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Comment by 127361 | Hacker News Reader

If we're not hiring based on merit then we're destroying the country's global competitiveness against China.

Hiring is not based on merit anyway. Plenty of talented and skillful workers who may lack in the social and communication skills department, don't have a maxed out and blinged up LinkedIn profile with a bazillion connections or have a resume that was automatically filtered into the rejection stream.

I agree with you otherwise, just wanted to point it out though.

Merriam Webster defines merit as "a praiseworthy quality".

Programming skills would qualify as merit but so would "social and communication skills". Hiring based on any of those skills would still be hiring on merit. Having an immutable characteristic like a specific gender or race is not a praiseworthy quality.

Being able to sell yourself during a job interview is not necessarily a good indicator of your ability to communicate effectively at work. Instead it selects for people are shameless self-promoters.

I never suggested that it was. I'm just saying it is a skill to being able to promote yourself. Hiring based on a skill (even if it is only semi-related to the job) is hiring based on merit.

Also, if you can sell yourself you are likely to be able to sell ideas which is a good skill for developers to have.

Depending on the work, it may be more valuable than coding ability even. You need people with the right ideas that can win arguments. Without that you can only build garbage.

So we need to address that one as well, so we can employ those who are brilliant technically but might not be so good at socializing. We urgently need something to counter the rise of China, so we are going to have to adapt as a society in order to compete globally.

In fact, hiring such people would be a step towards real diversity in the workplace, if we can find a way to fit them in somehow.

Also it would be in Russia and China's interest to promote these diversity agendas, in order to destabilize and weaken the West. I remember someone say these DEI agendas are a part of a "long march through the institutions" - something right out of China's playbook? If there's a real possibility of state actors promoting such agenads, then this is a serious national security issue.

Do you agree the important negative (often unconscious, based on cognitive bias) discrimination against minorities is a problem for the country competitiveness ? (negatively discriminated despite "merit")

Do you agree that reducing racial gap and gender gap in USA would be better for the country and its competitiveness ?

I am not a fan of quota, especially taken in isolation... But the underlying issued are huge, for a moral (not everybody have the same moral) but also economic standpoint

Racism is a societal disease. But it doesn’t follow that racial quotas is the cure. That is the Politician’s Fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Yes on the first question, no on the second question.

A diverse workforce, and thus diversity of perspectives, thoughts, and opinions, is a major competitive advantage against a monoculture that doesn’t value diverse thinking.

Why not hire specifically for "diversity of perspectives, thoughts, and opinions" then? Why bring race into it?

that is one proxy

Are you saying all blacks think the same way?

Most big companies want compliant followers who don't make themselves, their bosses, or the company look bad. The problem is the fads of business theater: open offices, DEI, butt-in-seat mentality, multiple layers of top-down militant managers, and multiple rounds of layoffs and uncertainty are the worst.

Would be a beautiful thing. But these initiatives don’t do that: instead, they select for a political and socioeconomic monoculture, with diversity in physical appearance only.

Everybody thinks they merit a position but your resumes all look the same. If you’re being switched out for some rando your work doesn’t matter.

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