revealing that I know better than to engage racist arguments as legitimate ones.

Piling on to say that yes, this is a real problem. My wife is a fantastic engineer and one day her company’s recruiter straight up told her that she was an absolute outlier and that there’s almost nobody who ever applies like her. He phrased it very poorly, but I think the frustration was the lack of candidates.

Watch out for the flip side, too. One of her biggest fears is that she’s only gotten jobs because she’s a woman and not because she’s talented. And it kills me that she’s better than I am in so many ways and still has to live with this fear. Fantastic engineer is an understatement to describe her, and every company has ended up replying on her in a key role. She’s worked at multiple YC cos now.

I have two nieces who are engineers (one robotics, one aerospace). They're both young, just starting their careers, but it seems clear to me that both are very talented, and certainly very conscientious hard workers.

It really bugs me that they'll always have this asterisk on their careers. Regardless of what they achieve, there will always be that footnote saying "but they got special advantages because they were women". Even if they didn't need those special advantages, they were there, and so the two of them will always have to wonder how much of their accomplishments are truly their own.

Getting hired and benchwarming isn’t an accomplishment and it is often discriminatory. Given two candidates within a standard deviation, HR mandates we hire the woman.

Once on the team though, there’s no more discrimination. Work accomplished is work accomplished. I know of more companies with positive hiring discrimination, so you shouldn’t wonder if it’s happening. It is happening.

This really varies. Among managers I personally know - we all agree that even if X engineer is basically contributing less to the team significantly… it doesn’t matter because they’re underrepresented and the company would never fire them. Instead, at most, they’ll be managed out.

Diversity pipelines and standards very much exist and are alive even within small startups all the way to FAANG. Even in the interview process - it’s very different. I was talking to a black woman who is transitioning out of being a software engineer - we were talking about leetcode and prep.. and she said she just talks her way out of those problems, she doesn’t ever have to actually solve them. This is explicitly different from my experience and most experiences of men I know - where you get LC mediums and hards and you have to have a solution on the board and it needs to be optimal otherwise you won’t pass. This was a repeated thing for her across many jobs she interviewed for from startup to FAANG. Completely different bar for hiring and often even for staying.

I’ve also been in the hiring loops for these candidates - no technical questions asked but if your bog standard Asian/white/Indian man interviewed you can bet they’re going through the system design and leetcode grinder. They’ll be put on a PIP at first sign of not conforming or having below average performance.

I used to think maybe only the hiring process was different but the entire thing is different. I’ve seen how the meat is made too much across too many companies. Women fearing they only get hired and retained because they’re women is justified - because it’s just true. Fortunately - most women I’ve run into are good engineers and try probably harder than some should because of imposter syndrome. That said - most men I’ve met are also good and are because they’ve had to grind so hard to get where they are. (Silicon Valley being so intensely difficult to break into repeatedly. Interviews here are very hard)

Our software development pool is not Silicon Valley and is very poor. If you can type and aren’t a complete idiot you won’t get fired.

So I’ve never experienced the low performer aspect of what you’re talking about. When everyone is a low performer, no one is, ha.

The only people I’ve needed to “fire” were bodyshop contractors forced onto the team who had never seen a computer before.

Where is this?

Even after hiring, I've seen HR doing analyses comparing raise percentages between men and women, or different nationalities of employees, trying to ensure that we're not showing favoritism to a particular group.

> One of her biggest fears is that she’s only gotten jobs because she’s a woman and not because she’s talented.

I don't know how reassuring this is, but on the flip side there's often a lot of opportunity and positive conditioning that a man will get, which will help them land a job ultimately because they're a man. I suppose the idea is to try to balance that out, although it's understandable for a woman not to feel like they're being evaluated appropriately.

Token hires are the outcome when HR departments play diversity Pokemon. That seems obvious.

That diversity tends to be diversity as defined by legally protected classes here in the US. Because the point of corporate "diversity" is really to avoid lawsuits, despite the kumbaya, drum circle inclusion rhetoric.

Be honest up front with your straight white engineers.

Got hired into a diverse team. Didn’t give it any thought as I couldn’t care less on race / sex whatever.

Was then informed how they hated hiring me because of my race. But they had way to many unqualified people and were desperate.

Lots of people liked me as an individual. But constantly ranted on how much they despised white males.

I would rather they not hired because of my race / sex. Then to hire me despite it.

> I couldn’t care less on race / sex whatever. [..] they hated hiring me because of my race [..] constantly ranted on how much they despised white males.

How long do you think your enlightened post-racial individualism will remain tenable against groups that proudly organize along ethnic lines?

What is the end game? Because dividing up a country along ethnic lines often leads to ethnic cleansing.

You're already divided - the team that hired you told you so to your face.

Weird, I've had the opposite experience. The vast majority are Asian, and most of those are of Indian descent. I would say about 30% of the candidates we get are white and many of those are European.

I was going to say this too. In my new team 4 out of 9 are European and its the highest proportion I've ever worked with.

It's interesting seeing "European" as a class of people. There are 44 sovereign countries in Europe and being just bundled together feels super weird for me. It's like there is no distinction between Germans and Greeks while these are two totally different cultures with different cultural norms.

True. Also for India and "Asia". It's almost as if generalising falls flat when you're actually trying to understand people ;)

Just for clarification, your definition of “diverse” here is effectively “not white,” correct?

Isn't that the standard these days? It totally ignores ethnic diversity within the "white" population but ... "whatever" would be the general response I guess.

Probably standard only in NA/Anglosphere.

I'm SO glad you said this. We've been trying, for years, to hire more diverse, but if the resumes that come in are white male, that's the only pool we have to choose from.

Things are getting better, our T1 and T2 incident responders are more diverse, and our Data Scientist positions were much easier to fill from a diversity standpoint.

An anecdote: the head of recruiting one time approached me and made a comment about there being a lack of diversity on my team (my team was all White males). She (head of recruiting) was Indian. Every few weeks an email goes out about new hires. I noticed that a department head, who is Indian, has a team entirely comprised of other Indians. I asked the recruiter "I am not seeing a lot of diversity on that team. Are you also concerned with that?" Recruiter was totally caught off guard - of course the reason is clear. Diversity always means less White people. A team of no Whites is the epitome of diversity. She stopped bothering me at that point.

I think it is worth pointing out that this simply is not true. The epitome of diversity is when the makeup of a team reflects the demographic makeup of the larger society.

Wrong. Look at D&I reports that are published publicly. Diversity is the percent of non white, or non male, or non heterosexual employees depending on the graph.

The company where I work recently published such a report. Population demographics have nothing to do with the hiring quotas.

There is a lot to unpack here, but what you are saying is only true in the context of an all-white, all-male company that is trying to become more diverse.

Do white europeans in general fall into the category of "white people" in the US? As in they are not treated as diversity hires compared to african americans?

The leadership is mostly female, and I think the white % was somewhere less than 60. Certainly nowhere near population representation.

I recently worked with a diversity recruiter and was allowed to select from one of 7 black candidates. Just black candidates.

American racism is VERY complicated. President Trump accidentally explained it pretty well in his comments about "shithole countries". But essentially, people from most European countries are considered "white" when it comes to hiring and diversity issues.

That's unfortunate but not unexpected. Europeans consider white americans / african americans / latino americans to be just "americans". There's no distinction.

That's just how silly racism is. By the same token, Americans consider all Europeans to be "just Europeans". We don't distinguish if you're from Ireland or England, Greece or Macedonia, etc.

I don’t follow the “just Europeans” consideration you’ve proposed. As an American, people will inquire and make distinctions when race/ethnicity comes up. ‘So-and-so is French’, or Italian, or Greek, etc.. Usually people also mention when their families immigrated, or that they are part x/y (Irish, part German, or something to that effect).

but they also make distinctions in where someone is from within the US, and in the end they are still all considered white.

Here is my 2¢ on the matter. Most tech companies currently have publicly stated goals to hire more under-represented minority engineers. Almost all of them publicly say they want to hire more of these engineers. Thus I conclude the demand for these engineers outpasses supply.

> Aside from lowering our hiring standards for minorities, I’m not sure what else we could be doing better.

Your options when supply constrained are to pay more, buy lower quality, find untapped supply or do without. It sounds like you are doing without. I don't see many issues with that approach.