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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

Whenever my company has had conversations about DEI initiatives, I always come back to the same argument: "talk is cheap, we can talk all day long about how we are diverse. How about we shut up, put our money where our mouth is, and actually hire some folks from diverse backgrounds".

DEI is something that is easy to talk about but actually kinda hard to implement. Part of the problem is the makeup of the industry in general. In tech for example it would be physically impossible for companies to be 50/50 male/female because the broader industry doesn't break down that way, same goes for any race, religion, background, etc. Companies love to scream from the rooftops about DEI because yelling about it is significantly easier than actually doing it.

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> actually hire some folks from diverse backgrounds

Because you’re trying to hire from a small pool of candidates (minority software developer or whatever) that EVERY OTHER tech company is trying to get in a desperate attempt to not look bad (because not having a sufficient number of minorities on staff is a sin).

It’s simply a question of numbers. There’s only so many minorities, and only a fraction of them are sufficiently talented, and everyone wants them. Your company may not be a big enough name to woo these folks. So it’s not necessarily the fault of your leadership to act on their principles.

Now there’s a whole OTHER can of worms associated with DEI, which is that everyone wants minority employees => there’s a lack of them => let’s lower our standards to widen the pool we have to choose from, and your company certainly could go down that route if you think they’re not doing enough.

Yeah I look at it from a top level. Say that in the tech industry, 20% (totally made up number BTW) of your workers are black. It would be possible for some companies to have >20% of their workforce be black, but if you look at the top employers (GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, AAPL, etc), there would be physically impossible for them to hire >20% black workers because there are simply not enough of them out there in the broader workforce.

The solution here is to drive more black people into the tech field, in order to raise that 20% figure that would then get reflected among tech companies. This is something that an individual company cannot solve, even at Google or Apple scale, it would have to be at the government level and even that is a complete crapshoot.

TL;DR: Diversity quotas are hard.

> The solution here is to drive more black people into the tech field

What's funny is everyone will agree the pool of available candidates to choose from is incredibly small due to (among other things) issues in education, but those same people won't cut companies any slack if they don't hit a certain percentage of minority employees. It then becomes a game of brute forcing minorities into every part of society where they're under-represented, all at once -- because the "real fix" will take decades.

>TL;DR: Diversity quotas are hard

Diversity quotas are wrong.

If you hire the black candidate because you have a quota to fill. How is that morally different to hiring a white person just because they're white?

The only situation where I can think of quotas being a 'good' is to rectify a past self sustaining imbalance. If you made the case that the police are racist, because they're all white, therefore black people don't want to join, I would say that's a good candidate. But it isn't a good thing in and of itself, and shouldn't be an ongoing thing. Because it's corrosive in its own right.

I would rather Google/apple/Amazon put effort into education if they feel there's an issue. I would guess the issue is one of poverty rather than colour per se. Targeting and helping schools in poor areas would actually be helping where it mattered, giving people the best start in life whatever their colour, rather than someone who already had that start, but happens not to be white.

Quotas are a straw/boogeyman. Most companies have hiring targets. The difference is that quotas must be filled (which doesn't make business or social sense) whereas hiring targets are goals (which aren't required to be attained).

Except those "targets" are often tied to things like pay and promotion. That really blurs the line between "quota" and "target". For example Intel docked people's pay unless they hit their totally-not-a-quota target of 40% women and URM hires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34679982

Agreed that DEI initiatives are hard, but the picture is a bit incomplete.

Quotas are the boogey/strawman that get trotted out when DEI initiatives are mentioned.

Quotas _must_ be filled, and this serves no one, not the companies doing the hiring (because there aren't enough qualified candidates, and hiring unqualified candidates is bad for business), nor the candidates themselves (because they didn't get hired on their own merits, and imposter syndrome).

Hiring _targets_, on the other hand, should be attained but can be missed due to lack of qualified candidates. When these misses occur, if the company is serious and capable about DEI initiatives, there's an investigation into why that is and if there's anything that can be done to remedy it, e.g. supporting educational/industrial pipelines, creating internship/apprenticeship programs or training opportunities for those changing careers, and so on.

> Hiring _targets_, on the other hand, should be attained

How do you determine what those targets should be? This implies the we can determine the correct % of X race/gender/etc.

Locally the pool of candidates might seem small. Globally it is much larger than one thinks or realizes.

To say that the company has a moral duty to file immigration paperwork or set up remote offices solely to increase diversity is a big ask.

When this topic comes up I always remember a friend's comments about Google shuttering their Atlanta office: they say they want to hire Black employees, but not "where they actually, you know, live". It's not that hard to find employees of color; they just tend to live in different places. It's also not necessarily easy to move somewhere nobody looks like you — which I also experienced as a white guy in China.

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