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Comment by atleastoptimal | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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