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.