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The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselv

• majos 9y ago
  I agree. Unfortunately, lazy fixes at clear and prominent decision points are much easier than removing hurdles in, say, the early childhood education system.
  • ghostcluster 9y ago
    This goes beyond a lazy fix. According to another HN commenter here: > under Title VII, the federal antidiscrimination law, employers aren’t allowed to make hiring decisions based on race and gender among other protected classes. The former veteran Google recruiters behind this suit are claiming they were 'instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories.'
    • wutbrodo 9y ago
      The fact that it's illegal doesn't make it any less lazy.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • apta 9y ago
      The entire thing is ridiculous, but I can't help but laugh at how it seems to them that all the different races and cultures have been reduced to being one of: white, asian, black, hispanic. What about Arabs, Persians, Turks, Natives, etc? Would those have gotten rejected as well?
• to3m 9y ago
  The horror! Who can say what unspeakable acts people will perform in the interests of potentially securing a better life for their children. I for one am reassured that there is at least one voice speaking out against this atrocity.
• alphabettsy 9y ago
  This isn’t a new problem. Women and POC that were hired following affirmative action reported being called “affirmative action hires” and faced workplace discrimination based on the idea that they didn’t deserve the jobs. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but how was the issue of them being denied jobs based on sex or race to be solved otherwise?
  • alphabettsy 9y ago
    Anyone have a good response or just typical HN downvotes when challenged?
  • danieltillett 9y ago
    You shouldn’t complain about being down voted. To answer your question the issue of discrimination is solved by not discriminating. If women and others are being discriminated against then stop doing this, rather than just start discriminating against other people.
    • fatbird 9y ago
      You can't stop discrimination without addressing the long-term systemic effects of pervasive discrimination.
      • danieltillett 9y ago
        This sounds awfully like we had to destroy the village to save the village. No one expects it will be easy to end discrimination, but it is hard to see how it will be solved by piling on more discrimination.
        • fatbird 9y ago
          The phrase "we had to burn the village in order to save it" was uttered by the officer who perpetrated the My Lai massacre, and it was an unironic paraphrasing of "better dead than red". Nothing about addressing the past and ongoing effects of long-term discrimination requires destroying anything. If you think affirmative action is reverse discrimination, then fine: there are other ways to address systemic disparities. Taking your boot off someone's throat doesn't make them your equal when they're still on the ground.
• Throwaway8762 9y ago
  > Not good for anyone. Not good for employees but I don’t see how it’s bad for Google. Unhappy people are less likely to reflect on things, and more likely to do what the boss tells them to. Which is what you want your employees to do when you attract them with nice “don’t be evil” slogan, and make them optimize an ad server for the market capitalization metric.
• throwaway0255 9y ago
  Tell that to the white and asian males who get rejected on the basis of their race and gender despite having worked their entire lives to be the most qualified and technically adept candidate. I'm pretty sure impostor syndrome is a problem they would love to have. Instead they got the entire course of their careers (and lives) stepped on by bigoted racists and sexists. I know your comment has to be the top one because it turns this whole thing back into more sympathy for women and minorities, but this is literally an article about white and asian males being overtly discriminated against on the basis of race and gender. Can some of the conversation be about that?
  • pasabagi 9y ago
    I think I'd settle for having a proportionate amount of the conversation being about discrimination against white men. So, perhaps, for every thousand comments about discrimination against other groups, we could include a word or two. I am a white man - I have never to my knowledge been meaningfully discriminated against. I think only a fool would suggest that if I was black, or a woman, I could say that - or even say that for a more limited time period.
    • oceanghost 9y ago
      In the most ironic statement possible... as a white man, I once was told, "We're only hiring women and niggers."
      • wutbrodo 9y ago
        Did this actually happen to you? Out of curiosity, in what time period and industry? I only ask because I imagine that even the most racist HR person in the world would know to show more discretion.
        • oceanghost 9y ago
          Yes, in the early 90s (I'm old), and it was the local AT&T office. I've also been "discriminated" against for not being Native American (Casino Morongo in So Cal), and not being an Evangelical Christian (Cal Baptist University). As it turns out-- those institutions are legally allowed to discriminate. It absolutely blew my mind being asked to "describe my relationship with jesus" in an interview.
• guildenstern 9y ago
  nevermind, hn is not the place for discussion of race.
  • Caveman_Coder 9y ago
    1. Discrimination is bad. 2. Minorities have faced discrimination the most. 3. Let's discriminate against Whites/Asians to correct #2, even though we accept the truth of #1. I don't get this thought process at all..."lets fight discrimination with more discrimination!"
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • Mithaldu 9y ago
      It's not simply more discrimination though. It rebalances the existing discrimination.
      • reitanqild 9y ago
        Punishing the grandchildren for the wrongdoings of the grandparents. I though we left that behind a 100 years or more ago?
        • Mithaldu 9y ago
          That's an ideal to strive for, but if society as a whole seems hellbent to keep punishing people who have neither themselves nor had their grandparents do anything wrong, then shifting it to people whose grandparents did can be a better solution than doing nothing.
          • viridian 9y ago
            Original sin is a heinous concept, and so are blood feuds, and this sounds like both. If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes? It seems like that is what you are asking of people as 'better than nothing'. I'm not being hyperbolic either, your logic, applied to criminal law would condemn me to suffer due to the actions of a person I have ever met once.
• whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  > The thing I hate about actions like this is what it does to talented people who fit some diversity quota checklist, both in the perception they have of themselves and those of other people. If you are a talented melanin-rich woman you are going to face both heightened impostor syndrome and dismissal by others that you only got the job because of some quota. The thing I hate about it is that it involves rejecting candidates on the basis of the colour of their skin.
• edanm 9y ago
  Well, we certainly should concentrate on removing hurdles, of course. But patching problems is not necessarily a bad idea, especially from the point of view of the employers themselves. Legality aside, there is a moral/practical argument for some discrimination based on "race" as a patch, which benefits the employer, so it's what we should expect employers to do. It's also something to keep in mind when thinking people are just hired to fill a "diversity quota checklist", which may or may not be true. For example, say I'm an employer that wants the best performing employees. I know that, for whatever societal/biological/whatever reasons, the black population in the US tends to have worse schooling (maybe the schools have less money, maybe the parents tend to be less wealthy, it doesn't really matter so long as I believe that the black population has some biases against them). I can deduce just from these biases that the black population will tend to have lower grades, just because of these biases. I may choose to "correct" this bias by preferring equivalent hires that are black, on the assumption that if they have equivalent grades, they had to work harder/be smarter to achieve them, because of the aforementioned biases. I do this entirely from a selfish perspective - I want the best, and if my beliefs about the world are right, this gets me the best! The same reasoning can theoretically be reversed for e.g. asian populations (maybe their schooling tends to be better, because e.g. wealthier or stricter parents causing more focus on school? Which would imply higher grades without necessarily translating into better workers). Note: This is a hypothetical case for why an employer might voluntarily and correctly choose to use some form of "affirmative action". It is not necessarily what I think is right or what I think is happening, and is based on a lot of possible assumptions which I have no idea if true. I'm just trying to demonstrate that there is a case, which doesn't rely on "social justice" or anything other than correct self-interest of the employer.
  • danieltillett 9y ago
    This approach only works if someone higher up in the education food chain hasn’t already correct for any earlier poor schooling by using some form of “affirmative action” in grading. The best way of overcoming handicaps based on poor schooling or other social/environmental handicaps is to fix the schooling (hard and long term) or just use g. Of course if you use g you run straight into Spearman’s Hypothesis [0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearman%27s_hypothesis