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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

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.

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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.
- mvarner 9y ago
  I believe the idea behind diversity initiatives is to ensure that the starting pool of 100 people is representative of larger demographics. Women make up ~50% of Carnegie Mellon's undergraduate computer science department (for instance). It's not like there's a dearth of qualified women.
  - throw_away_777 9y ago
    That maybe the theory, but it often isn't how it works in practice. Unfortunately people who claims this publicly get fired. I don't know the numbers, but it would be interesting to see if the acceptance rate of a google job interview depends on gender or race.
    - mvarner 9y ago
      I have a feeling that if race truly played a preferential role in hiring engineers, we would see more than 1% of tech roles being filled by Black engineers at Google. ;) https://www.google.com/diversity/ https://www.google.com/diversity/
      - throw_away_777 9y ago
        Without knowing the distribution of the applicants, we can't say. Maybe 0.1% of all applicants are black, we don't know. In the same way, just saying 1% of tech roles are filled by black engineers doesn't imply that google's hiring practices are discriminatory.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Yeah that's generally how it works at most of the majors. People at Google are evaluated by an independent panel and the decision to hire or not is independent of other candidates. So you really do get this kind of "good enough" or "not good enough" binary.
xienze 9y ago
> 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. No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_. They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google? [1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race... > Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says. She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.” The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.
- jonnathanson 9y ago
  How does a study about affirmative action policies in college admissions offer any specific evidence about Google's policies?
  - xienze 9y ago
    If universities can't increase minority enrollment without lowering the bar, what makes you think Google can? I would argue that university affirmative action is the inspiration for how Google and other tech companies are juicing their numbers.
    - jonnathanson 9y ago
      Again, I'm not taking any issue with your assumptions, but assumptions are not direct or even circumstantial evidence. That's all I'm trying to say.
Aunche 9y ago
I don't think Google ever lowers the bar for general hires, but they do have internships that are specifically targeted toward "underrepresented" people that are significantly easier to get into than regular internships. It's much easier to receive a return offer than a regular offer, so Google is effectively lowering the bar with that internship program

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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.

mvarner 9y ago
I believe the idea behind diversity initiatives is to ensure that the starting pool of 100 people is representative of larger demographics. Women make up ~50% of Carnegie Mellon's undergraduate computer science department (for instance). It's not like there's a dearth of qualified women.
- throw_away_777 9y ago
  That maybe the theory, but it often isn't how it works in practice. Unfortunately people who claims this publicly get fired. I don't know the numbers, but it would be interesting to see if the acceptance rate of a google job interview depends on gender or race.
  - mvarner 9y ago
    I have a feeling that if race truly played a preferential role in hiring engineers, we would see more than 1% of tech roles being filled by Black engineers at Google. ;) https://www.google.com/diversity/ https://www.google.com/diversity/
    - throw_away_777 9y ago
      Without knowing the distribution of the applicants, we can't say. Maybe 0.1% of all applicants are black, we don't know. In the same way, just saying 1% of tech roles are filled by black engineers doesn't imply that google's hiring practices are discriminatory.
UncleMeat 9y ago
Yeah that's generally how it works at most of the majors. People at Google are evaluated by an independent panel and the decision to hire or not is independent of other candidates. So you really do get this kind of "good enough" or "not good enough" binary.

xienze 9y ago

> 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. No, the argument is that there are not enough women or people of color in the population at large who are qualified for any given job _in the quantities desired by Google and every other tech company_. They are trying to create a workforce with roughly proportional amounts of women, men, blacks, etc. when men are awarded ~80% of CS degrees and blacks are awarded, what, 2% or so? You can't move the needle in employee demographics when that's the pool you're working with unless you fudge your system a bit. Hell, given how universities already do this[1], why wouldn't Google? [1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race-tutoring-20150222-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race... > Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column. African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says. She points to the second column. “Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.” The last column draws gasps. Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

jonnathanson 9y ago
How does a study about affirmative action policies in college admissions offer any specific evidence about Google's policies?
- xienze 9y ago
  If universities can't increase minority enrollment without lowering the bar, what makes you think Google can? I would argue that university affirmative action is the inspiration for how Google and other tech companies are juicing their numbers.
  - jonnathanson 9y ago
    Again, I'm not taking any issue with your assumptions, but assumptions are not direct or even circumstantial evidence. That's all I'm trying to say.

Aunche 9y ago

I don't think Google ever lowers the bar for general hires, but they do have internships that are specifically targeted toward "underrepresented" people that are significantly easier to get into than regular internships. It's much easier to receive a return offer than a regular offer, so Google is effectively lowering the bar with that internship program