The thing is, though, all companies are drawing from the same talent pool. Google hiring an above average number of diverse applicants doesn't raise the percentage of diverse tech workers. Those diverse tech workers came from somewhere. Google's act of hiring them in turn reduced another company's pool of diverse workers. Or if they came from a university, it reduces the number of diverse candidates that other compan…
Not quite. The question is how do you choose the most qualified candidates? As an example, a lot of emphasis is put on CS degrees. But if you've been in hiring, they aren't an indicator of how good someone is going to be, and interviewing candidates is hard. I can teach people who can think logically how to program. What I can't teach is having the guts to do the right thing, diligence, curiousness, willingness to le…
"Enter the field" doesn't just mean majoring in CS. It broadly refers to everyone working in tech. The point remains, if only 20% of people in tech are diverse, then Google hiring 25 or 30% doesn't change overall diversity. It just means some other companies will have less than 20%.
The thing is, though, all companies are drawing from the same talent pool. Google hiring an above average number of diverse applicants doesn't raise the percentage of diverse tech workers. Those diverse tech workers came from somewhere. Google's act of hiring them in turn reduced another company's pool of diverse workers. Or if they came from a university, it reduces the number of diverse candidates that other compan…
The industry is not a closed system. People can leave or join it at any point in their careers, and they may (read: do) do so because they can't find jobs or the jobs they do find are hostile to them.
Unemployment in tech is exceedingly low, and there have been more openings than workers for a while.
And the latter point is essentially the other side of the same coin as compared to the point that I'm making: it's whether prior people join or leave the system as a whole that ultimately dictates diversity.
I agree that tech isn't a closed system. But moving diverse candidates from one part of the system to another does not actually increase diversity. Getting people into the system does that.
I like what we are doing at our company, an unofficial 1:5, where for every over represented candidate, we aggressively pursue five underrepresented candidates. It is a lot easier to train people for tech than it is to "train" someone to come from a oppressed community.
The industry is not a closed system. People can leave or join it at any point in their careers, and they may (read: do) do so because they can't find jobs or the jobs they do find are hostile to them.
Unemployment in tech is exceedingly low, and there have been more openings than workers for a while. And the latter point is essentially the other side of the same coin as compared to the point that I'm making: it's whether prior people join or leave the system as a whole that ultimately dictates diversity. I agree that tech isn't a closed system. But moving diverse candidates from one part of the system to another d…
That there are more openings than workers does not mean that every potential worker experiences the same hireability. The entire issue here is that hiring biases towards a certain type of person and against another.
A woman may struggle to find a job while an equally qualified man does not. The woman may exit the industry. She does not become part of the 'pool' unless she stays.
This is how pushing for diversity in hiring can expand the pool of available workers, and how a company hiring marginalized people can be doing something other than cannibalizing other hirers (because those other employers are not bothering).
Unemployment in tech is exceedingly low, and there have been more openings than workers for a while. And the latter point is essentially the other side of the same coin as compared to the point that I'm making: it's whether prior people join or leave the system as a whole that ultimately dictates diversity. I agree that tech isn't a closed system. But moving diverse candidates from one part of the system to another d…
That there are more openings than workers does not mean that every potential worker experiences the same hireability. The entire issue here is that hiring biases towards a certain type of person and against another. A woman may struggle to find a job while an equally qualified man does not. The woman may exit the industry. She does not become part of the 'pool' unless she stays. This is how pushing for diversity in h…
> A woman may struggle to find a job while an equally qualified man does not. The woman may exit the industry. She does not become part of the 'pool' unless she stays.
No, she joins the pool the moment she starts and she leaves the pool when she leaves.
If a company wants to keep people from leaving the pool, then the company should focus on reducing attrition. Hiring more diverse candidates doesn't necessarily reduce attrition. Remember Uber had 23% of it's workforce women at one point, it didn't help their environment.
This is an honest question to people who side with the proposal. At what point would these measures become unnecessary? What are the conditions? Btw what is the name of the ideology that one would use to justify this?
This is a hard question to answer. But I'd consider something like racial bussing in the 60s. This was a positive step and was enacted without explicit exit conditions. Such exit conditions are not necessarily a requirement for these sorts of initiatives.
Bussing is actually a classic example of a well intentioned policy most supported for its symbolism which ended up damaging its supposed beneficieries because it ignored the necessity of matching peoples' abilities with the expectations placed on them. Putting 2nd-grade readers in classes with 4th-grade readers is a recipe for frustration and failure, not matter how pure your heart.
That there are more openings than workers does not mean that every potential worker experiences the same hireability. The entire issue here is that hiring biases towards a certain type of person and against another. A woman may struggle to find a job while an equally qualified man does not. The woman may exit the industry. She does not become part of the 'pool' unless she stays. This is how pushing for diversity in h…
> A woman may struggle to find a job while an equally qualified man does not. The woman may exit the industry. She does not become part of the 'pool' unless she stays. No, she joins the pool the moment she starts and she leaves the pool when she leaves. If a company wants to keep people from leaving the pool, then the company should focus on reducing attrition. Hiring more diverse candidates doesn't necessarily reduc…
When it comes to considering the working environment, I think it's informative to consider investment banking: a field infamous for pretty much all sorts of toxicity. Yet, it doesn't suffer from any particular gender diversity problems.
That's not to say that we should be OK with an abusive environment, or that we shouldn't always strive to make the environment better for everyone. It's just unlikely to be a key causal driver of low diversity in tech.
To what extent should diversity be the responsibility of companies? I would argue the responsibility is in proportion to added-discrimination, so to speak (kind of like your profit should be in proportion to your added value). So, as an example, if 90% of your applicants are male and 10% are female, presuming quality is randomly distributed, the default assumption is that the company ends up with 90% male employees a…
Here's a little thought experiment: Let's say the very most talented potential hires almost never apply for a job, because they get headhunted. That means the pool of applicants for an open position will mostly be a mix of competent-but-not-brilliant (or at least not-yet-proven-brilliant) and incompetent people. The hiring process, if it (mostly) works will lead to hiring the competent people while leaving the incompetents behind, who are then free to apply for job after job until the hiring process somewhere fails to filter them out. The point is, the incompetent people will spend much more time applying for jobs than the competent people will. This also means that at any given time, the incompetents will make up the vast majority of applicants to any given job - in other words they are vastly overrepresented in the 'market supply' that a company gets to see. This leads to some interesting effects. One is that many companies claim to hire only the top 5%, when in reality it just means that they hire only the few competent people in the pool that they see (and these competent people are more likely to be e.g. the top 50%-5%, since the actual top 5% got headhunted). Another is that if a company used a naive metric of the 'market supply' to determine things like the demographics of the available workforce, that metric would mostly be comprised of the demographics of said incompetent people. Which might lead to some interesting biases (IIRC it's fairly well documented that men tend to overestimate their abilities quite a bit more than women do - the saying is, if a position requires 5 skills, a man will apply if he has 1 of them, and a woman will not apply if she has only 4 of them). The point is, if you wanted to do something like benchmark a company's internal diversity against the market supply, you might need a better way to estimate that market than just looking at applicants, since that is mostly noise and very little signal (and the point of most hiring processes is to filter out all that noise)
Not quite. The question is how do you choose the most qualified candidates? As an example, a lot of emphasis is put on CS degrees. But if you've been in hiring, they aren't an indicator of how good someone is going to be, and interviewing candidates is hard. I can teach people who can think logically how to program. What I can't teach is having the guts to do the right thing, diligence, curiousness, willingness to le…
"Enter the field" doesn't just mean majoring in CS. It broadly refers to everyone working in tech. The point remains, if only 20% of people in tech are diverse, then Google hiring 25 or 30% doesn't change overall diversity. It just means some other companies will have less than 20%.
> "Enter the field" doesn't just mean majoring in CS. It broadly refers to everyone working in tech.
That's exactly what you get though, if you have interview processes that select for CS capabilities (which are not the only useful capabilities for a dev to have).