7 ms·

Merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other. In fact I'd say there is very little merit in hiring in tech today. It's statistically impossible that

Merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other. In fact I'd say there is very little merit in hiring in tech today. It's statistically impossible that the best programmers in the world all happen to be 20 year old white dudes who live in San Francisco.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
That's like saying it's statistically impossible for all of the best fashion designers in the world to be 20 somethings that live in NY or Milan. Many of the best programmers in the world move to SF specifically because of the opportunity.
- runako 5y ago
  Fashion doesn't claim to be a meritocracy. Fashion aims to be fashionable.
- meatbundragon 5y ago
  And do many of the best programmers also choose to become white, male, and 20?
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Whites are more portable
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Given the fact that Indian and East Asian men far exceed their US population ratios in the ranks of SF programmers, I'm baffled why you highlighted white.
deleted 5y ago
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dimes 5y ago
Why is it statistically impossible? Where one chooses to live is likely highly correlated with the job market for their skillset in that region.
- slavapestov 5y ago
  My comment was more about the demographics of the group (young, white, male) than where they chose to live.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    What are you thoughts on the demographics of the NBA?
    - rvz 5y ago
      Even better. The demographics of Gangsta Rap please? Downvoters: What is so problematic about this sentence verses the parent's sentence? Care to explain?
      - ben_w 5y ago
        Why is it, in your view, a better example?
  - tmule 5y ago
    This stereotype seems like one you got from the press rather than from observing what’s happening on the ground - the best companies in Silicon Valley have overwhelmingly hired East and some South Asians over the last 5 years. The not-at-all-atypical team I am part of currently at Facebook is entirely East/South Asian - zero whites, zero blacks, zero Hispanics. It does represent over 40% of the planet, though.
gambiting 5y ago
I mean, again, there can be merit in the group of applicants. There will be lots of reasons why applicants to tech companies in SF are mostly 20-something dudes, but that doesn't mean that when picking from your pile of applicants you don't pick solely on merit. Again, like you said yourself - merit and diversity aren't in the opposition to each other.
chrisco255 5y ago
As others have mentioned, you may not choose where you're born, but you can influence where you end up. And the trillions of dollars that are sloshing around the bay area certainly do a lot to attract talent to that area.
- ben_w 5y ago
  You can influence, but you can’t control, and money is a very strong form of influence, so if you’re from a poor background life can be a lottery.
tmule 5y ago
Casting a wide net is great. That’s how I would operationalize diversity (alongside high-signal criteria and corrections for restriction of range). However, I’m much less certain of the value or sanguine about the prospects of diversity-focused hiring in Silicon Valley, which is very check-box based, is reliant on a definition of diversity that is very US-focused, and has malleable standards. The last point is a contentious issue, but I’ve encountered instances in high-profile companies (Facebook, Netflix, Google) - it’ll be interesting to see how this works out, and I for one will closely look at all the data that I have handy.
jldugger 5y ago
> It's statistically impossible that the best programmers in the world all happen to be 20 year old white dudes who live in San Francisco. Which is why companies in SV sponsor visas, spin up satellite offices, and acqui-hire.
thegrimmest 5y ago
Indeed, merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other at all. Hiring based on merit from a largely homogeneous talent pool will net you largely homogenous candidates. I don't think a company has any responsibility do anything but hire the candidates with the most merit. Do you?
- bumby 5y ago
  >I don't think a company has any responsibility do anything but hire the candidates with the most merit. Do you think society as a whole (and by extension, said company) has a responsibility to create a system where there is an equal opportunity to develop merit?
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    I don't think "a system where there is an equal opportunity to develop merit" is defined sufficiently clearly to derive responsibility. What would such a society look like? How would it differ from ours?
    - bumby 5y ago
      You can define it by what you value as a society. Merit is partly derived from genetic attributes and partly derived from an environment to develop those attributes so it would make sense to ensure the developmental opportunity is not clustered if you truly want the cream to rise to the top. E.g., if society defines merit as the ability to play tennis, it would probably be best served (ha) to ensure everyone has access to a tennis court to develop those valued skills. Otherwise, you won't really get the "best" players you could, you'll essentially commit the equivalent of sampling error. We know training works to improve the measures we use to estimate merit. It's not a coincidence, for example, that those who have resources to dedicate to SAT prep tend to have better SAT scores. I think the argument is this tends to concentrate merit, perhaps under a erroneous notion that merit. E.g., those who have the resources to develop merit tend to get paid more which allows them to invest more in developing merit in themselves and their offspring...rinse and repeat. I would argue merit can be used as a bad-faith argument if there isn't equal opportunity to develop those attributes.
xiphias2 5y ago
Sure, merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other, but merit and politics at work are. I have seen Google transform from a place where people focus on the users getting the best search results to the place where talking and thinking about diversity takes a lot of communication bandwidth from meetings (hopefully it's better now, as I didn't stay).
deleted 5y ago
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deleted 5y ago
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Manuel_D 5y ago
That depends highly on what is meant by "diversity". Sometimes the diversity goals are also statistically impossible to achieve in a non-discriminatory manner. I've worked at companies that set hiring goals calling for X% women in tech roles and Y% people from historically underrepresented groups (long winded way of saying non-Asian minorities). Often times these targets are well above the representation in the available workforce. If 90% of pediatricians are women, and a hospital sets a quota calling for 30% male pediatricians that's inevitably going to lead to unequal hiring practices. At least not unless there's some other reason to expect a 3x overrepresentation of men at this particular company. Same if a company sets target of 40% women in tech roles, when the demographics of that labor force has women in the high teens or low twenties. Not every commitment to diversity has this conflict. For instance, committing to diversity by anonymizing applications is not. But pursuit of representation targets largely is.
kazinator 5y ago
> Merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other. Logic/math does not bear out this well-intended belief. If you select N employees for the company based entirely on merit, you get some set U. If you select N employees entirely based on diversity, you get a set V. Whenever U /= V, the criteria are necessarily in conflict. The conflicting choices are represented in the symmetric difference of U and V: elements in U that are not in V and vice versa. The merit criteria selects some people U\V (those in U who are not in V); the diversity criteria disagrees with that and insists they be replaced with people in the V\U difference. You can mix the criteria: somehow hedging between diversity and merit. There is more than one way of doing that and those ways can be in conflict with each other as well as with pure merit or pure diversity. Ideally you want merit only because only that is relevant to the organization. What may happen instead is that selection takes place based on a mixture of merit plus some undesirable bias. Diversity advocates rightfully point out that this is in conflict with pure merit. What diversity should ideally mean is the elimination of such a bias, rather than introduction of compensating biases.
geodel 5y ago
Just like people say "All life matters" is coded phrase for racism. Similarly "diversity goals" are just diversity of gender and skin color. This diversity does not include political orientation, location, language, food, religion or life experiences etc. So no surprise some are not onboard with "diversity goals"

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

That's like saying it's statistically impossible for all of the best fashion designers in the world to be 20 somethings that live in NY or Milan. Many of the best programmers in the world move to SF specifically because of the opportunity.

runako 5y ago
Fashion doesn't claim to be a meritocracy. Fashion aims to be fashionable.
meatbundragon 5y ago
And do many of the best programmers also choose to become white, male, and 20?
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  Whites are more portable
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Given the fact that Indian and East Asian men far exceed their US population ratios in the ranks of SF programmers, I'm baffled why you highlighted white.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dimes 5y ago

Why is it statistically impossible? Where one chooses to live is likely highly correlated with the job market for their skillset in that region.

slavapestov 5y ago
My comment was more about the demographics of the group (young, white, male) than where they chose to live.
- rajin444 5y ago
  What are you thoughts on the demographics of the NBA?
  - rvz 5y ago
    Even better. The demographics of Gangsta Rap please? Downvoters: What is so problematic about this sentence verses the parent's sentence? Care to explain?
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Why is it, in your view, a better example?
- tmule 5y ago
  This stereotype seems like one you got from the press rather than from observing what’s happening on the ground - the best companies in Silicon Valley have overwhelmingly hired East and some South Asians over the last 5 years. The not-at-all-atypical team I am part of currently at Facebook is entirely East/South Asian - zero whites, zero blacks, zero Hispanics. It does represent over 40% of the planet, though.

gambiting 5y ago

I mean, again, there can be merit in the group of applicants. There will be lots of reasons why applicants to tech companies in SF are mostly 20-something dudes, but that doesn't mean that when picking from your pile of applicants you don't pick solely on merit. Again, like you said yourself - merit and diversity aren't in the opposition to each other.

chrisco255 5y ago

As others have mentioned, you may not choose where you're born, but you can influence where you end up. And the trillions of dollars that are sloshing around the bay area certainly do a lot to attract talent to that area.

ben_w 5y ago
You can influence, but you can’t control, and money is a very strong form of influence, so if you’re from a poor background life can be a lottery.

tmule 5y ago

Casting a wide net is great. That’s how I would operationalize diversity (alongside high-signal criteria and corrections for restriction of range). However, I’m much less certain of the value or sanguine about the prospects of diversity-focused hiring in Silicon Valley, which is very check-box based, is reliant on a definition of diversity that is very US-focused, and has malleable standards. The last point is a contentious issue, but I’ve encountered instances in high-profile companies (Facebook, Netflix, Google) - it’ll be interesting to see how this works out, and I for one will closely look at all the data that I have handy.

jldugger 5y ago

> It's statistically impossible that the best programmers in the world all happen to be 20 year old white dudes who live in San Francisco. Which is why companies in SV sponsor visas, spin up satellite offices, and acqui-hire.

thegrimmest 5y ago

Indeed, merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other at all. Hiring based on merit from a largely homogeneous talent pool will net you largely homogenous candidates. I don't think a company has any responsibility do anything but hire the candidates with the most merit. Do you?

bumby 5y ago
>I don't think a company has any responsibility do anything but hire the candidates with the most merit. Do you think society as a whole (and by extension, said company) has a responsibility to create a system where there is an equal opportunity to develop merit?
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  I don't think "a system where there is an equal opportunity to develop merit" is defined sufficiently clearly to derive responsibility. What would such a society look like? How would it differ from ours?
  - bumby 5y ago
    You can define it by what you value as a society. Merit is partly derived from genetic attributes and partly derived from an environment to develop those attributes so it would make sense to ensure the developmental opportunity is not clustered if you truly want the cream to rise to the top. E.g., if society defines merit as the ability to play tennis, it would probably be best served (ha) to ensure everyone has access to a tennis court to develop those valued skills. Otherwise, you won't really get the "best" players you could, you'll essentially commit the equivalent of sampling error. We know training works to improve the measures we use to estimate merit. It's not a coincidence, for example, that those who have resources to dedicate to SAT prep tend to have better SAT scores. I think the argument is this tends to concentrate merit, perhaps under a erroneous notion that merit. E.g., those who have the resources to develop merit tend to get paid more which allows them to invest more in developing merit in themselves and their offspring...rinse and repeat. I would argue merit can be used as a bad-faith argument if there isn't equal opportunity to develop those attributes.

xiphias2 5y ago

Sure, merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other, but merit and politics at work are. I have seen Google transform from a place where people focus on the users getting the best search results to the place where talking and thinking about diversity takes a lot of communication bandwidth from meetings (hopefully it's better now, as I didn't stay).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Manuel_D 5y ago

That depends highly on what is meant by "diversity". Sometimes the diversity goals are also statistically impossible to achieve in a non-discriminatory manner. I've worked at companies that set hiring goals calling for X% women in tech roles and Y% people from historically underrepresented groups (long winded way of saying non-Asian minorities). Often times these targets are well above the representation in the available workforce. If 90% of pediatricians are women, and a hospital sets a quota calling for 30% male pediatricians that's inevitably going to lead to unequal hiring practices. At least not unless there's some other reason to expect a 3x overrepresentation of men at this particular company. Same if a company sets target of 40% women in tech roles, when the demographics of that labor force has women in the high teens or low twenties. Not every commitment to diversity has this conflict. For instance, committing to diversity by anonymizing applications is not. But pursuit of representation targets largely is.

kazinator 5y ago

> Merit and diversity are not in opposition to each other. Logic/math does not bear out this well-intended belief. If you select N employees for the company based entirely on merit, you get some set U. If you select N employees entirely based on diversity, you get a set V. Whenever U /= V, the criteria are necessarily in conflict. The conflicting choices are represented in the symmetric difference of U and V: elements in U that are not in V and vice versa. The merit criteria selects some people U\V (those in U who are not in V); the diversity criteria disagrees with that and insists they be replaced with people in the V\U difference. You can mix the criteria: somehow hedging between diversity and merit. There is more than one way of doing that and those ways can be in conflict with each other as well as with pure merit or pure diversity. Ideally you want merit only because only that is relevant to the organization. What may happen instead is that selection takes place based on a mixture of merit plus some undesirable bias. Diversity advocates rightfully point out that this is in conflict with pure merit. What diversity should ideally mean is the elimination of such a bias, rather than introduction of compensating biases.

geodel 5y ago

Just like people say "All life matters" is coded phrase for racism. Similarly "diversity goals" are just diversity of gender and skin color. This diversity does not include political orientation, location, language, food, religion or life experiences etc. So no surprise some are not onboard with "diversity goals"