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Comment by buckbova | Hacker News Reader

> “We’re not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of “people operations,” told the NewsHour in a statement prior to a broadcast interview Wednesday. “It is hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts. All our diversity efforts, including going public with these numbers, are designed to ensure Google recruits and retain many more women and minorities in the future.”

I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. Hire the most qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.

And also, Asians are a minority group, at least in California as of today.

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> I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. Hire the most qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.

Google will hire ALL the qualified candidates, not just the "most qualified" one. We are always looking to hire more people (headcount is easily the most precious and scarce resource at Google).

Nobody is missing out here. We're just trying to decrease the gender and race imbalance at the company.

In order to change the demographics, you have to hire more of one group and less of another.

Somebody must be turned away based on race/gender to accomplish this.

No, not less. If you hire equally from all demographics eventually the balance will be restored.

> I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. Hire the most qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.

If you read the Google blog post on this issue, Google's actions in regard to the problem they perceive with diversity are mostly about supporting/sponsoring efforts to grow the pool of qualified candidates in currently-underrepresented groups.

Just because external social factors are the source of the problem, not your company, doesn't mean that your company can't (a) recognize that the problem exists and manifests in the makeup of your workforce, and (b) take action to reduce the severity of the problem by addressing the external social factors.

For better or worse, Asians usually aren't mentioned as minorities in the context of diversity because they're "overrepresented" - in tech, colleges, etc.

Considering that Asians are also under-represented in popular media (movies, TV, western music), athletics (NHL/NFL/NBA/MLB), politics outside of San Francisco/NY, you have to figure that Asians had to go somewhere, i.e. tech, maybe medicine.

Unless that was meant as a joke, that seems like a non sequitur. Popular media, professional athletics, and politics altogether capture only a very tiny fraction of the population.

> I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. Hire the most qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.

Absolutely. I get upset every time someone presents me number about how workplace is not diverse. That's like someone is trying to pick a fight.

I think people have to let go of the term minority and realize true equality has no concept of gender and race.

> And also, Asians are a minority group, at least in California as of today.

Depending on where you live. In most Bay Area and major part of SoCal, Asians, especially Vietnamese, Chinese and Filipino aren't minority in their community. They may be minority in politics overall, but the number of Asian residents in some community can overwhelm other ethic groups.

I think there's a lot more unconscious race/gender bias in hiring than you imagine there is. "Most qualified candidate" starts with the (white male) person who appears qualified on the surface.

I once had a boss who would deliberately skip over any indian sounding names in a pile of CVs.

Update: He would skip over them without reading them.

Well we can't guarantee 100% fairness right?

You are right about the unconsciousness (yeah, I remember this from my psychology 101 class :) those famous prejudice experiments in the 40s, 50s).

My argument is once you are conscious of doing "I must hire more said gender, said race", you are sort of discriminating people who are believed to be minority. First, do they like to be called minority? Should they be given extra bonus point because they are minority?

Of course we can argue all day and make different situations when and when not to hire a minority over a majority, but let's not.

Granted, what makes one "more qualified" than another candidate. See [1]. This is an old post by Stripe's CTO. One of that is Sunday Test and the whole point is to see whether people like to work with the candidate.

X is super funny and X is as skillful as Y. But what makes people think Y can't have humor in his/her own way and isn't more productive than X? Data we gather from interview can only show some data. But that's where we stop because if we go full investigation we would spend a year to interview every candidate.

Unless we can completely hide our identity from interviewers... we will always be committing the unconscious bias.

[1]: http://www.quora.com/Stripe-company/What-is-the-engineering-...

The algorithm, in a nutshell:

1. We have unconscious bias. 2. We won't commit conscious bias, because it wouldn't be "fair". 3. The result - a hiring process biased against everyone who isn't an attractive white male American. 4. Bonus result - a horde of guys who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.

So I'm saying yes, there should be some conscious bias in our hiring process. "Qualified" isn't the hard black-and-white line we would like to imagine it is. I'm not saying hire people grossly underqualified or unprepared for a role, but if you have a candidate you would find good enough if there wasn't someone else you like better, and the differences are reflected at least in part by gender/race/appearance, stop and think really hard about why you like the more privileged candidate better.

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