16 ms·

> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates.

by comex 4y ago

> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with similar resumes do not get. So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. On average, those candidates would have started with a disadvantage in getting their foot in the door for several reasons – including outright discrimination, and the cumulative effect of past discrimination, but also softer factors such as being less likely to have helpful personal connections. This applies not just to the Microsoft job at issue, but to the previous jobs that would have populated their resumes (and for younger candidates, even schools). Compensating for that sounds like a good policy to me. Now, the post also suggests there is pressure to actually hire or promote less-qualified candidates, which might be a problem, but in that area the post is more vague and speculative.

gnerkus 4y ago
How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who start with a disadvantage?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I would also support a policy that supports at least considering disabled or impoverished candidates.
  - CoastalCoder 4y ago
    I'm interested in the question of who decides which attributes are relevant, and which values of those attributes shall be favored. I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.
    - somedude895 4y ago
      Agree. A white person from a trailer park home and a black person from a government housing home are much more alike than a group of like-skinned people among each other. I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to address originally was that a hiring manager might choose a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal I don't know, but it's not fairness.
    - genrilz 4y ago
      The people who decide which attributes are relevant are the higher ups in the company. These people are making their decisions based off traits that they believe unfairly disadvantage people. The reason for that belief is the political advocacy of people who have those traits. Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the hiring managers would be making perfect decisions. I do not think this is at all the case though. Regardless, I think it is better to correct for the traits that do have advocacy behind them rather than just not doing any correction at all.
      - woojoo666 4y ago
        I think what's more important is transparency. Tell us the modifiers used in the hiring process. Are black people a 1.25x or 1.5x modifier? What are the modifiers for impoverished individuals? Then we can start to come to a consensus as a society, how much we want each modifier to be. But as long as these weights and biases are kept behind closed doors, we'll be left spouting speculation until the end of time.
        genrilz 4y ago
        Currently, the hiring process is opaque in pretty much every respect. I think this probably is a benefit to companies, since if they list the metrics they use, candidates will optimize for those metrics instead of actually being good at the job (Goodhart's law) Thus, I don't think we can expect the hiring process to become transparent anytime soon. It is known that the (opaque) hiring process does discriminate based on race. If I had to guess, the policy mentioned in the article is a direct response to papers like [1], which show that simply changing a person's name to be more "ethnic" results in their application being considered less. Thus I don't mind if someone tries to opaquely enforce a rule like the one in the article to counterbalance this. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053 https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053
  - adra 4y ago
    Both of those classes are actually illegal to ask about(in Canada at least but probably many nations, so unless the candidate volunteers this information (almost certainly not). Who knows how one could know to reverse discriminate themselves. The more pain (and hence unlikely to see the light of day) would be companies chipping into a educational fund to support impoverished individuals who would need added education to make it into positions where they can support themselves and break the difficult to climb wealth ladder. He'll, even the location of on-site jobs can be considered discrimination. All our candidates must attend interviews at our offices in NY, SF, London, or Seattle. All others can spend their own bucks to travel here for the hope that we'll hire you .
- massinstall 4y ago
  It doesn’t, and nobody in the DEI crowd cares about then. Some will likely even think that it’s great.
tqi 4y ago
The author also ignores the obvious fact that only 1% of candidates being "diverse" is the root problem being addressed...
- badpun 4y ago
  Not really, it's basically circular. The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect parity according to existing criteria (no one category is less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing ones. The game will never end.
  - peter422 4y ago
    My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian. You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the obvious existing problem. There might be a slippery slope in the future, I agree, but that doesn't mean there isn't an active problem now!
    - badpun 4y ago
      Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and technical things much more than women, so it's natural than they flock to CS.
      - peter422 4y ago
badpun 4y ago
> but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. This notion of "qualified for the job" is really blurry in our field though. For example, is someone fresh out of a three months bootcamp qualified for a job at Microsoft?
- tptacek 4y ago
  Maybe. Many of the elite eng school grads Microsoft hires don't work out. At the upper levels of this industry, "meritocracy" is really just credentialism --- something embedded in your own comment --- which is something you learn quickly when you abandon resumes and interviews and replace them with work sample testing.
  - badpun 4y ago
    Companies like Microsoft want the best people. It's not brick laying, there's no "qualified for the job" tick box. The effects in software are non-linear, and one brilliant hire can create more value than 100 mediocre ones. These companies are actively hurt by having to hire second-best diversity hires, even if they're technically qualified for the job (whatever that means).
    - tptacek 4y ago
      You're trying to argue axiomatically and I'm relating an empirical fact: Microsoft hires from elite engineering schools, and many of those hires wash out. It's not improbable that there are coding camp people who would perform well at Microsoft. I have seem people with similar backgrounds perform well in other elite engineering environments (cryptography engineering, kernel software security, to name two). "Technically qualified for the job" isn't some ineffable abstraction. Most programming jobs at Microsoft are quite well defined, and qualifying people for them mostly means extracting solved problems from the work and presenting them uniformly to a pool of candidates. You don't need science to figure out how to do this, although if you want it, it was all worked out and written down in the 1950s.
      - 4y ago
purpleblue 4y ago
It's not those with a disadvantage. It's strictly based on skin color. That's the problem. You have no idea if they are disadvantaged or not. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-class Black families these days. Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.
- rhacker 4y ago
  It's also dangerously creating racism. The more we tow some kind of line of lets end racism by only hiring minorities, the more racist this country will get. Watch it. The moment you step back and let people hire the best candidate, you will find different cultures mixing and moving forward together.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    > It's also dangerously creating racism. That seems like the primary feature at this point.
  - MockObject 4y ago
    This is such an obvious point that I am now deaf to cries of incompetence and good intentions. Racial division can only be the end goal of such a concerted effort.
- peter422 4y ago
  So even if we have aggregate statistics showing how certain groups of people are disadvantaged, the fact that the rules do not apply universally means we should just ignore them?
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    You can flip the script and ask why you should apply rules based on the aggregate despite obvious counterexamples. White boonies kid isn't happy to be excluded over the fact they are white, either. Point being this whole strive for 'ultimate equality' is going to create victims in its fanatical wake. No perfect method exists and no one wants to be on the losing end. But it is easier for those in a position of affluence to decide who is allowed in, as long as they won't get hurt themselves.
Manuel_D 4y ago
> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we interviewed any non-whites or non-catholics, the interview would be unbiased towards them" Is that a non-discriminatory hiring process? The fact that non-catholics and non-whites weren't even given a chance to interview is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the White Catholics that were still had to pass a skill-based interview?
- tptacek 4y ago
  None of this engages with the comment it replies to. One way to see that is to simply remove the quoted sentence, and read the comment to see if it would remain coherent at the top of the thread.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    It absolutely engages with the parent comment. The parent comment is trying to argue that discrimination in selecting which candidates to interview isn't a form of bias. This is incorrect as I explain in my comment.
    - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
      The apparent Microsoft policy is that every interview pool “must include at least one external African-American, Black, Hispanic, or Latina/o and one external female candidate”. Your counterexample is “every interview pool has to be entirely white.” I was originally going to write that you’re playing the “I’m technically correct” trick here, but I don’t think your argument actually rises to the level of technical correctness. Setting aside the debate over whether the former policy is desirable, it is clearly not the same as the latter policy. If Microsoft had said “everyone interviewed cannot be a white male,” or even “most people interviewed cannot be white males,” then you could more credibly try to make the case you’re aiming for. But they simply didn’t.
epx 4y ago
It is easy to feel like we have a target painted on our backs with this diversity thing. It is a sentimeng generated by our reptilian brain. (It does not help that some hotheads at LinkedIn say that every black hole in the universe is blame of the white man.) But this is a feeling that must be let go. Privilege allows people to reach excellence and excellence is scarce, so no, privileged people that do their homework won't suffer because we are trying to do the right thing, allowed by our current stage of civilization that generates so much surplus. Not picking up the capable people and letting them reach their level of excellence is a big problem in our society, and everybody would be better off if this was fixed.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Skin color doesn't make you privileged.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    Being white gives me the privilege of not being followed by security at department stores while I see my non-white friends be not so subtly watched or followed.
    - ironcurtain 4y ago
      That’s not the privilege but the consequence of unfortunate experience with shoplifting and groups more likely to perpetrate it. Crime statistics is hateful and racist, no doubt. But it drives bias which serves as first order simplified decision making
      - boppo1 4y ago
        >Crime statistics are hateful and racist, no doubt. How so?
faeriechangling 4y ago
I'm so tired of this crap where we pretend discrimination isn't discrimination if we jump through a bunch of hoops. Yes asians being told they can't come to interviews because they're too asian is racism and it does impact their chances of seeking employment because how you do on any given interview is going to be to a degree random. You could get a coding test you've never seen before or one you practiced the night before. The whole song and dance about applying racism at the interview selection stage isn't about not being racist, it's that there isn't court precedent that specifically makes that illegal, but there is for other more direct techniques like racial quotas.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > isn't about not being racist They're not even saying it's not being racist - they freely admit that it is - they just insist that the ends justify the means.
antisthenes 4y ago
The problem with this reasoning is that you assume you have a perfect view of how disadvantaged every single subgroup is. Also, given that this a zero-sum game (the company only has a fixed number of hours to interview a single game), you are necessarily making someone else worse off when you give advantage to a sub-group of candidates. Also consider that many candidates can belong to a privileged group and a disadvantaged group at the same time. Of course none such nuances are being considered. How could they, when all you have on the person is their 1 page work resume? You know literally nothing about them, except a few projects they claim to have completed in the past. Now you're not actually hiring for skills, but playing disadvantage roulette with your hiring pool. Ok, maybe not, and you're still screening for skills, but at least call a spade a spade.
bradlys 4y ago
> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. I’ve heard from diversity candidates who work at Microsoft and interview at other companies that this part isn’t even true. I’ve been on the hiring side and seen how it isn’t true too… The bar is truly different at all levels. Recruitment, interviewing, hiring, offers, and management are all very different. To act as if there isn’t this is to truly be naive or just happen to have only worked and interacted in a very small group of people. I’ve worked with hundreds and talked to thousands - this shit happens a lot more than HR wants to admit. I’m not saying someone always get the preferential treatment - I’m just saying this happens more than people think it does.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  Don't forget the financial incentives that were given to managers who hired "URMs" at Intel (under represented minorities). The bonus was pretty fat too.
Balgair 4y ago
Ok, let's do some nice, calm soothing math for a second. Per the OP previously 'diversity' candidates were 1% of all applicants. I'll assume the null hypothesis here and then also assume that they were 1% of the interviewees too. Lets assume that diversity interviewees are turned into hires at some factor Y. I'll make no assumptions on if that is different than from non-diversity interviewees. Now, with the new policy, there is a 15x increase in the probability of turning diversity applicants into interviewees. However, nothing has been done to change Y, the factor at which diversity interviewees are turned into candidates. They are explicitly stating that they are not changing Y. So that then means that diversity interviewees are now less likely to move on past the interview stage. Based on the numbers, they then need to interview at 15x the rate as previously to be turned into hires. Please, correct me if I am wrong here, but this seems to hurt diversity interviewees. I see it as taking up 15x the time, rejecting at a 15x rate, and eliciting these real human people to become stats in some database that the policy makers can show off to some other boss without any compensation.
telltruth 4y ago
Managers are NOT free to choose who to hire. When you get headcount, they tell you to make sure not to sacrifice quality and, also in same breath, they tell you that you have no career paths if you don't make your DEI numbers. If there are no actual competent candidates in your field who also happens to be diverse, what would you do? Everyone from CEO to line managers in all major big techs are now have DEI target that must be achieved. If it is not then don't bother applying for promos. Most people at L7+ will also see significant cut in bonuses if they don't make DEI targets. Especially at VP level, the cut becomes pretty significant. So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers. There are very specific commitments you must write down in OKRs. I have seen a situation where a manager literally ignored every single non-diverse resume and did not interviewed single non-diverse candidate because of desperation of not making his numbers. He went out of his way to get person completely stranger to work his team was doing. He finally ended up hiring a person well below expectations and this person now simply hangs out in the team as diversity token. The VP sent email to whole group congratulating in supporting diversity and be inclusive. Everyone got their well deserved bonuses for this magnificent achievement.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  "So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers." Lazy, incompetent Fucks.

by comex 4y ago

gnerkus 4y ago

How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who start with a disadvantage?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I would also support a policy that supports at least considering disabled or impoverished candidates.
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  I'm interested in the question of who decides which attributes are relevant, and which values of those attributes shall be favored. I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.
  - somedude895 4y ago
    Agree. A white person from a trailer park home and a black person from a government housing home are much more alike than a group of like-skinned people among each other. I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to address originally was that a hiring manager might choose a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal I don't know, but it's not fairness.
  - genrilz 4y ago
    The people who decide which attributes are relevant are the higher ups in the company. These people are making their decisions based off traits that they believe unfairly disadvantage people. The reason for that belief is the political advocacy of people who have those traits. Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the hiring managers would be making perfect decisions. I do not think this is at all the case though. Regardless, I think it is better to correct for the traits that do have advocacy behind them rather than just not doing any correction at all.
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      I think what's more important is transparency. Tell us the modifiers used in the hiring process. Are black people a 1.25x or 1.5x modifier? What are the modifiers for impoverished individuals? Then we can start to come to a consensus as a society, how much we want each modifier to be. But as long as these weights and biases are kept behind closed doors, we'll be left spouting speculation until the end of time.
      - genrilz 4y ago
        Currently, the hiring process is opaque in pretty much every respect. I think this probably is a benefit to companies, since if they list the metrics they use, candidates will optimize for those metrics instead of actually being good at the job (Goodhart's law) Thus, I don't think we can expect the hiring process to become transparent anytime soon. It is known that the (opaque) hiring process does discriminate based on race. If I had to guess, the policy mentioned in the article is a direct response to papers like [1], which show that simply changing a person's name to be more "ethnic" results in their application being considered less. Thus I don't mind if someone tries to opaquely enforce a rule like the one in the article to counterbalance this. [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053 https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053
- adra 4y ago
  Both of those classes are actually illegal to ask about(in Canada at least but probably many nations, so unless the candidate volunteers this information (almost certainly not). Who knows how one could know to reverse discriminate themselves. The more pain (and hence unlikely to see the light of day) would be companies chipping into a educational fund to support impoverished individuals who would need added education to make it into positions where they can support themselves and break the difficult to climb wealth ladder. He'll, even the location of on-site jobs can be considered discrimination. All our candidates must attend interviews at our offices in NY, SF, London, or Seattle. All others can spend their own bucks to travel here for the hope that we'll hire you .
massinstall 4y ago
It doesn’t, and nobody in the DEI crowd cares about then. Some will likely even think that it’s great.

tqi 4y ago

The author also ignores the obvious fact that only 1% of candidates being "diverse" is the root problem being addressed...

badpun 4y ago
Not really, it's basically circular. The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect parity according to existing criteria (no one category is less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing ones. The game will never end.
- peter422 4y ago
  My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian. You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the obvious existing problem. There might be a slippery slope in the future, I agree, but that doesn't mean there isn't an active problem now!
  - badpun 4y ago
    Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and technical things much more than women, so it's natural than they flock to CS.
    - peter422 4y ago

badpun 4y ago

> but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. This notion of "qualified for the job" is really blurry in our field though. For example, is someone fresh out of a three months bootcamp qualified for a job at Microsoft?

tptacek 4y ago
Maybe. Many of the elite eng school grads Microsoft hires don't work out. At the upper levels of this industry, "meritocracy" is really just credentialism --- something embedded in your own comment --- which is something you learn quickly when you abandon resumes and interviews and replace them with work sample testing.
- badpun 4y ago
  Companies like Microsoft want the best people. It's not brick laying, there's no "qualified for the job" tick box. The effects in software are non-linear, and one brilliant hire can create more value than 100 mediocre ones. These companies are actively hurt by having to hire second-best diversity hires, even if they're technically qualified for the job (whatever that means).
  - tptacek 4y ago
    You're trying to argue axiomatically and I'm relating an empirical fact: Microsoft hires from elite engineering schools, and many of those hires wash out. It's not improbable that there are coding camp people who would perform well at Microsoft. I have seem people with similar backgrounds perform well in other elite engineering environments (cryptography engineering, kernel software security, to name two). "Technically qualified for the job" isn't some ineffable abstraction. Most programming jobs at Microsoft are quite well defined, and qualifying people for them mostly means extracting solved problems from the work and presenting them uniformly to a pool of candidates. You don't need science to figure out how to do this, although if you want it, it was all worked out and written down in the 1950s.
    - 4y ago

purpleblue 4y ago

It's not those with a disadvantage. It's strictly based on skin color. That's the problem. You have no idea if they are disadvantaged or not. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-class Black families these days. Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.

rhacker 4y ago
It's also dangerously creating racism. The more we tow some kind of line of lets end racism by only hiring minorities, the more racist this country will get. Watch it. The moment you step back and let people hire the best candidate, you will find different cultures mixing and moving forward together.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > It's also dangerously creating racism. That seems like the primary feature at this point.
- MockObject 4y ago
  This is such an obvious point that I am now deaf to cries of incompetence and good intentions. Racial division can only be the end goal of such a concerted effort.
peter422 4y ago
So even if we have aggregate statistics showing how certain groups of people are disadvantaged, the fact that the rules do not apply universally means we should just ignore them?
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  You can flip the script and ask why you should apply rules based on the aggregate despite obvious counterexamples. White boonies kid isn't happy to be excluded over the fact they are white, either. Point being this whole strive for 'ultimate equality' is going to create victims in its fanatical wake. No perfect method exists and no one wants to be on the losing end. But it is easier for those in a position of affluence to decide who is allowed in, as long as they won't get hurt themselves.

Manuel_D 4y ago

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we interviewed any non-whites or non-catholics, the interview would be unbiased towards them" Is that a non-discriminatory hiring process? The fact that non-catholics and non-whites weren't even given a chance to interview is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the White Catholics that were still had to pass a skill-based interview?

tptacek 4y ago
None of this engages with the comment it replies to. One way to see that is to simply remove the quoted sentence, and read the comment to see if it would remain coherent at the top of the thread.
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  It absolutely engages with the parent comment. The parent comment is trying to argue that discrimination in selecting which candidates to interview isn't a form of bias. This is incorrect as I explain in my comment.
  - chipotle_coyote 4y ago
    The apparent Microsoft policy is that every interview pool “must include at least one external African-American, Black, Hispanic, or Latina/o and one external female candidate”. Your counterexample is “every interview pool has to be entirely white.” I was originally going to write that you’re playing the “I’m technically correct” trick here, but I don’t think your argument actually rises to the level of technical correctness. Setting aside the debate over whether the former policy is desirable, it is clearly not the same as the latter policy. If Microsoft had said “everyone interviewed cannot be a white male,” or even “most people interviewed cannot be white males,” then you could more credibly try to make the case you’re aiming for. But they simply didn’t.

epx 4y ago

It is easy to feel like we have a target painted on our backs with this diversity thing. It is a sentimeng generated by our reptilian brain. (It does not help that some hotheads at LinkedIn say that every black hole in the universe is blame of the white man.) But this is a feeling that must be let go. Privilege allows people to reach excellence and excellence is scarce, so no, privileged people that do their homework won't suffer because we are trying to do the right thing, allowed by our current stage of civilization that generates so much surplus. Not picking up the capable people and letting them reach their level of excellence is a big problem in our society, and everybody would be better off if this was fixed.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Skin color doesn't make you privileged.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  Being white gives me the privilege of not being followed by security at department stores while I see my non-white friends be not so subtly watched or followed.
  - ironcurtain 4y ago
    That’s not the privilege but the consequence of unfortunate experience with shoplifting and groups more likely to perpetrate it. Crime statistics is hateful and racist, no doubt. But it drives bias which serves as first order simplified decision making
    - boppo1 4y ago
      >Crime statistics are hateful and racist, no doubt. How so?

faeriechangling 4y ago

I'm so tired of this crap where we pretend discrimination isn't discrimination if we jump through a bunch of hoops. Yes asians being told they can't come to interviews because they're too asian is racism and it does impact their chances of seeking employment because how you do on any given interview is going to be to a degree random. You could get a coding test you've never seen before or one you practiced the night before. The whole song and dance about applying racism at the interview selection stage isn't about not being racist, it's that there isn't court precedent that specifically makes that illegal, but there is for other more direct techniques like racial quotas.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> isn't about not being racist They're not even saying it's not being racist - they freely admit that it is - they just insist that the ends justify the means.

antisthenes 4y ago

The problem with this reasoning is that you assume you have a perfect view of how disadvantaged every single subgroup is. Also, given that this a zero-sum game (the company only has a fixed number of hours to interview a single game), you are necessarily making someone else worse off when you give advantage to a sub-group of candidates. Also consider that many candidates can belong to a privileged group and a disadvantaged group at the same time. Of course none such nuances are being considered. How could they, when all you have on the person is their 1 page work resume? You know literally nothing about them, except a few projects they claim to have completed in the past. Now you're not actually hiring for skills, but playing disadvantage roulette with your hiring pool. Ok, maybe not, and you're still screening for skills, but at least call a spade a spade.

bradlys 4y ago

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. I’ve heard from diversity candidates who work at Microsoft and interview at other companies that this part isn’t even true. I’ve been on the hiring side and seen how it isn’t true too… The bar is truly different at all levels. Recruitment, interviewing, hiring, offers, and management are all very different. To act as if there isn’t this is to truly be naive or just happen to have only worked and interacted in a very small group of people. I’ve worked with hundreds and talked to thousands - this shit happens a lot more than HR wants to admit. I’m not saying someone always get the preferential treatment - I’m just saying this happens more than people think it does.

Der_Einzige 4y ago
Don't forget the financial incentives that were given to managers who hired "URMs" at Intel (under represented minorities). The bonus was pretty fat too.

Balgair 4y ago

Ok, let's do some nice, calm soothing math for a second. Per the OP previously 'diversity' candidates were 1% of all applicants. I'll assume the null hypothesis here and then also assume that they were 1% of the interviewees too. Lets assume that diversity interviewees are turned into hires at some factor Y. I'll make no assumptions on if that is different than from non-diversity interviewees. Now, with the new policy, there is a 15x increase in the probability of turning diversity applicants into interviewees. However, nothing has been done to change Y, the factor at which diversity interviewees are turned into candidates. They are explicitly stating that they are not changing Y. So that then means that diversity interviewees are now less likely to move on past the interview stage. Based on the numbers, they then need to interview at 15x the rate as previously to be turned into hires. Please, correct me if I am wrong here, but this seems to hurt diversity interviewees. I see it as taking up 15x the time, rejecting at a 15x rate, and eliciting these real human people to become stats in some database that the policy makers can show off to some other boss without any compensation.

telltruth 4y ago

Managers are NOT free to choose who to hire. When you get headcount, they tell you to make sure not to sacrifice quality and, also in same breath, they tell you that you have no career paths if you don't make your DEI numbers. If there are no actual competent candidates in your field who also happens to be diverse, what would you do? Everyone from CEO to line managers in all major big techs are now have DEI target that must be achieved. If it is not then don't bother applying for promos. Most people at L7+ will also see significant cut in bonuses if they don't make DEI targets. Especially at VP level, the cut becomes pretty significant. So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers. There are very specific commitments you must write down in OKRs. I have seen a situation where a manager literally ignored every single non-diverse resume and did not interviewed single non-diverse candidate because of desperation of not making his numbers. He went out of his way to get person completely stranger to work his team was doing. He finally ended up hiring a person well below expectations and this person now simply hangs out in the team as diversity token. The VP sent email to whole group congratulating in supporting diversity and be inclusive. Everyone got their well deserved bonuses for this magnificent achievement.

datavirtue 4y ago
"So, they constantly badger their underlings to make their numbers." Lazy, incompetent Fucks.