YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says • Hacker News Board

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#291

Post by dahart » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

Caveman_Coder wrote: post #177

guildenstern wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nevermind, hn is not the place for discussion of race.

1. Discrimination is bad. 2. Minorities have faced discrimination the most. 3. Let's discriminate against Whites/Asians to correct #2, even though we accept the truth of #1. I don't get this thought process at all..."lets fight discrimination with more discrimination!"

What's your proposal for a solution that doesn't discriminate? Do nothing?

Can you fix the existing imbalance without doing something?

What if the affirmative action were only temporary, and was designed to stop once balance is reached -- is it still discrimination?

The solution can't be to do nothing, doing nothing is why we are where we are, doing nothing is why discrimination exists. We need to fix #1 and #2 on your list before we can fix #3.

I would love to hear of an alternative thought process, please please suggest something better than affirmative action that might fix discrimination.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#292

Post by edanm » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #280

edanm wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we certainly should concentrate on removing hurdles, of course. But patching problems is not necessarily a bad idea, especially from the point of view of the employers themselves. Legality aside, there is a moral/practical argument for some discrimination based on "race" as a patch, which benefits the employer, so it's what we should expect employers to do. It's also something to keep in mind when thinking peop…

The only thing you can really measure is motivation, merit and output. How much "harder/smarter" someone worked to achieve something seems incredibly vague, and in your instance it seems like you're just guessing? How does this get you "the best" in any objective way?

Well I'm talking totally theoretically, just to show that it's possible to discriminate in order to achieve a better end result for the business.

But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two candidates with the same GPA, you'd prefer the woman. This is not vague and has nothing to do with the underlying mechanics - you as the employer theoretically don't care, all you care is that same GPA woman leads to a better job performance as same GPA man.

An employer like Google could discover things like this, if they exist, and might want to, for purely business reasons, do this.

(No idea on the legality of any of this, seems to me like it's illegal but I have no idea).

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#293

Post by usaar333 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

whatyoucantsay wrote: post #198

usaar333 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"white alone" includes Hispanic. You need to read "white alone, not Hispanic". Anyway, going by https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/sanmateocountyc... San Mateo County is: 40% white alone 29% Asian alone From that data alone, whites could actually be more over-represented than Asians. (I stress could because you need per-site info to conclude anything) Regardless, I don't see evidence that whites are underre…

San Mateo County is small enough to be distorted by the effects of the very kind of discriminatory hiring the article is about. Based upon the rapid downvoting, I'll work off the premise that I misread the statistics and ask for clarification: Which group of people does the "76.9% of US population - White alone" statistic refer to? The San Mateo numbers in the link you shared say: 24.8% Hispanic or Latino 39.8% White…

> Which group of people does the "76.9% of US population - White alone" statistic refer to?

This is defined in the footing - hispanic is not a race

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217#qf...

> Does this mean that the vast majority of Hispanics in the county are also in the "white alone" category?

Yes

> San Mateo County is small enough to be distorted by the effects of the very kind of discriminatory hiring the article is about.

Possible, but you'd need more evidence to make this claim. SF and Santa Clara have similar demographics; that's nearly 4M people across these 3 counties.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#294

Post by adamnemecek » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #275

adamnemecek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except when left to our own devices to "look beyond the superficial traits of a person", we usually end up hiring people who remind us ourselves. Speak for yourself. Also, like similarity goes beyond skin color. I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race. That being said furries are weird.

> I have more in common with a programmer of any race than with a non-programmer of my own race. Is that unusual freedom from unconscious bias reflected in the history of what engineers you have chosen to interview, made offers to, or subsequently promoted? Everyone thinks they're free from bias, until the empirical results show that the majority of them mathematically must be wrong.

I never made a hiring decision.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#295

Post by Mithaldu » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 2:49 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #279

Mithaldu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not simply more discrimination though. It rebalances the existing discrimination.

Punishing the grandchildren for the wrongdoings of the grandparents. I though we left that behind a 100 years or more ago?

That's an ideal to strive for, but if society as a whole seems hellbent to keep punishing people who have neither themselves nor had their grandparents do anything wrong, then shifting it to people whose grandparents did can be a better solution than doing nothing.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#296

Post by sin7 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

candiodari wrote: post #256

sin7 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. California is 39% Hispanic, 38.8% White, 5.8% Black and 13% Asian. California has 40 Million people. Let's say half have not graduated college yet and are not in the employee pool. That means 8 Million Hispanics, 8 Million whites, 1.16 Million Blacks and 2.6 Million Asians. Taking this new information into account, Asians should be around 37% of the employees, Blacks less than 1%, Hispanics around 9% and Whites 5…

Based on those assumptions, which I'll iterate below first, let's get the numbers: 1) hiring based on IQ, cutoff at 2 standard deviations above the global mean (mu = 100, sigma = 15, by design), 2 sigma above that makes 130. You get hired if you're the candidate with the highest IQ, if you satisfy the minimum of an IQ of 130 2) 8/20 hispanic, 8/20 white, 1.16/20 black, 2.6/20 asians (and let's just pretned that sums…

> Odds of getting hired under those criteria: 0.25% Asians, 0.02% Hispanics, 0.01% Black, 0.13% White

> about 2% of employees would be black, 5% Hispanic, 30% white and 63% Asian.

These two comments say the same thing. Mine is standardized.

Your take away from all this is a little strange. The Google numbers say that Asians are 25 times more likely to be hired than blacks. That has happened in real life. No one complains about that. I have read that Google is too Asian though.

People harp about less-talented people not deserving to be there, but that is already the case. From a statistical point of view, Whites are over represented at the expense of Hispanics and Asians with a higher IQ. Real life is messy, but you get the idea.

This battle has been fought already and enough people at Google were convinced that there was a bias in their hiring practices. So, now they are in the process of correcting.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#297

Post by GhostVII » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 3:05 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #273

rendall wrote: post #271

"The latter suit was filed by plaintiff James Damore, an engineer who was fired from the company last year for distributing a memo that suggested men were better suited to certain tech jobs than women. " Excuse me. Hold on. Aaaaararrrrrarrrrgh!!!11!!! Sorry. Had to get that out of my system. It is frustrating to read the same misapprehension over and over and over. Once again: James Damore's memo suggested no such th…

When multiple degree educated people who use language as a tool of their job continue to misunderstand what damore said maybe the problem is with his piss-poor communication, and not their understanding. When very many people who read his document come to the same conclusion maybe, just maybe, that's what he actually said.

I'm not a particularly well educated person and I could still clearly see that Damore was talking about preferences not abilities (he explicitly said it in the memo if I remember correctly). Seems more like the degree educated people aren't reading the memo very carefully.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#298

Post by manigandham » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

edanm wrote: post #292

manigandham wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing you can really measure is motivation, merit and output. How much "harder/smarter" someone worked to achieve something seems incredibly vague, and in your instance it seems like you're just guessing? How does this get you "the best" in any objective way?

Well I'm talking totally theoretically, just to show that it's possible to discriminate in order to achieve a better end result for the business. But theoretically, if a large employer were to collect the statistics to calculate the correlation between GPA and job performance, and then were to discover that an equivalent GPA between, say, men and women lead to higher job performance in women, then faced with two cand…

That doesn't make sense. Reviewing by motivation + results already delivers you the best people, which is the best for the business.

Why use some random group dimension? It is absolutely vague because that is only relevant when talking about averages of the whole group, but the point of fairness and equal opportunity is to treat people like individuals and judge them accordingly. Instead of using some strange GPA proxy for job performance across a giant group, just use the actual job performance (history) of the individual and see if they're good for your business.

You cannot use generic group attributes to judge a single person. It sounds "good" but never works out and is the cause of the most of the mess in the first place.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#299

Post by viridian » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

Mithaldu wrote: post #295

reitanqild wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punishing the grandchildren for the wrongdoings of the grandparents. I though we left that behind a 100 years or more ago?

That's an ideal to strive for, but if society as a whole seems hellbent to keep punishing people who have neither themselves nor had their grandparents do anything wrong, then shifting it to people whose grandparents did can be a better solution than doing nothing.

Original sin is a heinous concept, and so are blood feuds, and this sounds like both. If your father was a violent degenerate and arsonist, would you comfortable paying society back for a portion of his crimes? It seems like that is what you are asking of people as 'better than nothing'. I'm not being hyperbolic either, your logic, applied to criminal law would condemn me to suffer due to the actions of a person I have ever met once.

Re: YouTube Hiring for Some Positions Excluded White and Asian Males, Lawsuit Says

#300

Post by sin7 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

GCU-Empiricist wrote: post #290

sin7 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. California is 39% Hispanic, 38.8% White, 5.8% Black and 13% Asian. California has 40 Million people. Let's say half have not graduated college yet and are not in the employee pool. That means 8 Million Hispanics, 8 Million whites, 1.16 Million Blacks and 2.6 Million Asians. Taking this new information into account, Asians should be around 37% of the employees, Blacks less than 1%, Hispanics around 9% and Whites 5…

What percentage of those populations have the requisite secondary education and or experience (coding, statistics, marketing, electrical engineering) to work at Google? Before you try to just match up a general population to a workforce let's at least try to have a representative sample of what the "pool of qualified applicants" looks like.

I assume you are saying that Blacks and Hispanics will not meet the educational standards. Asians will and they are under represented.

The level of the problem doesn't matter. Working at Google is an elite job. We could go a level lower to Stanford. Asians are under represented at Stanford. We could go down a level to an elite California High School. Asians are still under represented. Blacks and Hispanics are really under represented at this level. It only gets worse for them the lower you go at elite institutions.

I use the general population because that is where the workers are coming from. If the pool of qualified applicants does not match the general population, then somewhere the qualification process failed.