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Honestly, the more I read about all those "diversity initiatives", "outreach campaigns" and "pushes to increase H1B" caps - the more I wonder about the intent a

Honestly, the more I read about all those "diversity initiatives", "outreach campaigns" and "pushes to increase H1B" caps - the more I wonder about the intent and motivation of the people pulling the strings and funding the groups fighting so hard to further those causes. My comment is only tangentially related to hiring practices. Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously starts to look like an organized campaign to 1/ increase the supply of engineers in the valley 2/ increase competition for access to a limited supply of jobs 3/ maintain engineers as a inexpensive, replaceable and unorganized workforce (in the face of increasing demand). To address the diversity numbers of Facebook, I wonder what are they exactly suggesting when they mean that it is not "diverse"? At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". To clear that out and maybe find out that I am mistaken, I want to know with what kind of demographic breakdown would proponents of diversity be pleased. Should it follow the US racial distribution? Or have equal proportions of people from each race? Finally, I think that a breakdown according to class would be much more interesting than this document. Since race is only skin deep, I do believe that having people from all walks of life would be a better optima than having people of different colors (that are all upper middle class).

forgottenpass 10y ago
Maybe age has turned me into a cynic Nah man. Even a half-honest business person will tell you the business incentive for making and funding diversity goals is about expanding the hiring pool. The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. Maybe the businesses are true believers in diversity, or maybe they're cold, calculating, and just hiring the true believers to diversify their business. It's like when Google lobbies the government and their goals happen to overlap with ends an everyday engineer clued into the topic also likes. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. But they'll make the strong principled argument for it.
- mrkurt 10y ago
  The individuals probably are acting on a moral belief, but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart.
  - aries1980 10y ago
    > but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart. Why not?
    - spacebat 10y ago
      A public company may not be able to, because the board may be sued for doing things that do not increase shareholder value in the short term?
      - aries1980 10y ago
        The company's mission is to fulfil its purpose that may or may not related to immediate shareholder value. I recommend to read the Flow's author's other book called Good Business: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Business-Leadership-Making-Meaning/dp/0340739738 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Business-Leadership-Making-Mea... . He describes quite well what bugged me with the concept of “a business entity is to maximise the profit”.
    - mrkurt 10y ago
      Because orgs are amoral.
      - aries1980 10y ago
        If companies can have “culture”, they can have personality and morale / ethics as well.
- GuiA 10y ago
  > The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. This gets to the core of the issue: in a late stage capitalistic society, meaningful social change ONLY happens when it is aligned with business incentives.
white-flame 10y ago
>> Should it follow the US racial distribution? Should it follow the local area's racial distribution, especially if that is divergent from the national averages? In any case, one pro-diversity argument is that across cultures and genders lie different ways of looking at the world and looking at problems. This adds more potential good solutions to the discovery space your workers are exploring. However, I think underlying these movements is that companies desperately do not want to be viewed as socially offensive, to avoid being in the crosshairs of devastating angry mob backlashes.
mrkurt 10y ago
Expanding the hiring pool is valuable to these companies. Many companies also feel like they'll perform better with a more diverse group of employees. I sure felt like that about my company. They probably _also_ feel like it's right. This is one of those social problems where both the business need and moral need match up. My guess is that people who want racial diversity want class diversity, diversity of thought, cultural diversity, etc. These are not exclusive problems. In fact, if we got to a world state where race played no part in someone's job opportunities, I expect it would be easier to tackle the others.
- pj_mukh 10y ago
  This is mostly empirically provable [1]. Diverse teams come up with better ideas that apply to a larger swath of markets (an immediate payoff for companies). [1]: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/is-there-a-payoff-from-top-team-diversity http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...
  - elgenie 10y ago
    The results on this are quite wishy-washy. And the applicability of studies of the value of diversity in an executive team attempting to strategically position themselves in a market to a team building a compiler is questionable to say the least.
    - moduspwnens14 10y ago
      Even making your product appeal to a wide market often isn't recommended for small companies. We often see posts here about focusing on a specific winnable market and going from there. In a vacuum, I'd imagine that having likeness between the customer and the developers to be far more effective than general cultural diversity. A team making a compiler is programmers making a tool for programmers, so it's an excellent fit. I could see cultural diversity becoming more effective once you're trying to reach the general public or niche markets.
  - aantix 10y ago
serge2k 10y ago
> At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". Too many underrepresented groups would be a nicer way of putting it. > Should it follow the US racial distribution? Would that not be fairest? > Since race is only skin deep It's about institutionalized racism, so race is what we should be looking at. Besides, your idea wouldn't be that interesting considering how underrepresented women are regardless of race.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  >> Should it follow the US racial distribution? > Would that not be fairest? Only if everyone wants to do it equally. We haven't had enough experience with non-discrimination yet to figure out if this is the case or not.
- ManlyBread 10y ago
  >> Should it follow the US racial distribution? >Would that not be fairest? Why?
euyyn 10y ago
I think what they mean by "not diverse enough" is in comparison to the pool of candidates. Under the hypothesis that race/gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/nationality/age are uncorrelated to performance/ability of the candidates, it implies bias in the selection process. Which isn't only an ethical concern, but also a business one: it means they're not hiring the overall best candidates. Of course, there's also something to be said about the lack of diversity in the pool of software engineer candidates, which signals a problem for the industry in general for the same reasons. That's e.g. why tech companies are funding programs so that girls aren't turned off a software career if that's what they fancy. Those details aside, in general my impression is that the industry isn't currently in any sort of stagnation of opportunities, with employees' salaries racing to the bottom to cling on those opportunities. On the opposite, there seems to be plenty of things still to be done, and not enough hands. If you dump a lot of new good candidates in the pool, they're going to be absorbed right away, even if they're all white American males.
- taneq 10y ago
  That would make sense if they weren't also complaining about the fact that there are fewer [group X] applicants in the first place (and then using that to justify accusations of systemic discrimination).
  - euyyn 10y ago
    Did you read my 2nd paragraph?
- Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
  >Under the hypothesis that race/gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/nationality/age are uncorrelated to performance/ability of the candidates, it implies bias in the selection process. We are infinitely certain of this, which explains many things.
  - moduspol 10y ago
    We are in no way infinitely certain of this. We just like to think so.
gjulianm 10y ago
I think that 'non diversity' (or at least how I interpret is) is an indicator of possible unfairness, and not necessarily bad per se. If a company has too few people of a given group in comparison to the hiring pool availability, it may be something that the company is doing, maybe unconsciously, to keep them out. If the difference is with respect to the country's distribution of that group (which I suspect is the case in tech), there might be something either with the companies and/or the education-motivation given to access that knowledge. In any case, I think it's worth to look at it and try to solve it, because maybe you end up improving the actual/future employees' life and the company itself. And possibly race is not the only division to look at, as you say. Class is probably more interesting, but also age, family responsibilities or sexual orientation can reveal practices/attitudes that can be improved. I agree with you in the cynical thinking and in the motivations of some of the groups pushing for it, but I think that in the long run thinking about the diversity problem and trying to fix it can lead to better outcomes for everybody.
jdmichal 10y ago
Ideally, the demographic breakdown should perfectly match the candidate pool. And again, ideally, the candidate pool should perfectly match the general population. Lacking the actual candidate pool numbers, there's actually two assumptions in play: 1. That the candidate pool matches the general population. 2. That the company is discriminating against this candidate pool, leading to skewed demographics. For some reason, assumption (1) seems to be implicitly trusted, and all blame fall to assumption (2) -- that is, that any deviation from the general population is somehow the fault of the company. I would posit that assumption (1) is typically not true. For instance, we know from studies that the STEM candidate pool for women is smaller than the general population, due to university dropout. It is impossible for every STEM company to have a population distribution of women that matches the general population. Reverse applies to, say, nursing or teaching, which have larger-than-expected numbers of women. (I'll leave it to the reader to make their own conclusions about why we aren't reading about diversity problems in such fields.)
- tomp 10y ago
  Aren't you forgetting that different people, even different groups of people, have different motivations? E.g. in general, men like cars, gym and climbing; women like jewellery, yoga and dancing. These are all voluntary activities (well, you could argue that things like gym and jewellery are socially motivated), yet different sexes in average choose differently. Why wouldn't it be the same with careers?
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    Are you assuming that there is some genetic or evolutionary reason for men to like cars? That somehow it is hard-coded into the Y chromosome to like cars? Or have you considered the possibility that social conditioning can make a large difference in what hobbies and preferences someone ends up having?
    - flukus 10y ago
      No assumption necessary, we are a sexually dimorphic species.

forgottenpass 10y ago

Maybe age has turned me into a cynic Nah man. Even a half-honest business person will tell you the business incentive for making and funding diversity goals is about expanding the hiring pool. The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. Maybe the businesses are true believers in diversity, or maybe they're cold, calculating, and just hiring the true believers to diversify their business. It's like when Google lobbies the government and their goals happen to overlap with ends an everyday engineer clued into the topic also likes. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. But they'll make the strong principled argument for it.

mrkurt 10y ago
The individuals probably are acting on a moral belief, but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart.
- aries1980 10y ago
  > but an organization can't do things out of the goodness of its heart. Why not?
  - spacebat 10y ago
    A public company may not be able to, because the board may be sued for doing things that do not increase shareholder value in the short term?
    - aries1980 10y ago
      The company's mission is to fulfil its purpose that may or may not related to immediate shareholder value. I recommend to read the Flow's author's other book called Good Business: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Business-Leadership-Making-Meaning/dp/0340739738 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Business-Leadership-Making-Mea... . He describes quite well what bugged me with the concept of “a business entity is to maximise the profit”.
  - mrkurt 10y ago
    Because orgs are amoral.
    - aries1980 10y ago
      If companies can have “culture”, they can have personality and morale / ethics as well.
GuiA 10y ago
> The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. This gets to the core of the issue: in a late stage capitalistic society, meaningful social change ONLY happens when it is aligned with business incentives.

white-flame 10y ago

>> Should it follow the US racial distribution? Should it follow the local area's racial distribution, especially if that is divergent from the national averages? In any case, one pro-diversity argument is that across cultures and genders lie different ways of looking at the world and looking at problems. This adds more potential good solutions to the discovery space your workers are exploring. However, I think underlying these movements is that companies desperately do not want to be viewed as socially offensive, to avoid being in the crosshairs of devastating angry mob backlashes.

mrkurt 10y ago

Expanding the hiring pool is valuable to these companies. Many companies also feel like they'll perform better with a more diverse group of employees. I sure felt like that about my company. They probably _also_ feel like it's right. This is one of those social problems where both the business need and moral need match up. My guess is that people who want racial diversity want class diversity, diversity of thought, cultural diversity, etc. These are not exclusive problems. In fact, if we got to a world state where race played no part in someone's job opportunities, I expect it would be easier to tackle the others.

pj_mukh 10y ago
This is mostly empirically provable [1]. Diverse teams come up with better ideas that apply to a larger swath of markets (an immediate payoff for companies). [1]: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/is-there-a-payoff-from-top-team-diversity http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...
- elgenie 10y ago
  The results on this are quite wishy-washy. And the applicability of studies of the value of diversity in an executive team attempting to strategically position themselves in a market to a team building a compiler is questionable to say the least.
  - moduspwnens14 10y ago
    Even making your product appeal to a wide market often isn't recommended for small companies. We often see posts here about focusing on a specific winnable market and going from there. In a vacuum, I'd imagine that having likeness between the customer and the developers to be far more effective than general cultural diversity. A team making a compiler is programmers making a tool for programmers, so it's an excellent fit. I could see cultural diversity becoming more effective once you're trying to reach the general public or niche markets.
- aantix 10y ago

serge2k 10y ago

> At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". Too many underrepresented groups would be a nicer way of putting it. > Should it follow the US racial distribution? Would that not be fairest? > Since race is only skin deep It's about institutionalized racism, so race is what we should be looking at. Besides, your idea wouldn't be that interesting considering how underrepresented women are regardless of race.

robotresearcher 10y ago
>> Should it follow the US racial distribution? > Would that not be fairest? Only if everyone wants to do it equally. We haven't had enough experience with non-discrimination yet to figure out if this is the case or not.
ManlyBread 10y ago
>> Should it follow the US racial distribution? >Would that not be fairest? Why?

euyyn 10y ago

I think what they mean by "not diverse enough" is in comparison to the pool of candidates. Under the hypothesis that race/gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/nationality/age are uncorrelated to performance/ability of the candidates, it implies bias in the selection process. Which isn't only an ethical concern, but also a business one: it means they're not hiring the overall best candidates. Of course, there's also something to be said about the lack of diversity in the pool of software engineer candidates, which signals a problem for the industry in general for the same reasons. That's e.g. why tech companies are funding programs so that girls aren't turned off a software career if that's what they fancy. Those details aside, in general my impression is that the industry isn't currently in any sort of stagnation of opportunities, with employees' salaries racing to the bottom to cling on those opportunities. On the opposite, there seems to be plenty of things still to be done, and not enough hands. If you dump a lot of new good candidates in the pool, they're going to be absorbed right away, even if they're all white American males.

taneq 10y ago
That would make sense if they weren't also complaining about the fact that there are fewer [group X] applicants in the first place (and then using that to justify accusations of systemic discrimination).
- euyyn 10y ago
  Did you read my 2nd paragraph?
Moshe_Silnorin 10y ago
>Under the hypothesis that race/gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/nationality/age are uncorrelated to performance/ability of the candidates, it implies bias in the selection process. We are infinitely certain of this, which explains many things.
- moduspol 10y ago
  We are in no way infinitely certain of this. We just like to think so.

gjulianm 10y ago

I think that 'non diversity' (or at least how I interpret is) is an indicator of possible unfairness, and not necessarily bad per se. If a company has too few people of a given group in comparison to the hiring pool availability, it may be something that the company is doing, maybe unconsciously, to keep them out. If the difference is with respect to the country's distribution of that group (which I suspect is the case in tech), there might be something either with the companies and/or the education-motivation given to access that knowledge. In any case, I think it's worth to look at it and try to solve it, because maybe you end up improving the actual/future employees' life and the company itself. And possibly race is not the only division to look at, as you say. Class is probably more interesting, but also age, family responsibilities or sexual orientation can reveal practices/attitudes that can be improved. I agree with you in the cynical thinking and in the motivations of some of the groups pushing for it, but I think that in the long run thinking about the diversity problem and trying to fix it can lead to better outcomes for everybody.

jdmichal 10y ago

Ideally, the demographic breakdown should perfectly match the candidate pool. And again, ideally, the candidate pool should perfectly match the general population. Lacking the actual candidate pool numbers, there's actually two assumptions in play: 1. That the candidate pool matches the general population. 2. That the company is discriminating against this candidate pool, leading to skewed demographics. For some reason, assumption (1) seems to be implicitly trusted, and all blame fall to assumption (2) -- that is, that any deviation from the general population is somehow the fault of the company. I would posit that assumption (1) is typically not true. For instance, we know from studies that the STEM candidate pool for women is smaller than the general population, due to university dropout. It is impossible for every STEM company to have a population distribution of women that matches the general population. Reverse applies to, say, nursing or teaching, which have larger-than-expected numbers of women. (I'll leave it to the reader to make their own conclusions about why we aren't reading about diversity problems in such fields.)

tomp 10y ago
Aren't you forgetting that different people, even different groups of people, have different motivations? E.g. in general, men like cars, gym and climbing; women like jewellery, yoga and dancing. These are all voluntary activities (well, you could argue that things like gym and jewellery are socially motivated), yet different sexes in average choose differently. Why wouldn't it be the same with careers?
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  Are you assuming that there is some genetic or evolutionary reason for men to like cars? That somehow it is hard-coded into the Y chromosome to like cars? Or have you considered the possibility that social conditioning can make a large difference in what hobbies and preferences someone ends up having?
  - flukus 10y ago
    No assumption necessary, we are a sexually dimorphic species.