All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas. It's only a theoretic possibility that could be true if the available candidates only included one incompetent person from the minority group, but I don't think that's ever going to be the case in practise. The choice always comes down to two or three competent people, and the quota system then pushes the decision on one direction. White male programmers don't like it because it's not in their favour, but the reality is that they could be passed over even if there wasn't a quota system. While people continue to discriminate quotas will be necessary.

Do these people actually really exist in 2015, and are there organisations that would allow them to behave like that? I've known quite a few hiring managers, and some of them have definitely made stupid comments about "how nice it'd be to have a hot girl on the team" (though equally they might also make stupid comments about hiring graduates - of either gender - to make cups of tea), but none of them, to my knowledge, would ever have not picked a female candidate who was technically up to the task purely because she was a woman.

Have I just led a sheltered existence?

(I guess I'm talking here about SMEs and larger companies; I suppose if you're a tiny company run by a couple of sexist pigs, then any kind of behaviour is allowed to stand.)

ideally, we'd have a system where we have a balance sheet that gets tallied up- but interviewing is an important part in gauging competence and culture fit (yes, this is a real thing, I know some developers who don't wash and I would not call them culturally fitting), so it's not something that can be solved easily.

We all, inherently have a bias- we can't divorce ourselves from that bias, so how do we hire? by tribunal?

I certainly believe quotas to be a shitty solution.

    "I have a dream that my four little children will one day 
    live in a nation where they will not be judged by the 
    color of their skin, but by the content of their 
    character."

The best solution for inclusion is by eliminating the privilege through a blind process.

Yes, I know they are. My question ("Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater gains in the long run?") was genuine; I really wish I knew if positive discrimination to counteract the existing discrimination will improve the situation.

> All that said though, I don't believe there's any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas.

Evidence? Maybe not. But believe me, there are quotas with perfidious results in large companies. I've seen it happen somewhat like this: department X has 5 vacancies to fill; due to department "demographics", company mandates that 3 of the 5 vacancies are for female candidates; due to candidates "demographics", department X ends with a pool of N candidates for 3 vacancies and another pool of 10N for the other 2.

But, as you said, it's theoretical. If the candidates had a quantifiable "skill", the "no subpools" approach would yield better results - a bigger "skill" quantity for the total of vacancies. However, in practice, you can't quantify skill, and much less the impact a candidate will have in the department. The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" approach might get the 5 vacancies with "more than enough" skill; The apparently sub-optimal "subpools" might even yield better results due to e.g. diversity. That's why I said that this is a question for the ages - only cohort-like analysis of hiring practices will give us something close to a answer which isn't merely speculative.

    That point you've apparently missed is that current hiring
    practises among some companies can be discriminatory.

It would be nice if people applied some heuristic like the "5 whys" and tried to actually perform a root cause analysis and try to resolve the base causes instead of plastering over the problem with practices that are at best no worse than current practices.

Explicit reverse discrimination is still discrimination. Quotas result in a situation where brilliant majority developers get passed over because they are in the majority. How about we try and come up with a solution where equally brilliant developers regardless of their minority or majority status don't get overlooked?

Any evidence (other than anecdotal) for this claim? The only reason I have ever seen for quotas is that the overall distribution is skewed, and therefore it must be discrimination.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903

It happens in all sorts of industries and across a variety of axes. I've heard some argue that no, tech is different, that we're special, special snowflakes. But they have no evidence to back that, just feelings that bias is something only other people do.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract

http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-s...

And there are other studies I find more persuasive. E.g.:

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/stu...

In particular, I think the "switch the names" sort of study under realistic conditions makes it clear that bias is an issue. And it certainly matches widespread anecdotal opinions of nondominant groups in STEM fields.

Most of this criticism doesn't stand up to even a cursory reading. For example: "not only are there less women in STEM fields [..]" No shit, Sherlock, I don't think anybody disputed that.

Or the study that shows a disadvantage for mothers vs. fathers. The very same study shows a hiring/renumeration disadvantage for childless men vs. childless women. So yes, there's a dynamic here, but it's not male/female.

Also, the original comment I replied to was that outstanding developers are overlooked. None of the studies I've seen that show gender/racial bias (there are a few), deal with outstanding candidates (the Wiliams/Ceci did, IIRC). And incidentally not sure why you refer to "studies", your two links refer to the same single study.

There was another study (I think it was a different one) touted as showing hiring biases in STEM, except it turns out the study was performed in psychology departments.

Etc. etc.

There's some great information out there on the web in case you are interested, for example the Pinker / Spelke debate. Here's a quote:

"PINKER: But that makes the wrong prediction: the harder the science, the greater the participation of women! We find exactly the opposite: it's the most subjective fields within academia — the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions — that have the greatest representation of women. This follows exactly from the choices that women express in what gives them satisfaction in life. But it goes in the opposite direction to the prediction you made about the role of objective criteria in bringing about gender equity. Surely it's physics, and not, say, sociology, that has the more objective criteria for success."

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html

http://othersociologist.com/2015/04/16/myth-about-women-in-s...

I don't think it's a meaningfully large part of the explanation for the skewed distribution. I think there are deeper systemic issues for that. However, I don't think I've seen more than a handful of people say that quotas are in place because of discrimination either. From my experiences, I think my view here is by far the dominant one -- there is overt discrimination, but the bigger factor is more subtle. It's primary and secondary education, culture, socioeconomics, marketing and advertising to kids, in short, a bunch of stuff that serve to skew the pool of people even getting to the point of wanting tech jobs. Quotas aren't aimed at getting Klansmen to have to grit their teeth and hire a black guy. Quotas are an attempt to bootstrap the system -- maybe if we just dump a larger than normal population of minorities into our little world, it'll self-propagate through more minorities seeing this as a viable option, with the hope that a generation or two from now, you'll have the distribution you want naturally.

I also have never heard of a company actually having quotas. What I have heard is people gathering statistics and saying, "Hey, this looks pretty bad. What are we doing that might cause this? What can we do to fix our [generally unconscious and unnoticed] biases in our hiring processes?"

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/08/ac...

I agree on the subtle and implicit bias issue as well. I wasn't trying to be exhaustive, but that's a big enough issue that it ought to be specifically mentioned.