I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.
We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all. Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us.
It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome. To quote Kamala Harris’ recent remarks “to make sure everyone ends up in the same place”, i.e. “equity”
I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.
As a women in tech, I am feeling the backlash. I have seen a huge increase in the amount of skepticism of my abilities that I face from people who haven't worked with me before. And the worst part of it is that there's actually logic behind the bigotry, because it is extremely true that my company continues to hire incompetent people just because they are women.
Bigotry itself is very difficult to combat, but when you add in a solid logical grounding for the bigotry, it becomes dang near impossible to eradicate. I worry that companies are causing more harm than good with the change in hiring practices these past couple years. I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.
This “DIE” stuff is repulsive. Other than the obvious hiring of incompetent people simply to fill a quota, it also creates frictions in relationships when some job post hires one family member simply because they are brown or black while excluding their sibling simply because they are white. I can’t explain how disgusting these policies feel to me.
Diversity metrics are simple. The society they work on is not.
I keep seeing this being repeated everywhere. let me clarify Indians are NOT getting into US companies because of a colour quota.
I will tell you how they are getting in. There are two ways 1. Thru outsourcing/body shopping 2. A lot of Indians get in by doing Masters courses in the US. Most of them would have already worked for tech in India. For US companies they can hire experienced people at US fresher salaries.
Will you defend “diversity" that would rather hire a rich inner-city American kid versus a poor brahmin in need of a leg-up?
Some state authorities and companies like Microsoft are racist. You have to call them that even if there are people behind these programs that just mean well. But you cannot compromise on that accusation. If you do, you will lose that discussion. Simple politics and management 101 and this is just a dirty political game.
Yes, Microsoft is a racist company. Exposé 1 is that they hire people by skin color. It cannot be more direct than that. Again, you cannot compromise on that accusation. It is rational and formally correct. Most people are too nice to defend against this management pressure Microsoft tries to put forward.
Not that there are many young people that would want to work at MS these days. But again, Microsoft employs racist hiring schemes and the people in support behind this are real racists and this is always how real racial discrimination starts. Microsoft as a company is a fascist authoritarian organisation that collaborates with the state against citizens.
You might think that is a bit too much, but you have to start with this if your opponent in a discussion opens with accusations of systemic issues that require racial quotas. Otherwise you will lose. Just repeat it and the situation should again normalize and Microsoft hopefully has to pay the price for their little racist adventure.
Or why not by my birth origin? Say, India? India is a huge country with diverse languages, cultures, histories, religions, and social structures. I guarantee you that I had such a unique background among the other 10,000 ones in India because I grew up in this particular family in this particular town of this particular state in this particular union territory.
1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse. 2. There is nothing wrong with your kids being in a majority demographic. It sounds like you're more worried about the world discriminating based off race and other traits.
I suspect you agree with all of this but it's a little scary how insidious these policies are. Even in your dissent you're seeing things from their perspective.
There's a manager/HR somewhere saying "hold my beer"...
You can argue over definitions and terms as much as you want, but the uniform you wear is often defined by your opposition. In other words, it may not be completely relevant what you or OP think diverse is or isn't. It is very relevant what the power structures and people implementing these policies think it means, no?
If someone has a kid that potentially is going to be quota'ed out of jobs or education, why wouldn't they worry about it?
According to the plain old-fashioned definition, this is true. According to the modern political definition, “diverse” is approximately a synonym for “non-white”.
Compare and contrast with people saying "neurodiverse" when they mean "neurodivergent". I think there is general agreement that a single person should be described as "neurodivergent" rather than "neurodiverse". Some people say the wrong word just because the two words are so similar and are happy to be corrected.
On the other hand, if we're talking about other kinds of diversity then I don't think there's a similar pair of terms. "The addition of this gender-divergent person increases the gender-diversity of the team"? I don't think so!
"Seems", "like" "more and more", "only"... I sometimes wonder if people are downplaying it so others may not be as offended in a social situation, or are those words really what they meant?
We are in late 2022, at this (late) stage of the cycle, Big tech has been throwing DEI, ESG at our face for 5+ years. Both Internally and Externally via PR and Consumer Trade Show / Conference. We have got to a point they are actually "dialling" back a bit already.
>It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome.
I do not have data to judge how many people are on the side wants "equality of opportunity". Which is a very sane thing to do. But I can assure you there will be plenty of evidence the media ( Mainstream or not, ) has been arguing for equality of outcome for a very VERY long time. This isn't, and shouldn't be news.
Reading the above comment being Top Voted on HN gives me hope, but on the other hand also felt sad the realisation came so late.
i dont want to be right about it but i am not going to be shocked if i start seeing such bubble up as a reaction to this kind of short sighted strategy.
I did not come from a family of engineers. For most of their lives, my parents had to struggle to survive as immigrants, living in a fairly rough area, and making ends meet.
I was lucky enough to go to university for STEM. I saw the huge difference between myself and students who came from families that had even one parent experienced in any sort of engineering (let alone both parents). Not only did they always have someone to consult, but they knew what they were getting into, they were much better prepared, and for the most part, they were building the toolset from their early teens.
It dawned on me that similarly, people coming from very wealthy families are likely to be better prepared to create or at least sustain wealth, in a way that might be completely taken for granted, but is actually the result of years and years of mentoring and picking up on behavioral hints at home.
This is the meaning of inequality. It's literally the family you're born into. Your kids will make it either way way because you have already paved much of the path and can show them the way. For schools and jobs to insist on hiring people who are not born into this circle, is a good thing.
Another thing to mention is that I am far from being a touchy politically correct person. I don't really care about minutiae such as naming your git brach this way or that. But in inclusion I feel I've seen inequality from both sides of the coin. And I definitely support letting more people into the party.
So many people I know fall into the latter at least you are questioning how we got here.
Perfect equality of opportunity can only be achieved if everyone has 0 opportunity and the same outcome. Because if you can work hard to give your children a better life, that means that someone with parents who don't work hard will start worse off, with fewer opportunities. Optimizing solely for equality of opportunity inevitably leads to commie hellhole; instead, optimize for absolute opportunity (both average and minimum).
Think of how impossibly naive and utopian this is though, and I don't mean to personally attack just to condemn the idea this is possible in any way whatsoever. Is it possible economically? How about resource wise, or geographically can we all possess equal territory? How about military power? How about physical attributes such as height or beauty? How about intelligence?
On which axes of consequences can we equalize things; how do we do it? Zero sum conflicts are everywhere that demands for equalization exist.
There is only competition over limited resources, power and prestige. There is cooperation amongst allies and friends, but only in so far as feelings are mutual and the efforts of both are in each others interest, which goes with out saying includes in you or your family/tribe/groups interests.
Is anyone trying to take money and power out of you or your children's hands a friend or ally, or are they competing with you for their own interests at your expense?
The propaganda you believed was intended to take advantage of your good nature. As long as someone brow-beats you with moralism over the downtrodden they can convince you of doing anything to dis-empower you, if you believe the nonsense that "privilege" or power are bad things, which those scheming you certainly don't as they pursue both.
It is bad to not have privilege or power. It is good to have them. It is this simple.
That is wildly optimistic.
Next they will come for your already taxed wealth and money if you aren’t “diverse” enough.
People in the US need to be more aware of similar trajectories in other countries in the past.
That comment implies you take for granted that your kids will get into a school, and will have a job.
That’s silly. You should stay focused on ensuring that your kids become well rounded, educated, and cultured people fit for the society of tomorrow and prepared for problems you can’t imagine.
I understand this feeling. It’s because they do not at all want you to bring your authentic self. By definition, all this culture stuff is teach you who you should be at work. That’s ok. You have to run a company and you need a certain culture to do that (or at least you think you do). Fine. It’s your company. Discriminate against who you have to successfully run your business in the current cultural climate. But when you blatantly lie to my face about it and tell me to bring my authentic self, it infuriates me because I know that’s precisely what you DONT want.
Fuck off with that bullshit.
Doesn't anyone know what it means to be a professional any more? I don't care about your beliefs, as long as you come to work and do your fucking job, and be respectful to those around you. How fucking hard is that?
Apparently too hard in the 21st century for so many.
My friend had a company all hands where someone asked “Why does our company PAC give money to politicians with anti-diversity views?”.
The answer was a lot of handwaving but ended with “It’s good for business”.
It’s abundantly clear it’s all performative. Companies are happy to talk D&I all day long, but when it comes to the bottom line they are more than happy to drop it all if needed.
You’re smart to just play the game, because it is just a game.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him."
Racism is anti-racist. Objective thinking is biased. Burning down cities is mostly peaceful protest.
Read Vaclav Havel's "Power of the powerless".
Thank you for saying it.
So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.
On average, those candidates would have started with a disadvantage in getting their foot in the door for several reasons – including outright discrimination, and the cumulative effect of past discrimination, but also softer factors such as being less likely to have helpful personal connections. This applies not just to the Microsoft job at issue, but to the previous jobs that would have populated their resumes (and for younger candidates, even schools).
Compensating for that sounds like a good policy to me.
Now, the post also suggests there is pressure to actually hire or promote less-qualified candidates, which might be a problem, but in that area the post is more vague and speculative.
Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we interviewed any non-whites or non-catholics, the interview would be unbiased towards them"
Is that a non-discriminatory hiring process? The fact that non-catholics and non-whites weren't even given a chance to interview is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the White Catholics that were still had to pass a skill-based interview?
Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates.
Two people growing up in different places (not different cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city) have lived in completely different worlds. Their schools are different; their health care is different; their safety is different; their opportunities are different; the people they know are different. And much of the time there's a stark racial difference in the makeup of those places. Historically this was very much intentional; but even if it were no longer intentional, the effects won't dissipate for a long time.
So when you get a slate of candidates that all happen to be white, it's not just a random coincidence. Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?
Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to elevate candidates that just barely miss out. In other words, candidates that are strong, but, say, don't know anyone that works at microsoft (no surprise there... two worlds) or perhaps don't think they're good enough.
The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice, but, if the company works harder to find qualified black candidates then obviously the percentage would rise. Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does) then improving a hiring process would result in an employee population that more closely matches the demographics of the population at large.
The whole song and dance about applying racism at the interview selection stage isn't about not being racist, it's that there isn't court precedent that specifically makes that illegal, but there is for other more direct techniques like racial quotas.
They're not even saying it's not being racist - they freely admit that it is - they just insist that the ends justify the means.
I’ve heard from diversity candidates who work at Microsoft and interview at other companies that this part isn’t even true. I’ve been on the hiring side and seen how it isn’t true too…
The bar is truly different at all levels. Recruitment, interviewing, hiring, offers, and management are all very different. To act as if there isn’t this is to truly be naive or just happen to have only worked and interacted in a very small group of people. I’ve worked with hundreds and talked to thousands - this shit happens a lot more than HR wants to admit.
I’m not saying someone always get the preferential treatment - I’m just saying this happens more than people think it does.
Everyone from CEO to line managers in all major big techs are now have DEI target that must be achieved. If it is not then don't bother applying for promos. Most people at L7+ will also see significant cut in bonuses if they don't make DEI targets. Especially at VP level, the cut becomes pretty significant. So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers. There are very specific commitments you must write down in OKRs.
I have seen a situation where a manager literally ignored every single non-diverse resume and did not interviewed single non-diverse candidate because of desperation of not making his numbers. He went out of his way to get person completely stranger to work his team was doing. He finally ended up hiring a person well below expectations and this person now simply hangs out in the team as diversity token. The VP sent email to whole group congratulating in supporting diversity and be inclusive. Everyone got their well deserved bonuses for this magnificent achievement.
Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.
A. Spend a lot of time and effort growing into someone with the skills and social access to be a part of one of those middle-class (or with luck upper-class) families.
B. Spend a moderate amount of time and effort maintaining a position in the lower-middle-class.
C. Spend a small amount of time and effort to fall into what socialists call the lumpenproletariat.
D. Spend an enormous amount of time and effort to gather a group of conscientious and industrious peers to form a new militant group which seeks to take power, trusting them to be rational enough to act effectively and loyal enough not to betray your cause.
E. Join an established militant group.
Why does Microsoft care? Microsoft wants to sell services to various governments, who want to maintain monopsony power on recruiting those who choose path E.
They also want tax revenue from those who choose path A. They also don't want to spend tax revenue on the messes left behind by those who choose path C or D.
"Black people are this percentage of the company. We need to show minorities respect and ensure they're doing well economically by ensuring that we hire a certain percentage of minorities, and then hire the best among them. This is something they fought for through the political system, and it's something every group can benefit from if they ever find themselves under-represented"
I'd be like, well I don't like my asian friend Clive is not getting hired after trying so hard in school, I might disagree with it, but I would at least understand where it's coming from. However how these policies are actually justified is nonstop racism. "white privilege, "You were only hired because of unconscious bias", so on and so forth as people are paraded into mandatory racism training seminars. I'm just sick and tired of the racism from the DEI bigots and the way they parade around as anti-racists honestly makes me want to projectile vomit.
If you presuppose that giving disadvantaged groups an extra chance is a positive (your argument sort of does already) and only use wealth as a factor, isn't it still a net positive to uplift the typically poorer group? Doesn't that rightfully uplift more people than it does "wrongly"?
https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/african-americans-f...
The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status. And while a higher socio-economic status can help to offset that discrimination, we have no evidence it eliminates it.
We do know that skin color is a decisive factor in discrimination. You suggest to let this continue to happen (do nothing) because some specific individuals of a discriminated skin color do not seem to be discriminated.
So you just need one token black guy, not even in every company, just one, promoted to near executive-level, so that people like you can say "look; if they want to, they can!"
And then you can all go on with your lives pretending you're there because of your merits.
But this is a feeling that must be let go. Privilege allows people to reach excellence and excellence is scarce, so no, privileged people that do their homework won't suffer because we are trying to do the right thing, allowed by our current stage of civilization that generates so much surplus.
Not picking up the capable people and letting them reach their level of excellence is a big problem in our society, and everybody would be better off if this was fixed.
This notion of "qualified for the job" is really blurry in our field though. For example, is someone fresh out of a three months bootcamp qualified for a job at Microsoft?
The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect parity according to existing criteria (no one category is less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing ones. The game will never end.
Per the OP previously 'diversity' candidates were 1% of all applicants. I'll assume the null hypothesis here and then also assume that they were 1% of the interviewees too.
Lets assume that diversity interviewees are turned into hires at some factor Y. I'll make no assumptions on if that is different than from non-diversity interviewees.
Now, with the new policy, there is a 15x increase in the probability of turning diversity applicants into interviewees.
However, nothing has been done to change Y, the factor at which diversity interviewees are turned into candidates. They are explicitly stating that they are not changing Y.
So that then means that diversity interviewees are now less likely to move on past the interview stage. Based on the numbers, they then need to interview at 15x the rate as previously to be turned into hires.
Please, correct me if I am wrong here, but this seems to hurt diversity interviewees.
I see it as taking up 15x the time, rejecting at a 15x rate, and eliciting these real human people to become stats in some database that the policy makers can show off to some other boss without any compensation.
Also, given that this a zero-sum game (the company only has a fixed number of hours to interview a single game), you are necessarily making someone else worse off when you give advantage to a sub-group of candidates.
Also consider that many candidates can belong to a privileged group and a disadvantaged group at the same time. Of course none such nuances are being considered. How could they, when all you have on the person is their 1 page work resume? You know literally nothing about them, except a few projects they claim to have completed in the past.
Now you're not actually hiring for skills, but playing disadvantage roulette with your hiring pool. Ok, maybe not, and you're still screening for skills, but at least call a spade a spade.
There are only marginal differences between a white and a black person born in US, while myself, being a white male born in Russia, cultural experiences and background have barely anything in common with a white person born in US except for the color of my skin.
The same applies for a black guy from US and a black guy from Nigeria or something.
Other people have already brought it up, but Asian is such a vague term as well. There are Asians from 1st world Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Singapore) and from 3rd world countries (Vietnam and etc).
By diversity logic you really should have quotas for every flavor of color and birth, but you can imagine it's going to lead to madness, so people just choose an easy way out and do this as a PR stunt.
My theory? CRT in workplace is popular because it's effective at suppressing questions and at making it easy for organizations to avoid working on hard problems.
> more rigorous curriculum for all instead of for the elite students
This is called common core and was implemented with widespread bipartisan support. Really we all agree on most things.
That’s not to say there aren’t problems with the left. You just seem to have misunderstood them. For example, charter schools seem to be a good solution that combines choice with not leaving out those unable to pay. Yet both sides seem adamantly against them for their own reasons.
> by merely asking such questions I'm a far right, a racist, and of course, a fascist
Now we're really getting into speculation territory, but my hunch is that you've gotten these negative reactions because the people you are talking to/arguing with believe they are already supporting these initiatives and therefore that your complaints are in bad faith.
> vouchers that would mean poor students are stuck in schools with less funding while rich ones get a cheaper private education.
This is the discussion I wish we have more. That is, someone says that voucher is all about giving freedom and forcing teachers to teach better, but in reality it may work just the opposite. And we should really discuss its pros and cons without attacking each other's motives.
> You just seem to have misunderstood them
Maybe so, as I'm subject to exposure bias. I just can list equal number of examples that show how the left pushed their agenda too. Let's start with Gebru. When LeCun said that bias in model was the result of bias in data, Gebru attacked him for being a bigot. When Gebru was fired from Google, how many media spent even a single paragraph to discuss the quality of her paper, which was the root of the whole debacle, while being busy attacking Google for being racist or misogynist? Or search Allison Collins. When she was criticized for her policy, she said "“Many Asian believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS. In fact many Asian Americans actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead". When school boards lower their academic standards, they cite racism (again, they maybe right, but it's wrong to attack anyone who questions their conclusion). When students performed worse in maths, multiple school boards claimed that maths are racists or there are racisms in maths curriculum. When people were talking about bringing manufacturing back to the US, a pundit said along the line that it was poor white people wishing to bring back their power. When people asked why some Asians get ahead in the us, multiple Opinions and anchors argued that it's because Asians are closer to white. When people are talking about students' reading and maths proficiency were trending downwards, how many articles immediately claimed that the issue was racism? Of if we go back, how many people would call you a racist if you questioned Warren's claim that she was a native American?
So, yes, I'm not happy with what I saw, but I saw the aforementioned examples and more from WaPo, from NYT, from The Atlantic, from Reuters, from MSNBC, from school boards, and from politicians. So, I don't know what kind of misunderstanding I can avoid.
You’re 100% right about the funnel, but here’s the thing: junior positions are part of the funnel. About ten years ago I realized that I was screwing up massively by interviewing for current skill level instead of potential skill level. Sure, at a certain point you can’t just look for potential; I’m not gonna hire a senior engineer because they might reach senior levels at some point. But I’m sure thinking about my junior to middle levels differently.
And this benefits everyone. Too many FAANGs get obsessed with existing criteria and leetcoding and won’t even look at someone from a small shop, regardless of skin color or gender. Their loss, my gain.
Absolutely anything you can do to increase your pool of potential qualified employees is good. Making up theories which give you an excuse to keep the same small pool hurts your company. Again, my gain.
Further, cultural diversity helps me get my job done because different viewpoints are useful! It’s amusing: the same people who will insist that cancel culture is bad because we have to invite all the viewpoints will also explain that trying to increase diversity in the workplace is terrible. It’s almost like there’s something else going on there.
Diversity, as everything else, has a sweet spot. Too little and too much are equally bad. Of course nobody knows where the sweet spot is, but merely increasing diversity is not a guarantee for improvement. I mean, you can hire someone who hates your gut and doesn't speak your language. This will definitely increase the diversity, but you probably not going to like it.
> will also explain that trying to increase diversity in the workplace is terrible. It’s almost like there’s something else going on there.
I think most of those folks just despise hypocrisy. "Being anti-racist by being racist" makes me cringe.
If you're making a diversity hire to get alternative viewpoints, you're doing it for your own benefit and being honest, I don't think anybody will have problem with that. It's the virtue signaling that makes it despicable.
There's also argument to be made that if you're allowing diversity hires, you might have to allow "cohesion" hires. Justifying one but not the other seems disingenuous.
Sadly it is rare that people will hold management responsible in such cases.
i mostly hear about Republicans banning books
The rest of the companies won't be able to however, and now they look bad so they either have to (possibly) lower their standards or have bad PR.
The alt-right likes to call progressives "cucks". There are tumblerinas who call conservatives "fascists". That's what HN calls "free speech" - if you want to cry about it, try Facebook
Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot. He also seems fairly ineffective at navigating bureaucracy. Taken to extremes, lots of corporate policies can seem a bit overbearing. This essay reads to me like he's reading corporate D&I policies to be maximally inflexible and frustrating in ways that are unlikely to be the case (at least from based on my personal experience working in large corporations + a short stint at MSFT many years ago).
Search linkedin for “diversity recruiter”. It’s a role. Companies post specific reqs that state you must belong to a marginalized group in job posts often enough that it’s a bit stomach churning.
I’ve personally had to deal with HR for having too many white men on my teams. For software developers in America.
The whole thing breeds resentment and drives teams further apart, in fact it creates the exact problems DEI is purported to solve.
A much smaller amount of information about the applicants origin leaks through. Implicit bias is attacked via limiting the information that it can act on.
It seems categorizing people by race and gender at the individual level is a recipe for disaster and gives racists the power to do exactly what they want, pick and choose which types of people get to benefit.
If you give a regular person information about a persons race and gender, the damage they can do is limited to whatever implicit bias (if any) they have.
If you give these tools to a racist or sexist, you've given them the keys to the kingdom.
The conclusion is, why is Microsoft making it a requirement to know about race and gender at every single hiring step? Surely this just needs to be an aggeregate statistic right?
Sure. If it wasn't pretty sure or assumes Microsoft could be sued over it, so Microsoft implements these policies as harshly as they can without opening up the path to a clear lawsuit.
It's standard operating procedure for most discrimination.
For more fresh madness see what the the UKs financial conduct authority is proposing:
https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-finalises-pro...
Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups?
And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please help me understand if I'm missing something obvious.
"Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization.
Two main reasons that are given:
Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions.
Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields. You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism? It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable path to success.
Present fathers that raise and discipline their children.
1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.
Parents matter.
More likely is that filters for immigration are very high, which means the average immigrant is more educated, wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.
If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented. But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global workforce would be Asian.
I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?
What _are_ the groups?
"Asian" can mean anything. From India, China, Japan, many countries in Oceania, etc.
I think the classification is fundamentally flawed.
At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.
My guess is that there are a lot of immigrants from Asia that fall into any of those camps.
That's not what bias means.
What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen.
If more applicants are available that happen to be from a certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then that's what the organization has to work with.
That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you see".
If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen.
I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?
I have yet encountered anyone in my circle in the bay area who had any difficulty with high-school math, and none who did not excel at least most of college-level STEM classes. On the other hand, many of my coworkers are medalists in national or international competitions of maths/physics/chemistry/informatics, or they were in the top 2% for those college entrance exams. The bias was so strong that I used to think that tutoring was useless and the education in the US was pathetic because many high school students couldn't understand simple things like factoring polynomials. So, of course they do well, statistically speaking. On the other hand, not all Asians do well in other fields, especially in business and politics. Indians are more diverse in that regard, but people from mainland China didn't have a large enough presence, partly because only universities in China tended to select the nerdiest people for STEM, or so per my China friends.
Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and biased sampling ?
~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent + China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally, because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature proponents)
> Why can't we replicate this for other groups?
Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture, it must first start at trying to observe these with some level of granularity.
Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here. Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for immigrants from other racial groups ?
Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups with similar nurture methods ?
The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for differences in group level performance ?
Good faith social studies on group level differences must go into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a study that might report: "differences between groups persist even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity". So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to see here.
What is the average household income of the parents of these Asian people that comprise those data points?
Did they grow up in apartments or homes?
What quality was their elementary and high schools?
If you are truly in a domain where you cannot hire CS graduates, then D&I is going to put a lot of burden on your recruitment team to find candidates to meet slating requirements. But you probably aren't...
No but I think you should be able to find a single minority candidate over the course of months.
This is trying to treat the symptoms, not the disease. You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?
Whatever you're trying to solve - the "issue" starts decades earlier, at home. It's about how people are brought up, their access to education, their social environment. Culture actually plays a role, too.
When it comes to a recruiting pipeline this is critical. If you are tapping members of your team to help finding candidates from their networks and your team lacks diversity, you are going to just build out your team with more of the same.
The same goes for where you are looking for candidates outside of your team. If you are only targeting a small number of schools it's really easy to end up with a homogenized set to pull from. I know from experience working at some of the big tech powerhouses, they'd target a handful of schools and only hire college grads from there - which means they miss out on recruiting from state schools, historically black colleges, and other pockets where things are more diverse.
I'll chime in here that if a person works at Microsoft and has the resources of Microsoft recruiting on their side, that they are in a better position than most to end up with a wide choice of applicants. Microsoft can sponsor visas if need be, and their compensation is generally high enough to merit consideration of relocation, if necessary. (Worth noting here that a non-diverse slate of applicants is in many cases a process smell that your pipeline sucks.)
We also don't know for what role(s) the author was hiring. While the assumption here seems to be that they were having trouble finding a diverse slate of applicants for "Senior AI Researcher, PhD and 20+ years experience required," for all we know they are whining that they couldn't get applicants to be CRUD programmers building out APIs, or PMs, or doc writers, or any of the other myriad roles that go into shipping software. Given that, we don't really know where to place blame. Could be that this manager just sucks at their job.
Why is it telling? He's managing a team, and the policy is the more immediate and fixable obstacle to him solving his business hiring problem. Even if Microsoft was capable of "fixing" it's recruiting pipeline, that could never realistically happen in time for him to fill that role.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...
Maybe no-one dares to complain, because it is easily perceived as racism.
There is no broken recruiting pipeline. There are simply not enough candidates in the pool to staff every company in a way that is representative.
And what does "it's telling" mean? What do you think this tells us about the author?
But right now, it's the reverse: filter out non diverse candidates, and try to find a good one in the remaining.
Yet, it's already hard to hire talent, even with no filter at all.
So now I have clients I assist for interviews, looking desperately for good devs, but when they find one, which is already a rare event, they often can't hire him (yes, him, because the hiring pool is mostly males in IT in 2022) thanks of those blockers. Of course, they already have a ton of hiring constraints to match for, so this compounds.
This week, I'm going to interview the one candidate that could make it through the diversity policy. His resume is a train wreck, and I already know it's going to be a waste of time.
So they are going to go through those shenanigans for the next year or so before finding their mythical creature, the same one their competitors are fighting for in this very competitive market. Of course, this means their projects are going to be delayed a lot.
It's good for me, I get on the payroll for longer. And I'm a diversity bonus for them, being from another country, so they won't get rid of me any time soon.
But I don't envy them, they are set up for failure.
They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it? Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
It sounds like you're agreeing with the author here, because he says,
>I fear that when large companies hire and promote people based on group identities, it discourages individuals from cultivating their abilities.
It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
It is only one logical step to assume the opposite as well, that a company that thinks holistically about the hiring process, and questions whether or not managers are acting in a truly meritocratic way will give people confidence that cultivating their abilities won't be for naught if they have a racist/sexist manager.
The article states a lot of things based on feels but the one tangible point they make is that HR is not in fact insisting he hire someone based on an "additional random factor" just that they considered all the candidates.
I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning.
"They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?"
The biggest thing is that this metric is meaningless. They don't define what the target is and why. They don't dig into the how of the increase either. If it was the policy, they have not taken a systems thinking review of it to see if it's working as expected or causing some other harm. I see no inclusion of the root issue - a pipeline of diverse candidates via schools. If the numbers are underrepresented in school, then they will be in industry too. Maybe you can juice your own company's numbers, but that simply leaving less for other companies. Figuring out diversity discrepancies in the talent pipeline (school, mainly) is the first step. Then figuring out if it's an actual problem and what the proper metrics are, is a step that seems to be glossed over. Without understanding these, there will be no meaningful progress.
I'm still unclear as to why we're even bothering to ask the question. How many blonde leaders are there vs. brunettes? Are brunettes poorly represented in corporate leadership? Does anyone care? Why should they.
> I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
Therefore institute race-based policies?
All that matters here is how things _should_ work. The hiring process should be based off merit. They should not be based off race. We should do our best to correct these when they deviate.
It's also inherently unfair, that's why nobody likes it, I have seen it first hand that it just leads to a few token hires, with no real change. People who actually care realise that if you want to improve something you start at the beginning, not a the outcome, you would at minimum start at education, however I guess it's cheaper to have a few diversity hires here and there without changing anything that really matters.
> Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions
You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.
> which is pretty squishy to begin with
I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job, which diverts from the point, we make decisions without knowing the outcome all the time, if we would take your worldview then every decision where we don't know the outcome would be decided by a dice roll.
> Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
You are exchanging one favouritism for another, how is that an improvement? At least the CEO's nephew would have connections in high places and likely more pressure to perform.
I would disagree. First of all, just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways, it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice. I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes. Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?
Second of all, I'm not talking about a recent grad and someone with 10 years of experience, but having been in leadership circles. It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"
> I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job.
This seems like an overly broad interpretation. Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true. i.e. take your pool of 60 senior managers, there's one open director position. Find your best 15 senior managers. You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers? (assuming there aren't specific technical skillsets involved)
Furthermore, we as a culture ought to be at least not hypocritical in our tolerance of clearly nepotistic/discriminatory hiring practices in minority-owned businesses (restaurants/trades/jewelry/etc.) but somehow intolerant of them in some sectors like tech and finance. These things are equally silly:
1. Expecting a Chinese restaurant not to exclusively hire more Chinese people
2. Expecting a tech-bro agency not to exclusively hire a more tech bros
3. Expecting a Kosher butcher not to exclusively hire more Jews
4. Expecting a WASPy finance org not to exclusively hire more WASPs
But that's not what the law says.
Title VII of the CRA 1964 says:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer— (1)to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2)to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
So I guess you want to repeal the law?
I found the article interesting as I've just started to work in US corporation and I've wondered how achieving specific diversity goals are achieved in cases there is a very limited pool of people to hire / promote in a select subgroup.
So now instead of those 3% being seen as having earned their position, all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage. So now it's not only unfair to the people excluded based on skin color but it's unfair to those who benefitted strictly because of the perception they now have to deal with as having not really earned their position the same as everyone else. It puts them on equal footing with the bosses nephew, who nobody respects.
It's 2022 - maybe we can stop trying to defend race-based favoritism and discrimination?
Only by the kinds of people who tend to assume the worst about Black people.
And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can be completed in two minutes by anybody.
> And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
The article explicitly states they are not asked to make promotion decisions based on race.
Similar deal with tech hiring. What is the pool of candidates for this hire or promotion? If you're setting quotas in excess of the pool's representation you're explicitly instituting discrimination.
I'm okay with people doing this, provided they're transparent in that they're instituting affirmative action and do not intend to create a non-discriminatory hiring or promotion process. What does get on my nerves is when people privately push for policies like this, but publicly decry and mention of discrimination favoring "diverse" groups as hurtful.
What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.
But I don't buy into that being the reason for <insert my idea>.
I DO worry that "hey we doubt we're doing it right based on merit so we're picking race this time / some times" will have an effect, and not a good one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
"Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society."
Nobody can measure merit, but that doesn't mean you can hire people based on skin color and that is exactly what DEI did. And not much else, it remains plain racism. Without bias you can see it because racial quotas are the expression. People in the past also thought they had good reason for racial discrimination.
There are real good arguments against DEI hiring practices aside from people disliking them. Although many dislike them because of its racism.
"The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read. Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti-<insert phrase> then too.
Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.
Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was wrong, but I was referring to the fact that the article seemed to say "DE&I Bad, Merit Good" with a superiority complex about it, and I was just saying that that position on its own isn't necessarily the intellectually superior position, even though I think "merit" gets assumed as being more necessarily more objective.
(Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious; at least to me.)
I enjoy having women in my office, but because of DI&E I don't interview at places that have to many, since 9/10 times it's a big indicator the department or company is going under due to incompetence. Exact same thing applies to skin color. This shouldn't be the case, but this is all policies like this do, and it's going to whiplash REALLY hard once the cultural pendulum is over.
- One applying to one role at github/microsoft: After ton of meetings, I would have to talk with their diversity manager, it was a 60 minutes meeting, which i just didn't feel well to go through after some googling.
- As hiring manager (in another FAANG) company, I couldn't hire the best candidates, until all other 20 more diverse were interviewed. Everyone, regardless of qualified or not, had to be interviewed, before we could hire someone less diverse (aka not "white", not European, not "Man"). The position was for senior developer, and I had to go through a tedious set of interview with people straight of coding boot camp.. We ended up hiring one (guy), which wasn't in our top 5. All top 5 were able to get a new job, since our process took almost 6 month, from starting the process up to onboarding him. It was frustrating and actually the main reason why I left the team, to become architect. The process was called "agile/fair hiring", how ironic..
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Edit: Nevermind, it's the 1964 Title VII [Section 703] of the Civil Rights Act.
https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...
Despite the positive spin of QZ.com, it seems like there's overt incentives for discrimination.
Like many others, I simply hope this "goes away".
D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations within big business where it's too easy to lose sight of how balanced a company is internally. If you don't keep reports on finances a company can easily fail. If you don't take steps to make sure minority groups are represented within your company, it will also create situations where bias takes hold, and suddenly discrimination becomes the norm.
What's next? Should we get rid of sexual harassment training and policies?
Only someone from a background that elimination of equal opportunity would serve foremost would think that "complete blindness to race" is possible in our world. It's a childish and a destructive ignorance considering what is currently happening in our world even to this day, as white nationalist groups are growing in numbers, and other groups, a prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate.
Also, people hiring in their friends and family over others who are distinctly better.
I've been in many roles over the years in very different companies, and these two eventualities always play out. People are flawed, and the companies they create become equally flawed
This is already the norm in Silicon Valley. D&I awareness is a brand new thing, and mediocre reactionaries like the author pervade existing leadership structures.
Over 50 years ago the US Military recognized that segregation and entrenched racial biases lead to inefficiencies and lack of readiness.[1] In an economy where hiring pipelines for skilled technical people are stretched incredibly thin, we need to be taking a hard look at why we're only getting people that look a certain way through our hiring process.
(for you who downmodded me, this saying is how management gets away with illegal discrimination without saying the quiet part out loud)
I'm less tired coming home from 8 hours on my feet dealing with the public than I was in professional settings. I don't have to hide everything about myself and my background (I'm a first-generation college student with a poorish upbringing) or constantly worry about what all my interactions with colleagues mean for my 'career'.
I will say my class background is more of an issue than my sex/sexuality, but my sex was way more of a problem in my teens and early 20s. The interesting thing is that being a techy child was fine, being a techy teenage/20 something girl SUCKED, and being a techy 30 something woman is fine.
To fill a position, you need candidates. To have candidates, you need students of that discipline. There are numerous issues that could skew the demographics of the students (some are problematic, but some may be natural/acceptable!).
And of course this applies to domestic workers. Global workers and importing talent via visas have different benefits and issues.
All that said, in my experience most DEI company policies are more about not getting sued and avoiding bad press. They create policies, but many of them are ignored or just turned into a spineless checklist. As an example, the article didn't seem to address why the Microsoft metrics are meaningful, or what the targets are and their justifications. There's no systems thinking approach to explaining why or how the metrics/policies are beneficial, rather it's assumed.
I however, think many D&I ideas fail to work when written into policies, and I think many times, higher-ups seem to write policy out of the best of intentions, yet fail to see how they can easily lead to abuse and poor results.
Two examples from a corporate job a friend shared with me -
1. A friend was interviewing senior software engineers for an open position, then got a candidate who was grossly irrelevant (I won't bore you with the details, but she has ~1 year of experience at best, and this position was targeting a minimum of 5 years, 8+ years preferred). Turns out, that specific hiring manager had recently lost a (male) top candidate because they didn't have a female candidate in that candidate's pipeline - the manager learned his lesson and now always dumps 1-2 female candidates that have no chance of making it into any senior position, just to meet the "diverse slate" requirement of their D&I policy.
2. Another example, this time not related to diversity - during the recent economic downturn, a company decided that on top of an aggressive hiring freeze, for any employee that is fired or quits, their position goes away with them, then gets re-assigned to where the higher-ups think the need is greatest. At first glance, that sounds like a good idea - kind of a CI/CD for re-orgs with minimal "slack". But of course, if you're a smart enough manager, that means your biggest hope is to remain static through this period, which means you'll never fire (or even challenge) anyone. You'll even promote mediocre folks to keep them on, then fire them afterwards.
Naturally, the most talented will still get plenty of offers and move / leave at some point, and then the slightly less talented folks get hit with all of their work and eventually move on as well, and over time the average talent level of that team will slide down considerably, and as we all know - hiring a top performer into a mediocre team is a challenge.
Nice policy in theory, but in practice - it will cause the company to lose tons of great talent, in a way that will take years to recover from.
They’ve forgotten Goodhart’s law, and as such they’ve create a metric everyone is trying to game which ends up being counterproductive and unfair to everyone. Let’s not forget it’s equally unfair to promote someone before they are ready and then stack rank them against more experienced colleagues as it is not to promote someone who is ready.
The growing issue is the increasing number of employees coming in with skillset below 50% of current peers. Not all from EDI source, but for sure majority. Higher skilled engineers are leaving because they need to do more and more work to keep up the systems operational and that results in more and more of the skilled folks leaving.
Trying to explain this to VPs and directors and they would just say dont choose them! The interview system is set in a way that we get a bunch of resume without names and we need to stack them. HR contact as many of them as they feel good about and there goes the round of interviews. After the interviews we stack the results and hand it over to the management. And they decide whom to hire based on the stacked results and their own infallible judgment.
Sadly it also reflects poorly on people who are good and come in with DEI budget. They need to spend more times earning trust.
Stop asking people what race they are, stop storing their race. And do the same for gender and religion. Just treat your people as humans. And problems like this will just disappear.
As a start you can anonymise applications of candidates: https://wol.iza.org/articles/anonymous-job-applications-and-...
The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation, we should all be grateful for that. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous tumor that is metastasizing and infecting everything.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/i/36007039/wokeness-is-g...
History will not look kindly on this moment in time.
The common theme I see in all these happy HN contributors getting their panties in a twist over affirmative action is that transactions exist in America that discriminate against white people: for a given promotion, a black person is advanced over a white person who is better qualified.
It's like some idiot plugging away at debugging a single query timing out, while the cluster is down.
Just take a step back. It's a really important intellectual ability.
Are you a Grandmaster if you won all your matches starting with a material advantage?
- attend school with class sizes of 60: start minus four pawns - limited role models in middle-class jobs: start minus a bishop - generational effects from iniquitous zoning laws: minus a rook
Affirmative action is an attempt to give back the bishop. Other strategies are also needed.
The theme I'm bristling at is, approximately, complaining that you lost a piece because your opponent was given a bishop.
I had a really difficult childhood; fatherless, impoverished schools, welfare, surrounded by crime (heroin addiction, prostitution, violence), I was quiet and bookish so I got abuse from all angles.
I had food most days and a home made of bricks so I had it better than most.
But if you're going to assume my life is easier because I have a certain skin tone I'm going to be annoyed, because my life was decidedly not easy in the early stages and I only got my "leg up" by being willing to throw myself into extremely uncomfortable situations.
The irony of saying this while advocating a practice that gives material advantage on the basis of race...
I don't think people are irked by affirmative action on the basis of family income. It's policies that privilege someone of one race over another even with equal income, parental education, etc. that people are opposing. We're not giving chess pieces back to people with limited opportunity, we're giving extra pieces based on race.
I think DEI proponents fail to grasp the whole picture and miss how they are increasing racism. And that picture isn't even that large. Pretty important skill to have as you said too.
Now the issue is that there are not two races. So what about the Asians? They are discriminated against both by actual racism AND affirmative action. In fact AA discriminates harder against Asians than whites. Mixed race Asian (white+Asian) are regularly recommended to report their race as white. Surely this is doubly unfair?
by the same logic we should cut limbs off healthy people in the name of equity, just because disabled people have it worse.
Some easy examples: if you're hiring for most programming roles and you don't have any qualified women applying, your pipeline sucks.
If your company is in California, and you don't have any qualified Latinos applying for most of your jobs, your pipeline sucks.
Et cetera.
If you're not casting a wide enough net to find qualified Latinos on the west coast(!), I guarantee you're also missing qualified white men in whom you would be interested. Ultimately, this is why Microsoft cares; they have an interest in their overall process being the best it can be.
In 2021, 9% of computer science graduates were black (1). 18% were women (2). These numbers are the ceiling of what you might expect for a senior pipeline, since women attrit at a higher rate than men (3).
In a typical senior hiring pipeline for a Microsoft-scale company, while you'll have loads of applicants, you might have a dozen who make it through initial screening and are at least qualified on paper. I've been a hiring manager at companies slightly larger, and slightly smaller, than MS, and this was true at both.
So of those 12, you'd expect perhaps 1 to be black, and perhaps 2 to be women - optimistically. But every company, but especially high-profile fortune 100s, are trying to increase their D&I numbers. Qualified minority candidates rarely come through applications - instead, they're recruited, since everyone wants to somehow turn that 18% into 30% in order to get their D&I-linked bonus.
Blaming a hiring manager or company for their "pipeline" when they fail to hit impossible targets is absurd, and mathematically dishonest.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/04/01/stem-jobs-see...
2. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
3. http://edge.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/WomenInT...
The pipeline sucks for everyone, we all know that. Let's not pretend that this is just a matter of a single company having substandard processes.
Microsoft has a bigoted hiring policy which cares more for your skin tone & nipple size than your skillset: Microsoft calls this 'diversity and inclusion'.
“It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer, labor organization, or joint labor-management committee controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining, including on-the-job training programs to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.”
By specifically allowing Women to attend the Grace Hopper Conference on company time, funded by the company.
Men, are not allowed to attend (unless not male presenting), and thus being discriminated against based upon their sex.
At the Grace Hopper conference, there are plenty of sessions which could be argued are training.
If the attendees were going for recruiting purposes, I could see it not necessarily violating the law. However, Women are attending to go to the conference (training?) without any recruiting duties.
I expect there are similar conferences for POC, which equally violate the Civil rights act.
But, … another part of me is uneasy with the idea that there is such as thing as a racialised or gendered (for example) engineer - engineers are individuals, and shouldn’t be under an implied expectation of being recognisably distinct from each other - so I don’t really know how to avoid the ‘entrenched discrimination via sensitivity to fixed identities’ problem.
This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender equality"[0]. TL;DR: Men and women are different from each other in lots of ways, including what they prefer to work on. As you increase gender equality in a society (moving from, for instance, Saudi Arabia at one extreme to Norway at the other), you see a systematic /increase/ in the difference in what men and women end up working on. More gender equality --> fewer women engineers, more women doing child care.
Edit: oh,and I would encourage anyone looking in to the literature to view it in the correct light: the field is overtly hostile to this data, and that greatly skews what gets published. And here it is anyway.
A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their potential.
My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that “Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.
So where does your thinking go when the issues are outside of the company?
Groups made of inexperienced young folks tend to make products for inexperienced young folks. People code what they know. While marketeers would support this, there’s still a lot of money out there that’s help by less desirable groups of people. And needs that aren’t relatable to these developers.
In my university, in the whole class, we had 0 non white, and a single woman.
Now, you may argue that we should fix that.
But that's another debate, the thing is, people are hiring from the pool we have right now.
However the supreme court undid this in United Steelworkers v Weber.
I do not understand how Americans find it acceptable that you can vote for people, they can pass clear statutory language that says you cannot discriminate and then SCOTUS can come along, and read the complete opposite meaning into the statute.
Is pretty spot on.
SCOTUS needs to revisit this issue. Or congress needs to revise the Civil Rights act to correct the wording cited by the Supreme Court majority on their opinion.
Their argument is that the statue states that it’s not “required”, but doesn’t state “required, or allowed”, thus suggesting that congress intended to allow this racial based decisions. And yet Congress included 703(d).
Absurd court case which is the source of this ongoing insanity.
And while D&I advocates are busy, the reality diverges. There are large teams at Amazon et al that only speak Hindi or Chinese. Imagine what group of persons are not hired because they aren't a "cultural fit". It's good that many (mostly born in a western country) are aware of racism and try to prevent it. However, that usually doesn't apply to people with a different cultural background. E.g., I saw many times that Indians treated other Indians differently based on their caste. That happened in silicon valley companies in the US.
all you have to do is start recruiting in places that were overlooked. just stop obsessing over Stanford pedigrees and recruit at the same Tier 3 universities that the intelligence community recruits from.
fund your own coding academies and executive workshops and create your own pipeline, physically located in neighborhoods that have people you want representation from.
everyone is going to keep messing this up and discriminating on the hiring process, without a framework about how to do it.
This is happening at every F50 company. If you are thinking "not my company" right now, you're just not high enough in leadership.
The fundamental issue is we have lost our freedoms. We live in a socialist society where we have to follow party lines. It all starts with laws that sound fantastic, but took away freedoms of speech.
I do strongly believe that, even with Affirmative Action policies, it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male, today. For example, no matter how you slice it, white Americans are ~3-4x more likely to become millionaires than black or hispanic Americas (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/). I think there's a TONNE of reasons for race and gender based inequality, but IMO most of them have to do with "momentum". If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this. It wasn't long ago that racism and sexism were much, much worse than they are today (and there's still lots of conscious and unconscious bias today), so white families are a lot wealthier today than minority families, and that propagates to the next generation, and the one after that, etc. Slavery wasn't abolished in America until 1865, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (ending racial segregation of schools) came in 1954, Rosa Parks was 1955, Jim Crow laws weren't really sweepingly overturned until 1965. If you're a black American in their 40s today, your parents were probably born in the Jim Crow era, where the impediments to their financial success were immense.
If, as a society, we don't try to actively help non white males reach an equal footing in terms of opportunity, it'll be really, really hard to close these "momentum" gaps. I view Affirmative Action as a temporary approach to narrowing these gaps. It's realizing that it's too hard to succeed financially as a minority in America, and temporarily giving minorities a leg up on hiring and promotions to help even the wealth/opportunity gap. Once the gap more or less goes away, you remove the Affirmative Action policies, but that'll take time. If you hire based purely on qualifications, education, experience, etc., the gap isn't going away for an extremely long time, because white families are a lot wealthier than minority families today, so a disproportionate number of kids from those families are going to have those advantages, and the gap persists.
Part of the issue is that you're presupposing a uniform definition of success. Different cultures have different priorities, and not everyone wants to spend 80 hrs a week in the office to climb the ladder and become a millionaire. Some cultures prioritize family/social relationships, sports, or a connection with nature. Unsurprisingly, these different cultures can often be racially affinitized. Sure, most people wouldn't mind being rich, but many do mind the hustle often accompanying that form of success.
I think part of what you describe around momentum holds merit, but I don't think affirmative action goes about the remedy in a constructive manner. It's fighting racism with more (albeit different) racism. You turn it into a zero sum game where your political posturing can be more valuable than your work contributions. That incentive structure is degenerative for all parties.
> If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this.
Genuinely curious, would you support an initiative to shuffle all babies between families at birth? Your argument seems to be "who you're raised by gives an unfair advantage in life, and we should correct for this societally". It seems to me that a random shuffle would equally distribute any inherent bias relative to generational momentum.
I'm half Indian and half white. At my age (42) he was doing way better than myself (accounting for inflation of course). When my dad was going through all the same stuff, 50 years back there was no affirmative action yet he still grew in the ranks. He's not a "black person" but his skin color is the same.
I think there is a lot of perceived racism when in reality people are promoting strong individuals already. Look at head of Google, Twitter, and a series of other companies.
For some reason people shy away from calling out racism when it comes to people from India because of their American success story. But again, if it's about skin color - how did this happen?
That said, does discrimination in companies' hiring and promotion process yield improvements? Affirmative action like this just increases the representation within Microsoft, and does nothing to help Black or Latin youths become software developers. The gap isn't actually being closed. The same dismal percentage of Black and Latin people are entering the tech workforce. It's just that they're more likely to end up at Microsoft than some other company.
Affirmative action in the form of sponsoring coding camps in underserved communities would actually work towards closing the gap between the rate at which Asian and white people become software developers and Latin and Black people becoming so. Progress will be made when companies leave the mindset of trying to increase their representation by clawing over each other for the limited pool of diverse talent, and instead work towards increasing the diversity of the workforce.
If this is the issue, why are we targeting certain races rather than all those whose family is lacking momentum?
Statistically speaking, these are called “minorities” for a reason, there simply aren’t enough of them in STEM related fields.
Diversifying your team/group with one or two female or foreign born individuals won’t dramatically impact the overall productivity of your team - assuming this person is not already a very hard working and/or bright individual, which many/most are.
The fact that this person made it to the interview phase and passed the initial filters (which are typically gender/race blind) indicates that they are potentially qualified for the role.
Keep in mind, interviewing is hard - for both parties involved, for different reasons but especially hard for candidates. There is a significant “luck” component involved.
Many interviewers are inexperienced and focus solely on finding ways to disqualify candidates as opposed to figuring out how a given person could “fit in” and contribute/help level up the team.
I ask that you have an open mind and show some empathy. We still have a lot of work to do to create a more diverse and inclusive society.
What's the correct ratio of white to brown? To male to female? Do employee demographics need to mirror society demographics?
Thankfully, I have faith in capitalism.
I never thought I would say such an obvious thing, but we are entering an era where « hiring the most competent » is going to give an unfair advantage to smaller companies.
I am already seeing this with cinema. Sure the US is still producing a lot of interesting stuff, you still have very talented filmmakers. But you are literally losing market share to Korea (which should have never happened) just because you made your mission to transform every possible well known character into black characters for the sake of it.
I haven’t seen any interesting Netflix original show about Zulu, or how people competed for power in Egypt.
But I sure have seen plenty of black washing (even on non white historical figures)
I'm starting to see it everywhere on blog posts linked from HN.
Are "influencers" that desperate?
It is hard for anyone that is not "diverse" to get promoted at the highest levels of Microsoft. Almost all CVP promotions are "diverse" now in a way that is pretty overt.
I am a huge proponent of D&I, but it is hard not to feel discriminated against and feel like there isn't much of a career trajectory for me.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/a...
1. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
You can do top down diversity. If you can hire or fire, you can increase diversity. Not easy, but doable.
Inclusion is a very different thing. After someone is hired, they have to be see their employer as an accepting place.
This is accomplished mostly by peer to peer interactions.
You can’t top-down force inclusion.
There are good steps that can be taken, but objectively harming some students is not the way forward.
Improve public schools and try to get more money into the poor regions. Do not erase private ones.
This is a systemic problem, systemic measures will be taken, there will be winners and losers.
"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!" ~Scott Alexander
Finland does that.
This is the same "affirmative action hire" argument conservatives have been making since affirmative action was implemented.
Hunker down, leverage to the opp to do boring tech at an interesting large scale and and earn a mountain.
Find your non-enterprise, pure meritocracy Ayn Rand bonanza engineering experience at a pre-Series C.
I can’t understand why engs expect FAANGs to operate like anything but an enterprise now, and then complain about that behavior!
We can save $1mil in under 4 years while wearing pajamas. The blind spots of the extreme relative privilege in this job and anchoring on articles like this as serious grievances blows my mind.
I hope the comments can be civil, and I've seen more contentious topics surface high-quality comments on HN.
If your indeed job posts didn't bring diverse candidates then, why do you think it would now? Because you added a "Please apply if you're DiVeRsE" line to it? Don't be ridiculous.
If you want diversity of candidates you can't keep going back to the same talent pools. You have to diversify where you're drawing talent.
If your college program is primarily getting white/asian males, you can't suddenly expect it to start throwing in women & poc as well. You can't suddenly expect it to start giving you LGBTQ+ candidates.
If you want diverse candidates, you have to look at diverse hiring pools. Look at the bootcamps that focus on diverse groups you're targeting. Look at schools that focus on diverse groups you're targeting.
If you're really interested in diverse candidates, you can't keep expecting them to just show up if you add a "We want diversity!" to your job description - you have to change where you look for them.
It's not like there is a large pool of black developer talent that firms just keep missing. It doesn't exist. It could be created, but a separate and totally valid question is: why do that? Why should we want every group of people to be representative of the population down to the smallest scale in race x gender x sexual preference?
I would assume the diverse hiring pools come with candidates that are not as qualified as the other pools. That's the flip side to this.
Do business hire from specific pools for biased or performance reasons? I think the assumption is that all hiring inequality is the result of bias. What if it isn't?
I believe that Pursuit.org (started by StackExchange) is like that.
NOTE: I am not connected with Pursuit. I did consider working with them, but they weren't interested in my specialty.
Also, a couple of felon-assistance outfits have been mentioned on HN. If you really want diversity, that's a good bet.
Naturally it ends up being a mess of contradictions and confused thinking, because everyone has to pretend to ignore the obvious root cause.
Given that Twitter takes an active role in censoring particular ideas, I think it's worth being careful to distinguish "Twitter has decided this isn't allowed" from "a lot of Twitter users have decided this isn't allowed".
Or the company is rich enough not to really care about the waste at this point.
I doubt such a person would last through one round of layoffs if there was real pressure to reduce costs.
After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum aspect to this.
The cultural brainwashing that there is virtue in supporting this against your own interests is just Nietzschean slave-morality propaganda. You don't have to apologize for or pathologize being capable, successful and doing what is best for yourself, dare I say even for your own identity group. You can simply reject this nonsense; the emperor truly has no clothes here.
Related: my most recent submission [0] titled "Wikimedia is funding political activism" received over 20 points in 30 minutes, but of course was quickly flagged without discussion. Quite a bit of censorship around these parts regarding these particular topics with huge impact on all of us within the tech industry.
No, you can't. Not without becoming ostracised in many cases. My younger self made the poor decision to commit himself to a creative field. I cannot reject the nonsense or I will more-or-less be blackballed socially and professionally.
Are you afraid of not having privilege? Do you think that's a symptom of how we treat the unfortunate, or the cause?
One could define "privilege" as the accumulation of inheritance of ancestors, economic, culturally, biological, geopolitical, power. All coming together in "good ways" for descendants.
But back to the question, is bad to not have it and good to have it yes? Then why would anyone support not having it, willingly giving it up, expect those who take it from you to not then also abuse power against you etc etc. If bad, why choose not to keep it?
In terms of abstract ideological values, I support merit, some sort of meritocracy. But in concrete terms this will never avoid conflict of group interests. That is politics and an unavoidable aspect of human competition over resources, wealth, power, prestige. So let's stop pretending, is my point, that there is some achievable neutrality in all this. Because we all agree not being on top is bad. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. At the very least having cultural power like those implementing all these policies throughout Western corporations is a good thing to have. It is bad not to have it. What else is there to say?
they seem to really think that individual contributions truly affect Microsoft's fullfilment of their self-appointed mission; but I highly doubt this. Microsoft is really huge. No single individual can really detract, nor add too much, to the company's overall mission.
One way to improve hiring could by legislating that for-profit companies should do away with drug tests and background verification. Systemic & instituitional racism means a lot of people of the wrong race/color are simply ineligible to be hired just because they have drug charges or they have a record because once took a loaf of bread from Kroger.
Billion-dollar corporations can afford to hire them, mix them with existing teams, have them learn on the job from the best people in the industry and turn them to be a productive person of the society. In the short term, yes it can cause pain and loss of productivity, but in the long-term, as the society we all can come ahead!
Actually, Outlook is much more usable than GMail, but apparently that doesn’t translate to developer prestige.
Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men. Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best" candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not.
My current team is a diverse group of well-rounded people. Some women, some men, some younger, some older, from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Guess which is the higher performing? Guess which has a safe atmosphere with zero dick measuring? Guess which is the most pleasant to be a part of? Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior? etc etc
Sure, there's lots of room for improvement in how tech businesses actually implement diversity vs just paying lip service to it and slicing numbers. But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely needed in the industry.
I find the current push toward so-called equity to be more toxic than anything I experienced on male-dominated teams. People fear saying things because they don't want to be called out. Someone uses a phrase like "off the reservation" or "grandfathered" or "whitelisted" and then we have to have a meeting about how someone might have been offended. Was anyone offended? No. But we'll have a meeting to discuss a hypothetically-offended person. This leads to some behavior change but also some silent backlash.
I get that certain types of toxic behavior might be limited on diverse teams. But it's simply not the case that by adding women and minorities we will eliminate toxic behavior. From what I've seen, we simply swap one type of toxicity for another.
Do you think this would be true if you expanded it to all teams made up of one single demographic? Or is it just young white nerdy males? Cause that would sound pretty controversial if you swapped out white for any other color.
Diversity on most commonly selected metrics barely does a thing as far as empirical evidence goes.
The metrics that really matter aren't actively selected for. At best they are a byproduct. More often than not, the teams willing to be open about hiring gain their benefits over being open and cooperative rather than their diversity hires magically boosting things.
But by all means, let's continue to be reductionist by stereotyping 'le weird white young male' group.
"Making a good team" is part of meritocracy. D&I is often implemented as an entirely separate quota system.
Probably the one that isn't making hiring decisions based on the colour of the applicant's skin.
You worked at Big-O Tires as an installer?
This is clear racial prejudice.
Yes, it's true. There has never been a strong team of young, white nerdy men. Never happened.
Technological and engineering progress was at a baffling standstill for centuries until the wisdom of diversity, inclusion and equity dawned upon us.
I don't even think you want a "meritocracy". I want a world where people are happy. If that means they're all doing jobs they suck at, then so be it.
Depressing, but not suprising.
If society doesn't put some effort into overcoming its biases, those biases will always exist.
And then they show a graph where only 5.6% of the execs are black (up from 3.7%). It's a pitiful number.
Yes, it's still more likely they got there because of their accomplishments, bigot.
> From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft’s AI Platform division.
Wow. A whole year. In large companies that's barely enough time to understand all the unspoken lines of communication, let alone pass judgment on a company's culture.
I've seen BiPOC and women candidates turned down time and again because they "fit" better in the bullshit diversity spots. And then there's a rant about "fit" also known as "we want to discriminate on illegal or unethical things but we cant actually say that".
This would have sense if it wasn't for the fact that the company that he works for, the folks that are paying him to be there, are actually asking him to do the thing that he is paying lip-service to.
I would hate to have an employee who doesn't do what they're directed to do because they thought they knew better. Unless it's something illegal, if you're going to collect a paycheck, you either do what you're asked to do or you leave. You don't continue to take their money but do something other than what they're asking for. Ridiculous.
> There weren’t any quotas around how many of these “diverse” candidates I had to actually hire, but I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the annual D&I report look good.
Correct, there aren't quotas, but of course that doesn't stop the author from speculating that there might be, and basing the rest of the article on that.
> Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy.
Missing here is how BIPOC and women have been systemically under-promoted relative to their work output, and yes, although there is no quota, someone is checking in to make sure a manager (i.e., someone who has power over their reports' lives) is aware of systemic biases when approaching their decision-making. What is terrible about this exactly?