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Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you have a point here, but if you phrased it just 20% more carefully then a wider audience would be willing to hear it.

Also worth pointing out -- Yes many companies do include a huge number of "non-white" people when you count all the foreign people they hire, but a lot of times this isn't because we've reached a post-racist / post-cultural-preference state, but just because of the economics of many of these other countries being super cheap to hire in.

Perhaps a more reasonable goal would be to hire proportionally within US at rates roughly aligning to CS degrees by demographic. Then for overseas hires I'd like to see data on casts etc be factored in.

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There's so many problems with DIE.

1. There's no metrics put in place to identify where there are DIE-related problems. We're just told there ARE problems, and that we're horrible racist & sexist humans, and the C suite will let us know when they see better.

2. There's no real metrics to indicate when a DIE initiative is actually successful. We don't look at general population compared to hires, or pay equity, or any other factors. All we're told is that there's always room to do better (uhh, there always is).

3. There's no stopping point. If your DIE initiative was good-intending, then we'd also identify when the initiative is completed. Instead, its a forever-going "white man bad" propaganda machine.

4. Only the DIE hires can criticize. Doesn't matter if major flaws are found, or utter logical fallacies, or anything. If you criticize as not DIE person, you are bad and likely be fired for "racist" reasons.

5. There's a lack of diversity in DIE. When's the last time you saw a man in any DIE position? Yeah, excluding 50% of the population sure sounds... DIEverse. DIE never looks at socioeconomic differences, religious differences, sexuality differences, or multitudes of differences that aren't based on "possession of vagina" and a shallow skin color assessment that veers on Family Guy skin color card.

> Perhaps a more reasonable goal would be to hire proportionally within US at rates roughly aligning to CS degrees by demographic.

This doesn’t quite do it because of the systemic reasons that CS grads are not representative of the US population at large. So, the goal should really be to hire proportionally within US roughly aligning to the overall demographics of the US population.

> So, the goal should really be to hire proportionally within US roughly aligning to the overall demographics of the US population.

Well you're welcome to shoot for that goal if that's what you believe.

But I don't believe that; I believe exactly what I said.

That’s super interesting. I try to emphasize with other belief systems. Can you explain more?

Sure. In short I think in a simpler world we might expect all genders, races, and backgrounds to equally participate in all fields but in practice I don't think that needs to be our first goal (and maybe not ever depending on what the research shows).

For example, a lot of people think it's sexist to suggest some groups might prefer coding more, and I think they're coming from a good place with that. However scientists don't dispute that autism rates in boys are significantly higher than girls, for example, and though I haven't seen any formal research it's my impression that about half of professional software engineers fall somewhere on the spectrum (guy or girl).

So personally, I'd want to understand this huge correlation between autism and software engineering (and potentially between gender and autism) before I judged the problem primarily societal.

If we're being honest with ourselves I also think certain cultures have their own respective norms. This isn't really a hot take -- e.g. some cultures value machismo more than others. Different cultures can also value money and saving differently. I haven't looked deeply, but a cursory glance suggests some minorities are even overrepresented in software.

If differing cultures is a big player in differing interest in software careers then I see it as not-our-place to try to try to alter those values.

And I'd even go a step further and say that I've grown skeptical of both sides' motivations as simplistic and tribal. I haven't thought that deeply about this topic (e.g. never read an encyclopedia article), but I get the sense that many people who have much stronger opinions have thought about it even less than I have, and have put less effort into making a logically consistent views on the topic. Often I worry overzealous advocates give a bad image to the cause (as they do for pretty much any group).

The problem with the US is trying to play fairness around the world, when in fact their population is not interested in that, they really want the same old white supremacy ideas. This becomes very clear when the US alone supports the genocide of colored people (not just in the obvious place currently in the news). So, their "diversity" policies are hollow no matter how they try to sugar coat it.

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