11 ms·

Diversity quotas suck. Here’s why

97 points by hudon 8y ago

freedomben 8y ago
Not a new opinion, but well articulated and reasoned. Sadly, I don't think it will resonate because of the knee-jerk responses people seem to have these days regarding this topic. > So, what about diversity of thought? If you’re really going after candidates who can bring fresh perspectives to the table, their lived experience should trump their gender and ethnicity (though of course, those can correlate heavily) Diversity of thought is a dangerous term in this current culture of witch hunts and personal destruction: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-diversity-head-denise-young-smith-apologizes-for-controversial-choice-of-words-at-summit/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-diversity-head-denis...
- eesmith 8y ago
  I understand what it means to at least estimate representation based on gender, race, religion, nationality, veteran status, etc., and from that infer possible discrimination. I can also understand the reasons for having civil rights laws to protect members of those groups, and I fully acknowledge the long history of discrimination in the US (I'm from the US) against Native Americans, blacks, women, non-heterosexuals, non-Protestants, and more. But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any meaningful way. Look at all the places with 'No-Assholes' hiring policy. Aren't "assholes" part of the diversity of thought? I think it's pretty obvious that there may be good reasons to not hire people based on which thoughts they decide to express and how they express them. (I assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind reading devices aren't that good.) The author doesn't address this topic, and instead proposes an evaluation based "entirely on performance in anonymous technical interviews." How does that evaluation have anything to do with "diversity of thought"? If people from school X are 80% likely to pass the interview and people from elsewhere are 20% likely to pass the interview, then woudn't that process result in a monoculture of thought? freedomben? Can you tell me how one might meaningfully characterize "diversity of thought"? For lack of a better definition, by "meaningful" I mean "incorporate it into hiring decisions such that the result is to the overall benefit of the company and the society which allows the company to exist".
  - woodman 8y ago
    > But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any meaningful way. For that to be true, you'd have to be unaware of the fact that people can process data and reason through complex problems differently. > I assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind reading devices aren't that good. That is a poor assumption that requires the redefinition of the word "thought". Our mind reading devices are pretty good: "Here is a complex problem that can be solved in more than one way - show your work." > How does that evaluation have anything to do with "diversity of thought"? By clearly demonstrating an applicant's competing priorities by way of solution selection? It sounds like you've never worked on a team that had that one guy who would regularly shoot down seemingly sensible textbook solutions, and instead offer a solution that either sounded like more work or just plain insanity. Have you never heard the story of Mel [0]? I can tell you from my own experience, as a former full stack developer who had to do a lot of interdepartmental work at a non-software company, diversity of thought is very useful. [0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSpY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSp...
    - eesmith 8y ago
      > "people can process data and reason through complex problems differently" This was in the context of hiring, and I gave my operational definition - how does one apply 'diversity of thought' to the hiring process? > "Here is a complex problem that can be solved in more than one way - show your work." Presenting a solution, or an attempt at a solution, is an expression of one's thoughts. > "diversity of thought is very useful" How do you apply it to the hiring process? How does the proposed method (skills testing) result in improved diversity of thought? I'll be more concrete with two examples. Example 1: Suppose there are only three schools which teach COBOL programming, and you are a bank which is looking to hire junior COBOL programmers. Do you design your test for COBOL competency, which will result in preferential selection from those small number of schools and hence reduce the diversity of thought? Or do you hire for more general diversity of thought and expect more overhead to train people in COBOL? Example 2. Suppose you put the applicant on an Ubuntu box and ask them to write a sort program in C++ which takes two command-line arguments. The first is an input file name containing set of lines (ending with a '\n'), the second is the output file name containing the input lines but sorted by byte value. Of those that pass the test, 50 do the 'standard' vector<string> with a sort from the standard library, but only 10 do I/O failure checking, and 1 of the 50 decides to make the parent directories if the filename's directory doesn't already exist. But wait, another 40 treat C++ as C, and use stdio along with a resizing array of char * . Of those, 30 use qsort, 8 implement quicksort, and 2 use bubble sort. (Oh, and one person who didn't finish was 90% of the way through implementing a Timsort.) That's a diversity of thought. Do you give preference to them for thinking about the problem in a different way? But wait, another 7 think about it a bit, realize that 'sort' is on the Ubuntu box, and construct system("sort filename1 -o filename2"). That's surely thinking outside the box, so should be encouraged in the name of diversity of thought, yes? Except another 2 think about it further, realize that the filenames may contain spaces or shell metacharacters, so construct the exec call directly. Security thinking is hard to train, so they should have preference, yes? And finally, the last one writes a C++ program which uses the Python C API to pass in a Python program as a string. Surely that's even more diverse thinking - and completely within the test protocol as given. Now to reverse the direction. I know all of these solutions. If I were given the task and I know that the employee wants to hire for "diversity of thought". Which implementation should I do to improve my chances of being hired? That is, should I do something which I know is less maintainable simply because I know it's more obscure and thus shows my diversity of thought?
- taneq 8y ago
  It seems like the stronger a proponent of progressive ideals you are, the more likely you are to be pilloried for some minor transgression. (As an aside, this article linked from yours https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racially-diverse-companies-outperform-industry-norms-by-30/#3e60c9581132 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/raci... states a correlation between racial, ethnic and gender diversity and company performance. I wonder to what degree this is infuenced by the fact that many high-performing companies are tech companies which now fervently pursue diversity as a goal in itself?)
  - retrogradeorbit 8y ago
    Relating to your aside, correlation does not imply causation. Is it the diversity making those companies perform better, or better performance leading to the economic resources to pursue diversity programs? Jonathon Haidt's research shows there are trade-offs between mono-cultures and diverse cultures. Neither is "better" than the other. Each have different traits. As a quick example, diverse groups (on average) are more creative at problem solving than mono-cultures, while mono-cultures (on average) have higher "Moral Cultural Capital" and are thus better at group allegiance and out competing other groups when the tasks are known. An example from the real world might be that the United States has a more diverse culture and has a lot of creative output in its economy, while China or Japan are mono-cultures and have less creativity but are out competing others when the task undertaken is well known (ie not requiring creative problem solving).
manigandham 8y ago
Well said. The fact is that forcing outcomes will never lead to fairness and will instead create misery for all involved. The best plan is to make the process as fair as possible so that everyone has an opportunity if they want it, then let people do what they desire. It may not "look" like what some people want it to look like, but the whole point is that doesn't matter anyway.
- themarkn 8y ago
  I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity she brings to her team is invisible to most people.) What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while, of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance institutional discrimination and measure our success. Of course arbitrary targets sometimes lead to suboptimal outcomes in specific cases. But, in aggregate, they are better than no measurement at all and I believe they do improve things. There are many forms of institutional discrimination that alter the candidate pool before people even apply. Your blind process can be perfect but that's the last link in the chain. Quotas are a blunt tool to force us to compensate for unfairness that occurred before our process for which we are not responsible in order to build stronger teams. As such I believe quotas are a good thing, because institutional bias and discrimination are bullshit and need to be eradicated. When they are, we can drop the quotas. If we come up with anything better than quotas, we can drop the quotas.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    All that is covered under "make the process fair", but enforcing quotas based on random unchangeable physical characteristic is the opposite of fair.
    - conception 8y ago
      I think what they were trying to also say is "make the process fair" isn't as simple as 4 words. It's a struggle for even the most ardent of believers in giving everyone a fair shot. The problem is defining what is fair.
rdtsc 8y ago
Agree with the author. I think a lot of clarity can be gained by answering the question they posed: > I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with diversity quotas in the first place. Like the article says, maybe the company has found that hiring diverse candidates leads to more profits and they are seeking them out and letting the rest fall into place, i.e. they get higher salaries, better compensation packages... It would be no different than figuring out graduates from Stanford's such and such department end up doing particularly well in the company. Or maybe the company does want to right a wrong and want to not just improve its bottom line but also help marginalized groups who have been neglected, abused and pushed out in the past. Companies the size of Google, Amazon, Facebook and others can certainly, and maybe should take that position. They can influence the technology field and their policies can affect a huge number of people. But I think they shouldn't be shy about declaring their mission, and should be more bold, as opposed to trying to hide behind the former reason. It is this hiding that leads to controversy and conflict. Also in case of this article, the title could have been a bit less controversial too. It should have been something like "Diversity Quota Needs To be Explained".
known 8y ago
Why UBI is bad? We cannot hire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves
eadmund 8y ago
> I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with diversity quotas in the first place. Are we trying to level the playing field for marginalized groups? To bring in the requisite diversity of thought that correlates so strongly with a better bottom line? Or to improve our optics so that when the press writes about our company’s diversity numbers, we look good? Honestly, I believe it's the last reason. Levelling the playing field would be relatively easy: blind auditions (easy in some fields, like music, more difficult in ours — but doable). I'm really not convinced that diversity of thought has all the benefits we attribute to it. At the end of the day, I think it's fashion: we want to be seen as fashionable, and diversity is in fashion. Regarding diversity of thought, her example is a great one: 'And look, if you put a gun to my head and asked me, given absolutely identical abilities to do the job, whether I should hire a woman who came from an affluent background, aced her SATs because of access to a stellar prep program and supportive parents, went to a top school and interned at a top tech company over a man who dropped out of high school and worked a bunch of odd-jobs and taught himself to code and had the grit to end up with the requisite skills… I’ll take the man.' I'd take the woman, not because she's a woman, but because she almost certainly has more of the requisite skills than the man in the situation. If they actually have identical relevant skills, then maybe he'd be more interesting, just because he's so unusual, but judging by appearances the woman is more likely to have the skills I'd need.
- effie 8y ago
  Agreed on the fashion. Hiring both 1) fairly to all candidates and 2) most effectively for the company is a difficult and potentially impossible task. Introducing quotas is an easy "solution" of this problem for the hiring department. However, I do not understand your rationale for hiring the woman. By assumption, both the woman and the man have the same skills. It is the histories of how they got those skills that differ.
  - eadmund 8y ago
    In the hypothetical example, yes the assumption is that they have equivalent skills. My issue is that in real life you can never assume that two candidates have equal skills (in fact, the odds that they do are negligible); instead you have to make assumptions about the probability of increased skill given various priors. Given standard priors based on my own experience, I'd be more likely to hire the woman in that example. If I actually did know that they were exactly identical skill-wise, it'd be a different story.
Leary 8y ago
American Companies and universities will rarely admit they are using quotas. Rather, diversity initiatives boost the probability of hire for certain demographics. This may help correct existing prejudice and discrimination, but it is also unfair to the other demographics. Hopefully companies will consider other avenues to increase their diversity rather than having differing hiring standards.
- collyw 8y ago
  > This may help correct existing prejudice and discrimination, but it is also unfair to the other demographics. Correcting prejudice by introducing more prejudice doesn't see like the best way to go about it.
skookumchuck 8y ago
> optics That word meaning "appearances" suddenly appeared and became all the rage a year ago. Writers and commentators think they're hip and cool using it, rather than what it actually is - camp-following and boring. Blech. Just use "appearances".
- teddyh 8y ago
  The word “appearances” has bad optics now. It’s called the euphemism treadmill.
d--b 8y ago
Quotas are tough for people right now, but they serve a longer term role. Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech. That's a fact. Some dumb-ass dudes may tell you: "oh you're here because of diversity quotas, not for your inherent quality", and it will be annoying for you. But the purpose of the quotas is that the next generation of students can look at the distribution and tell themselves: "oh, actually this field is not only populated by bros, there is a lot of women in it, maybe I'll give that a shot". Ok, it's not meritocracy, but come on, meritocracy is only unbiased if the culture is unbiased...
- dnautics 8y ago
  > Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech Did you read the article? Aline claims that a completely blind application process lands more diversity in tech.
- manigandham 8y ago
  Why do people care so much about what others look like in a field instead of doing what they're interested in? Perhaps that's the real issue at the root of all this.
  - batiudrami 8y ago
    Because people who look different from people who are currently in the field they're interested in feel like they aren't welcome and won't pursue it. It's not about this generation; it's the next.
    - collyw 8y ago
      Is there any evidence of this? I hear it talked about a lot, but I have never seen anything that actually proves this is the case.
      - batiudrami 8y ago
        You might find this[1] interesting. [1]] https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-coding-1019aac9727c https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-coding-1...
toomanybeersies 8y ago
What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming workforce is female. That's not really fair is it? The company is overly diverse if anything. In a way they're stealing women from the workforce of other companies. Diversity needs to happen from the ground up. Affirmative action is more effective and more appropriate the earlier in life that it is. Special coding classes and programs for underserved groups (e.g. Rails Girls) are the best, because a lot of girls don't get the same opportunities. In New Zealand, a lot of single-sex girls' schools don't teach programming at all. It's the same with schools in lower income areas, they often have very underdeveloped STEM programs. Having lower entry requirements to university for less privileged populations also makes sense, although using ethnicity is a very blunt stick, as there are often external factors that mean that equally talented students have worse educational outcomes in school, such as poor nutrition, working a job after school to help pay the bills, and low quality teachers (most good teachers want to teach at good schools). There external factors tend to be ironed out at university. Obviously not every type of affirmative action is appropriate for every situation. Requiring lower grades for women to get into engineering programs at university probably isn't appropriate, since it's not like women grow up in less privileged households than men. Affirmative action in hiring makes a lot less sense than at earlier stages. There's only a certain percentage of women in the workforce, hiring over that percentage isn't going to help with diversity or inclusion. If only 20% of programmers are women, then your company's programming team should be somewhere around that number. If it's a lot higher or a lot lower than this, there's something wrong.
- batiudrami 8y ago
  If you want the best candidates you want to make your company look as desirable as possible. A 50% M/F workforce isn't scaring any good candidates away and might even attract a superstar who prefers a great culture over a bigger paycheque. It's just playing up a company's strengths.
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    From the perspective of the company, sure. It's in a company's best interests to do whatever they can to attract the best candidates. I'd prefer to work in a company that isn't a complete sausage fest, just like I'm sure most people would. I was more commenting that in general trying to get 50% women on your tech team isn't going to help the industry as a whole.
fipple 8y ago
"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if you peel back one layer, it has very little diversity of thought" as well. Why? Because the company was built to execute Steve Jobs' ideas. The more that any given executive could run an emulator of Steve Jobs' brain, the less of Jobs' time he required. "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything" we have all heard. Well, if you don't need a lot of ideas, but you need a streamlined execution organization, diversity is a huge weakness! For every fun example of "Oh, only a tattoo wearer would recognize that this product wouldn't work for people with tattoos! Diversity would have halped!" there are the Silicon Valley giants, achieving ridiculous financial results with highly non-diverse teams.
- batiudrami 8y ago
  It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good because it is designed such that, as best we can, everyone has equal opportunities. While, as a white man the fact that I may have been overlooked in graduate programs because many engineering firms have quotas sucks, but it is one small impediment in a world which was built for me to succeed more easily than others. Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.
  - chii 8y ago
    > diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.
    - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      Financial performance does not indicate that the company's actions are ethical. To the contrary, it is often the opposite because one of the prime motivators for unethical behavior is the promise of financial gain.
BadassFractal 8y ago
Coleman Hughes brought up the point, in a recent interview, that Prop 209 in California was an example of how abolishing affirmative action led to there being more diversity in colleges, a smaller grades gap between ethnicities and many other benefits that affirmative action was meant to accomplish. The argument being that quotas actually don't help with diversity because, in the example of high end colleges like MIT, a huge chunk of quota kids end up dropping out, or changing to non-technical majors, or stay in the bottom 10th percentile of their class. They end up feeling terrible, their classmates (who on average will be 300 SAT points above them) end up not taking them seriously, so instead of this being a positive experience for everybody, it just creates more resentment on both sides. I suppose many people believe that throwing unqualified kids into the meatgrinder is worth it just for the diversity exposure alone, and their sacrifice is for a greater cause. This is not to say that exposing different clusters of society to each other isn't beneficial to overall social cohesion and acceptance. Doing it through quotas, however, doesn't seem to have been proven to be an effective way of accomplishing that goal. Race is an awfully blunt way of looking at these societal clusters. Mashing all the white people together makes no sense. The Italians, the Polish, the Irish were discriminated against heavily early in the century. Russian-Americans make 30% more on average than French-Americans. West Indian blacks make 50% more on average than American blacks. Africans who move to the states for work are about as successful as Asians or Whites, despite supposed heavy racial discrimination. Race includes none of that nuance in it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zaarn 8y ago
Here is my take on it. I agree quotas suck. A lot. When people explain why we need them, they fall back to "it's morally good" because the other choice is "monoculture" or "racism" which is "bad" or "evil" depending on who you ask. My problem with that is that I don't accept purely moral arguments, these are usually subjective and depend on someone's culture. Additionally they easily lead to tribalization where people form two camps over a problem and neither side is willing to compromise because their tribe is good and the other is evil/bad. A diversity of thought seems intuitively to be more effective at solving "programmer didn't think of X because they're not in group Y" problems. Diversity by skin color or gender... not so much. Atleast, it doesn't seem to be a good solution for the above problem and when it is, only for a very very narrow range of problems. It obviously doesn't mean you shouldn't hire women or people with other skin colors or ethnicity. But also that you shouldn't hire them primarly. Hiring 50/50 male/female workers doesn't solve your ignorance of deaf or blind users of your software. Or people who lost limbs or are otherwise inhibited in movement (just look at Microsoft, their new controller is an amazing statement for diversity). A purely blind hiring process would solve some of this. Additionally the hiring process would also have to find people that challenge the status quo at the work place, atleast in the relevant matters. Writing an app in React? Hire someone who is good at Angular and React but advocates Angular. You'll be hearing about problems in your App you haven't thought about. Make this person satisfied with your App. Creating "Uber but for X"? Hire people who do X and who use X and don't want X disrupted by "Uber but for X". They'll tell you all about what's wrong with the implementation. Make them satisfied. A diverse group of people is a group that when asked about a problem will find at least as many solutions as people in the group. Ask your team "what would the ideal calculator look like" and see what they come up with. They can make it phyiscal or software, any arrangement or features they like. But each should have their own unique calculator. I would say this is a good start point for further thought and discussion on this, though obviously I'm reducing the complexity of such a wide, subjective and deep rooted problem.

97 points by hudon 8y ago

Not a new opinion, but well articulated and reasoned. Sadly, I don't think it will resonate because of the knee-jerk responses people seem to have these days regarding this topic. > So, what about diversity of thought? If you’re really going after candidates who can bring fresh perspectives to the table, their lived experience should trump their gender and ethnicity (though of course, those can correlate heavily) Diversity of thought is a dangerous term in this current culture of witch hunts and personal destruction: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-diversity-head-denise-young-smith-apologizes-for-controversial-choice-of-words-at-summit/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/13/apple-diversity-head-denis...

eesmith 8y ago
I understand what it means to at least estimate representation based on gender, race, religion, nationality, veteran status, etc., and from that infer possible discrimination. I can also understand the reasons for having civil rights laws to protect members of those groups, and I fully acknowledge the long history of discrimination in the US (I'm from the US) against Native Americans, blacks, women, non-heterosexuals, non-Protestants, and more. But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any meaningful way. Look at all the places with 'No-Assholes' hiring policy. Aren't "assholes" part of the diversity of thought? I think it's pretty obvious that there may be good reasons to not hire people based on which thoughts they decide to express and how they express them. (I assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind reading devices aren't that good.) The author doesn't address this topic, and instead proposes an evaluation based "entirely on performance in anonymous technical interviews." How does that evaluation have anything to do with "diversity of thought"? If people from school X are 80% likely to pass the interview and people from elsewhere are 20% likely to pass the interview, then woudn't that process result in a monoculture of thought? freedomben? Can you tell me how one might meaningfully characterize "diversity of thought"? For lack of a better definition, by "meaningful" I mean "incorporate it into hiring decisions such that the result is to the overall benefit of the company and the society which allows the company to exist".
- woodman 8y ago
  > But I can't wrap my head around what "diversity of thought" means, in any meaningful way. For that to be true, you'd have to be unaware of the fact that people can process data and reason through complex problems differently. > I assume 'diversity of thought' refers to expressed thoughts - our mind reading devices aren't that good. That is a poor assumption that requires the redefinition of the word "thought". Our mind reading devices are pretty good: "Here is a complex problem that can be solved in more than one way - show your work." > How does that evaluation have anything to do with "diversity of thought"? By clearly demonstrating an applicant's competing priorities by way of solution selection? It sounds like you've never worked on a team that had that one guy who would regularly shoot down seemingly sensible textbook solutions, and instead offer a solution that either sounded like more work or just plain insanity. Have you never heard the story of Mel [0]? I can tell you from my own experience, as a former full stack developer who had to do a lot of interdepartmental work at a non-software company, diversity of thought is very useful. [0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSpY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.jokes/k2JVKQzJSp...
  - eesmith 8y ago
    > "people can process data and reason through complex problems differently" This was in the context of hiring, and I gave my operational definition - how does one apply 'diversity of thought' to the hiring process? > "Here is a complex problem that can be solved in more than one way - show your work." Presenting a solution, or an attempt at a solution, is an expression of one's thoughts. > "diversity of thought is very useful" How do you apply it to the hiring process? How does the proposed method (skills testing) result in improved diversity of thought? I'll be more concrete with two examples. Example 1: Suppose there are only three schools which teach COBOL programming, and you are a bank which is looking to hire junior COBOL programmers. Do you design your test for COBOL competency, which will result in preferential selection from those small number of schools and hence reduce the diversity of thought? Or do you hire for more general diversity of thought and expect more overhead to train people in COBOL? Example 2. Suppose you put the applicant on an Ubuntu box and ask them to write a sort program in C++ which takes two command-line arguments. The first is an input file name containing set of lines (ending with a '\n'), the second is the output file name containing the input lines but sorted by byte value. Of those that pass the test, 50 do the 'standard' vector<string> with a sort from the standard library, but only 10 do I/O failure checking, and 1 of the 50 decides to make the parent directories if the filename's directory doesn't already exist. But wait, another 40 treat C++ as C, and use stdio along with a resizing array of char * . Of those, 30 use qsort, 8 implement quicksort, and 2 use bubble sort. (Oh, and one person who didn't finish was 90% of the way through implementing a Timsort.) That's a diversity of thought. Do you give preference to them for thinking about the problem in a different way? But wait, another 7 think about it a bit, realize that 'sort' is on the Ubuntu box, and construct system("sort filename1 -o filename2"). That's surely thinking outside the box, so should be encouraged in the name of diversity of thought, yes? Except another 2 think about it further, realize that the filenames may contain spaces or shell metacharacters, so construct the exec call directly. Security thinking is hard to train, so they should have preference, yes? And finally, the last one writes a C++ program which uses the Python C API to pass in a Python program as a string. Surely that's even more diverse thinking - and completely within the test protocol as given. Now to reverse the direction. I know all of these solutions. If I were given the task and I know that the employee wants to hire for "diversity of thought". Which implementation should I do to improve my chances of being hired? That is, should I do something which I know is less maintainable simply because I know it's more obscure and thus shows my diversity of thought?
taneq 8y ago
It seems like the stronger a proponent of progressive ideals you are, the more likely you are to be pilloried for some minor transgression. (As an aside, this article linked from yours https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/racially-diverse-companies-outperform-industry-norms-by-30/#3e60c9581132 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruchikatulshyan/2015/01/30/raci... states a correlation between racial, ethnic and gender diversity and company performance. I wonder to what degree this is infuenced by the fact that many high-performing companies are tech companies which now fervently pursue diversity as a goal in itself?)
- retrogradeorbit 8y ago
  Relating to your aside, correlation does not imply causation. Is it the diversity making those companies perform better, or better performance leading to the economic resources to pursue diversity programs? Jonathon Haidt's research shows there are trade-offs between mono-cultures and diverse cultures. Neither is "better" than the other. Each have different traits. As a quick example, diverse groups (on average) are more creative at problem solving than mono-cultures, while mono-cultures (on average) have higher "Moral Cultural Capital" and are thus better at group allegiance and out competing other groups when the tasks are known. An example from the real world might be that the United States has a more diverse culture and has a lot of creative output in its economy, while China or Japan are mono-cultures and have less creativity but are out competing others when the task undertaken is well known (ie not requiring creative problem solving).

manigandham 8y ago

Well said. The fact is that forcing outcomes will never lead to fairness and will instead create misery for all involved. The best plan is to make the process as fair as possible so that everyone has an opportunity if they want it, then let people do what they desire. It may not "look" like what some people want it to look like, but the whole point is that doesn't matter anyway.

themarkn 8y ago
I disagree that this was well said. I think the underlying is point that blind tests of skill reduce bias and lead to increased diversity is a good one. As is the idea that we need to measure diversity on more than one axis. (My wife is not Caucasian but she looks Caucasian... The cultural and ethnic diversity she brings to her team is invisible to most people.) What's missing in this is the acknowledgement that "diversity quotas" while, of course, imperfect and clumsy, reflect an effort to counterbalance institutional discrimination and measure our success. Of course arbitrary targets sometimes lead to suboptimal outcomes in specific cases. But, in aggregate, they are better than no measurement at all and I believe they do improve things. There are many forms of institutional discrimination that alter the candidate pool before people even apply. Your blind process can be perfect but that's the last link in the chain. Quotas are a blunt tool to force us to compensate for unfairness that occurred before our process for which we are not responsible in order to build stronger teams. As such I believe quotas are a good thing, because institutional bias and discrimination are bullshit and need to be eradicated. When they are, we can drop the quotas. If we come up with anything better than quotas, we can drop the quotas.
- manigandham 8y ago
  All that is covered under "make the process fair", but enforcing quotas based on random unchangeable physical characteristic is the opposite of fair.
  - conception 8y ago
    I think what they were trying to also say is "make the process fair" isn't as simple as 4 words. It's a struggle for even the most ardent of believers in giving everyone a fair shot. The problem is defining what is fair.

rdtsc 8y ago

Agree with the author. I think a lot of clarity can be gained by answering the question they posed: > I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with diversity quotas in the first place. Like the article says, maybe the company has found that hiring diverse candidates leads to more profits and they are seeking them out and letting the rest fall into place, i.e. they get higher salaries, better compensation packages... It would be no different than figuring out graduates from Stanford's such and such department end up doing particularly well in the company. Or maybe the company does want to right a wrong and want to not just improve its bottom line but also help marginalized groups who have been neglected, abused and pushed out in the past. Companies the size of Google, Amazon, Facebook and others can certainly, and maybe should take that position. They can influence the technology field and their policies can affect a huge number of people. But I think they shouldn't be shy about declaring their mission, and should be more bold, as opposed to trying to hide behind the former reason. It is this hiding that leads to controversy and conflict. Also in case of this article, the title could have been a bit less controversial too. It should have been something like "Diversity Quota Needs To be Explained".

known 8y ago

Why UBI is bad? We cannot hire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slaves

eadmund 8y ago

> I think it’s important to ask ourselves what we want to accomplish with diversity quotas in the first place. Are we trying to level the playing field for marginalized groups? To bring in the requisite diversity of thought that correlates so strongly with a better bottom line? Or to improve our optics so that when the press writes about our company’s diversity numbers, we look good? Honestly, I believe it's the last reason. Levelling the playing field would be relatively easy: blind auditions (easy in some fields, like music, more difficult in ours — but doable). I'm really not convinced that diversity of thought has all the benefits we attribute to it. At the end of the day, I think it's fashion: we want to be seen as fashionable, and diversity is in fashion. Regarding diversity of thought, her example is a great one: 'And look, if you put a gun to my head and asked me, given absolutely identical abilities to do the job, whether I should hire a woman who came from an affluent background, aced her SATs because of access to a stellar prep program and supportive parents, went to a top school and interned at a top tech company over a man who dropped out of high school and worked a bunch of odd-jobs and taught himself to code and had the grit to end up with the requisite skills… I’ll take the man.' I'd take the woman, not because she's a woman, but because she almost certainly has more of the requisite skills than the man in the situation. If they actually have identical relevant skills, then maybe he'd be more interesting, just because he's so unusual, but judging by appearances the woman is more likely to have the skills I'd need.

effie 8y ago
Agreed on the fashion. Hiring both 1) fairly to all candidates and 2) most effectively for the company is a difficult and potentially impossible task. Introducing quotas is an easy "solution" of this problem for the hiring department. However, I do not understand your rationale for hiring the woman. By assumption, both the woman and the man have the same skills. It is the histories of how they got those skills that differ.
- eadmund 8y ago
  In the hypothetical example, yes the assumption is that they have equivalent skills. My issue is that in real life you can never assume that two candidates have equal skills (in fact, the odds that they do are negligible); instead you have to make assumptions about the probability of increased skill given various priors. Given standard priors based on my own experience, I'd be more likely to hire the woman in that example. If I actually did know that they were exactly identical skill-wise, it'd be a different story.

Leary 8y ago

American Companies and universities will rarely admit they are using quotas. Rather, diversity initiatives boost the probability of hire for certain demographics. This may help correct existing prejudice and discrimination, but it is also unfair to the other demographics. Hopefully companies will consider other avenues to increase their diversity rather than having differing hiring standards.

collyw 8y ago
> This may help correct existing prejudice and discrimination, but it is also unfair to the other demographics. Correcting prejudice by introducing more prejudice doesn't see like the best way to go about it.

skookumchuck 8y ago

> optics That word meaning "appearances" suddenly appeared and became all the rage a year ago. Writers and commentators think they're hip and cool using it, rather than what it actually is - camp-following and boring. Blech. Just use "appearances".

teddyh 8y ago
The word “appearances” has bad optics now. It’s called the euphemism treadmill.

d--b 8y ago

Quotas are tough for people right now, but they serve a longer term role. Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech. That's a fact. Some dumb-ass dudes may tell you: "oh you're here because of diversity quotas, not for your inherent quality", and it will be annoying for you. But the purpose of the quotas is that the next generation of students can look at the distribution and tell themselves: "oh, actually this field is not only populated by bros, there is a lot of women in it, maybe I'll give that a shot". Ok, it's not meritocracy, but come on, meritocracy is only unbiased if the culture is unbiased...

dnautics 8y ago
> Because of quotas, there is more diversity in tech Did you read the article? Aline claims that a completely blind application process lands more diversity in tech.
manigandham 8y ago
Why do people care so much about what others look like in a field instead of doing what they're interested in? Perhaps that's the real issue at the root of all this.
- batiudrami 8y ago
  Because people who look different from people who are currently in the field they're interested in feel like they aren't welcome and won't pursue it. It's not about this generation; it's the next.
  - collyw 8y ago
    Is there any evidence of this? I hear it talked about a lot, but I have never seen anything that actually proves this is the case.
    - batiudrami 8y ago
      You might find this[1] interesting. [1]] https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-coding-1019aac9727c https://medium.com/@CodeKingdoms/why-did-women-stop-coding-1...

toomanybeersies 8y ago

What I've always found odd is when a company advertises something like "we have 50% women on the programming team" when only 20% of the programming workforce is female. That's not really fair is it? The company is overly diverse if anything. In a way they're stealing women from the workforce of other companies. Diversity needs to happen from the ground up. Affirmative action is more effective and more appropriate the earlier in life that it is. Special coding classes and programs for underserved groups (e.g. Rails Girls) are the best, because a lot of girls don't get the same opportunities. In New Zealand, a lot of single-sex girls' schools don't teach programming at all. It's the same with schools in lower income areas, they often have very underdeveloped STEM programs. Having lower entry requirements to university for less privileged populations also makes sense, although using ethnicity is a very blunt stick, as there are often external factors that mean that equally talented students have worse educational outcomes in school, such as poor nutrition, working a job after school to help pay the bills, and low quality teachers (most good teachers want to teach at good schools). There external factors tend to be ironed out at university. Obviously not every type of affirmative action is appropriate for every situation. Requiring lower grades for women to get into engineering programs at university probably isn't appropriate, since it's not like women grow up in less privileged households than men. Affirmative action in hiring makes a lot less sense than at earlier stages. There's only a certain percentage of women in the workforce, hiring over that percentage isn't going to help with diversity or inclusion. If only 20% of programmers are women, then your company's programming team should be somewhere around that number. If it's a lot higher or a lot lower than this, there's something wrong.

batiudrami 8y ago
If you want the best candidates you want to make your company look as desirable as possible. A 50% M/F workforce isn't scaring any good candidates away and might even attract a superstar who prefers a great culture over a bigger paycheque. It's just playing up a company's strengths.
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  From the perspective of the company, sure. It's in a company's best interests to do whatever they can to attract the best candidates. I'd prefer to work in a company that isn't a complete sausage fest, just like I'm sure most people would. I was more commenting that in general trying to get 50% women on your tech team isn't going to help the industry as a whole.

fipple 8y ago

"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if you peel back one layer, it has very little diversity of thought" as well. Why? Because the company was built to execute Steve Jobs' ideas. The more that any given executive could run an emulator of Steve Jobs' brain, the less of Jobs' time he required. "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything" we have all heard. Well, if you don't need a lot of ideas, but you need a streamlined execution organization, diversity is a huge weakness! For every fun example of "Oh, only a tattoo wearer would recognize that this product wouldn't work for people with tattoos! Diversity would have halped!" there are the Silicon Valley giants, achieving ridiculous financial results with highly non-diverse teams.

batiudrami 8y ago
It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good because it is designed such that, as best we can, everyone has equal opportunities. While, as a white man the fact that I may have been overlooked in graduate programs because many engineering firms have quotas sucks, but it is one small impediment in a world which was built for me to succeed more easily than others. Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.
- chii 8y ago
  > diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    Financial performance does not indicate that the company's actions are ethical. To the contrary, it is often the opposite because one of the prime motivators for unethical behavior is the promise of financial gain.

BadassFractal 8y ago

Coleman Hughes brought up the point, in a recent interview, that Prop 209 in California was an example of how abolishing affirmative action led to there being more diversity in colleges, a smaller grades gap between ethnicities and many other benefits that affirmative action was meant to accomplish. The argument being that quotas actually don't help with diversity because, in the example of high end colleges like MIT, a huge chunk of quota kids end up dropping out, or changing to non-technical majors, or stay in the bottom 10th percentile of their class. They end up feeling terrible, their classmates (who on average will be 300 SAT points above them) end up not taking them seriously, so instead of this being a positive experience for everybody, it just creates more resentment on both sides. I suppose many people believe that throwing unqualified kids into the meatgrinder is worth it just for the diversity exposure alone, and their sacrifice is for a greater cause. This is not to say that exposing different clusters of society to each other isn't beneficial to overall social cohesion and acceptance. Doing it through quotas, however, doesn't seem to have been proven to be an effective way of accomplishing that goal. Race is an awfully blunt way of looking at these societal clusters. Mashing all the white people together makes no sense. The Italians, the Polish, the Irish were discriminated against heavily early in the century. Russian-Americans make 30% more on average than French-Americans. West Indian blacks make 50% more on average than American blacks. Africans who move to the states for work are about as successful as Asians or Whites, despite supposed heavy racial discrimination. Race includes none of that nuance in it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

zaarn 8y ago

Here is my take on it. I agree quotas suck. A lot. When people explain why we need them, they fall back to "it's morally good" because the other choice is "monoculture" or "racism" which is "bad" or "evil" depending on who you ask. My problem with that is that I don't accept purely moral arguments, these are usually subjective and depend on someone's culture. Additionally they easily lead to tribalization where people form two camps over a problem and neither side is willing to compromise because their tribe is good and the other is evil/bad. A diversity of thought seems intuitively to be more effective at solving "programmer didn't think of X because they're not in group Y" problems. Diversity by skin color or gender... not so much. Atleast, it doesn't seem to be a good solution for the above problem and when it is, only for a very very narrow range of problems. It obviously doesn't mean you shouldn't hire women or people with other skin colors or ethnicity. But also that you shouldn't hire them primarly. Hiring 50/50 male/female workers doesn't solve your ignorance of deaf or blind users of your software. Or people who lost limbs or are otherwise inhibited in movement (just look at Microsoft, their new controller is an amazing statement for diversity). A purely blind hiring process would solve some of this. Additionally the hiring process would also have to find people that challenge the status quo at the work place, atleast in the relevant matters. Writing an app in React? Hire someone who is good at Angular and React but advocates Angular. You'll be hearing about problems in your App you haven't thought about. Make this person satisfied with your App. Creating "Uber but for X"? Hire people who do X and who use X and don't want X disrupted by "Uber but for X". They'll tell you all about what's wrong with the implementation. Make them satisfied. A diverse group of people is a group that when asked about a problem will find at least as many solutions as people in the group. Ask your team "what would the ideal calculator look like" and see what they come up with. They can make it phyiscal or software, any arrangement or features they like. But each should have their own unique calculator. I would say this is a good start point for further thought and discussion on this, though obviously I'm reducing the complexity of such a wide, subjective and deep rooted problem.