5 ms·

> Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles. https://

> Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wilberg-recruiter-hiring-reverse-discrimination-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

rubicon33 6y ago
What ever happened with that lawsuit?
KorematsuFred 6y ago
As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.
- thu2111 6y ago
  And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms: 1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities. 2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women. 3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women. 4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately. 5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men. 6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women". And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men. BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.
  - KorematsuFred 6y ago
    > But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Not my claim that Google is bias free. I am not denying what you have claimed, it is just that I have not come across such incidents and if you are a qualified person it is extremely unlikely that I will not judge you performance properly because of your gender, race or ethnicity. There is no doubt that Google has gone lala SJW route in last few years but then many of us put conscious efforts in fixing those problems.
  - christophilus 6y ago
    I’ve seen this, too, at a number of places I’ve worked. Pointing it out always gets you downvoted (or whatever the real life equivalent is).
    - Glide 6y ago
      Committing a Career Limiting Move?
    - alp10 6y ago
      Yep, or to state it in AnimalFarm terms: If cardinality(pigs + sheep) > cardinality(work horses), the truth will be downvoted. In software, the work horses need to be more proactive and not give up what is theirs.
  - Drew_ 6y ago
    Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.
    - lucaspm98 6y ago
      Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.
dmos62 6y ago
> Wilberg’s lawsuit targets Google and 25 unnamed Google employees who allegedly enforced discriminatory hiring rules, quoting a number of emails and other documents. It claims that for several quarters, Google would only hire people from historically underrepresented groups for technical positions. In one hiring round, the team was allegedly instructed to cancel all software engineering interviews with non-diverse applicants below a certain experience level, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.” California labor law prohibits refusing to hire employees based on characteristics like race or gender. Perception shaping is always unsavoury, but that's pretty dark.

rubicon33 6y ago

What ever happened with that lawsuit?

KorematsuFred 6y ago

As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.

thu2111 6y ago
And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms: 1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities. 2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women. 3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women. 4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately. 5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men. 6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women". And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men. BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.
- KorematsuFred 6y ago
  > But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it. Not my claim that Google is bias free. I am not denying what you have claimed, it is just that I have not come across such incidents and if you are a qualified person it is extremely unlikely that I will not judge you performance properly because of your gender, race or ethnicity. There is no doubt that Google has gone lala SJW route in last few years but then many of us put conscious efforts in fixing those problems.
- christophilus 6y ago
  I’ve seen this, too, at a number of places I’ve worked. Pointing it out always gets you downvoted (or whatever the real life equivalent is).
  - Glide 6y ago
    Committing a Career Limiting Move?
  - alp10 6y ago
    Yep, or to state it in AnimalFarm terms: If cardinality(pigs + sheep) > cardinality(work horses), the truth will be downvoted. In software, the work horses need to be more proactive and not give up what is theirs.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.
  - lucaspm98 6y ago
    Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.

dmos62 6y ago

> Wilberg’s lawsuit targets Google and 25 unnamed Google employees who allegedly enforced discriminatory hiring rules, quoting a number of emails and other documents. It claims that for several quarters, Google would only hire people from historically underrepresented groups for technical positions. In one hiring round, the team was allegedly instructed to cancel all software engineering interviews with non-diverse applicants below a certain experience level, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.” California labor law prohibits refusing to hire employees based on characteristics like race or gender. Perception shaping is always unsavoury, but that's pretty dark.