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Comment by stuckinhell | Hacker News Reader

It's because women are given far more advantages in the corporate workplace. I'm a woman in tech, who is now a full time manager part-time developer.

I'm under extreme pressure to hire and promote female, lgbt, or poc developers (even if under qualified). Resumes are filtered by third party contractors before they even get to me, so our company has plausible deniability. We have third party diversity groups give seminars, that are borderline insidious because they imply all men are just handed their positions and money or there is a global conspiracy to keep women out of tech.

This causes me EXTREME difficulty because my team is extremely high performance highly technical and critical team. I cannot compromise on skills or allow a hire that would demoralize the team.

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The same thing happens at my company as well. Preference is given to women or ppl from minority groups before hiring others (American males really). Hiring managers have to go through a period of only interviewing from these groups first, they will only then hire outside if the period passes and they don’t find a candidate.

I personally have worked with new hires that most certainly did not meet the bar but were hired because of their minority group to increase diversity. I really wondered how they passed their interview because their technical ability clearly did not meet the standard.

I was also involved in an interview with a candidate that was not qualified however the other interviewer passed them and said they’re giving them the benefit of the doubt because they were POC!!!

I’m all for diversity and increasing chances of folks from minority groups, but not at the cost of lowering the bar. Note that I’m not saying that ppl from minority groups are less competent, just that the bar is lowered for them when it’s not for others.

I myself am from a POC background and I really wonder if that was the case with me. Does it mean that Im less qualified and would not have been hired if I was not POC? It’s really not fair to me if so.

While I agree that your experience is real, I don't think it is sufficient to explain the phenomenon described in the article. The actual phenomenon must be much wider in scope if elementary and middle school boys already have a significant motivational gap.

What you describe is but one symptom.

Can you define what you mean by "extreme" pressure (eg. any examples)? Where does this pressure originate from?

This all sounds insane to me and I wouldn't have believed this if not for the fact that I was once asked by the (female) founder of a company I worked for if I knew any female engineers looking for work because another friend of hers was looking to hire specifically female engineers. I was surprised and mentioned that being sexist and she didn't seem to see anything wrong with it. It's incredible what a double standard there is when it comes to sexism because if the genders were reversed, it'd be national news.

> I'm under extreme pressure to hire and promote female, lgbt, or poc developers

Out of curiosity; how would lgbt developers be identified in this case? Since sexual orientation is not visible per se and I guess you cannot ask, is one just looking for specific patterns of behavior or dressing etc?

It's easy. People mention being part of various LGBT groups on their resumes, or they put rainbow flags on their social media. Sexual orientation is actually very visible these days.

Staffing agencies even have facets in their CRMs/spreadsheets list/search system to quickly identify candidates.

>Sexual orientation is actually very visible these days.

Well, obvious selection bias at play-- only some lgbt people do this.

If any founders/managers/HR people are reading this: I say this as a member of the lgbt community: if sexual orientation is completely irrelevant to the actual work (don't kid yourself, it probably is), then promoting careerist opportunism over irrelevant aspects of one's identity is not helpful. We don't need handouts, we actually need the same level of respect as everyone else. Please stop treating sexuality as being up for exploitation.

Does this sort of thing actually help your career development in a meaningful way? This may sound fucked up but I'd happily put myself down as LGBT if I knew it would speed up my career ladder climbing.

At my job, we have 3 separate bonus referral rates. One for standard hire, an increased bonus if they are a veteran, and a higher one for poc/lgbt.

Am I crazy to think that is borderline illegal?

No.

Imagine knowing you got a bonus because the person you referred is black/trans. That's so backwards and patronizing

How big is this corporation? I haven't seen this at my small company.

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