[HN Gopher] Four times I felt discriminated against for being a ...
___________________________________________________________________
Four times I felt discriminated against for being a female
developer
Author : anupamchugh
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-03-08 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (betterprogramming.pub)
(TXT) w3m dump (betterprogramming.pub)
| tester756 wrote:
| >"Carl is a difficult person to work with. But I trust in you to
| accomplish this. You will use your feminine approach and you'll
| be fine."
|
| What's wrong with feminine approach?
|
| People use this kind of wording especially when it comes to
| design
|
| - e.g room, or outfit, generally those things that are considered
| as a areas where women are way better, so?
|
| >That social networks can involve as much technology as any video
| game and that actually Facebook was one of the most influential
| tech companies of the last ten years?
|
| How's that relevant?
|
| People don't learn coding during Facebooking, unlike games where
| it's way more probable.
| tfigueroa wrote:
| What does "the feminine approach" mean? How is she supposed to
| employ "it"?
|
| What if a manager advised to use "manly ruggedness" to fix an
| algorithm from O(n^2) to O(n)? It employ "Irish Luck"?
| tester756 wrote:
| Ok, I get this, thank you.
| throwawayyy1986 wrote:
| Nah I think this is fair game...how much have we been told
| that Jacinda is better at handling a pandemic because she's a
| woman?
|
| The default position nowadays is that women/trans people/etc.
| are exactly the same as men but magically better.
| em-bee wrote:
| what's wrong is that the implied expectation that she would
| automatically be successful because she is a woman. the boss
| was probably thinking that she should let her feminine charm
| work on him or something like that.
|
| "you will use your whatever skill and you will be fine" is
| quite patronizing.
|
| i would have stated the situation without making assumptions
| about her ability to do this, especially not any assumptions
| tied to her gender. i would have explained that she was the
| only person on the team who doesn't already have a bad
| relationship with carl. i would have asked her if she wants to
| do this and give her the option to decline. and maybe even
| offered a bonus for taking on a difficult task. and at the same
| time i would have pushed to have carl fired because he clearly
| isn't getting along with anyone else.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| I agree with your first point but, with regards to the second
| point, how many people learn coding during gaming?
|
| Do you mean that more people get into gaming because of
| modding?
| tester756 wrote:
| >Do you mean that more people get into gaming because of
| modding?
|
| I meant that some games tend to get people into programming
| muglug wrote:
| Here's another anecdote about how female engineers are sometimes
| used to "balance" their team:
| https://twitter.com/SeaRyanC/status/1367191778386829312
| foogazi wrote:
| Unfortunate, BUT how many engineers/people are placed on teams
| they have no interest in?
| pluc wrote:
| You can be hired for the perspectives you've obtained due to your
| experience, but god forbid you're hired for the perspective you
| can provide with your experience as a certain gender.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Firing someone for a "lack of chemistry" and refusing to give
| details is a Grade A dick move.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I worked at a small company where everyone was on probation
| their first 3 months, towards the end of the 3 months our
| manager would come around and ask what we thought of the new
| person. If enough of the team found you annoying, you didn't
| get to stay.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Is it any better or worse than "Sorry, it's just not working
| out?" I've seen this happen a few times.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Assuming that a firing for "lack of chemistry" (which is a very
| real and valid concern, btw:
| https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-
| wor...) is, without evidence, veiled discrimination, is also a
| Grade A dick move, by being a "default victimization mindset".
| Anecdotal firings of minority hires are insubstantial proof of
| discrimination; in fact it may be the opposite, if there's a
| diversity retention policy (meaning that the problem was
| significant enough to violate their own policies). This is
| exactly the kind of conclusion-jumping that rubs people the
| wrong way and ironically _makes it more likely_ for you to get
| let go based on "lack of chemistry" (because it's really "we
| can sense this person is just itching for an opportunity to be
| a victim and we don't want to be subject to a baseless
| lawsuit"... but of course, that can't be stated aloud, because
| http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)
|
| I'll be honest again: Yes, I'm a white male, but I'm
| considering hiring people for the first time and this sort of
| thing TERRIFIES me because I genuinely want to help out whoever
| I can, and I'm even a natural fan of "underdogs"... What would
| I do if my nonwhite, nonmale (or both) hire just isn't working
| out (for valid reasons) but I can't yet afford to fight a
| discrimination lawsuit? Let's say my imperfect solution to this
| was simply to just keep hiring other white males for a while.
| Eventually I realize I NEED more diversity, but now I've
| created the perfect conditions for discrimination lawsuits by
| having an all-white, all-male company... Do you see yet what
| the problem is, here?
| handoflixue wrote:
| There's a difference between "this is evidence of
| discrimination" and "this is proof of discrimination".
| Getting fired without explanation is definitely evidence of
| discrimination: most employers are smart enough not to give a
| reason when firing someone for illegal reasons, so the
| majority of those firings are going to be "without giving a
| reason".
|
| Conversely, if you do have a legitimate issue, it's (a)
| usually something you couch the employee on before firing
| them and (b) means you can give a vague reason like
| "performance" and thus avoid paying out unemployment.
|
| The employee herself can also reasonably observe the social
| environment - it's not as common these days, but there's
| still plenty of places that have the Asshole Rockstar who is
| never going to get fired. It's a bit suspicious when places
| like that suddenly trot out "culture fit" for the first time,
| as an excuse to fire a woman.
|
| (I'd also say that as long as you don't do anything stupid
| like TELL people you're discriminating, it's remarkably hard
| to prove discrimination - legally you're pretty safe there.
| The other reply does a good job breaking out the math)
| fwip wrote:
| This article may be worth a read for you:
| https://www.paychex.com/articles/human-resources/eeoc-
| workpl...
|
| Below, I do some napkin math to attempt to estimate your
| likelihood of getting in trouble for firing somebody.
|
| In 20 years, there were 1.8M employee discrimination cases
| filed in the US, so ~roughly 90K per year. Each year, about
| 19M employees are fired or laid off.
|
| Considering that not all employee discrimination suits arise
| from termination, we can expect a rate to be significantly
| below the calculated likelihood of 0.04% (90K/19M), or less
| than 1 in 200. However, I don't have an estimate for this,
|
| You can adjust that for the prevalence of underrepresented
| groups in your field, of course - usually it will be about
| half that have some protected factor (age, gender, ethnicity,
| disability, etc.), so let's double that, for 1 in 100.
|
| Of those cases, 82% were closed without even a settlement. So
| we're back down to about 1 in 500, if you pretend that the
| EEOC chooses entirely randomly and cannot differentiate
| between real discrimination and made up ones.
|
| I think it would be worthwhile for you to do some real risk
| assessment, and figure out whether the < 1/500 chance of
| paying some money, if you need to fire a person with a
| protected attribute, is worth being "terrified" about.
|
| (Also, age discrimination constitutes the plurality of EEOC
| cases, so you should possibly be more concerned about hiring
| people over the age of 35 than hiring women or black people).
| moonshinefe wrote:
| In my experience the sort of people who would play the
| racism/sexism card if it wasn't the case also tend to be the
| people who loudly virtue signal and shame others on social
| media about those topics all the time, and even announce it
| in their profile/blurb next to their avatars. I think as long
| as you do a quick google search on someone and test their
| character in the interview, it shouldn't be as risky as
| you're worried about.
|
| I don't think the hiring all white guys scenario as a
| workaround as you described is very realistic. If people are
| actually doing that, they're missing out on the full talent
| pool certainly.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| IANAL, but I think the general perception is that by giving
| reasons, one exposes the employer to additional risk of a
| lawsuit.
|
| So IIUC, the legal system carries some of the blame here.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Similar to interviewing where they never tell you why you
| weren't selected (or very rarely - it's happened once in my
| experience) - they don't want any kind of legal liability. The
| less info they give you, the less you have to file a lawsuit is
| the theory. It definitely sucks, though.
| Kranar wrote:
| I don't let candidates know either and it has nothing to do
| with legal liability whatsoever.
|
| If I post a job up for a developer position, even as a small
| company in Toronto I get on the order of 1000 applicants in a
| matter of 2-3 weeks and I usually will only hire 1-4.
|
| I am not going to come up with a rejection reason for 996
| people. The reason you got rejected is because there are a
| ton of you out there and I can only hire so many so I am
| going to hire the very few who I am very certain will do a
| good job for the specific requirements my company has right
| now, even if it does something means I end up rejecting even
| better qualified candidates who I am uncertain about. Every
| hire costs me on the order of 50k per person in straight up
| recruiting costs, ramp up time to get that member to be
| productive, time lost doing interviews and filtering 1000s of
| people.
|
| Hiring and firing people is basically the option of last
| resort because of how risky, expensive, and time consuming it
| is.
|
| Finally it's highly unlikely that anything I say will be of
| much help to you anyways.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Not talking about all applicants here, I'm referring to
| people that have been interviewed and made it to some kind
| of final interviewing stage where typically you end up with
| only 3 or 4 applicants max.
|
| The one time this happened I had gone through the phone
| interview and had what I thought was one of the best onsite
| interviews I'd ever had (in over 25 years of software
| development). The hiring manager actually called me up a
| few days later and apologized for not selecting me. He said
| that I interviewed well and everyone on the team liked me,
| but that the other candidate had some extra experience in
| an arcane area that was quite relevant to what they were
| going to be doing. I thanked him and told him that I
| understood as not many people would have actual experience
| in that tech. It was helpful to know that my perception
| (that I had interviewed well) matched their perception.
| wyldfire wrote:
| And maybe a recipe for a lawsuit here in the US. The only
| female developer? It looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and
| quacks like a duck.
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| Honestly, not really. It sucks, but from a risk management
| perspective, less information given out is always better. Was
| she fired for legit reasons? Who knows. There is no advantage
| to the employer to give reasons. You can't really blame anyone
| for trying not to be sued.
| munificent wrote:
| Knowingly hurting someone else in order to avoid the risk of
| getting sued is a dick move.
|
| It's a _selfish, rational_ dick move, but most are. People
| rarely do dick moves that don 't benefit themselves.
| ironmagma wrote:
| However, life isn't all about avoiding risk. Sometimes you
| should seek out risk to make you a better person. Or, if
| you're part of a company, to make you a better company.
| Telling people why they weren't hired / were fired helps them
| improve, and taken to the limit, it helps the entire society
| improve.
| steve_g wrote:
| I'd say the dick move is firing someone without any kind of
| coaching or explanation about what you'd like to see done
| differently. The coaching should have happened well in
| advance of the firing.
|
| A firing that comes as a complete surprise to the employee is
| generally a sign of a bad manager (not always, but true
| enough to be a useful heuristic).
| rachelbythebay wrote:
| Upside of being a token X: sometimes you get enough cash out of
| it to be able to leave it behind again. This only works if they
| get to trot you out. So get used to that bridle.
|
| Downside of being a token X: normally they just keep you around
| long enough to tick off the "hiring" box(es), since nobody gives
| a shit about retention, and you probably won't be the one chosen
| to get put on a pedestal.
|
| So yeah, keep trying until you can find a place where you can
| just do your work and be taken seriously and not have them treat
| you like a piece of meat or worse. Good luck. I'm still looking
| for that place.
| vladletter wrote:
| I'm sorry you had to go through all of this. As myself being part
| of a minority, I can only tell you that I do my best to fight for
| minorities and women first in this IT env that can be rough.
|
| Keep faith cause I've worked in different companies where
| everyone was really accepted and celebrated. Thank you for
| writing this article: hopefully, straight IT men will hear us and
| fight too.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I don't think the poster of this article is the author
| vladletter wrote:
| Oops thanks you right. Nvm.
| einszwei wrote:
| Genuine question: Have you read the article?
|
| The article is just as much for those who are trying to help
| women and minorities as it is for those who are biased.
| vladletter wrote:
| 1) Yes 2) Yes agreed. I just hope the people that are biased
| read this article more than the people who already helping,
| that's it.
| DC1350 wrote:
| > The time I was asked to use my "female approach"
|
| This stuff is why a lot of diversity recruiting makes no sense to
| me. There are lots of good arguments in favour of targeting under
| represented groups (social justice, discovering talented people
| who get missed with traditional methods, willing to accept lower
| wages, less likely to unionize, etc) but the idea that women or
| Black people are useful because they "think differently" just
| seems offensive.
| coldtea wrote:
| Two things some people have difficulty differentiating between:
|
| - Being discriminated or insulted for being X
|
| vs:
|
| - Made fun or insulted with reference to X
|
| Not getting a job, a promotion, or even simply heard by your
| colleagues because you're X is discrimination. Being treated
| worse because of X is discrimination. Being called anti-X slurs
| by people considering X being inferior is racism.
|
| But being insulted or made fun of with reference to your X status
| might not be discrimination at all. Might just be an angry
| colleague or a colleague making a joke, and it might happen from
| each to every other member of the team.
|
| E.g. if someone makes fun of an fellow British or German's or
| Texan's dev's accent, the team can just laught it off. Such jokes
| happen (or used to happen before fast-track-cancelling became a
| thing) all the time between young devs in teams.
|
| But if the same is done with the same intent, but the person is
| e.g. Indian or Asian or Latino, many (especially outside the team
| or people new to one) make it all about racism and
| discrimination.
|
| There's this idea that people must be 100% "professional", non
| joking, always zen-calm, all the time. That is, dry and passive
| aggresive.
| jeofken wrote:
| Males joke with cruelty to test each other. We do in every
| culture. If you are not strong and team focused enough to laugh
| it off and banter, you are not trustworthy to carry your load
| for the group.
| ibudiallo wrote:
| I wrote about my experience as a black developer not too long ago
| [1]. At first, you are shocked when you hear some insensitive
| comments made around you. Then you realize no one else even
| notices, so it must be something wrong with you.
|
| Eventually you ignore it. When someone says something stupid, you
| rationalize it and move on. After all, you are only just here to
| do a job.
|
| But then you get angry. You are angry at everything. No one
| understand why you are angry or why you blow things out of
| proportion. "Hey Carl didn't mean to offend you. It was just that
| one time." What they don't understand is that you've been hearing
| the same stupid jokes or comments for 15 years in your career.
|
| In June of last summer, multiple companies contacted me to help
| them do something about diversity in their company. Here is what
| every company is excited to do: Diversity day, minority day,
| rainbow flag day, Awareness, BLM profile image, hashtags.
|
| Here is what was incredibly hard to do: Hiring more black people.
| I interviewed hundreds of black people on their behalf, many
| highly qualified for the jobs. Not more than a 10 candidates got
| a reply for a follow up. So far I only know of one who was hired.
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53180073
| arenaninja wrote:
| I'm in a similar boat, story time!
|
| $current_company runs internal events and makes noise about
| leadership bonuses being tied to diversity targets. I'm part of
| $targeted_minority so I usually show to the relevant zoom
| meetings. There's recurring meetings but no actionable items
| emerge from these meetings.
|
| In a way I'm alright with this because some people need the
| meetings as a coping mechanism but it doesn't fix the
| underlying problem; bringing in more $targeted_minority does
| that. What's missing: data about internal
| hiring/promotions/referrals showing whether $targeted_minority
| has a funnel problem. Maybe those reports are above my pay
| grade at this company. For some anecdata I've made over 30
| referrals and not one has been hired. At $previous_company I
| made 6 referrals that turned into 4 offers and 3 hires (and one
| of those referrals walked away before being made an offer).
| Sure, $current_company has higher standards but I'm a bit
| incredulous at the success rate gap.
|
| Maybe one day they will give up and pad the numbers with
| marketing/HR folk, etc. and pat themselves on the back. Maybe
| they already do that and I just don't know about it.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Tech certainly does have a diversity problem, by which I mean
| lack of diversity actually works to the detriment of tech
| companies. Yes, from the POV of companies who are hiring, this is
| largely a pipeline problem. No, tech companies aren't going to
| solve this problem directly themselves.
|
| But, what tech companies _can_ do is change their candidate
| sourcing practices. I 'm in favor of some version of the Rooney
| Rule [0] in tech hiring. Roughly, you should make sure to
| interview at least one person from an underrepresented group each
| time there's a position to fill. Given the pipeline problem, I'd
| cap it at some arbitrary number of candidates per opening -- one
| large enough to ensure that the company made an effort to seek
| out candidates who would add diversity to the company, but small
| enough that you can still actually hire. You'd have to validate
| that recruiters were actually contacting people from
| underrepresented groups to make sure you're not just getting to a
| point where every position ended with "Welp, we tried, but the
| only people we could find to interview for the position were
| these N white and Asian guys," but it could certainly work.
|
| The beauty of this approach is that you don't lower your hiring
| bar. You just make sure to get people from underrepresented
| groups in front of your interviewers and hire them if they're the
| most qualified people for the job.
|
| Now, I get that big companies don't hire for 1 position at a
| time, so, the point here would be to have your pool of candidates
| interviewing always contain a certain number of people from
| underrepresented groups. This is explicitly _not_ a hiring quota,
| because you don 't lower your bar. It's just putting an
| opportunity in front of more people to see if you can get people
| who look different from your standard straight, cisgender, white
| or Asian male tech worker into your recruiting pipeline to begin
| with.
|
| ---
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
| jariel wrote:
| "lack of diversity actually works to the detriment of tech
| companies. "
|
| Tech companies are diverse, more so than most companies.
|
| You mean to say 'not the right kind of diverse'.
|
| The ridiculous, Monty Python conversation that nobody wants to
| have, is that since White Americans are slightly
| underrepresented, but Asian Americans are about 600% over-
| represented ... which means getting the 'right' kind of
| diversity literally means hiring less people of colour,
| specifically Asians, which seems really unfair to them for very
| obvious reasons.
|
| It's funny and Orwellian at the same time that the problem
| exists out in the open, but nobody dare speak a word of it.
| These are the kinds of problems that Cults and the Bad Kinds of
| religions have.
|
| The problem with the 'rule' as you describe it is _it may
| decrease diversity_ in any sense.
|
| There is no data to support the fact that African Americans and
| Latino Americans are showing up in the pipelines in sufficient
| the right qualifications to 'balance out' diversity.
|
| The data actually works the other way - the ethnic and gender
| composition of people hired basically is a good reflection of
| the pipeline.
|
| I understand we can do better than just looking at the
| pipeline, but from any specific, direct hiring perspective, the
| pipeline is it.
|
| Within the pragmatic but admittedly narrow confines of 'the
| pipeline' - any company is going to be hard pressed to hire
| considerably more of the 'right race' of people. It's not going
| to matter that much how you do interviews.
|
| 'The Solution' is going to have to be 1) getting more kids from
| different backgrounds interested in tech at an early age and
| into the pipeline and 2) accepting that 'diversity' is an
| ideology on some level, and that just because you have people
| of some group, doesn't necessarily imply negative or racist
| behaviours. Nobody will ever state the later in public, but
| it's possible we come to terms with it.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Can you cite sources for "more diverse"? I'm curious if you
| mean "higher percentage of POC" or "numerous different
| minorities are all represented"? A company composed entirely
| of 30-something black men is 100% POC, but it's still not
| actually that diverse.
|
| I definitely agree that it's weird how much we focus on
| holding tech companies "accountable" for diversity when
| they're fundamentally working with whatever pipeline society
| gives them.
| jariel wrote:
| By 'diverse' I meant 'PoC' mostly.
|
| Tech, particularly in the Valley has technically an under
| representation of non-PoC.
|
| (I myself have worked at companies that were 95% Asian,
| being almost the only 'White Guy').
|
| The reason 'tech' is highlighted is ironically that's were
| the 'woke folk' are. You can go the Midwest Cracker Co. and
| find 90% White and people are not too worried about it,
| except for in a kind of 'corporate optics' way.
|
| It's the general employees of tech, tech press etc. that
| are fairly assertive in promoting issues of diversity
| because it's what they care about. A company has to have a
| certain profile in order for it to be newsworthy. CNN, even
| if they wanted to, can't really run an article on the
| Midwest Cracker Co. but they can for Twitter because it has
| public resonance.
| theluketaylor wrote:
| I saw an interview with one of the late night hosts (I think it
| was Seth Meyers). He told a story about building the staff for
| their show as part of the launch. They asked the various talent
| agencies for packets for writers (which are collections of
| sketches and other material tv comedy writers use to get hired.
| Think artist portfolio). The show wanted to hire a more diverse
| writing staff and asked for that in packet submissions. They
| only got a handful packets from women out of hundreds of
| options. The show went back and said they would only look at
| packets from women. Suddenly packets came from all over and the
| show found a number of great female writers.
|
| It was a really interesting conversation because to get a
| diversity of outcomes they had to completely change their
| approach, not just sprinkle some diversity into their existing
| process.
|
| Applied to the rooney rule from above it would involve
| cultivating multiple inputs to the talent pipeline to make sure
| interesting candidates don't get blocked along the way. NFL
| positions like head coach have a pretty limited pool of
| candidates to begin with, so ensuring an interview quota is
| likely sufficient. For something like software developer the
| pool is so much deeper and wider and interview quota on its own
| is unlikely to be sufficient.
| hypersoar wrote:
| Jon Stewart had a similar story. They had to change the way
| they did hiring to diversify the writer's room because the
| existing pipeline was just going to keep sending them
| college-educated ironic white guys.
|
| https://youtu.be/p1H7KxPlbQw?t=2631
| kbelder wrote:
| Isn't that blatantly illegal?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Certainly.
| jariel wrote:
| That doesn't make a whole lot of sense though as a fair
| hiring process, it's just brutal gender-specific hiring.
|
| Nobody ever doubted that there were 'good female writers' but
| there are 1000 writers for every 1 job, it's a hugely
| asymettrical situation.
|
| The reason it's completely illegal and morally questionable
| to hire that way is because it ignores the material character
| of the individual in question.
|
| If there are 10x more guys running the gauntlet of early-
| phase writing career, then it's really unfair and they are
| not getting the best writers (staff composition advantages
| notwithstanding).
|
| A better approach wold have been to work with the agencies to
| get a true sense of the pipeline, and then to encourage and
| demonstrate the job is 'real' for more young women to
| understand that it's something they can aspire to.
|
| The possibly sexist/racist actions of these companies are
| probably only going to get us into more culture wars, I'm not
| sure if they are a 'temporary pain' issue.
|
| Edit: if you listen to 'Inside Conan OBrien' podcast by the
| head writers you'll get insight into several very inside
| conversations about the gender issue. In the 2000's there
| were hardly any female writers. Writing is a buddy-buddy
| system that's going to lean a certain way, so expressedly
| looking outside the boundaries of the pipeline is reasonable.
| Also a lot of the female writers in the 2000's indicated they
| literally 'did not know it was a job' in their youth. To be
| fair - almost nobody did. Though I'm not in the biz, as a
| young man I literally never contemplated the concept, I don't
| know anyone that even thought about it, it was like a thing
| that happened in a far off land. It's a hyper-niche kind of
| job with specific dynamics.
| ncw96 wrote:
| The Rooney Rule sounds good in theory, and yet 28 out of 32
| head coaches in the NFL are white.
|
| (For reference, only about 25 percent of NFL players are
| white.)
| RulingWalnut wrote:
| Very much not challenging the experiences in this post but I will
| say:
|
| "I believe everyone can become a good professional as long as
| they're willing to learn."
|
| was most likely speaking to her youth than her femininity.
|
| Source: Myself as someone who has given advice to a lot of
| different interns/new grads along the same exact lines.
| koyote wrote:
| I almost stopped reading there. That sentence, no matter how I
| try to interpret it, seems like very common and genuine advice
| to a new graduate starter.
| d3ntb3ev1l wrote:
| I'm over 50 and feel discriminated as a developer every day.
| tester756 wrote:
| >I have never considered that "having chemistry with the team"
| could be a reason for being let go.
|
| That's what worries me too.
|
| I like to throw a racist jokes, especially about my own nation
| from time to time
|
| and I guess I'd have hard time in corpos and companies like faang
| because polacks tend to lack of thick skin /s
| driverdan wrote:
| > I like to throw a racist jokes, especially about my own
| nation from time to time
|
| Do we really have to explain why that's inappropriate?
| munificent wrote:
| There was a time in the US when racist/cultural jokes about
| groups one was a member of were considered harmless and funny.
| But, for better or worse, that time is not now.
|
| The set of things you can comfortably joke about at work is
| pretty small these days and almost never includes jokes about
| any kind of group identity.
| tolbish wrote:
| Generally one should read the room before opening the barn door
| of ethnic jokes.
| cobraetor wrote:
| In other words, it is all about social skills.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAe867evM18
| [deleted]
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| Racist "jokes" make people uncomfortable because it's directly
| adjacent to racist insults, racist hiring/firing practices, and
| even racist violence. Employers have a duty to workers from
| employees that are potential threats, and to remove employees
| that are walking legal liabilities. And that very much includes
| employees who claim to be "equal-opportunity offenders."
|
| I understand that it's more complicated when you are making
| jokes about your own ethnic group. But please understand that
| it's not an issue of "bad culture fit." As an example,
| employees who make relentless personal criticisms of their
| coworkers aren't gruff people that have trouble fitting in to
| an upright corporate culture: they are jerks whose behavior
| rightfully makes them difficult to work with and hard to
| justify hiring. It is the same with making ethnic / racist
| jokes in the office. Just don't do it.
|
| (There is also a difference between _ethnic_ jokes about Poles
| and _racist_ jokes about black people or Jews, but that's a
| different discussion. Both are really not appropriate for the
| office.)
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| >There is also a difference between ethnic jokes about Poles
| and racist jokes about black people or Jews, but that's a
| different discussion.
|
| Oh wow, here we go with racism gatekeeping.
| robbmorganf wrote:
| A lot of really insightful and disturbing stories in the comments
| here about discrimination in hiring. To bring them all together
| and improve, what hiring practices have you observed that have
| really worked well?
|
| (Particularly interested in responses from often-marginalized
| individuals)
| pmarreck wrote:
| I read the whole thing and I feel for her, especially around all
| the gendered language she has had to deal with, but had some
| thoughts.
|
| I want to make constructive criticisms (which is extremely
| difficult in the context of someone perceiving harm), but I'd
| prefer not to get downvoted, so I will try to be as empathetic as
| possible when stating the following.
|
| > I have a strong opinion about diversity hires: Although I don't
| think they are a perfect solution, I consider them an effective
| measure to break the ceiling glass that excludes minorities from
| certain roles.
|
| > Was I only selected because I was the only female applicant?
| Would I have passed the technical assessment? Would I keep moving
| up the company hierarchy only because I had a minority pass? Did
| they think that I wouldn't mind knowing my own recruitment
| criteria?
|
| These things are exactly why some people are against this way of
| increasing diversity. Critics of forced diversity hiring see this
| as a direct and obvious (at least to them) consequence of this
| practice; her experiencing the result is rather unsurprising (her
| surprise, however, is). She also does not suggest a better
| solution, so this just seems like whining (the definition of
| which is "complaining about a situation without a known
| solution"). I'd suggest that she probably wasn't informed that
| she was a diversity hire because intuitively, people know this is
| a shameful practice without great consequences...
|
| > I have never considered that "having chemistry with the team"
| could be a reason for being let go. Guess what? After a quick
| Google search about "cultural fitting in tech," I discovered that
| is an argument often used by tech companies to disguise a
| discriminatory preference.
|
| She links to an example of this, but the example is just another
| person pulling the racism card when the only example that person
| gave was not drinking after work with coworkers. You can't expect
| people to not see you as a diversity hire, but only when it is
| convenient for you... if you want them to not see you as one when
| hiring you, but if when letting go of you for some given reason,
| you want to jump to conclusions based on diversity... you're
| gonna need much better evidence than that. "Cultural fit" is
| unfortunately a very valid condition for hire, at least if the
| goal is productivity and happiness:
| https://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-relationships-wor...
| The fact that "lack of cultural fit" SEEMS TO sometimes fall
| along diversity lines, is not so much a problem with diversity
| hiring as it is a problem of people just hanging out too much
| with other people who seem more like them, something that is
| (unfortunately) a natural inclination and something that
| literally every one of us should be consciously fighting. But
| it's a subpar situation, for sure.
| em-bee wrote:
| i disagree with the validity of cultural fit. if there is a
| problem with someone fitting into the culture, then it is the
| culture that needs to change. letting someone go because they
| don't participate in after-work activities or because they
| don't drink alcohol is unacceptable. as is letting someone go
| because of gender differences.
|
| yes, some people have a problem working together. carl in the
| story is a good example. carl is someone i would let go because
| he is uncooperative. this again has nothing to do with cultural
| fit.
|
| and especially if the difference in cultures falls along
| diversity lines, i would very carefully examine what the actual
| culture is and make a strong effort to push for a culture
| change.
| njharman wrote:
| > problem with someone fitting into the culture, then it is
| the culture that needs to change.
|
| So the team should change to accept a racist, a rude asshole,
| an elitist narcissist, all the other toxic personality types.
|
| In my experience "doesn't fit culture" is code for they're an
| asshat.
|
| Culture in this context doesn't mean ethnic culture. It's
| referring to work culture, work ethics and personality at
| work.
|
| Also thinking the world needs to change to fit you is the
| epitome of entitled snowflake attitude. A cultural misfit
| anyplace I have or would work.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > if there is a problem with someone fitting into the
| culture, then it is the culture that needs to change.
|
| I don't think this is realistic. Suppose I move to Texas and
| manage to start working for a company that likes to watch
| rodeos on weekends and listens to country music all day in
| the office. Meanwhile, I'm a techno guy who can't stand
| rodeos nor country music. I start to get irritated with the
| all-day-country thing, and (as it turns out) work sometimes
| gets discussed at these rodeos everyone else is going to that
| I'm missing, so I always end up a little behind where
| everyone's at regarding work stuff. The rest of the team
| starts to perceive this as me "not really caring" or
| whatever, and eventually I get fired due to "lack of fit".
|
| I cannot claim veiled discrimination because I am a white
| male getting fired by other white males (and perhaps some
| females, but not 50%).
|
| Do you really expect the entire company to conform to my
| taste in things? I took race and gender out of the picture
| here to try to show that this is unrealistic.
|
| > carl is someone i would let go because he is uncooperative.
|
| Honestly it's weird that he was even kept around. Sometimes,
| people who are willing to butt heads on something are good
| workers, though.
|
| > if the difference in cultures falls along diversity lines,
| i would very carefully examine what the actual culture is and
| make a strong effort to push for a culture change.
|
| I think the best time to do this is at the start, because I
| also think that after you get above, say, 20 people, the
| cultural trajectory has already been set and it becomes
| massively harder to change.
| em-bee wrote:
| i don't expect either of you to change your preferences,
| but i do expect everyone, and in this case you too, to not
| put so much weight on your personal preferences, and to
| stop to expect others to conform to them. there is no
| reason that you could not get along. that part of the
| culture is what needs to change. everyone needs to be more
| tolerant of different preferences and interests. in other
| words the culture of the company needs to change to be more
| tolerant
|
| and you are right of course, the larger the company, the
| more difficult the change.
|
| company culture comes from the top. it is the leaders that
| need to give good examples.
|
| i'd say though that 20 people should still be manageable.
| as long as everyone knows everyone else.
|
| it takes longer and more effort in larger companies
| bollocks187 wrote:
| People react to many different things that are said or done to
| them. Many people use 'discrimination' as the cause. I will give
| you one example many hi-tech company's in the USA hire a people
| of the same heritage or culture - is that discrimination. If you
| say yes then many white people should put a class action lawsuit
| against all the non-white companies operating in silicon valley.
| EvilEy3 wrote:
| > If you say yes then many white people should put a class
| action lawsuit against all the non-white companies operating in
| silicon valley.
|
| It only works if you're PoC, sweaty.
| missosoup wrote:
| > The time I was told at a feminist event that men are more
| naturally predisposed to do my job
|
| They are. This is well studied in several countries now.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
| Peritract wrote:
| The linked article says the exact opposite of what you are
| claiming:
|
| > The issue doesn't appear to be girls' aptitude for STEM
| professions. In looking at test scores across 67 countries and
| regions, Stoet and Geary found that girls performed about as
| well or better than boys did on science in most countries, and
| in almost all countries, girls would have been capable of
| college-level science and math classes if they had enrolled in
| them.
| missosoup wrote:
| 'Predisposed to do job' doesn't mean 'better at doing job'.
| It means 'more likely to do job'. Which is what the linked
| article studies - the fact that as women get more choices,
| they choose STEM less and less.
| kroolik wrote:
| I've always been afraid of having to lower the hiring bar due to
| diversity quotas. Thankfully, I have always had the chance to
| focus on the particular skill set, instead. The ideas about
| ensuring big enough sampling from diverse sources during sourcing
| sounds like a good solution, without having to lower your hiring
| bar.
|
| What sparks my curiosity, though, is out of 3 companies the
| original poster has written about, the second time she knew she
| is a diversity hire. Yet, this time it doesn't matter at all,
| because she was excited about the opportunity.
|
| It strikes me, because it suddenly wasn't a problem once it
| aligned with the original poster. If we stand up to some idea,
| shouldn't we live up to it every time? If you hate being a
| diversity hire, why would you accept it once it suits you?
| cole-k wrote:
| I think you just misread what her objection was to the first
| point. Quoting from 1.,
|
| > I didn't know what to think. I have a strong opinion about
| diversity hires: Although I don't think they are a perfect
| solution, I consider them an effective measure to break the
| ceiling glass that excludes minorities from certain roles. But
| I always thought that if it ever happened to me, it would be a
| transparent process and I would have the opportunity to accept
| the conditions deliberately.
|
| It was at least implied upfront that she was a diversity hire
| for 2.
|
| And maybe I just don't have as strong a moral compass as you,
| but I have found it difficult to always uphold the ideas I
| stand for. E.g. I like the idea of solely merit-based hiring.
| But if I got a dream job because I knew the CEO's friend and
| they put in a good word for me, I would have a hard time
| rejecting that offer.
| causality0 wrote:
| _But I always thought that if it ever happened to me, it would be
| a transparent process and I would have the opportunity to accept
| the conditions deliberately._
|
| Why would anyone think that? The point of diversity hiring is to
| do deliberately what we should be doing naturally until we don't
| have to do it deliberately anymore. I would be flatly amazed if
| being told you are a diversity hire is common in any industry.
| Can you even imagine if a college recruiter said to a prospective
| student "You're only being accepted because you're Native
| American, do you still want to attend here?"
| raven105x wrote:
| Times like these make it critical to discern between those of a
| certain gender vs those without talent (or discipline, or perhaps
| both).
|
| This is difficult to do without unfairly discounting the cases
| where people with talent still encounter unfair discrimination
| ...but this isn't it.
|
| There are plenty of female developers / engineers who have their
| colleagues' respect. They would also never find out they are
| diversity hires.
|
| If you are simply bad at your job, but also [protected status
| here], it's suddenly somehow newsworthy - I never liked this part
| of our culture.
| mbyio wrote:
| Honestly many of the comments in this thread illustrate the
| author's point - there is such blatant sexism in tech, to the
| point that many people don't even realize it is sexism.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Why don't you reply to those comments with your criticism then
| instead of leaving us wondering?
| balkonpflanze wrote:
| I don't have many female colleges. The ones I work with, I like
| them.
|
| They are in avg more social.
|
| But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman
| because " what happens when she gets pregnant" and we did hire
| her because she was good and I stood up for her.
|
| I should not need do so this!
|
| I think we would be better if with have more woman in our teams.
| metajack wrote:
| > But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman
| because " what happens when she gets pregnant"
|
| This is perhaps an example where extending parental leave
| benefits to both parents solves both ends of the problem. Men
| also may leave if they choose to expand their family, and women
| aren't pressured into more child care than they prefer due to
| the men not having parental leave to help.
|
| > They are in avg more social
|
| Careful with these generalizations. Women get placed in
| impossible behavioral expectations. Told to be more assertive,
| but then perceived differently than men when they are.
| nimchimpsky wrote:
| The top comments to this post are all men saying how they were
| discriminated against, or how she did something wrong.
|
| Fucking hackernews man, I rarely visit here now, its toxic.
| edoceo wrote:
| Yea. I'm feeling pretty good about the policy of removing
| name/location/photos/etc from my profile reviews on applicants.
| It's an attempt to block some bias inducing factors. (It's not
| 100%).
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Oh, come on! Dozens of threads and thousands of comments for the
| weekly Dr. Seuss pearl-clutching. But mentioning that, on
| occasion, tech orgs are shitty to women is immediately flagged?
|
| Whose the snowflake that can't take any criticism and wants to
| stop others from seeing it here?
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post like this--it does nothing to help, and
| you're just stoking a flamewar, guaranteed to get dumber and
| nastier as it gets going, with this flamebait and name-calling.
|
| The way to help is to let us know. We don't come close to
| seeing everything.
|
| The way to let us know is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com, as
| the site guidelines say. Fortunately another user followed them
| and did so.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| Dang, I'm confused, why was this article flagged? Is it that
| it's considered flamebait? I'm asking because the article is
| in my Medium publication and a lot of our stuff does end up
| getting posted here and so I want to be a good citizen.
| (Also, I've been an active HN member since 2007 and I think
| have been relatively constructive at contributing.) I'm not
| trying to debate you. So if you do have time to say a bit
| more, I would fold your feedback into the work we do.
|
| (Or is it just that this was temporarily flagged and then got
| unflagged? Like I said, I'm interested but am having trouble
| following the details.)
| dang wrote:
| The article was flagged because users flagged it. I don't
| know why they flagged it. Most likely it was a combination
| of things. Some probably don't like the topic for
| ideological reasons, others are probably reacting to how
| common these threads are (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange
| =all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), others are probably
| reacting to the flamewar aspect. Those are just guesses.
|
| When someone told me about the article I looked at it,
| looked at the thread, and turned off the flags. We do that
| sometimes when there's interesting information in an
| article and it's capable of supporting a substantive
| discussion.
|
| Helpful notifications are welcome. Rants like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388171 make things
| worse.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| Thank you. Nice key phrase you have there for future
| search. I didn't know to look for flagging or that you
| could email for reconsideration. I will use that
| knowledge judiciously, if at all.
| wyldfire wrote:
| It's frustrating that we can't vouch for it, either.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Yeah, I'd like to know exactly why that is.
| dang wrote:
| Vouch links appear when a post is [dead]. There are degrees
| of [flagged] and [flagged][dead] is only the last of them.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Dr. Seuss threads were also interesting.
|
| But yes, why was this flagged? It is an extremely important
| topic and this was a an unusual and valuable approach to it.
|
| Pure tech discussions are better on lobste.rs anyway so I
| recommend those who are allergic to this kind of topics to seek
| refugee there.
|
| (Or on second thought, maybe not. I don't want deletionist and
| flag abusers there either.)
| serjester wrote:
| With all due respect, I think part of her issue is she looks at
| everything from a "sexism" lens. Her first discriminatory comment
| seems like a sensible thing to tell any new grad.
|
| She complains that the company didn't tell her she was a
| diversity hire? Doing this seems like a recipe for any diversity
| hire to always have imposter syndrome.
|
| There's definitely sexism in the tech industry but I'd argue the
| best way forward is with tact. Coming out guns blaring with
| accusations and always assuming bad intentions will just alienate
| people from the cause.
|
| She'd be better served trying to understand where people are
| coming from and working through specific, addressable issues.
| clarkdale wrote:
| > Coming out guns blaring with accusations
|
| She is not doing that
|
| > working through specific, addressable issues
|
| She is doing exactly this
| bpicolo wrote:
| > didn't tell her she was a diversity hire
|
| It's illegal to do and definitely illegal to put on paper (in
| the US) - it's discrimination. That said, depends on what "HR
| had intentions to prioritize candidates" means in context.
| mc32 wrote:
| I have to agree. Some of it is sexist (her feminist coworker)
| but the others not so much. I could accuse them of lacking
| tact, perhaps.
|
| One has to keep in mind that not only do Other people offend us
| inadvertently but also WE inadvertently offend others too.
|
| We can't be so sensitive that we become prickly and then have
| people avoid you because you're so prickly.
|
| We have to be okay with not everything coming from your point
| of view. You won't be able to have the Other persons PoV either
| even if you're conscious of it. You have no idea what I'm
| thinking in a moment. It's a fool's errand.
|
| Be genuine, be respectful, but don't fault people for coming
| short when trying.
|
| When talking to an audience you cannot simultaneously please
| everyone. It's just not possible. At best you can be compliant
| with whatever the accepted practice is.
| grayhatter wrote:
| she looks at everything from a sexism lense?... in the essay's
| topic of sexism she experienced? Yeah, agreed, she's too
| narrowly focused on her topic... She should ramble more and
| include more unrelated observations.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It seems like she's experienced a lot of inappropriate and
| difficult things explicitly about gender. My only question
| was the cultural fit -- we don't know for sure that gender
| had anything to do with it. Often times when people are fired
| not only can you never tell them why, they are incapable of
| seeing, assessing, and recognizing their own flaws
| (particular when it comes to personal interaction versus
| quantitative measurements).
| handoflixue wrote:
| "Culture fit" without any other explanation is fairly solid
| evidence. First off, programming is one of the most
| "culture agnostic" jobs I've worked - if you're a high
| performer, you can absolutely get away with being an
| abrasive asshole. At least, if you're male. That's slowly
| changing, but I still find the social skills of the average
| programmer to be significantly below what I'd expect from,
| say, a minimum wage cashier or call center employee. (And
| that's fine, but it makes "culture fit" look like a much
| more suspicious excuse)
|
| The other aspect here is that they just fired her, without
| any effort to actually work on that "culture fit". I've
| worked with managers who had wildly different styles, and
| some of them did NOT like mine. But instead of getting
| fired, I had conversations with them.
|
| It's certainly _possible_ that she 's lying, or in denial,
| or just plain wrong. But I'd say the weight of the evidence
| favors her.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| It's a pretty straightforward deadlock:
|
| "We want to hire you because you'll add diversity."
|
| vs.
|
| "I don't want to be hired just because I'll add diversity."
|
| Since the solution of giving preference based on diverse
| attributes creates a deadlock, the problem has been framed wrong.
|
| I'm not going to posit the right framing... I'm actually not
| sure. But letting people know they are doing the job for reasons
| other than their capability means they'll forever feel less
| qualified than their colleagues.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Taking a non-diverse population and making it diverse is not
| easy at first. You need to jumpstart the effort across the
| board. Example: if there are no minority engineers applying
| from schools, it is because there are no minority students
| getting degrees. Follow that back to the source. It also is a
| lot to ask of a non-diverse group to suddenly understand
| diversity: they really can't, you need the group to be diverse
| in the first place so that those opinions are baked-in to the
| system. It's a catch-22, and bootstrapping is gonna upset the
| status quo (and probably newcomers) until things are running
| smoothly.
|
| One source: With engineering it can be followed back to
| opportunity at school. The US school funding model sucks:
| wealthy districts get the most money, which means better
| education, which means students come out primed for better
| jobs. Then there's the Gatekeeping common in engineering that
| tries to keep out others (in the late 80's it was harassing
| women so that they dropped out... one of the frats at my uni
| had an actual game to try to get women to drop out by making
| fun of them in recitation, which was horrific).
| rwcarlsen wrote:
| More egalitarian funding will just make the wealthier classes
| just put their money and students somewhere else. I live in
| an area with a lot of private and charter schools. This is
| the mechanism that the community members have evolved to
| fund+support their children's education directly the way they
| want. If you try to make people pay for something they don't
| want to - they'll just find ways around it and you could even
| be left with even worse outcomes than before.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Simple. Don't let them. My province has a math education
| program that would rank amongst #2-3 in the world, and you
| aren't allowed to run a private school with a different
| curriculum - at all, beyond a certain amount of enriched
| tracks that are available to anyone.
|
| This also applies to the first few years of college.
|
| Result? Everyone gets an amazing education, and you can't
| pay your way around it.
|
| You might say that there is a risk that universities will
| simply select around it. In order to prevent that,
| universities may not use any criteria to select students
| from within the province, except a score, calculated from
| pre-university college education, that is a Z-score
| augmented by metrics from the performance of your
| classmates at standardized high school exams, deviation
| thereof, and a few more. The exception are programs like
| medicine and dentistry, where this score is used as the
| primary criteria but the interview and scores at ethical
| tests are also taken into account.
|
| That way, there is simply no way to pay your way around it.
| Private high-schools are not competitive with the best
| public schools (which you can enter by exam or
| recommendation), purely private colleges and universities
| are even worse, and everyone ends up on a common track.
|
| Result? In my Computer Science program, almost every
| minority is over-represented (the others are more commonly
| in Math or EEng), altough there is still a large majority
| of men.
|
| It works pretty well. I would recommend it to you, but
| you'd probably need to sort out your incompetent-on-purpose
| government (from both parties). It would also require
| basically nationalizing every accredited university, but on
| the upside you'd have tuition costs of ~3000$ per year for
| every university.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Unfortunately, in the US, people from higher
| socioeconomic strata don't like to mingle with those of
| the lower. That is why they flee public education and
| laws allow them.
|
| In addition, charter schools have no curriculum
| requirements in the name of "flexibility". They can teach
| whatever they want and hire whomever they wish but still
| get federal $$$. It's absurd.
|
| Even worse, the US lacks comprehensive nationalized
| standards to begin with - public schools can purchase
| textbooks that have completely different US histories,
| usually regarding the Civil War and racism. It really is
| a clusterf*ck of epic proportions driven entirely by the
| GOP. I know HN gets fussy about calling out political
| differences, but this is a huge one. The GOP fights
| standards tooth-and-nail, as do GOP governors at the
| state level.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Actually, this is not a deadlock at all really.
|
| If a company wants to hire someone because of diversity, it's
| not necessarily _just_ because of diversity.
|
| In the article, the author describes their experience as having
| been different than non-diverse candidates, therefore creating
| a sense of personal doubt about their abilities, however
| unfounded.
|
| If given two equally qualified candidates, giving a preference
| to diverse ones does not present any deadlock. If you're not
| _just_ hiring someone for diversity, then you are doing that
| due diligence. Additionally, I would hope also doing the due
| diligence to make the environment you are hiring them into
| welcoming as well. The authors stories reflect things breaking
| down in this regard in a big way as well.
| munchbunny wrote:
| There's a pretty standard accepted approach to this for
| software engineers: your resume might be more likely to make it
| to the first phone call because of diversity, but you have to
| go through the same interview loop as everyone else.
|
| The fact that you got the same competence test should be
| enough. Leave it at "the team thinks you can do the job."
| hypocrisy wrote:
| > This is an example of how methods to empower women, when
| wrongly applied, can have the opposite effect, making them feel
| even more insecure and powerless.
|
| The soft bigotry of low expectations and affirmative action rears
| its ugly head yet again.
|
| Hire people of all races, genders and creeds based on _merit_,
| not diversity quotas. No one should have to show up to work
| feeling like a second class citizen and that they're only there
| because of their sex or the color of their skin.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Just a note that it's useful to think about what merit criteria
| you have and what really matters for your job. There's a lot of
| room for biases to sneak in under the guise of an objective
| measure.
|
| For example, looking for only people who graduated from a
| certain tier of school limits you by adopting whatever
| discriminatory practices that those schools have adopted. Or
| looking for people with a particular experience that is rarely
| afforded to a particular class of people.
|
| Instead, by working identify the merits that actually result in
| high performance and then working to evaluate those in an
| interview can get you better and more diverse employees.
| [deleted]
| obelos wrote:
| Make that five times...
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In
| my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of
| companies. I never got a single response.
|
| I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the
| first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within
| 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses
| paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in
| Albuquerque, New Mexico. They followed up with several phone
| calls encouraging me to attend.
|
| I didn't want to go because I felt like the only reason they
| wanted to talk to me was so they could add another number to
| their diversity report. My Dad convinced me to go.
|
| They had Native American speakers, food, performances and music.
| It felt so condescending.
|
| On day 2 they had hiring managers from dozens of departments. It
| was like speed dating. One manager asked me "What was it like
| growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard
| it was for you." It felt gross.
|
| One hiring manager handed me an offer letter when I sat down. She
| hadn't even spoken a word to me. She told me she had reviewed my
| resume and that was enough. WTF.
|
| I got several offers from that event. I turned them all down.
|
| I ended up getting a job at Microsoft. They didn't ask me about
| my race when I applied.
| hinkley wrote:
| Probably you dodged a bullet.
|
| It's always seemed to me that people are aggressively
| attempting to hire for some criteria (even position) because
| they're either having trouble getting people on board, or
| holding onto them. There's something 'wrong' with them, for
| some definition of wrong.
|
| Either they're looking in the wrong place, they're giving off a
| bad vibe that scares people off, or people who have that
| quality they're looking for are leaving at a higher rate than
| everyone else.
|
| Why is this team trying so hard to hire team leads? Can't find
| any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring?
| Why doesn't this team have any women? Can't find any in house?
| Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring?
|
| My guess is you would find out pretty quick why there is nobody
| quite like you at those companies, and soon they'll be fishing
| for your replacements.
| ActorNightly wrote:
| I would argue that the metaphorical "getting your foot in the
| door" is worth it above everything else.
| hinkley wrote:
| But that could be true of the people in front of you too.
|
| This place is worth working at to get some hours on your
| resume, but it's not worth staying at beyond that.
|
| Within the wider world of employment, this is not an
| uncommon sentiment, but within software you don't hear so
| many people talking like this.
| f154hfds wrote:
| 'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc
|
| I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right
| approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I
| realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.
| vlod wrote:
| Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twit
| ter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang...
|
| This is the first time I've heard of this push-back.
|
| I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I
| have a dream that my four little children will one day live
| in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of
| their skin, but by the content of their character." was a
| good approach?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Advocating race neutrality is argued by anti-racist
| training types as ignoring the historical oppression that
| various groups have faced. Basically, it is why "equality"
| is out and "equity" is the new buzzword.
|
| YMMV.
| kevinmgranger wrote:
| Not to advocate for either approach, but surely MLK was
| describing an end goal, not a means for getting there, no?
| worker767424 wrote:
| I wonder if anything will ever happen with reverse
| discriminatory hiring practices like this. They're all seem so
| barely legal, and if even one in ten people in HR disagree with
| them, there could be a #metoo-like flood of issues once a high-
| profile case goes a little too far.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience. There are more and more
| people who have had similar experiences that are speaking out
| about it and how condescended to it made them feel. It's good
| you were able to find an employer with whom you feel valued for
| your contributions and accomplishments.
|
| Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal
| and socially acceptable? This is not something that is
| stealthly flying under the radar, it's pretty much in the open
| and celebrated. What moral ground will anyone have to stand on
| should the pendulum swing the other way, which it always
| eventually does? Instead of attempting to create equality,
| we've instead continued playing the same old game but with
| different winners selected. How long will the current chosen
| winners continue to be the winner? And when things change to
| other selected winners, how will anyone be able to complain
| when they supported the concept of selecting winners as long as
| those selected were the ones they favored?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native
| American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you."
| It felt gross._
|
| While "diversity via token hires", and "faux-diversity
| celebrations with folklore food, music, etc" are fake-ass and
| crinzy, I don't see the manager's question as gross.
|
| It's a legitimate question a human being can make to another.
| We're not just individual snowflakes, we're also people with
| certain traits and members of certain cultures with certain
| histories.
|
| It makes sense for someone to ask us about those aspects of our
| life.
|
| Of course, perhaps the way he did it was patronizing or fake,
| or whatever.
|
| But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another
| they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such...
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask
| another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such...
|
| Really? Consider it this way, by substituting x for something
| that fits for you personally:
|
| What was it like growing up x? Was it hard? Tell me about how
| hard it was for you."
|
| How might you feel by the end of the flight?
| cambalache wrote:
| NO! I have noticed that many white Americans cannot fathom
| how patronizing and "otherizing" are many of the attitudes
| they take. "Oh my god, it must have been hard to grow up as a
| POC, you must be so strong". " I am fully aware of my
| privilege , I had loving parents and a functional family, I
| must not assume other people had that luck" . "Racists cannot
| understand that the expectations for POC must be different
| because they have been oppressed all their lives"
|
| If the applicant was white, should the manager have asked
| them; "Oh wow as a half Italian/half English person , how was
| to grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey, was it difficult?
| Was it hard? Gee I cannot begin to imagine how strong you
| are"
| Fellshard wrote:
| Turns out Sowell was always right about the condescension
| angle.
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| The reaction you had resonated with me in that it's the feeling
| I most want to avoid giving someone else. I'm a white male
| hiring manager who is often incorporating explicit
| diversity/inclusion strategies into work. It's tricky--like tap
| dancing around all the ways that the work can go wrong. And
| this is one I overindex for. I never want someone to think they
| are a token.
|
| IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity &
| inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or
| facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell
| at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing
| to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun
| culture, belief that it will make the company more money.
|
| I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead
| with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the
| business by helping the business make better decisions, helps
| find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing
| blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those
| things boil down to: it's good for business.
|
| This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an
| employee that you only care about their ability to help the
| business make money. But there's also something really
| unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the
| business cares about an employee's happiness and positive
| social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the
| relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the
| employment in the first place, which is making money.
|
| I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because
| then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can
| see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a
| relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet
| this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I
| get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less
| competition from other recruiters."
|
| That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true,
| especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of
| inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage
| that allows you to take advantage of industry bias.
| Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means
| fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good
| opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform
| their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much
| opportunity.
|
| It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are
| real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand
| with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that
| doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the
| bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we
| think you could out perform your past work by a lot."
| _marypoza_ wrote:
| I would say the best way to make sure the diversity hires
| don't feel like being a token is by establishing a fair
| recruitment process. How? The more concrete the selection
| criteria better, so don't fall in the unconscious bias trap
| of assessing different candidates through different lens.
| Since it's good for business, inclusivity policies should be
| considered an investment and not an expense. The best way is
| involving the employees directly (are anonymous surveys that
| hard to pull of?) and ask them what they need. Giving you a
| concrete example: As a woman in tech, I've work in tons of
| places with pingue pongue tables and beer on the community
| fridge. That doesn't really appeal to me, since I prefer to
| leave work as soon as possible to work in my non-paid female
| duties. But I would be SO APPRECIATED that the female toilets
| had menstrual products available just like toilet paper. It
| would have a relevant impact in reducing my monthly expenses
| and would make me be a better professional because it's
| something that would stop being part of my day-to-day
| logistics. Every time I suggest this, I am told it's too
| expensive or the H.R. men don't know how to buy it. There is
| always a residual number of females on the teams, is that
| really a great expense? And I learn to code every language my
| company asks me too but the HR can't learn how to buy
| properly menstrual pads? Please just asks us!
| vmception wrote:
| I have multiple San Francisco and Bay Area friends that told me
| similar stories during a time period that coincides with
| AfroTech in recent years.
|
| Completely contrived, but personalized, introductory events.
|
| The difference is that they eventually took the job and have no
| issue performing on the job or have any stranger than usual
| corporate experiences.
|
| (They experienced the same super long interviewing and
| matchmaking process plaguing the rest of the industry, and the
| contrived intros were just the silly responses to how to deal
| with the recruiting pipeline).
|
| These were not right out of college though, and they would have
| likely gotten responses within 24 hours from the same companies
| anyway.
| bedhead wrote:
| While I'm your everyday white guy, I've never understood why
| people among minority groups would accept this completely over-
| the-top pandering. It's a form of shaming and it's
| dehumanizing. Who wants this?
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| They're just putting up with stupid crap for pay. Plenty of
| people do that. After you've got a couple jobs on your resume
| nobody knows or cares you were the diversity hire at your
| first one. Yeah the mere presence of diversity hires makes
| your accomplishments worth slightly less but it's still
| better for you to take advantage of it. See also: prisoner's
| dilemma.
| launderthis wrote:
| im gonna be racists here but very vague for you to make sense
| of it and make it rational but not racists... here it goes
|
| white men in power want this to control all others below
| them. Its a divide and conquer strategy.
| creato wrote:
| I don't think anyone does, but companies are absolutely
| desperate to meet the demands of (a subset of) society
| regarding diversity. That desperation manifests in funny
| ways.
| cambalache wrote:
| The common minority person hates it usually. The more vocal
| ones are the people who directly benefit from this system,
| they effectively have a rent-seeking behavior hidden behind
| the "diversity" umbrella.
| [deleted]
| tonystubblebine wrote:
| Doesn't it have an obvious answer? The people who accept this
| are the ones for whom this is the best option. Upside: money.
| Downside: offensive pandering. That's often better than being
| unemployed.
|
| If that's true, then it's not just an offensive strategy,
| it's also ineffective for the business employing it. It's a
| way to select the lowest performing of a target group.
| Macha wrote:
| Have had a former female coworker report a similar experience
| with IBM more recently than yours, pretty much search and
| replace "native american" with "female engineer". It was her
| first career out of college, and she just was not assigned very
| much duties in her actual team, and her management were far
| more interested in her DEI work than her engineering work.
| After a year of going "well maybe they just think I'm too
| junior for interesting work", she left for the company where we
| worked together.
| munificent wrote:
| All of this sounds horribly cringe-inducing and I don't fault
| you at all for walking away from IBM.
|
| At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an
| iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you _had_ taken
| the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But
| this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they
| can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it 's a
| little less awkward. Maybe they hire a couple more. Over time,
| the organization builds enough to overcome its own internal
| systemic bias and does have a strong local representative
| culture of Native American employees.
|
| But I don't see how an organization gets to that point without
| it being sort of weird and cringy at first.
|
| Of course, you are under no personal obligation to be the one
| to take those first steps simply because you happen to be a
| member of that group. But I have to wonder, if we're going to
| criticize an organization for trying to correct their biases
| this way... what other process would we suggest?
| ipaddr wrote:
| Just hire based on skill / experience and don't not hire
| someone because they are a minority. Basic fair hiring goes a
| long way.
|
| If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse
| places.
|
| To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful.
| People want to be judged based on their skills not skin /
| gender.
| kvetching wrote:
| You clearly don't understand Equity.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Oh, I think initial guidelines had that.
|
| And then it was all tramped on by some insane incentive
| like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a
| particular person actually gets to hire. Or a stack ranking
| based on the same.
|
| All it takes is just one perverse component in the mix.
| conception wrote:
| How does that overcome systemic bias, eg prevalent poverty
| in many minority groups. The poor don't have resources,
| wealth or contacts, to become a super
| coder/manager/whatever so they don't make it into your
| applicant pool based on skill alone in the first place.
|
| The cycle continues.
|
| Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income
| children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in
| the cold, etc etc.
|
| It's a tough nut to crack but trying to fix historical bias
| isn't necessarily a bad thing.
| km3r wrote:
| I always thought the best way was to treat those recruiting
| events as a way to get a more diverse set of candidates on
| the resume pile. Once they are on the same pile as everyone
| else, the higher ratios of minorities on the piles will
| naturally lead to more minority hires (assuming your hiring
| process is non discriminatory).
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| This is an example of a non-diverse company that doesn't
| understand diversity trying to implement some kind of
| diversity. I recall these kinds of ham-fisted attempts
| everywhere in the late 90's.
|
| Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no
| minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity.
|
| I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of
| white folk in HR tried to show off diversity during a co-op
| tour and had posters of Africa all over the room. But why would
| I expect someone who just learned the term to actually grok it?
|
| Bummer you go the offensive end of that.
|
| EDIT: From the article "It was when I first realized that tech
| leaders have no idea what it is to manage work dynamics through
| a gendered lens."
|
| When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly
| speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong.
| People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No,
| it takes literal diversity of opinion.
| [deleted]
| CodeMage wrote:
| > _When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they
| suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful,
| and wrong._
|
| I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a
| privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the
| minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572
| 082239488...
| lovegoblin wrote:
| There's always a relevant xkcd, right?
| https://xkcd.com/385/
| kvetching wrote:
| It's sickening that a white man doesn't have a chance at any
| of the big companies, unless he's a programming god. This
| makes white supremacy even more of a problem because the
| white people that are there, are some of the best ever.
| mattm wrote:
| As a white, non-god developer who just went through a job
| hunt, I had offers from big companies. I don't think this
| is an issue in any manner.
| launderthis wrote:
| thats what you get when you government mandate things. You
| cant expect things like diversity and culture to be processed
| by law. You pretty much have to make it non profitable for
| companies to not be diverse.
|
| Then they company has a personal responsiblity to change
| rather than a checkbox to check off , much like the "what
| race are you" checkbox given to pander to their diversity
| quota.
|
| I blame society, people cry about diversity but all they want
| to see is someone of a particular type in a manager position
| and never really as, "what is this person doing", "do they
| really get to make an impact". Diversity propaganda is all so
| shallow and has only made relationships different cultures
| worse.
| edoceo wrote:
| Who defines the rules in the society that you blame? How
| would they be enforced?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| You: "thats what you get when you government mandate
| things."
|
| Also you: "You pretty much have to make it non profitable
| for companies to not be diverse."
|
| /facepalm/
| coldtea wrote:
| Where's the contradiction?
|
| Things can be made non-profitable outside of government
| interventions like fines of tax incentives etc.
|
| In fact, the parent's position is an 100% consistent
| libertarian position: they believe that such a problem
| will (or wont) be solved by the market itself, and that
| companies should follow such incentives not being forced
| by laws.
|
| E.g. diversity would be good economically for companies,
| because else they will lose black, asian, indian, etc
| talent they could hire.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they
| suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful,
| and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was
| OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion.
|
| Which is why the entire concept of demographics-based
| "diversity" is such a shambles. The premise is supposed to be
| that if you get some women and minorities in there then
| you'll have a diversity of opinion.
|
| But then you select for the women willing to work 80 hour
| weeks, which is highly atypical and selects out e.g.
| prospective mothers, ensuring they're not represented in your
| organization. You select for the minorities with degrees from
| prestigious schools which selects out people who know what
| it's like to grow up poor.
|
| You end up with diversity on paper but not in practice, which
| is not only useless but worse than nothing because it creates
| the impression that you now have a diversity of opinion and
| you don't.
| anthony_romeo wrote:
| Your overall stance seems to require the assumption that
| "diversity on paper" is the more common/significant outcome
| relative to "diversity of opinion". Do you happen to have
| any info which might support such an assumption?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The thing you're asking for is the source of the problem.
| It's the Seeing Like A State thing. If you had some kind
| of actually robust diversity metric and not something
| which is going to get crushed into a black hole by
| Goodhart's Law then you would have a solution to the
| problem, but if you don't then you can't even measure it.
|
| If you wanted actual diversity then what you would
| presumably do is gather all the data you can on multiple
| metrics and then hire for maximum entropy. "Diversity"
| hiring based on a specific individual metric is literally
| the opposite of that, because it finds the people who are
| the _least_ unlike the existing people in your company
| but can check the box on the form.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired
| in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical
| challenges.
|
| That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want
| to call it.
|
| When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do
| affirmative action there are those that you know are there
| because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are
| the other ones. Are they there because of skills? Could be, could
| also be HR wanting to push diversity? Also possible.
|
| Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech
| recruiters that's tied to a bonus. So at every "diverse" hire you
| encounter you have to ask yourself: are they here because of
| skills or because someone was one hire short of cashing out their
| bonus?
| eqvinox wrote:
| ... which is exactly why the post points out the need for the
| applicant to be informed about affirmative action being
| applied. If you know how much AA was applied, you can actually
| make a better argument when you're mistreated.
|
| [for the people downvoting: I'm just pointing out what the
| article says.]
| stefan_ wrote:
| You are asking the companies to divulge that hiring you was a
| crass violation of labor laws?
|
| That doesn't seem a likely course of action.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Sure. Company wide email: "Careful with these demographics:
| make sure to re-interview them before joining your team, they
| might not have had a proper technical screen."
|
| The lawsuit would be hilarious.
| Cullinet wrote:
| as someone who would make a diversity hire myself I am
| aghast at how this situation isn't taken as a opportunity
| to show the fools who hired me how utterly wrongly they've
| judged me. this reads like it's creating the very
| conditions for not achieving that, born out by the litany
| of positions held too briefly for making anything out of
| them at all.
| bsder wrote:
| So why isn't some company or founder dipping into this
| underutilized labor pool and blowing everybody's doors off?
|
| That's a real question, and I don't have a good answer.
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| You don't have to ask yourself that, you can just accept that
| the people who you work with will usually be out of your
| control and respect their skills separately from what they look
| like. If they suck, then they suck, but don't prejudge because
| you think diversity hiring is rampant everywhere, which it is
| not.
| musingsole wrote:
| > who you work with will usually be out of your control and
| respect their skills
|
| Unless you're in a small company with a substantial ownership
| stake, not only should you accept the reality of this but
| also accept that dealing with it is part of your job. Making
| the best of the team and resources available is part of the
| job description.
|
| If given the reins of the hiring process, a given developer
| could not do a better job filling out company's a roster.
|
| The company has made decisions. Unless you were consulted on
| those decisions, your opinions aren't desired. Most of the
| time, your helping of those decisions' consequences will be
| inline with your responsibility for them: nil (scapegoating
| happens and shit rolls downhill, but I'd argue both are
| necessarily rare).
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| I guess not everyone agrees, since my comment was
| demolished.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| We had a great music director once, now world renowned (we
| never deserved him), who believed in blind as in blindfolded
| auditions.
|
| Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and
| accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know
| who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints
| of bias... for talent.
|
| During that period, yes, there were more women and people of
| color chosen than historically comprised their body, but they
| were from everywhere. It turns out musicians didn't want to be
| reduced to bigoted demographics, so it attracted many more
| "non-traditional" candidates when word spread you could make it
| on merit.
|
| Blind auditions were scrapped when he left, and so did actual
| diversity. You can include everyone today in a single
| introduction by mentioning Yale, Juilliard, Paris Conservatory,
| Royal Academy, etc.
|
| Merit destroys class privilege, which is a big faux pas when
| your patrons tend to be family of people who want to advance
| their careers in your institution. Just recently, I couldn't
| help but notice the timing of the creation of another
| superfluous position being filled by a fledgling choral
| director and a $MM donation by his parents to expand the
| performance hall he'll be using.
|
| Mere dutiful patronage, surely, in these times of austerity.
| vlod wrote:
| I've read about this before (some fancy orchestra, not sure
| if it's the same one as you've mentioned) and I went to one
| of those "Let's get more X in technology" speeches. They had
| some crazy complicated ways to solve this (not Occam's Razor
| thinking).
|
| I asked a question, mentioned the orchestra approach and
| suggested blind tests for tech recruiting.
|
| i.e. HR scrubs the name, pronouns and anything likely to
| subconsciously discriminate and pass their resume to the
| hiring team. Not perfect, but it gives X at least a better
| shot.
|
| I was pretty much told it would never work and there were
| better ways and dismissed with a wave of a hand.
|
| So why don't we do these somewhat blind tests?
| LockAndLol wrote:
| This is the kind of thing I think of when people talk a out
| meritocracy. Somehow social studies have warped the
| perception of meritocracy to mean "anti my group" by
| selecting examples that aren't meritocratic.
|
| Just look up "meritocracy dead" on a search engine of your
| choice. It's pretty minds boggling what people want to
| replace the goal of meritocracy with these days.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| Recruiters don't make the final decisions on hiring. The
| bonuses incentivize them or seek out diverse clients, not to
| lower standards. And your whole argument is, unfortunately, the
| standard-issue objection to any efforts to change an unfair
| system by, just to rub it in, once again blaming its victims.
|
| Why don't you ever suspect that young white guy to just have
| the job bececause their father knows the CXO from golf? Did
| that sysadmin use to room with the tech lead in colleges?
| Empirically, such employment biographies are far more common
| than your hypotheticals. Gut somehow, they do not seem to
| provoke this righteous anger of meritocracy.
| OptionX wrote:
| If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already
| lost. Two wrongs don't make a right.
|
| By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a
| prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also
| being.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| People always say "two wrongs don't make a right" and then
| make no effort to correct the first wrong that happens to
| benefit them.
| OptionX wrote:
| Never had anything given to me by any connection in my
| family. Heck, my family dosen't even have any connections
| I could profit off if I wanted to.
|
| Now, it does annoy me having had to jump-backwards
| through the modern interviews for tech position and now
| there are people like the author who get handed the same
| kind of jobs solely based on the genitalia the were born
| with and still complains about it.
|
| So save your dollar store philosophy and stop making
| judgments about my reasons.
| tharne wrote:
| You're making the assumption that all wrongs can be
| corrected or made right, and that's often not true. We
| want to believe that everything can be magically fixed if
| we just come up with a clever enough solution. But many
| things don't work that way, and can't be made right, even
| if someone wants to do so. For example if you best friend
| sleeps with your spouse, you can forgive everyone, you
| can get divorced, you can move on, but there's no "making
| the wrong right".
| majormajor wrote:
| If you cheat during a football game, there's a yardage
| penalty applied that gives the other team an "unearned"
| advantage. It's somehow plainly obvious there that if you
| simply say "don't commit penalties" but don't enforce it,
| _people will cheat and commit penalties_. And this wouldn
| 't be fair or just.
|
| Yet people lose their shit when it comes to trying to apply
| proactive equalizers to a historically deeply unfair
| society.
|
| There's no real mystery, it's just selfishness taking
| precedence over correcting past wrongs.
|
| That said, to do it _effectively_ , I believe we need to
| focus on doing it early on in schooling, and the burden and
| pressure being put on companies is a heavy one because it
| doesn't align with where the opportunities first diverge.
| temac wrote:
| So you think countries are necessarily made of teams of
| extremely cohesive people organized by e.g. skin color?
| And that all their members shall be jointly punished in
| case of wrongdoing of other members or even of their
| ancestors? Some of the results of that policy, if applied
| in its entirety, could well be not what you seem to
| expect. And I'm not to say that would be fair, when
| looking at an appropriate big picture, but let's not fall
| into infalsifiable hypotheses either. Nor complete
| essentialisation.
|
| I agree with the need to attempt to correct unfairness by
| starting early, though. Just also pay attention to
| confounding factors, and never lose sight of the goal.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| This is an absurd analogy that doesn't map to the
| situation at all. What you're actually saying is that if
| a white person cheated at football before you were even
| alive, all white people playing today should get a
| yardage penalty.
|
| What is selfish is you punishing someone else with the
| same skin color, and then upholding literal racism as a
| virtue.
|
| They absolutely should lose their shit over that.
| jonfw wrote:
| Sports are one of the few examples of a zero sum game in
| life. It is impossible to punish one team without giving
| an opposing team an unearned advantage in their league's
| standings. This unearned advantage is a negative
| externality of a game's best solution to prevent bad
| behavior.
|
| In hiring, which is not a zero sum game, we can prevent
| these undesired behaviors (acknowledging and correcting
| for bias) without giving token advantages which undermine
| meritocracy
| tharne wrote:
| I've seen this plenty of times. I even heard one manager at a
| happy hour say, "Thank god I finally hired an ABC and an XYZ, I
| can finally start recruiting based on talent again". This may
| be an extreme example, but still.
|
| Unfortunately when you have affirmative action or hiring
| quotas, you inadvertently to create a culture where the diverse
| individuals are seen as less skilled and less qualified even
| when many of them would have gotten to the same place without
| the quotas.
| asdff wrote:
| That's one take. Another take is that people want chums at
| work. An average person hires someone they see themselves as
| being friends with rather than the best qualified candidate.
| Animals such as bees, monkeys, and ourselves are also biased to
| favor their genetic group (kin selection). In other words, you
| subconsciously favor people who look like you and act like you.
|
| In that light, the non diverse office might be seen as less
| productive. Maybe this is a bunch of pals goofing off, rather
| than people hired to do work?
|
| But the whole point of the diversity hire isn't that you get
| someone who isn't white and that's it. The idea is that for
| every job, there are thousands of people who are qualified to
| do it, and among those, there are certainly people from all
| sorts of walks of life, and you'd spend earnest effort
| overcoming your subconscious biases by dipping your hand into
| the pool of equally skilled candidates, and pulling out the one
| that this overtly white dominated society we live in has held
| down since forever.
| darkwater wrote:
| Thanks for saying and explaining what diversity hiring
| actually is. Much needed and much appreciated.
| Fellshard wrote:
| So the whole thing is based off of false premises; good to
| know.
| lrem wrote:
| You can always do affirmative action like Google. Invite the
| minorities to boot camps, coaching and mentoring programmes and
| so on... But subject them to the regular interview process and
| hiring bar.
| munchbunny wrote:
| > Invite the minorities to boot camps, coaching and mentoring
| programmes and so on... But subject them to the regular
| interview process and hiring bar.
|
| That's not affirmative action. That's like giving free SAT
| prep to disadvantaged minorities. Affirmative action is
| further down the line, moving the bar for test/interview
| results to hit targets.
|
| Which is not to say Google doesn't do it, just that the
| programs you're describing aren't it.
| metajack wrote:
| > Some places I've even seen a "diversity quota" for tech
| recruiters that's tied to a bonus.
|
| It makes sense if you want to increase diversity to have the
| beginning of the funnel get lots of diverse candidates in. The
| recruiter is not a decision maker in most places, so the hiring
| bar is not necessarily affected by whether the recruiter got
| more diversity candidates into the funnel or not.
|
| As an example, in my experience there were not a lot of female
| candidate resumes coming in via normal channels. If the
| recruiter wants a bonus for increasing gender diversity, they
| are doing extra work to go and find female candidates and
| convincing them to apply. That is probably exactly what you
| want to be happening.
| darioush wrote:
| > Some places ... yeah you mean all (~ most) places :)
| aqme28 wrote:
| > there are those that you know are there because of their
| skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other ones.
|
| Wow this is not at all correct based on my experience.
|
| It is so common for "non-diverse individuals" to have gotten
| where they are based on things like network that I really don't
| think you can tell just by looking at someone.
|
| The worst developers I have worked with are often traditional
| "non-diverse" candidates.
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