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Google kills diversity hiring targets

wsj.com

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Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#211

Post by ChocolateGod »

anon7000 wrote: post #178
AlotOfReading wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEI is nominally about adjusting the situation so that the end result is equal. For example, paying women equally even if they don't negotiate as aggressively as men. The nominal case doesn't always match the reality, but the reality is that no one has a level playing field to begin with.

The whole thing is about trying to eliminate sources of bias that we can. For example, blind screening of resumes where names and similar personal info aren’t given is a way to avoid racial bias while focusing on what matters. People have pre-determined opinions about many things, even if it’s subconscious. That’s an example of DEI policies trying to level the playing field to avoid unfair discrimination.

So why did companies adopt quotas?

In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial.

But companies went in hard with things such as quotas, and there's even cases in the courts at the moment where Red Hat/IBM supposedly awarded bonuses based on hiring managers fulfilling diversity quotas.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#212

Post by drusenko »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #198
scblock wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been. Using it as a pejorative in the way you are is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist. It doesn't reflect the purpose of the concept at all. In fact your description of "favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal charact…

IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses. I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants. Finally, from the article in this post: > Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the num…

As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.

The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.

Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.

Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#213

Post by pertymcpert »

pkulak wrote: post #179
pertymcpert wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot address systemic inequalities at the hiring level without some preferential treatment. The idea was that if you had two candidates who were equally strong, you pick the one from an underrepresented/disadvantaged background because they've had to work harder to get to the same place. At a surface level that is a disadvantage at the hiring level to the other one because the other gets a bonus tie-breaker.

The idea is that instead of just interviewing the people right next to you, who look exactly like you and have your exact background, you make the effort to interview a diverse set of candidates. Then you try to get rid of bias in the hiring process, and make the workplace somewhere that doesn’t make folks who are slightly different miserable. That’s it.

What you think of DEI in hiring vs reality is completely different. Your version is what gets trotted out when it comes to defending DEI.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#214

Post by ithkuil »

42772827 wrote: post #55
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading his memo and agreed with many things he said. I think the public overreacted. He was right that DEI ignore the hard questions and discriminates another group. I'm no Trump lover. However, I do think DEI was the wrong approach. Many here work in tech. I'm sure some or many of us here have silently experienced unfair DEI hiring and promotion practices at least once. I've seen some truly incompetent p…

Damore’s letter was extremely balanced and had all the appropriate caveats about being applied to individuals. But what we’re seeing as the countervailing force to “woke” and “DEI” is unfortunately not like this. It’s as reactionary as the most egregious DEI programs.

We live on times of the great pendulum swings. It's hard to have nuanced conversations.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#215

Post by ChocolateGod »

scblock wrote: post #151
likeabatterycar wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now? No, because that would obviously be racist. DEI would be favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job. The just thing would be students from HBCUs having a level playing field along with everyone else. It's no different than hiring managers selectively preferring graduate…

You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been. Using it as a pejorative in the way you are is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist. It doesn't reflect the purpose of the concept at all. In fact your description of "favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal charact…

> DEI is not "reverse racism"

You're right, reverse racism does not exist, it's just racism.

> to work harder than white men to get where they are.

Asian Americans prove this is not true. I recall that statically the average wage for asians in America is higher than white people.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#216

Post by ithkuil »

rendaw wrote: post #209
sheepdestroyer wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"childhood household income. That transcends race or gender" vs "targeting childhood household income will see representation of the groups you're trying to help drop to nearly zero" Did you misunderstand the point? It seems right that if you want to help poor people, you should target poor people, how could that be counterproductive?

I think GP's point is that if the goal is to help those disadvantaged by childhood poverty, assuming similar levels of poverty, it will help white children who are relatively less disadvantaged and not help relatively more disadvantaged black children.

But that should be the goal. Using skin color as a proxy for being disadvantaged works only inasmuch the proxy is precise enough. If it's not, it's just another bias.

If you had a better metric that can be used to help people from marginalized cummunities, wherever they happen to be, you should be using those if the goal is to be more inclusive, more diverse and more equitable.

But the problem is that the very same psychological mechanisms that drive racism are the ones which drive these modern attempts at fixing racism.

I think there are two different but related angles at play:

1. Historical injustice. Racism against black communities in the USA has such a long and disgusting history that when new generations learn about that it's understandable that people want to wash that away and find ways to make amends and counterbalance things.

2. Since we live in a world where skin color is a visible marker that you literally wear on your skin, there is a sense that you're just being disadvantaged for being you and thus you need a more-than-normal counterbalance to set things straight.

We thus ended up in a situation where we destroyed the aspirations of a truly color-blind society. We need to keep reminding ourselves about the fact that color matters.

This is not helping defusing racism. This is feeding racism because despite the best intentions it operates in the worldview of racism.

Of all the words you Americans have purged from the language you kept the word race, a word that post WWII many European nations successfully defused.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#217

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ChocolateGod wrote: post #211
anon7000 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing is about trying to eliminate sources of bias that we can. For example, blind screening of resumes where names and similar personal info aren’t given is a way to avoid racial bias while focusing on what matters. People have pre-determined opinions about many things, even if it’s subconscious. That’s an example of DEI policies trying to level the playing field to avoid unfair discrimination.

So why did companies adopt quotas? In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial. But companies went in hard with things such as quotas, and there's even cases in the courts at the moment where Red Hat/IBM supposedly awarded bonuses based on hiring managers fulfilling diversity quotas.

>In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial.

I think it would, there is a substantial contingent that wouldn't even like that.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#218

Post by abhiyerra »

teractiveodular wrote: post #103
paxys wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is true, but these corporate diversity efforts are mostly used for PR and aren't actually making a difference to any race or community. The simple truth is that tech companies are going to hire any qualified engineer they can find, regardless of whether they are in a minority group or not and whether there is a DEI department at the company or not. So the question that should be asked is – why are black…

You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.

I think it may be just a lack of role models. When I went to high school in 2005 (30% black, 30% Latino) all of them basically modeled themselves after who they saw on tv. Blacks gravitated towards sports. Hispanics towards construction and woodworking. The whites in my school mostly came from military, first responders so lot of them went military/firemen. I being one of the few Indians at the school gravitated toward tech because that was what I saw men in my community going to (even before the parental pressure).

I don’t think any of them were dumb, just focused on the things they saw members of their community do.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#219

Post by mike_hearn »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #201
anon7000 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole thing is about trying to eliminate sources of bias that we can. For example, blind screening of resumes where names and similar personal info aren’t given is a way to avoid racial bias while focusing on what matters. People have pre-determined opinions about many things, even if it’s subconscious. That’s an example of DEI policies trying to level the playing field to avoid unfair discrimination.

That's a great example of a DEI-inspired policy that should be, at least in most cases, pretty non-controversial, and very beneficial to the company itself. I think there are also some other types of policies (whether formal or informal) that were much more controversial. For example: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/lawsuit-claims-google-...

Have you tried deploying it? If you do, you'll find blind screening is extremely controversial. DEI types loathe it and will fight against it.

The reason is that de facto unofficial discrimination against white men is widespread and blind screening eliminates it, so the resulting hires are more male and western than before. Mostly this result is kept hidden within the organizations in question, but there are a bunch of reported cases where this happened publicly.

Even the famous orchestra study that kicked off the fad for these screenings supports this if you read the data tables carefully. The paper made it sound like blind screenings are better for women and racial minorities, but their data properly interpreted didn't say that.

Re: Google kills diversity hiring targets

#220

Post by Lanolderen »

drusenko wrote: post #212
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses. I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants. Finally, from the article in this post: > Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the num…

As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring. The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best…

There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.

Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.

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