6 ms·

Google scraps diversity-based hiring targets

63 points by indy 2y ago

smb06 2y ago
I can understand companies having targets on who they have in their interviewee pool but it hasn’t made sense to me to have targets on who you hire.
- amluto 2y ago
  I think this is wrong distinction to make. One could have a metric like “how well does the interviewee pool match the overall population demographics” or the same thing for the new hires or for the current employees, etc. And improving those metrics could be a goal. BUT letting the actual hiring process have any part in achieving that goal beyond merely trying to be fair seems like it could be problematic. So, if a company actually wants to do anything to improve these diversity metrics, I think they should be in the form of outreach and thoroughly separated from the decisions to interview or hire a candidate. Make sure that the company goes to job fairs at variety of universities. Have outreach for people who didn’t go to university at all. Heck, a big company like Google could even try to encourage young members of under-represented groups to go to college, have some scholarship programs, and maybe cultivate an improved candidate pool (although care is still needed — giving scholarships only to people of a certain race or races is problematic). But don’t let the people making hiring decisions know that these are the people you reached out to so that you don’t taint the process!
atleastoptimal 2y ago
If you're from a group that is represented, in a company, at a smaller proportion than your group's proportion of the population from which a company hires from, how are you to assume anything but that you only got the job due to diversity quotas, if those quotas are in place? Wouldn't it make you feel worse about your own merits?
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  No, why would I? I'd be much more adverse to working for a company that engaged in disparate impact, but in general I believe that disparate impact should not be tolerated.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  I’m not in a minority group, but I don’t feel like I’ve ever really been hired based on my merits. I’ve been primarily hired based on the RNG of getting past application processes, and hiring managers liking things about me that aren’t particularly related to my merits.
  - riku_iki 2y ago
    But at google, they still have some coding interviews with feedback, right, so hires not from minority group can think that they beat many other applicants in this game.
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      I'm at Google. Also a member of various majority groups. I absolutely do not feel like I am in my position based on some abstract "merit." Absolutely shitloads of lucky situations placed me in advantaged opportunities to get me here.
- benlivengood 2y ago
  Google explicitly rejected merit-based hiring for least-regret hiring by setting the bar much higher than strictly necessary for adequate performance. This greatly reduced the rate of unregretted attrition and, until 2022, layoffs. What this means is that most applications are rejected and so it's very sensitive to unconscious bias or under-recruiting from pools of minority candidates essentially due to network effects. Internal referrals will make up a sizeable percentage of successful hires because they take precedence in the recruiting pipeline (recruiters are still incentivized to maximize their hiring percentage and referrals often have stronger signal to noise on candidate ability than searching through resumes or accepting applications). This effect occurs with more standard hiring practices as well, e.g. "old boys networks", but as the ratio of hires to applicants increases it becomes much more obvious when hiring is biased against minorities and the actual biases can be corrected with policies and procedures. Hence Google's focus on equity in the recruiting pipeline. I believe it was unconscious bias of referrals coming primarily from the same social and educational circles which, under a truly equitable society, would not have been a problem. But it's long been recognized that prestigious schools and social networks are also bereft of minorities from systemic disadvantages and pre-existing network forces. Reaching out to under-sourced schools and pools acts to restore a more uniform selection over actual candidate ability. In short, no one at Google I talked to felt like a "diversity hire". We mostly all felt imposter syndrome due to the least-regret hiring process.
Henchman21 2y ago
They also scrapped their pledge not to use AI to develop weapons. Do No Evil, so 20th century
429adjh 2y ago
Will they hire back James Damore? Of course not, the early dissenters remain disgraced even if the people in power adopt their views a couple of years later. I'm sure all Google leadership is best friends with Trump now.
- collingreen 2y ago
  Dropping DEI requirements on the hiring pipeline isn't quite reaching James Damores' expressed views on how hiring should go or the coolness of the ranks within the KKK.
exceptione 2y ago
One way to look at this: Google had no other way to do this. As the other tech billionaires sworn allegiance, as Bezos had even fallen flat on his face for Trump to save the other business interests he has besides the WaPo, Google had to do something. Book burnings were not possible, so this was a nice gesture. An alternative, better explanation could be obtained when ignoring all recent events. That would be the most convenient, and besides, we are not historians are we?
polski-g 2y ago
[flagged]
- nielsbot 2y ago
  I'd be surprised if Trump's DOJ did
  - polski-g 2y ago
    It's planned, but there's a lot of companies to sue: Agency heads are also directed to recommend actions to “... enforcement activities, contracts (including set-asides), consent orders, and litigating positions” https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/trump-anti-dei-executive-orders.html https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/trump-anti...
silexia 2y ago
"Diversity-based targets" is Orwellian language to disguise blatant racist policies.
- jollofricepeas 2y ago
  Agreed. Upper and middle class white women have benefitted richly from these policies for far too long. There’s too many of them in college and corporate America. Fairness is the goal but… …there’s been no real uptick in positive outcomes for ethnic minorities or even impoverished white people. It’s time to dismantle DEI and “diversity-based targets” because it’s a shield that protects disingenuous rich people from having to actually achieve equity and inclusion for the rest of society. Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/06/29/affirmative-action-who-benefits-white-women/70371219007/# https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/06/29/affirmative-... #satire
- akimbostrawman 2y ago
  Correct It is newspeak
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954598
distantaidenn 2y ago
Here's the thing about DEI initiatives, that many people seem to forget -- it was never about merit (or the lack thereof), it was about competing against racial bias and unfair laws. The old boys' clubs kept out anyone that didn't look like them. We can debate all day if this was an implicit bias, nepotism, cronyism, or whatever. Take a look at the numbers from the past, take a look at the laws from Jim Crow. People of color and women weren't even allowed to work in some areas or companies. DEI grew out of Affirmative Action to add checks and balances to the practice of only hiring straight white men. Of course, with human nature at play, DEI has become a way to add a checkmark for a member of historically excluded group. This checkmark may come at the expense of a more qualified member of a majority group -- or it may not. I can tell you as a member of several minority groups, we often have to work twice as hard to get to any position of authority, and even then, people assume we are just a DEI hire. Now we have immigrant minority groups riding the coat tails of the Civil Rights movement, acting against their own best interest... At any rate, I no longer live in the US, and sitting back with my popcorn. This is gonna be interesting in the long run.
- c0redump 2y ago
  > we often have to work twice as hard Are you referring to getting promoted over your teammates? Or something else?
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  > Now we have immigrant minority groups riding the coat tails of the Civil Rights movement, acting against their own best interest... It might amuse you to know that some of those groups were in fact, here before the Civil Rights Act and benefited from it
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Feigned cowardice is a peculiar cover story. Large companies anticipate a far more regimented future structure where the uppity intellectual sub management are replaced wholesale with prompt specifiers. Intellectualism, skepticism, and other forms of anti authority that used to be tolerated by the managerial class as necessary evils to employing high intelligence is not viewed that way anymore even among the allegedly progressive elite of silicon valley assuming Trump legitimately cares about his white blue collar constituency, these people support him not for rejection of racism, but for the path to to authoritarian oligarchy they think they can direct it towards. There's no meritocracy anymore, dei or otherwise. It is the path to the end state of capitalism: slave labor pulling large blocks of rock under whip, leadership in pyramids. I don't think people understand how horny these "leaders" are for this. And it's strange, because what approaches in the geopolitical future is war, economic or overt, hot or cold. We enter a world of receding resources and reduced global access to them. It will be a struggle of civilizations, and authoritarianism loses to proper liberal democracies almost every time. The "elite" are drawing the wrong conclusions,bor outright ignoring, the end of globalization.
whatever1 2y ago
What is the point? Literally Google could have any subset of high achieving population and still meet any targets. It could be a fully black, fully female, fully gay, fully Christian company and still the performance bar would not fall. They afford to select the cream of the crop out of any population set.
- josephg 2y ago
  I don’t think that’s true. There just aren’t enough top performing candidates graduating every year who pass their hiring bar. I was taking to a hiring manager here in Australia about 15 years ago at a house party. She said they literally call on the phone every woman who graduates from a CS program in Australia to personally invite them to come in and interview. At least a few years ago, they couldn’t get enough applicants.
janalsncm 2y ago
One cool thing about the DeepSeek team that struck me was that they have slightly unconventional backgrounds. These days if you want to do deep learning research at a big name lab like DeepMind or OpenAI you probably need a PhD and to have published a paper or 5. The DeepSeek folks are super smart of course but they have more diverse backgrounds. The CEO specifically said he values creativity not prior experience. https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-ceo-liang-wenfeng-leadership-style-opposite-silicon-valley/ https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-ceo-liang-wenfeng-le... As someone with a much more “traditional” background it makes me wonder what I’m not considering in my work and life.

63 points by indy 2y ago

I can understand companies having targets on who they have in their interviewee pool but it hasn’t made sense to me to have targets on who you hire.

amluto 2y ago
I think this is wrong distinction to make. One could have a metric like “how well does the interviewee pool match the overall population demographics” or the same thing for the new hires or for the current employees, etc. And improving those metrics could be a goal. BUT letting the actual hiring process have any part in achieving that goal beyond merely trying to be fair seems like it could be problematic. So, if a company actually wants to do anything to improve these diversity metrics, I think they should be in the form of outreach and thoroughly separated from the decisions to interview or hire a candidate. Make sure that the company goes to job fairs at variety of universities. Have outreach for people who didn’t go to university at all. Heck, a big company like Google could even try to encourage young members of under-represented groups to go to college, have some scholarship programs, and maybe cultivate an improved candidate pool (although care is still needed — giving scholarships only to people of a certain race or races is problematic). But don’t let the people making hiring decisions know that these are the people you reached out to so that you don’t taint the process!

atleastoptimal 2y ago

If you're from a group that is represented, in a company, at a smaller proportion than your group's proportion of the population from which a company hires from, how are you to assume anything but that you only got the job due to diversity quotas, if those quotas are in place? Wouldn't it make you feel worse about your own merits?

kelseyfrog 2y ago
No, why would I? I'd be much more adverse to working for a company that engaged in disparate impact, but in general I believe that disparate impact should not be tolerated.
Marsymars 2y ago
I’m not in a minority group, but I don’t feel like I’ve ever really been hired based on my merits. I’ve been primarily hired based on the RNG of getting past application processes, and hiring managers liking things about me that aren’t particularly related to my merits.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  But at google, they still have some coding interviews with feedback, right, so hires not from minority group can think that they beat many other applicants in this game.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    I'm at Google. Also a member of various majority groups. I absolutely do not feel like I am in my position based on some abstract "merit." Absolutely shitloads of lucky situations placed me in advantaged opportunities to get me here.
benlivengood 2y ago
Google explicitly rejected merit-based hiring for least-regret hiring by setting the bar much higher than strictly necessary for adequate performance. This greatly reduced the rate of unregretted attrition and, until 2022, layoffs. What this means is that most applications are rejected and so it's very sensitive to unconscious bias or under-recruiting from pools of minority candidates essentially due to network effects. Internal referrals will make up a sizeable percentage of successful hires because they take precedence in the recruiting pipeline (recruiters are still incentivized to maximize their hiring percentage and referrals often have stronger signal to noise on candidate ability than searching through resumes or accepting applications). This effect occurs with more standard hiring practices as well, e.g. "old boys networks", but as the ratio of hires to applicants increases it becomes much more obvious when hiring is biased against minorities and the actual biases can be corrected with policies and procedures. Hence Google's focus on equity in the recruiting pipeline. I believe it was unconscious bias of referrals coming primarily from the same social and educational circles which, under a truly equitable society, would not have been a problem. But it's long been recognized that prestigious schools and social networks are also bereft of minorities from systemic disadvantages and pre-existing network forces. Reaching out to under-sourced schools and pools acts to restore a more uniform selection over actual candidate ability. In short, no one at Google I talked to felt like a "diversity hire". We mostly all felt imposter syndrome due to the least-regret hiring process.

Henchman21 2y ago

They also scrapped their pledge not to use AI to develop weapons. Do No Evil, so 20th century

429adjh 2y ago

Will they hire back James Damore? Of course not, the early dissenters remain disgraced even if the people in power adopt their views a couple of years later. I'm sure all Google leadership is best friends with Trump now.

collingreen 2y ago
Dropping DEI requirements on the hiring pipeline isn't quite reaching James Damores' expressed views on how hiring should go or the coolness of the ranks within the KKK.

exceptione 2y ago

One way to look at this: Google had no other way to do this. As the other tech billionaires sworn allegiance, as Bezos had even fallen flat on his face for Trump to save the other business interests he has besides the WaPo, Google had to do something. Book burnings were not possible, so this was a nice gesture. An alternative, better explanation could be obtained when ignoring all recent events. That would be the most convenient, and besides, we are not historians are we?

polski-g 2y ago

[flagged]

nielsbot 2y ago
I'd be surprised if Trump's DOJ did
- polski-g 2y ago
  It's planned, but there's a lot of companies to sue: Agency heads are also directed to recommend actions to “... enforcement activities, contracts (including set-asides), consent orders, and litigating positions” https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/trump-anti-dei-executive-orders.html https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/trump-anti...

silexia 2y ago

"Diversity-based targets" is Orwellian language to disguise blatant racist policies.

jollofricepeas 2y ago
Agreed. Upper and middle class white women have benefitted richly from these policies for far too long. There’s too many of them in college and corporate America. Fairness is the goal but… …there’s been no real uptick in positive outcomes for ethnic minorities or even impoverished white people. It’s time to dismantle DEI and “diversity-based targets” because it’s a shield that protects disingenuous rich people from having to actually achieve equity and inclusion for the rest of society. Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/06/29/affirmative-action-who-benefits-white-women/70371219007/# https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/06/29/affirmative-... #satire
akimbostrawman 2y ago
Correct It is newspeak

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954598

distantaidenn 2y ago

Here's the thing about DEI initiatives, that many people seem to forget -- it was never about merit (or the lack thereof), it was about competing against racial bias and unfair laws. The old boys' clubs kept out anyone that didn't look like them. We can debate all day if this was an implicit bias, nepotism, cronyism, or whatever. Take a look at the numbers from the past, take a look at the laws from Jim Crow. People of color and women weren't even allowed to work in some areas or companies. DEI grew out of Affirmative Action to add checks and balances to the practice of only hiring straight white men. Of course, with human nature at play, DEI has become a way to add a checkmark for a member of historically excluded group. This checkmark may come at the expense of a more qualified member of a majority group -- or it may not. I can tell you as a member of several minority groups, we often have to work twice as hard to get to any position of authority, and even then, people assume we are just a DEI hire. Now we have immigrant minority groups riding the coat tails of the Civil Rights movement, acting against their own best interest... At any rate, I no longer live in the US, and sitting back with my popcorn. This is gonna be interesting in the long run.

c0redump 2y ago
> we often have to work twice as hard Are you referring to getting promoted over your teammates? Or something else?
selimthegrim 2y ago
> Now we have immigrant minority groups riding the coat tails of the Civil Rights movement, acting against their own best interest... It might amuse you to know that some of those groups were in fact, here before the Civil Rights Act and benefited from it

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Feigned cowardice is a peculiar cover story. Large companies anticipate a far more regimented future structure where the uppity intellectual sub management are replaced wholesale with prompt specifiers. Intellectualism, skepticism, and other forms of anti authority that used to be tolerated by the managerial class as necessary evils to employing high intelligence is not viewed that way anymore even among the allegedly progressive elite of silicon valley assuming Trump legitimately cares about his white blue collar constituency, these people support him not for rejection of racism, but for the path to to authoritarian oligarchy they think they can direct it towards. There's no meritocracy anymore, dei or otherwise. It is the path to the end state of capitalism: slave labor pulling large blocks of rock under whip, leadership in pyramids. I don't think people understand how horny these "leaders" are for this. And it's strange, because what approaches in the geopolitical future is war, economic or overt, hot or cold. We enter a world of receding resources and reduced global access to them. It will be a struggle of civilizations, and authoritarianism loses to proper liberal democracies almost every time. The "elite" are drawing the wrong conclusions,bor outright ignoring, the end of globalization.

whatever1 2y ago

What is the point? Literally Google could have any subset of high achieving population and still meet any targets. It could be a fully black, fully female, fully gay, fully Christian company and still the performance bar would not fall. They afford to select the cream of the crop out of any population set.

josephg 2y ago
I don’t think that’s true. There just aren’t enough top performing candidates graduating every year who pass their hiring bar. I was taking to a hiring manager here in Australia about 15 years ago at a house party. She said they literally call on the phone every woman who graduates from a CS program in Australia to personally invite them to come in and interview. At least a few years ago, they couldn’t get enough applicants.

janalsncm 2y ago

One cool thing about the DeepSeek team that struck me was that they have slightly unconventional backgrounds. These days if you want to do deep learning research at a big name lab like DeepMind or OpenAI you probably need a PhD and to have published a paper or 5. The DeepSeek folks are super smart of course but they have more diverse backgrounds. The CEO specifically said he values creativity not prior experience. https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-ceo-liang-wenfeng-leadership-style-opposite-silicon-valley/ https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-ceo-liang-wenfeng-le... As someone with a much more “traditional” background it makes me wonder what I’m not considering in my work and life.