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I'm sorry you had an experience like that, and I understand that it can be really tough to take concepts like these seriously when your personal experience clea

I'm sorry you had an experience like that, and I understand that it can be really tough to take concepts like these seriously when your personal experience clearly demonstrates the opposite effect. There's nothing I can say or do to counteract what you've experienced, but I will note that successful DEI work is often like successful SRE work: you generally only notice it if you're watching the statistics carefully or if things start going wrong. What might convince you this isn't totally baseless is if I give some suggestions for simple enough policies that an organization can implement without falling afoul of either the law or ethical considerations. Here are a few: * Ensure a diverse slate. If you start hiring as soon as you have just a couple of people in the pipeline, the likelihood that someone not in the majority is hired goes way down; correct that by ensuring at least N applicants in the pool are not in the majority before you kick things off. * Update your job descriptions. A lot of job descriptions have some really extreme and fairly specific demands of skills or experience gained but end up with hiring people who don't strictly meet every one. People not in the majority are pretty especially prone to impostor syndrome (for reasons whose explanation goes beyond the scope of this comment), so don't provide an unnecessarily high bar to entry if it isn't actually there. Include only skills that are actually necessary. * Take a closer look at your hiring pipeline. Is your pipeline fed from sources that are homogeneous themselves? If so, look for sources that aren't. If you offer a referral program, ensure that that isn't defeating your efforts and encourage those who refer others to share with more diverse groups if they can. * Ask everyone the same questions. Don't let someone bring their pet problem to an interview or crank up the difficulty unnecessarily. Standardize your questions and ensure interviewers are interviewing the same way by having folks shadow each other. There are lots of things you can do beyond hiring, but it's what I'm more familiar with. I can say as a quick aside that ensuring everyone gets the same opportunity to level up in their career and making sure they feel welcome goes a long way towards mitigating diversity attrition, but it's not something I'm as comfortable giving suggestions for. Hopefully this helps you feel like not everyone who advocates for DEI is out to get you or make your life worse for the sake of making others' lives better.

chitowneats 4y ago
Hiring is zero sum. The reality is that DEI departments at many tech companies work diligently to make life harder for white and Asian men. It's even explicitly stated some places.
- striking 4y ago
  Yes, hiring is zero sum, but if you're complaining about the suggestions I just gave, those work to remedy bias in a hiring pipeline rather than explicitly making people's lives harder. In other words, if you are unhappy that you no longer have an advantage because those rules are being implemented, you are seeking to benefit from policies that would otherwise advantage you as a result of your attributes, ones that make the lives of those with other attributes that much harder. There is nothing acceptable about that, even if in a technical sense this makes your life harder.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    I'm self taught. No college degree. Raised by a single mother on government assistance. I'm very tired of hearing about all the advantages I have from people born with the silver spoon, just not white. It's very common to run into such individuals in tech. Race-focused DEI is very beneficial to people like this because they have all the elite pedigree without any of the racial baggage. Rarely do I see these efforts help truly disadvantaged people. Your suggestions are all well and good. They would help someone coming from a background like mine. Unfortunately, they bear little resemblance to the DEI efforts and departments I'm familiar with.
    - striking 4y ago
      Again, I'm sorry to hear that, but I promise you there are people out there working to make things better for everyone. All I can offer you is that the successes are far less visible than the failures, and that it's really easy to get DEI wrong (whether intentionally or otherwise). I hope that at least I've conveyed why programs like this exist and why they might be helpful to everyone, even if we disagree on whether or not they're implemented correctly.
hunter2_ 4y ago
> Is your pipeline fed from sources that are homogeneous themselves? If so, look for sources that aren't. I think this is where some people get hung up. Suppose that before a company implements this change, it gets some set of applicants X, and after it implements this change, it gets some set of applicants Y. It's entirely possible that applicants in set Y are as good or even better for the company than applicants in set X, no doubt. But in instances where they're not, then isn't it the case that implementing this change is unfair to the best applicants?
- striking 4y ago
  > But in instances where [the new pipeline's applicants are worse than those of the old], then isn't it the case that implementing this change is unfair to the best applicants? So, to start with, I'm not sure that it would be necessarily unfair, even under the assumption that that would happen. If I were looking for the absolute "best" candidate, I would have to offer the absolute best pay, the absolute best working conditions, and so on. It would obviously narrow down the set to the extent that it could be really challenging to find anyone, let alone someone outside a majority or something like that. Most of the time, you're not looking for that person. You're looking for someone who's qualified for the job. You can't really even sample the population widely enough to identify which candidates are "best". In that sense, there are no "best" candidates, just those who fit better than the other folks in the rest of the hiring pool. Maybe put another way, one's sense of "best" might be worth reexamining. Maybe one particular candidate is really highly qualified in a general sense, but in specific comparison to the team they're being considered for, maybe there are enough of that kind of person already on that team. https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes comes to mind here; you can't have a team that is all Solvers or all Tech Leads or whatever. You can try to reevaluate your definition of "best" such that it enables a more diverse set of perspectives to take part in a team, where you're optimizing for the broadest possible set of e.g. synergistic psychological traits rather than just a specific performance against a specific test set. But even assuming it were unfair to the teleologically/meritocratically "best" candidates, that that concept isn't flawed: Don't hire bad candidates. Keep your standards high enough that people aren't often getting fired. Ensure inflows to your pipeline don't have surprisingly bad success rates. Track down which parts of the pipeline are failing to keep bad candidates from getting to the interview phase or getting hired and be relentless in optimizing them. That might not sound like novel or DEI-specific advice, and that's because it's not. You should continue to run your hiring pipeline in a way that produces good outcomes. The only difference here is that you have an advantage in finding lots of different kinds of people and that you're providing opportunities to people who often aren't getting them.

chitowneats 4y ago

Hiring is zero sum. The reality is that DEI departments at many tech companies work diligently to make life harder for white and Asian men. It's even explicitly stated some places.

striking 4y ago
Yes, hiring is zero sum, but if you're complaining about the suggestions I just gave, those work to remedy bias in a hiring pipeline rather than explicitly making people's lives harder. In other words, if you are unhappy that you no longer have an advantage because those rules are being implemented, you are seeking to benefit from policies that would otherwise advantage you as a result of your attributes, ones that make the lives of those with other attributes that much harder. There is nothing acceptable about that, even if in a technical sense this makes your life harder.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  I'm self taught. No college degree. Raised by a single mother on government assistance. I'm very tired of hearing about all the advantages I have from people born with the silver spoon, just not white. It's very common to run into such individuals in tech. Race-focused DEI is very beneficial to people like this because they have all the elite pedigree without any of the racial baggage. Rarely do I see these efforts help truly disadvantaged people. Your suggestions are all well and good. They would help someone coming from a background like mine. Unfortunately, they bear little resemblance to the DEI efforts and departments I'm familiar with.
  - striking 4y ago
    Again, I'm sorry to hear that, but I promise you there are people out there working to make things better for everyone. All I can offer you is that the successes are far less visible than the failures, and that it's really easy to get DEI wrong (whether intentionally or otherwise). I hope that at least I've conveyed why programs like this exist and why they might be helpful to everyone, even if we disagree on whether or not they're implemented correctly.

hunter2_ 4y ago

> Is your pipeline fed from sources that are homogeneous themselves? If so, look for sources that aren't. I think this is where some people get hung up. Suppose that before a company implements this change, it gets some set of applicants X, and after it implements this change, it gets some set of applicants Y. It's entirely possible that applicants in set Y are as good or even better for the company than applicants in set X, no doubt. But in instances where they're not, then isn't it the case that implementing this change is unfair to the best applicants?

striking 4y ago
> But in instances where [the new pipeline's applicants are worse than those of the old], then isn't it the case that implementing this change is unfair to the best applicants? So, to start with, I'm not sure that it would be necessarily unfair, even under the assumption that that would happen. If I were looking for the absolute "best" candidate, I would have to offer the absolute best pay, the absolute best working conditions, and so on. It would obviously narrow down the set to the extent that it could be really challenging to find anyone, let alone someone outside a majority or something like that. Most of the time, you're not looking for that person. You're looking for someone who's qualified for the job. You can't really even sample the population widely enough to identify which candidates are "best". In that sense, there are no "best" candidates, just those who fit better than the other folks in the rest of the hiring pool. Maybe put another way, one's sense of "best" might be worth reexamining. Maybe one particular candidate is really highly qualified in a general sense, but in specific comparison to the team they're being considered for, maybe there are enough of that kind of person already on that team. https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes comes to mind here; you can't have a team that is all Solvers or all Tech Leads or whatever. You can try to reevaluate your definition of "best" such that it enables a more diverse set of perspectives to take part in a team, where you're optimizing for the broadest possible set of e.g. synergistic psychological traits rather than just a specific performance against a specific test set. But even assuming it were unfair to the teleologically/meritocratically "best" candidates, that that concept isn't flawed: Don't hire bad candidates. Keep your standards high enough that people aren't often getting fired. Ensure inflows to your pipeline don't have surprisingly bad success rates. Track down which parts of the pipeline are failing to keep bad candidates from getting to the interview phase or getting hired and be relentless in optimizing them. That might not sound like novel or DEI-specific advice, and that's because it's not. You should continue to run your hiring pipeline in a way that produces good outcomes. The only difference here is that you have an advantage in finding lots of different kinds of people and that you're providing opportunities to people who often aren't getting them.