You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview

Thanks Aline. Excellent article, as always.

Not that any interview process is perfect, but another reason why the current process is not going away, is sheer convenience, especially for the fast growing core tech companies that don't have a pipeline problem. When you have hundreds of people applying for any open role, and you're under pressure to deliver products quarter after quarter, your incentive is to stick to a process that gives reasonable results, fast enough.

e.g. Google has estimated 40K engineers. With a 10 year average time on job (it's probably less), G is hiring 40K engineers every 10 years just to sustain itself. That's a massive operation and the incentive of any company at that scale, is to design a multi-layer, fast process. They are looking for 40K engineers that pass that process, not necessarily 40k best engineers from their pipeline.

Considering diversity with that little attention span is possible, but very hard to do. And like you said, technology is possibly the only way diversity hiring can be encouraged/enforced.

> We believe that technical interviewing is a broken process for everyone but that the flaws within the system hit underrepresented groups the hardest… because they haven’t had the chance to internalize just how much of technical interviewing is a numbers game

I just don't understand this reasoning. Can someone explain differently?

I also agree with a later point -- no firm should have a "VP of Diversity and Inclusivity" but for different reasons.

Maybe age has turned me into a cynic, you can never know for sure, but this seriously starts to look like an organized campaign to 1/ increase the supply of engineers in the valley 2/ increase competition for access to a limited supply of jobs 3/ maintain engineers as a inexpensive, replaceable and unorganized workforce (in the face of increasing demand).

To address the diversity numbers of Facebook, I wonder what are they exactly suggesting when they mean that it is not "diverse"? At the risk of sounding like a white supremacist (I am Vietnamese) that very much sounds like a code word for "too many white people" or "too many asians". To clear that out and maybe find out that I am mistaken, I want to know with what kind of demographic breakdown would proponents of diversity be pleased. Should it follow the US racial distribution? Or have equal proportions of people from each race?

Finally, I think that a breakdown according to class would be much more interesting than this document. Since race is only skin deep, I do believe that having people from all walks of life would be a better optima than having people of different colors (that are all upper middle class).

Nah man. Even a half-honest business person will tell you the business incentive for making and funding diversity goals is about expanding the hiring pool.

The fact it overlaps with a popular social goal is just an added bonus for marketing and internal feel-good. Maybe the businesses are true believers in diversity, or maybe they're cold, calculating, and just hiring the true believers to diversify their business.

It's like when Google lobbies the government and their goals happen to overlap with ends an everyday engineer clued into the topic also likes. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart. But they'll make the strong principled argument for it.