this person seem to not understand how microsoft's business stays on track.

they seem to really think that individual contributions truly affect Microsoft's fullfilment of their self-appointed mission; but I highly doubt this. Microsoft is really huge. No single individual can really detract, nor add too much, to the company's overall mission.

Oh, it's that right-wing culture war grievance blog that coincidentally chose the same initials as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and calls itself a think tank.

How does Tesla manage to be diverse without having an internal bureaucracy micromanaging everyone at D&I?

a lot of comments here recognize what a discussion of 'diversity and inclusion' on this forum (HN) is likely to contain -- i.e., HN should recognize it's own stereotypes of tech culture being toxic which only reinforces _any_ company from trying to curb that toxicity (whether it's the perfect approach to doing so or not)

At just 5.6% they are not doing enough! Capitalism has made "unwanted" people the outliers and capitalism can fix it!

One way to improve hiring could by legislating that for-profit companies should do away with drug tests and background verification. Systemic & instituitional racism means a lot of people of the wrong race/color are simply ineligible to be hired just because they have drug charges or they have a record because once took a loaf of bread from Kroger.

Billion-dollar corporations can afford to hire them, mix them with existing teams, have them learn on the job from the best people in the industry and turn them to be a productive person of the society. In the short term, yes it can cause pain and loss of productivity, but in the long-term, as the society we all can come ahead!

> would you rather work at Google on Gmail or at Microsoft on Outlook?

Actually, Outlook is much more usable than GMail, but apparently that doesn’t translate to developer prestige.

I hate articles like these and their appeals to "meritocracy".

Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men. Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best" candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not.

My current team is a diverse group of well-rounded people. Some women, some men, some younger, some older, from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Guess which is the higher performing? Guess which has a safe atmosphere with zero dick measuring? Guess which is the most pleasant to be a part of? Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior? etc etc

Sure, there's lots of room for improvement in how tech businesses actually implement diversity vs just paying lip service to it and slicing numbers. But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely needed in the industry.

Most of the top comments are literally recapitulating all the received unexamined "common sense meritocracy" talking points which are systematically examined and dismantled as the first order of business in such training.

Depressing, but not suprising.

This policy sounds like exactly what it should be. This is to make up for things like this (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...), but having a black sounding name makes you less likely to get an interview.

If society doesn't put some effort into overcoming its biases, those biases will always exist.

> Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they got to where they are because of their accomplishments?

And then they show a graph where only 5.6% of the execs are black (up from 3.7%). It's a pitiful number.

Yes, it's still more likely they got there because of their accomplishments, bigot.

> From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft’s AI Platform division.

Wow. A whole year. In large companies that's barely enough time to understand all the unspoken lines of communication, let alone pass judgment on a company's culture.

So, let me guess.... It means in practice hiring BiPOC and women in "diversity positions", all the while keeping them away from engineering and engineering management (you know, the positions that pay $$$$$$).

I've seen BiPOC and women candidates turned down time and again because they "fit" better in the bullshit diversity spots. And then there's a rant about "fit" also known as "we want to discriminate on illegal or unethical things but we cant actually say that".

It's obvious the writer of the article felt what he was asked to do was a mere distraction, made obvious by his statement that he would rather go back to "focusing on producing great software"

This would have sense if it wasn't for the fact that the company that he works for, the folks that are paying him to be there, are actually asking him to do the thing that he is paying lip-service to.

I would hate to have an employee who doesn't do what they're directed to do because they thought they knew better. Unless it's something illegal, if you're going to collect a paycheck, you either do what you're asked to do or you leave. You don't continue to take their money but do something other than what they're asking for. Ridiculous.

Ugh, another one of these.

> There weren’t any quotas around how many of these “diverse” candidates I had to actually hire, but I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the annual D&I report look good.

Correct, there aren't quotas, but of course that doesn't stop the author from speculating that there might be, and basing the rest of the article on that.

> Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy.

Missing here is how BIPOC and women have been systemically under-promoted relative to their work output, and yes, although there is no quota, someone is checking in to make sure a manager (i.e., someone who has power over their reports' lives) is aware of systemic biases when approaching their decision-making. What is terrible about this exactly?

There are no countries that are "heavily one demographic"

I think op is saying these things:

- We've had major progress over the last however many decades.

- A lot of the teams responsible for that work were probably made up of young white nerdy males (obviously not all, but young nerdy males probably covers a large portion of them, otherwise why would we even be here talking about DEI initiatives?)

- were all of those teams horrible?

I think the point was that quite a bit of technolgical progess happened in the world prior to diversity initiatives. The reference to white nerds likely places the comment in an historical US perspective, possibly western European. Advanced technologies developed in other non-diverse cultures as well. China comes to mind in particular. But I feel like you knew that already. "Feel free to let us know what that might be." If we have sarcasm tags, maybe we should have snark tags as well?

From TFA:

> But they make horrible teams.

It kinda makes me sad. It’s great that companies want to improve D&I but, assuming everything in that article is true, they’re making a hash of it.

They’ve forgotten Goodhart’s law, and as such they’ve create a metric everyone is trying to game which ends up being counterproductive and unfair to everyone. Let’s not forget it’s equally unfair to promote someone before they are ready and then stack rank them against more experienced colleagues as it is not to promote someone who is ready.

We are a European enterprise and we have contracts with special recruitment firm for DEI quota. We had the opportunity to hire some amazing and technical folks through them. People with special hobbies and interests that would really make a different and add a new dimension to conversations.

The growing issue is the increasing number of employees coming in with skillset below 50% of current peers. Not all from EDI source, but for sure majority. Higher skilled engineers are leaving because they need to do more and more work to keep up the systems operational and that results in more and more of the skilled folks leaving.

Trying to explain this to VPs and directors and they would just say dont choose them! The interview system is set in a way that we get a bunch of resume without names and we need to stack them. HR contact as many of them as they feel good about and there goes the round of interviews. After the interviews we stack the results and hand it over to the management. And they decide whom to hire based on the stacked results and their own infallible judgment.

Sadly it also reflects poorly on people who are good and come in with DEI budget. They need to spend more times earning trust.

In 2022 you couldn't pay me enough to be a people manager in an F500 company, precisely because of BS like this article describes.

We seem to have gone full circle somehow. It is ironic that in its intent to ensure employers hire based on merit, academic or physically qualified abilities so that people could obtain those jobs without being discriminated against - we have arrived back at a point where companies consider their identity to make sure they meet "quotas" - thus implementing discriminatory policies.

As of 2022, the only protected status one is allowed to discriminate against without new acronyms or hashtags or any uproar is age. We tend to hire people we want to befriend, which means people similar to us, which leads to a lot of this discrimination. See: "culture fit".

Outside of the US the race/ethnicity of a person is not even allowed to be asked for or even stored. I actually believe that this leads to many problems in the first place and actually promotes racial segregation. The first time I had to think about what race I am was when I moved to the US.

Stop asking people what race they are, stop storing their race. And do the same for gender and religion. Just treat your people as humans. And problems like this will just disappear.

As a start you can anonymise applications of candidates: https://wol.iza.org/articles/anonymous-job-applications-and-...

Wokeness is first and foremost a legal phenomenon. You must check the box, because your manager must check the box, because the VP must check the box, because otherwise some regulator or lawyer might get angry and sue.

The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation, we should all be grateful for that. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous tumor that is metastasizing and infecting everything.

https://richardhanania.substack.com/i/36007039/wokeness-is-g...

This happening in tech is actually benign. In a lot of countries there are mandated quotas for minorities and socially backward communities in fields such as medicine, civil engineering etc, where the cost of mistakes is much higher. I do feel all this would be temporary in nature and eventually as these sections of society get more prosperity due to these policies, they will end up increasing their competency levels overall (but may not be in the same generation).

I think it's valiant for a company to strive to create diversity within the organization that's reflective of their locale, but it seems many are trying to simply hire people with certain combinations of demographics and qualifications that are rare or non-existent. A more far-sighted solution is required, where private industry starts investing in education (in an equity-focused manner) to create the diverse, qualified workforce that they need.

It’s really amazing how these companies are treating people from disadvantaged groups as “a number on a spreadsheet” and patting themselves on the back for it.

History will not look kindly on this moment in time.

_sigh_

The common theme I see in all these happy HN contributors getting their panties in a twist over affirmative action is that transactions exist in America that discriminate against white people: for a given promotion, a black person is advanced over a white person who is better qualified.

It's like some idiot plugging away at debugging a single query timing out, while the cluster is down.

Just take a step back. It's a really important intellectual ability.

Are you a Grandmaster if you won all your matches starting with a material advantage?

- attend school with class sizes of 60: start minus four pawns - limited role models in middle-class jobs: start minus a bishop - generational effects from iniquitous zoning laws: minus a rook

Affirmative action is an attempt to give back the bishop. Other strategies are also needed.

The theme I'm bristling at is, approximately, complaining that you lost a piece because your opponent was given a bishop.

One of the key insights I think people are missing is that for most roles, not having a diverse slate of applicants in a country as diverse as America is a "process smell." The smell is that you're not casting a wide enough net to even know whether you're getting the best applicants.

Some easy examples: if you're hiring for most programming roles and you don't have any qualified women applying, your pipeline sucks.

If your company is in California, and you don't have any qualified Latinos applying for most of your jobs, your pipeline sucks.

Et cetera.

If you're not casting a wide enough net to find qualified Latinos on the west coast(!), I guarantee you're also missing qualified white men in whom you would be interested. Ultimately, this is why Microsoft cares; they have an interest in their overall process being the best it can be.

Microsoft makes their products difficult to repair: Microsoft calls this a 'security measure'.

Microsoft has a bigoted hiring policy which cares more for your skin tone & nipple size than your skillset: Microsoft calls this 'diversity and inclusion'.

I’ve seen active encouragement to violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Specifically Title VII section 703, (d) - Training Programs.

“It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer, labor organization, or joint labor-­management committee controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining, including on­-the-­job training programs to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.”

By specifically allowing Women to attend the Grace Hopper Conference on company time, funded by the company.

Men, are not allowed to attend (unless not male presenting), and thus being discriminated against based upon their sex.

At the Grace Hopper conference, there are plenty of sessions which could be argued are training.

If the attendees were going for recruiting purposes, I could see it not necessarily violating the law. However, Women are attending to go to the conference (training?) without any recruiting duties.

I expect there are similar conferences for POC, which equally violate the Civil rights act.

It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that.

But, … another part of me is uneasy with the idea that there is such as thing as a racialised or gendered (for example) engineer - engineers are individuals, and shouldn’t be under an implied expectation of being recognisably distinct from each other - so I don’t really know how to avoid the ‘entrenched discrimination via sensitivity to fixed identities’ problem.

Companies that want more diverse workforces need to grow them through, education and training. Remove the barriers to learning in these POC communities and map out clear pathways to knowledge.

What about ageism? It’s prevalent, is that ok? How about women or even men trying to renter the workforce after having children?

Groups made of inexperienced young folks tend to make products for inexperienced young folks. People code what they know. While marketeers would support this, there’s still a lot of money out there that’s help by less desirable groups of people. And needs that aren’t relatable to these developers.

The increase from 3.7% to 5.6% black executives as a sign of lowering standards, when black people are 14% of the population in the country... Can we first establish what percentage of managers people genuinely think got their job based on merit as a baseline? An equal explanation might be that because Microsoft forced people to actually interview black people at all, more qualified black candidates were hired.

The civil rights act, as written makes this form of discrimination illegal.

However the supreme court undid this in United Steelworkers v Weber.

I do not understand how Americans find it acceptable that you can vote for people, they can pass clear statutory language that says you cannot discriminate and then SCOTUS can come along, and read the complete opposite meaning into the statute.

Microsoft was always on my blacklist

In other places, like Africa or Asia, or just anywhere without a white majority, does the inverse exist? E.g. giving white people special treatment in hiring because they're a minority there? If the idea is logically consistent, based on diversity and inclusion and not racism, it should exist? Maybe it does? Never heard of it.

Serious question: I've worked with incredibly diverse (compared to the national demographic) teams that consisted mostly of Indians and Asians from various countries throughout Asia. Under the Microsoft D&I definition this would not count as diverse. Why do they define diversity in such an arbitrary way?

And that's why I tell any employer that I'm LGBTQ+ and identify as black Hispanic. What a clown world we live in...

And while D&I advocates are busy, the reality diverges. There are large teams at Amazon et al that only speak Hindi or Chinese. Imagine what group of persons are not hired because they aren't a "cultural fit". It's good that many (mostly born in a western country) are aware of racism and try to prevent it. However, that usually doesn't apply to people with a different cultural background. E.g., I saw many times that Indians treated other Indians differently based on their caste. That happened in silicon valley companies in the US.

from what I can tell, nobody knows how to interpret the civil rights acts and nobody wants to have a discussion on how to compliantly do so.

all you have to do is start recruiting in places that were overlooked. just stop obsessing over Stanford pedigrees and recruit at the same Tier 3 universities that the intelligence community recruits from.

fund your own coding academies and executive workshops and create your own pipeline, physically located in neighborhoods that have people you want representation from.

everyone is going to keep messing this up and discriminating on the hiring process, without a framework about how to do it.

This is all part of the public-private alliance between big corporations and left-wing politicians. They can't implement Marxism outright because of State authority to override, so they are using companies to do it and killing small business competition in return. This is also why some corporations get larger and larger without any real antitrust enforcement.

This is happening at every F50 company. If you are thinking "not my company" right now, you're just not high enough in leadership.

Hi please reread. It was a reply to the comment about an all young white nerdy men team being bad because they are all white and male, saying "But they make horrible teams". Second, I used statistics, not opinion. You straw man with this "everyone in those countries are" followed by describing how no 2 people occupy the same space-time. Please read what a person writes and listen to what a person says rather than warping it to your need. Just wowy :D

It could be the case that in societies where women aren’t arbitrarily discriminated against they seek greater engagement with the careers gender socialisation attract them to ie “women are better actualised as women in societies where female success isn’t artificially stifled by glass ceilings”.

A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their potential.

My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that “Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.

Before diversity programs were all the range most large companies being discussed here had populations that reflected their applicants reasonably well. But not necessarily their communities.

So where does your thinking go when the issues are outside of the company?

The argument is "the output that we're seeing is expected given the input". So you walk the chain back until inputs and outputs diverge, at which point the argument can no longer justify it.

The claim is that there may be a lack of availability. Lack of availability does not imply lack of merit. Prior discrimination, for example, could explain a lack of availability.

Some departments are indeed not as affected, and if you are looking for a product owner, a project manager, or sales, numbers don't work against you.

But there are departments where they do, even outside of IT. Accounting are mostly white males, HR are mostly female, etc.

So if you have one policy that is general to the whole company, some departments will have a hard time no matter what.

Case in point, one of my clients has a hard time finding a good dev matching diversity policies, but they have no problem finding analysts. For some reasons, good analyst profiles already are pretty diverse and the team is rocking people from all over Europe and Africa, also achieving gender parity without even trying.

Yet it's the same hiring pipeline, and we are all working in the same office. They are not excluding people, in the office, 10% only are locals! But it doesn't work for some demographics, and the general dumb rule is killing their IT projects.

> But add them back in using the numbers on your first link. So we could expect 1 Black applicant, 1 Latino applicant, and 2 women (optimistically!). That's a third of your set of 12, using your data sources, for a programming role.

Let's please keep this conversation mathematically honest. I don't know if you're intentionally trying to misrepresent statistics, or if you don't understand them, but:

- for three non-mutually-exclusive groups (black, latino, female)

- given participation in a set (1, 1, 2)

- you cannot sum their independent participation (4) to yield "a third"

Beyond that, you appear to intentionally miss the key terms "ceiling" and "optimistically." Given a sample size of one pipeline (the OP), if you optimistically might get a single applicant that meets a given DI quota, it's very likely that you'll get zero.

The original article explicitly stated zero, and the numbers make it clear that zero is a very likely result.

That's the trouble with small sample sizes. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by arguing that, in some other circumstance, maybe it could have been one... or even two!

1. Microsoft salaries are on the lower end compared to other FAANGs, this is well known fact.

2. Higher paying firms like goog fb are able to sweep the labor market and get the most of folks from tiny population of well qualified minority candidates. Making pipeline issues worse for everybody else.

3. At this point if you are minority and is qualified - you have no problem getting top tier job and top tier pay relatively easy, especially when compared to asian male population.

I appreciate you sharing your thoughts

>“Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.

There is widespread scientific (note: among _scientists_) consensus that this is not correct. Talk to an endocrinologist or a behavioral geneticist, or an economist, or a psychologist...

As it turns out, sex differences in psychology are the biggest effects we measure. We also see concomitant differences in other species, both closely related and not. And there is every reason to expect evolution has designed us to have innate differences by sex. The tablua rasa stuff is wrong.

Ideas like the one your innner feminist wants to believe were popularized by non-scientists (don't confuse scientists with "academics"), and they were easy to make popular because they're what cliques around those academics wanted to believe. But all the evidence is against it, that's just no how nature works.

So it sounds like I will not rise to the top in big tech regardless of my hard work and talent, what are the best alternative employers that don't do this?

DEI is the new racism and sexism. It's just as bad as the old racism and sexism.

The fundamental issue is we have lost our freedoms. We live in a socialist society where we have to follow party lines. It all starts with laws that sound fantastic, but took away freedoms of speech.

Affirmative Action is always going to be a very controversial topic. Personally I'm for it, but I understand why people dislike it.

I do strongly believe that, even with Affirmative Action policies, it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male, today. For example, no matter how you slice it, white Americans are ~3-4x more likely to become millionaires than black or hispanic Americas (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/). I think there's a TONNE of reasons for race and gender based inequality, but IMO most of them have to do with "momentum". If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this. It wasn't long ago that racism and sexism were much, much worse than they are today (and there's still lots of conscious and unconscious bias today), so white families are a lot wealthier today than minority families, and that propagates to the next generation, and the one after that, etc. Slavery wasn't abolished in America until 1865, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (ending racial segregation of schools) came in 1954, Rosa Parks was 1955, Jim Crow laws weren't really sweepingly overturned until 1965. If you're a black American in their 40s today, your parents were probably born in the Jim Crow era, where the impediments to their financial success were immense.

If, as a society, we don't try to actively help non white males reach an equal footing in terms of opportunity, it'll be really, really hard to close these "momentum" gaps. I view Affirmative Action as a temporary approach to narrowing these gaps. It's realizing that it's too hard to succeed financially as a minority in America, and temporarily giving minorities a leg up on hiring and promotions to help even the wealth/opportunity gap. Once the gap more or less goes away, you remove the Affirmative Action policies, but that'll take time. If you hire based purely on qualifications, education, experience, etc., the gap isn't going away for an extremely long time, because white families are a lot wealthier than minority families today, so a disproportionate number of kids from those families are going to have those advantages, and the gap persists.

If white people want to learn about racism, fail to know French and try to work in Quebec. Black as soon as you open your mouth…

Long time HN lurker here - some of the comments are being blown out of proportion.

Statistically speaking, these are called “minorities” for a reason, there simply aren’t enough of them in STEM related fields.

Diversifying your team/group with one or two female or foreign born individuals won’t dramatically impact the overall productivity of your team - assuming this person is not already a very hard working and/or bright individual, which many/most are.

The fact that this person made it to the interview phase and passed the initial filters (which are typically gender/race blind) indicates that they are potentially qualified for the role.

Keep in mind, interviewing is hard - for both parties involved, for different reasons but especially hard for candidates. There is a significant “luck” component involved.

Many interviewers are inexperienced and focus solely on finding ways to disqualify candidates as opposed to figuring out how a given person could “fit in” and contribute/help level up the team.

I ask that you have an open mind and show some empathy. We still have a lot of work to do to create a more diverse and inclusive society.

Didn't many people predict exactly this? Go back to Alex Jones videos from 2010 and apologize.

I think if diversity leads to lower profit but better work experience tech companies will get rid of it.

I left the western world several years ago, partly because of this. I could not live in an idiocracy where some people hire based on skin colors or genitals.

Thankfully, I have faith in capitalism.

I never thought I would say such an obvious thing, but we are entering an era where « hiring the most competent » is going to give an unfair advantage to smaller companies.

I am already seeing this with cinema. Sure the US is still producing a lot of interesting stuff, you still have very talented filmmakers. But you are literally losing market share to Korea (which should have never happened) just because you made your mission to transform every possible well known character into black characters for the sake of it.

I haven’t seen any interesting Netflix original show about Zulu, or how people competed for power in Egypt.

But I sure have seen plenty of black washing (even on non white historical figures)

Seriously, what's with that newsletter popup that has no close button?

I'm starting to see it everywhere on blog posts linked from HN.

Are "influencers" that desperate?

This is a real thing.

It is hard for anyone that is not "diverse" to get promoted at the highest levels of Microsoft. Almost all CVP promotions are "diverse" now in a way that is pretty overt.

I am a huge proponent of D&I, but it is hard not to feel discriminated against and feel like there isn't much of a career trajectory for me.

I think it is great that microsoft has a diversity policy and is making clear to everyone there that it matters. It is quite ham-handed, but that is kind of the default in corporations of that size. I can imagine the frustration having to deal with such policies, but he apparently did not reach out to get diverse candidates.

Diversity and Inclusion are very different things.

You can do top down diversity. If you can hire or fire, you can increase diversity. Not easy, but doable.

Inclusion is a very different thing. After someone is hired, they have to be see their employer as an accepting place.

This is accomplished mostly by peer to peer interactions.

You can’t top-down force inclusion.

If you want racial equity, you have to start at school or even earlier. Get rid of private schools, improve the public school system. Then you can actually get good people from all kinds of backgrounds that are not looked upon as "diversity hires".

"Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they got to where they are because of their accomplishments? "

This is the same "affirmative action hire" argument conservatives have been making since affirmative action was implemented.

The thing is, there are not many companies or jobs where you can save $1mil+ in under 4 years, especially if you’re Dual Income or pre-kids. Especially at a 9-5 where I am in pajamas more often than not.

Hunker down, leverage to the opp to do boring tech at an interesting large scale and and earn a mountain.

Find your non-enterprise, pure meritocracy Ayn Rand bonanza engineering experience at a pre-Series C.

I can’t understand why engs expect FAANGs to operate like anything but an enterprise now, and then complain about that behavior!

We can save $1mil in under 4 years while wearing pajamas. The blind spots of the extreme relative privilege in this job and anchoring on articles like this as serious grievances blows my mind.

Bypass paywall: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cspicenter.com%2Fp...

Maybe Microsoft managers think it's enough if everybody can decide for themselves about their pronouns.

DEI policies are pure racism but in the other direction.

TLDR: It still means nothing.

I read the comments then read the article, then came back to find it dead. But why? This post contains new information that is relevant to the tech industry. Its claims are not outlandish. And it brings receipts (screenshots). If this is what a major tech company is doing, isn't it worthy of discussion here?

I hope the comments can be civil, and I've seen more contentious topics surface high-quality comments on HN.

What always bothered me about DE&I initiatives is that they are trying to wring diversity out of their existing hiring pool.

If your indeed job posts didn't bring diverse candidates then, why do you think it would now? Because you added a "Please apply if you're DiVeRsE" line to it? Don't be ridiculous.

If you want diversity of candidates you can't keep going back to the same talent pools. You have to diversify where you're drawing talent.

If your college program is primarily getting white/asian males, you can't suddenly expect it to start throwing in women & poc as well. You can't suddenly expect it to start giving you LGBTQ+ candidates.

If you want diverse candidates, you have to look at diverse hiring pools. Look at the bootcamps that focus on diverse groups you're targeting. Look at schools that focus on diverse groups you're targeting.

If you're really interested in diverse candidates, you can't keep expecting them to just show up if you add a "We want diversity!" to your job description - you have to change where you look for them.

I've been at a particular company for 20 years. For most of those years our main focus was our core mission, but over the past few years D&I has risen to be our main focus. I've seen people hired who clearly are not qualified and often are not trainable to become qualified. An example is a woman who refused to take any hard assignments and usually made no progress on the easy stuff she was assigned. She was certainly able to do the work, but just didn't do it. Then she started taking standup zoom calls from the ski slopes in winter and hiking trails in the summer. Well, you would think this would be enough to at least get her onto some sort of remediation program, but nope, HR said we could do nothing to her. So she basically earns a six figure salary and does absolutely nothing, other than fulfill a D&I quota.

Why would anyone support a system that explicitly dis-empowers them in preference to other identity groups who themselves are perfectly fine to pursue their own self interest?

After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum aspect to this.

The cultural brainwashing that there is virtue in supporting this against your own interests is just Nietzschean slave-morality propaganda. You don't have to apologize for or pathologize being capable, successful and doing what is best for yourself, dare I say even for your own identity group. You can simply reject this nonsense; the emperor truly has no clothes here.

Related: my most recent submission [0] titled "Wikimedia is funding political activism" received over 20 points in 30 minutes, but of course was quickly flagged without discussion. Quite a bit of censorship around these parts regarding these particular topics with huge impact on all of us within the tech industry.

[0] https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633

> Why would any well qualified minority go to msf for 120k in Atlanta if they can get 240 in Mountain view + relocation bonus?

Because their family is in the Southeast, and because that $120k leads to a better overall living standard than $240k in Mountain View. Especially if one is raising/planning on raising children, proximity to family is a really important variable.

A process that systematically skips people who won't relocate to the West Coast is suboptimal in a world where we know remote work works.

> facetime is irrelevant, because of relocation. Very few will stay at MSFT in Atlanta for 100k if they can double pay + relo to CA/Seattle. Google does have office in atlanta, btw.

Reed Hastings and Tim Cook, among others, disagree with you. Google does have an Atlanta office, but most of FAANG does not have significant engineering presence there (Microsoft does). Notable that Google expects engineers in Atlanta to come to their office, even though their teams will likely be in other cities. This is the canonical definition of face-time.

And again, $100k in Atlanta or Dallas is roughly equivalent to $200k in the Bay or Seattle. Add in externalities like family and climate (everybody does not like the Bay climate!) and it's not as straightforward as you make it.

> because in Minneapolis metro is about 3.5M people and Target can tap from talent pool of 3.5M, while places like Bay Area can tap from global talent pool (7B people)

If you think everyone wants to move to the Bay, I probably can't convince you otherwise. But please consider that some people a) don't like the climate b) are married to people whose jobs are elsewhere c) prefer a lifestyle that includes homeownership.

> No, you cannot expect overlapping, non-mutually-exclusive sub-populations of 9% and 18% to equal 27% of a total population.

Obviously, this is true. I don't know why you continue to exclude the Latino population, but again Latino CS grads (to focus on that narrow slice of tech jobs) are also ~7%.

> I hope that helps explain why your expectation of the gender & racial diversity of CS graduates is inaccurate.

But (as you have pointed out) we do know more about the sub-populations that let us infer that the populations are less overlapping than we might prefer. If you're interested, there are published demographic data that go into more detail than I have time to do here. But yes, I understand the concept that a Black Latina fits into three categories.

> you'll extrapolate (incorrectly) that 2/3rds of this population meets your criteria.

The basic idea here is simple: at Microsoft scale, their pipelines broadly should look like the collegiate exit pipeline. If you think that < 30% of programmers are women and/or Black/Latino, I think that assumption is the problem.

No matter what assumptions you make around the numbers, my core point still holds. Which is that if your pipeline is routinely missing X% of qualified applicants, your sourcing is not good enough to know whether you're even seeing the best candidates. That is as true if X% is 15% or 30%.

Using an analogy: if your company isn't seeing any applicants from states representing 15% of the population (say: Texas and New York), that says more about your sourcing than the talent available.

This is pretty much it. We are a huge Fortune 100 company that, apparently, prizes D&I over money.

Why would you need a CS degree in HR, Marketing, Product, etc?

This is correct.

A couple hairs to split: I wouldn't say more "prone to risk", I'd say they have different risk preferences. It's not like one or the other attitude towards risk is better or worse, they're just more or less adaptive given a certain environment.

I also wouldn't say men are disposable, as the story you tell at the group level is weak selection compared to at the individual level, but the gist is correct. Another way to look at it is: it's possible for males to win the genetic lottery, but impossible for females. The most reproductively successful men have had thousands of children, but women are limited to ~13 max. The upshot is that men have evolved to prefer risk more than women because the ceiling on payoffs is very high (i.e., you could get really rich, have lots of kids, multiple wives, tons of cattle), but for women the benefits of those huge lottery-winnings payoffs are much smaller in comparison to the costs (because you can only have 13 kids, and only slowly).

In my head, this is the explanation for ~80% of the differences in behavior by sex.

> Depends on the "some" being "harmed."

How does harming anyone help? No it does not depend on the some.

Life isn't a zero sum game. Pull people down and you don't distribute their value to others, you only destroy it.

This will only work if you also forbid rich people from homeschooling (= private tutors supplemented with sports & social clubs full of other rich kids—and very-well-funded rich-parent homeschooling support groups would probably start to look an awful lot like private schools themselves) and from sending their kids out of the country for school.

Day school rates for good private schools (there are way, way more bad private schools than good ones) are in like the $20k-$60k/yr range. That's a lot of money to put toward avoiding public school, even if US private schools themselves are outlawed. You'd have to also mandate public school attendance, no alternatives whatsoever.

You'd also have to do something to prevent rich people from effectively buying whole school districts and turning them into private schools. There are already districts kinda like this—unleash the entire upper-middle and upper class on the current public school system, and pretty soon there will be a few dozen districts nationwide where it's impossible to buy a house for under a million dollars and the schools may as well be private schools.

What policy do you have in mind? Would it be illegal to pay for tutoring of any kind, or would it just be illegal to not send your kid to the local public school (illegalizing homeschooling as well)? And what about just moving to an area close to better schools, would you write laws to address that?

As long as parents raise their own children, you're going to have crazy levels of inequality. If you also continue to respect personal autonomy and private property, you'll have ever crazier levels.

> Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will ...

Cause rich families to blanket refuse to live anywhere near neighborhoods with poor kids and contribute massively to the segregation between well off and impoverished neighborhoods.

Just live in a place where every home in a 45 minute radius is over a million dollars to purchase.

As a fun historical side note, I've heard this one before in a different context! "Make exit impossible so people will have to focus on fixing the broken system they're forced to deal with" was also the stated rationale for building the Berlin Wall.

USA has a long documented history of being deeply racist inside class consciousness, which is why poor non-whites compromise on "help rich and poor PoC" instead of only "help poor but only white people"

Well yeah, calling something divergent implies that there is a "normal". For ways of thinking and personalities people are fine with calling others not normal. For races and genders that is currently very not politically correct.

"underrepresented" is pretty close to the word you need, but is a slightly miscast type.

Very well said

This isn't meant to target hires. It's meant to target investments which fuels alot of this. It's complicated legal stuff, and i'm just an engineer, but I think they're tackling from the mindset of "If you didn't invest in this company because it's not diverse enough, but it met every other metric on the good investment scale, then the company doing the investment went against the goals of their shareholders(more $$). The idea is that alot of the companies doing this are doing it for investments from outside parties, so by removing that incentive it should stop it.

I don't think this logic holds. It is true that a sales rep job benefits from diversity eg having hispanic employees talk to Spanish speaking customers. However the same role can be performed equally well by a fluent Spanish speaker of any race. So a job requirement for a Hispanics sales rep would be racial discrimination for no good reason. You could construct similar arguments for most instances of diversity hiring.

Additionally Diversity is not the same as DEI. Diversity is a statistical concept whereas DEI is a religious belief

Depends on the investors but allegedly it is widely spread. And if you want lucrative government contracts, you have to implement it. I think it is overwhelmingly driven by government. Didn't find enough racism so they needed to create it.

Are you actually unaware of the Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) programs?

Many institutional investors - the largest ones - have announced their funding is dependent on ESG scores. I'm fascinated that people on this site can be unaware of this.

> Not have the same opportunities as the founders of Google and Microsoft

You are seeing a trend of FAANG employees, leaving the company to create their own start-ups. This trend won't slow down that progress at least...

I don't mean they shouldn't worry. I mean they shouldn't use language that puts blame on their kid for not being "diverse" (which is also a non-sensical description of 1 person).

This! Somehow diversity at every office means 50% diversity + 50% indian

Unequal outcomes will produce unequal future opportunities. This fact undermines any of premise from that start. And compelled equalization will commence just the same.

So this is a distinction without much of a difference. Certainly rule of law and various good faith attempts to provide opportunity are understandable. But when the outcomes simply are not equal along various group identity lines or this or that interest group achieves less wealth and power than another, no one is going to give up that game and say "OK, fair play, we lost the outcome."

No, pursuit of human self interest does not ever stop. So there's no endgame to any of this.

A “problem” is the metrics for that goal are unfalsifiable.

However that problem becomes a feature if the actual goal is not the stated goal.

Well met stranger! I don't understand how your comment is related to anything I said. I never suggested you avoid helping your children. I stated that by being able to help them, you are giving them a significant advantage.

I'm coming in very late to this conversation, but there may be some ambiguity here. Americans will often use the word "Brahmin" to generally refer to an upper class. For instance, the "Boston Brahmins" is a phrase used to refer to old money WASP families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin. So this might not have been in tended specifically as a reference to upper class Indians (it wasn't entirely clear to me from the post).

> It's also dangerously creating racism.

That seems like the primary feature at this point.

This is such an obvious point that I am now deaf to cries of incompetence and good intentions. Racial division can only be the end goal of such a concerted effort.

A couple thoughts here. First, politics is inherently divisive. Just like facebook figured out that divisiveness drives engagement and so have politicians. The craziest voices end up most amplified as everyone who opposes them loudly shouts about how crazy the other side is. Just like I don't believe there is widespread support for book banning on the right I don't see the support for SF style school boards. If you want to know what dems actaully support just listen to a biden speech on education or better yet read the platform here https://democrats.org/where-we-stand/party-platform/providin.... You'll notice that the main focus regarding race is funding for bussing programs and other methods of integrating schools, and that the focus is on income more than race. The republicans decided not to publish a platform in 2022 for whatever reason but they gave us this to explain themselves https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2020. I will say that recent laws in Florida have been concerning, but obviously the same is true for SF, and I blame presidential posturing more than ideology for the Florida stuff.

I realize it can be difficult to separate the rhetoric from the actual bills and laws being passed, but it is extremely important to do so, and to call out troublesome ones no matter where they come from. I think taking pundits with a grain of salt is about as much as we can do as individuals, but it sure would be nice to figure out a way to better inform people(on both sides) of facts, because more and more I just see people parroting their talking points past each other instead of steelmanning. Because if we forget about the pundits we end up with stuff like common core. Common sense rules that can make everyone better off aren't what pundits are selling, their incentives aren't properly aligned unfortunately.

How frequently does that happen?

I haven't.

I have heard more republican outcry in response to Biden's student loan forgiveness

> A recent analysis by the Census Bureau said Black and Hispanic women could benefit the most from the one-time cancellation policy, as both groups hold a disproportionate share of education debt relative to their peers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/27/lawsuit-...

But it is true. Chinese and Indian people have nothing else in common but their parenting styles are the same. Historical accident maybe, but it's true

Why do you think so? I have a hard enough time finding a qualified candidate of any variety.

Anecdotal of course but I believe this is very much true. I'm Latino if it matters much.

I'm the oldest of three brothers and was the one who was most pushed/expected to excel in education. My parents became a lot more lax on my younger brothers because they thought they pushed me too hard growing up. I think they changed in part because our relationship was very strained as I was growing up and even today isn't anywhere near as close as my two siblings are with my parents.

But on the other-hand, we're all adults now and I am the only one to graduate college and have a career in a typical "high-paying" profession/job. I don't fault my brothers for this and am close with them, but it is pretty stark the difference in career path/"traditional success" between the three of us simply based on this emphasis/value.

> just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways

Evolution does work. Assuming people are free to try everything out, usually the strategies that become the norm are the strategies that work better than the other ones. If you know better then the market, you could theoretically go in, make your own company execute your own strategy and start dominating the market, this has been done in history multiple times.

> it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice

Would you try this out if your own money or health was on the line?

> I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes.

I have a lot of complaints against democracy, however that does not mean I desire fascism, it means I want a better democracy.

> Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?

Assuming we want the people who can best perform, we should be looking at ways how to better identify the best performers instead of actively sabotaging the process by adding arbitrary discrimination into it that is proven to work against the goal.

> It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"

Would you give keys to your house to someone you don't trust? Would you give the keys to your car to someone who has a reputation of crashing cars?

Democracy is based on trust as well, you don't know if your favourite politician is actually going to do what they say they are going to do or if it's actually a good idea, yet you are likely going to go with your feelings and cast your vote.

How do you think a CEO would fare if that CEO would not have the respect of their subordinates?

> Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true.

For highly skilled roles, I doubt that this happens often in real life, usually you will have candidates with different qualities and you have to figure out which are the ones you believe to be more valuable.

> You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers?

I would probably try to see who would do the job for less, but sure, if that's the case you could also choose at random, however the higher the skill requirement, the less likely you will get into this situation.

So why can't small teams in large orgs also hire extended family? Given we've established a benign proclivity amongst people to do so.

Hence the,

"However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning."

I was tangentially wondering if someone has a good way of measuring merit, objectively.

The article is a lot more than just complaining about D&I policies, for example you'll notice that the manager spent several months unsuccessfully trying to get even one qualified diverse candidate to interview with Microsoft. What's up with that?

Well, it's easy to not notice on the middle of all the noise. But policies that fight wealth concentration are much clearer and have many less side effects than the ones for diversity and inclusion.

They are probably more inclusive too, but that measurement is noisy.

I haven't seen a single example where it can justify its racial discrimination, which of course would require some real hard evidence of its own necessity. I think we agree that racial discrimination is very negative.

> What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.

100% this. If companies want to show that they're improving the diversity of the tech field, sponsoring study programs and science olympiad teams in underserved communities are a much better investment than quotas. The only thing that's going to increase the representation in tech as a whole is increasing the number of black, Latin, indigenous tech workers.

Instead, companies seem to only care about signaling diversity. When a company sets a quota and pushes their representation of "diverse" demographics up a few percentage points, they're increasing the diversity within the company. They're doing nothing to actually increase the diversity of the field.

We're simultaneously being told that the pipeline doesn't contain enough minorities and that catching more fish from a smaller pond isn't going to impact the average size of those fish.

I know one megacorp that achieved its diversity by paying above-market for those workers and poaching very qualified people. That's expensive and zero-sum, exacerbating the situation elsewhere, but at least their employees knew diversity didn't mean unqualified.

It has nothing to with the people who were given an unfair advantage based on skin color, it is the fact that skin color is used to give a preference that invalidates accomplishments.

My reading of the original article tells me that these initiatives were interfering with this manager's ability to accomplish his team's objectives/provide value to shareholders. Indeed an assertion could be made that these initiatives run counter to fiduciary duty.

If you want to accomplish a goal, hire people you trust, given them clear objectives, and then get out of their way. Don't micromanage them with endless bureaucracy. Do you think that these policies will deter a real racist? Do you think an interview requirement or call asking "Did you consider candidate X?" accomplishes anything? Can you describe what?

Also MSFT is publicly traded not publicly owned. It's still a private company.

It isn't like the law is being enforced in any case-- as people are posting all over these threads the diversity policies are explicitly "fail(ing) or refuse(ing) to hire or to discharge any individual ... because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."

So really, GP poster got their wish-- companies are just not using their ability to ignore the law the way the poster expected.

Yes please - let people make their own decisions. Why this list but not height or hair colour or beauty or sexual orientation or any one of 1000 traits that people have little to no control over? Do you think the last 50 years of identity-driven public policy have served to unify or divide Americans?

Also "race" isn't really a "thing", so what does it mean in the context of this law?

Merit isn't good per se. DEI is certainly worse though.

Simply because merit approximates fair far better.

> Also, people hiring in their friends and family over others who are distinctly better.

That mostly has to do with weighing trusted known-contact vs. untrusted stranger. In extreme case, we see this in a traditional family business that has been owned and operated for generations.

Optically maybe, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Just assuming that the “group of white men” are “all the same” is not very deep. The truth is that they’re all individuals with individual stories strangers who judge them by their looks know nothing about. It used to be understood as a good thing to not judge people based on their gender or skin color, including the nowadays declared “evil” white men.

"diversity of the candidate" doesnt make any sense. Or are you looking at the candidates ancestory and deciding what their diversity is? A single person isn't "diverse." I know some people are trying to change the meaning of "diverse"to mean "a minority."

May be if they are all posing for a stock photo then yes. But how does it add diversity in a workplace. Assuming all the white men are from different countries.

What if the black woman is privileged, and went to a prestigious college all expenses paid by parents...you know, like most of the white men you meet in tech?

Meanwhile, the person who is self made (real diversity in this situation) and successfully bootstrapped themselves gets passed over because thier skin color is too bright.

Qualified diverse people are rare (no relation to skin color "diversity"). That is why everyone is cracked out over skin color and gender because there is an actual population of people that the HR secretariat pool can EASILY identify by just taking a glance. Thier mission, of course, is to please thier white male executives.

> Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men

Yes or, for another example, an Israeli would add diversity to a group of Americans (of various colours).

No, that person is different or divergent, not diverse. The group is diverse.

In academic admissions, you're probably right. In tech hiring, I have seen it firsthand, on multiple occasions.

Sorry to hear that. I get it. I've been there. I reached a point where I was in a big company and got promoted to a level where there were no LGBTQIA+ people above my level - and this was at a FAANG company. All meetings were all straight cis guys that were overly aggressive. It was so incredible exhausting to function in that environment. The only reason I lasted as long as I did was because I had a very good female boss that could navigate working with these guys that had no clue the problems they caused for the people around them because they "were just being guys." I learned a ton about all these mental gymnastics you have to do to work with people that made no effort to adjust to work with different types of people. It was painful.

I'm now working at a smaller firm and get to be a major influencer and decision maker in how the culture is getting laid out. It's mind boggling how much trauma/PTSD people bring to the table from working in offices that are really homogenized and lack diversity with them being the one that's different. I still can't get over how common it is regardless if it's gender, sexuality, education background, or disability. What I think a lot of people are missing in the DEI discussions isn't about trying to find diverse candidates but how to create environments where they - along with everyone else - thrives.

It's pretty obvious from the comments in this post how there's a strong vocal minority of people that refuse to engage and constantly battle how broken things are. I just hope they figure it out before it's too late. And if they refuse, I hope they remain ICs with very little influence and not included in significant decision making because this attitude is poison for so many people.

> aforementioned black woman may have more in common with the white men on the team than other white men.

Diverse viewpoints are more likely to arise from introducing 3 black women to a group of 3 white men than if you introduced 3 more white men.

> it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity,

Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?

False dichotomy. I spent a couple of paragraphs talking about this. Please read my post and try again if you really want to have a conversation.

If the children of a president want to work in your company, and they aren't scammers, crazy as a goat, or involved in criminal activity, of course that they should get preferential treatment. Not hiring them would be extremely stupid.

Their network of friends and knowledge of the government is not the kind of things that one can buy with money normally.

What if that treatment is a necessary counter-weight to being taken less seriously?

Someone needs to do a screen recording on something light this and give it some sunlight/reveal the company. I hear about this practice frequently, but have never seen video.

Hispanic is even more confusing given that the population composition of some "hispanic" countries is 90%+ white.

Does make you wonder if heavy-handed affirmative action breeds imposter syndrome among its beneficiaries.

> Over 50 years ago the US Military recognized that segregation and entrenched racial biases lead to inefficiencies and lack of readiness.[1] In an economy where hiring pipelines for skilled technical people are stretched incredibly thin, we need to be taking a hard look at why we're only getting people that look a certain way through our hiring process.

That doesn't follow, at all. For one, you're comparing apples and oranges. The "norm in Silicon Valley" is not to practice explicit racial segregation like the US Army did in 1940. Additionally, D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.

An anecdote: a non-white friend of mine recently quit her job, because she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person who checked a lot of DEI boxes. That person proceeded to drive her crazy with their incompetence until she burned out and quit.

I'm sincerely confused about this comment. If I reverse it, I end up with the status quo in a lot of settings: everyone is the same, they don't have to worry about finding ways to interact with people that are different from them, and they get the luxury and safety of being who they are at home while at work.

Also, what are "bizarre sexual proclivities"? It sounds like you are living with a thick layer of judgement and shame in your life. That sounds rough.

You are removing words. OP was saying that they are worried that their kid would fail to reach the elite level, using standard coded words "decent" and "good".

Why are "decent" schools and "good" jobs so rare that we are competing for them against each other, instead of a standard anyone can reach with effort? Even schools! The very source of opportunity that we hope to equalize!

> What does that mean?

Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.

> Just about anyone can get into a school, or get a job.

Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes, it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and therefore no reason to worry.

If you do not believe someone can demonstrate merit, you cannot believe in equality of opportunity.

If you do not have Equality of Opportunity all you have left are power structures, usually attached to some degree of structural determinism.

At that moment, you have the same logic as the Communist/Marxian/Dialectic revolutionaries we have seen time and time again. Once they gain power they label everyone else a reactionary.

Saying they don't believe in being able to demonstrate merit is why I suggest they are a Communist/Marxian/Dialectic. Because not only is that stupid in the real world, it is literally a defining feature of the base ideology.

They are. kardianos is observing that the situation is very similar, that history is rhyming if not repeating.

Woke racism/sexism (DEI) is frequently referred to as neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism because when examined it turns out to be closely related to Marxist thought, with race/gender/sexual attributes substituted for class. Beyond this somewhat trivial difference there are many clear similarities:

1. The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.

2. The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.

3. The origin in the academic/(pseudo-)intellectual sphere. Communist revolutionaries claimed to speak for the working classes but didn't come from the working classes. Instead they were men of words, with their primary output being books, pamphlets and violence. Thus opposition to communism was sometimes identified as "anti-intellectual", because the arguments for communism sounded clever, whereas the complaints against it didn't.

4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies. See here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary#:~:text=In%20the%2....

I'm not sure about in the US, I know in Canada we've had lots of university faculty positions advertised recently that are explicity for women or some other groups. I don't understand how it's legal but it is.

A recent discussion on HN surfaced this fact. It's legal for higher education for now, but hiring is different.

I think a lot of people don't realize this. I didn't. I assumed if you could do it for education you could do it for hiring. Apparently not!

Is it?

I think there's an affirmative action lawsuit currently pending before SCOTUS. It seems discrimination is allowable (so far) as long as it has good intentions. It may change with this case.

Although there could be some discrepancy with a colloquial use of discrimination which includes an implied notion of negative bias, while positive biases (preferences to certain candidates) can also fit the more dry definition.

The law doesn't matter except to the degree that the regime will enforce it.

Tiger parenting is one way of investing in your kid. I agree, there are multiple ways to invest in your kid.

>More likely is that filters for immigration are very high Don't agree with this, there are lots of ways to immigrate and I don't think most of them have a sort of wealth/education filter. For example refugees.

While parent's comment was certainly to some degree tongue-in-cheek, they are likely agreeing with you. Investment in your parents AND likely a higher than average weight on "a good life" being grounded in employment, education, and certain values are contributing factors to the end results

People should care because big companies are constantly competing on talent and it would be a competitive advantage to leverage a larger talent pool.

Every single comment in this thread is a deflection. "It's the recruiters", "the manager sucks", "subconscious bias", "the position is too specialized", etc. Why is that?

The post describes turning down a lot of qualified people because they had not encountered any applicants of required race/gender yet. In fact, they ended up not hiring for the position at all because they never encountered applicants of the required race/gender. So despite the fact that they had qualified applicants, they ended up forced to hire nobody. No individual person was discriminated against, but the group of applicants sure was: none of them got hired, despite the fact that the manager had qualified applicants and wanted--needed--to hire one.

The post also notes that this was invisible to people who weren't a manager, so it was effectively a secret, whether or not it was intentionally so.

If I tell my recruiters to never interview black people, it's not discrimination because it's not actually prohibiting them from hiring or promotion? Quotas in choosing who to interview or who to consider for promotion is absolutely a form of discrimination.

I've worked at a company that implemented this. It resulted in a vast double standard: white and asian males only got interviews if they came from elite colleges or well-known companies. Diverse candidates could pretty much come from anywhere. This resulted in a substantial disparity of tech-screen pass rates. Which the company held up as evidence of discrimination, and demanded that we address this disparity. Proposals to anonymize tech-screen, strangely, were ignored. Instead, recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) got to decide who advanced from the tech-screen to the on-site instead of engineers.

Sure, but a black percentage of ~13%, which is actually exactly in line with the ratio of black americans to americans.

The "model minority myth" occurs when someone takes population-wide trends and applies it on an individual level: e.g. "he's Asian, so he must be good at math". That's stereotyping.

Pointing at demographic trend in academic achievement isn't the model minority myth, it's an empirical observation. Conflating objective facts with the model minority myth is perhaps well intentioned, but it comes off as a shallow attempt to deny real world observations. Asians Americans, on average do spend more time on academics, and do enter fields like medicine and engineering at higher rates. This is an empirical observation, not the model minority myth. Similarly, there's nothing racist or white supremacist about examining disparities in time spent on academics. If someone takes this data and then judges individuals for population-wide averages, then that's stereotyping and I do not condone that.

I'm not sure what your intent was with your last paragraph, but it comes off as an overzealous attempt to portray any analysis of time spent on academics as racist. I certainly wouldn't want someone to assume I'm personally less intelligent than my Asian co-worker because I'm Cuban. But I trust that most people are able to understanding that averages are not the same as individuals. And I find the pattern of people being worried that I'd be offended by data on Latin americans' academic achievement condescending. I am smart enough to understand that data saying Latin Americans on average spend less time on academics than whites or asians is not an attack on me personally, thank you very much.

> Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education.

No it doesn't. It implies that asian culture values education more than other cultures. Which has been shown in some studies. For example, this one from 2013 [1] showed that, when asked if a college degree was necessary for success, 70% of hispanics said yes, as well as 61% of asians, 55% of blacks, and 47% of whites. A more recent study from 2020 [2] asked if college led to more job opportunities, and 89% of asians said yes, as well as 86% of whites, 74% of latinos, and 69% of blacks.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/white-...

[2]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/25/views-higher-...

Being white gives me the privilege of not being followed by security at department stores while I see my non-white friends be not so subtly watched or followed.

I myself have to mark a checkbox saying "Hispanic OR Latino". I'm Latino, but NOT Hispanic. But I can also check "white". One is a skin color, another is ancestry, and yet another is geographical location...

Companies like Microsoft want the best people. It's not brick laying, there's no "qualified for the job" tick box. The effects in software are non-linear, and one brilliant hire can create more value than 100 mediocre ones. These companies are actively hurt by having to hire second-best diversity hires, even if they're technically qualified for the job (whatever that means).

Sure, you could obviously have a poorly functioning diverse workplace. Likewise, you could obviously have a poorly functioning lily-white all-male workplace.

The idea that diversity advocates are solely focused on diversity for its own sake is incorrect. There are two factors that typically play into it: one is practical (see my comment) and the other is moral (the belief that it’s inherently better if someone raised in a non-majority culture has an equal chance to succeed).

“Virtue signaling” is a tremendously non-useful term because it is always, always applied inconsistently. The dude I’m responding to used the phrase “CRT.” That ensures that we all know that he’s virtuous and recognizes the evil of leftist thought, but you’re not calling him a virtue signaler.

Don’t assume people who disagree with you are hypocrites. Maybe we’re just misinformed. “Virtue signaling” ends discussion and promotes division, and we really don’t need more of that in this world.

not in the usa, "no child left behind" did a lot of damage on the futures of the generation going forward here.

It absolutely engages with the parent comment. The parent comment is trying to argue that discrimination in selecting which candidates to interview isn't a form of bias. This is incorrect as I explain in my comment.

It directly responds to the comment even without the quoted sentence.

You can flip the script and ask why you should apply rules based on the aggregate despite obvious counterexamples. White boonies kid isn't happy to be excluded over the fact they are white, either.

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.

Yes. "Disadvantaged" isn't a clear enough concept to act on, even if it were the same thing as race or gender, which it isn't. It's not even semantically clear. Does it mean something bad has been inflicted on them externally in the past, or does it merely mean their present situation is worse than average without passing judgement on why?

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.

So you're okay with Lebron's children being given advantages in hiring process over a poor white candidate?

I'm interested in the question of who decides which attributes are relevant, and which values of those attributes shall be favored.

I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.

Both of those classes are actually illegal to ask about(in Canada at least but probably many nations, so unless the candidate volunteers this information (almost certainly not). Who knows how one could know to reverse discriminate themselves.

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 .

I notice that you only use the word “group” above and not “people” or some older word acknowledging that that’s what these groups are made of.

Why judge people by the groups that were born into when we could be judging them as individuals instead?

Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?

This would be a good case for anonymizing resumes in the interview process. I'm not sure why that wasn't considered over setting minimum representation requirements. An easy way to eliminate discrimination is to make it impossible to discriminate between protected classes.

>The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status.

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.

But here you have a multi-national corporation, with offices globally and ability to hire from any culture on the planet - and despite waiting months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate, they were unable to find a single candidate who was "diverse" enough.

What conclusions do you draw from this? That "people are racist"? That the pipeline is broken? This feels like ignoring the elephant in the room.

"Rules made by society" is exactly why it is relevant here.

I can't even imagine what it must be like to live in this kind of contrived world.

Does it have to? Humans are really bad at being rational actors. The fact that some groups are less represented is a source of bias on its own. They can still be sorted out if they don't meet hiring standards in the second step, where unconscious bias is a lot less likely to affect a person that can demonstrate their skills.

My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian.

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!

>Still assuming you’re right, and not prejudiced, why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad

this is simply not true. Hiring must be all about merit, not handouts for some noble social purpose.

Secondly, lowering bar for one race while keeping the same bar other races is blatant racism. It is conveniently called affirmative action, but in reality it is racism against more qualified candidates (like asians, jews, etc).

Third, just looking at skin color and handing out jobs does not accomplish intended goal (helping disadvantaged people), instead it only reinforces negative perceptions of minorities as unqualified and not deserving of high paying jobs.

Fourth, a lot of people who take advantage of DEI programs to get into high pay jobs/colleges - are not disadvantaged at all. I am talking about people from middle-class/high income families, kids from medium/high net worth families who also happened to be in a minority race. Also middle class/rich immigrants from Africa/Latin America, who never experienced many disadvantages that under represented minorities face in the US.

If you really really want to help underrepresented minorities get into tech - you should specifically target people from low income/poor neighborhoods, poor rating/high crime school districts - and to help them become qualified and deserving of jobs, not just handing out "Chief Diversity Officer" type token jobs that have no real impact, and are not really bona fide jobs. That also obviously includes white kids from poor neighborhoods, and becomes income targeted program, rather than racial profiling program.

>> What exactly is so terrible about helping people grow into roles instead of following the semi recent practice of only hiring perfectly qualified candidates?

Imagine your son was rejected for a job he perfectly was qualified for, and instead someone from another race was hired who was less qualified. Just because of race. Once you flip the situation to yourself and become on the other end of the "affirmative action" you will understand. You can't fix past discrimination with another discrimination.

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.

Is there any reason to believe this is true and not just conjecture? This always struck me as kind of far fetched.

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success

There's a ton of different sources of bias. Look at lesswrong.com. What (other than politics) makes minority bias more significant than the other? And why it can't be fought with ordinary means and working on yourself?

You don't need to be the same thing as the object of your study to study it. Just like you can study Geology without being a rock, you can study what a minority group wants/needs/buys without belonging to it. Nothing in principle prohibits that.

> white nationalist groups are growing in numbers

I don't know if it's valid, but let's assume it is. Have you considered that some of this growth can be attributed to DEI and the rest of far-left policies?

If you're openly being racist towards certain groups, they can also become racist. When a poor white male gets rejected/fired/demoted because company needed a diversity hire, it's not going to make him more tolerant.

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.

This is far-fetched and based mostly on ideology rather than evidence, not much different from a Soviet socialist explaining why planned economies are essential to the country's success (100 years ago it didn't sounds as absurd as now). It's your right to believe this sort of things, I don't deny you this, but don't insist that this is an objective truth that every reasonable person should believe in. As it goes with this kind of questionable ideas, it should be ok to choose not to believe in them, as I think the parent comment does.

And I agree with the parent comment's view here. Whatever advantage the woke-culture companies may have is easily explained by their increased visibility among woke audience, not by some deep insights. It's just a marketing trick, just like putting AI/Blockchain on your ad increases your visibility among some of tech enthusiasts.

> What's next?

Slippery slope is a fallacy.

> white nationalist groups are growing in numbers […] prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate

How does any of this back up the impossibility of blindness to race? (Remember that most of the world is outside of US.)

> What's next? Should we get rid of sexual harassment training and policies?

Yes.

Yes I think cultural lines are commonly divided along skin color.

Big tech profitability does not get hurt by hiring mediocre people. They are post-talent businesses. They do not depend on tech talent to drive and keep profit margins but rather depend on established monopoly and maintaining barrier-to-entry to continue their profitability. They show their growth by simply showing more ads or hiking subscription prices or through more sales people - not by developing new ground breaking tech. Apple is likely exception here.

> why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad?

Policies like this don't really change the number of disadvantaged people who are hired. To do that, they'd have to reduce the number of elites who are hired, and that doesn't happen.

Instead, these policies help disadvantaged people of some races by shutting out disadvantaged people of other races.

You are assuming that people who need hand outs are all not white. That appears to me to be pretty racist in itself. I know many poor white Americans that don't even have Internet. I also grew up poor. My grandmom was Italian and treated poorly when she arrived in America. She got called the n word because her skin was dark and couldn't go to school because of it as well. Well here I am 80 years later. White male that has worked very hard to get myself out of where I was only to be confronted with people talking about the color of skin and not Merritt. We are all in this together.

I put a lot of work into my life to get where I am. I did a lot of things I didn't want to and sacrificed a lot. I had a really good hour long interview at Microsoft last week and was told at the end that they are looking to diversify their team more and best of luck to you.

Racism is bad.

As a hiring manager I have substantial pressure to hire incompetent people to meet quotas. I confronted my recruiter in front of witnesses and was partially shunned.

I have been hiring for many years, and I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity. Now I am forced to.

It’s an insult to those who earned their position. It’s an insult to me as I am less and less likely to get a new job because I won’t fit quotas.

There is resentment all around.

I feel bad for the minorities who have worked hard to earn their positions, you are right that it undermines their work and trivializes their commitment to their work.

It’s gone way too far.

>I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.

As a man in tech, I've been a part of countless hush-hush conversations that would never be repeated within earshot of a woman or untrusted man. It's as grim as you say, and worse.

I'm really sorry that things have become like this.

Had a few times in the last 10 years. Where I was pushed very hard to hire someone either completely unqualified, or in we we simply didn’t need.

Like being told to hire a bash programmer for a database admin position. Because person was trans.

Thinking back on if. I’ve never had a regular white woman pushed on me.

I’ve hired woman before. But that was because they were qualified.

Now I’m considered evil for looking at merit.

Not questioning what you're saying, just adding that I think "prejudice" is a better word for this than bigotry? (to be clear: we're discussing here the results of identity-based hiring practices, as opposed to are there sex differences in programming ability)

Words never have entirely cleanly defined meanings, but broadly I think bigotry is often used to speak specifically of all-out irrational dogmatic beliefs. Prejudice is more often used where there is some partly rational judgement about a group of people, together with moral problems caused by applying that logic to a particular person. Of course, often our prejudices are very fallible: "rational" prejudices turn out to be wrong, and in that sense are functionally equivalent to bigotry. But holding a "rational" belief that all prejudice is irrational also does not make us infallible!

Some prejudice seems hard to criticize morally: for example, everybody makes prejudiced judgements say based partly on clothing, age, and sex if they find themselves in close proximity to a group of young men in a city at night. On the other hand, at work, one tries hard to not judge based on whatever preconceived group notions one has -- I think almost everybody thinks that's a good thing (which as you say can be harmed by identity-based hiring). I don't have a good abstract explanation of what makes the difference between "good" and "bad" prejudice, and I wish I did, so would love to hear of good writing about it if somebody can recommend some!

In the company I worked for recently, perhaps even a majority of the more capable programmers around me happened to be women. But wherever we do start hiring based on identity, it's hard to see how prejudice can be avoided, even if bigotry were entirely absent.

Of late I have been seeing people going viral for posting some incredible career trajectories. Usually involving someone in another career who made the switch to tech by doing a bootcamp, and within a year they were in FAANG. Now that I think about it, they were all people who fit into diversity quotas and were probably diversity hires

It's not the whole interview. Just the first part of many questions. You have to print a string abcdefghij... like

abcd

efgh

ijkl...

And you would be surprised by the number of people who it takes 20 minutes to do that. Doing it in 2 minutes doesn't mean you're competent, but taking 20 damn sure means you're not

> It is also possible that those companies will be suffocated by the fact that banks won't extend credit to them (ESG) or angry Twitter will pressure potential customers not to do business with them.

I think that would only be an issue if they made a big deal in public about rejecting DEI. Such a statement might also attract a bunch of obnoxious, oppositely-polarized people you don't want either. Probably the best strategy would be to not mention it at all unless forced, and then just make vague, positive statements about diversity until whoever is bothering you moves on to something else.

ESG practices are currently under lawsuits as it's not in the shareholders best financial interest to factor these in when doing investments. So should fix itself soon. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-08/texas-joi...

True, this is actually happening as we speak. There will be a bifurcation, once enough flywheel speed has picked up; ESG funds will see competitor funds that will outperform. No wasting money on greenwashing or other ESG bullshit. Totalitarianism has to fight a war with reality and facts. It is unsustainable (pardon the pun).

I'm arguing that belonging to a majority does not place implicit responsibilities on people. Wanting to associate with culturally similar people is a natural human behaviour, not something to be ashamed of.

You seem to be arguing that we should force people to deny this quite natural impulse in order to make minorities more comfortable. Seems pretty toxic/controlling to me. Let people be.

So you know your mind. You don’t know the minds of all not-whites.

I’m pretty sure all parents worry about how the world will treat their kids.

There’s pros and cons to everything. If you’re in the US or Europe, you’re in a very privileged position compared to others in less privileged countries.

To imagine that someone who is not-white will know how all not-white parents think is silly. Even within a small demographic sliver, it seems weird to generalize my thoughts to all people who have my race or culture (eg, it’s lack of critical thinking to think “I’m Vietnamese and my kids are Vietnamese so I know the mind of all Vietnamese parents”)

There is a lot of racism toward black and brown kids and it’s the worst for poor black and brown kids. Hopefully, since you’re reading on HN you have a tech job and make some money. Historically, and presently, poor kids don’t get treated well.

I feel you may have misunderstood my comment. I wasn't really trying to argue anything, merely stating my belief in light of information conveyed to me by someone. Let me explain.

I don't think I intended to counter anything with what I was saying. I was merely amused by the intersection of the article i was reading with the situation I had - being involved in the hiring of, specifically, an african american woman in Georgia to an engineering role and the turning down of a white dude from Boston. "Literally" was used to emphasize the exactness of the hypothetical to my reality - less analogous than equal.

With that out of the way, the core of my comment was intended to convey the message "I can believe that there is a lot of hidden bias out there in the world, based on the stories someone generally considered to be at risk of many biases has told me."

It just replaces one problem with a different one, or, worse, will mask the actual problem through "facially neutral" policies that are anything but.

> Mandating that X% of your interviews

“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.)

Currently, the hiring process is opaque in pretty much every respect. I think this probably is a benefit to companies, since if they list the metrics they use, candidates will optimize for those metrics instead of actually being good at the job (Goodhart's law)

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.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053

I'm surprised at how negative the reaction to my explanation is. It's not even controversial to anyone who keeps track of the current state of title VII legal strategy.

I'm not saying we shouldn't. I'm saying that's the status quo, and changing people on this level is much harder than a policy that simply says "you must have an underrepresented person in this batch of interview invites". Maybe that'll even get them to read the CVs as a side effect.

Maybe. But instead we're training AI.

You guess wrong! I'm a hiring manager, and I'm very good at it. In the last few years I've had multiple quarters in which I successfully hired at a rate of 1 engineer a month or higher.

One of the first things I do when I get a new job is reach out to whoever I partner with on recruiting and spend significant time working with them to make sure they understand what I'm looking for and how to do initial screens if that's the recruiter's role in this company. I talk about diversity and how I approach it. For the first month or so at least, I ask the recruiter to show me as many resumes as possible and I give a paragraph or two of feedback on each one so they know what I did or didn't like about them.

I also expect that I'll be doing a fair amount of time searching LinkedIn myself, particularly at the beginning of the process, for the same reasons I give the recruiter solid feedback on resumes -- it helps them understand what I want out of my candidates. I also tend to pull in my team for sourcing sessions, because there's always someone on the team who knows a perfect candidate but didn't think to refer them.

If the company isn't paying me for a LinkedIn professional account with unlimited searches, I'm not gonna pay for it myself, mind you. In that case the amount of searching I can do is limited, but that's life.

Let's review what the original author said:

> I spent months waiting for a single person to apply who fulfilled the racial requirement. When no one did, I spent hours trying to find people on LinkedIn who I thought might count as black or Hispanic based on their name or resume.

"I spent months waiting." That's awfully passive, but I've had bad recruiters in the past, so I get the possibility. However, as I said, I would be annoyed if my company had a goal -- regardless of what it was -- and the recruiters weren't actually doing anything to help me reach it.

All Brahmin, members at the top of a caste system established by British colonizers[1]. A system causing its own set of problems in Silicon Valley[2].

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734

2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...

>If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work and will cause pointless problems in the meantime.

So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work, we should throw it away. Sounds like a newbie dev throwing a tantrum over having to build on a system with legacy code.

>the bar was far higher for firing a diverse employee with performance issues, which followed from the DEI objectives.

That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI objectives." Was that bar for performance standards explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here, hyperbole?

The Last Psychiatrist: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w...

>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?

> And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.

... 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.

> 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!

It isn't as clear cut as with the CS, because women (on average) may be put off by the high competetiveness and poor life quality of law/medicine, but they are also drawn (on average) by the fact that in those fields you work with people. Whereas, in CS degree, there's literally nothing for them (on average).

Private sector affirmative action is illegal in the US.

Define "real". It's definitely measurable in the lab, but the effect sizes aren't very impressive, and the link to real-world outcomes remains quite controversial.

And in some cases, not Asian.

Except it doesn't seem to mean that (at least not anymore). Hence the exasperated comments you are reading on this very thread.

All people (including whites and heterosexual males) can be the targets of negative discrimination. No one wants to see themselves or their kids be intentionally disadvantaged based solely on the colour of their skin or their sexuality. Any attempt to create ANY exception to this rule is disingenuous and does nothing but further damage the very thing you claim to be trying to resolve.

Every not white parent I’ve met is concerned with their kid’s future- what job, what education, what marriage, etc.

I’ve met a lot of people from different backgrounds and one thing I notice is how much we have in common. I worked with people who make less than a few dollars a day in developing nations and it was interesting how the parent stories are almost the same. Pictures of kids and grandkids. Stories about successful kids. Plans for kids to have education and jobs. The scale varies but the concerns are very similar.

You made a lot of arguments in your post, and it's going to take a lot of work to unpack them all.

But I'll say right away - starting your post with "What evidence of sexism do you have?" is a bit laughable. There's a lot of evidence of sexism in our industry. But it seems that you are unwilling to consider any of it. If you truly believe that western feminism is the REAL sexism, do you think there is a chance to find any middle ground or agreement on this discussion?

I have something to say about almost everything you wrote, but I'll pick the thread on one spot that I think has the most potential:

> It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment

Well...yeah? If there is a concept, or behaviour that men happen to not mind, but women on average/generally/mostly do, and an environment that contains mostly men either actively promotes that concept/behaviour, or tacitly ignores it by looking the other way, that is going to create an environment that is hostile to women!

Now you might say, that's not inherently a problem. But what if this is an environment that doesn't inherently benefit from an imbalanced gender ratio. Then those behaviours, that hostility, is actually actively funnelling viable capable women out of the environment, and there is no meritocracy to ensure that it can occur.

> Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is,

Casual transphobic dog whistle? Disappointing.

Perfect, so you have no problem with Microsoft having this policy! Problem solved.

Right you are... I used be a Manager at Volvo (Sweden) and I really like their approach to boost the diversity on the workplace. Instead of targets/or lowering the standards they were moving obstacles (childcare, flex work) and focusing on marketing amongst the diversity groups.

So why did they invite you to the interview in the first place if you are not diverse enough?

It's extremely common beyond the new grad / junior level, from my experience.

First, anonymized resumes would not create increased in hiring rates. It might increase the candidate pool through the screen, but behold, racial discrimination is a function at every stage of the interview process.

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.

These rules and categories are ill-defined and even don't exist in some cases. You are not wrong stating ruling class has promoted racial ideas to weaken and control the populace at large. That doesn't mean they exist. The real power structure is held by particular networks and families, not races, as there is no such thing as race. The idea that you can draw lines around a group based on physical characteristic is what they promulgate to fool us, so to use the same groupings to supposedly fix society is a stupid mistake. Both Norwegians and Yemenis are considered "white", which makes no sense. Are you telling me that Kanye West should get more privileges than a poor Yemeni because they are white? This is absurd. Did you know that Swedes and North Africans are less diverse genetically than northern vs southern chinese? What about mixed race people? What about countries that are in between regions that follow traditional "racial" groupings, such as central asia? Are we really that dumb to categorize people based on superficial vague judgements about appearance? And to leave it up to the completely non-scientific and biased judgements of HR?

Hiring people based on skin color is not equality of opportunity, it is equality of outcome.

Working in tech, I don't see a system that rewards and uplifts whiteness. Asians (both East and from the subcontinent) are greatly overrepresented relative to their fraction of the US population in SWE jobs. Their skin color was never a factor. Most of the ones I've worked with/interviewed, were hired due to merit, not the color of their skin.

That richer and more well educated Indians are over-represented in tech jobs and as CEOs of major tech companies relative to those with fewer resources and less well educated is not surprising.

I am not sure what's the relevance of the skin color of those who allegedly imposed the system that led to this particular group being at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy in India today. How did that result in "uplifting whiteness"?

> Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected outright"

Nope, they didn't. A direct quote: "If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work". Note the "If". If you disagree that D&I wouldn't work under these conditions, or that stuff that doesn't work should be rejected as pointless, you're still welcome to make that argument. But please be careful not to misquote other users' comments.

Both facts that, on average, women are less interested in things (and more interested in people) and also women, on average, are less interested in money, have a solid backing in research. They're not factually wrong.

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).

>they are historically and factually wrong

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.

Guess women are just easily manipulated by the evil Big Computer Science Lobbyists.

You can alter the audio signal to mask gender: https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

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.

Most of what you said was irrelevant to what I was saying. I feel no need to address it.

I think we are getting caught in what it means to "exist". Perhaps my language was not precise enough. My meaning wasn't that the idea and abstraction of race does not exist in my earlier comments - my point was that the abstraction (social construct in this case) is very leaky, and doesn't match reality, hence the several examples I provide where the idea of race doesn't make sense at all. My argument is that the abstraction is so far removed from the reality that it's more harmful than helpful. In our computerized data driven modern reality, there's no reason we couldn't deeply assess every individual's full history and situation to determine how underprivileged they are, rather than using superficial and inaccurate measures such as skin color.

This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people use this perverted logic.

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.