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Relatedly: I cannot defend the kind of "diversity" that would rather hire a rich brahmin than an inner-city American kid in need of a leg-up, just to fulfill s

• jrs235 4y ago
  Some of starting to rearrange the letters to be DIE. Companies are going to die as they become paralyzed trying to placate differing views and opinions... or parts of their workforce are going to protest or cause internal strife/trouble...
• deleted 4y ago
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• paperwasp42 4y ago
  > I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general. As a women in tech, I am feeling the backlash. I have seen a huge increase in the amount of skepticism of my abilities that I face from people who haven't worked with me before. And the worst part of it is that there's actually logic behind the bigotry, because it is extremely true that my company continues to hire incompetent people just because they are women. Bigotry itself is very difficult to combat, but when you add in a solid logical grounding for the bigotry, it becomes dang near impossible to eradicate. I worry that companies are causing more harm than good with the change in hiring practices these past couple years. I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.
  • dijonman2 4y ago
    As a hiring manager I have substantial pressure to hire incompetent people to meet quotas. I confronted my recruiter in front of witnesses and was partially shunned. I have been hiring for many years, and I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity. Now I am forced to. It’s an insult to those who earned their position. It’s an insult to me as I am less and less likely to get a new job because I won’t fit quotas. There is resentment all around. I feel bad for the minorities who have worked hard to earn their positions, you are right that it undermines their work and trivializes their commitment to their work. It’s gone way too far.
    • chrismcb 4y ago
      And that is illegal (assuming you are in the us)
      • concinds 4y ago
        Likely not. Saying "we will only hire women for this position" would be illegal, but saying it implicitly would not be. True quotas are unlawful, but there are many loopholes there.
      • slt2021 4y ago
        it is not, almost all big employers happily announce that they are Affirmative Action employers and this provides shield for their actions
        • polski-g 4y ago
          Private sector affirmative action is illegal in the US.
    • tdeck 4y ago
      What are the specific quotas? Is there a percentage number you've been given?
    • ParetoOptimal 4y ago
      > I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity What are your thoughts on implicit bias?
      • softawre 4y ago
        Implicit bias is real and there are ways to mitigate some of it. More process driven interview frameworks, less 'he seem like me so he probably good'.
        • omginternets 4y ago
          Define "real". It's definitely measurable in the lab, but the effect sizes aren't very impressive, and the link to real-world outcomes remains quite controversial.
  • AussieWog93 4y ago
    >I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago. As a man in tech, I've been a part of countless hush-hush conversations that would never be repeated within earshot of a woman or untrusted man. It's as grim as you say, and worse. I'm really sorry that things have become like this.
    • juliendorra 4y ago
      What do you mean by "things have become like this"? I obviously don’t know your age but the software industry (and other fields) has been extremely sexist since decades (at least the 80s). The efforts to explicitly reign in the sexism in tech are quite recent (late 2000, early 2010, and even later in France where I live). My point is that what you perceive as a recent reaction might be the same old sexist culture continuing to spread, ruin life’s and block careers (which is a definition of backlash: reactionary fight against feminist advances)
      • unconed 4y ago
        What evidence of this sexist culture do you have? There seem to be a few classic stories that have been spun: - that a gender imbalance in students or employees automatically implies sexism - that being casual about sex is automatically sexist - that not favoring a feminine, talkative, consensus-first working style is sexist - that women deciding to leave tech means they are being "chased out" I don't find any of these arguments particularly convincing. It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment. What you may be referring to from the early 2010s is that a few activists of the Adria Richards type found that all they had to do was cry sexism, and a bunch of naive geeks stood ready to self flaggelate about how sexist all the other men were, but not them, no no no. Which of course means that tech is not particularly sexist at all, certainly not compared to media or finance. If there is one thing that is unabashedly sexist, it's western feminism, which has had 50 years to show its homework, and has revealed itself to not be interested in gender equality, but only in advancing female interests and positing women's rights, preferences and working styles as superior to those of men. Strangely, despite this long track record, feminists still haven't realized that they are the status quo and they do everything they can to maintain a monopoly on gender discussions and issues. The use of words like "reactionary" is meant to emphasize this: that anyone who does not agree with them is trying to go backwards. But this is a lie, because despite their "gender studies" we understand men and women worse than ever before. Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is, but they are all sure that women have it worse. Funny that.
  • treeman79 4y ago
    Had a few times in the last 10 years. Where I was pushed very hard to hire someone either completely unqualified, or in we we simply didn’t need. Like being told to hire a bash programmer for a database admin position. Because person was trans. Thinking back on if. I’ve never had a regular white woman pushed on me. I’ve hired woman before. But that was because they were qualified. Now I’m considered evil for looking at merit.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • majani 4y ago
    Of late I have been seeing people going viral for posting some incredible career trajectories. Usually involving someone in another career who made the switch to tech by doing a bootcamp, and within a year they were in FAANG. Now that I think about it, they were all people who fit into diversity quotas and were probably diversity hires
  • thingification 4y ago
    Not questioning what you're saying, just adding that I think "prejudice" is a better word for this than bigotry? (to be clear: we're discussing here the results of identity-based hiring practices, as opposed to are there sex differences in programming ability) Words never have entirely cleanly defined meanings, but broadly I think bigotry is often used to speak specifically of all-out irrational dogmatic beliefs. Prejudice is more often used where there is some partly rational judgement about a group of people, together with moral problems caused by applying that logic to a particular person. Of course, often our prejudices are very fallible: "rational" prejudices turn out to be wrong, and in that sense are functionally equivalent to bigotry. But holding a "rational" belief that all prejudice is irrational also does not make us infallible! Some prejudice seems hard to criticize morally: for example, everybody makes prejudiced judgements say based partly on clothing, age, and sex if they find themselves in close proximity to a group of young men in a city at night. On the other hand, at work, one tries hard to not judge based on whatever preconceived group notions one has -- I think almost everybody thinks that's a good thing (which as you say can be harmed by identity-based hiring). I don't have a good abstract explanation of what makes the difference between "good" and "bad" prejudice, and I wish I did, so would love to hear of good writing about it if somebody can recommend some! In the company I worked for recently, perhaps even a majority of the more capable programmers around me happened to be women. But wherever we do start hiring based on identity, it's hard to see how prejudice can be avoided, even if bigotry were entirely absent.
• busymom0 4y ago
  Brown Indian immigrant here. I am part of a multi racial family and have nephews and nieces who are white and mixed race. I have family who is white and black while I am brown. This “DIE” stuff is repulsive. Other than the obvious hiring of incompetent people simply to fill a quota, it also creates frictions in relationships when some job post hires one family member simply because they are brown or black while excluding their sibling simply because they are white. I can’t explain how disgusting these policies feel to me.
• nicbou 4y ago
  There was a fascinating article about how caste discrimination made its way into tech because many of the decision makers are blind to it. Diversity metrics are simple. The society they work on is not.
• ngc248 4y ago
  wow .... when was a rich brahmin hired instead of an inner city American kid .... are you really sure ... that the Indians working in the US tech industry have gotten those positions thru affirmative action? I keep seeing this being repeated everywhere. let me clarify Indians are NOT getting into US companies because of a colour quota. I will tell you how they are getting in. There are two ways 1. Thru outsourcing/body shopping 2. A lot of Indians get in by doing Masters courses in the US. Most of them would have already worked for tech in India. For US companies they can hire experienced people at US fresher salaries.
  • geebee 4y ago
    I'm coming in very late to this conversation, but there may be some ambiguity here. Americans will often use the word "Brahmin" to generally refer to an upper class. For instance, the "Boston Brahmins" is a phrase used to refer to old money WASP families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin. So this might not have been in tended specifically as a reference to upper class Indians (it wasn't entirely clear to me from the post).
    • ngc248 4y ago
      nope ... the post mentions skin color quota ... I doubt they are talking about "boston brahmins"
      • geebee 4y ago
        Yeah it’s there. Should have read it better.
• andrepd 4y ago
  Putting identity over class is the main sin of the modern "woke" movement, in my opinion. Seeing how much that identitarian, exclusionary, and sectarian thinking is promoted by mainstream media, I cannot help but think it is intentional, as a distraction.
  • lupire 4y ago
    USA has a long documented history of being deeply racist inside class consciousness, which is why poor non-whites compromise on "help rich and poor PoC" instead of only "help poor but only white people"
• cscurmudgeon 4y ago
  Nobody is preferring Indians in this diversity game. Will you defend “diversity" that would rather hire a rich inner-city American kid versus a poor brahmin in need of a leg-up?
  • omginternets 4y ago
    In academic admissions, you're probably right. In tech hiring, I have seen it firsthand, on multiple occasions.
    • cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      Totally not anecdotal lol
      • omginternets 4y ago
        Contrary to the parent /s
        • cscurmudgeon 4y ago
          • omginternets 4y ago
    • cscurmudgeon 4y ago
      I have seen the opposite of that firsthand several times and, and unlike your observation, it is public policy of many large companies.
      • omginternets 4y ago
        Well, if we take each other's experiences at face value, then we would conclude that some places are doing exactly as I claimed. I'm not sure what your point is, aside from implying that we should take public corporate statements at face value.
• desi_ninja 4y ago
  What's a rich Brahmin? Where this assumption coming from ? I think you are about to make highly biased and uninformed opinion on Hinduism based on some article you read , so go on...