4 ms·

I'm an engineer at google and this bit about hiring someone because of their genes is false. All candidates must past the same hiring bar, no one gets extra po

I'm an engineer at google and this bit about hiring someone because of their genes is false. All candidates must past the same hiring bar, no one gets extra points for "diversity". So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired.

username90 7y ago
Right, there is a lot of talk about things but ultimately the strongest political side at Google are still the ones clamoring for meritocracy.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  It's less "meritocracy vs. diversity" and more "meritocracy factors in diversity." They aren't opposed goals; an organization with a meritocracy that over-optimizes on too few metrics is fragile and collapses in a dynamic market.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Which organization has collapsed that focused only on technical skills?
thu2111 7y ago
I hate to break it to you, but that's not true. Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly. Some tricks I saw used: 1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me that they did this. 2. Allowing women who failed the phone screens to proceed to on-sites anyway. 3. Organising recruiting events which banned men, e.g. there was since early years Google CodeJam, a coding competition that was pretty openly used as a way to find candidates. But the men crushed the women, repeatedly. I think there was a female finalist once in 13 years. So they set up a second CodeJam with large cash prizes, but banned men from it. In recent times there was the recruiter who quit and claims he was told to not hire non-diverse candidates. I believe that. I was told about recruitment's diversity goals by recruiters themselves. But still, there was a lot of resistance to bending the hiring pipeline in more extreme ways. That culture carried over to Facebook. I've been told that at Facebook recruiters were incentivised with cash to hire more women, but they gave up pretty fast because stuffing the pipeline with weaker candidates didn't work: they got flushed out by the hiring committees. By the way you're blind to a much more important trick Google uses. Eng hiring was, during my time, at least somewhat well defended against diversity abuse. But firing was totally controlled by HR. And it is an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible for women to be fired, regardless of how low their performance is. Instead they get moved around between teams. Men, on the other hand, can be and are let go for merely not exceeding expectations. Obviously that's one way to get less male workforce, if you're patient!
- geofft 7y ago
  You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. It is absolutely possible to try to hire more women and require them all to meet the hiring bar (as you yourself point out with your story about Facebook). 1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected. 2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen. 3. Sourcing an all-women group from a hiring event and sending them through the normal interview process is ... sending them through the normal interview process. If you want to claim that Google is trying harder to hire qualified women than qualified men, sure, I don't think anyone disputed that. The dispute was whether Googlers ever think an unqualified person was hired to meet a diversity goal. (And how often does Google fire someone for discovering that their interview process emitted a false positive? Given the incredible cost of making that mistake, most hiring processes are tuned to err towards false negatives instead of false positives, and Google's intensive process should be particularly good at that. Unless you're claiming HR is firing qualified men to meet a quota - i.e., textbook wrongful termination at scale - a bias for never getting around to firing women can't have a noticeable effect.)
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Do you really think Google doesn't let men go for low performance? I saw that happen many times. That absolutely has an effect. The hiring process really isn't anywhere close to being accurate enough that firings are irrelevant and of course, people's performance changes over time. There's no difference between "trying harder to hire a qualified woman" and sexual discrimination during hiring. Just invert it to see: imagine someone found a software company that said it was trying harder to hire men because it preferred them, and so it did things like only advertise its jobs in men's clubs, recruited from events where women were banned, and did things it knew would bias its own interview process against female candidates like assigning incompetent interviewers and then discarding their feedback because it wasn't good enough. Feminists would utterly lose it. In the end the only reason Google doesn't just outright ban white men from applying for engineering jobs is it's illegal. And even then it seems like this doesn't always stop them!
    - 7y ago
kortilla 7y ago
Nope, allowing some candidates to retry more because of their genes or straight up skip a failed phone screen is lowering the bar for them. The entire hiring process from recruitment to offer is part of the hiring bar. Retries, easier judges, removing some earlier barriers, etc would all be obvious discrimination in any other process. You yourself admit that the process has false negatives. If those are in any way probabilistic (which is obvious that people get in after multiple tries), allowing minorities to try more frequently is lowering the bar for minorities. If you let someone throw extra darts at the dartboard to hit the bullseye, that doesn’t make them as good as the people that hit it in fewer attempts. > So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired. Good for you, but not everyone was so willfully ignorant when I worked there.

username90 7y ago

Right, there is a lot of talk about things but ultimately the strongest political side at Google are still the ones clamoring for meritocracy.

shadowgovt 7y ago
It's less "meritocracy vs. diversity" and more "meritocracy factors in diversity." They aren't opposed goals; an organization with a meritocracy that over-optimizes on too few metrics is fragile and collapses in a dynamic market.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Which organization has collapsed that focused only on technical skills?

thu2111 7y ago

I hate to break it to you, but that's not true. Yes, the company tells you that's how it works. But I was also a Google engineer, I did hundreds of interviews during a time when it was way less into diversity than it is today. And absolutely Google bent its policies to try and hire more women. Constantly. Some tricks I saw used: 1. Assigning the best/most reliable interviewers to women. Recruiters confirmed to me that they did this. 2. Allowing women who failed the phone screens to proceed to on-sites anyway. 3. Organising recruiting events which banned men, e.g. there was since early years Google CodeJam, a coding competition that was pretty openly used as a way to find candidates. But the men crushed the women, repeatedly. I think there was a female finalist once in 13 years. So they set up a second CodeJam with large cash prizes, but banned men from it. In recent times there was the recruiter who quit and claims he was told to not hire non-diverse candidates. I believe that. I was told about recruitment's diversity goals by recruiters themselves. But still, there was a lot of resistance to bending the hiring pipeline in more extreme ways. That culture carried over to Facebook. I've been told that at Facebook recruiters were incentivised with cash to hire more women, but they gave up pretty fast because stuffing the pipeline with weaker candidates didn't work: they got flushed out by the hiring committees. By the way you're blind to a much more important trick Google uses. Eng hiring was, during my time, at least somewhat well defended against diversity abuse. But firing was totally controlled by HR. And it is an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible for women to be fired, regardless of how low their performance is. Instead they get moved around between teams. Men, on the other hand, can be and are let go for merely not exceeding expectations. Obviously that's one way to get less male workforce, if you're patient!

geofft 7y ago
You're arguing against a point that wasn't being made. It is absolutely possible to try to hire more women and require them all to meet the hiring bar (as you yourself point out with your story about Facebook). 1. Assigning the most reliable interviewers to women ensures that women who do meet the bar don't get inaccurately rejected. 2. The hiring bar is enforced at the on-site, not at the phone screen. 3. Sourcing an all-women group from a hiring event and sending them through the normal interview process is ... sending them through the normal interview process. If you want to claim that Google is trying harder to hire qualified women than qualified men, sure, I don't think anyone disputed that. The dispute was whether Googlers ever think an unqualified person was hired to meet a diversity goal. (And how often does Google fire someone for discovering that their interview process emitted a false positive? Given the incredible cost of making that mistake, most hiring processes are tuned to err towards false negatives instead of false positives, and Google's intensive process should be particularly good at that. Unless you're claiming HR is firing qualified men to meet a quota - i.e., textbook wrongful termination at scale - a bias for never getting around to firing women can't have a noticeable effect.)
- thu2111 7y ago
  Do you really think Google doesn't let men go for low performance? I saw that happen many times. That absolutely has an effect. The hiring process really isn't anywhere close to being accurate enough that firings are irrelevant and of course, people's performance changes over time. There's no difference between "trying harder to hire a qualified woman" and sexual discrimination during hiring. Just invert it to see: imagine someone found a software company that said it was trying harder to hire men because it preferred them, and so it did things like only advertise its jobs in men's clubs, recruited from events where women were banned, and did things it knew would bias its own interview process against female candidates like assigning incompetent interviewers and then discarding their feedback because it wasn't good enough. Feminists would utterly lose it. In the end the only reason Google doesn't just outright ban white men from applying for engineering jobs is it's illegal. And even then it seems like this doesn't always stop them!
  - 7y ago

kortilla 7y ago

Nope, allowing some candidates to retry more because of their genes or straight up skip a failed phone screen is lowering the bar for them. The entire hiring process from recruitment to offer is part of the hiring bar. Retries, easier judges, removing some earlier barriers, etc would all be obvious discrimination in any other process. You yourself admit that the process has false negatives. If those are in any way probabilistic (which is obvious that people get in after multiple tries), allowing minorities to try more frequently is lowering the bar for minorities. If you let someone throw extra darts at the dartboard to hit the bullseye, that doesn’t make them as good as the people that hit it in fewer attempts. > So no, I never wonder why a coworker was hired. Good for you, but not everyone was so willfully ignorant when I worked there.