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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#281

Post by bioemerl »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #183
bioemerl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why not the way forward? Depends on the "some" being "harmed." This is a systemic problem, systemic measures will be taken, there will be winners and losers.

> Depends on the "some" being "harmed."

How does harming anyone help? No it does not depend on the some.

Life isn't a zero sum game. Pull people down and you don't distribute their value to others, you only destroy it.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#282

Post by etchalon »

notch656a wrote: post #239
etchalon wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have objective evidence, through numerous studies, that just "being black" produces disadvantage during the hiring process, and data which shows the outcomes of that disadvantage in fairly straight-forward terms: 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,…

Quoted post unavailable.

The answer to your question is yes.

They are more likely to be convicted, and are given longer sentences when they are: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...

They are 7.5 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/report-black-people-7-5-ti...

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#283

Post by tylerhou »

Manuel_D wrote: post #33
logicalmonster wrote: post #2

According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far exceeding their overall representation in the US population. Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please…

> Why are Asians doing so well? "Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization. Two main reasons that are given: Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians…

Please don’t reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well educated populations. So what you call “Asian culture” will have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who value money and education.

Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#284

Post by fzeroracer »

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 care about both money and technical things much more than women

Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong.

In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being for boys. They were the pioneers of the computer science world and in an era where things were incredibly technical without the resources we take for granted.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#285

Post by csmpltn »

forgomonika wrote: post #264
csmpltn wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline" This is trying to treat the symptoms, not the disease. You yourself say "they tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one". Why do you think that is? Whatever you're trying to solve - the "issue" starts decades earlier, at home. It's about how people are brought up, their access to education, their social environment. Culture actually plays…

That's part of the problem. The other part is the networks you are tapping into to find candidates. People tend to collect others that look, act, and think like them. That's one reason why people group up into subgroups that all have similar traits, past experiences, and belief systems. When it comes to a recruiting pipeline this is critical. If you are tapping members of your team to help finding candidates from the…

But here you have a multi-national corporation, with offices globally and ability to hire from any culture on the planet - and despite waiting months, actively searching for a "diverse" candidate, they were unable to find a single candidate who was "diverse" enough.

What conclusions do you draw from this? That "people are racist"? That the pipeline is broken? This feels like ignoring the elephant in the room.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#286

Post by BiteCode_dev »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #229
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, but these aren't that. These are just generic executives. So like, just rando leaders in accounting and HR and sales. The comparison would be if in your entire university campus only white students existed.

Some departments are indeed not as affected, and if you are looking for a product owner, a project manager, or sales, numbers don't work against you.

But there are departments where they do, even outside of IT. Accounting are mostly white males, HR are mostly female, etc.

So if you have one policy that is general to the whole company, some departments will have a hard time no matter what.

Case in point, one of my clients has a hard time finding a good dev matching diversity policies, but they have no problem finding analysts. For some reasons, good analyst profiles already are pretty diverse and the team is rocking people from all over Europe and Africa, also achieving gender parity without even trying.

Yet it's the same hiring pipeline, and we are all working in the same office. They are not excluding people, in the office, 10% only are locals! But it doesn't work for some demographics, and the general dumb rule is killing their IT projects.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#287

Post by rrradical »

Manuel_D wrote: post #222
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…

> 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…

> Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination.

Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates.

Two people growing up in different places (not different cities, but different neighborhoods within the same city) have lived in completely different worlds. Their schools are different; their health care is different; their safety is different; their opportunities are different; the people they know are different. And much of the time there's a stark racial difference in the makeup of those places. Historically this was very much intentional; but even if it were no longer intentional, the effects won't dissipate for a long time.

So when you get a slate of candidates that all happen to be white, it's not just a random coincidence. Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right?

Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel to elevate candidates that just barely miss out. In other words, candidates that are strong, but, say, don't know anyone that works at microsoft (no surprise there... two worlds) or perhaps don't think they're good enough.

The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice, but, if the company works harder to find qualified black candidates then obviously the percentage would rise. Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does) then improving a hiring process would result in an employee population that more closely matches the demographics of the population at large.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#289

Post by sascha_sl »

etchalon wrote: post #227
purpleblue wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have objective evidence, through numerous studies, that just "being black" produces disadvantage during the hiring process, and data which shows the outcomes of that disadvantage in fairly straight-forward terms: 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,…

>The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status.

They're a self-reinforcing loop. A lot of racism is affecting socio-economic status (redlining, no generational wealth) and the bad socio-economic status then fuels the continuation of the disadvantaged status alongside racism.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#290

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Manuel_D wrote: post #252
tptacek wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this engages with the comment it replies to. One way to see that is to simply remove the quoted sentence, and read the comment to see if it would remain coherent at the top of the thread.

It absolutely engages with the parent comment. The parent comment is trying to argue that discrimination in selecting which candidates to interview isn't a form of bias. This is incorrect as I explain in my comment.

The apparent Microsoft policy is that every interview pool “must include at least one external African-American, Black, Hispanic, or Latina/o and one external female candidate”. Your counterexample is “every interview pool has to be entirely white.”

I was originally going to write that you’re playing the “I’m technically correct” trick here, but I don’t think your argument actually rises to the level of technical correctness. Setting aside the debate over whether the former policy is desirable, it is clearly not the same as the latter policy. If Microsoft had said “everyone interviewed cannot be a white male,” or even “most people interviewed cannot be white males,” then you could more credibly try to make the case you’re aiming for. But they simply didn’t.

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