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I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single respon

I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They followed up with several phone calls encouraging me to attend. I didn't want to go because I felt like the only reason they wanted to talk to me was so they could add another number to their diversity report. My Dad convinced me to go. They had Native American speakers, food, performances and music. It felt so condescending. On day 2 they had hiring managers from dozens of departments. It was like speed dating. One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." It felt gross. One hiring manager handed me an offer letter when I sat down. She hadn't even spoken a word to me. She told me she had reviewed my resume and that was enough. WTF. I got several offers from that event. I turned them all down. I ended up getting a job at Microsoft. They didn't ask me about my race when I applied.

tonystubblebine 6y ago
The reaction you had resonated with me in that it's the feeling I most want to avoid giving someone else. I'm a white male hiring manager who is often incorporating explicit diversity/inclusion strategies into work. It's tricky--like tap dancing around all the ways that the work can go wrong. And this is one I overindex for. I never want someone to think they are a token. IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity & inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun culture, belief that it will make the company more money. I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the business by helping the business make better decisions, helps find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those things boil down to: it's good for business. This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an employee that you only care about their ability to help the business make money. But there's also something really unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the business cares about an employee's happiness and positive social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the employment in the first place, which is making money. I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less competition from other recruiters." That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true, especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage that allows you to take advantage of industry bias. Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much opportunity. It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we think you could out perform your past work by a lot."
- _marypoza_ 6y ago
  I would say the best way to make sure the diversity hires don't feel like being a token is by establishing a fair recruitment process. How? The more concrete the selection criteria better, so don't fall in the unconscious bias trap of assessing different candidates through different lens. Since it's good for business, inclusivity policies should be considered an investment and not an expense. The best way is involving the employees directly (are anonymous surveys that hard to pull of?) and ask them what they need. Giving you a concrete example: As a woman in tech, I've work in tons of places with pingue pongue tables and beer on the community fridge. That doesn't really appeal to me, since I prefer to leave work as soon as possible to work in my non-paid female duties. But I would be SO APPRECIATED that the female toilets had menstrual products available just like toilet paper. It would have a relevant impact in reducing my monthly expenses and would make me be a better professional because it's something that would stop being part of my day-to-day logistics. Every time I suggest this, I am told it's too expensive or the H.R. men don't know how to buy it. There is always a residual number of females on the teams, is that really a great expense? And I learn to code every language my company asks me too but the HR can't learn how to buy properly menstrual pads? Please just asks us!
- traverseda 6y ago
  >One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. I don't really understand this. Isn't any kind of race based discrimination going to potentially cause legal liability? At the end of the day you're advocating for a policy of race/gender based discrimination, and I don't really get why you'd think it wouldn't be opening yourself up to liability with programs like these? Have you actually talked to a lawyer about this? I've looked into in the the past, and while it seems to have a stronger case in Canada (where I live) I haven't really seen anything to suggest it's legal in the US unless you're a school. Admittedly you're probably not going to be the case the brings it tumbling down, but it still seems like explicitly basing your hiring decisions on race open you up to a whole lot of potential liability.
  - tonystubblebine 6y ago
    I don’t know anything about IBMs situation. But for me, a much smaller company, there’s a difference between saying you will only hire a Native American and saying you have intentionally chosen to put up a hiring booth at a Native American conference. In practice they have similar outcomes but the first is illegal, as you say, and the second isn’t. Every hiring pipeline will have demographic biases in it. And there is no law saying you have to investigate every single pipeline. But in practice how you choose your pipelines plays a big role in the demographics of your hires. I think too that this is not discrimination because it is merit based. I’m saying that because of other people’s discrimination you could probably operate on a valid business ROI hypothesis that choosing more diverse pipelines is a better use of a hiring managers time and money.
SavantIdiot 6y ago
This is an example of a non-diverse company that doesn't understand diversity trying to implement some kind of diversity. I recall these kinds of ham-fisted attempts everywhere in the late 90's. Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity. I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity during a co-op tour and had posters of Africa all over the room. But why would I expect someone who just learned the term to actually grok it? Bummer you go the offensive end of that. EDIT: From the article "It was when I first realized that tech leaders have no idea what it is to manage work dynamics through a gendered lens." When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion.
- deleted 6y ago
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- CodeMage 6y ago
  > When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1352785720822394885 https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572082239488...
  - lovegoblin 6y ago
    There's always a relevant xkcd, right? https://xkcd.com/385/ https://xkcd.com/385/
  - curryst 6y ago
    I think part of that is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM/Cisco/etc". You're somewhat more insulated from accusations of cringe or racism because you can't accuse someone of those things for how they view their own culture. It's a touchy area, nobody wants to be in the news because their recruiting event turned racist. Reactions are harsh, I don't think "We did research and tried to put on a tastefully themed event, but failed to consider this particular viewpoint" is going to get you out of the news. I also always took the "ambassador" to be an external facing thing. They speak for their culture at that company; the places I've seen it I was never given the impression that they were meant to be an ambassador for their entire culture. Maybe I was misreading it, though.
worker767424 6y ago
I wonder if anything will ever happen with reverse discriminatory hiring practices like this. They're all seem so barely legal, and if even one in ten people in HR disagree with them, there could be a #metoo-like flood of issues once a high-profile case goes a little too far.
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Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. There are more and more people who have had similar experiences that are speaking out about it and how condescended to it made them feel. It's good you were able to find an employer with whom you feel valued for your contributions and accomplishments. Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable? This is not something that is stealthly flying under the radar, it's pretty much in the open and celebrated. What moral ground will anyone have to stand on should the pendulum swing the other way, which it always eventually does? Instead of attempting to create equality, we've instead continued playing the same old game but with different winners selected. How long will the current chosen winners continue to be the winner? And when things change to other selected winners, how will anyone be able to complain when they supported the concept of selecting winners as long as those selected were the ones they favored?
- higerordermap 6y ago
  Until the "ruling class" is technical and not there by some politik and bullshitting all the way up, this is bound to happen.
hinkley 6y ago
Probably you dodged a bullet. It's always seemed to me that people are aggressively attempting to hire for some criteria (even position) because they're either having trouble getting people on board, or holding onto them. There's something 'wrong' with them, for some definition of wrong. Either they're looking in the wrong place, they're giving off a bad vibe that scares people off, or people who have that quality they're looking for are leaving at a higher rate than everyone else. Why is this team trying so hard to hire team leads? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring? Why doesn't this team have any women? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring? My guess is you would find out pretty quick why there is nobody quite like you at those companies, and soon they'll be fishing for your replacements.
- ActorNightly 6y ago
  I would argue that the metaphorical "getting your foot in the door" is worth it above everything else.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    But that could be true of the people in front of you too. This place is worth working at to get some hours on your resume, but it's not worth staying at beyond that. Within the wider world of employment, this is not an uncommon sentiment, but within software you don't hear so many people talking like this.
f154hfds 6y ago
'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.
- vlod 6y ago
  Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang=en https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang... This is the first time I've heard of this push-back. I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?
  - kevinmgranger 6y ago
    Not to advocate for either approach, but surely MLK was describing an end goal, not a means for getting there, no?
    - vlod 6y ago
      It's probably next to impossible to imagine an end goal. There will always be 'crazies'. I assume that most people would like to be treated by their characters. If everyone just started doing that, wouldn't the world be a better place? That's my take on MLK. Maybe it's naive.
      - lostcolony 6y ago
        "If everyone just started doing that" - that's the naive part. Everyone isn't. What if you do it, but others don't? Then you're not directly responsible for the issues, sure, but you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. You may not be part of the problem, but you're benefiting from the problem, and are not part of the solution.
tzs 6y ago
> They had Native American speakers, food, performances and music. It felt so condescending. How does that even work? Even if we restrict "Native American" to groups that were native to what later became the United States, that's still a whole lot of different cultures across a vast range of ecosystems. They had different foods and different kinds of music. How could IBM pick which Native American culture's food and music to have? Wouldn't any such choice be essentially foreign food and music to people from other Native American cultures?
Fellshard 6y ago
Turns out Sowell was always right about the condescension angle.
bedhead 6y ago
While I'm your everyday white guy, I've never understood why people among minority groups would accept this completely over-the-top pandering. It's a form of shaming and it's dehumanizing. Who wants this?
- austhrow743 6y ago
  You serious? I’d take the “shame and dehumanisation” of being hired for my innate attributes rather than skill for a big tech company salary for sure. Wouldn’t even have to think about it. Hell, I’m mostly learning software dev because it seems like the most straight forward to way to turn my above average intelligence in to money. I’d love to cut out the middle man and just receive a high iq allowance.
- launderthis 6y ago
  im gonna be racists here but very vague for you to make sense of it and make it rational but not racists... here it goes white men in power want this to control all others below them. Its a divide and conquer strategy.
- deleted 6y ago
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- creato 6y ago
  I don't think anyone does, but companies are absolutely desperate to meet the demands of (a subset of) society regarding diversity. That desperation manifests in funny ways.
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  Doesn't it have an obvious answer? The people who accept this are the ones for whom this is the best option. Upside: money. Downside: offensive pandering. That's often better than being unemployed. If that's true, then it's not just an offensive strategy, it's also ineffective for the business employing it. It's a way to select the lowest performing of a target group.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  They're just putting up with stupid crap for pay. Plenty of people do that. After you've got a couple jobs on your resume nobody knows or cares you were the diversity hire at your first one. Yeah the mere presence of diversity hires makes your accomplishments worth slightly less but it's still better for you to take advantage of it. See also: prisoner's dilemma.
munificent 6y ago
All of this sounds horribly cringe-inducing and I don't fault you at all for walking away from IBM. At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkward. Maybe they hire a couple more. Over time, the organization builds enough to overcome its own internal systemic bias and does have a strong local representative culture of Native American employees. But I don't see how an organization gets to that point without it being sort of weird and cringy at first. Of course, you are under no personal obligation to be the one to take those first steps simply because you happen to be a member of that group. But I have to wonder, if we're going to criticize an organization for trying to correct their biases this way... what other process would we suggest?
- ipaddr 6y ago
  Just hire based on skill / experience and don't not hire someone because they are a minority. Basic fair hiring goes a long way. If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places. To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.
  - kvetching 6y ago
    You clearly don't understand Equity.
  - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
    Oh, I think initial guidelines had that. And then it was all tramped on by some insane incentive like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a particular person actually gets to hire. Or a stack ranking based on the same. All it takes is just one perverse component in the mix.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      > it was all tramped on by some insane incentive like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a particular person actually gets to hire my company has done this and while it's not illegal to provide the incentives, I don't understand how they can expect it not to result in illegal hiring behavior (discrimination based on protected class) by those optimizing for those incentives.
coldtea 6y ago
>One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." It felt gross. While "diversity via token hires", and "faux-diversity celebrations with folklore food, music, etc" are fake-ass and crinzy, I don't see the manager's question as gross. It's a legitimate question a human being can make to another. We're not just individual snowflakes, we're also people with certain traits and members of certain cultures with certain histories. It makes sense for someone to ask us about those aspects of our life. Of course, perhaps the way he did it was patronizing or fake, or whatever. But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such...
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  > But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such... Really? Consider it this way, by substituting x for something that fits for you personally: What was it like growing up x? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." How might you feel by the end of the flight?
  - f154hfds 6y ago
    Like my neighbor is a curious person (perhaps more chatty than I would like)? Between acquaintances the above would be compassionate conversation. Of course in the wrong context many innocuous questions can come off as patronizing, and an employer should ask work-related questions over outside culture questions naturally. However, the plane-neighbor conversation doesn't seem belittling at face value.
    - wombatmobile 6y ago
      What quality did you use for x?
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >What was it like growing up x? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." I don't see absolutely any problem with that. In fact it's something we talk about frequently in casual discussions. Sure beats BS casual talk that means nothing. It also gives you the opportunity to give the other person an idea about x (e.g. my ethnicity). Perhaps it's about different ways societies see casual talk?
vmception 6y ago
I have multiple San Francisco and Bay Area friends that told me similar stories during a time period that coincides with AfroTech in recent years. Completely contrived, but personalized, introductory events. The difference is that they eventually took the job and have no issue performing on the job or have any stranger than usual corporate experiences. (They experienced the same super long interviewing and matchmaking process plaguing the rest of the industry, and the contrived intros were just the silly responses to how to deal with the recruiting pipeline). These were not right out of college though, and they would have likely gotten responses within 24 hours from the same companies anyway.
Macha 6y ago
Have had a former female coworker report a similar experience with IBM more recently than yours, pretty much search and replace "native american" with "female engineer". It was her first career out of college, and she just was not assigned very much duties in her actual team, and her management were far more interested in her DEI work than her engineering work. After a year of going "well maybe they just think I'm too junior for interesting work", she left for the company where we worked together.
- malandrew 6y ago
  If you have a developer you want to keep at all costs, I can imagine it making sense to some people to make that developer's life as easy as possible, including lowering expectations so there is no chance of attrition due to low performance.
bArray 6y ago
I've seen this before with hiring for women. Ending up as a 'diversity hire' can be absolutely awful, especially if you are really out of your depth. Even if you aren't a diversity hire, the fact that it happens a lot can sew that seed in your mind. I think you mostly have two scenarios: 1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. I suspect this is what most people believe is happening. 2. An employer has zero/little bias in their hiring practices, but the people most suitable for the job happen to not come from some minority (due to any number of reasons or issues). They then turn down the most suitable candidate to hire a less suitable minority to make an excel sheet somewhere look right. I suspect this happens all of the time. A real life scenario is a police department in the UK who were slammed by management for having only one black officer in their local unit. When they went away and crunched the numbers, they found that the one black officer they had actually over-represented the percentage of black people in the local community. As I've said many times before, we really need to make a decision about equal opportunity vs equal outcome. You can't have both. Unequal outcome is _not_ direct evidence for unequal opportunity. I think currently society pushes towards equal outcome under some delusion that eventually they will have both equal opportunity and outcome.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  >An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. Employers never actually discriminate on anything anymore. Instead, they let the recruitment firms do all that unpleasantness for them.
  - bArray 6y ago
    I understand this is meant as a joke - but for sure it's a way of limiting your exposure on being accused of unfair hiring practices.
- sophacles 6y ago
  Thank you, I've been looking for a word to describe myself - turns out its "delusional". I thought we were using the comparison of societal demographics to company demographics to measure how true the "equal opportunity" statement was. You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. Having looked at those numbers and found them to show bias, I delusionally thought that maybe we had looked at causes and effects, and found feedback loops like are present in so many complex systems. Get this though - in the grandeur of my delusion, I thought that studies of these feedback loops we had found: * people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves * people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo * complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally And that these hiring practices were part of a bigger attempt to use the third bullet to address the other two. But what do I know, I'm just a delusional fool who gets paid to work on complex systems. I should probably go resign. Anyone reading this - likely another person who works on complex systems - I encourage you to not apply your systems thinking to systems, you might end up delusional too!
deleted 6y ago
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jollofricepeas 6y ago
Have you ever experienced life on a res? If not are you on the Dawes? Not to fully doubt you but your entire story seems highly unlikely and politically convenient. Considering the genocide of Native Americans in America, the lack of reparations and the amount of US government monies paid to IBM, native peoples should be rolled to the front of the line YET still hired solely based on their merit. Rich executives’ kids are rolled to the front of the line for internships, entry level positions and college admissions. Making sure that natives are considered is the least we can do in making the world more just.
LouisSayers 6y ago
This type of thing is exactly what puts me off companies. When I ask what the most challenging problems company’s are facing and they mention PC stuff, then I know it’s not a place for me. I’m also mixed race, part Maori and I had a guy in an interview tell me that “white guys like us don’t add diversity to the company”. These social justice warriors can go fuck themselves.
smokey_the_bear 6y ago
Fwiw, I attended a nearly identical recruiting event at Microsoft for women and minorities.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
You don't want to work for IBM anyway, they burn new-grads like you to a cinder then dump you in a third world country at local salary or HR you out the door. Not to mention they are pretty much a has-been company at this point anyway. I can't remember the last time I came across any of their products in the field. They have been in decline ever since Lou Gerstner retired and they were well past their peak before he came along. You were right though that they were trying to check some boxes on a diversity report. IBM trots out those special events at trials to try and paint a favorable picture of their hiring practices - and if that doesn't work they just don't pay the judgements.
cloudedcordial 6y ago
IBM was so behind the times not only on technology. I'm glad that you found a place without any gimmicks. I'm in Canada. In the job applications, we don't even have a section to specify ethnicity. When I applied for American companies, I felt a slight cringe when I saw the optional form asking me for my ethnicity, sexual orientation or veteran status for statistical purposes.
refurb 6y ago
Another anecdote, but back in in the mid-2000's a VP at my Fortune 50 company (not tech) verbatim said "If you know any women or African Americans looking for a job let us know and we'll find a job for them". I get the intent, but it seems so incredibly forced and to your point, condescending for someone who busted their ass to get where they are in their career.
nonbirithm 6y ago
I was a diversity hire at Microsoft. The difference was that it wasn't based on race. Eligibility was decided by a mental health diagnosis, and successful applicants also received specific coaching that is better tailored to the way they think. Not having those things would have made work far less bearable than it was, as it had been for me in the past. And while I do believe that Microsoft wants to hire people from diverse backgrounds, I personally found that the workplace support was a legitimate material benefit to me. I did not feel like I was forgotten about just because I now contributed to some organizational diversity makeup. Parts of me that I consider my "identity" change the way I experience the world in significant ways, from the perspective of mentality and the senses. I continued to receive assistance for those things provided by the company, for years, and as a result was more or less successful at living an adult working life. If hiring candidates are preferred because they have a certain background, in a lot of cases it feels like it's not for a reason that makes sense except to reach a quota, but in my experience there are exceptions. Or programs that feel like exceptions, at least.
benmw333 6y ago
This is funny/sad - mostly because this is the complete opposite of what is parroted at universities.
joshxyz 6y ago
Lmfao that fucking sucks when the initial thing they ask for you to bring on the table is race or gender diversity - something born with you, out of your control, and didnt put any effort into

tonystubblebine 6y ago

The reaction you had resonated with me in that it's the feeling I most want to avoid giving someone else. I'm a white male hiring manager who is often incorporating explicit diversity/inclusion strategies into work. It's tricky--like tap dancing around all the ways that the work can go wrong. And this is one I overindex for. I never want someone to think they are a token. IMO, there are five main motivations for having a diversity & inclusion strategy. One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. One is PR so that general public doesn't yell at you. The other three are a belief that it's the right thing to do, belief that it creates a more interesting or fun culture, belief that it will make the company more money. I'm basically subscribed to all five. But I almost always lead with just the last one: diversity & inclusion helps the business by helping the business make better decisions, helps find higher quality candidates, helps avoid product/marketing blindspots that limit the reach of a product. All of those things boil down to: it's good for business. This is the tap dancing. It's almost uncouth to tell an employee that you only care about their ability to help the business make money. But there's also something really unhealthy about not mentioning it at all. Of course, the business cares about an employee's happiness and positive social impact, but those aren't the foundation of the relationship. The foundation is the thing that allows the employment in the first place, which is making money. I like leading with that good-for-business foundation because then if, say, I went out recruiting Native Americans, they can see a visible concrete motivation beyond tokenism. It's a relatively straightforward business hypothesis to think: "I bet this group of people doesn't see a lot of recruiters so if I get good at recruiting from that group then I'll be facing less competition from other recruiters." That's a hypothesis that I've found to generally be true, especially when paired with at least a mediocre level of inclusivity after you make a hire. It's like a sad arbitrage that allows you to take advantage of industry bias. Statistically, hiring from an underrepresented group means fewer counter offers, and if you follow up by creating good opportunity for growth, a lot of people will way out perform their peers simply because other jobs had never given them much opportunity. It's all about how do you talk about these issues which are real, and which are impossible for me to viscerally understand with my own limited & privileged life experience, in a way that doesn't sound like charity and instead sounds like raising the bar. "I know your past resume sucks, but you're here because we think you could out perform your past work by a lot."

_marypoza_ 6y ago
I would say the best way to make sure the diversity hires don't feel like being a token is by establishing a fair recruitment process. How? The more concrete the selection criteria better, so don't fall in the unconscious bias trap of assessing different candidates through different lens. Since it's good for business, inclusivity policies should be considered an investment and not an expense. The best way is involving the employees directly (are anonymous surveys that hard to pull of?) and ask them what they need. Giving you a concrete example: As a woman in tech, I've work in tons of places with pingue pongue tables and beer on the community fridge. That doesn't really appeal to me, since I prefer to leave work as soon as possible to work in my non-paid female duties. But I would be SO APPRECIATED that the female toilets had menstrual products available just like toilet paper. It would have a relevant impact in reducing my monthly expenses and would make me be a better professional because it's something that would stop being part of my day-to-day logistics. Every time I suggest this, I am told it's too expensive or the H.R. men don't know how to buy it. There is always a residual number of females on the teams, is that really a great expense? And I learn to code every language my company asks me too but the HR can't learn how to buy properly menstrual pads? Please just asks us!
traverseda 6y ago
>One is legal, to avoid breaking a law or facing a lawsuit. I don't really understand this. Isn't any kind of race based discrimination going to potentially cause legal liability? At the end of the day you're advocating for a policy of race/gender based discrimination, and I don't really get why you'd think it wouldn't be opening yourself up to liability with programs like these? Have you actually talked to a lawyer about this? I've looked into in the the past, and while it seems to have a stronger case in Canada (where I live) I haven't really seen anything to suggest it's legal in the US unless you're a school. Admittedly you're probably not going to be the case the brings it tumbling down, but it still seems like explicitly basing your hiring decisions on race open you up to a whole lot of potential liability.
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  I don’t know anything about IBMs situation. But for me, a much smaller company, there’s a difference between saying you will only hire a Native American and saying you have intentionally chosen to put up a hiring booth at a Native American conference. In practice they have similar outcomes but the first is illegal, as you say, and the second isn’t. Every hiring pipeline will have demographic biases in it. And there is no law saying you have to investigate every single pipeline. But in practice how you choose your pipelines plays a big role in the demographics of your hires. I think too that this is not discrimination because it is merit based. I’m saying that because of other people’s discrimination you could probably operate on a valid business ROI hypothesis that choosing more diverse pipelines is a better use of a hiring managers time and money.

SavantIdiot 6y ago

This is an example of a non-diverse company that doesn't understand diversity trying to implement some kind of diversity. I recall these kinds of ham-fisted attempts everywhere in the late 90's. Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity. I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity during a co-op tour and had posters of Africa all over the room. But why would I expect someone who just learned the term to actually grok it? Bummer you go the offensive end of that. EDIT: From the article "It was when I first realized that tech leaders have no idea what it is to manage work dynamics through a gendered lens." When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. People don't get this: "But X minority said it was OK..." No, it takes literal diversity of opinion.

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CodeMage 6y ago
> When minorities are made "ambassadors" as though they suddenly speak for EVERYONE in their minority, it is awful, and wrong. I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1352785720822394885 https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572082239488...
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  There's always a relevant xkcd, right? https://xkcd.com/385/ https://xkcd.com/385/
- curryst 6y ago
  I think part of that is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM/Cisco/etc". You're somewhat more insulated from accusations of cringe or racism because you can't accuse someone of those things for how they view their own culture. It's a touchy area, nobody wants to be in the news because their recruiting event turned racist. Reactions are harsh, I don't think "We did research and tried to put on a tastefully themed event, but failed to consider this particular viewpoint" is going to get you out of the news. I also always took the "ambassador" to be an external facing thing. They speak for their culture at that company; the places I've seen it I was never given the impression that they were meant to be an ambassador for their entire culture. Maybe I was misreading it, though.

worker767424 6y ago

I wonder if anything will ever happen with reverse discriminatory hiring practices like this. They're all seem so barely legal, and if even one in ten people in HR disagree with them, there could be a #metoo-like flood of issues once a high-profile case goes a little too far.

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Mountain_Skies 6y ago

Thank you for sharing your experience. There are more and more people who have had similar experiences that are speaking out about it and how condescended to it made them feel. It's good you were able to find an employer with whom you feel valued for your contributions and accomplishments. Anyone want to explain why this discrimination is both legal and socially acceptable? This is not something that is stealthly flying under the radar, it's pretty much in the open and celebrated. What moral ground will anyone have to stand on should the pendulum swing the other way, which it always eventually does? Instead of attempting to create equality, we've instead continued playing the same old game but with different winners selected. How long will the current chosen winners continue to be the winner? And when things change to other selected winners, how will anyone be able to complain when they supported the concept of selecting winners as long as those selected were the ones they favored?

higerordermap 6y ago
Until the "ruling class" is technical and not there by some politik and bullshitting all the way up, this is bound to happen.

hinkley 6y ago

Probably you dodged a bullet. It's always seemed to me that people are aggressively attempting to hire for some criteria (even position) because they're either having trouble getting people on board, or holding onto them. There's something 'wrong' with them, for some definition of wrong. Either they're looking in the wrong place, they're giving off a bad vibe that scares people off, or people who have that quality they're looking for are leaving at a higher rate than everyone else. Why is this team trying so hard to hire team leads? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring? Why doesn't this team have any women? Can't find any in house? Keep chewing them up? Or just incompetent hiring? My guess is you would find out pretty quick why there is nobody quite like you at those companies, and soon they'll be fishing for your replacements.

ActorNightly 6y ago
I would argue that the metaphorical "getting your foot in the door" is worth it above everything else.
- hinkley 6y ago
  But that could be true of the people in front of you too. This place is worth working at to get some hours on your resume, but it's not worth staying at beyond that. Within the wider world of employment, this is not an uncommon sentiment, but within software you don't hear so many people talking like this.

f154hfds 6y ago

'The Case For Color Blindness' by Coleman Hughes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_hRr5J9UUc I was sort of raised to believe 'Color blindness' was the right approach to take. It wasn't until the last couple years that I realized there was significant push back to the philosophy.

vlod 6y ago
Here's Coleman Hughes in an abbreviated version: https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang=en https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1305959575930142723?lang... This is the first time I've heard of this push-back. I always thought that the words of Martin Luther King: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." was a good approach?
- kevinmgranger 6y ago
  Not to advocate for either approach, but surely MLK was describing an end goal, not a means for getting there, no?
  - vlod 6y ago
    It's probably next to impossible to imagine an end goal. There will always be 'crazies'. I assume that most people would like to be treated by their characters. If everyone just started doing that, wouldn't the world be a better place? That's my take on MLK. Maybe it's naive.
    - lostcolony 6y ago
      "If everyone just started doing that" - that's the naive part. Everyone isn't. What if you do it, but others don't? Then you're not directly responsible for the issues, sure, but you also aren't helping address any issues others are facing, and may in fact be benefiting from the biased actions those others are performing. You may not be part of the problem, but you're benefiting from the problem, and are not part of the solution.

tzs 6y ago

> They had Native American speakers, food, performances and music. It felt so condescending. How does that even work? Even if we restrict "Native American" to groups that were native to what later became the United States, that's still a whole lot of different cultures across a vast range of ecosystems. They had different foods and different kinds of music. How could IBM pick which Native American culture's food and music to have? Wouldn't any such choice be essentially foreign food and music to people from other Native American cultures?

Fellshard 6y ago

Turns out Sowell was always right about the condescension angle.

bedhead 6y ago

While I'm your everyday white guy, I've never understood why people among minority groups would accept this completely over-the-top pandering. It's a form of shaming and it's dehumanizing. Who wants this?

austhrow743 6y ago
You serious? I’d take the “shame and dehumanisation” of being hired for my innate attributes rather than skill for a big tech company salary for sure. Wouldn’t even have to think about it. Hell, I’m mostly learning software dev because it seems like the most straight forward to way to turn my above average intelligence in to money. I’d love to cut out the middle man and just receive a high iq allowance.
launderthis 6y ago
im gonna be racists here but very vague for you to make sense of it and make it rational but not racists... here it goes white men in power want this to control all others below them. Its a divide and conquer strategy.
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creato 6y ago
I don't think anyone does, but companies are absolutely desperate to meet the demands of (a subset of) society regarding diversity. That desperation manifests in funny ways.
tonystubblebine 6y ago
Doesn't it have an obvious answer? The people who accept this are the ones for whom this is the best option. Upside: money. Downside: offensive pandering. That's often better than being unemployed. If that's true, then it's not just an offensive strategy, it's also ineffective for the business employing it. It's a way to select the lowest performing of a target group.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
They're just putting up with stupid crap for pay. Plenty of people do that. After you've got a couple jobs on your resume nobody knows or cares you were the diversity hire at your first one. Yeah the mere presence of diversity hires makes your accomplishments worth slightly less but it's still better for you to take advantage of it. See also: prisoner's dilemma.

munificent 6y ago

All of this sounds horribly cringe-inducing and I don't fault you at all for walking away from IBM. At the same time, I can't help but look at this from an iterated organizational perspective. Let's say you had taken the offer at IBM. Next year, IBM does the recruiting event. But this time they have a Native American employee, you, that they can talk to about how to reach out to that group. So it's a little less awkward. Maybe they hire a couple more. Over time, the organization builds enough to overcome its own internal systemic bias and does have a strong local representative culture of Native American employees. But I don't see how an organization gets to that point without it being sort of weird and cringy at first. Of course, you are under no personal obligation to be the one to take those first steps simply because you happen to be a member of that group. But I have to wonder, if we're going to criticize an organization for trying to correct their biases this way... what other process would we suggest?

ipaddr 6y ago
Just hire based on skill / experience and don't not hire someone because they are a minority. Basic fair hiring goes a long way. If you want more diverse candidates advertise in more diverse places. To go through some cringe-inducing ordeal is not helpful. People want to be judged based on their skills not skin / gender.
- kvetching 6y ago
  You clearly don't understand Equity.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  Oh, I think initial guidelines had that. And then it was all tramped on by some insane incentive like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a particular person actually gets to hire. Or a stack ranking based on the same. All it takes is just one perverse component in the mix.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    > it was all tramped on by some insane incentive like a bonus being dependent on how many "diverse" people a particular person actually gets to hire my company has done this and while it's not illegal to provide the incentives, I don't understand how they can expect it not to result in illegal hiring behavior (discrimination based on protected class) by those optimizing for those incentives.

coldtea 6y ago

>One manager asked me "What was it like growing up Native American? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." It felt gross. While "diversity via token hires", and "faux-diversity celebrations with folklore food, music, etc" are fake-ass and crinzy, I don't see the manager's question as gross. It's a legitimate question a human being can make to another. We're not just individual snowflakes, we're also people with certain traits and members of certain cultures with certain histories. It makes sense for someone to ask us about those aspects of our life. Of course, perhaps the way he did it was patronizing or fake, or whatever. But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such...

wombatmobile 6y ago
> But really, it's a question one might legitimately ask another they met at a bar or an airplane, or some such... Really? Consider it this way, by substituting x for something that fits for you personally: What was it like growing up x? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." How might you feel by the end of the flight?
- f154hfds 6y ago
  Like my neighbor is a curious person (perhaps more chatty than I would like)? Between acquaintances the above would be compassionate conversation. Of course in the wrong context many innocuous questions can come off as patronizing, and an employer should ask work-related questions over outside culture questions naturally. However, the plane-neighbor conversation doesn't seem belittling at face value.
  - wombatmobile 6y ago
    What quality did you use for x?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >What was it like growing up x? Was it hard? Tell me about how hard it was for you." I don't see absolutely any problem with that. In fact it's something we talk about frequently in casual discussions. Sure beats BS casual talk that means nothing. It also gives you the opportunity to give the other person an idea about x (e.g. my ethnicity). Perhaps it's about different ways societies see casual talk?

vmception 6y ago

I have multiple San Francisco and Bay Area friends that told me similar stories during a time period that coincides with AfroTech in recent years. Completely contrived, but personalized, introductory events. The difference is that they eventually took the job and have no issue performing on the job or have any stranger than usual corporate experiences. (They experienced the same super long interviewing and matchmaking process plaguing the rest of the industry, and the contrived intros were just the silly responses to how to deal with the recruiting pipeline). These were not right out of college though, and they would have likely gotten responses within 24 hours from the same companies anyway.

Macha 6y ago

Have had a former female coworker report a similar experience with IBM more recently than yours, pretty much search and replace "native american" with "female engineer". It was her first career out of college, and she just was not assigned very much duties in her actual team, and her management were far more interested in her DEI work than her engineering work. After a year of going "well maybe they just think I'm too junior for interesting work", she left for the company where we worked together.

malandrew 6y ago
If you have a developer you want to keep at all costs, I can imagine it making sense to some people to make that developer's life as easy as possible, including lowering expectations so there is no chance of attrition due to low performance.

bArray 6y ago

I've seen this before with hiring for women. Ending up as a 'diversity hire' can be absolutely awful, especially if you are really out of your depth. Even if you aren't a diversity hire, the fact that it happens a lot can sew that seed in your mind. I think you mostly have two scenarios: 1. An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. I suspect this is what most people believe is happening. 2. An employer has zero/little bias in their hiring practices, but the people most suitable for the job happen to not come from some minority (due to any number of reasons or issues). They then turn down the most suitable candidate to hire a less suitable minority to make an excel sheet somewhere look right. I suspect this happens all of the time. A real life scenario is a police department in the UK who were slammed by management for having only one black officer in their local unit. When they went away and crunched the numbers, they found that the one black officer they had actually over-represented the percentage of black people in the local community. As I've said many times before, we really need to make a decision about equal opportunity vs equal outcome. You can't have both. Unequal outcome is _not_ direct evidence for unequal opportunity. I think currently society pushes towards equal outcome under some delusion that eventually they will have both equal opportunity and outcome.

jimbob45 6y ago
>An employer has some/much systematic bias in their hiring process and they use this 'positive' bias hiring practice to negate it. Employers never actually discriminate on anything anymore. Instead, they let the recruitment firms do all that unpleasantness for them.
- bArray 6y ago
  I understand this is meant as a joke - but for sure it's a way of limiting your exposure on being accused of unfair hiring practices.
sophacles 6y ago
Thank you, I've been looking for a word to describe myself - turns out its "delusional". I thought we were using the comparison of societal demographics to company demographics to measure how true the "equal opportunity" statement was. You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. Having looked at those numbers and found them to show bias, I delusionally thought that maybe we had looked at causes and effects, and found feedback loops like are present in so many complex systems. Get this though - in the grandeur of my delusion, I thought that studies of these feedback loops we had found: * people who see others in the same category as them doing a thing, will be more likely to do the thing themselves * people who exist in a status quo will tend to make decisions preserving the status quo * complex feedback systems sometimes need sub-optimal input to eventually converge optimally And that these hiring practices were part of a bigger attempt to use the third bullet to address the other two. But what do I know, I'm just a delusional fool who gets paid to work on complex systems. I should probably go resign. Anyone reading this - likely another person who works on complex systems - I encourage you to not apply your systems thinking to systems, you might end up delusional too!

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jollofricepeas 6y ago

Have you ever experienced life on a res? If not are you on the Dawes? Not to fully doubt you but your entire story seems highly unlikely and politically convenient. Considering the genocide of Native Americans in America, the lack of reparations and the amount of US government monies paid to IBM, native peoples should be rolled to the front of the line YET still hired solely based on their merit. Rich executives’ kids are rolled to the front of the line for internships, entry level positions and college admissions. Making sure that natives are considered is the least we can do in making the world more just.

LouisSayers 6y ago

This type of thing is exactly what puts me off companies. When I ask what the most challenging problems company’s are facing and they mention PC stuff, then I know it’s not a place for me. I’m also mixed race, part Maori and I had a guy in an interview tell me that “white guys like us don’t add diversity to the company”. These social justice warriors can go fuck themselves.

smokey_the_bear 6y ago

Fwiw, I attended a nearly identical recruiting event at Microsoft for women and minorities.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

You don't want to work for IBM anyway, they burn new-grads like you to a cinder then dump you in a third world country at local salary or HR you out the door. Not to mention they are pretty much a has-been company at this point anyway. I can't remember the last time I came across any of their products in the field. They have been in decline ever since Lou Gerstner retired and they were well past their peak before he came along. You were right though that they were trying to check some boxes on a diversity report. IBM trots out those special events at trials to try and paint a favorable picture of their hiring practices - and if that doesn't work they just don't pay the judgements.

cloudedcordial 6y ago

IBM was so behind the times not only on technology. I'm glad that you found a place without any gimmicks. I'm in Canada. In the job applications, we don't even have a section to specify ethnicity. When I applied for American companies, I felt a slight cringe when I saw the optional form asking me for my ethnicity, sexual orientation or veteran status for statistical purposes.

refurb 6y ago

Another anecdote, but back in in the mid-2000's a VP at my Fortune 50 company (not tech) verbatim said "If you know any women or African Americans looking for a job let us know and we'll find a job for them". I get the intent, but it seems so incredibly forced and to your point, condescending for someone who busted their ass to get where they are in their career.

nonbirithm 6y ago

I was a diversity hire at Microsoft. The difference was that it wasn't based on race. Eligibility was decided by a mental health diagnosis, and successful applicants also received specific coaching that is better tailored to the way they think. Not having those things would have made work far less bearable than it was, as it had been for me in the past. And while I do believe that Microsoft wants to hire people from diverse backgrounds, I personally found that the workplace support was a legitimate material benefit to me. I did not feel like I was forgotten about just because I now contributed to some organizational diversity makeup. Parts of me that I consider my "identity" change the way I experience the world in significant ways, from the perspective of mentality and the senses. I continued to receive assistance for those things provided by the company, for years, and as a result was more or less successful at living an adult working life. If hiring candidates are preferred because they have a certain background, in a lot of cases it feels like it's not for a reason that makes sense except to reach a quota, but in my experience there are exceptions. Or programs that feel like exceptions, at least.

benmw333 6y ago

This is funny/sad - mostly because this is the complete opposite of what is parroted at universities.

joshxyz 6y ago

Lmfao that fucking sucks when the initial thing they ask for you to bring on the table is race or gender diversity - something born with you, out of your control, and didnt put any effort into