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> "My wife wrote all of those." There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code a

> "My wife wrote all of those." There was a place that hired a consultant for a project a friend worked on, and she was... I don't think she could write code at all. Like, had trouble manually inserting fragments into an XML file despite fragments with the same structure already being in the file. Her productivity skyrocketed at night however, and she generally had working code in the morning, which lead to rumors that her husband or someone in her home country was doing the work (would have been daytime over there). Nobody really complained. She wore a hijab and the company had just hired it’s first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why. Thankfully they stopped using that vendor not long after.

pmarreck 5y ago
>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")
- okeuro49 5y ago
  I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.
  - hraedon 5y ago
    Whatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on "merit." The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?
    - okeuro49 5y ago
      This conversation is referring to a specific phenomenon that has become strongly noticeable in the last 5 years or so. That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already existed to some extent, is another conversation. I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that are not corrupt. Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-competitive, or by actually creating legislation that actually protects against discrimination, rather than by perpetuating it. That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore corruption in another form.
      - hraedon 5y ago
        I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature. "Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit" almost always means something different or is a secondary consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse" doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a member of the same country club I am," though why it gets a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.
        pedrosorio 5y ago
        > Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. What would be an example of a company where “those people” (who comprise the company) are not making “the ultimate decisions”?
        hraedon 5y ago
        This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed. If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.
  - knodi123 5y ago
    Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the first day that she had exactly one year to prove that she was worth the same salary as the other staff. Obviously she did, and was quickly elevated to on-screen talent, and her star just kept climbing. But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse". There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend when it seems convenient [1]. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accuses-google-hiring-discrimination-against-white-asian-men-n853601 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu... [1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-with-whites/ https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        > It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse". Asians are current and historic targets of discrimination. This sometimes gets masked in outcome stats because lots of Asians in the US are themselves or first generation descendants of immigrants through programs which filter for the top end of the socioeconomic, and more particularly recently technical skills, spectrum.
    - tomcam 5y ago
      > basically for free Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    On the other hand it must be nice getting paid above your abilities, which is (one of) the common outcomes of diversity hiring, isn't it?
    - jeromegv 5y ago
      What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? But somehow, that isn't a problem for you?
      - lmm 5y ago
        > What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? Is it actually same ability though? IIRC the men vs women difference disappears once you control for hours worked, for example.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > tangible benefits to more diversity People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity. But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.
    - commandlinefan 5y ago
      Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.
      - DoreenMichele 5y ago
        Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc" If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.
        djhn 5y ago
        Which one was that?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- munk-a 5y ago
  I can say this as someone with ADHD, neurodiversity specifically allows me to approach problems in radically different manners than my coworkers which sometimes makes things an absolute cake walk for me and sometimes makes them nearly insurmountable. This is a result of my approach to problem solving which has been trained on the problems I've experienced in the past and my natural disposition. I think an entirely homogeneous company would have issues with tunnel vision - they might be excellent at dealing with some issues and absolutely flabbergasted with others... having a more diverse team ensures that you've got more varied experiences to draw on when approaching problems. Aside from all that, I think that diversity makes teams more healthy to work within - if everyone looks the same (straight white male) you're likely going to have cliquish social assumptions form in your team that will prevent you from hiring an excellent candidate that doesn't happen to fit the mold and might force out people who aren't what they appear: trans men, gay men and asians that appear white. As a company it's important to keep your workplace friendly to all potential employees and having a homogeneous company makes it more likely that a closed off social culture will form that makes life difficult for new employees. I have never seen any studies to support this but thought I'd add at least a well reasoned opinion.
  - macintux 5y ago
    Anecdotally speaking, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to find examples of companies doing stupid things that could have been avoided with a more diverse decision-making team. Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.
    - jeromegv 5y ago
      Or Google Photo that tagged Black people as gorilla. Clearly, developers must have tested with their own photos (on top of generic datasets) and if they had had more diversity within their dev team, they would have caught that sooner.
- beerandt 5y ago
  The only tangible benefit I've ever heard of was qualifying for contracts with diversity quotas. Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.
  - pmarreck 5y ago
    What is that saying about "tell me what your incentives are and I'll tell you how you'll act"?
HWR_14 5y ago
Sounds like she got all her work done on time.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Well, someone definitely got all her work done.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Goodluck getting her to help solve an issue in her code in a timely manner
  - munk-a 5y ago
    It sounds like, if that timely manner is at least a day long then she'd get it done reliably. I think the only issue you could possibly see here is one of labour exploitation if she was sending the work off to someone else - it might be that she specifically shouldn't be paid but you as a company would really like to get in touch with whoever is on the other side. Or it might just be that some people are introverted and crack under pressure whenever the spotlight is on them but, once they have quiet time to themselves, they can really power through problems. The description of the scenario isn't nearly enough for us to get any grip on what was going on without making some huge assumptions, but the facts that we have are that she tended to really struggle when coordinating with coworkers and that she completed the work expected of her - there could be numerous explanations and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate. It's a story a friend told me a long time ago. I didn’t and couldn’t fact-check it. The husband’s theory came from the fact she apparently mentioned her husband was also a software consultant.
toomanydoubts 5y ago
Oddly enough, once a friend of mine was hired to work on a project which one of the selling points was that it was designed and implemented by women. He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?
- esyir 5y ago
  Honestly, I'm mixed. On one hand that's basically false advertising. On the other, I despise external incentives that aim at gender, so anything that hacks this sounds good to me. I'll probably slant to the former though.
thumbsup-_- 5y ago
I had a friend who's wife worked in tech and even had a patent but she could barely code and could barely make her way through real world, on the job, tech problems. Her husband (my friend who worked in a major tech company) every night helped her do her work and she happily told us about it.

pmarreck 5y ago

>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")

okeuro49 5y ago
I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.
- hraedon 5y ago
  Whatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on "merit." The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?
  - okeuro49 5y ago
    This conversation is referring to a specific phenomenon that has become strongly noticeable in the last 5 years or so. That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already existed to some extent, is another conversation. I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that are not corrupt. Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-competitive, or by actually creating legislation that actually protects against discrimination, rather than by perpetuating it. That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore corruption in another form.
    - hraedon 5y ago
      I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature. "Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit" almost always means something different or is a secondary consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse" doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a member of the same country club I am," though why it gets a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.
      - pedrosorio 5y ago
        > Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. What would be an example of a company where “those people” (who comprise the company) are not making “the ultimate decisions”?
        hraedon 5y ago
        This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed. If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.
- knodi123 5y ago
  Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the first day that she had exactly one year to prove that she was worth the same salary as the other staff. Obviously she did, and was quickly elevated to on-screen talent, and her star just kept climbing. But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse". There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend when it seems convenient [1]. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accuses-google-hiring-discrimination-against-white-asian-men-n853601 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu... [1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-with-whites/ https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse". Asians are current and historic targets of discrimination. This sometimes gets masked in outcome stats because lots of Asians in the US are themselves or first generation descendants of immigrants through programs which filter for the top end of the socioeconomic, and more particularly recently technical skills, spectrum.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    > basically for free Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  On the other hand it must be nice getting paid above your abilities, which is (one of) the common outcomes of diversity hiring, isn't it?
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? But somehow, that isn't a problem for you?
    - lmm 5y ago
      > What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? Is it actually same ability though? IIRC the men vs women difference disappears once you control for hours worked, for example.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> tangible benefits to more diversity People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity. But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc" If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.
      - djhn 5y ago
        Which one was that?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
munk-a 5y ago
I can say this as someone with ADHD, neurodiversity specifically allows me to approach problems in radically different manners than my coworkers which sometimes makes things an absolute cake walk for me and sometimes makes them nearly insurmountable. This is a result of my approach to problem solving which has been trained on the problems I've experienced in the past and my natural disposition. I think an entirely homogeneous company would have issues with tunnel vision - they might be excellent at dealing with some issues and absolutely flabbergasted with others... having a more diverse team ensures that you've got more varied experiences to draw on when approaching problems. Aside from all that, I think that diversity makes teams more healthy to work within - if everyone looks the same (straight white male) you're likely going to have cliquish social assumptions form in your team that will prevent you from hiring an excellent candidate that doesn't happen to fit the mold and might force out people who aren't what they appear: trans men, gay men and asians that appear white. As a company it's important to keep your workplace friendly to all potential employees and having a homogeneous company makes it more likely that a closed off social culture will form that makes life difficult for new employees. I have never seen any studies to support this but thought I'd add at least a well reasoned opinion.
- macintux 5y ago
  Anecdotally speaking, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to find examples of companies doing stupid things that could have been avoided with a more diverse decision-making team. Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    Or Google Photo that tagged Black people as gorilla. Clearly, developers must have tested with their own photos (on top of generic datasets) and if they had had more diversity within their dev team, they would have caught that sooner.
beerandt 5y ago
The only tangible benefit I've ever heard of was qualifying for contracts with diversity quotas. Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.
- pmarreck 5y ago
  What is that saying about "tell me what your incentives are and I'll tell you how you'll act"?

HWR_14 5y ago

Sounds like she got all her work done on time.

dahfizz 5y ago
Well, someone definitely got all her work done.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Goodluck getting her to help solve an issue in her code in a timely manner
- munk-a 5y ago
  It sounds like, if that timely manner is at least a day long then she'd get it done reliably. I think the only issue you could possibly see here is one of labour exploitation if she was sending the work off to someone else - it might be that she specifically shouldn't be paid but you as a company would really like to get in touch with whoever is on the other side. Or it might just be that some people are introverted and crack under pressure whenever the spotlight is on them but, once they have quiet time to themselves, they can really power through problems. The description of the scenario isn't nearly enough for us to get any grip on what was going on without making some huge assumptions, but the facts that we have are that she tended to really struggle when coordinating with coworkers and that she completed the work expected of her - there could be numerous explanations and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > and the observations from the poster might even be inaccurate. It's a story a friend told me a long time ago. I didn’t and couldn’t fact-check it. The husband’s theory came from the fact she apparently mentioned her husband was also a software consultant.

toomanydoubts 5y ago

Oddly enough, once a friend of mine was hired to work on a project which one of the selling points was that it was designed and implemented by women. He was a male and had to sign an NDA to work in the project. Very shady stuff. Maybe the reason your place didn't care about the odd behaviors from the female engineer was because they were well aware about what's happening?

esyir 5y ago
Honestly, I'm mixed. On one hand that's basically false advertising. On the other, I despise external incentives that aim at gender, so anything that hacks this sounds good to me. I'll probably slant to the former though.

thumbsup-_- 5y ago

I had a friend who's wife worked in tech and even had a patent but she could barely code and could barely make her way through real world, on the job, tech problems. Her husband (my friend who worked in a major tech company) every night helped her do her work and she happily told us about it.