On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by evgen on Monday August 07, 2017 @05:32PM (#14951447)

I think you are suffering from the same delusion that many have regarding this so-called bar. At the level of recruiting done by the big-five you end up with a pool of candidates who all make it over "the bar." You only need a couple, so now you get to decide on additional criteria like how well they seem to work in teams, how well they can communicate with their peers, how easily they can adapt to new situations and shifting goals...all things that have very little to do with the pure technical criteria that you initially filter for, but which seem to end up contributing more to any particular candidate's impact on the org than simple coding abilities.

tl;dr they don't need to lower the bar to diversify the company.

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Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by shados on Monday August 07, 2017 @07:47PM (#14952260)

> You only need a couple

That's wrong though. Pretty much all high profile, successful tech companies right now have more open positions than they can hire for. My significant other (also a highly successful engineer) and I all get recruitment emails from Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Apple/whatever every couple of weeks. They get countless applicants, but most of them are not what they want.

That means if you're trying to diversify, out of those thousands, it would be exceedingly easy to just pick all the ones that match the current flavor of the day in term of diversity, regardless of skill, and be done with it. Even though certain combinations of gender/ethnicity are (relatively) rare, there are a few, especially if you include bootcamps, self taughts, promoting from other departments, etc. If you hired 100% of them, it would probably make a bump in the company statistics.

My current employer is, IMO, doing it reasonably well. They don't lower the bar as far as I can tell, but widen the net (open offices in other regions/countries, have hiring events at more colleges/universities in more cities, organize diversity events to attract people, etc). It's not "enough", but it does move the needle and everyone that I've interacted with have been really good.

One of my previous employers straight up lowered the bar, no ambiguity. We would interview someone from a diverse background, they were obviously terrible (like, by a landslide), and they'd be like "Well...we really don't have many people from <this ethnicity/gender>, maybe we could hire them anyway". And sometimes they did. It did not end well (and gave fodder for racist/sexist people, ugh).

There are a -lot- of companies right now that do the later, and they hurt everyone, because they force those doubts and discussions to happen. It's easy, and if the people who have to pick up the slack end up bitching, you can just call them out for discrimination. I don't work at Google and have no interest to do so, so I don't know where they fall. One of my friends who work there and is a fairly vocal activist tells me its relatively okay /shrug.

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Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by rcoveson on Monday August 07, 2017 @06:46PM (#14951909)

I don't think you made much of an effort to understand me. Which of the following aspects of my comment was "delusional"?

1. Posing the question, "Was the bar lowered to recruit female or minority candidates?"

2. Stating that I did not have an answer to that question.

3. Suggesting that the author believed the answer to that question was "yes."

4. Asserting that it was not wrong for the author to dispute the merit of policies that he believed had lowered the bar in question.

5. Disputing the idea that the original memo was "aggressive."

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Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by Eridrus on Monday August 07, 2017 @08:06PM (#14952343)

I don't think this is actually how hiring works at Google.

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