What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

cspicenter.com

442 pointseonwe881 comments

I work at a different FAANG and it seems like more and more the only news that we get from corporate is related to DEI. Also a lot of hiring details are now hidden from ICs. It used to be that you would be apart of the interview panel as an interviewer and then you would get together with your team afterwards and everyone on the team would vote yes/no and that would pretty much be it. Now it’s made by a manager elsewhere and you have no idea why the decision was made.

I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.

We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all. Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us.

It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome. To quote Kamala Harris’ recent remarks “to make sure everyone ends up in the same place”, i.e. “equity”

It reminds me when my childhood friend's parents moved to LA so he could attend an inner-city high school so that his scores from a lower ranking school were more heavily weighted for college admissions. They were wealthy immigrants from the middle east.

> I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.

1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse. 2. There is nothing wrong with your kids being in a majority demographic. It sounds like you're more worried about the world discriminating based off race and other traits.

I suspect you agree with all of this but it's a little scary how insidious these policies are. Even in your dissent you're seeing things from their perspective.

It is always useful and prudent to see things from the perspective of those attacking you. "Know your enemy.."

You can argue over definitions and terms as much as you want, but the uniform you wear is often defined by your opposition. In other words, it may not be completely relevant what you or OP think diverse is or isn't. It is very relevant what the power structures and people implementing these policies think it means, no?

If someone has a kid that potentially is going to be quota'ed out of jobs or education, why wouldn't they worry about it?

I don't mean they shouldn't worry. I mean they shouldn't use language that puts blame on their kid for not being "diverse" (which is also a non-sensical description of 1 person).

I'm sorry but you're just missing the point. You're taking the term literally, but it is very simple in practical terms how this actually plays out:

diverse is code word for non straight White male. Slightly more diverse would be straight White female.

Obviously OP is simply saying, as a White man, he worries his children through no fault of their own by virtue of birth would be excluded or limited by these cultural trends.

Blame on their kid? What sense does this make? He's blaming the system.

"A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse."

There's a manager/HR somewhere saying "hold my beer"...

A single person can be diverse relative to a group, though. Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men, for instance. When we talk about diversity in recruiting, usually we mean diversity of the candidate relative to the makeup of the company.

Optically maybe, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Just assuming that the “group of white men” are “all the same” is not very deep. The truth is that they’re all individuals with individual stories strangers who judge them by their looks know nothing about. It used to be understood as a good thing to not judge people based on their gender or skin color, including the nowadays declared “evil” white men.

right words, but it is not what's happening in real world in hiring

DIE initiatives achieve extremely poor diversity of beliefs. The type of diversity that matters. It is outright hostile to it.

> Optically maybe, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Just assuming that the “group of white men” are “all the same” is not very deep.

Not just optically. Even slightly different cultures can result in novel ways of thinking or world views that bring something new.

That's what the parent is saying. The aforementioned black woman may have more in common with the white men on the team than other white men. If you were striving for true diversity, it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity, but if you are only optimizing for optical diversity then those considerations go out the window.

> aforementioned black woman may have more in common with the white men on the team than other white men.

Diverse viewpoints are more likely to arise from introducing 3 black women to a group of 3 white men than if you introduced 3 more white men.

> it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity,

Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?

> Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?

People with different backgrounds are "better" at diversity than people with the same background who look dissimilar, for sure. The wealthy black woman who went to school at Stanford alongside all the other white men on your team does not bring any meaningful difference in viewpoint. The tribesman from Kenya, on the other hand, comes with a very different outlook.

Of course, something akin to "Must be a US Citizen" is attached to most jobs because we don't actually care about diversity, just optics.

"diversity of the candidate" doesnt make any sense. Or are you looking at the candidates ancestory and deciding what their diversity is? A single person isn't "diverse." I know some people are trying to change the meaning of "diverse"to mean "a minority."

> Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men

Yes or, for another example, an Israeli would add diversity to a group of Americans (of various colours).

May be if they are all posing for a stock photo then yes. But how does it add diversity in a workplace. Assuming all the white men are from different countries.

No, that person is different or divergent, not diverse. The group is diverse.

What if the black woman is privileged, and went to a prestigious college all expenses paid by parents...you know, like most of the white men you meet in tech?

Meanwhile, the person who is self made (real diversity in this situation) and successfully bootstrapped themselves gets passed over because thier skin color is too bright.

Qualified diverse people are rare (no relation to skin color "diversity"). That is why everyone is cracked out over skin color and gender because there is an actual population of people that the HR secretariat pool can EASILY identify by just taking a glance. Thier mission, of course, is to please thier white male executives.

> 1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse.

Compare and contrast with people saying "neurodiverse" when they mean "neurodivergent". I think there is general agreement that a single person should be described as "neurodivergent" rather than "neurodiverse". Some people say the wrong word just because the two words are so similar and are happy to be corrected.

On the other hand, if we're talking about other kinds of diversity then I don't think there's a similar pair of terms. "The addition of this gender-divergent person increases the gender-diversity of the team"? I don't think so!

"underrepresented" is pretty close to the word you need, but is a slightly miscast type.

Well yeah, calling something divergent implies that there is a "normal". For ways of thinking and personalities people are fine with calling others not normal. For races and genders that is currently very not politically correct.

> A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse.

According to the plain old-fashioned definition, this is true. According to the modern political definition, “diverse” is approximately a synonym for “non-white”.

Relatedly: I cannot defend the kind of "diversity" that would rather hire a rich brahmin than an inner-city American kid in need of a leg-up, just to fulfill some backwards skin-color quota. It's obscene, and insulting to all parties involved.

I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.

Some of starting to rearrange the letters to be DIE. Companies are going to die as they become paralyzed trying to placate differing views and opinions... or parts of their workforce are going to protest or cause internal strife/trouble...

> I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.

As a women in tech, I am feeling the backlash. I have seen a huge increase in the amount of skepticism of my abilities that I face from people who haven't worked with me before. And the worst part of it is that there's actually logic behind the bigotry, because it is extremely true that my company continues to hire incompetent people just because they are women.

Bigotry itself is very difficult to combat, but when you add in a solid logical grounding for the bigotry, it becomes dang near impossible to eradicate. I worry that companies are causing more harm than good with the change in hiring practices these past couple years. I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.

As a hiring manager I have substantial pressure to hire incompetent people to meet quotas. I confronted my recruiter in front of witnesses and was partially shunned.

I have been hiring for many years, and I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity. Now I am forced to.

It’s an insult to those who earned their position. It’s an insult to me as I am less and less likely to get a new job because I won’t fit quotas.

There is resentment all around.

I feel bad for the minorities who have worked hard to earn their positions, you are right that it undermines their work and trivializes their commitment to their work.

It’s gone way too far.

And that is illegal (assuming you are in the us)

it is not, almost all big employers happily announce that they are Affirmative Action employers and this provides shield for their actions

Private sector affirmative action is illegal in the US.

Likely not. Saying "we will only hire women for this position" would be illegal, but saying it implicitly would not be. True quotas are unlawful, but there are many loopholes there.

What are the specific quotas? Is there a percentage number you've been given?

> I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity

What are your thoughts on implicit bias?

Implicit bias is real and there are ways to mitigate some of it. More process driven interview frameworks, less 'he seem like me so he probably good'.

Define "real". It's definitely measurable in the lab, but the effect sizes aren't very impressive, and the link to real-world outcomes remains quite controversial.

> Now I am forced to.

You should think about legal recourse here. If this isn't stomped out it can result in real racism pretty quickly. It has to, because people aren't treated fairly and it creates adversary between people of different skin color.

This is bad management that needs to be replaced.

I was just interviewed at Microsoft last week and at the end of a very good interview the interviewer said welp we are looking to diversify our team more. Best of luck to you.

So why did they invite you to the interview in the first place if you are not diverse enough?

I didn't disclose my race because getting a job should not be about the color of my skin but my merit.

>I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.

As a man in tech, I've been a part of countless hush-hush conversations that would never be repeated within earshot of a woman or untrusted man. It's as grim as you say, and worse.

I'm really sorry that things have become like this.

What do you mean by "things have become like this"? I obviously don’t know your age but the software industry (and other fields) has been extremely sexist since decades (at least the 80s).

The efforts to explicitly reign in the sexism in tech are quite recent (late 2000, early 2010, and even later in France where I live).

My point is that what you perceive as a recent reaction might be the same old sexist culture continuing to spread, ruin life’s and block careers (which is a definition of backlash: reactionary fight against feminist advances)

What evidence of this sexist culture do you have?

There seem to be a few classic stories that have been spun:

- that a gender imbalance in students or employees automatically implies sexism

- that being casual about sex is automatically sexist

- that not favoring a feminine, talkative, consensus-first working style is sexist

- that women deciding to leave tech means they are being "chased out"

I don't find any of these arguments particularly convincing. It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment.

What you may be referring to from the early 2010s is that a few activists of the Adria Richards type found that all they had to do was cry sexism, and a bunch of naive geeks stood ready to self flaggelate about how sexist all the other men were, but not them, no no no.

Which of course means that tech is not particularly sexist at all, certainly not compared to media or finance.

If there is one thing that is unabashedly sexist, it's western feminism, which has had 50 years to show its homework, and has revealed itself to not be interested in gender equality, but only in advancing female interests and positing women's rights, preferences and working styles as superior to those of men.

Strangely, despite this long track record, feminists still haven't realized that they are the status quo and they do everything they can to maintain a monopoly on gender discussions and issues. The use of words like "reactionary" is meant to emphasize this: that anyone who does not agree with them is trying to go backwards. But this is a lie, because despite their "gender studies" we understand men and women worse than ever before. Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is, but they are all sure that women have it worse. Funny that.

You made a lot of arguments in your post, and it's going to take a lot of work to unpack them all.

But I'll say right away - starting your post with "What evidence of sexism do you have?" is a bit laughable. There's a lot of evidence of sexism in our industry. But it seems that you are unwilling to consider any of it. If you truly believe that western feminism is the REAL sexism, do you think there is a chance to find any middle ground or agreement on this discussion?

I have something to say about almost everything you wrote, but I'll pick the thread on one spot that I think has the most potential:

> It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment

Well...yeah? If there is a concept, or behaviour that men happen to not mind, but women on average/generally/mostly do, and an environment that contains mostly men either actively promotes that concept/behaviour, or tacitly ignores it by looking the other way, that is going to create an environment that is hostile to women!

Now you might say, that's not inherently a problem. But what if this is an environment that doesn't inherently benefit from an imbalanced gender ratio. Then those behaviours, that hostility, is actually actively funnelling viable capable women out of the environment, and there is no meritocracy to ensure that it can occur.

> Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is,

Casual transphobic dog whistle? Disappointing.

I have a different experience and believe that tech fields are extremely egalitarian. This might not apply to the specific regions like SV where tech and status often intermingles, don't know much about the situation there. There is probably also a difference between countries.

There are some very opinionated engineers, but they are an exception and quite rare. They might bark a little from time to time but it doesn't have any real repercussions.

Sure, if you are one of the few women in tech, you might face some difficulties getting into established groups, but that isn't due to sexism for the most part. Far more often it is some misplaced courtesy or something else in my experience.

Compared to medicine for example, tech is pretty harmless. Medicine has a lot of women, but that doesn't mean much. Surgeons for example are know to have their elitist clubs and it often is exclusively men. I have yet to hear similar "locker room talk" or what you call it in any tech circle. Probably exists but it has to be quite rare.

To my knowledge the diagnosis for tech was pretty much that there are far more men here. But that isn't indicative of sexism. So I don't understand what you mean by "extremely sexist" at all.

Had a few times in the last 10 years. Where I was pushed very hard to hire someone either completely unqualified, or in we we simply didn’t need.

Like being told to hire a bash programmer for a database admin position. Because person was trans.

Thinking back on if. I’ve never had a regular white woman pushed on me.

I’ve hired woman before. But that was because they were qualified.

Now I’m considered evil for looking at merit.

Of late I have been seeing people going viral for posting some incredible career trajectories. Usually involving someone in another career who made the switch to tech by doing a bootcamp, and within a year they were in FAANG. Now that I think about it, they were all people who fit into diversity quotas and were probably diversity hires

Not questioning what you're saying, just adding that I think "prejudice" is a better word for this than bigotry? (to be clear: we're discussing here the results of identity-based hiring practices, as opposed to are there sex differences in programming ability)

Words never have entirely cleanly defined meanings, but broadly I think bigotry is often used to speak specifically of all-out irrational dogmatic beliefs. Prejudice is more often used where there is some partly rational judgement about a group of people, together with moral problems caused by applying that logic to a particular person. Of course, often our prejudices are very fallible: "rational" prejudices turn out to be wrong, and in that sense are functionally equivalent to bigotry. But holding a "rational" belief that all prejudice is irrational also does not make us infallible!

Some prejudice seems hard to criticize morally: for example, everybody makes prejudiced judgements say based partly on clothing, age, and sex if they find themselves in close proximity to a group of young men in a city at night. On the other hand, at work, one tries hard to not judge based on whatever preconceived group notions one has -- I think almost everybody thinks that's a good thing (which as you say can be harmed by identity-based hiring). I don't have a good abstract explanation of what makes the difference between "good" and "bad" prejudice, and I wish I did, so would love to hear of good writing about it if somebody can recommend some!

In the company I worked for recently, perhaps even a majority of the more capable programmers around me happened to be women. But wherever we do start hiring based on identity, it's hard to see how prejudice can be avoided, even if bigotry were entirely absent.

Brown Indian immigrant here. I am part of a multi racial family and have nephews and nieces who are white and mixed race. I have family who is white and black while I am brown.

This “DIE” stuff is repulsive. Other than the obvious hiring of incompetent people simply to fill a quota, it also creates frictions in relationships when some job post hires one family member simply because they are brown or black while excluding their sibling simply because they are white. I can’t explain how disgusting these policies feel to me.

There was a fascinating article about how caste discrimination made its way into tech because many of the decision makers are blind to it.

Diversity metrics are simple. The society they work on is not.

wow .... when was a rich brahmin hired instead of an inner city American kid .... are you really sure ... that the Indians working in the US tech industry have gotten those positions thru affirmative action?

I keep seeing this being repeated everywhere. let me clarify Indians are NOT getting into US companies because of a colour quota.

I will tell you how they are getting in. There are two ways 1. Thru outsourcing/body shopping 2. A lot of Indians get in by doing Masters courses in the US. Most of them would have already worked for tech in India. For US companies they can hire experienced people at US fresher salaries.

I'm coming in very late to this conversation, but there may be some ambiguity here. Americans will often use the word "Brahmin" to generally refer to an upper class. For instance, the "Boston Brahmins" is a phrase used to refer to old money WASP families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin. So this might not have been in tended specifically as a reference to upper class Indians (it wasn't entirely clear to me from the post).

nope ... the post mentions skin color quota ... I doubt they are talking about "boston brahmins"

Yeah it’s there. Should have read it better.

Putting identity over class is the main sin of the modern "woke" movement, in my opinion. Seeing how much that identitarian, exclusionary, and sectarian thinking is promoted by mainstream media, I cannot help but think it is intentional, as a distraction.

USA has a long documented history of being deeply racist inside class consciousness, which is why poor non-whites compromise on "help rich and poor PoC" instead of only "help poor but only white people"

Nobody is preferring Indians in this diversity game.

Will you defend “diversity" that would rather hire a rich inner-city American kid versus a poor brahmin in need of a leg-up?

In academic admissions, you're probably right. In tech hiring, I have seen it firsthand, on multiple occasions.

Totally not anecdotal lol

Contrary to the parent /s

I have seen the opposite of that firsthand several times and, and unlike your observation, it is public policy of many large companies.

Well, if we take each other's experiences at face value, then we would conclude that some places are doing exactly as I claimed.

I'm not sure what your point is, aside from implying that we should take public corporate statements at face value.

What's a rich Brahmin? Where this assumption coming from ? I think you are about to make highly biased and uninformed opinion on Hinduism based on some article you read , so go on...

> I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.

That comment implies you take for granted that your kids will get into a school, and will have a job.

What does that mean? Just about anyone can get into a school, or get a job.

> What does that mean?

Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.

> Just about anyone can get into a school, or get a job.

Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes, it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and therefore no reason to worry.

I’m not sure what a “diverse” parent is or how you would know their mind.

I expect that all parents, regardless of demographic factors, worry about their kid getting a good job and going to school.

This seems to be forbidden to say, but for all intents and purposes, “diverse” means “not white”.

And in some cases, not Asian.

And sometimes Asian just means "Chinese, Japense, and Korean"

Not sure why this was downvoted. Asians get discriminated against even harder than whites when applying for elite universities.

Certain asians (Chinese and Indians descent), are over represented in elite universities, so yes, students of those origins face more competition, than say students who are Native American (who are very poorly represented at elite schools).

Except it doesn't seem to mean that (at least not anymore). Hence the exasperated comments you are reading on this very thread.

All people (including whites and heterosexual males) can be the targets of negative discrimination. No one wants to see themselves or their kids be intentionally disadvantaged based solely on the colour of their skin or their sexuality. Any attempt to create ANY exception to this rule is disingenuous and does nothing but further damage the very thing you claim to be trying to resolve.

Every not white parent I’ve met is concerned with their kid’s future- what job, what education, what marriage, etc.

I’ve met a lot of people from different backgrounds and one thing I notice is how much we have in common. I worked with people who make less than a few dollars a day in developing nations and it was interesting how the parent stories are almost the same. Pictures of kids and grandkids. Stories about successful kids. Plans for kids to have education and jobs. The scale varies but the concerns are very similar.

How I know their mind is simple, I am not-white, and my kid's aren't white.

And true, parents do want their kids to succeed in life. But I also worry about how the world will treat my kids, because historically black and brown kids don't get treated well.

So you know your mind. You don’t know the minds of all not-whites.

I’m pretty sure all parents worry about how the world will treat their kids.

There’s pros and cons to everything. If you’re in the US or Europe, you’re in a very privileged position compared to others in less privileged countries.

To imagine that someone who is not-white will know how all not-white parents think is silly. Even within a small demographic sliver, it seems weird to generalize my thoughts to all people who have my race or culture (eg, it’s lack of critical thinking to think “I’m Vietnamese and my kids are Vietnamese so I know the mind of all Vietnamese parents”)

There is a lot of racism toward black and brown kids and it’s the worst for poor black and brown kids. Hopefully, since you’re reading on HN you have a tech job and make some money. Historically, and presently, poor kids don’t get treated well.

You're arguing by straw man.

Worrying about going to a good school and getting a good job is a nice worry to have.

Worrying that your kid will be the next Trayvon Martin is the reality that many-non white parents worry about. I understand you won't ever have to worry about your children like in that manner. That is one of the benefits of being white.

And white people can scream as loud as they want about how it's unfair they are being discriminated against, in reality they just don't get to enjoy all the advantages they had in prior years for being white.

> and going to school.

I'm not concerned about that. A workplace that cares about diversity will not discriminate based on schooling. If businesses are imposing fake diversity measures to embolden certain ethnic groups, my child is no doubt doomed either way, so I would be more troubled if all that time and money was wasted.

> Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.

It only seems that way to you if you can't empathize with others. The OP makes a valid point. Any group that is caught in the crosshairs of discrimination will naturally be worried for their kids. It's not a "nice problem to have", as you put it, regardless of the group being targetted.

> Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes, it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and therefore no reason to worry.

Equality of outcomes? It's just a fact that some people excel at work/school (for various reasons) or that some people receive different pay (again, for various reasons). The point is that we shouldn't discriminate against things like sex, gender, and skin colour. That means I don't consider gender when I hire... but I also don't consider it when I fire, either.

>Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.

Do your typical ethnic minority immigrant parents worry about anything else _apart_ from their childrens' job prospects and education?

not in the usa, "no child left behind" did a lot of damage on the futures of the generation going forward here.

You are removing words. OP was saying that they are worried that their kid would fail to reach the elite level, using standard coded words "decent" and "good".

Why are "decent" schools and "good" jobs so rare that we are competing for them against each other, instead of a standard anyone can reach with effort? Even schools! The very source of opportunity that we hope to equalize!

>We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all

Think of how impossibly naive and utopian this is though, and I don't mean to personally attack just to condemn the idea this is possible in any way whatsoever. Is it possible economically? How about resource wise, or geographically can we all possess equal territory? How about military power? How about physical attributes such as height or beauty? How about intelligence?

On which axes of consequences can we equalize things; how do we do it? Zero sum conflicts are everywhere that demands for equalization exist.

There is only competition over limited resources, power and prestige. There is cooperation amongst allies and friends, but only in so far as feelings are mutual and the efforts of both are in each others interest, which goes with out saying includes in you or your family/tribe/groups interests.

Is anyone trying to take money and power out of you or your children's hands a friend or ally, or are they competing with you for their own interests at your expense?

The propaganda you believed was intended to take advantage of your good nature. As long as someone brow-beats you with moralism over the downtrodden they can convince you of doing anything to dis-empower you, if you believe the nonsense that "privilege" or power are bad things, which those scheming you certainly don't as they pursue both.

It is bad to not have privilege or power. It is good to have them. It is this simple.

The idea is equality of opportunity.

Of course, it is not possible to implement this in any grand, all-encompassing, perfect manner. But that does not mean that it shouldn't be a goal.

A “problem” is the metrics for that goal are unfalsifiable.

However that problem becomes a feature if the actual goal is not the stated goal.

Unequal outcomes will produce unequal future opportunities. This fact undermines any of premise from that start. And compelled equalization will commence just the same.

So this is a distinction without much of a difference. Certainly rule of law and various good faith attempts to provide opportunity are understandable. But when the outcomes simply are not equal along various group identity lines or this or that interest group achieves less wealth and power than another, no one is going to give up that game and say "OK, fair play, we lost the outcome."

No, pursuit of human self interest does not ever stop. So there's no endgame to any of this.

You cannot make everyone equal. Freedom and equality collide at some point. People need to grow out of that assumption because acceptance of that fact can alleviate cases of injustice. You are not solving any problems with such a strategy, you only make everything worse.

Impossible and naive is fighting racism with racism. Making everything equal is a perfectly paved route to totalitarianism by now. Did you read at least one book in your life? Sorry for the accusation here, but if you think of yourself to be able to determine what is just or unjust for others, you need to put some more cards on the table. And it certainly isn't simple.

with a push for "racial equity" combined with an inept middle management and hr who in order to get equal outcome will push people down instead of lifting people up, the only thing i can see from this is a sharp rise in ethno nationalist idiocy across the board.

i dont want to be right about it but i am not going to be shocked if i start seeing such bubble up as a reaction to this kind of short sighted strategy.

I was wondering why the US is so obsessed with diversity alone the line of race and gender instead of social-economical status, education background, career background, and etc? If I'm developing a statistical model, wouldn't it make more sense if my diversity means having in my team people who have statistics background, people who study statistical physics, people who are great at maths, people who are great at building a team, people who are creative, people who communicate and market and sell well, people who are amazing engineers, and people who are experts in the domain for which I develop my model? Why would I be interested in my team member's sex orientation, their gender, or their race? Or on the other hand, why would give up Quoc Le for Gebru if I have only one opening for developing the next generation of NLP model? Just because Quoc is an "over-represented" Asian and Gebru is the vanguard of righteousness and checks all the boxes of diversity?

Or why not by my birth origin? Say, India? India is a huge country with diverse languages, cultures, histories, religions, and social structures. I guarantee you that I had such a unique background among the other 10,000 ones in India because I grew up in this particular family in this particular town of this particular state in this particular union territory.

it's checkbox compliance all the way up to the top. it's only for show as if people wanted a rigorous solution the problem, the mechanisms in play and each possible solution would have been documented in autistic detail before anyone put it out. this is a kind of issue you would keep junior talent and HR far far away from at all costs. this is software after all, people who care about something specific, care a LOT. this topic is a real issue but it has been tainted by racial political framing. imo, start with women in tech first, then go from there.

For the purposes of American HR Marxists, Indians are Indians, but Indian women are just a little better for the optics.

Smart dudes need to opt out of the game entirely.

It's because of the law. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous tumor that is metastasizing and infecting everything. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...

Gebrus work was not especially impactful before the giant blowup about the Google paper.

There is a guy out there who spent a few years investigating this. He traced back the term in the scientific literature. He calls it Race Marxism. His name is James Lindsey.

It's weird that none of the answers here mention slavery and segregation. It's really not a long time ago, and not surprising at all that this trauma leaves permanent cultural marks. These people are peoples grandparents, and many of them are still alive: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/archivesphotos/results/item....

  > I was wondering why the US is so obsessed with diversity alone the line of race and gender instead of social-economical status, education background, career background, and etc?

because its way easier to do that than fix the real socio-economic/education problems and distracts people from the real root issues that you are eluding to: class

> It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome.

Perfect equality of opportunity can only be achieved if everyone has 0 opportunity and the same outcome. Because if you can work hard to give your children a better life, that means that someone with parents who don't work hard will start worse off, with fewer opportunities. Optimizing solely for equality of opportunity inevitably leads to commie hellhole; instead, optimize for absolute opportunity (both average and minimum).

Is it the case that the rug was truly pulled out beneath you? Or was the system you thought to be advocating for was not equal as you thought.

So many people I know fall into the latter at least you are questioning how we got here.

There is a silver lining. This DEI thing is now causing massive influx of sub-par employees in big tech. This is not because minority is sub-par but because hiring practices incentivize sacrificing quality over diversity to make your numbers and get your bonuses. Everyone winks at others and they say we don't sacrifice quality but it is not possible when you have limited window for headcount and your VP is sending you constant reminders for making your numbers and everyones bonuses are at stake. In my estimate, big tech already had 60% of employees just costing around and now this DEI will push them to almost 80% employees that are mediocre and unable to compete with the best. This is how startups like Google and Microsoft were born that toppled big techs of the day called Yahoo and IBM. A lot of talent will simply not even get opportunity to be interviewed at big tech. Guess what they are going to do?

Assuming you’re right and not unfairly discounting people who look or think different due to your prejudices, this just hurts mega-businesses profitability right? What’s the measurable material harm to you exactly? Can you prove it or do you just feel it? Still assuming you’re right, and not prejudiced, why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad? Won’t at least some of them thrive and blossom thereby paving the way for others who look, think, act, or worship like them? Is this not corporate welfare in a time when social welfare has been whittled so far down that there are generation long waiting lists for public housing vouchers? What exactly is so terrible about helping people grow into roles instead of following the semi recent practice of only hiring perfectly qualified candidates?

Big tech profitability does not get hurt by hiring mediocre people. They are post-talent businesses. They do not depend on tech talent to drive and keep profit margins but rather depend on established monopoly and maintaining barrier-to-entry to continue their profitability. They show their growth by simply showing more ads or hiking subscription prices or through more sales people - not by developing new ground breaking tech. Apple is likely exception here.

> post-talent businesses.

He, this seems to be quite accurate. I wonder how companies come up with that blindness. Internal politics?

I don't believe you have to be the best hacker to start a successful business at all, but some companies try to go out of their way to make working there unattractive.

>Still assuming you’re right, and not prejudiced, why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad

this is simply not true. Hiring must be all about merit, not handouts for some noble social purpose.

Secondly, lowering bar for one race while keeping the same bar other races is blatant racism. It is conveniently called affirmative action, but in reality it is racism against more qualified candidates (like asians, jews, etc).

Third, just looking at skin color and handing out jobs does not accomplish intended goal (helping disadvantaged people), instead it only reinforces negative perceptions of minorities as unqualified and not deserving of high paying jobs.

Fourth, a lot of people who take advantage of DEI programs to get into high pay jobs/colleges - are not disadvantaged at all. I am talking about people from middle-class/high income families, kids from medium/high net worth families who also happened to be in a minority race. Also middle class/rich immigrants from Africa/Latin America, who never experienced many disadvantages that under represented minorities face in the US.

If you really really want to help underrepresented minorities get into tech - you should specifically target people from low income/poor neighborhoods, poor rating/high crime school districts - and to help them become qualified and deserving of jobs, not just handing out "Chief Diversity Officer" type token jobs that have no real impact, and are not really bona fide jobs. That also obviously includes white kids from poor neighborhoods, and becomes income targeted program, rather than racial profiling program.

>> What exactly is so terrible about helping people grow into roles instead of following the semi recent practice of only hiring perfectly qualified candidates?

Imagine your son was rejected for a job he perfectly was qualified for, and instead someone from another race was hired who was less qualified. Just because of race. Once you flip the situation to yourself and become on the other end of the "affirmative action" you will understand. You can't fix past discrimination with another discrimination.

I’ve actually heard from many friends that even though they are in a “favored” group, because of their skin color or gender, they hate it because they suffer from even worse impostor syndrome than the average developer.

They might genuinely be awesome and yet they sit there and doubt and ask “am I only doing well because of something not related to my work”

I would like to think of it as first, second order effects.

First order effect of DEI:

- Bar is lowered in the name of DEI, to bring more diverse employees

- Managers/CEOs/HRs get their bonuses for meeting DEI metrics

Second order effects:

- Hired minority employees find it hard to perform to the expected(or peer) level

- Because lot more minority candidates were hired than if it were without DEI, performance issues start to become bigger and more noticeable problem. More importantly performance issues cluster around minority candidates

Third order effect:

- Long-term workplace perception of all minority candidates is harmed, regardless of skill.

- We are back to square one, where in order to compensate for 2nd order effects all minorities are subjected to unfair discrimination based on race, regardless of skill

Right you are... I used be a Manager at Volvo (Sweden) and I really like their approach to boost the diversity on the workplace. Instead of targets/or lowering the standards they were moving obstacles (childcare, flex work) and focusing on marketing amongst the diversity groups.

So, the same thing Big Tech company do.

This is something I have always wondered. What are the psychological/mental effects on an employee upon the discovery of the real reason they were hired?

> this is simply not true. Hiring must be all about merit,

Assessing merit is something we still suck at.

Implicit bias nearly always plays a part.

op specifically said about hiring unqualified/less qualified people and "let them grow into jobs", which assumes rejecting more qualified candidate (who doesnt need to grow into a job but has has wrong skin color ) so Op denies merit explicitly and prefers racial nepotism.

No wonder DIE initiatives face pushback as they do not make any sense and are plain harmful to all parties involved

> why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad?

Policies like this don't really change the number of disadvantaged people who are hired. To do that, they'd have to reduce the number of elites who are hired, and that doesn't happen.

Instead, these policies help disadvantaged people of some races by shutting out disadvantaged people of other races.

Racism is bad.

Who knew in 2022 this would end up being the "hot take" in Western culture...

You are assuming that people who need hand outs are all not white. That appears to me to be pretty racist in itself. I know many poor white Americans that don't even have Internet. I also grew up poor. My grandmom was Italian and treated poorly when she arrived in America. She got called the n word because her skin was dark and couldn't go to school because of it as well. Well here I am 80 years later. White male that has worked very hard to get myself out of where I was only to be confronted with people talking about the color of skin and not Merritt. We are all in this together.

I put a lot of work into my life to get where I am. I did a lot of things I didn't want to and sacrificed a lot. I had a really good hour long interview at Microsoft last week and was told at the end that they are looking to diversify their team more and best of luck to you.

Naw, they'll just lobby up barriers to entry.

> Guess what they are going to do?

Not have the same opportunities as the founders of Google and Microsoft due to the mediocre employees abusing their positions to engage in advocacy in the wider world that serves the purpose of keeping them employed.

Stuffing big firms with idiots is one way you get idiocracy, since those firms have influence far beyond what the idiots could get on their own.

> Not have the same opportunities as the founders of Google and Microsoft

You are seeing a trend of FAANG employees, leaving the company to create their own start-ups. This trend won't slow down that progress at least...

That's not a new trend. It's a pretty common path to do a couple of years in big tech, and then use that credential as part of your pitch. "Ex-Google Engineer leaves to Airbnb for Cats"

> Guess what they are going to do?

Get bought out then have their company warped beyond recognition once they become big enough. That, or sued into oblivion for patent infringement.

>I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.

That’s silly. You should stay focused on ensuring that your kids become well rounded, educated, and cultured people fit for the society of tomorrow and prepared for problems you can’t imagine.

> it seems like more and more the only news that we get from corporate.....

"Seems", "like" "more and more", "only"... I sometimes wonder if people are downplaying it so others may not be as offended in a social situation, or are those words really what they meant?

We are in late 2022, at this (late) stage of the cycle, Big tech has been throwing DEI, ESG at our face for 5+ years. Both Internally and Externally via PR and Consumer Trade Show / Conference. We have got to a point they are actually "dialling" back a bit already.

>It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome.

I do not have data to judge how many people are on the side wants "equality of opportunity". Which is a very sane thing to do. But I can assure you there will be plenty of evidence the media ( Mainstream or not, ) has been arguing for equality of outcome for a very VERY long time. This isn't, and shouldn't be news.

Reading the above comment being Top Voted on HN gives me hope, but on the other hand also felt sad the realisation came so late.

I share your concern... Started as a manager in a successful scale-up and as usual our engineering staff is white & male (we are hiring from European Timezone). In order to secure the funding round, the higher management has introduced a diversity targets, which is driven aggressively by HR. Funny enough lots of the European laws forbid asking if the candidate is a member of an "unrepresented" group, so I guess we'll be just eyeballing it??? This won't end good, but one must make a living.

How can you even report to your investors on this diversity? I was under the impression that registering things like sexual/gender/religious identity and "race" are not allowed under GDPR unless you have very good reasons (i would assume securing investment is not one of them).

hold up you need DIE to convince investors? how does this make sense; wouldn't they be more concerned about your company's cold, hard numbers?

Depends on the investors but allegedly it is widely spread. And if you want lucrative government contracts, you have to implement it. I think it is overwhelmingly driven by government. Didn't find enough racism so they needed to create it.

Are you actually unaware of the Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) programs?

Many institutional investors - the largest ones - have announced their funding is dependent on ESG scores. I'm fascinated that people on this site can be unaware of this.

> Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us.

Some state authorities and companies like Microsoft are racist. You have to call them that even if there are people behind these programs that just mean well. But you cannot compromise on that accusation. If you do, you will lose that discussion. Simple politics and management 101 and this is just a dirty political game.

Yes, Microsoft is a racist company. Exposé 1 is that they hire people by skin color. It cannot be more direct than that. Again, you cannot compromise on that accusation. It is rational and formally correct. Most people are too nice to defend against this management pressure Microsoft tries to put forward.

Not that there are many young people that would want to work at MS these days. But again, Microsoft employs racist hiring schemes and the people in support behind this are real racists and this is always how real racial discrimination starts. Microsoft as a company is a fascist authoritarian organisation that collaborates with the state against citizens.

You might think that is a bit too much, but you have to start with this if your opponent in a discussion opens with accusations of systemic issues that require racial quotas. Otherwise you will lose. Just repeat it and the situation should again normalize and Microsoft hopefully has to pay the price for their little racist adventure.

I don't think this will be effective. Kendi explicitly admits that his prescription is racist, it's not some secret. His supporters have just decided that equity is more important than equality and (probably) rightly see that the only path there is racism.

> worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older

That is wildly optimistic.

Next they will come for your already taxed wealth and money if you aren’t “diverse” enough.

People in the US need to be more aware of similar trajectories in other countries in the past.

You are optimistic. Even countries that had problems with this exact same issue are currently repeating the error by the letter. Case in point Germany. We now have sex quotas, won't take long for racial quotas be established. Shitty and dumb country, didn't learn a lot. And like any totalitarian movement before there is no reasoning possible and will at some point probably derail.

Very well said

Isn't that the thing though? Being your kids, they already have an advantage. You are their advantage, everything you bring with you, your behavioral habits that will give them a huge head start.

I did not come from a family of engineers. For most of their lives, my parents had to struggle to survive as immigrants, living in a fairly rough area, and making ends meet.

I was lucky enough to go to university for STEM. I saw the huge difference between myself and students who came from families that had even one parent experienced in any sort of engineering (let alone both parents). Not only did they always have someone to consult, but they knew what they were getting into, they were much better prepared, and for the most part, they were building the toolset from their early teens.

It dawned on me that similarly, people coming from very wealthy families are likely to be better prepared to create or at least sustain wealth, in a way that might be completely taken for granted, but is actually the result of years and years of mentoring and picking up on behavioral hints at home.

This is the meaning of inequality. It's literally the family you're born into. Your kids will make it either way way because you have already paved much of the path and can show them the way. For schools and jobs to insist on hiring people who are not born into this circle, is a good thing.

Another thing to mention is that I am far from being a touchy politically correct person. I don't really care about minutiae such as naming your git brach this way or that. But in inclusion I feel I've seen inequality from both sides of the coin. And I definitely support letting more people into the party.

Commies in USSR wanted to take away children from parents and nurture them in special institutions, but luckily didn't succeeded. Do you want the same for yours or is it better to be able to help your children and share your experience with them?

Well met stranger! I don't understand how your comment is related to anything I said. I never suggested you avoid helping your children. I stated that by being able to help them, you are giving them a significant advantage.

That's how natural selection works and it's natural for a reason, ie was proven to be evolutionary successful, diversity is the king, and when there's a king there's always going to be someone not that much successful. We as society should embrace competition and filtering out because that's healthy when resources isn't infinite, which is our case.

There are plenty of decent schools and also plenty of decent jobs. However, my anecdotal experience from applying a kid to college last year is that the most selective schools are taking diversity initiatives too far. I know a kid who was a Regeneron scholar who was rejected from many of the most selective schools.

I shut my mouth at work and go along with this stuff because I have no choice. I have a family to take care of. I've accepted this. But man, why do they always throw in the line about striving to make the workplace a "diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self"? Everyone knows that's a goddamn lie. I almost want to cry when I read that - it makes me so angry. I haven't been anything like myself in the workplace for over a decade now and I'm sure I'll never be again. I live a lie when I'm here and so do many, many others.

It stops if people refuse to live within the lie.

Read Vaclav Havel's "Power of the powerless".

Same here, and it's not just the job, intellectually participating in any community larger than "small and heavily guarded" seems to be subject to the same rules - all of them eventually collapse due to the same reason except people have easier time voting with their feet.

> Everyone knows that's a goddamn lie. I almost want to cry when I read that

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him."

Racism is anti-racist. Objective thinking is biased. Burning down cities is mostly peaceful protest.

If your allegiance is not absolute, then you absolutely do not have allegiance. So, don't question. Do.

> I almost want to cry when I read that - it makes me so angry.

I understand this feeling. It’s because they do not at all want you to bring your authentic self. By definition, all this culture stuff is teach you who you should be at work. That’s ok. You have to run a company and you need a certain culture to do that (or at least you think you do). Fine. It’s your company. Discriminate against who you have to successfully run your business in the current cultural climate. But when you blatantly lie to my face about it and tell me to bring my authentic self, it infuriates me because I know that’s precisely what you DONT want.

Did I post this and forget I did?

I’m in the same boat.

This might be the most honest comment over ever read on THN. Thanks for posting it.

Can you expand on what you mean by "I haven't been anything like myself in the workplace for over a decade now and I'm sure I'll never be again"?

The company knows it’s a lie too.

My friend had a company all hands where someone asked “Why does our company PAC give money to politicians with anti-diversity views?”.

The answer was a lot of handwaving but ended with “It’s good for business”.

It’s abundantly clear it’s all performative. Companies are happy to talk D&I all day long, but when it comes to the bottom line they are more than happy to drop it all if needed.

You’re smart to just play the game, because it is just a game.

> and so do many, many others.

Thank you for saying it.

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to." — Theodore Dalrymple

I know the feeling. At my work, the leader has started calling us a family, and that we should be a family and treat each other like family and bring our authentic selves to work. I'm not a leader, I'm a mother to 2 children, a daughter to an immigrant blah blah blah.

Fuck off with that bullshit.

Doesn't anyone know what it means to be a professional any more? I don't care about your beliefs, as long as you come to work and do your fucking job, and be respectful to those around you. How fucking hard is that?

Apparently too hard in the 21st century for so many.

I wonder if we shouldn't go back to addressing coworkers by their last names, to restore the lost sense of professionalism.

This might not apply to you, but it has helped me immensely to cut back spending money for pretty much anything. This means I get to work 70% or even less and still have a kids. I know it's not always easy, but there are people living very healthy and happy lives with minimum wage.

However I'm also aware that not everybody has that luxury, but I feel like most people have at least some options. Try to convice your boss that you can work 90% or something. Even getting rid partially of unhealthy work situations is a win.

It gets worse Khaine. New startups and companies being run by Millennial are a joke. They are too deep into this; and they encourage and nurture a culture of mediocrity.

But everything will eventually even out. Remember when it was claimed that QE will not bring inflation because MMT? How did that turn out Morties?

Will you speak up when if affects your performance or prospects for promotion?

> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with similar resumes do not get.

So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.

On average, those candidates would have started with a disadvantage in getting their foot in the door for several reasons – including outright discrimination, and the cumulative effect of past discrimination, but also softer factors such as being less likely to have helpful personal connections. This applies not just to the Microsoft job at issue, but to the previous jobs that would have populated their resumes (and for younger candidates, even schools).

Compensating for that sounds like a good policy to me.

Now, the post also suggests there is pressure to actually hire or promote less-qualified candidates, which might be a problem, but in that area the post is more vague and speculative.

How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who start with a disadvantage?

I would also support a policy that supports at least considering disabled or impoverished candidates.

I'm interested in the question of who decides which attributes are relevant, and which values of those attributes shall be favored.

I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.

Agree. A white person from a trailer park home and a black person from a government housing home are much more alike than a group of like-skinned people among each other.

I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to address originally was that a hiring manager might choose a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal I don't know, but it's not fairness.

The people who decide which attributes are relevant are the higher ups in the company. These people are making their decisions based off traits that they believe unfairly disadvantage people. The reason for that belief is the political advocacy of people who have those traits.

Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the hiring managers would be making perfect decisions. I do not think this is at all the case though. Regardless, I think it is better to correct for the traits that do have advocacy behind them rather than just not doing any correction at all.

I think what's more important is transparency. Tell us the modifiers used in the hiring process. Are black people a 1.25x or 1.5x modifier? What are the modifiers for impoverished individuals? Then we can start to come to a consensus as a society, how much we want each modifier to be. But as long as these weights and biases are kept behind closed doors, we'll be left spouting speculation until the end of time.

Currently, the hiring process is opaque in pretty much every respect. I think this probably is a benefit to companies, since if they list the metrics they use, candidates will optimize for those metrics instead of actually being good at the job (Goodhart's law)

Thus, I don't think we can expect the hiring process to become transparent anytime soon. It is known that the (opaque) hiring process does discriminate based on race. If I had to guess, the policy mentioned in the article is a direct response to papers like [1], which show that simply changing a person's name to be more "ethnic" results in their application being considered less. Thus I don't mind if someone tries to opaquely enforce a rule like the one in the article to counterbalance this.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053

Both of those classes are actually illegal to ask about(in Canada at least but probably many nations, so unless the candidate volunteers this information (almost certainly not). Who knows how one could know to reverse discriminate themselves.

The more pain (and hence unlikely to see the light of day) would be companies chipping into a educational fund to support impoverished individuals who would need added education to make it into positions where they can support themselves and break the difficult to climb wealth ladder.

He'll, even the location of on-site jobs can be considered discrimination. All our candidates must attend interviews at our offices in NY, SF, London, or Seattle. All others can spend their own bucks to travel here for the hope that we'll hire you .

It doesn’t, and nobody in the DEI crowd cares about then. Some will likely even think that it’s great.

It's not those with a disadvantage. It's strictly based on skin color. That's the problem. You have no idea if they are disadvantaged or not. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-class Black families these days.

Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.

It's also dangerously creating racism. The more we tow some kind of line of lets end racism by only hiring minorities, the more racist this country will get. Watch it. The moment you step back and let people hire the best candidate, you will find different cultures mixing and moving forward together.

> It's also dangerously creating racism.

That seems like the primary feature at this point.

This is such an obvious point that I am now deaf to cries of incompetence and good intentions. Racial division can only be the end goal of such a concerted effort.

So even if we have aggregate statistics showing how certain groups of people are disadvantaged, the fact that the rules do not apply universally means we should just ignore them?

You can flip the script and ask why you should apply rules based on the aggregate despite obvious counterexamples. White boonies kid isn't happy to be excluded over the fact they are white, either.

Point being this whole strive for 'ultimate equality' is going to create victims in its fanatical wake. No perfect method exists and no one wants to be on the losing end. But it is easier for those in a position of affluence to decide who is allowed in, as long as they won't get hurt themselves.

So we throw up our hands and perpetuate the obviously unjust status quo?

The beauty of capitalism is the process that farms for the most net value extracted from the employees is more favored to win. I'm all for competitor companies hiring based on diversity (aka progressive-approved racism) , it creates market opportunities for the firms I work for.

Perfect, so you have no problem with Microsoft having this policy! Problem solved.

I don't follow the logic that suggests that because I have no personal problem, a problem doesn't exist.

Splendid, we agree. I'm expensively-educated but not particularly talented. Inner-city kids who are smarter than me don't have anything like my opportunities. I have no personal problem, but a problem exists.

Hiring people based on skin color is not equality of opportunity, it is equality of outcome.

No, you go and fix the social inequalities and trickle that up. You can't trickle down equality by introducing more "positive" inequality

Yes. "Disadvantaged" isn't a clear enough concept to act on, even if it were the same thing as race or gender, which it isn't. It's not even semantically clear. Does it mean something bad has been inflicted on them externally in the past, or does it merely mean their present situation is worse than average without passing judgement on why?

The whole woke DEI idea of people being "disadvantaged" is itself a disempowering notion. It tells people that there is no point making better decisions or trying harder in life, because what you do or don't do doesn't matter, only outcomes matter, and if they are poor someone else will give you stuff for free. It's the ultimate form of emasculation.

You're about to get downvoted to hell but I'll add in that I love when big, fat, ugly White people think sees a Black person that may have their shit otherwise together and go "wow they really need my help and compassion." Because that's not racist lol

We have objective evidence, through numerous studies, that just "being black" produces disadvantage during the hiring process, and data which shows the outcomes of that disadvantage in fairly straight-forward terms:

https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-...

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/african-americans-f...

The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status. And while a higher socio-economic status can help to offset that discrimination, we have no evidence it eliminates it.

>The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status.

They're a self-reinforcing loop. A lot of racism is affecting socio-economic status (redlining, no generational wealth) and the bad socio-economic status then fuels the continuation of the disadvantaged status alongside racism.

This would be a good case for anonymizing resumes in the interview process. I'm not sure why that wasn't considered over setting minimum representation requirements. An easy way to eliminate discrimination is to make it impossible to discriminate between protected classes.

Reducing everyone to a list of past experience and skills would produce knock-on effects such as preferring people with specific existing experience over talented beginners. And in an industry with an extensive, existing problem of discrimination you'd just be maintaining the status quo.

It's also essentially impossible to anonymize resumes in a way that would provide meaningful distinction between people.

Resume design, for instance, is a fairly strong signal for how a developer might think, or their personal attention to detail and craftsmanship.

You'd be amazed how often we don't even need to read a resume to tell whether someone worth interviewing.

But people's work history is visible regardless of whether their resume is anonymized. If what you wrote in your previous comment is true, then anonymizing resumes should be strictly better for black applicants. Sure, it won't "solve" disparities in past work experience. But non-anonymous resumes still have that disparity and racial discrimination - anonymous resumes at least eliminate the latter. So if what you wrote about in your previous comment is true, companies should see some increases in hiring rates among black applicants under an anonymous hiring regime.

More broadly, I think you're confusing "non-discriminatory" with "equal chances". A blind audition doesn't mean all participants have equal chances of success. Someone who's been playing the violent for 25 years is probably going to have a better shot than someone who has only a few years of experience - and the lattice has better chances than me, who has zero experience. The fact that we have unequal chances of landing a spot in the orchestra isn't evidence of discrimnation. It's the system working as intended: the more skilled musician has greater chances of getting a spot, regardless of factors like race, gender, etc.

In the context of tech hiring, the purpose of the hiring process is to confer greater chances of success for candidates with relevant skills and ability. If someone is hiring for a position demanding C++ experience, then candidates who are C++ wizards are more likely to succeed at this job opening than people who occasionally dabble in C++.

First, anonymized resumes would not create increased in hiring rates. It might increase the candidate pool through the screen, but behold, racial discrimination is a function at every stage of the interview process.

I am not confusing "non-discriminatory" with "equal chances". I have no idea why anyone would. Obviously, a person with 12 years experience coding in a specific language or stack would be preferable to hire, depending on budget, to someone with none.

That is not the issue any of these measures address, or even should address. No one is arguing we should be hiring people with a GED as physicians because they're "diverse".

You're arguing at a straw man.

With Zoom interviews, it's possible to anonymize candidates throughout every stage of the interview process. Anonymous resumes, anonymous interviews. This would entirely eliminate racial, or gender, discrimination.

That would be true if people didn't sound different.

You can alter the audio signal to mask gender: https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

Similar tech could be used to mask accents.

I suspect the real reason people are so hesitant to anonymize interviews is that the disparities will persist - or even grow larger - and it'll be more difficult to ascribe it to racism or sexism.

Accent and pitch are not the only ways in which people sound different.

If technology could be developed which masked pitch, accent, idioms, patterns and approach, I suspect it would change hiring rates.

I suspect the reason you think such technology wouldn’t improve the situation is because you’re a bigot.

> If technology could be developed which masked pitch, accent

This is already possible. Idioms are more specific, but how often do you encounter an identifying idiom in a technical phone interview? I'm even struggling to think of an idiom that would distinguish, say, an Asian applicant from a white applicant. Idioms are more culturally-specific not racially specific. I encounter greater differences in idioms between urban and rural people than along racial lines.

"Patterns and approach" are part of the software development skills being measured - it's like saying a blind orchestra discriminates between people of different musical skill.

> I suspect the reason you think such technology wouldn’t improve the situation is because you’re a bigot.

Did you miss the empirical evidence to the contrary linked earlier? Regardless, let's start using anonymous hiring tools and find out who's right. I'm all for it, and if it does improve URM and women's pass rates, great! But again, for some reason, those who most ardently claim that interviews are biased against "diverse" candidates are oddly resistant to anonymization.

> Idioms are more culturally-specific not racially specific. I encounter greater differences in idioms between urban and rural people than along racial lines.

You need to revisit what "culture" means, and how many people of a given race share a culture.

> "Patterns and approach" are part of the software development skills being measured.

This was about speech patterns and conversational approaches, which vary greatly across cultures, both socio-economic, national and internal.

> Did you miss the empirical evidence to the contrary linked earlier?

You posted a blog post, from a startup. It was not peer-reviewed. It was not readily duplicatable. I'm not sure how to have a conversation with a person's whose standard of evidence for "genders and races are inherently inferior" is "a guy on a website said it."

Culture is vastly variable even inside a given race. Heck even within inside a given race, inside a given country culture is highly variable. It's probably much easier to distinguish between a costal urban educated white person and a rural white person, than distinguishing between two people of different races in the same location.

You can easily test whether anonymization is working: have interviewers try to guess the identity characteristics of the applicant and if they're able to distinguish between them then it's failing. If the interviewer is unable to infer it, then the anonymization is working.

> I'm not sure how to have a conversation with a person's whose standard of evidence for "genders and races are inherently inferior" is "a guy on a website said it."

Who on earth said this? This reads like a complete no sequitur. Who is saying that genders and races are inherently inferior?

I'm not sure how to have a conversation who thinks that the mere notion that not all disparities are due to bias means "genders and races are inherently inferior." Men are vastly overrepresented among murder convictions. If someone says this is not because of bias, but because men commit more murders are you going to accuse them of sexism?

> preferring people with specific existing experience over talented beginners.

Well that sure beats institutionalized racism

It just replaces one problem with a different one, or, worse, will mask the actual problem through "facially neutral" policies that are anything but.

Spot on. I wonder if daughters of Barrack Obama will get preferrential treatment as diversity hires. As women of color, they definitely should, according to many companies' policies.

What if that treatment is a necessary counter-weight to being taken less seriously?

Daughers of Barrack Obama will be taken less seriously?

If the children of a president want to work in your company, and they aren't scammers, crazy as a goat, or involved in criminal activity, of course that they should get preferential treatment. Not hiring them would be extremely stupid.

Their network of friends and knowledge of the government is not the kind of things that one can buy with money normally.

One goal of this is maintaining social cohesion between groups of people who can be immediately distinguished in combat. The visible existence of middle-class and upper-class Black families presents a lower-middle-class black teenager (or any teenager) with a choice:

A. Spend a lot of time and effort growing into someone with the skills and social access to be a part of one of those middle-class (or with luck upper-class) families.

B. Spend a moderate amount of time and effort maintaining a position in the lower-middle-class.

C. Spend a small amount of time and effort to fall into what socialists call the lumpenproletariat.

D. Spend an enormous amount of time and effort to gather a group of conscientious and industrious peers to form a new militant group which seeks to take power, trusting them to be rational enough to act effectively and loyal enough not to betray your cause.

E. Join an established militant group.

Why does Microsoft care? Microsoft wants to sell services to various governments, who want to maintain monopsony power on recruiting those who choose path E.

They also want tax revenue from those who choose path A. They also don't want to spend tax revenue on the messes left behind by those who choose path C or D.

Disadvantage is not solely based on wealth, though it does play a large part.

If you presuppose that giving disadvantaged groups an extra chance is a positive (your argument sort of does already) and only use wealth as a factor, isn't it still a net positive to uplift the typically poorer group? Doesn't that rightfully uplift more people than it does "wrongly"?

I notice that you only use the word “group” above and not “people” or some older word acknowledging that that’s what these groups are made of.

Why judge people by the groups that were born into when we could be judging them as individuals instead?

Have you ever been involved with hiring? The first stage - reading CVs - is not exactly the greatest point in time to judge people as individuals, if they're even read beyond a short skim. It is the biggest opportunity for unconscious bias to reject a candidate.

I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying that we shouldn't consider people as individuals when reading their CV because that's when unconscious bias may lead to their rejection? If the latter is true, then shouldn't we do the former all the more?

Maybe. But instead we're training AI.

I'm not saying we shouldn't. I'm saying that's the status quo, and changing people on this level is much harder than a policy that simply says "you must have an underrepresented person in this batch of interview invites". Maybe that'll even get them to read the CVs as a side effect.

I'd have less of a problem with D&I policies if they were justified in the following way.

"Black people are this percentage of the company. We need to show minorities respect and ensure they're doing well economically by ensuring that we hire a certain percentage of minorities, and then hire the best among them. This is something they fought for through the political system, and it's something every group can benefit from if they ever find themselves under-represented"

I'd be like, well I don't like my asian friend Clive is not getting hired after trying so hard in school, I might disagree with it, but I would at least understand where it's coming from. However how these policies are actually justified is nonstop racism. "white privilege, "You were only hired because of unconscious bias", so on and so forth as people are paraded into mandatory racism training seminars. I'm just sick and tired of the racism from the DEI bigots and the way they parade around as anti-racists honestly makes me want to projectile vomit.

Even Lebron James children have to deal with racism. Someone spray painted the n word on his house. Are poor people more disadvantaged? Obviously. But all else equal, being black or brown in this country means you face more adversity.

So you're okay with Lebron's children being given advantages in hiring process over a poor white candidate?

I think it’s ok to factor race into the criteria that resumes are judged on because it affects the experiences those students have had and I do think thought diversity is valuable in and of itself. It’s a tricky situation obviously.

But at the resume level all we're doing is using heuristics to decide who deserves an interview. Are white applicants with a 3.2 gpa more likely to be successful than black ones with a 3.1 gpa? I have no idea. I don't think you do either. Really the only way to find out is to hire some black applicants and compare them which might be what msft is doing.

>thought diversity

And you believe this is a function of skin color?

Yes I think cultural lines are commonly divided along skin color.

> It's strictly based on skin color. That's the problem. You have no idea if they are disadvantaged or not.

We do know that skin color is a decisive factor in discrimination. You suggest to let this continue to happen (do nothing) because some specific individuals of a discriminated skin color do not seem to be discriminated.

So you just need one token black guy, not even in every company, just one, promoted to near executive-level, so that people like you can say "look; if they want to, they can!"

And then you can all go on with your lives pretending you're there because of your merits.

The author also ignores the obvious fact that only 1% of candidates being "diverse" is the root problem being addressed...

Not really, it's basically circular.

The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect parity according to existing criteria (no one category is less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing ones. The game will never end.

My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian.

You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the obvious existing problem.

There might be a slippery slope in the future, I agree, but that doesn't mean there isn't an active problem now!

Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and technical things much more than women, so it's natural than they flock to CS.

And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.

60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!

> And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.

... Yes? At least in countries such as US, where these people in those professions can make large amounts of money. In my country (Poland), up to very recently, doctors were poorly paid and thus large number of doctors were women.

> 60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!

It isn't as clear cut as with the CS, because women (on average) may be put off by the high competetiveness and poor life quality of law/medicine, but they are also drawn (on average) by the fact that in those fields you work with people. Whereas, in CS degree, there's literally nothing for them (on average).

The Last Psychiatrist: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w...

>I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd?

> And men care about both money and technical things much more than women

Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong.

In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being for boys. They were the pioneers of the computer science world and in an era where things were incredibly technical without the resources we take for granted.

>they are historically and factually wrong

No, the money part is pretty accurate historically. Almost every field with high income historically attracted far more men than women once it became public knowledge. Job status and money are very disproportionately more important to men.

Which is why doctors and lawyers, two of the historically most highly paid and high status jobs, now graduate more women than men.

Or wait a second, I guess it isn't public knowledge doctors make a lot of money.

This is overly hostile and I don't really want to engage with it because of that.

To answer the question as coldly as I can:

1) Women are graduating from nearly all University programmes more than men.[0]

2) The role of Doctor is not as highly paid or prestigious as it used to be, at least in Europe.[1]

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...

[1]: https://www.paragona.com/healthcare-jobseekers/where-would-y... ; cites a 70k average where a project manager will make an average of 99k: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-project-manager...

This is not the gotcha you think it is.

Sibling already pointed some things out. Specifically for doctors, go ahead and look up what specializations men go into primarily and what specializations women go into primarily. The only high paying one I noticed being particularly female-dominated is dermatology, and it's not that much of a difference. The male-dominated specialties tend to have far more high earning specializations, and the ratios are far more skewed too.

As for lawyers, I can't speak except for the fact lawyers work more akin to salesmen and make a lot of money based on performance, and once again, historically speaking, men have always dominated on anything performance-based. Law is an exception, and it's an extremely poor one at that.

As for both, both medicine / biomedical sciences and law pale in comparison to every other field known to both pay well and do so with high security still being largely in favor of men, whereas fields with low pays and low security tend to be dominated by women. Most STEM fields women dominate aren't known for paying well compared to the ones men dominate. Comparing those fields to social sciences is a no-brainer. All of this still excludes entrepreneurship and high-paying blue collar work still being dominated by men.

None of this exempts the fact historically, women have never chased money through career nearly as much as men, and have always placed far higher value on a man's status than vice versa. There are cultural reasons why this has changed, and none of those reasons are necessarily pointing towards improvements. We can open this entire can of worms if you so desire, but it will go far too off-topic for this.

It has not occurred to you that the historical data shows evidence of bias instead of evidence of choice and that's fascinating.

Oh please, do yourself a favor and perform a very simple litmus test. Ask how many men are willing to date homeless women and vice versa.

What's fascinating is how people are trying to avoid talking about the obvious motivator for men not present in women, and how the slow death of that motivator is affecting things.

Take a look in the mirror before trying to subtly call someone ignorant, would you?

You are very convinced your 80s stand-up comedy stereotypes are accurate and it's deeply funny.

I'm trying to see the charitable way of interpreting this but all I can see is an intent to emotionally wound someone else. there's absolutely nothing in what you just said that can be considered constructive.

the parent was at least trying to make a reasoned point, even if you don't agree with him.

This is Hacker News not Prime Ministers Questions. We're here for intellectual curiosity, some measure of vulnerability and open discussion.

Calling people bigoted or old fashioned isn't swaying anyone, if anything it will push people away because as soon as someone says "they've got a point there" and there's backlash instead of a rebuttal: you've lost another person.

I suggested the parent consider the data shows bias instead of choice and the parent responded with an obviously outdated and generalized stereotype.

There was not reason in the parent's point, and I believe such arguments have no right to be treated as serious.

Men behavior is at least partially shaped by dating dynamics. Women tend to prefer partners with higher social and economic status than themselves. Men care less. Search term hypergamy

edit: typo

Both facts that, on average, women are less interested in things (and more interested in people) and also women, on average, are less interested in money, have a solid backing in research. They're not factually wrong.

The field of software business changed rapidly in the 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only natural that men became much more interested in it at that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get that $500k salary).

That's also not true regarding the history of the software field. The explosion in engineer salaries is relatively recent. It was only post-2000s when it became a very lucrative field for engineers and by that point the percentage of women developers had dropped off. This was due to both companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men as well a shift in advertising for home computers and deriding women.

Can you point me to your sources on companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men? It's the first time I'm hearing about this.

In the '60s the common way programmers were interviewed were through aptitude tests. The standard at the time was the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, but in the 70s and 80s that shifted to a new personality profile that inherently favored men [1] [2] [3] by Cannon and Perry. This became the new institutional standard and was used to determine who was a 'viable' programmer or not. This is where the traditional 'programmers are anti-social and hate people' thing came from and took root. In turn, advertising became male-focused, men were given more opportunity to become programmers and that's how the industry shifted. There's a bunch of very blatant advertising in the late-70s and early-80s that shows how this shifted.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-bias-pushed-the-compu...

[2] https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/born-it-how-image...

[3] https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-...

Interesting. If that was truly the case and was widespread in the 80s, it died with the eighties, as in the late nineties companies came back to truly meritorous hiring that doesn't care about personality (i.e. whiteboarding/leetcoding people to death, or doing weird pseudo-IQ question such as "how many gas stations are there in Manhattan"). Why couldn't women come back in then? The argument that they couldn't, because the field was stereotypically dominated by men by then is not convincing, because the reverse wasn't true (i.e. men moved into women dominated IT in the 80s without a problem, against the field stereotypes that it's for women).

It's because the stereotype changed, like I said. The new gold standard had the average programmer be 'male, nerdy, antisocial' and that was reflected by the rise of home computing being an almost exclusively young boy thing. The stereotype shifted in the 80s to computing being an activity for men, rates of women whom were computer science majors plummeted and it hasn't quite recovered. It hasn't quite died out because people still perpetuate the stereotype that the 1960s research study created.

You can see here in the chart that women were nearing 40% of all computer science majors in the mid-80s, followed by a sharp drop-off into below 20% today [1]. There's about a 15ish year lag period for changes in hiring, perception and stereotypes to catch up as people graduate, join the work force and cycle out.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

Guess women are just easily manipulated by the evil Big Computer Science Lobbyists.

That's not a problem unless you are either racist or sexist, in which case a preference for people based on their race or sex would make it a problem. But for everyone else, it's just whatever it is.

>My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian.

> You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the obvious existing problem.

I dont see a problem.

> My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian.

Most certainly. Anyone else will get paid to learn CS on the job so it would be rather silly of them to spend their own dime in college. There is no free lunch here. If you strive for diversity in the workplace it is going to disappear from other places.

Does it have to? Humans are really bad at being rational actors. The fact that some groups are less represented is a source of bias on its own. They can still be sorted out if they don't meet hiring standards in the second step, where unconscious bias is a lot less likely to affect a person that can demonstrate their skills.

> but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.

This notion of "qualified for the job" is really blurry in our field though. For example, is someone fresh out of a three months bootcamp qualified for a job at Microsoft?

Maybe. Many of the elite eng school grads Microsoft hires don't work out. At the upper levels of this industry, "meritocracy" is really just credentialism --- something embedded in your own comment --- which is something you learn quickly when you abandon resumes and interviews and replace them with work sample testing.

Companies like Microsoft want the best people. It's not brick laying, there's no "qualified for the job" tick box. The effects in software are non-linear, and one brilliant hire can create more value than 100 mediocre ones. These companies are actively hurt by having to hire second-best diversity hires, even if they're technically qualified for the job (whatever that means).

You're trying to argue axiomatically and I'm relating an empirical fact: Microsoft hires from elite engineering schools, and many of those hires wash out. It's not improbable that there are coding camp people who would perform well at Microsoft. I have seem people with similar backgrounds perform well in other elite engineering environments (cryptography engineering, kernel software security, to name two).

"Technically qualified for the job" isn't some ineffable abstraction. Most programming jobs at Microsoft are quite well defined, and qualifying people for them mostly means extracting solved problems from the work and presenting them uniformly to a pool of candidates. You don't need science to figure out how to do this, although if you want it, it was all worked out and written down in the 1950s.

>You don't need science to figure out how to do this, although if you want it, it was all worked out and written down in the 1950s.

Where/by who? This would be cool to have onhand.

What does best mean? That is very hard to quantify especially when the job is more than just LeetCode. It requires communicating with other teams, writing skills, general statistical thinking and data analysis skills (something not tested on leetcode), ability to receive feedback, ability to understand customer requirements, etc.

I do not mean to imply that "diversity" hires have those properties and non-diversity hires do not. However, I'd argue that if you don't make an effort to at least talk to everybody you can (phone screens), then you are going to miss a lot of people who are great.

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.

Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we interviewed any non-whites or non-catholics, the interview would be unbiased towards them"

Is that a non-discriminatory hiring process? The fact that non-catholics and non-whites weren't even given a chance to interview is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the White Catholics that were still had to pass a skill-based interview?

None of this engages with the comment it replies to. One way to see that is to simply remove the quoted sentence, and read the comment to see if it would remain coherent at the top of the thread.

It absolutely engages with the parent comment. The parent comment is trying to argue that discrimination in selecting which candidates to interview isn't a form of bias. This is incorrect as I explain in my comment.

The apparent Microsoft policy is that every interview pool “must include at least one external African-American, Black, Hispanic, or Latina/o and one external female candidate”. Your counterexample is “every interview pool has to be entirely white.”

I was originally going to write that you’re playing the “I’m technically correct” trick here, but I don’t think your argument actually rises to the level of technical correctness. Setting aside the debate over whether the former policy is desirable, it is clearly not the same as the latter policy. If Microsoft had said “everyone interviewed cannot be a white male,” or even “most people interviewed cannot be white males,” then you could more credibly try to make the case you’re aiming for. But they simply didn’t.

How big is said interview pool? With a pool of four people, which isn't uncommon in my experience, that means that 50% of the interviews are locked behind racial and gender requirements.

My example just made it bluntly obvious that discrimination in the interview stage is still discrimination, there's no "technically correct trick here". Mandating that X% of your interviews be of a particular race or gender is discrimination, no matter the value of X. Setting X to 100 just makes it very clear.

> Mandating that X% of your interviews

“2 of the candidates you interview must meet these gender/racial requirements” is a mandate, but it’s not a percentage mandate. I know that’s a little pedantic, but I think it’s important pedantry, because you keep using percentages:

> With a pool of four people, which isn’t uncommon in my experience, that means 50% of the interviews are locked behind racial and gender requirements.

That’s only true if you are limited to just four people, which obviously you are not. You may feel it’s an unfair burden on the hiring manager to expand the candidate pool if necessary to meet the racial and gender requirements, but that’s not an argument about discrimination.

> Setting X to 100 just makes it very clear.

I sincerely believe setting X to 100 makes it a different argument. :) “All of your candidates must be X” is manifestly not the same as “some of your candidates must be X”. (The former may require you to leave out candidates you think are qualified, the latter does not, for a start, which strikes me as an extremely important distinction in this context.)

> The former may require you to leave out candidates you think are qualified, the latter does not, for a start, which strikes me as an extremely important distinction in this context.)?

Incorrect. If you mandate that 20% of candidates be Y, but only 10% of candidates in the applicant pool are Y and 90% are X then on average you need to exclude 50% of qualified non-X candidates. If I have a pool of 90 X and 10 Y candidates and I have a quota of 80,20 then even if I include all 10 Y candidates I can only include 40 of the 90 X candidates. Sure, if I said that 100% have to be Y then all of the X candidates would be excluded. But even lower quota values still result in the out-group being limited.

> “2 of the candidates you interview must meet these gender/racial requirements” is a mandate, but it’s not a percentage mandate. I know that’s a little pedantic, but I think it’s important pedantry, because you keep using percentages:

Since there's a finite number of candidates it's still ultimately a percentage. The percentage is variable based on the total number of candidates, but it's still a percentage in the end.

Quotas and caps are two sides of the same coin. Instituting a minimum representation of one group, is fundamentally the same thing as capping the representation of those who don't belong to said group.

It directly responds to the comment even without the quoted sentence.

> Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination.

Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates.

Two people growing up in different places (not different cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city) have lived in completely different worlds. Their schools are different; their health care is different; their safety is different; their opportunities are different; the people they know are different. And much of the time there's a stark racial difference in the makeup of those places. Historically this was very much intentional; but even if it were no longer intentional, the effects won't dissipate for a long time.

So when you get a slate of candidates that all happen to be white, it's not just a random coincidence. Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?

Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to elevate candidates that just barely miss out. In other words, candidates that are strong, but, say, don't know anyone that works at microsoft (no surprise there... two worlds) or perhaps don't think they're good enough.

The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice, but, if the company works harder to find qualified black candidates then obviously the percentage would rise. Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does) then improving a hiring process would result in an employee population that more closely matches the demographics of the population at large.

This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people use this perverted logic.

But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism.

Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty.

So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.

Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are less likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.

Reality isn't fighting against their argument as long as a single white or Asian poor person exists. It still means an approach is punching a part of the population further down.

These things aren't mutually exclusive, stop trying to project them as such.

No it isn't.

> Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are less likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.

Yet there are more white people in poverty than black people in the US. If we are trying to give opportunity to impoverished people we would judge by poverty. If we want to live in a racist society then we would judge by race.

> Yet there are more white people in poverty than black people in the US

Where are you people getting these stats? This is being repeated elsewhere and is not based in reality at all.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/income-poverty/...

You may be thinking of poverty rates or proportional percentages if you think the above is untrue. The data is there for you to manipulate for your purposes as you wish, though.

It is ambiguous as written, and false by one interpretation but true by the other.

True: There are more white people in poverty (~5.5% of population) than black people [in poverty (~2.5%)] in the US.

False: There are more white people in poverty (~5.5%) than black people [in or out of poverty (~13.6%)] in the US.

To be clear, I meant "Yet there are more white people in poverty than black people in poverty in the US."

https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/277...

Why is that statistic even important to you? If it's about solving poverty then judge by how impoverished someone is, not their skin color.

But it also shouldn't be surprising. There are almost 6x as many white people in the US as black people. Poverty rates amongst white people is about half of black people. Do the math.

> There are almost 6x as many white people in the US as black people. Poverty rates amongst white people is about half of black people.

You've given the exact reason why your statement is a completely useless red herring. Say there was a minority in the U.S., the Romulans. Let's say literally every single Romulan in the U.S. was impoverished due to hundreds of years of systemic, intentional racism. But there's only, say, 500,000 of them. Half a million.

Your argument is "we shouldn't give more opportunities to the Romulans to counteract the very obvious and intentional systemic racism that put them in the shitty position they're in, because way more white people are in that shitty position. We should only focus on poverty, so that we help 36 white people for every 1 Romulan helped. Even though the Romulans are impoverished because of intentional, systemic racism. Even though their towns were literally bombed if they dared get too successful. Nope, we have to help 36 white people each time we help 1 Romulan." Do you see why that sounds racist?

You have to resort to science fiction references to obscure the fact that middle-class and wealthy black people exist in this country.

>> Where are you people getting these stats? > Why is that statistic even important to you?

Your first inclination when someone ask for the source of the statistic you cite is to ask why it's important?

Do you expect anyone to take your argument seriously after doing that?

> Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty.

This is false. But let me charitably engage your argument and ask you the following -- if your premise is correct, that means that lower access to education and economic attainment among under represented people of color has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with...something. What is that thing? Why would it be the case that, as Philosopher Liam Bright says, "the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by"?

Do Obama's daughters have lower access to education?

No.

So it's not about race. (I just gave you proof.)

It's about wealth and social class. Sure, those might correlate with race, and even be caused by racism (past or present), but virtually all real world consequences are downstream of wealth (in particular the ones mentioned: where you live, what you can afford, the amount of free time you have, your health, your nutrition, access to education/jobs, ...).

If you ignore wealth and focus on race, you're racist.

Has there ever been a poor person that has succeeded in our society? Of course. Therefore I proved money doesn't matter. (Do you see how stupid this argument is?)

> that means that lower access to education and economic attainment

But you're not arguing that we give opportunities to people without good access to education and poor finances. You're arguing we give opportunity based off race. In fact, there are far more white people in the US with poor access to education. If you really wanted to increase opportunities for such people you wouldn't accomplish it by judging by race.

> there are far more white people in the US with poor access to education

More total or more per-capita?

> What is that thing?

The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were discriminated against (Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). The main difference seems to be cultural values that prioritize the nuclear family and educational attainment. The SAT isn't racist, poor black people who study do far better than rich white people who don't.

If America was so racist, the single most successful ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the culture, family, and values you grew up with.

>If America was so racist, the single most successful ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians.

Do you have a source for this? Not for debate, I'm genuinely wondering where the information comes from. From time to time I've heard things about people from Nigeria being hardworking - haven't looked into it very deep though.

Not a direct source but https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/spotchecks/yes-nigerian-... pops up as a fact check after the same claim was made by Candace Owens. This link (from 2018) refers to several reputable sources of the time. I would guess that there are updated data from the US Census Bureau et al if you want to double check, but from all sources linked it seems Nigeria is and has been on an upward swing as far as exporting educated, successful people to the U.S. (and perhaps retrieving them to prevent brain drain, but I cannot be sure).

FWIW and from anecdotal accounts of acquaintances of mine (not a lot but in the double digits), this comes down to a cultural focus on education and family structure from a young age. Compare to the culture and family values promulgated elsewhere.

> The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were discriminated against. ...It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the culture, family, and values you grew up with.

This might actually be the best plausible argument in favor of affirmative action and D&I policies targeted towards these folks. By making it easier for them to enter especially high-skilled industry sectors such as tech we strengthen their incentive for adopting more effective cultural norms, which has significant benefits in the longer run.

(Unfortunately, this won't do any good if the educational system as a whole is not up to reasonable standards - if you're uneducated, you're still practically barred from the most productive and lucrative careers. And U.S. K-12 public education sucks.)

"The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor."

Wasn't there a Harvard study that concluded the biggest factor was a 2 parent household?

> Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study: family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to mobility, “the strongest and most robust predictor is the fraction of children with single parents.” They find that children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are significantly less likely to experience absolute and relative mobility. Moreover, “[c]hildren of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.” In other words, as the figure below indicates, it looks like a married village is more likely to raise the economic prospects of a poor child.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w... (Slate: What’s the most important factor blocking social mobility? Single parents, suggests a new study.)

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754 ("Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States")

Of course, this has been known for very long. Moynihan was getting in trouble for saying it back in the 60s. It's also the reason why the Civil Rights Act includes women; a particularly angry racist congressman from Virginia added women to the bill (which was widely understood to be aimed at strengthening black fathers to keep families together) to get the whole thing killed (though some publications have argued that Smith was the Baptist rather than the bootlegger in the group that got women added to the bill). The bill was still destroyed by it, if not in the way originally pictured, since it passed.

>a particularly angry racist congressman from Virginia added women to the bill

Where do I read more about this?

The congressman you're looking for is Howard W. Smith. I'll let you pick a preferred source.

No, it's not, What the GP said is true. as I responded to someone else, you really should study Thomas Sowell because he articulates this stuff better than anyone else. I would specifically recommend Black Rednecks and White Liberals for a discussion about negative cultural elements that trace back to rural areas of Scotland, Ireland, and England, were transplanted to the American south, and eventually transplanted to African americans, who themselves eventually migrated from the south for more opportunity. He also talk about how leftists exacerbate the problem.

Wealth, Poverty, and Poltics reads like a textbook, but provides a wealth of information about causes of disparity that have nothing to do with racism. Similarly, conquest and cultures talks a lot about disparate impact throughout history.

One of the foundational tenets of CRT is that all racial disparity is caused by systemic racism, and, therefore, that all racial disparity must be addressed by systemic change until there are equal outcomes. This idea is fundamentally wrong on a billion levels, and also insanely harmful to society. It is one of the main reasons, if not the primary reason, why CRT is so wrong and so dangerous. When you diagnose the illness so completely wrong, and then diagnose the cause of the alleged illness so completely wrong, then, your prognosis is not only going to fail to improve anything, it's going to make things worse for everyone!

The poverty achievement gap is nearly 3x the race achievement gap. Targeting disadvantaged people seems like the better goal for equity.

Edit: according to this study, there is no race achievement gap—it is entirely accounted for by poverty

https://edsource.org/2019/poverty-levels-in-schools-key-dete...

The beauty of it is that you don't have to figure out what the underlying mechanism is. You just need to help people on the basis of those measurable metrics - poverty, access to education etc - while ignoring other factors. If it so happens that those other factors have a causal correlation with poverty etc, well, you've just mitigated that.

Why should there be any one, single thing? Maybe it's the aggregate of a million small factors which don't add up to any compact story. That's not a terribly exciting hypothesis, and I don't have any great answers for what to do about it, but it seems a lot more plausible than the epicycles required to explain how overrepresented people of color and Indian CEOs are compatible with a white-led racial hierarchy.

I've met plenty of white programmers that grew up poor, but not many black programmers who grew up poor.

Please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Two people growing up in different places (not different cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city) have lived in completely different worlds.

The top comment doesn't care about that at all, skin color is all that matters. It's about group identity, not differences in backgrounds. They'd give Obama's daughter "a foot in the door" over the daughter of some white hillbillies that is the first in her family to finish high school. Because obviously: group identity is paramount.

>The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice

I agree, it is incoherent for people to say that certain racial groups being over-represented doesn't mean the system isn't fair, but blacks suddenly being hired is evidence the system isn't fair.

>So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel

With racism... and honestly this entire process is annoyingly indirect... just apply a racial quota and don't BS me.

> Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate.

People sure are obsessed with this narrative that affirmative action is all about preventing too many whites from getting jobs. This isn't the 60s, most of the people who are getting the bump are asian not white and it's not even close. This narrative doesn't work because it's nearly impossible to explain how asians ended up in the span of around a century ended up way behind whites and getting discriminated against to shooting past them in income.

> Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does)

If you claim that people can get worse healthcare, worse schools, worse safety, worse opportunities, and know less connected people and still think they perform equally at a job? Well you actually are still predicting performance, you're predicting that certain groups are stoic supermen. Whereas other groups are a bunch of losers who couldn't even be better at their job despite growing up with every advantage in the world. So not only have you not gotten away from predicting performance based on skin colour, now you're also predicting privilege based on skin colour, so you've doubled your race based assumptions.

Personally I'm just so done with the racist theories and the mental gymnastics people play around this data. If people want to reserve jobs for people of different identity groups, fine, lets do it for the sake of racial harmony so we can all sing songs together holding hands interracially in a circle.

> it is incoherent for people to say that certain racial groups being over-represented doesn't mean the system isn't fair, blacks suddenly being hired is evidence the system isn't fair

Incorrect, for these aren't the same thing: one has existed for a long time and the other is a sudden change. The latter begs an explanation, and it's there: deliberate management manipulation of the candidate pool. It's therefore understandable that co-workers will see such hires/promotions as based in part on factors beyond performance.

it's there: deliberate management manipulation of the candidate pool

In which direction was the manipulation? How do you prove that the pool manipulation was neutral before and is now favouring blacks, rather than it was disadvantaging blacks and has now moved to a more neutral postion?

"has existed for a long time" is just an appeal to tradition. It says nothing about the validity or correctness of the previous situation.

> How do you prove that the pool manipulation was neutral before and is now favouring blacks, rather than it was disadvantaging blacks and has now moved to a more neutral postion?

Anonymize the applicants. You can determine what a neutral pool is by removing the ability to discriminate between applicants of different race, gender, etc.

> By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates.

Maybe, maybe not. In either case, two wrongs don't make a right. If you want to eliminate discrimination then you need to stop discriminating. The solution is not to counter-discriminate, it's to remove the discrimination further up the funnel, to use your analogy.

> Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?

Why would that be odd? It does happen in sport, and nobody cares (nor should they).

> So a good thing to do is apply some pressure

Why is it good? Author talks about not being able to hire for several months due to lack of DIE candidates in the pipeline.

Of course a giant like Microsoft can afford to waste resources, but for a lot of startups doubling down on DIE means to literally die.

> Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?

In the US? Well yeah. Black people comprise 1% of college graduates. White people are 60%.

> Why would that be odd? It does happen in sport, and nobody cares (nor should they).

Why would that be odd? You just quoted the author as saying they looked for months to find non-white candidates and failed. Do you work in tech? That's the norm. If someone tried to hire for a tech position and got a slate of entirely non-white candidates, that would be entirely remarkable.

> Why is it good?

It's good because if your hiring funnel doesn't represent the general population then it is biased and therefore sub-optimal. It's good because we enslaved a population for generations and then tried as hard as possible to keep them out of the middle class, and I think that's a bad thing.

> if your hiring funnel doesn't represent the general population then it is biased

So 0.1% of engineers in the funnel should be Amish and 18% should be younger than 14.

There might be a flaw in your logic.

Jokes aside, this is maliciously reductive. There's too many factors contributing to the funnel (location, sourcing channels, employer, job preference, hiring market state) that makes predictions about funnel virtually impossible. But you already know it. You're not here for the truth, you're here to push your ideology.

> It's good because we enslaved a population for generations

My ancestors were thousands of miles away from US territory when slavery happened. In fact, it is quite likely they were slaves themselves. And yet you're saying I'm supposed to pay the price for your crimes just because of my skin color.

That sounds quite racist to me. Luckily, my skin is not only white, it's also thick.

"we" is clearly referring to the history of the U.S., the history which has led to you having a cushy, high-paying desk job doing whatever you do, and which has led to an enormous under-representation of black people in the workplace. You don't get to ignore the history that has led to the life you currently live just because Genghis Khan burned down your (great)^30th ancestor's village. It has nothing to do with that.

> I'm supposed to pay the price for your crimes

Whose crimes, the person you're replying to? Do you believe in some sort of original sin handed down by your ancestors? Your blood is pure because your ancestors were victims, but GP's blood is tainted because their ancestors were slave owners? You're making some seriously insane judgements based on a person's ancestry.

And who's paying any price anyway? Hiring from a limited pool of candidates is sub-optimal. What price are you even talking about?

> history which has led to you having a cushy, high-paying desk job doing whatever you do

So when a white person gets a high-paying job, it's because of history of slavery. If a black person gets a high-paying job, it's because they worked hard. Did I get that right?

No wonder Trump got elected when this is the agenda.

> You don't get to ignore the history that has led to the life you currently live just because Genghis Khan burned down your (great)^30th ancestor's village. It has nothing to do with that.

So Genghis Khan has nothing to do with that. But slavery has everything to do with that. Is there a threshold I'm not aware of? How far in the past we have to look at to be able to claim "event X led to event Y".

Lots of Jews ended up in US during World War 2, and now their grandkids are doing quite well. Should they be thanking Hitler because he is the "history that has led to the life they currently live"?

> Do you believe in some sort of original sin handed down by your ancestors?

Obviously I don't, but that's what this person implied.

> You're making some seriously insane judgements based on a person's ancestry.

When I speak your language, I sound insane. Good.

> Hiring from a limited pool of candidates is sub-optimal

To me "optimal" is the minimum amount of effort that leads to maximum results. E.g. if you get enough resumes by posting a job on your website you don't need to put extra effort to find more candidates. I'm curious to hear what's your definition. I suspect it requires augmenting math with morals.

Finally, here's a couple of questions for you to think about:

1. How should countries with homogenous skin color deal with history of slavery?

2. Should we exclude Nigerian Americans from DIE / affirmative action policies, because they are doing better than average American?

> So when a white person gets a high-paying job, it's because of history of slavery. If a black person gets a high-paying job, it's because they worked hard. Did I get that right?

Not quite. I said "led to", not "because", and everything that happens today was "led to" by history, including a black person getting a high-paying job. Remember this was all in response to this rather amazing comment:

> My ancestors were thousands of miles away from US territory when slavery happened ... and yet you're saying I'm supposed to pay the price for your crimes just because of my skin color.

You're using "my" and "we" to mean "me and my particular ancestors" and "you and your ancestors", whereas the person you were replying to was very clearly using "we" to mean "the history of all of humanity". The latter acknowledges reality as it is right now and the events leading up to it, and the former relies on some magical inheritance of responsibilities depending on your blood ancestors.

> So Genghis Khan has nothing to do with that. But slavery has everything to do with that.

Again you're ignoring the point. Both of these events led to the world as it is today, and neither of us is more responsible for them than the other. Your ancestors, my ancestors: that has nothing to do with it. And you're the one who started out assigning blame and "why should I pay!?" based on whose ancestors are whose. Affirmative action proponents are not doing that. They're looking at the situation as it currently exists right now and trying to make it better. We can debate whether their particular approach works or not, but we can not say "it's not my problem because of who my ancestors are".

(That's not even mentioning the fact that Genghis Khan died in 1227 and there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves.)

> To me "optimal" is the minimum amount of effort that leads to maximum results. E.g. if you get enough resumes by posting a job on your website you don't need to put extra effort to find more candidates.

So your definition of "optimal" is wrong, in any reasonably complex situation. What if your job posting was written poorly and all your applicants thought the job was something a little different? They could literally all be mis-qualified for the job, and you'd never have the opportunity to realize there are much better candidates out there. That's an example of "systemic bias" that prevents optimal outcomes. If you suddenly realize your job posting was crap and your candidate pool is sub-par because of it, you should take some affirmative actions to fix it, rather than spend "the minimum amount of effort."

Can we think of any other systemic biases like that, that prevent optimal outcomes? Any at all? Like, oh, I don't know, race discrimination?

> 1. How should countries with homogenous skin color deal with history of slavery?

By learning about it and understanding its effects on their society today? The same way I'm suggesting the U.S. does?

> 2. Should we exclude Nigerian Americans from DIE / affirmative action policies, because they are doing better than average American?

I don't agree with all the ways DIE / affirmative action are practiced today. I agree with many of the criticisms levied against it in this comment thread. Many other criticisms sound like they're rooted in the fundamental idea of "racism is natural/historical/OK and I'm racist for saying so, you're racist for disagreeing". I'd rather have DIE / affirmative action as we have right now than nothing, and certainly than whatever world you imagine where we (humanity) can essentially bully another group of humans for centuries, and then when we realize that actually doesn't lead to optimal outcomes in society, we shove them back down again anyway in some sunk-cost fallacy in order to avoid those nasty uncomfortable feelings of shame, regret, and blame (which have nothing to do with it anyway).

> everything that happens today was "led to" by history, including a black person getting a high-paying job

Then why focus on the past at all? "everything led to everything" is meaningless statement, it adds no value. But we both know that the reason you made it is because it allows you to use emotions as an argument.

And I still don't understand it, is average income black male more deserving of a good job than poor white male? If you focus on the past, the answer is yes. If you focus on the present, the answer is no. Which is it?

> we can not say "it's not my problem because of who my ancestors are".

On it's own it's a terrible argument. But one can definitely use it in response to "this is your problem because of who your ancestors were".

> That's not even mentioning the fact that Genghis Khan died in 1227 and there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves

It's not the gotcha you think it is. You're the one who brought up Genghis Khan in the first place.

FYI slavery in Russian Empire ended in 1866. So yeah, there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves. And those people as white as it gets.

Not to mention that slavery still exists in many parts of the world.

So I'm still failing to understand why one group of ancestors of slaves is more deserving of inclusion than another group of ancestors of slaves. In fact, it seem to be more deserving than today's slaves. It is almost like slavery has nothing to do with those policies, and yet all your talking points are about slavery.

> What if your job posting was written poorly

Then it would not lead to the results and would not be considered optimal.

> By learning about it and understanding its effects on their society today?

Bad answer. Learning and understanding are not actionable.

> I'd rather have DIE / affirmative action as we have right now than nothing

That's a false dichotomy. Minorities well being has been improving decade after decade. That's not nothing.

> Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?

In the US? Well yeah. Black people comprise 1% of college graduates. White people are 60%.

It doesn't help when students are under-qualified for the schools that they get into. It hurst every party.

Black people are being scammed by colleges. Colleges happily admit everyone and hand out diplomas in return for ridiculous tuition (only made possible thanks to student loans) and graduate folks with very little prospect of getting jobs and repaying loans.

In the end black people with diplomas end up college educated with fancy but useless degree, still underemployed, with giant student loans accruing % every day and living paycheck to paycheck.

Literally modern servitude reinvented, what an irony

You should read some Thomas Sowell. He should help cure you of your "cosmic justice" aspirations.

https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Cosmic-Justice-Thomas-Sowell/dp...

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell...

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell...

The very idea that, in a just world, outcomes along various lines of demarcation between groups of humans would be roughly even has zero evidence to support it. In fact, all of history, as well as the state of the universe itself, testify that this should not be the case! Never has there ever been equal outcomes between any groups in history. The world is complex, and the causes for disparity are too numerous to list and impossible to even attempt to measure or tease apart in their impacts. Sowell has written about numerous causes of disparity between groups that have nothing to do with racism or any societal injustice, and the above book examples are just a small portion of what he has written.

What leftists like to do is over-simplify the world to fit their pre-conceived notions. If there is racial disparity, it must have been caused by systemic racism! Therefore, we must fix it through systemic racism in the opposite direction! This kind of thinking is broken, flawed, and completely incorrect to the core, and acting on it simply leads to more injustice, more unfairness, and more disparity of different kinds. It is an ideology born of intellectual pride, moral vanity, and an utter lack of wisdom.

> The very idea that, in a just world, outcomes along various lines of demarcation between groups of humans would be roughly even has zero evidence to support it.

Actually it has as much evidence as you have time. Take a big bag of fair dice, and split them randomly into two groups. Actually, split them however you want, whatever "lines of demarcation" you choose. Then roll them and apply literally any measure of literally any statistical outcome you want.

Oh shit, it turns out: in a just world, outcomes along arbitrary lines of demarcation are roughly even! Every time!

> Never has there ever been equal outcomes between any groups in history.

So? You need to assert that history has been just to different groups for this to be evidence to support your statement about what happens in a just world. Are you asserting that history has been just? Think hard before you answer this one.

> What leftists like to do is over-simplify the world to fit their pre-conceived notions.

Sure, like my dice example. Except the problem is, for my dice example to be wrong, you need to specify a reason why some dice roll differently than others, and you need to split the groups based on this reason. Remember: any arbitrary split must necessarily have roughly equal outcomes in a just world. If the world is just, any clear variance from equal outcomes must be due to some intrinsic differences in the dice themselves.

Let's say we split humans into two groups based on whether their birthday is an even or odd number (day of the month). This is a line of demarcation between groups of humans. Let's use your first sentence here:

> The very idea that, in a just world, outcomes along various lines of demarcation between groups of humans would be roughly even has zero evidence to support it.

So this is where we disagree, right? I assert that these two groups would have roughly the same outcome in almost any measure. It's a clearly arbitrary line. But you say there's no evidence to support that. Really? Really? Do you really believe that the odd-birthday group would be significantly different in outcome than the even-numbered, in any way? Of course not. In literally any "outcome" measure you could come up with, these two groups are indistinguishable.

Let's say we split humans into two groups based on biological sex. Would we expect to see any differences in any outcomes? Of course: there are differences in average height, muscle mass, sexual preferences, arrangement of sex organs, etc. There are actual intrinsic differences between these groups that account for some differences in outcomes, even in a just world.

Now let's say we split humans into two groups based on skin color. Uh-oh. We see huge differences in outcomes here. Can we explain it by intrinsic differences? Careful. There are really only two options here: either the world is not just, or skin color is not arbitrary. Asserting the second is literal racism: you're saying there's something naturally different about people with black skin that accounts for their vastly greater rates of poverty even in a just world. That's textbook racism, and, even worse, plain-old incorrect. It's also simply not logically necessary, because we know the world has not been just. Very, very not-just to that particular group, in fact.

> If there is racial disparity, it must have been caused by systemic racism!

Such a vapid strawman argument. This bullshit only works if we've never actually observed systemic racism. Slavery, the Greenwood bombing, segregation, Jim Crow, police slayings -- those are not hypothetical events dreamed up by "leftists" to account for racial disparity we observe. Systemic racism did happen, and in many cases is still happening, and then later we observe that there is also racial disparity. These "leftists" go "hey, maybe the racial disparity we see now has something to do with all that systemic racism that was going on for hundreds of years" and you pretend like this is some unfounded conclusion-jumping?

Your train of pseudo-reasoning, like that of so many other racism-apologists, only works if you conveniently ignore the actual multi-hundred year history of actual racism that actually happened. So many of your points sound completely asinine when you re-read them with that in mind.

If you maintain any sort of ethnic distinction, the consequence of that is going to be a divergence of cultural values and practices that leads to different outcomes. In the 1940’s, the United States deliberately assembled the greatest collection of scientific minds available to them to invent the first atomic bombs; for some reason, the most overrepresented ethnic group in that project were Hungarian Jews. This was not a time of great philo-Semitic or pro-Hungarian sentiment among American elites; it just worked out that way. In fact, the America of that time was so threatened by Jewish overperformance that universities adopted de facto anti-Semitic quotas in their admissions process; East Asians experience similar discrimination do today.

You aren’t wrong to think black Americans are the victims of systemic racism; the problem is that most the “systemic racism” that operates today is an unintended consequence of well-meaning liberal policies, as Sowell has discussed for decades now.

> Take a big bag of fair dice, and split them randomly into two groups.

If you think human outcomes follow a simple normal distribution in a just world, then you are making the exact prime mistake I already pointed out; which is dramatically, and I mean dramatically, over-simplifying the world. Seriously: read some Thomas Sowell. Nothing about this world or this universe is normally distributed.

> Are you asserting that history has been just? Think hard before you answer this one.

What is "just"? Think hard before you answer that one. Actually, read "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" and the "Intellectuals and Society" by Sowell. You'll find that the social justice version of justice is vastly different from what people have historically thought of as justice. It is also, in my estimation, far more unjust, unfair, harmful, and evil than the traditional view. It is an arrogant ideology based on a belief that one has the power to shape the world, and all of society within it, according to one's whims, rather than a proper respect for the fact that we are brief sojourners in a vast, complex, and powerful universe, and a planet filled with billions of complex individuals.

> Sure, like my dice example. Except the problem is, for my dice example to be wrong, you need to specify a reason why some dice roll differently than others,

You should read "Discrimination and Disparities" By Thomas Sowell, where he quickly crushes the normal distribution hypothesis for economic outcome. He shows through very simple examples, which are still dramatically over-simplifying the world, where there are multiple preconditions for success, and where missing even one precondition results in the same failure as missing all of them. This model alone completely disproves a normal distribution hypothesis, even in a world where the preconditions are distributed randomly. And, not to sound like a broken record, the preconditions are not distributed randomly or evenly in any way, not by nature or time themselves.

> I assert that these two groups would have roughly the same outcome in almost any measure.

Nice assertion, but do you even have any scientific data to back it up? And, even if it you did, and I actually can't find any by searching, it would simply provide evidence that your birthday modulo 2 likely doesn't impact economic outcomes. But we can, of course, find economic disparity everywhere for a thousand different reasons. Firstborns on average have higher IQs and better economic outcomes than all other-borns. There is not random economic outcome distribution even within the same household and within the same genetic pool: http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/53/1/123.short.

In a world of universal economic disparity, the burden of proof is on you to show why things she be different and how. But, like your leftist forebears, you have no proof, only words and religious beliefs packaged into an ideology.

> Can we explain it by intrinsic differences?

You can explain it a billion different ways. The question is: who is right, and how do you prove it? Read "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Sowell, and "Intellectuals and Race" while you're at it. You'll find plenty of explanations that have nothing to do with either racism or of innate genetic differences. It is proponents of CRT who need to prove themselves, but because they are in vogue culturally, they get away with their evidence-less assertions without any pushback.

> Slavery, the Greenwood bombing, segregation, Jim Crow, police slayings -- those are not hypothetical events dreamed up by "leftists" to account for racial disparity we observe.

It's good leftists didn't make them up, since leftists, namely, the democrat party, were primarily responsible for all of those things over the past 200 years. They didn't make it up because they mostly caused it! And again, correlation does not imply causation, such a basic statistical truism that CRT theorists love to ignore. Just because there was racism, even just because there still is racism, doesn't mean that racism is the primary cause of economic disparity, or, even a major cause at all! Sowell has written about multiple minority groups in different countries, who, despite being oppressed by real racism, and not the made up CRT kind, managed to prosper economically far above and beyond the majority population.

> Your train of pseudo-reasoning, like that of so many other racism-apologists, only works if you conveniently ignore the actual multi-hundred year history of actual racism that actually happened.

Go read "The real history of slavery" and "Conquest and Cultures" by Sowell. In fact, we are probably more educated on slavery than you are, judging from your performance in this debate. The only racists are people like you who think that the appropriate reaction to disparity is real, explicit racism against those with "privileged" skin color. But, really, you're just following a long tradition of the political left being racist.

I realize this conversation is a waste of time, but maybe one day you'll listen, educate yourself on reality, and develop a better-functioning moral compass.

Edit: I just want to take a moment to point out how unscientific you are with your statements, like: "Sure, like my dice example. Except the problem is, for my dice example to be wrong, you need to provide a reason why...."

I don't know what leftist education you paid for or in what university, but in a just world you deserve that loan forgiveness Biden is offering. Science is about making a hypothesis, and then, you yourself objectively gathering evidence that could either support or refute that hypothesis, and only then making a conclusion that is backed by your data. You, of course, did the opposite. You made a hypothesis, that economic outcomes between humans "should" be normally distributed, concluded it must be true, and, finally you put it on other people to disprove it. That's, anti-science! And, no, comparing human beings to six-sided dice is not scientific evidence. You might have missed that in your education as well.

Similarly, you assert that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome, yet fail to provide any scientific evidence. Yours is a world of cult-like ideology and secular religion, where evidence is irrelevant, or an afterthought.

So many things in this response make it clear you have no interest in arguing in good faith. I thought you were actually trying to make a rational argument before, but this response belies that you are not.

Like this one:

> since leftists, namely, the democrat party, were primarily responsible for all of those things over the past 200 years

That is so inane it does not even deserve a response. You've given away that you're not arguing in good faith.

> Similarly, you assert that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome, yet fail to provide any scientific evidence

This comment illustrates this well. You know that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome. You know that that's the case. There is not a shadow of a doubt in your mind that that is obviously correct. But of course whoever you're arguing with must provide mountains of scientific evidence (at which point you would undoubtedly move the goal posts), whereas you're allowed to get away with "simply" making semi-rational arguments and quoting, over and over, literally one source, who (according to wikipedia):

> Sowell was an important figure to the new conservative movement during the Reagan Era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Oof. Double-oof. So this singular person you're relying on for all your backup was an important figure to the most awful presidency of the modern era, the start of an economic plague that has allowed the rich to loot and ransack this nation's prosperity and dramatically worsened the very racial and socioeconomic disparities at the heart of this argument, and a corrupt Supreme Court justice who is a major leader in a movement to destroy democracy in the U.S. and replace it with a peusdo-Christian Theology. Yikes.

I came here prepared to reply with more rational discussion, but like always, the longer you talk to racism-apologists, the more you see the facade unraveling, the bad-faith arguments, and the goalposts moving. It's not worth it.

You can call it insane but it doesn't change the fact that what I said about the democrat party is true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_a7dQXilCo

"Did you know that the Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, founded the KKK, and fought against every major civil rights act in U.S. history? watch as Carol Swain, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, shares the inconvenient history of the Democratic Party."

Your resistance to my statement has nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with your own cognitive bias.

Here is another source: https://www.socialjusticesurvivalguide.com/2018/01/08/the-de...

"SJWs who go around browbeating Americans over a history of slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow can’t then complain when we point out that it was actually the Democratic Party which was most involved in this history."

> You know that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome. You know that that's the case

The point is not what I believe or "know" to be true. The point is to actually test your beliefs empirically against reality. If you're not doing that, then you're not doing anything remotely scientific. You might as well be spouting your religious beliefs, which you have been, by the way.

Your views on Reagan and Thomas, along with your rejection of the truth about your own political party, reveal your extreme bias, ignorance, and mis-education. No one could claim the Reagan presidency was the worst in U.S. history, or that Thomas leads a movement to destroy "democracy in the U.S.", without a hefty combination of all three. And, If I am quoting one source, it beats your zero sources and your ridiculous comparison of humans to dice and economic outcomes to dice rolls. But, really, many, many others have said the same things as Sowell. He just says it best. Those include a host of other people you'll dismiss because you clearly only pay attention to leftwing sources that agree with your existing religion.

> or perhaps don't think they're good enough

Or perhaps it is not your business to decide what blacks should think?

Imagine if you're hiring in a region where blacks are 10% of the population, but only 1% of resumes you receive are black folks (and if your pool of candidates is low, 1% can literally mean zero candidates).

Your mindset seems to be "those poor blacks don't understand which jobs they should apply to. I know better than them, I'll help them". You still think you are superior to them. You're not a hateful racist, you're a virtuous racist. Still a racist though.

Generally agree that the problem is larger. However, I think this quick fix could result in a net negative.

"So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to elevate candidates that just barely miss out."

Imagine you're one of the non-minorities who worked hard and misses out because of an artificial pressure. How do I explain to my kid that all else equal they will lose to another candidate because of not being a minority (assume this is similar to minorities of the past; however the results are mixed)? What's the point of trying hard in school? What's the point of working hard at work? These are the types of questions I'm starting to struggle with in real life. Teach the kid the same stuff I was taught (lies), or disillusion them that the world is not a meritocracy, truth and honor count for nothing, hard work may or may not pay off, etc?

>disillusion them that the world is not a meritocracy, truth and honor count for nothing, hard work may or may not pay off, etc?

They'll pick it up all on their own.

A person that truly believe this would find themselves advocating for an increase in the interview pool of West Virginian / Appalachian white kids.

I have seen exactly zero people suggest that. That's how I know it's made up.

It's essentially impossible to have a job opening without making choices that will directly affect which people see that job opening. If you go to some university's job fair, you're selecting for the students at that university. If you had chosen to go to a different university's job fair instead, the students who were exposed to your job posting would likely have different qualities. There is no "default behavior that doesn't constitute making a choice," thus the only thing we can debate is the virtues of which particular choice was made, not whether a choice was made.

It is easy to feel like we have a target painted on our backs with this diversity thing. It is a sentimeng generated by our reptilian brain. (It does not help that some hotheads at LinkedIn say that every black hole in the universe is blame of the white man.)

But this is a feeling that must be let go. Privilege allows people to reach excellence and excellence is scarce, so no, privileged people that do their homework won't suffer because we are trying to do the right thing, allowed by our current stage of civilization that generates so much surplus.

Not picking up the capable people and letting them reach their level of excellence is a big problem in our society, and everybody would be better off if this was fixed.

Skin color doesn't make you privileged.

Being white gives me the privilege of not being followed by security at department stores while I see my non-white friends be not so subtly watched or followed.

That’s not the privilege but the consequence of unfortunate experience with shoplifting and groups more likely to perpetrate it. Crime statistics is hateful and racist, no doubt. But it drives bias which serves as first order simplified decision making

>Crime statistics are hateful and racist, no doubt.

How so?

I'm so tired of this crap where we pretend discrimination isn't discrimination if we jump through a bunch of hoops. Yes asians being told they can't come to interviews because they're too asian is racism and it does impact their chances of seeking employment because how you do on any given interview is going to be to a degree random. You could get a coding test you've never seen before or one you practiced the night before.

The whole song and dance about applying racism at the interview selection stage isn't about not being racist, it's that there isn't court precedent that specifically makes that illegal, but there is for other more direct techniques like racial quotas.

> isn't about not being racist

They're not even saying it's not being racist - they freely admit that it is - they just insist that the ends justify the means.

The problem with this reasoning is that you assume you have a perfect view of how disadvantaged every single subgroup is.

Also, given that this a zero-sum game (the company only has a fixed number of hours to interview a single game), you are necessarily making someone else worse off when you give advantage to a sub-group of candidates.

Also consider that many candidates can belong to a privileged group and a disadvantaged group at the same time. Of course none such nuances are being considered. How could they, when all you have on the person is their 1 page work resume? You know literally nothing about them, except a few projects they claim to have completed in the past.

Now you're not actually hiring for skills, but playing disadvantage roulette with your hiring pool. Ok, maybe not, and you're still screening for skills, but at least call a spade a spade.

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.

I’ve heard from diversity candidates who work at Microsoft and interview at other companies that this part isn’t even true. I’ve been on the hiring side and seen how it isn’t true too…

The bar is truly different at all levels. Recruitment, interviewing, hiring, offers, and management are all very different. To act as if there isn’t this is to truly be naive or just happen to have only worked and interacted in a very small group of people. I’ve worked with hundreds and talked to thousands - this shit happens a lot more than HR wants to admit.

I’m not saying someone always get the preferential treatment - I’m just saying this happens more than people think it does.

Don't forget the financial incentives that were given to managers who hired "URMs" at Intel (under represented minorities). The bonus was pretty fat too.

Ok, let's do some nice, calm soothing math for a second.

Per the OP previously 'diversity' candidates were 1% of all applicants. I'll assume the null hypothesis here and then also assume that they were 1% of the interviewees too.

Lets assume that diversity interviewees are turned into hires at some factor Y. I'll make no assumptions on if that is different than from non-diversity interviewees.

Now, with the new policy, there is a 15x increase in the probability of turning diversity applicants into interviewees.

However, nothing has been done to change Y, the factor at which diversity interviewees are turned into candidates. They are explicitly stating that they are not changing Y.

So that then means that diversity interviewees are now less likely to move on past the interview stage. Based on the numbers, they then need to interview at 15x the rate as previously to be turned into hires.

Please, correct me if I am wrong here, but this seems to hurt diversity interviewees.

I see it as taking up 15x the time, rejecting at a 15x rate, and eliciting these real human people to become stats in some database that the policy makers can show off to some other boss without any compensation.

Managers are NOT free to choose who to hire. When you get headcount, they tell you to make sure not to sacrifice quality and, also in same breath, they tell you that you have no career paths if you don't make your DEI numbers. If there are no actual competent candidates in your field who also happens to be diverse, what would you do?

Everyone from CEO to line managers in all major big techs are now have DEI target that must be achieved. If it is not then don't bother applying for promos. Most people at L7+ will also see significant cut in bonuses if they don't make DEI targets. Especially at VP level, the cut becomes pretty significant. So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers. There are very specific commitments you must write down in OKRs.

I have seen a situation where a manager literally ignored every single non-diverse resume and did not interviewed single non-diverse candidate because of desperation of not making his numbers. He went out of his way to get person completely stranger to work his team was doing. He finally ended up hiring a person well below expectations and this person now simply hangs out in the team as diversity token. The VP sent email to whole group congratulating in supporting diversity and be inclusive. Everyone got their well deserved bonuses for this magnificent achievement.

"So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers."

Lazy, incompetent Fucks.

This is how literally everything in corporate America works. You start with a good idea. It gets turned into a metric. Targets for this metric are assigned at various levels in the management hierarchy. Bonuses are made dependent upon meeting the target for the metric. Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and just focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting, client satisfaction is obviously very important, leadership made the determination that NPS is the best way to measure csat, we all have NPS targets, our bonuses are tied to them, so what does everyone do? They only send NPS surveys to specific clients they know will give a good score and then they spend time and effort to make sure the client follows up and does in fact give a good score. Everyone manages the metric, same as with the DE&I stuff.

You missed the part where after a few years of cheating the metric, getting "above average" satisfaction (4 out of 5) from a client is considered a failure and a manager 3 levels above you will personally come asking what went wrong with this client.

If you don't give 5 of 5 in any gig economy app (from cars to delivery to AirBnB), it's like you're scalping babies.

Spot on, other than it was never a good idea.

I don’t work at Microsoft, but another large corporation, and have been told by my manager that right now it is difficult for a white male to get promoted and that we may need to do some strange maneuvers to make it happen if I’m interested in a promo. Was kind of taken aback by the bluntness.

I _do_ work at Microsoft, and judging by the recent crop of promotions (early September) there was still plenty of opportunity for white males (and everyone else).

Assuming you're in the United States, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the EEOC are mere suggestions nowadays. There is no willingness in our DEI-co-opted government to tackle these issues and hold these blatantly illegal and unethical actors accountable.

I've experienced this too, and in practice DI&E reminds me of the kind of rules advocated for by people who live on a lake, ostensibly to protect the lake but in reality to preserve their own property value and make sure nobody can build near them. Making rules than mean explicit support and sponsorship are needed to get somebody though means that employees end up serving and being promoted at the pleasure of whoever is currently in power, giving them more power. There are many ways this works but all-in, it ends up just consolidating power, not achieving any of the ostensible aims (whether or not you think those aims are worthy)

You should carefully document this sort of thing, even if you don't plan to use your documentation in a legal action. Who knows what the future will bring?

And yet, I'll bet you the majority of your corporation's management layers are white males.

At Google (in Silicon Valley), 7 out of 8 people in my reporting chain were Indian males. Go figure!

This! Somehow diversity at every office means 50% diversity + 50% indian

someone has to do the actual job, so there will be some part of purely merit based hiring to meet baseline needs

My boss was a woman, my bosses boss was a woman, and my bosses bosses boss was a woman. CEO was a hispanic male

I find it puzzling why people are split by their skin color rather than their country of origin.

There are only marginal differences between a white and a black person born in US, while myself, being a white male born in Russia, cultural experiences and background have barely anything in common with a white person born in US except for the color of my skin.

The same applies for a black guy from US and a black guy from Nigeria or something.

Other people have already brought it up, but Asian is such a vague term as well. There are Asians from 1st world Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Singapore) and from 3rd world countries (Vietnam and etc).

By diversity logic you really should have quotas for every flavor of color and birth, but you can imagine it's going to lead to madness, so people just choose an easy way out and do this as a PR stunt.

Puzzling thing for me is why people are split by genders. In developed countries like USA, women is as free as men. There are zero cultural aspects like in Saudi Arabia or other countries that prevents women from getting education or apply for jobs they want. Still, vast number of women gravitates to jobs like teachers, nurses, hygenists, hair saloon, waiting staff and so on. It is not that they were forced to take on those jobs. It is what they chose by their own will. Female participation in labor market is now well over 40% so almost everyone has chosen to do some job. But we still complain about lack of women in tech and we blame it on bias. I am certain bias is definitely there for women but is it the only reason, or even most prominent, why we have so few women choosing tech instead of those other very low paying jobs? I think people should be putting much more effort at incentivizing girls to pursue tech career paths than force upon artificial DEI targets on management hierarchy.

Maybe the question is why the leftists are so influential that for-profit companies are willing to comply with their ideology. Isn't the best way to increase the representation of minorities is to increase the funnel? Better schools, better teachers, more rigorous curriculum for all instead of for the elite students, a whole new culture that values curiosity and geekiness in general, and eventually a larger number of people who are willing to toil for years to study STEM? But oh no, by merely asking such questions I'm a far right, a racist, and of course, a fascist (I can be wrong, of course, but I should be free to ask questions and propose alternative solutions).

My theory? CRT in workplace is popular because it's effective at suppressing questions and at making it easy for organizations to avoid working on hard problems.

my assumption is that the left is actually in support for better education in inner cities.

i mostly hear about Republicans banning books

Have you also heard of “decolonizing” the libraries?

I haven't.

I have heard more republican outcry in response to Biden's student loan forgiveness

> A recent analysis by the Census Bureau said Black and Hispanic women could benefit the most from the one-time cancellation policy, as both groups hold a disproportionate share of education debt relative to their peers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/27/lawsuit-...

How frequently does that happen?

You're missing the obvious answer, it's a zero sum game. If a company pays top of market, they can absolutely find enough qualified candidates any way they wish to subdivide them (by race/gender/background etc).

The rest of the companies won't be able to however, and now they look bad so they either have to (possibly) lower their standards or have bad PR.

From my view it’s the right that is making education more arduous, especially for teachers at every step of the process. I haven’t seen anyone on the left try to censor teachers or cut their funding. “Girls who code” was huge at my inner city high school. Funded by the left. Democrat politicians fought constantly to make the schools better while republicans campaigned on vouchers that would mean poor students are stuck in schools with less funding while rich ones get a cheaper private education. I think you’re falling for the trap of only ingesting the “outrage” news and letting the normal stuff pass you by(maybe I'm just projecting because i fall for that all the time unfortunately).

> more rigorous curriculum for all instead of for the elite students

This is called common core and was implemented with widespread bipartisan support. Really we all agree on most things.

That’s not to say there aren’t problems with the left. You just seem to have misunderstood them. For example, charter schools seem to be a good solution that combines choice with not leaving out those unable to pay. Yet both sides seem adamantly against them for their own reasons.

> by merely asking such questions I'm a far right, a racist, and of course, a fascist

Now we're really getting into speculation territory, but my hunch is that you've gotten these negative reactions because the people you are talking to/arguing with believe they are already supporting these initiatives and therefore that your complaints are in bad faith.

I really wish that education is a bipartisan issue. It's really not about left or right. What I was criticizing is not any specific policy but that the elites, whatever parties they belong to, use morality to block legitimate discussion of tough problems. It just so happens that the left love to put people into racists and fascists group, or so when I am being subject to exposure bias.

> vouchers that would mean poor students are stuck in schools with less funding while rich ones get a cheaper private education.

This is the discussion I wish we have more. That is, someone says that voucher is all about giving freedom and forcing teachers to teach better, but in reality it may work just the opposite. And we should really discuss its pros and cons without attacking each other's motives.

> You just seem to have misunderstood them

Maybe so, as I'm subject to exposure bias. I just can list equal number of examples that show how the left pushed their agenda too. Let's start with Gebru. When LeCun said that bias in model was the result of bias in data, Gebru attacked him for being a bigot. When Gebru was fired from Google, how many media spent even a single paragraph to discuss the quality of her paper, which was the root of the whole debacle, while being busy attacking Google for being racist or misogynist? Or search Allison Collins. When she was criticized for her policy, she said "“Many Asian believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS. In fact many Asian Americans actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead". When school boards lower their academic standards, they cite racism (again, they maybe right, but it's wrong to attack anyone who questions their conclusion). When students performed worse in maths, multiple school boards claimed that maths are racists or there are racisms in maths curriculum. When people were talking about bringing manufacturing back to the US, a pundit said along the line that it was poor white people wishing to bring back their power. When people asked why some Asians get ahead in the us, multiple Opinions and anchors argued that it's because Asians are closer to white. When people are talking about students' reading and maths proficiency were trending downwards, how many articles immediately claimed that the issue was racism? Of if we go back, how many people would call you a racist if you questioned Warren's claim that she was a native American?

So, yes, I'm not happy with what I saw, but I saw the aforementioned examples and more from WaPo, from NYT, from The Atlantic, from Reuters, from MSNBC, from school boards, and from politicians. So, I don't know what kind of misunderstanding I can avoid.

A couple thoughts here. First, politics is inherently divisive. Just like facebook figured out that divisiveness drives engagement and so have politicians. The craziest voices end up most amplified as everyone who opposes them loudly shouts about how crazy the other side is. Just like I don't believe there is widespread support for book banning on the right I don't see the support for SF style school boards. If you want to know what dems actaully support just listen to a biden speech on education or better yet read the platform here https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providin.... You'll notice that the main focus regarding race is funding for bussing programs and other methods of integrating schools, and that the focus is on income more than race. The republicans decided not to publish a platform in 2022 for whatever reason but they gave us this to explain themselves https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2020. I will say that recent laws in Florida have been concerning, but obviously the same is true for SF, and I blame presidential posturing more than ideology for the Florida stuff.

I realize it can be difficult to separate the rhetoric from the actual bills and laws being passed, but it is extremely important to do so, and to call out troublesome ones no matter where they come from. I think taking pundits with a grain of salt is about as much as we can do as individuals, but it sure would be nice to figure out a way to better inform people(on both sides) of facts, because more and more I just see people parroting their talking points past each other instead of steelmanning. Because if we forget about the pundits we end up with stuff like common core. Common sense rules that can make everyone better off aren't what pundits are selling, their incentives aren't properly aligned unfortunately.

Oh, that’s easy. Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better.

You’re 100% right about the funnel, but here’s the thing: junior positions are part of the funnel. About ten years ago I realized that I was screwing up massively by interviewing for current skill level instead of potential skill level. Sure, at a certain point you can’t just look for potential; I’m not gonna hire a senior engineer because they might reach senior levels at some point. But I’m sure thinking about my junior to middle levels differently.

And this benefits everyone. Too many FAANGs get obsessed with existing criteria and leetcoding and won’t even look at someone from a small shop, regardless of skin color or gender. Their loss, my gain.

Absolutely anything you can do to increase your pool of potential qualified employees is good. Making up theories which give you an excuse to keep the same small pool hurts your company. Again, my gain.

Further, cultural diversity helps me get my job done because different viewpoints are useful! It’s amusing: the same people who will insist that cancel culture is bad because we have to invite all the viewpoints will also explain that trying to increase diversity in the workplace is terrible. It’s almost like there’s something else going on there.

> you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity

Diversity, as everything else, has a sweet spot. Too little and too much are equally bad. Of course nobody knows where the sweet spot is, but merely increasing diversity is not a guarantee for improvement. I mean, you can hire someone who hates your gut and doesn't speak your language. This will definitely increase the diversity, but you probably not going to like it.

> will also explain that trying to increase diversity in the workplace is terrible. It’s almost like there’s something else going on there.

I think most of those folks just despise hypocrisy. "Being anti-racist by being racist" makes me cringe.

If you're making a diversity hire to get alternative viewpoints, you're doing it for your own benefit and being honest, I don't think anybody will have problem with that. It's the virtue signaling that makes it despicable.

There's also argument to be made that if you're allowing diversity hires, you might have to allow "cohesion" hires. Justifying one but not the other seems disingenuous.

Sure, you could obviously have a poorly functioning diverse workplace. Likewise, you could obviously have a poorly functioning lily-white all-male workplace.

The idea that diversity advocates are solely focused on diversity for its own sake is incorrect. There are two factors that typically play into it: one is practical (see my comment) and the other is moral (the belief that it’s inherently better if someone raised in a non-majority culture has an equal chance to succeed).

“Virtue signaling” is a tremendously non-useful term because it is always, always applied inconsistently. The dude I’m responding to used the phrase “CRT.” That ensures that we all know that he’s virtuous and recognizes the evil of leftist thought, but you’re not calling him a virtue signaler.

Don’t assume people who disagree with you are hypocrites. Maybe we’re just misinformed. “Virtue signaling” ends discussion and promotes division, and we really don’t need more of that in this world.

I did not imply you're a hypocrite. I only tried to explain the cancel culture / diversity paradox. Both cancel culture and DEI are incredibly hypocritical "holier than thou" contests.

> belief that it’s inherently better if someone raised in a non-majority culture has an equal chance to succeed

I think it's safe to say that equality of opportunity ship has long sailed. Far left is all about equality of outcome now.

But let's focus on equality of opportunity. It's an incredibly complex problem to solve. Take affirmative action for example: based on dose and implementation it could either help, or it could backfire. But any criticism of it will get you labelled as bigot or racist. "We're helping disenfranchised minorities here, how dare you criticize us?"

Once you believe you have the moral high ground, criticism is no longer acceptable.

I'm not labelling the other guy as virtue signaler because he seems capable of self-doubt and rational thought.

I believe that you didn't mean to label me as a hypocrite, but if you think that my expression of virtue is designed to signal that I'm a good person rather than being a sincere expression of what I believe -- you're saying I'm a hypocrite. If you don't want to do that, don't accuse me of virtue signaling.

> Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better.

What evidence do you have to support the claim that DIE-focused companies outcompete merit-focused companies?

False dichotomy. I spent a couple of paragraphs talking about this. Please read my post and try again if you really want to have a conversation.

You made a pretty bold claim about the inherent value of diversity; if you cannot support it with evidence, the failure isn’t with me.

Efforts to increase diversity this late in the pipeline come at the cost of other priorities, including (and perhaps especially) merit, and are, almost without exception, advanced through patently discriminatory practices.

> … people who will insist that cancel culture is bad because we have to invite all the viewpoints …

Are we to understand that, given your espoused commitment to viewpoint diversity, that you also oppose cancel culture on this basis?

Either you also agree that “cancel culture is bad”, or you don’t actually believe viewpoint diversity is valuable, and yours is just an ethics-of-convenience argument.

> Oh, that’s easy. Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better.

It would help if you cited your sources here, but I do remember myself seeing some studies on this.

One in particular was about how venture capital firms did better when they hired for diversity and had diverse people in top roles [1]. The study mentioned that venture capitalism has very particular homogenous in-group culture, which diversity hiring helped firms break out of. In fact many articles seem to push this idea that diversity hiring leads to more perspectives on issues and more out-of-the-box thinking, leading to greater success.

While this makes sense, this is very different from the rational pushed by the top-level comment of this thread, which says that diversity hiring is to make up for discrimination at the beginning of the funnel. Because if the goal is just to broaden perspectives by tweaking their hiring process, companies can do this without looking at race or gender. There are metrics that can specifically optimize for this. There's no reason why race/gender needs to be specifically considered in order to end up with more diversity of thought.

[1]: https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend

You probably don't hire diversity, you hire conformity.

It's not left or right ideologies but CEO and their desire to be in good standing in social media. During early 2010s, there was whole barrage of books and editorial on income gap, gender gap and biases. News channels regularly picked up authors and circulated them on and on. Talk shows need someone to talk with and what could be better than these topics to energize audience to argue? This built-up a lot of resentment of being exploited and left behind in "diverse" group over short span of years which eventually exploded into me-too movement. During those days, a CEO will go out and post on Twitter how they cared about diversity and going all-in by tying the diversity targets with bonuses. Then if the next CEO doesn't do the same then they obviously looked upon as anti-diversity/racists. So, this whole thing cascaded into all big tech CEOs lining up to setup artificial diversity targets and that's where we are now. No one really cared that pipeline to funnel diversity in tech was broken at the start.

It's also probably why these initiatives focus on skin color and gender rather than things like economic advantage: You can walk into an office and see that it's mostly asian men, you cant walk in and see that it made sure that people who didn't have elite educations got an opportunity.

Yes, you absolutely should fix the funding gap in schools. 100%. I was really liking your comment until I got to the self-pitying complaints about being called a racist.

The alt-right likes to call progressives "cucks". There are tumblerinas who call conservatives "fascists". That's what HN calls "free speech" - if you want to cry about it, try Facebook

One strategy of the rule book of toxic middle management about how to keep your underlings from eating you alive is to treat them differently. One group will notice they get treated unfairly and instead of holding management responsible will develop frustration at the group that gets preference. A conflict ensures that you can leverage to your benefit.

Sadly it is rare that people will hold management responsible in such cases.

"I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the annual D&I report look good."

Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot. He also seems fairly ineffective at navigating bureaucracy. Taken to extremes, lots of corporate policies can seem a bit overbearing. This essay reads to me like he's reading corporate D&I policies to be maximally inflexible and frustrating in ways that are unlikely to be the case (at least from based on my personal experience working in large corporations + a short stint at MSFT many years ago).

Very recently I was only allowed to hire a black person. The assumptions here are probably correct.

Search linkedin for “diversity recruiter”. It’s a role. Companies post specific reqs that state you must belong to a marginalized group in job posts often enough that it’s a bit stomach churning.

I’ve personally had to deal with HR for having too many white men on my teams. For software developers in America.

These kinds of policies are also massively unfair to the exact people you are trying to hire. I know lots of engineers who would fit into the cliche "diversity" categories who are skilled and deserving of their job. But now they have to wonder if they were hired for merit or to meet some sort of a quota.

The whole thing breeds resentment and drives teams further apart, in fact it creates the exact problems DEI is purported to solve.

Does make you wonder if heavy-handed affirmative action breeds imposter syndrome among its beneficiaries.

In this case there was no competition. The person I hired was the most qualified of their peer group: all black men.

We don’t get a plethora of good candidates through the normal recruiters anyway so there would be no way to know one way or the other how they would have stacked up in a wider job pool. I found one person that was solid so I felt I got kind of lucky. Restricting applicants by ANY criteria (diploma, work history, age, race, etc) in this market seems insane. My most recent HR insanity is an in office requirement. Candidates bail so fast. I don’t hide it though; there’s no reason to string someone alone that doesn’t want to meet the in office requirement I have no control over. And I don’t fault anyone for refusing to work in office for some portion of the work year.

Our recent town hall included not only a "Diversity Up" slide, but also a "Whiteness Down" slide to which the Black host said "whiteness is down 9% but we can do better". I legit turned off my PC for the day. Still haven't fully recovered from that one.

Someone needs to do a screen recording on something light this and give it some sunlight/reveal the company. I hear about this practice frequently, but have never seen video.

Ah, you'll love the zoom feature that watermarks videos and audio with invisible markers to identify leakers.

If you look at the way discrimination was actually carried out a hundred years ago, you'll find that it was primarily done through strong hints rather than through having policemen standing outside. If a department head is sending out memos that cause middle managers to get the message not to hire black people, that is all it takes. It did not even require 100% compliance, as long as there is a strong headwind at every step of the advancement process, nobody will make it to the top that's not being favored.

MS gives higher compensation for diverse hiring, it is not a far reach to believe it also affects promotions. Especially if you contributed to your boss's bonus

> Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot.

Sure. If it wasn't pretty sure or assumes Microsoft could be sued over it, so Microsoft implements these policies as harshly as they can without opening up the path to a clear lawsuit.

It's standard operating procedure for most discrimination.

We know how to reduce bias in hiring. Using a blind audition.

A much smaller amount of information about the applicants origin leaks through. Implicit bias is attacked via limiting the information that it can act on.

It seems categorizing people by race and gender at the individual level is a recipe for disaster and gives racists the power to do exactly what they want, pick and choose which types of people get to benefit.

If you give a regular person information about a persons race and gender, the damage they can do is limited to whatever implicit bias (if any) they have.

If you give these tools to a racist or sexist, you've given them the keys to the kingdom.

The conclusion is, why is Microsoft making it a requirement to know about race and gender at every single hiring step? Surely this just needs to be an aggeregate statistic right?

I have worked at MSFT and the author is correct. It’s not explicitly said, but everyone knows you have to hire diverse people if you want to get promoted. And those folks are incredibly hard to find so you end up ignoring hundreds of qualified candidates desperately searching for the diverse one who is at the very least somewhat qualified.

I'm hoping one day everyone wakes up and realises that the emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately DI is a virtue status game. It's easier to play that than delivering real value in your job. It's pretty much a religion with its own dogmas and lingo.

For more fresh madness see what the the UKs financial conduct authority is proposing:

https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-finalises-pro...

According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far exceeding their overall representation in the US population.

Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups?

And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please help me understand if I'm missing something obvious.

> Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups?

Parents matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting

I actually don't think Tiger parenting is more special than, say, just investing in your kids more broadly. You don't have to be an authoritarian and still get excellent results by caring about the success of your children in society and also having the resources and means in which to perform that investment.

More likely is that filters for immigration are very high, which means the average immigrant is more educated, wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.

While parent's comment was certainly to some degree tongue-in-cheek, they are likely agreeing with you. Investment in your parents AND likely a higher than average weight on "a good life" being grounded in employment, education, and certain values are contributing factors to the end results

Tiger parenting is one way of investing in your kid. I agree, there are multiple ways to invest in your kid.

>More likely is that filters for immigration are very high Don't agree with this, there are lots of ways to immigrate and I don't think most of them have a sort of wealth/education filter. For example refugees.

Self selection among immigrants is easily the largest factor behind their higher rates of success. Even as a refuge, there were tons of applicants, there is almost surely a reason you are the one who made it. It's in no way an easy process.

Refugees are pretty much the only category that doesn't have some kind of wealth filter, if only because immigration paperwork costs a fair bit of money (esp. when you look at it from the perspective of someone in a country where cost of living is much lower than in US).

And the majority of immigrants in US aren't refugees.

In that case, systemic racism matters too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism

I think an important question is how many of those Asians are drawn from abroad, vs our American homegrown Asians?

If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented. But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global workforce would be Asian.

If you're assuming a global workforce this would mean the representative share of African Americans would be 0.5%

Sure, but a black percentage of ~13%, which is actually exactly in line with the ratio of black americans to americans.

One of the biggest arguments for DEI is to undo the damage the US government and culture has done to it's own black citizens. I don't think filling a bunch of VP positions with highly qualified African immigrants does that.

A cynical person would think DEI was invented precisely because solving that would be hard but treating everyone the same by skin color allows for easier solutions such as simply importing non-aggrieved people to replace our marginalized ones.

At least in the parts of the company I've worked -- always on product teams -- the majority of my coworkers were not born in the United States. Given that, even if all the other parts of the world were represented proportionally you'd expect a large percentage of people from China and the Indian subcontinent.

Asian parents give a shit whether their kids show up for school.

Down voted for this but it's really a reality. Talk to teachers, if the parent doesn't value school then it takes a truly exceptional kid to direct themselves through it.

Anecdotal of course but I believe this is very much true. I'm Latino if it matters much.

I'm the oldest of three brothers and was the one who was most pushed/expected to excel in education. My parents became a lot more lax on my younger brothers because they thought they pushed me too hard growing up. I think they changed in part because our relationship was very strained as I was growing up and even today isn't anywhere near as close as my two siblings are with my parents.

But on the other-hand, we're all adults now and I am the only one to graduate college and have a career in a typical "high-paying" profession/job. I don't fault my brothers for this and am close with them, but it is pretty stark the difference in career path/"traditional success" between the three of us simply based on this emphasis/value.

'asian' parents from which country? They are not all the same. It's a huge chunk of the planet.

But it is true. Chinese and Indian people have nothing else in common but their parenting styles are the same. Historical accident maybe, but it's true

What you're missing is that a company cannot just hire to meet racial quotas which reflect population percentages in order to be free of bias.

That's not what bias means.

What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen.

If more applicants are available that happen to be from a certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then that's what the organization has to work with.

That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you see".

I think your statement is the issue.

If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen.

I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?

Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?

there's a few studies regarding resume names and getting call backs

Written, documented company policy?

While I do think GP is correct at many places, my team literally hired a black woman from Georgia and turned down a white dude from Boston, lol. I am not a fan of the overbearing top down policies like Microsoft is talking about, but I have become friendly with aforementioned hire, and some of the stories of discrimination and just people being really rude to her in the professional world are mind blowing to me. I can definitely believe that a lot of workplaces do actively discriminate against various minority groups.

A single datapoint doesn't confirm or refute the presence of bias; your anecode doesn't contrast anything I've written in my comment about the definition of bias. If the organization consistently chose a black woman over an equally qualified white man, that would likely indicate bias.

What is "literally hired"; does your organization figuratively hire most of the time, except for the surprising odd time when it is, wow, literal?

I feel you may have misunderstood my comment. I wasn't really trying to argue anything, merely stating my belief in light of information conveyed to me by someone. Let me explain.

I don't think I intended to counter anything with what I was saying. I was merely amused by the intersection of the article i was reading with the situation I had - being involved in the hiring of, specifically, an african american woman in Georgia to an engineering role and the turning down of a white dude from Boston. "Literally" was used to emphasize the exactness of the hypothetical to my reality - less analogous than equal.

With that out of the way, the core of my comment was intended to convey the message "I can believe that there is a lot of hidden bias out there in the world, based on the stories someone generally considered to be at risk of many biases has told me."

> Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups?

What _are_ the groups?

"Asian" can mean anything. From India, China, Japan, many countries in Oceania, etc.

I think the classification is fundamentally flawed.

As an outsider, it's obvious looking in that racial classification in the US is just crazy -- they took some racial stereotypes from 100 years ago, gave them neutral sounding names, and started pretending it's not racist to group everybody south of Texas as "hispanic". And then build official policy on top of these simplistic classes that fail to describe reality in any meaningful way, only serving to reveal to everybody else in the world what the people in the US think about them.

At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.

I myself have to mark a checkbox saying "Hispanic OR Latino". I'm Latino, but NOT Hispanic. But I can also check "white". One is a skin color, another is ancestry, and yet another is geographical location...

My (least?) favorite anecdote on this was when we were running stats demographics and found there was one more African American than Black. Turns out it’s a rich white kid who was born in South Africa. He’s not wrong…

Elon Musk and Charlize Theron are African Americans too.

The fun part is that 60% of world population have to share a single classification whereas a couple of small islands in the pacific somehow get a label for themselves

Agree. Asian is kind of like Hispanic, it doesn't mean anything in terms of ethnicities.

Hispanic is even more confusing given that the population composition of some "hispanic" countries is 90%+ white.

In US government paperwork, Hispanic / non-Hispanic is usually a binary category that is orthogonal to "race", and sometimes referred to "ethnicity". Thus, you can be "Hispanic White", "Hispanic Black", "Hispanic Native American" etc, but there is no such thing as "Black Native American" under that classification.

Don't forget Middle East.

The South Asia Subcontinent has about 2 billion people. A different part of Asia has more than 2 billion people. Identifying as Asian is utterly meaningless, except to perhaps generalize as (non-white & non-black). Madness.

US immigration policy selects for high earners, the highly educated, the highly skilled and experienced, and the already wealthy.

My guess is that there are a lot of immigrants from Asia that fall into any of those camps.

In theory it is, in practice it is not. The intention is to let in talents that the US native population otherwise cannot provide. The reality is that the US tech visa have been heavily abused and let in people that shouldn't be let in.

> Why are Asians doing so well?

"Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization.

Two main reasons that are given:

Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions.

Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields. You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism? It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable path to success.

There's a third you're completely missing.

Present fathers that raise and discipline their children.

Please don’t reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well educated populations. So what you call “Asian culture” will have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who value money and education.

Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.

The "model minority myth" occurs when someone takes population-wide trends and applies it on an individual level: e.g. "he's Asian, so he must be good at math". That's stereotyping.

Pointing at demographic trend in academic achievement isn't the model minority myth, it's an empirical observation. Conflating objective facts with the model minority myth is perhaps well intentioned, but it comes off as a shallow attempt to deny real world observations. Asians Americans, on average do spend more time on academics, and do enter fields like medicine and engineering at higher rates. This is an empirical observation, not the model minority myth. Similarly, there's nothing racist or white supremacist about examining disparities in time spent on academics. If someone takes this data and then judges individuals for population-wide averages, then that's stereotyping and I do not condone that.

I'm not sure what your intent was with your last paragraph, but it comes off as an overzealous attempt to portray any analysis of time spent on academics as racist. I certainly wouldn't want someone to assume I'm personally less intelligent than my Asian co-worker because I'm Cuban. But I trust that most people are able to understanding that averages are not the same as individuals. And I find the pattern of people being worried that I'd be offended by data on Latin americans' academic achievement condescending. I am smart enough to understand that data saying Latin Americans on average spend less time on academics than whites or asians is not an attack on me personally, thank you very much.

I’m Asian-American, if you can’t tell by my username.

My point is that very often the success of Asian-Americans even though they are a disadvantaged class has been used to justify anti-Black rhetoric. In the context of this HN thread, which is specifically about D&I and hiring more Black people, bringing up a “better Asian culture” can be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, even if it was unintentional. This is the myth of the model minority.

It’s a mistake to assume that “empirical,” “objective” observations cannot be racist. In particular, white-supremacists often intentionally present “facts” and “data” in order to paint a misleading picture. For examples, see 13/52: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1352-1390. The missing context in 13/52 is that Black people have suffered much more economic and social injustice, Black areas are more likely to be policed, Black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted for the same crime, etc. It would be dishonest to simply say “Black people make up 13% of the population but commit 52%…” without supplying this additional context. I.e. even if the data itself is “objective,” the context and presentation also matters because those will affect how people interpret that data.

Again, not trying to say that you were intending to be racist. I just wanted to show you what your statements could imply and that you may be unknowingly repeating white-supremacist rhetoric.

No, facts are not in and of themselves racist.

If someone points out that men commit the vast majority of rape, and thus we shouldn't assume courts are misandrist on account of the immense inequity in rape convictions, that is not sexist. If someone points to this fact to try and justify a curfew for men, or lowered burdens of proof the yes it is.

A flag showing "13/52" next to a snarling ape is undoubtedly racist. Pushing back against a quota mandating that African Americans make up no more than 13% of murder convictions, on the grounds that murder rates are not equal isn't racist.

Is this really hard to comprehend? I expect the average middle schooler is capable of understanding this, and repeatedly cautioning HN readers about potentially racist readings is more than a little condescending.

> can be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, even if it was unintentional

I agree that people interpret things as dogwhistles even when they were not intended that way. To me, that's a problem because it means anything can be a dogwhistle.

It also doesn't make sense given the meaning of "dogwhistle" which is something that is intended to communicate to an in-group. If it is not intended, then it's not a dogwhistle.

> Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education.

No it doesn't. It implies that asian culture values education more than other cultures. Which has been shown in some studies. For example, this one from 2013 [1] showed that, when asked if a college degree was necessary for success, 70% of hispanics said yes, as well as 61% of asians, 55% of blacks, and 47% of whites. A more recent study from 2020 [2] asked if college led to more job opportunities, and 89% of asians said yes, as well as 86% of whites, 74% of latinos, and 69% of blacks.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/white-...

[2]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/25/views-higher-...

I realize now I totally flubbed on posting the link:

1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...

Who's "WE" in your view? There was not top-down effort to get Asians to excel in the US, it was due to their own desires and efforts.

I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?

intelligence doesn't have the same distribution across groups.

> Why are Asians doing so well?

Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and biased sampling ?

~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent + China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally, because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature proponents)

> Why can't we replicate this for other groups?

Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture, it must first start at trying to observe these with some level of granularity.

Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here. Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for immigrants from other racial groups ?

Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups with similar nurture methods ?

The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for differences in group level performance ?

Good faith social studies on group level differences must go into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a study that might report: "differences between groups persist even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity". So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to see here.

"So well" as in academically or in STEM fields, right? One reason is the selection process. Or put it bluntly, genes matter. Asians, at least the FOBs in the STEM fields, mostly came to the US for graduate degrees first. They are, statistically speaking, already the top students who have a knack in STEM. If you are a techie in the Bay Area, try to count how many people are PhDs in a social gathering.

I have yet encountered anyone in my circle in the bay area who had any difficulty with high-school math, and none who did not excel at least most of college-level STEM classes. On the other hand, many of my coworkers are medalists in national or international competitions of maths/physics/chemistry/informatics, or they were in the top 2% for those college entrance exams. The bias was so strong that I used to think that tutoring was useless and the education in the US was pathetic because many high school students couldn't understand simple things like factoring polynomials. So, of course they do well, statistically speaking. On the other hand, not all Asians do well in other fields, especially in business and politics. Indians are more diverse in that regard, but people from mainland China didn't have a large enough presence, partly because only universities in China tended to select the nerdiest people for STEM, or so per my China friends.

> Why are Asians doing so well?

What is the average household income of the parents of these Asian people that comprise those data points?

Did they grow up in apartments or homes?

What quality was their elementary and high schools?

For black people, at least, they were enslaved in the US in much larger numbers than any other ethnic group. This is bound to hurt their opportunities relative to other ethnic groups, among many other problems.

It's telling that this person posted a job listing, interviewed dozens of candidates, realized they couldn't proceed because they hadn't interviewed any minority candidate, tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one, and the take away wasn't that they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.

Why do you suppose that a non-broken recruiting pipeline would result in more diverse candidates? Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all times?

I think this really varies for each position, but most SWE positions really don't require special skills beyond a CS degree from a 4-year program. Sure, there may be special industry knowledge that you need to know but I'm not talking about languages, frameworks, databases, etc... if you studied CS, I expect you to have the capacity to learn this shit. You can learn the problem domain in well enough in 6 months and rely on your PMs and boss to fill in the details.

If you are truly in a domain where you cannot hire CS graduates, then D&I is going to put a lot of burden on your recruitment team to find candidates to meet slating requirements. But you probably aren't...

> Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all times?

No but I think you should be able to find a single minority candidate over the course of months.

Why do you think so? I have a hard enough time finding a qualified candidate of any variety.

At our school, 100% of teachers are women. One Hundred Percent. 97% of administrative staff is also women. In all of hair saloons in my area, 100% of staff is women. All of the nurses in our nearby hospital are women. They don't care about diversity and I do not think it is due to bias. I think they simply don't have enough men applying in their pipeline for these jobs. None of their CEOs have insisted in enforcing population statistics on to their employee statistics.

My friend works at PayP[redacted] and as a white female, _she_ was the minority hire. Somehow, in the SF Bay Area, almost all of their recruits that get to interview are [country of origin redacted]. It sounds like blatant discrimination, BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?

> BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?

Maybe no-one dares to complain, because it is easily perceived as racism.

The pipeline is clogged for everyone. Lack of diversity is an industry-wide issue which needs to be addressed throughout the industry and beyond, not a problem with recruiting at any single company.

I'm surprised they didn't do c) which was to interview an obviously unqualified candidate to get the checkoff on the policy. This is the usual workaround.

There is no broken recruiting pipeline. There are simply not enough candidates in the pool to staff every company in a way that is representative.

I am ignorant when it comes to where companies look when they are hiring, but your comment makes it seem like companies can choose sources that are somehow segregated by race/gender/etc. What/where are these sources? Do you really think microsoft has any trouble finding people who want to work there? Where else should they look? In all my time being a straight white male, I've never listed my resume on a "whites only" job site.

The author says he is in AI, and when I was hiring entry level ML engineers I had similar challenges. As much as we blame the recruiting pipeline, I think it is the educational pipeline that is not creating a sufficiently diverse talent pool. Part of it is "weed out" courses that adversely affect students from less privileged backgrounds[1]. An additional (perhaps controversial) opinion I have is that companies are so aggressive about their individual diversity goals that they often pluck students out of the training pipelines prematurely (e.g. courting Ph.D. students before they finish their dissertation).

[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...

> "they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline"

This is trying to treat the symptoms, not the disease. You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?

Whatever you're trying to solve - the "issue" starts decades earlier, at home. It's about how people are brought up, their access to education, their social environment. Culture actually plays a role, too.

That's part of the problem. The other part is the networks you are tapping into to find candidates. People tend to collect others that look, act, and think like them. That's one reason why people group up into subgroups that all have similar traits, past experiences, and belief systems.

When it comes to a recruiting pipeline this is critical. If you are tapping members of your team to help finding candidates from their networks and your team lacks diversity, you are going to just build out your team with more of the same.

The same goes for where you are looking for candidates outside of your team. If you are only targeting a small number of schools it's really easy to end up with a homogenized set to pull from. I know from experience working at some of the big tech powerhouses, they'd target a handful of schools and only hire college grads from there - which means they miss out on recruiting from state schools, historically black colleges, and other pockets where things are more diverse.

But here you have a multi-national corporation, with offices globally and ability to hire from any culture on the planet - and despite waiting months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate, they were unable to find a single candidate who was "diverse" enough.

What conclusions do you draw from this? That "people are racist"? That the pipeline is broken? This feels like ignoring the elephant in the room.

> months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate

I think it explicitly said they did not do that:

> I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who fulfilled the racial requirement. When no one did, I spent hours trying to find people on LinkedIn who I thought might count as black or Hispanic based on their name or resume.

It seems like a good next step would be to give the author more tools to find more diverse candidates, rather than having them come up with trying to gauge ethnicity by name on LinkedIn and getting those to apply.

I think that if he had to do the LinkedIn searches himself, you can conclude that his recruiters weren’t all that great. I’d be annoyed at them in his shoes.

Oh, whatever. Blame it on the recruiters.

I guess we're just looking for any excuse now to NOT talk about the actual source of the problem.

Let me guess, you don't work in recruiting nor in a role where you actually have to try to find good candidates? Because you are way off the mark on how these things work.

You guess wrong! I'm a hiring manager, and I'm very good at it. In the last few years I've had multiple quarters in which I successfully hired at a rate of 1 engineer a month or higher.

One of the first things I do when I get a new job is reach out to whoever I partner with on recruiting and spend significant time working with them to make sure they understand what I'm looking for and how to do initial screens if that's the recruiter's role in this company. I talk about diversity and how I approach it. For the first month or so at least, I ask the recruiter to show me as many resumes as possible and I give a paragraph or two of feedback on each one so they know what I did or didn't like about them.

I also expect that I'll be doing a fair amount of time searching LinkedIn myself, particularly at the beginning of the process, for the same reasons I give the recruiter solid feedback on resumes -- it helps them understand what I want out of my candidates. I also tend to pull in my team for sourcing sessions, because there's always someone on the team who knows a perfect candidate but didn't think to refer them.

If the company isn't paying me for a LinkedIn professional account with unlimited searches, I'm not gonna pay for it myself, mind you. In that case the amount of searching I can do is limited, but that's life.

Let's review what the original author said:

"I spent months waiting." That's awfully passive, but I've had bad recruiters in the past, so I get the possibility. However, as I said, I would be annoyed if my company had a goal -- regardless of what it was -- and the recruiters weren't actually doing anything to help me reach it.

What conclusions do I draw from this? Sorry to be so blunt, but my conclusion is that you are lacking a lot of understanding of how these things work. Are you really arguing that they can fly and move anyone in from any country as a means to deal with struggles in diverse hiring? Do you not know much about much that costs and the issues with visa involved?

> You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?

I'll chime in here that if a person works at Microsoft and has the resources of Microsoft recruiting on their side, that they are in a better position than most to end up with a wide choice of applicants. Microsoft can sponsor visas if need be, and their compensation is generally high enough to merit consideration of relocation, if necessary. (Worth noting here that a non-diverse slate of applicants is in many cases a process smell that your pipeline sucks.)

We also don't know for what role(s) the author was hiring. While the assumption here seems to be that they were having trouble finding a diverse slate of applicants for "Senior AI Researcher, PhD and 20+ years experience required," for all we know they are whining that they couldn't get applicants to be CRUD programmers building out APIs, or PMs, or doc writers, or any of the other myriad roles that go into shipping software. Given that, we don't really know where to place blame. Could be that this manager just sucks at their job.

Every single comment in this thread is a deflection. "It's the recruiters", "the manager sucks", "subconscious bias", "the position is too specialized", etc. Why is that?

A deflection from what? A predetermined conclusion?

When I'm troubleshooting a bug, the first thing I do is to enumerate the possible ways in which the bug might occur, then devise tests to rule out most of those possibilities. This doesn't seem to be any different.

> It's telling that this person['s]... take away wasn't that they should fix [Microsoft's] broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.

Why is it telling? He's managing a team, and the policy is the more immediate and fixable obstacle to him solving his business hiring problem. Even if Microsoft was capable of "fixing" it's recruiting pipeline, that could never realistically happen in time for him to fill that role.

I work at a crypto/fintech startup. There aren't many women in tech, in finance or in crypto. Even fewer in all three. It took us months to find a woman to hire when our HR insisted we do so before hiring anyone else.

What part of the recruiting pipeline is broken? What would you suggest as a fix?

And what does "it's telling" mean? What do you think this tells us about the author?

The problem is those filters are applied in the wrong order. If it was "promote diversity hiring once you have a pool of talented candidates to pick from", it would work.

But right now, it's the reverse: filter out non diverse candidates, and try to find a good one in the remaining.

Yet, it's already hard to hire talent, even with no filter at all.

So now I have clients I assist for interviews, looking desperately for good devs, but when they find one, which is already a rare event, they often can't hire him (yes, him, because the hiring pool is mostly males in IT in 2022) thanks of those blockers. Of course, they already have a ton of hiring constraints to match for, so this compounds.

This week, I'm going to interview the one candidate that could make it through the diversity policy. His resume is a train wreck, and I already know it's going to be a waste of time.

So they are going to go through those shenanigans for the next year or so before finding their mythical creature, the same one their competitors are fighting for in this very competitive market. Of course, this means their projects are going to be delayed a lot.

It's good for me, I get on the payroll for longer. And I'm a diversity bonus for them, being from another country, so they won't get rid of me any time soon.

But I don't envy them, they are set up for failure.

Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diversity into an already squishy process is the least of your worries.

They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it? Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.

>Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?

It sounds like you're agreeing with the author here, because he says,

>I fear that when large companies hire and promote people based on group identities, it discourages individuals from cultivating their abilities.

It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.

> It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.

It is only one logical step to assume the opposite as well, that a company that thinks holistically about the hiring process, and questions whether or not managers are acting in a truly meritocratic way will give people confidence that cultivating their abilities won't be for naught if they have a racist/sexist manager.

The article states a lot of things based on feels but the one tangible point they make is that HR is not in fact insisting he hire someone based on an "additional random factor" just that they considered all the candidates.

The article is a lot more than just complaining about D&I policies, for example you'll notice that the manager spent several months unsuccessfully trying to get even one qualified diverse candidate to interview with Microsoft. What's up with that?

It's clear as day that some culturally contingent notion of race isn't a good way of measuring merit.

Absolutely - there aren't clearly defined lines between cultural notions of race, and the scientific community doesn't even recognize race as anything but a social construct [1]. So in the end it's either how someone self-identifies, or the arbitrary superficial judgement of race by the hiring team, which is patently ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

"Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society."

"Rules made by society" is exactly why it is relevant here.

Can you explain further? Not getting your meaning.

Society defines racial categories according to made-up rules. The basis of these rules is not biological. All good so far. But, then we have to live with these categories, and they get applied to how we organize society, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less explicitly. And we may wish for these rules to change, or for the ways that they shape the experiences of individuals to change. But then the people who benefit from the status quo have a material interest in having them stay the same. And in fact the people who benefit from the status quo often are in a position to shape society in a way that keeps them the same. You get the idea.

These rules and categories are ill-defined and even don't exist in some cases. You are not wrong stating ruling class has promoted racial ideas to weaken and control the populace at large. That doesn't mean they exist. The real power structure is held by particular networks and families, not races, as there is no such thing as race. The idea that you can draw lines around a group based on physical characteristic is what they promulgate to fool us, so to use the same groupings to supposedly fix society is a stupid mistake. Both Norwegians and Yemenis are considered "white", which makes no sense. Are you telling me that Kanye West should get more privileges than a poor Yemeni because they are white? This is absurd. Did you know that Swedes and North Africans are less diverse genetically than northern vs southern chinese? What about mixed race people? What about countries that are in between regions that follow traditional "racial" groupings, such as central asia? Are we really that dumb to categorize people based on superficial vague judgements about appearance? And to leave it up to the completely non-scientific and biased judgements of HR?

They do exist... the fact that they are not biological does not mean they do not exist. They have a social-historical reality. They exist in the minds of people making decisions, overtly or not. Trying to become conscious of that and counter it, and (of course imperfectly) correct for some past wrongs due to it, is what this is about.

Are you going to address anything I said or just carte blanche reject it without rationale?

Most of what you said was irrelevant to what I was saying. I feel no need to address it.

The discussion is on the socially constructed nature of race. My comments directly address this with specific examples. Your final response is nothing more than "no, you are wrong". Not sure what I was expecting on a public forum, as this topic is sensitive and brings out a lot of deep seated irrationality, gaslighting, and binary thinking in people.

I have no objections to your claim that race is socially constructed. I agree. Where I disagree is in the logical leap that that means it doesn't exist. Your specific examples are irrelevant to this point.

(Added: and for what it's worth, I don't necessarily disagree on the specific examples you give. They are just irrelevant.)

I think we are getting caught in what it means to "exist". Perhaps my language was not precise enough. My meaning wasn't that the idea and abstraction of race does not exist in my earlier comments - my point was that the abstraction (social construct in this case) is very leaky, and doesn't match reality, hence the several examples I provide where the idea of race doesn't make sense at all. My argument is that the abstraction is so far removed from the reality that it's more harmful than helpful. In our computerized data driven modern reality, there's no reason we couldn't deeply assess every individual's full history and situation to determine how underprivileged they are, rather than using superficial and inaccurate measures such as skin color.

Yes.

They sure can be seen as reactionary as one of CSPI's areas of interest in "The Great Awokening" (see https://www.cspicenter.com/about).

I found the article interesting as I've just started to work in US corporation and I've wondered how achieving specific diversity goals are achieved in cases there is a very limited pool of people to hire / promote in a select subgroup.

You don't need to prove that that measurements are reliable to highlight the existence of discrimination. If 10% of applicants are X, and I mandate that 20% of hires are X, then even if my interview results are truly random it's still discriminating in favor of X.

Similar deal with tech hiring. What is the pool of candidates for this hire or promotion? If you're setting quotas in excess of the pool's representation you're explicitly instituting discrimination.

I'm okay with people doing this, provided they're transparent in that they're instituting affirmative action and do not intend to create a non-discriminatory hiring or promotion process. What does get on my nerves is when people privately push for policies like this, but publicly decry and mention of discrimination favoring "diverse" groups as hurtful.

The post doesn’t suggest there’s any mandated quota for hiring or promotion—only for interviews or consideration. And it doesn’t suggest any secrecy about this policy.

If I tell my recruiters to never interview black people, it's not discrimination because it's not actually prohibiting them from hiring or promotion? Quotas in choosing who to interview or who to consider for promotion is absolutely a form of discrimination.

I've worked at a company that implemented this. It resulted in a vast double standard: white and asian males only got interviews if they came from elite colleges or well-known companies. Diverse candidates could pretty much come from anywhere. This resulted in a substantial disparity of tech-screen pass rates. Which the company held up as evidence of discrimination, and demanded that we address this disparity. Proposals to anonymize tech-screen, strangely, were ignored. Instead, recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) got to decide who advanced from the tech-screen to the on-site instead of engineers.

> recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires)

It's hard to attribute longterm success of the company to any given hires but race is easy to count. What is easy to measure comes to dominate your thinking.

The post describes turning down a lot of qualified people because they had not encountered any applicants of required race/gender yet. In fact, they ended up not hiring for the position at all because they never encountered applicants of the required race/gender. So despite the fact that they had qualified applicants, they ended up forced to hire nobody. No individual person was discriminated against, but the group of applicants sure was: none of them got hired, despite the fact that the manager had qualified applicants and wanted--needed--to hire one.

The post also notes that this was invisible to people who weren't a manager, so it was effectively a secret, whether or not it was intentionally so.

Agreed, I'd much rather just be honest and transparent with processes. That's not to say there aren't potential down sides. Of course, I still hold that trying to resolve these issues completely on the demand side of careers that often involve an educational component doesn't always work well, it can drive up incomes, but won't necessarily make the implied problem better.

What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.

> What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.

100% this. If companies want to show that they're improving the diversity of the tech field, sponsoring study programs and science olympiad teams in underserved communities are a much better investment than quotas. The only thing that's going to increase the representation in tech as a whole is increasing the number of black, Latin, indigenous tech workers.

Instead, companies seem to only care about signaling diversity. When a company sets a quota and pushes their representation of "diverse" demographics up a few percentage points, they're increasing the diversity within the company. They're doing nothing to actually increase the diversity of the field.

I'm not really convinced how good we are at measuring merit.

But I don't buy into that being the reason for <insert my idea>.

I DO worry that "hey we doubt we're doing it right based on merit so we're picking race this time / some times" will have an effect, and not a good one.

You're writing with the implicit assumption that private companies ought to be meritocratic above all. I don't think that's the case. I think private people and orgs ought to be free to choose whom they associate with, hire, and promote based on any criteria they can come up with. Nepotism? No problem. Height/weight/age/beauty/culture/hair colour discrimination? You bet. Then these orgs all compete and the most efficient ones win. This leads to a long conversation about the merits/efficiencies of monocultures.

Furthermore, we as a culture ought to be at least not hypocritical in our tolerance of clearly nepotistic/discriminatory hiring practices in minority-owned businesses (restaurants/trades/jewelry/etc.) but somehow intolerant of them in some sectors like tech and finance. These things are equally silly:

1. Expecting a Chinese restaurant not to exclusively hire more Chinese people

2. Expecting a tech-bro agency not to exclusively hire a more tech bros

3. Expecting a Kosher butcher not to exclusively hire more Jews

4. Expecting a WASPy finance org not to exclusively hire more WASPs

I think it becomes more complex when you consider wealth concentration.

Well, it's easy to not notice on the middle of all the noise. But policies that fight wealth concentration are much clearer and have many less side effects than the ones for diversity and inclusion.

They are probably more inclusive too, but that measurement is noisy.

MSFT is not private, it's public. It's responsibility is to create value for the shareholders. Part of that deal is to hire the best talent.

My reading of the original article tells me that these initiatives were interfering with this manager's ability to accomplish his team's objectives/provide value to shareholders. Indeed an assertion could be made that these initiatives run counter to fiduciary duty.

If you want to accomplish a goal, hire people you trust, given them clear objectives, and then get out of their way. Don't micromanage them with endless bureaucracy. Do you think that these policies will deter a real racist? Do you think an interview requirement or call asking "Did you consider candidate X?" accomplishes anything? Can you describe what?

Also MSFT is publicly traded not publicly owned. It's still a private company.

Most of these (Kosher Butcher for example) are going to be very small companies and these kinds of requirements don't usually kick in till you have a certain minimum level of employees since there is an assumption in most states that very small businesses will mostly hire (extended) family.

So why can't small teams in large orgs also hire extended family? Given we've established a benign proclivity amongst people to do so.

Sure that's a nice libertarian framing of the issue. I would love to be able to hire whoever I want, with no say from anyone else, for my companies.

But that's not what the law says.

Title VII of the CRA 1964 says:

> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer— (1)to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2)to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

So I guess you want to repeal the law?

Yes please - let people make their own decisions. Why this list but not height or hair colour or beauty or sexual orientation or any one of 1000 traits that people have little to no control over? Do you think the last 50 years of identity-driven public policy have served to unify or divide Americans?

Also "race" isn't really a "thing", so what does it mean in the context of this law?

It isn't like the law is being enforced in any case-- as people are posting all over these threads the diversity policies are explicitly "fail(ing) or refuse(ing) to hire or to discharge any individual ... because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."

So really, GP poster got their wish-- companies are just not using their ability to ignore the law the way the poster expected.

"Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?"

I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.

However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning.

"They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?"

The biggest thing is that this metric is meaningless. They don't define what the target is and why. They don't dig into the how of the increase either. If it was the policy, they have not taken a systems thinking review of it to see if it's working as expected or causing some other harm. I see no inclusion of the root issue - a pipeline of diverse candidates via schools. If the numbers are underrepresented in school, then they will be in industry too. Maybe you can juice your own company's numbers, but that simply leaving less for other companies. Figuring out diversity discrepancies in the talent pipeline (school, mainly) is the first step. Then figuring out if it's an actual problem and what the proper metrics are, is a step that seems to be glossed over. Without understanding these, there will be no meaningful progress.

> They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?

I'm still unclear as to why we're even bothering to ask the question. How many blonde leaders are there vs. brunettes? Are brunettes poorly represented in corporate leadership? Does anyone care? Why should they.

People should care because big companies are constantly competing on talent and it would be a competitive advantage to leverage a larger talent pool.

Don't we already hire managers explicitly to make decisions like this? Given we've hired them, shouldn't we trust them to make the best decisions for their teams and their objectives? It seems as though the additional bureaucracy introduced by DEI serves only to disempower managers. This is the function of all bureaucracy, to disempower individual decision making.

This presupposes they are discriminated against for these positions. 3-5% representation is extremely high for a demographic that comprises 1% of college graduates.

>> "Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?"

> I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.

Therefore institute race-based policies?

All that matters here is how things _should_ work. The hiring process should be based off merit. They should not be based off race. We should do our best to correct these when they deviate.

Hence the,

"However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning."

I was tangentially wondering if someone has a good way of measuring merit, objectively.

When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question. If you want to argue that it is impossible to judge merit, it is you who needs to provide proof.

And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.

> When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question.

Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can be completed in two minutes by anybody.

> And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.

The article explicitly states they are not asked to make promotion decisions based on race.

It's not the whole interview. Just the first part of many questions. You have to print a string abcdefghij... like

abcd

efgh

ijkl...

And you would be surprised by the number of people who it takes 20 minutes to do that. Doing it in 2 minutes doesn't mean you're competent, but taking 20 damn sure means you're not

20 minutes might just be interview anxiety, especially if it’s a first question in the interview.

Being able to perform under stress could be a metric he values.

"Hey, the website was down for a few hours. Technically I could fix it in a minute, but have a downtime anxiety".

Then they have 70 minutes to recover. It never happens, though.

I've been coding for over a decade including things 1000x as complicated as that (think embedded systems from the ground up). I could easily take 20 minutes or even fail doing such a task because I'm literally never asked to code things in a professional environment with 3+ strangers breathing down my neck and judging me based on some simplified fizzbuzz.

I'm convinced white board / live coding interviews don't do much other than test for how you perform with a group of strangers pressuring you to jump through hoops publicly on which in a short time your entire value is judged (including determining say if you'll have money for daycare next week), which for most software professionals basically happens never except during an interview.

I have never been in an interview with 3+ strangers. Is that common?

It's extremely common beyond the new grad / junior level, from my experience.

I don't understand what's the value in having 3 people in the room looking at you solve a coding problem, at any level of seniority. Sounds like it's just wasting the time of 3 engineers when 1 could perform the task.

Maybe so (though I don't really believe you couldn't) but I gotta evaluate people somehow. And my job is to prevent false positives. False negatives are less damaging.

I could bikeshed on this, but I think this is missing the overall point. It's not that nothing is measurable, obviously some tech skills are measurable and obviously some people are going to do better on those things, but those things are less measurable as you move up the ladder, and less measurable for leadership skills over technical skills, and less measurable among groups of people with relatively similar levels of experience. I'm not saying nothing can be measured so you might as well hire the mailperson to the principal engineers job. The point is that you can have a fairly large group of equally qualified people for a job.

Unless you're hiring someone for a speed coding competition, I don't see what speed has to do with it. Especially since it seems like you would be biasing for younger candidates and committing ageism in the process.

> Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people.

It's also inherently unfair, that's why nobody likes it, I have seen it first hand that it just leads to a few token hires, with no real change. People who actually care realise that if you want to improve something you start at the beginning, not a the outcome, you would at minimum start at education, however I guess it's cheaper to have a few diversity hires here and there without changing anything that really matters.

> Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions

You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.

> which is pretty squishy to begin with

I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job, which diverts from the point, we make decisions without knowing the outcome all the time, if we would take your worldview then every decision where we don't know the outcome would be decided by a dice roll.

> Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.

You are exchanging one favouritism for another, how is that an improvement? At least the CEO's nephew would have connections in high places and likely more pressure to perform.

> You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.

I would disagree. First of all, just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways, it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice. I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes. Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?

Second of all, I'm not talking about a recent grad and someone with 10 years of experience, but having been in leadership circles. It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"

> I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job.

This seems like an overly broad interpretation. Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true. i.e. take your pool of 60 senior managers, there's one open director position. Find your best 15 senior managers. You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers? (assuming there aren't specific technical skillsets involved)

> just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways

Evolution does work. Assuming people are free to try everything out, usually the strategies that become the norm are the strategies that work better than the other ones. If you know better then the market, you could theoretically go in, make your own company execute your own strategy and start dominating the market, this has been done in history multiple times.

> it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice

Would you try this out if your own money or health was on the line?

> I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes.

I have a lot of complaints against democracy, however that does not mean I desire fascism, it means I want a better democracy.

> Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?

Assuming we want the people who can best perform, we should be looking at ways how to better identify the best performers instead of actively sabotaging the process by adding arbitrary discrimination into it that is proven to work against the goal.

> It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"

Would you give keys to your house to someone you don't trust? Would you give the keys to your car to someone who has a reputation of crashing cars?

Democracy is based on trust as well, you don't know if your favourite politician is actually going to do what they say they are going to do or if it's actually a good idea, yet you are likely going to go with your feelings and cast your vote.

How do you think a CEO would fare if that CEO would not have the respect of their subordinates?

> Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true.

For highly skilled roles, I doubt that this happens often in real life, usually you will have candidates with different qualities and you have to figure out which are the ones you believe to be more valuable.

> You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers?

I would probably try to see who would do the job for less, but sure, if that's the case you could also choose at random, however the higher the skill requirement, the less likely you will get into this situation.

> Reactionary, anti-intellectual.

"The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read. Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti-<insert phrase> then too.

Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.

This seems like a very large leap in logic, if I follow… are you saying the parent is communist for using the term reactionary?

They are. kardianos is observing that the situation is very similar, that history is rhyming if not repeating.

Woke racism/sexism (DEI) is frequently referred to as neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism because when examined it turns out to be closely related to Marxist thought, with race/gender/sexual attributes substituted for class. Beyond this somewhat trivial difference there are many clear similarities:

1. The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.

2. The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.

3. The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.

4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary#:~:text=In%20the%2....

Have you read Marx then? I'd love to hear about the core dialectics of the "race theory of value" in your words if so.

> The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.

Wholly untrue. Inequality happens for a whole mess of reasons, including individual ability and interest, it's just not exclusive to that either.

> The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.

We're probably going to disagree on the definition of oppression, but no, there should is no need for "reverse oppression", unfortunately, I can't control how people feel about aid fixes, but I think everyone should be able to pursue opportunity equally.

> The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.

This is taken too far in the other direction where I have to accept every single "DE&I Bad" Argument so as not to seem elitist. This is a complex issue and there are plenty of good arguments on both sides, the original article just didn't attempt to make them.

4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies

"In Marxist terminology, reactionary is a pejorative adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be socialist, but, in their opinion, contain elements of feudalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism or other characteristics of the ruling class, including usage between conflicting factions of Marxist movements."

Wow, that is way more involved than I meant it to be. If forgot reactionary was a loaded term, I just meant it to mean that his argument was in reaction to "wokeism" and wasn't independent of that. See item 3.

Sorry, to clarify, I think we agree on everything. I wasn't trying to defend this new form of Marxism, only to describe the similarities.

If you do not believe someone can demonstrate merit, you cannot believe in equality of opportunity.

If you do not have Equality of Opportunity all you have left are power structures, usually attached to some degree of structural determinism.

At that moment, you have the same logic as the Communist/Marxian/Dialectic revolutionaries we have seen time and time again. Once they gain power they label everyone else a reactionary.

Saying they don't believe in being able to demonstrate merit is why I suggest they are a Communist/Marxian/Dialectic. Because not only is that stupid in the real world, it is literally a defining feature of the base ideology.

You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what I did or didn't say. I didn't say people can't demonstrate merit. I said people are bad at measuring merit, and I think that is relatively true on its face, and the subject of a whole mess of thinkpieces and arguments on Hacker News. Shit I thought it was funny there was one posted today:

https://workweek.com/2022/09/26/performance-reviews-dont-act...

No where in the article is it suggesting that anyone is pressuring managers to promote demonstrably poor performers for racial reasons. They are being asked to adjust their processes to consider the most candidates.

I think for a medium size group of relatively equal performers, it would be nearly impossible to rank order them in a way you could get a small handful of people to consistently agree with. Everyone seems to love to straw men this with some idea that Microsoft is firing all of their principal engineers to replace them with entry level candidates from state universities.

Intra-organization measurements are not the same as inter-oganizations measurements.

(Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious; at least to me.)

> The Cultural Revolution: A people's history

Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was wrong, but I was referring to the fact that the article seemed to say "DE&I Bad, Merit Good" with a superiority complex about it, and I was just saying that that position on its own isn't necessarily the intellectually superior position, even though I think "merit" gets assumed as being more necessarily more objective.

Merit isn't good per se. DEI is certainly worse though.

Simply because merit approximates fair far better.

>They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders.

So now instead of those 3% being seen as having earned their position, all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage. So now it's not only unfair to the people excluded based on skin color but it's unfair to those who benefitted strictly because of the perception they now have to deal with as having not really earned their position the same as everyone else. It puts them on equal footing with the bosses nephew, who nobody respects.

It's 2022 - maybe we can stop trying to defend race-based favoritism and discrimination?

> all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage.

Only by the kinds of people who tend to assume the worst about Black people.

It has nothing to with the people who were given an unfair advantage based on skin color, it is the fact that skin color is used to give a preference that invalidates accomplishments.

We're simultaneously being told that the pipeline doesn't contain enough minorities and that catching more fish from a smaller pond isn't going to impact the average size of those fish.

I know one megacorp that achieved its diversity by paying above-market for those workers and poaching very qualified people. That's expensive and zero-sum, exacerbating the situation elsewhere, but at least their employees knew diversity didn't mean unqualified.

By now, America is so racially mixed that "race" of a certain person is even harder to quantify than "merit".

In America it is not 'harder to quantify' because much of contemporary American society still follows the 'One Drop Rule': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule

DEI is anti-intellectual to the core. Worse, it is codified racism. It creates problems where there were few to solve.

Nobody can measure merit, but that doesn't mean you can hire people based on skin color and that is exactly what DEI did. And not much else, it remains plain racism. Without bias you can see it because racial quotas are the expression. People in the past also thought they had good reason for racial discrimination.

There are real good arguments against DEI hiring practices aside from people disliking them. Although many dislike them because of its racism.

DEI has an enormous surface area, I don’t think you can blanket describe it as anti-intellectual.

I haven't seen a single example where it can justify its racial discrimination, which of course would require some real hard evidence of its own necessity. I think we agree that racial discrimination is very negative.

All this does is make it so certain groups appear to be REALLY dumb at certain companies. In my experience at my work places, only one in 10 women are actually qualified, and the rest are so utterly incompetent that they just end up taking up money. It's not because they're women, it's because they just don't belong there due to their skill level, but got a diversity hire.

I enjoy having women in my office, but because of DI&E I don't interview at places that have to many, since 9/10 times it's a big indicator the department or company is going under due to incompetence. Exact same thing applies to skin color. This shouldn't be the case, but this is all policies like this do, and it's going to whiplash REALLY hard once the cultural pendulum is over.

Back in 2020, I interviewed at Github for a professional services customer facing position. One of the steps in the interview was D&I, where I had 2 white males interview me, another white male, about what I do and will do for diversity, whatever that means. It was clear that they had a scripted checklist that they were going on and it was just a formality. They were visibly uncomfortable which this interview and so was I.

There are plenty of places where they aren’t uncomfortable with those questions.

I experienced this in two different roles:

- One applying to one role at github/microsoft: After ton of meetings, I would have to talk with their diversity manager, it was a 60 minutes meeting, which i just didn't feel well to go through after some googling.

- As hiring manager (in another FAANG) company, I couldn't hire the best candidates, until all other 20 more diverse were interviewed. Everyone, regardless of qualified or not, had to be interviewed, before we could hire someone less diverse (aka not "white", not European, not "Man"). The position was for senior developer, and I had to go through a tedious set of interview with people straight of coding boot camp.. We ended up hiring one (guy), which wasn't in our top 5. All top 5 were able to get a new job, since our process took almost 6 month, from starting the process up to onboarding him. It was frustrating and actually the main reason why I left the team, to become architect. The process was called "agile/fair hiring", how ironic..

note that I quoted "Man" and "White". That's because we don't have a color palette to say how white is ok and we don't ask question to know how Manly someone is. That was so ridiculous, that most our team members didn't want to help me with the interviews...

These practices are explicitly against federal law. When are judges going to start enforcing the law?

> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -

    (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

    (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

edit: not letting me reply down chain. source is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Just curious; where's the source on this? Is this in the US? If so, is it state or federal law, and which law?

Edit: Nevermind, it's the 1964 Title VII [Section 703] of the Civil Rights Act.

https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...

The current U.S. Supreme Court, though perhaps more ideologically bent than I'd like on many other issues, is certainly well poised to start slapping down some of these policies which brazenly dance on the wrong side (gray area at best) of Civil Rights law.

There's a group of Republican AG's that are suing public companies who do this. Along with DI&E investing, as it's not in the shareholders financial interest to invest in these thing, which is all that matters. So hopefully that will end these polcies.

I am not sure how legal argument can work unless you show that it breaks equal employment laws. DE&I actually is beneficial in many roles such as design, customer advocacy, sales, support, UX and so on. It helps achieve a better representation of population and diverse ideas in the group. Even for managerial roles, DE&I helpful to have representation for minorities at org level. So there are a lot of provable benefits of encouraging DE&I. However, for many technical roles, for example database administrator, I am not sure how DE&I will yield same benefits. One of my pet peeve is not including disabled people in DE&I group. Most big tech only mandates racial and gender minorities for DE&I targets.

I don't think this logic holds. It is true that a sales rep job benefits from diversity eg having hispanic employees talk to Spanish speaking customers. However the same role can be performed equally well by a fluent Spanish speaker of any race. So a job requirement for a Hispanics sales rep would be racial discrimination for no good reason. You could construct similar arguments for most instances of diversity hiring.

Additionally Diversity is not the same as DEI. Diversity is a statistical concept whereas DEI is a religious belief

This isn't meant to target hires. It's meant to target investments which fuels alot of this. It's complicated legal stuff, and i'm just an engineer, but I think they're tackling from the mindset of "If you didn't invest in this company because it's not diverse enough, but it met every other metric on the good investment scale, then the company doing the investment went against the goals of their shareholders(more $$). The idea is that alot of the companies doing this are doing it for investments from outside parties, so by removing that incentive it should stop it.

The problem is that they aren’t doing anything blatantly illegal. And discrimination is hard to prove. This is not a new game in America - we’ve been playing it since the 60’s at least and now we’re just playing the same game by another name. I had someone tell me I was not eligible to apply for a position because it was only open to women. That’s blatant, but it’s word of mouth. There is no way for me to prove that conversation ever happened.

A previous, related, brew up on Yammer (microsoft's internal forum): https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questionin...

Despite the positive spin of QZ.com, it seems like there's overt incentives for discrimination.

This categorization of human beings by race and sex is such a large step back in the opposite direction of how I would like society to be.

Like many others, I simply hope this "goes away".

At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong color/gender.

This. Saying "no" to people based on their physical appearance is a discrimination.

It's also illegal.

I'm not sure about in the US, I know in Canada we've had lots of university faculty positions advertised recently that are explicity for women or some other groups. I don't understand how it's legal but it is.

In Canada the definition of "visible minority" is essentially anyone who isn't a white male.

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-service-commission/jobs/serv...

> I don't understand how it's legal but it is.

Are you sure?

Many countries require being harmed by an action and then bringing that action before a court, before anyone ever compares that action to any specific law at all.

So you can see how many actions become de facto legal if nobody ever does that.

Some manage to find a workaround even when it's illegal. I was reading somewhere that Lund University in Sweden was cancelling the job opening right before the deadline if the most promising candidate wasn't a woman.

There's so much bullshit in this. Universities are not allowed to advertise positions as "women only", but at the same time they are required to reach certain percentage of female "representation" by law.

A recent discussion on HN surfaced this fact. It's legal for higher education for now, but hiring is different.

I think a lot of people don't realize this. I didn't. I assumed if you could do it for education you could do it for hiring. Apparently not!

Any source?

This seems to indicate that minority demographics may be targeted for recruitment, advancement, etc.

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/affirmativeact

At least at my company, I know they have preferences for minorities over similarly qualified candidates. I've heard a department head specifically tell the managers that we need more women in a specific role. Maybe they're just breaking the law though...

This is one longish discussion of the differences between education and hiring. [1] I think there is a carveout for federal contractors, which is what your link refers to. In general, it is not legal in hiring.

1: https://spigglelaw.com/employers-affirmative-action-boost-di...

Is it?

I think there's an affirmative action lawsuit currently pending before SCOTUS. It seems discrimination is allowable (so far) as long as it has good intentions. It may change with this case.

Although there could be some discrepancy with a colloquial use of discrimination which includes an implied notion of negative bias, while positive biases (preferences to certain candidates) can also fit the more dry definition.

The law doesn't matter except to the degree that the regime will enforce it.

That's cause "they're just not a good fit".

(for you who downmodded me, this saying is how management gets away with illegal discrimination without saying the quiet part out loud)

I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed, perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I concept and move forward with complete blindness to race, culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals of operations of a company – i.e., just focus on building good things.

It is also possible that those companies will be suffocated by the fact that banks won't extend credit to them (ESG) or angry Twitter will pressure potential customers not to do business with them.

True, this is actually happening as we speak. There will be a bifurcation, once enough flywheel speed has picked up; ESG funds will see competitor funds that will outperform. No wasting money on greenwashing or other ESG bullshit. Totalitarianism has to fight a war with reality and facts. It is unsustainable (pardon the pun).

It is likely that some foreign funds (Arab, Chinese) won't give a damn about ESG anytime soon, if at all.

That said, this is how you end with critical technology in potential adversaries' hands.

> ESG funds will see competitor funds that will outperform. No wasting money on greenwashing or other ESG bullshit.

Would that work? IIRC, stock prices aren't so much about performance, just who wants to buy your stock. Decreased actual performance from "greenwashing or other ESG bullshit" might be overwhelmed by demand by ESG pots of money.

> It is also possible that those companies will be suffocated by the fact that banks won't extend credit to them (ESG) or angry Twitter will pressure potential customers not to do business with them.

I think that would only be an issue if they made a big deal in public about rejecting DEI. Such a statement might also attract a bunch of obnoxious, oppositely-polarized people you don't want either. Probably the best strategy would be to not mention it at all unless forced, and then just make vague, positive statements about diversity until whoever is bothering you moves on to something else.

The University of Central Florida has bought an email address I own from some spammers and they're now occasionally asking me to enroll in some program where I can prove my commitment to diversity and inclusion and eventually become a certified supplier to them. "Positive statements" will not be what you need, you'll need to show that you actually have the numbers, and if you don't, you will not be considered.

IIRC, the US government's contracting rules are so byzantine that it gets shut results and wastes all kinds of money on incompetent contractors whose primary skill is compliance with the government's byzantine process.

If you want to ignore requirements like that (or similar DEI requirements), you're going to have to forgo those kinds of customers.

ESG practices are currently under lawsuits as it's not in the shareholders best financial interest to factor these in when doing investments. So should fix itself soon. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-08/texas-joi...

This is optimistic - I certainly hope it works out this way. I think a recent problem is that all the "free" or nearly free money has completely disconnected many operations from actual market forces, so they are not incentivized to build something good and their attention can wander to fitness signaling type activities

>that will reject the whole D&I concept

This is already the norm in Silicon Valley. D&I awareness is a brand new thing, and mediocre reactionaries like the author pervade existing leadership structures.

Over 50 years ago the US Military recognized that segregation and entrenched racial biases lead to inefficiencies and lack of readiness.[1] In an economy where hiring pipelines for skilled technical people are stretched incredibly thin, we need to be taking a hard look at why we're only getting people that look a certain way through our hiring process.

1. https://twitter.com/pptsapper/status/1579610768638881800

> Over 50 years ago the US Military recognized that segregation and entrenched racial biases lead to inefficiencies and lack of readiness.[1] In an economy where hiring pipelines for skilled technical people are stretched incredibly thin, we need to be taking a hard look at why we're only getting people that look a certain way through our hiring process.

That doesn't follow, at all. For one, you're comparing apples and oranges. The "norm in Silicon Valley" is not to practice explicit racial segregation like the US Army did in 1940. Additionally, D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.

An anecdote: a non-white friend of mine recently quit her job, because she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person who checked a lot of DEI boxes. That person proceeded to drive her crazy with their incompetence until she burned out and quit.

The norm in Silicon Valley is treat D&I with an inordinate level of skepticism, if not reject it outright as "anti-meritocratic." What we have here is not explicit racial segregation, but a system operating via capital and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant segment of the American economy. This creates huge bind spots and carries the risk of building systems that reinforce oppression.

>D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.

Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.

>she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person

That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization. The requirements for any role you hire for should be clear, expectations should be set and when they are not met there should be consequences. If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.

>> D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.

> Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.

That doesn't follow. If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work and will cause pointless problems in the meantime.

> That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization.... If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.

There was a system in place, but if you couldn't read between the lines: the bar was far higher for firing a "diverse" employee with performance issues, which followed from the DEI ethos in place.

>If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work and will cause pointless problems in the meantime.

So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work, we should throw it away. Sounds like a newbie dev throwing a tantrum over having to build on a system with legacy code.

>the bar was far higher for firing a diverse employee with performance issues, which followed from the DEI objectives.

That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI objectives." Was that bar for performance standards explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here, hyperbole?

> That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI objectives." Was that bar for performance standards explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here, hyperbole?

The person simply couldn't do the job and was profoundly incompetent, and the response was to that was to repeatedly be told to spend more time training them. My friend had previously successfully terminated a white employee who was under-performing but turned out to be more competent than this one.

> So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work

Parent comment didn't say anything like that. Please assume good faith in discussions. They said that D&I efforts are more likely to work if focused on other parts of the education/industry pipeline, which seems at least plausible.

Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected outright" and uselessly categorized the pain of driving institutional change as "pointless problems."

There is a point to trying to change a system that only sees white people at the end of the hiring pipeline. We can debate where it needs to change, but the change is necessary.

> Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected outright"

Nope, they didn't. A direct quote: "If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work". Note the "If". If you disagree that D&I wouldn't work under these conditions, or that stuff that doesn't work should be rejected as pointless, you're still welcome to make that argument. But please be careful not to misquote other users' comments.

>> Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected outright"

> Nope, they didn't. A direct quote: "If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work".

Yeah, it's also worth noting that "rejected outright" is actually omegaworks's own language, which he is now taking issue with. I was only echoing it back to emphasize a point in his own terms.

Also, I suspect there's some sloppiness with definitions going on here. When I was using "D&I," I was referring specifically to kinds of corporate hiring polices the OP was talking about and this thread is discussing. I suspect omegaworks may be interpreting the term more broadly at times.

It makes no sense to debate the meaning of "rejected outright" with you. Just because a strategy doesn't work when it is applied at a particular point in the process, doesn't indicate that the strategic goals are wrong to pursue. Even the idea that it won't work is debatable, I question whether the strategy was applied in good faith by the people responsible.

> What we have here is not explicit racial segregation, but a system operating via capital and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant segment of the American economy

Microsoft - Satya Nadella

Google - Sundar Pichai

Twitter - Parag Agrawal

None of these men is white or even born in the USA, and somehow they managed to arrive at positions of extreme power and influence through this system of "capital and clout".

All Brahmin, members at the top of a caste system established by British colonizers[1]. A system causing its own set of problems in Silicon Valley[2].

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734

2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...

So, what's the mechanism here? The white Americans in power are fans of the caste system established by the British colonizers and decided to make an exception to their white supremacy to allow some Brahmins to control some of the most important US tech companies?

I'm simply pointing out that your three examples don't negate the fact that we have a system here that taken whole rewards and uplifts whiteness. White colonialism literally crafted the system that elevated those three non-white people. Do you think that that influence is not relevant just because those three people are not white?

Working in tech, I don't see a system that rewards and uplifts whiteness. Asians (both East and from the subcontinent) are greatly overrepresented relative to their fraction of the US population in SWE jobs. Their skin color was never a factor. Most of the ones I've worked with/interviewed, were hired due to merit, not the color of their skin.

That richer and more well educated Indians are over-represented in tech jobs and as CEOs of major tech companies relative to those with fewer resources and less well educated is not surprising.

I am not sure what's the relevance of the skin color of those who allegedly imposed the system that led to this particular group being at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy in India today. How did that result in "uplifting whiteness"?

> I don't see a system that rewards and uplifts whiteness.

What you see is little more than your own personal anecdote. Who are the voices centered in the conversations around funding? Why is it easier for some people to secure investment? Who is considered important in the conversations around what tech is developed and who is ignored? Who reaps the rewards and who shoulders the costs?

> with fewer resources

Think a little deeper: why were resources allocated in this way?

>How did that result in "uplifting whiteness"?

The people put in charge of these companies have little interest in critically examining the race and caste-based resource allocation mechanisms that helped to get them there.

Companies aren't doing DEI because they feel like it. They're doing it because if they don't, they will be punished by the state. The way this works is that there is a patronage relationship between the grievance HR class and certain political actors. If you fail to hire enough DEI HR people to suck revenue from your company, the state prosecutors hit you with all kinds of hiring discrimination lawsuits. It's sort of like a mob protection racket. You hire some of our guys for some no-show jobs, we don't burn your business down.

I can't even imagine what it must be like to live in this kind of contrived world.

I kind of agree with OP. Lot of the D&I initiatives are CYA from lawsuits and we have built regulations so that D&I are instituted permanently by law.

I hope SCOTUS strikes all of this down.

I’m surprised I had to go down this far into the conversation before I saw someone bringing up legal liability.

I'm surprised at how negative the reaction to my explanation is. It's not even controversial to anyone who keeps track of the current state of title VII legal strategy.

What process do you use to select between world-models? I'm curious if you have a coherent answer here, or if you just can't accept what I'm describing because you don't like the way it sounds.

Do you know anything about employment law or the current state of title VII jurisprudence? I'm guessing not if you're reacting this way to a pretty uncontroversial claim.

What kind of statement is this? D&I is supposed to be comparatively balanced to the society is serves. Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.

D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations within big business where it's too easy to lose sight of how balanced a company is internally. If you don't keep reports on finances a company can easily fail. If you don't take steps to make sure minority groups are represented within your company, it will also create situations where bias takes hold, and suddenly discrimination becomes the norm.

What's next? Should we get rid of sexual harassment training and policies?

Only someone from a background that elimination of equal opportunity would serve foremost would think that "complete blindness to race" is possible in our world. It's a childish and a destructive ignorance considering what is currently happening in our world even to this day, as white nationalist groups are growing in numbers, and other groups, a prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate.

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.

Is there any reason to believe this is true and not just conjecture? This always struck me as kind of far fetched.

It's just one of those things that gets repeated so much that people just start to believe it.

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.

This is far-fetched and based mostly on ideology rather than evidence, not much different from a Soviet socialist explaining why planned economies are essential to the country's success (100 years ago it didn't sounds as absurd as now). It's your right to believe this sort of things, I don't deny you this, but don't insist that this is an objective truth that every reasonable person should believe in. As it goes with this kind of questionable ideas, it should be ok to choose not to believe in them, as I think the parent comment does.

And I agree with the parent comment's view here. Whatever advantage the woke-culture companies may have is easily explained by their increased visibility among woke audience, not by some deep insights. It's just a marketing trick, just like putting AI/Blockchain on your ad increases your visibility among some of tech enthusiasts.

> What's next?

Slippery slope is a fallacy.

> white nationalist groups are growing in numbers […] prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate

How does any of this back up the impossibility of blindness to race? (Remember that most of the world is outside of US.)

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success

There's a ton of different sources of bias. Look at lesswrong.com. What (other than politics) makes minority bias more significant than the other? And why it can't be fought with ordinary means and working on yourself?

You don't need to be the same thing as the object of your study to study it. Just like you can study Geology without being a rock, you can study what a minority group wants/needs/buys without belonging to it. Nothing in principle prohibits that.

>> Just like you can study Geology without being a rock, you can study what a minority group wants/needs/buys without belonging to it.

Your logic by nature is total flaw. You can't see it because of your own condition, and supremacist beliefs.

It could probably citing that not be explained to you how a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life, or how a Hasidic Jew can be fairly considerate of a Muslim perspective and vice versa.

This is the root of arrogance in ignorance that perpetuates racial bias. People have a right to be different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards their own individual and cultural perspectives, and globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required to properly represent all of the people they serve PROPERLY or they will simply fail over time... It's not the call of a few biassed individuals to determine that they are qualified. The market dictates the need for D&I.

> You can't see it because of your own condition, and supremacist beliefs

Being disrespectful to people who disagree with you, and at the same time unable to produce any sensible argument only harms the cause you're fighting for.

> how a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life

Limited intelligence is the defining factor here, not background. Think about it. Humans can understand lions quite well, and we understand what's good for them, what makes them happy. And we do it without having to run around savanna biting zebras!

And yes, Jews and Muslims can have a very good idea about each others life, struggles and priorities—it's just a matter of education.

> globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required to properly represent all of the people

I could argue with this and would probably enjoy it another time. Now let's remember the context we are in. We were talking about whether D&I are good for company's performance, not about any moral obligations you may think the company has.

> People have a right to be different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards their own individual and cultural perspectives

We also have a natural tendency to fall for logical fallacies. But somehow we managed to identify those and find ways to fight them, not worship them. Nothing stops you from fighting the cultural bias you have (maybe not completely, but just enough to get it off the way of your work duties) in the same way—later go home, take off your employee hat and be different, biased, whatever.

> white nationalist groups are growing in numbers

I don't know if it's valid, but let's assume it is. Have you considered that some of this growth can be attributed to DEI and the rest of far-left policies?

If you're openly being racist towards certain groups, they can also become racist. When a poor white male gets rejected/fired/demoted because company needed a diversity hire, it's not going to make him more tolerant.

There is only one solution: To be completely objective and treat everyone equally.

This is rational, straightforward, healthy and just righteous in a deep way. It creates an environment bereft of envy and injustice.

Turns out, most high brain mass mammals have a innate sense of fairness. When humans are treated unfairly because of some ostensible moral goal whether through racism or D&I; the end result is not pretty. Humans of all culture are enamored and magnetized by fairness and justice. But those words have been twisted to mean exactly the opposite by contemporaneous social-justice movements.

This was the mainstream view of the Civil Rights movement. It was utterly beautiful. But, post-moderity came and neo-Marxists have reigned for last 40 years in USA at least, gutting out Universities and now, Corporations.

> What's next? Should we get rid of sexual harassment training and policies?

Yes.

It should happen all other factors being equal, but eventually successful companies start to grow and attract the kind of political manager types. Then the turmoil and in fighting starts.

Also, people hiring in their friends and family over others who are distinctly better.

I've been in many roles over the years in very different companies, and these two eventualities always play out. People are flawed, and the companies they create become equally flawed

> Also, people hiring in their friends and family over others who are distinctly better.

That mostly has to do with weighing trusted known-contact vs. untrusted stranger. In extreme case, we see this in a traditional family business that has been owned and operated for generations.

That doesn't work. There are some really amazing people out there that don't fit the typical tech mold of straight cis (white) guy. They don't stick around if they have to navigate a monoculture that doesn't understand that they are constantly throwing out micro-aggressions to people outside of their view of what acceptable behaviour is. Separating your home life from work life only works for so long before you start to crack.

I'm sure you'll be eager to consider that the reverse is also true, except in that case it's the majority of the pool getting aliened by open favoritism toward ethnic minorities and people with bizarre sexual proclivities. If the outcomes of explicit neutrality aren't good enough for you then you'd better start thinking up a new pretense, because people can see through it quite easily and they aren't going to put up with it forever.

I'm sincerely confused about this comment. If I reverse it, I end up with the status quo in a lot of settings: everyone is the same, they don't have to worry about finding ways to interact with people that are different from them, and they get the luxury and safety of being who they are at home while at work.

Also, what are "bizarre sexual proclivities"? It sounds like you are living with a thick layer of judgement and shame in your life. That sounds rough.

I'm still not sure I see anything wrong with this picture. Yes being different from other people is hard - the more different the harder. People naturally gravitate towards those they can identify with. The solution to this problem is to develop a coping strategy, not to use force to bend the world around you. People should be entitled to seek out and live in homogenous environments. Just because these are not available to everyone all the time doesn't mean they should never be available to anyone.

Wow. Just wow. So you are arguing that people from marginalized communities should just suck it up and stick to their own or constantly have to hide and adjust who they are to make others feel comfortable. I feel sorry for the people that you work with and god forbid you actually end up managing people. This sort of crap creates such a toxic environment for people.

I'm arguing that belonging to a majority does not place implicit responsibilities on people. Wanting to associate with culturally similar people is a natural human behaviour, not something to be ashamed of.

You seem to be arguing that we should force people to deny this quite natural impulse in order to make minorities more comfortable. Seems pretty toxic/controlling to me. Let people be.

You do realize you are advocating for minorities to do all the work? Carry the burden, deal with the trauma that gets involved, constantly have to work at navigating everyone else, while people in a spot of privilege don't need to do any sort of work, right? This is the world you are arguing for and it's not a world you'll want to be living in long term. Hopefully you figure that out sooner before it's too late.

Yes, I do realize this. I'm arguing that people's privilege is theirs. It's not yours to redistribute as you see fit. The situation you're describing is reality - an inevitable consequence of human social biology.

When you belong to a minority, you navigate the world on the majority's terms. This is true everywhere but only in the US do people seem to get bent of of shape about it. The saying is "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". How would you mutilate this phrase so that it conforms to your worldview?

I currently work in a lingerie store after having spent a fair amount of time in 'professional' environments.

I'm less tired coming home from 8 hours on my feet dealing with the public than I was in professional settings. I don't have to hide everything about myself and my background (I'm a first-generation college student with a poorish upbringing) or constantly worry about what all my interactions with colleagues mean for my 'career'.

I will say my class background is more of an issue than my sex/sexuality, but my sex was way more of a problem in my teens and early 20s. The interesting thing is that being a techy child was fine, being a techy teenage/20 something girl SUCKED, and being a techy 30 something woman is fine.

Sorry to hear that. I get it. I've been there. I reached a point where I was in a big company and got promoted to a level where there were no LGBTQIA+ people above my level - and this was at a FAANG company. All meetings were all straight cis guys that were overly aggressive. It was so incredible exhausting to function in that environment. The only reason I lasted as long as I did was because I had a very good female boss that could navigate working with these guys that had no clue the problems they caused for the people around them because they "were just being guys." I learned a ton about all these mental gymnastics you have to do to work with people that made no effort to adjust to work with different types of people. It was painful.

I'm now working at a smaller firm and get to be a major influencer and decision maker in how the culture is getting laid out. It's mind boggling how much trauma/PTSD people bring to the table from working in offices that are really homogenized and lack diversity with them being the one that's different. I still can't get over how common it is regardless if it's gender, sexuality, education background, or disability. What I think a lot of people are missing in the DEI discussions isn't about trying to find diverse candidates but how to create environments where they - along with everyone else - thrives.

It's pretty obvious from the comments in this post how there's a strong vocal minority of people that refuse to engage and constantly battle how broken things are. I just hope they figure it out before it's too late. And if they refuse, I hope they remain ICs with very little influence and not included in significant decision making because this attitude is poison for so many people.

Yeah, I'm also gay and disabled (MS). So that's fun. Being female is less of an issue now that I'm old enough that men don't harass me as often, but tech spaces between the ages of 11 and ~25 SUCKED. The thing that stuck out to me was that there was no way to 'win' and the boys (because it was mostly adolescents and males in their 20s) projected their dating issues onto me HARD. And I know for a fact that I never 'led anyone on' since I've been out since I was 12 and very open about it. The gatekeeping was ridiculous (I'm a 2nd generation programmer and my grandfather was playing with electronics in the 1920s), and I also put up with rape threats and rampant homophobia (nothing quite like worrying about corrective rape if you want to go to a LAN party!)

The cultural homophobia and misogyny is one of the two major reasons I didn't opt for a CS degree (the other being I had too much pride to take intro classes to prove myself when I'd been coding since I was 5 because 17 year old me was arrogant as hell). This WAS 10-20 years ago, but experiences like mine do have impacts on the candidate pipeline for midlevel and senior positions.

And on the other hand, taking my tech skills into non-tech spaces is very well received. Libraries are always happy to have tech-literate people, and even in my current job, I've had 2 freelance dev projects dropped into my lap in the space of a month simply because I'm easier to work with and very familiar with the very feminine subject domain.

I'm very skeptical of DEI, ironically, because I've seen too much of it turn into grifts for upper-class and upper-middle class POC and gay people while ignoring non-visible differences or differences that might actually require behavior changes (disability and class, mostly). But there's definitely a cultural problem. And I say this as a woman who greatly prefers 'male' communication styles and was raised by a warehouse worker. I'm not pearl clutching - I've lived in a couple of the most dangerous cities in the US, I'm no shrinking violet.

I mean, a lot of the hiring issues are really symptoms of other issues earlier in the progress, and thus most (not all) of the fixes at that stage will not actually address the true issue and may even cause other problems.

To fill a position, you need candidates. To have candidates, you need students of that discipline. There are numerous issues that could skew the demographics of the students (some are problematic, but some may be natural/acceptable!).

And of course this applies to domestic workers. Global workers and importing talent via visas have different benefits and issues.

All that said, in my experience most DEI company policies are more about not getting sued and avoiding bad press. They create policies, but many of them are ignored or just turned into a spineless checklist. As an example, the article didn't seem to address why the Microsoft metrics are meaningful, or what the targets are and their justifications. There's no systems thinking approach to explaining why or how the metrics/policies are beneficial, rather it's assumed.

I think a large part of society panicked after we killed racism, and they have been performing CPR on racism ever since.

There is a large multi-million dollar industry supporting DEI now. If there are people benefiting from racism continuing, it's people that work in this industry.

I'd like to see evidence that racism was ever 'killed' in society.

I absolutely want to work in a diverse team. I want to be challenged by different perspectives and ideas. I want to have the best team members out there, regardless of their backgrounds.

I however, think many D&I ideas fail to work when written into policies, and I think many times, higher-ups seem to write policy out of the best of intentions, yet fail to see how they can easily lead to abuse and poor results.

Two examples from a corporate job a friend shared with me -

1. A friend was interviewing senior software engineers for an open position, then got a candidate who was grossly irrelevant (I won't bore you with the details, but she has ~1 year of experience at best, and this position was targeting a minimum of 5 years, 8+ years preferred). Turns out, that specific hiring manager had recently lost a (male) top candidate because they didn't have a female candidate in that candidate's pipeline - the manager learned his lesson and now always dumps 1-2 female candidates that have no chance of making it into any senior position, just to meet the "diverse slate" requirement of their D&I policy.

2. Another example, this time not related to diversity - during the recent economic downturn, a company decided that on top of an aggressive hiring freeze, for any employee that is fired or quits, their position goes away with them, then gets re-assigned to where the higher-ups think the need is greatest. At first glance, that sounds like a good idea - kind of a CI/CD for re-orgs with minimal "slack". But of course, if you're a smart enough manager, that means your biggest hope is to remain static through this period, which means you'll never fire (or even challenge) anyone. You'll even promote mediocre folks to keep them on, then fire them afterwards.

Naturally, the most talented will still get plenty of offers and move / leave at some point, and then the slightly less talented folks get hit with all of their work and eventually move on as well, and over time the average talent level of that team will slide down considerably, and as we all know - hiring a top performer into a mediocre team is a challenge.

Nice policy in theory, but in practice - it will cause the company to lose tons of great talent, in a way that will take years to recover from.

I've heard of similar diversity backfires. For instance, a company started making bonuses for execs contingent on reaching representation targets. This meant that diverse workers were almost never approved to transfer to a different org, because execs were worried about dropping below their bonus threshold. End result was that Asian and White men had a lot more internal mobility than diverse employees.

Like Amazon having a minimum turnover policy, so managers hire to fire so they can protect their employees. Metrics always get gamed.

It kinda makes me sad. It’s great that companies want to improve D&I but, assuming everything in that article is true, they’re making a hash of it.

They’ve forgotten Goodhart’s law, and as such they’ve create a metric everyone is trying to game which ends up being counterproductive and unfair to everyone. Let’s not forget it’s equally unfair to promote someone before they are ready and then stack rank them against more experienced colleagues as it is not to promote someone who is ready.

We are a European enterprise and we have contracts with special recruitment firm for DEI quota. We had the opportunity to hire some amazing and technical folks through them. People with special hobbies and interests that would really make a different and add a new dimension to conversations.

The growing issue is the increasing number of employees coming in with skillset below 50% of current peers. Not all from EDI source, but for sure majority. Higher skilled engineers are leaving because they need to do more and more work to keep up the systems operational and that results in more and more of the skilled folks leaving.

Trying to explain this to VPs and directors and they would just say dont choose them! The interview system is set in a way that we get a bunch of resume without names and we need to stack them. HR contact as many of them as they feel good about and there goes the round of interviews. After the interviews we stack the results and hand it over to the management. And they decide whom to hire based on the stacked results and their own infallible judgment.

Sadly it also reflects poorly on people who are good and come in with DEI budget. They need to spend more times earning trust.

In 2022 you couldn't pay me enough to be a people manager in an F500 company, precisely because of BS like this article describes.

We seem to have gone full circle somehow. It is ironic that in its intent to ensure employers hire based on merit, academic or physically qualified abilities so that people could obtain those jobs without being discriminated against - we have arrived back at a point where companies consider their identity to make sure they meet "quotas" - thus implementing discriminatory policies.

As of 2022, the only protected status one is allowed to discriminate against without new acronyms or hashtags or any uproar is age. We tend to hire people we want to befriend, which means people similar to us, which leads to a lot of this discrimination. See: "culture fit".

Outside of the US the race/ethnicity of a person is not even allowed to be asked for or even stored. I actually believe that this leads to many problems in the first place and actually promotes racial segregation. The first time I had to think about what race I am was when I moved to the US.

Stop asking people what race they are, stop storing their race. And do the same for gender and religion. Just treat your people as humans. And problems like this will just disappear.

As a start you can anonymise applications of candidates: https://wol.iza.org/articles/anonymous-job-applications-and-...

Wokeness is first and foremost a legal phenomenon. You must check the box, because your manager must check the box, because the VP must check the box, because otherwise some regulator or lawyer might get angry and sue.

The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation, we should all be grateful for that. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous tumor that is metastasizing and infecting everything.

https://richardhanania.substack.com/i/36007039/wokeness-is-g...

This is wrong, the civil rights legislation from the 60s is now being used by Asians in current discrimination suits against colleges. The CRM legislation was colorblind, and therefore will be an enduring protection against discrimination towards any group.

The text of the laws is colorblind. But the institutions the laws created were hijacked by radicals. In the federal agencies, univerities, and HR departments, those who serve the laws and organizations hemselves won out over those who served the ostensible purposes of the laws and organizations.

The Civil Rights legislation was blatantly unconstitutional and we should not be surprised at the modern consequences.

This happening in tech is actually benign. In a lot of countries there are mandated quotas for minorities and socially backward communities in fields such as medicine, civil engineering etc, where the cost of mistakes is much higher. I do feel all this would be temporary in nature and eventually as these sections of society get more prosperity due to these policies, they will end up increasing their competency levels overall (but may not be in the same generation).

I think it's valiant for a company to strive to create diversity within the organization that's reflective of their locale, but it seems many are trying to simply hire people with certain combinations of demographics and qualifications that are rare or non-existent. A more far-sighted solution is required, where private industry starts investing in education (in an equity-focused manner) to create the diverse, qualified workforce that they need.

It’s really amazing how these companies are treating people from disadvantaged groups as “a number on a spreadsheet” and patting themselves on the back for it.

History will not look kindly on this moment in time.

_sigh_

The common theme I see in all these happy HN contributors getting their panties in a twist over affirmative action is that transactions exist in America that discriminate against white people: for a given promotion, a black person is advanced over a white person who is better qualified.

It's like some idiot plugging away at debugging a single query timing out, while the cluster is down.

Just take a step back. It's a really important intellectual ability.

Are you a Grandmaster if you won all your matches starting with a material advantage?

- attend school with class sizes of 60: start minus four pawns - limited role models in middle-class jobs: start minus a bishop - generational effects from iniquitous zoning laws: minus a rook

Affirmative action is an attempt to give back the bishop. Other strategies are also needed.

The theme I'm bristling at is, approximately, complaining that you lost a piece because your opponent was given a bishop.

If you think of AA as restitution, fine, that is a noble goal.

Now the issue is that there are not two races. So what about the Asians? They are discriminated against both by actual racism AND affirmative action. In fact AA discriminates harder against Asians than whites. Mixed race Asian (white+Asian) are regularly recommended to report their race as white. Surely this is doubly unfair?

I would be up for a points based system like you said.

I had a really difficult childhood; fatherless, impoverished schools, welfare, surrounded by crime (heroin addiction, prostitution, violence), I was quiet and bookish so I got abuse from all angles.

I had food most days and a home made of bricks so I had it better than most.

But if you're going to assume my life is easier because I have a certain skin tone I'm going to be annoyed, because my life was decidedly not easy in the early stages and I only got my "leg up" by being willing to throw myself into extremely uncomfortable situations.

So it is indeed racial discrimination in your opinion.

I think DEI proponents fail to grasp the whole picture and miss how they are increasing racism. And that picture isn't even that large. Pretty important skill to have as you said too.

> Are you a Grandmaster if you won all your matches starting with a material advantage?

The irony of saying this while advocating a practice that gives material advantage on the basis of race...

I don't think people are irked by affirmative action on the basis of family income. It's policies that privilege someone of one race over another even with equal income, parental education, etc. that people are opposing. We're not giving chess pieces back to people with limited opportunity, we're giving extra pieces based on race.

why do you think that growing up in a full family is an advantage?

by the same logic we should cut limbs off healthy people in the name of equity, just because disabled people have it worse.

One of the key insights I think people are missing is that for most roles, not having a diverse slate of applicants in a country as diverse as America is a "process smell." The smell is that you're not casting a wide enough net to even know whether you're getting the best applicants.

Some easy examples: if you're hiring for most programming roles and you don't have any qualified women applying, your pipeline sucks.

If your company is in California, and you don't have any qualified Latinos applying for most of your jobs, your pipeline sucks.

Et cetera.

If you're not casting a wide enough net to find qualified Latinos on the west coast(!), I guarantee you're also missing qualified white men in whom you would be interested. Ultimately, this is why Microsoft cares; they have an interest in their overall process being the best it can be.

> your pipeline sucks

The pipeline sucks for everyone, we all know that. Let's not pretend that this is just a matter of a single company having substandard processes.

Right, but here we're talking about Microsoft, one of the most valuable/profitable companies on the planet. Microsoft doesn't have to make do with a crappy pipeline. In fact, they have the resources to make it harder for the rest of us to have good pipelines.

And again -- I am talking about process smells. Women, Latinos, Black people, etc. are gainfully employed in roles where they ship software. (If you work in tech, you know the "CS Majors only" objection is a red herring given the breadth of roles at large tech firms.) If your process is unable to find them, that speaks to your process specifically (because someone else did find & hire them!).

Understanding why your process is bad is a good thing that every team should continually work towards.

1. Microsoft salaries are on the lower end compared to other FAANGs, this is well known fact.

2. Higher paying firms like goog fb are able to sweep the labor market and get the most of folks from tiny population of well qualified minority candidates. Making pipeline issues worse for everybody else.

3. At this point if you are minority and is qualified - you have no problem getting top tier job and top tier pay relatively easy, especially when compared to asian male population.

Quick thoughts:

1) You are correct, but this does not speak to the need for Microsoft to have sub-optimal processes in any aspect of its business.

Separately, all of the big tech companies including Microsoft pay significantly more than typical employers in places where there are no big tech offices (this is most of the country).

2) This is just incorrect. Those firms cannot sweep the labor market because their US cultures have historically been so dependent on face-time. Microsoft is able to hire engineers in Atlanta in part because Facebook and Google have yet to put down significant engineering presences here, for example. Most medium-to-large US cities do not have significant FAANMG presence and so are also ripe for picking. This is why e.g. Target is able to get great talent in Minneapolis.

3) This is a claim that is difficult to evaluate given that engineering has had essentially full employment for going on 20 years.

1. process is not suboptimal, market conditions are different. Why would any well qualified minority go to msf for 120k in Atlanta if they can get 240 in Mountain view + relocation bonus? Plus most of qualified minority candidates are hired from top tier engineering programs are across the country. Local market is irrelevant at this point

2. You are wrong again, facetime is irrelevant, because of relocation. Very few will stay at MSFT in Atlanta for 100k if they can double pay + relo to CA/Seattle. Google does have office in atlanta, btw.

Your concept of supposedly "untapped talent in Minneapolis" is wrong, because in Minneapolis metro is about 3.5M people and Target can tap from talent pool of 3.5M, while places like Bay Area can tap from global talent pool (7B people) who self-selects and specifically migrates to places like Bay Area/NY/Seattle. This is three orders of magnitude difference in talent quantity and quality.

There is a reason Walmart established office in Bay Area, and doesn't want to limit itself to the great talent pool of Fayetville AR

> Why would any well qualified minority go to msf for 120k in Atlanta if they can get 240 in Mountain view + relocation bonus?

Because their family is in the Southeast, and because that $120k leads to a better overall living standard than $240k in Mountain View. Especially if one is raising/planning on raising children, proximity to family is a really important variable.

A process that systematically skips people who won't relocate to the West Coast is suboptimal in a world where we know remote work works.

> facetime is irrelevant, because of relocation. Very few will stay at MSFT in Atlanta for 100k if they can double pay + relo to CA/Seattle. Google does have office in atlanta, btw.

Reed Hastings and Tim Cook, among others, disagree with you. Google does have an Atlanta office, but most of FAANG does not have significant engineering presence there (Microsoft does). Notable that Google expects engineers in Atlanta to come to their office, even though their teams will likely be in other cities. This is the canonical definition of face-time.

And again, $100k in Atlanta or Dallas is roughly equivalent to $200k in the Bay or Seattle. Add in externalities like family and climate (everybody does not like the Bay climate!) and it's not as straightforward as you make it.

> because in Minneapolis metro is about 3.5M people and Target can tap from talent pool of 3.5M, while places like Bay Area can tap from global talent pool (7B people)

If you think everyone wants to move to the Bay, I probably can't convince you otherwise. But please consider that some people a) don't like the climate b) are married to people whose jobs are elsewhere c) prefer a lifestyle that includes homeownership.

I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong.

In 2021, 9% of computer science graduates were black (1). 18% were women (2). These numbers are the ceiling of what you might expect for a senior pipeline, since women attrit at a higher rate than men (3).

In a typical senior hiring pipeline for a Microsoft-scale company, while you'll have loads of applicants, you might have a dozen who make it through initial screening and are at least qualified on paper. I've been a hiring manager at companies slightly larger, and slightly smaller, than MS, and this was true at both.

So of those 12, you'd expect perhaps 1 to be black, and perhaps 2 to be women - optimistically. But every company, but especially high-profile fortune 100s, are trying to increase their D&I numbers. Qualified minority candidates rarely come through applications - instead, they're recruited, since everyone wants to somehow turn that 18% into 30% in order to get their D&I-linked bonus.

Blaming a hiring manager or company for their "pipeline" when they fail to hit impossible targets is absurd, and mathematically dishonest.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/04/01/stem-jobs-see...

2. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

3. http://edge.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/WomenInT...

There are a few common problems in your analysis:

- as is frequently noted here, programming positions do not always require CS degrees.

- companies that produce software typically are composed of lots of roles. Microsoft has 100k engineers, but even more of their staff is not engineers. (That is: less than half the jobs at Microsoft are "engineers," and some of their engineers do not have CS degrees.) Many/most of those other roles translate quite well into tech. Just to take a few functional examples, the Finance function under the CFO, the HR function under the top people officer, the sales function, and the marketing function are not typically run by CS grads or staffed with programmers. Companies do not have to hit their DEI targets solely in their Engineering functions.

But back to your assertions, you seem to agree with me.

> So of those 12, you'd expect perhaps 1 to be black, and perhaps 2 to be women - optimistically.

Yes, if this is your slate for a programming role (again, assuming you are not somehow running a pipeline that somehow misses the enormous Latino population), you are probably doing okay. (Microsoft et. al. are able to aim for better than okay, but that's a business decision.)

Edit: I want to expand a little on the Latino/Hispanic component as well, as it's common in debates on this site to exclude them. But add them back in using the numbers on your first link. So we could expect 1 Black applicant, 1 Latino applicant, and 2 women (optimistically!). That's a third of your set of 12, using your data sources, for a programming role. This is optimistic, but nobody managing a F100 is asking their leadership to do easy things.

But it does sound like you generally agree that if you get sets of 12 applicants and they are all consistently white men in each set that there is a process defect? Similarly, if you are hiring for another role, your definition of a "diverse" set of applicants would be different.

> Qualified minority candidates rarely come through applications - instead, they're recruited

This is the activity that management is trying to encourage. Given industry history, it is not surprising that companies have to put in extra effort to try to change the perception of who is welcome. Microsoft is not new to this, having spent tons of money rehabilitating the image of Windows as an insecure, unreliable OS. Fixing a business process takes work, this is not surprising.

> But add them back in using the numbers on your first link. So we could expect 1 Black applicant, 1 Latino applicant, and 2 women (optimistically!). That's a third of your set of 12, using your data sources, for a programming role.

Let's please keep this conversation mathematically honest. I don't know if you're intentionally trying to misrepresent statistics, or if you don't understand them, but:

- for three non-mutually-exclusive groups (black, latino, female)

- given participation in a set (1, 1, 2)

- you cannot sum their independent participation (4) to yield "a third"

Beyond that, you appear to intentionally miss the key terms "ceiling" and "optimistically." Given a sample size of one pipeline (the OP), if you optimistically might get a single applicant that meets a given DI quota, it's very likely that you'll get zero.

The original article explicitly stated zero, and the numbers make it clear that zero is a very likely result.

That's the trouble with small sample sizes. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by arguing that, in some other circumstance, maybe it could have been one... or even two!

> given participation in a set (1, 1, 2)

When the set is of 12, that's 4 of 12, which is exactly one third, assuming independent participation (which obviously is what makes the number optimistic/ a ceiling).

> Given a sample size of one pipeline

Fair! If the OP only ever hires one person, you are correct. At Microsoft's scale, they are more like "the house" at a casino, and so their ratios should more closely approximate the population.

I am making the larger point that yes, in one instance, this hiring manager could have experienced a challenge building a diverse pipeline, but that this experience is not generalizable to Microsoft or the industry as a whole. And the related takeaway that if your pipeline is routinely not presenting you with the significant plurality represented by "diverse" candidates, then you have a solvable process problem.

> When the set is of 12, that's 4 of 12, which is exactly one third, assuming independent participation (which obviously is what makes the number optimistic/ a ceiling).

I think this misunderstanding of statistics may be at the core of our disagreement.

Yes, 4 is one-third of 12.

No, you cannot expect overlapping, non-mutually-exclusive sub-populations of 9% and 18% to equal 27% of a total population.

If you're interested in learning why, read (1), but the TL;DR is: given three people, A: black female, B: white male, C: white male, if you sum sub-populations as you're trying to do, you'll get (1 black + 1 female = 2) from a population of 3, and you'll extrapolate (incorrectly) that 2/3rds of this population meets your criteria. I hope that helps explain why your expectation of the gender & racial diversity of CS graduates is inaccurate.

1. https://stats.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_Statis...

> No, you cannot expect overlapping, non-mutually-exclusive sub-populations of 9% and 18% to equal 27% of a total population.

Obviously, this is true. I don't know why you continue to exclude the Latino population, but again Latino CS grads (to focus on that narrow slice of tech jobs) are also ~7%.

> I hope that helps explain why your expectation of the gender & racial diversity of CS graduates is inaccurate.

But (as you have pointed out) we do know more about the sub-populations that let us infer that the populations are less overlapping than we might prefer. If you're interested, there are published demographic data that go into more detail than I have time to do here. But yes, I understand the concept that a Black Latina fits into three categories.

> you'll extrapolate (incorrectly) that 2/3rds of this population meets your criteria.

The basic idea here is simple: at Microsoft scale, their pipelines broadly should look like the collegiate exit pipeline. If you think that < 30% of programmers are women and/or Black/Latino, I think that assumption is the problem.

No matter what assumptions you make around the numbers, my core point still holds. Which is that if your pipeline is routinely missing X% of qualified applicants, your sourcing is not good enough to know whether you're even seeing the best candidates. That is as true if X% is 15% or 30%.

Using an analogy: if your company isn't seeing any applicants from states representing 15% of the population (say: Texas and New York), that says more about your sourcing than the talent available.

Microsoft makes their products difficult to repair: Microsoft calls this a 'security measure'.

Microsoft has a bigoted hiring policy which cares more for your skin tone & nipple size than your skillset: Microsoft calls this 'diversity and inclusion'.

I’ve seen active encouragement to violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Specifically Title VII section 703, (d) - Training Programs.

“It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining, including on-the-job training programs to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.”

By specifically allowing Women to attend the Grace Hopper Conference on company time, funded by the company.

Men, are not allowed to attend (unless not male presenting), and thus being discriminated against based upon their sex.

At the Grace Hopper conference, there are plenty of sessions which could be argued are training.

If the attendees were going for recruiting purposes, I could see it not necessarily violating the law. However, Women are attending to go to the conference (training?) without any recruiting duties.

I expect there are similar conferences for POC, which equally violate the Civil rights act.

It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that.

But, … another part of me is uneasy with the idea that there is such as thing as a racialised or gendered (for example) engineer - engineers are individuals, and shouldn’t be under an implied expectation of being recognisably distinct from each other - so I don’t really know how to avoid the ‘entrenched discrimination via sensitivity to fixed identities’ problem.

>It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that.

This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender equality"[0]. TL;DR: Men and women are different from each other in lots of ways, including what they prefer to work on. As you increase gender equality in a society (moving from, for instance, Saudi Arabia at one extreme to Norway at the other), you see a systematic /increase/ in the difference in what men and women end up working on. More gender equality --> fewer women engineers, more women doing child care.

Edit: oh,and I would encourage anyone looking in to the literature to view it in the correct light: the field is overtly hostile to this data, and that greatly skews what gets published. And here it is anyway.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox

It could be the case that in societies where women aren’t arbitrarily discriminated against they seek greater engagement with the careers gender socialisation attract them to ie “women are better actualised as women in societies where female success isn’t artificially stifled by glass ceilings”.

A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their potential.

My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that “Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts

>“Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.

There is widespread scientific (note: among _scientists_) consensus that this is not correct. Talk to an endocrinologist or a behavioral geneticist, or an economist, or a psychologist...

As it turns out, sex differences in psychology are the biggest effects we measure. We also see concomitant differences in other species, both closely related and not. And there is every reason to expect evolution has designed us to have innate differences by sex. The tablua rasa stuff is wrong.

Ideas like the one your innner feminist wants to believe were popularized by non-scientists (don't confuse scientists with "academics"), and they were easy to make popular because they're what cliques around those academics wanted to believe. But all the evidence is against it, that's just no how nature works.

I’m prepared to believe that those differences exist wrt reproductive role ie that humans have some sexed instincts around mating and child care, but, as per what right-thinking people believe about about race and intelligence / personality / emotionality (viz ‘races’ don’t actually have different characters or abilities) I don’t think the sexes are fundamentally different mentally.

It used to be the case until fairly recently (my lifetime) that “women are suited to be nurses, and men to be doctors” but no-one believes that kind of thing now. It should be possible to culturally evolve past expectations of significant psychological differences between men and women, just as we have between white and other races.

(There’s a discussion to be had about the value of preserving cultural differences between groups, particularly at the expense of individuals within those groups, but it’s a massive can of worms)

Lots of it boils down to risk. For sexual/reproductive reasons, men are more prone to risk - both behaviourally and generically. Evolution doesn't tend to favour risk-taking in the sex that carries and rears offspring. The number of women (not men) in a group is also the bottleneck to the group's ability to reproduce/recover population. Males are more fundamentally disposable, and have developed traits to fit into this niche. We have just about all of this in common with our closest ape relatives. I'm no researcher, but I've found the work of Frans de Waal and other primatologists enlightening.

This is correct.

A couple hairs to split: I wouldn't say more "prone to risk", I'd say they have different risk preferences. It's not like one or the other attitude towards risk is better or worse, they're just more or less adaptive given a certain environment.

I also wouldn't say men are disposable, as the story you tell at the group level is weak selection compared to at the individual level, but the gist is correct. Another way to look at it is: it's possible for males to win the genetic lottery, but impossible for females. The most reproductively successful men have had thousands of children, but women are limited to ~13 max. The upshot is that men have evolved to prefer risk more than women because the ceiling on payoffs is very high (i.e., you could get really rich, have lots of kids, multiple wives, tons of cattle), but for women the benefits of those huge lottery-winnings payoffs are much smaller in comparison to the costs (because you can only have 13 kids, and only slowly).

In my head, this is the explanation for ~80% of the differences in behavior by sex.

> but women are limited to ~13 max

Make that ~70: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-prol...

Lol

Lawd, all right, 95th%ile is 13 or something :-D

Before diversity programs were all the range most large companies being discussed here had populations that reflected their applicants reasonably well. But not necessarily their communities.

So where does your thinking go when the issues are outside of the company?

Companies that want more diverse workforces need to grow them through, education and training. Remove the barriers to learning in these POC communities and map out clear pathways to knowledge.

What about ageism? It’s prevalent, is that ok? How about women or even men trying to renter the workforce after having children?

Groups made of inexperienced young folks tend to make products for inexperienced young folks. People code what they know. While marketeers would support this, there’s still a lot of money out there that’s help by less desirable groups of people. And needs that aren’t relatable to these developers.

The increase from 3.7% to 5.6% black executives as a sign of lowering standards, when black people are 14% of the population in the country... Can we first establish what percentage of managers people genuinely think got their job based on merit as a baseline? An equal explanation might be that because Microsoft forced people to actually interview black people at all, more qualified black candidates were hired.

That represents the population at large, not the percentage of job applicants. Without knowing that number, you can't know how reasonable such a rule is.

Yeah, neither can we know how reasonable the implication of lack of merit is in that case.

The claim is that there may be a lack of availability. Lack of availability does not imply lack of merit. Prior discrimination, for example, could explain a lack of availability.

Yes, but if you are looking at the population of rust dev with a background in system coding, or telecom engineer with ciso certification, the stats don't look like the ones of the general population at all.

In my university, in the whole class, we had 0 non white, and a single woman.

Now, you may argue that we should fix that.

But that's another debate, the thing is, people are hiring from the pool we have right now.

Right, but these aren't that. These are just generic executives. So like, just rando leaders in accounting and HR and sales. The comparison would be if in your entire university campus only white students existed.

Some departments are indeed not as affected, and if you are looking for a product owner, a project manager, or sales, numbers don't work against you.

But there are departments where they do, even outside of IT. Accounting are mostly white males, HR are mostly female, etc.

So if you have one policy that is general to the whole company, some departments will have a hard time no matter what.

Case in point, one of my clients has a hard time finding a good dev matching diversity policies, but they have no problem finding analysts. For some reasons, good analyst profiles already are pretty diverse and the team is rocking people from all over Europe and Africa, also achieving gender parity without even trying.

Yet it's the same hiring pipeline, and we are all working in the same office. They are not excluding people, in the office, 10% only are locals! But it doesn't work for some demographics, and the general dumb rule is killing their IT projects.

It's not another debate because that debate never happens. People will use the same arguments to justify university selection, etc etc.

The argument is "the output that we're seeing is expected given the input". So you walk the chain back until inputs and outputs diverge, at which point the argument can no longer justify it.

The civil rights act, as written makes this form of discrimination illegal.

However the supreme court undid this in United Steelworkers v Weber.

I do not understand how Americans find it acceptable that you can vote for people, they can pass clear statutory language that says you cannot discriminate and then SCOTUS can come along, and read the complete opposite meaning into the statute.

The dissent’s argument - “Were Congress to act today specifically to prohibit the type of racial discrimination suffered by Weber, it would be hard pressed to draft language better tailored to the task than that found in § 703(d) of Title VII:”

Is pretty spot on.

SCOTUS needs to revisit this issue. Or congress needs to revise the Civil Rights act to correct the wording cited by the Supreme Court majority on their opinion.

Their argument is that the statue states that it’s not “required”, but doesn’t state “required, or allowed”, thus suggesting that congress intended to allow this racial based decisions. And yet Congress included 703(d).

Absurd court case which is the source of this ongoing insanity.

Microsoft was always on my blacklist

It's "disallowlist" or a "blocklist". ;-)

In other places, like Africa or Asia, or just anywhere without a white majority, does the inverse exist? E.g. giving white people special treatment in hiring because they're a minority there? If the idea is logically consistent, based on diversity and inclusion and not racism, it should exist? Maybe it does? Never heard of it.

It doesn’t exist. Curiously my company employs few folks of Asian descent but I never see this raised anywhere in D&I material.

Serious question: I've worked with incredibly diverse (compared to the national demographic) teams that consisted mostly of Indians and Asians from various countries throughout Asia. Under the Microsoft D&I definition this would not count as diverse. Why do they define diversity in such an arbitrary way?

And that's why I tell any employer that I'm LGBTQ+ and identify as black Hispanic. What a clown world we live in...

And while D&I advocates are busy, the reality diverges. There are large teams at Amazon et al that only speak Hindi or Chinese. Imagine what group of persons are not hired because they aren't a "cultural fit". It's good that many (mostly born in a western country) are aware of racism and try to prevent it. However, that usually doesn't apply to people with a different cultural background. E.g., I saw many times that Indians treated other Indians differently based on their caste. That happened in silicon valley companies in the US.

from what I can tell, nobody knows how to interpret the civil rights acts and nobody wants to have a discussion on how to compliantly do so.

all you have to do is start recruiting in places that were overlooked. just stop obsessing over Stanford pedigrees and recruit at the same Tier 3 universities that the intelligence community recruits from.

fund your own coding academies and executive workshops and create your own pipeline, physically located in neighborhoods that have people you want representation from.

everyone is going to keep messing this up and discriminating on the hiring process, without a framework about how to do it.

This is all part of the public-private alliance between big corporations and left-wing politicians. They can't implement Marxism outright because of State authority to override, so they are using companies to do it and killing small business competition in return. This is also why some corporations get larger and larger without any real antitrust enforcement.

This is happening at every F50 company. If you are thinking "not my company" right now, you're just not high enough in leadership.

So it sounds like I will not rise to the top in big tech regardless of my hard work and talent, what are the best alternative employers that don't do this?

DEI is the new racism and sexism. It's just as bad as the old racism and sexism.

The fundamental issue is we have lost our freedoms. We live in a socialist society where we have to follow party lines. It all starts with laws that sound fantastic, but took away freedoms of speech.

Affirmative Action is always going to be a very controversial topic. Personally I'm for it, but I understand why people dislike it.

I do strongly believe that, even with Affirmative Action policies, it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male, today. For example, no matter how you slice it, white Americans are ~3-4x more likely to become millionaires than black or hispanic Americas (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/). I think there's a TONNE of reasons for race and gender based inequality, but IMO most of them have to do with "momentum". If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this. It wasn't long ago that racism and sexism were much, much worse than they are today (and there's still lots of conscious and unconscious bias today), so white families are a lot wealthier today than minority families, and that propagates to the next generation, and the one after that, etc. Slavery wasn't abolished in America until 1865, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (ending racial segregation of schools) came in 1954, Rosa Parks was 1955, Jim Crow laws weren't really sweepingly overturned until 1965. If you're a black American in their 40s today, your parents were probably born in the Jim Crow era, where the impediments to their financial success were immense.

If, as a society, we don't try to actively help non white males reach an equal footing in terms of opportunity, it'll be really, really hard to close these "momentum" gaps. I view Affirmative Action as a temporary approach to narrowing these gaps. It's realizing that it's too hard to succeed financially as a minority in America, and temporarily giving minorities a leg up on hiring and promotions to help even the wealth/opportunity gap. Once the gap more or less goes away, you remove the Affirmative Action policies, but that'll take time. If you hire based purely on qualifications, education, experience, etc., the gap isn't going away for an extremely long time, because white families are a lot wealthier than minority families today, so a disproportionate number of kids from those families are going to have those advantages, and the gap persists.

What I don't understand is, that if it's purely skin color and upbringing and background, why is most of SV absolutely dominated by Indian people: My dad is Indian and grew up with his family in a single room. He is in his 80s now and has a net worth in California of probably $3M.

I'm half Indian and half white. At my age (42) he was doing way better than myself (accounting for inflation of course). When my dad was going through all the same stuff, 50 years back there was no affirmative action yet he still grew in the ranks. He's not a "black person" but his skin color is the same.

I think there is a lot of perceived racism when in reality people are promoting strong individuals already. Look at head of Google, Twitter, and a series of other companies.

For some reason people shy away from calling out racism when it comes to people from India because of their American success story. But again, if it's about skin color - how did this happen?

> it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male.

Part of the issue is that you're presupposing a uniform definition of success. Different cultures have different priorities, and not everyone wants to spend 80 hrs a week in the office to climb the ladder and become a millionaire. Some cultures prioritize family/social relationships, sports, or a connection with nature. Unsurprisingly, these different cultures can often be racially affinitized. Sure, most people wouldn't mind being rich, but many do mind the hustle often accompanying that form of success.

I think part of what you describe around momentum holds merit, but I don't think affirmative action goes about the remedy in a constructive manner. It's fighting racism with more (albeit different) racism. You turn it into a zero sum game where your political posturing can be more valuable than your work contributions. That incentive structure is degenerative for all parties.

> If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this.

Genuinely curious, would you support an initiative to shuffle all babies between families at birth? Your argument seems to be "who you're raised by gives an unfair advantage in life, and we should correct for this societally". It seems to me that a random shuffle would equally distribute any inherent bias relative to generational momentum.

"Affirmative action" is a vague term. I, too, agree that if you select a White, Asian, Latin, and a Black teenager at random there's substantial barriers to the latter two training and becoming an engineer or software developer. The latter two are less likely to be exposed to engineering and programming, and are less likely to enter university to study those fields.

That said, does discrimination in companies' hiring and promotion process yield improvements? Affirmative action like this just increases the representation within Microsoft, and does nothing to help Black or Latin youths become software developers. The gap isn't actually being closed. The same dismal percentage of Black and Latin people are entering the tech workforce. It's just that they're more likely to end up at Microsoft than some other company.

Affirmative action in the form of sponsoring coding camps in underserved communities would actually work towards closing the gap between the rate at which Asian and white people become software developers and Latin and Black people becoming so. Progress will be made when companies leave the mindset of trying to increase their representation by clawing over each other for the limited pool of diverse talent, and instead work towards increasing the diversity of the workforce.

> but IMO most of them have to do with "momentum". If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this

If this is the issue, why are we targeting certain races rather than all those whose family is lacking momentum?

If white people want to learn about racism, fail to know French and try to work in Quebec. Black as soon as you open your mouth…

Long time HN lurker here - some of the comments are being blown out of proportion.

Statistically speaking, these are called “minorities” for a reason, there simply aren’t enough of them in STEM related fields.

Diversifying your team/group with one or two female or foreign born individuals won’t dramatically impact the overall productivity of your team - assuming this person is not already a very hard working and/or bright individual, which many/most are.

The fact that this person made it to the interview phase and passed the initial filters (which are typically gender/race blind) indicates that they are potentially qualified for the role.

Keep in mind, interviewing is hard - for both parties involved, for different reasons but especially hard for candidates. There is a significant “luck” component involved.

Many interviewers are inexperienced and focus solely on finding ways to disqualify candidates as opposed to figuring out how a given person could “fit in” and contribute/help level up the team.

I ask that you have an open mind and show some empathy. We still have a lot of work to do to create a more diverse and inclusive society.

>Statistically speaking, these are called “minorities” for a reason, there simply aren’t enough of them in STEM related fields.

What's the correct ratio of white to brown? To male to female? Do employee demographics need to mirror society demographics?

This is not how it works dude. Right now, in big tech, teams have target of 30% diversity, i.e., 1/3rd of the team. There is literally not that many "diverse" people available to hire. You would be lucky to even fill these positions with competent non-diverse candidates. If your team works on networking stack, how many well qualified female/black/latino folks are out there who will apply to your post at that point in time? VPs then come to you and tell you to hire "diverse" candidate any way with no experience in networking and ask you to train them later. They do this to protect their bonuses. Now your 30% of the team is filled with people who have no business of being there. Besides experience, most don't even have any passion for the field. They just walk-in flashing their diversity cards. This is massive drain on teams productivity. How does this team would compete with lean and mean startups? The truth is they won't. The DEI is great initiative to sunset aging big tech and replace them with new blood.

Didn't many people predict exactly this? Go back to Alex Jones videos from 2010 and apologize.

I think if diversity leads to lower profit but better work experience tech companies will get rid of it.

I left the western world several years ago, partly because of this. I could not live in an idiocracy where some people hire based on skin colors or genitals.

Thankfully, I have faith in capitalism.

I never thought I would say such an obvious thing, but we are entering an era where « hiring the most competent » is going to give an unfair advantage to smaller companies.

I am already seeing this with cinema. Sure the US is still producing a lot of interesting stuff, you still have very talented filmmakers. But you are literally losing market share to Korea (which should have never happened) just because you made your mission to transform every possible well known character into black characters for the sake of it.

I haven’t seen any interesting Netflix original show about Zulu, or how people competed for power in Egypt.

But I sure have seen plenty of black washing (even on non white historical figures)

Seriously, what's with that newsletter popup that has no close button?

I'm starting to see it everywhere on blog posts linked from HN.

Are "influencers" that desperate?

This is a real thing.

It is hard for anyone that is not "diverse" to get promoted at the highest levels of Microsoft. Almost all CVP promotions are "diverse" now in a way that is pretty overt.

I am a huge proponent of D&I, but it is hard not to feel discriminated against and feel like there isn't much of a career trajectory for me.

The majority of managers at Microsoft remain white, and male (page 13):

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/a...

And yet, with women representing just 18% of CS graduates (1), still 200% as much as would be expected as an extrapolation of the population.

1. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

Why would you need a CS degree in HR, Marketing, Product, etc?

I think it is great that microsoft has a diversity policy and is making clear to everyone there that it matters. It is quite ham-handed, but that is kind of the default in corporations of that size. I can imagine the frustration having to deal with such policies, but he apparently did not reach out to get diverse candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion are very different things.

You can do top down diversity. If you can hire or fire, you can increase diversity. Not easy, but doable.

Inclusion is a very different thing. After someone is hired, they have to be see their employer as an accepting place.

This is accomplished mostly by peer to peer interactions.

You can’t top-down force inclusion.

If you want racial equity, you have to start at school or even earlier. Get rid of private schools, improve the public school system. Then you can actually get good people from all kinds of backgrounds that are not looked upon as "diversity hires".

> Get rid of private schools

There are good steps that can be taken, but objectively harming some students is not the way forward.

Improve public schools and try to get more money into the poor regions. Do not erase private ones.

Why not the way forward? Depends on the "some" being "harmed."

This is a systemic problem, systemic measures will be taken, there will be winners and losers.

> Depends on the "some" being "harmed."

How does harming anyone help? No it does not depend on the some.

Life isn't a zero sum game. Pull people down and you don't distribute their value to others, you only destroy it.

You are begging the question, I don't believe eliminating private schooling harms anyone, nor will it "pull people down."

Inequity in schooling is already harming others.

But in the comment I'll responded to you said and I quote

" It depends on the some who are being harmed"

"There will be winners and losers"

That doesn't sound to me like someone who believes eliminating private schools harms nobody, That sounds to me like someone who is being a little bit reactionary and doesn't care.

You aren't harming anyone, but there will be losers?

Nope. Get rid of all of them. Private schools are just legal segregation. Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will give their parents a huge incentive to lobby for the increased quality of public schools. Lottery systems would make it even better. Education and healthcare being made available to everybody at the exact same availability and quality level would majorly improve both systems.

> Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will ...

Cause rich families to blanket refuse to live anywhere near neighborhoods with poor kids and contribute massively to the segregation between well off and impoverished neighborhoods.

Just live in a place where every home in a 45 minute radius is over a million dollars to purchase.

Right—in my city all the rich people neighborhoods in the city proper only exist because of private schools. If you have some money, but not enough for an expensive in-the-city house in a non-terrible neighborhood plus private school, you do not live there—you live in the 'burbs. All the urban- and close-old-suburb dwelling rich people would pack up and leave within a year if they were forced to send their kids to public school. Or find some way to get themselves a weird-bordered carved-out new district all to themselves. That's the only possible way they'd stay.

That's why I said lottery systems. If they want to bus their kids 45 minutes to be stuck in the same school system, that's on them. I don't care.

This will only work if you also forbid rich people from homeschooling (= private tutors supplemented with sports & social clubs full of other rich kids—and very-well-funded rich-parent homeschooling support groups would probably start to look an awful lot like private schools themselves) and from sending their kids out of the country for school.

Day school rates for good private schools (there are way, way more bad private schools than good ones) are in like the $20k-$60k/yr range. That's a lot of money to put toward avoiding public school, even if US private schools themselves are outlawed. You'd have to also mandate public school attendance, no alternatives whatsoever.

You'd also have to do something to prevent rich people from effectively buying whole school districts and turning them into private schools. There are already districts kinda like this—unleash the entire upper-middle and upper class on the current public school system, and pretty soon there will be a few dozen districts nationwide where it's impossible to buy a house for under a million dollars and the schools may as well be private schools.

What policy do you have in mind? Would it be illegal to pay for tutoring of any kind, or would it just be illegal to not send your kid to the local public school (illegalizing homeschooling as well)? And what about just moving to an area close to better schools, would you write laws to address that?

As long as parents raise their own children, you're going to have crazy levels of inequality. If you also continue to respect personal autonomy and private property, you'll have ever crazier levels.

Students needing additional tutoring is normal, but it's also a signal that the educators need to reevaluate why students aren't meeting expectations from the existing curriculum. How many broken curriculum have been perpetuated because the top performing students had to spend hours after class filling in the gaps on their own dime?

Wouldn't a better invested (not just money, but also socially) public school system support students so they don't need to seek outside tutoring like what you're describing?

And I do believe homeschooling should be prohibited. Once again, a better invested (money, socially) public school system would solve whatever problem parents think they're addressing by way of homeschooling.

As a fun historical side note, I've heard this one before in a different context! "Make exit impossible so people will have to focus on fixing the broken system they're forced to deal with" was also the stated rationale for building the Berlin Wall.

> Get rid of private schools

"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!" ~Scott Alexander

> Get rid of private schools

Finland does that.

"Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they got to where they are because of their accomplishments? "

This is the same "affirmative action hire" argument conservatives have been making since affirmative action was implemented.

"We can't fix racism because of racism."

The thing is, there are not many companies or jobs where you can save $1mil+ in under 4 years, especially if you’re Dual Income or pre-kids. Especially at a 9-5 where I am in pajamas more often than not.

Hunker down, leverage to the opp to do boring tech at an interesting large scale and and earn a mountain.

Find your non-enterprise, pure meritocracy Ayn Rand bonanza engineering experience at a pre-Series C.

I can’t understand why engs expect FAANGs to operate like anything but an enterprise now, and then complain about that behavior!

We can save $1mil in under 4 years while wearing pajamas. The blind spots of the extreme relative privilege in this job and anchoring on articles like this as serious grievances blows my mind.

Bypass paywall: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cspicenter.com%2Fp...

Or turn off JS.

Maybe Microsoft managers think it's enough if everybody can decide for themselves about their pronouns.

DEI policies are pure racism but in the other direction.

TLDR: It still means nothing.

I read the comments then read the article, then came back to find it dead. But why? This post contains new information that is relevant to the tech industry. Its claims are not outlandish. And it brings receipts (screenshots). If this is what a major tech company is doing, isn't it worthy of discussion here?

I hope the comments can be civil, and I've seen more contentious topics surface high-quality comments on HN.

What always bothered me about DE&I initiatives is that they are trying to wring diversity out of their existing hiring pool.

If your indeed job posts didn't bring diverse candidates then, why do you think it would now? Because you added a "Please apply if you're DiVeRsE" line to it? Don't be ridiculous.

If you want diversity of candidates you can't keep going back to the same talent pools. You have to diversify where you're drawing talent.

If your college program is primarily getting white/asian males, you can't suddenly expect it to start throwing in women & poc as well. You can't suddenly expect it to start giving you LGBTQ+ candidates.

If you want diverse candidates, you have to look at diverse hiring pools. Look at the bootcamps that focus on diverse groups you're targeting. Look at schools that focus on diverse groups you're targeting.

If you're really interested in diverse candidates, you can't keep expecting them to just show up if you add a "We want diversity!" to your job description - you have to change where you look for them.

A big part of the issue here is that, even though the predomaninance of white and Asian men in CS is very obviously a pipeline problem, for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy", they have to undergo these absurd contortions to try and have a DEI program that can't say where the lack of DEI is coming from.

Naturally it ends up being a mess of contradictions and confused thinking, because everyone has to pretend to ignore the obvious root cause.

> for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy"

Given that Twitter takes an active role in censoring particular ideas, I think it's worth being careful to distinguish "Twitter has decided this isn't allowed" from "a lot of Twitter users have decided this isn't allowed".

> Look at schools that focus on diverse groups you're targeting.

I believe that Pursuit.org (started by StackExchange) is like that.

NOTE: I am not connected with Pursuit. I did consider working with them, but they weren't interested in my specialty.

Also, a couple of felon-assistance outfits have been mentioned on HN. If you really want diversity, that's a good bet.

This is making a common but wrong rhetorical move, which is ignoring the fact that qualified candidates of the preferred race, with the preferred genitalia or gender presentation, and with the preferred sexual proclivities just aren't out there.

It's not like there is a large pool of black developer talent that firms just keep missing. It doesn't exist. It could be created, but a separate and totally valid question is: why do that? Why should we want every group of people to be representative of the population down to the smallest scale in race x gender x sexual preference?

> If you want diverse candidates, you have to look at diverse hiring pools.

I would assume the diverse hiring pools come with candidates that are not as qualified as the other pools. That's the flip side to this.

Do business hire from specific pools for biased or performance reasons? I think the assumption is that all hiring inequality is the result of bias. What if it isn't?

I've been at a particular company for 20 years. For most of those years our main focus was our core mission, but over the past few years D&I has risen to be our main focus. I've seen people hired who clearly are not qualified and often are not trainable to become qualified. An example is a woman who refused to take any hard assignments and usually made no progress on the easy stuff she was assigned. She was certainly able to do the work, but just didn't do it. Then she started taking standup zoom calls from the ski slopes in winter and hiking trails in the summer. Well, you would think this would be enough to at least get her onto some sort of remediation program, but nope, HR said we could do nothing to her. So she basically earns a six figure salary and does absolutely nothing, other than fulfill a D&I quota.

Apparently fulfilling the D&I quota is worth 6 figures to the company.

> Apparently fulfilling the D&I quota is worth 6 figures to the company.

Or the company is rich enough not to really care about the waste at this point.

I doubt such a person would last through one round of layoffs if there was real pressure to reduce costs.

This is pretty much it. We are a huge Fortune 100 company that, apparently, prizes D&I over money.

Fuck me! I wish I was more diverse.

Why would anyone support a system that explicitly dis-empowers them in preference to other identity groups who themselves are perfectly fine to pursue their own self interest?

After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum aspect to this.

The cultural brainwashing that there is virtue in supporting this against your own interests is just Nietzschean slave-morality propaganda. You don't have to apologize for or pathologize being capable, successful and doing what is best for yourself, dare I say even for your own identity group. You can simply reject this nonsense; the emperor truly has no clothes here.

Related: my most recent submission [0] titled "Wikimedia is funding political activism" received over 20 points in 30 minutes, but of course was quickly flagged without discussion. Quite a bit of censorship around these parts regarding these particular topics with huge impact on all of us within the tech industry.

[0] https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633

>After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society.

Are you afraid of not having privilege? Do you think that's a symptom of how we treat the unfortunate, or the cause?

Setting aside the connotation/framing of the word itself, tell me, is not having privilege good or bad?

One could define "privilege" as the accumulation of inheritance of ancestors, economic, culturally, biological, geopolitical, power. All coming together in "good ways" for descendants.

But back to the question, is bad to not have it and good to have it yes? Then why would anyone support not having it, willingly giving it up, expect those who take it from you to not then also abuse power against you etc etc. If bad, why choose not to keep it?

In terms of abstract ideological values, I support merit, some sort of meritocracy. But in concrete terms this will never avoid conflict of group interests. That is politics and an unavoidable aspect of human competition over resources, wealth, power, prestige. So let's stop pretending, is my point, that there is some achievable neutrality in all this. Because we all agree not being on top is bad. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. At the very least having cultural power like those implementing all these policies throughout Western corporations is a good thing to have. It is bad not to have it. What else is there to say?

Even though you're advocating for your own submission and a bit hot-tempered about it, now that I've followed the link, I'd say it does deliver quality factual content about an important topic. Thanks.

Thanks and yes, not good form to complain about forum meta, was just very frustrated that something so quickly supported by many voters could be blocked so easily, because it has a particularly verboten point of view amongst SV elite. It was definitely a whiny comment.

> You can simply reject this nonsense

No, you can't. Not without becoming ostracised in many cases. My younger self made the poor decision to commit himself to a creative field. I cannot reject the nonsense or I will more-or-less be blackballed socially and professionally.

this person seem to not understand how microsoft's business stays on track.

they seem to really think that individual contributions truly affect Microsoft's fullfilment of their self-appointed mission; but I highly doubt this. Microsoft is really huge. No single individual can really detract, nor add too much, to the company's overall mission.

I guess MS should just pick people to hire in a lottery then.

I somehow suspect they wouln't fare any worse.

Oh, it's that right-wing culture war grievance blog that coincidentally chose the same initials as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and calls itself a think tank.

How does Tesla manage to be diverse without having an internal bureaucracy micromanaging everyone at D&I?

a lot of comments here recognize what a discussion of 'diversity and inclusion' on this forum (HN) is likely to contain -- i.e., HN should recognize it's own stereotypes of tech culture being toxic which only reinforces _any_ company from trying to curb that toxicity (whether it's the perfect approach to doing so or not)

At just 5.6% they are not doing enough! Capitalism has made "unwanted" people the outliers and capitalism can fix it!

One way to improve hiring could by legislating that for-profit companies should do away with drug tests and background verification. Systemic & instituitional racism means a lot of people of the wrong race/color are simply ineligible to be hired just because they have drug charges or they have a record because once took a loaf of bread from Kroger.

Billion-dollar corporations can afford to hire them, mix them with existing teams, have them learn on the job from the best people in the industry and turn them to be a productive person of the society. In the short term, yes it can cause pain and loss of productivity, but in the long-term, as the society we all can come ahead!

I think the satire is being lost on people.

> would you rather work at Google on Gmail or at Microsoft on Outlook?

Actually, Outlook is much more usable than GMail, but apparently that doesn’t translate to developer prestige.

I hate articles like these and their appeals to "meritocracy".

Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men. Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best" candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not.

My current team is a diverse group of well-rounded people. Some women, some men, some younger, some older, from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Guess which is the higher performing? Guess which has a safe atmosphere with zero dick measuring? Guess which is the most pleasant to be a part of? Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior? etc etc

Sure, there's lots of room for improvement in how tech businesses actually implement diversity vs just paying lip service to it and slicing numbers. But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely needed in the industry.

Anyone with their head out their asses who has ever worked a real job knows that the "meritocracy" is bullshit. Plenty of under performers get jobs. Plenty of overachievers get run down for a variety of factors. The idea that the worthy somehow rise above adversity is confirmation bias at its very worst.

I don't even think you want a "meritocracy". I want a world where people are happy. If that means they're all doing jobs they suck at, then so be it.

> "If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not."

Yes, it's true. There has never been a strong team of young, white nerdy men. Never happened.

Technological and engineering progress was at a baffling standstill for centuries until the wisdom of diversity, inclusion and equity dawned upon us.

Your sarcasm would work better if anyone understood what the hell you were trying to refer to. You seem to ascribe "technological and engineering progress" exclusively to teams of young, white, nerdy men in this comment, which is clearly something only an idiot would do, so I presume you are trying to make a different, better point. Feel free to let us know what that might be.

From TFA:

> But they make horrible teams.

To be fair, Microsoft Teams is horrible.

I think op is saying these things:

- We've had major progress over the last however many decades.

- A lot of the teams responsible for that work were probably made up of young white nerdy males (obviously not all, but young nerdy males probably covers a large portion of them, otherwise why would we even be here talking about DEI initiatives?)

- were all of those teams horrible?

No, the OP is taking for granted that "a lot" of the teams responsible for that work were made of young white nerdy males, and provides no justification for this assumption. Especially in a world where, prior to the current computer boom, Western scientific progress has been associated with grizzled elderly people in solitary labs, and technology was the purview of megacorps run by middle-aged managers.

I think the point was that quite a bit of technolgical progess happened in the world prior to diversity initiatives. The reference to white nerds likely places the comment in an historical US perspective, possibly western European. Advanced technologies developed in other non-diverse cultures as well. China comes to mind in particular. But I feel like you knew that already. "Feel free to let us know what that might be." If we have sarcasm tags, maybe we should have snark tags as well?

This is a fallacy, unless you would change your mind if someone else experienced the opposite.

"Making a good team" is part of meritocracy. D&I is often implemented as an entirely separate quota system.

> Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men. Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best" candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not.

Do you think this would be true if you expanded it to all teams made up of one single demographic? Or is it just young white nerdy males? Cause that would sound pretty controversial if you swapped out white for any other color.

Dare they go to another country that is heavily one demographic and hence the tech teams are. All those countries' teams are "horrible"? God forbid a family be of shared blood.

There are no countries that are "heavily one demographic"

What?? It is common for certain areas to be mostly populated by a certain demographic. Iceland: 93% ethnic Icelandic. Bolivia 88% Mestizo/Indigenous. Thailand 93% Buddhist. India 80% Hindu. Japan 98% ethnic Japanese. Nigeria 100% fast. Dive in to specific geographic areas within a country and it is often fully homogenous.

https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16...

Oh yeah, everyone in those countries are the same ethnicity, gender, the same relationship and family status, the same interests and personality type etc etc?

Literally no diversity proponents are saying tech teams in Taiwan must have 20% African Americans or whatever and you'd have to be completely missing the point, or willfully missing it, to think so. In any case, it's pretty telling of your level of understanding of the topic that you seem to think that's what we're saying.

Likewise using friggin India and Nigeria as examples of "fully homogenous" countries is also very telling of your knowledge about other countries from your own. Just wow.

Hi please reread. It was a reply to the comment about an all young white nerdy men team being bad because they are all white and male, saying "But they make horrible teams". Second, I used statistics, not opinion. You straw man with this "everyone in those countries are" followed by describing how no 2 people occupy the same space-time. Please read what a person writes and listen to what a person says rather than warping it to your need. Just wowy :D

>But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely needed in the industry

Diversity on most commonly selected metrics barely does a thing as far as empirical evidence goes.

The metrics that really matter aren't actively selected for. At best they are a byproduct. More often than not, the teams willing to be open about hiring gain their benefits over being open and cooperative rather than their diversity hires magically boosting things.

But by all means, let's continue to be reductionist by stereotyping 'le weird white young male' group.

> Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior?

I find the current push toward so-called equity to be more toxic than anything I experienced on male-dominated teams. People fear saying things because they don't want to be called out. Someone uses a phrase like "off the reservation" or "grandfathered" or "whitelisted" and then we have to have a meeting about how someone might have been offended. Was anyone offended? No. But we'll have a meeting to discuss a hypothetically-offended person. This leads to some behavior change but also some silent backlash.

I get that certain types of toxic behavior might be limited on diverse teams. But it's simply not the case that by adding women and minorities we will eliminate toxic behavior. From what I've seen, we simply swap one type of toxicity for another.

Speechless.

> every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men.

You worked at Big-O Tires as an installer?

>Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior?

Probably the one that isn't making hiring decisions based on the colour of the applicant's skin.

>If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not.

This is clear racial prejudice.

Most of the top comments are literally recapitulating all the received unexamined "common sense meritocracy" talking points which are systematically examined and dismantled as the first order of business in such training.

Depressing, but not suprising.

This policy sounds like exactly what it should be. This is to make up for things like this (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...), but having a black sounding name makes you less likely to get an interview.

If society doesn't put some effort into overcoming its biases, those biases will always exist.

> Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they got to where they are because of their accomplishments?

And then they show a graph where only 5.6% of the execs are black (up from 3.7%). It's a pitiful number.

Yes, it's still more likely they got there because of their accomplishments, bigot.

> From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft’s AI Platform division.

Wow. A whole year. In large companies that's barely enough time to understand all the unspoken lines of communication, let alone pass judgment on a company's culture.

Well only 4.5% of all people in Washington are black. If we go by country wide population white people white people are not really over presented in MS leadership, Asians are though, as much as blacks are underrepresented.

How many black people from elsewhere in the country can afford to move to seattle, where most of the tech jobs in Washington are?

So, let me guess.... It means in practice hiring BiPOC and women in "diversity positions", all the while keeping them away from engineering and engineering management (you know, the positions that pay $$$$$$).

I've seen BiPOC and women candidates turned down time and again because they "fit" better in the bullshit diversity spots. And then there's a rant about "fit" also known as "we want to discriminate on illegal or unethical things but we cant actually say that".

It's obvious the writer of the article felt what he was asked to do was a mere distraction, made obvious by his statement that he would rather go back to "focusing on producing great software"

This would have sense if it wasn't for the fact that the company that he works for, the folks that are paying him to be there, are actually asking him to do the thing that he is paying lip-service to.

I would hate to have an employee who doesn't do what they're directed to do because they thought they knew better. Unless it's something illegal, if you're going to collect a paycheck, you either do what you're asked to do or you leave. You don't continue to take their money but do something other than what they're asking for. Ridiculous.

Ugh, another one of these.

> There weren’t any quotas around how many of these “diverse” candidates I had to actually hire, but I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the annual D&I report look good.

Correct, there aren't quotas, but of course that doesn't stop the author from speculating that there might be, and basing the rest of the article on that.

> Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy.

Missing here is how BIPOC and women have been systemically under-promoted relative to their work output, and yes, although there is no quota, someone is checking in to make sure a manager (i.e., someone who has power over their reports' lives) is aware of systemic biases when approaching their decision-making. What is terrible about this exactly?

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