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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 yo

by 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!
- bArray 6y ago
  > You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. This is a false analogy, it robs people of their agency. Humans do not act with some uniform distribution. It could be cultural, social, environmental, class - any number of factors. People are different and these differences should be celebrated, not squashed and ironed out. > 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 Sure, but at what point have we biased the input enough? At what point do we except the result? Bare in mind for example, women were among the first programmers (computers). If we achieve equal numbers of men and women in programming roles, what makes you believe the situation won't once again become biased? What concerns me is that equal outcome is a goal without any real measurement of success or plan to revert back to equal opportunity once the input has been 'corrected'.

by bArray 6y ago

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!

bArray 6y ago
> You know, like trying to find biases in die rolls - if 6 comes up more than 1, you might have a bias. This is a false analogy, it robs people of their agency. Humans do not act with some uniform distribution. It could be cultural, social, environmental, class - any number of factors. People are different and these differences should be celebrated, not squashed and ironed out. > 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 Sure, but at what point have we biased the input enough? At what point do we except the result? Bare in mind for example, women were among the first programmers (computers). If we achieve equal numbers of men and women in programming roles, what makes you believe the situation won't once again become biased? What concerns me is that equal outcome is a goal without any real measurement of success or plan to revert back to equal opportunity once the input has been 'corrected'.