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Comment by spurgu | Hacker News Reader

Good. Hiring based on race is... racist.

No, this is bad. Because the whole point of a diversity program is to reduce hiring based on race[0].

If a business is, say, 100% white men, it's extremely unlikely for this to have happened purely by chance. Like, "all the fast molecules in a can of air moving to one side" levels of impossible. If you want to argue that the problem is education or qualifications instead of overt refusal to hire minorities, that's one thing[1], but that's not an argument against measuring the company's diversity at all. That's an argument against affirmative action policies.

As far as I'm concerned, deleting this page is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear and shouting "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" at the problem.

[0] Or sex, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, etc...

[1] Though I will disagree vehemently with the idea that it's purely an education problem. The minorities are here, they just don't stick around because big tech treats them like garbage.

The crucial piece you're missing is that the problem is further upstream. Most American commercial pilots are white men. Most job applicants are too.

Forcing airlines to hire people who are not qualified just to meet a quota is the absolute worst way to solve this problem. In fact, it exacerbates it. What do you think happens when you force employers to hire people who are unqualified, and those people are all women or minorities? Well, now you just might create a perception that women and minorities are inherently less capable. Obviously untrue. But let's fix the pipeline instead of mandating "equity".

We should also work towards accepting that people are different and they have different drives and passions in their life. I imagine most Hindu women do not aspire to being professional rappers, or construction workers, for example.

No, "fixing the pipeline" is also a red herring. The problem isn't "tech businesses should hire more women just for their gender" or "more women need to get CS degrees". The way you get to, say, all white men in your field is from attrition; i.e. all the women and minorities burning out and changing careers. That burnout comes from exploitative labor practices and workplace harassment, which are rampant in the tech industry - and especially in games development.

If your business is able to properly enforce workplace rules against harassment, then you will have more women and minorities than other firms purely because they will remain at the company. No need for quotas, diversity hires, or affirmative action.

There's a difference between having a quota and having a target.

Targets can be missed, and reasons for the miss can be explored, e.g. were there sufficient qualified candidates in the pipeline? If not, what can be done about it. The hope is that over time, a target will be hit.

That said, I agree with you that quotas are problematic. They are the wrong solution for the problem of lack of diversity.

> Targets can be missed, and reasons for the miss can be explored, e.g. were there sufficient qualified candidates in the pipeline? If not, what can be done about it. The hope is that over time, a target will be hit.

And if it's not, surely the company can find a hiring manager "a bit more motivated to hit company diversity targets".

If you run a mom and pop shop and need a new employee, sure, this strategy is great. Codifying it at major corporations creates all of the same bad incentives as quotas, just implicitly.

> If a business is, say, 100% white men, it's extremely unlikely for this to have happened purely by chance.

Affirmative action is indeed based on this fundamentally flawed premise. Such statistical bias occurs quite frequently, even in the absence of racism/discrimination. This is, among other things, evidenced by some minority groups being disproportionally successful in many societies. I strongly recommend Thomas Sowell's book on the topic: "Discrimination and Disparities".

I think the bigger problem here is 50% for women. Mind blowing.

Why is that mind blowing?

Because the pool of male engineers is ~4-8x larger than female candidates, so hiring 50% women is intentionally hiring worse employees because of their genitals.

Isn't the interview process the same for each role regardless? How does the size of the pool matter?

The interview process may be the same but the hiring choices ultimately must be discriminatorily skewed to achieve 50% women in the workforce if the percentage of women among the applicants is way less.

I've been part of a number of recruiting exercises to hire 20-100 SWEs at different levels. DE&I is front and center, both implicitly through corporate culture and explicitly through reminders, comments, etc in the process. It very clearly influences outcomes.

I've come to terms with it as the results have been pretty impressive in the last place I worked. It creates a 'put up or shut up' environment where excuses don't really get much traction. I led a team of eight SWE and six were women, representing both the top and bottom of skillset and teamwork in my crew, one in particular being easily top three engineers I've worked with in my 25 year career. She has the potential to go very very far.

It says half of the workforce, not half of engineers

The pool is skewed male because of sexist bullshit. Computers used to be viewed as predominantly clerical and thus women were far more prevalent. And it’s patently false to assume it has to effect hiring quality at all.

Nonsense, in countries with higher gender equality women naturally flow to careers more in line with their strengths, tech is not one of them. Men and women are not equal.

>women naturally flow to careers more in line with their strengths

Explain what you mean by this, without making a hacked butcher job of it.

I’ve got a fresh drink and plate of snacks, I’m actually giddily excited to see how you do (and of course have the X-posts drafted out already)

Ok, but why is the pool of engineers 80% men when the population is 50% women?

I'll offer one explanation: because the women that go into the field get treated like shit and burn out. There are many documented examples of tech businesses with systemic sexual harassment problems[0]. If your business takes steps to ensure its corporate culture does not fall into that same trap, then women who don't want to be sexually harassed will flock to you. That's how you get 50% women in a sexually-discriminated field: do the hard work of actually rooting out sex pests.

[0] Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard-King, Microsoft, etc

Hmm.

Is it conceivable to you that women may also be inherently less interested in tech- and more so in people-jobs compared to their male counterparts?

Maybe this interesting talk titled "Autism and the male brain" can serve to enlighten you on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjE_yaJjXE8

Because it is not representative of the underlying demographics. There are vastly more men trained to work in the field (one representative datapoint: there's an 80/20 gender difference in computer science degrees).

If you are hiring equal numbers of women and men from a talent pool which is 80% male then you are almost certainly illegally discriminating on the basis of a protected class.

Or just heavily recruiting from women dominated spaces.

Also say what you will about it, once a company/team gets known for having women other women will flock to it.

Edit: haha people downvoting for the reality that women like working with other women.

To me, the "at least" qualifier makes it look pretty bad. So if they reached 75% it wouldn't be a diversity issue?

Also, they're saying: "At least half of our Tweepforce will be women". So they're suggesting that more than 50% of one gender is ok, as long as they're women.

A majority in one company of an overall underrepresented demographic isn’t the oppression that you so desperately want it to be.

Only 28% of software developers are women, so it’s impossible for all of tech to get to 50%. The only way to actually get 50% representation is by promoting tech careers to women, or by barring jobs/training to men

In my university not too long ago, my classes were maybe 14% women? May have been slightly more in others, but I remember counting at one point

We need to stop accusing companies of being sexist, they are bending over backwards to try to be the ones who get closer to 50%, which reduces the available female talent pool for other companies.

All these sexism allegations are completely toxic

The fix comes from outreach towards teen and preteen girls to convince them to consider stem. I’ve attended lectures on this

Yeah, same logic applies.

Not really, minorities generally easily make up more than 25% at tech companies. You don’t have to go out of your way to make that happen.

It’s just not possible to get 50% of women in without significant handicaps to the interview process.

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