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I work at a FANG company and I can guarantee you that there are quotas and no one is willing to speak out about it. I was literally CC'ed on an email that said

I work at a FANG company and I can guarantee you that there are quotas and no one is willing to speak out about it. I was literally CC'ed on an email that said "[...] I want to remind everyone that the hiring season for 2021 is not complete and we are still missing our target for diversity [...]. For those who already reached their headcount for 2021 there will always be more budget for a candidate that brings more diversity to our workplace". So forget it, it's just a new name for discrimination.

tanotcare 6y ago
The rhymes with a few emails I've received. maybe we work for the same fang.
tylersmith 6y ago
Not get into the politics, but this seems like an interesting potential incentive misalignment where a team is incentivized to fill up their budget with non-diverse employees so they can try to hire even more (diverse) help with "overflow" budget.
908B64B197 6y ago
First time I heard about "minority quotas" I just didn't believe it. But then YouTube got sued for doing exactly that [0] Do quotas actually help minorities? To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. The others who knows? Maybe the recruiter was so close to hitting his incentive that he lowered the bar. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positions-excluded-white-and-asian-males-lawsuit-says-1519948013 https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. I mean, yeah, unless there is a wide-spread feeling that tech hiring is broken and nobody knows how to tell if anyone really is any good through the hiring process which is the feeling that almost every hiring, interviewing, test-taking focused post on HN elicits. Because I mean all the stuff on HN I read leads me to think we can't be sure about if someone is qualified for a job until they are actually in the job. My own personal experience is that people can even be technically qualified for a job and still not be qualified for all sorts of other things.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat. They are cargo-culted to death, since everyone wants to be like FANG but won't pay they do the one thing they can afford from their playbook and execute poorly on it. Truth is, from having conducted interviews, it's a real sink or swim situation where some folks won't be able to complete a simple wordcount implementation in 30+ minutes. A real whiteboard is a toy problem where you have to use an algorithm or a data structure, write a few test cases and some code on the board and explain why/how you did it, not some rote learning exercise. At the senior band they shouldn't even be used, if the candidate is coming from a reputable company. But at the college level what else are you going to interview applicants about? You know everyone has done an algorithm class.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      >It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat. I generally see take home tests getting the heat, because people are being expected to give up an extra 4-6 hours of their life to the job process without getting compensation. And maybe the person doing 4 hours gets beat out by the person doing 8, and the people with kids are screwed.
- nicoffeine 6y ago
  > Do quotas actually help minorities? It's disappointing to see this kind of comment in 2020. If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are. In my experience as a subcontractor for few extremely large corporations (including one of the "A"s), the largest roadblock was usually an incompetent VP. How'd they get there? Well, they had connections, friends or family or both. In SMB world, it's even more obvious. I've seen millions of dollars wasted on projects and POCs that existed only because one of these folks didn't "believe" the research and the vendor specs. And I've seen a room full of VPs all afraid to tell the boss that the product demo isn't going well because the product -- the very idea of it -- was garbage. So, worst case scenario, there are a few more incompetent people in corporations already brimming with bad hires and waste, and they come from different backgrounds. What's the problem?
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are. In tech, there's the pipeline issue too. You can't really double the percentage of senior engineers of a certain group overnight. You'd have to magically go back to the 90's and try to get more diverse folks to apply! Same way the class of 2021 they are hiring from now can't really suddenly change.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      Well why is that? Wasn’t everyone and there mother going into CS and IT around the dotcom bubble? Not sure why we even have a pipeline problem (which is real).
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    > If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. By this logic we should expect the NBA, NFL, NHL etc. to look like a random sample of the US population. If the source subpopulations differ by even small amounts on mean or variance those on the extreme tails of distributions will look very different from the general population. So the ranks of men who have ever run 100m in under ten seconds are basically all black and elite marathon runners are about half Kalenjin, an ethnic group of fewer than ten million.

tanotcare 6y ago

The rhymes with a few emails I've received. maybe we work for the same fang.

tylersmith 6y ago

Not get into the politics, but this seems like an interesting potential incentive misalignment where a team is incentivized to fill up their budget with non-diverse employees so they can try to hire even more (diverse) help with "overflow" budget.

908B64B197 6y ago

First time I heard about "minority quotas" I just didn't believe it. But then YouTube got sued for doing exactly that [0] Do quotas actually help minorities? To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. The others who knows? Maybe the recruiter was so close to hitting his incentive that he lowered the bar. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positions-excluded-white-and-asian-males-lawsuit-says-1519948013 https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. I mean, yeah, unless there is a wide-spread feeling that tech hiring is broken and nobody knows how to tell if anyone really is any good through the hiring process which is the feeling that almost every hiring, interviewing, test-taking focused post on HN elicits. Because I mean all the stuff on HN I read leads me to think we can't be sure about if someone is qualified for a job until they are actually in the job. My own personal experience is that people can even be technically qualified for a job and still not be qualified for all sorts of other things.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat. They are cargo-culted to death, since everyone wants to be like FANG but won't pay they do the one thing they can afford from their playbook and execute poorly on it. Truth is, from having conducted interviews, it's a real sink or swim situation where some folks won't be able to complete a simple wordcount implementation in 30+ minutes. A real whiteboard is a toy problem where you have to use an algorithm or a data structure, write a few test cases and some code on the board and explain why/how you did it, not some rote learning exercise. At the senior band they shouldn't even be used, if the candidate is coming from a reputable company. But at the college level what else are you going to interview applicants about? You know everyone has done an algorithm class.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    >It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat. I generally see take home tests getting the heat, because people are being expected to give up an extra 4-6 hours of their life to the job process without getting compensation. And maybe the person doing 4 hours gets beat out by the person doing 8, and the people with kids are screwed.
nicoffeine 6y ago
> Do quotas actually help minorities? It's disappointing to see this kind of comment in 2020. If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are. In my experience as a subcontractor for few extremely large corporations (including one of the "A"s), the largest roadblock was usually an incompetent VP. How'd they get there? Well, they had connections, friends or family or both. In SMB world, it's even more obvious. I've seen millions of dollars wasted on projects and POCs that existed only because one of these folks didn't "believe" the research and the vendor specs. And I've seen a room full of VPs all afraid to tell the boss that the product demo isn't going well because the product -- the very idea of it -- was garbage. So, worst case scenario, there are a few more incompetent people in corporations already brimming with bad hires and waste, and they come from different backgrounds. What's the problem?
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are. In tech, there's the pipeline issue too. You can't really double the percentage of senior engineers of a certain group overnight. You'd have to magically go back to the 90's and try to get more diverse folks to apply! Same way the class of 2021 they are hiring from now can't really suddenly change.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Well why is that? Wasn’t everyone and there mother going into CS and IT around the dotcom bubble? Not sure why we even have a pipeline problem (which is real).
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  > If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. By this logic we should expect the NBA, NFL, NHL etc. to look like a random sample of the US population. If the source subpopulations differ by even small amounts on mean or variance those on the extreme tails of distributions will look very different from the general population. So the ranks of men who have ever run 100m in under ten seconds are basically all black and elite marathon runners are about half Kalenjin, an ethnic group of fewer than ten million.