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You don't need to prove that that measurements are reliable to highlight the existence of discrimination. If 10% of applicants are X, and I mandate that 20% of

You don't need to prove that that measurements are reliable to highlight the existence of discrimination. If 10% of applicants are X, and I mandate that 20% of hires are X, then even if my interview results are truly random it's still discriminating in favor of X. Similar deal with tech hiring. What is the pool of candidates for this hire or promotion? If you're setting quotas in excess of the pool's representation you're explicitly instituting discrimination. I'm okay with people doing this, provided they're transparent in that they're instituting affirmative action and do not intend to create a non-discriminatory hiring or promotion process. What does get on my nerves is when people privately push for policies like this, but publicly decry and mention of discrimination favoring "diverse" groups as hurtful.

anderskaseorg 4y ago
The post doesn’t suggest there’s any mandated quota for hiring or promotion—only for interviews or consideration. And it doesn’t suggest any secrecy about this policy.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  If I tell my recruiters to never interview black people, it's not discrimination because it's not actually prohibiting them from hiring or promotion? Quotas in choosing who to interview or who to consider for promotion is absolutely a form of discrimination. I've worked at a company that implemented this. It resulted in a vast double standard: white and asian males only got interviews if they came from elite colleges or well-known companies. Diverse candidates could pretty much come from anywhere. This resulted in a substantial disparity of tech-screen pass rates. Which the company held up as evidence of discrimination, and demanded that we address this disparity. Proposals to anonymize tech-screen, strangely, were ignored. Instead, recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) got to decide who advanced from the tech-screen to the on-site instead of engineers.
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    > recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) It's hard to attribute longterm success of the company to any given hires but race is easy to count. What is easy to measure comes to dominate your thinking.
- prewett 4y ago
  The post describes turning down a lot of qualified people because they had not encountered any applicants of required race/gender yet. In fact, they ended up not hiring for the position at all because they never encountered applicants of the required race/gender. So despite the fact that they had qualified applicants, they ended up forced to hire nobody. No individual person was discriminated against, but the group of applicants sure was: none of them got hired, despite the fact that the manager had qualified applicants and wanted--needed--to hire one. The post also notes that this was invisible to people who weren't a manager, so it was effectively a secret, whether or not it was intentionally so.
tracker1 4y ago
Agreed, I'd much rather just be honest and transparent with processes. That's not to say there aren't potential down sides. Of course, I still hold that trying to resolve these issues completely on the demand side of careers that often involve an educational component doesn't always work well, it can drive up incomes, but won't necessarily make the implied problem better. What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  > What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths. 100% this. If companies want to show that they're improving the diversity of the tech field, sponsoring study programs and science olympiad teams in underserved communities are a much better investment than quotas. The only thing that's going to increase the representation in tech as a whole is increasing the number of black, Latin, indigenous tech workers. Instead, companies seem to only care about signaling diversity. When a company sets a quota and pushes their representation of "diverse" demographics up a few percentage points, they're increasing the diversity within the company. They're doing nothing to actually increase the diversity of the field.

anderskaseorg 4y ago

The post doesn’t suggest there’s any mandated quota for hiring or promotion—only for interviews or consideration. And it doesn’t suggest any secrecy about this policy.

Manuel_D 4y ago
If I tell my recruiters to never interview black people, it's not discrimination because it's not actually prohibiting them from hiring or promotion? Quotas in choosing who to interview or who to consider for promotion is absolutely a form of discrimination. I've worked at a company that implemented this. It resulted in a vast double standard: white and asian males only got interviews if they came from elite colleges or well-known companies. Diverse candidates could pretty much come from anywhere. This resulted in a substantial disparity of tech-screen pass rates. Which the company held up as evidence of discrimination, and demanded that we address this disparity. Proposals to anonymize tech-screen, strangely, were ignored. Instead, recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) got to decide who advanced from the tech-screen to the on-site instead of engineers.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  > recruiters (who had bonuses attached to diverse hires) It's hard to attribute longterm success of the company to any given hires but race is easy to count. What is easy to measure comes to dominate your thinking.
prewett 4y ago
The post describes turning down a lot of qualified people because they had not encountered any applicants of required race/gender yet. In fact, they ended up not hiring for the position at all because they never encountered applicants of the required race/gender. So despite the fact that they had qualified applicants, they ended up forced to hire nobody. No individual person was discriminated against, but the group of applicants sure was: none of them got hired, despite the fact that the manager had qualified applicants and wanted--needed--to hire one. The post also notes that this was invisible to people who weren't a manager, so it was effectively a secret, whether or not it was intentionally so.

tracker1 4y ago

Agreed, I'd much rather just be honest and transparent with processes. That's not to say there aren't potential down sides. Of course, I still hold that trying to resolve these issues completely on the demand side of careers that often involve an educational component doesn't always work well, it can drive up incomes, but won't necessarily make the implied problem better. What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths.

Manuel_D 4y ago
> What is at least also needed are dealing with the supply side, which is incentivising and cultivating educational paths. 100% this. If companies want to show that they're improving the diversity of the tech field, sponsoring study programs and science olympiad teams in underserved communities are a much better investment than quotas. The only thing that's going to increase the representation in tech as a whole is increasing the number of black, Latin, indigenous tech workers. Instead, companies seem to only care about signaling diversity. When a company sets a quota and pushes their representation of "diverse" demographics up a few percentage points, they're increasing the diversity within the company. They're doing nothing to actually increase the diversity of the field.