Tech's DEI backlash is here
techcrunch.com
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We had an All Hands once where they actually spent 20+ minutes talking about the Genderbread Cookie, which I found especially egregious. Not that I have a problem with the Genderbread Cookie, but an All Hands is the most expensive meeting a company can host. Why are we learning about sex and gender identity vocabulary in that meeting?
Of course, this all matters a lot less than hiring and promotion processes. I don't work at a larger company, so I don't think I've seen the worst of it. Smaller businesses still have to take what they can get, and if that means the pipeline is mostly Asian men and white men, that's who gets hired.
Even people ranting anonymously in Blind would admit we had ~nothing extreme like this. Nothing even close. Yet we were famous for it.
For them, the issue was feeling they couldn't share their politic opinions without derision because their coworkers were uniformly liberal.
If you tweeted this and tweeted about DEI a lot I'd say you were making it up completely. You aren't. That's very very very strange. I've never even heard of the Genderbread Cookie.
I've been wondering if maybe mid-small corporation try-hards were ending up doing some distorted funhouse mirror version of "let's try to interview more minorities and champion them more publicly?" and ended up doing crazy stuff.
https://www.samkillermann.com/work/
You can find it on that ^^ list, along with other projects by the same person.
From a director during a all-hands.
"We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman"
From my manager's manager.
"Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman"
The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things otherwise it is simply too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high.
Would that offend you in the same way?
Interviewing someone who is male and getting told that we can't hire them because they are male is gender-based discrimination.
For example, there is an optical illusion where people see the top line as shorter:
<——>
>—-<
Everyone falls for this illusion across all countries and cultures, so much so that folks hypothesized it is affected by our biology. Well, until some anthropologist showed it to some African tribesman. It turns out they were not susceptible to that form of illusion at all. It is unclear why.
My point is that if something as simple estimates of a length of line can benefit from diversity of thought, imagine how many other “obvious” yet wrong assumptions people make. And that is why it is valuable to include people of different genders, races, abilities.
Just like it is okay to pass on a yet another Python developer, maybe it is okay to pass on yet another person who assumes the top line is shorter.
Look, I don’t like the idea of quotas, either. But I also don’t like working at place where everyone is the same.
You want more people from poor backgrounds so that you can take into account lower socioeconomic viewpoints? Well, the modern DEI answer to that is hire a black person. The correct answer is to hire someone that grew up poor.
That was disproven. This is scientific racism/bio-essentialism. Let's not go there, it's an evil path.
My contention nor original researchers, so far as I can tell, claimed the difference was based on race or biology. It looks like they thought it had to do with the presence of rectilinear buildings, thus cultural.
Some subsequent research did hypothesize eye pigmentation played a role and that was disproven. However, as far as I can tell, different groups of people have differing abilities to perceive illusions.
Moreover, my fundamental point was that culture affects thought, and a variety of thought is valuable. Do you dispute either of those points?
(This sort of thing is why I distrust many statements asserted as fact without citations by posters on HN; too often they turn out to be incorrect, incomplete, or out of date.)
I think the catch is that diversity of thought itself, tells you nothing. You have to be accepting of different viewpoints. This sounds obvious, of course, but a lot of people seem to be weaponizing their being different as a way to overrule previous thoughts. This isn't diversity of viewpoints, this is replacing viewpoints.
This is most easily seen when a crowd is constantly correcting another. Not seeking to understand. Not adding details. Correcting and admonishing.
To directly answer your question, yes, that phrasing would likely bother me. "Let me know if you have someone that you are convinced could help us." That alone should be good enough. If there is a specific skillset, that is a different matter. (Note, I don't think I'd be bothered to the point of offense.)
The issue is when you swap out "private sector experience" with protected classes like race and gender. That's illegal.
This is largely analogous to the "Opportunistic Hiring" policies Dropbox introduced in April 2019. We set aside reserved headcount for "diverse" candidates (ostensibly this includes women of any race, and URM men. In practice, almost entirely non-URM women). When a team hired a "diverse" candidate, the headcount was drawn from the reserved pool not the team's normal headcount allocation.
In practice, this meant that women were often hired into roles without much work to do. By far the most common complaints I've heard from women in tech is that the company doesn't have enough work for them and they aren't being given projects. Makes me wonder how many companies are engaging in similar behavior.
Even though some people would call me that, I've always hated that term/ideology. I wish companies would shift their mindset to, "a candidate that adds to our diversity". E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio so it's more representative of the source population. We haven't done as well with regard to racial and age non-discrimination. As we do better in either of those two categories, the definition of "a candidate that adds to our diversity" will change.
> We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman
This is both true and legal (though I wish it included NBs as well). The more candidates you select from a given demographic, the probability increases that your organization is participating in a discriminatory system. If it makes it more palatable, reword it in your head by tacking on at the end, "... so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination."
> Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman
Studies have shown even women evaluate women more harshly than they evaluate men. Extra justification is warranteed when gender is known or implied and the reviewer is likely to have unconscious bias. That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. (That said, there are a lot of gender implications on many applications, so it can be tough to hide gender completely).
> The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things
Alternatively, guaranteed job placement into one's chosen profession would help everyone indiscriminately. Trying to ban anti-discrimination efforts serves only status quo biases.
> too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high
I agree this is a risk. Surely there are some people who "bring this up" in a bigoted way and are rightfully fired, but I suspect there's a number of people who, with a gentle reframing, can see how their views are problematic and can learn the knowledge gaps that caused them to come to the wrong conclusion. From the company's perspective, they're doing anti-discrimination work, and an employee objection sounds like they're pro-discrimination. It's a bilateral failure to communicate in an at-will employment relationship.
> This is both true and legal
Absolutely not. Using any protected class (race, gender, religion, disability, etc.) in hiring decisions is illegal unless this is a bona fide occupational qualification [1]. You can deliberately hire a Black person to play Frederick Douglass in a move. You cannot deliberately hire or favor someone on the basis of race or gender for software development jobs. This example above is textbook illegal discrimination: "I don't want to select $protected_class_X, it'd be best of the next one was $protected_class_Y". The fact that the previous hire belonged to $protected_class_X does not in any way make it legal to discriminate on the next hire.
Companies do this, but they're breaking the law and hoping they aren't going to be held accountable. And as per TFA, now that they're realizing that people aren't as supportive of racial and gender discrimination as they thought these policies are being rolled back.
> That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor.
Interestingly, all the DEI staff I've encountered have resoundingly shut down calls to anonymize applications. It puzzled me at first until I attended a career fair and recruiters instructed us to mark female URM candidates with two stars, non-URM women and URM men with one star, and Asian men with "ND". Which I later learned stood for "negative diversity". I poked around the onboarding docs recruiters had, and they linked to census data on majority-female and majority-URM names. Recruiters were being given specific percentage quotas for women and URM hires. Of course they don't want anonymization. It all makes sense when you realize DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination.
> E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man
This really struck me as an odd thing to say. You admit that women are overrepresented, and elsewhere in your comment you seem to think that discrimination favoring women is legal. Yet you assume that the overrepresentation of women is evidence that your company isn't discriminatory.
Imagine someone wrote this: "Our company is good at avoiding anti-male discrimination, so we're well above industry average in our men:women ratio." And now imagine that the same person writes that refusing to hire a woman for an internship is legal if the previous intern hire was a woman. Do you think this person's company is non-discriminatory?
The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men [2], so maybe don't assume that your company's overrepresentation of women is because other companies are discriminating against women and yours is non-biased.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...
2. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
Right. And they're saying it would be best if they weren't accidentally doing that.
> DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination
Why do you think this? All efforts I've seen have been to correct for the discrimination currently occurring in the system.
> You admit that women are overrepresented
I don't. We're still substantially less than 50% of engineering.
> The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men
If this were true, men would be the minority. Women like money just as much as men do, and would leverage that non-existent favoritism to get those high paying jobs.
"We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman" This is deliberately engaging in discrimination on the basis of gender. The fact that the previous hire was a man does not make it legal to use gender as a factor in hiring the next candidate, this is the gambler's fallacy [1]. I'm truly baffled as to how you think this is preventing discrimination by explicitly voicing preference for a protected class.
Your line of thinking amounts to, "we should intentially discriminate on the basis of gender, so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination."
> Why do you think this? All efforts I've seen have been to correct for the discrimination currently occurring in the system.
Because companies often "correct" for discrimination that doesn't exist. At two of the three tech companies I've worked at, these "corrections" took the form of quotas mandating that 33% and 40% of tech hires be women, respectively. Despite the fact that ~20% of software developers and 10% of electrical engineers are women, and those two fields made up the overwhelming majority tech roles at these companies and women were already above industry average representation. This isn't correcting for discrimination. This is mandating 2-3x overrepresentation of women, this is discrimination. It'd be one thing to anonymize resumes, stripping out names, racially identifying details, and otherwise prevent recruiters and interviewers from knowing the race and gender of applicants. I'd be all for that. But that's the opposite of what DEI strives to do.
And how do you know that women are discriminated against? Do you send mock resumes to your recruiters and notice disparities between men and women? Do you anonymize interviews and notice a disparity? I doubt it. As we'll see, you reach the conclusion that women are discriminated against in a very simplistic way.
> I don't. We're still substantially less than 50% of engineering.
Correct, women make up about 20% of tech workers. Thus, a company that has 40% women in tech roles has an overrepresentation of women. Why are you comparing the demographics of a specific field with the general population? If a hospital institutes a policy that 50% of pediatricians be male, that'd be massively discriminatory against women because they make up well over 50% of pediatricians.
You seem to erroneously believe that equal employment opportunity means each job must strive to match the general population. This is incorrect. The benchmark is the demographics of the workforce, not the general population. Don't just trust me, read the law [2]:
"[Affirmative Action] is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market."
If the workforce for a particular job is 80% women and 20% men and a company has 50% women and 50% men in that role, then that company is going to have a hard time getting Federal contracts because it's probably discriminating against women. Same if the genders were reversed. Equity with respect to the workforce not the general population is what matters.
> If this were true, men would be the minority. Women like money just as much as men do, and would leverage that non-existent favoritism to get those high paying jobs.
Disparity is not evidence of bias. Should the government mandate that women make up 50% of murder convictions? Is this just "correcting" for discrimination? No, that is discrimination. Achieving that quota would involve either convicting innocent women or deliberately letting guilty men go free, because men commit more murder than women. A non-discriminatory justice system doesn't try to achieve a predetermined outcome, it ensures that each defendant is treated equally. Quotas inevitably compromise this equality.
Women make up ~25% of the STEM workforce (software development specifically is a bit lower, around 20%). This directly matches the rate at which they graduate from STEM fields. Which matches the rate at which they say they're interested in STEM in surveys given to high school and middle school [3]. You assume that the only thing that can explain a disparity is bias or discrimination. You totally ignore the fact that women have agency. Sure women like money, but they choose on their own initiative to earn that money in different fields.
Your replies here are excellent in illustrating how DEI is more often than not a dog whistle for gender and racial discrimination. Women are already overrepresented at your company relative to the available workforce ("we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio"), and you've repeatedly insisted that discriminating on the basis of gender is legal. Your justification for this is that women make up less than 50% of tech workers.
But that's not how anti-discrimination law works. The law requires that applicants are discriminated against on the basis of protected class, not achieving equity with respect to the general population. If 80% of the workforce is one gender, then a non-discriminatory company would probably hire about 80% of said gender. Policies designed to push down representation of that group to bring it more in line with the general population isn't correcting for discrimination, it is actively perpetrating illegal discrimination. And that's what DEI is usually about.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy
You cannot fix the world by implementing new types of bias and discrimination, even if it is being wrapped up and sold as diversity and inclusion or however else it is pitched. This should be unconstitutional and against the Equal Protection Clause in the Constitution period.
We cannot and should not ever judge a book by its cover. We must always focus on merit, ability, and equality first. However, I do think society needs to provide social nets to help people get free education that are not able to afford it if the education has promise to lead to great career opportunities.
From the film Lincoln, 'Euclid's first common notion is this: "Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other." That's a rule of mathematical reasoning. It's true because it works; has done and will always will do. In his book, Euclid says this is "self-evident." You see, there it is, even in that two-thousand year old book of mechanical law: it is a self-evident truth of things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to each other. We begin with equality. That's the origin, isn't it? That balance-that's fairness, that's justice.'
We are all homo sapiens and need to be treated fairly, equally. No one should be given structural preferential bias on a public or private level. We have fought so hard for equality in this country, DEI is a step backwards in equality by sanctioning new biases.
Each generation benefits from the prosperity of the last, giving them a leg up over those without that advantage. Over time, random chance may reduce the resulting advantage to below the noise floor, but how long should those affected be expected to wait?
Or maybe we can try to remedy the situation, now, for the living. Overt diversity initiatives try to solve the problem that someone from a marginalized group is likely to be less qualified than their unmarginalized peers because they've had fewer opportunities to become qualified exactly because of that marginalization. If you don't take corrective action, then you just perpetuate the problem.
So, if you still are opposed to corrective action: How many centuries is enough?
What about the people growing up now who have only ever been discriminated against? What happens to these demographics in 20 or 30 years? We're lucky the backlash is happening now and not then.
Creating more discrimination is never the solution, it just creates more problems.
No one wants to post some James Damore screed decrying the longhouse, nor some 2010s style social justice screed.
No matter which side you argue, you'll get a 1,000 very uninteresting comments from uncurious ideologues doing their duty to defend The Good Truth. I don't like to talk to these partisan soldiers, but rather, curious scouts having fun exploring ideas. Maybe that's because I have the privilege to not take these ideas so personally, or maybe I'm a brave hero speaking out against the HR scolds.
Blegh. It's all so tired. Mom and dad arguing in the other room, about things which are surely much more important than my gameboy, but which nevertheless seem much less interesting to me.
By the time I post, others will have gotten here sooner. We'll see if my pessimism is justified. I'm gonna close my laptop, since clearly I'm procrastinating instead of finishing that keylogging article I'm supposed to be writing. I'll write it at home. I miss my babies.
Hope you all have a merry Christmas btw!
As you said, it's tiring, and there are other things to talk about online that don't inevitably lead to the worst possible outcomes.
> hostile interlocutors
A strong noise filter is indeed required.
Did you read what he actually wrote, instead of just the whines of Googlers and the journalists who amplified them? I ignored the whole thing for a long time, but when I finally read it word for word out of curiosity well after the shitstorm, I thought it was one of the most reasonable and blatantly obvious things I had ever read.
In this case, it's explicit privilege in hiring, promotions, and legal mandates for reporting in layoffs.
Seems like he's pushing for equality
Firing people because they make you uncomfortable is ridiculous. It's possible to be a grown-up adult and move on with your life if something makes you uncomfortable.
Also people forget that he posted it privately to an internal review group, looking for feedback before submitting it, and that internal group was the one that leaked it.
Here’s a long but useful read if you haven’t looked at the studies commonly cited before:
https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot...
> if you pull out a random man and a random woman, you have about a 77% chance the man will be taller
> you’d have about a 2% advantage over sheer random chance if you bet on the man to be more invested in achieving
I have no doubt that math is correct, but that's not the point. A small difference in the means becomes a big difference at the tails. And Google does select for the tail.
This response did the math: https://medium.com/@ryanbaldini/worth-noting-small-differenc...
Google employs on the order of 140k people and it’s unlikely that more than a few of those are so dependent on one of those narrow skills that it would dominate hiring, much less that the bias would always run in a single direction.
Anyway, the example you give - verbal tilt - makes other career prospects more desirable, so the person is less likely to become a programmer.
I just talked about how I think it is important for leaders to have an extra-fine antenna for the psychological well-being of your colleages when in a remote-first environment. The moment I uttered the word "psychological" it triggered the interviewer's DEI-driven buzzword thesaurus and he immediately started talking endlessly about their efforts for "Inclusivity" which of course stands for: if a non-straight, non-white, non-male candidate existed alongside me, they would've of course chosen him/her/... instead of me.
I know that this is what it meant because this were his exact words ;-) (which he confided in me thinking I would see statements like these as a good thing and not a massive red-flag)
Needless to say I declined.
Or of course that a link criticizing DEI would get flagged on HN. Shocker.
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
I agree though it's understandable if a bit sad that this submission gets flag killed. Better to stick to safer tech stuff unless there's a big story I guess!
Personally I don't believe the hype of this "backlash". It smells manufactured.
This is real diversity, and it's wrong to evaluate diversity in a way that ignores this.
affirmative action -> DEI
PC (political correctness) -> "woke"
Can't wait to see what the language for the next iteration of this looks like, because I doubt the debate itself is going away anytime soon.
So have the lawsuits, and the IBM lawsuit will change even more
PC != Woke
These are different terms for different concepts, even if there's some overlap.
One other observation. Some of these "diversity" candidates seem to have found a way to leverage this DEI 'movement' to advance their careers (at the risk of generalizing, but I'm only talking about extreme cases here). They put in a maybe 2 years of mediocre work, while spending an inordinate time on LinkedIn on relentless self-promotion to build up their profile for their next DEI entry point into another tech company on the DEI virtue signalling bandwagon.
what even does this mean
This is still illegal. You cannot, outside of bona fide occupational qualification [1], prioritize the hiring any any protected class (race, gender, religion, etc.) over another.
Also, care to explain the criteria for "diverse"? Answer that question and swap out "diverse" in the sentence above with your answer. Then read it aloud, and ask yourself if that's something that's legal. There's a reason why companies hide behind euphemisms like "diverse".
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...
Also, since when is being "diverse" a property of an individual rather than a group?
The justifications for benefitting underrepresented racial minorities seem way, way stronger than gender. Black and Latin students are less likely to go to college, while women are more likely to go to college than men. Some try to justify affirmative action for women in tech on the grounds of ameliorating the pay gap, but that too has reversed and now favors women. The idea that favoring women over men is justified to the same degree as favoring disadvantaged ethnic minorities seems absurd to me.
I'd be way more motivated to spend time mentoring or otherwise helping aspiring high school and college students from underprivileged backgrounds. But instead effectively all of the "DEI" I've seen has been preferences for well off White and Asian women, rather than people coming from underprivileged backgrounds
I want to be clear I don't fault or resent non-URM women. Many (most?) agree that diversity initiatives ought to be focused on ethnic disparities. These women also had no agency over these policies, they are institutions by leadership, often over the objections of the supposed beneficiaries.
Ideally I'd prefer if there was some mechanism to actually examine people's backgrounds. I'm Latin myself, but had educated parents, went to a top 10 school, and basically not disadvantaged in any way. But aggregate disparities do exist and I see reason to take action on them.
This is sadly a reality that is difficult to talk about.
I would even go further and say that we have a tendency to benefit the "least" minority of the minority. Hiring a black or Hispanic or women from MIT is from my perspectives not really what this work should be about. Those outliers already have enough opportunity, but tend to be the one benefiting from most efforts. I would love to see deeper investment like 3 or 4 year before college in more at risk communities.
I find that companies only care about improving their annual diversity report pie chart, and have adopted a cynical attitude along the lines of "the diverse talent pool is limited so we need to make sure we get more of them than our competitors". Nobody is actually trying to get more underprivileged people into tech as a whole.
A company instituting a DEI initiative where employees take one day a week mentoring students at a less affluent high school would do way more good than a percentage quota. The former actually makes the world have more software developers of underrepresented backgrounds. The latter just increase the share of "diverse" devs at that particular company, doesn't actually shift the needle in the industry as a whole.
If you want to fix a problem, you fix the original cause. You do not come along at the very end and adjust the values to where you think they should be.
Secondary Gain
In psychoanalytic theory, the advantage derived from a neurosis in addition to the primary gain of relief from anxiety or internal conflict. Advantages may include extra attention, sympathy, avoidance of work, and domination of others. Such gains are secondary in that they are derived from others’ reactions to the neurosis instead of from causal factors. They often prolong the neurosis and create resistance to therapy. Also called advantage by illness.
https://dictionary.apa.org/secondary-gain
Once a hindrance becomes a benefit all sorts of incentive problems begin to arise.
Musk and Thiel see the world in very specific ways. Because they are who they are, and the people that surround them, they will not change their view unless something drastic happens. They simply don't have to, because they are rich enough to weather any storm that requires anyone else to change tack. They have opinion gravity, where anything they say will become true, because people with the same opinions will gravitate towards them (see Taylor Swift & Kanye)
Don't get me wrong, there are parts of DEI that grate my balls: the performative celebration, the "days of action" and the tedious celebrations where we pretend that we've not got a problem with women in the workplace.
However, applying a bit of data to change a few procedures so that we get a better more diverse set of people joining and thriving, is fucking great. Done properly, most people wont notice.
I guess that's the problem. When it's not done properly, you can't criticize it, because you'll get fired.
And when it's not done properly, it's catastrophic (ie lowering hiring bars, hiring no-hire candidates, etc.)
I mean yeah, but everyone hired after me is a low bar hire. Thems the rules.
This is by far not the only such example in British life.
So this type of discrimination is rampant and out in the open. If you only read the Guardian you may not be aware of it.
come on, the gruaniad ceased to be a newspaper many years ago.
the source: https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/14007/html/
q141 actually makes a fair bit of sense, as its a insurance company who are the generally masters of hiring Henno who went to a good school, not Terry who's talented.
Moreover, its not "we directly discriminate" its "I question to make sure that the procedure is followed". Which is different.
Bear in mind, this is for rich senior insurance execs, who have a fucktonne of money to take people to court, you're sure as shit going to be sure that the policies they are talking about are going to be water fucking tight. Also, as its insurance, there are about 5 women who are that senior, so the CEO is going to be doing a lot of asking if the procedure is being followed.
Instead we get quotas for college admission, hiring, and promotion. Then, when the quotas aren't met because the candidate pools are way too small, we tell admissions officers and hiring managers to "stop putting up white males". Like everything else in corporate America, it just becomes a metric to be gamed.
Of course those days were numbered amongst organizations that have to focus on revenue instead of social justice
What an incredibly biased take by the author, who clearly has not worked at one of these companies and seen DEI in action. Having actually worked at big tech companies with DEI initiatives, there have been many instances when we have had to lower the hiring bar to meet diversity requirements.
What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit, and in times of layoffs, is often not targeted over engineering functions due to politics and PR. The whole DEI profession feels like a grift on top of the hard work of those that actually drove a company to success.
This is not to say a company shouldn't consider the diversity of users when building a product, UX, etc, but it's absurd when you're hiring a backend engineer and your team has to meet some vague diversity quota.
Where have you worked, if you don't mind me asking?
Where does the profits and dividends sent off to the idle class aristocracy fit into this constellation? Your resentment seems to mostly be that some dufferent people might be at the workplace.
I am annoyed by the fact that DEI is not targeted by layoffs but ostensibly contribute less to the company than engineering. I find it ridiculous that no one can criticize these initiatives without being labeled racist and fired by HR.
Do with that info what you will.
My resentment stems from the fact that I have witnessed people being hired with 3x more lenient interviews and end up doing 5-10% of what I do while being paid 80-90% of the money. Of course I will resent that. Every working person would be resentful of that.
I'm not a fan of corporate and especially tech DEI initiatives either, I don't think they're an effective way to achieve their stated goals. But the hiring bar thing just does not match my experience at all. Some of the worst teams I've been on have been behind some of the most grueling & "selective" interview processes and some of the best teams have had lax ones. Given how poor we are at actually predicting who is going to be a good coworker we might as well allow some other backgrounds in.
By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether. But for every team I've worked at, hiring bars clearly worked. We filter out maybe 95% of candidates and none of them would work for our team. Everyone on our team is incredible at what they do.
When I had to lower the hiring bar, it was destructive. We hired a person that was inexperienced and could not keep up with the rest of us. They did not have the domain knowledge others on our team had. They were eager, friendly, and personable, but they required a longer period of extensive coaching get up to a level we would consider adequate.
Did they end up being productive, and hopefully worth the effort?
---
As a data point I'm ok when hiring new people with less-than-desired level of experience (within reason ;>), as long as their general attitude and willingness to learn are solid.
Those last two mean they'll get the hang of things given some appropriate guidance, so it works out ok.
I don't think the parent comment is negating the need to hiring bars. IMO two important points :
1 - DEI and hiring bars are not opposed to one another. Actually well designed DEI program are meant to make sure the hiring bar are free of un neccesasary blockers.
2 - I think that mostly what the parent comment was trying to say, "hiring bars" is a nebulous term thrown around. Every team "saying/thinking" they have ha hiring bar doesn't mean that there actually have one. Just rejecting 99% percent of the candidate doesn't imply a good hiring bar... since you might selecting the bottom 1%...
Since we are throwing random samples of 1 on the internet, having been involved into some of those initiative at a large big tech company : Not lowering the bar was pretty much always top of mind, and we always made sure to be fair to ALL candidate.
Most of the initiative where around reaching a larger pool of candidate (for example reaching out to more school than we use too) and also addressing what looked to us like information deficiencies : Someone in an IVY league school for example just by osmosis will absorb a lot of the what/why/how companies look for in an employee and therefore can better show the required characteristics.
Every generation of engineer always feels like the engineer after them are somewhat the consequence of lowering the bar... We used to think this when we started recruiting outside of ivy league, then we started lowering the importance of formal education at all ettc... etc...
You would be amazed at the difference good interview preps makes to someone who was never exposed to it.
> What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit
From experience, those type of feeling are usually a consequence of lack of information and exposure of what actually goes on in the meetings. You mentioned you worked at the companies with those initiative, but i am not sure how many time you have actually been involved in the design of those programs.
Tech jobs in large tech companies is very competitive job. Everything is always framed as a competitive advantage and can sometime wrap one's perceptions. Companies spend a bunch of moneys on all kind of weird stuff.
And finally let me be clear, i am a software engineer myself. I do believe that pretty much anything HR does that's not purely the day to day of employee is a grift. Hell the bigger the companies, the more grift around : from management "training" that somewhat requires fancy restaurant. Team building exercise that somewhat require a bunch of very introverted engineer to go to a concert non of them are interested in etc... etc...
DEI is not different, yes grifter gonna grift and some people are just in it for themselve.
So can DEI be better/ more efficient : yes, is there a lot of virtue signaling and fakeness around yes, are we somewhat lowering the bar because we like having diverse people around NO, and for having witness the difference that those program can be in the lives of young and new people in the industry... i think they worth keeping around even if a better more pragmatic form.
RED HAT ALLYSHIP COMMANDMENTS
1. Openly acknowledges PRIVILEGE and SYSTEMIC racism exist in trauma
2. Never questions the REALITY of our BLACK friends and colleagues
3. Rejects the idea that race is political
4. Accepts that WHITE people are responsible for dismantling racism
5. Only WHITE people are racist
6. Knows the BLACK community owes us nothing in this work
7. Requires acknowledgment and repair of inevitable MISTAKES
8. Is never rooted in WHITE SAVIORISM
9. Sees the black community as a group of individuals and not a MONOLITH
10. Does NOT seek recognition or praise for a job well doneGenuinely, if you have a point to make i am happy to hear it and discuss it.
But the very few times that I did it left a very bitter taste; that otherwise well-sounding initiative was hijacked to hire much less capable people who were commanding almost the same salary as mine or the other team members' while doing barely 10% of the work (vetted via code output and team discussion collaboration; nobody knew what that person was doing, even his direct supervisor who was also their coach buddy).
And it was doubly strange because the company actively went out of its way to look for these people, easily spending times more on hiring even single such person as compared to, you know, posting on several reputable job boards and filtering resumes.
I suspect it was investor pressure. Or the CEO getting a "life-changing experience" after watching a few videos.
Oh and you know what happened to those forced hires? Months later the CTO and two other seniors said "it's me or them" and had their resignation ready on the same day.
Turns out business interests do override some nebulous diversity targets after all. Take a guess who actually left / was fired? Exercise for the reader.
DEI is good in principle but poorly executed.
Diversity is good for business. You want people from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking.
But we have had a problem in tech of hiring only people like we already have, whether it be age, attitude, or race. At the same time, the DEI initiatives went too far. I am ok with racial targets that try to bring the company numbers closer to the local geography, but not the national statistics. We also have to be mindful that the qualified candidate pool may not yet allow us to reach parity. We should also be investing in the pipeline much earlier so that the qualified candidate pool has parity with the local geography.
The DEI effort we saw was an over reaction to our self created self similar selection bias. The pendulum is swinging back now, but we should not throw everything away. Maybe we can think about it like we do our software... rapid cycles of iteration and learning
It's not clear to me that it is either good or bad for business. Why is this stated as a matter of fact. And please spare me links to studies funded by special interest groups.
> You want people from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking.
Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?
Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)
If you are hiring the first 5 employees of a company you started, I think DEI will be the last thing on your mind. So why does DEI suddenly become so important 50+ employees later?
Not the poster and going to try to read the last sentence with positive intent.
You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public. The design of products come from the vantage of who is designing them. Historically this has been products designed by men and made for men. From male crash test dummies, to PPE, and even medical treatments. The designers were not looking to exclude women in these cases, everyone simply has blind spots or things that they don't consider, leading to worse/less safe products.
Going back to tech. How many demographic text boxes are designed by people who are not accustomed to long surnames? Security/Admin controls by someone who has never been in an abusive relationship? UX that is unusable by anyone with a disability, or simply not accustomed to technology.
If you don't care about these groups using your product effectively, then it's likely fine for business. Heck, many companies don't see a problem and conclude that their customers are "wrong" or "dumb" when features are left unused or bugs are reported.
> Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?
Everyone is different but I statistically have more in common with a white male 21-35 than any other group (even if he played team sports). Could a particular person be a deeply different 25 year old white man born in Thailand, deeply poor, and raised Jewish? I suppose, but we're all doing heuristics out there. So we use the heuristics that are both good proxies to determine "diversity of thoughts and experiences" and are easy to know.
We all know that a leetcode question, or a system design interview, or a take home project isn't a perfect show of someone's technical skills, why should heuristics around diversity be any different?
> Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)
It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that. You ask most people on the street and few will say they judge people beyond their character/actions/intelligence/whatever. But we know that isn't true, people aren't that logical and detached.
It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us. Let's even ignore gender/race. I know many engineers that view front end code as "beneath them" and "not real software engineering". Are they really going to view me as a hardworking, intelligent engineer if that's what I'm doing?
Heck, am I a hard working, intelligent engineer if I focus some of my time on DEI initiatives? What if I can't invert a B-tree? What if I still got hired, what would you think of me?
Who is "we"? I personally define "different background" very similarly to your parent poster, and anecdotally 90% of all people I chatted on the topic (several dozen) do so as well.
So don't act like you represent some bigger group. I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
So let's stop normalizing a thought process that shouldn't even be called that. Would be a good start.
> It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that.
It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
I'm confused why this was focused on so much. I guess "people that use DEI for hiring". Or when I was speaking of heuristics generally that could be "hiring managers in general".
> So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
There are an infinite number of factors that go into a person and there will always be something missed with whatever way we slice it. "common-sensical" criteria in that world will end up as a wishy washy "we hire those with diverse opinions and backgrounds". But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
> I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity. It can be lobbed at literally any position one takes.
> It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
You're blowing by that I was responding to
"Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person"
If we're talking about company culture now, then we're talking about something different.
> Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
The comment I was responding to spoke generally so I spoke generally. I applied it to both tech and nontech with examples though.
OK. That is true. And? Your point being?
> But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Yes, that happens very often. What's the problem? Are you really having the goal of being able to get inside any company out there and tell them you know better who's a better fit for their specific team? If not, what's your angle / point / goal?
> Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
Sounds like you're looking what to be outraged at, I am saying this genuinely and apologies if it comes across as blunt but I am old enough to stop caring about sugar-coating stuff.
Point me at the exact problem in your quote above and tell me what you want changed?
> Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity.
Indeed, I am not at all curious about what do privileged people are looking to feel guilty about this week. (And yes you and I are privileged, there are no two ways about it.)
It is not your fault that a potential next John von Neumann happened to be born in Bangladesh and only used his wits to steal fruit and bread so as not to starve, for his entire life, and never managed to get educated enough to rise above such life circumstances. You can't be everywhere. Hell, you can't even be at 0.00001% of places. Let go and stop looking for injustices. If anything, our world is 99.9% injustice, if one bothers to look carefully enough just for a few months of their entire life spans.
> You're blowing by that I was responding to
OK, then I didn't understand your point there, which is the case for most of your comment anyway.
---
In general, I found your entire original comment super puzzling. It sounded like you are looking for problems where there might be none or they are impossible to fix (yet). OK, women are different and have different lives than you and me... and?
Yes people out there discriminate black people. I'd like that to stop as well. What are you doing to stop it, exactly? Surely you realize talking on a very niche forum like HN isn't going to achieve that, right?
Modern DEI got warped into an unrecognizable mess and nowadays it's mostly weaponized against white males by trying to play on their guilt (kill me if I know where does that guilt even comes from...) in order to gain convenient shortcuts to lucrative positions.
As such, I am neither impressed by modern DEI, nor do I support it. When its proponents chase away the leeches I'll be one of the first people to get on the line to donate and try to help. Until then, I'll just shake my head in disgust at what DEI has become.
I think you're pigeon-holing me a bit into a spot where you view me taking a moral stance with no external logic. Eg. I am a well meaning but ultimately naive savior-person that wants to create fairness and this doesn't help the company, the product, or the team. I feel like I'm becoming a projection for frustrations you have with those on a moral crusade.
I disagree that there is no logic to DEI. Specifically the idealized version of DEI, not whatever implementation company A has. I think a diverse team creates better products. I think diversity around gender/racial lines are stronger indicators of diverse experience than a wishy-washy "diversity of thought" angle that I see going around.
I also assert that, honestly, from a practical standpoint race/gender selection is easier to select for than most other forms of diversity. We use inexact tools as a heuristic for technical ability (leetcode, take home project, system design, CS fundamentals, etc), why would diversity be any different?
I assert that our interview tools and processes are inexact and consistently leave talented people off the table due to biases. The reality is if I have 10 candidates for a CRUD position I assert I could pick a name out of a hat and they'd be able to do the job most of the time. I think people pretend they can determine person A is 10% better of a developer than person B in an interview when they really can't. The reality is you could have probably picked B and it wouldn't have been a noticeable change once on the job. I think seeing these "successes" lead people to think they are better at interviews than they really are.
DEI to me is understanding the hiring process has bias + blindspots and taking the gamble that selecting in a differently biased way gets me better odds of getting that "Bangladeshi John von Neumann". And even if it's not a home run like that, that there is still an overall benefit to the added diversity to the team vs taking the person that did 10% better on our leetcode question.
The thing that most people don't like to talk about is, at many tech companies Black, Latin, and white people are underrepresented in tech roles. The only race that is overrepresented is Asians. And if the goal is equity, you can connect the dots.
Why? If the company is already working well, why rock the boat?
In the real world, I've consistently seen DEI policies that call for X% URM engineers and Y% women engineers. And these figures for X and Y were substantially higher than the percentage of URM and women in the software development workforce (at Dropbox the gender target was 33% women in spring of 2019). This led recruiters to be much more selective when hiring white and especially Asian men. It didn't eliminate bias, it incentivized bias for the desirable races and genders. We didn't expand our candidate pools, we contracted them. We stopped interviewing non-URM men from boot camps any only advanced URM and women from bootcamps. We did the same with non-engineering majors. Women and URM men who majored in a non-tech field but practiced programming on the side were interviewed, men in the same situation were not.
Pretty much every attempt to make a company more "equitable" that I've witnessed has followed the same arc. Leadership assures people this isn't discrimination, it's just broadening candidate pools. They send recruiters to Grace Hopper, HBUs, etc. But this doesn't yield any change, because there's no untapped pool of women and URM engineers. Then the company sets quotas (under euphemisms like "inclusion targets", "diversity goals", etc.) and turns a blind eye to discrimination.
The whole reason why we use euphemisms like "DEI" is because nobody wants to discuss these phenomenons in concrete terms. We use euphemisms like "diverse" because we'd cringe if we just explained our policies in plain English terms (and it'd land us in lawsuits). If DEI really was about anonymizing applications, trying to identify and eliminate biases, and preventing discrimination then I'd be all for it. But that's to polar opposite of what DEI really is.
I have background as an engineer in consumer products in SV for 10+ years
Indeed the elephant in the room is that the people designing these products often have little in common with people using them (outside of the Bay Area anyway) Financial status, affluent, well educated immigrants from China, India, etc.
I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard.
> It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us.
I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself.
It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
I don't understand DEI initiatives enough to agree or disagree. The poster I was responding to seemed to be speaking of diversity in general so that was what I was intending to address.
> I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself. It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
I view diversity in general as shifting biases, not eliminating them. It's just not possible to eliminate them.
We already know that certain groups are underrepresented based on historical selection criteria so we're going in with the assumption that they are capable of doing the job but are not given the opportunity.
To make it less open to misunderstanding I'll just use self-taught software engineer as an example. We can all imagine there is a 100x engineer that is self taught. But due to hiring practices (requires college degree, requires unrelated computer science fundamentals, etc) is never hired and given a chance to reach their potential.
Maybe we're not quite sure how to evaluate self taught engineers like we are with engineers that take a more traditional path, it's likely they work and learn differently. All we know is some part of our process is selecting them out.
I view the idealized vision of DEI sort of in those ways. We know there are some set of biases that are leading certain groups to be underrepresented in tech. We also know that our interview process isn't some grand objective measure of engineer competence.
DEI to me is accepting the existence of biases. While you try to address the ones you can, you cannot eliminate them all so you design processes with assumptions of bias.
I don't pretend to know what companies do specifically in their DEI to shift those weights. But let me pretend my company gives everyone score on 100 point scale. Now I'll shift to a genuinely controversial case.
The info I have:
A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.
But if I think they both can do the job reasonably well, is it right to tip the scales? Do I think my company can benefit from underrepresented people in tech? Is there some bias that caused her to get the lower score in the first place such that she is the better engineer? Etc etc.
Sorry that is unorganized stream of consciousness
It's also the law.
NASA was doing some good work for years before Katherine Johnson came along. Heck, I'm sure people at the time would say that NASA would accept anyone that was hardworking and intelligent. Would NASA have collapsed without her? Likely not, but it was made better because of her involvement. You don't know what you miss out on by not accepting people.
In the most broadest sense, along all the dimensions. Including both what bad DEI is talking about and what you are talking asking about.
> If you are hiring the first 5 employees of a company you started, I think DEI will be the last thing on your mind.
100%, as for when, always part of the culture so it never needs to be top of mind. I think it likely sufficient to root out bigots, zealots, and those who discriminate. At some point the scale does grow large enough that you need people who's job is to help standardize and facilitate the process. The bad DEI did not do this well, I've seen it done really well personally.
There IS discrimination in the workplace. The only good way to fight discrimination is to fight discrimination. Find it, prove it and target it. "There are too few women in tech" is as good a proof of discrimination as "There are too few woman in beick laying".
Both sides need to chill their tone and rhetoric. DEI done right starts by ceasing the demonization of the other side and coming together to talk like adults and find common ground.
While there are companies where DEI isn't a dog whistle for racial and gender discrimination, they're the minority in my experience.
This basically results in a lot of mediocre "diverse" candidates, and many hiring objections being ignored or not shared with others.
It’s ironic, because my teams typically were the most diverse when you look at their economic backgrounds, graduating from state schools, older people, veterans, etc. - while other teams I worked with were very frequently monocultures of young attractive people from good schools and backgrounds. But somehow skin color makes things “diverse“.
DEI agendas can only work if the displaced people (i.e. white males), see a genuinely better alternative rising in its place and are not asked to pay the price for their skin color and gender for their entire lives. I suspect white males would be far more accepting of DEI if it wasn't a lifetime penalty they felt they had to struggle against, but just a few years.
Fixing labor laws, minimum wages, parental leave, cash or securing good housing, etc is way more expensive. And a lot of it is not solvable in a timeline of a few decades, it would be a slow multi generational change.
I raised this with colleagues on a few separate ocassions and was promptly shunned, yet they didn't have an answer. Most recently when he hired an engineer from one of these "favorable races" even when half of the interview panel recommended a no-hire.
Your coworkers probably agree with you, but conversations critical of DEI efforts in the workplace are radioactive as HR will come down on you for being racist or whatever.
Thus, the DEI bubble in any corporation is completely insulated from checks and balances or internal critical feedback.
Yes. It's assuming that the non-white person is in some way incompetent or lesser than (soft bigotry of low expectations) and needs a boost from the feigned-benevolence of the white man (or opportunistic "person of color").
FWIW, I'm mixed-race (white/black) and was mouth-agape at how this got as far as it did the past few years.
That's the sneaky part. There's an assumed "bias," but it's rarely rooted in fact or backed by statistical evidence and more of a religious statement. At best, it's admission of a guilty conscience [1].
Then you end up with a wider range of quality levels among the underrepresented group (because you had to scrape deeper in the barrel to fill your quota, and the overrepresented group ends up being in the higher quality band (because scooping the cream off the top filled the quota).
This has the really perverse effect of creating a true observation (in the context of your organization) that the average quality of the underrepresented group is lower than the average quality of the overrepresented group. e.g. the asian men you hired are all the cream of the crop and the black women you hired are everything from the cream to the dregs.
I suppose you could artificially hire lower quality overrepresented groups to correct for this, but then you're really setting yourself up to be outcompeted by companies that only hire the highest quality employees they can.
This is uninteresting thinking. If the pool doesn't have enough qualified candidates, you expand the pool. That requires more effort. That's good effort that should be taken. It's lazy to do otherwise.
There are a few universities where there are above average proportions in STEM fields like MIT and Harvey Mudd. But these are few and far between, and their graduates have heavy competition for offers. There aren't enough graduates to meaningfully make a dent in representation. Furthermore, these universities have big gender disparities in admissions rates - over two to one [1] - so directing recruitment at these universities is still achieving "better" representation through discrimination, just indirect discrimination.
1. https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/can-your-gender-give...
yes, which is why that kind of thing is illegal in the UK.
Proper DEI is about creating a decent pipeline of people, that includes outreach, or having training programmes for non-traditional juniors.
And, if done properly, its a great way to lower your wage bill, as you hire people at more junior levels and keep them longer. (you need to job hop to get good wage increases.) But that requires a commitment to develop your own team. (regardless of who they are)
https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/house-of-lor...
Actions outside of parliamentary testimony are not protected .. but these have to be seperately observed | evidenced as the testimony cannot be used to convict.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/part/11/chapter...
Specifically outlaws having a policy of lowering the bar. You can only choose one protected character over another if they are equally qualified.
Specifically the guidance that comes with this says that its legally unwise to do anything past pipeline stage, once you have reached interviewing, its a bad idea. Its certainly something I'm not going to do.
Now, in the uk we do not have "affirmative action" thats an americanism. We do not need to import american racism issues, we have enough of our own.
I have worked in IT long enough, and recruited enough people to know that the people who complain about the "bar" generally are never privy to the actual data.
1. You assume that giving a certain race a favorable edge is unfair. If the premise of DEI is correct, that the field is tilted against certain races, then having a preference for those races is leveling the playing field, not tilting it in their favor.
2. Perhaps hiring a no-hire was exactly the right thing to do. Perhaps the interviewers were prejudiced against the candidate for reasons other than merit. Of course, I don’t know the exact situation, so I said “potential” flaws.
No, as a non american living in the US i find american obsession with race fascinating.
DEI is about every characteristic on which human can differ and how those difference play a role in the work place. Race is of course a factor , but so are neuro divergence, language, culture, gender and sexuality. Hell even things like "Don't schedule a meeting before 9 AM" is a form of inclusion for the non morning people.
> yet its practical effect is giving certain races a favorable edge in the hiring process, independent of merit.
Then that's a badly designed program. However the other side of the equation, if there some aspect of the workplace ( such as say every important meeting are at 8 AM) are needlessly preventing certain people of expressing their talent... we should also look into it.
> Most recently when he hired an engineer from one of these "favorable races" even when half of the interview panel recommended a no-hire.
Yeah sounds like a problem. Maybe look into the statistics to see if usually those type of candidate would have been rejected.
Especially super weird is the hiring practises of (non-US) businesses OUTSIDE the US who've blindly copied this US DEI stuff without thinking if it even applies.
Several major Australian universities (and some gov departments) practically don't hire white males any more. As several friends already working at these places have complained about in private.
Sometimes forwarding the "new and updated policy" mass emails from HR about it, just to show how insane things have become.
This is a disingeuous point of comparison, because this is a behavior that can easily be corrected. Just set an alarm clock like everyone else. On the other hand, I cannot correct the fact that I am from a non-minority background. How is it in any way fair for me to be disadvantaged in the hiring process for something I cannot control?
> Maybe look into the statistics to see if usually those type of candidate would have been rejected.
This sounds like a question asked in bad faith. Rather than analyzing hiring outcomes by background, does it not make a lot more sense to analyze hiring decisions based on interview performance, totally independent of race/language/gender/etc.
If this data is then correlated against race, and hiring decisions are provably equitable across races, then great! But anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case.
This person does not have, or does not know anybody with a sleep disorder.
I don't think that you are.
Ah, and we all know the plural of anecdote is "data". /s Oh wait...
The fact that you said this, suggests to me that you were the odd-person out on a hiring committee, and because the person got hired anyways, you feel like that means all hiring decisions are made on the basis of race. When in reality, you just didn't like the one candidate, and everyone else was fine.
I don't know for sure that this happened, but I've met people who made these cases, and they pretty consistently overvalue their own opinions.
there are magical criteria like culture fit which is inherently discretionary and biased which should be penalized too
DEI as you have experienced isnt a solution for that either
one reality is that companies dont always need most the cognitively/physically qualified person. they need to tap into markets and revenue, companies that have already reached the peak of their primary market gain perspective by having people of backgrounds more in align with markets they aspire to be in. Many large companies are in that position and should be ignoring employee reindeer games about pedigree and performance.
although one most complaint alteration of DEI is just recruiting from different sources that might have more minorities, like different schools, or even creating the pipeline in those schools, where the goal is more talent that happens to perform as well as existing talent, there is a parallel effort where none of that matters if the organization’s expansion into markets simply relies more on familiarity with that market. Do both, I say
but other organizations that are just metoo-ing DEI should absolutely be called out
all organizations that implemented it for arbitrary reasons should be called out
OK, I have been rejected once -- during the interview no less, not via an email after -- because I said I am not into Game of Thrones. Apparently everyone on the team's pass time was chatting about it. They openly told me I don't fit in because I don't like GoT, even though the interview before that was an exhaustive technical one and I passed with 93% score.
Whom should I contact so they get penalized?
You realize these are private companies and they are not accountable to how they achieve their results as long as the means are not illegal, right?
And you do realize suing them over this will take a huge amount of time and money? Money that most working people don't have?
> one reality is that companies dont always need most the cognitively/physically qualified person.
Whose reality is that? I haven't seen it ever. Business makes money by hiring N people with capability X, and not N*5 people with capability X/5. Otherwise business will go broke paying salaries to incapable people. Common sense.
I get that you are saying that you might need people who understand certain markets better and that's practically their only skill but... on a more general premise the statement "you don't always need the most qualified person" is just confusing.
obviously its paradoxical because the person with the only skill that differs from the rest of the entire corporation would be the most qualified person. I tried to qualify that with other ways. I'm glad that we used language to convey a shared understanding, which is the purpose of language.
Regarding how to hold corporations accountable for hiring bias, I never broached that at all. "Culture fit" likely has a limited halflife, where legislatures or labor agencies will just discourage the word and that kind of discretion. labor agencies use their own budget from taxpayers or the state's other revenue sources to bring action to corporations, you should check them out, they might have found the Game of Thrones criteria to be window dressing for a sanctionable form of employment discrimination, that other people have already complained about. So that suggests your reality is either hyperbole or ignorance, easily remediable with accurate guidance.
As someone commented bellow, that's incorrect. Modern sleep science seems to indicate that people have different circadian rhythm, which correlate with different energy and alertness level at different time of the days. Sure it's easy to set an alarm at 8 AM, but it's not easy to be at 100 % for some people at that time. I think there is even a movement to make school start later to combat those effects.
> How is it in any way fair for me to be disadvantaged in the hiring process for something I cannot control?
I can't pretend to understand your experience on DIE but at the risk of repeating myself... this is not what DIE is about... you don't get browny point because your are a minority or get point taken away because you not a minority. It's about providing the best condition for EVERYONE to express their best potential and then select the best one.
> This sounds like a question asked in bad faith. Rather than analyzing hiring outcomes by background, does it not make a lot more sense to analyze hiring decisions based on interview performance, totally independent of race/language/gender/etc.
I do not follow your reasoning here. You mentioned that you witnessed "ONE" case where a candidate was accepted despite having "HALF" of the reviewers no hire decision.
Where i work, those case go to deliberation and usually we would have the candidate come back for a second round of interview, or even depending on the seniority level send him to specialist reviewer. Generally, those case are a result of miss-calibration of the interview loop : like for example having an experience network/kernel specialist ending up in a generalist loop designed for entry level.
I do not know how things work in your company : You are making the case that one experience is an example of DEI gone bad... My point is that if you want to make that point, a statistical analysis of similar case is the only way to know for sure. Just saying that someone with so so performance on half reviewer got in is simply not enough...
Most DEI work I've seen at my company was in reducing HR complaints from women, LGBT and different ethnic groups. When it comes to hiring, it was in showing up at recruiting events and other areas to encourage people to apply.
I've done interviews and I think they're more fair/merit-based than other places. I view it as a positive. Also barely any minority applicants.
A lot of DEI was to counterract really annoying people on one side who were very racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. and ruin the environment or opportunities for people. I think this is just the pendulum swinging the other direction where some people are very vocal or unfair in dealing with men, white people, republican, etc. and/or creating an unproductive work environment getting mired in politics.
Also recession creates more economic pressure for results, but I honestly think DEI has barely had an impact in most companies and most revenue loss is hiring consultats or bad hires.
So at least in my experience, DEI == affirmative action for white and Asian women.
The color wars have been going on for at least 100 years in the US. Just look at the testimony of Manning Johnson. The communists of the 1920s realized that race was the weakest point in the American social fabric and bent a large quantity of resources on that point (and probably still do). If they figured that out then others have too.
EDIT: Spelling
Seems like it's a valid thing to discuss though, as it affects a lot of people.
It's a bit manual, but emailing "hn@ycombinator.com" to ask about unflagging a particular submission can work. :)
This is quite an important topic go discuss because the ramifications of its implementation are everywhere. Does anyone have a link handy so that I may read the article?