Comment by adamlett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamlett | Hacker News Reader

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.

We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.

That sounds great and all, but how? How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job? How do you prevent unconscious biases from causing you to unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual?

There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity.

I think there is a very well founded belief that organisations that claim to be pure meritocracies struggle with diversity.

I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.

That’s probably true, if the hiring process truly is based on merit and nothing else. We have no way to tell if that’s the case here.

MEI has gotten us to where we are today.

Or maybe it was just product/market fit.

   > How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job?

I understood Scale’s stance as: « out of the candidates we have in front of us for any opened job position, we’ll select the one providing the best immediate value on their concrete field - as opposed to the one offering less of a direct outcome but more « indirect » value, such as helping make our workplace a diverse, intercultural and safe place. »

I’d bet this article answers very concrete decisions they had to take internally recently and the article’s writer simply decided to turn his opinion into a company « value ».

The exact opposite stance would’ve been possible (as in « we’re an intercultural, diverse place to work and we try to make the world a better and safe place for everybody, one hire at a time »), and companies usually mix a bit of the 2.

Don’t assume evil intentions or a big « socio-political » plan. That just looks like a company leader trying to make an opinionated decision public, so anyone working there could subscribe. Better in my opinion than nothing.

The MEI (as opposed to DEI) acronym is however unfortunate as it can easily raise unneeded binary conflicts, as seen on this forum ;)

You can prevent discrimination by anonymizing interviews. You can't discriminate on the basis of race and gender if your interviewers can't discriminate between men and women, and between ethnicities. If bias was really the cause of the lack of "diversity" then anonymization will solve this. And if it doesn't then bias was not the cause of the lack of "diversity".

You are assuming that diversity for diversity's sake is a worthwhile pursuit to begin with. When the metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric.

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