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You will get downvoted because HN reflects SV groupthink, but you are absolutely correct. This is a well-studied phenomenon analogous to the Peter principle, an

You will get downvoted because HN reflects SV groupthink, but you are absolutely correct. This is a well-studied phenomenon analogous to the Peter principle, and has been observed in workplaces (as you described) and schools (black students who get in to meet an arbitrary target struggle more and have a worse college experience). We are doing these people a disservice. Even in the most “socially forward thinking” companies like Google, this sentiment prevails. The loudest non-black advocates for black hiring are privately the owners of the strongest fences. But when its time to virtue-signal, they’re at the front of the line. Hire a black employee directly into their team in eng/sales? No thanks - but they’ll gladly advocate for the customer service, recruitment and “diversity officer” roles to go to a black individual. Direct result of the push to hire disproportionately many black people which has led to them having a worse experience at these jobs as the psyche of existing employees is they’re automatically a lower bar hire (very unfair to these people!). Good job big tech - you have once again turned a target into a measure and completely missed the point. Except now the people you supposedly tried to help are hurt the most. Look at Coinbase - the exec team is largely women and minorities, yet NYT takes every opportunity to point out the percent of black employees (with no context on the number in the hiring funnel and at target colleges) as if CB has an obligation to hit a certain number. Disclosure: I worked at Coinbase for a brief period. Ready for the downvotes, but look around at those in your team and within yourself, and ask yourself if there is anything untrue in what I said before hitting that button.

snypher 6y ago
Please don't bother replying to something you know will be flagged, as now we have no context for your comments.
- aparsons 6y ago
  When I replied, the thread was quite young. I thought that comment (vaguely mirroring the first paragraph of my comment iirc) was unpopular but certainly not offensive enough to be flagged. Or it is on HN?
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  You can turn on showdead, and if people are flagging simply because they love to censor, you can vouch the comments too.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    It looks like the censorship is HN-approved. Oh well.
sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
Sorry, could you clarify what precisely is a "well studied phenomenon" and maybe link some of the studies? With this sort of research you have to be extremely careful about what claims you assert it supports because there are often serious methodological issues. I also notice in your post that you use the phrase "virtue signal", which suggests a certain political view on your part, so I want to make sure I'm responding to exactly what you claim so we don't get confused by terminology or matters of degree.
- aparsons 6y ago
  I am on mobile, so can’t find an exhaustive list, but here are a few: https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/how-affirmative-action-colleges-hurts-minority-students https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/how-affirmative-a... (Relating to drop out rates) https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-... https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699572?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699572?seq=1 https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/Vol02x10UnintendedConsequences.pdf https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/document... https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai... I have worked in this industry - on and off - for 3 decades. This is an ugly phenomenon nobody wants to acknowledge. The mere suggestion that this is a funnel issue, rather than a racial bias issue, is met with vehement accusations of racism (if coming from an older man like me, even more so). I’d even go as far as to say SV has a real discrimination problem - and that is ageism. When supply and demand is considered, it is many times as blatant as the supposed race issue. Finally, I did use the term virtue signalling. It is fairly unambiguous. There are no political leanings to extrapolate from there, yet the subtle accusations put forward based on that is abundantly clear here. Once again - before dissecting my comment and projecting an image of me to attack/downvote, ask yourself if the way SV (likely your employer based on HN demographics)and outlets like NYT frame these issues is truly honest.
aparsons 6y ago
Since there seems to be some activity around this comment and I can no longer edit the parent comment, let me add a few more thoughts here. Diverse hiring (as in equal outcome hiring) does not materially benefit companies. I was on, or closely worked with teams that built early versions of modern virtual memory, Excel, Turbo Pascal, WebTV, and IIS, and they were largely white men, with a sprinkling of Asian men. Would these products be better engineering marvels with more racial and gender representation? Possibly, but not because of the existence of “women algorithms” or “black design patterns”. Human brains work similarly given similar inputs. There is some revenue to be regained in designing for edge case blind spots, but it is an overwhelming small fraction when you are working at the bleeding edge of an industry. You did not see these initiatives in tech at the time for the same reason you don’t see them in the space travel industry, or anti-aging research, or on the teams working on a COVID-19 vaccine (how ridiculous would that sound?). The industry was not mature enough, as it is now, for such overhead (distractions, to be less polite). There was important work to be done, and we didn’t care who you were as long as you could help. These were some of the most open, progressive, intelligent and honest teams I got to work with. Then why is it important? Because diverse hiring (as in equal-opportunity hiring) is __the right thing to do__. Talent can come from South America or South Chicago just as easily as Bangalore or Austin, TX. The next Donald Knuth or Jeffrey Dean should not be denied an opportunity because of their skin color or gender if they shone through. And in those teams, several of them shone through and we scrambled to bring them aboard. What is happening now is analogous to dredging the river bed, incurring the costs of that (which is possible because the industry is massively profitable and mature, with very little paradigm-shifting work left at these companies) to find what might be remotely shiny. We can then report our “progress” and pat ourselves on the back. Except, this breeds resentment from the rocks and diamonds not getting dredged, the aforementioned Peter Principle issue, and as I’ve observed, the general unease. You will not find a team at a company like Etsy that is as accepting and open as the teams I mentioned, because the sacred thing that pulls together smart people - the “bar” for lack of better term - may have been compromised in bringing in the latest new hire. If there is a shadow of doubt about that, even if this person truly is a diamond, they are done a disservice because of this dynamic at play. It is unfair, and in the long term, actually hurts these UR communities in this industry.
chaganated 6y ago
What can be quantified is then optimized. What can't be quantified is ignored or even denied. Chinese or Russian historians in the distant future, rustling through the bones of our fallen civilization, will disagree on many things. Marking the rise of the nerd as the beginning of the end won't be one of them.

snypher 6y ago

Please don't bother replying to something you know will be flagged, as now we have no context for your comments.

aparsons 6y ago
When I replied, the thread was quite young. I thought that comment (vaguely mirroring the first paragraph of my comment iirc) was unpopular but certainly not offensive enough to be flagged. Or it is on HN?
SamReidHughes 6y ago
You can turn on showdead, and if people are flagging simply because they love to censor, you can vouch the comments too.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  It looks like the censorship is HN-approved. Oh well.

sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago

Sorry, could you clarify what precisely is a "well studied phenomenon" and maybe link some of the studies? With this sort of research you have to be extremely careful about what claims you assert it supports because there are often serious methodological issues. I also notice in your post that you use the phrase "virtue signal", which suggests a certain political view on your part, so I want to make sure I'm responding to exactly what you claim so we don't get confused by terminology or matters of degree.

aparsons 6y ago
I am on mobile, so can’t find an exhaustive list, but here are a few: https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/how-affirmative-action-colleges-hurts-minority-students https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/how-affirmative-a... (Relating to drop out rates) https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of-affirmative-action https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-... https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699572?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699572?seq=1 https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/Vol02x10UnintendedConsequences.pdf https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/document... https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-painful-truth-about-affirmative-action/263122/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai... I have worked in this industry - on and off - for 3 decades. This is an ugly phenomenon nobody wants to acknowledge. The mere suggestion that this is a funnel issue, rather than a racial bias issue, is met with vehement accusations of racism (if coming from an older man like me, even more so). I’d even go as far as to say SV has a real discrimination problem - and that is ageism. When supply and demand is considered, it is many times as blatant as the supposed race issue. Finally, I did use the term virtue signalling. It is fairly unambiguous. There are no political leanings to extrapolate from there, yet the subtle accusations put forward based on that is abundantly clear here. Once again - before dissecting my comment and projecting an image of me to attack/downvote, ask yourself if the way SV (likely your employer based on HN demographics)and outlets like NYT frame these issues is truly honest.

aparsons 6y ago

Since there seems to be some activity around this comment and I can no longer edit the parent comment, let me add a few more thoughts here. Diverse hiring (as in equal outcome hiring) does not materially benefit companies. I was on, or closely worked with teams that built early versions of modern virtual memory, Excel, Turbo Pascal, WebTV, and IIS, and they were largely white men, with a sprinkling of Asian men. Would these products be better engineering marvels with more racial and gender representation? Possibly, but not because of the existence of “women algorithms” or “black design patterns”. Human brains work similarly given similar inputs. There is some revenue to be regained in designing for edge case blind spots, but it is an overwhelming small fraction when you are working at the bleeding edge of an industry. You did not see these initiatives in tech at the time for the same reason you don’t see them in the space travel industry, or anti-aging research, or on the teams working on a COVID-19 vaccine (how ridiculous would that sound?). The industry was not mature enough, as it is now, for such overhead (distractions, to be less polite). There was important work to be done, and we didn’t care who you were as long as you could help. These were some of the most open, progressive, intelligent and honest teams I got to work with. Then why is it important? Because diverse hiring (as in equal-opportunity hiring) is __the right thing to do__. Talent can come from South America or South Chicago just as easily as Bangalore or Austin, TX. The next Donald Knuth or Jeffrey Dean should not be denied an opportunity because of their skin color or gender if they shone through. And in those teams, several of them shone through and we scrambled to bring them aboard. What is happening now is analogous to dredging the river bed, incurring the costs of that (which is possible because the industry is massively profitable and mature, with very little paradigm-shifting work left at these companies) to find what might be remotely shiny. We can then report our “progress” and pat ourselves on the back. Except, this breeds resentment from the rocks and diamonds not getting dredged, the aforementioned Peter Principle issue, and as I’ve observed, the general unease. You will not find a team at a company like Etsy that is as accepting and open as the teams I mentioned, because the sacred thing that pulls together smart people - the “bar” for lack of better term - may have been compromised in bringing in the latest new hire. If there is a shadow of doubt about that, even if this person truly is a diamond, they are done a disservice because of this dynamic at play. It is unfair, and in the long term, actually hurts these UR communities in this industry.

chaganated 6y ago

What can be quantified is then optimized. What can't be quantified is ignored or even denied. Chinese or Russian historians in the distant future, rustling through the bones of our fallen civilization, will disagree on many things. Marking the rise of the nerd as the beginning of the end won't be one of them.