Comment by icantthinkofone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icantthinkofone | Hacker News Reader

icantthinkofone

When I put HomeDepot in the search bar, I'm searching for HomeDepot products so putting a targeted search bar for HomeDepot in there is a feature, not a problem. Thank you, Google!

"scores of young people, mostly male (70%) mostly white (61%)," Is this article about age-ism, sexism and race, too? Having 61% white employees is far above most companies and hardly "mostly white". If you say "mostly", I'm assuming 90% or more.

But what's the problem with that? are These authors saying white employees are bad? Or that a 60% white force is bad? I'm sick and tired of the "white people" bashing for no good reason.

"...the same set of top universities (in that order: Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, UCLA…). They are pampered in the best possible way, with free food, on location dental care, etc. "

Again, he's bashing this as if it's a bad thing. They don't mention the reason for the so-called "pampering" which isn't at all for what they're trying to give the impression it really is for.

"In practical terms, they fire first and reflect afterwards. "

This is an absolutely, thoughtless comment. In the restaurant parlance, it's called a "soft opening", where you open the doors and let people discover your place while you learn what works and what doesn't and what breaks. It's a smart thing to do when you can afford it or have the time but these authors think it's a problem that will ruin the company and an example of bad communication.

I'm not reading the rest of it. There are more important things for me to do.

>These authors saying white employees are bad? Or that a 60% white force is bad? I'm sick and tired of the "white people" bashing for no good reason.

They're saying that hiring based on merit, from the top universities in the US, which happens to result in a lot of white male employees, is bad and that Google et al. should be essentially watering down their talent pool in favour of diversity.

It's a narrative that has polluted the tech industry over the last few years - mainly pushed by people not even in the industry and who are just writing about it - and I'm really growing weary of it.

Yes, we get it, tech is cool and has status now and everyone wants a part of it. Well sorry, to get into the best tech companies you've to be the best, and unfortunately for a lot of people that will be the generation of young white guys who were at home tinkering with their computers from a very young age and who pursued it through third level, over people who saw the salaries in technology when they were graduating HS and decided that CS was for them.

This disparity can be addressed, but its not by the Soviet solution of fixing prices or quotas. Its by doing diligent hiring, looking hard for the good candidates of minority descent. And since there won't be enough to go around (that's the premise after all) then agitating at the secondary school level to get Everybody included in the tech revolution.

>This disparity can be addressed, but its not by the Soviet solution of fixing prices or quotas

I agree.

> Its by doing diligent hiring, looking hard for the good candidates of minority descent

This contradicts your first point in a way. If we essentially overlook say white or Asian candidates in favour of recruiting from potentially worse schools with a lower quality of student, simply for the sake of introducing diversity in our workplace, then not only are we consciously trying to fill a quota (i.e. there are not enough X minority here, instead of going to MIT and looking for candidates, we'll overlook them and go to X community college or whatever) but we're being racist in doing so.

>And since there won't be enough to go around (that's the premise after all) then agitating at the secondary school level to get Everybody included in the tech revolution.

Absolutely.

I mean it's an interesting and complex issue. Much of the disparities in the tech industry come from a place of somewhat fortunate circumstances - many of us are from middle class or higher backgrounds, with fathers who were engineers or similar, and so had access to better schools who provided their students with access to computers, along with having computers in the home at a time where many wouldn't have.

But it also comes from luck and being in the right place at the right time. Being into technology not so long ago was relegated to a status of being for nerds, geeks and other supposedly anti-social labels. The people who were into it pursued it, despite its stigma, and as luck would have it the skills they developed in doing so turned out to be very valuable today.

As such, I absolutely do not support overlooking these people when hiring simply to fill a perceived void pushed by the mainstream media these days.

We now live in a different era, where even lower social or economic classes have widespread access to technology. To address the perceived disparity, the focus should be on getting these people to pursue technology from a young age, as you said. It should not be addressed by attempting to shame companies into overlooking what are the best candidates in favour of others simply because they've a different skin colour, a different set of genitals, etc.

Diligent hiring just means, considering culture and upbringing before rejecting a candidate. Also, interviewing at colleges that you would not normally associate with upper-middle-class-white-kid. Excluding these schools is biased; including them can no more be considered 'racist' than including Yale.

Yeah. Retailers were trying to capture leverage from google by implementing good local search, google tested the waters to see if it could push back and found that the answer was "no," not necessarily because their customers started whining, but because they had somebody use the new data to do a calculation that demonstrated that their customers actually were willing to talk back with their wallets.

This experiment wasn't a mistake and no amount of diversity or cultural sensitivity training would have been sufficient to let them jump from question to conclusion without the experiment. But when all you have is a hammer...

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