221–230 of 972 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who start with a disadvantage?
I would also support a policy that supports at least considering disabled or impoverished candidates.
I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.
> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with simi…
Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we interviewed any non-whites or non-catholics, the interview would be unbiased towards them"
Is that a non-discriminatory hiring process? The fact that non-catholics and non-whites weren't even given a chance to interview is rendered irrelevant by the fact that the White Catholics that were still had to pass a skill-based interview?
Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diver…
You're writing with the implicit assumption that private companies ought to be meritocratic above all. I don't think that's the case. I think private people and orgs ought to be free to choose whom they associate with, hire, and promote based on any criteria they can come up with. Nepotism? No problem. Height/weight/age/beauty/culture/hair colour discrimination? You bet. Then these orgs all compete and the most effic…
> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with simi…
The author also ignores the obvious fact that only 1% of candidates being "diverse" is the root problem being addressed...
The selection of who does and who doesn't belong to a "diverse" category is based on how frequent these people happen to be in the population (for example, Asians men are not "diverse", because there's plenty of them in tech - but Asian women are, because they're far less frequent). So, by definition, the "diverse" candidates will always be a minority. It can't be fixed. Even if we somehow reach perfect parity according to existing criteria (no one category is less frequent than the other, so no category can be chosen as the new "diverse" one), new dimensions of oppression can always be invented (e.g. tall/short, rich parents/poor parents etc.) or just created as intersections of existing ones. The game will never end.
It's telling that this person posted a job listing, interviewed dozens of candidates, realized they couldn't proceed because they hadn't interviewed any minority candidate, tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one , and the take away wasn't that they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.
Why is it telling? He's managing a team, and the policy is the more immediate and fixable obstacle to him solving his business hiring problem. Even if Microsoft was capable of "fixing" it's recruiting pipeline, that could never realistically happen in time for him to fill that role.
Actually, Outlook is much more usable than GMail, but apparently that doesn’t translate to developer prestige.
> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with simi…
It's not those with a disadvantage. It's strictly based on skin color. That's the problem. You have no idea if they are disadvantaged or not. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-class Black families these days. Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.
https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/african-americans-f...
The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status. And while a higher socio-economic status can help to offset that discrimination, we have no evidence it eliminates it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't work. There are some really amazing people out there that don't fit the typical tech mold of straight cis (white) guy. They don't stick around if they have to navigate a monoculture that doesn't understand that they are constantly throwing out micro-aggressions to people outside of their view of what acceptable behaviour is. Separating your home life from work life only works for so long before you start…
I'm sure you'll be eager to consider that the reverse is also true, except in that case it's the majority of the pool getting aliened by open favoritism toward ethnic minorities and people with bizarre sexual proclivities. If the outcomes of explicit neutrality aren't good enough for you then you'd better start thinking up a new pretense, because people can see through it quite easily and they aren't going to put up…
Also, what are "bizarre sexual proclivities"? It sounds like you are living with a thick layer of judgement and shame in your life. That sounds rough.
The increase from 3.7% to 5.6% black executives as a sign of lowering standards, when black people are 14% of the population in the country... Can we first establish what percentage of managers people genuinely think got their job based on merit as a baseline? An equal explanation might be that because Microsoft forced people to actually interview black people at all, more qualified black candidates were hired.
Yes, but if you are looking at the population of rust dev with a background in system coding, or telecom engineer with ciso certification, the stats don't look like the ones of the general population at all. In my university, in the whole class, we had 0 non white, and a single woman. Now, you may argue that we should fix that. But that's another debate, the thing is, people are hiring from the pool we have right now…
If you want racial equity, you have to start at school or even earlier. Get rid of private schools, improve the public school system. Then you can actually get good people from all kinds of backgrounds that are not looked upon as "diversity hires".
> Get rid of private schools There are good steps that can be taken, but objectively harming some students is not the way forward. Improve public schools and try to get more money into the poor regions. Do not erase private ones.