Who cares about diversity? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#401

Post by koonsolo » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

bumby wrote: post #396

koonsolo wrote: post #339

I do a lot of hiring, and co-hired a lot of my colleagues. I would never hire for diversity, and would explicitly refuse to do so. Why? Everyone in my team is hired for 1 thing: excellent developers. Nobody is questioning why they are there, and I would never put those people in a position where project managers have to question why anyone in my team is there, because of being a good developer or to fill up some stat…

I'm a hetro white male, so there can be ony 1 reason why I was hired This is constraining the definition of protected class. For example, if you're over 40 or a veteran, there could be the same doubt regardless if you are hetero and white. And that says nothing of non-visible disability status. The list is surprising long of protected classes so we'd probably do our organizations a service to not presume we know if s…

Damn I'm over 40. I lost my edge there. But on the bright side, I can score an extra point during the hiring.

Crazy.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#402

Post by bumby » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

handoflixue wrote: post #391

jjslocum3 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mainly agree with the OP. While they don't come out and say it, most on the DEI frontlines execute on the idea that the fix to the fact that "those people have been discriminated against, well, forever" is not to do away with discrimination completely, but rather to discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way. This strikes me as faulty thinking. R…

Giving alms to the poor isn't "revenge-driven justice against the rich" - it's helping out people in need. Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me. Surely one can by analogy reason that there are ways to support historically disadvantaged groups that aren't "perpetuating discrimination"?

I think part of the problem is that the lines upon which diversity hires may be cut is a very rudimentary proxy for opportunity.

Minority != "the poors", despite Wolf Blitzer's gaffs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sfo32rlkiE

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#403

Post by green_on_black » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

handoflixue wrote: post #391

jjslocum3 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mainly agree with the OP. While they don't come out and say it, most on the DEI frontlines execute on the idea that the fix to the fact that "those people have been discriminated against, well, forever" is not to do away with discrimination completely, but rather to discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way. This strikes me as faulty thinking. R…

Giving alms to the poor isn't "revenge-driven justice against the rich" - it's helping out people in need. Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me. Surely one can by analogy reason that there are ways to support historically disadvantaged groups that aren't "perpetuating discrimination"?

I agree with your train of thought, but I disagree with the specifics.

Though, that's in part due to my own definition of discrimination in this context to be "placing a label to tell 2+ groups apart and taking action using that label".

Taking money from the rich and giving to the poor is inherently discriminating between the rich and the poor with a follow-up action to remove resources from one group (the rich) and give to the other (the poor). The action is there regardless of the reason or ethics of the context (i.e. why someone is rich or poor).

If someone really doesn't want to discriminate, sure. But I think the argument of "labelling it discrimination is wrong" is wrong in the sense of my own definition of discrimination. For me, a more useful argument would be "well, let's figure out the metrics we're optimizing when we discriminate like this".

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#404

Post by tester756 » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

sillystuff wrote: post #298

littlelamb wrote: post #88

I am absolutely all in for equality, but definitely strongly against equity. When I get HR try to shove a resume down my throat because it ticks all of their boxes despite having none of the boxes to be succesful on the job, that is when I draw the line. I don't care if you're white, black, purple or green, and whether you fuck men, women, all of them or none of them is none of my business. At the end of the day I wa…

(Speaking of the US) Our society has historically created great differences in opportunity. It is unarguable that white males have disproportionately benefited[1][2][3]. Affirmative action / Diversity Initiatives are a blunt instrument that attempts to address these historical inequities. If e.g., a student from a school in a poor area had the same quality of a K-12 education, did not have to worry about tuition (I.e…

Why not just put more money into schools and poorer areas?

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#405

Post by azth » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

No post body was provided.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#406

Post by xtracto » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

ScipioAfricanuz wrote: post #362

Hiring for social diversity (e.g race, ethnicity, gender, age) when the benefits of diversity come from cognitive diversity (micro vs macro pov, engineer working with computer scientist) is a very inefficient way of doing things. Yes it may be that someone of a different gender/race/ethnicity may have a different way of thinking, but it may also not be the case

As an Hispanic Engineer I would hate to be hired to fill up a diversity quota... I am better than that.

And as a Software Engineering hiring manager, when hiring I always strive to to be statistically unbiased in the diversity distribution in my team. My base distribution is the population of Software Engineering University graduates.

As long as that base population has 1/10 women and 1/20 "non majority population" (in our case is average Mexican) my team should be expected to follow the same diversity distribution.

The problem with a lot of "diversity" pushes is that they treat use the full country population distribution as a base, which is unreal for ALL labours, Hospitality may be skewed to females, Basketball may be skewed to Blacks, mechanics may be skewed to males, etc. Unless the distribution in the upper part of the funnels do not change, it will be unfair to attempt to force a change in the distribution in the lower stages of the funnel.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#407

Post by lazyeye » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:41 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #368

lazyeye wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought this would make it easy to construct a response.

No, it doesn't! It famously doesn't! There's a whole discipline of creating arguments that are deliberately difficult to engage with or respond to: it's called "college debate".

See it alot on HN too then.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#408

Post by tptacek » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

cxr wrote: post #399

tptacek wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you try to rattle some of them off?

Huh?

You asked me upthread to come up with some strong arguments (to contrast with the really weak ones in the post) for the article's position. I'm asking you to do the same in the other direction.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#409

Post by bluefirebrand » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:48 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #180

So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever. So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the…

> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man

I think this argument always fails to realize that even in a group of white dudes, probably all of them have had a vastly different life experience and can bring those perspectives too.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#410

Post by Grismar » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

Diversity is not important in and of itself, but it has been shown again and again that people will discriminate against it over of just selecting for quality. And it doesn't seem to be the case that having to overcome their aversion to diversity then negatively affects long term outcome. Since it is hard to measure and affect what people actually think, it's easier to measure and make policy based on outcomes, and in that sense, businesses should care about diversity as a metric. And perhaps as therapy, to cure their company culture of systemic discrimination - through exposure and by taking away the power of the drivers of discrimination to affect hiring.