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Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

481 points by kbwt 9y ago

zerr 9y ago
This happens in many companies. The response rate is much higher if you refuse to specify the corresponding details in the application.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
projectramo 9y ago
> In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Stafﬁng Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. If this were remotely true, we wouldn't see any white men hired in a junior level at the moment. Yet every year you see hundreds hired at that level.
- gpm 9y ago
  > the manager of YouTube's Tech Staffing Management Team, Allison Alogna So not all of Google, just junior engineers who came in via this manager. Also > Google had a policy that recruiters were not to hire Level 3 ad Level 4 Software Engineers. However, YouTube recruiters were given permission to hire Level 3 and Level 4 Software Engineers, if they were diversity hires. and I've been told the general way to get hired at Google as a new graduate is to apply to a general thing, and that you get placed somewhere in Google after you get hired, so it's quite possible that most junior engineers even in YouTube simply don't go through people working for this manager while getting hired.
  - fh973 9y ago
    ... and not even Google, but YouTube. Even if it looks like to be Google, there is still a separate YouTube LLC and last time I checked, it was also a different organization career-path wise.
  - benmmurphy 9y ago
    There is a good chance if this was true it was just the result of a rogue manager. You can imagine some managers might have incentives to increase diversity, and there is also a policy of non-discrimination in hiring. However, one of the easy ways to increase diversity to achieve your objectives might be to engage in a discriminatory hiring policy. So it might be very tempting for some managers to go rogue if they are not able to hit their objectives using non-discriminatory methods.
- beisner 9y ago
  As a white man hired at L3 last year, I can confirm this.
  - plandis 9y ago
    In the YouTube organization?
  - craftyguy 9y ago
    Maybe they couldn't find any 'diverse' candidates to hire and had to settle with you.
2aa07e2 9y ago
> In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Stafﬁng Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. Plaintiff refused to comply with this request. Good for him. Google is now excluded from the "dream" companies I'd want to work for.
- icc97 9y ago
  Do you seriously think that Google is going to stop hiring white men? What is claimed sounds like a completely crass method. Whether you like Google or not they typically do things in a fairly data driven method even with their hiring. It is also blatant discrimination that as others claim would be fairly easy to prove in court. This would be stupid. For Google to be both crass and stupid seems unlikely.
  - bitL 9y ago
    Do you really want to work for a company where world-class work might not be that important for your career progress? Do you think a super talented high-achieving person with wrong gender/race should be expected to sacrifice their achievements for "common good" as defined by internal diversity officers? Do you think those diversity hires would be happy staying at junior positions and not pushing beyond their capabilities by non-merit related ways, not exploiting prevailing winds? I think second world countries would love to talk to you about how this turned out. Obviously, interviews aren't that great indicator of success, especially in a company that tries to hire the best according to their criteria, so the overall medium-term effect might be small, but they do risk losing those people that could knock them out of the ring in the future, and making those people forever negative towards them. But maybe that's already taken into account and weighted in their internal decision tooling and they are fine with that.
    - izacus 9y ago
      Google does not look at race, gender or ethnicity when evaluating performance. You should figure that from the other whiny post here.
samfisher83 9y ago
If this is true and the recruiter has emails to back up his case it should be a pretty easy case to win. According to the the rules: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which makes it illegal to discriminate against a person on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It should also be a massive fine.
- hunta2097 9y ago
  I have recently left tenure at a large telecoms company in the UK. They definitely had a practice of encouraging female hires. Even if they weren't the best fit for the role. Don't get me wrong, I am not approaching this in a sexist way - on the contrary I have worked with excellent and poor colleagues of both sexes. I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy. I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Except that’s not what we get right now. We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. In my profession (corporate law) we get a balanced gender distribution of applicants at the entry level. But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. We’d be getting the subset of the best people who were willing to put up with a highly gender skewed environment.
    - chronic193 9y ago
      > We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. This should be treated at the harassment/legal level. Not at the interview level. We should not lower the bar for females or "diversity" hires. I'm sorry, but with all this diversity encouragement bullshit, every black or female engineer I see, I automatically assume they aren't as smart as their male counterparts and were offered a job simply because of their gender or ethnicity. A large portion of silicon valley makes this same assumption.
Helloworldboy 9y ago
Fuck google
to3m 9y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551
- mbel 9y ago
  And also this one, which was flagged to death: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500834
  - to3m 9y ago
    Yep. I posted a link in that one too, so, fingers crossed, the people interested in discussing this will be able to find one another.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  This one has been flagged out also. It’s beginning to look like HN really doesn’t like this story, since it’s the third time in the last 24 hours they’ve blown it off the front page.
  - throwaway1584 9y ago
    Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest. It is very common on HN for articles that does not agree with or points out problems in the prevailing viewpoint to be blown off the front page. I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.
    - commandlinefan 9y ago
      When I searched "google", this story didn't even show up in the first page of "popular". I had to sort by date to even find it.
thegreatcosmo 9y ago
It looks like the dam is breaking on lawsuits against Google. Google will not settle, it will attract the worst kinds of lawyers, unless discovery for them is worse.
bitL 9y ago
So, if one starts injecting large quantities of melanin into skin, renaming themselves to Hispanic-sounding name and undergoing "private parts" surgery, would that give them super high chance of being employed by Google? I bet in the next 5 years this will be becoming pretty popular in Silicon Valley :D Life truly is either a comedy when viewed from outside, or tragedy, when viewed from inside :DDD
- skocznymroczny 9y ago
  Why bother all those steps. Just claim that even though you look like a white male, you self-identify as a Hispanic lesbian, and if they reject you it's discriminatory.
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    To top it off being trans-sexual and trans-racial should get your placed into the most-victimised hiring pool.
- whichdan 9y ago
  Cut it out with the racist anti-trans bullshit.
  - bitL 9y ago
    > racist anti-trans bullshit. Where do you see that? It's a simple optimization algorithm - if this is what it takes to get hired, people will do it, and it looks comical from outside.
xb123nq 9y ago
What is the actual economic reason behind all this? Do women click more on ads and have to be appeased? Is it an attempt to depress the salaries of male hackers?
chapill 9y ago
Plausible deniabilty. Google will claim the illegal activity was due to the management of the recruitment company and not direct orders. And ARS puts illegal in scare quotes. Shameful.
- shaki-dora 9y ago
  The lawsuit insists on putting diversity in scare-quotes, so I guess fair’s fair?
  - chapill 9y ago
    I would assume a legal filing would call it what it is: illegal discrimination. I don't trust ARS to get these things right.
wand3r 9y ago
> In a statement, Google said that it would “vigorously defend this lawsuit,” adding that it has a “clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.” This sounds contradictory.
- colanderman 9y ago
  How? Creating a diverse pool of candidates, and selecting the most meritorious individual from that pool, are two separate stages in the hiring pipeline. Google's policy as stated in that quote is simply addressing the fact that entrenched network effects (known more popularly as "patriarchy" and "white supremacy") cause minorities – and, by extension, talented minorities – to be underrepresented in the hiring pool. It's entirely possible to enrich the hiring pool by focusing on minority outreach, yet still select from that pool the most meritorious candidate (who may or may not be a minority). Yesterday there was a comment on another story to the effect of, "I [male] wouldn't introduce myself to a group of two or more women at a professional conference, because I'd be the odd one out." The ultimate loss of networking opportunities for women and minorities which stems from such behavior is what Google's policy (as stated) seeks to correct. Reach out to those women (or minorities) who were denied a professional connection due to their gender/race/etc., so that they are granted a chance to be judged on their merit, alongside others for whom the opportunity to be interviewed came as easily as getting a sunburn or growing a beard. Granted, it sounds like what happened in the case in TFA was one of explicitly culling the pool to remove otherwise meritorious candidates based solely on their race, which is in conflict with the above policy statement.
- spunker540 9y ago
  It’s not. The idea is that when evaluating/interviewing an applicant it’s strictly merit based. But when reaching out to potential candidates on LinkedIn, choosing how to represent the company on campuses and at conferences the company can choose to act in ways to bring in more underrepresented applicants. So without changing their hiring standards, they can hopefully still increase the diversity of the pool of applicants and in turn increase diversity of the company. A lot of tech companies right now are adopting this diversification strategy.
chippy 9y ago
The lawsuit makes interesting reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...
gwbas1c 9y ago
I suspect that lawsuits like this will show that trying to artificially influence diversity through hiring practices is an incorrect approach. When I'm in a hiring position, it's not like we sit around a table and say, "we'd prefer the white male." We just don't have enough women and minorities in the hiring pool to begin with. The problem is that there aren't enough women and minorities entering our field. We just can't decide to hire more women and minorities when there aren't any to hire. Getting women and minorities to choose tech as a career isn't something that I honestly don't know how to solve. Ultimately, our employees reflect who's in our hiring pool. The same happens in other fields, too. In pediatrics, there aren't a lot of men entering medical school, so there is a desire to hire more men. Anyway, getting back to the original topic; I suspect there's more going on than we realize. I'm curious about how much this reflects Google actual policies versus a decision of a middle manager.
- DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
  I agree with you in general, but I'm curious how many would be "enough"?
  - edanm 9y ago
    Since the US has 10s of thousands of open developer positions which are going unfilled, then purely from a pragmatic "what would help the economy" perspective, a good lower bound on "enough" is "we are able to fill those open positions".
    - quotemstr 9y ago
      There is no such thing as a labor shortage --- only a mismatch with respect to salary expectations.
      - edanm 9y ago
        That's kind-of-true, but I think doesn't fit in this case. I mean, let's take a hypothetical world - only one person knows how to program. You could say "there's no such thing as a labor shortage - just a price mismatch, she should be receiving one billion dollars for every line of code". But you could also say "maybe we should teach a few more people programming. And clearly, lots of software wouldn't get written, because its cost would be too high. This is the "same" situation, only a bit more spread out. Maybe those 10k jobs legitimately aren't worth paying more for - that doesn't mean that, if there were more programmers and therefore their salaries would be lower, that software wouldn't be valuable. It's still a good indication that there's lots more to do.
burger_moon 9y ago
It's interesting, in the time it took me to read through the comments this went from #4 to #33. The discussion isn't crude or a flame war, so why does it get flagged?
RandomCSGeek 9y ago
One thing I never understand is how people claim to support both equality and pro-minority/anti-majority actions at the same time. It's like saying you support democracy and kim jong un.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > One thing I never understand is how people claim to support both equality and pro-minority/anti-majority actions at the same time. If you believe that the status quo is systematically biased, you cannot meanignfully support equality without supporting action to correct the bias.
  - RandomCSGeek 9y ago
    There are two ways to nullify a problem. 1. Solve it 2. Create another problem in equal magnitude and opposite direction. Unfortunately, most countries/organisations seem to prefer second one, because it's easier and shows effect earlier, although over long period of time, it's going to be the worse one.
    - shimon 9y ago
      Do you believe it feasible for Google, or even a theoretical consortium of powerful companies like Google, to solve the gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities in access to education and other resources that enable someone to work at such companies? If yes, how? If no, do you think it's better for them to attempt to compensate in a way that is feasible, or to do nothing?
      - RandomCSGeek 9y ago
        They should solve the problems, instead of hiding the symptoms. They need to encourage women to enter tech field. This could be done at school level. They could ensure that women don't face harrasement at work. They could help women find jobs after a gap due to childbirth. Find why women don't take admissions in STEM as much as men do. If there isn't any human-made reason, then let it be. Don't force equal numbers down the throat of deserving candidates. What is currently going on in the world isn't going to solve the problem of race/gender based problems.
dep_b 9y ago
You can't fix in hiring what's already broken before people even get to college. I'm pretty sure Google's hiring disproportionally much women, black people, gay people already if you would compare it to what's graduating from the compsci careers in the US. Google is making other companies probably even more exclusively white/asian male because they tend to hire more of the women that do qualify for programming jobs. There are only two things you really can do: - Fix the school system. But the people that really call the shots in the US would call that communist because you would have to raise taxes - Train people from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds yourself If they really would care about diversity they could have Google schools in prisons to educate the more motivated and promising inmates in the skills Google requires.
- GuiA 9y ago
  > If they really would care about diversity they could have Google schools in prisons to educate the more motivated and promising inmates in the skills Google requires. Precisely. Or sending recruiters to Mississippi/Alabama/Louisiana/etc to identify brilliant 18 year olds who can’t go to college because of their socio-economic situation, etc. One can come up with many other ways to directly attack these problems. But really, most at Google/FB/Apple/etc do not believe there is much of an issue. They just want to appease the media by saying how much they care about diversity, resulting in terribly misaligned incentives all over, resulting in the kind of crazy situations the original linked article describes.
adomanico 9y ago
Those screenshots are damning. Enforced equity is not the answer to these problems.
xxcode 9y ago
I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein. Please consider not working here, if you have other options (which you almost always do)
- klausjensen 9y ago
  Friend - Get out. Many of us have been there, and it is not worth that feeling in your stomach every morning, because it drains the life out of you, can cause all kinds of physical and emotional problems. Go take a job somewhere else, where you might earn less - but will be less miserable - or maybe even happy. Get out.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- izacus 9y ago
  These kind of posts (and the amount of anti-Google articles here) make me think that Google is currently targeted by paid trolling/smear campaign.
  - lettergram 9y ago
    Perhaps, but that user has been on HN since 2011 - not many posts though
    - tomp 9y ago
      Old social media accounts are available for sale exactly because they look more legitimate. (I'm just pointing a general fact, not that the user in question is a shill.) I read an article describing the fenomenon, I can't find it now but there's plenty of interesting results if you search Google.
gpm 9y ago
People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including: A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups. Another stating in part > And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. It also tells us that this wasn't the first time the plaintiff had issues with his manager over this topic. He had the same issues with the previous manager, the previous manager was found by internally by Google to have retaliated against him for his complaints, and Allison Alogna was hired to replace that manager. [0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442.html#document/p4/a407608 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...
- wheaties 9y ago
  This definitely changes the tone of things. That's pure discrimination. It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all. Sounds like someone above the manager is responsible for this and the manager is carrying out orders. You don't get a historic paper trail like that by not being told to continue on.
  - masterleep 9y ago
    > It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all. Both of those are illegal.
    - ComputerGuru 9y ago
      Affirmative action is definitely not illegal, regardless of whether it should or shouldn’t be.
      - ashelmire 9y ago
        Affirmative action literally means the opposite of what you think it means. It means that there will be efforts taken to ensure no discrimination in hiring on the basis of race, sex, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246 etc
southphillyman 9y ago
Companies should clearly articulate how diversity programs work. It seems like people don't understand that diversity outreach programs don't create an advantage for minorities, instead they level the playing field as once closed pipelines get opened/discovered. I fear that all this recent news about diversity and Google will create an environment where perfectly qualified non Asian minorities won't feel welcomed or will unfairly have their competency questioned.
- viridian 9y ago
  Isn't this allegation an exact counterpoint to what you are saying? Throwing out the resumes of everyone who isn't hispanic, black, or female seems to be creating an advantage.
  - southphillyman 9y ago
    This specific allegation seems like "reverse discrimination" sure. But as of right now it's just a one sided allegation presented in a lawsuit. I'll be interested in seeing what the evidence bears out. I have intimate knowledge of the workings of diversity programs at some of the FAANG and big 4 consultancy companies and none of them involve purging white male applicants. Do postmortems occur when the diversity goals aren't met? Well sure, it IS a targeted diversity program after all. Sourcing initiatives have no bearing on whether a candidate meets a manager's hiring bar or not.
- throwaway1584 9y ago
  Almost anyone working in tech has seen race and gender discrimination in favor of women and minorities at this point. I have personally experienced it. If we were to apply affirmative action then class would be a better differentiator than race or gender. As it stands now an upper-middle-class Ivy League educated person of the right identities will receive affirmative action over a man that worked his way up from a poor neighborhood in Bangalore. I fail to see how that is just.
  - southphillyman 9y ago
heisnotanalien 9y ago
What about if you are white working-class man? Is a middle-class black woman less privileged than a white working-class man? What about short versus tall people? What about beautiful versus ugly people? The halo effect is well-known. The whole thing is just absurd and dehumanising.
- hashkb 9y ago
  > Is a middle-class black woman less privileged than a white working-class man? Yes, on average, significantly. I'd be interested in your definition of "privilege" though.
  - merpnderp 9y ago
    I'm interested in your definition of privilege. How exactly do the millions of variables that make up a person's life get outweighed by their skin color? Especially when we're comparing two people with similar job paths and economic equality? And how will answering this question not imply making drastic assumptions about an individual based on their race?
- mlevental 9y ago
  yes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/10/white-high-school-dropouts-are-wealthier-than-black-and-hispanic-college-graduates-can-a-new-policy-tool-fix-that/?utm_term=.db15a22d5a09 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/10/white...
  - sol_remmy 9y ago
    > White high school dropouts are wealthier than Hispanic college graduates. What I'm seeing is "people who have lived in America for a long time (European heritage) are on average wealthier than people who arrived fairly recently from third world countries (Hispanic heritage). Why is that surprising? Why is that a problem?
    - mlevental 9y ago
wyck 9y ago
There's more than a few very large tech companies that have let politics and emotions take over from innovation and excellence. It's opened the door to mass demotivation because people know inherently what is fake and posturing over what is real, creative, and interesting.
shomyo 9y ago
OBEY
colmvp 9y ago
I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps." Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry despite Japan, China, Korea, India, etc. being quite different from one another. Then you look at industries where Asians are under-represented and you can read articles from actors like Steven Yeun who talk about how they rarely get offered roles and when they do, it's often for roles that stereotype their ethnicity. For example, I just watched Annihilation and the only Asian actor they had in it of course had a broken English accent despite the fact that in real life, the actor actually has a British accent. Pull up an article on diversity in the U.S., and chances are if you search "Asian" in the article you'll get 0 results. I've always looked up to tech because it's a realm where we Asians are judged by our skill level and output, not the color of our skin or how attractive we look. It's a realm that rewards people who study hard and work tirelessly to refine their craft. And so it's absolutely frustrating to hear that we're too successful and that people scale back our representation despite the fact that they never happens for us in other industries.
- so_obviously 9y ago
  all of what you said is true, and that's why i (asian male) will always run my own business, no matter what the perceived opportunity cost may be, because it's nothing but a mirage. counting on the white establishment, political right OR political left to give us any kind of a leg up or break is foolish in the extreme. this google episode is a perfect example of why. because we are merely 5% of the US population, we are treated as naive pawns by two sides in a larger game of ideological chess. i contribute financially to asian-interest causes i deem worthy, but i'm under no illusion of this changing in my lifetime. the american social fabric is configured heavily against us and will be for at least one more generation, likely another 2.
- burlesona 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I hadn’t heard this specific perspective before.
gigatexal 9y ago
There has to be a way to use tech to anonymize vetting and hiring until the hired candidate shows up for work the next day. Phone interviews could be handled in such a way that gender can’t be determined say by using voice scramblers. Whiteboarding can be done in separate rooms with a digital whiteboard that evaluators see and where the candidate can ask questions but not be seen. Etc etc. or, or, people could stop being biased which as you get more educated you become less racist and biased and sexist I thought.
- chrisseaton 9y ago
  Unless you are fresh from an undergraduate degree, the thing people care about is what you have shown you can actually do in the industry. And showing what you can do will in most cases instantly identify who you are. As soon as I say what projects I've worked on or what my skills are anyone recruiting me will know exactly who I am. How do you get around that?
  - gigatexal 9y ago
    “Built micro services that served millions of api calls per second in golang” how is that self identifiable?
    - chrisseaton 9y ago
      But how are you going to use something as bland and generic like that to differentiate your applicants? You've got twenty applicants, and they've all built a production API using Go or some equivalent language and they used some design pattern like micro-services or something else. Now what? Plus in my field even something as generic as that would identify me.
      - gigatexal 9y ago
        No system is perfect but it’s at least a step in the right direction for obfuscating gender and race.
      - 9y ago
plebian79878 9y ago
I am a female engineer. All of this is so frustrating because whether what Google is doing is right or wrong (and I do have opinions on that to come) about how they are going about this, regardless, this kind of media buzz belittles the general view of value add of female engineers like me. I work really hard, and I don't want to be given extra breaks, or have the bar lowered. I would rather fail an interview (and I have) than be given a boost in the process. That being said, one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there, with the most widespread global impact on the perception of male and female roles in society, yet they have the audacity to scrutinize industries who have done far more for society, pumped far more into education programs for just females, both males and females, science fairs etc and provided more opportunities to open the playing field than anyone else. I went to an engineering school as an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science and my department was 5% female is f that, despite my school bragging 30% of our school was female. Yeh right, 90% of those girls were management majors, the rest of us were sparsely strewn across the engineering majors.
plebian79878 9y ago
I am a female engineer. All of this is so frustrating because whether what Google is doing is right or wrong (and I do have opinions on that to come) about how they are going about this, regardless, this kind of media buzz belittles the general view of value add of female engineers like me. I work really hard, and I don't want to be given extra breaks, or have the bar lowered. I would rather fail an interview (and I have) than be given a boost in the process. That being said, one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there, with the most widespread global impact on the perception of male and female roles in society, yet they have the audacity to scrutinize industries who have done far more for society, pumped far more into education programs for just females, both males and females, science fairs etc and provided more opportunities to open the playing field than anyone else. I went to an engineering school as an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science and my department was 5% female is f that, despite my school bragging 30% of our school was female. Yeh right, 90% of those girls were management majors, the rest of us were sparsely strewn across the engineering majors. I have worked in male dominated environments my entire career and at the age of 27, I am and almost always have been the youngest in upper level management meetings in addition to being the only girl. What I can tell you is this, and i have talked to many female and male engineers working on east coast, west coast, multiple countries in Europe, India and Asia including Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and many other places in China. The issue is this. Yes (disclaimer) everyone needs to take responsibility for their own success, companies included, but this is really about society, and the tech companies are at the end of the pipeline of a girls life before she hits her career, the end of a pipeline of 21 grueling years of social conditioning, and the tech companies inherit the results of our heavily biased society. And I would also like to add, WOMEN DO ADD TO THIS PROBLEM. I've seen more MOTHERS steer their daughters away from STEM to engage in socialite activities and trophy wife conditioning and I've seen MORE WOMEN than men making fun of girls for being "weird" (weird in America means, oh my gosh that girl does all of her homework and prioritizes her school and career over boyfriend. O. M. G.) to put it best, someone I know who has worked at 2/3 big three companies on both coasts and in Europe, as well as other people I know, men I respect, work with, men who have daughters they teach to code and want to raise to be strong independentm, smart respectable women, have said this "The western culture is very limiting to women. What women need to do to do more in STEM is stay at home, play with things on their computer and break things. Women are not encouraged to stay at home and be introverted and curious" I agree, women are taught to waste their money and time being politically polite, politically correct and wasting money on clothes and makeup to seem desireable. If you don't believe me just leave your home and go to any store, gas station, grocery store, clothing store, anywhere basically where other humans reside and you will see this conditioning all around you. This is not the fault of tech companies, yet the media, the very people propogating this disgusting excuse for equality (spoken from the microphones of women who are airbrushed in pencil skirts with perfect hair) is asking tech companies to fix all of the root of societies problems with women and equality because they found a statistic the liberal media (I'm a liberal myself, but I'm also capable of scrutinizing my own party, you know why? Because I'm not in a cult.) and its just not going to happen. Tech companies are an easy finger to point to. YES, beleive me, I have lots of rants about the companies I have worked for, but I can tell you this issue did not start at these companies. They should take on more responsibility to stop it. However, to believe that these issues begin and end with tech companies, and that tech companies can make their portfolios equal in 5 years with some stretch recruiting goals is unreasonable at best, but the media is pressuring them to do that. I would LOVE to see this same scrutiny go to the finance industry, which is WORSE than tech and WAY worse when it comes to how they treat women, but finance and media are all snuggled up together in NYC so they are pointing at their biggest industry threat, which is tech. Thats what really going on in my opinion.
doktrin 9y ago
In my opinion, and only my opinion : Google has for a while been toxic to the technology ecosystem. I don't think their halo is deserved, certainly not on the basis of the "free" trinkets they release to the public (like, say, Kubernetes). More often than not they are corrosive to innovation, and I don't take them at their word when they swear that your/mine/everybody's data is safe in their hands. It comes as no major surprise that their actual workplace is as toxic as their role in the market, even with all the creature comforts they dangle in front of their employee.
cletus 9y ago
This is such a minefield of an issue that I don't envy anyone who has to deal with it. For one, it seems almost impossible to have a rational debate about the issue of diversity because there are some pretty strongly held views on both sides of this. So just some general observations with an explicit disclaimer that I know nothing that directly relates to this case. 1. I'm personally a little skeptical about a flurry of lawsuits like this. Lawsuits can be a little... opportunistic. I mean this in the sense that they're somewhat predatory and there's a tendency to "pile on" when the other side has a vulnerability. This isn't to say that this or any other given case doesn't have merit. It's just that a flurry tends to raise the chance that any one case of spurious. 2. US CS graduates are still predominantly white males [1] [2]. Obviously there are also graduates outside the US. I'm not sure on numbers on those but it's hard to come up with a reasonable estimation given the fact that a) employment in tech is predominantly US-centric and b) visa quotas in the US artificially limit the number of non-US people you can hire. 3. The graduate figures are important for those who take the so-called pipeline view of workforce diversity, namely that if 20% of graduates in a given field are women then you can't really expect more than 20% of your workforce to be women. This is not a universally agreed principle where some argue you can and should do better than this; 4. Doing better than this seems like nothing more than local vs global optimization. For example, I've known different companies to mandate diversity targets from the executive level and some orgs will deal with this by simply hiring underrepresented groups from other parts of the same company in a classic "robbing Peter to pay Paul" type scenario. It's hard to argue that this does anything more than make some manager or director's numbers look good and nothing more. 5. Other commenters have argued that favouring underrepresented groups is illegal. IANAL but the case law on this in the US isn't so clear. Just look at SCOTUS's rulings on affirmative action eg [3]. 6. While some hold the view that you can't discriminate in favour of one group you are by definition discriminating against others. This is both strictly true and too simplistic a view. Specifically, others will argue that you need such "positive discrimination" to correct against bias and historical imbalance. 7. Elements of the majority arguing that there is bias against them isn't of course limited to tech eg [4] [5]. 8. One wonders, in situations like this one, that (if true) whether management's instructions (mentioned in the complaint) were a response to an executive edict to increase diversity numbers. 9. Pipeline issues aside, it's worth considering internal long-term diversity trends within a company and within different parts of the company. For example, let's say 25% new hires are women, after 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 years how does that figure change? Does it stay constant or go up or down? If it goes down, why? This may hint at cultural issues worth addressing. 10. Being an engineer and having worked with lots of engineers I think I can fairly safely say that engineers (IME), as a group, are more socially awkward than the general population. This alone may well be a significant factor in long-term retention of a more diverse workforce. [1] https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-science/ https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruiting-pipeline-for-lack-of-diversity-in-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruit... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger [4] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07/look-data-and-arguments-about-asian-americans-and-admissions-elite https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07... [5] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-discriminating-against-jews-2014-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-di...
nell 9y ago
My request to the courageous recruiter: please don't settle.
pmarreck 9y ago
The fact that affirmative-action policies of any kind are technically discriminatory but legally ethical continues to confuse people
KeitIG 9y ago
I strongly believe diversity should be solved when students declare their major, and not by HR years later (though I have no idea "how" we could achieve that. If the workforce of a country in a certain is composed of 80% white male, then having the same representation in your company is NOT wrong. Hire people that are competent and with who you would enjoy working with. That's it.
munnisthebest 9y ago
throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at Square, and there was an interesting presentation in front of the company about diversity efforts. Someone asked our head of diversity (who has since left) what "diverse" means, to which she responded pretty casually "non Asian and non White". As an Asian male I guess I feel privileged to be lumped in with the White males? I came here with my parents at age 10 with not much, and lived in an attic above a car rental company for a year because it was the cheapest rent we could find. Both parents worked labor jobs for years (i.e. inside a dry cleaner, and inside a factory assembling CD cases). Thanks to their efforts, I got in a good CS program (my parents couldn't pay for shit, were still poor), and then got a job at Square. It's just kind of weird to hear your entire people get lumped in with the "privileged white males" in front of the whole company like that. It's always really weird that "Asians" get treated as one homogeneous group in the name of diversity. It's weird because if you are say Hmong, or Cambodian, or from Laos, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or various parts of Southeast Asia, or Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka, statistically you are far more disadvantaged than your "traditional" Asians, like Indians or Chinese or Koreans or whatever. Yet these individuals often become disadvantaged in the name of diversity. Also for anyone working at Square, can we please stop referring to a candidate as "diverse"? I really hate that term, to describe one candidate as diverse, when it just means non White/Asian/Male.
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  it also doesn't make much sense for white people. There's rich and poor, educated and uneducated, privileged and unprivileged in any arbitrary grouping of people. The idea of lumping a trust fund Ivy League kid in with a working class Ukrainian because of skin colour is just blatantly nonsense, and you can map that nonsensicality onto any designation of group privilege. Hence the idea of individualism, or treating people with respect to their actual circumstances rather than what one assumes to be their circumstances based on correlative but not absolute indicators like race.
- 0x00000000 9y ago
  When I was applying to universities I came to realize all they actually care about is how you will look in a slide or pamphlet about diversity. They don't care about your story or experience or upbringing. Diversity as they use it only means physical appearance A side note I also had a real existential crisis as a half white half asian male. What do you put down in order to be fucked over the least? Asian? White? Both if they let you or would that make you twice as screwed? Why should I have to make that decision at all?
yomly 9y ago
Something I have been mulling over lately is, how "progressiveness" encodes bias in and of itself. Let's reason out a (very naive and overly simplistic) thought experiment: You are BigCo and want to promote diversity. Part of your cultural strategy is nurture a culture that is "progressive". Therefore you implement a litmus test behavioural question that implicitly tests the candidate's attitudes to sexism as part of your hiring procedure. Enter candidate A and candidate B, both are male. Candidate A went to IvySchool and studied CS, candidate B grew up in LEDCountry but was #1 national algorithms prize-winner. Suppose A and B were identical in performance in every part of the interview, save for the "progressive" litmus test. A gave a stellar answer, meanwhile B gave some answer which could be described as being a bit "traditional". Under these conditions, A would probably get the job for being a "culture-fit". What interests me though is that being able to speak the same "language" of progressives is correlates with access to education, and access to education is largely coupled to wealth. So here we have a system which is yet again entrenching a power group of sorts, and extrapolating, I see echoes of the institutions which churn out readymade bankers and lawyers. Now this is all grossly oversimple, and I don't really have any solutions I can propose, but I find the notion of bias in culture fit, even the paradoxically "I am pro diversity" culture to be a curious idea.
- err4nt 9y ago
  Any time a principle is applied to a culture at a specific point in time, when you look back from an even better place the original improvement can look barbaric. An example: killing animals to eat them. In the ancient world I heard that it was common to tie up an animal and cut off one limb at a time, keeping the animal alive as long as possible to keep the rest of the meat 'fresh'. When you got hungry, you would go hack off another limb, etc. This means that the kosher laws that involved swiftly killing an animal before eating any part of it actually reduced the animals suffering quite a bit. But from our modern perspective where we have access to even more efficient slaughterhouses, by our standards the kosher laws seem unnecessarily gory and greusome. In this case, the principle has remained the same over time: try to reduce the animal's suffering and bring it a swift death…but when you compare how that progressive principle gets applied into different cultures at different times, you can have wildly different perspectives on how ethical the different practices are.
turc1656 9y ago
"Google said that it would “vigorously defend this lawsuit,” adding that it has a “clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products." You'll notice that official statement from Google did not claim the allegations were false nor that the events by the recruiter's manager did not take place. Defending yourself vigorously doesn't mean you're not guilty. Usually we see companies come right out and say that the claims are false. Google didn't do that, I suspect, because this is almost certainly documented in emails and formal communications. If this guy knew he was stirring the pot and causing issues and making claims of illegal activity, I doubt he didn't put at least some of this in email to protect himself. I'm sure Google performed a preliminary investigation once the lawsuit was filed and found internal emails which clearly show this guy documenting what he was told to do and his objection to it. Emails which the guy probably CC'ed or BCC'ed himself on so that he would also have a record of some of it is probably included/mentioned in the lawsuit when it was filed.
throwaway1957 9y ago
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I was once asked to do recruiting at a university. They told me to only collect the resumes of Females, Blacks, and Hispanics. And that they would not consider any other genders/races for the positions. This was for the BOLD program: https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html. Talking around with my co-workers, we found Google has multiple programs like this. Another is a program to hire only LGBTQ people for entry MBA positions. Still afraid to speak up within Google as I fear my job would be at risk. Google claims its a meritocracy. It used to be a meritocracy , but in the past few years thats no longer the case. We've become a Microsoft.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
  How do you know if a candidate is LGBTQ? Do you just ask them?
  - throwaway1957 9y ago
    They will email the LGBTQ organization at the university. And the only place they'll be is that club. For BOLD most people were only emailing the Hispanic / Black frats & organizations. I know that Google even has a dedicated team who does interview prep & mock interviews (with real questions btw) for `diversity` candidates. This training is not available to whites / asian males. Obviously if you've interviewed 10x before hand and seen all the real interview questions, you're going to do better. Basically they are doing everything they can to make sure diversity candidates are applying and have the absolute best chance of getting in.
deleted 9y ago
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mc32 9y ago
I think, or hope, one day we'll come to realize the only fair way to do any sort of affirmative action is by evaluating on economics, after ability. That's to say the objective is not to hire underrepresented groups based on loose ethnic lines, but rather on their circumstance in life, all other meaningful qualifications being equal and lawful. That said, regarding women, that's a special case where we want to improve things at the input side, get pupils when young excited so that one day they may find it's what they want to do to contribute to our society.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cik 9y ago
I find the whole thing offense. I'm 'white'(ish coloured), I'm also half-african, half-asian, due to geography, and I'm sick of the identity politics. At the end of the day, I can be ~28th generation African, 28th generation Asian, 100% white, and not meet a 'quota'. Years ago, working with a US company going after 'Section 503' funding for something, I was the randomly pulled auditee. The auditor freaked out at the notion that I can be half-african, half-asian and white, and I refused to 'update my answer' on the government survey. Seriously. What happened to the idea that in Tech we'd have a legitimate meritocracy. It really doesn't matter what someone's skin tone, language, gender expression, or sexual preference(s) are. We do work, we do work individually and collectively, and we put our best into it. Anything else is simply disingenuous. /rant over.
kraig911 9y ago
When I started working in the late 90's I had worked for this old guy who now looking back was way smarter than I caught on. He always said crotchety shit like: I'd ask hey lets put a job ad in the newspaper and he'd respond, " When you go fishing for trout it's best to cast your line by a stream and not out in the ocean." I'd have a stack of resumes to contact and he once picked up half of them and threw in the trash. He said "You don't want to work with unlucky people" I wonder if Enterprise HR's cultures have gotten so PC that they're losing sight on the companies needs. It'd be better to go to largely black universities, or smaller colleges. Code quizzes and job fairs on college campuses attract people who can afford to go. The kids I've helped largely have families that need them outside of college, and jobs. Maybe an internship/mentorship-hire program would be better fit than a top-down candidate approach.
rvo 9y ago
And it's removed from the front page ...
sp527 9y ago
I once had the ‘privilege’ of talking to one of the admissions directors at my alma mater (an Ivy fwiw). An eminently qualified Asian candidate I had interviewed was rejected (while an inferior Jewish-Cuban candidate from the same school was accepted), I had quit the interview program out of disgust, and my complaints were escalated up to this director. Now this particular individual happened to be Asian himself. So am I. I expected empathy. Here’s what I got instead: this director asked me to imagine what a predominantly Asian campus would look and feel like. Is that a university experience I would have appreciated? I found this absolutely flabbergasting. This director had blown past the tacit admission that a quotaless, merit-based system would result in a visibly higher ratio of Asian students into outright stereotyping and borderline racism. Here’s the problem: people equate diversity with race and gender. They really do. They’re not after real diversity. They want the outward presentation of real diversity. Then no one can ask them difficult questions. No one is going to ask them to prove that they’ve achieved true diversity on the basis of character and intellectual bent.
jameskegel 9y ago
As with all extremes, the pendulum must return to its path, and soon we will see a return to a meritocratic approach. Approaching the lack of diversity in this industry from a hiring perspective is too late stage and short sighted- the change should happen with education during childhood and teen years in areas where there are concentrations of historically uninterested parties that are uninterested due to a lack of mentorship availability. I want to see after school programs being arranged, charter schools being built, stipends for families who encourage this field of study, fair pay for the teachers who are selected to offer to service to these areas, extracurricular activities that focus on tech and following through with those that show any modicum of interest potential. The change begins at home, and it has nothing to do with race, it has to do with opportunity to learn and the freedom to abstract your home life problems and concerns long enough to make use of the education without the preoccupation of where the next meal is or where you’ll sleep.
sol_remmy 9y ago
For an ongoing discussion of this topic see: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/81aw5u/google_accused_in_lawsuit_of_excluding_white_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/81aw5u/google_a...
enknamel 9y ago
Well the top of the funnel (your applicant pool) is like 90% asian or white men. If you want a 50/50 workforce you MUST be super discriminatory.
killjoywashere 9y ago
No less a bastion of conservative lust than the US Military actively pursues diversity in promotion and selection processes. While it makes my own life a little harder, I can't disagree with the motivation. And, quite frankly, it's not the minorities internally pushing this. It's saltine-white leadership over-ruling minorities in management positions and demanding they find even the most marginally qualified minority candidates. I have heard a senior black woman say "I can't in good conscience recommend any of the available candidates" only to hear the senior member say "I totally understand, but the slate as it stands is completely white. I, the institution, cannot accept that. This will face public scrutiny. Of the options, who's the most qualified? Of the white slate, who can we most easily replace?"
muddi900 9y ago
ITT: all top comments about how HN censors their viewpoint, with no sense of irony. Literally every thread on a topic like this is a bunch of Conservative martyrs bleeding all over page.

481 points by kbwt 9y ago

zerr 9y ago

This happens in many companies. The response rate is much higher if you refuse to specify the corresponding details in the application.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

projectramo 9y ago

> In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Stafﬁng Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. If this were remotely true, we wouldn't see any white men hired in a junior level at the moment. Yet every year you see hundreds hired at that level.

gpm 9y ago
> the manager of YouTube's Tech Staffing Management Team, Allison Alogna So not all of Google, just junior engineers who came in via this manager. Also > Google had a policy that recruiters were not to hire Level 3 ad Level 4 Software Engineers. However, YouTube recruiters were given permission to hire Level 3 and Level 4 Software Engineers, if they were diversity hires. and I've been told the general way to get hired at Google as a new graduate is to apply to a general thing, and that you get placed somewhere in Google after you get hired, so it's quite possible that most junior engineers even in YouTube simply don't go through people working for this manager while getting hired.
- fh973 9y ago
  ... and not even Google, but YouTube. Even if it looks like to be Google, there is still a separate YouTube LLC and last time I checked, it was also a different organization career-path wise.
- benmmurphy 9y ago
  There is a good chance if this was true it was just the result of a rogue manager. You can imagine some managers might have incentives to increase diversity, and there is also a policy of non-discrimination in hiring. However, one of the easy ways to increase diversity to achieve your objectives might be to engage in a discriminatory hiring policy. So it might be very tempting for some managers to go rogue if they are not able to hit their objectives using non-discriminatory methods.
beisner 9y ago
As a white man hired at L3 last year, I can confirm this.
- plandis 9y ago
  In the YouTube organization?
- craftyguy 9y ago
  Maybe they couldn't find any 'diverse' candidates to hire and had to settle with you.

2aa07e2 9y ago

> In April of 2017, Google’s Technology Stafﬁng Management team was instructed by Alogna to immediately cancel all Level 3 (0-5 years experience) software engineering interviews with every single applicant who was not either female, Black, or Hispanic and to purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline. Plaintiff refused to comply with this request. Good for him. Google is now excluded from the "dream" companies I'd want to work for.

icc97 9y ago
Do you seriously think that Google is going to stop hiring white men? What is claimed sounds like a completely crass method. Whether you like Google or not they typically do things in a fairly data driven method even with their hiring. It is also blatant discrimination that as others claim would be fairly easy to prove in court. This would be stupid. For Google to be both crass and stupid seems unlikely.
- bitL 9y ago
  Do you really want to work for a company where world-class work might not be that important for your career progress? Do you think a super talented high-achieving person with wrong gender/race should be expected to sacrifice their achievements for "common good" as defined by internal diversity officers? Do you think those diversity hires would be happy staying at junior positions and not pushing beyond their capabilities by non-merit related ways, not exploiting prevailing winds? I think second world countries would love to talk to you about how this turned out. Obviously, interviews aren't that great indicator of success, especially in a company that tries to hire the best according to their criteria, so the overall medium-term effect might be small, but they do risk losing those people that could knock them out of the ring in the future, and making those people forever negative towards them. But maybe that's already taken into account and weighted in their internal decision tooling and they are fine with that.
  - izacus 9y ago
    Google does not look at race, gender or ethnicity when evaluating performance. You should figure that from the other whiny post here.

samfisher83 9y ago

If this is true and the recruiter has emails to back up his case it should be a pretty easy case to win. According to the the rules: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), which makes it illegal to discriminate against a person on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It should also be a massive fine.

hunta2097 9y ago
I have recently left tenure at a large telecoms company in the UK. They definitely had a practice of encouraging female hires. Even if they weren't the best fit for the role. Don't get me wrong, I am not approaching this in a sexist way - on the contrary I have worked with excellent and poor colleagues of both sexes. I think it diminishes the accomplishments of genuinely great minority/female employees to have this policy. I would prefer identity to be neutralized somehow during the hiring process. The best person for the job, no matter your sex, colour, creed, disability.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Except that’s not what we get right now. We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. In my profession (corporate law) we get a balanced gender distribution of applicants at the entry level. But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today. We’d be getting the subset of the best people who were willing to put up with a highly gender skewed environment.
  - chronic193 9y ago
    > We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. This should be treated at the harassment/legal level. Not at the interview level. We should not lower the bar for females or "diversity" hires. I'm sorry, but with all this diversity encouragement bullshit, every black or female engineer I see, I automatically assume they aren't as smart as their male counterparts and were offered a job simply because of their gender or ethnicity. A large portion of silicon valley makes this same assumption.

Helloworldboy 9y ago

Fuck google

to3m 9y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551

mbel 9y ago
And also this one, which was flagged to death: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16500834
- to3m 9y ago
  Yep. I posted a link in that one too, so, fingers crossed, the people interested in discussing this will be able to find one another.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
This one has been flagged out also. It’s beginning to look like HN really doesn’t like this story, since it’s the third time in the last 24 hours they’ve blown it off the front page.
- throwaway1584 9y ago
  Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest. It is very common on HN for articles that does not agree with or points out problems in the prevailing viewpoint to be blown off the front page. I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.
  - commandlinefan 9y ago
    When I searched "google", this story didn't even show up in the first page of "popular". I had to sort by date to even find it.

thegreatcosmo 9y ago

It looks like the dam is breaking on lawsuits against Google. Google will not settle, it will attract the worst kinds of lawyers, unless discovery for them is worse.

bitL 9y ago

So, if one starts injecting large quantities of melanin into skin, renaming themselves to Hispanic-sounding name and undergoing "private parts" surgery, would that give them super high chance of being employed by Google? I bet in the next 5 years this will be becoming pretty popular in Silicon Valley :D Life truly is either a comedy when viewed from outside, or tragedy, when viewed from inside :DDD

skocznymroczny 9y ago
Why bother all those steps. Just claim that even though you look like a white male, you self-identify as a Hispanic lesbian, and if they reject you it's discriminatory.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  To top it off being trans-sexual and trans-racial should get your placed into the most-victimised hiring pool.
whichdan 9y ago
Cut it out with the racist anti-trans bullshit.
- bitL 9y ago
  > racist anti-trans bullshit. Where do you see that? It's a simple optimization algorithm - if this is what it takes to get hired, people will do it, and it looks comical from outside.

xb123nq 9y ago

What is the actual economic reason behind all this? Do women click more on ads and have to be appeased? Is it an attempt to depress the salaries of male hackers?

chapill 9y ago

Plausible deniabilty. Google will claim the illegal activity was due to the management of the recruitment company and not direct orders. And ARS puts illegal in scare quotes. Shameful.

shaki-dora 9y ago
The lawsuit insists on putting diversity in scare-quotes, so I guess fair’s fair?
- chapill 9y ago
  I would assume a legal filing would call it what it is: illegal discrimination. I don't trust ARS to get these things right.

wand3r 9y ago

> In a statement, Google said that it would “vigorously defend this lawsuit,” adding that it has a “clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.” This sounds contradictory.

colanderman 9y ago
How? Creating a diverse pool of candidates, and selecting the most meritorious individual from that pool, are two separate stages in the hiring pipeline. Google's policy as stated in that quote is simply addressing the fact that entrenched network effects (known more popularly as "patriarchy" and "white supremacy") cause minorities – and, by extension, talented minorities – to be underrepresented in the hiring pool. It's entirely possible to enrich the hiring pool by focusing on minority outreach, yet still select from that pool the most meritorious candidate (who may or may not be a minority). Yesterday there was a comment on another story to the effect of, "I [male] wouldn't introduce myself to a group of two or more women at a professional conference, because I'd be the odd one out." The ultimate loss of networking opportunities for women and minorities which stems from such behavior is what Google's policy (as stated) seeks to correct. Reach out to those women (or minorities) who were denied a professional connection due to their gender/race/etc., so that they are granted a chance to be judged on their merit, alongside others for whom the opportunity to be interviewed came as easily as getting a sunburn or growing a beard. Granted, it sounds like what happened in the case in TFA was one of explicitly culling the pool to remove otherwise meritorious candidates based solely on their race, which is in conflict with the above policy statement.
spunker540 9y ago
It’s not. The idea is that when evaluating/interviewing an applicant it’s strictly merit based. But when reaching out to potential candidates on LinkedIn, choosing how to represent the company on campuses and at conferences the company can choose to act in ways to bring in more underrepresented applicants. So without changing their hiring standards, they can hopefully still increase the diversity of the pool of applicants and in turn increase diversity of the company. A lot of tech companies right now are adopting this diversification strategy.

chippy 9y ago

The lawsuit makes interesting reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...

gwbas1c 9y ago

I suspect that lawsuits like this will show that trying to artificially influence diversity through hiring practices is an incorrect approach. When I'm in a hiring position, it's not like we sit around a table and say, "we'd prefer the white male." We just don't have enough women and minorities in the hiring pool to begin with. The problem is that there aren't enough women and minorities entering our field. We just can't decide to hire more women and minorities when there aren't any to hire. Getting women and minorities to choose tech as a career isn't something that I honestly don't know how to solve. Ultimately, our employees reflect who's in our hiring pool. The same happens in other fields, too. In pediatrics, there aren't a lot of men entering medical school, so there is a desire to hire more men. Anyway, getting back to the original topic; I suspect there's more going on than we realize. I'm curious about how much this reflects Google actual policies versus a decision of a middle manager.

DoofusOfDeath 9y ago
I agree with you in general, but I'm curious how many would be "enough"?
- edanm 9y ago
  Since the US has 10s of thousands of open developer positions which are going unfilled, then purely from a pragmatic "what would help the economy" perspective, a good lower bound on "enough" is "we are able to fill those open positions".
  - quotemstr 9y ago
    There is no such thing as a labor shortage --- only a mismatch with respect to salary expectations.
    - edanm 9y ago
      That's kind-of-true, but I think doesn't fit in this case. I mean, let's take a hypothetical world - only one person knows how to program. You could say "there's no such thing as a labor shortage - just a price mismatch, she should be receiving one billion dollars for every line of code". But you could also say "maybe we should teach a few more people programming. And clearly, lots of software wouldn't get written, because its cost would be too high. This is the "same" situation, only a bit more spread out. Maybe those 10k jobs legitimately aren't worth paying more for - that doesn't mean that, if there were more programmers and therefore their salaries would be lower, that software wouldn't be valuable. It's still a good indication that there's lots more to do.

burger_moon 9y ago

It's interesting, in the time it took me to read through the comments this went from #4 to #33. The discussion isn't crude or a flame war, so why does it get flagged?

RandomCSGeek 9y ago

One thing I never understand is how people claim to support both equality and pro-minority/anti-majority actions at the same time. It's like saying you support democracy and kim jong un.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> One thing I never understand is how people claim to support both equality and pro-minority/anti-majority actions at the same time. If you believe that the status quo is systematically biased, you cannot meanignfully support equality without supporting action to correct the bias.
- RandomCSGeek 9y ago
  There are two ways to nullify a problem. 1. Solve it 2. Create another problem in equal magnitude and opposite direction. Unfortunately, most countries/organisations seem to prefer second one, because it's easier and shows effect earlier, although over long period of time, it's going to be the worse one.
  - shimon 9y ago
    Do you believe it feasible for Google, or even a theoretical consortium of powerful companies like Google, to solve the gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities in access to education and other resources that enable someone to work at such companies? If yes, how? If no, do you think it's better for them to attempt to compensate in a way that is feasible, or to do nothing?
    - RandomCSGeek 9y ago
      They should solve the problems, instead of hiding the symptoms. They need to encourage women to enter tech field. This could be done at school level. They could ensure that women don't face harrasement at work. They could help women find jobs after a gap due to childbirth. Find why women don't take admissions in STEM as much as men do. If there isn't any human-made reason, then let it be. Don't force equal numbers down the throat of deserving candidates. What is currently going on in the world isn't going to solve the problem of race/gender based problems.

dep_b 9y ago

You can't fix in hiring what's already broken before people even get to college. I'm pretty sure Google's hiring disproportionally much women, black people, gay people already if you would compare it to what's graduating from the compsci careers in the US. Google is making other companies probably even more exclusively white/asian male because they tend to hire more of the women that do qualify for programming jobs. There are only two things you really can do: - Fix the school system. But the people that really call the shots in the US would call that communist because you would have to raise taxes - Train people from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds yourself If they really would care about diversity they could have Google schools in prisons to educate the more motivated and promising inmates in the skills Google requires.

GuiA 9y ago
> If they really would care about diversity they could have Google schools in prisons to educate the more motivated and promising inmates in the skills Google requires. Precisely. Or sending recruiters to Mississippi/Alabama/Louisiana/etc to identify brilliant 18 year olds who can’t go to college because of their socio-economic situation, etc. One can come up with many other ways to directly attack these problems. But really, most at Google/FB/Apple/etc do not believe there is much of an issue. They just want to appease the media by saying how much they care about diversity, resulting in terribly misaligned incentives all over, resulting in the kind of crazy situations the original linked article describes.

adomanico 9y ago

Those screenshots are damning. Enforced equity is not the answer to these problems.

xxcode 9y ago

I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein. Please consider not working here, if you have other options (which you almost always do)

klausjensen 9y ago
Friend - Get out. Many of us have been there, and it is not worth that feeling in your stomach every morning, because it drains the life out of you, can cause all kinds of physical and emotional problems. Go take a job somewhere else, where you might earn less - but will be less miserable - or maybe even happy. Get out.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
izacus 9y ago
These kind of posts (and the amount of anti-Google articles here) make me think that Google is currently targeted by paid trolling/smear campaign.
- lettergram 9y ago
  Perhaps, but that user has been on HN since 2011 - not many posts though
  - tomp 9y ago
    Old social media accounts are available for sale exactly because they look more legitimate. (I'm just pointing a general fact, not that the user in question is a shill.) I read an article describing the fenomenon, I can't find it now but there's plenty of interesting results if you search Google.

gpm 9y ago

People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including: A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups. Another stating in part > And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. It also tells us that this wasn't the first time the plaintiff had issues with his manager over this topic. He had the same issues with the previous manager, the previous manager was found by internally by Google to have retaliated against him for his complaints, and Allison Alogna was hired to replace that manager. [0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442.html#document/p4/a407608 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4391847-18-CIV-00442...

wheaties 9y ago
This definitely changes the tone of things. That's pure discrimination. It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all. Sounds like someone above the manager is responsible for this and the manager is carrying out orders. You don't get a historic paper trail like that by not being told to continue on.
- masterleep 9y ago
  > It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all. Both of those are illegal.
  - ComputerGuru 9y ago
    Affirmative action is definitely not illegal, regardless of whether it should or shouldn’t be.
    - ashelmire 9y ago
      Affirmative action literally means the opposite of what you think it means. It means that there will be efforts taken to ensure no discrimination in hiring on the basis of race, sex, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246 etc

southphillyman 9y ago

Companies should clearly articulate how diversity programs work. It seems like people don't understand that diversity outreach programs don't create an advantage for minorities, instead they level the playing field as once closed pipelines get opened/discovered. I fear that all this recent news about diversity and Google will create an environment where perfectly qualified non Asian minorities won't feel welcomed or will unfairly have their competency questioned.

viridian 9y ago
Isn't this allegation an exact counterpoint to what you are saying? Throwing out the resumes of everyone who isn't hispanic, black, or female seems to be creating an advantage.
- southphillyman 9y ago
  This specific allegation seems like "reverse discrimination" sure. But as of right now it's just a one sided allegation presented in a lawsuit. I'll be interested in seeing what the evidence bears out. I have intimate knowledge of the workings of diversity programs at some of the FAANG and big 4 consultancy companies and none of them involve purging white male applicants. Do postmortems occur when the diversity goals aren't met? Well sure, it IS a targeted diversity program after all. Sourcing initiatives have no bearing on whether a candidate meets a manager's hiring bar or not.
throwaway1584 9y ago
Almost anyone working in tech has seen race and gender discrimination in favor of women and minorities at this point. I have personally experienced it. If we were to apply affirmative action then class would be a better differentiator than race or gender. As it stands now an upper-middle-class Ivy League educated person of the right identities will receive affirmative action over a man that worked his way up from a poor neighborhood in Bangalore. I fail to see how that is just.
- southphillyman 9y ago

heisnotanalien 9y ago

What about if you are white working-class man? Is a middle-class black woman less privileged than a white working-class man? What about short versus tall people? What about beautiful versus ugly people? The halo effect is well-known. The whole thing is just absurd and dehumanising.

hashkb 9y ago
> Is a middle-class black woman less privileged than a white working-class man? Yes, on average, significantly. I'd be interested in your definition of "privilege" though.
- merpnderp 9y ago
  I'm interested in your definition of privilege. How exactly do the millions of variables that make up a person's life get outweighed by their skin color? Especially when we're comparing two people with similar job paths and economic equality? And how will answering this question not imply making drastic assumptions about an individual based on their race?
mlevental 9y ago
yes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/10/white-high-school-dropouts-are-wealthier-than-black-and-hispanic-college-graduates-can-a-new-policy-tool-fix-that/?utm_term=.db15a22d5a09 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/10/white...
- sol_remmy 9y ago
  > White high school dropouts are wealthier than Hispanic college graduates. What I'm seeing is "people who have lived in America for a long time (European heritage) are on average wealthier than people who arrived fairly recently from third world countries (Hispanic heritage). Why is that surprising? Why is that a problem?
  - mlevental 9y ago

wyck 9y ago

There's more than a few very large tech companies that have let politics and emotions take over from innovation and excellence. It's opened the door to mass demotivation because people know inherently what is fake and posturing over what is real, creative, and interesting.

shomyo 9y ago

OBEY

colmvp 9y ago

I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps." Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry despite Japan, China, Korea, India, etc. being quite different from one another. Then you look at industries where Asians are under-represented and you can read articles from actors like Steven Yeun who talk about how they rarely get offered roles and when they do, it's often for roles that stereotype their ethnicity. For example, I just watched Annihilation and the only Asian actor they had in it of course had a broken English accent despite the fact that in real life, the actor actually has a British accent. Pull up an article on diversity in the U.S., and chances are if you search "Asian" in the article you'll get 0 results. I've always looked up to tech because it's a realm where we Asians are judged by our skill level and output, not the color of our skin or how attractive we look. It's a realm that rewards people who study hard and work tirelessly to refine their craft. And so it's absolutely frustrating to hear that we're too successful and that people scale back our representation despite the fact that they never happens for us in other industries.

so_obviously 9y ago
all of what you said is true, and that's why i (asian male) will always run my own business, no matter what the perceived opportunity cost may be, because it's nothing but a mirage. counting on the white establishment, political right OR political left to give us any kind of a leg up or break is foolish in the extreme. this google episode is a perfect example of why. because we are merely 5% of the US population, we are treated as naive pawns by two sides in a larger game of ideological chess. i contribute financially to asian-interest causes i deem worthy, but i'm under no illusion of this changing in my lifetime. the american social fabric is configured heavily against us and will be for at least one more generation, likely another 2.
burlesona 9y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I hadn’t heard this specific perspective before.

gigatexal 9y ago

There has to be a way to use tech to anonymize vetting and hiring until the hired candidate shows up for work the next day. Phone interviews could be handled in such a way that gender can’t be determined say by using voice scramblers. Whiteboarding can be done in separate rooms with a digital whiteboard that evaluators see and where the candidate can ask questions but not be seen. Etc etc. or, or, people could stop being biased which as you get more educated you become less racist and biased and sexist I thought.

chrisseaton 9y ago
Unless you are fresh from an undergraduate degree, the thing people care about is what you have shown you can actually do in the industry. And showing what you can do will in most cases instantly identify who you are. As soon as I say what projects I've worked on or what my skills are anyone recruiting me will know exactly who I am. How do you get around that?
- gigatexal 9y ago
  “Built micro services that served millions of api calls per second in golang” how is that self identifiable?
  - chrisseaton 9y ago
    But how are you going to use something as bland and generic like that to differentiate your applicants? You've got twenty applicants, and they've all built a production API using Go or some equivalent language and they used some design pattern like micro-services or something else. Now what? Plus in my field even something as generic as that would identify me.
    - gigatexal 9y ago
      No system is perfect but it’s at least a step in the right direction for obfuscating gender and race.
    - 9y ago

plebian79878 9y ago

I am a female engineer. All of this is so frustrating because whether what Google is doing is right or wrong (and I do have opinions on that to come) about how they are going about this, regardless, this kind of media buzz belittles the general view of value add of female engineers like me. I work really hard, and I don't want to be given extra breaks, or have the bar lowered. I would rather fail an interview (and I have) than be given a boost in the process. That being said, one thign that annoys me about the media scrutinizing tech companies like this, is that the MEDIA themselves is one of the most masogogynistic cultures out there, with the most widespread global impact on the perception of male and female roles in society, yet they have the audacity to scrutinize industries who have done far more for society, pumped far more into education programs for just females, both males and females, science fairs etc and provided more opportunities to open the playing field than anyone else. I went to an engineering school as an Electrical Engineer with a minor in Computer Science and my department was 5% female is f that, despite my school bragging 30% of our school was female. Yeh right, 90% of those girls were management majors, the rest of us were sparsely strewn across the engineering majors. I have worked in male dominated environments my entire career and at the age of 27, I am and almost always have been the youngest in upper level management meetings in addition to being the only girl. What I can tell you is this, and i have talked to many female and male engineers working on east coast, west coast, multiple countries in Europe, India and Asia including Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and many other places in China. The issue is this. Yes (disclaimer) everyone needs to take responsibility for their own success, companies included, but this is really about society, and the tech companies are at the end of the pipeline of a girls life before she hits her career, the end of a pipeline of 21 grueling years of social conditioning, and the tech companies inherit the results of our heavily biased society. And I would also like to add, WOMEN DO ADD TO THIS PROBLEM. I've seen more MOTHERS steer their daughters away from STEM to engage in socialite activities and trophy wife conditioning and I've seen MORE WOMEN than men making fun of girls for being "weird" (weird in America means, oh my gosh that girl does all of her homework and prioritizes her school and career over boyfriend. O. M. G.) to put it best, someone I know who has worked at 2/3 big three companies on both coasts and in Europe, as well as other people I know, men I respect, work with, men who have daughters they teach to code and want to raise to be strong independentm, smart respectable women, have said this "The western culture is very limiting to women. What women need to do to do more in STEM is stay at home, play with things on their computer and break things. Women are not encouraged to stay at home and be introverted and curious" I agree, women are taught to waste their money and time being politically polite, politically correct and wasting money on clothes and makeup to seem desireable. If you don't believe me just leave your home and go to any store, gas station, grocery store, clothing store, anywhere basically where other humans reside and you will see this conditioning all around you. This is not the fault of tech companies, yet the media, the very people propogating this disgusting excuse for equality (spoken from the microphones of women who are airbrushed in pencil skirts with perfect hair) is asking tech companies to fix all of the root of societies problems with women and equality because they found a statistic the liberal media (I'm a liberal myself, but I'm also capable of scrutinizing my own party, you know why? Because I'm not in a cult.) and its just not going to happen. Tech companies are an easy finger to point to. YES, beleive me, I have lots of rants about the companies I have worked for, but I can tell you this issue did not start at these companies. They should take on more responsibility to stop it. However, to believe that these issues begin and end with tech companies, and that tech companies can make their portfolios equal in 5 years with some stretch recruiting goals is unreasonable at best, but the media is pressuring them to do that. I would LOVE to see this same scrutiny go to the finance industry, which is WORSE than tech and WAY worse when it comes to how they treat women, but finance and media are all snuggled up together in NYC so they are pointing at their biggest industry threat, which is tech. Thats what really going on in my opinion.

doktrin 9y ago

In my opinion, and only my opinion : Google has for a while been toxic to the technology ecosystem. I don't think their halo is deserved, certainly not on the basis of the "free" trinkets they release to the public (like, say, Kubernetes). More often than not they are corrosive to innovation, and I don't take them at their word when they swear that your/mine/everybody's data is safe in their hands. It comes as no major surprise that their actual workplace is as toxic as their role in the market, even with all the creature comforts they dangle in front of their employee.

cletus 9y ago

This is such a minefield of an issue that I don't envy anyone who has to deal with it. For one, it seems almost impossible to have a rational debate about the issue of diversity because there are some pretty strongly held views on both sides of this. So just some general observations with an explicit disclaimer that I know nothing that directly relates to this case. 1. I'm personally a little skeptical about a flurry of lawsuits like this. Lawsuits can be a little... opportunistic. I mean this in the sense that they're somewhat predatory and there's a tendency to "pile on" when the other side has a vulnerability. This isn't to say that this or any other given case doesn't have merit. It's just that a flurry tends to raise the chance that any one case of spurious. 2. US CS graduates are still predominantly white males [1] [2]. Obviously there are also graduates outside the US. I'm not sure on numbers on those but it's hard to come up with a reasonable estimation given the fact that a) employment in tech is predominantly US-centric and b) visa quotas in the US artificially limit the number of non-US people you can hire. 3. The graduate figures are important for those who take the so-called pipeline view of workforce diversity, namely that if 20% of graduates in a given field are women then you can't really expect more than 20% of your workforce to be women. This is not a universally agreed principle where some argue you can and should do better than this; 4. Doing better than this seems like nothing more than local vs global optimization. For example, I've known different companies to mandate diversity targets from the executive level and some orgs will deal with this by simply hiring underrepresented groups from other parts of the same company in a classic "robbing Peter to pay Paul" type scenario. It's hard to argue that this does anything more than make some manager or director's numbers look good and nothing more. 5. Other commenters have argued that favouring underrepresented groups is illegal. IANAL but the case law on this in the US isn't so clear. Just look at SCOTUS's rulings on affirmative action eg [3]. 6. While some hold the view that you can't discriminate in favour of one group you are by definition discriminating against others. This is both strictly true and too simplistic a view. Specifically, others will argue that you need such "positive discrimination" to correct against bias and historical imbalance. 7. Elements of the majority arguing that there is bias against them isn't of course limited to tech eg [4] [5]. 8. One wonders, in situations like this one, that (if true) whether management's instructions (mentioned in the complaint) were a response to an executive edict to increase diversity numbers. 9. Pipeline issues aside, it's worth considering internal long-term diversity trends within a company and within different parts of the company. For example, let's say 25% new hires are women, after 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 years how does that figure change? Does it stay constant or go up or down? If it goes down, why? This may hint at cultural issues worth addressing. 10. Being an engineer and having worked with lots of engineers I think I can fairly safely say that engineers (IME), as a group, are more socially awkward than the general population. This alone may well be a significant factor in long-term retention of a more diverse workforce. [1] https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-science/ https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruiting-pipeline-for-lack-of-diversity-in-tech.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruit... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger [4] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07/look-data-and-arguments-about-asian-americans-and-admissions-elite https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07... [5] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-discriminating-against-jews-2014-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-di...

nell 9y ago

My request to the courageous recruiter: please don't settle.

pmarreck 9y ago

The fact that affirmative-action policies of any kind are technically discriminatory but legally ethical continues to confuse people

KeitIG 9y ago

I strongly believe diversity should be solved when students declare their major, and not by HR years later (though I have no idea "how" we could achieve that. If the workforce of a country in a certain is composed of 80% white male, then having the same representation in your company is NOT wrong. Hire people that are competent and with who you would enjoy working with. That's it.

munnisthebest 9y ago

throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at Square, and there was an interesting presentation in front of the company about diversity efforts. Someone asked our head of diversity (who has since left) what "diverse" means, to which she responded pretty casually "non Asian and non White". As an Asian male I guess I feel privileged to be lumped in with the White males? I came here with my parents at age 10 with not much, and lived in an attic above a car rental company for a year because it was the cheapest rent we could find. Both parents worked labor jobs for years (i.e. inside a dry cleaner, and inside a factory assembling CD cases). Thanks to their efforts, I got in a good CS program (my parents couldn't pay for shit, were still poor), and then got a job at Square. It's just kind of weird to hear your entire people get lumped in with the "privileged white males" in front of the whole company like that. It's always really weird that "Asians" get treated as one homogeneous group in the name of diversity. It's weird because if you are say Hmong, or Cambodian, or from Laos, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or various parts of Southeast Asia, or Bangladesh, or Sri Lanka, statistically you are far more disadvantaged than your "traditional" Asians, like Indians or Chinese or Koreans or whatever. Yet these individuals often become disadvantaged in the name of diversity. Also for anyone working at Square, can we please stop referring to a candidate as "diverse"? I really hate that term, to describe one candidate as diverse, when it just means non White/Asian/Male.

beaconstudios 9y ago
it also doesn't make much sense for white people. There's rich and poor, educated and uneducated, privileged and unprivileged in any arbitrary grouping of people. The idea of lumping a trust fund Ivy League kid in with a working class Ukrainian because of skin colour is just blatantly nonsense, and you can map that nonsensicality onto any designation of group privilege. Hence the idea of individualism, or treating people with respect to their actual circumstances rather than what one assumes to be their circumstances based on correlative but not absolute indicators like race.
0x00000000 9y ago
When I was applying to universities I came to realize all they actually care about is how you will look in a slide or pamphlet about diversity. They don't care about your story or experience or upbringing. Diversity as they use it only means physical appearance A side note I also had a real existential crisis as a half white half asian male. What do you put down in order to be fucked over the least? Asian? White? Both if they let you or would that make you twice as screwed? Why should I have to make that decision at all?

yomly 9y ago

Something I have been mulling over lately is, how "progressiveness" encodes bias in and of itself. Let's reason out a (very naive and overly simplistic) thought experiment: You are BigCo and want to promote diversity. Part of your cultural strategy is nurture a culture that is "progressive". Therefore you implement a litmus test behavioural question that implicitly tests the candidate's attitudes to sexism as part of your hiring procedure. Enter candidate A and candidate B, both are male. Candidate A went to IvySchool and studied CS, candidate B grew up in LEDCountry but was #1 national algorithms prize-winner. Suppose A and B were identical in performance in every part of the interview, save for the "progressive" litmus test. A gave a stellar answer, meanwhile B gave some answer which could be described as being a bit "traditional". Under these conditions, A would probably get the job for being a "culture-fit". What interests me though is that being able to speak the same "language" of progressives is correlates with access to education, and access to education is largely coupled to wealth. So here we have a system which is yet again entrenching a power group of sorts, and extrapolating, I see echoes of the institutions which churn out readymade bankers and lawyers. Now this is all grossly oversimple, and I don't really have any solutions I can propose, but I find the notion of bias in culture fit, even the paradoxically "I am pro diversity" culture to be a curious idea.

err4nt 9y ago
Any time a principle is applied to a culture at a specific point in time, when you look back from an even better place the original improvement can look barbaric. An example: killing animals to eat them. In the ancient world I heard that it was common to tie up an animal and cut off one limb at a time, keeping the animal alive as long as possible to keep the rest of the meat 'fresh'. When you got hungry, you would go hack off another limb, etc. This means that the kosher laws that involved swiftly killing an animal before eating any part of it actually reduced the animals suffering quite a bit. But from our modern perspective where we have access to even more efficient slaughterhouses, by our standards the kosher laws seem unnecessarily gory and greusome. In this case, the principle has remained the same over time: try to reduce the animal's suffering and bring it a swift death…but when you compare how that progressive principle gets applied into different cultures at different times, you can have wildly different perspectives on how ethical the different practices are.

turc1656 9y ago

"Google said that it would “vigorously defend this lawsuit,” adding that it has a “clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products." You'll notice that official statement from Google did not claim the allegations were false nor that the events by the recruiter's manager did not take place. Defending yourself vigorously doesn't mean you're not guilty. Usually we see companies come right out and say that the claims are false. Google didn't do that, I suspect, because this is almost certainly documented in emails and formal communications. If this guy knew he was stirring the pot and causing issues and making claims of illegal activity, I doubt he didn't put at least some of this in email to protect himself. I'm sure Google performed a preliminary investigation once the lawsuit was filed and found internal emails which clearly show this guy documenting what he was told to do and his objection to it. Emails which the guy probably CC'ed or BCC'ed himself on so that he would also have a record of some of it is probably included/mentioned in the lawsuit when it was filed.

throwaway1957 9y ago

Throwaway for obvious reasons. I was once asked to do recruiting at a university. They told me to only collect the resumes of Females, Blacks, and Hispanics. And that they would not consider any other genders/races for the positions. This was for the BOLD program: https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html https://www.google.com/about/careers/students/bold.html. Talking around with my co-workers, we found Google has multiple programs like this. Another is a program to hire only LGBTQ people for entry MBA positions. Still afraid to speak up within Google as I fear my job would be at risk. Google claims its a meritocracy. It used to be a meritocracy , but in the past few years thats no longer the case. We've become a Microsoft.

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
How do you know if a candidate is LGBTQ? Do you just ask them?
- throwaway1957 9y ago
  They will email the LGBTQ organization at the university. And the only place they'll be is that club. For BOLD most people were only emailing the Hispanic / Black frats & organizations. I know that Google even has a dedicated team who does interview prep & mock interviews (with real questions btw) for `diversity` candidates. This training is not available to whites / asian males. Obviously if you've interviewed 10x before hand and seen all the real interview questions, you're going to do better. Basically they are doing everything they can to make sure diversity candidates are applying and have the absolute best chance of getting in.

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mc32 9y ago

I think, or hope, one day we'll come to realize the only fair way to do any sort of affirmative action is by evaluating on economics, after ability. That's to say the objective is not to hire underrepresented groups based on loose ethnic lines, but rather on their circumstance in life, all other meaningful qualifications being equal and lawful. That said, regarding women, that's a special case where we want to improve things at the input side, get pupils when young excited so that one day they may find it's what they want to do to contribute to our society.

deleted 9y ago
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cik 9y ago

I find the whole thing offense. I'm 'white'(ish coloured), I'm also half-african, half-asian, due to geography, and I'm sick of the identity politics. At the end of the day, I can be ~28th generation African, 28th generation Asian, 100% white, and not meet a 'quota'. Years ago, working with a US company going after 'Section 503' funding for something, I was the randomly pulled auditee. The auditor freaked out at the notion that I can be half-african, half-asian and white, and I refused to 'update my answer' on the government survey. Seriously. What happened to the idea that in Tech we'd have a legitimate meritocracy. It really doesn't matter what someone's skin tone, language, gender expression, or sexual preference(s) are. We do work, we do work individually and collectively, and we put our best into it. Anything else is simply disingenuous. /rant over.

kraig911 9y ago

When I started working in the late 90's I had worked for this old guy who now looking back was way smarter than I caught on. He always said crotchety shit like: I'd ask hey lets put a job ad in the newspaper and he'd respond, " When you go fishing for trout it's best to cast your line by a stream and not out in the ocean." I'd have a stack of resumes to contact and he once picked up half of them and threw in the trash. He said "You don't want to work with unlucky people" I wonder if Enterprise HR's cultures have gotten so PC that they're losing sight on the companies needs. It'd be better to go to largely black universities, or smaller colleges. Code quizzes and job fairs on college campuses attract people who can afford to go. The kids I've helped largely have families that need them outside of college, and jobs. Maybe an internship/mentorship-hire program would be better fit than a top-down candidate approach.

rvo 9y ago

And it's removed from the front page ...

sp527 9y ago

I once had the ‘privilege’ of talking to one of the admissions directors at my alma mater (an Ivy fwiw). An eminently qualified Asian candidate I had interviewed was rejected (while an inferior Jewish-Cuban candidate from the same school was accepted), I had quit the interview program out of disgust, and my complaints were escalated up to this director. Now this particular individual happened to be Asian himself. So am I. I expected empathy. Here’s what I got instead: this director asked me to imagine what a predominantly Asian campus would look and feel like. Is that a university experience I would have appreciated? I found this absolutely flabbergasting. This director had blown past the tacit admission that a quotaless, merit-based system would result in a visibly higher ratio of Asian students into outright stereotyping and borderline racism. Here’s the problem: people equate diversity with race and gender. They really do. They’re not after real diversity. They want the outward presentation of real diversity. Then no one can ask them difficult questions. No one is going to ask them to prove that they’ve achieved true diversity on the basis of character and intellectual bent.

jameskegel 9y ago

As with all extremes, the pendulum must return to its path, and soon we will see a return to a meritocratic approach. Approaching the lack of diversity in this industry from a hiring perspective is too late stage and short sighted- the change should happen with education during childhood and teen years in areas where there are concentrations of historically uninterested parties that are uninterested due to a lack of mentorship availability. I want to see after school programs being arranged, charter schools being built, stipends for families who encourage this field of study, fair pay for the teachers who are selected to offer to service to these areas, extracurricular activities that focus on tech and following through with those that show any modicum of interest potential. The change begins at home, and it has nothing to do with race, it has to do with opportunity to learn and the freedom to abstract your home life problems and concerns long enough to make use of the education without the preoccupation of where the next meal is or where you’ll sleep.

sol_remmy 9y ago

For an ongoing discussion of this topic see: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/81aw5u/google_accused_in_lawsuit_of_excluding_white_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/81aw5u/google_a...

enknamel 9y ago

Well the top of the funnel (your applicant pool) is like 90% asian or white men. If you want a 50/50 workforce you MUST be super discriminatory.

killjoywashere 9y ago

No less a bastion of conservative lust than the US Military actively pursues diversity in promotion and selection processes. While it makes my own life a little harder, I can't disagree with the motivation. And, quite frankly, it's not the minorities internally pushing this. It's saltine-white leadership over-ruling minorities in management positions and demanding they find even the most marginally qualified minority candidates. I have heard a senior black woman say "I can't in good conscience recommend any of the available candidates" only to hear the senior member say "I totally understand, but the slate as it stands is completely white. I, the institution, cannot accept that. This will face public scrutiny. Of the options, who's the most qualified? Of the white slate, who can we most easily replace?"

muddi900 9y ago

ITT: all top comments about how HN censors their viewpoint, with no sense of irony. Literally every thread on a topic like this is a bunch of Conservative martyrs bleeding all over page.