6 ms·

what can we do to help? If the answer is hiring more diverse employees for the sake of their ethnicity/cultural backgrounds, we need to accept that it involves

by spydum 12y ago

what can we do to help? If the answer is hiring more diverse employees for the sake of their ethnicity/cultural backgrounds, we need to accept that it involves a compromise. You no longer are opting to choose based on cost/performance of the employee. are we seriously okay with this? Isn't that demoralizing to the new hire? Now every moment, they are wondering if they got hired because of who their parents are, versus whether they earned it or not. Perhaps the real problem is not the corporate culture not catering to the employees, but the employees needing to mature a bit and learn to be comfortable with themselves regardless of social pressures. You will not always fit in culturally with your coworkers. That is just life. If you prioritize this in your own life, that is great and good for you! That is your choice about who you choose to work for (and where). However, in the article, as I stated elsewhere, the poor management and lack of HR follow up is horrendously unacceptable. Nobody should tolerate harassment at any level.

owenmarshall 12y ago
> You no longer are opting to choose based on cost/performance of the employee. are we seriously okay with this? Isn't that demoralizing to the new hire? Now every moment, they are wondering if they got hired because of who their parents are, versus whether they earned it or not. If you're a white male who is honest with himself, you'll understand that being a white male carries with it a set of privileges. Just consider: a white child is significantly more likely to go to a school with experienced teachers than a black child, more likely to take honors classes in high school, more likely to get into a good university, and when they graduate, are more likely to get job offers based on nothing more than their white male name[1]. Let's not fool ourselves: humans are not the coldly rational actors we like to think. Ignore the fact that I've already got a leg up on networking because my (white male) peers work the jobs I want to work. When it's time for me to go in for an interview for a software engineering position the odds are overwhelmingly high that every person who interviews me, from the team interview up to senior management, will look a lot like me. That goes a long way in me getting the job - our monkey brains are pretty well wired to look at someone that looks like ourself and think "yeah, he's a competent, trustworthy individual!" So yeah, I don't think anyone's actually hired in the cold cost/benefit analysis you talk about. There's lots of chances for significant bias to creep in. In reality, if people were hired solely based on the criteria you talk about, and race/gender/... were not considered, I bet we'd see more diverse workforces than we have now. If someone can figure out how to set up a blinded interview that would be interesting. [1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf
- kofejnik 12y ago
  As a white Eastern European male in a US university, I had a privilege of paying out-of-state tuition out of my pocket (which was about 8x the in-state amount), while being denied most forms of aid and not allowed to work. And I had to take classes about how privileged I am! Didn't feel very privileged. Could it be that the concept is flawed?
  - owenmarshall 12y ago
    Joke answer: what is intersectionality, precious? Real answer: privilege is attained from an intersection of many factors. How many times have you heard someone say "Sure, I'm a white man, but I grew up on a rural farm to poor parents. Where's my privilege?" And in a way, they are correct - socioeconomic privilege is a real thing, and if you're poor the deck is stacked against you. But put Tim, the poor white farmer, and John, a rich black man, behind the wheel of a BMW. Which one belongs there? Which one gets stopped by the police? Hand Tim an airplane ticket to fly to NYC, and hand one to Hamza, and see who gets the extra TSA pat-down. In your case, are you an immigrant or on a student visa? Either way that's a disadvantage for sure. Are you as privileged as Biff Kennedy, who had a Nantucket yacht club membership at age two and graduated Groton as an all-star lacrosse player? Nope. But when you and Biff go in for an interview, management is gonna look more like you two than John or Hamza. (Of course, Biff's father already arranged for him to get the job. And if he hadn't, the connections he made from his Skull and Bones days would be more than enough. But that's just Biff's privilege!) The concept is only flawed under the most cursory of understanding and analysis.
    - codygman 12y ago
      > The concept is only flawed under the most cursory of understanding and analysis. I find that many counter-arguments to privilege will try to dial back the level of analysis to make privilege seem ridiculous.
anigbrowl 12y ago
cost/performance of the employee I wonder how good people really are at measuring the latter. In some jobs such as sales, you can get a pretty good approximation - although it's still hard to measure which sales persons build lasting accounts vs. which ones overpromise and then dump the cost of unmet expectations onto technical support or account maintenance people. (Edit: obviously you can measure it in a lot of repetitive type jobs like facotry works etc., but that doesn't seem appropriate for this context.) It's even trickier in environments like technology. Twitter's a huge company, but how do you measure the productivity of their employees? The stock price is down on what it IPOed for, user acquisition growth has slowed and the firm has never made a profit, so should we conclude that the average Twitter employee has negative productivity? Obviously not, that would be a highly misleading generalization - but it's no more foolish than some of the generalizations I've seen offered to justify executive compensation or equity allocation at some companies. Economically we'd like to maximize the return on capital invested in hiring someone, but if we don't have a way to measure that objectively then 'performance' can end up as just a bullshit story to rationalize essentially arbitrary management hiring decisions of the staff who fall within 1 or 2 standard deviations of the norm (excluding the infrequent brilliant or burnout employees).
seanflyon 12y ago
> You no longer are opting to choose based on cost/performance of the employee If performance is actually better with a diverse team then preferring diversity in the hiring process is based on cost/benefit. > whether they earned it or not Businesses don't care if you "earned it" they care about cost/performance. My parents are both quite intelligent and up until high school I learned more from them than I did from school. If I had less awesome parents I would have a significantly harder time finding a job. It's not fair, but it does not demoralize me.
- spydum 12y ago
  So I cannot say I have personally reviewed the studies on diversity improving outcomes, but I have a suspicion that it applies only when all other things are equal (as in talent/skills/performance were all as equivalent as they could be vs the non diverse comparison). My point is there is hardly ever a scenario where you are presented with >1 candidates which have equivalent skills and some happen to be diverse. Someone else made the point though, that we probably suck as determining level of skill/performance anyways? I can personally attest to that, and maybe based solely on that fact, hiring for diversity might be a winning strategy, I simply don't know. I know I am terrible at judging others skill/performance during an interview, and am striving to improve it.
crazy1van 12y ago
> You no longer are opting to choose based on cost/performance of the employee. are we seriously okay with this? I think this is a fair question. If diversity is weighted non-zero for hiring, it means some other factor's weight in the hiring decision was reduced. Maybe that's a completely fine trade-off, but it does exist.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
This rests on the assumption that hiring and interviewing is meritocratic. It's not, it's a hugely flawed system. And in the valley there is a HUGE preference towards "fit". So much so that some companies even prioritize "fit" as a primary hiring criterion. That is a major part of the problem. The solution isn't to start prioritizing "diversity" when hiring folks, the solution is to avoid hiring just within your narrow comfort zone of people who are like you. And that includes people with different life experiences, educational backgrounds, etc. as well as people with different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities. Mostly that's just a matter of becoming a better, less biased, more objective interviewer. Another factor is acceptance and prejudice. Keep your own prejudices in check and police other folks. When you see or hear of instances of people being insensitive or of excluding someone based on their cultural or other differences, act on it, and help fix it. If you want women to be part of your team, then maybe don't consider having a meeting at a strip club. You'd think that sort of thing is a no brainer, but especially in the SV world full of man children who have discovered there are no rules other than the ones they impose on themselves, it can be a bit of a problem.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Suppose we adopt a more meritocratic system - base hiring decisions mostly on code tests, github accounts, and similar things that are almost entirely based on performance. (I mostly do this already. When I do a 1 hour interview, I have a ladder of 4 standard questions I ask, followed 1 question about a topic on the person's resume that I understand well. Just to see if they really know what they claim to know.) Would you be happy with such a process? Note that most SJWs (at least, the pro-female SJWs, who rarely discuss race) tend to oppose this sort of process on the grounds that it will result in fewer women.
  - owenmarshall 12y ago
    > github accounts Hiring by github/open source contributions mean you're selecting for programmers who have ample free time and an interest joining the overwhelmingly young, white, and male open source community. You're going to filter out women, black people, and anyone with a family. You're also going to filter out people who are bound by nasty non-competes, or even people who just don't like to program outside work. It's a tough one: you can clearly see how people navigate communities and get a much more in-depth picture of their development process, but you're also leaving people out that don't fit the mold. > Would you be happy with such a process? Until someone figures out how to do a blinded interview, focusing strictly on applicable skills and being conscious of bias is as good as it'll get.
aperrien 12y ago
You can help by attempting to break your coworkers of bad habits. There's enough to joke at about the nature of code and system administration that they don't need to joke about ethnicity and sexism, too.
gaius 12y ago
It does matter how many blacks, whites, women, men, gays or straights you hire, if they are all 20-something graduates of the same 10 CS programmes, you have not achieved any meaningful sort of diversity.

by spydum 12y ago

owenmarshall 12y ago

> You no longer are opting to choose based on cost/performance of the employee. are we seriously okay with this? Isn't that demoralizing to the new hire? Now every moment, they are wondering if they got hired because of who their parents are, versus whether they earned it or not. If you're a white male who is honest with himself, you'll understand that being a white male carries with it a set of privileges. Just consider: a white child is significantly more likely to go to a school with experienced teachers than a black child, more likely to take honors classes in high school, more likely to get into a good university, and when they graduate, are more likely to get job offers based on nothing more than their white male name[1]. Let's not fool ourselves: humans are not the coldly rational actors we like to think. Ignore the fact that I've already got a leg up on networking because my (white male) peers work the jobs I want to work. When it's time for me to go in for an interview for a software engineering position the odds are overwhelmingly high that every person who interviews me, from the team interview up to senior management, will look a lot like me. That goes a long way in me getting the job - our monkey brains are pretty well wired to look at someone that looks like ourself and think "yeah, he's a competent, trustworthy individual!" So yeah, I don't think anyone's actually hired in the cold cost/benefit analysis you talk about. There's lots of chances for significant bias to creep in. In reality, if people were hired solely based on the criteria you talk about, and race/gender/... were not considered, I bet we'd see more diverse workforces than we have now. If someone can figure out how to set up a blinded interview that would be interesting. [1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf

kofejnik 12y ago
As a white Eastern European male in a US university, I had a privilege of paying out-of-state tuition out of my pocket (which was about 8x the in-state amount), while being denied most forms of aid and not allowed to work. And I had to take classes about how privileged I am! Didn't feel very privileged. Could it be that the concept is flawed?
- owenmarshall 12y ago
  Joke answer: what is intersectionality, precious? Real answer: privilege is attained from an intersection of many factors. How many times have you heard someone say "Sure, I'm a white man, but I grew up on a rural farm to poor parents. Where's my privilege?" And in a way, they are correct - socioeconomic privilege is a real thing, and if you're poor the deck is stacked against you. But put Tim, the poor white farmer, and John, a rich black man, behind the wheel of a BMW. Which one belongs there? Which one gets stopped by the police? Hand Tim an airplane ticket to fly to NYC, and hand one to Hamza, and see who gets the extra TSA pat-down. In your case, are you an immigrant or on a student visa? Either way that's a disadvantage for sure. Are you as privileged as Biff Kennedy, who had a Nantucket yacht club membership at age two and graduated Groton as an all-star lacrosse player? Nope. But when you and Biff go in for an interview, management is gonna look more like you two than John or Hamza. (Of course, Biff's father already arranged for him to get the job. And if he hadn't, the connections he made from his Skull and Bones days would be more than enough. But that's just Biff's privilege!) The concept is only flawed under the most cursory of understanding and analysis.
  - codygman 12y ago
    > The concept is only flawed under the most cursory of understanding and analysis. I find that many counter-arguments to privilege will try to dial back the level of analysis to make privilege seem ridiculous.

anigbrowl 12y ago

cost/performance of the employee I wonder how good people really are at measuring the latter. In some jobs such as sales, you can get a pretty good approximation - although it's still hard to measure which sales persons build lasting accounts vs. which ones overpromise and then dump the cost of unmet expectations onto technical support or account maintenance people. (Edit: obviously you can measure it in a lot of repetitive type jobs like facotry works etc., but that doesn't seem appropriate for this context.) It's even trickier in environments like technology. Twitter's a huge company, but how do you measure the productivity of their employees? The stock price is down on what it IPOed for, user acquisition growth has slowed and the firm has never made a profit, so should we conclude that the average Twitter employee has negative productivity? Obviously not, that would be a highly misleading generalization - but it's no more foolish than some of the generalizations I've seen offered to justify executive compensation or equity allocation at some companies. Economically we'd like to maximize the return on capital invested in hiring someone, but if we don't have a way to measure that objectively then 'performance' can end up as just a bullshit story to rationalize essentially arbitrary management hiring decisions of the staff who fall within 1 or 2 standard deviations of the norm (excluding the infrequent brilliant or burnout employees).

seanflyon 12y ago

> You no longer are opting to choose based on cost/performance of the employee If performance is actually better with a diverse team then preferring diversity in the hiring process is based on cost/benefit. > whether they earned it or not Businesses don't care if you "earned it" they care about cost/performance. My parents are both quite intelligent and up until high school I learned more from them than I did from school. If I had less awesome parents I would have a significantly harder time finding a job. It's not fair, but it does not demoralize me.

spydum 12y ago
So I cannot say I have personally reviewed the studies on diversity improving outcomes, but I have a suspicion that it applies only when all other things are equal (as in talent/skills/performance were all as equivalent as they could be vs the non diverse comparison). My point is there is hardly ever a scenario where you are presented with >1 candidates which have equivalent skills and some happen to be diverse. Someone else made the point though, that we probably suck as determining level of skill/performance anyways? I can personally attest to that, and maybe based solely on that fact, hiring for diversity might be a winning strategy, I simply don't know. I know I am terrible at judging others skill/performance during an interview, and am striving to improve it.

crazy1van 12y ago

> You no longer are opting to choose based on cost/performance of the employee. are we seriously okay with this? I think this is a fair question. If diversity is weighted non-zero for hiring, it means some other factor's weight in the hiring decision was reduced. Maybe that's a completely fine trade-off, but it does exist.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

This rests on the assumption that hiring and interviewing is meritocratic. It's not, it's a hugely flawed system. And in the valley there is a HUGE preference towards "fit". So much so that some companies even prioritize "fit" as a primary hiring criterion. That is a major part of the problem. The solution isn't to start prioritizing "diversity" when hiring folks, the solution is to avoid hiring just within your narrow comfort zone of people who are like you. And that includes people with different life experiences, educational backgrounds, etc. as well as people with different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities. Mostly that's just a matter of becoming a better, less biased, more objective interviewer. Another factor is acceptance and prejudice. Keep your own prejudices in check and police other folks. When you see or hear of instances of people being insensitive or of excluding someone based on their cultural or other differences, act on it, and help fix it. If you want women to be part of your team, then maybe don't consider having a meeting at a strip club. You'd think that sort of thing is a no brainer, but especially in the SV world full of man children who have discovered there are no rules other than the ones they impose on themselves, it can be a bit of a problem.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
Suppose we adopt a more meritocratic system - base hiring decisions mostly on code tests, github accounts, and similar things that are almost entirely based on performance. (I mostly do this already. When I do a 1 hour interview, I have a ladder of 4 standard questions I ask, followed 1 question about a topic on the person's resume that I understand well. Just to see if they really know what they claim to know.) Would you be happy with such a process? Note that most SJWs (at least, the pro-female SJWs, who rarely discuss race) tend to oppose this sort of process on the grounds that it will result in fewer women.
- owenmarshall 12y ago
  > github accounts Hiring by github/open source contributions mean you're selecting for programmers who have ample free time and an interest joining the overwhelmingly young, white, and male open source community. You're going to filter out women, black people, and anyone with a family. You're also going to filter out people who are bound by nasty non-competes, or even people who just don't like to program outside work. It's a tough one: you can clearly see how people navigate communities and get a much more in-depth picture of their development process, but you're also leaving people out that don't fit the mold. > Would you be happy with such a process? Until someone figures out how to do a blinded interview, focusing strictly on applicable skills and being conscious of bias is as good as it'll get.

aperrien 12y ago

You can help by attempting to break your coworkers of bad habits. There's enough to joke at about the nature of code and system administration that they don't need to joke about ethnicity and sexism, too.

gaius 12y ago

It does matter how many blacks, whites, women, men, gays or straights you hire, if they are all 20-something graduates of the same 10 CS programmes, you have not achieved any meaningful sort of diversity.