According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far exceeding their overall representation in the US population.
Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups?
And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please help me understand if I'm missing something obvious.
I actually don't think Tiger parenting is more special than, say, just investing in your kids more broadly. You don't have to be an authoritarian and still get excellent results by caring about the success of your children in society and also having the resources and means in which to perform that investment.
More likely is that filters for immigration are very high, which means the average immigrant is more educated, wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.
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
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.
Self selection among immigrants is easily the largest factor behind their higher rates of success. Even as a refuge, there were tons of applicants, there is almost surely a reason you are the one who made it. It's in no way an easy process.
Refugees are pretty much the only category that doesn't have some kind of wealth filter, if only because immigration paperwork costs a fair bit of money (esp. when you look at it from the perspective of someone in a country where cost of living is much lower than in US).
And the majority of immigrants in US aren't refugees.
I think an important question is how many of those Asians are drawn from abroad, vs our American homegrown Asians?
If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented. But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global workforce would be Asian.
One of the biggest arguments for DEI is to undo the damage the US government and culture has done to it's own black citizens. I don't think filling a bunch of VP positions with highly qualified African immigrants does that.
A cynical person would think DEI was invented precisely because solving that would be hard but treating everyone the same by skin color allows for easier solutions such as simply importing non-aggrieved people to replace our marginalized ones.
At least in the parts of the company I've worked -- always on product teams -- the majority of my coworkers were not born in the United States. Given that, even if all the other parts of the world were represented proportionally you'd expect a large percentage of people from China and the Indian subcontinent.
Down voted for this but it's really a reality. Talk to teachers, if the parent doesn't value school then it takes a truly exceptional kid to direct themselves through it.
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.
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
What you're missing is that a company cannot just hire to meet racial quotas which reflect population percentages in order to be free of bias.
That's not what bias means.
What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen.
If more applicants are available that happen to be from a certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then that's what the organization has to work with.
That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you see".
If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen.
I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?
While I do think GP is correct at many places, my team literally hired a black woman from Georgia and turned down a white dude from Boston, lol. I am not a fan of the overbearing top down policies like Microsoft is talking about, but I have become friendly with aforementioned hire, and some of the stories of discrimination and just people being really rude to her in the professional world are mind blowing to me. I can definitely believe that a lot of workplaces do actively discriminate against various minority groups.
A single datapoint doesn't confirm or refute the presence of bias; your anecode doesn't contrast anything I've written in my comment about the definition of bias. If the organization consistently chose a black woman over an equally qualified white man, that would likely indicate bias.
What is "literally hired"; does your organization figuratively hire most of the time, except for the surprising odd time when it is, wow, literal?
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."
As an outsider, it's obvious looking in that racial classification in the US is just crazy -- they took some racial stereotypes from 100 years ago, gave them neutral sounding names, and started pretending it's not racist to group everybody south of Texas as "hispanic". And then build official policy on top of these simplistic classes that fail to describe reality in any meaningful way, only serving to reveal to everybody else in the world what the people in the US think about them.
At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.
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...
My (least?) favorite anecdote on this was when we were running stats demographics and found there was one more African American than Black. Turns out it’s a rich white kid who was born in South Africa. He’s not wrong…
The fun part is that 60% of world population have to share a single classification whereas a couple of small islands in the pacific somehow get a label for themselves
In US government paperwork, Hispanic / non-Hispanic is usually a binary category that is orthogonal to "race", and sometimes referred to "ethnicity". Thus, you can be "Hispanic White", "Hispanic Black", "Hispanic Native American" etc, but there is no such thing as "Black Native American" under that classification.
The South Asia Subcontinent has about 2 billion people. A different part of Asia has more than 2 billion people. Identifying as Asian is utterly meaningless, except to perhaps generalize as (non-white & non-black). Madness.
In theory it is, in practice it is not. The intention is to let in talents that the US native population otherwise cannot provide. The reality is that the US tech visa have been heavily abused and let in people that shouldn't be let in.
"Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization.
Two main reasons that are given:
Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions.
Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields. You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism? It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable path to success.
Please don’t reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well educated populations. So what you call “Asian culture” will have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who value money and education.
Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.
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.
I’m Asian-American, if you can’t tell by my username.
My point is that very often the success of Asian-Americans even though they are a disadvantaged class has been used to justify anti-Black rhetoric. In the context of this HN thread, which is specifically about D&I and hiring more Black people, bringing up a “better Asian culture” can be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, even if it was unintentional. This is the myth of the model minority.
It’s a mistake to assume that “empirical,” “objective” observations cannot be racist. In particular, white-supremacists often intentionally present “facts” and “data” in order to paint a misleading picture. For examples, see 13/52: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1352-1390. The missing context in 13/52 is that Black people have suffered much more economic and social injustice, Black areas are more likely to be policed, Black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted for the same crime, etc. It would be dishonest to simply say “Black people make up 13% of the population but commit 52%…” without supplying this additional context. I.e. even if the data itself is “objective,” the context and presentation also matters because those will affect how people interpret that data.
Again, not trying to say that you were intending to be racist. I just wanted to show you what your statements could imply and that you may be unknowingly repeating white-supremacist rhetoric.
If someone points out that men commit the vast majority of rape,
and thus we shouldn't assume courts are misandrist on account of the immense inequity in rape convictions, that is not sexist. If someone points to this fact to try and justify a curfew for men, or lowered burdens of proof the yes it is.
A flag showing "13/52" next to a snarling ape is undoubtedly racist. Pushing back against a quota mandating that African Americans make up no more than 13% of murder convictions, on the grounds that murder rates are not equal isn't racist.
Is this really hard to comprehend? I expect the average middle schooler is capable of understanding this, and repeatedly cautioning HN readers about potentially racist readings is more than a little condescending.
> can be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, even if it was unintentional
I agree that people interpret things as dogwhistles even when they were not intended that way. To me, that's a problem because it means anything can be a dogwhistle.
It also doesn't make sense given the meaning of "dogwhistle" which is something that is intended to communicate to an in-group. If it is not intended, then it's not a dogwhistle.
> 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.
Who's "WE" in your view? There was not top-down effort to get Asians to excel in the US, it was due to their own desires and efforts.
I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?
Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and biased sampling ?
~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent + China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally, because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature proponents)
> Why can't we replicate this for other groups?
Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture, it must first start at trying to observe these with some level of granularity.
Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here. Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for immigrants from other racial groups ?
Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups with similar nurture methods ?
The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for differences in group level performance ?
Good faith social studies on group level differences must go into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a study that might report: "differences between groups persist even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity". So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to see here.
"So well" as in academically or in STEM fields, right? One reason is the selection process. Or put it bluntly, genes matter. Asians, at least the FOBs in the STEM fields, mostly came to the US for graduate degrees first. They are, statistically speaking, already the top students who have a knack in STEM. If you are a techie in the Bay Area, try to count how many people are PhDs in a social gathering.
I have yet encountered anyone in my circle in the bay area who had any difficulty with high-school math, and none who did not excel at least most of college-level STEM classes. On the other hand, many of my coworkers are medalists in national or international competitions of maths/physics/chemistry/informatics, or they were in the top 2% for those college entrance exams. The bias was so strong that I used to think that tutoring was useless and the education in the US was pathetic because many high school students couldn't understand simple things like factoring polynomials. So, of course they do well, statistically speaking. On the other hand, not all Asians do well in other fields, especially in business and politics. Indians are more diverse in that regard, but people from mainland China didn't have a large enough presence, partly because only universities in China tended to select the nerdiest people for STEM, or so per my China friends.
For black people, at least, they were enslaved in the US in much larger numbers than any other ethnic group. This is bound to hurt their opportunities relative to other ethnic groups, among many other problems.
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.
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.
Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diversity into an already squishy process is the least of your worries.
They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it? Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
>Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?
It sounds like you're agreeing with the author here, because he says,
>I fear that when large companies hire and promote people based on group identities, it discourages individuals from cultivating their abilities.
It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
> It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
It is only one logical step to assume the opposite as well, that a company that thinks holistically about the hiring process, and questions whether or not managers are acting in a truly meritocratic way will give people confidence that cultivating their abilities won't be for naught if they have a racist/sexist manager.
The article states a lot of things based on feels but the one tangible point they make is that HR is not in fact insisting he hire someone based on an "additional random factor" just that they considered all the candidates.
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?
Absolutely - there aren't clearly defined lines between cultural notions of race, and the scientific community doesn't even recognize race as anything but a social construct [1]. So in the end it's either how someone self-identifies, or the arbitrary superficial judgement of race by the hiring team, which is patently ridiculous.
Society defines racial categories according to made-up rules. The basis of these rules is not biological. All good so far. But, then we have to live with these categories, and they get applied to how we organize society, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less explicitly. And we may wish for these rules to change, or for the ways that they shape the experiences of individuals to change. But then the people who benefit from the status quo have a material interest in having them stay the same. And in fact the people who benefit from the status quo often are in a position to shape society in a way that keeps them the same. You get the idea.
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?
They do exist... the fact that they are not biological does not mean they do not exist. They have a social-historical reality. They exist in the minds of people making decisions, overtly or not. Trying to become conscious of that and counter it, and (of course imperfectly) correct for some past wrongs due to it, is what this is about.
The discussion is on the socially constructed nature of race. My comments directly address this with specific examples. Your final response is nothing more than "no, you are wrong". Not sure what I was expecting on a public forum, as this topic is sensitive and brings out a lot of deep seated irrationality, gaslighting, and binary thinking in people.
I have no objections to your claim that race is socially constructed. I agree. Where I disagree is in the logical leap that that means it doesn't exist. Your specific examples are irrelevant to this point.
(Added: and for what it's worth, I don't necessarily disagree on the specific examples you give. They are just irrelevant.)
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.
They sure can be seen as reactionary as one of CSPI's areas of interest in "The Great Awokening" (see https://www.cspicenter.com/about).
I found the article interesting as I've just started to work in US corporation and I've wondered how achieving specific diversity goals are achieved in cases there is a very limited pool of people to hire / promote in a select subgroup.
You don't need to prove that that measurements are reliable to highlight the existence of discrimination. If 10% of applicants are X, and I mandate that 20% of hires are X, then even if my interview results are truly random it's still discriminating in favor of X.
Similar deal with tech hiring. What is the pool of candidates for this hire or promotion? If you're setting quotas in excess of the pool's representation you're explicitly instituting discrimination.
I'm okay with people doing this, provided they're transparent in that they're instituting affirmative action and do not intend to create a non-discriminatory hiring or promotion process. What does get on my nerves is when people privately push for policies like this, but publicly decry and mention of discrimination favoring "diverse" groups as hurtful.
The post doesn’t suggest there’s any mandated quota for hiring or promotion—only for interviews or consideration. And it doesn’t suggest any secrecy about this policy.
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.
> recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires)
It's hard to attribute longterm success of the company to any given hires but race is easy to count. What is easy to measure comes to dominate your thinking.
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.
Agreed, I'd much rather just be honest and transparent with processes. That's not to say there aren't potential down sides. Of course, I still hold that trying to resolve these issues completely on the demand side of careers that often involve an educational component doesn't always work well, it can drive up incomes, but won't necessarily make the implied problem better.
What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.
> 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.
I'm not really convinced how good we are at measuring merit.
But I don't buy into that being the reason for <insert my idea>.
I DO worry that "hey we doubt we're doing it right based on merit so we're picking race this time / some times" will have an effect, and not a good one.
You're writing with the implicit assumption that private companies ought to be meritocratic above all. I don't think that's the case. I think private people and orgs ought to be free to choose whom they associate with, hire, and promote based on any criteria they can come up with. Nepotism? No problem. Height/weight/age/beauty/culture/hair colour discrimination? You bet. Then these orgs all compete and the most efficient ones win. This leads to a long conversation about the merits/efficiencies of monocultures.
Furthermore, we as a culture ought to be at least not hypocritical in our tolerance of clearly nepotistic/discriminatory hiring practices in minority-owned businesses (restaurants/trades/jewelry/etc.) but somehow intolerant of them in some sectors like tech and finance. These things are equally silly:
1. Expecting a Chinese restaurant not to exclusively hire more Chinese people
2. Expecting a tech-bro agency not to exclusively hire a more tech bros
3. Expecting a Kosher butcher not to exclusively hire more Jews
4. Expecting a WASPy finance org not to exclusively hire more WASPs
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.
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.
Most of these (Kosher Butcher for example) are going to be very small companies and these kinds of requirements don't usually kick in till you have a certain minimum level of employees since there is an assumption in most states that very small businesses will mostly hire (extended) family.
Sure that's a nice libertarian framing of the issue. I would love to be able to hire whoever I want, with no say from anyone else, for my companies.
But that's not what the law says.
Title VII of the CRA 1964 says:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer—
(1)to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
(2)to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
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?
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.
"Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?"
I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning.
"They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?"
The biggest thing is that this metric is meaningless. They don't define what the target is and why. They don't dig into the how of the increase either. If it was the policy, they have not taken a systems thinking review of it to see if it's working as expected or causing some other harm. I see no inclusion of the root issue - a pipeline of diverse candidates via schools. If the numbers are underrepresented in school, then they will be in industry too. Maybe you can juice your own company's numbers, but that simply leaving less for other companies. Figuring out diversity discrepancies in the talent pipeline (school, mainly) is the first step. Then figuring out if it's an actual problem and what the proper metrics are, is a step that seems to be glossed over. Without understanding these, there will be no meaningful progress.
> They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?
I'm still unclear as to why we're even bothering to ask the question. How many blonde leaders are there vs. brunettes? Are brunettes poorly represented in corporate leadership? Does anyone care? Why should they.
Don't we already hire managers explicitly to make decisions like this? Given we've hired them, shouldn't we trust them to make the best decisions for their teams and their objectives? It seems as though the additional bureaucracy introduced by DEI serves only to disempower managers. This is the function of all bureaucracy, to disempower individual decision making.
This presupposes they are discriminated against for these positions. 3-5% representation is extremely high for a demographic that comprises 1% of college graduates.
>> "Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with?"
> I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
Therefore institute race-based policies?
All that matters here is how things _should_ work. The hiring process should be based off merit. They should not be based off race. We should do our best to correct these when they deviate.
When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question. If you want to argue that it is impossible to judge merit, it is you who needs to provide proof.
And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
> When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question.
Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can be completed in two minutes by anybody.
> And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
The article explicitly states they are not asked to make promotion decisions based on race.
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
I've been coding for over a decade including things 1000x as complicated as that (think embedded systems from the ground up). I could easily take 20 minutes or even fail doing such a task because I'm literally never asked to code things in a professional environment with 3+ strangers breathing down my neck and judging me based on some simplified fizzbuzz.
I'm convinced white board / live coding interviews don't do much other than test for how you perform with a group of strangers pressuring you to jump through hoops publicly on which in a short time your entire value is judged (including determining say if you'll have money for daycare next week), which for most software professionals basically happens never except during an interview.
I don't understand what's the value in having 3 people in the room looking at you solve a coding problem, at any level of seniority. Sounds like it's just wasting the time of 3 engineers when 1 could perform the task.
Maybe so (though I don't really believe you couldn't) but I gotta evaluate people somehow. And my job is to prevent false positives. False negatives are less damaging.
I could bikeshed on this, but I think this is missing the overall point. It's not that nothing is measurable, obviously some tech skills are measurable and obviously some people are going to do better on those things, but those things are less measurable as you move up the ladder, and less measurable for leadership skills over technical skills, and less measurable among groups of people with relatively similar levels of experience. I'm not saying nothing can be measured so you might as well hire the mailperson to the principal engineers job. The point is that you can have a fairly large group of equally qualified people for a job.
Unless you're hiring someone for a speed coding competition, I don't see what speed has to do with it. Especially since it seems like you would be biasing for younger candidates and committing ageism in the process.
> Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people.
It's also inherently unfair, that's why nobody likes it, I have seen it first hand that it just leads to a few token hires, with no real change. People who actually care realise that if you want to improve something you start at the beginning, not a the outcome, you would at minimum start at education, however I guess it's cheaper to have a few diversity hires here and there without changing anything that really matters.
> Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions
You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.
> which is pretty squishy to begin with
I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job, which diverts from the point, we make decisions without knowing the outcome all the time, if we would take your worldview then every decision where we don't know the outcome would be decided by a dice roll.
> Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
You are exchanging one favouritism for another, how is that an improvement? At least the CEO's nephew would have connections in high places and likely more pressure to perform.
> You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.
I would disagree. First of all, just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways, it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice. I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes. Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?
Second of all, I'm not talking about a recent grad and someone with 10 years of experience, but having been in leadership circles. 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"
> I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job.
This seems like an overly broad interpretation. Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true. i.e. take your pool of 60 senior managers, there's one open director position. Find your best 15 senior managers. You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers? (assuming there aren't specific technical skillsets involved)
> 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.
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:
> The insistence that any inequality of outcome is caused by unjust oppression, and not anything else.
Wholly untrue. Inequality happens for a whole mess of reasons, including individual ability and interest, it's just not exclusive to that either.
> The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.
We're probably going to disagree on the definition of oppression, but no, there should is no need for "reverse oppression", unfortunately, I can't control how people feel about aid fixes, but I think everyone should be able to pursue opportunity equally.
> 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.
This is taken too far in the other direction where I have to accept every single "DE&I Bad" Argument so as not to seem elitist. This is a complex issue and there are plenty of good arguments on both sides, the original article just didn't attempt to make them.
4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies
"In Marxist terminology, reactionary is a pejorative adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be socialist, but, in their opinion, contain elements of feudalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism or other characteristics of the ruling class, including usage between conflicting factions of Marxist movements."
Wow, that is way more involved than I meant it to be. If forgot reactionary was a loaded term, I just meant it to mean that his argument was in reaction to "wokeism" and wasn't independent of that. See item 3.
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.
You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what I did or didn't say. I didn't say people can't demonstrate merit. I said people are bad at measuring merit, and I think that is relatively true on its face, and the subject of a whole mess of thinkpieces and arguments on Hacker News. Shit I thought it was funny there was one posted today:
No where in the article is it suggesting that anyone is pressuring managers to promote demonstrably poor performers for racial reasons. They are being asked to adjust their processes to consider the most candidates.
I think for a medium size group of relatively equal performers, it would be nearly impossible to rank order them in a way you could get a small handful of people to consistently agree with. Everyone seems to love to straw men this with some idea that Microsoft is firing all of their principal engineers to replace them with entry level candidates from state universities.
Intra-organization measurements are not the same as inter-oganizations measurements.
(Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious; at least to me.)
Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was wrong, but I was referring to the fact that the article seemed to say "DE&I Bad, Merit Good" with a superiority complex about it, and I was just saying that that position on its own isn't necessarily the intellectually superior position, even though I think "merit" gets assumed as being more necessarily more objective.
>They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders.
So now instead of those 3% being seen as having earned their position, all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage. So now it's not only unfair to the people excluded based on skin color but it's unfair to those who benefitted strictly because of the perception they now have to deal with as having not really earned their position the same as everyone else. It puts them on equal footing with the bosses nephew, who nobody respects.
It's 2022 - maybe we can stop trying to defend race-based favoritism and discrimination?
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.
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.
DEI is anti-intellectual to the core. Worse, it is codified racism. It creates problems where there were few to solve.
Nobody can measure merit, but that doesn't mean you can hire people based on skin color and that is exactly what DEI did. And not much else, it remains plain racism. Without bias you can see it because racial quotas are the expression. People in the past also thought they had good reason for racial discrimination.
There are real good arguments against DEI hiring practices aside from people disliking them. Although many dislike them because of its racism.
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.
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.
Anyone with their head out their asses who has ever worked a real job knows that the "meritocracy" is bullshit. Plenty of under performers get jobs. Plenty of overachievers get run down for a variety of factors. The idea that the worthy somehow rise above adversity is confirmation bias at its very worst.
I don't even think you want a "meritocracy". I want a world where people are happy. If that means they're all doing jobs they suck at, then so be it.
Your sarcasm would work better if anyone understood what the hell you were trying to refer to. You seem to ascribe "technological and engineering progress" exclusively to teams of young, white, nerdy men in this comment, which is clearly something only an idiot would do, so I presume you are trying to make a different, better point. Feel free to let us know what that might be.
- 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?)
No, the OP is taking for granted that "a lot" of the teams responsible for that work were made of young white nerdy males, and provides no justification for this assumption. Especially in a world where, prior to the current computer boom, Western scientific progress has been associated with grizzled elderly people in solitary labs, and technology was the purview of megacorps run by middle-aged managers.
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?
> 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.
Do you think this would be true if you expanded it to all teams made up of one single demographic? Or is it just young white nerdy males? Cause that would sound pretty controversial if you swapped out white for any other color.
Dare they go to another country that is heavily one demographic and hence the tech teams are. All those countries' teams are "horrible"? God forbid a family be of shared blood.
What?? It is common for certain areas to be mostly populated by a certain demographic. Iceland: 93% ethnic Icelandic. Bolivia 88% Mestizo/Indigenous. Thailand 93% Buddhist. India 80% Hindu. Japan 98% ethnic Japanese. Nigeria 100% fast. Dive in to specific geographic areas within a country and it is often fully homogenous.
Oh yeah, everyone in those countries are the same ethnicity, gender, the same relationship and family status, the same interests and personality type etc etc?
Literally no diversity proponents are saying tech teams in Taiwan must have 20% African Americans or whatever and you'd have to be completely missing the point, or willfully missing it, to think so. In any case, it's pretty telling of your level of understanding of the topic that you seem to think that's what we're saying.
Likewise using friggin India and Nigeria as examples of "fully homogenous" countries is also very telling of your knowledge about other countries from your own. Just wow.
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
>But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely needed in the industry
Diversity on most commonly selected metrics barely does a thing as far as empirical evidence goes.
The metrics that really matter aren't actively selected for. At best they are a byproduct. More often than not, the teams willing to be open about hiring gain their benefits over being open and cooperative rather than their diversity hires magically boosting things.
But by all means, let's continue to be reductionist by stereotyping 'le weird white young male' group.
> Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior?
I find the current push toward so-called equity to be more toxic than anything I experienced on male-dominated teams. People fear saying things because they don't want to be called out. Someone uses a phrase like "off the reservation" or "grandfathered" or "whitelisted" and then we have to have a meeting about how someone might have been offended. Was anyone offended? No. But we'll have a meeting to discuss a hypothetically-offended person. This leads to some behavior change but also some silent backlash.
I get that certain types of toxic behavior might be limited on diverse teams. But it's simply not the case that by adding women and minorities we will eliminate toxic behavior. From what I've seen, we simply swap one type of toxicity for another.
"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."
Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot. He also seems fairly ineffective at navigating bureaucracy. Taken to extremes, lots of corporate policies can seem a bit overbearing. This essay reads to me like he's reading corporate D&I policies to be maximally inflexible and frustrating in ways that are unlikely to be the case (at least from based on my personal experience working in large corporations + a short stint at MSFT many years ago).
Very recently I was only allowed to hire a black person. The assumptions here are probably correct.
Search linkedin for “diversity recruiter”. It’s a role. Companies post specific reqs that state you must belong to a marginalized group in job posts often enough that it’s a bit stomach churning.
I’ve personally had to deal with HR for having too many white men on my teams. For software developers in America.
These kinds of policies are also massively unfair to the exact people you are trying to hire. I know lots of engineers who would fit into the cliche "diversity" categories who are skilled and deserving of their job. But now they have to wonder if they were hired for merit or to meet some sort of a quota.
The whole thing breeds resentment and drives teams further apart, in fact it creates the exact problems DEI is purported to solve.
In this case there was no competition. The person I hired was the most qualified of their peer group: all black men.
We don’t get a plethora of good candidates through the normal recruiters anyway so there would be no way to know one way or the other how they would have stacked up in a wider job pool. I found one person that was solid so I felt I got kind of lucky. Restricting applicants by ANY criteria (diploma, work history, age, race, etc) in this market seems insane. My most recent HR insanity is an in office requirement. Candidates bail so fast. I don’t hide it though; there’s no reason to string someone alone that doesn’t want to meet the in office requirement I have no control over. And I don’t fault anyone for refusing to work in office for some portion of the work year.
Our recent town hall included not only a "Diversity Up" slide, but also a "Whiteness Down" slide to which the Black host said "whiteness is down 9% but we can do better". I legit turned off my PC for the day. Still haven't fully recovered from that one.
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.
If you look at the way discrimination was actually carried out a hundred years ago, you'll find that it was primarily done through strong hints rather than through having policemen standing outside. If a department head is sending out memos that cause middle managers to get the message not to hire black people, that is all it takes. It did not even require 100% compliance, as long as there is a strong headwind at every step of the advancement process, nobody will make it to the top that's not being favored.
MS gives higher compensation for diverse hiring, it is not a far reach to believe it also affects promotions. Especially if you contributed to your boss's bonus
> Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot.
Sure. If it wasn't pretty sure or assumes Microsoft could be sued over it, so Microsoft implements these policies as harshly as they can without opening up the path to a clear lawsuit.
It's standard operating procedure for most discrimination.
We know how to reduce bias in hiring. Using a blind audition.
A much smaller amount of information about the applicants origin leaks through. Implicit bias is attacked via limiting the information that it can act on.
It seems categorizing people by race and gender at the individual level is a recipe for disaster and gives racists the power to do exactly what they want, pick and choose which types of people get to benefit.
If you give a regular person information about a persons race and gender, the damage they can do is limited to whatever implicit bias (if any) they have.
If you give these tools to a racist or sexist, you've given them the keys to the kingdom.
The conclusion is, why is Microsoft making it a requirement to know about race and gender at every single hiring step? Surely this just needs to be an aggeregate statistic right?
I have worked at MSFT and the author is correct. It’s not explicitly said, but everyone knows you have to hire diverse people if you want to get promoted. And those folks are incredibly hard to find so you end up ignoring hundreds of qualified candidates desperately searching for the diverse one who is at the very least somewhat qualified.
At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong color/gender.
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.
Many countries require being harmed by an action and then bringing that action before a court, before anyone ever compares that action to any specific law at all.
So you can see how many actions become de facto legal if nobody ever does that.
Some manage to find a workaround even when it's illegal. I was reading somewhere that Lund University in Sweden was cancelling the job opening right before the deadline if the most promising candidate wasn't a woman.
There's so much bullshit in this. Universities are not allowed to advertise positions as "women only", but at the same time they are required to reach certain percentage of female "representation" by law.
At least at my company, I know they have preferences for minorities over similarly qualified candidates. I've heard a department head specifically tell the managers that we need more women in a specific role. Maybe they're just breaking the law though...
This is one longish discussion of the differences between education and hiring. [1] I think there is a carveout for federal contractors, which is what your link refers to. In general, it is not legal in hiring.
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.
What's "funny" about your comment is that there is no "white" race.
"Whiteness" was created in a Virginia 1691 law to be "not negroe and not indian". Naturally, that also expanded to be not: Jews, Asians, sometimes not Italians, usually not Irish, and absolutely no indigenous people of any sort.
Defining yourself by what peoples you exclude is the core kernel of racism. And that's what "white" means.
> This results in some people (mainly white men) feeling like they are being left out when they really weren’t the best fit but in the past may have picked over someone else.
There would be merit to this line of thinking, if the diversity initiatives came in the form of anonymizing resumes and interviews (which is easier to do with remote interviews). But that's not the case. More often than not, diversity initiatives come in the form of quotas or penalties for hiring or promoting too many "non-diverse" people. And those penalties often kick in at levels of representation lower than "non-diverse" people's representation in the candidate pool. This is why I'm not irked by over-representation of Asians in tech. They're not advantaged relative to whites, if anything they're penalized for their race (at a past company asian males were categorized as "ND", Negative-Diversity even more undesirable than white males).
However, this is often not how diversity initiatives work. More often than not, they're not aimed at eliminating discrimination, they're aimed at mandating it: attaching bonuses to hires and promotions of particular races and genders, or achieving specific representation numbers (AKA quotas). This isn't eliminating discrimination, this is creating it.
>More often than not, diversity initiatives come in the form of quotas or penalties for hiring or promoting too many "non-diverse" people.
This is literally not the case for the author. From the article:
>I told HR that I had considered it and I believed my recommendation was correct. HR said “OK, then we don’t need to change anything. I just wanted to check that you had considered them.”
That's literally all the author had to do. He made up the idea that it had an impact on his ability to advance in his career in his own mind.
>Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy.
It only "seemed clear." Weasel words. Engaging in the hyperbolic. This entire discussion is predicated on the fabrication that there is some racialized penalization system in place. It is scaremongering, nothing more than balking at the requirement to do the bare minimum.
Because explicit quotas are illegal, they're often conveyed ambiguously. "You don't need to hire X% of Y group. But hiring X% of Y group would demonstrate inclusivity, which is one of the core company values. And upholding our core company values is crucial to advancement."
Also, as per "Diversity Slating Guidelines" quotas are indeed being used. They require at least one Black or Latin candidate, and one female candidate. If there's only 4 people
on the slate, this could mean that 50% of the pool is subject to racial or gender quotas.
There's more context behind Microsoft's diversity initiatives. Hiring managers were given bonuses for hiring diverse applicants. Or conversely, they were penalized for hiring non-diverse applications: https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questionin...
If you think white men have it hard... Try being a black woman.
Your rosy portrayal of white struggle is deeply mis-informed... People struggle because of corporate cost-cutting strategies, not because minority hires are taking jobs from white men in droves.
A lot of the posts in this thread are evoquing memories from Birth of a Nation... geesis.
This is how literally everything in corporate America works. You start with a good idea. It gets turned into a metric. Targets for this metric are assigned at various levels in the management hierarchy. Bonuses are made dependent upon meeting the target for the metric. Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and just focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting, client satisfaction is obviously very important, leadership made the determination that NPS is the best way to measure csat, we all have NPS targets, our bonuses are tied to them, so what does everyone do? They only send NPS surveys to specific clients they know will give a good score and then they spend time and effort to make sure the client follows up and does in fact give a good score. Everyone manages the metric, same as with the DE&I stuff.
What's especially troubling is that blind interviews and auditions, and other similar anonymizing techniques, are now being explicitly attacked from the DE&I perspective on the basis that they don't produce results that are "diverse enough".
I have found that this is absolutely true, but not in the way you are thinking.
The highest performing team I have been on had people from 4 continents, ran the gamut on political views, had disparate education levels (from literally a high school dropout to PhDs from prestigious schools), and had people of many races. It had no women and no black people. By the standards of HR, it was not a diverse team at all.
The DEI folks I have worked with want a very specific kind of diversity: They want you to hire people of all genders and colors, but only rich ones from a few schools. They think that school reputation and awards are a better measure of aptitude than an interview or a take-home test (claiming that the test or interviewer is biased).
> The new leftist talking point is that there is no possible way to measure merit objectively so we shouldn't even attempt to do so. Therefore, they would counter your point by saying that you're incapable of hiring the best based on merit.
Those who believe that there is no possibility of measuring merit are destined to be out-competed by those who can and do measure it at least somewhat accurately.
I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed, perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I concept and move forward with complete blindness to race, culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals of operations of a company – i.e., just focus on building good things.
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.
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).
> ESG funds will see competitor funds that will outperform. No wasting money on greenwashing or other ESG bullshit.
Would that work? IIRC, stock prices aren't so much about performance, just who wants to buy your stock. Decreased actual performance from "greenwashing or other ESG bullshit" might be overwhelmed by demand by ESG pots of money.
> 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.
The University of Central Florida has bought an email address I own from some spammers and they're now occasionally asking me to enroll in some program where I can prove my commitment to diversity and inclusion and eventually become a certified supplier to them. "Positive statements" will not be what you need, you'll need to show that you actually have the numbers, and if you don't, you will not be considered.
IIRC, the US government's contracting rules are so byzantine that it gets shut results and wastes all kinds of money on incompetent contractors whose primary skill is compliance with the government's byzantine process.
If you want to ignore requirements like that (or similar DEI requirements), you're going to have to forgo those kinds of customers.
This is optimistic - I certainly hope it works out this way. I think a recent problem is that all the "free" or nearly free money has completely disconnected many operations from actual market forces, so they are not incentivized to build something good and their attention can wander to fitness signaling type activities
This is already the norm in Silicon Valley. D&I awareness is a brand new thing, and mediocre reactionaries like the author pervade existing leadership structures.
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.
> 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.
The norm in Silicon Valley is treat D&I with an inordinate level of skepticism, if not reject it outright as "anti-meritocratic." What we have here is not explicit racial segregation, but a system operating via capital and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant segment of the American economy. This creates huge bind spots and carries the risk of building systems that reinforce oppression.
>D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.
Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.
>she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person
That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization. The requirements for any role you hire for should be clear, expectations should be set and when they are not met there should be consequences. If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.
>> D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.
> Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.
That doesn't follow. 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.
> That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization.... If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.
There was a system in place, but if you couldn't read between the lines: the bar was far higher for firing a "diverse" employee with performance issues, which followed from the DEI ethos in place.
>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?
> 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 person simply couldn't do the job and was profoundly incompetent, and the response was to that was to repeatedly be told to spend more time training them. My friend had previously successfully terminated a white employee who was under-performing but turned out to be more competent than this one.
> So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work
Parent comment didn't say anything like that. Please assume good faith in discussions. They said that D&I efforts are more likely to work if focused on other parts of the education/industry pipeline, which seems at least plausible.
Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected outright" and uselessly categorized the pain of driving institutional change as "pointless problems."
There is a point to trying to change a system that only sees white people at the end of the hiring pipeline. We can debate where it needs to change, but the change is necessary.
> 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.
>> 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".
Yeah, it's also worth noting that "rejected outright" is actually omegaworks's own language, which he is now taking issue with. I was only echoing it back to emphasize a point in his own terms.
Also, I suspect there's some sloppiness with definitions going on here. When I was using "D&I," I was referring specifically to kinds of corporate hiring polices the OP was talking about and this thread is discussing. I suspect omegaworks may be interpreting the term more broadly at times.
It makes no sense to debate the meaning of "rejected outright" with you. Just because a strategy doesn't work when it is applied at a particular point in the process, doesn't indicate that the strategic goals are wrong to pursue. Even the idea that it won't work is debatable, I question whether the strategy was applied in good faith by the people responsible.
> What we have here is not explicit racial segregation, but a system operating via capital and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant segment of the American economy
Microsoft - Satya Nadella
Google - Sundar Pichai
Twitter - Parag Agrawal
None of these men is white or even born in the USA, and somehow they managed to arrive at positions of extreme power and influence through this system of "capital and clout".
So, what's the mechanism here? The white Americans in power are fans of the caste system established by the British colonizers and decided to make an exception to their white supremacy to allow some Brahmins to control some of the most important US tech companies?
I'm simply pointing out that your three examples don't negate the fact that we have a system here that taken whole rewards and uplifts whiteness. White colonialism literally crafted the system that elevated those three non-white people. Do you think that that influence is not relevant just because those three people are not white?
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"?
> I don't see a system that rewards and uplifts whiteness.
What you see is little more than your own personal anecdote. Who are the voices centered in the conversations around funding? Why is it easier for some people to secure investment? Who is considered important in the conversations around what tech is developed and who is ignored? Who reaps the rewards and who shoulders the costs?
> with fewer resources
Think a little deeper: why were resources allocated in this way?
>How did that result in "uplifting whiteness"?
The people put in charge of these companies have little interest in critically examining the race and caste-based resource allocation mechanisms that helped to get them there.
Companies aren't doing DEI because they feel like it. They're doing it because if they don't, they will be punished by the state. The way this works is that there is a patronage relationship between the grievance HR class and certain political actors. If you fail to hire enough DEI HR people to suck revenue from your company, the state prosecutors hit you with all kinds of hiring discrimination lawsuits. It's sort of like a mob protection racket. You hire some of our guys for some no-show jobs, we don't burn your business down.
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.
What process do you use to select between world-models? I'm curious if you have a coherent answer here, or if you just can't accept what I'm describing because you don't like the way it sounds.
Do you know anything about employment law or the current state of title VII jurisprudence? I'm guessing not if you're reacting this way to a pretty uncontroversial claim.
What kind of statement is this? D&I is supposed to be comparatively balanced to the society is serves. Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success.
D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations within big business where it's too easy to lose sight of how balanced a company is internally. If you don't keep reports on finances a company can easily fail. If you don't take steps to make sure minority groups are represented within your company, it will also create situations where bias takes hold, and suddenly discrimination becomes the norm.
What's next? Should we get rid of sexual harassment training and policies?
Only someone from a background that elimination of equal opportunity would serve foremost would think that "complete blindness to race" is possible in our world. It's a childish and a destructive ignorance considering what is currently happening in our world even to this day, as white nationalist groups are growing in numbers, and other groups, a prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate.
> 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.)
> 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.
>> Just like you can study Geology without being a rock, you can study what a minority group wants/needs/buys without belonging to it.
Your logic by nature is total flaw. You can't see it because of your own condition, and supremacist beliefs.
It could probably citing that not be explained to you how a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life, or how a Hasidic Jew can be fairly considerate of a Muslim perspective and vice versa.
This is the root of arrogance in ignorance that perpetuates racial bias. People have a right to be different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards their own individual and cultural perspectives, and globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required to properly represent all of the people they serve PROPERLY or they will simply fail over time... It's not the call of a few biassed individuals to determine that they are qualified. The market dictates the need for D&I.
> You can't see it because of your own condition, and supremacist beliefs
Being disrespectful to people who disagree with you, and at the same time unable to produce any sensible argument only harms the cause you're fighting for.
> how a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life
Limited intelligence is the defining factor here, not background. Think about it. Humans can understand lions quite well, and we understand what's good for them, what makes them happy. And we do it without having to run around savanna biting zebras!
And yes, Jews and Muslims can have a very good idea about each others life, struggles and priorities—it's just a matter of education.
> globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required to properly represent all of the people
I could argue with this and would probably enjoy it another time. Now let's remember the context we are in. We were talking about whether D&I are good for company's performance, not about any moral obligations you may think the company has.
> People have a right to be different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards their own individual and cultural perspectives
We also have a natural tendency to fall for logical fallacies. But somehow we managed to identify those and find ways to fight them, not worship them. Nothing stops you from fighting the cultural bias you have (maybe not completely, but just enough to get it off the way of your work duties) in the same way—later go home, take off your employee hat and be different, biased, whatever.
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.
There is only one solution: To be completely objective and treat everyone equally.
This is rational, straightforward, healthy and just righteous in a deep way. It creates an environment bereft of envy and injustice.
Turns out, most high brain mass mammals have a innate sense of fairness. When humans are treated unfairly because of some ostensible moral goal whether through racism or D&I; the end result is not pretty. Humans of all culture are enamored and magnetized by fairness and justice. But those words have been twisted to mean exactly the opposite by contemporaneous social-justice movements.
This was the mainstream view of the Civil Rights movement. It was utterly beautiful. But, post-moderity came and neo-Marxists have reigned for last 40 years in USA at least, gutting out Universities and now, Corporations.
It should happen all other factors being equal, but eventually successful companies start to grow and attract the kind of political manager types. Then the turmoil and in fighting starts.
Also, people hiring in their friends and family over others who are distinctly better.
I've been in many roles over the years in very different companies, and these two eventualities always play out. People are flawed, and the companies they create become equally flawed
> 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.
That doesn't work. There are some really amazing people out there that don't fit the typical tech mold of straight cis (white) guy. They don't stick around if they have to navigate a monoculture that doesn't understand that they are constantly throwing out micro-aggressions to people outside of their view of what acceptable behaviour is. Separating your home life from work life only works for so long before you start to crack.
I'm sure you'll be eager to consider that the reverse is also true, except in that case it's the majority of the pool getting aliened by open favoritism toward ethnic minorities and people with bizarre sexual proclivities. If the outcomes of explicit neutrality aren't good enough for you then you'd better start thinking up a new pretense, because people can see through it quite easily and they aren't going to put up with it forever.
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.
I'm still not sure I see anything wrong with this picture. Yes being different from other people is hard - the more different the harder. People naturally gravitate towards those they can identify with. The solution to this problem is to develop a coping strategy, not to use force to bend the world around you. People should be entitled to seek out and live in homogenous environments. Just because these are not available to everyone all the time doesn't mean they should never be available to anyone.
Wow. Just wow. So you are arguing that people from marginalized communities should just suck it up and stick to their own or constantly have to hide and adjust who they are to make others feel comfortable. I feel sorry for the people that you work with and god forbid you actually end up managing people. This sort of crap creates such a toxic environment for people.
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.
You do realize you are advocating for minorities to do all the work? Carry the burden, deal with the trauma that gets involved, constantly have to work at navigating everyone else, while people in a spot of privilege don't need to do any sort of work, right? This is the world you are arguing for and it's not a world you'll want to be living in long term. Hopefully you figure that out sooner before it's too late.
Yes, I do realize this. I'm arguing that people's privilege is theirs. It's not yours to redistribute as you see fit. The situation you're describing is reality - an inevitable consequence of human social biology.
When you belong to a minority, you navigate the world on the majority's terms. This is true everywhere but only in the US do people seem to get bent of of shape about it. The saying is "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". How would you mutilate this phrase so that it conforms to your worldview?
I currently work in a lingerie store after having spent a fair amount of time in 'professional' environments.
I'm less tired coming home from 8 hours on my feet dealing with the public than I was in professional settings. I don't have to hide everything about myself and my background (I'm a first-generation college student with a poorish upbringing) or constantly worry about what all my interactions with colleagues mean for my 'career'.
I will say my class background is more of an issue than my sex/sexuality, but my sex was way more of a problem in my teens and early 20s. The interesting thing is that being a techy child was fine, being a techy teenage/20 something girl SUCKED, and being a techy 30 something woman is fine.
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.
Yeah, I'm also gay and disabled (MS). So that's fun. Being female is less of an issue now that I'm old enough that men don't harass me as often, but tech spaces between the ages of 11 and ~25 SUCKED. The thing that stuck out to me was that there was no way to 'win' and the boys (because it was mostly adolescents and males in their 20s) projected their dating issues onto me HARD. And I know for a fact that I never 'led anyone on' since I've been out since I was 12 and very open about it. The gatekeeping was ridiculous (I'm a 2nd generation programmer and my grandfather was playing with electronics in the 1920s), and I also put up with rape threats and rampant homophobia (nothing quite like worrying about corrective rape if you want to go to a LAN party!)
The cultural homophobia and misogyny is one of the two major reasons I didn't opt for a CS degree (the other being I had too much pride to take intro classes to prove myself when I'd been coding since I was 5 because 17 year old me was arrogant as hell). This WAS 10-20 years ago, but experiences like mine do have impacts on the candidate pipeline for midlevel and senior positions.
And on the other hand, taking my tech skills into non-tech spaces is very well received. Libraries are always happy to have tech-literate people, and even in my current job, I've had 2 freelance dev projects dropped into my lap in the space of a month simply because I'm easier to work with and very familiar with the very feminine subject domain.
I'm very skeptical of DEI, ironically, because I've seen too much of it turn into grifts for upper-class and upper-middle class POC and gay people while ignoring non-visible differences or differences that might actually require behavior changes (disability and class, mostly). But there's definitely a cultural problem. And I say this as a woman who greatly prefers 'male' communication styles and was raised by a warehouse worker. I'm not pearl clutching - I've lived in a couple of the most dangerous cities in the US, I'm no shrinking violet.
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.
These practices are explicitly against federal law. When are judges going to start enforcing the law?
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
edit: not letting me reply down chain. source is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
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.
> 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.
Well only 4.5% of all people in Washington are black. If we go by country wide population white people white people are not really over presented in MS leadership, Asians are though, as much as blacks are underrepresented.
I mean, a lot of the hiring issues are really symptoms of other issues earlier in the progress, and thus most (not all) of the fixes at that stage will not actually address the true issue and may even cause other problems.
To fill a position, you need candidates. To have candidates, you need students of that discipline. There are numerous issues that could skew the demographics of the students (some are problematic, but some may be natural/acceptable!).
And of course this applies to domestic workers. Global workers and importing talent via visas have different benefits and issues.
All that said, in my experience most DEI company policies are more about not getting sued and avoiding bad press. They create policies, but many of them are ignored or just turned into a spineless checklist. As an example, the article didn't seem to address why the Microsoft metrics are meaningful, or what the targets are and their justifications. There's no systems thinking approach to explaining why or how the metrics/policies are beneficial, rather it's assumed.
It's telling that this person posted a job listing, interviewed dozens of candidates, realized they couldn't proceed because they hadn't interviewed any minority candidate, tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one, and the take away wasn't that they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.
Why do you suppose that a non-broken recruiting pipeline would result in more diverse candidates? Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all times?
I think this really varies for each position, but most SWE positions really don't require special skills beyond a CS degree from a 4-year program. Sure, there may be special industry knowledge that you need to know but I'm not talking about languages, frameworks, databases, etc... if you studied CS, I expect you to have the capacity to learn this shit. You can learn the problem domain in well enough in 6 months and rely on your PMs and boss to fill in the details.
If you are truly in a domain where you cannot hire CS graduates, then D&I is going to put a lot of burden on your recruitment team to find candidates to meet slating requirements. But you probably aren't...
At our school, 100% of teachers are women. One Hundred Percent. 97% of administrative staff is also women. In all of hair saloons in my area, 100% of staff is women. All of the nurses in our nearby hospital are women. They don't care about diversity and I do not think it is due to bias. I think they simply don't have enough men applying in their pipeline for these jobs. None of their CEOs have insisted in enforcing population statistics on to their employee statistics.
My friend works at PayP[redacted] and as a white female, _she_ was the minority hire. Somehow, in the SF Bay Area, almost all of their recruits that get to interview are [country of origin redacted]. It sounds like blatant discrimination, BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?
The pipeline is clogged for everyone. Lack of diversity is an industry-wide issue which needs to be addressed throughout the industry and beyond, not a problem with recruiting at any single company.
I'm surprised they didn't do c) which was to interview an obviously unqualified candidate to get the checkoff on the policy. This is the usual workaround.
There is no broken recruiting pipeline. There are simply not enough candidates in the pool to staff every company in a way that is representative.
I am ignorant when it comes to where companies look when they are hiring, but your comment makes it seem like companies can choose sources that are somehow segregated by race/gender/etc. What/where are these sources? Do you really think microsoft has any trouble finding people who want to work there? Where else should they look? In all my time being a straight white male, I've never listed my resume on a "whites only" job site.
The author says he is in AI, and when I was hiring entry level ML engineers I had similar challenges. As much as we blame the recruiting pipeline, I think it is the educational pipeline that is not creating a sufficiently diverse talent pool. Part of it is "weed out" courses that adversely affect students from less privileged backgrounds[1]. An additional (perhaps controversial) opinion I have is that companies are so aggressive about their individual diversity goals that they often pluck students out of the training pipelines prematurely (e.g. courting Ph.D. students before they finish their dissertation).
> "they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline"
This is trying to treat the symptoms, not the disease. You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?
Whatever you're trying to solve - the "issue" starts decades earlier, at home. It's about how people are brought up, their access to education, their social environment. Culture actually plays a role, too.
That's part of the problem. The other part is the networks you are tapping into to find candidates. People tend to collect others that look, act, and think like them. That's one reason why people group up into subgroups that all have similar traits, past experiences, and belief systems.
When it comes to a recruiting pipeline this is critical. If you are tapping members of your team to help finding candidates from their networks and your team lacks diversity, you are going to just build out your team with more of the same.
The same goes for where you are looking for candidates outside of your team. If you are only targeting a small number of schools it's really easy to end up with a homogenized set to pull from. I know from experience working at some of the big tech powerhouses, they'd target a handful of schools and only hire college grads from there - which means they miss out on recruiting from state schools, historically black colleges, and other pockets where things are more diverse.
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.
> months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate
I think it explicitly said they did not do that:
> 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.
It seems like a good next step would be to give the author more tools to find more diverse candidates, rather than having them come up with trying to gauge ethnicity by name on LinkedIn and getting those to apply.
I think that if he had to do the LinkedIn searches himself, you can conclude that his recruiters weren’t all that great. I’d be annoyed at them in his shoes.
Let me guess, you don't work in recruiting nor in a role where you actually have to try to find good candidates? Because you are way off the mark on how these things work.
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.
What conclusions do I draw from this? Sorry to be so blunt, but my conclusion is that you are lacking a lot of understanding of how these things work. Are you really arguing that they can fly and move anyone in from any country as a means to deal with struggles in diverse hiring? Do you not know much about much that costs and the issues with visa involved?
> You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?
I'll chime in here that if a person works at Microsoft and has the resources of Microsoft recruiting on their side, that they are in a better position than most to end up with a wide choice of applicants. Microsoft can sponsor visas if need be, and their compensation is generally high enough to merit consideration of relocation, if necessary. (Worth noting here that a non-diverse slate of applicants is in many cases a process smell that your pipeline sucks.)
We also don't know for what role(s) the author was hiring. While the assumption here seems to be that they were having trouble finding a diverse slate of applicants for "Senior AI Researcher, PhD and 20+ years experience required," for all we know they are whining that they couldn't get applicants to be CRUD programmers building out APIs, or PMs, or doc writers, or any of the other myriad roles that go into shipping software. Given that, we don't really know where to place blame. Could be that this manager just sucks at their job.
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?
A deflection from what? A predetermined conclusion?
When I'm troubleshooting a bug, the first thing I do is to enumerate the possible ways in which the bug might occur, then devise tests to rule out most of those possibilities. This doesn't seem to be any different.
> It's telling that this person['s]... take away wasn't that they should fix [Microsoft's] broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.
Why is it telling? He's managing a team, and the policy is the more immediate and fixable obstacle to him solving his business hiring problem. Even if Microsoft was capable of "fixing" it's recruiting pipeline, that could never realistically happen in time for him to fill that role.
I work at a crypto/fintech startup. There aren't many women in tech, in finance or in crypto. Even fewer in all three. It took us months to find a woman to hire when our HR insisted we do so before hiring anyone else.
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.
>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.
This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender equality"[0]. TL;DR: Men and women are different from each other in lots of ways, including what they prefer to work on. As you increase gender equality in a society (moving from, for instance, Saudi Arabia at one extreme to Norway at the other), you see a systematic /increase/ in the difference in what men and women end up working on. More gender equality --> fewer women engineers, more women doing child care.
Edit: oh,and I would encourage anyone looking in to the literature to view it in the correct light: the field is overtly hostile to this data, and that greatly skews what gets published. And here it is anyway.
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.
>“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.
I’m prepared to believe that those differences exist wrt reproductive role ie that humans have some sexed instincts around mating and child care, but, as per what right-thinking people believe about about race and intelligence / personality / emotionality (viz ‘races’ don’t actually have different characters or abilities) I don’t think the sexes are fundamentally different mentally.
It used to be the case until fairly recently (my lifetime) that “women are suited to be nurses, and men to be doctors” but no-one believes that kind of thing now. It should be possible to culturally evolve past expectations of significant psychological differences between men and women, just as we have between white and other races.
(There’s a discussion to be had about the value of preserving cultural differences between groups, particularly at the expense of individuals within those groups, but it’s a massive can of worms)
Lots of it boils down to risk. For sexual/reproductive reasons, men are more prone to risk - both behaviourally and generically. Evolution doesn't tend to favour risk-taking in the sex that carries and rears offspring. The number of women (not men) in a group is also the bottleneck to the group's ability to reproduce/recover population. Males are more fundamentally disposable, and have developed traits to fit into this niche. We have just about all of this in common with our closest ape relatives. I'm no researcher, but I've found the work of Frans de Waal and other primatologists enlightening.
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.
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?
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.
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)
> a nice thought experiment would be to ask "how much would someone have to pay you to be the same person but black in your organization?"
These days, it would be the other way around. I'd bet many devs would pay a one-time fee of $10k to be a black dev in their organization. The payback period would be very short and would pay dividends for years.
> White people are over represented across the workforce because America is not a meritocracy -- benefits of economic class are correlated with race because of white supremacy.
Be careful because white people are actually under-represented[1] at Microsoft relative to their makeup of American population[2] (48% at Microsoft vs 75% country-wide). It's really important to understand this because otherwise DEI initiatives may counter-intuitively increase representation of white people. See school admissions for an example: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc...
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.
That represents the population at large, not the percentage of job applicants. Without knowing that number, you can't know how reasonable such a rule is.
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.
Yes, but if you are looking at the population of rust dev with a background in system coding, or telecom engineer with ciso certification, the stats don't look like the ones of the general population at all.
In my university, in the whole class, we had 0 non white, and a single woman.
Now, you may argue that we should fix that.
But that's another debate, the thing is, people are hiring from the pool we have right now.
Right, but these aren't that. These are just generic executives. So like, just rando leaders in accounting and HR and sales. The comparison would be if in your entire university campus only white students existed.
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.
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.
- One applying to one role at github/microsoft: After ton of meetings, I would have to talk with their diversity manager, it was a 60 minutes meeting, which i just didn't feel well to go through after some googling.
- As hiring manager (in another FAANG) company, I couldn't hire the best candidates, until all other 20 more diverse were interviewed. Everyone, regardless of qualified or not, had to be interviewed, before we could hire someone less diverse (aka not "white", not European, not "Man"). The position was for senior developer, and I had to go through a tedious set of interview with people straight of coding boot camp.. We ended up hiring one (guy), which wasn't in our top 5. All top 5 were able to get a new job, since our process took almost 6 month, from starting the process up to onboarding him. It was frustrating and actually the main reason why I left the team, to become architect. The process was called "agile/fair hiring", how ironic..
note that I quoted "Man" and "White". That's because we don't have a color palette to say how white is ok and we don't ask question to know how Manly someone is. That was so ridiculous, that most our team members didn't want to help me with the interviews...
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadWhy are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups?
And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please help me understand if I'm missing something obvious.
Parents matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting
More likely is that filters for immigration are very high, which means the average immigrant is more educated, wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.
>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.
And the majority of immigrants in US aren't refugees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented. But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global workforce would be Asian.
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.
That's not what bias means.
What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen.
If more applicants are available that happen to be from a certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then that's what the organization has to work with.
That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you see".
If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen.
I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?
What is "literally hired"; does your organization figuratively hire most of the time, except for the surprising odd time when it is, wow, literal?
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."
What _are_ the groups?
"Asian" can mean anything. From India, China, Japan, many countries in Oceania, etc.
I think the classification is fundamentally flawed.
At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.
My guess is that there are a lot of immigrants from Asia that fall into any of those camps.
"Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization.
Two main reasons that are given:
Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions.
Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields. You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism? It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable path to success.
Present fathers that raise and discipline their children.
Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.
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.
My point is that very often the success of Asian-Americans even though they are a disadvantaged class has been used to justify anti-Black rhetoric. In the context of this HN thread, which is specifically about D&I and hiring more Black people, bringing up a “better Asian culture” can be interpreted as a racist dogwhistle, even if it was unintentional. This is the myth of the model minority.
It’s a mistake to assume that “empirical,” “objective” observations cannot be racist. In particular, white-supremacists often intentionally present “facts” and “data” in order to paint a misleading picture. For examples, see 13/52: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1352-1390. The missing context in 13/52 is that Black people have suffered much more economic and social injustice, Black areas are more likely to be policed, Black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted for the same crime, etc. It would be dishonest to simply say “Black people make up 13% of the population but commit 52%…” without supplying this additional context. I.e. even if the data itself is “objective,” the context and presentation also matters because those will affect how people interpret that data.
Again, not trying to say that you were intending to be racist. I just wanted to show you what your statements could imply and that you may be unknowingly repeating white-supremacist rhetoric.
If someone points out that men commit the vast majority of rape, and thus we shouldn't assume courts are misandrist on account of the immense inequity in rape convictions, that is not sexist. If someone points to this fact to try and justify a curfew for men, or lowered burdens of proof the yes it is.
A flag showing "13/52" next to a snarling ape is undoubtedly racist. Pushing back against a quota mandating that African Americans make up no more than 13% of murder convictions, on the grounds that murder rates are not equal isn't racist.
Is this really hard to comprehend? I expect the average middle schooler is capable of understanding this, and repeatedly cautioning HN readers about potentially racist readings is more than a little condescending.
I agree that people interpret things as dogwhistles even when they were not intended that way. To me, that's a problem because it means anything can be a dogwhistle.
It also doesn't make sense given the meaning of "dogwhistle" which is something that is intended to communicate to an in-group. If it is not intended, then it's not a dogwhistle.
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-...
1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...
I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?
Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and biased sampling ?
~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent + China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally, because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature proponents)
> Why can't we replicate this for other groups?
Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture, it must first start at trying to observe these with some level of granularity.
Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here. Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for immigrants from other racial groups ?
Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups with similar nurture methods ?
The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for differences in group level performance ?
Good faith social studies on group level differences must go into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a study that might report: "differences between groups persist even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity". So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to see here.
I have yet encountered anyone in my circle in the bay area who had any difficulty with high-school math, and none who did not excel at least most of college-level STEM classes. On the other hand, many of my coworkers are medalists in national or international competitions of maths/physics/chemistry/informatics, or they were in the top 2% for those college entrance exams. The bias was so strong that I used to think that tutoring was useless and the education in the US was pathetic because many high school students couldn't understand simple things like factoring polynomials. So, of course they do well, statistically speaking. On the other hand, not all Asians do well in other fields, especially in business and politics. Indians are more diverse in that regard, but people from mainland China didn't have a large enough presence, partly because only universities in China tended to select the nerdiest people for STEM, or so per my China friends.
What is the average household income of the parents of these Asian people that comprise those data points?
Did they grow up in apartments or homes?
What quality was their elementary and high schools?
History will not look kindly on this moment in time.
I hope the comments can be civil, and I've seen more contentious topics surface high-quality comments on HN.
Despite the positive spin of QZ.com, it seems like there's overt incentives for discrimination.
They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it? Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
It sounds like you're agreeing with the author here, because he says,
>I fear that when large companies hire and promote people based on group identities, it discourages individuals from cultivating their abilities.
It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
It is only one logical step to assume the opposite as well, that a company that thinks holistically about the hiring process, and questions whether or not managers are acting in a truly meritocratic way will give people confidence that cultivating their abilities won't be for naught if they have a racist/sexist manager.
The article states a lot of things based on feels but the one tangible point they make is that HR is not in fact insisting he hire someone based on an "additional random factor" just that they considered all the candidates.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
"Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society."
(Added: and for what it's worth, I don't necessarily disagree on the specific examples you give. They are just irrelevant.)
I found the article interesting as I've just started to work in US corporation and I've wondered how achieving specific diversity goals are achieved in cases there is a very limited pool of people to hire / promote in a select subgroup.
Similar deal with tech hiring. What is the pool of candidates for this hire or promotion? If you're setting quotas in excess of the pool's representation you're explicitly instituting discrimination.
I'm okay with people doing this, provided they're transparent in that they're instituting affirmative action and do not intend to create a non-discriminatory hiring or promotion process. What does get on my nerves is when people privately push for policies like this, but publicly decry and mention of discrimination favoring "diverse" groups as hurtful.
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.
It's hard to attribute longterm success of the company to any given hires but race is easy to count. What is easy to measure comes to dominate your thinking.
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.
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.
But I don't buy into that being the reason for <insert my idea>.
I DO worry that "hey we doubt we're doing it right based on merit so we're picking race this time / some times" will have an effect, and not a good one.
Furthermore, we as a culture ought to be at least not hypocritical in our tolerance of clearly nepotistic/discriminatory hiring practices in minority-owned businesses (restaurants/trades/jewelry/etc.) but somehow intolerant of them in some sectors like tech and finance. These things are equally silly:
1. Expecting a Chinese restaurant not to exclusively hire more Chinese people
2. Expecting a tech-bro agency not to exclusively hire a more tech bros
3. Expecting a Kosher butcher not to exclusively hire more Jews
4. Expecting a WASPy finance org not to exclusively hire more WASPs
They are probably more inclusive too, but that measurement is noisy.
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.
But that's not what the law says.
Title VII of the CRA 1964 says:
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer— (1)to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2)to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
So I guess you want to repeal the law?
Also "race" isn't really a "thing", so what does it mean in the context of this law?
So really, GP poster got their wish-- companies are just not using their ability to ignore the law the way the poster expected.
I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
However, I disagree with the conclusion that adding another flawed metric shouldn't be concerning.
"They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it?"
The biggest thing is that this metric is meaningless. They don't define what the target is and why. They don't dig into the how of the increase either. If it was the policy, they have not taken a systems thinking review of it to see if it's working as expected or causing some other harm. I see no inclusion of the root issue - a pipeline of diverse candidates via schools. If the numbers are underrepresented in school, then they will be in industry too. Maybe you can juice your own company's numbers, but that simply leaving less for other companies. Figuring out diversity discrepancies in the talent pipeline (school, mainly) is the first step. Then figuring out if it's an actual problem and what the proper metrics are, is a step that seems to be glossed over. Without understanding these, there will be no meaningful progress.
I'm still unclear as to why we're even bothering to ask the question. How many blonde leaders are there vs. brunettes? Are brunettes poorly represented in corporate leadership? Does anyone care? Why should they.
> I'd love to hear answers for this. In my experience, it seems ratings are just the boss's unverified opinion.
Therefore institute race-based policies?
All that matters here is how things _should_ work. The hiring process should be based off merit. They should not be based off race. We should do our best to correct these when they deviate.
"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.
And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can be completed in two minutes by anybody.
> And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin flips would be better than on race.
The article explicitly states they are not asked to make promotion decisions based on race.
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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
"Hey, the website was down for a few hours. Technically I could fix it in a minute, but have a downtime anxiety".
I'm convinced white board / live coding interviews don't do much other than test for how you perform with a group of strangers pressuring you to jump through hoops publicly on which in a short time your entire value is judged (including determining say if you'll have money for daycare next week), which for most software professionals basically happens never except during an interview.
It's also inherently unfair, that's why nobody likes it, I have seen it first hand that it just leads to a few token hires, with no real change. People who actually care realise that if you want to improve something you start at the beginning, not a the outcome, you would at minimum start at education, however I guess it's cheaper to have a few diversity hires here and there without changing anything that really matters.
> Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions
You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.
> which is pretty squishy to begin with
I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job, which diverts from the point, we make decisions without knowing the outcome all the time, if we would take your worldview then every decision where we don't know the outcome would be decided by a dice roll.
> Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
You are exchanging one favouritism for another, how is that an improvement? At least the CEO's nephew would have connections in high places and likely more pressure to perform.
I would disagree. First of all, just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways, it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice. I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes. Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?
Second of all, I'm not talking about a recent grad and someone with 10 years of experience, but having been in leadership circles. 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"
> I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job.
This seems like an overly broad interpretation. Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true. i.e. take your pool of 60 senior managers, there's one open director position. Find your best 15 senior managers. You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers? (assuming there aren't specific technical skillsets involved)
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.
"The Cultural Revolution: A people's history" is a good read. Lot's of people got called reactionary and anti-<insert phrase> then too.
Yes, you can measure merit. But then, I'm not a Communist.
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....
Wholly untrue. Inequality happens for a whole mess of reasons, including individual ability and interest, it's just not exclusive to that either.
> The belief that the fix for that perceived oppression is itself oppression, but the other way around.
We're probably going to disagree on the definition of oppression, but no, there should is no need for "reverse oppression", unfortunately, I can't control how people feel about aid fixes, but I think everyone should be able to pursue opportunity equally.
> 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.
This is taken too far in the other direction where I have to accept every single "DE&I Bad" Argument so as not to seem elitist. This is a complex issue and there are plenty of good arguments on both sides, the original article just didn't attempt to make them.
4. The use of the term "reactionary" to describe its enemies
"In Marxist terminology, reactionary is a pejorative adjective denoting people whose ideas might appear to be socialist, but, in their opinion, contain elements of feudalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism or other characteristics of the ruling class, including usage between conflicting factions of Marxist movements."
Wow, that is way more involved than I meant it to be. If forgot reactionary was a loaded term, I just meant it to mean that his argument was in reaction to "wokeism" and wasn't independent of that. See item 3.
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.
https://workweek.com/2022/09/26/performance-reviews-dont-act...
No where in the article is it suggesting that anyone is pressuring managers to promote demonstrably poor performers for racial reasons. They are being asked to adjust their processes to consider the most candidates.
I think for a medium size group of relatively equal performers, it would be nearly impossible to rank order them in a way you could get a small handful of people to consistently agree with. Everyone seems to love to straw men this with some idea that Microsoft is firing all of their principal engineers to replace them with entry level candidates from state universities.
(Not that we are good on the later one. We are not. But we are much worse for the first. And, anyway, where the "give up, we are better not measuring" line falls is not obvious; at least to me.)
Never read it, have you read "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" or "Mao?" by Jung Chang? Great books on the subject as well, I'll check yours out. Not sure what this has to do with my post though. Maybe the term 'anti-intellectual' was wrong, but I was referring to the fact that the article seemed to say "DE&I Bad, Merit Good" with a superiority complex about it, and I was just saying that that position on its own isn't necessarily the intellectually superior position, even though I think "merit" gets assumed as being more necessarily more objective.
Simply because merit approximates fair far better.
So now instead of those 3% being seen as having earned their position, all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage. So now it's not only unfair to the people excluded based on skin color but it's unfair to those who benefitted strictly because of the perception they now have to deal with as having not really earned their position the same as everyone else. It puts them on equal footing with the bosses nephew, who nobody respects.
It's 2022 - maybe we can stop trying to defend race-based favoritism and discrimination?
Only by the kinds of people who tend to assume the worst about Black people.
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.
Nobody can measure merit, but that doesn't mean you can hire people based on skin color and that is exactly what DEI did. And not much else, it remains plain racism. Without bias you can see it because racial quotas are the expression. People in the past also thought they had good reason for racial discrimination.
There are real good arguments against DEI hiring practices aside from people disliking them. Although many dislike them because of its racism.
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.
I don't even think you want a "meritocracy". I want a world where people are happy. If that means they're all doing jobs they suck at, then so be it.
Yes, it's true. There has never been a strong team of young, white nerdy men. Never happened.
Technological and engineering progress was at a baffling standstill for centuries until the wisdom of diversity, inclusion and equity dawned upon us.
> But they make horrible teams.
- 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?
"Making a good team" is part of meritocracy. D&I is often implemented as an entirely separate quota system.
Do you think this would be true if you expanded it to all teams made up of one single demographic? Or is it just young white nerdy males? Cause that would sound pretty controversial if you swapped out white for any other color.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16...
Literally no diversity proponents are saying tech teams in Taiwan must have 20% African Americans or whatever and you'd have to be completely missing the point, or willfully missing it, to think so. In any case, it's pretty telling of your level of understanding of the topic that you seem to think that's what we're saying.
Likewise using friggin India and Nigeria as examples of "fully homogenous" countries is also very telling of your knowledge about other countries from your own. Just wow.
Diversity on most commonly selected metrics barely does a thing as far as empirical evidence goes.
The metrics that really matter aren't actively selected for. At best they are a byproduct. More often than not, the teams willing to be open about hiring gain their benefits over being open and cooperative rather than their diversity hires magically boosting things.
But by all means, let's continue to be reductionist by stereotyping 'le weird white young male' group.
I find the current push toward so-called equity to be more toxic than anything I experienced on male-dominated teams. People fear saying things because they don't want to be called out. Someone uses a phrase like "off the reservation" or "grandfathered" or "whitelisted" and then we have to have a meeting about how someone might have been offended. Was anyone offended? No. But we'll have a meeting to discuss a hypothetically-offended person. This leads to some behavior change but also some silent backlash.
I get that certain types of toxic behavior might be limited on diverse teams. But it's simply not the case that by adding women and minorities we will eliminate toxic behavior. From what I've seen, we simply swap one type of toxicity for another.
You worked at Big-O Tires as an installer?
Probably the one that isn't making hiring decisions based on the colour of the applicant's skin.
This is clear racial prejudice.
Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot. He also seems fairly ineffective at navigating bureaucracy. Taken to extremes, lots of corporate policies can seem a bit overbearing. This essay reads to me like he's reading corporate D&I policies to be maximally inflexible and frustrating in ways that are unlikely to be the case (at least from based on my personal experience working in large corporations + a short stint at MSFT many years ago).
Search linkedin for “diversity recruiter”. It’s a role. Companies post specific reqs that state you must belong to a marginalized group in job posts often enough that it’s a bit stomach churning.
I’ve personally had to deal with HR for having too many white men on my teams. For software developers in America.
The whole thing breeds resentment and drives teams further apart, in fact it creates the exact problems DEI is purported to solve.
We don’t get a plethora of good candidates through the normal recruiters anyway so there would be no way to know one way or the other how they would have stacked up in a wider job pool. I found one person that was solid so I felt I got kind of lucky. Restricting applicants by ANY criteria (diploma, work history, age, race, etc) in this market seems insane. My most recent HR insanity is an in office requirement. Candidates bail so fast. I don’t hide it though; there’s no reason to string someone alone that doesn’t want to meet the in office requirement I have no control over. And I don’t fault anyone for refusing to work in office for some portion of the work year.
Sure. If it wasn't pretty sure or assumes Microsoft could be sued over it, so Microsoft implements these policies as harshly as they can without opening up the path to a clear lawsuit.
It's standard operating procedure for most discrimination.
A much smaller amount of information about the applicants origin leaks through. Implicit bias is attacked via limiting the information that it can act on.
It seems categorizing people by race and gender at the individual level is a recipe for disaster and gives racists the power to do exactly what they want, pick and choose which types of people get to benefit.
If you give a regular person information about a persons race and gender, the damage they can do is limited to whatever implicit bias (if any) they have.
If you give these tools to a racist or sexist, you've given them the keys to the kingdom.
The conclusion is, why is Microsoft making it a requirement to know about race and gender at every single hiring step? Surely this just needs to be an aggeregate statistic right?
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-service-commission/jobs/serv...
Are you sure?
Many countries require being harmed by an action and then bringing that action before a court, before anyone ever compares that action to any specific law at all.
So you can see how many actions become de facto legal if nobody ever does that.
There's so much bullshit in this. Universities are not allowed to advertise positions as "women only", but at the same time they are required to reach certain percentage of female "representation" by law.
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!
This seems to indicate that minority demographics may be targeted for recruitment, advancement, etc.
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/affirmativeact
At least at my company, I know they have preferences for minorities over similarly qualified candidates. I've heard a department head specifically tell the managers that we need more women in a specific role. Maybe they're just breaking the law though...
1: https://spigglelaw.com/employers-affirmative-action-boost-di...
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.
(for you who downmodded me, this saying is how management gets away with illegal discrimination without saying the quiet part out loud)
If this is true, then I guess affirmative action isn't needed, right?
Only the diversity may go along the lines that the contemporary DEI philosophy does not like or even accept.
E.g. a Ukrainian refugee, a kid of poor Korean shopkeepers, an ex-Muslim atheist who does not even want to pretend that he is still Muslim.
"Whiteness" was created in a Virginia 1691 law to be "not negroe and not indian". Naturally, that also expanded to be not: Jews, Asians, sometimes not Italians, usually not Irish, and absolutely no indigenous people of any sort.
Defining yourself by what peoples you exclude is the core kernel of racism. And that's what "white" means.
There would be merit to this line of thinking, if the diversity initiatives came in the form of anonymizing resumes and interviews (which is easier to do with remote interviews). But that's not the case. More often than not, diversity initiatives come in the form of quotas or penalties for hiring or promoting too many "non-diverse" people. And those penalties often kick in at levels of representation lower than "non-diverse" people's representation in the candidate pool. This is why I'm not irked by over-representation of Asians in tech. They're not advantaged relative to whites, if anything they're penalized for their race (at a past company asian males were categorized as "ND", Negative-Diversity even more undesirable than white males).
However, this is often not how diversity initiatives work. More often than not, they're not aimed at eliminating discrimination, they're aimed at mandating it: attaching bonuses to hires and promotions of particular races and genders, or achieving specific representation numbers (AKA quotas). This isn't eliminating discrimination, this is creating it.
This is literally not the case for the author. From the article:
>I told HR that I had considered it and I believed my recommendation was correct. HR said “OK, then we don’t need to change anything. I just wanted to check that you had considered them.”
That's literally all the author had to do. He made up the idea that it had an impact on his ability to advance in his career in his own mind.
>Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy.
It only "seemed clear." Weasel words. Engaging in the hyperbolic. This entire discussion is predicated on the fabrication that there is some racialized penalization system in place. It is scaremongering, nothing more than balking at the requirement to do the bare minimum.
Also, as per "Diversity Slating Guidelines" quotas are indeed being used. They require at least one Black or Latin candidate, and one female candidate. If there's only 4 people on the slate, this could mean that 50% of the pool is subject to racial or gender quotas.
There's more context behind Microsoft's diversity initiatives. Hiring managers were given bonuses for hiring diverse applicants. Or conversely, they were penalized for hiring non-diverse applications: https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questionin...
Your rosy portrayal of white struggle is deeply mis-informed... People struggle because of corporate cost-cutting strategies, not because minority hires are taking jobs from white men in droves.
A lot of the posts in this thread are evoquing memories from Birth of a Nation... geesis.
The highest performing team I have been on had people from 4 continents, ran the gamut on political views, had disparate education levels (from literally a high school dropout to PhDs from prestigious schools), and had people of many races. It had no women and no black people. By the standards of HR, it was not a diverse team at all.
The DEI folks I have worked with want a very specific kind of diversity: They want you to hire people of all genders and colors, but only rich ones from a few schools. They think that school reputation and awards are a better measure of aptitude than an interview or a take-home test (claiming that the test or interviewer is biased).
Those who believe that there is no possibility of measuring merit are destined to be out-competed by those who can and do measure it at least somewhat accurately.
Please stop with the tribal generalisations. There are more than two points of view in the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166633
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166674
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33166773
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33167483
That said, this is how you end with critical technology in potential adversaries' hands.
Would that work? IIRC, stock prices aren't so much about performance, just who wants to buy your stock. Decreased actual performance from "greenwashing or other ESG bullshit" might be overwhelmed by demand by ESG pots of money.
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.
If you want to ignore requirements like that (or similar DEI requirements), you're going to have to forgo those kinds of customers.
This is already the norm in Silicon Valley. D&I awareness is a brand new thing, and mediocre reactionaries like the author pervade existing leadership structures.
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.
1. https://twitter.com/pptsapper/status/1579610768638881800
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.
>D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.
Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.
>she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person
That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization. The requirements for any role you hire for should be clear, expectations should be set and when they are not met there should be consequences. If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.
> Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.
That doesn't follow. 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.
> That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization.... If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.
There was a system in place, but if you couldn't read between the lines: the bar was far higher for firing a "diverse" employee with performance issues, which followed from the DEI ethos in place.
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 person simply couldn't do the job and was profoundly incompetent, and the response was to that was to repeatedly be told to spend more time training them. My friend had previously successfully terminated a white employee who was under-performing but turned out to be more competent than this one.
Parent comment didn't say anything like that. Please assume good faith in discussions. They said that D&I efforts are more likely to work if focused on other parts of the education/industry pipeline, which seems at least plausible.
There is a point to trying to change a system that only sees white people at the end of the hiring pipeline. We can debate where it needs to change, but the change is necessary.
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.
> 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".
Yeah, it's also worth noting that "rejected outright" is actually omegaworks's own language, which he is now taking issue with. I was only echoing it back to emphasize a point in his own terms.
Also, I suspect there's some sloppiness with definitions going on here. When I was using "D&I," I was referring specifically to kinds of corporate hiring polices the OP was talking about and this thread is discussing. I suspect omegaworks may be interpreting the term more broadly at times.
Microsoft - Satya Nadella
Google - Sundar Pichai
Twitter - Parag Agrawal
None of these men is white or even born in the USA, and somehow they managed to arrive at positions of extreme power and influence through this system of "capital and clout".
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734
2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...
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"?
What you see is little more than your own personal anecdote. Who are the voices centered in the conversations around funding? Why is it easier for some people to secure investment? Who is considered important in the conversations around what tech is developed and who is ignored? Who reaps the rewards and who shoulders the costs?
> with fewer resources
Think a little deeper: why were resources allocated in this way?
>How did that result in "uplifting whiteness"?
The people put in charge of these companies have little interest in critically examining the race and caste-based resource allocation mechanisms that helped to get them there.
I hope SCOTUS strikes all of this down.
Do you know anything about employment law or the current state of title VII jurisprudence? I'm guessing not if you're reacting this way to a pretty uncontroversial claim.
D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations within big business where it's too easy to lose sight of how balanced a company is internally. If you don't keep reports on finances a company can easily fail. If you don't take steps to make sure minority groups are represented within your company, it will also create situations where bias takes hold, and suddenly discrimination becomes the norm.
What's next? Should we get rid of sexual harassment training and policies?
Only someone from a background that elimination of equal opportunity would serve foremost would think that "complete blindness to race" is possible in our world. It's a childish and a destructive ignorance considering what is currently happening in our world even to this day, as white nationalist groups are growing in numbers, and other groups, a prior US president, and public celebrities are also regularly publicly expressing race based hate.
Is there any reason to believe this is true and not just conjecture? This always struck me as kind of far fetched.
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.)
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.
Your logic by nature is total flaw. You can't see it because of your own condition, and supremacist beliefs.
It could probably citing that not be explained to you how a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life, or how a Hasidic Jew can be fairly considerate of a Muslim perspective and vice versa.
This is the root of arrogance in ignorance that perpetuates racial bias. People have a right to be different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards their own individual and cultural perspectives, and globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required to properly represent all of the people they serve PROPERLY or they will simply fail over time... It's not the call of a few biassed individuals to determine that they are qualified. The market dictates the need for D&I.
Being disrespectful to people who disagree with you, and at the same time unable to produce any sensible argument only harms the cause you're fighting for.
> how a lion cannot be taught to understand an ox's life
Limited intelligence is the defining factor here, not background. Think about it. Humans can understand lions quite well, and we understand what's good for them, what makes them happy. And we do it without having to run around savanna biting zebras!
And yes, Jews and Muslims can have a very good idea about each others life, struggles and priorities—it's just a matter of education.
> globalist companies like Microsoft are by nature required to properly represent all of the people
I could argue with this and would probably enjoy it another time. Now let's remember the context we are in. We were talking about whether D&I are good for company's performance, not about any moral obligations you may think the company has.
> People have a right to be different, and a natural tendency to be biassed towards their own individual and cultural perspectives
We also have a natural tendency to fall for logical fallacies. But somehow we managed to identify those and find ways to fight them, not worship them. Nothing stops you from fighting the cultural bias you have (maybe not completely, but just enough to get it off the way of your work duties) in the same way—later go home, take off your employee hat and be different, biased, whatever.
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.
This is rational, straightforward, healthy and just righteous in a deep way. It creates an environment bereft of envy and injustice.
Turns out, most high brain mass mammals have a innate sense of fairness. When humans are treated unfairly because of some ostensible moral goal whether through racism or D&I; the end result is not pretty. Humans of all culture are enamored and magnetized by fairness and justice. But those words have been twisted to mean exactly the opposite by contemporaneous social-justice movements.
This was the mainstream view of the Civil Rights movement. It was utterly beautiful. But, post-moderity came and neo-Marxists have reigned for last 40 years in USA at least, gutting out Universities and now, Corporations.
Yes.
Also, people hiring in their friends and family over others who are distinctly better.
I've been in many roles over the years in very different companies, and these two eventualities always play out. People are flawed, and the companies they create become equally flawed
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.
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 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.
When you belong to a minority, you navigate the world on the majority's terms. This is true everywhere but only in the US do people seem to get bent of of shape about it. The saying is "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". How would you mutilate this phrase so that it conforms to your worldview?
I'm less tired coming home from 8 hours on my feet dealing with the public than I was in professional settings. I don't have to hide everything about myself and my background (I'm a first-generation college student with a poorish upbringing) or constantly worry about what all my interactions with colleagues mean for my 'career'.
I will say my class background is more of an issue than my sex/sexuality, but my sex was way more of a problem in my teens and early 20s. The interesting thing is that being a techy child was fine, being a techy teenage/20 something girl SUCKED, and being a techy 30 something woman is fine.
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.
The cultural homophobia and misogyny is one of the two major reasons I didn't opt for a CS degree (the other being I had too much pride to take intro classes to prove myself when I'd been coding since I was 5 because 17 year old me was arrogant as hell). This WAS 10-20 years ago, but experiences like mine do have impacts on the candidate pipeline for midlevel and senior positions.
And on the other hand, taking my tech skills into non-tech spaces is very well received. Libraries are always happy to have tech-literate people, and even in my current job, I've had 2 freelance dev projects dropped into my lap in the space of a month simply because I'm easier to work with and very familiar with the very feminine subject domain.
I'm very skeptical of DEI, ironically, because I've seen too much of it turn into grifts for upper-class and upper-middle class POC and gay people while ignoring non-visible differences or differences that might actually require behavior changes (disability and class, mostly). But there's definitely a cultural problem. And I say this as a woman who greatly prefers 'male' communication styles and was raised by a warehouse worker. I'm not pearl clutching - I've lived in a couple of the most dangerous cities in the US, I'm no shrinking violet.
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.
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
edit: not letting me reply down chain. source is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964Edit: Nevermind, it's the 1964 Title VII [Section 703] of the Civil Rights Act.
https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...
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.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/a...
1. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
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.
To fill a position, you need candidates. To have candidates, you need students of that discipline. There are numerous issues that could skew the demographics of the students (some are problematic, but some may be natural/acceptable!).
And of course this applies to domestic workers. Global workers and importing talent via visas have different benefits and issues.
All that said, in my experience most DEI company policies are more about not getting sued and avoiding bad press. They create policies, but many of them are ignored or just turned into a spineless checklist. As an example, the article didn't seem to address why the Microsoft metrics are meaningful, or what the targets are and their justifications. There's no systems thinking approach to explaining why or how the metrics/policies are beneficial, rather it's assumed.
If you are truly in a domain where you cannot hire CS graduates, then D&I is going to put a lot of burden on your recruitment team to find candidates to meet slating requirements. But you probably aren't...
No but I think you should be able to find a single minority candidate over the course of months.
Maybe no-one dares to complain, because it is easily perceived as racism.
There is no broken recruiting pipeline. There are simply not enough candidates in the pool to staff every company in a way that is representative.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...
This is trying to treat the symptoms, not the disease. You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is?
Whatever you're trying to solve - the "issue" starts decades earlier, at home. It's about how people are brought up, their access to education, their social environment. Culture actually plays a role, too.
When it comes to a recruiting pipeline this is critical. If you are tapping members of your team to help finding candidates from their networks and your team lacks diversity, you are going to just build out your team with more of the same.
The same goes for where you are looking for candidates outside of your team. If you are only targeting a small number of schools it's really easy to end up with a homogenized set to pull from. I know from experience working at some of the big tech powerhouses, they'd target a handful of schools and only hire college grads from there - which means they miss out on recruiting from state schools, historically black colleges, and other pockets where things are more diverse.
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.
I think it explicitly said they did not do that:
> 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.
It seems like a good next step would be to give the author more tools to find more diverse candidates, rather than having them come up with trying to gauge ethnicity by name on LinkedIn and getting those to apply.
I guess we're just looking for any excuse now to NOT talk about the actual source of the problem.
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.
I'll chime in here that if a person works at Microsoft and has the resources of Microsoft recruiting on their side, that they are in a better position than most to end up with a wide choice of applicants. Microsoft can sponsor visas if need be, and their compensation is generally high enough to merit consideration of relocation, if necessary. (Worth noting here that a non-diverse slate of applicants is in many cases a process smell that your pipeline sucks.)
We also don't know for what role(s) the author was hiring. While the assumption here seems to be that they were having trouble finding a diverse slate of applicants for "Senior AI Researcher, PhD and 20+ years experience required," for all we know they are whining that they couldn't get applicants to be CRUD programmers building out APIs, or PMs, or doc writers, or any of the other myriad roles that go into shipping software. Given that, we don't really know where to place blame. Could be that this manager just sucks at their job.
When I'm troubleshooting a bug, the first thing I do is to enumerate the possible ways in which the bug might occur, then devise tests to rule out most of those possibilities. This doesn't seem to be any different.
Why is it telling? He's managing a team, and the policy is the more immediate and fixable obstacle to him solving his business hiring problem. Even if Microsoft was capable of "fixing" it's recruiting pipeline, that could never realistically happen in time for him to fill that role.
And what does "it's telling" mean? What do you think this tells us about the author?
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.
This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender equality"[0]. TL;DR: Men and women are different from each other in lots of ways, including what they prefer to work on. As you increase gender equality in a society (moving from, for instance, Saudi Arabia at one extreme to Norway at the other), you see a systematic /increase/ in the difference in what men and women end up working on. More gender equality --> fewer women engineers, more women doing child care.
Edit: oh,and I would encourage anyone looking in to the literature to view it in the correct light: the field is overtly hostile to this data, and that greatly skews what gets published. And here it is anyway.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
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.
>“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.
It used to be the case until fairly recently (my lifetime) that “women are suited to be nurses, and men to be doctors” but no-one believes that kind of thing now. It should be possible to culturally evolve past expectations of significant psychological differences between men and women, just as we have between white and other races.
(There’s a discussion to be had about the value of preserving cultural differences between groups, particularly at the expense of individuals within those groups, but it’s a massive can of worms)
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.
Make that ~70: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-prol...
Lawd, all right, 95th%ile is 13 or something :-D
So where does your thinking go when the issues are outside of the company?
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.
These days, it would be the other way around. I'd bet many devs would pay a one-time fee of $10k to be a black dev in their organization. The payback period would be very short and would pay dividends for years.
Be careful because white people are actually under-represented[1] at Microsoft relative to their makeup of American population[2] (48% at Microsoft vs 75% country-wide). It's really important to understand this because otherwise DEI initiatives may counter-intuitively increase representation of white people. See school admissions for an example: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc...
[1] Page 9 of https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW...
[2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221
In my university, in the whole class, we had 0 non white, and a single woman.
Now, you may argue that we should fix that.
But that's another debate, the thing is, people are hiring from the pool we have right now.
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.
- One applying to one role at github/microsoft: After ton of meetings, I would have to talk with their diversity manager, it was a 60 minutes meeting, which i just didn't feel well to go through after some googling.
- As hiring manager (in another FAANG) company, I couldn't hire the best candidates, until all other 20 more diverse were interviewed. Everyone, regardless of qualified or not, had to be interviewed, before we could hire someone less diverse (aka not "white", not European, not "Man"). The position was for senior developer, and I had to go through a tedious set of interview with people straight of coding boot camp.. We ended up hiring one (guy), which wasn't in our top 5. All top 5 were able to get a new job, since our process took almost 6 month, from starting the process up to onboarding him. It was frustrating and actually the main reason why I left the team, to become architect. The process was called "agile/fair hiring", how ironic..