8 ms·

The obsession with race and having people from every race to the point people that aren't fit for the position get it because they are "marginalized" is just cr

The obsession with race and having people from every race to the point people that aren't fit for the position get it because they are "marginalized" is just crazy in the US. You should hire based on talent and experience. And if the company is all white, then be it, that's the market. Of course that way doesn't fix racism, but the US way also doesn't.

colechristensen 4y ago
There are also a whole lot of white people who have had very few advantages in life who don’t get the benefits of progressive support because they don’t look different in a way that lets people put an easy label on them.
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  America has far more poor white people than poor non-white people. It seems like this should be obvious but apparently is not.
  - thethirdone 4y ago
    If you define poor as "below the poverty line" and white people as "white non-hispanic", this is not true. There are more white hispanics below the poverty line than white non-hispanics. Typically when people are using the phrase "white people", they are not including latinos so I would rate "America has far more poor white people than poor non-white people" mostly false. Also I really hate how the standard demographics in the US are WHITE, BLACK, ASIAN, or OTHER with an additional binary of HISPANIC or NON-HISPANIC.
    - silisili 4y ago
      I'm not attempting to refute your claim, just adding an anecdote. I recently moved to a majority hispanic area, 80ish percent. It was a bit of culture shock for me in a lot of ways, one of which is you better have cash. Everyone I've hired to do anything will only take cash. If you offer a check, they'll sometimes say no, sometimes say OK, but I have to add tax. Not one would accept a credit card. Plumbers, electricians, handymen, guys with 50k dollar trucks and 80k dollar skid steers. I don't mean to intend to paint this as a solely hispanic thing, this is just the first place I've lived that functions that way. The guy who did our floor was white, and made the same demands in fact. It occurred to me there's likely a not insignificant amount of people making 6 figures who are according to the government, below the poverty line.
    - jmpman 4y ago
      I was intrigued by your assertion that the previous poster’s statement was incorrect. I’d heard that statement was also correct. Finding a data source online was surprisingly difficult, as almost all graphs on the topic were presented in percentages by race as opposed to absolute numbers. I finally found the following data source, and multiplied out the population count by race with the percentage below 100% of the poverty line by race. If you have a different data source, or methodology, please share. https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=Poverty%20by%20race&tid=ACSST1Y2021.S1703 https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=Poverty%20by%20race&t... White alone, not Hispanic or Latino 188537199 Less than 100% of poverty line 9.5% = 17,911,033 Versus Hispanic or Latino origin (of any race) 61398400 Less than 100% of poverty line 17.5% = 10,744,720 By absolute count, the assertion that White, Hispanic population have more people in poverty than White, non-Hispanic population, appears to be incorrect. From the data, there are 324173084 people in the US, with an overall poverty rate of 12.8%, meaning that 41,494,154 people are in poverty. 17,911,033 White non-Hispanic in poverty 41,494,154 - 17,911,033 = 23,583,121 (rest of the population) So, the White Non Hispanic Population in Poverty is less than the number of non (White Non Hispanic) Population. So, neither of you were correct? But there are a ton of poor white people in the US. Significantly more than any other single race.
      - thethirdone 4y ago
        I made a mistake when fact checking; I used the column for under-18 rather than all people. It made it easy to refute the gp's claim so I didn't bother doing the detailed work to support my intended claim ("white non-hispanics are not > 50% of people below the poverty line") before confirming. Thank you for correcting me.
ivalm 4y ago
> You should hire based on talent and experience I agree that you shouldn’t hire unqualified people. However, oftentimes as a hiring manager you have a bunch of relatively equivalent candidates (let’s say the top 5 of the 100 that applied). In this case there isn’t really a clear choice of who is better and diversity metrics can and should play a role in the hiring decision.
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  In that case, why not cast a lot?
  - ivalm 4y ago
    Because having a diverse employee pool has advantages as it helps avoid group think, reduces mental blind spots, and introduces new perspectives. Diversity is itself good for teams.
    - ajvs 4y ago
      What does ethnic diversity have to do with intellectual diversity? Do blind testing.
      - ivalm 4y ago
        Because we live in a society and ethnicity has massive effect on culture. At the same time, blind testing only tests what is on a test. If the test makers aren’t diverse then the test won’t test diversity. Ethnicity is an incredibly easy proxy to use.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      I grew up in a rural area. The difference between me (white) and one of the two black kids or two Asian kids in my grade in terms of “perspective” or “group think” would be far less than me and a white kid from even the nearest big city. Also, how the hell does “perspective” matter for say…an accountant? Programmer? Vet tech? I’d buy it in marketing, product development, and some other random situations, but as a whole?
rizoma_dev 4y ago
I took an ethics class on this. Basically some quotas should be necessary because of unconscious biases (e.g. the resume of a white person being preferred to one of a black person with the exact same qualifications), but it's not enough to fix disparities, mostly because the current structure of the economy benefits from the existence of a precarious underclass
- remarkEon 4y ago
  You took an ethics class that said racial quotas are actually good? What quota is “enough” to overcome this (unmeasurable) “unconscious bias” that allegedly exists?
  - rizoma_dev 4y ago
    It was about representation in positions of influence (politics, corporate boards, laboratories), which I think we agree should attempt to reflect the distribution of the populations
    - dmitrygr 4y ago
      3% of the population is mentally ill. Should that be represented? 2% are senile. That too? I don’t want “someone like me” in positions of power over me. I have no idea what that’s such a popular phrase in America. I want someone vastly better than me in positions of power.
      - tadfisher 4y ago
        It's good that Title VII doesn't identify mental illness or senility as protected classes for the purposes of employment, then.
      - weard_beard 4y ago
        22% of the population are children. 40% of interns generate 0 paid income. 21% of families have a stay at home mother not in the work force. When are these slackers going to start demonstrating their worth!?
dmitrygr 4y ago
Presented without comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...
decafninja 4y ago
So I used to work for a small company (~20 people) where all but one person was of a certain nationality. The reason for this was that all of the company's clients were also companies that were mostly comprised of people of that same nationality, many who spoke limited English. Because this company was small, everyone wore many hats, including technical staff having to interact with the clients. So while a candidate of a different nationality/ethnicity/race could technically be hired, the odds of this happening was extremely unlikely - because the language in question was usually not spoken by people outside of this nationality (this was nearly 15 years ago, things have changed a bit now). The one employee who was of a different nationality was part of that tiny exception - he had picked up the language from somewhere. Would you classify this hiring policy as racist?
- threatofrain 4y ago
  It's within the sphere of discrimination but may also be a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi... Of course this only describes how a legal framework might negotiate between adverse impacts and technical merit. In terms of who has the responsibility of fixing the ripples of current and historical wrongdoings between races, I don't think businesses are the right place to start. By the time it gets to business, asking people to make potentially unmeritorious decisions is a kind of corruption. Society-wide grievances ought to be addressed at the national level via a reparations program which funds education and family.
_8j50 4y ago
I agree but there are many companies that make their companies all white or black or <insert country they're from>. So there needs to be a practical way to day "you're in detroit and your 10k person company is hiring only white people for 20 years straight?" because otherwise how can equal treatment of everyone be enforced? If hiring was done on an objective metric this would be an easy solution, but even if you are skilled and experienced , they can say everyone of a certain race is a bad culture fit, didn't go to the all white college which also uses similar resons for exclusion, your experience and skills are not what they want (they don't have to hire the most skilled and experienced) and at most states they don't even need to give a reason at all. This was already happening before the civil rights act and after as well against the law. While better laws are conceivable, this is what judges are there for, to determine if the intent and effect was harming someone based on race. The gov doesn't force them to use race metrics, it just sues them if they, let's say, layoff 5k people and 4900 are all of a certain race and that happens to be 99% of people of that race. That doesn't make the company guilty, it just forces them to justify in front of a jury their reasoning (perhaps people of that race all worked in one department that was really not needes?). Their aversion to lawsuits is what drives their insanity. If you can prove that all the applicants of a certain race did not meet an objective criteria which can be scrutinized by outside industry experts then I see no problem with excluding those people and I have never heard of the EEOC suing companies otherwise (although I would be glad to be educated on this), and you will find many companies do have entire all white or all some nationality (east or south asian in tech) departments solely based on objective metrics. I am just saying, no law forced twilio so perhaps blame twilion in this case instead of the law/gov?

colechristensen 4y ago

There are also a whole lot of white people who have had very few advantages in life who don’t get the benefits of progressive support because they don’t look different in a way that lets people put an easy label on them.

hallway_monitor 4y ago
America has far more poor white people than poor non-white people. It seems like this should be obvious but apparently is not.
- thethirdone 4y ago
  If you define poor as "below the poverty line" and white people as "white non-hispanic", this is not true. There are more white hispanics below the poverty line than white non-hispanics. Typically when people are using the phrase "white people", they are not including latinos so I would rate "America has far more poor white people than poor non-white people" mostly false. Also I really hate how the standard demographics in the US are WHITE, BLACK, ASIAN, or OTHER with an additional binary of HISPANIC or NON-HISPANIC.
  - silisili 4y ago
    I'm not attempting to refute your claim, just adding an anecdote. I recently moved to a majority hispanic area, 80ish percent. It was a bit of culture shock for me in a lot of ways, one of which is you better have cash. Everyone I've hired to do anything will only take cash. If you offer a check, they'll sometimes say no, sometimes say OK, but I have to add tax. Not one would accept a credit card. Plumbers, electricians, handymen, guys with 50k dollar trucks and 80k dollar skid steers. I don't mean to intend to paint this as a solely hispanic thing, this is just the first place I've lived that functions that way. The guy who did our floor was white, and made the same demands in fact. It occurred to me there's likely a not insignificant amount of people making 6 figures who are according to the government, below the poverty line.
  - jmpman 4y ago
    I was intrigued by your assertion that the previous poster’s statement was incorrect. I’d heard that statement was also correct. Finding a data source online was surprisingly difficult, as almost all graphs on the topic were presented in percentages by race as opposed to absolute numbers. I finally found the following data source, and multiplied out the population count by race with the percentage below 100% of the poverty line by race. If you have a different data source, or methodology, please share. https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=Poverty%20by%20race&tid=ACSST1Y2021.S1703 https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=Poverty%20by%20race&t... White alone, not Hispanic or Latino 188537199 Less than 100% of poverty line 9.5% = 17,911,033 Versus Hispanic or Latino origin (of any race) 61398400 Less than 100% of poverty line 17.5% = 10,744,720 By absolute count, the assertion that White, Hispanic population have more people in poverty than White, non-Hispanic population, appears to be incorrect. From the data, there are 324173084 people in the US, with an overall poverty rate of 12.8%, meaning that 41,494,154 people are in poverty. 17,911,033 White non-Hispanic in poverty 41,494,154 - 17,911,033 = 23,583,121 (rest of the population) So, the White Non Hispanic Population in Poverty is less than the number of non (White Non Hispanic) Population. So, neither of you were correct? But there are a ton of poor white people in the US. Significantly more than any other single race.
    - thethirdone 4y ago
      I made a mistake when fact checking; I used the column for under-18 rather than all people. It made it easy to refute the gp's claim so I didn't bother doing the detailed work to support my intended claim ("white non-hispanics are not > 50% of people below the poverty line") before confirming. Thank you for correcting me.

ivalm 4y ago

> You should hire based on talent and experience I agree that you shouldn’t hire unqualified people. However, oftentimes as a hiring manager you have a bunch of relatively equivalent candidates (let’s say the top 5 of the 100 that applied). In this case there isn’t really a clear choice of who is better and diversity metrics can and should play a role in the hiring decision.

inglor_cz 4y ago
In that case, why not cast a lot?
- ivalm 4y ago
  Because having a diverse employee pool has advantages as it helps avoid group think, reduces mental blind spots, and introduces new perspectives. Diversity is itself good for teams.
  - ajvs 4y ago
    What does ethnic diversity have to do with intellectual diversity? Do blind testing.
    - ivalm 4y ago
      Because we live in a society and ethnicity has massive effect on culture. At the same time, blind testing only tests what is on a test. If the test makers aren’t diverse then the test won’t test diversity. Ethnicity is an incredibly easy proxy to use.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    I grew up in a rural area. The difference between me (white) and one of the two black kids or two Asian kids in my grade in terms of “perspective” or “group think” would be far less than me and a white kid from even the nearest big city. Also, how the hell does “perspective” matter for say…an accountant? Programmer? Vet tech? I’d buy it in marketing, product development, and some other random situations, but as a whole?

rizoma_dev 4y ago

I took an ethics class on this. Basically some quotas should be necessary because of unconscious biases (e.g. the resume of a white person being preferred to one of a black person with the exact same qualifications), but it's not enough to fix disparities, mostly because the current structure of the economy benefits from the existence of a precarious underclass

remarkEon 4y ago
You took an ethics class that said racial quotas are actually good? What quota is “enough” to overcome this (unmeasurable) “unconscious bias” that allegedly exists?
- rizoma_dev 4y ago
  It was about representation in positions of influence (politics, corporate boards, laboratories), which I think we agree should attempt to reflect the distribution of the populations
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    3% of the population is mentally ill. Should that be represented? 2% are senile. That too? I don’t want “someone like me” in positions of power over me. I have no idea what that’s such a popular phrase in America. I want someone vastly better than me in positions of power.
    - tadfisher 4y ago
      It's good that Title VII doesn't identify mental illness or senility as protected classes for the purposes of employment, then.
    - weard_beard 4y ago
      22% of the population are children. 40% of interns generate 0 paid income. 21% of families have a stay at home mother not in the work force. When are these slackers going to start demonstrating their worth!?

dmitrygr 4y ago

Presented without comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

decafninja 4y ago

So I used to work for a small company (~20 people) where all but one person was of a certain nationality. The reason for this was that all of the company's clients were also companies that were mostly comprised of people of that same nationality, many who spoke limited English. Because this company was small, everyone wore many hats, including technical staff having to interact with the clients. So while a candidate of a different nationality/ethnicity/race could technically be hired, the odds of this happening was extremely unlikely - because the language in question was usually not spoken by people outside of this nationality (this was nearly 15 years ago, things have changed a bit now). The one employee who was of a different nationality was part of that tiny exception - he had picked up the language from somewhere. Would you classify this hiring policy as racist?

threatofrain 4y ago
It's within the sphere of discrimination but may also be a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi... Of course this only describes how a legal framework might negotiate between adverse impacts and technical merit. In terms of who has the responsibility of fixing the ripples of current and historical wrongdoings between races, I don't think businesses are the right place to start. By the time it gets to business, asking people to make potentially unmeritorious decisions is a kind of corruption. Society-wide grievances ought to be addressed at the national level via a reparations program which funds education and family.

_8j50 4y ago

I agree but there are many companies that make their companies all white or black or <insert country they're from>. So there needs to be a practical way to day "you're in detroit and your 10k person company is hiring only white people for 20 years straight?" because otherwise how can equal treatment of everyone be enforced? If hiring was done on an objective metric this would be an easy solution, but even if you are skilled and experienced , they can say everyone of a certain race is a bad culture fit, didn't go to the all white college which also uses similar resons for exclusion, your experience and skills are not what they want (they don't have to hire the most skilled and experienced) and at most states they don't even need to give a reason at all. This was already happening before the civil rights act and after as well against the law. While better laws are conceivable, this is what judges are there for, to determine if the intent and effect was harming someone based on race. The gov doesn't force them to use race metrics, it just sues them if they, let's say, layoff 5k people and 4900 are all of a certain race and that happens to be 99% of people of that race. That doesn't make the company guilty, it just forces them to justify in front of a jury their reasoning (perhaps people of that race all worked in one department that was really not needes?). Their aversion to lawsuits is what drives their insanity. If you can prove that all the applicants of a certain race did not meet an objective criteria which can be scrutinized by outside industry experts then I see no problem with excluding those people and I have never heard of the EEOC suing companies otherwise (although I would be glad to be educated on this), and you will find many companies do have entire all white or all some nationality (east or south asian in tech) departments solely based on objective metrics. I am just saying, no law forced twilio so perhaps blame twilion in this case instead of the law/gov?