Ask HN: Is discrimination to promote diversity okay?

Your perceptions are accurate and you are not alone in your distaste of modern racism.

It's been my experience as well. I mentioned before on different threads that as a hiring manager I've been told by HR to move all non white male candidates to the phone screen step automatically. Regardless of their resume.

It does not make me comfortable at all, and I'll admit, it actually creates a bias in my mind when I do perform the phone screen for these candidates. It's completely counter productive because even if they are excellent candidates I feel like I'm just being strong armed into calling them regardless.

I do not embrace it. As you mentioned, brushing off concerns by saying "well, it's time for all these oppressors to know how it feels" is dumb. Those who think like that don't care about justice for the future, they just want revenge for the past. And it never ends well.

In India the concept is literally called "positive discrimination".

> It's unjust to discriminate against a young graduate today, and have them pay the price for bygone injustice.

That implies the price will ever be paid (and perish the thought that you get a discount if your ancestors fought or died for the Union during the Civil War, or were on the "right side of history" in any other conflict).

When those who think remotely like you are driven out of the halls of economic and political power*, do you think they will look at the state of things and say: "You know what, we've achieved enough diversity. It's time to stop discriminating against whites"?

*Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

It’s so great that HN seems uniformly against racism affecting white men.

But I guess I missed all the posts decrying discrimination when it was affecting women and POC?

> Candidates that are doing well are literally being ejected from the hiring process because they don't help diversity stats. On more than one occasion I've seen a hiring manager with open roles tell a recruiter to not bother them with any applications from white males.

That's illegal per US law. It's also racist, but that particular flavor of racism is illegal.

> The nuance has gone in recent years, and it has become common for interviewers to think nothing of directly and openly identifying "white male" as a negative trait when discussing a candidate after an interview.

I've heard the opposite. The HR rep seemed not to be thrilled by the applicant but the technical team really liked him. Afterward with just the engineers someone said out loud "Hey, and he (the candidate) went to X and he's white so you know he's there on merit".

At first I was shocked but then over the years I've seen firsthand "affirmative action" push for candidates that were less qualified (despite being told that the diverse candidate was only preferred when both were of "equal competencies").

> I will inevitably have to either challenge something, and be labelled a bigot or misogynist, or live an increasingly bizarre existence with things happening around me that I consider to be clearly wrong.

Don't discuss this openly. You'll put a target on your back and get cancelled (just look at the MIT lecturer). These discussions, sadly, will have to happen behind closed doors.

Sidestepping the specific, delicate topic:

Once a business starts making decisions based on anything arbitrary (e.g. nepotism, or meeting specific quotas that aren't related to the business), it's a slow downhill slide in my experience.

Practically: There's not much you can do other than quietly exit.

Are there laws against this form of discrimination in your jurisdiction?

If not, do you own the company or have significant leverage with the owners?

If the answers are "no" and "no", then the answer to your question doesn't matter, and any discussion is at-best therapeutic kvetching.

In the USA, in software, laborers have very little recourse other than finding a new job. We are explicitly carved out of what little labor protections are afforded to most other professions. This means that, from the perspective of tech employees, companies operate as feudal kingdoms and your only savior is a favorable labor market.

Practically, this translates into the following advice for questions on any number of HR-related topics: if there isn't a more powerful king who can step in for you, and you're not willing to challenge the king or find a new one, then go back to the fields and quietly work your plot of land.

I find myself giving this advice more and more often. Software people have been been empowered by excellent supply/demand dynamics for a couple decades and seem to have forgotten how capitalism sans labor power works.

... and the topic only lasted 20 minutes before getting flagged!

I see the desirable state as being two-pronged:

1. From any given candidate’s perspective, I want them to be treated equally and evaluated fairly.

2. From a candidate pool perspective, I think we need to ensure that the candidate pool is opened more widely than to the top N schools or top M companies.

No.

Why is diversity an explicit goal anyways? What is there to gain from "diversity" in particular superficial diversity (skin color, sex) vs intellectual diversity?

> Over the last decade I think there has often been an unspoken preference towards candidates that improve diversity, and I don't have a problem with this.

You're part of the problem. Discrimination is always a problem, even if it's subtle. We (the tech geeks) should have pushed against this from the start, not let it fester and spread.

(Aus, white male)

Our (not a tech company) enterprise aims to make hiring diversity match applicant diversity, which at first glance sounds reasonable. (I know there are thorns here, please don't reply just to go down that path)

Does anyone have experience with such a system vs more explicit affirmative action as per OP?

As an guy who otherwise tends way towards the lefty socialist end of the spectrum, I would share OP's discomfort in such a situation.

Diversity is a stupid thing to target, but people have quite obviously failed to tackle discrimination by just not being prejudiced arseholes so this is where we are

This submission is flagged, but it shouldn't IMO. Everyone goes through hiring processes, everyone has been in a team onboarding people, and this of course isn't alien to tech companies.

This submission, from my POV is clearly on-topic.

As a white male (and simply as human being who believes in fairness), I would say I'm concerned with this trend. Positive discrimination for some means negative discrimination for others. I think we should give unprivileged people access to good education, but I'm against quotas.

I used to work in academia in computer science. There were no written rules but the recruiting committees always favoured minorities and women. It was obvious when looking at the stats.

I work now for a big tech company. The policy is that the hiring bar is the same for all candidates, but they're actively looking for candidates from minorities to interview. I'm fine with that approach.

Why is this flagged?

I will repeat most of a previous comment:

At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days.

Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect.

Candidate B: Had never worked in the industry, had only a handful of qualifications, barely responsive. Seemed indifferent to getting the job. Additionally, not too fluent in English, to the point where it was more than a little difficult to communicate.

Candidate A was a white man, Candidate B was a recent immigrant and a woman. The immediate supervisor for the position -- a woman -- wanted Candidate A, as did most others. However, the person running the show said, out loud I might add, that our group already had "too many pale males." I would like to repeat that: too many pale males. A significant glance was then cast at me and the guy in the wheelchair on the hiring committee, both being not-particularly-dark men. Presumably by "virtue" of our disabilities we would automatically be down for the Diversity Squad.

Candidate B was hired and turned out exactly as she was in the interview: disinterested in doing the job, lacking even some bare understanding of how to accomplish many things, always trying to find ways to do her grad school homework while on the job and pushing off her duties on someone else, rather than trying to learn her tasks. Her poor English was a significant barrier. She remained a leaden weight until she went off to be someone else's problem. She wasn't a drag due to her skin color or sex, but she was hired because of those things.

This was over ten years ago, in academia. A friend who worked for pharmacy chain was bluntly told that as a white male, he was not going to get a manager job, no matter how long he held on. Something something equity.

I am not even a little comfortable with it, I know it is there. Frankly, now it is part of the calculus -- if I see a white man in a position, he probably had to work pretty hard to earn it. Anyone else? Welllllll ... they might have been diversitied into the position. And so the cycle continues!

A difficult issue with equity in hiring is that companies do not hire the _best_ applicants. People tend to think about hiring like that, but it can't actually work like that. Hiring is not a tournament; you have some (high) bar and just find enough people who can pass it, and then you stop looking! even though there might have been better people out there.

I believe this is one of the very problematic factors that drives lack of diversity in tech hiring; for example, a historically black college might pump out fewer extremely high caliber students as a result of centuries of marginalization (and not as a result of the race of the applicants); this makes going through the new hire application stacks from some schools more expensive, so companies just don't do it -- even though if they _were_ to go through that _entire_ stack, they _would_ find some candidates who meet their bar.

Relatedly, the cheapest way to find candidates are through referrals, but referrals are very likely to reinforce whatever dynamics already exist in the organization (whether that's in education, favorite sports, intro/extravertedness, race, religion, language, school, city, former experiences...)

So if you have, e.g., a referral program, or you go to college career fairs for the colleges where most of your employees went to, etc, there are already plenty of people who you are not interviewing who would pass your interview bar. And that is unfortunately already based, albeit indirectly, on race, religion, sex, etc.

Seeing it happen in the "affirmative" form is kind of like a trolley problem; you can intervene (decline to interview overrepresented groups) and cause a still deontologically problematic but potentially better outcome (intentionally decline to interview potentially qualified candidates, but increase equity and diversity in your org), or do nothing and claim absolution of responsibility, but cause an avoidable worse outcome (by passively refusing to interview essentially entire underrepresented groups).

But in practice, things are more complicated. If you have to look in more diverse places for hires, you might need a more robust hiring system (e.g., less emphasis on coding tests or less emphasis on extensive system design experience and more emphasis on figuring out who can grow into roles, which is much harder to interview for; going to more places; having more avenues for finding applicants), and you might need to interview more people. That makes it expensive, and so the natural impulse might be to lower the bar just so you can maintain your hiring at the same cost.

I don't have any explanation of the perfect way to do it that actually is equitable. It might be nearly impossible; hiring is already a really hard thing to do right. But I don't think its correct or reasonable to think of doing nothing as a "neutral" and purely meritocratic approach.

Is this perhaps an opportunity for some companies to explicitly do blind hiring, or something along those lines? I'm thinking of Coinbase (and others) who have taken a somewhat contrarian approach and said that the workplace is just for work, and not politics. They've taken flak for it, but are also probably(?) attracting people for whom that kind of workplace is a positive. A company that goes out of their way to say "We don't discriminate in our hiring, positively or negatively" and follows through on it could probably pick up talented engineers who are otherwise being filtered out of the hiring process due to their skin color / gender.

The argument you point out, about treating well-off groups equally as bad as those less well-off, is a bad argument and not what you should be thinking about. The practices you point out have nothing to do treating everyone equally bad. You are focusing on the unfortunate consequence of attempting to make right past injustices, rather than the effort to right past injustices. The goal is not to discriminate against young graduates. Rather, biasing hiring in favor of historically oppressed groups is an attempt to, in some small way, achieve a society we would have been in without things like racism and sexism. I understand this type of thing is frustrating for a qualified candidate who personally has a minuscule impact on society, yet is feeling the full brunt of a rejection. But I would encourage you to focus on the much more widespread similar feeling felt by those being helped up by such efforts.

It was not that many years ago where society universally recognized that discrimination based on immutable physical characteristics such as race, gender, etc. was morally repugnant. The counter-argument we're often presented with these days is that the ends justify the means. As someone who paid attention in history class, I find that troubling.

One of the first things you have to embrace is the inherent hypocrisy in the overall equality movement. While there are people who genuinely believe in equality and equal treatment for all, the loudest and most prominent people are pushing the exact agenda you are speaking about : " directly and openly identifying "white male" as a negative trait when discussing a candidate after an interview ". I have seen this first hand in interviews and in employment with some of the largest and influential companies in the tech industry.

The sad truth is that you have to find some way to find peace in it all. If that means being quiet, if it means accepting things that you feel are wrong, or if it means standing up to say it is wrong and being labeled. You have to make hard choices in both potential employers and how far up the ladder you want to climb. IT is not an easy decision and not one that anyone other then yourself can make. The idea of making current people pay for past mistakes is irrational, and the "what it has been like " movement will forever be seen as such. The socio-political components aside there are financial burdens as well, should a company not appear 'woke' enough and see their bottom line deteriorate.

IMHO our biggest mistake was making the cause of social justice profitable. As soon as people could gain money, power or influence based on calling other people out the core values became null and void to people who could care less about social justice and just want to be 'right' and/or reap the rewards both socially and financially. That is NOT to say that the fight for social justice should not be / can not be happening, it simply needs to be a matter of doing right for the sake of doing right and not for profiteering or popularity. We are the first to call out bad actors and put our hands out for the rewards therein, but we are the last to recognize good actors and then they turn up with their hands out, looking to be recognized from the rest of the pack we tell them "what do you want, a cookie?".

We need more social justice advocates, and less social justice warriors.

You can flag this all you care to , or even downvote it but it does not change the truth : We all fall into one of two categories - those who believe in equality for all with no discrimination whatsoever, or those who believe in socially acceptable 'justified' discrimination against specific groups.

I choose not to self-disclose, even in places where it might benefit me like sexuality or gender identity. If I get to the interview stage and the person I'm being interviewed by makes it a big deal, I thank them for their time and leave.

As a white male team leader with hiring authority I select the best person for the job who will enhance the team and bring with them the talent to accomplish our goals. Having said that, I believe diversity is a strength and that women and people of color are underrepresented in tech, and use my influence to help correct that as much as possible without sacrificing operational readiness. It has not been a problem. I can't speak for others experiences or biases but I simply do not see the problem that OP is detailing.