181–190 of 252 posts
Ah, the US, where blatantly racist categorization of humans is used to prove your not racist. Seriously, how many other countries divide people in "black" and "white"? Or is it even legal to do so?
I really don't get why gender or ethnicity should play any role at all. Especially for jobs based on technical skill it would make a lot of sense to select mainly for ability. It is then very likely that this would have the same skewed distribution of ethnicities that all the 'elite' universities have, despite affirmative action. As a white priviledged male, I feel sort of disheartened reading that all things being e…
I don't necessarily agree with affirmative action, but if you believe that many of the factors which contribute towards easily measured ability (attending a good school, work experience) may be skewed, then you presumably also accept that there is untapped potential out there - people with the ability to be as great but who have been in some way - fairly or otherwise - disadvantaged.
In IT in particular, where everything changes rapidly, you want to be hiring for potential as much as skill the candidate has today.
I don't think it's about picking someone because they're part of a minority, it's about thinking about how you look for and judge candidates to take into account that potential which so far hasn't been tapped.
It's {{current_year}} and people are still asking, "why does diversity matter?" Diversity matters for a lot of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, demographic diversity is strongly correlated with diversity in points of view. You want the people building your products to come from many walks of life. Remember how Google+ had significant uptake in the rich white tech dude demographic? Not a coincidence. If you want the…
Nope. It didn't have significant uptake with ANY demographic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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It sounds to me like you believe that some ethnic groups have intrinsic (genetic) advantages over others in some areas. Like most things to do with race there is a tiny, tiny sliver of truth in this, but not enough to explain the outcomes. sigh Lets look at sports. Sprints: The ACTN3 gene[1] is associated with the fast-twitch muscles, and is more prevalent in people of West African descent. Out of the last 7 Olympic…
I'd be really curious to see the gender/ethnic breakdown of just the Google software engineers. As it stands it's hard to make a meaningful comparison between Google and the overall US population of CS majors.
Ah, the US, where blatantly racist categorization of humans is used to prove your not racist. Seriously, how many other countries divide people in "black" and "white"? Or is it even legal to do so?
Not to mention it makes less and less sense everyday. Look at how many multi-racial people there are. Well, almost everybody really if you think about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A quota implies there are limited spots. There are not. Google will hire as many qualified people as it can. These initiatives are about getting more diverse candidates in the recruiting pipeline. We are not turning away any qualified white dudes!
Perhaps "quota" is the wrong term. Yes Google doesn't have a limit on how many people they can hire in total, but in the interest of diversity they are likely to _limit_ the number of "X" people they hire (where "X" is some over-represented ethnic group).
I really don't get why gender or ethnicity should play any role at all. Especially for jobs based on technical skill it would make a lot of sense to select mainly for ability. It is then very likely that this would have the same skewed distribution of ethnicities that all the 'elite' universities have, despite affirmative action. As a white priviledged male, I feel sort of disheartened reading that all things being e…
From a company perspective the reason is you may well be missing out on great talent and the great teams that research shows come with greater diversity. I don't necessarily agree with affirmative action, but if you believe that many of the factors which contribute towards easily measured ability (attending a good school, work experience) may be skewed, then you presumably also accept that there is untapped potential…
I am not sure if an individual company can really do anything about the factors contributing to those inequal oportunities. I feel for many skills they come to late, the education system is really the place that should work to reduce the amount of wasted potential.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My response was flippant, which is probably why some people have been downvoting it, but I'm legitimately glad if they're working to make their hiring pool more representative of the population. But at the same time, it's hardly their fault or responsibility to "fix" it if universities just aren't graduating people in those proportions. If they have reasons to prefer a diverse workforce, whether or not they are at…
> it is their responsibility to fix it. This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions. 1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (other than biology) why is that inherently a problem? Do you think women are too dumb to make their own choices? 2. That it can reasonably be "fixed". Spending more money on education must be the most commonly employed and most universally fai…
Example: I grew up on a farm and love farming. The moment I had some free cash I bought a couple of acres to engage in hobby farming. I would never, ever consider becoming a farmer professionally, because farming is a terrible job. In bad years you rely on crop insurance and loans to get by, and in good years you make enough money to cover your costs and keep going. You're squeezed in all directions by megafarms who sometimes have legitimately lower costs and sometimes just want to drop prices to drive everyone else out, real estate developers who can pay more than you for new land, and middle men who use their mass to pay producers less and charge consumers more. You'll work eighty, ninety hours a week for the pay of a McDonald's employee, without the chance of a "big score" like a startup founder.
None of these are intrinsic to the actual act of farming.
So what is the reason why the composition of the hiring pool for software engineers does not match the composition of the population as a whole? If it for reasons intrinsic to the nature of the job, that's one thing, but if it's for stupid reasons, like an unappealing culture (eg, white dude-bro culture) or lack of early access to computers and programming, well, we can fix that.
If we can fix that, and bring in all the people who are currently excluded from software engineering for stupid reasons, we could potentially double the number of software engineers.
Doubling the number of software engineers should be an obvious good.