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Comment by throaweee123 | Hacker News Reader

"Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining"

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.

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> Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining"

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.

To be fair, I've got plenty of white (or white passing) male friends who also ended up in roles with a shortage of work to do. There's this awkward period between someone being hired, and them being familiar enough with the workplace to actively seek out stuff that needs to be done that leaves a lot of people with very little to do.

My sister, though, had been in her role for 2+ years but still only had work to keep her busy maybe 30% of the time. Similar situation with one of my past girlfriends. These were both Product Managers - I think it's less of an issue for software developers, since there's always a backlog to hack away at.

Shit, I was talking about software developers. I've never known a busy manager. Not a gendered thing at all, it's just a bloated class of employee.

Not managers, product managers. They didn't have any reports, they were still ICs.

Of course, because project management isn’t a real job, and it’s almost exclusively staffed by white women. Coincidentally.

I worked with maybe half a dozen product managers and none of them were women.

I don’t see why you need legal protections. A diversity of thought can bring value. If the manager said, “We currently only have staff with public sector experience. We don’t have headcount for more folks. But let me know if you have someone with private sector experience. They are extremely rare, and could really open up the way we solve the problem.”

Would that offend you in the same way?

No because the would be competency based. If we need a senior Go programmer and the candidate is only experienced in Python it makes sense to pass.

Interviewing someone who is male and getting told that we can't hire them because they are male is gender-based discrimination.

Hmm. I see what you are saying, but it totally discounts the value of diversity of thought.

For example, there is an optical illusion where people see the top line as shorter:

   <——>

   >—-<

However, they are the same length. (The illusion is more pronounced with hand drawn lines.)

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.

The real problem is the assumption race or gender are not only accurate proxies for diversity of thought (they’re not), but that they’re actually better proxies than just looking for diversity of thought directly.

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.

Yes. You make a good point. I would fully support a system that account for diversity of thought directly. That’s hard to do. Your suggestion of means testing applicants is interesting. Do you have others?

>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.

That was disproven. This is scientific racism/bio-essentialism. Let's not go there, it's an evil path.

Ah. I don’t see where it was disproven. The Wikipedia article about it seems to indicate the difference in perception between various populations was further substantiated.

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?

The illusion you refer to is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BCller-Lyer_illusion but the "Variations in perception" section mentions the African tribesmen finding that you are using to support your point was contradicted by later research.

(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 appreciate that link. It seems subsequent research did not contradict it. I am open to changing my mind, but in the section about perception, it lists numerous studies that found differences between populations. It does not appear the differences have been definitively explained. I’m not sure how you concluded that either the research or my point were contradicted, but again, I’m open to the being wrong. I often am.

If the goal is diversity of thought, why select based on physical characteristics instead of asking question about areas of thought that are underrepresented in the company? If the company has no communists, shouldn't you look for communists instead trying to link that thought pattern with a physical attribute? And does this purported desire for diversity of thought extend to all types of thoughts or just a narrow range? Is an entire rainbow of thought welcome or just some range of shades of purple?

Because the goal of DEI is not to hire based on diversity of thoughts. Else the places in the world where DEI was the dominant philosophy (university professors especially in the humanities) would have the highest diversity of thought. But in reality they are simply echo chambers.

A thing that scares me in the current environment is that I agree with the idea, but I've seen it fail rather comically.

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.)

Yes, but that's using a candidate's previous job experience as a factor in hiring. That's totally legal.

The issue is when you swap out "private sector experience" with protected classes like race and gender. That's illegal.

> diverse candidate

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.

> > 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

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

The other reason they hate anonymous packets is that whenever that's been implemented by them thinking the result would be more women, the result is a swing towards hiring white men. Because it turned out they were already engaging in discrimination without admitting to it or being aware of it. Word got around and now they know what the outcome would be.

> Using any protected class

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.

> Right. And they're saying it would be best if they weren't accidentally doing that.

"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

2. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs

3. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2020/2020167.pdf

The fundamental mistake at the root of your argument is the assumption that the demographics of a job should represent the demographics of the total population, as opposed to the demographics of the qualified applicant pool.

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