Fascinating. It mostly seems you're company is taking a poor approach to diversity, and doing even worse at communicating and gaining buy-in from existing employees. With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. So perhaps the real issue is that the hiring process allows for "many engineers who are barely competent at their job." And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. But by your own admission, the bar is already low enough to admit false positives so I think you're conflating issues here. On a side note: holding your argument to be true, could the existence of barely competent engineers lead your article to a different title: "How my company is lowering the bar to accommodate privilege." I don't have that data, but could be an interesting followup!
How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#22I've actually been given the same advice on HN regarding "not looking for a portfolio" since it excludes women.
I think it's pretty disparaging to say women don't have the time for writing some code outside of work because of childcare commitments (for everyone involved - including the father of the child who's immediately and implicitly branded as off-scene or not pulling his weight).
"Cultural fit" in my experience has been equated to "is this person someone I can see five days a week, 8 hours a day without driving me potty". That seems fairly legitimate to me - and completely inclusive of everyone.
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#23I think I probably guessed which company this is. But this doesn't smell right. Feels like a real-world version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
Reminds me of what geohot says about academia: "We get it, you can't do anything."
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#24Summary: 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 homeles…
Are you honestly going to try to tell me that you get a lot of homeless applicants? If I get a homeless applicant, they're getting an interview.
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#25> 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…
Since when did a college degree become a requirement for programming, or indicate a higher quality of programmer? I know CS graduates who have no ability to program. Half of these big companies have been started by dropouts, and the oldest ones were started when there was no such thing as a CS degree.
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#26I'm sorry, but this post seems totally fabricated or at least intentionally misrepresenting what is happening. I spend a lot of time reading about diversity initiatives in tech and I'm trying to set up an initiative where I work. However, I've never heard anyone suggest lowering the bar in the ways listed in this article. The whole thing is constructed as reductio ad absurdum.
For example:
>Stop considering some colleges as better than other colleges because that’s racist
No one says this, because it does not follow. One might say that it is important to recruit outside of the Ivies/Stanford, because you will miss qualified candidates who are otherwise pushed out of the industry despite their talent.
Or:
>Stop looking for people with relevant industry experience because it is sexist
No one says that, ever. I think the original kernel of advice may have been, don't only post listings for people with 15 years of experience. Your crud app doesn't require that, so give someone a little greener a chance.
I could go on, but this post is basically reactionary garbage.
*edit for formatting
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#27Hiring should be the sum of a "Skill" score and a "Culture Fit" score. "Diversity" shouldn't be apart of either of these scores. It shouldn't matter what race, religion or color you are.
"Culture Fit" is exactly where the bias creeps in, and what breeds monoculture. Skill should be the only indicator.
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 homeles…
Are you honestly going to try to tell me that you get a lot of homeless applicants? If I get a homeless applicant, they're getting an interview.
If I get an applicant who cannot or will not understand what a thought experiment is, they're not getting an interview - I don't care what college they went to.
And yes, I registered this account because your comment was so breathtakingly ill-informed.
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#29I think I probably guessed which company this is. But this doesn't smell right. Feels like a real-world version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM
This is a incredible video - thanks so much for sharing it.
Re: How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity
#30I've actually been given the same advice on HN regarding "not looking for a portfolio" since it excludes women. I think it's pretty disparaging to say women don't have the time for writing some code outside of work because of childcare commitments (for everyone involved - including the father of the child who's immediately and implicitly branded as off-scene or not pulling his weight). "Cultural fit" in my experience…
I've been given the "not looking for a portfolio" one before, but it was explained in more detail to me as - to put work up online opens yourself up to criticism, and given the sexism in our industry, this criticism can more easily become abuse when targeted at women, and therefore there are a not-insignificant group of women who do not publish code on GitHub because of abuse - this issue affects men less, therefore, a 'portfolio' is a biased metric.
I think it's still a useful metric, but would now not take a lack of portfolio as an outright negative, without other factors considered.