undefined | Better HN

0 pointsnosefurhairdo1y ago0 comments

IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses.

I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.

Finally, from the article in this post:

> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.

It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.

These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.

0 comments

drusenko1y ago

As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.

The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.

Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.

Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?

nosefurhairdoOP1y ago

The idea that people aren't comfortable on a team that doesn't have other people matching their immutable sex/race characteristics, and that we should encourage this fragility is insane to me.

If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?

I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.

Lanolderen1y ago

There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.

Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse