acctjustforyou

>I think these are legitimate questions

They are, and the fact that you even have to defend asking them is a non-trivial indicator of how bat-shit crazy the thinking has gotten on this topic.

>BTW Temple University is not an HBCU

Which means that instead of one HBCU being ranked on the US News list of best colleges for Computer Science [1] (albeit at the very bottom), there are zero.[2]

[1] - http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

[2] - http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

Sounds like you've found a great indicator of skill then - "does not have a CS degree."

"There exists a young man with no legs who has a stellar collegiate wrestling record.

There also exists an athlete in the most prestigious wrestling program in the country who always loses because he never makes weight, and when he does make weight, he gets defeated in seconds.

Therefore I can confidently conclude that 'number of limbs' has no correlation whatsoever to wrestling ability."

Hmmm...

>With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse.

The top of a company's funnel could also be made more diverse by starting with "OK, there are 7+ billion people on the planet..." - that doesn't make it a good idea.

>And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants.

That's how you handle a great volume of applicants - you look for indicators of skill. None of them are necessary or sufficient; they just increase the likelihood that this will be a good hire a little bit. Giving every single person who is able to use the "resume" template in Microsoft Word an in-person interview would catch those false negatives you're missing, but it would be ridiculously inefficient.

Or am I to assume that when you want to hire a plumber you canvass your neighborhood door-to-door so you dont miss out on someone who might be qualified but just drummed out of the plumbing industry for institutional reasons?

Although I do like how you dismissed points 2-8 with a simple handwaving of "elite males are more likely to score higher on these points, so they're no good."

Not to mention the fact that that argument does virtually nothing to contracdict point #8. If youre someone who truly believes they're a Great Programmer Who's Not Being Given a Chance Due To White Male Supremacy, a github profile is the greatest arrow in your quiver that you could possibly dream of.

>edit: and about "open source" contributions; ethnic minorities and women are far more likely to have worked in large corporations rather than in open source or startups, because those companies are held to a higher standard in their behavior towards minorities than the kind of self-assembling social clubs that this article (and site) are focused on.

Open source software is probably the single most meritocratic resume-building opportunity I've ever seen in any industry.

If you don't like the fact that many minorities and women, far from being denied this opportunity, are simply declining to take advantage of it (as most developers do, by the way), then to paraphrase Richard Feynman, perhaps you should go find another universe where the conditions are more appealing to your sensibilities.

Or to put it another way, if you think that a submission on github containing a great new feature and some long overdue bugfixes for an open source project would get rejected because the submitter was black, then the part of your mind that desperately needs certain groups of people to be Irreparably Downtrodden is causing you to lose a great deal of your grip on reality.

The fact that a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good programmer does not mean it is a worthless data point.

If I get an applicant who cannot or will not understand what a thought experiment is, they're not getting an interview - I don't care what college they went to.

And yes, I registered this account because your comment was so breathtakingly ill-informed.

>Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar."

So, suppose you had to fill an open position for a developer and you had two candidates: an MIT grad with years of experience at Apple and Google, and a homeless guy who never went to college and never worked in IT before.

You're honestly going to try to tell us that you have no idea who might be the better candidate?

And if hypothetically you could only interview one, you'd what? Be totally stymied? Flip a coin maybe?

There's no possible way you can actually believe what you're saying.

>In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost. [points 1,8]

I don't recall him mentioning ruling people out before speaking to them, although once you get to a certain scale that has to happen at some point since if an individual manager gets 1,000 applicants for one position on his team he can't speak to them all. Or is math racist too?

The scale requirement becomes much smaller when talking about reviewing someone's work, because that is much more involved than a resume scan or even most phone screens.

Giving them a diversity grade boost is the definition of racism/sexism/*ism. Funny how youve managed to find yourself on the same side as someone who gives a buxom under qualified blonde a second interview because "we don't have any hot chicks in this office."