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Comment by Jerrrry | Hacker News Reader

Two "issues," not to be conflated:

>Meetings with such team is always awkward as they internally discuss the topic in their own language during the meeting.

If English/lingua franca is to be expected, then that can be asserted thru HR or thru placatable means.

>Also their hiring practices are essentially discriminatory.

"essentially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The alternative is blind hiring, which may not "solve" the "problem" - because equal opportunities does not guarantee equal equitable results. Anything else is intentionally discriminatory.

If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take such a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to achieve it.

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Discrimination is the norm in SE Asia. The US has plenty of racial issues, but they're in a different form. Here, race is often drawn along the lines of religious, political, and cultural lines. In fact, when someone crosses enough religious and political lines, they are considered ethnically different.

Ethnic issues in the office include: taking off shoes at work, toilet paper or lack of it, policy on alcohol and non-halal food at the workplace, Friday/Sunday prayer policies, dog policy. We've had people burning incense in the office. We've had people playing prayers on loudspeaker every morning. On one team, we'd only buy vegan non-garlic pizza to be inclusive.

So I think here you actually have to go to significant effort to be inclusive.

> If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take such a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to achieve it.

Something being worthwhile and it being hard to achieve are unrelated. It might be hard to drink a bottle of hot sauce, but it's not particularly worthwhile. It's easy to lock the door when leaving the house, but it's likely to be worthwhile.

The value of a lock is that it encourages a thief to leave evidence of breaking in. This may be necessary for a successful insurance claim.

> If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take such a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to achieve it.

This is not even slightly supported by any available evidence: discrimination is so systemic that you can take a white applicant, put a black-sounding name of it and watch as callbacks for that literally exact same CV in the marketplace fall through the floor[1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...

> This is not even slightly supported by any available evidence

Look at it the other way — the article that you cited may serve to support the parent's argument, if this argument is that if diversity were actually a strength, then the companies that have embraced it would have outcompeted the backward companies that haven't; and we wouldn't be seeing discriminatory practices among the Fortune 500 companies, as the authors of the study that you cite claim to have observed.

>if this argument is that if diversity were actually a strength, then the companies that have embraced it would have outcompeted the backward companies that haven't; and we wouldn't be seeing discriminatory practices among the Fortune 500 companies

You're assuming that companies outside of this set of Fortune 500 companies are less discriminatory. Maybe the Fortune 500 are the least bad.

Even if the Fortune 500 were the most discriminatory, their size and entrenched position in the market could allow them to stay on top in spite of this and many other weaknesses.

You are assuming “diversity is worthwhile” is the same as “diversity alone is required for success”. No one is saying that companies can outcompete based on diversity alone. But that doesn’t mean that diversity is not worthwhile. In fact, several companies do not even do things that have been shown to be worthwhile in outcompeting. You are assuming people in companies behave like perfectly rational automatons who will do exactly what is required to outcompete.

I don't know if you're being disingenuous on purpose or if you've just not clear about the parent's objections :

You are using "worthwhile" as "(morally) worthwhile (for (an appeased) society)".

The parent is clearly stating that, for a corporation, the main goal is to make money by out-competing its rivals. Society is not relevant, here. If such goal was reached by diversity hiring (no need to add "only" : if this policy added even 1% to the end goal, that would be a net positive), laws wouldn't be needed because, except for the most racist ones, companies would be fighting to get all those racially diverse people. Tech companies percentage of indians or chinese workers are very high without any coercion.

The simple reality is that talents can be found anywhere but that everybody doesn't have the same amount of talent.

I wouldn’t call 2% “dropping through the floor”. It wasn’t able to replicate the previous studies results. Could be a lot of confounding variables here i.e. distinctive names may signal class as well as race.

> If diversity was actually a strength, then it wouldn't take such a monumental effort (of actual discrimination, no less) to achieve it.

The implication here is that worthwhile efforts don't take a lot of work. That doesn't ring true at all.

You are assuming "diversity" is worthwhile, then working backwards from that assumption, justifying the actual discrimination, all to arrive at a begged conclusion.

If diversity was worthwhile - leading to productivity gains or whatever metric, then evidence of that would had manifested by now; and we wouldn't have to put an inordinate amount of effort into shoehorning diversity, for its own sake.

The company needs skilled people. So limiting the pool to whatever “normal” is to you reduces the scope of recruitment possibilities.

Does that mean a Brazilian company should hire someone who only speaks Urdu? Probably not.

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