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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#271

Post by afarrell »

purpleblue wrote: post #202
comex wrote: post #132

> 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.

One goal of this is maintaining social cohesion between groups of people who can be immediately distinguished in combat. The visible existence of middle-class and upper-class Black families presents a lower-middle-class black teenager (or any teenager) with a choice:

A. Spend a lot of time and effort growing into someone with the skills and social access to be a part of one of those middle-class (or with luck upper-class) families.

B. Spend a moderate amount of time and effort maintaining a position in the lower-middle-class.

C. Spend a small amount of time and effort to fall into what socialists call the lumpenproletariat.

D. Spend an enormous amount of time and effort to gather a group of conscientious and industrious peers to form a new militant group which seeks to take power, trusting them to be rational enough to act effectively and loyal enough not to betray your cause.

E. Join an established militant group.

Why does Microsoft care? Microsoft wants to sell services to various governments, who want to maintain monopsony power on recruiting those who choose path E.

They also want tax revenue from those who choose path A. They also don't want to spend tax revenue on the messes left behind by those who choose path C or D.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#272

Post by peter422 »

badpun wrote: post #244
peter422 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My CS classes in college were literally 98% male and 98% white and Asian. You are talking about a slippery slope to distract from the obvious existing problem. There might be a slippery slope in the future, I agree, but that doesn't mean there isn't an active problem now!

Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and t…

And Men obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons.

60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#273

Post by sascha_sl »

purpleblue wrote: post #202
comex wrote: post #132

> 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.

Disadvantage is not solely based on wealth, though it does play a large part.

If you presuppose that giving disadvantaged groups an extra chance is a positive (your argument sort of does already) and only use wealth as a factor, isn't it still a net positive to uplift the typically poorer group? Doesn't that rightfully uplift more people than it does "wrongly"?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#274

Post by Manuel_D »

yashap wrote: post #200

Affirmative Action is always going to be a very controversial topic. Personally I'm for it, but I understand why people dislike it. I do strongly believe that, even with Affirmative Action policies, it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male, today. For example, no matter how you slice it, white Americans are ~3-4x more likely to become millionaires than black or hispanic Americ…

"Affirmative action" is a vague term. I, too, agree that if you select a White, Asian, Latin, and a Black teenager at random there's substantial barriers to the latter two training and becoming an engineer or software developer. The latter two are less likely to be exposed to engineering and programming, and are less likely to enter university to study those fields.

That said, does discrimination in companies' hiring and promotion process yield improvements? Affirmative action like this just increases the representation within Microsoft, and does nothing to help Black or Latin youths become software developers. The gap isn't actually being closed. The same dismal percentage of Black and Latin people are entering the tech workforce. It's just that they're more likely to end up at Microsoft than some other company.

Affirmative action in the form of sponsoring coding camps in underserved communities would actually work towards closing the gap between the rate at which Asian and white people become software developers and Latin and Black people becoming so. Progress will be made when companies leave the mindset of trying to increase their representation by clawing over each other for the limited pool of diverse talent, and instead work towards increasing the diversity of the workforce.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#275

Post by lr4444lr »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #102
jimbob45 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> The new leftist talking point is that there is no possible way to measure merit objectively so we shouldn't even attempt to do so. Therefore, they would counter your point by saying that you're incapable of hiring the best based on merit. Those who believe that there is no possibility of measuring merit are destined to be out-competed by those who can and do measure it at least somewhat accurately.

Unless they can successfully create laws to hamstring their betters.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#276

Post by notch656a »

fallingknife wrote: post #139
mikkergp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question. Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can be completed in two minutes by anybody. > And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin fl…

It's not the whole interview. Just the first part of many questions. You have to print a string abcdefghij... like abcd efgh ijkl... And you would be surprised by the number of people who it takes 20 minutes to do that. Doing it in 2 minutes doesn't mean you're competent, but taking 20 damn sure means you're not

I've been coding for over a decade including things 1000x as complicated as that (think embedded systems from the ground up). I could easily take 20 minutes or even fail doing such a task because I'm literally never asked to code things in a professional environment with 3+ strangers breathing down my neck and judging me based on some simplified fizzbuzz.

I'm convinced white board / live coding interviews don't do much other than test for how you perform with a group of strangers pressuring you to jump through hoops publicly on which in a short time your entire value is judged (including determining say if you'll have money for daycare next week), which for most software professionals basically happens never except during an interview.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#277

Post by Manuel_D »

sascha_sl wrote: post #255
Manuel_D wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. 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…

Quoted post unavailable.

> You addressed the wrong argument. The intent is to give groups that are disadvantaged in the hiring process a chance. The intent is equity. Your example distorts that by shifting the balance in favor of an already advantaged group.

Then anonymize the resumes so that recruiters can't tell which candidates are men or women, or which is white, Asian, Black, etc. You don't eliminate discrimination by setting caps on how many interviewees can belong to each race. It certainly could be the case that whites are advantaged (curious why you focus on whites despite Asians being far more overrepresented, by the way). Put the proverbial veil between the candidate and the hiring manager, and we'll find out the truth.

One of my previous workplaces rejected proposals to anonymize our interview process, on the grounds that it would inhibit our diversity initiatives. Interviewing.io did an experiment relative to gender with anonymized phone interviews, and the result were the opposite of the traditional narrative [1].

1. https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma...

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#278

Post by implements »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #73
implements wrote: post #35

It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that. But, … another part of me is uneasy with the idea that there is such as thing as a racialised or gendered (for example) engineer - engineers are individuals, and shouldn’t be under an impli…

>It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that. This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender eq…

It could be the case that in societies where women aren’t arbitrarily discriminated against they seek greater engagement with the careers gender socialisation attract them to ie “women are better actualised as women in societies where female success isn’t artificially stifled by glass ceilings”.

A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their potential.

My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that “Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#280

Post by irrational »

I've been at a particular company for 20 years. For most of those years our main focus was our core mission, but over the past few years D&I has risen to be our main focus. I've seen people hired who clearly are not qualified and often are not trainable to become qualified. An example is a woman who refused to take any hard assignments and usually made no progress on the easy stuff she was assigned. She was certainly able to do the work, but just didn't do it. Then she started taking standup zoom calls from the ski slopes in winter and hiking trails in the summer. Well, you would think this would be enough to at least get her onto some sort of remediation program, but nope, HR said we could do nothing to her. So she basically earns a six figure salary and does absolutely nothing, other than fulfill a D&I quota.
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