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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Parents matter.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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/...
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?