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Goals != Quotas. This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity). You're suppo

Goals != Quotas. This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity). You're supposed to meet goals without compromising on integrity or quality. e.g. you can't ship buggy messes. And you can't hire substandard employees. There are mechanisms ("bar raisers") in place to do this, at least at Amazon. I suppose I can't speak for Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. But I'm pretty sure that it's exactly the same and what you're getting is a game of broken telephone where an ambitious goal in a high stakes environment gets re-interpreted as a quota. BTW, you're supposed to fail ~20-30% of your goals at Amazon, or you didn't set ambitious-enough ones.

reducesuffering 5y ago
You're suggesting I'm playing broken telephone game, yet you're the one extrapolating your company's experience to all the other hundreds. I can't speak for Amazon's policies. But there are companies that have headcount for N people, and N/X slots will be for Y identity. Then you have companies like Twitter that literally say on their hiring boards: "Our vision for the future is clear. 50%. At least half of our global workforce will be women. 25% At least a quarter of our US workforce will be under-represented minorities."[0] Key word "will", not "would like." How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota? Honestly I can't wrap my head around how Twitter believes 45% men / 55% women is the ideal and 55% men / 45% women would be unacceptable. [0]https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html
- addicted 5y ago
  Most of the large tech companies have similar hiring policies. It’s not unreasonable to think what goes at Amazon is fairly similar to what goes on at Apple, Google, etc. There’s a reason the FAANG acronym exists. Also, if your takeaway from “at least half the employees will be women” as a goal, at a time when the breakdown is 43% women, and has been a lot lower for the past decade, is that “55% women is ok but 55% men is not”, it’s pretty obvious you’re arguing in bad faith. It’s pretty obvious that’s a goal that at least half the workforce will be women in fewer than 4 years. What that actually means is that Twitter is likely gonna barely cross the 50% mark, if they are even gonna meet it. The reality is that the moment they hit 50% they will ease off on the effort to recruit more women than men, which, thanks to structural factors that have led to the current unbalanced distribution of employees, will only make their hiring easier ans allow them to continue hiring equitably.
- cutemonster 5y ago
  They write "Our vision for the future is clear ...", But not "Our future is clear, there will be ...". There is a big difference. > How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota? They explicitly say it's a vision (goal). (Still, goals and monetary incentives can have the same effect, it seems, looking at what thu2111 wrote nearby, about Google.)
thu2111 5y ago
I worked at Google and was interviewing twice a week for years. They had "goals" then too. They made the same claims, that it wouldn't affect employee quality, and I believed it at first. But the goals were incentivised with money and what happens when you do that? The system was bent in all sorts of creative but illegitimate ways to try and get there. Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway. They were given the best interviewers that were preferred by the hiring committees, and men who were mis-interviewed were simply dropped on the floor instead of re-doing the process or filtering the bad interviewers out. I was told they were doing this by the recruiters themselves. They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on. More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place. But that was some years ago. Tech firms became much more extreme since then. A recruiter leaked YouTube's instructions to do biased hiring previously, and nothing happened. Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments, they're constantly attacked by an activist class who insist they do so - what do you think happens? Of course they are discriminating. How else could they achieve their goals? "Encouragement" is a fantasy, there aren't huge pools of women who are inexplicably refusing to apply to major tech firms.
- amzn-throw 5y ago
  You said a lot of things in your first 2 paragraphs but at no point did you say "And then we hired women at a lower bar than we hired men" "Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway." sounds like it but the next stage isn't an offer - it's the onsite interview. If Google's process is anything like Amazon's, there is a screen-OUT stage and a screen-IN stage. The screen out stage is primarily there to make sure not to waste the time of the full onsite interview loop. It's highly subjective and you are SUPPOSED to err on the side of letting people go through. You're SUPPOSED to have the most senior engineers on the team do these screens. But people frequently don't. They introduce their own biases, and managers use phone screens as practice for their most junior interviews. The outcome is qualified candidates sometimes don't even get a chance to prove their worth in an onsite loop. So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No, but there is no way to make this process truly fair at the scale that FAAMNG hires. So long as the FINAL process is fair, that's all that you can really do and ensure you don't hire unqualified people. > They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on. That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities. Or HBCU's. Amazon also does "women's only" hiring events. They have lower hire ratios because there is a pipeline intake problem too in our whole industry. But that's okay. > More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place. I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable. It's extremely hard to get fired from a FAAMNG company once you're in. What you describe happens to all employees (being moved between teams). > Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed? Making it easier for women to apply does not make it HARDER for Men. All the initiatives we discussed are IN ADDITION not INSTEAD OF.

reducesuffering 5y ago

You're suggesting I'm playing broken telephone game, yet you're the one extrapolating your company's experience to all the other hundreds. I can't speak for Amazon's policies. But there are companies that have headcount for N people, and N/X slots will be for Y identity. Then you have companies like Twitter that literally say on their hiring boards: "Our vision for the future is clear. 50%. At least half of our global workforce will be women. 25% At least a quarter of our US workforce will be under-represented minorities."[0] Key word "will", not "would like." How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota? Honestly I can't wrap my head around how Twitter believes 45% men / 55% women is the ideal and 55% men / 45% women would be unacceptable. [0]https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html https://careers.twitter.com/en/diversity.html

addicted 5y ago
Most of the large tech companies have similar hiring policies. It’s not unreasonable to think what goes at Amazon is fairly similar to what goes on at Apple, Google, etc. There’s a reason the FAANG acronym exists. Also, if your takeaway from “at least half the employees will be women” as a goal, at a time when the breakdown is 43% women, and has been a lot lower for the past decade, is that “55% women is ok but 55% men is not”, it’s pretty obvious you’re arguing in bad faith. It’s pretty obvious that’s a goal that at least half the workforce will be women in fewer than 4 years. What that actually means is that Twitter is likely gonna barely cross the 50% mark, if they are even gonna meet it. The reality is that the moment they hit 50% they will ease off on the effort to recruit more women than men, which, thanks to structural factors that have led to the current unbalanced distribution of employees, will only make their hiring easier ans allow them to continue hiring equitably.
cutemonster 5y ago
They write "Our vision for the future is clear ...", But not "Our future is clear, there will be ...". There is a big difference. > How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota? They explicitly say it's a vision (goal). (Still, goals and monetary incentives can have the same effect, it seems, looking at what thu2111 wrote nearby, about Google.)

thu2111 5y ago

I worked at Google and was interviewing twice a week for years. They had "goals" then too. They made the same claims, that it wouldn't affect employee quality, and I believed it at first. But the goals were incentivised with money and what happens when you do that? The system was bent in all sorts of creative but illegitimate ways to try and get there. Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway. They were given the best interviewers that were preferred by the hiring committees, and men who were mis-interviewed were simply dropped on the floor instead of re-doing the process or filtering the bad interviewers out. I was told they were doing this by the recruiters themselves. They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on. More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place. But that was some years ago. Tech firms became much more extreme since then. A recruiter leaked YouTube's instructions to do biased hiring previously, and nothing happened. Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments, they're constantly attacked by an activist class who insist they do so - what do you think happens? Of course they are discriminating. How else could they achieve their goals? "Encouragement" is a fantasy, there aren't huge pools of women who are inexplicably refusing to apply to major tech firms.

amzn-throw 5y ago
You said a lot of things in your first 2 paragraphs but at no point did you say "And then we hired women at a lower bar than we hired men" "Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway." sounds like it but the next stage isn't an offer - it's the onsite interview. If Google's process is anything like Amazon's, there is a screen-OUT stage and a screen-IN stage. The screen out stage is primarily there to make sure not to waste the time of the full onsite interview loop. It's highly subjective and you are SUPPOSED to err on the side of letting people go through. You're SUPPOSED to have the most senior engineers on the team do these screens. But people frequently don't. They introduce their own biases, and managers use phone screens as practice for their most junior interviews. The outcome is qualified candidates sometimes don't even get a chance to prove their worth in an onsite loop. So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No, but there is no way to make this process truly fair at the scale that FAAMNG hires. So long as the FINAL process is fair, that's all that you can really do and ensure you don't hire unqualified people. > They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on. That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities. Or HBCU's. Amazon also does "women's only" hiring events. They have lower hire ratios because there is a pipeline intake problem too in our whole industry. But that's okay. > More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place. I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable. It's extremely hard to get fired from a FAAMNG company once you're in. What you describe happens to all employees (being moved between teams). > Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed? Making it easier for women to apply does not make it HARDER for Men. All the initiatives we discussed are IN ADDITION not INSTEAD OF.