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random_i

I previously assembled & managed a team of engineers at Microsoft.

Out of 10 employees on my team, I had:

- male and female (80/20 split)

- black, white, asian, latino

- engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s

- east coast, west coast

- ivy league, college and high-school graduates

That level of diversity was very rare at Microsoft, and even rarer at other tech companies.

It took a *lot* of work; with less effort I would have had a more uniform distribution (male, white/asian, younger, west coast)

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>It took a lot of work

A lot of work rejecting talented candidates of the wrong color?

From a business perspective, did it work? Was the team more, less, or equally effective than one where you didn't expend the time and expense of hiring a more homogenous group? Was turnover better or worse?

I know you can't absolutely know the counter-factual, but I've always wondered this. Incidentally, when I was a young man and CS major, I changed majors and went into a different field because I wanted to be around more women, but I've never known if being outside that kind of monoculture actually is better for the business or not.

Is the business perspective the right one to go with?

Let's say it's legal to discriminate on race in hiring in the US. Then a Japanese restaurant hires only Japanese workers because they find customers prefer it. Do we want to have this?

It's a business. The business perspective is what's relevant.

The purpose of our state is to provide for its citizens. So we decided to use a market economy because it seems the most efficient way to do that. But we make up the rules that it runs by and we can change the rules as we see fit.

So it seems now we are saying DEI is not a good rule. Can we make a better rule or is the goal of that rule not good?

There are multiple axes upon which something like this can be evaluated. I'm not against us as a society collectively deciding we should enforce rules that may be counter to business logic (e.g., child labor laws to pick something uncontroversial).

When something is more controversial, it's common to look at the business case. It has commonly been argued that 'diversity' is good business even disregarding any desire one may have related to restorative justice.

Put simply, if it's good business and good morals we should do it, if it's bad business and good morals or good business and bad morals, we have to weigh the balance of it (bad business can lead to morally bad outcomes, like layoffs), and if it's bad business and bad morals we ought not do it at all. I was just focusing on the business case under the assumption that the poster believed it to be good morally.

How did you get there? Did you have to make a conscious choice, for minority candidates, to prefer them to majority candidates?

I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI.

It could be close to blind if communication were only done through writing and the candidate names were not known.

> I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI.

Isn't the central point of DEI that whites prefer whites due to an unconscious bias?

Then, on one hand you have a very conscious decision to hire a minority just because he or she is a minority. On the other hand, you have an unconscious bias that might or might not be there but you can't really measure it by definition because it's unconscious. It's not the same.

I think it's more unsaid than unconscious. But putting that aside, if DEI is purposeful and deliberate while the "natural state" of things is not (unconscious bias), is that how we should leave it?

Should businesses have the freedom to exclude if it's unconscious?

The problem with unconscious bias is that it's unobservable by definition: it might be there, it might not be there and if it's there it might be imperceptible or very strong; you don't know because it's unconscious. It might even be not existing, and the gaps in hiring explained by the fact that minorities have less access to higher education for economic reasons. Yet the response to this is always conscious.

I think people can have unconscious bias.

But in hiring, I think it's mostly conscious. What I mean is that I think people will see a long Indian name they can't pronounce and skip that resume or put it off until later. That's conscious. They'll see someone who looks like themselves and feel more comfortable talking to them. That's conscious. Etc.

If it was so simple, we wouldn't need equality of outcome. We would just need to tell people to pay more attention. The whole point of dei is that, since bias is unconscious and impossible to eliminate, we should err on the other side.

It might not be simple. It could be very hard, very expensive. Is it worth doing? Does it have value?

Would it be so bad if most of the CEOs are white men? All the execs are white men?

But I don't want to pick on white men. Let's say would it be so bad to let the incumbents call the shots. Let the incumbents hire only who they want to hire.

> Should businesses have the freedom to exclude if it's unconscious?

Business should have the freedom to not hire for any reason. They shouldn't be forced to enter a business relationship they're not fully convinced of.

Should business have freedoms that are good for business but bad for society?

Isn't the whole reason for businesses in the first place is that they improve society? They are an efficient way to allocate resources for the good of everyone involved. It runs by rules that we set. And we tweak those rules. And it seems DEI may be one of those rules that aren't good and we can change it.

But the end goal shouldn't be defined as anything that is good for business is good for society.

Introducing unfair bias to contrast perceived bias that might or not might be there and might have or not have the provided explanation is not good for society, no.

What if we don't assume any bias and just look at outcome?

We stipulate that bias should play no part in decision making. Only the outcome should matter. If the outcome doesn't match racial balance of the society we make it so.

> What if we don't assume any bias and just look at outcome?

That's a great way to distribute work ignoring differences in scholarization. Normally ends up in a lot of resentment.

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