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How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

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Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#11

Post by anothermoron »

pessimizer wrote: post #5

Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar." [points 2,3,4,5,6,7,9] In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "d…

But they're specificially asking to discriminate against certain applicants in favor of other.

"Hire people from certain place instead of other" "Favor people who never worked in company like google" "Hire people from "bad" college instead of top one"

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#12

Post by nailer »

The proper way to fix unconscious bias is blind hiring, at least until the final stage. I know a bunch of people with CS degrees in the Unix world and they can't program, I know a bunch of people without them who can.

The only test of skill is a test of skill. Blindly ask them both to make a thing, leave them alone for forty minutes to make it, and see who makes it better.

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#13

Post by cmdrfred »

mseebach wrote: post #4

> My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education. This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity activist" might say…

By that logic shouldn't you not look at college degrees at all as more women hold degrees[0]?

[0]http://time.com/4064665/women-college-degree/

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#14

Post by darod »

Not sure what this author is complaining about? The goal was to achieve diversity and they seemed to have done it by hiring an ex-googler who is female. The author seems to be giving a rant because he had to do more work than calling up his buddy. BTW Temple University is not an HBCU

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#18

Post by michaelbuddy »

iheatu wrote: post #10

I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion, it's simply bad business. What is needed are un-biased assessments and non of these assessments are unbiased. They seem to try to correct the bias meter the most quick fix manner possible. People…

There's no point in letting diversity trainers in your door. They are unemployable leeches with made up social science degrees. And they themselves are racist. The good thing is their hypocrisy is easy to detect by anyone with a solid rational outlook on life and business.

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#19

Post by acctjustforyou »

pessimizer wrote: post #5

Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar." [points 2,3,4,5,6,7,9] In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "d…

>Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is equivalent to "lowering the bar."

So, suppose you had to fill an open position for a developer and you had two candidates: an MIT grad with years of experience at Apple and Google, and a homeless guy who never went to college and never worked in IT before.

You're honestly going to try to tell us that you have no idea who might be the better candidate?

And if hypothetically you could only interview one, you'd what? Be totally stymied? Flip a coin maybe?

There's no possible way you can actually believe what you're saying.

>In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade boost. [points 1,8]

I don't recall him mentioning ruling people out before speaking to them, although once you get to a certain scale that has to happen at some point since if an individual manager gets 1,000 applicants for one position on his team he can't speak to them all. Or is math racist too?

The scale requirement becomes much smaller when talking about reviewing someone's work, because that is much more involved than a resume scan or even most phone screens.

Giving them a diversity grade boost is the definition of racism/sexism/*ism. Funny how youve managed to find yourself on the same side as someone who gives a buxom under qualified blonde a second interview because "we don't have any hot chicks in this office."

Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

#20

Post by eastbayjake »

This is a strawman that doesn't even attempt a charitable summary of opposing arguments. There is one link to an actual opponent's arguments and it's some random consultant/speaker's blog, not anyone actually being paid to advise on tech hiring diversity.

Here's an attempt at a charitable characterization: Lots of heuristics for quickly evaluating programming skill may inadvertently toss out qualified applicants or give an undeserved boost to unqualified applicants who tick off superficial traits. Instead of leaning so heavily on heuristics that might disproportionately favor white men, let's try to create hiring systems that fairly evaluate people on their merits and give people full opportunity to demonstrate their talents. We should also try to make people aware that humans can make unconsciously-biased decisions based on some deeply-hardwired evolutionary heuristics around race and gender, so they have the awareness and mental tools to recognize when unconscious bias is influencing their decisions.

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