[HN Gopher] What "diversity and inclusion" means at Microsoft
___________________________________________________________________
What "diversity and inclusion" means at Microsoft
Author : eonwe
Score : 260 points
Date : 2022-10-11 17:05 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cspicenter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cspicenter.com)
| therobot24 wrote:
| a lot of comments here recognize what a discussion of 'diversity
| and inclusion' on this forum (HN) is likely to contain -- i.e.,
| HN should recognize it's own stereotypes of tech culture being
| toxic which only reinforces _any_ company from trying to curb
| that toxicity (whether it's the perfect approach to doing so or
| not)
| logicalmonster wrote:
| According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion
| report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far
| exceeding their overall representation in the US population.
|
| Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for
| other groups?
|
| And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that
| mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted
| to achieve greater equality? Please help me understand if I'm
| missing something obvious.
| kazinator wrote:
| What you're missing is that a company cannot just hire to meet
| racial quotas which reflect population percentages in order to
| be free of bias.
|
| That's not what bias means.
|
| What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified
| candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss
| between them), then one from a certain background is
| consistently chosen.
|
| If more applicants are available that happen to be from a
| certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then
| that's what the organization has to work with.
|
| That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the
| shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please
| fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your
| door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you
| see".
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| I think your statement is the issue.
|
| If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo
| saxan male from boston, and one african american female from
| georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently
| chosen.
|
| I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected
| characteristics. Do you?
| ryan93 wrote:
| Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Written, documented company policy?
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| there's a few studies regarding resume names and getting
| call backs
| outworlder wrote:
| > Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for
| other groups?
|
| What _are_ the groups?
|
| "Asian" can mean anything. From India, China, Japan, many
| countries in Oceania, etc.
|
| I think the classification is fundamentally flawed.
| Qtips87 wrote:
| Agree. Asian is kind of like Hispanic, it doesn't mean
| anything in terms of ethnicities.
| screye wrote:
| Hispanic is even more confusing given that the population
| composition of some "hispanic" countries is 90%+ white.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| As an outsider, it's obvious looking in that racial
| classification in the US is just crazy -- they took some
| racial stereotypes from 100 years ago, gave them neutral
| sounding names, and started pretending it's not racist to
| group everybody south of Texas as "hispanic". And then build
| official policy on top of these simplistic classes that fail
| to describe reality in any meaningful way, only serving to
| reveal to everybody else in the world what the people in the
| US think about them.
|
| At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes
| "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are
| being sincere in their ignorance.
| outworlder wrote:
| I myself have to mark a checkbox saying "Hispanic OR
| Latino". I'm Latino, but NOT Hispanic. But I can also check
| "white". One is a skin color, another is ancestry, and yet
| another is geographical location...
| killjoywashere wrote:
| My (least?) favorite anecdote on this was when we were
| running stats demographics and found there was one more
| African American than Black. Turns out it's a rich white
| kid who was born in South Africa. He's not wrong...
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| The fun part is that 60% of world population have to
| share a single classification whereas a couple of small
| islands in the pacific somehow get a label for themselves
| odiroot wrote:
| Don't forget Middle East.
| skrbjc wrote:
| Who's "WE" in your view? There was not top-down effort to get
| Asians to excel in the US, it was due to their own desires and
| efforts.
|
| I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in
| the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote
| whites, why do they promote Asians?
| pengaru wrote:
| > Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for
| other groups?
|
| Parents matter.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I actually don't think Tiger parenting is more special than,
| say, just investing in your kids more broadly. You don't have
| to be an authoritarian and still get excellent results by
| caring about the success of your children in society and also
| having the resources and means in which to perform that
| investment.
|
| More likely is that filters for immigration are very high,
| which means the average immigrant is more educated,
| wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| While parent's comment was certainly to some degree tongue-
| in-cheek, they are likely agreeing with you. Investment in
| your parents AND likely a higher than average weight on "a
| good life" being grounded in employment, education, and
| certain values are contributing factors to the end results
| chimineycricket wrote:
| Tiger parenting is one way of investing in your kid. I
| agree, there are multiple ways to invest in your kid.
|
| >More likely is that filters for immigration are very high
| Don't agree with this, there are lots of ways to immigrate
| and I don't think most of them have a sort of
| wealth/education filter. For example refugees.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Self selection among immigrants is easily the largest
| factor behind their higher rates of success. Even as a
| refuge, there were tons of applicants, there is almost
| surely a reason you are the one who made it. It's in no
| way an easy process.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| In that case, systemic racism matters too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
| googlryas wrote:
| I think an important question is how many of those Asians are
| drawn from abroad, vs our American homegrown Asians?
|
| If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented.
| But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-
| reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global
| workforce would be Asian.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| If you're assuming a global workforce this would mean the
| representative share of African Americans would be 0.5%
| googlryas wrote:
| Sure, but a black percentage of ~13%, which is actually
| exactly in line with the ratio of black americans to
| americans.
| orangepurple wrote:
| The South Asia Subcontinent has about 2 billion people. A
| different part of Asia has more than 2 billion people.
| Identifying as Asian is utterly meaningless, except to perhaps
| generalize as (non-white & non-black). Madness.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| US immigration policy selects for high earners, the highly
| educated, the highly skilled and experienced, and the already
| wealthy.
|
| My guess is that there are a lot of immigrants from Asia that
| fall into any of those camps.
| Qtips87 wrote:
| In theory it is, in practice it is not. The intention is to
| let in talents that the US native population otherwise cannot
| provide. The reality is that the US tech visa have been
| heavily abused and let in people that shouldn't be let in.
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| At least in the parts of the company I've worked -- always on
| product teams -- the majority of my coworkers were not born in
| the United States. Given that, even if all the other parts of
| the world were represented proportionally you'd expect a large
| percentage of people from China and the Indian subcontinent.
| dddaaa34 wrote:
| intelligence doesn't have the same distribution across groups.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > Why are Asians doing so well?
|
| "Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge
| variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That
| said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially
| when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the
| potential for generalization.
|
| Two main reasons that are given:
|
| Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per
| the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students
| and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions.
|
| Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic
| and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained
| generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's
| some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career
| choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this
| isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a
| realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields.
| You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism?
| It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job
| in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable
| path to success.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| There's a third you're completely missing.
|
| Present fathers that raise and discipline their children.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I realize now I totally flubbed on posting the link:
|
| 1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-
| chalkboard/2017/...
| tylerhou wrote:
| Please don't reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model
| minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between
| poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any
| ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian
| immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well
| educated populations. So what you call "Asian culture" will
| have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who
| value money and education.
|
| Also, stereotyping "Asian culture" as a culture which values
| education implies (in a racist way) that "other cultures"
| (hint hint) don't value education. I don't think you were
| intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-
| supremacist rhetoric.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The "model minority myth" occurs when someone takes
| population-wide trends and applies it on an individual
| level: e.g. "he's Asian, so he must be good at math".
| That's stereotyping.
|
| Pointing at demographic trend in academic achievement isn't
| the model minority myth, it's an empirical observation.
| Conflating objective facts with the model minority myth is
| perhaps well intentioned, but it comes off as a shallow
| attempt to deny real world observations. Asians Americans,
| on average _do_ spend more time on academics, and _do_
| enter fields like medicine and engineering at higher rates.
| This is an empirical observation, not the model minority
| myth. Similarly, there 's nothing racist or white
| supremacist about examining disparities in time spent on
| academics. If someone takes this data and then judges
| individuals for population-wide averages, then that's
| stereotyping and I do not condone that.
|
| I'm not sure what your intent was with your last paragraph,
| but it comes off as an overzealous attempt to portray any
| analysis of time spent on academics as racist. I certainly
| wouldn't want someone to assume I'm personally less
| intelligent than my Asian co-worker because I'm Cuban. But
| I trust that most people are able to understanding that
| averages are not the same as individuals. And I find the
| pattern of people being worried that I'd be offended by
| data on Latin americans' academic achievement
| condescending. I am smart enough to understand that data
| saying Latin Americans on average spend less time on
| academics than whites or asians is not an attack on me
| personally, thank you very much.
| tylerhou wrote:
| I'm Asian-American, if you can't tell by my username.
|
| My point is that very often the success of Asian-
| Americans even though they are a disadvantaged class has
| been used to justify anti-Black rhetoric. In the context
| of this HN thread, which is specifically about D&I and
| hiring more Black people, bringing up a "better Asian
| culture" can be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, even
| if it was unintentional. This is the myth of the model
| minority.
|
| It's a mistake to assume that "empirical," "objective"
| observations cannot be racist. In particular, white-
| supremacists often intentionally present "facts" and
| "data" in order to paint a misleading picture. For
| examples, see 13/52: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-
| symbol/1352-1390. The missing context in 13/52 is that
| Black people have suffered much more economic and social
| injustice, Black areas are more likely to be policed,
| Black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted
| for the same crime, etc. It would be dishonest to simply
| say "Black people make up 13% of the population but
| commit 52%..." without supplying this additional context.
| I.e. even if the data itself is "objective," the context
| and presentation also matters because those will affect
| how people interpret that data.
|
| Again, not trying to say that you were intending to be
| racist. I just wanted to show you what your statements
| could imply and that you may be unknowingly repeating
| white-supremacist rhetoric.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| No, facts are not in and of themselves racist.
|
| If someone points out that men commit the vast majority
| of rape, and thus we shouldn't assume courts are
| misandrist on account of the immense inequity in rape
| convictions, that is not sexist. If someone points to
| this fact to try and justify a curfew for men, or lowered
| burdens of proof the yes it is.
|
| A flag showing "13/52" next to a snarling ape is
| undoubtedly racist. Pushing back against a quota
| mandating that African Americans make up no more than 13%
| of murder convictions, on the grounds that murder rates
| are not equal isn't racist.
|
| Is this really hard to comprehend? I expect the average
| middle schooler is capable of understanding this, and
| repeatedly cautioning HN readers about _potentially_
| racist readings is more than a little condescending.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > can be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, even if it
| was unintentional
|
| I agree that people interpret things as dogwhistles even
| when they were not intended that way. To me, that's a
| problem because it means anything can be a dogwhistle.
|
| It also doesn't make sense given the meaning of
| "dogwhistle" which is something that is intended to
| communicate to an in-group. If it is not intended, then
| it's not a dogwhistle.
| screye wrote:
| > Why are Asians doing so well?
|
| Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and
| biased sampling ?
|
| ~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent +
| China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in
| the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most
| accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not
| allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are
| already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that
| aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-
| fulfilling prophecy.
|
| As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and
| Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from
| smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics
| where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will
| inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally,
| because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed
| to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it
| forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting
| relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler
| proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature
| proponents)
|
| > Why can't we replicate this for other groups?
|
| Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture,
| it must first start at trying to observe these with some level
| of granularity.
|
| Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of
| Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows
| incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here.
| Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for
| immigrants from other racial groups ?
|
| Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-
| level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried
| observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups
| with similar nurture methods ?
|
| The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even
| the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how
| can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for
| differences in group level performance ?
|
| Good faith social studies on group level differences must go
| into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that
| violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect
| that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a
| study that might report: "differences between groups persist
| even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity".
| So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other
| hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-
| altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to
| see here.
| Qtips87 wrote:
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Asian parents give a shit whether their kids show up for
| school.
| outworlder wrote:
| 'asian' parents from which country? They are not all the
| same. It's a huge chunk of the planet.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| But it is true. Chinese and Indian people have nothing else
| in common but their parenting styles are the same.
| Historical accident maybe, but it's true
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Down voted for this but it's really a reality. Talk to
| teachers, if the parent doesn't value school then it takes a
| truly exceptional kid to direct themselves through it.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Anecdotal of course but I believe this is very much true.
| I'm Latino if it matters much.
|
| I'm the oldest of three brothers and was the one who was
| most pushed/expected to excel in education. My parents
| became a lot more lax on my younger brothers because they
| thought they pushed me too hard growing up. I think they
| changed in part because our relationship was very strained
| as I was growing up and even today isn't anywhere near as
| close as my two siblings are with my parents.
|
| But on the other-hand, we're all adults now and I am the
| only one to graduate college and have a career in a typical
| "high-paying" profession/job. I don't fault my brothers for
| this and am close with them, but it is pretty stark the
| difference in career path/"traditional success" between the
| three of us simply based on this emphasis/value.
| AngeloR wrote:
| What always bothered me about DE&I initiatives is that they are
| trying to wring diversity out of their existing hiring pool.
|
| If your indeed job posts didn't bring diverse candidates then,
| why do you think it would now? Because you added a "Please apply
| if you're DiVeRsE" line to it? Don't be ridiculous.
|
| If you want diversity of candidates you can't keep going back to
| the same talent pools. You have to diversify where you're drawing
| talent.
|
| If your college program is primarily getting white/asian males,
| you can't suddenly expect it to start throwing in women & poc as
| well. You can't suddenly expect it to start giving you LGBTQ+
| candidates.
|
| If you want diverse candidates, you have to look at diverse
| hiring pools. Look at the bootcamps that focus on diverse groups
| you're targeting. Look at schools that focus on diverse groups
| you're targeting.
|
| If you're really interested in diverse candidates, you can't keep
| expecting them to just show up if you add a "We want diversity!"
| to your job description - you have to change where you look for
| them.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Look at schools that focus on diverse groups you 're
| targeting._
|
| I believe that Pursuit.org (started by StackExchange) is like
| that.
|
| _NOTE: I am not connected with Pursuit. I did consider working
| with them, but they weren 't interested in my specialty._
|
| Also, a couple of felon-assistance outfits have been mentioned
| on HN. If you _really_ want diversity, that 's a good bet.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| This is making a common but wrong rhetorical move, which is
| ignoring the fact that qualified candidates of the preferred
| race, with the preferred genitalia or gender presentation, and
| with the preferred sexual proclivities just aren't out there.
|
| It's not like there is a large pool of black developer talent
| that firms just keep missing. It doesn't exist. It could be
| created, but a separate and totally valid question is: why do
| that? Why should we want every group of people to be
| representative of the population down to the smallest scale in
| race x gender x sexual preference?
| [deleted]
| akira2501 wrote:
| > If you want diverse candidates, you have to look at diverse
| hiring pools.
|
| I would assume the diverse hiring pools come with candidates
| that are not as qualified as the other pools. That's the flip
| side to this.
|
| Do business hire from specific pools for biased or performance
| reasons? I think the assumption is that all hiring inequality
| is the result of bias. What if it isn't?
| Analemma_ wrote:
| A big part of the issue here is that, even though the
| predomaninance of white and Asian men in CS is _very obviously_
| a pipeline problem, for whatever reason Twitter has decided
| that nobody is allowed to say it 's a pipeline problem, and
| they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these
| initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy", they
| have to undergo these absurd contortions to try and have a DEI
| program that can't say where the lack of DEI is coming from.
|
| Naturally it ends up being a mess of contradictions and
| confused thinking, because everyone has to pretend to ignore
| the obvious root cause.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is
| allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate
| you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the
| primary aim of "keep Twitter happy"
|
| Given that Twitter takes an active role in censoring
| particular ideas, I think it's worth being careful to
| distinguish "Twitter has decided this isn't allowed" from "a
| lot of Twitter users have decided this isn't allowed".
| superjan wrote:
| I think it is great that microsoft has a diversity policy and is
| making clear to everyone there that it matters. It is quite ham-
| handed, but that is kind of the default in corporations of that
| size. I can imagine the frustration having to deal with such
| policies, but he apparently did not reach out to get diverse
| candidates.
| [deleted]
| hintymad wrote:
| Maybe the question is why the leftists are so influential that
| for-profit companies are willing to comply with their ideology.
| Isn't the best way to increase the representation of minorities
| is to increase the funnel? Better schools, better teachers, more
| rigorous curriculum for all instead of for the elite students, a
| whole new culture that values curiosity and geekiness in general,
| and eventually a larger number of people who are willing to toil
| for years to study STEM? But oh no, by merely asking such
| questions I'm a far right, a racist, and of course, a fascist (I
| can be wrong, of course, but I should be free to ask questions
| and propose alternative solutions).
|
| My theory? CRT in workplace is popular because it's effective at
| suppressing questions and at making it easy for organizations to
| avoid working on hard problems.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| my assumption is that the left is actually in support for
| better education in inner cities.
|
| i mostly hear about Republicans banning books
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| You're missing the obvious answer, it's a zero sum game. If a
| company pays top of market, they can absolutely find enough
| qualified candidates any way they wish to subdivide them (by
| race/gender/background etc).
|
| The rest of the companies won't be able to however, and now
| they look bad so they either have to (possibly) lower their
| standards or have bad PR.
| BryantD wrote:
| Oh, that's easy. Because you wind up with a better, more
| productive company when you put forth the considerable effort
| necessary to increase diversity. It's winning in the
| marketplace because it's better.
|
| You're 100% right about the funnel, but here's the thing:
| junior positions are part of the funnel. About ten years ago I
| realized that I was screwing up massively by interviewing for
| current skill level instead of potential skill level. Sure, at
| a certain point you can't just look for potential; I'm not
| gonna hire a senior engineer because they might reach senior
| levels at some point. But I'm sure thinking about my junior to
| middle levels differently.
|
| And this benefits everyone. Too many FAANGs get obsessed with
| existing criteria and leetcoding and won't even look at someone
| from a small shop, regardless of skin color or gender. Their
| loss, my gain.
|
| Absolutely anything you can do to increase your pool of
| potential qualified employees is good. Making up theories which
| give you an excuse to keep the same small pool hurts your
| company. Again, my gain.
|
| Further, cultural diversity helps me get my job done because
| different viewpoints are useful! It's amusing: the same people
| who will insist that cancel culture is bad because we have to
| invite all the viewpoints will also explain that trying to
| increase diversity in the workplace is terrible. It's almost
| like there's something else going on there.
| [deleted]
| catiopatio wrote:
| > Because you wind up with a better, more productive company
| when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to
| increase diversity. It's winning in the marketplace because
| it's better.
|
| What evidence do you have to support the claim that DIE-
| focused companies outcompete merit-focused companies?
| hbrn wrote:
| > you wind up with a better, more productive company when you
| put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase
| diversity
|
| Diversity, as everything else, has a sweet spot. Too little
| and too much are equally bad. Of course nobody knows where
| the sweet spot is, but merely increasing diversity is not a
| guarantee for improvement. I mean, you can hire someone who
| hates your gut and doesn't speak your language. This will
| definitely increase the diversity, but you probably not going
| to like it.
|
| > will also explain that trying to increase diversity in the
| workplace is terrible. It's almost like there's something
| else going on there.
|
| I think most of those folks just despise hypocrisy. "Being
| anti-racist by being racist" makes me cringe.
|
| If you're making a diversity hire to get alternative
| viewpoints, you're doing it for your own benefit and being
| honest, I don't think anybody will have problem with that.
| It's the virtue signaling that makes it despicable.
|
| There's also argument to be made that if you're allowing
| diversity hires, you might have to allow "cohesion" hires.
| Justifying one but not the other seems disingenuous.
| postsantum wrote:
| Here is a hint https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-09-19
| colinmhayes wrote:
| From my view it's the right that is making education more
| arduous, especially for teachers at every step of the process.
| I haven't seen anyone on the left try to censor teachers or cut
| their funding. "Girls who code" was huge at my inner city high
| school. Funded by the left. Democrat politicians fought
| constantly to make the schools better while republicans
| campaigned on vouchers that would mean poor students are stuck
| in schools with less funding while rich ones get a cheaper
| private education. I think you're falling for the trap of only
| ingesting the "outrage" news and letting the normal stuff pass
| you by(maybe I'm just projecting because i fall for that all
| the time unfortunately).
|
| > more rigorous curriculum for all instead of for the elite
| students
|
| This is called common core and was implemented with widespread
| bipartisan support. Really we all agree on most things.
|
| That's not to say there aren't problems with the left. You just
| seem to have misunderstood them. For example, charter schools
| seem to be a good solution that combines choice with not
| leaving out those unable to pay. Yet both sides seem adamantly
| against them for their own reasons.
|
| > by merely asking such questions I'm a far right, a racist,
| and of course, a fascist
|
| Now we're really getting into speculation territory, but my
| hunch is that you've gotten these negative reactions because
| the people you are talking to/arguing with believe they are
| already supporting these initiatives and therefore that your
| complaints are in bad faith.
| hintymad wrote:
| I really wish that education is a bipartisan issue. It's
| really not about left or right. What I was criticizing is not
| any specific policy but that the elites, whatever parties
| they belong to, use morality to block legitimate discussion
| of tough problems. It just so happens that the left love to
| put people into racists and fascists group, or so when I am
| being subject to exposure bias.
|
| > vouchers that would mean poor students are stuck in schools
| with less funding while rich ones get a cheaper private
| education.
|
| This is the discussion I wish we have more. That is, someone
| says that voucher is all about giving freedom and forcing
| teachers to teach better, but in reality it may work just the
| opposite. And we should really discuss its pros and cons
| without attacking each other's motives.
|
| > You just seem to have misunderstood them
|
| Maybe so, as I'm subject to exposure bias. I just can list
| equal number of examples that show how the left pushed their
| agenda too. Let's start with Gebru. When LeCun said that bias
| in model was the result of bias in data, Gebru attacked him
| for being a bigot. When Gebru was fired from Google, how many
| media spent even a single paragraph to discuss the quality of
| her paper, which was the root of the whole debacle, while
| being busy attacking Google for being racist or misogynist?
| Or search Allison Collins. When she was criticized for her
| policy, she said ""Many Asian believe they benefit from the
| 'model minority' BS. In fact many Asian Americans actively
| promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to
| assimilate and get ahead". When school boards lower their
| academic standards, they cite racism (again, they maybe
| right, but it's wrong to attack anyone who questions their
| conclusion). When students performed worse in maths, multiple
| school boards claimed that maths are racists or there are
| racisms in maths curriculum. When people were talking about
| bringing manufacturing back to the US, a pundit said along
| the line that it was poor white people wishing to bring back
| their power. When people asked why some Asians get ahead in
| the us, multiple Opinions and anchors argued that it's
| because Asians are closer to white. When people are talking
| about students' reading and maths proficiency were trending
| downwards, how many articles immediately claimed that the
| issue was racism? Of if we go back, how many people would
| call you a racist if you questioned Warren's claim that she
| was a native American?
|
| So, yes, I'm not happy with what I saw, but I saw the
| aforementioned examples and more from WaPo, from NYT, from
| The Atlantic, from Reuters, from MSNBC, from school boards,
| and from politicians. So, I don't know what kind of
| misunderstanding I can avoid.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| A couple thoughts here. First, politics is inherently
| divisive. Just like facebook figured out that divisiveness
| drives engagement and so have politicians. The craziest
| voices end up most amplified as everyone who opposes them
| loudly shouts about how crazy the other side is. Just like
| I don't believe there is widespread support for book
| banning on the right I don't see the support for SF style
| school boards. If you want to know what dems actaully
| support just listen to a biden speech on education or
| better yet read the platform here
| https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-
| platform/providin.... You'll notice that the main focus
| regarding race is funding for bussing programs and other
| methods of integrating schools, and that the focus is on
| income more than race. The republicans decided not to
| publish a platform in 2022 for whatever reason but they
| gave us this to explain themselves https://ballotpedia.org/
| The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2020. I will say that recent
| laws in Florida have been concerning, but obviously the
| same is true for SF, and I blame presidential posturing
| more than ideology for the Florida stuff.
|
| I realize it can be difficult to separate the rhetoric from
| the actual bills and laws being passed, but it is extremely
| important to do so, and to call out troublesome ones no
| matter where they come from. I think taking pundits with a
| grain of salt is about as much as we can do as individuals,
| but it sure would be nice to figure out a way to better
| inform people(on both sides) of facts, because more and
| more I just see people parroting their talking points past
| each other instead of steelmanning. Because if we forget
| about the pundits we end up with stuff like common core.
| Common sense rules that can make everyone better off aren't
| what pundits are selling, their incentives aren't properly
| aligned unfortunately.
| maldev wrote:
| All this does is make it so certain groups appear to be REALLY
| dumb at certain companies. In my experience at my work places,
| only one in 10 women are actually qualified, and the rest are so
| utterly incompetent that they just end up taking up money. It's
| not because they're women, it's because they just don't belong
| there due to their skill level, but got a diversity hire.
|
| I enjoy having women in my office, but because of DI&E I don't
| interview at places that have to many, since 9/10 times it's a
| big indicator the department or company is going under due to
| incompetence. Exact same thing applies to skin color. This
| shouldn't be the case, but this is all policies like this do, and
| it's going to whiplash REALLY hard once the cultural pendulum is
| over.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I work at a different FAANG and it seems like more and more the
| only news that we get from corporate is related to DEI. Also a
| lot of hiring details are now hidden from ICs. It used to be that
| you would be apart of the interview panel as an interviewer and
| then you would get together with your team afterwards and
| everyone on the team would vote yes/no and that would pretty much
| be it. Now it's made by a manager elsewhere and you have no idea
| why the decision was made.
|
| I do worry that my kids won't be diverse enough to be able to get
| into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when
| they're older.
|
| We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all.
| Now we've had the rug swapped from underneath us.
|
| It's no longer about equality of opportunity, it's about equality
| of outcome. To quote Kamala Harris' recent remarks "to make sure
| everyone ends up in the same place", i.e. "equity"
| president wrote:
| It reminds me when my childhood friend's parents moved to LA so
| he could attend an inner-city high school so that his scores
| from a lower ranking school were more heavily weighted for
| college admissions. They were wealthy immigrants from the
| middle east.
| hintymad wrote:
| I was wondering why the US is so obsessed with diversity alone
| the line of race and gender instead of social-economical
| status, education background, career background, and etc? If
| I'm developing a statistical model, wouldn't it make more sense
| if my diversity means having in my team people who have
| statistics background, people who study statistical physics,
| people who are great at maths, people who are great at building
| a team, people who are creative, people who communicate and
| market and sell well, people who are amazing engineers, and
| people who are experts in the domain for which I develop my
| model? Why would I be interested in my team member's sex
| orientation, their gender, or their race? Or on the other hand,
| why would give up Quoc Le for Gebru if I have only one opening
| for developing the next generation of NLP model? Just because
| Quoc is an "over-represented" Asian and Gebru is the vanguard
| of righteousness and checks all the boxes of diversity?
|
| Or why not by my birth origin? Say, India? India is a huge
| country with diverse languages, cultures, histories, religions,
| and social structures. I guarantee you that I had such a unique
| background among the other 10,000 ones in India because I grew
| up in this particular family in this particular town of this
| particular state in this particular union territory.
| arpstick wrote:
| it's checkbox compliance all the way up to the top. it's only
| for show as if people wanted a rigorous solution the problem,
| the mechanisms in play and each possible solution would have
| been documented in autistic detail before anyone put it out.
| this is a kind of issue you would keep junior talent and HR
| far far away from at all costs. this is software after all,
| people who care about something specific, care a LOT. this
| topic is a real issue but it has been tainted by racial
| political framing. imo, start with women in tech first, then
| go from there.
| twomoonsbysurf wrote:
| kodyo wrote:
| For the purposes of American HR Marxists, Indians are
| Indians, but Indian women are just a little better for the
| optics.
|
| Smart dudes need to opt out of the game entirely.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > I do worry that my kids won't be diverse enough to be able to
| get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to
| when they're older.
|
| 1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse. 2. There
| is nothing wrong with your kids being in a majority
| demographic. It sounds like you're more worried about the world
| discriminating based off race and other traits.
|
| I suspect you agree with all of this but it's a little scary
| how insidious these policies are. Even in your dissent you're
| seeing things from their perspective.
| PKop wrote:
| It is always useful and prudent to see things from the
| perspective of those attacking you. "Know your enemy.."
|
| You can argue over definitions and terms as much as you want,
| but the uniform you wear is often defined by your opposition.
| In other words, it may not be completely relevant what _you_
| or _OP_ think diverse is or isn 't. It is very relevant what
| the power structures and people implementing these policies
| think it means, no?
|
| If someone has a kid that potentially is going to be quota'ed
| out of jobs or education, why wouldn't they worry about it?
| giantg2 wrote:
| "A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse."
|
| There's a manager/HR somewhere saying "hold my beer"...
| omginternets wrote:
| Relatedly: I cannot defend the kind of "diversity" that would
| rather hire a rich brahmin than an inner-city American kid in
| need of a leg-up, just to fulfill some backwards skin-color
| quota. It's obscene, and insulting to all parties involved.
|
| I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind
| of diversity I _do_ defend, or worse, prompt some kind of
| revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.
| [deleted]
| jrs235 wrote:
| Some of starting to rearrange the letters to be DIE.
| Companies are going to die as they become paralyzed trying to
| placate differing views and opinions... or parts of their
| workforce are going to protest or cause internal
| strife/trouble...
| arpstick wrote:
| with a push for "racial equity" combined with an inept middle
| management and hr who in order to get equal outcome will push
| people down instead of lifting people up, the only thing i can
| see from this is a sharp rise in ethno nationalist idiocy
| across the board.
|
| i dont want to be right about it but i am not going to be
| shocked if i start seeing such bubble up as a reaction to this
| kind of short sighted strategy.
| [deleted]
| PKop wrote:
| >We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all
|
| Think of how impossibly naive and utopian this is though, and I
| don't mean to personally attack just to condemn the idea this
| is possible in any way whatsoever. Is it possible economically?
| How about resource wise, or geographically can we all possess
| equal territory? How about military power? How about physical
| attributes such as height or beauty? How about intelligence?
|
| On which axes of consequences can we equalize things; how do we
| do it? Zero sum conflicts are everywhere that demands for
| equalization exist.
|
| There is only competition over limited resources, power and
| prestige. There is cooperation amongst allies and friends, but
| only in so far as feelings are mutual and the efforts of both
| are in each others interest, which goes with out saying
| includes in you or your family/tribe/groups interests.
|
| Is anyone trying to take money and power out of you or your
| children's hands a friend or ally, or are they competing with
| you for their own interests at your expense?
|
| The propaganda you believed was intended to take advantage of
| your good nature. As long as someone brow-beats you with
| moralism over the downtrodden they can convince you of doing
| anything to dis-empower you, if you believe the nonsense that
| "privilege" or power are bad things, which those scheming you
| certainly don't as they pursue both.
|
| It is bad to not have privilege or power. It is good to have
| them. It is this simple.
| balls187 wrote:
| > I do worry that my kids won't be diverse enough to be able to
| get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to
| when they're older.
|
| That comment implies you take for granted that your kids will
| get into a school, and will have a job.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| What does that mean? Just about anyone can get into _a_
| school, or get _a_ job.
| arpstick wrote:
| not in the usa, "no child left behind" did a lot of damage
| on the futures of the generation going forward here.
| balls187 wrote:
| > What does that mean?
|
| Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent
| school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a
| nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have
| much larger worries.
|
| > Just about anyone can get into a school, or get a job.
|
| Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes,
| it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and
| therefore no reason to worry.
| prepend wrote:
| I'm not sure what a "diverse" parent is or how you would
| know their mind.
|
| I expect that all parents, regardless of demographic
| factors, worry about their kid getting a good job and
| going to school.
| colpabar wrote:
| This seems to be forbidden to say, but for all intents
| and purposes, "diverse" means "not white".
| mikkergp wrote:
| Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual.
| Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for
| people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you
| need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people
| are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for
| leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It
| seems to me like throwing some extra diversity into an already
| squishy process is the least of your worries.
|
| They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior
| black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?
| Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of
| leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional
| and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's
| nephew.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| You're writing with the implicit assumption that private
| companies _ought to be_ meritocratic above all. I don 't think
| that's the case. I think private people and orgs _ought to be_
| free to choose whom they associate with, hire, and promote
| based on any criteria they can come up with. Nepotism? No
| problem. Height /weight/age/beauty/culture/hair colour
| discrimination? You bet. Then these orgs all compete and the
| most efficient ones win. This leads to a long conversation
| about the merits/efficiencies of monocultures.
|
| Furthermore, we as a culture _ought to be_ at least not
| hypocritical in our tolerance of clearly nepotistic
| /discriminatory hiring practices in minority-owned businesses
| (restaurants/trades/jewelry/etc.) but somehow intolerant of
| them in some sectors like tech and finance. These things are
| equally silly:
|
| 1. Expecting a Chinese restaurant not to exclusively hire more
| Chinese people
|
| 2. Expecting a tech-bro agency not to exclusively hire a more
| tech bros
|
| 3. Expecting a Kosher butcher not to exclusively hire more Jews
|
| 4. Expecting a WASPy finance org not to exclusively hire more
| WASPs
| skavi wrote:
| I think it becomes more complex when you consider wealth
| concentration.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, it's easy to not notice on the middle of all the
| noise. But policies that fight wealth concentration are
| much clearer and have many less side effects than the ones
| for diversity and inclusion.
|
| They are probably more inclusive too, but that measurement
| is noisy.
| shinjitsu wrote:
| Most of these (Kosher Butcher for example) are going to be
| very small companies and these kinds of requirements don't
| usually kick in till you have a certain minimum level of
| employees since there is an assumption in most states that
| very small businesses will mostly hire (extended) family.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| So why can't small teams in large orgs also hire extended
| family? Given we've established a benign proclivity amongst
| people to do so.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| MSFT is not private, it's public. It's responsibility is to
| create value for the shareholders. Part of that deal is to
| hire the best talent.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| My reading of the original article tells me that these
| initiatives were interfering with this manager's ability to
| accomplish his team's objectives/provide value to
| shareholders. Indeed an assertion could be made that these
| initiatives run counter to fiduciary duty.
|
| If you want to accomplish a goal, hire people you trust,
| given them clear objectives, and then _get out of their
| way_. Don 't micromanage them with endless bureaucracy. Do
| you think that these policies will deter a real racist? Do
| you think an interview requirement or call asking "Did you
| consider candidate X?" _accomplishes anything_? Can you
| describe _what_?
|
| Also MSFT is _publicly traded_ not _publicly owned_. It 's
| still a private company.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| By now, America is so racially mixed that "race" of a certain
| person is even harder to quantify than "merit".
| voidr wrote:
| > Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for
| people.
|
| It's also inherently unfair, that's why nobody likes it, I have
| seen it first hand that it just leads to a few token hires,
| with no real change. People who actually care realise that if
| you want to improve something you start at the beginning, not a
| the outcome, you would at minimum start at education, however I
| guess it's cheaper to have a few diversity hires here and there
| without changing anything that really matters.
|
| > Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of
| measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions
|
| You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices,
| however we don't tend to do that.
|
| > which is pretty squishy to begin with
|
| I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select
| as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job,
| which diverts from the point, we make decisions without knowing
| the outcome all the time, if we would take your worldview then
| every decision where we don't know the outcome would be decided
| by a dice roll.
|
| > Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
|
| You are exchanging one favouritism for another, how is that an
| improvement? At least the CEO's nephew would have connections
| in high places and likely more pressure to perform.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling
| dices, however we don't tend to do that.
|
| I would disagree. First of all, just because we think we have
| ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways, it may be that our
| ways are the equivalent of rolling dice. I mean hilariously
| there are all like endemic complaints about interview
| processes. Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against
| the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?
|
| Second of all, I'm not talking about a recent grad and
| someone with 10 years of experience, but having been in
| leadership circles. It's often "trust" and "reputation" and
| other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem
| to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because
| "I had a good feeling about him"
|
| > I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we
| select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally
| bad job.
|
| This seems like an overly broad interpretation. Among
| relatively equal candidates I think this is true. i.e. take
| your pool of 60 senior managers, there's one open director
| position. Find your best 15 senior managers. You could
| probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe
| you're not that great at training senior managers? (assuming
| there aren't specific technical skillsets involved)
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of
| measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is
| pretty squishy to begin with?_
|
| It sounds like you're agreeing with the author here, because he
| says,
|
| > _I fear that when large companies hire and promote people
| based on group identities, it discourages individuals from
| cultivating their abilities._
|
| It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The
| idea that the promotion process is so random that the
| introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is
| totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse
| would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > It is only one logical step to go from one to the other.
| The idea that the promotion process is so random that the
| introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is
| totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse
| would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
|
| It is only one logical step to assume the opposite as well,
| that a company that thinks holistically about the hiring
| process, and questions whether or not managers are acting in
| a truly meritocratic way will give people confidence that
| cultivating their abilities won't be for naught if they have
| a racist/sexist manager.
|
| The article states a lot of things based on feels but the one
| tangible point they make is that HR is not in fact insisting
| he hire someone based on an "additional random factor" just
| that they considered all the candidates.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The article is a lot more than just complaining about D&I
| policies, for example you'll notice that the manager spent
| several months unsuccessfully trying to get even one
| qualified diverse candidate to interview with Microsoft.
| What's up with that?
| kardianos wrote:
| > Reactionary, anti-intellectual.
|
| "The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read.
| Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti-<insert phrase>
| then too.
|
| Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > The Cultural Revolution: A people's history
|
| Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of
| China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as
| well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with
| my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was wrong,
| but I was referring to the fact that the article seemed to
| say "DE&I Bad, Merit Good" with a superiority complex about
| it, and I was just saying that that position on its own isn't
| necessarily the intellectually superior position, even though
| I think "merit" gets assumed as being more necessarily more
| objective.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Intra-organization measurements are not the same as inter-
| oganizations measurements.
|
| (Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we
| are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give
| up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious;
| at least to me.)
| weakfish wrote:
| This seems like a very large leap in logic, if I follow...
| are you saying the parent is communist for using the term
| reactionary?
| origin_path wrote:
| They are. kardianos is observing that the situation is very
| similar, that history is rhyming if not repeating.
|
| Woke racism/sexism (DEI) is frequently referred to as neo-
| Marxism or cultural Marxism because when examined it turns
| out to be closely related to Marxist thought, with
| race/gender/sexual attributes substituted for class. Beyond
| this somewhat trivial difference there are many clear
| similarities:
|
| 1. The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused
| by unjust oppression, and not anything else.
|
| 2. The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is
| itself oppression, but the other way around.
|
| 3. The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere.
| Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working
| classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead
| they were men of words, with their primary output being
| books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism
| was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because
| the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the
| complaints against it didn't.
|
| 4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its
| enemies. See here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary#:~:text=In%20the%
| 2....
| topaz0 wrote:
| Have you read Marx then? I'd love to hear about the core
| dialectics of the "race theory of value" in your words if
| so.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused
| by unjust oppression, and not anything else.
|
| Wholly untrue. Inequality happens for a whole mess of
| reasons, including individual ability and interest, it's
| just not exclusive to that either.
|
| > The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression
| is itself oppression, but the other way around.
|
| We're probably going to disagree on the definition of
| oppression, but no, there should is no need for "reverse
| oppression", unfortunately, I can't control how people
| feel about aid fixes, but I think everyone should be able
| to pursue opportunity equally.
|
| > The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual
| sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for
| the working classes but didn't come from the working
| classes. Instead they were men of words, with their
| primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus
| opposition to communism was sometimes identified as
| "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism
| sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.
|
| This is taken too far in the other direction where I have
| to accept every single "DE&I Bad" Argument so as not to
| seem elitist. This is a complex issue and there are
| plenty of good arguments on both sides, the original
| article just didn't attempt to make them.
|
| 4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its
| enemies
|
| "In Marxist terminology, reactionary is a pejorative
| adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be
| socialist, but, in their opinion, contain elements of
| feudalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism or other
| characteristics of the ruling class, including usage
| between conflicting factions of Marxist movements."
|
| Wow, that is way more involved than I meant it to be. If
| forgot reactionary was a loaded term, I just meant it to
| mean that his argument was in reaction to "wokeism" and
| wasn't independent of that. See item 3.
| kardianos wrote:
| If you do not believe someone can demonstrate merit, you
| cannot believe in equality of opportunity.
|
| If you do not have Equality of Opportunity all you have
| left are power structures, usually attached to some degree
| of structural determinism.
|
| At that moment, you have the same logic as the
| Communist/Marxian/Dialectic revolutionaries we have seen
| time and time again. Once they gain power they label
| everyone else a reactionary.
|
| Saying they don't believe in being able to demonstrate
| merit is why I suggest they are a
| Communist/Marxian/Dialectic. Because not only is that
| stupid in the real world, it is literally a defining
| feature of the base ideology.
| mikkergp wrote:
| You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what I
| did or didn't say. I didn't say people can't demonstrate
| merit. I said people are bad at measuring merit, and I
| think that is relatively true on its face, and the
| subject of a whole mess of thinkpieces and arguments on
| Hacker News. Shit I thought it was funny there was one
| posted today:
|
| https://workweek.com/2022/09/26/performance-reviews-dont-
| act...
|
| No where in the article is it suggesting that anyone is
| pressuring managers to promote demonstrably poor
| performers for racial reasons. They are being asked to
| adjust their processes to consider the most candidates.
|
| I think for a medium size group of relatively equal
| performers, it would be nearly impossible to rank order
| them in a way you could get a small handful of people to
| consistently agree with. Everyone seems to love to straw
| men this with some idea that Microsoft is firing all of
| their principal engineers to replace them with entry
| level candidates from state universities.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of
| measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is
| pretty squishy to begin with?"
|
| I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems
| ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
|
| However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another
| flawed metric shouldn't be concerning.
|
| "They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of
| senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders
| earned it?"
|
| The biggest thing is that this metric is meaningless. They
| don't define what the target is and _why_. They don 't dig into
| the _how_ of the increase either. If it was the policy, they
| have not taken a systems thinking review of it to see if it 's
| working as expected or causing some other harm. I see no
| inclusion of the root issue - a pipeline of diverse candidates
| via schools. If the numbers are underrepresented in school,
| then they will be in industry too. Maybe you can juice your own
| company's numbers, but that simply leaving less for other
| companies. Figuring out diversity discrepancies in the talent
| pipeline (school, mainly) is the first step. Then figuring out
| if it's an actual problem and what the proper metrics are, is a
| step that seems to be glossed over. Without understanding
| these, there will be no meaningful progress.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >> "Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable
| of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions,
| which is pretty squishy to begin with?"
|
| > I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it
| seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
|
| Therefore institute race-based policies?
|
| All that matters here is how things _should_ work. The hiring
| process should be based off merit. They should not be based
| off race. We should do our best to correct these when they
| deviate.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Hence the,
|
| "However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding
| another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning."
|
| I was tangentially wondering if someone has a good way of
| measuring merit, objectively.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of
| senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders
| earned it?_
|
| I'm still unclear as to why we're even bothering to ask the
| question. How many blonde leaders are there vs. brunettes?
| Are brunettes poorly represented in corporate leadership?
| Does anyone _care_? Why should they.
| [deleted]
| mikkergp wrote:
| People should care because big companies are constantly
| competing on talent and it would be a competitive advantage
| to leverage a larger talent pool.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Don't we already hire managers explicitly to make
| decisions like this? Given we've hired them, shouldn't we
| trust them to make the best decisions for their teams and
| their objectives? It seems as though the additional
| bureaucracy introduced by DEI serves only to disempower
| managers. This is the function of all bureaucracy, to
| disempower individual decision making.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| This presupposes they are discriminated against for these
| positions. 3-5% representation is extremely high for a
| demographic that comprises 1% of college graduates.
| fallingknife wrote:
| When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple
| coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability
| to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the
| same question. If you want to argue that it is impossible to
| judge merit, it is you who needs to provide proof.
|
| And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin
| flips would be better than on race.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple
| coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my
| ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins
| on the same question.
|
| Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in
| measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can
| be completed in two minutes by anybody.
|
| > And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin
| flips would be better than on race.
|
| The article explicitly states they are not asked to make
| promotion decisions based on race.
| fallingknife wrote:
| It's not the whole interview. Just the first part of many
| questions. You have to print a string abcdefghij... like
|
| abcd
|
| efgh
|
| ijkl...
|
| And you would be surprised by the number of people who it
| takes 20 minutes to do that. Doing it in 2 minutes doesn't
| mean you're competent, but taking 20 damn sure means you're
| not
| notch656a wrote:
| I've been coding for over a decade including things 1000x
| as complicated as that (think embedded systems from the
| ground up). I could easily take 20 minutes or even fail
| doing such a task because I'm literally never asked to
| code things in a professional environment with 3+
| strangers breathing down my neck and judging me based on
| some simplified fizzbuzz.
|
| I'm convinced white board / live coding interviews don't
| do much other than test for how you perform with a group
| of strangers pressuring you to jump through hoops
| publicly on which in a short time your entire value is
| judged (including determining say if you'll have money
| for daycare next week), which for most software
| professionals basically happens never except during an
| interview.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| I have never been in an interview with 3+ strangers. Is
| that common?
| notch656a wrote:
| It's extremely common beyond the new grad / junior level,
| from my experience.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| 20 minutes might just be interview anxiety, especially if
| it's a first question in the interview.
| hbrn wrote:
| Being able to perform under stress could be a metric he
| values.
|
| "Hey, the website was down for a few hours. Technically I
| could fix it in a minute, but have a downtime anxiety".
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Unless you're hiring someone for a speed coding competition,
| I don't see what speed has to do with it. Especially since it
| seems like you would be biasing for younger candidates and
| committing ageism in the process.
| bigbacaloa wrote:
| It's clear as day that some culturally contingent notion of
| race isn't a good way of measuring merit.
| colordrops wrote:
| Absolutely - there aren't clearly defined lines between
| cultural notions of race, and the scientific community
| doesn't even recognize race as anything but a social
| construct [1]. So in the end it's either how someone self-
| identifies, or the arbitrary superficial judgement of race by
| the hiring team, which is patently ridiculous.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
|
| "Modern science regards race as a social construct, an
| identity which is assigned based on rules made by society."
| topaz0 wrote:
| "Rules made by society" is exactly why it is relevant here.
| colordrops wrote:
| Can you explain further? Not getting your meaning.
| topaz0 wrote:
| Society defines racial categories according to made-up
| rules. The basis of these rules is not biological. All
| good so far. But, then we have to live with these
| categories, and they get applied to how we organize
| society, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less explicitly.
| And we may wish for these rules to change, or for the
| ways that they shape the experiences of individuals to
| change. But then the people who benefit from the status
| quo have a material interest in having them stay the
| same. And in fact the people who benefit from the status
| quo often are in a position to shape society in a way
| that keeps them the same. You get the idea.
| luckylion wrote:
| yucky wrote:
| >They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of
| senior black leaders.
|
| So now instead of those 3% being seen as having earned their
| position, all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair
| advantage. So now it's not only unfair to the people excluded
| based on skin color but it's unfair to those who benefitted
| strictly because of the perception they now have to deal with
| as having not _really_ earned their position the same as
| everyone else. It puts them on equal footing with the bosses
| nephew, who nobody respects.
|
| It's 2022 - maybe we can stop trying to defend race-based
| favoritism and discrimination?
| topaz0 wrote:
| > all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair
| advantage.
|
| Only by the kinds of people who tend to assume the worst
| about Black people.
| eonwe wrote:
| They sure can be seen as reactionary as one of CSPI's areas of
| interest in "The Great Awokening" (see
| https://www.cspicenter.com/about).
|
| I found the article interesting as I've just started to work in
| US corporation and I've wondered how achieving specific
| diversity goals are achieved in cases there is a very limited
| pool of people to hire / promote in a select subgroup.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| You don't need to prove that that measurements are reliable to
| highlight the existence of discrimination. If 10% of applicants
| are X, and I mandate that 20% of hires are X, then even if my
| interview results are truly random it's still discriminating in
| favor of X.
|
| Similar deal with tech hiring. What is the pool of candidates
| for this hire or promotion? If you're setting quotas in excess
| of the pool's representation you're explicitly instituting
| discrimination.
|
| I'm okay with people doing this, provided they're transparent
| in that they're instituting affirmative action and do not
| intend to create a non-discriminatory hiring or promotion
| process. What _does_ get on my nerves is when people privately
| push for policies like this, but publicly decry and mention of
| discrimination favoring "diverse" groups as hurtful.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Agreed, I'd much rather just be honest and transparent with
| processes. That's not to say there aren't potential down
| sides. Of course, I still hold that trying to resolve these
| issues completely on the demand side of careers that often
| involve an educational component doesn't always work well, it
| can drive up incomes, but won't necessarily make the implied
| problem better.
|
| What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply
| side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational
| paths.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply
| side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational
| paths.
|
| 100% this. If companies want to show that they're improving
| the diversity of the tech field, sponsoring study programs
| and science olympiad teams in underserved communities are a
| much better investment than quotas. The only thing that's
| going to increase the representation in tech _as a whole_
| is increasing the number of black, Latin, indigenous tech
| workers.
|
| Instead, companies seem to only care about _signaling_
| diversity. When a company sets a quota and pushes their
| representation of "diverse" demographics up a few
| percentage points, they're increasing the diversity _within
| the company_. They 're doing nothing to actually increase
| the diversity _of the field_.
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| The post doesn't suggest there's any mandated quota for
| hiring or promotion--only for interviews or consideration.
| And it doesn't suggest any secrecy about this policy.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| If I tell my recruiters to never interview black people,
| it's not discrimination because it's not actually
| prohibiting them from hiring or promotion? Quotas in
| choosing who to interview or who to consider for promotion
| is absolutely a form of discrimination.
|
| I've worked at a company that implemented this. It resulted
| in a vast double standard: white and asian males only got
| interviews if they came from elite colleges or well-known
| companies. Diverse candidates could pretty much come from
| anywhere. This resulted in a substantial disparity of tech-
| screen pass rates. Which the company held up as evidence of
| discrimination, and demanded that we address this
| disparity. Proposals to anonymize tech-screen, strangely,
| were ignored. Instead, recruiters (who had bonuses attached
| to diverse hires) got to decide who advanced from the tech-
| screen to the on-site instead of engineers.
| prewett wrote:
| The post describes turning down a lot of qualified people
| because they had not encountered any applicants of required
| race/gender yet. In fact, they ended up not hiring for the
| position at all because they never encountered applicants
| of the required race/gender. So despite the fact that they
| had _qualified_ applicants, they ended up forced to hire
| nobody. No individual person was discriminated against, but
| the group of applicants sure was: none of them got hired,
| despite the fact that the manager had qualified applicants
| and wanted--needed--to hire one.
|
| The post also notes that this was invisible to people who
| weren't a manager, so it was effectively a secret, whether
| or not it was intentionally so.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm not really convinced how good we are at measuring merit.
|
| But I don't buy into that being the reason for <insert my
| idea>.
|
| I DO worry that "hey we doubt we're doing it right based on
| merit so we're picking race this time / some times" will have
| an effect, and not a good one.
| layer8 wrote:
| > would you rather work at Google on Gmail or at Microsoft on
| Outlook?
|
| Actually, Outlook is much more usable than GMail, but apparently
| that doesn't translate to developer prestige.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Ugh, another one of these.
|
| > There weren't any quotas around how many of these "diverse"
| candidates I had to actually hire, but I was pretty sure my
| corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people
| who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the
| annual D&I report look good.
|
| Correct, there aren't quotas, but of course that doesn't stop the
| author from speculating that there might be, and basing the rest
| of the article on that.
|
| > Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting
| this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president
| happy.
|
| Missing here is how BIPOC and women have been systemically under-
| promoted relative to their work output, and yes, although there
| is no quota, someone is checking in to make sure a _manager_
| (i.e., someone who has power over their reports ' lives) is aware
| of systemic biases when approaching their decision-making. What
| is terrible about this exactly?
| rvz wrote:
| TLDR: It still means nothing.
| ParksNet wrote:
| googlryas wrote:
| theow7384iri wrote:
| jansan wrote:
| If you want racial equity, you have to start at school or even
| earlier. Get rid of private schools, improve the public school
| system. Then you can actually get good people from all kinds of
| backgrounds that are not looked upon as "diversity hires".
| bioemerl wrote:
| > Get rid of private schools
|
| There are good steps that can be taken, but objectively harming
| some students is not the way forward.
|
| Improve public schools and try to get more money into the poor
| regions. Do not erase private ones.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Nope. Get rid of all of them. Private schools are just legal
| segregation. Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with
| poor and average kids will give their parents a huge
| incentive to lobby for the increased quality of public
| schools. Lottery systems would make it even better. Education
| and healthcare being made available to everybody at the exact
| same availability and quality level would majorly improve
| both systems.
| pjscott wrote:
| As a fun historical side note, I've heard this one before
| in a different context! "Make exit impossible so people
| will have to focus on fixing the broken system they're
| forced to deal with" was also the stated rationale for
| building the Berlin Wall.
| bioemerl wrote:
| > Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and
| average kids will ...
|
| Cause rich families to blanket refuse to live anywhere near
| neighborhoods with poor kids and contribute massively to
| the segregation between well off and impoverished
| neighborhoods.
|
| Just live in a place where every home in a 45 minute radius
| is over a million dollars to purchase.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right--in my city all the rich people neighborhoods in
| the city proper _only_ exist because of private schools.
| If you have _some_ money, but not enough for an expensive
| in-the-city house in a non-terrible neighborhood _plus_
| private school, you do not live there--you live in the
| 'burbs. All the urban- and close-old-suburb dwelling rich
| people would pack up and leave within a year if they were
| forced to send their kids to public school. Or find some
| way to get themselves a weird-bordered carved-out new
| district all to themselves. That's the only possible way
| they'd stay.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This will only work if you also forbid rich people from
| homeschooling (= private tutors supplemented with sports &
| social clubs full of other rich kids--and very-well-funded
| rich-parent homeschooling support groups would probably
| start to look _an awful lot_ like private schools
| themselves) and from sending their kids out of the country
| for school.
|
| Day school rates for _good_ private schools (there are way,
| way more bad private schools than good ones) are in like
| the $20k-$60k /yr range. That's a lot of money to put
| toward avoiding public school, even if US private schools
| themselves are outlawed. You'd have to also mandate public
| school attendance, no alternatives whatsoever.
|
| You'd also have to do something to prevent rich people from
| effectively _buying_ whole school districts and turning
| them into private schools. There are already districts
| kinda like this--unleash the entire upper-middle and upper
| class on the current public school system, and pretty soon
| there will be a few dozen districts nationwide where it 's
| impossible to buy a house for under a million dollars and
| the schools may as well be private schools.
| rcoveson wrote:
| What policy do you have in mind? Would it be illegal to pay
| for tutoring of any kind, or would it just be illegal to
| not send your kid to the local public school (illegalizing
| homeschooling as well)? And what about just moving to an
| area close to better schools, would you write laws to
| address that?
|
| As long as parents raise their own children, you're going
| to have crazy levels of inequality. If you also continue to
| respect personal autonomy and private property, you'll have
| ever crazier levels.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| Why not the way forward? Depends on the "some" being
| "harmed."
|
| This is a systemic problem, systemic measures will be taken,
| there will be winners and losers.
| bioemerl wrote:
| > Depends on the "some" being "harmed."
|
| How does harming anyone help? No it does not depend on the
| some.
|
| Life isn't a zero sum game. Pull people down and you don't
| distribute their value to others, you only destroy it.
| Animats wrote:
| > Get rid of private schools
|
| Finland does that.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > Get rid of private schools
|
| "I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current
| system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must
| prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise
| that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last
| nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the
| miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian
| torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and
| unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your
| system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to
| participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse!
| Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making
| your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in
| happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-
| year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill
| A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing
| things super, super backwards!" ~Scott Alexander
| sn0w_crash wrote:
| It's really amazing how these companies are treating people from
| disadvantaged groups as "a number on a spreadsheet" and patting
| themselves on the back for it.
|
| History will not look kindly on this moment in time.
| comex wrote:
| > You might imagine this policy doesn't bias the hiring process,
| since managers are still free to choose who to hire after
| interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of
| applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine
| diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those
| interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well
| in interviews that their peers with similar resumes do not get.
|
| So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their
| foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified
| for the job by doing well in interviews.
|
| On average, those candidates would have started with a
| disadvantage in getting their foot in the door for several
| reasons - including outright discrimination, and the cumulative
| effect of past discrimination, but also softer factors such as
| being less likely to have helpful personal connections. This
| applies not just to the Microsoft job at issue, but to the
| previous jobs that would have populated their resumes (and for
| younger candidates, even schools).
|
| Compensating for that sounds like a good policy to me.
|
| Now, the post also suggests there is pressure to actually hire or
| promote less-qualified candidates, which might be a problem, but
| in that area the post is more vague and speculative.
| antisthenes wrote:
| The problem with this reasoning is that you assume you have a
| perfect view of how disadvantaged every single subgroup is.
|
| Also, given that this a zero-sum game (the company only has a
| fixed number of hours to interview a single game), you are
| _necessarily_ making someone else worse off when you give
| advantage to a sub-group of candidates.
|
| Also consider that many candidates can belong to a privileged
| group and a disadvantaged group at the same time. Of course
| none such nuances are being considered. How could they, when
| all you have on the person is their 1 page work resume? You
| know literally nothing about them, except a few projects they
| claim to have completed in the past.
|
| Now you're not actually hiring for skills, but playing
| disadvantage roulette with your hiring pool. Ok, maybe not, and
| you're still screening for skills, but at least call a spade a
| spade.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting
| their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves
| qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.
|
| Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a
| form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to
| exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well,
| those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based
| interview. Had we interviewed any non-whites or non-catholics,
| the interview would be unbiased towards them"
|
| Is that a non-discriminatory hiring process? The fact that non-
| catholics and non-whites weren't even given a chance to
| interview is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the White
| Catholics that were still had to pass a skill-based interview?
| tptacek wrote:
| None of this engages with the comment it replies to. One way
| to see that is to simply remove the quoted sentence, and read
| the comment to see if it would remain coherent at the top of
| the thread.
| missingrib wrote:
| It directly responds to the comment even without the quoted
| sentence.
| steve76 wrote:
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It absolutely engages with the parent comment. The parent
| comment is trying to argue that discrimination in selecting
| which candidates to interview isn't a form of bias. This is
| incorrect as I explain in my comment.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The apparent Microsoft policy is that every interview
| pool "must include at least one external African-
| American, Black, Hispanic, or Latina/o and one external
| female candidate". Your counterexample is "every
| interview pool has to be _entirely_ white."
|
| I was originally going to write that you're playing the
| "I'm technically correct" trick here, but I don't think
| your argument actually rises to the level of technical
| correctness. Setting aside the debate over whether the
| former policy is desirable, it is clearly _not the same_
| as the latter policy. If Microsoft had said "everyone
| interviewed cannot be a white male," or even "most people
| interviewed cannot be white males," then you could more
| credibly try to make the case you're aiming for. But they
| simply didn't.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| How big is said interview pool? With a pool of four
| people, which isn't uncommon in my experience, that means
| that 50% of the interviews are locked behind racial and
| gender requirements.
|
| My example just made it bluntly obvious that
| discrimination in the interview stage is still
| discrimination, there's no "technically correct trick
| here". Mandating that X% of your interviews be of a
| particular race or gender is discrimination, no matter
| the value of X. Setting X to 100 just makes it very
| clear.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| > Mandating that X% of your interviews
|
| "2 of the candidates you interview must meet these
| gender/racial requirements" is a mandate, but it's not a
| percentage mandate. I know that's a little pedantic, but
| I think it's important pedantry, because you keep using
| percentages:
|
| > With a pool of four people, which isn't uncommon in my
| experience, that means 50% of the interviews are locked
| behind racial and gender requirements.
|
| That's only true if you are limited to just four people,
| which obviously you are not. You may feel it's an unfair
| burden on the hiring manager to _expand_ the candidate
| pool if necessary to meet the racial and gender
| requirements, but that's not an argument about
| discrimination.
|
| > Setting X to 100 just makes it very clear.
|
| I sincerely believe setting X to 100 makes it a different
| argument. :) "All of your candidates must be X" is
| manifestly not the same as "some of your candidates must
| be X". (The former may require you to leave out
| candidates you think are qualified, the latter does not,
| for a start, which strikes me as an _extremely_ important
| distinction in this context.)
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > The former may require you to leave out candidates you
| think are qualified, the latter does not, for a start,
| which strikes me as an extremely important distinction in
| this context.)?
|
| Incorrect. If you mandate that 20% of candidates be Y,
| but only 10% of candidates in the applicant pool are Y
| and 90% are X then on average you need to exclude 50% of
| qualified non-X candidates. If I have a pool of 90 X and
| 10 Y candidates and I have a quota of 80,20 then even if
| I include all 10 Y candidates I can only include 40 of
| the 90 X candidates. Sure, if I said that 100% have to be
| Y then _all_ of the X candidates would be excluded. But
| even lower quota values still result in the out-group
| being limited.
|
| > "2 of the candidates you interview must meet these
| gender/racial requirements" is a mandate, but it's not a
| percentage mandate. I know that's a little pedantic, but
| I think it's important pedantry, because you keep using
| percentages:
|
| Since there's a finite number of candidates it's still
| ultimately a percentage. The percentage is variable based
| on the total number of candidates, but it's still a
| percentage in the end.
|
| Quotas and caps are two sides of the same coin.
| Instituting a minimum representation of one group, is
| fundamentally the same thing as capping the
| representation of those who don't belong to said group.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's essentially impossible to have a job opening without
| making choices that will directly affect which people see
| that job opening. If you go to some university's job fair,
| you're selecting for the students at that university. If you
| had chosen to go to a different university's job fair
| instead, the students who were exposed to your job posting
| would likely have different qualities. There is no "default
| behavior that doesn't constitute making a choice," thus the
| only thing we can debate is the virtues of which particular
| choice was made, not _whether_ a choice was made.
| rrradical wrote:
| > Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely
| a form of discrimination.
|
| Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they
| are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it.
| By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring
| process, there has already been an immense selection bias
| against minority candidates.
|
| Two people growing up in different places (not different
| cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city)
| have lived in completely different worlds. Their schools are
| different; their health care is different; their safety is
| different; their opportunities are different; the people they
| know are different. And much of the time there's a stark
| racial difference in the makeup of those places. Historically
| this was very much intentional; but even if it were no longer
| intentional, the effects won't dissipate for a long time.
|
| So when you get a slate of candidates that all happen to be
| white, it's not just a random coincidence. Imagine if a slate
| of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd,
| right?
|
| Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other
| environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate
| slate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. So a
| good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to
| elevate candidates that just barely miss out. In other words,
| candidates that are strong, but, say, don't know anyone that
| works at microsoft (no surprise there... two worlds) or
| perhaps don't think they're good enough.
|
| The article points to a rising black employee population has
| some kind of evidence of injustice, but, if the company works
| harder to find qualified black candidates then obviously the
| percentage would rise. Unless we think that skin-color is a
| predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does)
| then improving a hiring process would result in an employee
| population that more closely matches the demographics of the
| population at large.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That
| would seem kind of odd, right?
|
| In the US? Well yeah. Black people comprise 1% of college
| graduates. White people are 60%.
|
| It doesn't help when students are under-qualified for the
| schools that they get into. It hurst every party.
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| You should read some Thomas Sowell. He should help cure you
| of your "cosmic justice" aspirations.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Cosmic-Justice-Thomas-
| Sowell/dp...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-
| Sow...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-
| Sowell...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-
| Sowell...
|
| The very idea that, in a just world, outcomes along various
| lines of demarcation between groups of humans would be
| roughly even has zero evidence to support it. In fact, all
| of history, as well as the state of the universe itself,
| testify that this should _not_ be the case! Never has there
| ever been equal outcomes between any groups in history. The
| world is complex, and the causes for disparity are too
| numerous to list and impossible to even attempt to measure
| or tease apart in their impacts. Sowell has written about
| numerous causes of disparity between groups that have
| nothing to do with racism or any societal injustice, and
| the above book examples are just a small portion of what he
| has written.
|
| What leftists like to do is over-simplify the world to fit
| their pre-conceived notions. If there is racial disparity,
| it _must_ have been caused by systemic racism! Therefore,
| we must fix it through systemic racism in the opposite
| direction! This kind of thinking is broken, flawed, and
| completely incorrect to the core, and acting on it simply
| leads to more injustice, more unfairness, and more
| disparity of different kinds. It is an ideology born of
| intellectual pride, moral vanity, and an utter lack of
| wisdom.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Generally agree that the problem is larger. However, I
| think this quick fix could result in a net negative.
|
| "So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel
| to elevate candidates that just barely miss out."
|
| Imagine you're one of the non-minorities who worked hard
| and misses out because of an artificial pressure. How do I
| explain to my kid that all else equal they will lose to
| another candidate because of not being a minority (assume
| this is similar to minorities of the past; however the
| results are mixed)? What's the point of trying hard in
| school? What's the point of working hard at work? These are
| the types of questions I'm starting to struggle with in
| real life. Teach the kid the same stuff I was taught
| (lies), or disillusion them that the world is not a
| meritocracy, truth and honor count for nothing, hard work
| may or may not pay off, etc?
| faeriechangling wrote:
| >The article points to a rising black employee population
| has some kind of evidence of injustice
|
| I agree, it is incoherent for people to say that certain
| racial groups being over-represented doesn't mean the
| system isn't fair, but blacks suddenly being hired is
| evidence the system isn't fair.
|
| >So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel
|
| With racism... and honestly this entire process is
| annoyingly indirect... just apply a racial quota and don't
| BS me.
|
| > Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the
| other environmental factors that led to an all-white
| candidate slate.
|
| People sure are obsessed with this narrative that
| affirmative action is all about preventing too many whites
| from getting jobs. This isn't the 60s, most of the people
| who are getting the bump are asian not white and it's not
| even close. This narrative doesn't work because it's nearly
| impossible to explain how asians ended up in the span of
| around a century ended up way behind whites and getting
| discriminated against to shooting past them in income.
|
| > Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of
| performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does)
|
| If you claim that people can get worse healthcare, worse
| schools, worse safety, worse opportunities, and know less
| connected people and still think they perform equally at a
| job? Well you actually are still predicting performance,
| you're predicting that certain groups are stoic supermen.
| Whereas other groups are a bunch of losers who couldn't
| even be better at their job despite growing up with every
| advantage in the world. So not only have you not gotten
| away from predicting performance based on skin colour, now
| you're also predicting privilege based on skin colour, so
| you've doubled your race based assumptions.
|
| Personally I'm just so done with the racist theories and
| the mental gymnastics people play around this data. If
| people want to reserve jobs for people of different
| identity groups, fine, lets do it for the sake of racial
| harmony so we can all sing songs together holding hands
| interracially in a circle.
| ponow wrote:
| > it is incoherent for people to say that certain racial
| groups being over-represented doesn't mean the system
| isn't fair, blacks suddenly being hired is evidence the
| system isn't fair
|
| Incorrect, for these aren't the same thing: one has
| existed for a long time and the other is a sudden change.
| The latter begs an explanation, and it's there:
| deliberate management manipulation of the candidate pool.
| It's therefore understandable that co-workers will see
| such hires/promotions as based in part on factors beyond
| performance.
| tremon wrote:
| _it 's there: deliberate management manipulation of the
| candidate pool_
|
| In which direction was the manipulation? How do you prove
| that the pool manipulation was neutral before and is now
| favouring blacks, rather than it was disadvantaging
| blacks and has now moved to a more neutral postion?
|
| "has existed for a long time" is just an appeal to
| tradition. It says nothing about the validity or
| correctness of the previous situation.
| hbrn wrote:
| > or perhaps don't think they're good enough
|
| Or perhaps it is not your business to decide what blacks
| should think?
|
| Imagine if you're hiring in a region where blacks are 10%
| of the population, but only 1% of resumes you receive are
| black folks (and if your pool of candidates is low, 1% can
| literally mean zero candidates).
|
| Your mindset seems to be "those poor blacks don't
| understand which jobs they should apply to. I know better
| than them, I'll help them". You still think you are
| superior to them. You're not a hateful racist, you're a
| virtuous racist. Still a racist though.
| tomp wrote:
| This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people
| use this perverted logic.
|
| But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism.
|
| Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care)
| doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of
| wealth/poverty.
|
| So if you apply a racist filter _on top of_ the (implicit)
| wealth filter, you 're just being racist against poor Asian
| & white people.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are less
| likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African
| Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| Reality isn't fighting against their argument as long as
| a single white or Asian poor person exists. It still
| means an approach is punching a part of the population
| further down.
|
| These things aren't mutually exclusive, stop trying to
| project them as such.
| ponow wrote:
| No it isn't.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are
| less likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African
| Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.
|
| Yet there are more white people in poverty than black
| people in the US. If we are trying to give opportunity to
| impoverished people we would judge by poverty. If we want
| to live in a racist society then we would judge by race.
| adamwk wrote:
| > Yet there are more white people in poverty than black
| people in the US
|
| Where are you people getting these stats? This is being
| repeated elsewhere and is not based in reality at all.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/income-
| poverty/...
|
| You may be thinking of poverty rates or proportional
| percentages if you think the above is untrue. The data is
| there for you to manipulate for your purposes as you
| wish, though.
| rcoveson wrote:
| It is ambiguous as written, and false by one
| interpretation but true by the other.
|
| True: There are more white people in poverty (~5.5% of
| population) than black people [in poverty (~2.5%)] in the
| US.
|
| False: There are more white people in poverty (~5.5%)
| than black people [in or out of poverty (~13.6%)] in the
| US.
| lordleft wrote:
| > Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health
| care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens
| because of wealth/poverty.
|
| This is false. But let me charitably engage your argument
| and ask you the following -- if your premise is correct,
| that means that lower access to education and economic
| attainment among under represented people of color has
| nothing to do with racism, and everything to do
| with...something. What is that thing? Why would it be the
| case that, as Philosopher Liam Bright says, "the people
| who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks
| must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by"?
| PathOfEclipse wrote:
| No, it's not, What the GP said is true. as I responded to
| someone else, you really should study Thomas Sowell
| because he articulates this stuff better than anyone
| else. I would specifically recommend Black Rednecks and
| White Liberals for a discussion about negative cultural
| elements that trace back to rural areas of Scotland,
| Ireland, and England, were transplanted to the American
| south, and eventually transplanted to African americans,
| who themselves eventually migrated from the south for
| more opportunity. He also talk about how leftists
| exacerbate the problem.
|
| Wealth, Poverty, and Poltics reads like a textbook, but
| provides a wealth of information about causes of
| disparity that have nothing to do with racism. Similarly,
| conquest and cultures talks a lot about disparate impact
| throughout history.
|
| One of the foundational tenets of CRT is that all racial
| disparity is caused by systemic racism, and, therefore,
| that all racial disparity must be addressed by systemic
| change until there are equal outcomes. This idea is
| fundamentally wrong on a billion levels, and also
| insanely harmful to society. It is one of the main
| reasons, if not the primary reason, why CRT is so wrong
| and so dangerous. When you diagnose the illness so
| completely wrong, and then diagnose the cause of the
| alleged illness so completely wrong, then, your prognosis
| is not only going to fail to improve anything, it's going
| to make things worse for everyone!
| tomp wrote:
| Do Obama's daughters have lower access to education?
|
| No.
|
| So it's not about race. (I just gave you proof.)
|
| It's about wealth and social class. Sure, those might
| correlate with race, and even be caused by racism (past
| or present), but _virtually all_ real world consequences
| are downstream of wealth (in particular the ones
| mentioned: where you live, what you can afford, the
| amount of free time you have, your health, your
| nutrition, access to education /jobs, ...).
|
| If you ignore wealth and focus on race, you're racist.
| rrradical wrote:
| Has there ever been a poor person that has succeeded in
| our society? Of course. Therefore I proved money doesn't
| matter. (Do you see how stupid this argument is?)
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > that means that lower access to education and economic
| attainment
|
| But you're not arguing that we give opportunities to
| people without good access to education and poor
| finances. You're arguing we give opportunity based off
| race. In fact, there are far more white people in the US
| with poor access to education. If you really wanted to
| increase opportunities for such people you wouldn't
| accomplish it by judging by race.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| > _What is that thing?_
|
| The people who study this stuff seriously end up
| concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the
| biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups
| who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were
| discriminated against (Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese,
| Japanese, etc.). The main difference seems to be cultural
| values that prioritize the nuclear family and educational
| attainment. The SAT isn't racist, poor black people who
| study do far better than rich white people who don't.
|
| If America was so racist, the single most successful
| ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians. It has nothing to
| do with race and everything to do with the culture,
| family, and values you grew up with.
| _manifold wrote:
| >If America was so racist, the single most successful
| ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians.
|
| Do you have a source for this? Not for debate, I'm
| genuinely wondering where the information comes from.
| From time to time I've heard things about people from
| Nigeria being hardworking - haven't looked into it very
| deep though.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Not a direct source but https://africacheck.org/fact-
| checks/spotchecks/yes-nigerian-... pops up as a fact
| check after the same claim was made by Candace Owens.
| This link (from 2018) refers to several reputable sources
| of the time. I would guess that there are updated data
| from the US Census Bureau et al if you want to double
| check, but from all sources linked it seems Nigeria is
| and has been on an upward swing as far as exporting
| educated, successful people to the U.S. (and perhaps
| retrieving them to prevent brain drain, but I cannot be
| sure).
|
| FWIW and from anecdotal accounts of acquaintances of mine
| (not a lot but in the double digits), this comes down to
| a cultural focus on education and family structure from a
| young age. Compare to the culture and family values
| promulgated elsewhere.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The people who study this stuff seriously end up
| concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the
| biggest predictor."
|
| Wasn't there a Harvard study that concluded the biggest
| factor was a 2 parent household?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > Of all the factors most predictive of economic mobility
| in America, one factor clearly stands out in their study:
| family structure. By their reckoning, when it comes to
| mobility, "the strongest and most robust predictor is the
| fraction of children with single parents." They find that
| children raised in communities with high percentages of
| single mothers are significantly less likely to
| experience absolute and relative mobility. Moreover,
| "[c]hildren of married parents also have higher rates of
| upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer
| single parents." In other words, as the figure below
| indicates, it looks like a married village is more likely
| to raise the economic prospects of a poor child.
|
| https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-
| study-w... (Slate: What's the most important factor
| blocking social mobility? Single parents, suggests a new
| study.)
|
| https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754
| ("Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of
| Intergenerational Mobility in the United States")
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > The people who study this stuff seriously end up
| concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the
| biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups
| who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were
| discriminated against. ...It has nothing to do with race
| and everything to do with the culture, family, and values
| you grew up with.
|
| This might actually be the best plausible argument _in
| favor_ of affirmative action and D &I policies targeted
| towards these folks. By making it easier for them to
| enter especially high-skilled industry sectors such as
| tech we strengthen their incentive for adopting more
| effective cultural norms, which has significant benefits
| in the longer run.
|
| (Unfortunately, this won't do any good if the educational
| system as a whole is not up to reasonable standards - if
| you're uneducated, you're still practically barred from
| the most productive and lucrative careers. And U.S. K-12
| public education sucks.)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The poverty achievement gap is nearly 3x the race
| achievement gap. Targeting disadvantaged people seems
| like the better goal for equity.
|
| Edit: according to this study, there is no race
| achievement gap--it is entirely accounted for by poverty
|
| https://edsource.org/2019/poverty-levels-in-schools-key-
| dete...
| nyuszika7h wrote:
| You can't be racist against white people because they are
| not systematically oppressed. And I'm saying this as a
| white person.
|
| Asians sure, but I would think diversity programs
| generally try to include them too.
| djbebs wrote:
| But they are systematically oppressed. Just look at
| college affirmative action policies.
| Octabrain wrote:
| I hate to have to say something this obvious but here it
| goes:
|
| Discriminating against a group of human beings for an
| arbitrary detail such as the color of the skin is indeed
| racist. No matter if that human being is a freaking
| north-europe-blonde-arian-white or whatever. No matter if
| that human being is or not opressed or whatever. Judging
| people by the color of the skin is WRONG. This
| ideological bullshit that US is expelling that pretends
| to normalice racism against white people is atrocious and
| must end and everyone, like you, that follows this line
| of thought must be called out and being exposed as what
| you are, which is being a fucking racist.
|
| Seriously, it is beyond me.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Depends on the system in "systemic". I wouldn't dare
| argue too much about the U.S. but if you applied the same
| standards globally?... Well, "whites" aren't looking so
| oppressive on an individual scale, and on a national
| scale the "white" countries most oppressive aren't long
| for being viewed as "white" within a generation or two,
| regardless of how often "great replacement" conspiracy
| theories are debunked. See the ever-expanding definition
| of "white" in order to maintain the illusion.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's
| hiring process, there has already been an immense selection
| bias against minority candidates.
|
| Maybe, maybe not. In either case, two wrongs don't make a
| right. If you want to eliminate discrimination then you
| need to stop discriminating. The solution is not to
| counter-discriminate, it's to remove the discrimination
| further up the funnel, to use your analogy.
| hbrn wrote:
| > Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That
| would seem kind of odd, right?
|
| Why would that be odd? It does happen in sport, and nobody
| cares (nor should they).
|
| > So a good thing to do is apply some pressure
|
| Why is it good? Author talks about not being able to hire
| for several months due to lack of DIE candidates in the
| pipeline.
|
| Of course a giant like Microsoft can afford to waste
| resources, but for a lot of startups doubling down on DIE
| means to literally die.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That
| would seem kind of odd, right?
|
| In the US? Well yeah. Black people comprise 1% of college
| graduates. White people are 60%.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Two people growing up in different places (not different
| cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city)
| have lived in completely different worlds.
|
| The top comment doesn't care about that at all, skin color
| is all that matters. It's about group identity, not
| differences in backgrounds. They'd give Obama's daughter "a
| foot in the door" over the daughter of some white
| hillbillies that is the first in her family to finish high
| school. Because obviously: group identity is paramount.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| You addressed the wrong argument. The intent is to give
| groups that are disadvantaged in the hiring process a chance.
| The intent is equity. Your example distorts that by shifting
| the balance in favor of an already advantaged group.
|
| If you don't believe non-white people have disadvantages just
| say so and we can move on.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > You addressed the wrong argument. The intent is to give
| groups that are disadvantaged in the hiring process a
| chance. The intent is equity. Your example distorts that by
| shifting the balance in favor of an already advantaged
| group.
|
| Then anonymize the resumes so that recruiters can't tell
| which candidates are men or women, or which is white,
| Asian, Black, etc. You don't eliminate discrimination by
| setting caps on how many interviewees can belong to each
| race. It certainly _could_ be the case that whites are
| advantaged (curious why you focus on whites despite Asians
| being far more overrepresented, by the way). Put the
| proverbial veil between the candidate and the hiring
| manager, and we 'll find out the truth.
|
| One of my previous workplaces rejected proposals to
| anonymize our interview process, on the grounds that it
| would inhibit our diversity initiatives. Interviewing.io
| did an experiment relative to gender with anonymized phone
| interviews, and the result were the opposite of the
| traditional narrative [1].
|
| 1. https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-
| to-ma...
| ealexhudson wrote:
| Blinding an interviewer by changing pitch/modulating the
| voice does little to erase the actual disadvantage. Few
| are arguing "people that sound like women are
| discriminated against", they're saying that the systems
| are set up in such a way that there is a bias against
| women that encompasses the evaluation of their
| experience, their work profiles, the topics they're
| interested in, the projects they've completed previously,
| etc. It's a systemic disadvantage, and that experiment
| isn't getting at the issue being claimed.
|
| As just one example, women still do the majority of child
| rearing, especially babies. People who want children make
| that choice, but men typically take a few weeks out of
| their career whereas women take months or more. That's a
| systemic disadvantage women suffer.
| coryrc wrote:
| > That's a systemic disadvantage women suffer.
|
| That's, perhaps, a systemic disadvantage _mothers_
| suffer. Tilting the tables advantages childless women
| most of all (and would be illegal discrimination against
| men, were the law to be enforced). Similar to how Ivies '
| affirmative action helps the children of African despots
| more than disadvantaged Americans.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > there is a bias against women that encompasses the
| evaluation of their experience, their work profiles, the
| topics they're interested in, the projects they've
| completed previously, etc.
|
| Actually, studies specifically aimed at measuring tech
| jobs indicate preferences favoring women candidates:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
|
| People frequently compare the rates of women in tech
| relative to the general population, not the pool of tech
| workers. This is misleading, when in fact most companies
| are quite balanced in terms of gender representation -
| relative to the representation of women in the field. 80%
| of nurses being women isn't a sign of men being
| disadvantaged any more than 80% of coders being men.
|
| working link for the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/
| papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Silicon Valley is hardly representative of tech as a
| whole.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > curious why you focus on whites despite Asians being
| far more overrepresented, by the way
|
| Asians are often referred to as "white" or "lily-white"
| in the context of hiring and college admissions.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| > curious why you focus on whites despite Asians being
| far more overrepresented, by the way
|
| I picked your example. Also, I'm not in the US. Apologies
| for failing at the intricacies of US-centrism.
|
| Anonymous CVs are an interesting idea, and indeed how
| most of the studies measuring biases (not just on gender,
| but also things like perceived origin of name) are
| constructed.
|
| But you're not going to get everyone to do them.
|
| > Interviewing.io did an experiment relative to gender
| with anonymized phone interviews
|
| If voices were so representative gender, we wouldn't have
| a severely worse pay gap for trans women. These are more
| systemic issues that start with gender roles and expected
| acceptable behaviors themselves.
| jalk wrote:
| The New York Philharmonic Orchestra introduced blind
| auditions due to racism concerns - in the 1970ies. New
| York Times launched a campaign in 2020 to put an end to
| blind auditions as the orchestra is not diverse enough.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I'm so tired of this crap where we pretend discrimination isn't
| discrimination if we jump through a bunch of hoops. Yes asians
| being told they can't come to interviews because they're too
| asian is racism and it does impact their chances of seeking
| employment because how you do on any given interview is going
| to be to a degree random. You could get a coding test you've
| never seen before or one you practiced the night before.
|
| The whole song and dance about applying racism at the interview
| selection stage isn't about not being racist, it's that there
| isn't court precedent that specifically makes that illegal, but
| there is for other more direct techniques like racial quotas.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > isn't about not being racist
|
| They're not even saying it's not being racist - they freely
| admit that it is - they just insist that the ends justify the
| means.
| bradlys wrote:
| > So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting
| their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves
| qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.
|
| I've heard from diversity candidates who work at Microsoft and
| interview at other companies that this part isn't even true.
| I've been on the hiring side and seen how it isn't true too...
|
| The bar is truly different at all levels. Recruitment,
| interviewing, hiring, offers, and management are all very
| different. To act as if there isn't this is to truly be naive
| or just happen to have only worked and interacted in a very
| small group of people. I've worked with hundreds and talked to
| thousands - this shit happens a lot more than HR wants to
| admit.
|
| I'm not saying someone always get the preferential treatment -
| I'm just saying this happens more than people think it does.
| Balgair wrote:
| Ok, let's do some nice, calm soothing math for a second.
|
| Per the OP previously 'diversity' candidates were 1% of all
| applicants. I'll assume the null hypothesis here and then also
| assume that they were 1% of the interviewees too.
|
| Lets assume that diversity interviewees are turned into hires
| at some factor Y. I'll make no assumptions on if that is
| different than from non-diversity interviewees.
|
| Now, with the new policy, there is a 15x increase in the
| probability of turning diversity applicants into interviewees.
|
| However, nothing has been done to change Y, the factor at which
| diversity interviewees are turned into candidates. They are
| _explicitly stating_ that they are not changing Y.
|
| So that then means that diversity interviewees are now _less
| likely_ to move on past the interview stage. Based on the
| numbers, they then need to interview at 15x the rate as
| previously to be turned into hires.
|
| Please, correct me if I am wrong here, but this seems to _hurt_
| diversity interviewees.
|
| I see it as taking up 15x the time, rejecting at a 15x rate,
| and eliciting these real human people to become stats in some
| database that the policy makers can show off to some other boss
| without any compensation.
| epx wrote:
| It is easy to feel like we have a target painted on our backs
| with this diversity thing. It is a sentimeng generated by our
| reptilian brain. (It does not help that some hotheads at
| LinkedIn say that every black hole in the universe is blame of
| the white man.)
|
| But this is a feeling that must be let go. Privilege allows
| people to reach excellence and excellence is scarce, so no,
| privileged people that do their homework won't suffer because
| we are trying to do the right thing, allowed by our current
| stage of civilization that generates so much surplus.
|
| Not picking up the capable people and letting them reach their
| level of excellence is a big problem in our society, and
| everybody would be better off if this was fixed.
| purpleblue wrote:
| It's not those with a disadvantage. It's strictly based on skin
| color. That's the problem. You have no idea if they are
| disadvantaged or not. There are plenty of middle-class and
| upper-class Black families these days.
|
| Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To
| me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh
| look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about
| her background.
| etchalon wrote:
| We have objective evidence, through numerous studies, that
| just "being black" produces disadvantage during the hiring
| process, and data which shows the outcomes of that
| disadvantage in fairly straight-forward terms:
|
| https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-
| black-...
|
| https://www.americanprogress.org/article/african-
| americans-f...
|
| The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of
| their skin color, not their socio-economic status. And while
| a higher socio-economic status can help to offset that
| discrimination, we have no evidence it eliminates it.
| notch656a wrote:
| etchalon wrote:
| The answer to your question is yes.
|
| They are more likely to be convicted, and are given
| longer sentences when they are:
| https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-
| reports/demographic-d...
|
| They are 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully
| convicted: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/report-
| black-people-7-5-ti...
| notch656a wrote:
| sascha_sl wrote:
| >The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of
| their skin color, not their socio-economic status.
|
| They're a self-reinforcing loop. A lot of racism is
| affecting socio-economic status (redlining, no generational
| wealth) and the bad socio-economic status then fuels the
| continuation of the disadvantaged status alongside racism.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| This would be a good case for anonymizing resumes in the
| interview process. I'm not sure why that wasn't considered
| over setting minimum representation requirements. An easy
| way to eliminate discrimination is to make it impossible to
| discriminate between protected classes.
| afarrell wrote:
| One goal of this is maintaining social cohesion between
| groups of people who can be immediately distinguished in
| combat. The visible existence of middle-class and upper-class
| Black families presents a lower-middle-class black teenager
| (or any teenager) with a choice:
|
| A. Spend a lot of time and effort growing into someone with
| the skills and social access to be a part of one of those
| middle-class (or with luck upper-class) families.
|
| B. Spend a moderate amount of time and effort maintaining a
| position in the lower-middle-class.
|
| C. Spend a small amount of time and effort to fall into what
| socialists call the lumpenproletariat.
|
| D. Spend an enormous amount of time and effort to gather a
| group of conscientious and industrious peers to form a new
| militant group which seeks to take power, trusting them to be
| rational enough to act effectively and loyal enough not to
| betray your cause.
|
| E. Join an established militant group.
|
| Why does Microsoft care? Microsoft wants to sell services to
| various governments, who want to maintain monopsony power on
| recruiting those who choose path E.
|
| They also want tax revenue from those who choose path A. They
| also don't want to spend tax revenue on the messes left
| behind by those who choose path C or D.
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Disadvantage is not solely based on wealth, though it does
| play a large part.
|
| If you presuppose that giving disadvantaged groups an extra
| chance is a positive (your argument sort of does already) and
| only use wealth as a factor, isn't it still a net positive to
| uplift the typically poorer group? Doesn't that rightfully
| uplift more people than it does "wrongly"?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I notice that you only use the word "group" above and not
| "people" or some older word acknowledging that that's what
| these groups are made of.
|
| Why judge people by the groups that were born into when we
| could be judging them as individuals instead?
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Have you ever been involved with hiring? The first stage
| - reading CVs - is not exactly the greatest point in time
| to judge people as individuals, if they're even read
| beyond a short skim. It is the biggest opportunity for
| unconscious bias to reject a candidate.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying
| that we shouldn't consider people as individuals when
| reading their CV because that's when unconscious bias may
| lead to their rejection? If the latter is true, then
| shouldn't we do the former all the more?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Even Lebron James children have to deal with racism. Someone
| spray painted the n word on his house. Are poor people more
| disadvantaged? Obviously. But all else equal, being black or
| brown in this country means you face more adversity.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| So you're okay with Lebron's children being given
| advantages in hiring process over a poor white candidate?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think it's ok to factor race into the criteria that
| resumes are judged on because it affects the experiences
| those students have had and I do think thought diversity
| is valuable in and of itself. It's a tricky situation
| obviously.
|
| But at the resume level all we're doing is using
| heuristics to decide who deserves an interview. Are white
| applicants with a 3.2 gpa more likely to be successful
| than black ones with a 3.1 gpa? I have no idea. I don't
| think you do either. Really the only way to find out is
| to hire some black applicants and compare them which
| might be what msft is doing.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I'd have less of a problem with D&I policies if they were
| justified in the following way.
|
| "Black people are this percentage of the company. We need to
| show minorities respect and ensure they're doing well
| economically by ensuring that we hire a certain percentage of
| minorities, and then hire the best among them. This is
| something they fought for through the political system, and
| it's something every group can benefit from if they ever find
| themselves under-represented"
|
| I'd be like, well I don't like my asian friend Clive is not
| getting hired after trying so hard in school, I might
| disagree with it, but I would at least understand where it's
| coming from. However how these policies are actually
| justified is nonstop racism. "white privilege, "You were only
| hired because of unconscious bias", so on and so forth as
| people are paraded into mandatory racism training seminars.
| I'm just sick and tired of the racism from the DEI bigots and
| the way they parade around as anti-racists honestly makes me
| want to projectile vomit.
| rhacker wrote:
| It's also dangerously creating racism. The more we tow some
| kind of line of lets end racism by only hiring minorities,
| the more racist this country will get. Watch it. The moment
| you step back and let people hire the best candidate, you
| will find different cultures mixing and moving forward
| together.
| peter422 wrote:
| So even if we have aggregate statistics showing how certain
| groups of people are disadvantaged, the fact that the rules
| do not apply universally means we should just ignore them?
| origin_path wrote:
| Yes. "Disadvantaged" isn't a clear enough concept to act
| on, even if it were the same thing as race or gender, which
| it isn't. It's not even semantically clear. Does it mean
| something bad has been inflicted on them externally in the
| past, or does it merely mean their present situation is
| worse than average without passing judgement on why?
|
| The whole woke DEI idea of people being "disadvantaged" is
| itself a disempowering notion. It tells people that there
| is no point making better decisions or trying harder in
| life, because what you do or don't do doesn't matter, only
| outcomes matter, and if they are poor someone else will
| give you stuff for free. It's the ultimate form of
| emasculation.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| You can flip the script and ask why you should apply rules
| based on the aggregate despite obvious counterexamples.
| White boonies kid isn't happy to be excluded over the fact
| they are white, either.
|
| Point being this whole strive for 'ultimate equality' is
| going to create victims in its fanatical wake. No perfect
| method exists and no one wants to be on the losing end. But
| it is easier for those in a position of affluence to decide
| who is allowed in, as long as they won't get hurt
| themselves.
| peter422 wrote:
| So we throw up our hands and perpetuate the obviously
| unjust status quo?
| notch656a wrote:
| The beauty of capitalism is the process that farms for
| the most net value extracted from the employees is more
| favored to win. I'm all for competitor companies hiring
| based on diversity (aka progressive-approved racism) , it
| creates market opportunities for the firms I work for.
| peter422 wrote:
| Perfect, so you have no problem with Microsoft having
| this policy! Problem solved.
| notch656a wrote:
| I don't follow the logic that suggests that because I
| have no personal problem, a problem doesn't exist.
| [deleted]
| badpun wrote:
| Spot on. I wonder if daughters of Barrack Obama will get
| preferrential treatment as diversity hires. As women of
| color, they definitely should, according to many companies'
| policies.
| mmmpop wrote:
| You're about to get downvoted to hell but I'll add in that I
| love when big, fat, ugly White people think sees a Black
| person that may have their shit otherwise together and go
| "wow they really need my help and compassion." Because that's
| not racist lol
| gnerkus wrote:
| How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who
| start with a disadvantage?
| [deleted]
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I would also support a policy that supports at least
| considering disabled or impoverished candidates.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I'm interested in the question of _who decides_ which
| attributes are relevant, and which values of those
| attributes shall be favored.
|
| I think there's the potential for self-contradiction /
| hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular
| logic they use.
| somedude895 wrote:
| Agree. A white person from a trailer park home and a
| black person from a government housing home are much more
| alike than a group of like-skinned people among each
| other.
|
| I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents
| of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to
| address originally was that a hiring manager might choose
| a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today
| it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal
| I don't know, but it's not fairness.
| genrilz wrote:
| The people who decide which attributes are relevant are
| the higher ups in the company. These people are making
| their decisions based off traits that they believe
| unfairly disadvantage people. The reason for that belief
| is the political advocacy of people who have those
| traits.
|
| Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait
| also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the
| hiring managers would be making perfect decisions. I do
| not think this is at all the case though. Regardless, I
| think it is better to correct for the traits that _do_
| have advocacy behind them rather than just not doing any
| correction at all.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| I think what's more important is transparency. Tell us
| the modifiers used in the hiring process. Are black
| people a 1.25x or 1.5x modifier? What are the modifiers
| for impoverished individuals? Then we can start to come
| to a consensus as a society, how much we want each
| modifier to be. But as long as these weights and biases
| are kept behind closed doors, we'll be left spouting
| speculation until the end of time.
| adra wrote:
| Both of those classes are actually illegal to ask about(in
| Canada at least but probably many nations, so unless the
| candidate volunteers this information (almost certainly
| not). Who knows how one could know to reverse discriminate
| themselves.
|
| The more pain (and hence unlikely to see the light of day)
| would be companies chipping into a educational fund to
| support impoverished individuals who would need added
| education to make it into positions where they can support
| themselves and break the difficult to climb wealth ladder.
|
| He'll, even the location of on-site jobs can be considered
| discrimination. All our candidates must attend interviews
| at our offices in NY, SF, London, or Seattle. All others
| can spend their own bucks to travel here for the hope that
| we'll hire you .
| tqi wrote:
| The author also ignores the obvious fact that only 1% of
| candidates being "diverse" is the root problem being
| addressed...
| badpun wrote:
| Not really, it's basically circular.
|
| The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a
| "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people
| happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are
| not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but
| Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by
| definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a
| minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect
| parity according to existing criteria (no one category is
| less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as
| the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can
| always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor
| parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing
| ones. The game will never end.
| peter422 wrote:
| My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98%
| white and Asian.
|
| You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the
| obvious existing problem.
|
| There might be a slippery slope in the future, I agree, but
| that doesn't mean there isn't an active problem now!
| origin_path wrote:
| That's not a problem unless you are either racist or
| sexist, in which case a preference for people based on
| their race or sex would make it a problem. But for
| everyone else, it's just whatever it is.
| badpun wrote:
| Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that
| causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in
| tech (and often in business or managerial positions,
| directing those white and asian programmers), they just
| don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame
| them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and
| mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And
| men care about both money and technical things much more
| than women, so it's natural than they flock to CS.
| peter422 wrote:
| And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers
| more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.
|
| 60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and
| because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly
| dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't
| changed at all!
| badpun wrote:
| > And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers
| more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.
|
| ... Yes? At least in countries such as US, where these
| people in those professions can make large amounts of
| money. In my country (Poland), up to very recently,
| doctors were poorly paid and thus large number of doctors
| were women.
|
| > 60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and
| because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly
| dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't
| changed at all!
|
| It isn't as clear cut as with the CS, because women (on
| average) may be put off by the high competetiveness and
| poor life quality of law/medicine, but they are also
| drawn (on average) by the fact that in those fields you
| work with people. Whereas, in CS degree, there's
| literally nothing for them (on average).
| invalidOrTaken wrote:
| The Last Psychiatrist:
| https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-
| respecting_w...
|
| >I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard
| not to observe that at the very moment in our history
| when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is
| perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated
| and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that
| those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know
| it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some
| field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual
| power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like
| the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if
| power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did
| they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street
| bankers are men, isn't that odd?
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > And men care about both money and technical things much
| more than women
|
| Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive
| assumptions but they are historically and factually
| wrong.
|
| In the history of computing and computer science women
| formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and
| programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the
| culture and advertising shifted to market computers and
| such as being for boys. They were the pioneers of the
| computer science world and in an era where things were
| incredibly technical without the resources we take for
| granted.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >they are historically and factually wrong
|
| No, the money part is pretty accurate historically.
| Almost every field with high income historically
| attracted far more men than women once it became public
| knowledge. Job status and money are very
| disproportionately more important to men.
| peter422 wrote:
| Which is why doctors and lawyers, two of the historically
| most highly paid and high status jobs, now graduate more
| women than men.
|
| Or wait a second, I guess it isn't public knowledge
| doctors make a lot of money.
| [deleted]
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| This is not the gotcha you think it is.
|
| Sibling already pointed some things out. Specifically for
| doctors, go ahead and look up what specializations men go
| into primarily and what specializations women go into
| primarily. The only high paying one I noticed being
| particularly female-dominated is dermatology, and it's
| not that much of a difference. The male-dominated
| specialties tend to have far more high earning
| specializations, and the ratios are far more skewed too.
|
| As for lawyers, I can't speak except for the fact lawyers
| work more akin to salesmen and make a lot of money based
| on performance, and once again, historically speaking,
| men have always dominated on anything performance-based.
| Law is an exception, and it's an extremely poor one at
| that.
|
| As for both, both medicine / biomedical sciences and law
| pale in comparison to every other field known to both pay
| well and do so with high security still being largely in
| favor of men, whereas fields with low pays and low
| security tend to be dominated by women. Most STEM fields
| women dominate aren't known for paying well compared to
| the ones men dominate. Comparing those fields to social
| sciences is a no-brainer. All of this still excludes
| entrepreneurship and high-paying blue collar work still
| being dominated by men.
|
| None of this exempts the fact historically, women have
| never chased money through career nearly as much as men,
| and have always placed far higher value on a man's status
| than vice versa. There are cultural reasons why this has
| changed, and none of those reasons are necessarily
| pointing towards improvements. We can open this entire
| can of worms if you so desire, but it will go far too
| off-topic for this.
| dijit wrote:
| This is overly hostile and I don't really want to engage
| with it because of that.
|
| To answer the question as coldly as I can:
|
| 1) Women are graduating from _nearly all_ University
| programmes more than men.[0]
|
| 2) The role of Doctor is not as highly paid or
| prestigious as it used to be, at least in Europe.[1]
|
| [0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-
| tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...
|
| [1]: https://www.paragona.com/healthcare-
| jobseekers/where-would-y... ; cites a 70k average where a
| project manager will make an average of 99k:
| https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-project-
| manager...
| peter422 wrote:
| Your prior is that women don't like technical things even
| though time and time again when women are given
| opportunities in various fields they excel. But I guess
| this time it's different!
|
| I'm sorry that you consider it hostile to be exposed to
| the obvious truth that your incredibly self-motivated
| (you are a man after all) beliefs are the problem.
| dijit wrote:
| Actually it seems that the evidence is against you.
|
| In the most unequal societies (Russia[0], India[1]) the
| tech industry is much closer to gender parity than in the
| west.
|
| Sweden has gone further than any other nation on earth to
| be equitable across gendered lines yet remains extremely
| unequal in the actual working model. (In my former
| employer 14% of applicants were women, yet they
| constitute 20% of employed staff due to _excessive_ D &I
| initiatives).
|
| I should be self interested, we're talking about
| competition for work. It would be death to roll over.
| Jobs are absolutely zero sum-
|
| However my argument is backed by statistics, so I think
| you need to face the reality in front of you.
|
| [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39579321
|
| [1]: https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-
| employment-tr...
| dmarcos wrote:
| Men behavior is at least partially shaped by dating
| dynamics. Women tend to prefer partners with higher
| social and economic status than themselves. Men care
| less. Search term hypergamy
|
| edit: typo
| badpun wrote:
| Both facts that, on average, women are less interested in
| things (and more interested in people) and also women, on
| average, are less interested in money, have a solid
| backing in research. They're not factually wrong.
|
| The field of software business changed rapidly in the
| 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying
| thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where
| fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock
| options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only
| natural that men became much more interested in it at
| that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less
| inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get
| that $500k salary).
| fzeroracer wrote:
| That's also not true regarding the history of the
| software field. The explosion in engineer salaries is
| relatively recent. It was only post-2000s when it became
| a very lucrative field for engineers and by that point
| the percentage of women developers had dropped off. This
| was due to both companies shifting hiring strategies to
| focus specifically on hiring men as well a shift in
| advertising for home computers and deriding women.
| badpun wrote:
| Can you point me to your sources on companies shifting
| hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men?
| It's the first time I'm hearing about this.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| In the '60s the common way programmers were interviewed
| were through aptitude tests. The standard at the time was
| the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, but in the 70s and 80s
| that shifted to a new personality profile that inherently
| favored men [1] [2] [3] by Cannon and Perry. This became
| the new institutional standard and was used to determine
| who was a 'viable' programmer or not. This is where the
| traditional 'programmers are anti-social and hate people'
| thing came from and took root. In turn, advertising
| became male-focused, men were given more opportunity to
| become programmers and that's how the industry shifted.
| There's a bunch of very blatant advertising in the
| late-70s and early-80s that shows how this shifted.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-bias-pushed-
| the-compu...
|
| [2] https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/born-it-
| how-image...
|
| [3] https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-
| womans-job-...
| badpun wrote:
| Interesting. If that was truly the case and was
| widespread in the 80s, it died with the eighties, as in
| the late nineties companies came back to truly meritorous
| hiring that doesn't care about personality (i.e.
| whiteboarding/leetcoding people to death, or doing weird
| pseudo-IQ question such as "how many gas stations are
| there in Manhattan"). Why couldn't women come back in
| then? The argument that they couldn't, because the field
| was stereotypically dominated by men by then is not
| convincing, because the reverse wasn't true (i.e. men
| moved into women dominated IT in the 80s without a
| problem, against the field stereotypes that it's for
| women).
| fzeroracer wrote:
| It's because the stereotype changed, like I said. The new
| gold standard had the average programmer be 'male, nerdy,
| antisocial' and that was reflected by the rise of home
| computing being an almost exclusively young boy thing.
| The stereotype shifted in the 80s to computing being an
| activity for men, rates of women whom were computer
| science majors plummeted and it hasn't quite recovered.
| It hasn't quite died out because people still perpetuate
| the stereotype that the 1960s research study created.
|
| You can see here in the chart that women were nearing 40%
| of all computer science majors in the mid-80s, followed
| by a sharp drop-off into below 20% today [1]. There's
| about a 15ish year lag period for changes in hiring,
| perception and stereotypes to catch up as people
| graduate, join the work force and cycle out.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/3576297
| 65/when...
| sascha_sl wrote:
| Does it have to? Humans are really bad at being rational
| actors. The fact that some groups are less represented is a
| source of bias on its own. They can still be sorted out if
| they don't meet hiring standards in the second step, where
| unconscious bias is a lot less likely to affect a person
| that can demonstrate their skills.
| badpun wrote:
| > but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by
| doing well in interviews.
|
| This notion of "qualified for the job" is really blurry in our
| field though. For example, is someone fresh out of a three
| months bootcamp qualified for a job at Microsoft?
| tptacek wrote:
| Maybe. Many of the elite eng school grads Microsoft hires
| don't work out. At the upper levels of this industry,
| "meritocracy" is really just credentialism --- something
| embedded in your own comment --- which is something you learn
| quickly when you abandon resumes and interviews and replace
| them with work sample testing.
| badpun wrote:
| Companies like Microsoft want the best people. It's not
| brick laying, there's no "qualified for the job" tick box.
| The effects in software are non-linear, and one brilliant
| hire can create more value than 100 mediocre ones. These
| companies are actively hurt by having to hire second-best
| diversity hires, even if they're technically qualified for
| the job (whatever that means).
| ironman1478 wrote:
| What does best mean? That is very hard to quantify
| especially when the job is more than just LeetCode. It
| requires communicating with other teams, writing skills,
| general statistical thinking and data analysis skills
| (something not tested on leetcode), ability to receive
| feedback, ability to understand customer requirements,
| etc.
|
| I do not mean to imply that "diversity" hires have those
| properties and non-diversity hires do not. However, I'd
| argue that if you don't make an effort to at least talk
| to everybody you can (phone screens), then you are going
| to miss a lot of people who are great.
| tptacek wrote:
| You're trying to argue axiomatically and I'm relating an
| empirical fact: Microsoft hires from elite engineering
| schools, and many of those hires wash out. It's not
| improbable that there are coding camp people who would
| perform well at Microsoft. I have seem people with
| similar backgrounds perform well in other elite
| engineering environments (cryptography engineering,
| kernel software security, to name two).
|
| "Technically qualified for the job" isn't some ineffable
| abstraction. Most programming jobs at Microsoft are quite
| well defined, and qualifying people for them mostly means
| extracting solved problems from the work and presenting
| them uniformly to a pool of candidates. You don't need
| science to figure out how to do this, although if you
| want it, it was all worked out and written down in the
| 1950s.
| kiddz wrote:
| kiddz wrote:
| kiddz wrote:
| crackercrews wrote:
| > a nice thought experiment would be to ask "how much would
| someone have to pay you to be the same person but black in your
| organization?"
|
| These days, it would be the other way around. I'd bet many devs
| would pay a one-time fee of $10k to be a black dev in their
| organization. The payback period would be very short and would
| pay dividends for years.
| throwingitaway9 wrote:
| > White people are over represented across the workforce
| because America is not a meritocracy -- benefits of economic
| class are correlated with race because of white supremacy.
|
| Be careful because white people are actually under-
| represented[1] at Microsoft relative to their makeup of
| American population[2] (48% at Microsoft vs 75% country-wide).
| It's really important to understand this because otherwise DEI
| initiatives may counter-intuitively increase representation of
| white people. See school admissions for an example:
| https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc...
|
| [1] Page 9 of
| https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW...
|
| [2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| How does Tesla manage to be diverse without having an internal
| bureaucracy micromanaging everyone at D&I?
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| The increase from 3.7% to 5.6% black executives as a sign of
| lowering standards, when black people are 14% of the population
| in the country... Can we first establish what percentage of
| managers people genuinely think got their job based on merit as a
| baseline? An equal explanation might be that because Microsoft
| forced people to actually interview black people at all, more
| qualified black candidates were hired.
| truetotest wrote:
| seti0Cha wrote:
| That represents the population at large, not the percentage of
| job applicants. Without knowing that number, you can't know how
| reasonable such a rule is.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Yeah, neither can we know how reasonable the implication of
| lack of merit is in that case.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| The claim is that there may be a lack of availability. Lack
| of availability does not imply lack of merit. Prior
| discrimination, for example, could explain a lack of
| availability.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes, but if you are looking at the population of rust dev with
| a background in system coding, or telecom engineer with ciso
| certification, the stats don't look like the ones of the
| general population at all.
|
| In my university, in the whole class, we had 0 non white, and a
| single woman.
|
| Now, you may argue that we should fix that.
|
| But that's another debate, the thing is, people are hiring from
| the pool we have right now.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Right, but these aren't that. These are just generic
| executives. So like, just rando leaders in accounting and HR
| and sales. The comparison would be if in your entire
| university campus only white students existed.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Some departments are indeed not as affected, and if you are
| looking for a product owner, a project manager, or sales,
| numbers don't work against you.
|
| But there are departments where they do, even outside of
| IT. Accounting are mostly white males, HR are mostly
| female, etc.
|
| So if you have one policy that is general to the whole
| company, some departments will have a hard time no matter
| what.
|
| Case in point, one of my clients has a hard time finding a
| good dev matching diversity policies, but they have no
| problem finding analysts. For some reasons, good analyst
| profiles already are pretty diverse and the team is rocking
| people from all over Europe and Africa, also achieving
| gender parity without even trying.
|
| Yet it's the same hiring pipeline, and we are all working
| in the same office. They are not excluding people, in the
| office, 10% only are locals! But it doesn't work for some
| demographics, and the general dumb rule is killing their IT
| projects.
| rrradical wrote:
| It's not another debate because that debate never happens.
| People will use the same arguments to justify university
| selection, etc etc.
| bedobi wrote:
| I hate articles like these and their appeals to "meritocracy".
|
| Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I
| worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men.
| Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best"
| candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it)
| But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your
| team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's
| not.
|
| My current team is a diverse group of well-rounded people. Some
| women, some men, some younger, some older, from many ethnic and
| cultural backgrounds.
|
| Guess which is the higher performing? Guess which has a safe
| atmosphere with zero dick measuring? Guess which is the most
| pleasant to be a part of? Guess which has zero tolerance for any
| toxic behavior? etc etc
|
| Sure, there's lots of room for improvement in how tech businesses
| actually implement diversity vs just paying lip service to it and
| slicing numbers. But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely
| needed in the industry.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This is a fallacy, unless you would change your mind if someone
| else experienced the opposite.
|
| "Making a good team" is part of meritocracy. D&I is often
| implemented as an entirely separate quota system.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior?
|
| Probably the one that isn't making hiring decisions based on
| the colour of the applicant's skin.
| splistud wrote:
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| > Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I
| worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men.
| Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best"
| candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt
| it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that,
| your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself
| it's not.
|
| Do you think this would be true if you expanded it to all teams
| made up of one single demographic? Or is it just young white
| nerdy males? Cause that would sound pretty controversial if you
| swapped out white for any other color.
| andirk wrote:
| Dare they go to another country that is heavily one
| demographic and hence the tech teams are. All those
| countries' teams are "horrible"? God forbid a family be of
| shared blood.
| bedobi wrote:
| There are no countries that are "heavily one demographic"
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely needed in the
| industry
|
| Diversity on most commonly selected metrics barely does a thing
| as far as empirical evidence goes.
|
| The metrics that really matter aren't actively selected for. At
| best they are a byproduct. More often than not, the teams
| willing to be open about hiring gain their benefits over being
| open and cooperative rather than their diversity hires
| magically boosting things.
|
| But by all means, let's continue to be reductionist by
| stereotyping 'le weird white young male' group.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior?
|
| I find the current push toward so-called equity to be more
| toxic than anything I experienced on male-dominated teams.
| People fear saying things because they don't want to be called
| out. Someone uses a phrase like "off the reservation" or
| "grandfathered" or "whitelisted" and then we have to have a
| meeting about how someone might have been offended. Was anyone
| offended? No. But we'll have a meeting to discuss a
| hypothetically-offended person. This leads to some behavior
| change but also some silent backlash.
|
| I get that certain types of toxic behavior might be limited on
| diverse teams. But it's simply not the case that by adding
| women and minorities we will eliminate toxic behavior. From
| what I've seen, we simply swap one type of toxicity for
| another.
| delusional wrote:
| Anyone with their head out their asses who has ever worked a
| real job knows that the "meritocracy" is bullshit. Plenty of
| under performers get jobs. Plenty of overachievers get run down
| for a variety of factors. The idea that the worthy somehow rise
| above adversity is confirmation bias at its very worst.
|
| I don't even think you want a "meritocracy". I want a world
| where people are happy. If that means they're all doing jobs
| they suck at, then so be it.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Speechless.
| chernevik wrote:
| > "If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no
| matter how much you tell yourself it's not."
|
| Yes, it's true. There has never been a strong team of young,
| white nerdy men. Never happened.
|
| Technological and engineering progress was at a baffling
| standstill for centuries until the wisdom of diversity,
| inclusion and equity dawned upon us.
| stonogo wrote:
| Your sarcasm would work better if anyone understood what the
| hell you were trying to refer to. You seem to ascribe
| "technological and engineering progress" exclusively to teams
| of young, white, nerdy men in this comment, which is clearly
| something only an idiot would do, so I presume you are trying
| to make a different, better point. Feel free to let us know
| what that might be.
| troon-lover wrote:
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| I think op is saying these things:
|
| - We've had major progress over the last however many
| decades.
|
| - A lot of the teams responsible for that work were
| probably made up of young white nerdy males (obviously not
| all, but young nerdy males probably covers a large portion
| of them, otherwise why would we even be here talking about
| DEI initiatives?)
|
| - were all of those teams horrible?
| stonogo wrote:
| No, the OP is _taking for granted_ that "a lot" of the
| teams responsible for that work were made of young white
| nerdy males, and provides no justification for this
| assumption. Especially in a world where, prior to the
| current computer boom, Western scientific progress has
| been associated with grizzled elderly people in solitary
| labs, and technology was the purview of megacorps run by
| middle-aged managers.
| leveraction wrote:
| I think the point was that quite a bit of technolgical
| progess happened in the world prior to diversity
| initiatives. The reference to white nerds likely places the
| comment in an historical US perspective, possibly western
| European. Advanced technologies developed in other non-
| diverse cultures as well. China comes to mind in
| particular. But I feel like you knew that already. "Feel
| free to let us know what that might be." If we have sarcasm
| tags, maybe we should have snark tags as well?
| secondcoming wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > But they make horrible teams.
| crackercrews wrote:
| To be fair, Microsoft Teams is horrible.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| > every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively
| young, white, nerdy men.
|
| You worked at Big-O Tires as an installer?
| danielodievich wrote:
| Back in 2020, I interviewed at Github for a professional services
| customer facing position. One of the steps in the interview was
| D&I, where I had 2 white males interview me, another white male,
| about what I do and will do for diversity, whatever that means.
| It was clear that they had a scripted checklist that they were
| going on and it was just a formality. They were visibly
| uncomfortable which this interview and so was I.
| Glide wrote:
| There are plenty of places where they aren't uncomfortable with
| those questions.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| "I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more
| likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made
| his contribution to the annual D&I report look good."
|
| Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's
| "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot. He also seems fairly
| ineffective at navigating bureaucracy. Taken to extremes, lots of
| corporate policies can seem a bit overbearing. This essay reads
| to me like he's reading corporate D&I policies to be maximally
| inflexible and frustrating in ways that are unlikely to be the
| case (at least from based on my personal experience working in
| large corporations + a short stint at MSFT many years ago).
| bioemerl wrote:
| > Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay:
| He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot.
|
| Sure. If it wasn't pretty sure or assumes Microsoft could be
| sued over it, so Microsoft implements these policies as harshly
| as they can without opening up the path to a clear lawsuit.
|
| It's standard operating procedure for most discrimination.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If you look at the way discrimination was actually carried out
| a hundred years ago, you'll find that it was primarily done
| through strong hints rather than through having policemen
| standing outside. If a department head is sending out memos
| that cause middle managers to get the message not to hire black
| people, that is all it takes. It did not even require 100%
| compliance, as long as there is a strong headwind at every step
| of the advancement process, nobody will make it to the top
| that's not being favored.
| throwawsy51573 wrote:
| MS gives higher compensation for diverse hiring, it is not a
| far reach to believe it also affects promotions. Especially if
| you contributed to your boss's bonus
| geraldwhen wrote:
| Very recently I was only allowed to hire a black person. The
| assumptions here are probably correct.
|
| Search linkedin for "diversity recruiter". It's a role.
| Companies post specific reqs that state you must belong to a
| marginalized group in job posts often enough that it's a bit
| stomach churning.
|
| I've personally had to deal with HR for having too many white
| men on my teams. For software developers in America.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| These kinds of policies are also massively unfair to the
| exact people you are trying to hire. I know lots of engineers
| who would fit into the cliche "diversity" categories who are
| skilled and deserving of their job. But now they have to
| wonder if they were hired for merit or to meet some sort of a
| quota.
|
| The whole thing breeds resentment and drives teams further
| apart, in fact it creates the exact problems DEI is purported
| to solve.
| crackercrews wrote:
| Does make you wonder if heavy-handed affirmative action
| breeds imposter syndrome among its beneficiaries.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| In this case there was no competition. The person I hired
| was the most qualified of their peer group: all black
| men.
|
| We don't get a plethora of good candidates through the
| normal recruiters anyway so there would be no way to know
| one way or the other how they would have stacked up in a
| wider job pool. I found one person that was solid so I
| felt I got kind of lucky. Restricting applicants by ANY
| criteria (diploma, work history, age, race, etc) in this
| market seems insane. My most recent HR insanity is an in
| office requirement. Candidates bail so fast. I don't hide
| it though; there's no reason to string someone alone that
| doesn't want to meet the in office requirement I have no
| control over. And I don't fault anyone for refusing to
| work in office for some portion of the work year.
| FrontierPsych wrote:
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| In the US the EEOC has a standard set of questions to ask
| applicants:
|
| https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/what-are-eeo-questions-why...
|
| Hiring managers shouldn't see individual results for these -
| they should be used for aggregate reporting to ensure the
| overall process is unbiased.
| Decker87 wrote:
| At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring
| advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So
| many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot
| distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong
| color/gender.
| bergenty wrote:
| andirk wrote:
| Sure but keep in mind in a lot of tech positions, the
| oversaturation is Asian, Indian. Not white.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I have found that this is absolutely true, but not in the way
| you are thinking.
|
| The highest performing team I have been on had people from 4
| continents, ran the gamut on political views, had disparate
| education levels (from literally a high school dropout to
| PhDs from prestigious schools), and had people of many races.
| It had no women and no black people. By the standards of HR,
| it was not a diverse team at all.
|
| The DEI folks I have worked with want a very specific kind of
| diversity: They want you to hire people of all genders and
| colors, but only rich ones from a few schools. They think
| that school reputation and awards are a better measure of
| aptitude than an interview or a take-home test (claiming that
| the test or interviewer is biased).
| PointA2B wrote:
| crackercrews wrote:
| > Hiring the best people invariably leads to hiring a very
| diverse team
|
| If this is true, then I guess affirmative action isn't
| needed, right?
| bergenty wrote:
| There's no affirmative action anywhere. What are you
| referring to?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Hiring the best people invariably leads to hiring a very
| diverse team."
|
| Only the diversity may go along the lines that the
| contemporary DEI philosophy does not like or even accept.
|
| E.g. a Ukrainian refugee, a kid of poor Korean shopkeepers,
| an ex-Muslim atheist who does not even want to pretend that
| he is still Muslim.
| cvalka wrote:
| +1
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I don't appreciate the casual racism in your post.
| noasaservice wrote:
| What's "funny" about your comment is that there is no
| "white" race.
|
| "Whiteness" was created in a Virginia 1691 law to be "not
| negroe and not indian". Naturally, that also expanded to be
| not: Jews, Asians, sometimes not Italians, usually not
| Irish, and absolutely no indigenous people of any sort.
|
| Defining yourself by what peoples you exclude is the core
| kernel of racism. And that's what "white" means.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| These poor tactics of rhetoric do not justify racism. I
| don't believe this was an intellectually honest response.
| bergenty wrote:
| There's no race either. Asian is not a race and neither
| is white but I'm using the current designation society
| uses.
| bergenty wrote:
| Every article I've ever read on pushback against DEI has
| been a white male author so it's just "stats" as the
| sayings goes.
| ryan93 wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/opinion/race-
| admissions.h... whats his race?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| > This results in some people (mainly white men) feeling like
| they are being left out when they really weren't the best fit
| but in the past may have picked over someone else.
|
| There would be merit to this line of thinking, if the
| diversity initiatives came in the form of anonymizing resumes
| and interviews (which is easier to do with remote
| interviews). But that's not the case. More often than not,
| diversity initiatives come in the form of quotas or penalties
| for hiring or promoting too many "non-diverse" people. And
| those penalties often kick in at levels of representation
| lower than "non-diverse" people's representation in the
| candidate pool. This is why I'm not irked by over-
| representation of Asians in tech. They're not advantaged
| relative to whites, if anything they're penalized for their
| race (at a past company asian males were categorized as "ND",
| Negative-Diversity even more undesirable than white males).
|
| However, this is often not how diversity initiatives work.
| More often than not, they're not aimed at eliminating
| discrimination, they're aimed at mandating it: attaching
| bonuses to hires and promotions of particular races and
| genders, or achieving specific representation numbers (AKA
| quotas). This isn't eliminating discrimination, this is
| creating it.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >More often than not, diversity initiatives come in the
| form of quotas or penalties for hiring or promoting too
| many "non-diverse" people.
|
| This is _literally_ not the case for the author. From the
| article:
|
| >I told HR that I had considered it and I believed my
| recommendation was correct. HR said "OK, then we don't need
| to change anything. I just wanted to check that you had
| considered them."
|
| That's literally all the author had to do. He _made up_ the
| idea that it had an impact on his ability to advance in his
| career _in his own mind_.
|
| >Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that
| promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate
| vice president happy.
|
| It only "seemed clear." Weasel words. Engaging in the
| hyperbolic. This entire discussion is predicated on the
| fabrication that there is some racialized penalization
| system in place. It is scaremongering, nothing more than
| balking at the requirement to do the _bare minimum_.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Because explicit quotas are illegal, they're often
| conveyed ambiguously. "You don't _need_ to hire X% of Y
| group. But hiring X% of Y group would demonstrate
| inclusivity, which is one of the core company values. And
| upholding our core company values is crucial to
| advancement. "
|
| Also, as per "Diversity Slating Guidelines" quotas are
| indeed being used. They require at least one Black or
| Latin candidate, and one female candidate. If there's
| only 4 people on the slate, this could mean that 50% of
| the pool is subject to racial or gender quotas.
|
| There's more context behind Microsoft's diversity
| initiatives. Hiring managers were given bonuses for
| hiring diverse applicants. Or conversely, they were
| penalized for hiring non-diverse applications:
| https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-
| questionin...
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| This is how literally everything in corporate America
| works. You start with a good idea. It gets turned into a
| metric. Targets for this metric are assigned at various
| levels in the management hierarchy. Bonuses are made
| dependent upon meeting the target for the metric.
| Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and just
| focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting,
| client satisfaction is obviously very important, leadership
| made the determination that NPS is the best way to measure
| csat, we all have NPS targets, our bonuses are tied to
| them, so what does everyone do? They only send NPS surveys
| to specific clients they know will give a good score and
| then they spend time and effort to make sure the client
| follows up and does in fact give a good score. Everyone
| manages the metric, same as with the DE&I stuff.
| winternett wrote:
| If you think white men have it hard... Try being a black
| woman.
|
| Your rosy portrayal of white struggle is deeply mis-
| informed... People struggle because of corporate cost-
| cutting strategies, not because minority hires are taking
| jobs from white men in droves.
|
| A lot of the posts in this thread are evoquing memories
| from Birth of a Nation... geesis.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| mnd999 wrote:
| > The new leftist talking point
|
| Please stop with the tribal generalisations. There are more
| than two points of view in the world.
| arbitrage wrote:
| weakfish wrote:
| Gross generalizations don't really help prove a point
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Here are four examples from this very thread. Reddit is
| currently saying the same, though the identical verbiage is
| entirely coincidental.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166633
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166674
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166773
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33167483
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > The new leftist talking point is that there is no possible
| way to measure merit objectively so we shouldn't even attempt
| to do so. Therefore, they would counter your point by saying
| that you're incapable of hiring the best based on merit.
|
| Those who believe that there is no possibility of measuring
| merit are destined to be out-competed by those who can and do
| measure it at least somewhat accurately.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Unless they can successfully create laws to hamstring their
| betters.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That works within a country. It doesn't help against
| international competition, though. (And countries face
| international competition too...)
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed,
| perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I
| concept and move forward with complete blindness to race,
| culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new
| age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I
| want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals
| of operations of a company - i.e., just focus on building good
| things.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >that will reject the whole D&I concept
|
| This is already the norm in Silicon Valley. D&I awareness is
| a brand new thing, and mediocre reactionaries like the author
| pervade existing leadership structures.
|
| Over 50 years ago the US Military recognized that segregation
| and entrenched racial biases lead to inefficiencies and lack
| of readiness.[1] In an economy where hiring pipelines for
| skilled technical people are stretched incredibly thin, we
| need to be taking a hard look at why we're only getting
| people that look a certain way through our hiring process.
|
| 1. https://twitter.com/pptsapper/status/1579610768638881800
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Over 50 years ago the US Military recognized that
| segregation and entrenched racial biases lead to
| inefficiencies and lack of readiness.[1] In an economy
| where hiring pipelines for skilled technical people are
| stretched incredibly thin, we need to be taking a hard look
| at why we're only getting people that look a certain way
| through our hiring process.
|
| That doesn't follow, at all. For one, you're comparing
| apples and oranges. The "norm in Silicon Valley" is not to
| practice explicit racial segregation like the US Army did
| in 1940. Additionally, D&I may very well be operating at
| the wrong end of the pipe.
|
| An anecdote: a non-white friend of mine recently quit her
| job, because she was pressured into hiring an incompetent
| person who checked a lot of DEI boxes. That person
| proceeded to drive her crazy with their incompetence until
| she burned out and quit.
| omegaworks wrote:
| The norm in Silicon Valley is treat D&I with an
| inordinate level of skepticism, if not reject it outright
| as "anti-meritocratic." What we have here is not explicit
| racial segregation, but a system operating via capital
| and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white
| men into positions of extreme power and influence over
| the most vibrant segment of the American economy. This
| creates huge bind spots and carries the risk of building
| systems that reinforce oppression.
|
| >D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the
| pipe.
|
| Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting
| the idea outright.
|
| >she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person
|
| That there is no system in place for addressing concrete
| performance issues in any employee is the failing of the
| organization. The requirements for any role you hire for
| should be clear, expectations should be set and when they
| are not met there should be consequences. If this is not
| the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound
| to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the
| pipe.
|
| > Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting
| the idea outright.
|
| That doesn't follow. If D&I is operating at the wrong end
| of the pipe, it _should_ be rejected outright because it
| won 't work and will cause pointless problems in the
| meantime.
|
| > That there is no system in place for addressing
| concrete performance issues in any employee is the
| failing of the organization.... If this is not the case
| at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn
| out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.
|
| There was a system in place, but if you couldn't read
| between the lines: the bar was far higher for firing a
| "diverse" employee with performance issues, which
| followed from the DEI ethos in place.
| omegaworks wrote:
| >If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it
| should be rejected outright because it won't work and
| will cause pointless problems in the meantime.
|
| So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work, we
| should throw it away. Sounds like a newbie dev throwing a
| tantrum over having to build on a system with legacy
| code.
|
| >the bar was far higher for firing a diverse employee
| with performance issues, which followed from the DEI
| objectives.
|
| That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI
| objectives." Was that bar for performance standards
| explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here,
| hyperbole?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI
| objectives." Was that bar for performance standards
| explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here,
| hyperbole?
|
| The person simply couldn't do the job and was
| _profoundly_ incompetent, and the response was to that
| was to repeatedly be told to spend more time training
| them. My friend had previously successfully terminated a
| white employee who was under-performing but turned out to
| be _more_ competent than this one.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work
|
| Parent comment didn't say anything like that. Please
| assume good faith in discussions. They said that D&I
| efforts are more likely to work if focused on other parts
| of the education/industry pipeline, which seems at least
| plausible.
| omegaworks wrote:
| Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected
| outright" and uselessly categorized the pain of driving
| institutional change as "pointless problems."
|
| There is a point to trying to change a system that only
| sees white people at the end of the hiring pipeline. We
| can debate _where_ it needs to change, but the change is
| necessary.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected
| outright"
|
| Nope, they didn't. A direct quote: "If D&I is operating
| at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected
| outright because it won't work". Note the "If". If you
| disagree that D&I wouldn't work under these conditions,
| or that stuff that doesn't work should be rejected as
| pointless, you're still welcome to make that argument.
| But please be careful not to misquote other users'
| comments.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected
| outright"
|
| > Nope, they didn't. A direct quote: "If D&I is operating
| at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected
| outright because it won't work".
|
| Yeah, it's also worth noting that "rejected outright" is
| actually _omegaworks 's own language_, which he is now
| taking issue with. I was only echoing it back to
| emphasize a point in his own terms.
|
| Also, I suspect there's some sloppiness with definitions
| going on here. When I was using "D&I," I was referring
| specifically to kinds of corporate hiring polices the OP
| was talking about and this thread is discussing. I
| suspect omegaworks may be interpreting the term more
| broadly at times.
| omegaworks wrote:
| It makes no sense to debate the meaning of "rejected
| outright" with you. Just because a strategy doesn't work
| when it is applied at a particular point in the process,
| doesn't indicate that the strategic goals are wrong to
| pursue. Even the idea that it won't work is debatable, I
| question whether the strategy was applied in good faith
| by the people responsible.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > What we have here is not explicit racial segregation,
| but a system operating via capital and clout that has
| elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions
| of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant
| segment of the American economy
|
| Microsoft - Satya Nadella
|
| Google - Sundar Pichai
|
| Twitter - Parag Agrawal
|
| None of these men is white or even born in the USA, and
| somehow they managed to arrive at positions of extreme
| power and influence through this system of "capital and
| clout".
| omegaworks wrote:
| All Brahmin, members at the top of a caste system
| established by British colonizers[1]. A system causing
| its own set of problems in Silicon Valley[2].
|
| 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734
|
| 2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-
| valley-th...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is also possible that those companies will be suffocated
| by the fact that banks won't extend credit to them (ESG) or
| angry Twitter will pressure potential customers not to do
| business with them.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It is also possible that those companies will be
| suffocated by the fact that banks won't extend credit to
| them (ESG) or angry Twitter will pressure potential
| customers not to do business with them.
|
| I think that would only be an issue if they made a big deal
| in public about rejecting DEI. Such a statement might also
| attract a bunch of obnoxious, oppositely-polarized people
| you don't want either. Probably the best strategy would be
| to not mention it at all unless forced, and then just make
| vague, positive statements about diversity until whoever is
| bothering you moves on to something else.
| luckylion wrote:
| The University of Central Florida has bought an email
| address I own from some spammers and they're now
| occasionally asking me to enroll in some program where I
| can prove my commitment to diversity and inclusion and
| eventually become a certified supplier to them. "Positive
| statements" will not be what you need, you'll need to
| show that you actually have the numbers, and if you
| don't, you will not be considered.
| tablespoon wrote:
| IIRC, the US government's contracting rules are so
| byzantine that it gets shut results and wastes all kinds
| of money on incompetent contractors whose primary skill
| is compliance with the government's byzantine process.
|
| If you want to ignore requirements like that (or similar
| DEI requirements), you're going to have to forgo those
| kinds of customers.
| maldev wrote:
| ESG practices are currently under lawsuits as it's not in
| the shareholders best financial interest to factor these in
| when doing investments. So should fix itself soon.
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-08/texas-
| joi...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| True, this is actually happening as we speak. There will be
| a bifurcation, once enough flywheel speed has picked up;
| ESG funds will see competitor funds that will outperform.
| No wasting money on greenwashing or other ESG bullshit.
| Totalitarianism has to fight a war with reality and facts.
| It is unsustainable (pardon the pun).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| It is likely that some foreign funds (Arab, Chinese)
| won't give a damn about ESG anytime soon, if at all.
|
| That said, this is how you end with critical technology
| in potential adversaries' hands.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > ESG funds will see competitor funds that will
| outperform. No wasting money on greenwashing or other ESG
| bullshit.
|
| Would that work? IIRC, stock prices aren't so much about
| performance, just who wants to buy your stock. Decreased
| actual performance from "greenwashing or other ESG
| bullshit" might be overwhelmed by demand by ESG pots of
| money.
| wyager wrote:
| Companies aren't doing DEI because they feel like it. They're
| doing it because if they don't, they will be punished by the
| state. The way this works is that there is a patronage
| relationship between the grievance HR class and certain
| political actors. If you fail to hire enough DEI HR people to
| suck revenue from your company, the state prosecutors hit you
| with all kinds of hiring discrimination lawsuits. It's sort
| of like a mob protection racket. You hire some of our guys
| for some no-show jobs, we don't burn your business down.
| pc86 wrote:
| I can't even imagine what it must be like to live in this
| kind of contrived world.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I kind of agree with OP. Lot of the D&I initiatives are
| CYA from lawsuits and we have built regulations so that
| D&I are instituted permanently by law.
|
| I hope SCOTUS strikes all of this down.
| Glide wrote:
| I'm surprised I had to go down this far into the
| conversation before I saw someone bringing up legal
| liability.
| wyager wrote:
| I'm surprised at how negative the reaction to my
| explanation is. It's not even controversial to anyone who
| keeps track of the current state of title VII legal
| strategy.
| wyager wrote:
| What process do you use to select between world-models?
| I'm curious if you have a coherent answer here, or if you
| just can't accept what I'm describing because you don't
| like the way it sounds.
|
| Do you know anything about employment law or the current
| state of title VII jurisprudence? I'm guessing not if
| you're reacting this way to a pretty uncontroversial
| claim.
| winternett wrote:
| What kind of statement is this? D&I is supposed to be
| comparatively balanced to the society is serves. Minorities
| are essential within companies to prevent bias in their
| marketing and product development that can be fatal to
| business success.
|
| D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled
| just because some companies take it to far, it's no different
| than accounting or other functional considerations within big
| business where it's too easy to lose sight of how balanced a
| company is internally. If you don't keep reports on finances
| a company can easily fail. If you don't take steps to make
| sure minority groups are represented within your company, it
| will also create situations where bias takes hold, and
| suddenly discrimination becomes the norm.
|
| What's next? Should we get rid of sexual harassment training
| and policies?
|
| Only someone from a background that elimination of equal
| opportunity would serve foremost would think that "complete
| blindness to race" is possible in our world. It's a childish
| and a destructive ignorance considering what is currently
| happening in our world even to this day, as white nationalist
| groups are growing in numbers, and other groups, a prior US
| president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly
| expressing race based hate.
| gnull wrote:
| > Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias
| in their marketing and product development that can be
| fatal to business success.
|
| This is far-fetched and based mostly on ideology rather
| than evidence, not much different from a Soviet socialist
| explaining why planned economies are essential to the
| country's success (100 years ago it didn't sounds as absurd
| as now). It's your right to believe this sort of things, I
| don't deny you this, but don't insist that this is an
| objective truth that every reasonable person should believe
| in. As it goes with this kind of questionable ideas, it
| should be ok to choose not to believe in them, as I think
| the parent comment does.
|
| And I agree with the parent comment's view here. Whatever
| advantage the woke-culture companies may have is easily
| explained by their increased visibility among woke
| audience, not by some deep insights. It's just a marketing
| trick, just like putting AI/Blockchain on your ad increases
| your visibility among some of tech enthusiasts.
|
| > What's next?
|
| Slippery slope is a fallacy.
|
| > white nationalist groups are growing in numbers [...]
| prior US president, and public celebrities are also
| regularly publicly expressing race based hate
|
| How does any of this back up the impossibility of blindness
| to race? (Remember that most of the world is outside of
| US.)
| seti0Cha wrote:
| > Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias
| in their marketing and product development that can be
| fatal to business success.
|
| Is there any reason to believe this is true and not just
| conjecture? This always struck me as kind of far fetched.
| skrbjc wrote:
| It's just one of those things that gets repeated so much
| that people just start to believe it.
| gnull wrote:
| > Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias
| in their marketing and product development that can be
| fatal to business success
|
| There's a ton of different sources of bias. Look at
| lesswrong.com. What (other than politics) makes minority
| bias more significant than the other? And why it can't be
| fought with ordinary means and working on yourself?
|
| You don't need to be the same thing as the object of your
| study to study it. Just like you can study Geology without
| being a rock, you can study what a minority group
| wants/needs/buys without belonging to it. Nothing in
| principle prohibits that.
| winternett wrote:
| >> Just like you can study Geology without being a rock,
| you can study what a minority group wants/needs/buys
| without belonging to it.
|
| Your logic by nature is total flaw. You can't see it
| because of your own condition, and supremacist beliefs.
|
| It could probably citing that not be explained to you how
| a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life, or
| how a Hasidic Jew can be fairly considerate of a Muslim
| perspective and vice versa.
|
| This is the root of arrogance in ignorance that
| perpetuates racial bias. People have a right to be
| different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards
| their own individual and cultural perspectives, and
| globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required
| to properly represent all of the people they serve
| PROPERLY or they will simply fail over time... It's not
| the call of a few biassed individuals to determine that
| they are qualified. The market dictates the need for D&I.
| hbrn wrote:
| > white nationalist groups are growing in numbers
|
| I don't know if it's valid, but let's assume it is. Have
| you considered that some of this growth can be attributed
| to DEI and the rest of far-left policies?
|
| If you're openly being racist towards certain groups, they
| can also become racist. When a poor white male gets
| rejected/fired/demoted because company needed a diversity
| hire, it's not going to make him more tolerant.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| There is only one solution: To be completely objective
| and treat everyone equally.
|
| This is rational, straightforward, healthy and just
| righteous in a deep way. It creates an environment bereft
| of envy and injustice.
|
| Turns out, most high brain mass mammals have a innate
| sense of fairness. When humans are treated unfairly
| because of some ostensible moral goal whether through
| racism or D&I; the end result is not pretty. Humans of
| all culture are enamored and magnetized by fairness and
| justice. But those words have been twisted to mean
| exactly the opposite by contemporaneous social-justice
| movements.
|
| This was the mainstream view of the Civil Rights
| movement. It was utterly beautiful. But, post-moderity
| came and neo-Marxists have reigned for last 40 years in
| USA at least, gutting out Universities and now,
| Corporations.
| version_five wrote:
| This is optimistic - I certainly hope it works out this way.
| I think a recent problem is that all the "free" or nearly
| free money has completely disconnected many operations from
| actual market forces, so they are not incentivized to build
| something good and their attention can wander to fitness
| signaling type activities
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| It should happen all other factors being equal, but
| eventually successful companies start to grow and attract the
| kind of political manager types. Then the turmoil and in
| fighting starts.
|
| Also, people hiring in their friends and family over others
| who are distinctly better.
|
| I've been in many roles over the years in very different
| companies, and these two eventualities always play out.
| People are flawed, and the companies they create become
| equally flawed
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > Also, people hiring in their friends and family over
| others who are distinctly better.
|
| That mostly has to do with weighing trusted known-contact
| vs. untrusted stranger. In extreme case, we see this in a
| traditional family business that has been owned and
| operated for generations.
| forgomonika wrote:
| That doesn't work. There are some really amazing people out
| there that don't fit the typical tech mold of straight cis
| (white) guy. They don't stick around if they have to navigate a
| monoculture that doesn't understand that they are constantly
| throwing out micro-aggressions to people outside of their view
| of what acceptable behaviour is. Separating your home life from
| work life only works for so long before you start to crack.
| csmpltn wrote:
| weakfish wrote:
| This comment gives more FUD than the parent. Your comment
| really adds nothing to the discussion, whereas the parent
| you're dismissing is contributing.
| [deleted]
| homonculus1 wrote:
| I'm sure you'll be eager to consider that the reverse is also
| true, except in that case it's the majority of the pool
| getting aliened by open favoritism toward ethnic minorities
| and people with bizarre sexual proclivities. If the outcomes
| of explicit neutrality aren't good enough for you then you'd
| better start thinking up a new pretense, because people can
| see through it quite easily and they aren't going to put up
| with it forever.
| forgomonika wrote:
| I'm sincerely confused about this comment. If I reverse it,
| I end up with the status quo in a lot of settings: everyone
| is the same, they don't have to worry about finding ways to
| interact with people that are different from them, and they
| get the luxury and safety of being who they are at home
| while at work.
|
| Also, what are "bizarre sexual proclivities"? It sounds
| like you are living with a thick layer of judgement and
| shame in your life. That sounds rough.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| I'm still not sure I see anything wrong with this
| picture. Yes being different from other people is hard -
| the more different the harder. People naturally gravitate
| towards those they can identify with. The solution to
| this problem is to develop a coping strategy, not to use
| force to bend the world around you. People should be
| _entitled_ to seek out and live in homogenous
| environments. Just because these are not available to
| everyone all the time doesn 't mean they should never be
| available to anyone.
| Mezzie wrote:
| I currently work in a lingerie store after having spent a
| fair amount of time in 'professional' environments.
|
| I'm less tired coming home from 8 hours on my feet dealing
| with the public than I was in professional settings. I don't
| have to hide everything about myself and my background (I'm a
| first-generation college student with a poorish upbringing)
| or constantly worry about what all my interactions with
| colleagues mean for my 'career'.
|
| I will say my class background is more of an issue than my
| sex/sexuality, but my sex was way more of a problem in my
| teens and early 20s. The interesting thing is that being a
| techy child was fine, being a techy teenage/20 something girl
| SUCKED, and being a techy 30 something woman is fine.
| franczesko wrote:
| This. Saying "no" to people based on their physical appearance
| is a discrimination.
| chrischattin wrote:
| It's also illegal.
| crackercrews wrote:
| A recent discussion on HN surfaced this fact. It's legal
| for higher education for now, but hiring is different.
|
| I think a lot of people don't realize this. I didn't. I
| assumed if you could do it for education you could do it
| for hiring. Apparently not!
| giantg2 wrote:
| Any source?
|
| This seems to indicate that minority demographics may be
| targeted for recruitment, advancement, etc.
|
| https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/affirmativeact
|
| At least at my company, I know they have preferences for
| minorities over similarly qualified candidates. I've
| heard a department head specifically tell the managers
| that we need more women in a specific role. Maybe they're
| just breaking the law though...
| crackercrews wrote:
| This is one longish discussion of the differences between
| education and hiring. [1] I think there is a carveout for
| federal contractors, which is what your link refers to.
| In general, it is not legal in hiring.
|
| 1: https://spigglelaw.com/employers-affirmative-action-
| boost-di...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Is it?
|
| I think there's an affirmative action lawsuit currently
| pending before SCOTUS. It seems discrimination is allowable
| (so far) as long as it has good intentions. It may change
| with this case.
|
| Although there could be some discrepancy with a colloquial
| use of discrimination which includes an implied notion of
| negative bias, while positive biases (preferences to
| certain candidates) can also fit the more dry definition.
| wyager wrote:
| The law doesn't matter except to the degree that the regime
| will enforce it.
| [deleted]
| version_five wrote:
| I'm not sure about in the US, I know in Canada we've had
| lots of university faculty positions advertised recently
| that are explicity for women or some other groups. I don't
| understand how it's legal but it is.
| richbell wrote:
| In Canada the definition of "visible minority" is
| essentially anyone who isn't a white male.
|
| https://www.canada.ca/en/public-service-
| commission/jobs/serv...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > I don't understand how it's legal but it is.
|
| Are you sure?
|
| Many countries require being harmed by an action and then
| bringing that action before a court, before anyone ever
| compares that action to any specific law at all.
|
| So you can see how many actions become de facto legal if
| nobody ever does that.
| gnull wrote:
| Some manage to find a workaround even when it's illegal.
| I was reading somewhere that Lund University in Sweden
| was cancelling the job opening right before the deadline
| if the most promising candidate wasn't a woman.
|
| There's so much bullshit in this. Universities are not
| allowed to advertise positions as "women only", but at
| the same time they are required to reach certain
| percentage of female "representation" by law.
| noasaservice wrote:
| That's cause "they're just not a good fit".
|
| (for you who downmodded me, this saying is how management
| gets away with illegal discrimination without saying the
| quiet part out loud)
| mmmpop wrote:
| theow7384iri wrote:
| mnd999 wrote:
| It kinda makes me sad. It's great that companies want to improve
| D&I but, assuming everything in that article is true, they're
| making a hash of it.
|
| They've forgotten Goodhart's law, and as such they've create a
| metric everyone is trying to game which ends up being
| counterproductive and unfair to everyone. Let's not forget it's
| equally unfair to promote someone before they are ready and then
| stack rank them against more experienced colleagues as it is not
| to promote someone who is ready.
| koziserek wrote:
| Microsoft was always on my blacklist
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| It's "disallowlist" or a "blocklist". ;-)
| theow7384iri wrote:
| pelasaco wrote:
| I experienced this in two different roles:
|
| - One applying to one role at github/microsoft: After ton of
| meetings, I would have to talk with their diversity manager, it
| was a 60 minutes meeting, which i just didn't feel well to go
| through after some googling.
|
| - As hiring manager (in another FAANG) company, I couldn't hire
| the best candidates, until all other 20 more diverse were
| interviewed. Everyone, regardless of qualified or not, had to be
| interviewed, before we could hire someone less diverse (aka not
| "white", not European, not "Man"). The position was for senior
| developer, and I had to go through a tedious set of interview
| with people straight of coding boot camp.. We ended up hiring one
| (guy), which wasn't in our top 5. All top 5 were able to get a
| new job, since our process took almost 6 month, from starting the
| process up to onboarding him. It was frustrating and actually the
| main reason why I left the team, to become architect. The process
| was called "agile/fair hiring", how ironic..
| pelasaco wrote:
| note that I quoted "Man" and "White". That's because we don't
| have a color palette to say how white is ok and we don't ask
| question to know how Manly someone is. That was so ridiculous,
| that most our team members didn't want to help me with the
| interviews...
| kasajian wrote:
| It's obvious the writer of the article felt what he was asked to
| do was a mere distraction, made obvious by his statement that he
| would rather go back to "focusing on producing great software"
|
| This would have sense if it wasn't for the fact that the company
| that he works for, the folks that are paying him to be there, are
| actually asking him to do the thing that he is paying lip-service
| to.
|
| I would hate to have an employee who doesn't do what they're
| directed to do because they thought they knew better. Unless it's
| something illegal, if you're going to collect a paycheck, you
| either do what you're asked to do or you leave. You don't
| continue to take their money but do something other than what
| they're asking for. Ridiculous.
| etchalon wrote:
| crackercrews wrote:
| I read the comments then read the article, then came back to find
| it dead. But why? This post contains new information that is
| relevant to the tech industry. Its claims are not outlandish. And
| it brings receipts (screenshots). If this is what a major tech
| company is doing, isn't it worthy of discussion here?
|
| I hope the comments can be civil, and I've seen more contentious
| topics surface high-quality comments on HN.
| [deleted]
| dogman144 wrote:
| The thing is, there are not many companies or jobs where you can
| save $1mil+ in under 4 years, especially if you're Dual Income or
| pre-kids. Especially at a 9-5 where I am in pajamas more often
| than not.
|
| Hunker down, leverage to the opp to do boring tech at an
| interesting large scale and and earn a mountain.
|
| Find your non-enterprise, pure meritocracy Ayn Rand bonanza
| engineering experience at a pre-Series C.
|
| I can't understand why engs expect FAANGs to operate like
| anything but an enterprise now, and then complain about that
| behavior!
|
| We can save $1mil in under 4 years while wearing pajamas. The
| blind spots of the extreme relative privilege in this job and
| anchoring on articles like this as serious grievances blows my
| mind.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| The current U.S. Supreme Court, though perhaps more ideologically
| bent than I'd like on many other issues, is certainly well poised
| to start slapping down some of these policies which brazenly
| dance on the wrong side (gray area at best) of Civil Rights law.
| maldev wrote:
| There's a group of Republican AG's that are suing public
| companies who do this. Along with DI&E investing, as it's not
| in the shareholders financial interest to invest in these
| thing, which is all that matters. So hopefully that will end
| these polcies.
| sys32768 wrote:
| I think a large part of society panicked after we killed racism,
| and they have been performing CPR on racism ever since.
| president wrote:
| There is a large multi-million dollar industry supporting DEI
| now. If there are people benefiting from racism continuing,
| it's people that work in this industry.
| [deleted]
| irrational wrote:
| I've been at a particular company for 20 years. For most of those
| years our main focus was our core mission, but over the past few
| years D&I has risen to be our main focus. I've seen people hired
| who clearly are not qualified and often are not trainable to
| become qualified. An example is a woman who refused to take any
| hard assignments and usually made no progress on the easy stuff
| she was assigned. She was certainly able to do the work, but just
| didn't do it. Then she started taking standup zoom calls from the
| ski slopes in winter and hiking trails in the summer. Well, you
| would think this would be enough to at least get her onto some
| sort of remediation program, but nope, HR said we could do
| nothing to her. So she basically earns a six figure salary and
| does absolutely nothing, other than fulfill a D&I quota.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Fuck me! I wish I was more diverse.
| [deleted]
| ourmandave wrote:
| Apparently fulfilling the D&I quota is worth 6 figures to the
| company.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Apparently fulfilling the D&I quota is worth 6 figures to
| the company.
|
| Or the company is rich enough not to really care about the
| waste at this point.
|
| I doubt such a person would last through one round of layoffs
| if there was real pressure to reduce costs.
| irrational wrote:
| This is pretty much it. We are a huge Fortune 100 company
| that, apparently, prizes D&I over money.
| fallingknife wrote:
| These practices are explicitly against federal law. When are
| judges going to start enforcing the law?
|
| > It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
| (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or
| otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to
| his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,
| because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or
| national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or
| classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way
| which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of
| employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status
| as an employee, because of such individual's race, color,
| religion, sex, or national origin.
|
| edit: not letting me reply down chain. source is Title VII of the
| Civil Rights Act of 1964
| tflinton wrote:
| Just curious; where's the source on this? Is this in the US? If
| so, is it state or federal law, and which law?
|
| Edit: Nevermind, it's the 1964 Title VII [Section 703] of the
| Civil Rights Act.
|
| https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...
| slowhadoken wrote:
| I think if diversity leads to lower profit but better work
| experience tech companies will get rid of it.
| wafflestomp wrote:
| I've seen active encouragement to violate the 1964 Civil Rights
| Act. Specifically Title VII section 703, (d) - Training Programs.
|
| "It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer,
| labor organization, or joint labor-management committee
| controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining,
| including on-the-job training programs to discriminate against
| any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or
| national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program
| established to provide apprenticeship or other training."
|
| By specifically allowing Women to attend the Grace Hopper
| Conference on company time, funded by the company.
|
| Men, are not allowed to attend (unless not male presenting), and
| thus being discriminated against based upon their sex.
|
| At the Grace Hopper conference, there are plenty of sessions
| which could be argued are training.
|
| If the attendees were going for recruiting purposes, I could see
| it not necessarily violating the law. However, Women are
| attending to go to the conference (training?) without any
| recruiting duties.
|
| I expect there are similar conferences for POC, which equally
| violate the Civil rights act.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Serious question: I've worked with incredibly diverse (compared
| to the national demographic) teams that consisted mostly of
| Indians and Asians from various countries throughout Asia. Under
| the Microsoft D&I definition this would not count as diverse. Why
| do they define diversity in such an arbitrary way?
| runako wrote:
| One of the key insights I think people are missing is that for
| most roles, _not_ having a diverse slate of applicants in a
| country as diverse as America is a "process smell." The smell is
| that you're not casting a wide enough net to even know whether
| you're getting the best applicants.
|
| Some easy examples: if you're hiring for most programming roles
| and you don't have any qualified women applying, your pipeline
| sucks.
|
| If your company is in California, and you don't have any
| qualified Latinos applying for most of your jobs, your pipeline
| sucks.
|
| Et cetera.
|
| If you're not casting a wide enough net to find qualified Latinos
| on the west coast(!), I guarantee you're also missing qualified
| white men in whom you would be interested. Ultimately, this is
| why Microsoft cares; they have an interest in their overall
| process being the best it can be.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > your pipeline sucks
|
| The pipeline sucks for everyone, we all know that. Let's not
| pretend that this is just a matter of a single company having
| substandard processes.
| runako wrote:
| Right, but here we're talking about Microsoft, one of the
| most valuable/profitable companies on the planet. Microsoft
| doesn't have to make do with a crappy pipeline. In fact, they
| have the resources to make it harder for the rest of us to
| have good pipelines.
|
| And again -- I am talking about process smells. Women,
| Latinos, Black people, etc. are gainfully employed in roles
| where they ship software. (If you work in tech, you know the
| "CS Majors only" objection is a red herring given the breadth
| of roles at large tech firms.) If your process is unable to
| find them, that speaks to your process specifically (because
| someone else did find & hire them!).
|
| Understanding _why_ your process is bad is a good thing that
| every team should continually work towards.
| truetotest wrote:
| Ztynovovk wrote:
| Ztynovovk wrote:
| atlgator wrote:
| This is all part of the public-private alliance between big
| corporations and left-wing politicians. They can't implement
| Marxism outright because of State authority to override, so they
| are using companies to do it and killing small business
| competition in return. This is also why some corporations get
| larger and larger without any real antitrust enforcement.
|
| This is happening at every F50 company. If you are thinking "not
| my company" right now, you're just not high enough in leadership.
| grammers wrote:
| Maybe Microsoft managers think it's enough if everybody can
| decide for themselves about their pronouns.
| [deleted]
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Most of the top comments are literally recapitulating all the
| received unexamined "common sense meritocracy" talking points
| which are systematically examined and dismantled as the first
| order of business in such training.
|
| Depressing, but not suprising.
| noasaservice wrote:
| So, let me guess.... It means in practice hiring BiPOC and women
| in "diversity positions", all the while keeping them away from
| engineering and engineering management (you know, the positions
| that pay $$$$$$).
|
| I've seen BiPOC and women candidates turned down time and again
| because they "fit" better in the bullshit diversity spots. And
| then there's a rant about "fit" also known as "we want to
| discriminate on illegal or unethical things but we cant actually
| say that".
| outside1234 wrote:
| This is a real thing.
|
| It is hard for anyone that is not "diverse" to get promoted at
| the highest levels of Microsoft. Almost all CVP promotions are
| "diverse" now in a way that is pretty overt.
|
| I am a huge proponent of D&I, but it is hard not to feel
| discriminated against and feel like there isn't much of a career
| trajectory for me.
| etchalon wrote:
| The majority of managers at Microsoft remain white, and male
| (page 13):
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/a...
| yashap wrote:
| Affirmative Action is always going to be a very controversial
| topic. Personally I'm for it, but I understand why people dislike
| it.
|
| I do strongly believe that, even with Affirmative Action
| policies, it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male
| than it is as a white male, today. For example, no matter how you
| slice it, white Americans are ~3-4x more likely to become
| millionaires than black or hispanic Americas (source:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/). I
| think there's a TONNE of reasons for race and gender based
| inequality, but IMO most of them have to do with "momentum". If
| you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great
| education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in
| a poor family you have way less of all of this. It wasn't long
| ago that racism and sexism were much, much worse than they are
| today (and there's still lots of conscious and unconscious bias
| today), so white families are a lot wealthier today than minority
| families, and that propagates to the next generation, and the one
| after that, etc. Slavery wasn't abolished in America until 1865,
| the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (ending racial
| segregation of schools) came in 1954, Rosa Parks was 1955, Jim
| Crow laws weren't really sweepingly overturned until 1965. If
| you're a black American in their 40s today, your parents were
| probably born in the Jim Crow era, where the impediments to their
| financial success were immense.
|
| If, as a society, we don't try to actively help non white males
| reach an equal footing in terms of opportunity, it'll be really,
| really hard to close these "momentum" gaps. I view Affirmative
| Action as a temporary approach to narrowing these gaps. It's
| realizing that it's too hard to succeed financially as a minority
| in America, and temporarily giving minorities a leg up on hiring
| and promotions to help even the wealth/opportunity gap. Once the
| gap more or less goes away, you remove the Affirmative Action
| policies, but that'll take time. If you hire based purely on
| qualifications, education, experience, etc., the gap isn't going
| away for an extremely long time, because white families are a lot
| wealthier than minority families today, so a disproportionate
| number of kids from those families are going to have those
| advantages, and the gap persists.
| bufbupa wrote:
| > it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than
| it is as a white male.
|
| Part of the issue is that you're presupposing a uniform
| definition of success. Different cultures have different
| priorities, and not everyone wants to spend 80 hrs a week in
| the office to climb the ladder and become a millionaire. Some
| cultures prioritize family/social relationships, sports, or a
| connection with nature. Unsurprisingly, these different
| cultures can often be racially affinitized. Sure, most people
| wouldn't mind being rich, but many do mind the hustle often
| accompanying that form of success.
|
| I think part of what you describe around momentum holds merit,
| but I don't think affirmative action goes about the remedy in a
| constructive manner. It's fighting racism with more (albeit
| different) racism. You turn it into a zero sum game where your
| political posturing can be more valuable than your work
| contributions. That incentive structure is degenerative for all
| parties.
|
| > If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to
| great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you
| grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this.
|
| Genuinely curious, would you support an initiative to shuffle
| all babies between families at birth? Your argument seems to be
| "who you're raised by gives an unfair advantage in life, and we
| should correct for this societally". It seems to me that a
| random shuffle would equally distribute any inherent bias
| relative to generational momentum.
| rhacker wrote:
| What I don't understand is, that if it's purely skin color and
| upbringing and background, why is most of SV absolutely
| dominated by Indian people: My dad is Indian and grew up with
| his family in a single room. He is in his 80s now and has a net
| worth in California of probably $3M.
|
| I'm half Indian and half white. At my age (42) he was doing way
| better than myself (accounting for inflation of course). When
| my dad was going through all the same stuff, 50 years back
| there was no affirmative action yet he still grew in the ranks.
| He's not a "black person" but his skin color is the same.
|
| I think there is a lot of perceived racism when in reality
| people are promoting strong individuals already. Look at head
| of Google, Twitter, and a series of other companies.
|
| For some reason people shy away from calling out racism when it
| comes to people from India because of their American success
| story. But again, if it's about skin color - how did this
| happen?
| Manuel_D wrote:
| "Affirmative action" is a vague term. I, too, agree that if you
| select a White, Asian, Latin, and a Black teenager at random
| there's substantial barriers to the latter two training and
| becoming an engineer or software developer. The latter two are
| less likely to be exposed to engineering and programming, and
| are less likely to enter university to study those fields.
|
| That said, does discrimination in companies' hiring and
| promotion process yield improvements? Affirmative action like
| this just increases the representation _within Microsoft_ , and
| does nothing to help Black or Latin youths become software
| developers. The gap isn't actually being closed. The same
| dismal percentage of Black and Latin people are entering the
| tech workforce. It's just that they're more likely to end up at
| Microsoft than some other company.
|
| Affirmative action in the form of sponsoring coding camps in
| underserved communities would actually work towards closing the
| gap between the rate at which Asian and white people become
| software developers and Latin and Black people becoming so.
| Progress will be made when companies leave the mindset of
| trying to increase _their_ representation by clawing over each
| other for the limited pool of diverse talent, and instead work
| towards increasing the diversity of the workforce.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I shut my mouth at work and go along with this stuff because I
| have no choice. I have a family to take care of. I've accepted
| this. But man, why do they always throw in the line about
| striving to make the workplace a "diverse and inclusive culture
| where everyone can bring their full and authentic self"? Everyone
| knows that's a goddamn lie. I almost want to cry when I read that
| - it makes me so angry. I haven't been anything like myself in
| the workplace for over a decade now and I'm sure I'll never be
| again. I live a lie when I'm here and so do many, many others.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Same here, and it's not just the job, intellectually
| participating in any community larger than "small and heavily
| guarded" seems to be subject to the same rules - all of them
| eventually collapse due to the same reason except people have
| easier time voting with their feet.
| s1k3 wrote:
| Did I post this and forget I did?
| torstenvl wrote:
| > _Everyone knows that 's a goddamn lie. I almost want to cry
| when I read that_
|
| "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and
| ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart
| sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him."
|
| Racism is anti-racist. Objective thinking is biased. Burning
| down cities is mostly peaceful protest.
| hintymad wrote:
| If your allegiance is not absolute, then you absolutely do
| not have allegiance. So, don't question. Do.
| drewbug01 wrote:
| > Burning down cities is mostly peaceful protest.
|
| What cities burned to the ground?
| arpstick wrote:
| minneapolis got hit pretty hard.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > In 2017 Portland ranked third. Now it has dropped to
| 66th out of 80.
|
| https://www.economist.com/united-
| states/2021/06/12/portland-...
| listless wrote:
| > I almost want to cry when I read that - it makes me so angry.
|
| I understand this feeling. It's because they do not at all want
| you to bring your authentic self. By definition, all this
| culture stuff is teach you who you should be at work. That's
| ok. You have to run a company and you need a certain culture to
| do that (or at least you think you do). Fine. It's your
| company. Discriminate against who you have to successfully run
| your business in the current cultural climate. But when you
| blatantly lie to my face about it and tell me to bring my
| authentic self, it infuriates me because I know that's
| precisely what you DONT want.
| ploppyploppy wrote:
| It stops if people refuse to live within the lie.
|
| Read Vaclav Havel's "Power of the powerless".
| outworlder wrote:
| > Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a
| graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they
| got to where they are because of their accomplishments?
|
| And then they show a graph where only 5.6% of the execs are black
| (up from 3.7%). It's a pitiful number.
|
| Yes, it's still more likely they got there because of their
| accomplishments, bigot.
|
| > From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft's AI
| Platform division.
|
| Wow. A whole year. In large companies that's barely enough time
| to understand all the unspoken lines of communication, let alone
| pass judgment on a company's culture.
| qwytw wrote:
| Well only 4.5% of all people in Washington are black. If we go
| by country wide population white people white people are not
| really over presented in MS leadership, Asians are though, as
| much as blacks are underrepresented.
| 7speter wrote:
| How many black people from elsewhere in the country can
| afford to move to seattle, where most of the tech jobs in
| Washington are?
| artec wrote:
| Companies that want more diverse workforces need to grow them
| through, education and training. Remove the barriers to learning
| in these POC communities and map out clear pathways to knowledge.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| This is how literally everything in corporate America works. You
| start with a good idea. It gets turned into a metric. Targets for
| this metric are assigned at various levels in the management
| hierarchy. Bonuses are made dependent upon meeting the target for
| the metric. Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and
| just focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting, client
| satisfaction is obviously very important, leadership made the
| determination that NPS is the best way to measure csat, we all
| have NPS targets, our bonuses are tied to them, so what does
| everyone do? They only send NPS surveys to specific clients they
| know will give a good score and then they spend time and effort
| to make sure the client follows up and does in fact give a good
| score. Everyone manages the metric, same as with the DE&I stuff.
| max51 wrote:
| You missed the part where after a few years of cheating the
| metric, getting "above average" satisfaction (4 out of 5) from
| a client is considered a failure and a manager 3 levels above
| you will personally come asking what went wrong with this
| client.
| Terretta wrote:
| If you don't give 5 of 5 in any gig economy app (from cars to
| delivery to AirBnB), it's like you're scalping babies.
| jimbobimbo wrote:
| In 2022 you couldn't pay me enough to be a people manager in an
| F500 company, precisely because of BS like this article
| describes.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I mean, a lot of the hiring issues are really symptoms of other
| issues earlier in the progress, and thus most (not all) of the
| fixes at that stage will not actually address the true issue and
| may even cause other problems.
|
| To fill a position, you need candidates. To have candidates, you
| need students of that discipline. There are numerous issues that
| could skew the demographics of the students (some are
| problematic, but some may be natural/acceptable!).
|
| And of course this applies to domestic workers. Global workers
| and importing talent via visas have different benefits and
| issues.
|
| All that said, in my experience most DEI company policies are
| more about not getting sued and avoiding bad press. They create
| policies, but many of them are ignored or just turned into a
| spineless checklist. As an example, the article didn't seem to
| address why the Microsoft metrics are meaningful, or what the
| targets are and their justifications. There's no systems thinking
| approach to explaining why or how the metrics/policies are
| beneficial, rather it's assumed.
| paxys wrote:
| It's telling that this person posted a job listing, interviewed
| dozens of candidates, realized they couldn't proceed because they
| hadn't interviewed any minority candidate, tried for months and
| were still unsuccessful at finding a _single one_ , and the take
| away wasn't that they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline
| but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.
| colpabar wrote:
| I am ignorant when it comes to where companies look when they
| are hiring, but your comment makes it seem like companies can
| choose sources that are somehow segregated by race/gender/etc.
| What/where are these sources? Do you really think microsoft has
| any trouble finding people who want to work there? Where else
| should they look? In all my time being a straight white male,
| I've never listed my resume on a "whites only" job site.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's telling that this person['s]... take away wasn't that
| they should fix [Microsoft's] broken recruiting pipeline but
| that the corporate policy was what was wrong.
|
| Why is it telling? He's managing a team, and the policy is the
| more immediate and fixable obstacle to him solving his business
| hiring problem. Even if Microsoft was capable of "fixing" it's
| recruiting pipeline, that could never realistically happen in
| time for him to fill that role.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Why do you suppose that a non-broken recruiting pipeline would
| result in more diverse candidates? Do you really think all
| candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are
| as diverse as the population at all times?
| guhidalg wrote:
| I think this really varies for each position, but most SWE
| positions really don't require special skills beyond a CS
| degree from a 4-year program. Sure, there may be special
| industry knowledge that you need to know but I'm not talking
| about languages, frameworks, databases, etc... if you studied
| CS, I expect you to have the capacity to learn this shit. You
| can learn the problem domain in well enough in 6 months and
| rely on your PMs and boss to fill in the details.
|
| If you are truly in a domain where you cannot hire CS
| graduates, then D&I is going to put a lot of burden on your
| recruitment team to find candidates to meet slating
| requirements. But you probably aren't...
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions,
| and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all
| times?
|
| No but I think you should be able to find a single minority
| candidate over the course of months.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Why do you think so? I have a hard enough time finding a
| _qualified_ candidate of any variety.
| hardtke wrote:
| The author says he is in AI, and when I was hiring entry level
| ML engineers I had similar challenges. As much as we blame the
| recruiting pipeline, I think it is the educational pipeline
| that is not creating a sufficiently diverse talent pool. Part
| of it is "weed out" courses that adversely affect students from
| less privileged backgrounds[1]. An additional (perhaps
| controversial) opinion I have is that companies are so
| aggressive about their individual diversity goals that they
| often pluck students out of the training pipelines prematurely
| (e.g. courting Ph.D. students before they finish their
| dissertation).
|
| [1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-
| chalkboard/2021/...
| [deleted]
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I work at a crypto/fintech startup. There aren't many women in
| tech, in finance or in crypto. Even fewer in all three. It took
| us months to find a woman to hire when our HR insisted we do so
| before hiring anyone else.
| andirk wrote:
| My friend works at PayP[redacted] and as a white female, _she_
| was the minority hire. Somehow, in the SF Bay Area, almost all
| of their recruits that get to interview are [country of origin
| redacted]. It sounds like blatant discrimination, BUT if no
| one's complaining, is there an issue?
| sebazzz wrote:
| > BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?
|
| Maybe no-one dares to complain, because it is easily
| perceived as racism.
| csmpltn wrote:
| > "they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline"
|
| This is trying to treat the symptoms, not the disease. You
| yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful
| at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?
|
| Whatever you're trying to solve - the "issue" starts decades
| earlier, at home. It's about how people are brought up, their
| access to education, their social environment. Culture actually
| plays a role, too.
| runako wrote:
| > You yourself say "they tried for months and were still
| unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that
| is?
|
| I'll chime in here that if a person works at Microsoft and
| has the resources of Microsoft recruiting on their side, that
| they are in a better position than most to end up with a wide
| choice of applicants. Microsoft can sponsor visas if need be,
| and their compensation is generally high enough to merit
| consideration of relocation, if necessary. (Worth noting here
| that a non-diverse slate of applicants is in many cases a
| process smell that your pipeline sucks.)
|
| We also don't know for what role(s) the author was hiring.
| While the assumption here seems to be that they were having
| trouble finding a diverse slate of applicants for "Senior AI
| Researcher, PhD and 20+ years experience required," for all
| we know they are whining that they couldn't get applicants to
| be CRUD programmers building out APIs, or PMs, or doc
| writers, or any of the other myriad roles that go into
| shipping software. Given that, we don't really know where to
| place blame. Could be that this manager just sucks at their
| job.
| csmpltn wrote:
| Every single comment in this thread is a deflection. "It's
| the recruiters", "the manager sucks", "subconscious bias",
| "the position is too specialized", etc. Why is that?
| tremon wrote:
| A deflection from what? A predetermined conclusion?
|
| When I'm troubleshooting a bug, the first thing I do is
| to enumerate the possible ways in which the bug might
| occur, then devise tests to rule out most of those
| possibilities. This doesn't seem to be any different.
| forgomonika wrote:
| That's part of the problem. The other part is the networks
| you are tapping into to find candidates. People tend to
| collect others that look, act, and think like them. That's
| one reason why people group up into subgroups that all have
| similar traits, past experiences, and belief systems.
|
| When it comes to a recruiting pipeline this is critical. If
| you are tapping members of your team to help finding
| candidates from their networks and your team lacks diversity,
| you are going to just build out your team with more of the
| same.
|
| The same goes for where you are looking for candidates
| outside of your team. If you are only targeting a small
| number of schools it's really easy to end up with a
| homogenized set to pull from. I know from experience working
| at some of the big tech powerhouses, they'd target a handful
| of schools and only hire college grads from there - which
| means they miss out on recruiting from state schools,
| historically black colleges, and other pockets where things
| are more diverse.
| csmpltn wrote:
| But here you have a multi-national corporation, with
| offices globally and ability to hire from any culture on
| the planet - and despite waiting months, actively searching
| for a "diverse" candidate, they were unable to find a
| single candidate who was "diverse" enough.
|
| What conclusions do you draw from this? That "people are
| racist"? That the pipeline is broken? This feels like
| ignoring the elephant in the room.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate
|
| I think it explicitly said they did _not_ do that:
|
| > I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who
| fulfilled the racial requirement. When no one did, I
| spent hours trying to find people on LinkedIn who I
| thought might count as black or Hispanic based on their
| name or resume.
|
| It seems like a good next step would be to give the
| author more tools to find more diverse candidates, rather
| than having them come up with trying to gauge ethnicity
| by name on LinkedIn and getting those to apply.
| BryantD wrote:
| I think that if he had to do the LinkedIn searches
| himself, you can conclude that his recruiters weren't all
| that great. I'd be annoyed at them in his shoes.
| csmpltn wrote:
| Oh, whatever. Blame it on the recruiters.
|
| I guess we're just looking for any excuse now to NOT talk
| about the actual source of the problem.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The pipeline is clogged for everyone. Lack of diversity is an
| industry-wide issue which needs to be addressed throughout the
| industry and beyond, not a problem with recruiting at any
| single company.
| outside1234 wrote:
| I'm surprised they didn't do c) which was to interview an
| obviously unqualified candidate to get the checkoff on the
| policy. This is the usual workaround.
|
| There is no broken recruiting pipeline. There are simply not
| enough candidates in the pool to staff every company in a way
| that is representative.
| Qtips87 wrote:
| mikaeluman wrote:
| This categorization of human beings by race and sex is such a
| large step back in the opposite direction of how I would like
| society to be.
|
| Like many others, I simply hope this "goes away".
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The problem is those filters are applied in the wrong order. If
| it was "promote diversity hiring once you have a pool of talented
| candidates to pick from", it would work.
|
| But right now, it's the reverse: filter out non diverse
| candidates, and try to find a good one in the remaining.
|
| Yet, it's already hard to hire talent, even with no filter at
| all.
|
| So now I have clients I assist for interviews, looking
| desperately for good devs, but when they find one, which is
| already a rare event, they often can't hire him (yes, him,
| because the hiring pool is mostly males in IT in 2022) thanks of
| those blockers. Of course, they already have a ton of hiring
| constraints to match for, so this compounds.
|
| This week, I'm going to interview the one candidate that could
| make it through the diversity policy. His resume is a train
| wreck, and I already know it's going to be a waste of time.
|
| So they are going to go through those shenanigans for the next
| year or so before finding their mythical creature, the same one
| their competitors are fighting for in this very competitive
| market. Of course, this means their projects are going to be
| delayed a lot.
|
| It's good for me, I get on the payroll for longer. And I'm a
| diversity bonus for them, being from another country, so they
| won't get rid of me any time soon.
|
| But I don't envy them, they are set up for failure.
| implements wrote:
| It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should
| be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it
| isn't that organisation should take steps to identify why and
| address whatever issues lie behind that.
|
| But, ... another part of me is uneasy with the idea that there is
| such as thing as a racialised or gendered (for example) engineer
| - engineers are individuals, and shouldn't be under an implied
| expectation of being recognisably distinct from each other - so I
| don't really know how to avoid the _'entrenched discrimination
| via sensitivity to fixed identities'_ problem.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| >It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation
| should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and
| if it isn't that organisation should take steps to identify why
| and address whatever issues lie behind that.
|
| This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and
| gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented
| with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender
| equality"[0]. TL;DR: Men and women are different from each
| other in lots of ways, including what they prefer to work on.
| As you increase gender equality in a society (moving from, for
| instance, Saudi Arabia at one extreme to Norway at the other),
| you see a systematic /increase/ in the difference in what men
| and women end up working on. More gender equality --> fewer
| women engineers, more women doing child care.
|
| Edit: oh,and I would encourage anyone looking in to the
| literature to view it in the correct light: the field is
| overtly hostile to this data, and that greatly skews what gets
| published. And here it is anyway.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
| implements wrote:
| It could be the case that in societies where women aren't
| arbitrarily discriminated against they seek greater
| engagement with the careers gender socialisation attract them
| to ie "women are better actualised as women in societies
| where female success isn't artificially stifled by glass
| ceilings".
|
| A factor in that could be that there's a recognition that
| those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career
| minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their
| potential.
|
| My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that "Men
| and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of
| ways" is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted
| in socialisation that we, the the name of true
| individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| I appreciate you sharing your thoughts
|
| >"Men and women are [innately] different from each other in
| lots of ways" is false, and the differences are cultural
| and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true
| individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.
|
| There is widespread scientific (note: among _scientists_)
| consensus that this is not correct. Talk to an
| endocrinologist or a behavioral geneticist, or an
| economist, or a psychologist...
|
| As it turns out, sex differences in psychology are the
| biggest effects we measure. We also see concomitant
| differences in other species, both closely related and not.
| And there is every reason to expect evolution has designed
| us to have innate differences by sex. The tablua rasa stuff
| is wrong.
|
| Ideas like the one your innner feminist wants to believe
| were popularized by non-scientists (don't confuse
| scientists with "academics"), and they were easy to make
| popular because they're what cliques around those academics
| wanted to believe. But all the evidence is against it,
| that's just no how nature works.
| implements wrote:
| I'm prepared to believe that those differences exist wrt
| reproductive role ie that humans have some sexed
| instincts around mating and child care, but, as per what
| right-thinking people believe about about race and
| intelligence / personality / emotionality (viz 'races'
| don't actually have different characters or abilities) I
| don't think the sexes are fundamentally different
| mentally.
|
| It used to be the case until fairly recently (my
| lifetime) that "women are suited to be nurses, and men to
| be doctors" but no-one believes that kind of thing now.
| It should be possible to culturally evolve past
| expectations of significant psychological differences
| between men and women, just as we have between white and
| other races.
|
| (There's a discussion to be had about the value of
| preserving cultural differences between groups,
| particularly at the expense of individuals within those
| groups, but it's a massive can of worms)
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Lots of it boils down to risk. For sexual/reproductive
| reasons, men are more prone to risk - both behaviourally
| and generically. Evolution doesn't tend to favour risk-
| taking in the sex that carries and rears offspring. The
| number of women (not men) in a group is also the
| bottleneck to the group's ability to reproduce/recover
| population. Males are more fundamentally disposable, and
| have developed traits to fit into this niche. We have
| just about all of this in common with our closest ape
| relatives. I'm no researcher, but I've found the work of
| Frans de Waal and other primatologists enlightening.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| This is correct.
|
| A couple hairs to split: I wouldn't say more "prone to
| risk", I'd say they have different risk preferences. It's
| not like one or the other attitude towards risk is better
| or worse, they're just more or less adaptive given a
| certain environment.
|
| I also wouldn't say men are disposable, as the story you
| tell at the group level is weak selection compared to at
| the individual level, but the gist is correct. Another
| way to look at it is: it's possible for males to win the
| genetic lottery, but impossible for females. The most
| reproductively successful men have had thousands of
| children, but women are limited to ~13 max. The upshot is
| that men have evolved to prefer risk more than women
| because the ceiling on payoffs is very high (i.e., you
| could get really rich, have lots of kids, multiple wives,
| tons of cattle), but for women the benefits of those huge
| lottery-winnings payoffs are much smaller in comparison
| to the costs (because you can only have 13 kids, and only
| slowly).
|
| In my head, this is the explanation for ~80% of the
| differences in behavior by sex.
| nyxtom wrote:
| We seem to have gone full circle somehow. It is ironic that in
| its intent to ensure employers hire based on merit, academic or
| physically qualified abilities so that people could obtain those
| jobs without being discriminated against - we have arrived back
| at a point where companies consider their identity to make sure
| they meet "quotas" - thus implementing discriminatory policies.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Bypass paywall:
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cspicenter.com%2Fp...
| cryptonector wrote:
| Or turn off JS.
| therusskiy wrote:
| I find it puzzling why people are split by their skin color
| rather than their country of origin.
|
| There are only marginal differences between a white and a black
| person born in US, while myself, being a white male born in
| Russia, cultural experiences and background have barely anything
| in common with a white person born in US except for the color of
| my skin.
|
| The same applies for a black guy from US and a black guy from
| Nigeria or something.
|
| Other people have already brought it up, but Asian is such a
| vague term as well. There are Asians from 1st world Asian
| countries (Japan, South Korea, Singapore) and from 3rd world
| countries (Vietnam and etc).
|
| By diversity logic you really should have quotas for every flavor
| of color and birth, but you can imagine it's going to lead to
| madness, so people just choose an easy way out and do this as a
| PR stunt.
| [deleted]
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| I don't work at Microsoft, but another large corporation, and
| have been told by my manager that right now it is difficult for a
| white male to get promoted and that we may need to do some
| strange maneuvers to make it happen if I'm interested in a promo.
| Was kind of taken aback by the bluntness.
| version_five wrote:
| I've experienced this too, and in practice DI&E reminds me of
| the kind of rules advocated for by people who live on a lake,
| ostensibly to protect the lake but in reality to preserve their
| own property value and make sure nobody can build near them.
| Making rules than mean explicit support and sponsorship are
| needed to get somebody though means that employees end up
| serving and being promoted at the pleasure of whoever is
| currently in power, giving them more power. There are many ways
| this works but all-in, it ends up just consolidating power, not
| achieving any of the ostensible aims (whether or not you think
| those aims are worthy)
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| You should carefully document this sort of thing, even if you
| don't plan to use your documentation in a legal action. Who
| knows what the future will bring?
| [deleted]
| sblom wrote:
| I _do_ work at Microsoft, and judging by the recent crop of
| promotions (early September) there was still plenty of
| opportunity for white males (and everyone else).
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| Assuming you're in the United States, the Civil Rights Act of
| 1964 and the EEOC are mere suggestions nowadays. There is no
| willingness in our DEI-co-opted government to tackle these
| issues and hold these blatantly illegal and unethical actors
| accountable.
| mblatt2 wrote:
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| And yet, I'll bet you the majority of your corporation's
| management layers are white males.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| At Google (in Silicon Valley), 7 out of 8 people in my
| reporting chain were Indian males. Go figure!
| PKop wrote:
| Why would anyone support a system that explicitly dis-empowers
| them in preference to other identity groups who themselves are
| perfectly fine to pursue their own self interest?
|
| After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture
| yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either
| you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum
| aspect to this.
|
| The cultural brainwashing that there is virtue in supporting this
| against your own interests is just Nietzschean slave-morality
| propaganda. You don't have to apologize for or pathologize being
| capable, successful and doing what is best for yourself, dare I
| say even for your _own_ identity group. You can simply reject
| this nonsense; the emperor truly has no clothes here.
|
| Related: my most recent submission [0] titled "Wikimedia is
| funding political activism" received over 20 points in 30
| minutes, but of course was quickly flagged without discussion.
| Quite a bit of censorship around these parts regarding these
| particular topics with huge impact on all of us within the tech
| industry.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| >After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture
| yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society.
|
| Are you afraid of not having privilege? Do you think that's a
| symptom of how we treat the unfortunate, or the cause?
| PKop wrote:
| Setting aside the connotation/framing of the word itself,
| tell me, is not having privilege good or bad?
|
| One could define "privilege" as the accumulation of
| inheritance of ancestors, economic, culturally, biological,
| geopolitical, power. All coming together in "good ways" for
| descendants.
|
| But back to the question, is bad to not have it and good to
| have it yes? Then why would _anyone_ support not having it,
| willingly giving it up, expect those who take it from you to
| not then also abuse power against you etc etc. If bad, why
| choose not to keep it?
|
| In terms of abstract ideological values, I support merit,
| some sort of meritocracy. But in concrete terms this will
| never avoid conflict of group interests. That is politics and
| an unavoidable aspect of human competition over resources,
| wealth, power, prestige. So let's stop pretending, is my
| point, that there is some achievable neutrality in all this.
| Because we _all_ agree not being on top is bad. The strong do
| what they can, the weak suffer what they must. At the very
| least having cultural power like those implementing all these
| policies throughout Western corporations is a good thing to
| have. It is bad not to have it. What else is there to say?
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Even though you're advocating for your own submission and a bit
| hot-tempered about it, now that I've followed the link, I'd say
| it does deliver quality factual content about an important
| topic. Thanks.
| PKop wrote:
| Thanks and yes, not good form to complain about forum meta,
| was just very frustrated that something so quickly supported
| by many voters could be blocked so easily, because it has a
| particularly verboten point of view amongst SV elite. It was
| definitely a whiny comment.
| bennysonething wrote:
| I'm hoping one day everyone wakes up and realises that the
| emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately DI is a virtue status game.
| It's easier to play that than delivering real value in your job.
| It's pretty much a religion with its own dogmas and lingo.
|
| For more fresh madness see what the the UKs financial conduct
| authority is proposing:
|
| https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-finalises-pro...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| from what I can tell, _nobody_ knows how to interpret the civil
| rights acts and nobody wants to have a discussion on how to
| compliantly do so.
|
| all you have to do is start recruiting in _places_ that were
| overlooked. just stop obsessing over Stanford pedigrees and
| recruit at the same Tier 3 universities that the intelligence
| community recruits from.
|
| fund your own coding academies and executive workshops and create
| your own pipeline, physically located in neighborhoods that have
| people you want representation from.
|
| everyone is going to keep messing this up and discriminating on
| the hiring process, without a framework about how to do it.
| spearson23 wrote:
| This policy sounds like exactly what it should be. This is to
| make up for things like this
| (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-
| appli...), but having a black sounding name makes you less likely
| to get an interview.
|
| If society doesn't put some effort into overcoming its biases,
| those biases will always exist.
| yellsatclouds wrote:
| this person seem to not understand how microsoft's business stays
| on track.
|
| they seem to really think that individual contributions truly
| affect Microsoft's fullfilment of their self-appointed mission;
| but I highly doubt this. Microsoft is really huge. No single
| individual can really detract, nor add too much, to the company's
| overall mission.
| creato wrote:
| I guess MS should just pick people to hire in a lottery then.
| yellsatclouds wrote:
| I somehow suspect they wouln't fare any worse.
| andirk wrote:
| As of 2022, the only protected status one is allowed to
| discriminate against without new acronyms or hashtags or any
| uproar is age. We tend to hire people we want to befriend, which
| means people similar to us, which leads to a lot of this
| discrimination. See: "culture fit".
| balls187 wrote:
| "Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a
| graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they
| got to where they are because of their accomplishments? "
|
| This is the same "affirmative action hire" argument conservatives
| have been making since affirmative action was implemented.
| etchalon wrote:
| "We can't fix racism because of racism."
| freedom-fries wrote:
| At just 5.6% they are not doing enough! Capitalism has made
| "unwanted" people the outliers and capitalism can fix it!
|
| One way to improve hiring could by legislating that for-profit
| companies should do away with drug tests and background
| verification. Systemic & instituitional racism means a lot of
| people of the wrong race/color are simply ineligible to be hired
| just because they have drug charges or they have a record because
| once took a loaf of bread from Kroger.
|
| Billion-dollar corporations can afford to hire them, mix them
| with existing teams, have them learn on the job from the best
| people in the industry and turn them to be a productive person of
| the society. In the short term, yes it can cause pain and loss of
| productivity, but in the long-term, as the society we all can
| come ahead!
| Manuel_D wrote:
| A previous, related, brew up on Yammer (microsoft's internal
| forum): https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-
| questionin...
|
| Despite the positive spin of QZ.com, it seems like there's overt
| incentives for discrimination.
| int0x2e wrote:
| I absolutely want to work in a diverse team. I want to be
| challenged by different perspectives and ideas. I want to have
| the best team members out there, regardless of their backgrounds.
|
| I however, think many D&I ideas fail to work when written into
| policies, and I think many times, higher-ups seem to write policy
| out of the best of intentions, yet fail to see how they can
| easily lead to abuse and poor results.
|
| Two examples from a corporate job a friend shared with me -
|
| 1. A friend was interviewing senior software engineers for an
| open position, then got a candidate who was grossly irrelevant (I
| won't bore you with the details, but she has ~1 year of
| experience at best, and this position was targeting a minimum of
| 5 years, 8+ years preferred). Turns out, that specific hiring
| manager had recently lost a (male) top candidate because they
| didn't have a female candidate in that candidate's pipeline - the
| manager learned his lesson and now always dumps 1-2 female
| candidates that have no chance of making it into any senior
| position, just to meet the "diverse slate" requirement of their
| D&I policy.
|
| 2. Another example, this time not related to diversity - during
| the recent economic downturn, a company decided that on top of an
| aggressive hiring freeze, for any employee that is fired or
| quits, their position goes away with them, then gets re-assigned
| to where the higher-ups think the need is greatest. At first
| glance, that sounds like a good idea - kind of a CI/CD for re-
| orgs with minimal "slack". But of course, if you're a smart
| enough manager, that means your biggest hope is to remain static
| through this period, which means you'll never fire (or even
| challenge) anyone. You'll even promote mediocre folks to keep
| them on, then fire them afterwards.
|
| Naturally, the most talented will still get plenty of offers and
| move / leave at some point, and then the slightly less talented
| folks get hit with all of their work and eventually move on as
| well, and over time the average talent level of that team will
| slide down considerably, and as we all know - hiring a top
| performer into a mediocre team is a challenge.
|
| Nice policy in theory, but in practice - it will cause the
| company to lose tons of great talent, in a way that will take
| years to recover from.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I've heard of similar diversity backfires. For instance, a
| company started making bonuses for execs contingent on reaching
| representation targets. This meant that diverse workers were
| almost never approved to transfer to a different org, because
| execs were worried about dropping below their bonus threshold.
| End result was that Asian and White men had a lot more internal
| mobility than diverse employees.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Like Amazon having a minimum turnover policy, so managers hire
| to fire so they can protect their employees. Metrics always get
| gamed.
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