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Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

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131–140 of 219 posts

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#131
I'd be VERY careful here!

Please evaluate YOUR OWN downside risk vs upside risk.

Your supervisor has asked you discriminate.

Politically, under current administration, almost EVERY enforcement body will not actually take action here even if its clear cut discrimination. Ie, they won't care.

Out in the job market, if you are anti-diversity / take any steps to undermine a diversity initiative - that can follow you now for a very long time.

Wilberg, who recruited candidates for engineering and technology positions for YouTube and parent company Google, also alleges in the suit that for several quarters Google would not make employment offers for technical positions to applicants “who were not ‘diverse,’" which the lawsuit alleges Google defined as women, black and Latino.

The lawsuit said Wilberg complained about this to his managers and HR. He was fired in November for, among other things, “not meeting goals” and “talking too much in meetings,” reasons that the lawsuit called “pretextual.”

“Plaintiff was an exemplary employee and received positive performance evaluations until he began opposing illegal hiring and recruiting practices at Google,” the complaint asserts.

The reality is that to get diversity anywhere close to what Silicon Valley is being asked to get it too, pretty significant steps like this will need to be taken. The company may have evaluated that the downside of NOT having women / minorities in positions is too high.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#132
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree that this is a win-win. My friend recently went through another round of interviews trying to find a job. He got tons of follow up interviews, only to be told that the company decided to hire internally, or some other excuse that strongly implied they already had another candidate in mind. My friend, it ought not surprise you to discover, fits into several "minority" categories. The worst industry…

This isn't necessarily a DEI thing and more that the company has some dumb policy that you have to have job descriptions posted publicly for $x number of weeks and interview at least $y candidates. And then you make internal promotions go through the same process because reasons. Source: have worked for companies that have this policy, academia especially is famous for this level of institutional incompetence.

Not sure why this guy is downvoted. His comment is 100% true in at least some contexts. In a past life I worked at a state university. Greater than 80% of positions during my tenure were filled by nepotism. Friends and family of a currently employed person. Every time they would post the job, bring in 2 poor sobs to interview alongside the friend or family member, and then hire the friend or family member even when they were glaringly weaker (the most egregious example I remember was for a position running a copy center for one of the colleges and one of the passed over interview candidates had 10 years of experience at a local Kinkos like shop. The actual person hired had been a stay at home mom for the last 10 years, and worked in retail before that. She was also a close friend of one of the people at the college where the copy shop was located. Both were asking for commensurate pay.)

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#133
DEI came out of no where. It was as if 2020 happened, and then, suddenly every company in the country had a DEI consultant directing hiring and compensation practices. It reminds me of a party commissar, embedded in every organization telling the organization who, based on the politics of the day, to hire.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#134
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems pretty clear cut to me that if your company hasn't been found guilty of discrimination in the past, then it's illegal for the company to institute "affirmative action." That's not what United Steelworkers v. Weber established though. The supreme court said: > An affirmative action plan has to be (1) necessary (2) aiming to correct a statistical imbalance (3) not result in an absolute bar to hiring non-mino…

You're right, but point 3 means that even under United Steelworkers v. Weber the policy in the original question may be illegal. " Must be female" is an instruction to bar the non-minority completely from this position, so as another comment says it depends on if that bar on complete bars applies to individual positions or whole departments.

Consider you are going to hire 10 mid-career SWEs this year (as a generic pool) and you set aside 2 slots for females, because the current org of 50 is all male.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#135
post #99
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just what OP is experiencing with extra steps. Here's why: 1. Find merit based, good, but (unfortunately) majority candidate. 2. Position is held open, the meritorious engineer is waiting for an offer. 3. A few minority position trickle in that are nearly as good but not quite. 4. DEI argues you should choose the minority and uses an excuse like "they're trainable" to justify racist hiring practices. In both…

It's not racism it's prejudice. "According to the sociological perspective, members of privileged groups can experience prejudice, but their experience will be different than the experience of someone who experiences systemic racism." One could argue that being in the majority you would have an easier time getting a lateral promotion than someone as a minority.

This is one of those ‘well actually’ type of statements that assumes that there is a single correct definition of a concept and it is defined by a consortium of researchers 5 years ago. The the term already had common definition and widespread use for 50 years. Saying people don’t know what the concept means because they were taught a different definition since the age of 6 is not going to move the discussion forward.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#136
post #38
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty clear cut to me that if your company hasn't been found guilty of discrimination in the past, then it's illegal for the company to institute "affirmative action." That being said, it's usually the company that receives penalties in these situations, and not individual employees. If a lawsuit is made, and the lawsuit is successful (a big "if" in itself), it's not a guarantee that you will be held person…

Obviously IANAL, but I don't read "remediate past failures" as requiring a guilty verdict in court to institute affirmative action.

You’d need to get a running start to make that leap of logic.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#138

how do you choose between white female and black male given that both are equally qualified ?

I've been a hiring manager for 3 years and have been interviewing candidates for 7. In all that time, I have _never_ had a situation where two candidates were exactly equally qualified. There has always been factors that we can use to choose one over the other. the last time I had to make a recommendation on a candidate decision, both would have been appropriate for the job. I recommended we contact the one we didn't hire for our next opening, and my hire recommendation was because candidate A had marginally more experience than B in an area that our team was weaker on.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is a terrible and naive way to think of DEI No, it isn’t. OP is describing the intended use of DEI. A proper merit based approach would have 0 knowledge of race, gender, etc. DSA as well requires prior knowledge of irrelevant attributes of a candidate because its goal is to increase the representation of people with those attributes, not hire the best candidates. Any process trying to select for the best devel…

Hmm. Without actively taking steps to widen the net and account for those irrelevant attributes, those attributes instead act as the first filter in your hiring process. IMO the process that ignores this is the one that’s not looking for the best developers. In order to make those attributes truly irrelevant we have to correct for the massive, obvious influence they have in human decision making (on both sides of the…

What’s the correct breakdown of software developers by race / gender / etc? I think if we can answer that question we can then accurately assess whether or not those attributes are acting as filters. However, without knowing those breakdowns, taking any action to correct those breakdowns is wrong. We can’t accurately say there is a problem.

The best we can do is remove any bias we find at an individual level (ie a blind hiring process). Looking at aggregate level metrics is nearly useless because we cannot accurately account for all the factors contributing to them.

Re: Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

#140
> I had a call with VP eng where I raised the issue again and they insisted that the requirement remain.

I would have loved for you to have followed that up with "Ok then. Do you also have particular breast size requirements?" and watch them squirm as they realise how the "must be female" requirement could be interpreted in other ways.

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