I personally have worked with new hires that most certainly did not meet the bar but were hired because of their minority group to increase diversity. I really wondered how they passed their interview because their technical ability clearly did not meet the standard.
I was also involved in an interview with a candidate that was not qualified however the other interviewer passed them and said they’re giving them the benefit of the doubt because they were POC!!!
I’m all for diversity and increasing chances of folks from minority groups, but not at the cost of lowering the bar. Note that I’m not saying that ppl from minority groups are less competent, just that the bar is lowered for them when it’s not for others.
I myself am from a POC background and I really wonder if that was the case with me. Does it mean that Im less qualified and would not have been hired if I was not POC? It’s really not fair to me if so.
What you describe is but one symptom.
This all sounds insane to me and I wouldn't have believed this if not for the fact that I was once asked by the (female) founder of a company I worked for if I knew any female engineers looking for work because another friend of hers was looking to hire specifically female engineers. I was surprised and mentioned that being sexist and she didn't seem to see anything wrong with it. It's incredible what a double standard there is when it comes to sexism because if the genders were reversed, it'd be national news.
Out of curiosity; how would lgbt developers be identified in this case? Since sexual orientation is not visible per se and I guess you cannot ask, is one just looking for specific patterns of behavior or dressing etc?
Staffing agencies even have facets in their CRMs/spreadsheets list/search system to quickly identify candidates.
Well, obvious selection bias at play-- only some lgbt people do this.
If any founders/managers/HR people are reading this: I say this as a member of the lgbt community: if sexual orientation is completely irrelevant to the actual work (don't kid yourself, it probably is), then promoting careerist opportunism over irrelevant aspects of one's identity is not helpful. We don't need handouts, we actually need the same level of respect as everyone else. Please stop treating sexuality as being up for exploitation.
I'm under extreme pressure to hire and promote female, lgbt, or poc developers (even if under qualified). Resumes are filtered by third party contractors before they even get to me, so our company has plausible deniability. We have third party diversity groups give seminars, that are borderline insidious because they imply all men are just handed their positions and money or there is a global conspiracy to keep women out of tech.
This causes me EXTREME difficulty because my team is extremely high performance highly technical and critical team. I cannot compromise on skills or allow a hire that would demoralize the team.