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Does Google's hiring practices "effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates"? That's a key issue. If so, the details of Google's hiring practices thems

Does Google's hiring practices "effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates"? That's a key issue. If so, the details of Google's hiring practices themselves impugn the qualifications of preferred candidate groups.

danso 9y ago
Apparently Google doesn't think that it has lowered the bar for women and minority candidates. So the memo's author has effectively raised a "Have you stopped beating your mother?" begging-type question. Should people get fired for poor rhetorical reasoning? Probably not, but this one happened to imply the inferiority of certain groups of employees.
- xname2 9y ago
  You only said "probably not", so you are also implying it is probably true. Why didn't you just say "absolutely not"?
  - qu4z-2 9y ago
    That's not how probably works. GP is only implying it's potentially true, presumably because they aren't sure they've fully considered every angle of the question and there may be weird edge cases. Let's not Purity Test people for showing some humbleness in their beliefs. We could probably use more of that these days.
- red75prime 9y ago
  Apparently Google fired the person. Apparently Google can't say that it has lowered the bar, as it will be PR disaster. "Google doesn't think it has lowered the bar" is implied, not apparent.
mikeash 9y ago
Or it's an implicit admission that the qualifications they look at are bused and they don't know how to fix that. There's an underlying assumption in these discussions that implementing a meritocracy is easy and examining every candidate without regard to their race and sex is the default state of affairs. In this view, any changes you make to the process is necessarily de-optimizing for merit. But what is "merit"? This isn't a field where you can quantify it. If you were hiring people to lift heavy objects or something, you could test them all and hire the ones with the best numbers and be confident you got the best people for the job. There's no way to implement something like that for the jobs Google has. So we approximate. We look at degrees and open source projects and do in-person interviews. We pretend that this results in a purely objective evaluation of the candidate's ability to do the job, free of any bias... not because there's any reason to think that's true, but because we really want it to be. Techies often bemoan whiteboard interviews for being unfair: the skill being tested isn't really the skill you'd use on the job, and it discriminates against people who get nervous when put on the spot, or whatever. It's not outrageous to think that maybe some parts of the interview process, without ever intending to, discriminate against women and minorities in a similar way.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  That's an argument for digging into the inner workings of the hiring process more than an argument for looking at aggregate effect. If you're just looking at aggregate group statistics about candidate pools and hiring decisions, how would you ever know the difference between your hiring screen preferring a group and the candidate pool genuinely having more strong candidates in that group? It seems more than a little quixotic if fixing every known flaw in the hiring process isn't enough - that the process must get a certain hiring outcome in order to be "fair".
  - mikeash 9y ago
    And if they do dig into the inner workings of the hiring process and the results are still not representative of the general population? Do you just assume you've somehow managed to eliminate all bias and the results must reflect the population? Or do you assume that you haven't managed to 100% debug this highly difficult process? It is very difficult to tell the difference between biased hiring and actual skew in the population. But when it's a trait that has no obvious connection to the job, it seems best to assume the process is biased, unless really good evidence exists to demonstrate a connection. For example, let's say your interview process produces hires whose heights are substantially above average. If you're hiring for a basketball team then this would make perfect sense. If you're hiring Java programmers, it's highly likely that your interview process is screwed up. It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions. Obviously, the first thing to do is to examine your interview process and eliminate any source of height bias you can find. But what if you do that and you're still hiring an abnormally large number of tall people? You could take this as sufficient evidence that tall people are better at this, but that's putting an awful lot of confidence in your interview program. It's more likely that you just haven't found all the sources of tall bias. If that's the case, then pushing for more short hires will improve the overall quality of your hires because you won't be artificially excluding good short ones.
    - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
jonnathanson 9y ago
There is no evidence that Google "lowers the bar," and this is a common misconception about diversity-focused hiring practices. The idea isn't to lower the bar to hire more candidates for the mere sake of their ethic or gender diversity. The idea is to ensure that the hiring manager at least looks at some qualified, diverse candidates in his or her process. The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job. Google's approach probably assumes there are, and puts a burden on the hiring manager and recruiter to find and consider those candidates. I don't work at Google and am wholly unfamiliar with their internal hiring practices. But in order to prove the author's specific "lowering the bar" claim, we'd need to see data not just on hiring numbers, but on success of the hired cohorts over time. (I'm willing to guess that Google does not try to hire unqualified candidates, period.) "Lowering the bar" is a dangerous claim that offends the dignity and qualifications of every diverse employee at the company or ever hired by the company. A claim that bold would demand extraordinary evidence, which the author does not convincingly supply, and which I am taking a wild guess does not exist.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Right. Which is why many female engineers do not want the appearance of preferential treatment in the hiring process.
- ppod 9y ago
  This assumes that talent and hiring is considered as a thresholded binary model, where you are either "good enough" or "not good enough" to work for the company, and the difference between two people who are "good enough" isn't important. Of course, because of cultural and historical prejudices and biases, the pool of candidates that even apply to google is biased towards white males. Everything possible should be done to attract applications or seek out potential candidates from minority populations. But without suggesting any biological differences, it is still likely that because of cultural and historical prejudice, the distribution of talent among candidates will be skewed toward white males. Again, not because of any biological difference, but because they are more likely to have been encouraged or gone to rich universities or had parents who were engineers. If we have a pool of 100 people and we want to hire the best five, then the bar is set by ranking the people by talent and qualification. If we want to hire everyone who is qualified, then wherever we set the bar, it is still likely that the population above the bar is skewed. So if we want to achieve a rebalancing or quota of employees from a certain sub-population, then it certainly does involve lowering the bar. We can argue over whether that is a good thing to want, or a fair thing, but I don't think you can logically argue that the bar isn't being lowered if you want to achieve a quota for a certain subpopulation. If you are suggesting that the population above the bar is not skewed, then you are suggesting that the terrible cultural stereotypes, biases and prejudices against women and minorities in technical fields has had no effect on their ability to achieve talent and qualification above the level of the bar, which I find implausible.
geofft 9y ago
> Does Google's hiring practices "effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates"? He uses the phrase "effectively lower the bar" to mean something very different from what almost all of us think of as lowering the bar. The full quote is that one of Google's "discriminatory practices" is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." That is, the bar isn't lowered, they're just trying to fail to hire qualified candidates (from certain groups) less than they currently do. Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  So essentially, passing Google's hiring bar is a lottery, and Google is giving out more tickets to diversity candidates?
  - geofft 9y ago
    Google has a conceptual "bar", and sure, in theory there's a way to map every candidate onto that bar. Passing the bar isn't a lottery (it's just a deterministic mapping), but actually getting an offer is. Having gone through the interview process and received an offer recently, I'd certainly say it is. I don't know that I'd agree with the second part; one thing you can reasonably conclude is correlated with false negatives is diversity (there are studies that people form hire/no-hire opinions within seconds of meeting a candidate, and studies that people have immediate biases when meeting people based on race/gender; there's also the simple fact that's put to good use in small companies that hiring people like yourselves, although mostly in ideological bias etc., is a good means for team cohesion). I assume Google has done more research on this than I have. Handing out "more tickets" may just be a way to cancel out the fact that so-called diversity candidates are getting worse tickets. However, even if they were simply giving out more tickets to diversity candidates, the average level of qualification of these candidates doesn't change. You just have more of them. Maybe that's a problem because you're discriminating in their favor, but it certainly does not "effectively lower the bar" or impugn the qualifications of this over-represented group. They're all qualified. They're all on the right side of the "bar". There's no alleged increase in the false positive rate. The fact that he chose to interpret this as "effectively lower[ing] the bar" is not just insulting to his colleagues and unprofessional, but also a sign that he doesn't understand math enough to pass a well-tuned Google interview and got one of the rare false-positive lottery tickets.

danso 9y ago

Apparently Google doesn't think that it has lowered the bar for women and minority candidates. So the memo's author has effectively raised a "Have you stopped beating your mother?" begging-type question. Should people get fired for poor rhetorical reasoning? Probably not, but this one happened to imply the inferiority of certain groups of employees.

xname2 9y ago
You only said "probably not", so you are also implying it is probably true. Why didn't you just say "absolutely not"?
- qu4z-2 9y ago
  That's not how probably works. GP is only implying it's potentially true, presumably because they aren't sure they've fully considered every angle of the question and there may be weird edge cases. Let's not Purity Test people for showing some humbleness in their beliefs. We could probably use more of that these days.
red75prime 9y ago
Apparently Google fired the person. Apparently Google can't say that it has lowered the bar, as it will be PR disaster. "Google doesn't think it has lowered the bar" is implied, not apparent.

mikeash 9y ago

Or it's an implicit admission that the qualifications they look at are bused and they don't know how to fix that. There's an underlying assumption in these discussions that implementing a meritocracy is easy and examining every candidate without regard to their race and sex is the default state of affairs. In this view, any changes you make to the process is necessarily de-optimizing for merit. But what is "merit"? This isn't a field where you can quantify it. If you were hiring people to lift heavy objects or something, you could test them all and hire the ones with the best numbers and be confident you got the best people for the job. There's no way to implement something like that for the jobs Google has. So we approximate. We look at degrees and open source projects and do in-person interviews. We pretend that this results in a purely objective evaluation of the candidate's ability to do the job, free of any bias... not because there's any reason to think that's true, but because we really want it to be. Techies often bemoan whiteboard interviews for being unfair: the skill being tested isn't really the skill you'd use on the job, and it discriminates against people who get nervous when put on the spot, or whatever. It's not outrageous to think that maybe some parts of the interview process, without ever intending to, discriminate against women and minorities in a similar way.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
That's an argument for digging into the inner workings of the hiring process more than an argument for looking at aggregate effect. If you're just looking at aggregate group statistics about candidate pools and hiring decisions, how would you ever know the difference between your hiring screen preferring a group and the candidate pool genuinely having more strong candidates in that group? It seems more than a little quixotic if fixing every known flaw in the hiring process isn't enough - that the process must get a certain hiring outcome in order to be "fair".
- mikeash 9y ago
  And if they do dig into the inner workings of the hiring process and the results are still not representative of the general population? Do you just assume you've somehow managed to eliminate all bias and the results must reflect the population? Or do you assume that you haven't managed to 100% debug this highly difficult process? It is very difficult to tell the difference between biased hiring and actual skew in the population. But when it's a trait that has no obvious connection to the job, it seems best to assume the process is biased, unless really good evidence exists to demonstrate a connection. For example, let's say your interview process produces hires whose heights are substantially above average. If you're hiring for a basketball team then this would make perfect sense. If you're hiring Java programmers, it's highly likely that your interview process is screwed up. It's possible that the population of good Java programmers is unusually tall because of some biological factor, but this idea needs some major justification before you use it to make decisions. Obviously, the first thing to do is to examine your interview process and eliminate any source of height bias you can find. But what if you do that and you're still hiring an abnormally large number of tall people? You could take this as sufficient evidence that tall people are better at this, but that's putting an awful lot of confidence in your interview program. It's more likely that you just haven't found all the sources of tall bias. If that's the case, then pushing for more short hires will improve the overall quality of your hires because you won't be artificially excluding good short ones.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago

jonnathanson 9y ago

There is no evidence that Google "lowers the bar," and this is a common misconception about diversity-focused hiring practices. The idea isn't to lower the bar to hire more candidates for the mere sake of their ethic or gender diversity. The idea is to ensure that the hiring manager at least looks at some qualified, diverse candidates in his or her process. The "lowering the bar" argument assumes there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job. Google's approach probably assumes there are, and puts a burden on the hiring manager and recruiter to find and consider those candidates. I don't work at Google and am wholly unfamiliar with their internal hiring practices. But in order to prove the author's specific "lowering the bar" claim, we'd need to see data not just on hiring numbers, but on success of the hired cohorts over time. (I'm willing to guess that Google does not try to hire unqualified candidates, period.) "Lowering the bar" is a dangerous claim that offends the dignity and qualifications of every diverse employee at the company or ever hired by the company. A claim that bold would demand extraordinary evidence, which the author does not convincingly supply, and which I am taking a wild guess does not exist.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
Right. Which is why many female engineers do not want the appearance of preferential treatment in the hiring process.
ppod 9y ago
This assumes that talent and hiring is considered as a thresholded binary model, where you are either "good enough" or "not good enough" to work for the company, and the difference between two people who are "good enough" isn't important. Of course, because of cultural and historical prejudices and biases, the pool of candidates that even apply to google is biased towards white males. Everything possible should be done to attract applications or seek out potential candidates from minority populations. But without suggesting any biological differences, it is still likely that because of cultural and historical prejudice, the distribution of talent among candidates will be skewed toward white males. Again, not because of any biological difference, but because they are more likely to have been encouraged or gone to rich universities or had parents who were engineers. If we have a pool of 100 people and we want to hire the best five, then the bar is set by ranking the people by talent and qualification. If we want to hire everyone who is qualified, then wherever we set the bar, it is still likely that the population above the bar is skewed. So if we want to achieve a rebalancing or quota of employees from a certain sub-population, then it certainly does involve lowering the bar. We can argue over whether that is a good thing to want, or a fair thing, but I don't think you can logically argue that the bar isn't being lowered if you want to achieve a quota for a certain subpopulation. If you are suggesting that the population above the bar is not skewed, then you are suggesting that the terrible cultural stereotypes, biases and prejudices against women and minorities in technical fields has had no effect on their ability to achieve talent and qualification above the level of the bar, which I find implausible.

geofft 9y ago

> Does Google's hiring practices "effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates"? He uses the phrase "effectively lower the bar" to mean something very different from what almost all of us think of as lowering the bar. The full quote is that one of Google's "discriminatory practices" is "Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for 'diversity' candidates by decreasing the false negative rate." That is, the bar isn't lowered, they're just trying to fail to hire qualified candidates (from certain groups) less than they currently do. Unless we have a reason to believe that false negatives are strongly correlated with the axis on which "the bar" is placed (and I don't think we do; false negatives are generally going to come from asking an out-of-left-field question, or the interviewee having a bad day, or something, which are pretty random), this doesn't lower the bar, "effectively" or otherwise.

ThrustVectoring 9y ago
So essentially, passing Google's hiring bar is a lottery, and Google is giving out more tickets to diversity candidates?
- geofft 9y ago
  Google has a conceptual "bar", and sure, in theory there's a way to map every candidate onto that bar. Passing the bar isn't a lottery (it's just a deterministic mapping), but actually getting an offer is. Having gone through the interview process and received an offer recently, I'd certainly say it is. I don't know that I'd agree with the second part; one thing you can reasonably conclude is correlated with false negatives is diversity (there are studies that people form hire/no-hire opinions within seconds of meeting a candidate, and studies that people have immediate biases when meeting people based on race/gender; there's also the simple fact that's put to good use in small companies that hiring people like yourselves, although mostly in ideological bias etc., is a good means for team cohesion). I assume Google has done more research on this than I have. Handing out "more tickets" may just be a way to cancel out the fact that so-called diversity candidates are getting worse tickets. However, even if they were simply giving out more tickets to diversity candidates, the average level of qualification of these candidates doesn't change. You just have more of them. Maybe that's a problem because you're discriminating in their favor, but it certainly does not "effectively lower the bar" or impugn the qualifications of this over-represented group. They're all qualified. They're all on the right side of the "bar". There's no alleged increase in the false positive rate. The fact that he chose to interpret this as "effectively lower[ing] the bar" is not just insulting to his colleagues and unprofessional, but also a sign that he doesn't understand math enough to pass a well-tuned Google interview and got one of the rare false-positive lottery tickets.