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So I guess you are right!
I think this is a strawman. The argument would be that if you hire for diversity, you are no longer hiring for capability first (which is much harder to refute than the straw-man "all DEI hires are incompetent").
You could make an argument for DEI-hiring being possibly helpful against nepotism, though.
Personally, I think that DEI efforts (especially quota-driven hiring) just paper over underlying problems while being actively unethical on their own (discriminating against the majority, basically).
And a counter-argument is to question the assumptions that:
current hiring practices actually select for capability. See discussions on live coding tests for one example.
In most work, where output requires a team, the output of the team is simply the sum of the capability of the members (i.e. team dynamics/composition/morale do not influence team output).
That claim is also hard to prove in the first place, but apparently people can just peddle it, and expect other people to do the hard work to debunk it.
Usually, whenever you start asking people to justify that claim, you end up with an anecdote or two and, if you point out that anecdotal data don't make a point, personal attacks.
I don't have personal experience either way - I see both of you saying the thing you're talking about exists and the thing the other doesn't. Is it possible both are happening? How would you know if the other isn't?
What I mean by "hiring for diversity" is that the business has some DEI goals, like "more female software devs" and lets those influence its hiring decisions.
As soon as you have gender/race distribution goals that deviate from your candidate stream, you have to make hiring decisions that discriminate against your otherwise "most capable candidate", or you're not gonna reach those goals.
Just making sure that your hiring is not actively racist itself is not something I'm arguing against (and I would not call that "DEI hiring").
The issue with this logic is that you assume the candidate stream can't be changed/expanded.
An example of a business decision that could be influenced by DEI hiring: rather than doing the usual outreach programs only to the usual universities, you could decide to turn stones that you wouldn't usually turn in order to find people you wouldn't usually find. This has zero impact on the quality of people you hire.
Also, "We only hire the best" is a bullshit catchphrase designed to flatter the ego of fresh grads in order to soften them for comp discussion. What usually happens is that you hire whoever passes an arbitrary bar you've set, and you're content not to have and waste another month in a new interview round before you start your new project.
> Just making sure that your hiring is not actively racist itself is not something I'm arguing against (and I would not call that "DEI hiring").
edit: Unfortunately, it is. e.g. someone created a throwaway account to peddle weird fantasies in answer to this message.
This reads to me "onesidedly relax hiring criteria to keep quota" and is exactly the kind of intervention into the hiring process that I expect to decrease average capability of new hires.
Sure, if your criteria themselves are bad in the first place (you are basically rejecting a huge pool of candidates randomly), it does not matter. But plenty of companies don't have a somewhat infinite stream of candidates that would be willing to relocate from across the world, and expanding that candidate stream has a very real cost for the business, too.
For instance, if you're a Stanford grad and keep strong ties with the alma mater, teachers there may say a word about you to their promising students, and you'll end up with more people from Stanford than from e.g. Yale. A DEI program could look to fix that by advertising your company to other venues.
> expanding that candidate stream has a very real cost for the business
I don't dispute that, but we've moved from "it would lead to worse hires" to "it would cost money to the company". If the company is willing to put $0 into the issue, business as usual is the only viable solution.
But I think in practice (also from personal experience) it is very hard to make a business stick to this.
I also think that this mostly amounts to investing additional ressources into expanding the candidate stream (=> outreach programs), hiding a bunch of the costs (those outreach programs could have gotten you twice the benefit without the quota-rejection) for extremely questionable gain; consider: You could've probably gotten the same result from a DEI perspective by just paying female candidates the cost of those outreach programs (that would be a strictly better outcome for them, but a shit framework from an ethical POV).
In summary: I think it's always an excellent idea to remove racial/gender bias in hiring (=> create non-hostile environment, accomodate needs where possible, get rid of condescending, sexist pricks in HR), but I think it is misguided, pointless and wasteful to try and balance the outcomes at the very end...