91–100 of 464 posts
I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…
> I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical challenges. That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it. When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other one…
That's one take. Another take is that people want chums at work. An average person hires someone they see themselves as being friends with rather than the best qualified candidate. Animals such as bees, monkeys, and ourselves are also biased to favor their genetic group (kin selection). In other words, you subconsciously favor people who look like you and act like you. In that light, the non diverse office might be s…
I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…
This is an example of a non-diverse company that doesn't understand diversity trying to implement some kind of diversity. I recall these kinds of ham-fisted attempts everywhere in the late 90's. Ironically, this was most likely cringe because there were no minorities on the staff, a consequence of: no diversity. I observed a similar event in the early 90's when a bunch of white folk in HR tried to show off diversity…
I've seen this described as "privilege of individuality", a privilege accorded to the majority and denied to the minority: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/135278572082239488...
Tech certainly does have a diversity problem, by which I mean lack of diversity actually works to the detriment of tech companies. Yes, from the POV of companies who are hiring, this is largely a pipeline problem. No, tech companies aren't going to solve this problem directly themselves. But, what tech companies can do is change their candidate sourcing practices. I'm in favor of some version of the Rooney Rule [0] i…
Tech companies are diverse, more so than most companies.
You mean to say 'not the right kind of diverse'.
The ridiculous, Monty Python conversation that nobody wants to have, is that since White Americans are slightly underrepresented, but Asian Americans are about 600% over-represented ... which means getting the 'right' kind of diversity literally means hiring less people of colour, specifically Asians, which seems really unfair to them for very obvious reasons.
It's funny and Orwellian at the same time that the problem exists out in the open, but nobody dare speak a word of it. These are the kinds of problems that Cults and the Bad Kinds of religions have.
The problem with the 'rule' as you describe it is it may decrease diversity in any sense.
There is no data to support the fact that African Americans and Latino Americans are showing up in the pipelines in sufficient the right qualifications to 'balance out' diversity.
The data actually works the other way - the ethnic and gender composition of people hired basically is a good reflection of the pipeline.
I understand we can do better than just looking at the pipeline, but from any specific, direct hiring perspective, the pipeline is it.
Within the pragmatic but admittedly narrow confines of 'the pipeline' - any company is going to be hard pressed to hire considerably more of the 'right race' of people. It's not going to matter that much how you do interviews.
'The Solution' is going to have to be 1) getting more kids from different backgrounds interested in tech at an early age and into the pipeline and 2) accepting that 'diversity' is an ideology on some level, and that just because you have people of some group, doesn't necessarily imply negative or racist behaviours. Nobody will ever state the later in public, but it's possible we come to terms with it.
I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're using whataboutism to justify something you already lost. Two wrongs don't make a right. By the same conflation one could argue that nepotism is a prefectly valid employment tactic due to quota-filling also being.
If you cheat during a football game, there's a yardage penalty applied that gives the other team an "unearned" advantage. It's somehow plainly obvious there that if you simply say "don't commit penalties" but don't enforce it, people will cheat and commit penalties . And this wouldn't be fair or just. Yet people lose their shit when it comes to trying to apply proactive equalizers to a historically deeply unfair soci…
What is selfish is you punishing someone else with the same skin color, and then upholding literal racism as a virtue.
They absolutely should lose their shit over that.
> I was even madder when I found the data science interns hired in a parallel recruitment process had been submitted to technical challenges. That's the miracle of "affirmative action" or whatever you want to call it. When looking at candidates internally, if a company decides to do affirmative action there are those that you know are there because of their skills (non-diverse individuals) and there are the other one…
Whoever the candidates were, whatever their backgrounds and accolades and educations, he didn't care. No one was to know who they were rating, and after a while there were complaints of bias... for talent.
During that period, yes, there were more women and people of color chosen than historically comprised their body, but they were from everywhere. It turns out musicians didn't want to be reduced to bigoted demographics, so it attracted many more "non-traditional" candidates when word spread you could make it on merit.
Blind auditions were scrapped when he left, and so did actual diversity. You can include everyone today in a single introduction by mentioning Yale, Juilliard, Paris Conservatory, Royal Academy, etc.
Merit destroys class privilege, which is a big faux pas when your patrons tend to be family of people who want to advance their careers in your institution. Just recently, I couldn't help but notice the timing of the creation of another superfluous position being filled by a fledgling choral director and a $MM donation by his parents to expand the performance hall he'll be using.
Mere dutiful patronage, surely, in these times of austerity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking a non-diverse population and making it diverse is not easy at first. You need to jumpstart the effort across the board. Example: if there are no minority engineers applying from schools, it is because there are no minority students getting degrees. Follow that back to the source. It also is a lot to ask of a non-diverse group to suddenly understand diversity: they really can't, you need the group to be diverse…
More egalitarian funding will just make the wealthier classes just put their money and students somewhere else. I live in an area with a lot of private and charter schools. This is the mechanism that the community members have evolved to fund+support their children's education directly the way they want. If you try to make people pay for something they don't want to - they'll just find ways around it and you could ev…
This also applies to the first few years of college.
Result? Everyone gets an amazing education, and you can't pay your way around it.
You might say that there is a risk that universities will simply select around it. In order to prevent that, universities may not use any criteria to select students from within the province, except a score, calculated from pre-university college education, that is a Z-score augmented by metrics from the performance of your classmates at standardized high school exams, deviation thereof, and a few more. The exception are programs like medicine and dentistry, where this score is used as the primary criteria but the interview and scores at ethical tests are also taken into account.
That way, there is simply no way to pay your way around it. Private high-schools are not competitive with the best public schools (which you can enter by exam or recommendation), purely private colleges and universities are even worse, and everyone ends up on a common track.
Result? In my Computer Science program, almost every minority is over-represented (the others are more commonly in Math or EEng), altough there is still a large majority of men.
It works pretty well. I would recommend it to you, but you'd probably need to sort out your incompetent-on-purpose government (from both parties). It would also require basically nationalizing every accredited university, but on the upside you'd have tuition costs of ~3000$ per year for every university.
I'm a light skinned male. I'm also a Choctaw Native American. In my senior year of college in 2004 I applied to dozens of companies. I never got a single response. I decided to try an experiment - I applied to IBM and, for the first time, I selected "Native American" as my ethnicity. Within 24 hours I got an email inviting me to a special, all expenses paid IBM recruiting event held for Native Americans in Albuquerqu…
While I'm your everyday white guy, I've never understood why people among minority groups would accept this completely over-the-top pandering. It's a form of shaming and it's dehumanizing. Who wants this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't post like this—it does nothing to help, and you're just stoking a flamewar, guaranteed to get dumber and nastier as it gets going, with this flamebait and name-calling. The way to help is to let us know. We don't come close to seeing everything. The way to let us know is by emailing hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines say. Fortunately another user followed them and did so. https://news.ycombinator…
Dang, I'm confused, why was this article flagged? Is it that it's considered flamebait? I'm asking because the article is in my Medium publication and a lot of our stuff does end up getting posted here and so I want to be a good citizen. (Also, I've been an active HN member since 2007 and I think have been relatively constructive at contributing.) I'm not trying to debate you. So if you do have time to say a bit more…
When someone told me about the article I looked at it, looked at the thread, and turned off the flags. We do that sometimes when there's interesting information in an article and it's capable of supporting a substantive discussion.
Helpful notifications are welcome. Rants like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26388171 make things worse.