The post describes turning down a lot of qualified people because they had not encountered any applicants of required race/gender yet. In fact, they ended up not hiring for the position at all because they never encountered applicants of the required race/gender. So despite the fact that they had qualified applicants, they ended up forced to hire nobody. No individual person was discriminated against, but the group of applicants sure was: none of them got hired, despite the fact that the manager had qualified applicants and wanted--needed--to hire one.

The post also notes that this was invisible to people who weren't a manager, so it was effectively a secret, whether or not it was intentionally so.

If I tell my recruiters to never interview black people, it's not discrimination because it's not actually prohibiting them from hiring or promotion? Quotas in choosing who to interview or who to consider for promotion is absolutely a form of discrimination.

I've worked at a company that implemented this. It resulted in a vast double standard: white and asian males only got interviews if they came from elite colleges or well-known companies. Diverse candidates could pretty much come from anywhere. This resulted in a substantial disparity of tech-screen pass rates. Which the company held up as evidence of discrimination, and demanded that we address this disparity. Proposals to anonymize tech-screen, strangely, were ignored. Instead, recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) got to decide who advanced from the tech-screen to the on-site instead of engineers.

> What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.

100% this. If companies want to show that they're improving the diversity of the tech field, sponsoring study programs and science olympiad teams in underserved communities are a much better investment than quotas. The only thing that's going to increase the representation in tech as a whole is increasing the number of black, Latin, indigenous tech workers.

Instead, companies seem to only care about signaling diversity. When a company sets a quota and pushes their representation of "diverse" demographics up a few percentage points, they're increasing the diversity within the company. They're doing nothing to actually increase the diversity of the field.