At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkward. Maybe they hire a couple more. Over time, the organization builds enough to overcome its own internal systemic bias and does have a strong local representative culture of Native American employees.

But I don't see how an organization gets to that point without it being sort of weird and cringy at first.

Of course, you are under no personal obligation to be the one to take those first steps simply because you happen to be a member of that group. But I have to wonder, if we're going to criticize an organization for trying to correct their biases this way... what other process would we suggest?

If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places.

To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.

The cycle continues.

Breaking the cycle is hard. You could target low income children but that leaves everyone looking for jobs today in the cold, etc etc.

It’s a tough nut to crack but trying to fix historical bias isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Why someone is poor today shouldn’t be rated. It’s not a suffering rating contest. You could be denied a job 50 years ago because of your skin, your accent, etc.

It’s far better to just look at where someone is financially and use to determine if they need help. It also prevents divides from popping up. A very good way to get people angry is to tell someone who needs help they are privileged and should shut up because they are either white, male, straight, don’t look poor, etc.

But that may be an inaccurate assumption on my part as well.

Not. Human experience is universal. Every single human in the planet can understand how other humans feel. We all have experienced similar events before and can provide solid advice about it to fellow humans.

"You can't understand me, because I'm ... (native /black / woman / trans / philatelic...) and you aren't" is a very popular opinion. Very popular, very gratifying, and totally wrong.

Human experience is not universal. Try going back in time and be a slave. Or a victim of the Nanjing rape. Tell me, with a straight face, that you can truly understand the pain and suffering those people went through. You think a royal family member can understand what it is like to be whipped and denied all manner of opportunity?

Frankly, this comment disgusts me.

There are lots of white people perfectly able to understand what was to be a slave in Siberia, Germany, Spain or Roma, and for sure asian people could tell us about their own quote of pain. Please don't feel so special, there is plenty of s*t for everyone in the history of humanity.

It's about socioeconomic and class status. There are lots of poor white communities that suffer serious oppression and missed opportunities too, but that's not the point of my post, or why I found your post disgusting. There are lots of rich East Asian people who've never had to do any manual labor in their life, or worry about their infant not being able to eat; just as there are East Asians who watched as Japanese soldiers tore the infants from their pregnant mother. Or German/Russian Mennonites who watched as Slavic peoples(as you call them) come in and murder their village. The common denominator here is class, power, and social status, not race.

Are you saying that the rich and poor have equal human experience? Please, answer that point first, instead of redirecting into this tired anti-"white guilt" narrative.

This is literally the definition of racism.

Like violence, the solution to systemic bias are simple but unattractive. Don't display and rub symbols in people faces. Do not create ambiguous borders between groups of people. Treat each person as individual and avoid generalizations. Add social and economical support based on lack of those resources on an individual level, from the bottom up.

The progress towards equally would look very different if people weren't constantly doing the opposite in the belief that this time the symbols will convince the enemy of the wrong doing, the ambiguous borders will work, the generalizations will send the important message, and that top to bottom approach will create a foundation for change.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Providing free buses to people who live far away from desired schools do not rub the act in the face of people who live near those schools and do not need buses. It might cause a negative side effect that school buses becomes a symbolic proxy for being poor, making those intended to use them less likely to agree to use them, but it extends the option available for those who only have few options to begin with. In contrast, free grade points is much more displayed directly in the face of other fellow students, both to those who get into the program and those who were rejected with similar grades.

Free buses does not provide any ambiguous borders or rules once the student is at school. The requirements and expectations of the student is same as any other student. There are few situation where uncertainty and doubt can occur between buss and non-buss student, except maybe for times of heavy snow or road congestion. To my knowledge, when students who depend on buses can't reach the school and thus given a pass to skip school, the other students are given the same pass. If we go back to the Swedish example, requirements and expectations get ambiguous when people get in through other means than merit, causing tensions between those who got in through grades and those who got in through the free points system.

Both systems has generalizations, so I would say that a way to improve the desegregation efforts would have been to skip the qualification of race and simply provide the busing to any individual that is below a set amount of wealth and live a distance far away from the desired school in order to need a bus. Such change might have saved it from being abandoned in 1988.

It's such a shame, because we want as a society the hiring manager to go to the reservation job fair looking for applicants. But the manager knows that there are precious few 'qualified' applicants and we recognize they will tend to maximize the efficiency of their time.

Of course, it isn't an accident there are few qualified applicants in those places. Poverty has a holistic effect on a group. My hope is that groups can somehow separate financial poverty from poverty of ambition to try to break these cycles and make progress. Every 'group culture' has a unique ethos, many poor groups had rich ambition and rose out of their poverty over time. To me this is the only way I can see real progress being made without giving up on meritocracy (and by extension technological/scientific progression).

So the question becomes - what does it look like to cultivate group ambition?

1. Generational support: believe your situation is not guaranteed for your children. Fight for them. Sacrifice for them.

2. Education/medical: we pour resources into certain underprivileged places (not groups, physical locations). This isn't going against meritocracy, it's a long-term investment.

3. Recognize that human civilization is at its finest when people believe they can rise above their circumstances, despite all the external and internal factors pulling them down.

How do you apply this to a system that has favoured certain groups for so long that the whole structure has close to none of those it supposedly wants to help?

You need representation from groups that need help in order to help. You need representative individuals in the organisation to guide it. You may have to positively discriminate at first, or else you won’t have any representative to draw from.

There are abundant examples of butchered attempts at ‘helping’ when those with good intent have no idea (this thread gives plenty of cringe inducing examples).

The key, I think, it making it clear what the role is and what is wanted to those that are there in that role.

Then there are disparities that better hiring practices can fix, namely correcting the “first and only” problem. Most people just want to fit in, and being the “first and only X” makes that harder. It’s a kind of disparity that exists only because it exists and can be fixed by simply hiring people from diverse backgrounds to achieve a critical mass so that future applicants don’t face that conundrum.

If it can’t be done in one of the most successful companies on earth, in the richest country, who can?

The value in Google trying is greater than just the value to the successful applicants. It might not be much but just throwing up your hands because it’s hard is not helpful.

I find it strange that people think you can just magically provide a top notch school and things magically correct themselves. How can you completely discount the impact of the parents involvement with their children's educational life?

Paraphasing JFK, "Ask not what your school can do for your kid's education, but what you can do for your kid's education".

Parents play a huge part in imparting good values in their children and also holding their children accountable for their performance in school. Furthermore, when some kids do poorly that rubs off on all the other kids by lowering the bar and setting bad examples. The parents set bad examples for their kids and then those kids set bad examples for other kids. It's turtles all the way down.

"If you want to see the poor remain poor, generation after generation, just keep the standards low in their schools and make excuses for their academic shortcomings and personal misbehavior. But please don't congratulate yourself on your compassion." – Thomas Sowell

Of course, the superlocal, balkanized property tax system used to fund schools really doesn’t help things.

And then it was all tramped on by some insane incentive like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a particular person actually gets to hire. Or a stack ranking based on the same.

All it takes is just one perverse component in the mix.

my company has done this and while it's not illegal to provide the incentives, I don't understand how they can expect it not to result in illegal hiring behavior (discrimination based on protected class) by those optimizing for those incentives.

Of course they expect it to result in illegal hiring behavior. They just also expect to always get away with it, because some technically illegal things are nonetheless tolerated by society.

Certain groups need the chance to prove themselves. If certain groups aren't fairly represented, then it does pay to prefer to hire from those groups when everything else is roughly equal.

I do find it hard to believe that "the best" candidate is more often than not a straight white man.

So do I, which is why I find this diversity hire exercise entirely pointless.

I remember reading someone's opinion basically stating that things like that for underrepresented groups are unpaid emotional labor, which I kind of agree with - it's got to be a weird position to be in to be hired to write code and somehow end up as the defacto sounding board for questions regarding the company's interactions with people similar to you. Imagine having randos come up to you and ask you for your time to pitch new ideas for how to recruit white dudes or asking questions about how it was growing up a white dude or even just people making the assumption that since you're a white dude you care about hiring more white dudes.

> what other process would we suggest?

Personal opinion alert: I feel like a lot of (not all) tech's diversity problem is a pipeline problem so maybe identifying people that belong to underrepresented groups out there doing good work getting folks from the group interested in cs/tech and then giving them more resources?

Presumably if the person in question is salaried and it's understood that they are spending work time on this, then it's not unpaid emotional labor. But, sure, it's work that requires leaning on emotional and social sensitivies one might otherwise not have to bring to bear in their tech job.

I don't think anyone should be obligated to do that kind of work because of their background. But my experience is that organizations and culture often progress only when some people do volunteer to do that work. And, fortunately, there are many people who choose to do that because the intangible rewards, for them, outweigh the costs.

I imagine this all the time, yet it never happens.

Society has developed other mechanisms precisely because orgs are dumb as shit at handling complexity.

Its sort of like encouraging 2nd graders to think about 10th grade problems. They need a whole lot of help and time from someone else before they can. Thats why the East India Company runs to King or Goldman runs to the President or Jack Ma evaporates from the earth when things get too complex.

Orgs are just dumb simple parts of society like the ribosome is a part of a cell. Expecting the ribosome to morph into something it is not just because every part of the ribosome has good intentions and feels it can be doing much more to influence the behavior of one cell, or a clump of them and therefore the whole body makes for a good Pixar movie and Google hiring material. But in real life that stuff happens on very different time scales and by very different institutions.

If you want to change the world don't work in the corporate world. Work in places that supervise them.

- Better if it is not the corporation organizing it, but just sponsoring either trough financial contributions or things like providing space instead.

- Have interesting topics beyond just talking about group X.

- Don’t assume everyone within a group is the same.

- Actual hiring/evaluation process should be same for everyone, do as much blindly as you can.

Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity.

I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity during a co-op tour and had posters of Africa all over the room. But why would I expect someone who just learned the term to actually grok it?

Bummer you go the offensive end of that.

EDIT: From the article "It was when I first realized that tech leaders have no idea what it is to manage work dynamics through a gendered lens."

When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion.

Which is why the entire concept of demographics-based "diversity" is such a shambles. The premise is supposed to be that if you get some women and minorities in there then you'll have a diversity of opinion.

But then you select for the women willing to work 80 hour weeks, which is highly atypical and selects out e.g. prospective mothers, ensuring they're not represented in your organization. You select for the minorities with degrees from prestigious schools which selects out people who know what it's like to grow up poor.

You end up with diversity on paper but not in practice, which is not only useless but worse than nothing because it creates the impression that you now have a diversity of opinion and you don't.

The example I like is which would be more diverse in a silicon valley tech company - 1) an African American guy who grew up upper-middle class and went to an Ivy League school and always voted for "progressive" candidates or 2) a white guy who grew up poor in West Virginia, was the first to go to college and has an affinity for right wing politics?

No one was self-made. If you hired in mid-career you were seen as different and if you brought a different point of view they just nodded their heads and basically ignored what you said until you came around to thier point of view. The most non-diverse environment I have ever seen.

If you wanted actual diversity then what you would presumably do is gather all the data you can on multiple metrics (birthplace, parental income, culture, language, etc.) and then hire for maximum entropy. "Diversity" hiring based on a specific individual metric is literally the opposite of that, because it finds the people who are the least unlike the existing people in your company but can check the box on the form.

I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572082239488...

I also always took the "ambassador" to be an external facing thing. They speak for their culture at that company; the places I've seen it I was never given the impression that they were meant to be an ambassador for their entire culture. Maybe I was misreading it, though.

Then they company has a personal responsiblity to change rather than a checkbox to check off , much like the "what race are you" checkbox given to pander to their diversity quota.

I blame society, people cry about diversity but all they want to see is someone of a particular type in a manager position and never really as, "what is this person doing", "do they really get to make an impact". Diversity propaganda is all so shallow and has only made relationships different cultures worse.

Also you: "You pretty much have to make it non profitable for companies to not be diverse."

/facepalm/

Things can be made non-profitable outside of government interventions like fines of tax incentives etc.

In fact, the parent's position is an 100% consistent libertarian position: they believe that such a problem will (or wont) be solved by the market itself, and that companies should follow such incentives not being forced by laws.

E.g. diversity would be good economically for companies, because else they will lose black, asian, indian, etc talent they could hire.

This reminds me of a VC/incubator who was offering a favorable equity loan hybrid where you get no strings funding with the additional benefit that you can buy your equity back at any time for 3x the original investment. It turns out that this met the needs of a lot of black and female founders even though diversity was not even an explicit goal. You could literally feel the HN commenters roll their eyes while they said "So this is just a terrible loan with high interest rates?" as if having access to business loans is completely natural like breathing air, when it's the exception for black people.

In the 20 years I've been working in tech, I've seen countless candidates rejected because of "culture fit." Of those, the majority were women; but also black, Hispanic, and indigenous men. Only one was a white guy: he was overtly sexist towards every woman he encountered, including the HR recruiter.

Edit: oh, I forgot one. One white guy was slightly effeminate by north American standards, and wasn't considered after somebody made a comment to the effect of "I think it's weird when men wear scarves". I think he was French (or Québécois), and I wouldn't speculate about his sexuality

I think you mostly have two scenarios:

1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. I suspect this is what most people believe is happening.

2. An employer has zero/little bias in their hiring practices, but the people most suitable for the job happen to not come from some minority (due to any number of reasons or issues). They then turn down the most suitable candidate to hire a less suitable minority to make an excel sheet somewhere look right. I suspect this happens all of the time.

A real life scenario is a police department in the UK who were slammed by management for having only one black officer in their local unit. When they went away and crunched the numbers, they found that the one black officer they had actually over-represented the percentage of black people in the local community.

As I've said many times before, we really need to make a decision about equal opportunity vs equal outcome. You can't have both. Unequal outcome is _not_ direct evidence for unequal opportunity. I think currently society pushes towards equal outcome under some delusion that eventually they will have both equal opportunity and outcome.

Employers never actually discriminate on anything anymore. Instead, they let the recruitment firms do all that unpleasantness for them.

I thought we were using the comparison of societal demographics to company demographics to measure how true the "equal opportunity" statement was. You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. Having looked at those numbers and found them to show bias, I delusionally thought that maybe we had looked at causes and effects, and found feedback loops like are present in so many complex systems.

Get this though - in the grandeur of my delusion, I thought that studies of these feedback loops we had found:

* people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves

* people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo

* complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally

And that these hiring practices were part of a bigger attempt to use the third bullet to address the other two.

But what do I know, I'm just a delusional fool who gets paid to work on complex systems. I should probably go resign. Anyone reading this - likely another person who works on complex systems - I encourage you to not apply your systems thinking to systems, you might end up delusional too!

This is a false analogy, it robs people of their agency. Humans do not act with some uniform distribution. It could be cultural, social, environmental, class - any number of factors. People are different and these differences should be celebrated, not squashed and ironed out.

> people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves

> people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo

> complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally

Sure, but at what point have we biased the input enough? At what point do we except the result? Bare in mind for example, women were among the first programmers (computers). If we achieve equal numbers of men and women in programming roles, what makes you believe the situation won't once again become biased?

What concerns me is that equal outcome is a goal without any real measurement of success or plan to revert back to equal opportunity once the input has been 'corrected'.

I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.

This is the first time I've heard of this push-back.

I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "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." was a good approach?

I recently heard a radio interview where the guest explained that part of her character was "blackness", and she was offended by intimations that her character could be separated from her racial identity. (The context was a caller who had recited MLK's famous line.)

Taken at face value it necessarily implies a partial refutation of some of MLK's premises, and indeed of some of the premises behind the mid-century Civil Rights movement and even the American Experiment. Suffice it to say MLK can hardly be said to represent the sentiments of all black Americans, let alone all Americans.

That said, there's a ton to unpack there, and decades later many of the concepts that we as a society are implicitly discussing are quite different, such as what we mean by "character". (I seriously doubt MLK had a sense of self that was any less black than the guest speaker.) So the two sentiments may still be reconcilable. Certainly I don't think the guest's expression of her opinions would have been as well considered and articulated as MLK's. (Ditto the caller's.)

Let's not even say that, he was just a person who was trying to communicate how we should treat each other. It's easy to label him to a group and start saying he does/doesn't represent that group. Let's keep it simple and say he was 'Homo sapien'.

I find the association between cultural identity and the color of ones skin a simplistic way of looking at things. "Blackness"/"Whiteness" are so overloaded and it often brings confusion.

Being a s/w engineer I immediately went to edge cases, where skin color can muddle the waters:

- Elon Musk was born in S.Africa and living in the US. Is he African American? Technically yes.

- A black French person, raised by white French parents, living in the US would refer to himself as French.

- A white French person, raised by black French parents, living in the US would refer to himself as French.

I'm a white Englishman who's living in the US, but there's not a chance you can say I'm the same as a classic white born American.

Heck my parents are not English, so you'd be hard pressed to compare me to a 'standard' Englishman.

Ultimately I try and view MLK 'spirit' of the talk, which is are you a good/bad character (irrespective of your upbringing) and that's how you should be judged.

Edit: formating

I believe that makes him just African, not African-American.

Edit: clarification.

Having a self respect for your cultural identity doesn't mean you prefer to be judged by the color of your skin rather than your character.

There's nothing new about race essentialism. Anglo-American racial concepts are rooted in pseudo-scientific ideas about biological capacities, but that's a very peculiar flavor of race-ist scholarship. There are plenty of white supremacist groups who argue that equitable integration is impossible for various sociological reasons--i.e. racism cannot be completely extirpated and so will always impose an unacceptable burden on all groups in an attempt to achieve the unachievable, so all groups are better off segregated. But they didn't invent these arguments, either.

These same fatalistic sentiments and conclusions (albeit from a much different perspective) can also be found in the writings of famous black authors such as Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon. They're similarly race essentialist--race may be a cultural construct, but it's a durable one that imposes mutually exclusive options for organizing society, similar to class in the Marxist worldview. Frantz Fanon, who grew up under French Colonialism, does an amazing job articulating the various often mundane ways in which living as a racial minority in society leads (necessarily in his view) to systemic oppression of the self and group. These authors likewise believe that a truly multiracial polity is fundamentally impossible. (In Fanon's broader philosophy, racial fault lines lend themselves to class-based oppression in the vein of Marxist class warfare. An observation echoed by modern black scholars like Cornell West and Adolph Reed Jr.--neither of whom is race essentialist, FWIW, though I think alot of West's nuance is lost on people.) In fact, a significant amount of African-American and, more generally, anti-colonialist literature came to these conclusions. And if you speak to many well-read activist black Americans of a certain generation, you'll find many strongly sympathize with these views. Famously Justice Clarence Thomas is of this view--he opposes all affirmative action and many Civil Rights initiatives because he believes that black Americans will never be able to live as unburdened by race as those in white society, and that in many cases these initiatives ultimately increase that inevitable burden. (IOW, Thomas is resigned to a fundamentally unequal America, and that informs his cost/benefit calculus. Thomas' legal opinions are far more peculiar than his racial fatalism, however.)

I found Frantz Fanon quite enlightening, but I don't accept all his premises and his conclusions. I don't accept them intellectually, and as an American I feel obligated to reject them as anathema to our national moral framework--America may be a doomed experiment, but I have a civic duty to believe there's a way forward. My takeaway from Fanon, et al is an acceptance of the very deep, very systemic problems that multiracial polities face (in many ways no less today than 60 years ago); and an acceptance that the answers to those problems are still nowhere to be found. Fanon (better than any other author) not only taught me to recognize the depth and breadth of racism, but convinced me to be extremely wary of claims that it has been lifted. So I accept many of the premises, but not some crucial conclusory ones--e.g. that the absence of answers is evidence of absence. From my perspective it's actually not hard to see how anyone, black, white, or w'ever, could easily make the jump from these intractable dilemmas to the view that we simply cannot ever separate racial identity from our political character. (By political character I mean to say that while we may all be equal in God's eyes, such platitudes have no substantive meaning or application in the real world.)

IMO, we live in an age where we've inherited many concepts from the radical literature of the 1960s and 1970s, but without an appreciation of the context or the consequences. I have no reason to doubt that the radio speaker more-or-less meant what she said regarding her character, and intended it to mean precisely that her perspectives on race (in particular, the burdens and graces of living as a black woman) are intrinsically out of the reach of contemplation by others and therefore of more value in the political debate because of her lived experience as a black person. That is actually a quite common refrain these days. I even sympathize with this. In many ways it's a reaction to white people (or some other majority or power-dominate group--these same dynamics play out in multiethnic societies everywhere) systematically dismissing and discounting claims of racism by rationalizing their inability to see that racism as a consequence of adopting a color-blind mentality. In that vein, I can totally appreciate the use of radical leftist race essentialist concepts from the 1960s to argue that, hey, race and therefore racism is more than skin deep.

OTOH, if you confuse such pragmatic, matter-of-fact arguments with a broader cultural moral philosophy, then you're going to end up precisely where authors like Frantz Fanon did. And unfortunately I think a lot of people do precisely that, without an appreciation for where that ultimately leads. People want to be heard and recognized, and unfortunately sometimes resort to contradictory conceptual frameworks.

YMMV.

I assume that most people would like to be treated by their characters. If everyone just started doing that, wouldn't the world be a better place? That's my take on MLK. Maybe it's naive.

What if you do it, but others don't? Then you're not directly responsible for the issues, sure, but you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. You may not be part of the problem, but you're benefiting from the problem, and are not part of the solution.

My point is that there are IMHO a lot of people complaining about this (here on HN) but I don't see a lot of concrete solutions that are actionable.

> you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing.

I presented a way that would make it somewhat fairer (looks like the orchestra approach suggested that) till someone else brings something better to the table. Rinse and repeat has to be better than just talking. No?

> but you're benefiting from the problem, and are not part of the solution.

It's easy to criticize others. I would be interested in exploring your solution to this.

Sure; you can create hiring processes that hide as much identifying information as possible. That doesn't address the issue in other parts of the workforce though. Trying to just be as colorblind as possible for yourself doesn't address the systemic issues, nor the biases coworkers/etc may have. It also doesn't force others to adopt the solution you propose.

Recognize the contexts people aren't blind in and be an advocate for diversity in them (not instead of ability, but alongside it). Recognize that a person's lived experience may be different from yours because of their skin color or gender. Which implies recognizing when their skin color or gender is different than yours.

Of course not, but it's a start. Getting X hired and in the door, means we can at least have the opportunity to tackle problems downstream. Hoping that we can solve X-ism (for the points you mention) and then everything will magically be fixed, is going to probably take at least another 3 generations.

>Recognize the contexts people aren't blind in and be an advocate for diversity in them (not instead of ability, but alongside it). Recognize that a person's lived experience may be different from yours because of their skin color or gender. Which implies recognizing when their skin color or gender is different than yours.

All great points, however we've been doing gender/diversity training (at big tech companies at least) what ~20 years? and we are still having problems. I guess it's getting better slowly...

Growing up in the UK (Ukrainian background), I was always taught to never trust Russians because they were the cause of ALL the problems of Ukraine. Completely idiotic I know. I had never meet a Russian and the people telling me hadn't either. Sigh.

Working in NYC, yep, I was right in the middle of a team of Russians and what did I find? There was nothing crazy about them, they had a dry (similar to British) humor and I got on well with them. My prejudges fell away.

Generally IMHO we can only change our view of X, by mixing with X and realize they're just 'normal' people and that previous generations/peers that manipulate us are a bunch of idiots.

But, yes, generally I think we're in agreement. I'm mostly just responding that "I'm colorblind", while possibly true, implicitly is distancing yourself from the problem. It's effectively saying "I don't recognize your skin color, so any experiences you ascribe to it will be alien to me". No, recognize color, accept that a person's experiences will be different from yours, especially those tied to skin color, and that your own experiences can't really touch that; a comment you find inoffensive they might find offensive, and you can't really adjudicate that. Etc.

But, yes, the best thing we can do is encounter those different than us and realize how similar they actually are.

If by “is relatively new” you mean “very briefly receded before returning”, sure. The whole “we are living in a post-racial society” thing was trendy for about the second half of 00s, but fell apart fairly rapidly in the early 2010s.i

> and orders of magnitude more controversial than its pushers like to admit.

No one, anywhere, disputes that it's controversial, and always had been; what has changed notably, though, is the degree to which the divide had become much more aligned with the partisan divide than it had ever been in the past.

Lots of people agree that color blindness would be the ideal world, but seeing that the world is not color blind, trying to advocate for it seems like a way to continue pushing an injustice instead of addressing it.

If there are biases upstream of that point in the process (such as "those with a social security number ending in 9 are admitted to law school at one-sixth the expected rate"), then I'd expect an unbiased hiring process to result in that same discrepancy in those hired (presuming here that social security digits are entirely uncorrelated with performance in law school and the practice of law).

Should the law firm work to try to eliminate that upstream bias? Sure. Should the law firm work to hire in a biased way such that they end up with an evenly distributed outcome? I personally don't think so, but I understand others who think they should.

If there is some other bias present, the solution is to rectify that bias, not force diversity hire. Forcing diversity hire is a lazy solution, a way to *not" actually fix the cause of the problem.

It's always seemed to me that people are aggressively attempting to hire for some criteria (even position) because they're either having trouble getting people on board, or holding onto them. There's something 'wrong' with them, for some definition of wrong.

Either they're looking in the wrong place, they're giving off a bad vibe that scares people off, or people who have that quality they're looking for are leaving at a higher rate than everyone else.

Why is this team trying so hard to hire team leads? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring? Why doesn't this team have any women? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring?

My guess is you would find out pretty quick why there is nobody quite like you at those companies, and soon they'll be fishing for your replacements.

This place is worth working at to get some hours on your resume, but it's not worth staying at beyond that.

Within the wider world of employment, this is not an uncommon sentiment, but within software you don't hear so many people talking like this.

If that's true, then it's not just an offensive strategy, it's also ineffective for the business employing it. It's a way to select the lowest performing of a target group.

Hell, I’m mostly learning software dev because it seems like the most straight forward to way to turn my above average intelligence in to money. I’d love to cut out the middle man and just receive a high iq allowance.

It's the Diversity & Inclusion Industrial Complex and it's related to all the other "industrial complexes" that form in that it's just a problem/industry specific manifestation of the Shirky Principle:

https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/

Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable? This is not something that is stealthly flying under the radar, it's pretty much in the open and celebrated. What moral ground will anyone have to stand on should the pendulum swing the other way, which it always eventually does? Instead of attempting to create equality, we've instead continued playing the same old game but with different winners selected. How long will the current chosen winners continue to be the winner? And when things change to other selected winners, how will anyone be able to complain when they supported the concept of selecting winners as long as those selected were the ones they favored?

The difference was that it wasn't based on race. Eligibility was decided by a mental health diagnosis, and successful applicants also received specific coaching that is better tailored to the way they think.

Not having those things would have made work far less bearable than it was, as it had been for me in the past.

And while I do believe that Microsoft wants to hire people from diverse backgrounds, I personally found that the workplace support was a legitimate material benefit to me. I did not feel like I was forgotten about just because I now contributed to some organizational diversity makeup. Parts of me that I consider my "identity" change the way I experience the world in significant ways, from the perspective of mentality and the senses. I continued to receive assistance for those things provided by the company, for years, and as a result was more or less successful at living an adult working life.

If hiring candidates are preferred because they have a certain background, in a lot of cases it feels like it's not for a reason that makes sense except to reach a quota, but in my experience there are exceptions. Or programs that feel like exceptions, at least.

When I ask what the most challenging problems company’s are facing and they mention PC stuff, then I know it’s not a place for me.

I’m also mixed race, part Maori and I had a guy in an interview tell me that “white guys like us don’t add diversity to the company”.

These social justice warriors can go fuck themselves.

While "diversity via token hires", and "faux-diversity celebrations with folklore food, music, etc" are fake-ass and crinzy, I don't see the manager's question as gross.

It's a legitimate question a human being can make to another. We're not just individual snowflakes, we're also people with certain traits and members of certain cultures with certain histories.

It makes sense for someone to ask us about those aspects of our life.

Of course, perhaps the way he did it was patronizing or fake, or whatever.

But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such...

If the applicant was white, should the manager have asked them; "Oh wow as a half Italian/half English person , how was to grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey, was it difficult? Was it hard? Gee I cannot begin to imagine how strong you are"

Well, I'm not American - and like many other cultures that aren't exactly black but just aren't WASP, my people weren't even considered white by Americans.

But I see no problem with "otherizing" you seem to fear so much. Is it an American pre-occupation, that every ethnic person is necessarily just a good-old American, with no distinction or unique experience coming out of an all-american melting pot?

And if you acknolwedge that an Italian American or an Native American, or an Asian American, etc could have different experiences growing up in the US because of their ethnicity/heritage you're "otherizing" and that's bad?

What the duck is wrong with a culture so afraid of discussing these things (except in adversarial tones: X are evil, Y have privilege, mentioning Z is otherizing, asking K is patronizing, and so on)?

>If the applicant was white, should the manager have asked them; "Oh wow as a half Italian/half English person , how was to grow up in the suburbs of New Jersey, was it difficult? Was it hard? Gee I cannot begin to imagine how strong you are"

Depends of if whites had it bad statistically, or perhaps whites from some specific area. I'd sure ask whites from Alaska say how it was growing up there, or italians from the Bronx in the 30s, etc...

Really? Consider it this way, by substituting x for something that fits for you personally:

What was it like growing up x? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you."

How might you feel by the end of the flight?

I don't see absolutely any problem with that. In fact it's something we talk about frequently in casual discussions.

Sure beats BS casual talk that means nothing. It also gives you the opportunity to give the other person an idea about x (e.g. my ethnicity).

Perhaps it's about different ways societies see casual talk?

I'm in Canada. In the job applications, we don't even have a section to specify ethnicity. When I applied for American companies, I felt a slight cringe when I saw the optional form asking me for my ethnicity, sexual orientation or veteran status for statistical purposes.

You were right though that they were trying to check some boxes on a diversity report. IBM trots out those special events at trials to try and paint a favorable picture of their hiring practices - and if that doesn't work they just don't pay the judgements.

Completely contrived, but personalized, introductory events.

The difference is that they eventually took the job and have no issue performing on the job or have any stranger than usual corporate experiences.

(They experienced the same super long interviewing and matchmaking process plaguing the rest of the industry, and the contrived intros were just the silly responses to how to deal with the recruiting pipeline).

These were not right out of college though, and they would have likely gotten responses within 24 hours from the same companies anyway.

IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity & inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun culture, belief that it will make the company more money.

I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the business by helping the business make better decisions, helps find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those things boil down to: it's good for business.

This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an employee that you only care about their ability to help the business make money. But there's also something really unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the business cares about an employee's happiness and positive social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the employment in the first place, which is making money.

I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less competition from other recruiters."

That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true, especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage that allows you to take advantage of industry bias. Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much opportunity.

It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we think you could out perform your past work by a lot."

I don't really understand this. Isn't any kind of race based discrimination going to potentially cause legal liability? At the end of the day you're advocating for a policy of race/gender based discrimination, and I don't really get why you'd think it wouldn't be opening yourself up to liability with programs like these?

Have you actually talked to a lawyer about this? I've looked into in the the past, and while it seems to have a stronger case in Canada (where I live) I haven't really seen anything to suggest it's legal in the US unless you're a school.

Admittedly you're probably not going to be the case the brings it tumbling down, but it still seems like explicitly basing your hiring decisions on race open you up to a whole lot of potential liability.

I get the intent, but it seems so incredibly forced and to your point, condescending for someone who busted their ass to get where they are in their career.

How does that even work? Even if we restrict "Native American" to groups that were native to what later became the United States, that's still a whole lot of different cultures across a vast range of ecosystems.

They had different foods and different kinds of music. How could IBM pick which Native American culture's food and music to have? Wouldn't any such choice be essentially foreign food and music to people from other Native American cultures?

Not to fully doubt you but your entire story seems highly unlikely and politically convenient.

Considering the genocide of Native Americans in America, the lack of reparations and the amount of US government monies paid to IBM, native peoples should be rolled to the front of the line YET still hired solely based on their merit.

Rich executives’ kids are rolled to the front of the line for internships, entry level positions and college admissions.

Making sure that natives are considered is the least we can do in making the world more just.