The advocates need to further explain why it is good for the team and such. Since many companies, including my own, implementing the diversity initiative by lowering the bar for the diversity candidates, even those that are being turned down at earliest stage, still interestingly, being rescued later. However, even people take issues about the candidate in question, they are afraid to voice any opinions, because the fear of being labeled as bigots. As ironic as it gets, during the group meeting, that the said candidate apparently doesn't have any deliverable for 6 months, still being praised with great efforts and hard works, while others in the team are pressured to take over what is supposedly to be done by the candidate.

I don't think this put the diversity initiative into good lights. It only further convinces people that it is more to the vanity of higher management other than productivity/benefits of the team/company itself.

If this does happen at your company, there's no need to use a throwaway account.

The company is a big one, a named one, but with some age on it. As absurd as it sounds, the candidate is hired for a hotly sought after position, that supposedly requires production ready coding skills AND battle tested machine learning skills. Yet the candidate comes with no knowledge of Python or Linux.

And, if your claim is that this doesn't happen: I have to say, I've seen people hired for many reasons. Because they're related to X (perhaps including that they can't find a job otherwise). Because they or someone in their immediate environment is disabled (which gets your boss a tax advantage). Because ...

So I would argue in Europe, it's almost the opposite. People are really treated as interchangeable, and hiring for ability is really more the exception in many companies. Hiring to make the boss look good, hiring fox tax reasons, ...

And before you say "that doesn't happen at fancy FANG company", I would like to remind you that all of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Facebook have LARGE Irish offices, and I've visited the Facebook one: not many Irish (like 30% of the office at most, and they apologize during the interview for trying to get you to Ireland, so it's not like they like it. I'd bet good money the other companies are similar).

How much do you want to bet that the "dutch Irish sandwich" tax avoidance scheme requires a minimum headcount in Ireland ?

So let's just state this as a fact: ALL the FANG companies hire less competent people because of location (this must be the tradeoff) in trade for tax advantages in Europe.

Every last one of them.

Every last one.

And if they do it, which are these mythical companies that hire because of the bar, wherever ? We complain a lot, but when it comes to employees, nobody really doubts that FB, GOOG, MSFT, AMZN are the top, la creme de la creme. Who is this mythical company that does not lower the bar ? And if they do lower the bar, why would they not lower it below whatever you consider a reasonable level, especially for positions where they can't really hire well anyway ?

Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.

One of the biggest problem with affirmative action is that it is always used in a discriminating way. If one were to sort the worst gender or race segregated profession guess how proportional affirmative action is being applied? A while back I took a list of the top 20 gender segregated profession here in Sweden and most of them were government employed, and there is no policy in regard to hiring procedures to address that. No one is even suggesting affirmative action to address the worst professions with 99%/1% and higher gender segregation.

To give some context for Sweden, 90% of the employed people work in a profession that is considered gender segregated. That is to say if you take a random employed woman or man there is a 90% chance that they work somewhere where the ratio is worse than 60/40. If affirmative action was only used to address gender segregation then 9 out of 10 new hiring should be using it.

I think the problem with affirmative action in the gender space is that there is some evidence to suggest that a purely unbiased world would not be one where every industry had a perfect 50/50 split.

So when you approach the problem from the 'outcome' end, it's hard to know what outcome you should be aiming for.

in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.

This argument goes both ways. We also don't have concrete evidence proving that "diversifying the engineering team" will necessarily result in success.

You say Apple has almost none, yet is doing great. So what? Lots of things that were or are shit have done well. Even things that are now illegal. Do you like discrimination?

Every company the size of Apple should have people of all backgrounds, ages, sex, race. For every room full of twenty somethings designing a "great" product achieving ridiculous financial results there will be a dozen features or possibilities missed to invisibly cater better for more groups (potential customers).

Perhaps they need to use it in subtly different ways, or have different goals that needs an option or overlay not seen by the room full of bros. Perhaps when you hit 50 and your eyesight isn't quite so sharp so you need reading specs before you reach for the phone you realise Apple's much vaunted, industry leading, accessibility is shit. A few 40 year olds on all the teams might have noticed that and come up with better ideas and solutions than the current dross.

As to diversity being a drawback in execution, what utter twaddle.

I'd argue "diversity quotas" are the very archetype of discrimination.