71–80 of 111 posts
I'm sure this ideology gets lost in some departments and it feels like a checkbox exercise, but that doesn't make it meritless.
It's not just who's the best, it's who's best for the team and the company.
Diversity has actual value, unless you're only making software for educated white men. I'm sure this ideology gets lost in some departments and it feels like a checkbox exercise, but that doesn't make it meritless. It's not just who's the best, it's who's best for the team and the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with this view, to me, is that it takes a really narrow view of discrimination. Why are you only concerned with the hiring process of software engineers? To me, bad-faith alarm bells go off when concern about discrimination only rears its head when the speaker's corner of the world is impacted. There are much more pernicious problems that need addressing than the quality of engineers at your job. How is t…
Somehow many people in this thread are jumping to rebut the idea of meritocratic hiring. I'm with you on that. I think meritocracy is a naive idea and it's actively damaging when hiring teams think they can boil the talent of candidates, and their effectiveness to do a job, down to some objective and comparable score of merit. I also don't give a shit about making my page loads quicker. That's rarely what the world,…
And I will say, it is fine to broach these subjects. Your concerns are legitimate. I simply choose to take a much broader view of things and feel that until we get much closer to making the world more equal and righting past injustices, we should try and use as many tools we have to close the wealth gap between majority and minority groups.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of genuine interest, what is your opinion on the OP?
I've never found the argument that acknowledging, much less attempting to correct for, systemic biases in hiring is always equally as discriminatory as the biases themselves to be compelling, as the only possible conclusion to reach from that rationale is to maintain the status quo and its biases at all times. If one accepts that unjust bias exists in the system, it is impossible to correct that bias without discrimi…
As Justice Roberts said, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
It's disturbing that so many people cannot see this. It seems to be a capitulation to the inevitability of bigotry, as if we are unable to be fair and always have to discriminate one way or the other.
> There also seems to be an unspoken assumption in OP's post that diversity hires are never as qualified as white male hires.
I see absolutely no evidence of this and I worry that you are reading your own prejudices into OP's words. OP's ideas are squarely in the tradition of the early US civil rights movement, which was focused on working hard to bring about equal treatment rather than simply discriminating in the opposite direction.
Is this perhaps an opportunity for some companies to explicitly do blind hiring, or something along those lines? I'm thinking of Coinbase (and others) who have taken a somewhat contrarian approach and said that the workplace is just for work, and not politics. They've taken flak for it, but are also probably(?) attracting people for whom that kind of workplace is a positive. A company that goes out of their way to sa…
https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-h...
Sidestepping the specific, delicate topic: Once a business starts making decisions based on anything arbitrary (e.g. nepotism, or meeting specific quotas that aren't related to the business), it's a slow downhill slide in my experience. Practically: There's not much you can do other than quietly exit.
This begs the question of where one can exit to when the arbitrary decision-making extends to every corner of society, including many of its most fundamental institutions.
I will repeat most of a previous comment: At this one job, we had only two remotely viable candidates for an open position. I was on the hiring committee, as I often was in those days. Candidate A: Had worked in the industry, had all of the qualifications, already chock-full of some interesting ideas I wanted to hear more of from the interview alone. Excited at the prospect. Candidate B: Had never worked in the indus…
I would prefer not to discriminate at all. But in the current climate, to anyone with power reading this, giving preference to white men is ironically the right thing to do. I hope things change soon to where I and others don't need to do this.
> I'm concerned that at some point I will inevitably have to either challenge something, and be labelled a bigot or misogynist, or live an increasingly bizarre existence with things happening around me that I consider to be clearly wrong.
This is a hard issue. I have chosen to accept the 'bigot' label if it comes (no one has called me that irl yet). My skills are highly in demand, and I don't care at all if I get fired; I can have another job in a week. If you're not in this fortunate position, I can't say what you should do. But I do believe that once you've "made it" and you can afford to do and say what is right, you have the duty to do so no matter what people will say.
This submission is flagged, but it shouldn't IMO. Everyone goes through hiring processes, everyone has been in a team onboarding people, and this of course isn't alien to tech companies. This submission, from my POV is clearly on-topic.
Does anyone have any idea where to actually have this discussion?