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"Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be inte

"Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining" From a director during a all-hands. "We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman" From my manager's manager. "Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman" The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things otherwise it is simply too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high.

minerva23 3y ago
> diverse candidate Even though some people would call me that, I've always hated that term/ideology. I wish companies would shift their mindset to, "a candidate that adds to our diversity". E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio so it's more representative of the source population. We haven't done as well with regard to racial and age non-discrimination. As we do better in either of those two categories, the definition of "a candidate that adds to our diversity" will change. > We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman This is both true and legal (though I wish it included NBs as well). The more candidates you select from a given demographic, the probability increases that your organization is participating in a discriminatory system. If it makes it more palatable, reword it in your head by tacking on at the end, "... so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination." > Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman Studies have shown even women evaluate women more harshly than they evaluate men. Extra justification is warranteed when gender is known or implied and the reviewer is likely to have unconscious bias. That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. (That said, there are a lot of gender implications on many applications, so it can be tough to hide gender completely). > The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things Alternatively, guaranteed job placement into one's chosen profession would help everyone indiscriminately. Trying to ban anti-discrimination efforts serves only status quo biases. > too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high I agree this is a risk. Surely there are some people who "bring this up" in a bigoted way and are rightfully fired, but I suspect there's a number of people who, with a gentle reframing, can see how their views are problematic and can learn the knowledge gaps that caused them to come to the wrong conclusion. From the company's perspective, they're doing anti-discrimination work, and an employee objection sounds like they're pro-discrimination. It's a bilateral failure to communicate in an at-will employment relationship.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  > > We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman > This is both true and legal Absolutely not. Using any protected class (race, gender, religion, disability, etc.) in hiring decisions is illegal unless this is a bona fide occupational qualification [1]. You can deliberately hire a Black person to play Frederick Douglass in a move. You cannot deliberately hire or favor someone on the basis of race or gender for software development jobs. This example above is textbook illegal discrimination: "I don't want to select $protected_class_X, it'd be best of the next one was $protected_class_Y". The fact that the previous hire belonged to $protected_class_X does not in any way make it legal to discriminate on the next hire. Companies do this, but they're breaking the law and hoping they aren't going to be held accountable. And as per TFA, now that they're realizing that people aren't as supportive of racial and gender discrimination as they thought these policies are being rolled back. > That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. Interestingly, all the DEI staff I've encountered have resoundingly shut down calls to anonymize applications. It puzzled me at first until I attended a career fair and recruiters instructed us to mark female URM candidates with two stars, non-URM women and URM men with one star, and Asian men with "ND". Which I later learned stood for "negative diversity". I poked around the onboarding docs recruiters had, and they linked to census data on majority-female and majority-URM names. Recruiters were being given specific percentage quotas for women and URM hires. Of course they don't want anonymization. It all makes sense when you realize DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination. > E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man This really struck me as an odd thing to say. You admit that women are overrepresented, and elsewhere in your comment you seem to think that discrimination favoring women is legal. Yet you assume that the overrepresentation of women is evidence that your company isn't discriminatory. Imagine someone wrote this: "Our company is good at avoiding anti-male discrimination, so we're well above industry average in our men:women ratio." And now imagine that the same person writes that refusing to hire a woman for an internship is legal if the previous intern hire was a woman. Do you think this person's company is non-discriminatory? The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men [2], so maybe don't assume that your company's overrepresentation of women is because other companies are discriminating against women and yours is non-biased. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi... 2. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484
Hnrobert42 3y ago
I don’t see why you need legal protections. A diversity of thought can bring value. If the manager said, “We currently only have staff with public sector experience. We don’t have headcount for more folks. But let me know if you have someone with private sector experience. They are extremely rare, and could really open up the way we solve the problem.” Would that offend you in the same way?
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  Yes, but that's using a candidate's previous job experience as a factor in hiring. That's totally legal. The issue is when you swap out "private sector experience" with protected classes like race and gender. That's illegal.
- throaweee123 3y ago
  No because the would be competency based. If we need a senior Go programmer and the candidate is only experienced in Python it makes sense to pass. Interviewing someone who is male and getting told that we can't hire them because they are male is gender-based discrimination.
  - Hnrobert42 3y ago
    Hmm. I see what you are saying, but it totally discounts the value of diversity of thought. For example, there is an optical illusion where people see the top line as shorter: <——> >—-< However, they are the same length. (The illusion is more pronounced with hand drawn lines.) Everyone falls for this illusion across all countries and cultures, so much so that folks hypothesized it is affected by our biology. Well, until some anthropologist showed it to some African tribesman. It turns out they were not susceptible to that form of illusion at all. It is unclear why. My point is that if something as simple estimates of a length of line can benefit from diversity of thought, imagine how many other “obvious” yet wrong assumptions people make. And that is why it is valuable to include people of different genders, races, abilities. Just like it is okay to pass on a yet another Python developer, maybe it is okay to pass on yet another person who assumes the top line is shorter. Look, I don’t like the idea of quotas, either. But I also don’t like working at place where everyone is the same.
Manuel_D 3y ago
> Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining" This is largely analogous to the "Opportunistic Hiring" policies Dropbox introduced in April 2019. We set aside reserved headcount for "diverse" candidates (ostensibly this includes women of any race, and URM men. In practice, almost entirely non-URM women). When a team hired a "diverse" candidate, the headcount was drawn from the reserved pool not the team's normal headcount allocation. In practice, this meant that women were often hired into roles without much work to do. By far the most common complaints I've heard from women in tech is that the company doesn't have enough work for them and they aren't being given projects. Makes me wonder how many companies are engaging in similar behavior.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  To be fair, I've got plenty of white (or white passing) male friends who also ended up in roles with a shortage of work to do. There's this awkward period between someone being hired, and them being familiar enough with the workplace to actively seek out stuff that needs to be done that leaves a lot of people with very little to do.
  - Manuel_D 3y ago
    My sister, though, had been in her role for 2+ years but still only had work to keep her busy maybe 30% of the time. Similar situation with one of my past girlfriends. These were both Product Managers - I think it's less of an issue for software developers, since there's always a backlog to hack away at.
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      Shit, I was talking about software developers. I've never known a busy manager. Not a gendered thing at all, it's just a bloated class of employee.
      - Manuel_D 3y ago

minerva23 3y ago

> diverse candidate Even though some people would call me that, I've always hated that term/ideology. I wish companies would shift their mindset to, "a candidate that adds to our diversity". E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man ratio so it's more representative of the source population. We haven't done as well with regard to racial and age non-discrimination. As we do better in either of those two categories, the definition of "a candidate that adds to our diversity" will change. > We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman This is both true and legal (though I wish it included NBs as well). The more candidates you select from a given demographic, the probability increases that your organization is participating in a discriminatory system. If it makes it more palatable, reword it in your head by tacking on at the end, "... so we can be somewhat reassured we're not contributing to gender discrimination." > Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate is a woman Studies have shown even women evaluate women more harshly than they evaluate men. Extra justification is warranteed when gender is known or implied and the reviewer is likely to have unconscious bias. That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. (That said, there are a lot of gender implications on many applications, so it can be tough to hide gender completely). > The reality is that we need a strong legal ruling against these type of things Alternatively, guaranteed job placement into one's chosen profession would help everyone indiscriminately. Trying to ban anti-discrimination efforts serves only status quo biases. > too "problematic" to bring this up and the risk for retaliation is insanely high I agree this is a risk. Surely there are some people who "bring this up" in a bigoted way and are rightfully fired, but I suspect there's a number of people who, with a gentle reframing, can see how their views are problematic and can learn the knowledge gaps that caused them to come to the wrong conclusion. From the company's perspective, they're doing anti-discrimination work, and an employee objection sounds like they're pro-discrimination. It's a bilateral failure to communicate in an at-will employment relationship.

Manuel_D 3y ago
> > We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman > This is both true and legal Absolutely not. Using any protected class (race, gender, religion, disability, etc.) in hiring decisions is illegal unless this is a bona fide occupational qualification [1]. You can deliberately hire a Black person to play Frederick Douglass in a move. You cannot deliberately hire or favor someone on the basis of race or gender for software development jobs. This example above is textbook illegal discrimination: "I don't want to select $protected_class_X, it'd be best of the next one was $protected_class_Y". The fact that the previous hire belonged to $protected_class_X does not in any way make it legal to discriminate on the next hire. Companies do this, but they're breaking the law and hoping they aren't going to be held accountable. And as per TFA, now that they're realizing that people aren't as supportive of racial and gender discrimination as they thought these policies are being rolled back. > That's why better hiring systems try to hide gender on the initial application, so you can be reasonably reassured gender is not a factor. Interestingly, all the DEI staff I've encountered have resoundingly shut down calls to anonymize applications. It puzzled me at first until I attended a career fair and recruiters instructed us to mark female URM candidates with two stars, non-URM women and URM men with one star, and Asian men with "ND". Which I later learned stood for "negative diversity". I poked around the onboarding docs recruiters had, and they linked to census data on majority-female and majority-URM names. Recruiters were being given specific percentage quotas for women and URM hires. Of course they don't want anonymization. It all makes sense when you realize DEI isn't an anti-discrimination effort, they are actively carrying out discrimination. > E.g. my current employer has done a really good job at not discriminating too much against women and attracting women, so we're well above industry average in our woman:NB:man This really struck me as an odd thing to say. You admit that women are overrepresented, and elsewhere in your comment you seem to think that discrimination favoring women is legal. Yet you assume that the overrepresentation of women is evidence that your company isn't discriminatory. Imagine someone wrote this: "Our company is good at avoiding anti-male discrimination, so we're well above industry average in our men:women ratio." And now imagine that the same person writes that refusing to hire a woman for an internship is legal if the previous intern hire was a woman. Do you think this person's company is non-discriminatory? The evidence in tech company hiring actually shows women are favored over men [2], so maybe don't assume that your company's overrepresentation of women is because other companies are discriminating against women and yours is non-biased. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi... 2. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484

Hnrobert42 3y ago

I don’t see why you need legal protections. A diversity of thought can bring value. If the manager said, “We currently only have staff with public sector experience. We don’t have headcount for more folks. But let me know if you have someone with private sector experience. They are extremely rare, and could really open up the way we solve the problem.” Would that offend you in the same way?

Manuel_D 3y ago
Yes, but that's using a candidate's previous job experience as a factor in hiring. That's totally legal. The issue is when you swap out "private sector experience" with protected classes like race and gender. That's illegal.
throaweee123 3y ago
No because the would be competency based. If we need a senior Go programmer and the candidate is only experienced in Python it makes sense to pass. Interviewing someone who is male and getting told that we can't hire them because they are male is gender-based discrimination.
- Hnrobert42 3y ago
  Hmm. I see what you are saying, but it totally discounts the value of diversity of thought. For example, there is an optical illusion where people see the top line as shorter: <——> >—-< However, they are the same length. (The illusion is more pronounced with hand drawn lines.) Everyone falls for this illusion across all countries and cultures, so much so that folks hypothesized it is affected by our biology. Well, until some anthropologist showed it to some African tribesman. It turns out they were not susceptible to that form of illusion at all. It is unclear why. My point is that if something as simple estimates of a length of line can benefit from diversity of thought, imagine how many other “obvious” yet wrong assumptions people make. And that is why it is valuable to include people of different genders, races, abilities. Just like it is okay to pass on a yet another Python developer, maybe it is okay to pass on yet another person who assumes the top line is shorter. Look, I don’t like the idea of quotas, either. But I also don’t like working at place where everyone is the same.

Manuel_D 3y ago

> Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining" This is largely analogous to the "Opportunistic Hiring" policies Dropbox introduced in April 2019. We set aside reserved headcount for "diverse" candidates (ostensibly this includes women of any race, and URM men. In practice, almost entirely non-URM women). When a team hired a "diverse" candidate, the headcount was drawn from the reserved pool not the team's normal headcount allocation. In practice, this meant that women were often hired into roles without much work to do. By far the most common complaints I've heard from women in tech is that the company doesn't have enough work for them and they aren't being given projects. Makes me wonder how many companies are engaging in similar behavior.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
To be fair, I've got plenty of white (or white passing) male friends who also ended up in roles with a shortage of work to do. There's this awkward period between someone being hired, and them being familiar enough with the workplace to actively seek out stuff that needs to be done that leaves a lot of people with very little to do.
- Manuel_D 3y ago
  My sister, though, had been in her role for 2+ years but still only had work to keep her busy maybe 30% of the time. Similar situation with one of my past girlfriends. These were both Product Managers - I think it's less of an issue for software developers, since there's always a backlog to hack away at.
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    Shit, I was talking about software developers. I've never known a busy manager. Not a gendered thing at all, it's just a bloated class of employee.
    - Manuel_D 3y ago