> "mandatory firing of over-represented groups," a ridiculous and awful suggestion that nobody wants
Poe's law strikes again then because if you follow Gebru's crowd on Twitter you'll see a lot of talk of cleaning up and making room for new hires. That's a coded racist dogwhistle for exactly what Hintymad was joking about.
This is the problem with platforming extremists.
But making that distinction requires some critical reasoning skills.
In particular, I imagine there's a large crowd of people who are in the group that would be negatively affected by the first proposal trying to paint it as the second - possibly people who have convinced themselves that they have their job due to their genuine qualification, and if they lose it, it is because they were evaluated in a non-race-neutral manner. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Cough, no. This is where I know that's not even a rough paraphrasing because racially-neutral or sex-neutral hiring practices are not okay these days. They lead to a meritocracy and that's also not okay. That's how we got where we are. In fact, in hiring now resumes more often have pictures and HR tells us that people are intersectional and to try to hire them. They try to be subtle but they fail. (They don't tell us what intersections.) All interviewers are given the racial statistics and we're told that it's a very serious company priority.
> if a company has had racially-biased hiring and promotion processes, there are unqualified people who benefited from the bias just as much as there are qualified people who lost out because of it
This only stands to reason if the company had racially-biased hiring policies.
Instead big SV companies seem to reflect the later years of tech fields in school. And if we look at sex, not race, we can see that the gender-equality paradox from scandinavian schools suggests that not all groups may be equally interested in all things. Perhaps this is society telling those groups not to be, or natural consequences of their upbringing in different areas and circumstances.
We should definitely try to stamp out any racism we find, but let's not cry wolf and label everything racist. Let's actually try to make sure first.
Please, to battle racisms, we also need to use logic and reasoning.
Most of your comment doesn't make sense to me, but for this one at least, I can point out your mistake. Even if Google is maintaining a mostly constant head count, people change jobs all the time, and to account for this Google is continuously hiring. This is part of the process, where tech companies have already focused on fixing problems. The other part of the problem is that tech companies can be quite hostile to underrepresented minorities, and the comments on this post are a perfect example, especially all the trolling dead comments. In real life, URM experience those comments and they don't get deleted from their memories. So making the work environment less hostile is essential to, in addition to the hiring practices.