> It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard.

I have interviewed a bunch of women and non-white devs lately, and I doubt they would agree with you. This morning I interviewed a very impressive woman of color who said that she's struggled to find engineering jobs.

I've noticed that it can be MUCH harder to find women and non-white candidates when your existing engineering team does not already have much gender/racial diversity. And that stands to reason. Nobody wants to be the token "diverse" hire.

Is it possible that your company has already developed a reputation for its lack of diversity, so those candidates just aren't interested?

My company tries to go out of its way to be inclusive in the hiring process (including trying to do away with requirements etc) and the hiring pipeline is predominantly white/Asian men, and outside of it the occasional Asian woman. The really rare candidate that falls out of this category interviews alright at best and we have given them offers in the past. Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme.

The poster clearly mentions they want to increase diversity and unless they do something sexist /racist as part of their interview what more are they supposed to do? If they look all white now what are they supposed to do about it? Find the token colored person from some corner of the company and paste them in every page in their website?

> Unfortunately 3/4 of those people were actually really bad at their jobs, they just wanted to phone it in. All 3 quit at the one year mark and went to another job. This is their entire resume - a string of one year stints with assumably increasing salaries. Not saying this is representative of minorities but theres a few who have figured out that they can phone it in because they are diversity-quota and milk it to the extreme.

Nobody will acknowledge it publicly but diversity-quota and affirmative action is actually hurting minority candidates. Some places are notorious for lowering the bar for "diverse" applicants. So when faced with a resume, I know that the non-diverse candidate got there on merit alone. But the "diverse" one? Maybe it was merit, maybe it was the quota... Why should I be the one to take the risk?

I can't speak for anyone else, but as far as my hiring process, I don't interview like 5 candidates to decide which one I want for one position. I interview them one at a time, and if I think you are qualified enough to meet or beat my standards, then you get an offer. The strategy closely follows optimal solution for The Secretary Problem[0], and I passed the cutoff interview years ago. (I am very fortunate in this regard in that I've never really had headcount restrictions because every company I've ever worked for has basically told me "HIRE HIRE HIRE HIRE" and I can never actually hire enough people to fill that headcount.)

With that in mind, from my perspective the goal of diversity is to increase the number of diverse candidates in the pipeline, which should theoretically lead to an increase in diverse talent on the teams. The goal is NOT to reduce the number of white men in the pipeline. In other words, if you're a cis straight white guy and you're qualified, I'm not going to say "no, I don't need another white guy" and reject you just because of your race and gender. First and foremost, that's illegal. And second, it's a dick move. And I try really hard to live by Wheaton's Law[1]. I've never done that and don't intend to ever do that. Talent is talent, and any hiring manager would be an idiot to turn it away for arbitrary reasons. (Sadly, there are a lot of idiots out there.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem [1] http://www.wheatonslaw.com/

> the goal of diversity is to increase the number of diverse candidates in the pipeline, which should theoretically lead to an increase in diverse talent on the teams.

That's a good goal. You seem to have a good approach to it.

> So when faced with a resume, I know that the non-diverse candidate got there on merit alone. But the "diverse" one? Maybe it was merit, maybe it was the quota... Why should I be the one to take the risk?

So the white candidate benefits from your attributing their career progress to merit alone, while the non-white candidate has to work extra hard to convince you, and every other potential interviewer, in a short amount of time that their career progress was legitimately earned. Maybe they'll be able to persuade you, maybe they won't. You might consider yourself to be unbiased and just doing a basic risk assessment ("Why should I be the one to take the risk?"), but maybe other managers would really just prefer to work with other white people, using thin excuses like "better culture fit."

Let's say that this type of bias leads to 10% fewer offers being made toward a non-white candidate than a comparable white candidate. Now multiply that by the number of interviews a person needs to go through to amass a decent amount of experience in their field. Think of the compounding effects!

This is exactly why we need programs that prioritize diversity in hiring, to try to chip away at the biases that non-white candidates often face.

I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure).

We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well.

This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down.

I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual.

The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.

> (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD)

Just my opinion; as an aside. ANY engineer worth his or her salt, should be able to pivot from one to another. This is probably THE primary skill an engineer should have. Industry hiring practices mostly disqualify candidates based on this type of thing, and it's a terrible practice, and it leads to good qualified engineers getting pigeonholed into a skills-dead-end.

Most of the basic computer skills are applicable across all platforms. If they want to specialize in some skill set that you as an employer do not utilize, then they won't apply anyway.

So I'm saying; hire engineers who could use some professional development.

If you think MS-focussed people are generally low-skill and uninterested, it will be difficult to hire them for a non-MS skill (or any skill, for that matter).

But that can apply generally.

Need C# but they only know Java?

Cancel.

I'm fine with canceling people who are lazy or not smart or not interested, but canceling someone because of their stack just seems like finding plausible deniability.

I, too, feel guilty sometimes about being in the position I'm in as a straight white man. But at the end of the day, I have two options: quit, or use my position to better change the world, for lack of a better term. Despite being a white male, I am also a marginalized member of society due to my disability. Because of this, I spend a lot of time thinking about diversity and what it means and how we can improve our workplaces to be more inclusive and welcoming to marginalized groups.

I feel you. Don't let it get you down. Let's try and use our privilege to make the tech industry a more inclusive and welcoming place for those who do not have our privileges. Good luck. :)

> we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate)

That's incredibly racist.

These anecdote-for-anecdote hiring threads are often missing crucial elements like location. Even now with most jobs being significantly remote, hiring is very regional. Problems in one job market will often be non-problems in another and, especially where race is concerned, the demographics of different cities can be wildly different.

There’s also other ways the hiring pool becomes fragmented such as area of focus (e.g. game dev vs web dev vs embedded dev) that make employees non-fungible.

I guess the point is that both can be true. There can be a frustrating shortage of qualified under-represented minorities available to companies and it can be hard for qualified under-represented minorities to find work. The job market is not like the financial markets where money can mostly move fluidly to the area of highest opportunity. Job fits are more complex and we should naturally expect a much less efficient allocation of employees.

Totally possible! I'm just going by my own experience. Most of the applicants I've seen have been unqualified, though, at least going by their resumes. I'd love to find some talented women of color to join

more likely they optimize along the same dimensions as FAANG companies, i.e. proficiency in Leetcode and memorizing "system design" templates.

This leads to implicit discrimination against anyone who doesn't spend months grinding for these "exams", with the same distribution of "grades" across races/ethnicities/genders as e.g. math tests in schools.

We don't do this, actually. Our take-home code challenge is fairly straightforward (I suspect anyone with 2-3 years of real-world experience could complete it in a few hours). I do spend about 45-60 minutes per candidate in a phone screen to talk with them and get a sense of their experience. Our on-sites convert to hires at a pretty high ratio, because I try not to bring people on-site unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to hire them, and while we do a few whiteboarding exercises, my team is trained to ask questions that don't have a single correct solution. This isn't about memorizing trivia questions. It's about critical thinking skills and problem solving in real-time, and that's what we're trying to measure. If I give them a question and they take the entire 30 minutes to get halfway to the answer, that's OK.

But, having interviewed at a number of other companies in Silicon Valley, you aren't wrong. Most companies optimize on the FAANG dimensions and it's not particularly accessible for anyone who hasn't spent months grinding on those challenges. Not a good way to hire, imo.

This is not a dig at you, but describing even relatively humane processes like this to folks who aren't in tech will get you some real WTF reactions. Hours of homework to even get an actual interview, for example. "Whiteboarding" sessions in which one often has very little idea what will be asked about in advance (yours may not have this problem, but, for all that's shitty about FAANG-style interviews, at least it's pretty clear what sort of thing you need to be ready for—lots of other companies seem to want to keep even hints at the specifics of their interview process hush-hush like if it's not a goddamn pop-quiz drawing from potentially all of software development, trivia about languages and systems, and CS, then it won't work). The sheer length of the interview process is often surprising to people outside our industry, even. Multi-step and a single one of those steps may involve being grilled for half a day or more? That alone will get you some puzzled or alarmed looks from non-tech folks.

Yup, totally agree. A friend of mine is interviewing for a job and he's scheduled for a 3 hour "deep dive technical challenge" this afternoon. I think that's bonkers.

well i guess one benefit of this system is that it can be gamed if you put in x number of hours preparing for the semi-standardized test, regardless of your background, education, connections and even experience, while in non-tech roles hiring decisions could be more subjective and prone to bias.

not sure which one sucks less.

And yet, we're the ones wringing our hands over diversity while the problem's gotten much better over the same timespan, in such historically inclusive (haha) professions as Doctor and Lawyer.

Shit, I don't love it either, but it's entirely possible the answer to "how do we fix tech diversity?" is "more credentialism". "Do these things and you'll absolutely be able to get jobs at the level you've already proven you're qualified for, with a normal interview process" might be more appealing to a broader set of candidates than "after putting in all the work to get good, also survive a full day of hazing-whiteboarding and if you get really lucky we'll hire you, if not better luck next time, sometimes it takes several tries to pass even for good candidates. Oh and you'll have to do it again every time you switch jobs, which by the way you'll have to do constantly if you like meaningful raises."

Not having any turn over in 6 years in our field is kind of amazing. Do you think you're doing something different than the standard set of practices? How have you retained people for so long?

I would love to take credit for this, but I'm not sure I'm doing anything particularly mind-blowing. I would honestly attribute it to sheer luck. That said, my company has had increased turnover in the last 6 months, but my organization has not. Just to be clear that I'm not claiming nobody is leaving the company. But if the company overall has attrition and my team doesn't, I must be doing something right, right? Not necessarily... again, could be sheer dumb luck that I have people that hate looking for jobs or something.

(Disclaimer: I have fired people, and I have had two people transferred off my team onto other teams, and both of them have left the company, but I don't count those as attrition under me.)

But if I had to pick something as a thing that I do to make sure my teams are happy and want to stay, it's this: I care deeply about the people who work for me. I'm a people-first leader. I firmly and strongly believe that unhappy people do shitty work, and happy people do good work. I believe that you don't get what you don't ask for (eg, raises, promotions, cool projects), and I also believe that most people won't ask for those things... so I pro-actively ask for them. Our 1:1s are their time to talk about whatever they want to talk about. It's not my time to pontificate. But if they don't have anything to talk about, I'll ask them questions! Things like: where do you see yourself in 5 years? Are you happy with the project you're working on? Are there cool projects that you want to work on? Is there a piece of technology that you haven't used that you would like to learn?

And then once I get those answers, I work with them to achieve those goals. If they want to be a manager in 5 years, then we work on that. If they love the project they're on, then I get them more involved. If they want to work on Project X, then I figure out a way for them to transition off what they're doing now and move on to the other thing.

I also spend a lot of time getting to know them as people. I know their partner's and kids' names, their hobbies, where they go on vacation. I frequently ask questions about those, like, "Did [partner's name] get that promotion?" or "Are you looking forward to your next trip to Disney World?" or "Has [kid's name] seen the movie The Mitchells & The Machines?" and so on.

I'm transparent and honest. I make it clear that I support them as much as I possibly can, and that I would rather they be successful and happy than successful and miserable. One of my guys came to me about three months ago and said, "A recruiter from Stripe reached out to me about a role there. Why shouldn't I apply there?" and I just shrugged and said, "You should. You should always have an idea of what you're worth on the market, and if you think that's a better fit for you than here, I support you." And he applied and he got an offer and it was a little more than he was making here, but he declined because he felt like he'd be a cog in the machine at Stripe versus a valued member of my team. On the flip side, the offer clarified some ideas that he had in his mind about where he wanted to take his career, and so for the past few months we've been talking in our 1:1s about how to shift his career into a different direction, and he's been taking advantage of some opportunities that have come up.

(NOTE: Despite the above scenario, I would never ever suggest to your boss that you are looking elsewhere, no matter how good your relationship is with your boss. It puts us in a very difficult position regarding certain decisions around pay raises and bonuses and promotions and hiring and so on. I did give this feedback to this engineer.)

So if I had to claim credit for anything, it's just that. The soft skill of treating people like people, trusting them to do their jobs well, and giving them the space to make mistakes, learn, and grow along with me. After all, I don't know what the hell I'm doing either. :)

(I really do think I got lucky with a team of rockstar engineers.)

No turn overs in 6 years is really impressive. Not currently looking, but would love to know the company you're working for and possibly/hopefully grab a coffee when I'm in the area. Please shoot me an email (under my profile).

My general understanding of 'turnover' includes firings, but not layoffs.

And that seems appropriate to me.

Maybe 'attrition' or some other term would more accurately describe how stable a unit/org is outside of firings.

Or you could just say 'Nobody has quit me/the org, but I helped two folks transfer.'

That may be a better way to phrase it, yes. Nobody has quit me or my org voluntarily. Thank you.

> Number one for first two questions: hiring. Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard. I probably spend 30-40% of my time on the hiring side of things. We have so much work to do and not enough people to do it, and combining that with the slow rate of inbound high quality candidates means that I have to spend a ton of my time screening and talking to candidates.

Spending 30-40% on hiring is a lot. How is the current compensation and what does your hiring pipeline looks like? Internships? One of the smartest decision I've ever seen was to simply raise initial offers by quite a bit. Suddenly the quality of applicants just jumped.

> Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes.

I'm curious why does it matters? Shouldn't folks be hired on their abilities rather than some arbitrary reasons?

This is a great question.

Diversity is the solution to groupthink. From the book Surrounded By Idiots, the author demonstrates that people with different backgrounds and behaviour models come together to make stronger teams.

As engineers become more senior, they have a hand in design, in product etc. they bring something of themselves to their software solutions. Making software with only a team of white dudes means you miss the mark on issues important outside that group.

Also, inclusion goes hand in hand with diversity. People from all ethnicities and not just cis males can code, but if your team is mainly white guys, you have to work twice as hard convincing others that they'll be welcome and fit right in otherwise it becomes a self perpetuating pattern.

Also, "abilities" is subjective. If your exemplar for software engineer progression is a path that fits a majority white man route into the industry, and plays to the strengths of the people you promote, you'll over-index on those abilities. It's a good question to ask, what skills are we missing out on because our lack of diversity leads us to self selecting?

For transparency, I'm a white cis male manager, who manages a team of almost exclusively white cis males. I'm working on some long term strategic projects to help foster diversity in engineering in my city.

Well said.

Someone else answered the second part so I'll just focus on the first part. The 30-40% might be a little hyperbole, but napkin math says it's not terribly far off. The reason I spend that much of my time on hiring is because we always have more work than we have engineers, and we have yet to fill our headcount quota. There's ALWAYS a position open. It just never ends. Fortunately, I like the process, so it's not a burden on me!

Our comp isn't the most competitive in the SF Bay Area. It's competitive, but if you really want more money, there are other places to go. We're fine with that, generally. Our HQ is not in SF at all, and neither is our parent company, so there's some weirdness at the really high levels of the company about how much we should be offering people. In fact, there are some states that we hire in people make a KILLING. SF is not one of those. That said, we are competitive enough and I rarely get offers declined because of pay. Most folks don't even try to negotiate much, even though they should! [0]

I actually have a great closing rate! In other words, when I make an offer, people accept! I'm very good at selling people on the team and the company! If you get to the stage where I make you an offer, I am generally pretty confident that you're going to accept and that you're going to be a great fit.

But getting a candidate to that offer stage is fairly hard. My standards are a little different than most of my peers (a thesis on which I'm not sure I could elaborate coherently nor in the space allotted here on HN... maybe a future blog post), and so I suspect I spend less time actually interviewing than you might think. But "time on hiring" is not just the interviewing process. It's figuring out what the best process is, looking at our funnel and identifying bottlenecks, sourcing high quality candidates. Is our technical screen a good one? Does it evaluate what we think it does? Do our candidates that are rejected walk away feeling frustrated rather than challenged? Is it a fair and equitable hiring process? Is the interview panel a diverse cross-section of the company and representative of the types of folks the candidate would work with? Are we giving them adequate time to learn about us as well? I could go on...

Then there's the looking at resumes. Most of my peers are almost exclusively looking for senior roles, whereas I'm usually willing to have more of a mix between senior/intermediate/new engineers. This willingness depends on the composition of the team, but I actually really enjoy converting interns into full-time employees (75% success rate on that so far!). But we get SO. MANY. APPLICANTS. for every single role, that for me and my recruiting team to go through them and figure out which ones are worth taking 30 minutes out of my day to talk to, that takes time and energy. And I feel bad about every single person that I decline to speak to, but I just have to manage my time more efficiently or else I'd be spending 100% of my time on this specific part of the hiring process.

This part DOES take a lot of time, but truthfully, it's like 2-3 hours a week on any given week, and sometimes 4-5 hours on my worst weeks, and it's easily the worst part of the whole process.

The actual interview process, for me, is about 30+15 minutes per candidate. I do a 30 minute phone screen at the start, and then I'm usually the one who makes the offer at the end, since I have one the best closing rates in the company. The actual interview process is not a huge time sink for me. In fact, the interview process is pretty streamlined and at this point is kind of a well-oiled machine. I average about 1.5 offers per month, and I'd say we interview 3-5 candidates before one of them gets an offer, so this isn't tremendously burdensome.

Then there's the post-offer phase, where we need to coordinate with HR and recruiting to get the new hire onboarded, get them a laptop and some swag, make sure all of their credentials are set up, set up a welcome happy hour, and perhaps most importantly, make sure we have a well-defined project for them to start on day 1! There's nothing worse than starting on day 1 and twiddling your thumbs because nobody knows what you should be working on. It's the wooooorst. On average, my org has a new hire start every 2-3 weeks, so this isn't a trivial process, though it's far more streamlined than it was when I started.

Then there's the follow-up, which falls outside the "hiring" definition, but my managers and I absolutely spend time with the new hires for their first week or two to make sure they get up to speed quickly and become productive quickly. Especially since our primary programming language is Go and most folks don't know Go, so there's a short training class that we do to get them onboarded quickly.

So if you take the phrase "hiring" to mean only the interviewing process, then sure, 30% of my time seems like a lot. But when you add all the other stuff in, it's not really that bad. And in recent months, I've been training some of the managers to do it My Way (TM) and we're seeing some good results, so maybe it'll drop down to 15% soon! Ahh, a person can dream...

Thanks for the questions and the suggestion!

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Wanted to PM you but no contact info, so I'll do it thru here.

> Finding solid, dependable people with the right skills and attitude is really, really hard.

1. What are the soft skills of the candidates that you most value? 2. After 6 months, what the most important aspect that you value to decide if it was a good/great hire? 3. Offtopic: Do you have an all time favourite book for growth/self improvement you could recommend?

Thanks in advance!

>It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups.

I was a VP Eng with a slightly larger team, and EVERY subteam in my org included one or more folks in those groups.

I didn't go through any particular effort, but it's one of those things that builds on itself. Finding ANYONE was really difficult, so I couldn't target specific groups and hired anyone qualified that accepted an offer (which is probably how things should work).

The key was that many of the leaders of this tech company, including CEO and COO were women. That helped demonstrate that we weren't hiring folks just to hit quotas and that there really wasn't a glass ceiling at the company.

Yeah, at my company, our CEO and half of our C-level execs are women, but less than 20% of our engineers are women.

To your point, every team in my org also has one or more... but it's not enough to have one in each team. More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women. And when talking about people of color, the stats are even worse. It's less about whether we have any and more about whether our team composition reflects the population accurately.

To your other point, one of the reasons our teams are composed inequitably like this is because of exactly what you described: we have to take ANYONE who is qualified and accepts an offer, because otherwise we'd never even come close to our hiring goals! (Not that we ever meet those, anyway...)

> More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women.

You should try to match the pipeline, not the general population. For the bachelor in CS, women are only 18% in the US. Less than 20% of your engineers are women → normal outcome.

[0] -- https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

Correct, the pipeline is one of the biggest problems to solve, IMHO. When I actually looked at metrics, the makeup of my org was actually a fairly accurate representation of the pipeline as a whole, which was very encouraging.

It was an interesting state of affairs. When we were eventually acquired, I receive many comments praising the diversity of my org, and it was noted several times that, of the many dozens of acquisitions made by the company, ours was the first woman led company.

I hear you on the diversity front. As a former team/tech lead engineer, I was responsible for most of the hiring and resume screening on my team. Finding women and minority candidates was difficult, but unfortunately I was also hampered by the application intake process. In other words, my company wasn't reaching out to places like HBCU's or non-tech-bro events/meetups. That was mostly a function of HR. As a director you'd probably have more sway that I did at the time so maybe rejigger your outreach efforts to be more diverse?

I do attend a number of Women Who Code meetup events and I've been to two HBCU career fairs in the last few years. It's definitely something we do, but as you suggest, we could always do better. I'm a big advocate of this, but our recruiting team is the one who does most of the sourcing efforts and it's been tough to get them to think outside their traditional high-yield tech-bro mindset. I'm working on it!

Have you found hiring to be significantly more difficult in the last 6/12/18 months? I don’t mean the process - that’s universally more difficult since COVID began. I’m referring to the quality and behavior of candidates. Our job postings get as many responses as ever, but the candidates rarely match their resumes lately. And the number of interview no-shows is much higher than normal. This has turned into an astronomical rejection rate. Is anyone else seeing the same? If not it is long past time to re-evaluate our process.

I haven't seen that myself, but I don't think it's particularly surprising. We do get a lot of fresh college grads applying for jobs that I wouldn't normally consider them for, but we just either redirect them toward more junior roles or don't even process them altogether. I also have a fantastic relationship with our recruiter--we talk almost daily--and our minimum requirements (vs what's posted on the job ad) are clear enough that I normally don't get a lot of low-quality resumes sent to me directly.

This might be obvious, but not to me --- why are your minimum requirements not the same as what is posted on the job ad?

Great question! This is true of every industry, not just tech, but essentially it boils down to this: the job ad is for the ideal candidate. Sometimes you'll see ads for things like "10 years of Go experience" and then you look it up and you see that Go has only been around for 10 years! How many people can satisfy that?! Well, they can't, but wouldn't it be great if we got someone who could?

It's kind of like dating. You fill out your Tinder profile and you say you want someone SMART and FUNNY and BEAUTIFUL and TALENTED and INDEPENDENT and NERDY but also ATHLETIC and WANTS TO SPEND TIME WITH YOU and MAKES A LOT OF MONEY and HAS COOL PARENTS and ENJOYS THE SAME THINGS YOU DO and and and and...

And then you go on dates, and you realize that that perfect person doesn't exist, so on a case-by-case basis you say, "This person is smart and funny and talented and nerdy and I love spending time with them, but not the most attractive or the most athletic, and you know, that's OK!" or maybe "This person is beautiful and funny and athletic, and they also can't carry a tune or understand the complexities of my work life... but I can deal with that!" or in many cases, "This person ticks off every one of those boxes except.... we don't have anything in common and our conversations are boring... so no thanks."

Similarly, we have job descriptions that are say that we want someone with these 100 different things... and then we get the applicants in and pick the ones that satisfy as many of them as we possibly can. OK, so maybe you don't have 10 years of Go experience, but you have 5 years of Python experience AND you built your own CI/CD pipeline? That's cool! Let's talk. I can teach you Go, and you can bring your CI/CD genius to the table!

It's about putting your ideal case out there and seeing what comes in and then deciding what to compromise on.

If this sounds weird to you, consider the alternative: posting the minimum requirements. It would like filling out your Tinder profile and saying you want someone who CAN BREATHE and HAS SKIN and BATHES SOMETIMES. lol, how big of a disaster would THAT be?

(The big secret is: apply for any job that looks interesting, whether you think you satisfy the requirements or not. You never know! Honestly, most of it's for SEO anyway.)

Does that help?

Ahhh, got it, yes. I'm familiar with this practice[1] but for some reason it didn't jump out at me that this is what you were referring to.

Unsolicited speculation: I wonder if this is related to your hiring woes? I have vague memories of seeing research along the lines that marginalized groups are less likely to apply to positions that do things like "Want 10 years of Go experience". Of course not everyone already knows "the big secret" and maybe (some?) marginalized groups are less likely to know it.

I'm pretty sure I've seen lively debate on HN about this practice, as well, though I wouldn't know what keywords to search for. It's definitely not universal in the industry, or at least it's a continuum. An example I remember recently seeing of a posting on the lower end of the "requirements" spectrum is Mighty App[2], where the list of posted requirements is two items long. I think HN user 'tptacek has written about taking this even to the extreme of having no posted requirements, and doing all candidate qualification via a practical exercise.

Of course if you go that route then you might make the screening phase more difficult. You'd also have to convince Recruiting/HR to go along with it.

[1] After a month at my first job in the industry (I came from academia) I idly checked out the job listing for the position I was then holding, since I hadn't come in through a job listing but rather through a recruiter. There were something like eight "requirements", and I held exactly one of them (a PhD).

[2] https://www.notion.so/Mighty-is-hiring-945d3168d3e34a37883ca...

It's possible! I think our job descriptions are pretty reasonable, actually, so I don't think that's the problem. If anything, I'd say our compensation probably isn't as competitive as we'd like, and the kinds of folks we're talking about are in high enough demand that we just aren't putting enough dollars behind the push to get them... Not a whole lot I personally can do about that, but I do my best.

The Mighty listing and tptacek's thoughts are interesting ideas, but part of the process is the screening phase which, as you said, is more difficult if there are no barriers. But they seems to be fairly successful, so maybe it's working out!

these sorts of job descriptions are a well know barrier to entry for women and minorities, correcting them is like DEI 101

> it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes.

What's wrong with that? I'm not in the US, so I don't know. Is there a law against teams of white dudes? Or is it just about avoiding a possible witch hunt by the media/activist?

I'm curious about what roles you're currently hiring for. After reading your other thoughtful comments on HN, I'm even more curious to virtually meet you. :-) If you care, feel free to reach out to me at aleksandr <dot> blekh <at> Gmail.

> Number two problem relating to the above: diversity. It's nigh impossible to find women and other marginalized groups. They're in such high demand and the supply is so low that it's just so hard to hire people and have your team not look like a team of white dudes.

Aren't "marginalized" and "in such high demand" somewhat contradictory?

Rather than "marginalized", which implies active resistance to the entry of people into the industry, which is clearly not the case, perhaps a more neutral term like "relatively rare" would be both accurate and not contradictory.

But of course, what I just said is thoughtcrime, even though it's obviously true.

You might be incorrectly conflating "underrepresented" with "marginalized." While it's true that the marginalized groups that we're talking about (women, people of color, people with disabilities) are also underrepresented, those are not the same things at all, and I chose the word "marginalized" intentionally.

Here's a link to what seems like a decent definition of "marginalization" to me: https://www.inhersight.com/blog/guide/marginalization

I would argue that people with disabilities are the only people in that list who are actually discriminated against and marginalized in the tech industry (or in most other areas of life), and yet far fewer resources are dedicated to reaching out to them and encouraging them to join companies than the other groups mentioned.

I suspect we would disagree about the facts of who is marginalized or discriminated against, and that's probably not something we can resolve in a comment thread. My position is based on data I've read, and I'm sure yours is as well, but it would probably take a lot of time to merge those data sets and come to a consensus opinion.

At this point, I actually think some of the people in the "majority group" are being marginalized, due to the focus on basically anyone else being preferentially hired. When a person from the majority group is being considered for a role, the attitude I've seen expressed during hiring discussions is, "But is there nobody else available? Ugh. Oh well, I guess we need to hire this white guy." And that's not limited to attitude... I've heard very similar words expressed.

As someone else mentioned, when we say "marginalized" in the context of diversity hiring not just referring to the hiring process. There's value in hiring people who have been marginalized elsewhere. Black people in the United States go through life in a totally different manner than white people. Immigrants face hurdles that citizens are not even aware of. Women face obstacles like harassment and dismissiveness everywhere from their local grocery store to parent-teacher conferences to their jobs and even in the courtrooms. Having teams that reflect these viewpoints in the room where it happens is valuable.

Consider a lot of the camera-related fiascos in the tech industry recently. Until very recently, Twitter routinely cropped out non-white faces on photo previews. Why? Potentially because people of color weren't involved enough in the process to notice. Augmented reality and facial recognition routinely fail when paired up with the faces of people of color. Amazon in the not-so-distant past tried to use AI to filter resumes, and it wound up throwing out all of the women. If more women had been involved, perhaps that might have been caught earlier.

A lot of these are hypotheticals, and we may never know how the ethnic composition of the teams affected the final output, but it's hard to argue that having a more diverse team is a bad thing when it comes to issues like this.

And for what it's worth, the thought isn't "ugh, we gotta hire this white guy," but rather "does hiring yet another white guy bring something to the table that we don't already have and couldn't get from a woman or person of color?" The answer is "probably not."

I have heard words very similar to "ugh, we gotta hire this white guy" actually expressed out loud. So yes, that really is the thought some people have. It is NOT "does hiring another white guy bring something to the table...". And even if it were the latter form, it would still be an ugly thing to say.

Also, not all white people, black people, or any other group of people based on their skin color, sex, or other obvious characteristics are the same. A black person and a white person both with a net worth above a million dollars will have life experiences more similar than two white people, one of which grew up incredibly poor and one of which has a million dollars.

In my opinion, we shouldn't be trying to achieve diversity on the basis of outward characteristics. What that ends up doing is giving huge advantage to already-advantaged people who look like people from sometimes marginalized groups, and a huge disadvantage to non-advantaged people who look like people from sometimes advantaged groups, statistically speaking.

We should judge people as individuals, not as members of categories.

What about the advantage and disadvantage of people who grew up in single parent vs two parent households? What about people who are first vs 3rd generation college students? People who had to work during college vs those who didn't? What about their mental health? Abuse as a child? Are we going to put all these on a questionnaire? There are too many possible influences on a person's life to account for, and focusing only on the outward physical appearance seems like a very blunt and inaccurate instrument.

> Consider a lot of the camera-related fiascos in the tech industry recently.

Serious question. How much of this is due to “move fast and break things” and incompetence as opposed to discrimination and biases caused by white people?

I keep hearing the narrative in podcasts that this is an issue caused by having white people be involved in tech, but I’ve seen many cases where developers just ship something out and expect the users to do testing.

They meant "marginalized" in a far broader context than hiring. Just because someone is in high demand for a job doesn't mean they aren't marginalized in other aspects of their life.