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Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

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Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#121

Post by lokar »

qorrect wrote: post #33
lokar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you gain from being so intentionally offensive and hurtful to people who have done nothing to you?

Where in the world do you get _intentionally_ offensive ? Everyone gets offended now a days, I would bet very little of it is actually intentional, but people like you are putting intent into peoples actions when you simply cannot know what the poster was thinking. That is god damn offensive.

Did you read the comment? It was pretty clearly either a joke at someone else's expense or a troll

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#122

Post by rjspotter »

themarkn wrote: post #103
rajin444 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is a terrible and naive way to think of DEI No, it isn’t. OP is describing the intended use of DEI. A proper merit based approach would have 0 knowledge of race, gender, etc. DSA as well requires prior knowledge of irrelevant attributes of a candidate because its goal is to increase the representation of people with those attributes, not hire the best candidates. Any process trying to select for the best devel…

Hmm. Without actively taking steps to widen the net and account for those irrelevant attributes, those attributes instead act as the first filter in your hiring process. IMO the process that ignores this is the one that’s not looking for the best developers. In order to make those attributes truly irrelevant we have to correct for the massive, obvious influence they have in human decision making (on both sides of the…

" In order to make those attributes truly irrelevant we have to correct for the massive, obvious influence they have in human decision making"

Which is exactly what blind-hiring / blind-auditions are meant to do. The problem, from my perspective having tried to implement it, is that it requires a real cognitive leap from people who are most successful for their social acumen and don't regularly make decisions based on hard evidence. Often those kinds of people have a title with Manager or Officer in it.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#123

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

I worked in one particular tech company where this went on for promotions as well as hiring, but nothing was ever put down in writing.

It was all handled in back room meetings at a manager, director or VP level, so they could meet diversity quotas and get personal share bonuses.

First be 100 percent sure you've got something in writing to back up what you are claiming, then, bring it to the US Dept of Labor.

But you won't get everything in writing, and it's a dangerous short term career move, even though it might be right/moral/legal thing to do.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#124

Post by Zababa »

virtue3 wrote: post #99
a30b40 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just what OP is experiencing with extra steps. Here's why: 1. Find merit based, good, but (unfortunately) majority candidate. 2. Position is held open, the meritorious engineer is waiting for an offer. 3. A few minority position trickle in that are nearly as good but not quite. 4. DEI argues you should choose the minority and uses an excuse like "they're trainable" to justify racist hiring practices. In both…

It's not racism it's prejudice. "According to the sociological perspective, members of privileged groups can experience prejudice, but their experience will be different than the experience of someone who experiences systemic racism." One could argue that being in the majority you would have an easier time getting a lateral promotion than someone as a minority.

Systemic racism is one form of racism, but not the only one. Just because you don't experience systemic racism doesn't mean that you don't experience racism at all.

I would say that only hiring non-white people would be prejudice if and only if you consider that only hiring white people is prejudice and not racism too.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#126

Post by drdeca »

virtue3 wrote: post #99
a30b40 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just what OP is experiencing with extra steps. Here's why: 1. Find merit based, good, but (unfortunately) majority candidate. 2. Position is held open, the meritorious engineer is waiting for an offer. 3. A few minority position trickle in that are nearly as good but not quite. 4. DEI argues you should choose the minority and uses an excuse like "they're trainable" to justify racist hiring practices. In both…

It's not racism it's prejudice. "According to the sociological perspective, members of privileged groups can experience prejudice, but their experience will be different than the experience of someone who experiences systemic racism." One could argue that being in the majority you would have an easier time getting a lateral promotion than someone as a minority.

Just another attempt to exert power over others by (an attempt at) imposing a definition used by one group, on the rest of society.

The common understanding of the term is not “incorrect”.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#127

Post by walterclifford »

pesenti wrote: post #26

Legality aside, this is a terrible and naive way to think of DEI. Candidates recruited this way will have a stigma attached to them (“they were recruited because they were X”). A better way is to enforce DSA - Diverse Slate Approach - which ensure that you don’t recruit anybody without having considered multiple genders and/or ethnicity before making the offer. The goal of DSA is to recruit the best candidate for the…

> don’t recruit anybody without having considered multiple genders and/or ethnicity before making the offer.

There are downsides to this approach as well.

My previous company had such a policy (no offer could be extended until at least one female or under-represented minority had been interviewed) - and we had someone who interned with us twice while in school and he was amazing, everybody on the team thought he was great and wanted to bring him on full-time once he graduated. So as he neared graduation our manager got us an open req and we extended him a (verbal) offer without interviewing him but HR blocked us from extending a formal offer because this exceptional engineer had the misfortune of being born male and Indian. HR told us we could extend an offer to him only after interviewing (on-site) a female or under-represented minority. And so we brought in and interviewed a female applicant wasting five hours of her time and ours as she had virtually zero chance of getting the job.

Generally it also meant female candidates were almost guaranteed to make it to the onsite, regardless of how they performed during the phonescreen because if you tried to pass on a female candidate you'd get pushback from the recruiter and/or manager, because with this policy we needed to interview at least one on-site before extending an offer to anyone.

I do genuinely applaud efforts at increasing diversity in tech, but I don't think policies like this are the right approach. We should probably be looking at other historically male dominated professions that now have gender-parity like medicine and law and emulate what they did to increase diversity (I have no idea what that is/was, but I'm guessing it's not what we're spinning our wheels on, since as far as I can tell we've barely moved the needle despite a very concerted effort).

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#130

Post by Zababa »

Hamuko wrote: post #67
lokar wrote: post #7

A quick web search finds some answers. eg https://www.spigglelaw.com/employment-blog/employers-affirma... """ Title VII prohibits employers from making employment decisions because of an individual’s skin color, national origin, sex, religion, or race. Therefore, it is illegal to give an applicant an advantage solely because of the applicant’s race. However, this is not always the case. Under United Steelworkers of A…

> However, this is permissible only if the purpose is to remediate past failures to hire minority employees in areas that contain few minorities. Women are obviously not a minority in the US, but does this apply if they're a minority in a particular field (such as engineering)?

Minority is often not used in terms of numbers, but in terms of "privilege scale". In that view, women are less privileged than men, and thus get classified as a minority.
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