"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.
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.