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> 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 consid

> 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.

grzm 10y ago
Thanks for the civil and thoughtful reply. These types of topics can so easily escalate out of control! Agreed all around. Add to that is how to properly measure how a given employee will work out with for a company. Determining the best measures of ability and that oft-discussed ever-elusive "fit" are not easy tasks for some jobs, and something companies are continually trying to improve. Hiring for diversity is itself a proxy of sorts, isn't it? I doubt Microsoft is hiring for diversity for diversity's sake. There are inequalities in society as a whole that appear to break to some extent along racial and gender lines. You bring two others with respect to nationality and income or economic class. (I mention all of these without making a moral judgement.) There's a lot of different ideas as to why these inequalities exist. I'm speculating, but one reason Microsoft may be hiring for diversity is that they see that the demographic make up of their employee base is significantly different from the make up of society as a whole. Is there a merit/ability reason why this should be? If there isn't, should the company take steps to change the disparity? This gets into questions of the role of the company in society. Does/can/should a company have responsibilities beyond short term profit? Are people good at making decisions that affect the long-term? Do the effects of pure capitalism affect societal change at a rate that maximizes societal good (for some measure) on scales comparable to the average human life? Should we be concerned about these things? Throw up our hands? Try to figure out solutions outside pure meritocracy? I'm just riffing now in a pretty non-structured way. I'd be happy for others to push against them and see how quickly they fall over. I also recognize that not everybody is interested in these questions. The HN forums are a good place to get exposed to other ideas from different perspectives. I'm pretty sure we're not going to figure all of this out in this thread, but it is good stuff to think about overall.

grzm 10y ago

Thanks for the civil and thoughtful reply. These types of topics can so easily escalate out of control! Agreed all around. Add to that is how to properly measure how a given employee will work out with for a company. Determining the best measures of ability and that oft-discussed ever-elusive "fit" are not easy tasks for some jobs, and something companies are continually trying to improve. Hiring for diversity is itself a proxy of sorts, isn't it? I doubt Microsoft is hiring for diversity for diversity's sake. There are inequalities in society as a whole that appear to break to some extent along racial and gender lines. You bring two others with respect to nationality and income or economic class. (I mention all of these without making a moral judgement.) There's a lot of different ideas as to why these inequalities exist. I'm speculating, but one reason Microsoft may be hiring for diversity is that they see that the demographic make up of their employee base is significantly different from the make up of society as a whole. Is there a merit/ability reason why this should be? If there isn't, should the company take steps to change the disparity? This gets into questions of the role of the company in society. Does/can/should a company have responsibilities beyond short term profit? Are people good at making decisions that affect the long-term? Do the effects of pure capitalism affect societal change at a rate that maximizes societal good (for some measure) on scales comparable to the average human life? Should we be concerned about these things? Throw up our hands? Try to figure out solutions outside pure meritocracy? I'm just riffing now in a pretty non-structured way. I'd be happy for others to push against them and see how quickly they fall over. I also recognize that not everybody is interested in these questions. The HN forums are a good place to get exposed to other ideas from different perspectives. I'm pretty sure we're not going to figure all of this out in this thread, but it is good stuff to think about overall.