5 ms·

Focusing your company on hiring people based on their race and gender, rather than their ability, seems like a horrible idea. Not to mention a great way to open

Focusing your company on hiring people based on their race and gender, rather than their ability, seems like a horrible idea. Not to mention a great way to open yourself to law suits and massive animosity among your employees.

tenpies 10y ago
Not to mention the effect on the person being hired: was I hired because I was the best candidate or because some manager wanted their bonus and had to fill a quota?
- AlexB138 10y ago
  Indeed. Or the person who wasn't hired. "Was I rejected because I'm white?". Lawsuits aside, that's a great way to build quite a bit of bitterness toward your company.
kevingadd 10y ago
Why "rather than their ability"? Are you suggesting that hiring diverse candidates makes it impossible to hire skilled workers? Why would that be so?
- AlexB138 10y ago
  > Why "rather than their ability"? Because that is literally what the article is about. Unless you're under the impression that they previously hired candidates based on something other than ability, I don't see how else you could read this. Companies typically try to hire the most skilled person they can afford for a position. MS is now incentivizing leaders to favor women and certain racial groups because their previous hiring methods didn't result in the desired number of them being hired. > Are you suggesting that hiring diverse candidates makes it impossible to hire skilled workers? Why would that be so? You're intentionally twisting words.
  - kevingadd 10y ago
    Why does including race or gender as a factor in the evaluation of a candidate exclude ability? All hiring is based on a variety of factors, not just 'ability'. Availability for the position, quantity of experience, leadership skill, willingness to learn, familiarity with the problem space, quality of personal references, interpersonal skills... all that along with 'how good are you at writing code'. What is the huge negative impact of adding 'diversity' to that set of evaluation factors? Are you arguing that adding diversity would actually push the most qualified candidates to the bottom of the pile somehow? If all things are truly equal, adding diversity to the sort has no impact on the ability of qualified candidates to get hired.
    - parenthephobia 10y ago
      Reasonable hiring is based on solely upon whether the candidate is both willing and able to fill the role. All the factors you listed are equivalent to or surrogates of that fundamental requirement. Or, in the case of leadership skill, are excess to requirements unless the role involves leadership. All races and sexes being equal on average does not mean that all candidates are equal on average. If they were, we wouldn't have interviews. Almost always, one candidate will be better. Necessary, that candidate will be a member of one race or sex. If any of the other candidates is a member of another race or sex, and that race or sex is one which the hirer is incentivized to hire people for, a less-suitable candidate will be hired if the hirer follows his incentives.
- falcolas 10y ago
  The hiring pipeline for non-white non-asian non-male developers is significantly smaller than that "other" pipeline. All other things being equal (i.e. percentage of capable candidates to total candidates), this means that it will be demonstrably harder to fill hiring needs using otherwise identical criteria. So, if you have a quota (or a bonus) of diverse hires needed, you will either end up lowering your standards or spend a lot more money in order to fill the hiring needs.
  - kevingadd 10y ago
    Why is it smaller? Do you have data to support this? How much more money does it take to fill your pool with qualified non-white-non-male candidates? I'm curious whether you are citing any data here or personal experience working in HR or recruiting. Is the pool smaller because you primarily rely on referrals from your (already not especially diverse) workforce and applications from people off the street? Are you recruiting from universities that are predominantly white, as a result implicitly biasing your available pool of recent college graduates? Are you recruiting only from your local area, subjecting yourself to the local race balance? If hiring diverse candidates costs more money, that can absolutely still be worth it if hiring diverse candidates provides measurable upsides. Of course, the cost matters - if it's 10x or 100x it's much harder to see a positive return. But dismissing it for being 'too hard' or 'too expensive' without actually doing an evaluation of the pros and cons is a little lazy, isn't it?
    - falcolas 10y ago
      > Why is it smaller? Fewer women in the Engineering workforce. Which stems from fewer women in College engineering programs. Which stems from (and I'm firmly in the "IMO" stage here) girls being encouraged to play with dolls and boys with legos. Of course, engineering isn't the only occupation where there is an obvious gender bias, check out the book publishing industry. 90% white females, last I heard. > Do you have data to support this? The college numbers are broadly available, as are the employment records. > citing any data here or personal experience working in HR or recruiting Mostly from my attempts to hire someone for a number of positions - every time I get the candidate pool narrowed down to qualified individuals, they are all white males in their late 20's or early 30's. Is there an unconscious bias? Perhaps, but I'm narrowing based on their work experience, not their name, website or talking to them on the phone by this point. > if hiring diverse candidates provides measurable upsides It's very hard to quantify the benefit of a diverse work team. You know the benefits when you see them, but putting a dollar amount to it? "We made 20 fewer boneheaded decisions this year, resulting in a savings of $30,000." I'd love to see it, but I doubt I will.
- tuna-piano 10y ago
  When the criteria for a job is aptitude, experience, etc then of course it's ability over diversity. When diversity is a qualification along with aptitude and experience, people are right to question. A parallel discussion (and recent litigation) for college admissions is happening as well. Many black people admitted to top schools are only admitted because they are black. The stats show that black people admitted to some top schools need much lower SAT scores, while Asians need much higher (vs whites). This might not be the most polite way to phrase the situation, but it is absolutely true.
  - kevingadd 10y ago
    So you're saying the only reason they were admitted is the color of their skin and no other criteria were considered? What are the criteria that are normally used to evaluate a white student that were thrown out for these black students? Are their grades lower? What about their post-graduation job outcomes? Do they cost the campus more money? How much money do they make the campus by playing on basketball and football teams for the university? What do the on-campus crime and harassment statistics look like if broken down by race and gender - do the diverse students cause more trouble or less? If you're going to say something like 'they were only admitted because they are black' and then 'absolutely true' I hope you're prepared to back it up, otherwise you just sound racist - and I'm sure that's absolutely not true!
    - candiodari 10y ago
      > So you're saying the only reason they were admitted is the color of their skin and no other criteria were considered? What are the criteria that are normally used to evaluate a white student that were thrown out for these black students? No, he's saying that they were selected over people who performed better in the interviews and other selection criteria because of the color of their skin/gender/religion/... Now in some way that's equivalent, in the sense that they would not have been selected if not for their skin color (they would have been third or fifth on the list where the top spot gets hired), but in other ways it's not. It does not mean they don't have any ability at all, for instance. Just less than would be required if they were white males. And I'm sure if executive compensation is tied to this, that there will in fact be cases of no ability at all, but I doubt it will be the common case. And we all know the methods executives will use to hit their targets while lying about this, for instance to make sure it looks fair, when it isn't. Going in and changing interview reports and scores after the fact to make sure they "didn't select based on skin color", except it'll be blatantly obvious for their colleagues that's exactly what happened. And in fact I bet those other team members will have to work more, harder and ... to compensate for the lower abilities.
foolrush 10y ago
> Focusing your company on hiring people based on their race and gender, rather than their ability, seems like a horrible idea. What exactly do you estimate has been happening when your current field of diversity is landlocked at some 90% or more? Fluke?
- falcolas 10y ago
  The hiring pipeline for "diverse" applicants is much smaller than the pipeline for non-diverse applicants. Insinuates that the problem needs to be addressed at a wholly different level.
  - kevingadd 10y ago
    So, presuming the pipeline is smaller, why does that make it a bad idea to more highly weight diverse candidates? Why can't you expand the pipeline AND hire diverse candidates? What's the solution to the small pipeline? If there's a well-understood solution, why isn't it fixed yet? This has been a known problem for a while. Is it too expensive?
    - falcolas 10y ago
      > does that make it a bad idea to more highly weight diverse candidates It doesn't, but you can't weight in favor of candidates which aren't there. If I have 10 positions to fill, 30 qualified white males, and 1 qualified female, is it better to go out and spend more money attracting females, or fill the jobs with the best candidates and move on? > What's the solution to the small pipeline? As with my other response to you, I believe it's cultural. You can't force women who are interested in writing novels or nursing to go into engineering. Find where the cultural issues are, accept that you'll never get to a clean split between the races and genders (for any position), and the symptoms of few diverse candidates will clear itself up.
grzm 10y ago
Purely focussing on race and gender does seem like a horrible idea. Do you think race and gender should have any role at all in hiring decisions? There's a difference between "focussing" and taking it into account. Can race and gender be proxies for adding additional perspective? First example that comes to mind is, say, if you're looking to expand your market into new demographics. Edited to add: If you choose to down vote, I'd appreciate a comment as to why in the interest of communication. Given the amount of discussion that still goes on around these topics, it's far from a settled issue. Understanding how others think about them is important to figuring out some kind of agreement or acceptable solution. If the solution is obvious to you, please share, as it's not obvious to me.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  Yeah, studies have in fact shown that this is the case - in certain problem spaces if your team isn't diverse you can fail to find the correct solution to the problem because you have too few different perspectives on it. i.e. https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation On the other hand there have definitely been studies showing negative outcomes from diversity programs, so there's an interesting conflict there.
  - grzm 10y ago
    Thanks for the link. It's also great to see a more nuanced take on a lot of this. Some people do see it in black and white. Sometimes I wish I did, as it would make some things easier. Unfortunately (?), I'm not at that point of certainty yet.
- AlexB138 10y ago
  > Do you think race and gender should have any role at all in hiring decisions? In general, no, unless there is some specific reason why a role needs to consider those qualities, which you alluded to. > Can race and gender be proxies for adding additional perspective? I should think so, but at the same time I find it a bit insulting to suggest that they're primary indicators for perspective. For example, a wealthy British black man and a wealthy American white woman have significantly more in common than a poor black man and the same wealthy black man. Using race as primary indicators is actually a bit racist.
falcolas 10y ago
> open yourself to law suits Positive discrimination for minorities is legal. > animosity among your employees My wife has seen this, being one of the hires made to fill a quota while working at EA.
- home_boi 10y ago
  >My wife has seen this, being one of the hires made to fill a quota while working at EA. Can you elaborate on this? I'm very curious how far companies go to fill quotas and how much weight is put into race/gender.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    This is her favorite "token female" story. Basically, for a temp QA position she was given a test to test a short section of a videogame. Her goal was to identify all the bugs she possibly could. When I took the same test, I had identified about 15, and I missed a lot of them. She identified 0. She was hired. She was also given a "most improved" award at the end of the testing cycle, and got a copy of Fifa for the Game Boy Color as her prize. Put another way, she had no past experience, displayed no aptitude for the position, and she was hired. She was, the manager admitted to her later, also the only woman to apply.
- omonra 10y ago
  "Positive discrimination for minorities is legal." White and asian men (the groups discriminated by this policy) make up about 37% of US population. So in this instance we've already reached the point where 'minority' make up the majority of the population.

tenpies 10y ago

Not to mention the effect on the person being hired: was I hired because I was the best candidate or because some manager wanted their bonus and had to fill a quota?

AlexB138 10y ago
Indeed. Or the person who wasn't hired. "Was I rejected because I'm white?". Lawsuits aside, that's a great way to build quite a bit of bitterness toward your company.

kevingadd 10y ago

Why "rather than their ability"? Are you suggesting that hiring diverse candidates makes it impossible to hire skilled workers? Why would that be so?

AlexB138 10y ago
> Why "rather than their ability"? Because that is literally what the article is about. Unless you're under the impression that they previously hired candidates based on something other than ability, I don't see how else you could read this. Companies typically try to hire the most skilled person they can afford for a position. MS is now incentivizing leaders to favor women and certain racial groups because their previous hiring methods didn't result in the desired number of them being hired. > Are you suggesting that hiring diverse candidates makes it impossible to hire skilled workers? Why would that be so? You're intentionally twisting words.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  Why does including race or gender as a factor in the evaluation of a candidate exclude ability? All hiring is based on a variety of factors, not just 'ability'. Availability for the position, quantity of experience, leadership skill, willingness to learn, familiarity with the problem space, quality of personal references, interpersonal skills... all that along with 'how good are you at writing code'. What is the huge negative impact of adding 'diversity' to that set of evaluation factors? Are you arguing that adding diversity would actually push the most qualified candidates to the bottom of the pile somehow? If all things are truly equal, adding diversity to the sort has no impact on the ability of qualified candidates to get hired.
  - parenthephobia 10y ago
    Reasonable hiring is based on solely upon whether the candidate is both willing and able to fill the role. All the factors you listed are equivalent to or surrogates of that fundamental requirement. Or, in the case of leadership skill, are excess to requirements unless the role involves leadership. All races and sexes being equal on average does not mean that all candidates are equal on average. If they were, we wouldn't have interviews. Almost always, one candidate will be better. Necessary, that candidate will be a member of one race or sex. If any of the other candidates is a member of another race or sex, and that race or sex is one which the hirer is incentivized to hire people for, a less-suitable candidate will be hired if the hirer follows his incentives.
falcolas 10y ago
The hiring pipeline for non-white non-asian non-male developers is significantly smaller than that "other" pipeline. All other things being equal (i.e. percentage of capable candidates to total candidates), this means that it will be demonstrably harder to fill hiring needs using otherwise identical criteria. So, if you have a quota (or a bonus) of diverse hires needed, you will either end up lowering your standards or spend a lot more money in order to fill the hiring needs.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  Why is it smaller? Do you have data to support this? How much more money does it take to fill your pool with qualified non-white-non-male candidates? I'm curious whether you are citing any data here or personal experience working in HR or recruiting. Is the pool smaller because you primarily rely on referrals from your (already not especially diverse) workforce and applications from people off the street? Are you recruiting from universities that are predominantly white, as a result implicitly biasing your available pool of recent college graduates? Are you recruiting only from your local area, subjecting yourself to the local race balance? If hiring diverse candidates costs more money, that can absolutely still be worth it if hiring diverse candidates provides measurable upsides. Of course, the cost matters - if it's 10x or 100x it's much harder to see a positive return. But dismissing it for being 'too hard' or 'too expensive' without actually doing an evaluation of the pros and cons is a little lazy, isn't it?
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > Why is it smaller? Fewer women in the Engineering workforce. Which stems from fewer women in College engineering programs. Which stems from (and I'm firmly in the "IMO" stage here) girls being encouraged to play with dolls and boys with legos. Of course, engineering isn't the only occupation where there is an obvious gender bias, check out the book publishing industry. 90% white females, last I heard. > Do you have data to support this? The college numbers are broadly available, as are the employment records. > citing any data here or personal experience working in HR or recruiting Mostly from my attempts to hire someone for a number of positions - every time I get the candidate pool narrowed down to qualified individuals, they are all white males in their late 20's or early 30's. Is there an unconscious bias? Perhaps, but I'm narrowing based on their work experience, not their name, website or talking to them on the phone by this point. > if hiring diverse candidates provides measurable upsides It's very hard to quantify the benefit of a diverse work team. You know the benefits when you see them, but putting a dollar amount to it? "We made 20 fewer boneheaded decisions this year, resulting in a savings of $30,000." I'd love to see it, but I doubt I will.
tuna-piano 10y ago
When the criteria for a job is aptitude, experience, etc then of course it's ability over diversity. When diversity is a qualification along with aptitude and experience, people are right to question. A parallel discussion (and recent litigation) for college admissions is happening as well. Many black people admitted to top schools are only admitted because they are black. The stats show that black people admitted to some top schools need much lower SAT scores, while Asians need much higher (vs whites). This might not be the most polite way to phrase the situation, but it is absolutely true.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  So you're saying the only reason they were admitted is the color of their skin and no other criteria were considered? What are the criteria that are normally used to evaluate a white student that were thrown out for these black students? Are their grades lower? What about their post-graduation job outcomes? Do they cost the campus more money? How much money do they make the campus by playing on basketball and football teams for the university? What do the on-campus crime and harassment statistics look like if broken down by race and gender - do the diverse students cause more trouble or less? If you're going to say something like 'they were only admitted because they are black' and then 'absolutely true' I hope you're prepared to back it up, otherwise you just sound racist - and I'm sure that's absolutely not true!
  - candiodari 10y ago
    > So you're saying the only reason they were admitted is the color of their skin and no other criteria were considered? What are the criteria that are normally used to evaluate a white student that were thrown out for these black students? No, he's saying that they were selected over people who performed better in the interviews and other selection criteria because of the color of their skin/gender/religion/... Now in some way that's equivalent, in the sense that they would not have been selected if not for their skin color (they would have been third or fifth on the list where the top spot gets hired), but in other ways it's not. It does not mean they don't have any ability at all, for instance. Just less than would be required if they were white males. And I'm sure if executive compensation is tied to this, that there will in fact be cases of no ability at all, but I doubt it will be the common case. And we all know the methods executives will use to hit their targets while lying about this, for instance to make sure it looks fair, when it isn't. Going in and changing interview reports and scores after the fact to make sure they "didn't select based on skin color", except it'll be blatantly obvious for their colleagues that's exactly what happened. And in fact I bet those other team members will have to work more, harder and ... to compensate for the lower abilities.

foolrush 10y ago

> Focusing your company on hiring people based on their race and gender, rather than their ability, seems like a horrible idea. What exactly do you estimate has been happening when your current field of diversity is landlocked at some 90% or more? Fluke?

falcolas 10y ago
The hiring pipeline for "diverse" applicants is much smaller than the pipeline for non-diverse applicants. Insinuates that the problem needs to be addressed at a wholly different level.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  So, presuming the pipeline is smaller, why does that make it a bad idea to more highly weight diverse candidates? Why can't you expand the pipeline AND hire diverse candidates? What's the solution to the small pipeline? If there's a well-understood solution, why isn't it fixed yet? This has been a known problem for a while. Is it too expensive?
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > does that make it a bad idea to more highly weight diverse candidates It doesn't, but you can't weight in favor of candidates which aren't there. If I have 10 positions to fill, 30 qualified white males, and 1 qualified female, is it better to go out and spend more money attracting females, or fill the jobs with the best candidates and move on? > What's the solution to the small pipeline? As with my other response to you, I believe it's cultural. You can't force women who are interested in writing novels or nursing to go into engineering. Find where the cultural issues are, accept that you'll never get to a clean split between the races and genders (for any position), and the symptoms of few diverse candidates will clear itself up.

grzm 10y ago

Purely focussing on race and gender does seem like a horrible idea. Do you think race and gender should have any role at all in hiring decisions? There's a difference between "focussing" and taking it into account. Can race and gender be proxies for adding additional perspective? First example that comes to mind is, say, if you're looking to expand your market into new demographics. Edited to add: If you choose to down vote, I'd appreciate a comment as to why in the interest of communication. Given the amount of discussion that still goes on around these topics, it's far from a settled issue. Understanding how others think about them is important to figuring out some kind of agreement or acceptable solution. If the solution is obvious to you, please share, as it's not obvious to me.

kevingadd 10y ago
Yeah, studies have in fact shown that this is the case - in certain problem spaces if your team isn't diverse you can fail to find the correct solution to the problem because you have too few different perspectives on it. i.e. https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation On the other hand there have definitely been studies showing negative outcomes from diversity programs, so there's an interesting conflict there.
- grzm 10y ago
  Thanks for the link. It's also great to see a more nuanced take on a lot of this. Some people do see it in black and white. Sometimes I wish I did, as it would make some things easier. Unfortunately (?), I'm not at that point of certainty yet.
AlexB138 10y ago
> Do you think race and gender should have any role at all in hiring decisions? In general, no, unless there is some specific reason why a role needs to consider those qualities, which you alluded to. > Can race and gender be proxies for adding additional perspective? I should think so, but at the same time I find it a bit insulting to suggest that they're primary indicators for perspective. For example, a wealthy British black man and a wealthy American white woman have significantly more in common than a poor black man and the same wealthy black man. Using race as primary indicators is actually a bit racist.

falcolas 10y ago

> open yourself to law suits Positive discrimination for minorities is legal. > animosity among your employees My wife has seen this, being one of the hires made to fill a quota while working at EA.

home_boi 10y ago
>My wife has seen this, being one of the hires made to fill a quota while working at EA. Can you elaborate on this? I'm very curious how far companies go to fill quotas and how much weight is put into race/gender.
- falcolas 10y ago
  This is her favorite "token female" story. Basically, for a temp QA position she was given a test to test a short section of a videogame. Her goal was to identify all the bugs she possibly could. When I took the same test, I had identified about 15, and I missed a lot of them. She identified 0. She was hired. She was also given a "most improved" award at the end of the testing cycle, and got a copy of Fifa for the Game Boy Color as her prize. Put another way, she had no past experience, displayed no aptitude for the position, and she was hired. She was, the manager admitted to her later, also the only woman to apply.
omonra 10y ago
"Positive discrimination for minorities is legal." White and asian men (the groups discriminated by this policy) make up about 37% of US population. So in this instance we've already reached the point where 'minority' make up the majority of the population.