People can't even see politics anymore they're so steeped in it.

You'd probably be angry at their prejudices. But I'm sure you'd understand, because groupthink is bad.

And there is an effective white guy target at many workplaces: all but one. People choose other people like themselves.

The preposterous nature of your contention is that I would be passed over for being too white? Well, I would simply take one of the many other jobs my strategic class and race positioning allows me to take.

The issue of anti-asian quotas at major american universities is absolutely a legitimate one that needs addressing.

Here's why it's a little bit more complicated than just: "Let's just remove all criteria for university admission besides high scores. That won't discriminate against asians and be a true meritocracy".

Because then, the amount of poor people getting into university would absolutely plummet, and the socioeconomic divide between the classes in the US would only grow further. Being able to do well on tests is a privilige based on having time to study, the money for tutors, and other factors. There is obviously a pure raw talent aspect, and the geniuses of the world might get in regardless of their race or poverty level. But there is not enough geniuses in the world. Most University student bodies are average and slightly above average humans. There has to be some way to promote balance in the student body - racially, economically, culturally. And right now, Asians are disproportionately pay that burden. It should be worked on, and improved.

But you should in no way conflate this problem with university admissions with "pink quotas" for hiring diverse groups of talent. The companies that are the most promoting the idea of improving their diversity through initiatives are the largest and richest tech companies. They do so not just because it's beneficial to the bottom line, but also because they can AFFORD to be choosy.

Joe Blow Software Co and Fizz Buzz Sandwiches aren't putting in diversity goals in their hiring strategy. They wait for people to come in to apply for jobs, and hope that they can get someone to cover a shift before the end of the week that isn't a drug addict.

Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft do it because they know that on any given day for any given position they're going to get 100 resumes, and they have what can only be described as a "loosely scientific" approach to weaning them out to 40 that can be phone screened, 5 that will come onsite, and 1 that will be hired. (Numbers are made up but are close to the real ratios).

Everything from the phone screen onward is data driven, meticulous, and kept to a strict quality bar. But the intake process has a lot of randomness, a lot of flexibility, and THAT is where the companies focus to say "Why don't we actually try to interview more women, and minorities for a change. What's the worst that can happen? We phone screen 50 people instead of 40, and so our "onsite efficiency ratio" drops from 12% to 10%.

There is no quota. There are goals to improve these numbers. But there is no quota in the professional world.

My point is more that, it should be ok to question current practices; both those propagating societal issues, and those attempting to solve them. Currently on many topics, even slightly questioning the current remedy risks getting one labeled negatively.

You're simply misinformed on this. I have direct primary source information from recruiting personnel in "Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft" that there are significant specific quota'd positions. These programs leaking to non-woke press is going to be an outrage.

This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity).

You're supposed to meet goals without compromising on integrity or quality. e.g. you can't ship buggy messes.

And you can't hire substandard employees. There are mechanisms ("bar raisers") in place to do this, at least at Amazon.

I suppose I can't speak for Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. But I'm pretty sure that it's exactly the same and what you're getting is a game of broken telephone where an ambitious goal in a high stakes environment gets re-interpreted as a quota.

BTW, you're supposed to fail ~20-30% of your goals at Amazon, or you didn't set ambitious-enough ones.

Then you have companies like Twitter that literally say on their hiring boards:

"Our vision for the future is clear.

50%.

At least half of our global workforce will be women.

25%

At least a quarter of our US workforce will be under-represented minorities."[0]

Key word "will", not "would like." How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?

Honestly I can't wrap my head around how Twitter believes 45% men / 55% women is the ideal and 55% men / 45% women would be unacceptable.

[0]https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html

Also, if your takeaway from “at least half the employees will be women” as a goal, at a time when the breakdown is 43% women, and has been a lot lower for the past decade, is that “55% women is ok but 55% men is not”, it’s pretty obvious you’re arguing in bad faith.

It’s pretty obvious that’s a goal that at least half the workforce will be women in fewer than 4 years. What that actually means is that Twitter is likely gonna barely cross the 50% mark, if they are even gonna meet it.

The reality is that the moment they hit 50% they will ease off on the effort to recruit more women than men, which, thanks to structural factors that have led to the current unbalanced distribution of employees, will only make their hiring easier ans allow them to continue hiring equitably.

But not "Our future is clear, there will be ...".

There is a big difference.

> How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?

They explicitly say it's a vision (goal).

(Still, goals and monetary incentives can have the same effect, it seems, looking at what thu2111 wrote nearby, about Google.)

But the goals were incentivised with money and what happens when you do that? The system was bent in all sorts of creative but illegitimate ways to try and get there. Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway. They were given the best interviewers that were preferred by the hiring committees, and men who were mis-interviewed were simply dropped on the floor instead of re-doing the process or filtering the bad interviewers out. I was told they were doing this by the recruiters themselves. They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.

More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.

But that was some years ago. Tech firms became much more extreme since then. A recruiter leaked YouTube's instructions to do biased hiring previously, and nothing happened. Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments, they're constantly attacked by an activist class who insist they do so - what do you think happens? Of course they are discriminating. How else could they achieve their goals? "Encouragement" is a fantasy, there aren't huge pools of women who are inexplicably refusing to apply to major tech firms.

"Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway." sounds like it but the next stage isn't an offer - it's the onsite interview. If Google's process is anything like Amazon's, there is a screen-OUT stage and a screen-IN stage.

The screen out stage is primarily there to make sure not to waste the time of the full onsite interview loop. It's highly subjective and you are SUPPOSED to err on the side of letting people go through. You're SUPPOSED to have the most senior engineers on the team do these screens. But people frequently don't. They introduce their own biases, and managers use phone screens as practice for their most junior interviews. The outcome is qualified candidates sometimes don't even get a chance to prove their worth in an onsite loop.

So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No, but there is no way to make this process truly fair at the scale that FAAMNG hires.

So long as the FINAL process is fair, that's all that you can really do and ensure you don't hire unqualified people.

> They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.

That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities. Or HBCU's. Amazon also does "women's only" hiring events. They have lower hire ratios because there is a pipeline intake problem too in our whole industry. But that's okay.

> More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.

I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable. It's extremely hard to get fired from a FAAMNG company once you're in. What you describe happens to all employees (being moved between teams).

> Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments

Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed? Making it easier for women to apply does not make it HARDER for Men. All the initiatives we discussed are IN ADDITION not INSTEAD OF.

You're interpreting this the way you want to. If given an identical interview a man would fail and the woman automatically gets interviewed more, that is bar lowering. If given identical behaviour the man is fired and the woman is promoted, that is bar lowering. What do you think the point of interviewing or firing people is? And for sure the only person who ever generated reactions in my teams of the form "how the hell did this person get hired and why aren't they fired yet", was a female engineer who was the darling of the manager's manager, another female engineer who thought getting more women into tech management was a high priority.

Now, again, that was years ago. There are plenty of people since who came forward and said yes, Google and other tech firms use quotas in hiring. Recruiters, people who would know.

So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No

It's good you admit this, because that's the core of the issue. Not if hiring can be made truly, perfectly fair (whatever definition is used), but if it's actively being made unfair by gender-biased policies. To which the answer is an absolute yes.

That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities

You claim it's not insidious and then say, well, this type of discrimination goes unpunished elsewhere so it's OK. That doesn't make it not insidious. It just proves the underlying argument: that our society is by this point systematically biased against men despite the theoretical existence of equality laws. Do you think male-only hiring events would be tolerated? Surely not.

I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable

I understand why you might think that, but that certainly wasn't true when I was there and IMHO it clearly still isn't true. There were at least two guys who I directly worked with who got fired for being unproductive. I knew quite a few others who were put on PIPs for various reasons. Google did, maybe still does, operate a policy of "up or out" in which being fired is automatic if you don't get promoted. It was very much possible to get fired there, unless you were a woman, in which case HR would have preferred to sacrifice a goat than fire a woman. Remember, the firm had "goals" to keep the female:male ratio as high as they could, and it was explicitly phrased as a moral issue.

And of course, look at James Damore. Fired and viciously publicly attacked for spelling out the reality of the situation: these firms discriminate horrendously in favour of women and against men, and yet it's not working, that approach doesn't generate a torrent of happy women in tech. It generates angry men who, rightly, feel they're being treated unfairly for genetic reasons.

Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed?

I just gave you a list but maybe repetition will help:

- Men are being banned from senior executive roles.

- Men are being banned from board seats, in some parts of the world, by law.

- Men are being banned from recruiting events.

- Men are being banned from training programmes (e.g. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/news/articles/bbc-defends...)

- When women make an accusation against a man, they are automatically believed and their identity is protected. The same is not true for men. Again, in many parts of the world, this principle is enshrined in law: the law itself in unequitable.

- Men who point out obvious demographic truths backed by plenty of research are fired, like "women are less interested in computers than men". If women make claims directly contradicted by plenty of research, like "women are paid less than men due to discrimination", they are praised and rewarded.

- Men who want fair treatment of other men are routinely banned from "diversity committees", e.g. https://fortune.com/2015/01/23/diversity-work/ (but I saw this at my previous employer too). That's why the concept of diversity is so widely treated with derision. They want an absolute diversity of people who all hold their extremist beliefs.

- Beyond prizes in hiring-related competitions, there are bonus pots at firms set aside exclusively for women. This has been true at least since the early 90s at Microsoft.

- Job assessment is routinely biased against white men in ways that are obviously illegal, but again, men have no protection and SJW activists are so confident about this they actively boast about it in public. Consider this quote from an interview with someone at Atlassian on their new HR policies:

"A huge component for us was de-biasing the assessment process. There’s been a lot of talk and testing on de-biasing and we worked closely with our design team to remove bias from the process. What we realized were that systems weren’t designed to be anti-racist, for example, which isn’t the same as non-racist. We wanted to be actively conscious, for example, of being anti-racist"

This sort of list could go on all day. I know you really don't want to believe that because it undermines so many other beliefs that go along with the whole package, but women are lionised in our industry, men are second class citizens and the sexist/racist discrimination that occurs is all done by people who most loudly announce themselves as "anti-sexist" or "anti-racist". One day this whole ideology will be recognised by all as the dark evil it truly is. Until that day we have to point out its hypocrisies, every day.

I fundamentally live in a different world from you if you believe that men are second class citizens in our industry.

I don't really think that is unfair, but then I think the whole system of elite university admission is a total disaster for equity.

Yes, it objectively is. No matter how you will try to paint it using colourful phrases and invocation of "justice" - this is discrimination.

This is specifically trying to be fair, rather than trying to make access equally difficult. I don't know why that is hard to grasp. I don't think 'righting injustice' is bad way to explain it.

Harvard is also discriminating against Asians because there are 'too many'. This seems quite likely but is a separate issue. The historical injustice is present, but cannot be said to have the same character. I don't think criticism of other minority AA programs is justified, but you can have your own opinion.

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-d...

Again, I'm not questioning your heart, but I do think that words are powerful and words are how the society group think evolves.

Asians do (on average) score higher. Asians were discriminated against due to this.

For reasons folks may or may not agree with, most elite schools look at a wider range of factors than just scores and grades. Does this lead to there being room for discrimination? Yes. Does it guarantee that discrimination is happening? No.

Just as a simple example, there are plenty of non-Asian folks with high scores and high grades that get rejected too, often for similar reasons — namely, being narrowly focused on academics and not even being world-class at that.

1. How elite school applicants are rated. Most folks seem to think it’s just test scores and maybe grades. It’s not.

2. What successful applicants at elite schools look like on paper. Most people think that elite school student bodies are just a bunch of brainiacs with near perfect grades and scores. While grades and scores are certainly high, the defining characteristic of the core admits are that they have done something of note at the regional, national, or international level (not always true of fringe admits, but that’s a different story). Sometimes these people don’t even have near perfect test scores or grades (frankly, some come across as not terribly smart at all), but they are able to get compelling things done.

I recommend reading Cal Newport’s book on elite school admissions to get a better idea of how to get in.

Also, it seems like two courts have said that Harvard in particular did not discriminate against Asians.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/12/934122462/appeals-court-rules...

Opposing the explicit carve out of 25% of a recruiting pipeline specifically for HBCU candidates, for example, does not imply one is racist.

HBCUs have significant underrepresentation in tech -- despite graduating many talented individuals, they never seem to get hired. A company could see a competitive advantage in recruiting there, where competition for talent is less. The mgmt might also think that the resulting diversity of thought is beneficial. Other potential employees might be attracted to work at such a forward looking company.

What basis would you have for believing that such a goal is bad for a software company? Is it your job to bolster the hiring practices of the past?

Reply to reply: You're arguing for the status quo, against setting targets for HBCU grads. Why? What is the basis for believing it is any better, when it pretty clearly disadvantages minorities?

I only made one contention: graduates of HBCUs are under-represented in tech. If this is a misapprehension please correct me.

I'm not, and this is a real problem with the kind of thinking in this area these days. Opposition to a quota system is not the same as support of the status quo.

"I only made one contention: graduates of HBCUs are under-represented in tech."

> The mgmt might also think that the resulting diversity of thought is beneficial.

The implication that diversity in ethnicity, gender, etc., is the same as diversity of thought is not a good quality assertion. It certainly isn't uniformly true.

> work at such a forward looking company.

"Forward looking" is certainly an assertion, here. Not everyone would agree that quotas are "forward looking."

"Is it your job to bolster the hiring practices of the past?" is a particularly good example of what I referred to in my comment, actually. You're essentially shutting down any rational conversation by asserting that disagreement is necessarily in support of "hiring practices of the past."

Managment may think many things, but that presuposes that diversity of thought comes from the diversity of skin. I can practically guarantee that if your company hired a diverse mix of races, but they were all of technical background and straight HS to college to work then you would not get the diversity of thought you would get if you focused your spare hiring capacity on hiring retiring US marines, radar techs, prisoners, people close to retiring age or any other group that is typically left out (or persevered to be left out) of the typical high tech startup.

In some ways I agree; we're all shaped by adversity and experience. But I don't think you can ignore the incredible lack of people from black or hispanic backgrounds in tech either. The goal of increased diversity in entry level hiring is advanced by the suggested HBCU recruitment drive. Supporting it doesn't preclude recruiting from other talent pools.

That isn't at all what the commenter argued. They argued that diversity in ethnicity/race is not the same as diversity in background. The commenter did not provide a superlative or other qualifier.

If you hire a former gang-banger who is a wiz with eletronics, then you will have some real diversity.

Tech is often focused on the minutiae of our machines, but even then information and learning is not evenly distributed. I've worked with various minority engineers and also Indian/Chinese/Persian/etc and they've all had really different views on how to approach things, how to manage conflicts, and different mathematical backgrounds too.

This is the issue I have when discussing these matters with certain people. When everything is presented in such stark black-and-white terms there's little room for discussion.