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> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on s

> He claimed that Google’s diversity efforts represent a lowering of the bar. Google has stated many times that its efforts involve focusing more resources on searching for candidates in minority groups rather than lowering the bar for these groups. Such misrepresentation is harmful to those of us at Google who have to overcome the bias that we were hired based other factors beside our skills. This to me is the most interesting question that hasn't been answered about the memo. There seems to still be two camps, those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. They can't both be right and I'd imagine if we could take a look at Google's hiring practices it wouldn't be too hard to tell which is which. Of course, we can't Google keeps its hiring practices, at least the ones relating to diversity very hush hush. This was actually Damore's impetus for writing the memo, he attended a diversity summit at Google where he learned about his employer's hiring practices and also observed that this summit was, unlike other meetings at Google, not recorded for later viewing. Damore's conclusion was that the hiring processes were unethical and likely illegal, although afaik he's yet to say specifically what it was that he observed. Still I don't think it's very reasonable to say that Damore has caused harm with this misrepresentation unless you can show conclusively that it is indeed a misrepresentation, and so far I haven't seen anything conclusive that shows that.

pj_mukh 9y ago
He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.
- waqf 9y ago
  It's trading off the false positive vs. false negative rate in the hiring signal. The question is what your assumptions are about the sources of error in that signal. If you assume that the variance consists exclusively of false negatives due to discrimination, then the extra interviewers will work as Google claims and no bars will be lowered. If you assume that the variance consists of randomly distributed error that's the same for all interviewees, then the second interviewer is just some statistical sleight-of-hand that's, on average, equivalent to lowering the bar. Of course it's possible that the truth is in between.
  - intopieces 9y ago
    >Of course it's possible that the truth is in between. In this case, isn't the finding the truth pretty straightforward? Pull the performance reviews of the second chance hires. Check to see if there's a clear correlation in review and find a pattern. Are we assuming that Google, which specializes in using data, does not bother to mine its own data with regards to its hiring practices?
    - micahbright 9y ago
      Furthermore, simply look for interviewers who tend to reject women and minorities more often. Remove them from the interviewer pool.
- ErikVandeWater 9y ago
  That definitely sounds like something that would lower the bar. If I was playing H.O.R.S.E. with an NBA player, if I got two chances to hit a shot for every one chance that an NBA player got, I might look competitive, even though I'm not very good at basketball.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  > Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion. Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind. I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though. 1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar it still doesn't prove conclusively that's not what they're doing. Again I'd like to see a more complete accounting of what exactly it is they do. However, I'm certainly not saying that you need to provide this in order to have a legitimate argument, you don't have access to this information any more than I do. 2) This practice seems to have a somewhat narrow view of what a interviewer bias looks like. In particular it only tries to eliminate bias in the case of a minority being rejected. What would happen if we were to instead attempt to detect interviewers who were prone to bias by randomly giving rejected candidates second interviews and seeing which interviewers wound up frequently disagreeing with their peers? If the assumption that bias only effects minority candidates is true this would have much the same effect. 3) What if it wasn't a second chance but 100 chances? I.e. if you're a minority you get to interview for Google 100 times and if any of those say yes your in. White people only get 1 shot. Unless you think Google's false positive rate is 0, this would have to lower the bar wouldn't it?
  - jshevek 9y ago
    Thank you for this. This is one of the most important comments on this page: " Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind." Or, at the very least, present speculation as speculation. It does "show" anything definitive.
  - pj_mukh 9y ago
    "Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind." So let us extend him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't extend the hiring committee? How about we extend the benefit of the doubt to everybody involved, which would result in him never writing this memo and second guessing the hiring process. The rest of your points seem to be just a whole lot of speculation, which you just told me not to do. The article shouldn't have been written without clarification on these points and conclusive evidence. Maybe go talk to the hiring committee about their motives/state of mind first Mr. Damore?
- moduspol 9y ago
  The bar for all candidates at a non-Google company: Pass your first interview. The bar for white male candidates at Google: Pass your first interview. The bar for minority candidates at Google: Pass your first or second interview. Of course it lowers the bar for hiring. Maybe it's justified, but it's certainly not raising it. It's not keeping it the same. Maybe it's still tougher to get hired as a minority candidate than as a white one, but that doesn't change what the policy does.
  - cbanek 9y ago
    Google seems to track which candidates, even if you're white and male, have done well enough in the interview process where they think it's a false negative, and give you another interview after 12 months. It's not just minority hires that interview more than once at Google, so there's no bar lowering. There's just trying again, and everyone can try again. So really it's what you'd expect: The bar for all candidates at Google: Pass your interview.
    - moduspol 9y ago
      Just some candidates get more attempts at that bar than others, systematically, as a result of explicit policy ensuring that’s the case. You can call it justified, leveling the playing field, or whatever else, but it’s still lowering the bar to getting hired.
- joveian 9y ago
  It is an attempt to get past the type of issues that Dan Luu wrote about almost three years ago[0], where he referred someone to Google as one of the most impressive engineers he ever met in any field and that person didn't get past the phone screening as "not technical enough". [0] https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
wan23 9y ago
Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allowing unqualified people to be hired, but simply because he feels that the special treatment is unfair.
- jdoliner 9y ago
  The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them. How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.
  - wan23 9y ago
    That's not really moving the bar though - false positives are undesired errors. Also, at Google hiring decisions are made by committees using feedback collected from the interviewers. Presumably they don't discard the first interviews, but instead consider all of them.
  - bduerst 9y ago
    There's a demonstrable, statistical bias against hiring minorities that creates a higher false negative rate for them: https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-candidate-pool-theres-statistically-no-chance-shell-be-hired https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can... Having an extra interview would seem a logical way of preventing the loss of qualified candidates, wouldn't it?
alkonaut 9y ago
> those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. That part aside - why does it matter? If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group. But why is that a problem? The whole argument behind striving for diversity is that "A diverse team is stronger than a non-diverse one". So the argument must be that regardless of whether you recruit the strongest individual or not, you are building the strongest team. There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that a) The strongest team is built by having the strongest individuals, or b) that the strongest candidate has a right to be recruited even though the team is not the strongest if he is.
- subroutine 9y ago
  >If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group. But why is that a problem? Well, from the linked article, one of the women stated that "When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?" Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds. I would absolutely not want my company to start recruiting weak candidates who resemble my general physiological description; I wouldn't even want them to announce they are considering it. That said, you are right, there are merits to diversity. And I would rather err on the side of too much diversity than not enough. However, this is a complex problem which merits open discussion, otherwise we are bound to settle for suboptimal solutions, or worse.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    > Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds I think this is impossible to avoid, but I also think it's an issue coming from the same flawed thinking, which is that people can be individually measured for their strengths. That's only true to a certain extent. Once people are qualified "enough" - the strength of the team is what's important. And if you want diversity you subscribe (whether it's correct or not!) to the notion that a diverse team is a stronger team than a non-diverse team. That also means that a diverse team of slightly weaker individuals is a stronger team than a non-diverse team of slightly stronger individuals. The bottom line is: the company doesn't want the strongest individual, and the strongest individual donesn't automatically have a "right" to the available position. The strongest candidate is the one that would give the biggest improvement to the team, not (necessarily) the one that scores highest on tests, has the best experience or education, or that would be the best contribution to any set of other teams. Only the team in question matters. For a (poor-ish) analogy: a college soccer team could select the 11 individually strongest players, and still not be the strongest team. If the 11 strongest players in the school were all defenders it's likely that the team would be terrible. Among the defenders recruited would be players that are individually "weaker" than some of the rejected attackers. The rejected attackers would complain that the defenders were recruited to fill a quota of defenders in the team. And they'd be right.

pj_mukh 9y ago

He specifically mentions in an interview that minority interviewees get assigned to a second interviewer if one interviewer doesn't like them in the first round. He saw this as a 'second chance' when the committee might just be controlling for interviewer biases. Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion.

waqf 9y ago
It's trading off the false positive vs. false negative rate in the hiring signal. The question is what your assumptions are about the sources of error in that signal. If you assume that the variance consists exclusively of false negatives due to discrimination, then the extra interviewers will work as Google claims and no bars will be lowered. If you assume that the variance consists of randomly distributed error that's the same for all interviewees, then the second interviewer is just some statistical sleight-of-hand that's, on average, equivalent to lowering the bar. Of course it's possible that the truth is in between.
- intopieces 9y ago
  >Of course it's possible that the truth is in between. In this case, isn't the finding the truth pretty straightforward? Pull the performance reviews of the second chance hires. Check to see if there's a clear correlation in review and find a pattern. Are we assuming that Google, which specializes in using data, does not bother to mine its own data with regards to its hiring practices?
  - micahbright 9y ago
    Furthermore, simply look for interviewers who tend to reject women and minorities more often. Remove them from the interviewer pool.
ErikVandeWater 9y ago
That definitely sounds like something that would lower the bar. If I was playing H.O.R.S.E. with an NBA player, if I got two chances to hit a shot for every one chance that an NBA player got, I might look competitive, even though I'm not very good at basketball.
jdoliner 9y ago
> Though, the fact that he jumped to this 'lowering the bar' line of thinking shows to me that he was fishing for a conclusion. Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind. I'd ask a few questions about this interview practice though. 1) Is this the entirety of Google's diversity practices in hiring? I'd be surprised if it is. So even if this isn't lowering the bar it still doesn't prove conclusively that's not what they're doing. Again I'd like to see a more complete accounting of what exactly it is they do. However, I'm certainly not saying that you need to provide this in order to have a legitimate argument, you don't have access to this information any more than I do. 2) This practice seems to have a somewhat narrow view of what a interviewer bias looks like. In particular it only tries to eliminate bias in the case of a minority being rejected. What would happen if we were to instead attempt to detect interviewers who were prone to bias by randomly giving rejected candidates second interviews and seeing which interviewers wound up frequently disagreeing with their peers? If the assumption that bias only effects minority candidates is true this would have much the same effect. 3) What if it wasn't a second chance but 100 chances? I.e. if you're a minority you get to interview for Google 100 times and if any of those say yes your in. White people only get 1 shot. Unless you think Google's false positive rate is 0, this would have to lower the bar wouldn't it?
- jshevek 9y ago
  Thank you for this. This is one of the most important comments on this page: " Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind." Or, at the very least, present speculation as speculation. It does "show" anything definitive.
- pj_mukh 9y ago
  "Let's focus on things we can actually know rather than speculating about Damore's state of mind." So let us extend him the benefit of the doubt that he didn't extend the hiring committee? How about we extend the benefit of the doubt to everybody involved, which would result in him never writing this memo and second guessing the hiring process. The rest of your points seem to be just a whole lot of speculation, which you just told me not to do. The article shouldn't have been written without clarification on these points and conclusive evidence. Maybe go talk to the hiring committee about their motives/state of mind first Mr. Damore?
moduspol 9y ago
The bar for all candidates at a non-Google company: Pass your first interview. The bar for white male candidates at Google: Pass your first interview. The bar for minority candidates at Google: Pass your first or second interview. Of course it lowers the bar for hiring. Maybe it's justified, but it's certainly not raising it. It's not keeping it the same. Maybe it's still tougher to get hired as a minority candidate than as a white one, but that doesn't change what the policy does.
- cbanek 9y ago
  Google seems to track which candidates, even if you're white and male, have done well enough in the interview process where they think it's a false negative, and give you another interview after 12 months. It's not just minority hires that interview more than once at Google, so there's no bar lowering. There's just trying again, and everyone can try again. So really it's what you'd expect: The bar for all candidates at Google: Pass your interview.
  - moduspol 9y ago
    Just some candidates get more attempts at that bar than others, systematically, as a result of explicit policy ensuring that’s the case. You can call it justified, leveling the playing field, or whatever else, but it’s still lowering the bar to getting hired.
joveian 9y ago
It is an attempt to get past the type of issues that Dan Luu wrote about almost three years ago[0], where he referred someone to Google as one of the most impressive engineers he ever met in any field and that person didn't get past the phone screening as "not technical enough". [0] https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

wan23 9y ago

Though if you read the memo carefully, Damore doesn't actually make the claim that Google lowers the bar for women in the sense that they hire women who are less capable. His complaint is that Google lowers the bar in the sense of reducing the number of "false negative" rejections of diversity candidates by paying more attention to those applications. He was calling for an end to this practice not because it was allowing unqualified people to be hired, but simply because he feels that the special treatment is unfair.

jdoliner 9y ago
The devil's in the details on this stuff, and unfortunately we don't have the details so it's hard to say exactly how much devil there is in them. How do they lower the false negative rate? A sibling comment mentioned Google's practice of giving diversity candidates a second interview if they fail the first. This would mean if you have a false negative rate of `n` your false negative rate would become `n^2` (which is lower because n is hopefully much less than 1). However, this also increases your false positive rate from `p` to `1 - (1 - p)^2`. So in effect, this is lowering the bar as it's giving certain groups a better chance of being hired when they're not qualified than others. I would be very interested to hear about a hiring practice that lowers false negative rate without affecting false positive rate. I can't think of one right now but it seems like it should be possible.
- wan23 9y ago
  That's not really moving the bar though - false positives are undesired errors. Also, at Google hiring decisions are made by committees using feedback collected from the interviewers. Presumably they don't discard the first interviews, but instead consider all of them.
- bduerst 9y ago
  There's a demonstrable, statistical bias against hiring minorities that creates a higher false negative rate for them: https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-candidate-pool-theres-statistically-no-chance-shell-be-hired https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can... Having an extra interview would seem a logical way of preventing the loss of qualified candidates, wouldn't it?

alkonaut 9y ago

> those who believe Google does not lower the bar for women and those who do. That part aside - why does it matter? If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group. But why is that a problem? The whole argument behind striving for diversity is that "A diverse team is stronger than a non-diverse one". So the argument must be that regardless of whether you recruit the strongest individual or not, you are building the strongest team. There seems to be a widespread misunderstanding that a) The strongest team is built by having the strongest individuals, or b) that the strongest candidate has a right to be recruited even though the team is not the strongest if he is.

subroutine 9y ago
>If you want to recruit for diversity and there is a smaller selection of one group, you are very likely to have to recruit the weaker candidate from the smaller group. But why is that a problem? Well, from the linked article, one of the women stated that "When I walk into my job at a tech company, how do I know which of my colleagues thinks I’m an outlier among women versus someone who was hired because I’m female that doesn’t deserve the job they have?" Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds. I would absolutely not want my company to start recruiting weak candidates who resemble my general physiological description; I wouldn't even want them to announce they are considering it. That said, you are right, there are merits to diversity. And I would rather err on the side of too much diversity than not enough. However, this is a complex problem which merits open discussion, otherwise we are bound to settle for suboptimal solutions, or worse.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  > Thus, if a company engages in affirmative action-like hiring practices, whether or not the bar is actually lowered, inevitably some employees will feel that some exceptions are being made to fill a quota. As a result, all personnel who fit those sought-after demographics might be considered suspect, and unfairly labeled by some minds I think this is impossible to avoid, but I also think it's an issue coming from the same flawed thinking, which is that people can be individually measured for their strengths. That's only true to a certain extent. Once people are qualified "enough" - the strength of the team is what's important. And if you want diversity you subscribe (whether it's correct or not!) to the notion that a diverse team is a stronger team than a non-diverse team. That also means that a diverse team of slightly weaker individuals is a stronger team than a non-diverse team of slightly stronger individuals. The bottom line is: the company doesn't want the strongest individual, and the strongest individual donesn't automatically have a "right" to the available position. The strongest candidate is the one that would give the biggest improvement to the team, not (necessarily) the one that scores highest on tests, has the best experience or education, or that would be the best contribution to any set of other teams. Only the team in question matters. For a (poor-ish) analogy: a college soccer team could select the 11 individually strongest players, and still not be the strongest team. If the 11 strongest players in the school were all defenders it's likely that the team would be terrible. Among the defenders recruited would be players that are individually "weaker" than some of the rejected attackers. The rejected attackers would complain that the defenders were recruited to fill a quota of defenders in the team. And they'd be right.