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Tech's DEI backlash is here

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Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#171
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, but being familiar with the space helped identify all of the areas where the reasonable sounding prose was hiding shoddy reasoning in service of old tropes. Here’s a long but useful read if you haven’t looked at the studies commonly cited before: https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot...

The section on overlapping bell curves is disappointing. > if you pull out a random man and a random woman, you have about a 77% chance the man will be taller > you’d have about a 2% advantage over sheer random chance if you bet on the man to be more invested in achieving I have no doubt that math is correct, but that's not the point. A small difference in the means becomes a big difference at the tails. And Google d…

There are a few sex-linked neuroscience differences linked to innate rather than learned behavior, but they tend to be very low-level skills which aren’t directly linked to high level tasks, much less performance at a job which requires many high-level skills. A slight difference in, say, verbal versus spatial memory doesn’t tell you who’s a better programmer, and in studies it’s consistently been found that top performers mix a variety of skills.

Google employs on the order of 140k people and it’s unlikely that more than a few of those are so dependent on one of those narrow skills that it would dominate hiring, much less that the bias would always run in a single direction.

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to drop the inline quotes and respond more holistically. I think you're pigeon-holing me a bit into a spot where you view me taking a moral stance with no external logic. Eg. I am a well meaning but ultimately naive savior-person that wants to create fairness and this doesn't help the company, the product, or the team. I feel like I'm becoming a projection for frustrations you have with those on a moral cru…

Bangladeshi John von Neumann is probably going to be discriminated against by DEI policies because Asians are overrepresented is most tech companies. When I attended a career fair at Dropbox, Asian male applicants were marked with "ND" on their resumes. I later found out this stood for "negative diversity". Asian males are even worse than white males in the DEI policies used by most of the companies I've worked at. T…

I can't speak to specific implementations of DEI or Dropbox but if my engineering department was 95% Chinese American males, I would say it isn't a diverse team. The targets should be company dependent. The whole point is to select from candidate pools that your company isn't typically pulling from (due to bias whether in employee selection, type of interview, etc)

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#173
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Things that are considered normal in society like women not being interested in it and engineering are self reinforcing. I'm sorry, but I guess can't follow your logic at all. I haven't used the word normal anywhere. To me it seems you find it normal that everyone should be thrilled to become an engineer. Women themself at large find it more normal to choose other professions when they have an option. >> I don't k…

I'm just arguing from a perspective that society influences women not to go into STEM, and that's not a positive thing.

The idea that society influences women not to go into STEM is not at all clear. It's essentially just assuming that any disparity must be due to social influence. The reality is that larger male participation in STEM is universal across a wide variety of societies. There isn't a single country in the world where women make up more than 55% of STEM workers, while the vast majority of countries have fewer than 30% of women in STEM [1]. When a trend is present across rich and poor societies, conservative and liberal societies, religious and secular societies, it's pretty hard to say social influence is the cause.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bangladeshi John von Neumann is probably going to be discriminated against by DEI policies because Asians are overrepresented is most tech companies. When I attended a career fair at Dropbox, Asian male applicants were marked with "ND" on their resumes. I later found out this stood for "negative diversity". Asian males are even worse than white males in the DEI policies used by most of the companies I've worked at. T…

I can't speak to specific implementations of DEI or Dropbox but if my engineering department was 95% Chinese American males, I would say it isn't a diverse team. The targets should be company dependent. The whole point is to select from candidate pools that your company isn't typically pulling from (due to bias whether in employee selection, type of interview, etc)

> The whole point is to select from candidate pools that your company isn't typically pulling from

Why? If the company is already working well, why rock the boat?

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bangladeshi John von Neumann is probably going to be discriminated against by DEI policies because Asians are overrepresented is most tech companies. When I attended a career fair at Dropbox, Asian male applicants were marked with "ND" on their resumes. I later found out this stood for "negative diversity". Asian males are even worse than white males in the DEI policies used by most of the companies I've worked at. T…

I can't speak to specific implementations of DEI or Dropbox but if my engineering department was 95% Chinese American males, I would say it isn't a diverse team. The targets should be company dependent. The whole point is to select from candidate pools that your company isn't typically pulling from (due to bias whether in employee selection, type of interview, etc)

I don't really care what the idealized DEI policy is. I care about what companies actually put into practice. If companies submitted test resumes that were similar besides details identifying race and gender, and a disparity was noticed then I would be totally supportive of rectifying that bias. I'd similarly be totally supportive of anonymizing resumes, turning videos off in Zoom interviews and masking voices. But that's the total opposite of every DEI policy I've encountered. The problem is that a non-discriminatory recruiting system does produce an equitable outcome, but it's equitable with respect to the workforce not the general population. And if other companies in the field are engaging in hiring preferences, non-discriminatory recruitment will actually yield less because the diverse talent is siphoned off to those less scrupulous companies.

In the real world, I've consistently seen DEI policies that call for X% URM engineers and Y% women engineers. And these figures for X and Y were substantially higher than the percentage of URM and women in the software development workforce (at Dropbox the gender target was 33% women in spring of 2019). This led recruiters to be much more selective when hiring white and especially Asian men. It didn't eliminate bias, it incentivized bias for the desirable races and genders. We didn't expand our candidate pools, we contracted them. We stopped interviewing non-URM men from boot camps any only advanced URM and women from bootcamps. We did the same with non-engineering majors. Women and URM men who majored in a non-tech field but practiced programming on the side were interviewed, men in the same situation were not.

Pretty much every attempt to make a company more "equitable" that I've witnessed has followed the same arc. Leadership assures people this isn't discrimination, it's just broadening candidate pools. They send recruiters to Grace Hopper, HBUs, etc. But this doesn't yield any change, because there's no untapped pool of women and URM engineers. Then the company sets quotas (under euphemisms like "inclusion targets", "diversity goals", etc.) and turns a blind eye to discrimination.

The whole reason why we use euphemisms like "DEI" is because nobody wants to discuss these phenomenons in concrete terms. We use euphemisms like "diverse" because we'd cringe if we just explained our policies in plain English terms (and it'd land us in lawsuits). If DEI really was about anonymizing applications, trying to identify and eliminate biases, and preventing discrimination then I'd be all for it. But that's to polar opposite of what DEI really is.

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> merit based DEI what even does this mean

It means you prioritize hiring diverse candidates over regular candidates, but without lowering your hiring bar.

> It means you prioritize hiring diverse candidates over regular candidates, but without lowering your hiring bar.

This is still illegal. You cannot, outside of bona fide occupational qualification [1], prioritize the hiring any any protected class (race, gender, religion, etc.) over another.

Also, care to explain the criteria for "diverse"? Answer that question and swap out "diverse" in the sentence above with your answer. Then read it aloud, and ask yourself if that's something that's legal. There's a reason why companies hide behind euphemisms like "diverse".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#177
post #85
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case. Ah, and we all know the plural of anecdote is "data". /s Oh wait... The fact that you said this, suggests to me that you were the odd-person out on a hiring committee, and because the person got hired anyways, you feel like that means all hiring decisions are made on the basis of race . When in reality, you just didn't like the one candidate, and everyone else was f…

The plural of anecdote is data though

It really isn't...

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#178

"Due to the current economic situation we don't have new headcount for our org however feel free to reach out if you have a diverse candidate that would be interested in joining" From a director during a all-hands. "We have already selected a male candidate for the internship so it'd be best if the next one was a woman" From my manager's manager. "Your no-hire vote should have more justification since the candidate i…

I don’t see why you need legal protections. A diversity of thought can bring value. If the manager said, “We currently only have staff with public sector experience. We don’t have headcount for more folks. But let me know if you have someone with private sector experience. They are extremely rare, and could really open up the way we solve the problem.” Would that offend you in the same way?

Yes, but that's using a candidate's previous job experience as a factor in hiring. That's totally legal.

The issue is when you swap out "private sector experience" with protected classes like race and gender. That's illegal.

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public. I have background as an engineer in consumer products in SV for 10+ years Indeed the elephant in the room is that the people designing these products often have little in common with people using them (outside of the Bay Area anyway) Financial status, affluent, well educated immigrants from China, India,…

> I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard. I don't understand DEI initiatives enough to agree or disagree. The poster I was responding to seemed to be speaking of diversity in general so that was what I was intending to address. > I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself. It’s like delegating…

> A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.

It's also the law.

Re: Tech's DEI backlash is here

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> merit based DEI what even does this mean

It means you prioritize hiring diverse candidates over regular candidates, but without lowering your hiring bar.

If you have enough passing candidates that you can do additional filtering on irrelevant reasons, that means your hiring bar is lower than it could be.

Also, since when is being "diverse" a property of an individual rather than a group?

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