I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.
I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to address originally was that a hiring manager might choose a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal I don't know, but it's not fairness.
Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the hiring managers would be making perfect decisions. I do not think this is at all the case though. Regardless, I think it is better to correct for the traits that do have advocacy behind them rather than just not doing any correction at all.
Thus, I don't think we can expect the hiring process to become transparent anytime soon. It is known that the (opaque) hiring process does discriminate based on race. If I had to guess, the policy mentioned in the article is a direct response to papers like [1], which show that simply changing a person's name to be more "ethnic" results in their application being considered less. Thus I don't mind if someone tries to opaquely enforce a rule like the one in the article to counterbalance this.
The more pain (and hence unlikely to see the light of day) would be companies chipping into a educational fund to support impoverished individuals who would need added education to make it into positions where they can support themselves and break the difficult to climb wealth ladder.
He'll, even the location of on-site jobs can be considered discrimination. All our candidates must attend interviews at our offices in NY, SF, London, or Seattle. All others can spend their own bucks to travel here for the hope that we'll hire you .
Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.
"Black people are this percentage of the company. We need to show minorities respect and ensure they're doing well economically by ensuring that we hire a certain percentage of minorities, and then hire the best among them. This is something they fought for through the political system, and it's something every group can benefit from if they ever find themselves under-represented"
I'd be like, well I don't like my asian friend Clive is not getting hired after trying so hard in school, I might disagree with it, but I would at least understand where it's coming from. However how these policies are actually justified is nonstop racism. "white privilege, "You were only hired because of unconscious bias", so on and so forth as people are paraded into mandatory racism training seminars. I'm just sick and tired of the racism from the DEI bigots and the way they parade around as anti-racists honestly makes me want to projectile vomit.
A. Spend a lot of time and effort growing into someone with the skills and social access to be a part of one of those middle-class (or with luck upper-class) families.
B. Spend a moderate amount of time and effort maintaining a position in the lower-middle-class.
C. Spend a small amount of time and effort to fall into the lumpenproletariat.
D. Spend an enormous amount of time and effort to gather a group of conscientious and industrious peers to form a new militant group which seeks to take power, trusting them to be rational enough to act effectively and loyal enough not to betray your cause.
E. Join an established militant group.
Why does Microsoft care? Microsoft wants to sell services to various governments, who want to maintain monopsony power on recruiting those who choose path E.
That seems like the primary feature at this point.
Their network of friends and knowledge of the government is not the kind of things that one can buy with money normally.
https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/african-americans-f...
The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status. And while a higher socio-economic status can help to offset that discrimination, we have no evidence it eliminates it.
They're a self-reinforcing loop. A lot of racism is affecting socio-economic status (redlining, no generational wealth) and the bad socio-economic status then fuels the continuation of the disadvantaged status alongside racism.
Using population level pigmentation correlated statistics is an utterly baffling, and confused, way to design a hiring process.
They are more likely to be convicted, and are given longer sentences when they are: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...
They are 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/report-black-people-7-5-ti...
All else equal I would pick the employee with 1/7th the chance of being wrongfully convicted, as having my employee in jail is bad for business.
It's also essentially impossible to anonymize resumes in a way that would provide meaningful distinction between people.
Resume design, for instance, is a fairly strong signal for how a developer might think, or their personal attention to detail and craftsmanship.
You'd be amazed how often we don't even need to read a resume to tell whether someone is whether someone is worth hiring.
More broadly, I think you're confusing "non-discriminatory" with "equal chances". A blind audition doesn't mean all participants have equal chances of success. Someone who's been playing the violent for 25 years is probably going to have a better shot than someone who has only a few years of experience - and the lattice has better chances than me, who has zero experience. The fact that we have unequal chances of landing a spot in the orchestra isn't evidence of discrimnation. It's the system working as intended: the more skilled musician has greater chances of getting a spot, regardless of factors like race, gender, etc.
In the context of tech hiring, the purpose of the hiring process is to confer greater chances of success for candidates with relevant skills and ability. If someone is hiring for a position demanding C++ experience, then candidates who are C++ wizards are more likely to succeed at this job opening than people who occasionally dabble in C++.
I am not confusing "non-discriminatory" with "equal chances". I have no idea why anyone would. Obviously, a person with 12 years experience coding in a specific language or stack would be preferable to hire, depending on budget, to someone with none.
That is not the issue any of these measures address, or even should address. No one is arguing we should be hiring people with a GED as physicians because they're "diverse".
You're arguing at a straw man.
Similar tech could be used to mask accents.
I suspect the real reason people are so hesitant to anonymize interviews is that the disparities will persist - or even grow larger - and it'll be more difficult to ascribe it to racism or sexism.
If technology could be developed which masked pitch, accent, idioms, patterns and approach, I suspect it would change hiring rates.
I suspect the reason you think such technology wouldn’t improve the situation is because you’re a bigot.
This is already possible. Idioms are more specific, but how often do you encounter an identifying idiom in a technical phone interview. "Patterns and approach" are part of the software development skills being measured - it's like saying a blind orchestra discriminates between people of different musical skill.
> I suspect the reason you think such technology wouldn’t improve the situation is because you’re a bigot.
Then let's start using anonymous hiring tools and find out who's right. But again, for some reason, those who most ardently claim that interviews are biased against "diverse" candidates are oddly resistant to anonymization.
You need to revisit what "culture" means, and how many people of a given race share a culture.
> "Patterns and approach" are part of the software development skills being measured.
This was about speech patterns and conversational approaches, which vary greatly across cultures, both socio-economic, national and internal.
> Did you miss the empirical evidence to the contrary linked earlier?
You posted a blog post, from a startup. It was not peer-reviewed. It was not readily duplicatable. I'm not sure how to have a conversation with a person's whose standard of evidence for "genders and races are inherently inferior" is "a guy on a website said it."
You can easily test whether anonymization is working: have interviewers try to guess the identity characteristics of the applicant and if they're able to distinguish between them then it's failing. If the interviewer is unable to infer it, then the anonymization is working.
> I'm not sure how to have a conversation with a person's whose standard of evidence for "genders and races are inherently inferior" is "a guy on a website said it."
Who on earth said this? This reads like a complete no sequitur. Who is saying that genders and races are inherently inferior?
I'm not sure how to have a conversation who thinks that the mere notion that not all disparities are due to bias means "genders and races are inherently inferior." Men are vastly overrepresented among murder convictions. If someone says this is not because of bias, but because men commit more murders are you going to accuse them of sexism?
Well that sure beats institutionalized racism
If you presuppose that giving disadvantaged groups an extra chance is a positive (your argument sort of does already) and only use wealth as a factor, isn't it still a net positive to uplift the typically poorer group? Doesn't that rightfully uplift more people than it does "wrongly"?
Why judge people by the groups that were born into when we could be judging them as individuals instead?
Point being this whole strive for 'ultimate equality' is going to create victims in its fanatical wake. No perfect method exists and no one wants to be on the losing end. But it is easier for those in a position of affluence to decide who is allowed in, as long as they won't get hurt themselves.
The whole woke DEI idea of people being "disadvantaged" is itself a disempowering notion. It tells people that there is no point making better decisions or trying harder in life, because what you do or don't do doesn't matter, only outcomes matter, and if they are poor someone else will give you stuff for free. It's the ultimate form of emasculation.
But at the resume level all we're doing is using heuristics to decide who deserves an interview. Are white applicants with a 3.2 gpa more likely to be successful than black ones with a 3.1 gpa? I have no idea. I don't think you do either. Really the only way to find out is to hire some black applicants and compare them which might be what msft is doing.
And you believe this is a function of skin color?
We do know that skin color is a decisive factor in discrimination. You suggest to let this continue to happen (do nothing) because some specific individuals of a discriminated skin color do not seem to be discriminated.
So you just need one token black guy, not even in every company, just one, promoted to near executive-level, so that people like you can say "look; if they want to, they can!"
And then you can all go on with your lives pretending you're there because of your merits.
The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect parity according to existing criteria (no one category is less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing ones. The game will never end.
You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the obvious existing problem.
There might be a slippery slope in the future, I agree, but that doesn't mean there isn't an active problem now!
60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!
... Yes? At least in countries such as US, where these people in those professions can make large amounts of money. In my country (Poland), up to very recently, doctors were poorly paid and thus large number of doctors were women.
>I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd?
Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong.
In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being for boys. They were the pioneers of the computer science world and in an era where things were incredibly technical without the resources we take for granted.
The field of software business changed rapidly in the 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only natural that men became much more interested in it at that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get that $500k salary).
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-bias-pushed-the-compu...
[2] https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/born-it-how-image...
[3] https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-...
You can see here in the chart that women were nearing 40% of all computer science majors in the mid-80s, followed by a sharp drop-off into below 20% today [1]. There's about a 15ish year lag period for changes in hiring, perception and stereotypes to catch up as people graduate, join the work force and cycle out.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
No, the money part is pretty accurate historically. Almost every field with high income historically attracted far more men than women once it became public knowledge. Job status and money are very disproportionately more important to men.
Or wait a second, I guess it isn't public knowledge doctors make a lot of money.
To answer the question as coldly as I can:
1) Women are graduating from nearly all University programmes more than men.[0]
2) The role of Doctor is not as highly paid or prestigious as it used to be, at least in Europe.[1]
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...
[1]: https://www.paragona.com/healthcare-jobseekers/where-would-y... ; cites a 70k average where a project manager will make an average of 99k: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-project-manager...
I'm sorry that you consider it hostile to be exposed to the obvious truth that your incredibly self-motivated (you are a man after all) beliefs are the problem.
In the most unequal societies (Russia[0], India[1]) the tech industry is much closer to gender parity than in the west.
Sweden has gone further than any other nation on earth to be equitable across gendered lines yet remains extremely unequal in the actual working model. (In my former employer 14% of applicants were women, yet they constitute 20% of employed staff due to excessive D&I initiatives).
I should be self interested, we’re talking about competition for work. It would be death to roll over. Jobs are absolutely zero sum-
However my argument is backed by statistics, so I think you need to face the reality in front of you.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39579321
[1]: https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-employment-tr...
Sibling already pointed some things out. Specifically for doctors, go ahead and look up what specializations men go into primarily and what specializations women go into primarily. The only high paying one I noticed being particularly female-dominated is dermatology, and it's not that much of a difference. The male-dominated specialties tend to have far more high earning specializations, and the ratios are far more skewed too.
As for lawyers, I can't speak except for the fact lawyers work more akin to salesmen and make a lot of money based on performance, and once again, historically speaking, men have always dominated on anything performance-based. Law is an exception, and it's an extremely poor one at that.
As for both, both medicine / biomedical sciences and law pale in comparison to every other field known to both pay well and do so with high security still being largely in favor of men, whereas fields with low pays and low security tend to be dominated by women. Most STEM fields women dominate aren't known for paying well compared to the ones men dominate. Comparing those fields to social sciences is a no-brainer. All of this still excludes entrepreneurship and high-paying blue collar work still being dominated by men.
None of this exempts the fact historically, women have never chased money through career nearly as much as men, and have always placed far higher value on a man's status than vice versa. There are cultural reasons why this has changed, and none of those reasons are necessarily pointing towards improvements. We can open this entire can of worms if you so desire, but it will go far too off-topic for this.
What's fascinating is how people are trying to avoid talking about the obvious motivator for men not present in women, and how the slow death of that motivator is affecting things.
Take a look in the mirror before trying to subtly call someone ignorant, would you?
the parent was at least trying to make a reasoned point, even if you don't agree with him.
This is Hacker News not Prime Ministers Questions. We're here for intellectual curiosity, some measure of vulnerability and open discussion.
Calling people bigoted or old fashioned isn't swaying anyone, if anything it will push people away because as soon as someone says "they've got a point there" and there's backlash instead of a rebuttal: you've lost another person.
There was not reason in the parent's point, and I believe such arguments have no right to be treated as serious.
edit: typo
> You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the obvious existing problem.
I dont see a problem.
Most certainly. Anyone else will get paid to learn CS on the job so it would be rather silly of them to spend their own dime in college. There is no free lunch here. If you strive for diversity in the workplace it is going to disappear from other places.
This notion of "qualified for the job" is really blurry in our field though. For example, is someone fresh out of a three months bootcamp qualified for a job at Microsoft?
"Technically qualified for the job" isn't some ineffable abstraction. Most programming jobs at Microsoft are quite well defined, and qualifying people for them mostly means extracting solved problems from the work and presenting them uniformly to a pool of candidates. You don't need science to figure out how to do this, although if you want it, it was all worked out and written down in the 1950s.
Where/by who? This would be cool to have onhand.
I do not mean to imply that "diversity" hires have those properties and non-diversity hires do not. However, I'd argue that if you don't make an effort to at least talk to everybody you can (phone screens), then you are going to miss a lot of people who are great.
Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we interviewed any non-whites or non-catholics, the interview would be unbiased towards them"
Is that a non-discriminatory hiring process? The fact that non-catholics and non-whites weren't even given a chance to interview is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the White Catholics that were still had to pass a skill-based interview?
Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates.
Two people growing up in different places (not different cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city) have lived in completely different worlds. Their schools are different; their health care is different; their safety is different; their opportunities are different; the people they know are different. And much of the time there's a stark racial difference in the makeup of those places. Historically this was very much intentional; but even if it were no longer intentional, the effects won't dissipate for a long time.
So when you get a slate of candidates that all happen to be white, it's not just a random coincidence. Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?
Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to elevate candidates that just barely miss out. In other words, candidates that are strong, but, say, don't know anyone that works at microsoft (no surprise there... two worlds) or perhaps don't think they're good enough.
The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice, but, if the company works harder to find qualified black candidates then obviously the percentage would rise. Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does) then improving a hiring process would result in an employee population that more closely matches the demographics of the population at large.
But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism.
Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty.
So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.
This is false. But let me charitably engage your argument and ask you the following -- if your premise is correct, that means that lower access to education and economic attainment among under represented people of color has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with...something. What is that thing? Why would it be the case that, as Philosopher Liam Bright says, "the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by"?
No.
So it's not about race. (I just gave you proof.)
It's about wealth and social class. Sure, those might correlate with race, and even be caused by racism (past or present), but virtually all real world consequences are downstream of wealth (in particular the ones mentioned: where you live, what you can afford, the amount of free time you have, your health, your nutrition, access to education/jobs, ...).
If you ignore wealth and focus on race, you're racist.
But you're not arguing that we give opportunities to people without good access to education and poor finances. You're arguing we give opportunity based off race. In fact, there are far more white people in the US with poor access to education. If you really wanted to increase opportunities for such people you wouldn't accomplish it by judging by race.
More total or more per-capita?
The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were discriminated against (Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). The main difference seems to be cultural values that prioritize the nuclear family and educational attainment. The SAT isn't racist, poor black people who study do far better than rich white people who don't.
If America was so racist, the single most successful ethnic minority wouldn't be Nigerians. It has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the culture, family, and values you grew up with.
Do you have a source for this? Not for debate, I'm genuinely wondering where the information comes from. From time to time I've heard things about people from Nigeria being hardworking - haven't looked into it very deep though.
FWIW and from anecdotal accounts of acquaintances of mine (not a lot but in the double digits), this comes down to a cultural focus on education and family structure from a young age. Compare to the culture and family values promulgated elsewhere.
This might actually be the best plausible argument in favor of affirmative action and D&I policies targeted towards these folks. By making it easier for them to enter especially high-skilled industry sectors such as tech we strengthen their incentive for adopting more effective cultural norms, which has significant benefits in the longer run.
(Unfortunately, this won't do any good if the educational system as a whole is not up to reasonable standards - if you're uneducated, you're still practically barred from the most productive and lucrative careers. And U.S. K-12 public education sucks.)
Wasn't there a Harvard study that concluded the biggest factor was a 2 parent household?
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/01/new-harvard-study-w... (Slate: What’s the most important factor blocking social mobility? Single parents, suggests a new study.)
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754 ("Where is the land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States")
Oh that's right... racism.
What is their average household income?
What countries in Africa do most of them come from?
Where do I read more about this?
Wealth, Poverty, and Poltics reads like a textbook, but provides a wealth of information about causes of disparity that have nothing to do with racism. Similarly, conquest and cultures talks a lot about disparate impact throughout history.
One of the foundational tenets of CRT is that all racial disparity is caused by systemic racism, and, therefore, that all racial disparity must be addressed by systemic change until there are equal outcomes. This idea is fundamentally wrong on a billion levels, and also insanely harmful to society. It is one of the main reasons, if not the primary reason, why CRT is so wrong and so dangerous. When you diagnose the illness so completely wrong, and then diagnose the cause of the alleged illness so completely wrong, then, your prognosis is not only going to fail to improve anything, it's going to make things worse for everyone!
Edit: according to this study, there is no race achievement gap—it is entirely accounted for by poverty
https://edsource.org/2019/poverty-levels-in-schools-key-dete...
These things aren't mutually exclusive, stop trying to project them as such.
Yet there are more white people in poverty than black people in the US. If we are trying to give opportunity to impoverished people we would judge by poverty. If we want to live in a racist society then we would judge by race.
Where are you people getting these stats? This is being repeated elsewhere and is not based in reality at all.
You may be thinking of poverty rates or proportional percentages if you think the above is untrue. The data is there for you to manipulate for your purposes as you wish, though.
True: There are more white people in poverty (~5.5% of population) than black people [in poverty (~2.5%)] in the US.
False: There are more white people in poverty (~5.5%) than black people [in or out of poverty (~13.6%)] in the US.
But it also shouldn't be surprising. There are almost 6x as many white people in the US as black people. Poverty rates amongst white people is about half of black people. Do the math.
You've given the exact reason why your statement is a completely useless red herring. Say there was a minority in the U.S., the Romulans. Let's say literally every single Romulan in the U.S. was impoverished due to hundreds of years of systemic, intentional racism. But there's only, say, 500,000 of them. Half a million.
Your argument is "we shouldn't give more opportunities to the Romulans to counteract the very obvious and intentional systemic racism that put them in the shitty position they're in, because way more white people are in that shitty position. We should only focus on poverty, so that we help 36 white people for every 1 Romulan helped. Even though the Romulans are impoverished because of intentional, systemic racism. Even though their towns were literally bombed if they dared get too successful. Nope, we have to help 36 white people each time we help 1 Romulan." Do you see why that sounds racist?
Your first inclination when someone ask for the source of the statistic you cite is to ask why it's important?
Do you expect anyone to take your argument seriously after doing that?
Asians sure, but I would think diversity programs generally try to include them too.
Discriminating against a group of human beings for an arbitrary detail such as the color of the skin is indeed racist. No matter if that human being is a freaking north-europe-blonde-arian-white or whatever. No matter if that human being is or not opressed or whatever. Judging people by the color of the skin is WRONG. This ideological bullshit that US is expelling that pretends to normalice racism against white people is atrocious and must end and everyone, like you, that follows this line of thought must be called out and being exposed as what you are, which is being a fucking racist.
Seriously, it is beyond me.
How uncharitable. I never said either racism was bad, just that one has less weight behind it.
> Also, stop assuming that the whole world has the same historical context as the US.
This is a thread about a US based company so assuming the historical context of the US matters is fair.
Also anti-black racism exists across the world.
> This is a thread about a US based company so assuming the historical context of the US matters is fair.
I was talking in general terms given that I've encountered this US ideological racist garbage in many places at this point.
> Also anti-black racism exists across the world.
Not at least where I'm originally from (Africa).
I cannot get my head around any of these arguments other than pure and simple indoctrination. As soon as you apply basic common sensical logical reasoning to it, you see how outrageous and ridiculous is.
The whole "prejudice + power" thing is a late social studies invention. Which is fine - different fields of study often have their own terminology, including using words in ways that do not directly match their regular meaning. What's not fine is people from those fields of study lecturing everyone else on how we're supposedly using it wrong. It's like biologists going around randomly yelling at people that tomatoes aren't vegetables whenever the subject comes up... except biologists don't do that.
Of course you can. And it's really easy, too. You simply discriminate against their race (or, as you have described, their skin color).
In case you haven't figured it out by now, if a human being can be lumped into a race, then racism can be levelled towards that person. That's literally baked into the meaning of the word racism.
Tell me you do not know the history of the USA. I’m a fucking Canuck and even I know that post-war housing support for the returning troops was starkly racist, that lenders were blatantly racist in their policies, that every fucking aspect of the #1 way to establish future generational prosperity - owning a house in a nice neighbourhood - was stacked against blacks.
The poverty exists On. Fucking. Purpose. It is racism that has created impoverished black neighbourhoods in America.
FFS, Black Wall Street was bombed by White America because racism prevents black people from getting ahead.
My god.
So mind your own “fucking” business, hoser. You think your country has none of its own problems to solve?
I would have banned the two of you, but I don't want to ban you without a warning and I'm not going to let you off the hook while banning the other person, so I'm going to let you both off the hook. However, please don't ever vandalize HN like this again.
You can't vandalize HN like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are. And you've done it elsewhere recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33148354. That's not ok.
I actually banned you just now, but decided to undo it because the other user was also way over the line. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please respect the rules from now on.
The top comment doesn't care about that at all, skin color is all that matters. It's about group identity, not differences in backgrounds. They'd give Obama's daughter "a foot in the door" over the daughter of some white hillbillies that is the first in her family to finish high school. Because obviously: group identity is paramount.
I agree, it is incoherent for people to say that certain racial groups being over-represented doesn't mean the system isn't fair, but blacks suddenly being hired is evidence the system isn't fair.
>So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel
With racism... and honestly this entire process is annoyingly indirect... just apply a racial quota and don't BS me.
> Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate.
People sure are obsessed with this narrative that affirmative action is all about preventing too many whites from getting jobs. This isn't the 60s, most of the people who are getting the bump are asian not white and it's not even close. This narrative doesn't work because it's nearly impossible to explain how asians ended up in the span of around a century ended up way behind whites and getting discriminated against to shooting past them in income.
> Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does)
If you claim that people can get worse healthcare, worse schools, worse safety, worse opportunities, and know less connected people and still think they perform equally at a job? Well you actually are still predicting performance, you're predicting that certain groups are stoic supermen. Whereas other groups are a bunch of losers who couldn't even be better at their job despite growing up with every advantage in the world. So not only have you not gotten away from predicting performance based on skin colour, now you're also predicting privilege based on skin colour, so you've doubled your race based assumptions.
Personally I'm just so done with the racist theories and the mental gymnastics people play around this data. If people want to reserve jobs for people of different identity groups, fine, lets do it for the sake of racial harmony so we can all sing songs together holding hands interracially in a circle.
Incorrect, for these aren't the same thing: one has existed for a long time and the other is a sudden change. The latter begs an explanation, and it's there: deliberate management manipulation of the candidate pool. It's therefore understandable that co-workers will see such hires/promotions as based in part on factors beyond performance.
In which direction was the manipulation? How do you prove that the pool manipulation was neutral before and is now favouring blacks, rather than it was disadvantaging blacks and has now moved to a more neutral postion?
"has existed for a long time" is just an appeal to tradition. It says nothing about the validity or correctness of the previous situation.
Anonymize the applicants. You can determine what a neutral pool is by removing the ability to discriminate between applicants of different race, gender, etc.
Maybe, maybe not. In either case, two wrongs don't make a right. If you want to eliminate discrimination then you need to stop discriminating. The solution is not to counter-discriminate, it's to remove the discrimination further up the funnel, to use your analogy.
Why would that be odd? It does happen in sport, and nobody cares (nor should they).
> So a good thing to do is apply some pressure
Why is it good? Author talks about not being able to hire for several months due to lack of DIE candidates in the pipeline.
Of course a giant like Microsoft can afford to waste resources, but for a lot of startups doubling down on DIE means to literally die.
In the US? Well yeah. Black people comprise 1% of college graduates. White people are 60%.
Why would that be odd? You just quoted the author as saying they looked for months to find non-white candidates and failed. Do you work in tech? That's the norm. If someone tried to hire for a tech position and got a slate of entirely non-white candidates, that would be entirely remarkable.
> Why is it good?
It's good because if your hiring funnel doesn't represent the general population then it is biased and therefore sub-optimal. It's good because we enslaved a population for generations and then tried as hard as possible to keep them out of the middle class, and I think that's a bad thing.
So 0.1% of engineers in the funnel should be Amish and 18% should be younger than 14.
There might be a flaw in your logic.
Jokes aside, this is maliciously reductive. There's too many factors contributing to the funnel (location, sourcing channels, employer, job preference, hiring market state) that makes predictions about funnel virtually impossible. But you already know it. You're not here for the truth, you're here to push your ideology.
> It's good because we enslaved a population for generations
My ancestors were thousands of miles away from US territory when slavery happened. In fact, it is quite likely they were slaves themselves. And yet you're saying I'm supposed to pay the price for your crimes just because of my skin color.
That sounds quite racist to me. Luckily, my skin is not only white, it's also thick.
> I'm supposed to pay the price for your crimes
Whose crimes, the person you're replying to? Do you believe in some sort of original sin handed down by your ancestors? Your blood is pure because your ancestors were victims, but GP's blood is tainted because their ancestors were slave owners? You're making some seriously insane judgements based on a person's ancestry.
And who's paying any price anyway? Hiring from a limited pool of candidates is sub-optimal. What price are you even talking about?
So when a white person gets a high-paying job, it's because of history of slavery. If a black person gets a high-paying job, it's because they worked hard. Did I get that right?
No wonder Trump got elected when this is the agenda.
> You don't get to ignore the history that has led to the life you currently live just because Genghis Khan burned down your (great)^30th ancestor's village. It has nothing to do with that.
So Genghis Khan has nothing to do with that. But slavery has everything to do with that. Is there a threshold I'm not aware of? How far in the past we have to look at to be able to claim "event X led to event Y".
Lots of Jews ended up in US during World War 2, and now their grandkids are doing quite well. Should they be thanking Hitler because he is the "history that has led to the life they currently live"?
> Do you believe in some sort of original sin handed down by your ancestors?
Obviously I don't, but that's what this person implied.
> You're making some seriously insane judgements based on a person's ancestry.
When I speak your language, I sound insane. Good.
> Hiring from a limited pool of candidates is sub-optimal
To me "optimal" is the minimum amount of effort that leads to maximum results. E.g. if you get enough resumes by posting a job on your website you don't need to put extra effort to find more candidates. I'm curious to hear what's your definition. I suspect it requires augmenting math with morals.
Finally, here's a couple of questions for you to think about:
1. How should countries with homogenous skin color deal with history of slavery?
2. Should we exclude Nigerian Americans from DIE / affirmative action policies, because they are doing better than average American?
Not quite. I said "led to", not "because", and everything that happens today was "led to" by history, including a black person getting a high-paying job. Remember this was all in response to this rather amazing comment:
> My ancestors were thousands of miles away from US territory when slavery happened ... and yet you're saying I'm supposed to pay the price for your crimes just because of my skin color.
You're using "my" and "we" to mean "me and my particular ancestors" and "you and your ancestors", whereas the person you were replying to was very clearly using "we" to mean "the history of all of humanity". The latter acknowledges reality as it is right now and the events leading up to it, and the former relies on some magical inheritance of responsibilities depending on your blood ancestors.
> So Genghis Khan has nothing to do with that. But slavery has everything to do with that.
Again you're ignoring the point. Both of these events led to the world as it is today, and neither of us is more responsible for them than the other. Your ancestors, my ancestors: that has nothing to do with it. And you're the one who started out assigning blame and "why should I pay!?" based on whose ancestors are whose. Affirmative action proponents are not doing that. They're looking at the situation as it currently exists right now and trying to make it better. We can debate whether their particular approach works or not, but we can not say "it's not my problem because of who my ancestors are".
(That's not even mentioning the fact that Genghis Khan died in 1227 and there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves.)
> To me "optimal" is the minimum amount of effort that leads to maximum results. E.g. if you get enough resumes by posting a job on your website you don't need to put extra effort to find more candidates.
So your definition of "optimal" is wrong, in any reasonably complex situation. What if your job posting was written poorly and all your applicants thought the job was something a little different? They could literally all be mis-qualified for the job, and you'd never have the opportunity to realize there are much better candidates out there. That's an example of "systemic bias" that prevents optimal outcomes. If you suddenly realize your job posting was crap and your candidate pool is sub-par because of it, you should take some affirmative actions to fix it, rather than spend "the minimum amount of effort."
Can we think of any other systemic biases like that, that prevent optimal outcomes? Any at all? Like, oh, I don't know, race discrimination?
> 1. How should countries with homogenous skin color deal with history of slavery?
By learning about it and understanding its effects on their society today? The same way I'm suggesting the U.S. does?
> 2. Should we exclude Nigerian Americans from DIE / affirmative action policies, because they are doing better than average American?
I don't agree with all the ways DIE / affirmative action are practiced today. I agree with many of the criticisms levied against it in this comment thread. Many other criticisms sound like they're rooted in the fundamental idea of "racism is natural/historical/OK and I'm racist for saying so, you're racist for disagreeing". I'd rather have DIE / affirmative action as we have right now than nothing, and certainly than whatever world you imagine where we (humanity) can essentially bully another group of humans for centuries, and then when we realize that actually doesn't lead to optimal outcomes in society, we shove them back down again anyway in some sunk-cost fallacy in order to avoid those nasty uncomfortable feelings of shame, regret, and blame (which have nothing to do with it anyway).
Then why focus on the past at all? "everything led to everything" is meaningless statement, it adds no value. But we both know that the reason you made it is because it allows you to use emotions as an argument.
And I still don't understand it, is average income black male more deserving of a good job than poor white male? If you focus on the past, the answer is yes. If you focus on the present, the answer is no. Which is it?
> we can not say "it's not my problem because of who my ancestors are".
On it's own it's a terrible argument. But one can definitely use it in response to "this is your problem because of who your ancestors were".
> That's not even mentioning the fact that Genghis Khan died in 1227 and there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves
It's not the gotcha you think it is. You're the one who brought up Genghis Khan in the first place.
FYI slavery in Russian Empire ended in 1866. So yeah, there are people alive today whose grandparents were born slaves. And those people as white as it gets.
Not to mention that slavery still exists in many parts of the world.
So I'm still failing to understand why one group of ancestors of slaves is more deserving of inclusion than another group of ancestors of slaves. In fact, it seem to be more deserving than today's slaves. It is almost like slavery has nothing to do with those policies, and yet all your talking points are about slavery.
> What if your job posting was written poorly
Then it would not lead to the results and would not be considered optimal.
> By learning about it and understanding its effects on their society today?
Bad answer. Learning and understanding are not actionable.
> I'd rather have DIE / affirmative action as we have right now than nothing
That's a false dichotomy. Minorities well being has been improving decade after decade. That's not nothing.
In the US? Well yeah. Black people comprise 1% of college graduates. White people are 60%.
It doesn't help when students are under-qualified for the schools that they get into. It hurst every party.
In the end black people with diplomas end up college educated with fancy but useless degree, still underemployed, with giant student loans accruing % every day and living paycheck to paycheck.
Literally modern servitude reinvented, what an irony
https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Cosmic-Justice-Thomas-Sowell/dp...
https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Rednecks-Liberals-Thomas-Sowell...
https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell...
The very idea that, in a just world, outcomes along various lines of demarcation between groups of humans would be roughly even has zero evidence to support it. In fact, all of history, as well as the state of the universe itself, testify that this should not be the case! Never has there ever been equal outcomes between any groups in history. The world is complex, and the causes for disparity are too numerous to list and impossible to even attempt to measure or tease apart in their impacts. Sowell has written about numerous causes of disparity between groups that have nothing to do with racism or any societal injustice, and the above book examples are just a small portion of what he has written.
What leftists like to do is over-simplify the world to fit their pre-conceived notions. If there is racial disparity, it must have been caused by systemic racism! Therefore, we must fix it through systemic racism in the opposite direction! This kind of thinking is broken, flawed, and completely incorrect to the core, and acting on it simply leads to more injustice, more unfairness, and more disparity of different kinds. It is an ideology born of intellectual pride, moral vanity, and an utter lack of wisdom.
Actually it has as much evidence as you have time. Take a big bag of fair dice, and split them randomly into two groups. Actually, split them however you want, whatever "lines of demarcation" you choose. Then roll them and apply literally any measure of literally any statistical outcome you want.
Oh shit, it turns out: in a just world, outcomes along arbitrary lines of demarcation are roughly even! Every time!
> Never has there ever been equal outcomes between any groups in history.
So? You need to assert that history has been just to different groups for this to be evidence to support your statement about what happens in a just world. Are you asserting that history has been just? Think hard before you answer this one.
> What leftists like to do is over-simplify the world to fit their pre-conceived notions.
Sure, like my dice example. Except the problem is, for my dice example to be wrong, you need to specify a reason why some dice roll differently than others, and you need to split the groups based on this reason. Remember: any arbitrary split must necessarily have roughly equal outcomes in a just world. If the world is just, any clear variance from equal outcomes must be due to some intrinsic differences in the dice themselves.
Let's say we split humans into two groups based on whether their birthday is an even or odd number (day of the month). This is a line of demarcation between groups of humans. Let's use your first sentence here:
> The very idea that, in a just world, outcomes along various lines of demarcation between groups of humans would be roughly even has zero evidence to support it.
So this is where we disagree, right? I assert that these two groups would have roughly the same outcome in almost any measure. It's a clearly arbitrary line. But you say there's no evidence to support that. Really? Really? Do you really believe that the odd-birthday group would be significantly different in outcome than the even-numbered, in any way? Of course not. In literally any "outcome" measure you could come up with, these two groups are indistinguishable.
Let's say we split humans into two groups based on biological sex. Would we expect to see any differences in any outcomes? Of course: there are differences in average height, muscle mass, sexual preferences, arrangement of sex organs, etc. There are actual intrinsic differences between these groups that account for some differences in outcomes, even in a just world.
Now let's say we split humans into two groups based on skin color. Uh-oh. We see huge differences in outcomes here. Can we explain it by intrinsic differences? Careful. There are really only two options here: either the world is not just, or skin color is not arbitrary. Asserting the second is literal racism: you're saying there's something naturally different about people with black skin that accounts for their vastly greater rates of poverty even in a just world. That's textbook racism, and, even worse, plain-old incorrect. It's also simply not logically necessary, because we know the world has not been just. Very, very not-just to that particular group, in fact.
> If there is racial disparity, it must have been caused by systemic racism!
Such a vapid strawman argument. This bullshit only works if we've never actually observed systemic racism. Slavery, the Greenwood bombing, segregation, Jim Crow, police slayings -- those are not hypothetical events dreamed up by "leftists" to account for racial disparity we observe. Systemic racism did happen, and in many cases is still happening, and then later we observe that there is also racial disparity. These "leftists" go "hey, maybe the racial disparity we see now has something to do with all that systemic racism that was going on for hundreds of years" and you pretend like this is some unfounded conclusion-jumping?
Your train of pseudo-reasoning, like that of so many other racism-apologists, only works if you conveniently ignore the actual multi-hundred year history of actual racism that actually happened. So many of your points sound completely asinine when you re-read them with that in mind.
You aren’t wrong to think black Americans are the victims of systemic racism; the problem is that most the “systemic racism” that operates today is an unintended consequence of well-meaning liberal policies, as Sowell has discussed for decades now.
If you think human outcomes follow a simple normal distribution in a just world, then you are making the exact prime mistake I already pointed out; which is dramatically, and I mean dramatically, over-simplifying the world. Seriously: read some Thomas Sowell. Nothing about this world or this universe is normally distributed.
> Are you asserting that history has been just? Think hard before you answer this one.
What is "just"? Think hard before you answer that one. Actually, read "The Quest for Cosmic Justice" and the "Intellectuals and Society" by Sowell. You'll find that the social justice version of justice is vastly different from what people have historically thought of as justice. It is also, in my estimation, far more unjust, unfair, harmful, and evil than the traditional view. It is an arrogant ideology based on a belief that one has the power to shape the world according to one's whims, rather than a proper respect for the fact that we are brief sojourners in a vast, complex, and powerful universe, and a planet filled with billions of complex individuals.
> Sure, like my dice example. Except the problem is, for my dice example to be wrong, you need to specify a reason why some dice roll differently than others,
You should read "Discrimination and Disparities" By Thomas Sowell, where he quickly crushes the normal distribution hypothesis. He has shown through very simple examples, which are still dramatically over-simplifying the world, where there are multiple preconditions for success, and where missing even one precondition results in the same failure as missing all of them. This model alone completely disproves a normal distribution hypothesis, even in a world where the preconditions are distributed randomly. And, not to sound like a broken record, the preconditions are not distributed randomly in any way.
> I assert that these two groups would have roughly the same outcome in almost any measure.
If you think the birthday group problem remotely models human outcomes, then you're repeating the same basic mistake over and over.
> Can we explain it by intrinsic differences?
You can explain it a billion different ways. The question is: who is right, and how do you prove it? Read "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Sowell. You'll find plenty of explanations that have nothing to do with either racism or of innate genetic differences. It is proponents of CRT who should need to prove themselves, but because they are in vogue culturally, they get away with their evidence-less assertions without any pushback.
> Slavery, the Greenwood bombing, segregation, Jim Crow, police slayings -- those are not hypothetical events dreamed up by "leftists" to account for racial disparity we observe.
It's good leftists didn't make them up, since leftists, namely, the democrat party, were primarily responsible for all of those things over the past 200 years. They didn't make it up because they mostly caused it! And again, correlation does not imply causation, such a basic statistical truism that CRT theorists love to ignore. Just because there was racism, even just because there still is racism, doesn't mean that racism is the primary cause of economic disparity, or, even a major cause at all! Sowell has written about multiple minority groups in different countries, who, despite being oppressed by real racism, and not the made up CRT kind, managed to prosper economically far above and beyond the majority population.
> Your train of pseudo-reasoning, like that of so many other racism-apologists, only works if you conveniently ignore the actual multi-hundred year history of actual racism that actually happened.
Go read "The real history of slavery" by Sowell. Read the other essays in the same book. No one is ignoring slavery. In fact, we are probably more educated on slavery than you are, judging from this conversation. The only racists are people like you who think that the appropriate reaction to disparity is real, explicit racism against those with "privileged" skin color. But, really, you're just following a long tradition of the political left being racist.
I realize this conversation is a waste of time. But it still feels good to crush your arguments. Maybe one day you'll listen, educate yourself on reality, and develop a better-functioning moral compass.
Like this one:
> since leftists, namely, the democrat party, were primarily responsible for all of those things over the past 200 years
That is so inane it does not even deserve a response. You've given away that you're not arguing in good faith.
> Similarly, you assert that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome, yet fail to provide any scientific evidence
This comment illustrates this well. You know that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome. You know that that's the case. There is not a shadow of a doubt in your mind that that is obviously correct. But of course whoever you're arguing with must provide mountains of scientific evidence (at which point you would undoubtedly move the goal posts), whereas you're allowed to get away with "simply" making semi-rational arguments and quoting, over and over, literally one source, who (according to wikipedia):
> Sowell was an important figure to the new conservative movement during the Reagan Era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Oof. Double-oof. So this singular person you're relying on for all your backup was an important figure to the most awful presidency of the modern era, the start of an economic plague that has allowed the rich to loot and ransack this nation's prosperity and dramatically worsened the very racial and socioeconomic disparities at the heart of this argument, and a corrupt Supreme Court justice who is a major leader in a movement to destroy democracy in the U.S. and replace it with a peusdo-Christian Theology. Yikes.
I came here prepared to reply with more rational discussion, but like always, the longer you talk to racism-apologists, the more you see the facade unraveling, the bad-faith arguments, and the goalposts moving. It's not worth it.
"Did you know that the Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, founded the KKK, and fought against every major civil rights act in U.S. history? watch as Carol Swain, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, shares the inconvenient history of the Democratic Party."
Your resistance to my statement has nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with your own cognitive bias.
> You know that birthday modulo 2 has no impact on economic outcome. You know that that's the case
The point is not what I believe or "know" to be true. The point is to actually test your beliefs empirically against reality. If you're not doing that, then you're not doing anything remotely scientific. You might as well be spouting your religious beliefs, which you have been, by the way.
Your views on Reagan and Thomas reveal your extreme bias, ignorance, and mis-education. No one could claim the Reagan presidency was the worst in U.S. history, or that Thomas leads a movement to destroy "democracy in the U.S.", without a hefty combination of all three. And, If I am quoting one source, it beats your zero sources and your ridiculous comparison of humans to dice and economic outcomes to dice rolls. But, really, many, many others have said the same things as Sowell. He just says it best. Those include a host of other people you'll dismiss because you clearly only pay attention to leftwing sources that agree with your existing religion.
Or perhaps it is not your business to decide what blacks should think?
Imagine if you're hiring in a region where blacks are 10% of the population, but only 1% of resumes you receive are black folks (and if your pool of candidates is low, 1% can literally mean zero candidates).
Your mindset seems to be "those poor blacks don't understand which jobs they should apply to. I know better than them, I'll help them". You still think you are superior to them. You're not a hateful racist, you're a virtuous racist. Still a racist though.
"So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to elevate candidates that just barely miss out."
Imagine you're one of the non-minorities who worked hard and misses out because of an artificial pressure. How do I explain to my kid that all else equal they will lose to another candidate because of not being a minority (assume this is similar to minorities of the past; however the results are mixed)? What's the point of trying hard in school? What's the point of working hard at work? These are the types of questions I'm starting to struggle with in real life. Teach the kid the same stuff I was taught (lies), or disillusion them that the world is not a meritocracy, truth and honor count for nothing, hard work may or may not pay off, etc?
They'll pick it up all on their own.
I have seen exactly zero people suggest that. That's how I know it's made up.
If you don't believe non-white people have disadvantages just say so and we can move on.
Then anonymize the resumes so that recruiters can't tell which candidates are men or women, or which is white, Asian, Black, etc. You don't eliminate discrimination by setting caps on how many interviewees can belong to each race. It certainly could be the case that whites are advantaged (curious why you focus on whites despite Asians being far more overrepresented, by the way). Put the proverbial veil between the candidate and the hiring manager, and we'll find out the truth.
One of my previous workplaces rejected proposals to anonymize our interview process, on the grounds that it would inhibit our diversity initiatives. Interviewing.io did an experiment relative to gender with anonymized phone interviews, and the result were the opposite of the traditional narrative [1].
1. https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...
As just one example, women still do the majority of child rearing, especially babies. People who want children make that choice, but men typically take a few weeks out of their career whereas women take months or more. That's a systemic disadvantage women suffer.
Actually, studies specifically aimed at measuring tech jobs indicate preferences favoring women candidates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
People frequently compare the rates of women in tech relative to the general population, not the pool of tech workers. This is misleading, when in fact most companies are quite balanced in terms of gender representation - relative to the representation of women in the field. 80% of nurses being women isn't a sign of men being disadvantaged any more than 80% of coders being men.
That's, perhaps, a systemic disadvantage mothers suffer. Tilting the tables advantages childless women most of all (and would be illegal discrimination against men, were the law to be enforced). Similar to how Ivies' affirmative action helps the children of African despots more than disadvantaged Americans.
I picked your example. Also, I'm not in the US. Apologies for failing at the intricacies of US-centrism.
Anonymous CVs are an interesting idea, and indeed how most of the studies measuring biases (not just on gender, but also things like perceived origin of name) are constructed.
But you're not going to get everyone to do them.
> Interviewing.io did an experiment relative to gender with anonymized phone interviews
If voices were so representative gender, we wouldn't have a severely worse pay gap for trans women. These are more systemic issues that start with gender roles and expected acceptable behaviors themselves.
Asians are often referred to as "white" or "lily-white" in the context of hiring and college admissions.
There's your "white guilt" in action. Meanwhile, at the end of the day, everybody (regardless of skin colour) just wants to attend a damn fine musical performance. The fuck do I care if the musicians are black, white, young, old, fat, or skinny?! NONE of those are relevant attributes to being a talented musician who can perform well on a team!
I was originally going to write that you’re playing the “I’m technically correct” trick here, but I don’t think your argument actually rises to the level of technical correctness. Setting aside the debate over whether the former policy is desirable, it is clearly not the same as the latter policy. If Microsoft had said “everyone interviewed cannot be a white male,” or even “most people interviewed cannot be white males,” then you could more credibly try to make the case you’re aiming for. But they simply didn’t.
My example just made it bluntly obvious that discrimination in the interview stage is still discrimination, there's no "technically correct trick here". Mandating that X% of your interviews be of a particular race or gender is discrimination, no matter the value of X. Setting X to 100 just makes it very clear.
“2 of the candidates you interview must meet these gender/racial requirements” is a mandate, but it’s not a percentage mandate. I know that’s a little pedantic, but I think it’s important pedantry, because you keep using percentages:
> With a pool of four people, which isn’t uncommon in my experience, that means 50% of the interviews are locked behind racial and gender requirements.
That’s only true if you are limited to just four people, which obviously you are not. You may feel it’s an unfair burden on the hiring manager to expand the candidate pool if necessary to meet the racial and gender requirements, but that’s not an argument about discrimination.
> Setting X to 100 just makes it very clear.
I sincerely believe setting X to 100 makes it a different argument. :) “All of your candidates must be X” is manifestly not the same as “some of your candidates must be X”. (The former may require you to leave out candidates you think are qualified, the latter does not, for a start, which strikes me as an extremely important distinction in this context.)
Incorrect. If you mandate that 20% of candidates be Y, but only 10% of candidates in the applicant pool are Y and 90% are X then on average you need to exclude 50% of qualified non-X candidates. If I have a pool of 90 X and 10 Y candidates and I have a quota of 80,20 then even if I include all 10 Y candidates I can only include 40 of the 90 X candidates. Sure, if I said that 100% have to be Y then all of the X candidates would be excluded. But even lower quota values still result in the out-group being limited.
> “2 of the candidates you interview must meet these gender/racial requirements” is a mandate, but it’s not a percentage mandate. I know that’s a little pedantic, but I think it’s important pedantry, because you keep using percentages:
Since there's a finite number of candidates it's still ultimately a percentage. The percentage is variable based on the total number of candidates, but it's still a percentage in the end.
Quotas and caps are two sides of the same coin. Instituting a minimum representation of one group, is fundamentally the same thing as capping the representation of those who don't belong to said group.
But this is a feeling that must be let go. Privilege allows people to reach excellence and excellence is scarce, so no, privileged people that do their homework won't suffer because we are trying to do the right thing, allowed by our current stage of civilization that generates so much surplus.
Not picking up the capable people and letting them reach their level of excellence is a big problem in our society, and everybody would be better off if this was fixed.
How so?
The whole song and dance about applying racism at the interview selection stage isn't about not being racist, it's that there isn't court precedent that specifically makes that illegal, but there is for other more direct techniques like racial quotas.
They're not even saying it's not being racist - they freely admit that it is - they just insist that the ends justify the means.
Also, given that this a zero-sum game (the company only has a fixed number of hours to interview a single game), you are necessarily making someone else worse off when you give advantage to a sub-group of candidates.
Also consider that many candidates can belong to a privileged group and a disadvantaged group at the same time. Of course none such nuances are being considered. How could they, when all you have on the person is their 1 page work resume? You know literally nothing about them, except a few projects they claim to have completed in the past.
Now you're not actually hiring for skills, but playing disadvantage roulette with your hiring pool. Ok, maybe not, and you're still screening for skills, but at least call a spade a spade.
I’ve heard from diversity candidates who work at Microsoft and interview at other companies that this part isn’t even true. I’ve been on the hiring side and seen how it isn’t true too…
The bar is truly different at all levels. Recruitment, interviewing, hiring, offers, and management are all very different. To act as if there isn’t this is to truly be naive or just happen to have only worked and interacted in a very small group of people. I’ve worked with hundreds and talked to thousands - this shit happens a lot more than HR wants to admit.
I’m not saying someone always get the preferential treatment - I’m just saying this happens more than people think it does.
Per the OP previously 'diversity' candidates were 1% of all applicants. I'll assume the null hypothesis here and then also assume that they were 1% of the interviewees too.
Lets assume that diversity interviewees are turned into hires at some factor Y. I'll make no assumptions on if that is different than from non-diversity interviewees.
Now, with the new policy, there is a 15x increase in the probability of turning diversity applicants into interviewees.
However, nothing has been done to change Y, the factor at which diversity interviewees are turned into candidates. They are explicitly stating that they are not changing Y.
So that then means that diversity interviewees are now less likely to move on past the interview stage. Based on the numbers, they then need to interview at 15x the rate as previously to be turned into hires.
Please, correct me if I am wrong here, but this seems to hurt diversity interviewees.
I see it as taking up 15x the time, rejecting at a 15x rate, and eliciting these real human people to become stats in some database that the policy makers can show off to some other boss without any compensation.
Everyone from CEO to line managers in all major big techs are now have DEI target that must be achieved. If it is not then don't bother applying for promos. Most people at L7+ will also see significant cut in bonuses if they don't make DEI targets. Especially at VP level, the cut becomes pretty significant. So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers. There are very specific commitments you must write down in OKRs.
I have seen a situation where a manager literally ignored every single non-diverse resume and did not interviewed single non-diverse candidate because of desperation of not making his numbers. He went out of his way to get person completely stranger to work his team was doing. He finally ended up hiring a person well below expectations and this person now simply hangs out in the team as diversity token. The VP sent email to whole group congratulating in supporting diversity and be inclusive. Everyone got their well deserved bonuses for this magnificent achievement.
Lazy, incompetent Fucks.
So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews.
On average, those candidates would have started with a disadvantage in getting their foot in the door for several reasons – including outright discrimination, and the cumulative effect of past discrimination, but also softer factors such as being less likely to have helpful personal connections. This applies not just to the Microsoft job at issue, but to the previous jobs that would have populated their resumes (and for younger candidates, even schools).
Compensating for that sounds like a good policy to me.
Now, the post also suggests there is pressure to actually hire or promote less-qualified candidates, which might be a problem, but in that area the post is more vague and speculative.