Google scraps diversity-based hiring targets | Hacker News Reader

Google scraps diversity-based hiring targets

reuters.com

63 pointsindy46 comments

If you're from a group that is represented, in a company, at a smaller proportion than your group's proportion of the population from which a company hires from, how are you to assume anything but that you only got the job due to diversity quotas, if those quotas are in place? Wouldn't it make you feel worse about your own merits?

No, why would I? I'd be much more adverse to working for a company that engaged in disparate impact, but in general I believe that disparate impact should not be tolerated.

I’m not in a minority group, but I don’t feel like I’ve ever really been hired based on my merits. I’ve been primarily hired based on the RNG of getting past application processes, and hiring managers liking things about me that aren’t particularly related to my merits.

But at google, they still have some coding interviews with feedback, right, so hires not from minority group can think that they beat many other applicants in this game.

I'm at Google. Also a member of various majority groups.

I absolutely do not feel like I am in my position based on some abstract "merit." Absolutely shitloads of lucky situations placed me in advantaged opportunities to get me here.

Google explicitly rejected merit-based hiring for least-regret hiring by setting the bar much higher than strictly necessary for adequate performance. This greatly reduced the rate of unregretted attrition and, until 2022, layoffs.

What this means is that most applications are rejected and so it's very sensitive to unconscious bias or under-recruiting from pools of minority candidates essentially due to network effects. Internal referrals will make up a sizeable percentage of successful hires because they take precedence in the recruiting pipeline (recruiters are still incentivized to maximize their hiring percentage and referrals often have stronger signal to noise on candidate ability than searching through resumes or accepting applications). This effect occurs with more standard hiring practices as well, e.g. "old boys networks", but as the ratio of hires to applicants increases it becomes much more obvious when hiring is biased against minorities and the actual biases can be corrected with policies and procedures.

Hence Google's focus on equity in the recruiting pipeline. I believe it was unconscious bias of referrals coming primarily from the same social and educational circles which, under a truly equitable society, would not have been a problem. But it's long been recognized that prestigious schools and social networks are also bereft of minorities from systemic disadvantages and pre-existing network forces. Reaching out to under-sourced schools and pools acts to restore a more uniform selection over actual candidate ability.

In short, no one at Google I talked to felt like a "diversity hire". We mostly all felt imposter syndrome due to the least-regret hiring process.

This was a reasonable argument to make in, say, 2012, but not in 2022, when the company grew to something like 100k+ engineers. The hiring standards have definitely deteriorated, because you can’t hit these numbers with very high hiring bar. I worked at Google between 2014 and 2019, and observed it myself, and it got even worse after that: I interviewed a bunch of laid off Googlers, and while some of them were solid, I have met multiple who were barely able to pass a phone screen.

I suspect that LeetCode is a factor too. Even if the hiring standards haven't deteriorated, the fact that you can "study to the test" nowadays in ways you couldn't in 2012 selects for a different set of candidates.

Phone screens, at least in SRE, were chosen from the same pool of questions as the on-sites except for the whiteboard-heavy ones. I imagine practices differed org to org, but I didn't really see a drop in question quality by the time I left in 2018. Calibration still looked like a fairly meaningful signal but I suppose everything regresses to the mean eventually.

Honestly, I had a lot more time and energy back then to devote to algorithms and data structures and knowing Linux and networks inside and out and not sure how I would do now.

not at all; the hardest thing about getting hired is not clearing an interview, it's getting the interview in the first place. that's really most of what diversity pipelines are meant to fix.

It's usually a good idea not to attach your self-worth to your employment at a particular company or your belief in your job prowess. That employment can end at any moment, or the market might decide that your prowess is irrelevant. People end up with all sorts of trauma and depression because their whole ego is wrapped up in their job and then suddenly their job disappears.

A job is a simply a trade of money for services. If you got hired, it means that your employer has a seat to fill, and you were the one they happened to choose to fill it. Nothing more, nothing less.

When I was in Europe people I spoke to thought it was strange that Americans even ask each other what they do for work. Work to live, not live to work.

That's weird to me. I have no personal emotional attachment or ego around my work, but I do it for 8 hours 5 days a week. It's the single thing I do the most besides sleep. Seems a very relevant question to ask to get to know someone.

> It's the single thing I do the most besides sleep

Best description of work I've heard recently.

"Well, besides sleeping, I sometimes spend time in an office. The two activities are not necessarily mutually exclusive."

It’s seen as rude here in Australia too. It’s not rude because of ego. It’s rude because of status.

If you know someone’s job, you can make a good guess of how much money they make. If that’s the first question you ask someone when you meet them, the assumption is you might only be interested in talking to someone if they’re sufficiently rich or something.

So here it’s polite to leave that question alone until you know them well enough.

Obviously we put all of that aside at conferences and work events. But if you meet people outside of work, it’s uncomfortable to immediately ask about your job.

> If you know someone’s job, you can make a good guess of how much money they make.

Only in Canberra, where you'll probably meet public servants who will tell you they are an APS6 at the tax office.

A "lawyer" for example could be a junior solicitor (or government lawyer) earning $60k a year, or they could be a top barrister billing $10k a day.

What's weird to me also is that some people ask you directly "how much you make?".

seems weird, but i have no issues disclosing that.

frankly it makes your position as employee more fair - if you are underpaid and there's a culture of sharing the salary - you can renegotiate.

I've lived in Austria and Germany for almost 20 years now and this is a pretty common question here.

Complete bullshit lol

The thing I always have a problem with when it comes to diversity targets is that (from what I have seen) they base it on a representation of the total population. Is that really accurate? Let's say 50% of the population are men, and 50% of the population are women - do 50% of the women actually want to work in, say, construction? If not, why is the target 50%?

I will admit, I am not in HR and am not in charge of diversity hiring targets so maybe it is more nuanced than what I have seen. But everytime I hear these targes talked about, they always reference "as a percentage of the total population" which seems like a VERY dumb way to look at it.

And to be clear, I'm totally onboard with trying to create a more diverse workplace, I just think you do everyone involved a disservice if you go about it with a shotgun approach.

> Let's say 50% of the population are men, and 50% of the population are women - do 50% of the women actually want to work in, say, construction? If not,

I think construction is a unique case because men typically have higher muscle mass, which makes physically demanding jobs like construction easier. You're less likely to apply for a job if you think you're not physically able to match the work of your peers.

I think a good example is game development. Why are most developers (coding side) men? I'd argue that it's partially because stereotypes in society push that boys are into games and that happens from a young age.

But I don't think it's up to a company to actively nullify this with diversity hires, instead it requires changes to eduction and society, which would naturally bleed into the company if it's hiring based on merit.

How about rather than spending money on DEI programs you sponsor coding clubs for girls at local schools?

Gaming is also interesting because you have another tactic of removing reasons why people walk away. It’s practically cliche to observe how toxic many gaming communities are, and the companies also have a reputation for poor pay and work-life balance which is going to deter a lot of people who didn’t spend their tween/teen years cultivating a self-identity as a member of that community. I would bet that improving working conditions would attract more women along with men who have a different balance of life priorities.

If I had a magic wand, I’d add support for parents: that’s expensive and difficult for everyone, and studies show it disproportionately impacts women so you could make your staffing more balanced in a way which benefits everyone fairly.

I could just as easily feel the opposite.

If I worked for a company so biased against my demographic they needed quotas to try to balance it out, and I STILL got hired and succeed at that company, I must be pretty good at my job.

You still have to meet the hiring bar, it doesn't change the hiring criteria. I've been on hiring committee at FAANG, I'm never made aware of a candidates DEI status, I assume that discussion happens amongst management.

You are just rehashing the same debate ever since positive discrimination has been invented. There are thousand of pages available for you to read on the theoretical ethical implications and the actual practical results on the ground.

But if you want a TLDR: hiring is very inaccurate, arbitrary and inefficient _anyway_.

And (according to Google's 2024 own report) only 7.5% of U.S. staff are Latino and less than 6% are Black (after 4 years of diversification policy).

So TLDR^2: it is a non-problem.

The counter argument I’ve seen presented is that merit based systems favor a white centric system because they have more access to resources like higher education and thus it’s easier for them to compete at a higher level and misrepresent the actual competition.

Vivek Ramiswamy debated Mark Cuban on YouTube and they spoke about this and that was my takeaway.

Couldn’t find the original so here is a snippet it’s a good debate.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IHTeDbIjTbQ

Cuban also mentioned that what they lack in aptitude for the job they provide other value through there experiences.

I can understand companies having targets on who they have in their interviewee pool but it hasn’t made sense to me to have targets on who you hire.

I think this is wrong distinction to make. One could have a metric like “how well does the interviewee pool match the overall population demographics” or the same thing for the new hires or for the current employees, etc. And improving those metrics could be a goal.

BUT letting the actual hiring process have any part in achieving that goal beyond merely trying to be fair seems like it could be problematic. So, if a company actually wants to do anything to improve these diversity metrics, I think they should be in the form of outreach and thoroughly separated from the decisions to interview or hire a candidate. Make sure that the company goes to job fairs at variety of universities. Have outreach for people who didn’t go to university at all. Heck, a big company like Google could even try to encourage young members of under-represented groups to go to college, have some scholarship programs, and maybe cultivate an improved candidate pool (although care is still needed — giving scholarships only to people of a certain race or races is problematic). But don’t let the people making hiring decisions know that these are the people you reached out to so that you don’t taint the process!

They also scrapped their pledge not to use AI to develop weapons. Do No Evil, so 20th century

Will they hire back James Damore? Of course not, the early dissenters remain disgraced even if the people in power adopt their views a couple of years later.

I'm sure all Google leadership is best friends with Trump now.

Dropping DEI requirements on the hiring pipeline isn't quite reaching James Damores' expressed views on how hiring should go or the coolness of the ranks within the KKK.

One cool thing about the DeepSeek team that struck me was that they have slightly unconventional backgrounds. These days if you want to do deep learning research at a big name lab like DeepMind or OpenAI you probably need a PhD and to have published a paper or 5.

The DeepSeek folks are super smart of course but they have more diverse backgrounds. The CEO specifically said he values creativity not prior experience.

https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-ceo-liang-wenfeng-le...

As someone with a much more “traditional” background it makes me wonder what I’m not considering in my work and life.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954598

Here's the thing about DEI initiatives, that many people seem to forget -- it was never about merit (or the lack thereof), it was about competing against racial bias and unfair laws.

The old boys' clubs kept out anyone that didn't look like them. We can debate all day if this was an implicit bias, nepotism, cronyism, or whatever. Take a look at the numbers from the past, take a look at the laws from Jim Crow. People of color and women weren't even allowed to work in some areas or companies. DEI grew out of Affirmative Action to add checks and balances to the practice of only hiring straight white men.

Of course, with human nature at play, DEI has become a way to add a checkmark for a member of historically excluded group. This checkmark may come at the expense of a more qualified member of a majority group -- or it may not. I can tell you as a member of several minority groups, we often have to work twice as hard to get to any position of authority, and even then, people assume we are just a DEI hire.

Now we have immigrant minority groups riding the coat tails of the Civil Rights movement, acting against their own best interest... At any rate, I no longer live in the US, and sitting back with my popcorn. This is gonna be interesting in the long run.

> we often have to work twice as hard

Are you referring to getting promoted over your teammates? Or something else?

> Now we have immigrant minority groups riding the coat tails of the Civil Rights movement, acting against their own best interest...

It might amuse you to know that some of those groups were in fact, here before the Civil Rights Act and benefited from it

"Diversity-based targets" is Orwellian language to disguise blatant racist policies.

Agreed.

Upper and middle class white women have benefitted richly from these policies for far too long.

There’s too many of them in college and corporate America.

Fairness is the goal but…

…there’s been no real uptick in positive outcomes for ethnic minorities or even impoverished white people.

It’s time to dismantle DEI and “diversity-based targets” because it’s a shield that protects disingenuous rich people from having to actually achieve equity and inclusion for the rest of society.

Source:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/06/29/affirmative-...

#satire

Correct It is newspeak

One way to look at this: Google had no other way to do this. As the other tech billionaires sworn allegiance, as Bezos had even fallen flat on his face for Trump to save the other business interests he has besides the WaPo, Google had to do something. Book burnings were not possible, so this was a nice gesture.

An alternative, better explanation could be obtained when ignoring all recent events. That would be the most convenient, and besides, we are not historians are we?

What is the point? Literally Google could have any subset of high achieving population and still meet any targets.

It could be a fully black, fully female, fully gay, fully Christian company and still the performance bar would not fall. They afford to select the cream of the crop out of any population set.

I don’t think that’s true. There just aren’t enough top performing candidates graduating every year who pass their hiring bar. I was taking to a hiring manager here in Australia about 15 years ago at a house party. She said they literally call on the phone every woman who graduates from a CS program in Australia to personally invite them to come in and interview. At least a few years ago, they couldn’t get enough applicants.

Feigned cowardice is a peculiar cover story.

Large companies anticipate a far more regimented future structure where the uppity intellectual sub management are replaced wholesale with prompt specifiers.

Intellectualism, skepticism, and other forms of anti authority that used to be tolerated by the managerial class as necessary evils to employing high intelligence is not viewed that way anymore even among the allegedly progressive elite of silicon valley

assuming Trump legitimately cares about his white blue collar constituency, these people support him not for rejection of racism, but for the path to to authoritarian oligarchy they think they can direct it towards.

There's no meritocracy anymore, dei or otherwise. It is the path to the end state of capitalism: slave labor pulling large blocks of rock under whip, leadership in pyramids.

I don't think people understand how horny these "leaders" are for this. And it's strange, because what approaches in the geopolitical future is war, economic or overt, hot or cold. We enter a world of receding resources and reduced global access to them.

It will be a struggle of civilizations, and authoritarianism loses to proper liberal democracies almost every time. The "elite" are drawing the wrong conclusions,bor outright ignoring, the end of globalization.

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