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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways

That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it.

The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those separate groups.

That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead, you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, but you have to pretend that they're all available to everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota.

And you have to call Asians "white".

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You fell into the instant trap I was talking about by equating DEI to “hiring quotas.” That’s a lazy and stupid approach to the problem of increasing opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The solution is, unfortunately, much more difficult and requires work across society to achieve it.

In theory sure, in practice DEI = hiring quotas.

The definition you want DEI to have: Extra training for DEI students, does not exist in the real world. And if it did no one is complaining about it.

> That’s a lazy and stupid approach

Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.

To avoid repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302

> Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.

No, the reason has been the refusal of people in positions of power to engage thoughtfully with the genuine criticism.

It is kind of inevitable when you think of it. Regardless of how one implements DEI, its success is still going to be measured by looking at the demographic breakdown. So even if the implementation isn't literally quotas, the metric is - and once you have the metric, everything else is optimized around that. If quotas cannot be used directly, then other mechanisms will be introduced that amount to the same thing in practice (as with Harvard character assessment etc).

You're imagining that there's ever been a meaning of DEI other than quotas, but there hasn't. That's the way it began and the only thing it's ever done or wanted.

Then maybe you should see how it’s done in other countries and companies. I’ve worked on hiring and we’ve never once lowered our standards just to get in a black candidate. What I’ve seen done is conscious outreach to increase diversity of applicants, changing language to increase applications from women, blind reviews where you can’t see the name or details of the applicant (to minimise subconscious bias).

All of these actually happen and, to a greater or lesser extent, do help without discriminating against white applicants. How do I know? I ended up only hiring two white men in that particular round!

>conscious outreach to increase diversity of applicants

Which involved doingwhat exactly?

In our case, the recruitment team started by only headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that pool, they would headhunt any candidate.

Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.

So you started out your hiring practices focused solely on one race...and you don't think it's racist?

Weird how I knew performative outrage would be the response, just as night follows day.

It's not performative outrage, it's a statement of fact. You didn't merely widen the net, you spearfished candidates of the right race and ignored those of the wrong ones. Regardless of your intentions, how is that not racist?

> Just for clarity, this was for a publicly posted job position, so non-target candidates were able to, and did, put in applications. They were assessed the same way target candidates were.

Try again.

> In our case, the recruitment team started by only headhunting target candidates. Once we exhausted that pool, they would headhunt any candidate.

"Target candidate" = those in minority groups, yes?

Before answering your question, I quickly checked your history to confirm my suspicion that you don't give a fuck about racism unless it's against white people and found this gem:

> You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.

Your outrage against our hiring practice is 100% performative. So no, I'm not going to engage with you any further.

What do you expect the approach to be when your goal is to go out into the world and find qualified people in demographics you aren't getting naturally in your applicant pool? If you want to hire women software engineers you solicit applicants from "women in tech" events and groups.

The belief, whether you agree with it or not, is that diverse teams produce better results. If your natural applicant pool is all dudes then your job as a headhunter is to find a woman who you think can beat them on merit.

The other way you do it is you hire them on as juniors where everyone's resumes might as well be written on toilet paper and "most qualified applicant" is a bit of a joke and train them up.

Are the the two sources of resumes really treated the same?

If I'm contacted by a recruiter and encouraged to apply for a position, I would expect to at least get a phone screening if not a full interview. Are you really reaching out to minority candidates individually only to sometimes send back a message that you have decided not to proceed with them a few days later? I think that would leave a bad taste in my mouth and make me less inclined to apply or encourage anyone else to apply with your company.

Yes, I rejected a number of CVs/screening calls that didn’t fit the criteria. In practice, this was a small number because our recruiter tried to pre-screen before reaching out. She was good at her job and she didn’t want to waste mine or the candidate’s time on a poor fit that could be seen quickly.

Do the teams you're hiring for know that you're looking to avoid contacting whites, Asians or black people depending on the demographics you're missing until given no other option?

Do you try to get an approximation of society with that selective net you're casting? Of the field? Or is it more according to own preference with something like an equal amount of the subsections you can think of?

> Do the teams you're hiring for know that you're looking to avoid contacting whites, Asians or black people depending on the demographics you're missing until given no other option?

That’s a very strange reading of what I said. I need to remind you that the vast majority of applicants were white men. This headhunting merely added more minority (from a European perspective) candidates into our pipeline.

I was going to be their manager, so yes, I knew the process.

Except that’s what it becomes in practice. As soon as you inject race into these decisions, it becomes de facto racial quotas and preferences: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...

It took like five minutes for Biden to start deploying SBA loans whites weren’t eligible for and for NASDAQ to create diversity quotas for boards. Racial gerrymandering is always the ultimate goal of this stuff.

> there isn't another legal way to do it

The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.

This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income high schools that makes it clear to bright kids trapped in poverty that there is a path to success for them.

The "clean" solution you have presented IS the lazy route.

> The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.

Except that that won't actually improve hiring outcomes, if by "improve hiring outcomes" you mean "hire more individuals from historically marginalized groups".

You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's true. But every prior stage of the process, including the stage where children are too young to enroll in kindergarten, exhibits exactly the same pipeline problem. There is no point at which there are enough "qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups" to meet demand. If you want "improved" hiring outcomes, the only thing you can do is accept that better hiring means worse on-the-job performance.

> You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's true. But every prior stage of the process, including the stage where children are too young to enroll in kindergarten, exhibits exactly the same pipeline problem. There is no point at which there are enough "qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups" to meet demand. If you want "improved" hiring outcomes, the only thing you can do is accept that better hiring means worse on-the-job performance.

So if we take a random assortment of preschool age children and give them all the the same resources and education we are still going to find when they come out of the other end of the pipeline as adults and ready to work those from historically marginalized groups are still going to be underrepresented unless we lower hiring standards?

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