Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#291

Post by eloisant » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:13 PM UTC

dmihal wrote: post #94

JPKab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that people still view Google as a cool place to work. It seems to me that ship sailed years ago. They are a giant corporation reliant on one monopoly product to fund everything else. Employees usually are stuck with some tiny part of a component in a system. The office perks are nice, but are you really going to do interesting work there anymore?

The free food & other perks will keep their "cool" image going for a while. But it's certainly dipping.

They were the first to do it in the 2000's, but now isn't every SV company doing that already?

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#292

Post by jknoepfler » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #218

hodgesrm wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but attitudes like what you just described contribute to a toxic work culture--people sticking around just because of the money but hating every minute of it. It implies that people there are not just unhappy but will do/say things they don't believe in just to keep the paychecks rolling in. Working at big companies like Google is not for everyone. Unless you have material reason…

Management is responsible for the environment that is created in a company. Please don't blame employees that are complaining about stressful working environments - their plate is already full.

people should take ownership of the consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are part of their professional identity and are reasonably within their control. Google is by almost no account a "stressful" working environment in the sense that its employees are well paid even within the context of a wealthy developed nation, have the freedom to leave, have ample access to health care, sick days, and paid vacation, have a physically safe workplace with minimal to no risk of personal injury, have socially highly respected work that is building a foundation for whatever career future they want, etc. etc.

This isn't a field worker complaining about back-breaking labor conditions and wage theft, this a professional engineer at a top company who I certainly would not want on my team (I'm also a software engineer) if they're as checked out as they say, both for their sake and mine.

I've worked with plenty of checked-out paycheck/stock-vest campers, and their effect on team morale is palpable, and the damage they do during their remaining tenure is usually pretty severe.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#293

Post by memo_ree » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:14 PM UTC

throwawaybipbop wrote: post #267

xxcode wrote: post #85

I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein. Please consider not…

(throwaway account for obvious reasons) I left Google a few years ago, and I did love working there, but unfortunately my experience was similar. I was on one of the non-software engineering ladders. The group I was part of grew very rapidly the first few years I was there. We were poaching the absolute best people from the best companies to come work on our team. It seemed like there was a new former principal engin…

Google has an internal system which allows engineers to transfer to other teams. If what you described happened to me, I would secure a transfer and then report the situation to higher ups.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#294

Post by Slansitartop » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:15 PM UTC

mintplant wrote: post #270

Slansitartop wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say that only applies to the people who try to fix discrimination by using group-identity-based adjustments. I'd think that attempts to fix discrimination that focus on forming shared identity (replacing the old categories) would not be susceptible to the same problems.

In psychology this is referred to as the common ingroup identity model for reducing intergroup bias. There are indications that the effects achieved are only temporary in nature, and negative outcomes can result from the loss of the overridden identities.

It probably depends on the scale. If you try to form a new in-group identity over a short time in a smallish group against a background that reinforces the existing categories, then I can believe the effects will be temporary. However, if the group is larger, the background identities weakened and de-emphasized, and enough time given, I think it'd work.

My impression is that current "anti-discrimination" attitudes actually reinforce the existing categories, even more strongly and explicitly than had been done before. There's a lot more labeling and "reasoning" through labels going on in places where it seems very counterproductive.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#295

Post by jerf » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

daxorid wrote: post #233

colmvp wrote: post #126

I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps." Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry…

Given this (correct) understanding of what "diversity" really means in American culture, why do you think it is that Asian-Americans overwhelmingly vote for pro-diversity policies?

There's a time dependency in some of this. What "diversity" is, even from a purely left-wing perspective, has changed a lot within my lifetime. I was born in 1978, and when I was growing up, the left-wing diversity perspective focused on "race blindness", MLK's dream about his children being measured by the quality of their character and not the color of their skin, and that sort of thing. Now... well... I know a lot of you on HN are very, very leftist; how does that sound to you now? I'm serious about that question. I'd guess a lot of you, if you were careful and thought about it, would have a hard time answering that question, because it isn't a "right wing" perspective, but it certainly isn't a left-wing perspective any more, which now focuses intensely on looking at people by their identity groups, to a degree that (very, very much no sarcasm here) greatly exceeds anything like the KKK, who merely looked at your race, rather than race, gender, disability status, and all the rest of the intersectional categories. The idea that anyone can be race-blind is seriously heterodox stuff now; grounds to get one instantly accused of not just racism, but subconscious racism.

There's a lot of people still operating under the assumption that the older meanings of the terms are in use, because most people have better things to do than to stay up-to-date on this sort of stuff when they've got lives to lead and their own problems, not to mention the fact that there's some deliberate obfuscation that tends to go on.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#296

Post by rayiner » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

mrep wrote: post #181

rayiner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that’s not what we get right now. We have qualified women driven away from the profession because of all the unwanted attention and hurdles that come along wit being a minority at work. In my profession (corporate law) we get a balanced gender distribution of applicants at the entry level. But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the…

How do you guys recruit and how has that influenced the number of law school graduates by gender assuming you are not a professor? I see that woman now are the majority of law graduates [0] which I find doubtful that it is attributable to corporate recruiting tactics. [0]: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/business/dealbook/wome...

At a higher-ranked law school, 80% of graduates will go into private practice, about evenly split by gender. What the prospects are at the other end has a big impact on the people coming in.

As to what law firms do—they do about the same thing any Big Corp. does, and it works out at the entry level (at least as to gender) because the pool of applicants is gender balanced. The more interesting question is how they got there. There was a strong push in the 1980s and 1990s to simply hire more women, to make up for the fact that the profession was 95% men due to past discrimination. The whole industry did this, from law schools to law firms to the judiciary.

And it ended up being largely self-perpetuating. While law still faces challenges retaining more senior women, there is a critical mass (probably a third of potential clients as well as judges are women) such that qualified left-brained women aren’t turned away from the field because they don’t want to put up with a 10:1 ratio.

Now you can debate about whether two wrongs make a right, but realize that’s a different point than what I was replying to. If you’re in a highly gender-skewed industry that hasn’t tackled the effects of past discrimination, you’re not getting the best of the best. You’re limiting half your potential talant pool to the subset of people who are willing to put up with the hassle of being a minority in their field.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#297

Post by KAdot » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

colmvp wrote: post #126

I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps." Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry…

> Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity

As an immigrant who came to the US from a poor Eastern European country just a few years ago I feel the same about being labeled as "white". It blows my mind that for many people a guy of British descent who was born in the US and a woman from Russia who speaks very poor English are both just "white".

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#298

Post by sp527 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:16 PM UTC

I once had the ‘privilege’ of talking to one of the admissions directors at my alma mater (an Ivy fwiw). An eminently qualified Asian candidate I had interviewed was rejected (while an inferior Jewish-Cuban candidate from the same school was accepted), I had quit the interview program out of disgust, and my complaints were escalated up to this director.

Now this particular individual happened to be Asian himself. So am I. I expected empathy. Here’s what I got instead: this director asked me to imagine what a predominantly Asian campus would look and feel like. Is that a university experience I would have appreciated?

I found this absolutely flabbergasting. This director had blown past the tacit admission that a quotaless, merit-based system would result in a visibly higher ratio of Asian students into outright stereotyping and borderline racism.

Here’s the problem: people equate diversity with race and gender. They really do. They’re not after real diversity. They want the outward presentation of real diversity. Then no one can ask them difficult questions. No one is going to ask them to prove that they’ve achieved true diversity on the basis of character and intellectual bent.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#299

Post by Eridrus » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:17 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #87

People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including: A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups. Another stating in part > And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. It also tells us that thi…

Thanks for finding this, this seems different than what the article alleges.

This actually seems more likely, since it lines up with what Google has said previously - that they do not alter the hiring bar for anyone, i.e. that interview/hiring committee is independent, but they do ask recruiters to focus on finding diverse candidates, and they have also said they coach diverse candidates about what to expect from interviews.

I think how this will play out depends on whether this applied to all recruiters in the company/all recruiters filling a set of specific roles, and/or if non-diverse candidates could still apply to Google and get into the funnel.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#300

Post by rtx » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

RandomCSGeek wrote: post #164

jptoor wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> although over long period of time, it's going to be the worse one. Why do you believe that? Are there specific examples you're thinking of? How do you know it's too far?

Look what happened in India. The brahmin were once the richest group and at the top of socio-economic ladder. Today, they are the poorest ones, at least in the state of Maharashtra. A major reason being that brahmins don't get job/education reservation or caste based scholarships as many others do.

That would be unique to Maharashtra due to Peshwa rule. Everywhere else Brahmin were mostly poor. My family is from Bihar and Brahmin caste. My grand parents lost four out of five children due to poverty. Luckily my grand Father got a job as coal miner and the families situation improved.

Nirdhan Brahmin has been a popular motif in Indian mythology and epics. Brahmins became victim of same kind of propaganda as happenings with Asians right now in SV.