I empathize with the author's frustration but there were many parts of the article which I found troubling: > "I also quickly learned that hiring managers for

I empathize with the author's frustration but there were many parts of the article which I found troubling: > "I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are." I've never met anyone who didn't claim that their colleges is full of good students. There seems to be a heavy bias here - everyone has a rosy opinion of their own college, but clearly, companies can't go to every single one. If you feel that X college, whether it's a HBU, state-college, community-college, or code-camp, is great enough to be shortlisted over other alternatives, you really need to make a compelling case for this, using data. Just saying that Microsoft doesn't recruit from the college you used to attend, and therefore, they are being unfair/stupid, doesn't sound like a great argument. > In one of the most reasonably-priced major cities of America, a ten-minute walk from one of the world’s top ten engineering schools, Google has an office. There were once dozens of SWEs and SREs in this office, humming along, cranking out GWT, nerd shit etc. Google decided to close Atlanta engineering Again, this sounds exactly like the point above about colleges. There are ~30 major cities in America, and Google can't open significant dev-centers in every one of them. If you think that ATL would provide great value for Google along all axes (not just diversity), you need to make a compelling case for it. Just stating that Google doesn't have a major office in ATL, and therefore they are being unfair/stupid, isn't a great argument. > There were also the Hiring Committee meetings that became contentious when I advocated for diverse candidates. Candidates who were dinged for not being fast enough to solve problems, not having internships at ‘strong’ companies and who took too long to finish their degree. Only after hours of lobbying would they be hired. > when tech companies talk about “lowering the bar” by hiring minorities they are actually just saying they don’t want to hire minorities since no one in tech actually has a bar that works very well in determining good versus bad hires regardless of ethnicity or gender. This was the part I actually found most troubling. Google has an extremely high rejection rate - a large majority of their candidates end up getting rejected for "not being fast enough, not having strong internships" or for any number of other reasons. When the average Joe gets rejected for the above reasons, it's ok, but when a diversity candidate gets rejected for the same reasons, it's suddenly a problem? And what exactly is the author advocating when he talks about how interviews are useless, and therefore, there's no point in having a bar at all? It just sounds like the author is saying that there's no way of figuring out who's going to be a great candidate, and therefore, you might as well just set some minimum qualifications, and then hire anyone who meets those minimum qualifications and happens to be a diversity-candidate. It's arguments like this that make people think that diversity == lowering-the-bar. Yes, hiring is extremely hard, but no, that doesn't mean it can be skipped or watered down. Every successful company needs to figure out some heuristic that will allow them to hire only the best candidates, and any diversity push needs to be made while still respecting this stringent heuristic. If you think that Google's heuristic in unfairly biased against diversity candidates, in a way that's unrelated to job performance, you really need to provide evidence for this. Simply saying that Google rejected some diversity candidates because they didn't pass their evaluation-process, is a really weak argument. Overall, I agree with the author's thesis that the interviewing process is biased in many ways (race, gender, age, height, charisma, eloquence, etc etc), and that we need to do more to fix these problems. But the arguments he presents are so weak, and the insults he piles on MS/GOOG/FB are so unfair, that I find myself disagreeing with most of what he says.