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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#291

Post by epx »

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 is easy to feel like we have a target painted on our backs with this diversity thing. It is a sentimeng generated by our reptilian brain. (It does not help that some hotheads at LinkedIn say that every black hole in the universe is blame of the white man.)

But this is a feeling that must be let go. Privilege allows people to reach excellence and excellence is scarce, so no, privileged people that do their homework won't suffer because we are trying to do the right thing, allowed by our current stage of civilization that generates so much surplus.

Not picking up the capable people and letting them reach their level of excellence is a big problem in our society, and everybody would be better off if this was fixed.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#292

Post by DebtDeflation »

This is how literally everything in corporate America works. You start with a good idea. It gets turned into a metric. Targets for this metric are assigned at various levels in the management hierarchy. Bonuses are made dependent upon meeting the target for the metric. Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and just focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting, client satisfaction is obviously very important, leadership made the determination that NPS is the best way to measure csat, we all have NPS targets, our bonuses are tied to them, so what does everyone do? They only send NPS surveys to specific clients they know will give a good score and then they spend time and effort to make sure the client follows up and does in fact give a good score. Everyone manages the metric, same as with the DE&I stuff.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#293

Post by ourmandave »

irrational wrote: post #280

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…

Apparently fulfilling the D&I quota is worth 6 figures to the company.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#294

Post by crackercrews »

oceanplexian wrote: post #210
geraldwhen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very recently I was only allowed to hire a black person. The assumptions here are probably correct. Search linkedin for “diversity recruiter”. It’s a role. Companies post specific reqs that state you must belong to a marginalized group in job posts often enough that it’s a bit stomach churning. I’ve personally had to deal with HR for having too many white men on my teams. For software developers in America.

These kinds of policies are also massively unfair to the exact people you are trying to hire. I know lots of engineers who would fit into the cliche "diversity" categories who are skilled and deserving of their job. But now they have to wonder if they were hired for merit or to meet some sort of a quota. The whole thing breeds resentment and drives teams further apart, in fact it creates the exact problems DEI is pur…

Does make you wonder if heavy-handed affirmative action breeds imposter syndrome among its beneficiaries.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#295

Post by tptacek »

badpun wrote: post #258
tptacek wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Many of the elite eng school grads Microsoft hires don't work out. At the upper levels of this industry, "meritocracy" is really just credentialism --- something embedded in your own comment --- which is something you learn quickly when you abandon resumes and interviews and replace them with work sample testing.

Companies like Microsoft want the best people. It's not brick laying, there's no "qualified for the job" tick box. The effects in software are non-linear, and one brilliant hire can create more value than 100 mediocre ones. These companies are actively hurt by having to hire second-best diversity hires, even if they're technically qualified for the job (whatever that means).

You're trying to argue axiomatically and I'm relating an empirical fact: Microsoft hires from elite engineering schools, and many of those hires wash out. It's not improbable that there are coding camp people who would perform well at Microsoft. I have seem people with similar backgrounds perform well in other elite engineering environments (cryptography engineering, kernel software security, to name two).

"Technically qualified for the job" isn't some ineffable abstraction. Most programming jobs at Microsoft are quite well defined, and qualifying people for them mostly means extracting solved problems from the work and presenting them uniformly to a pool of candidates. You don't need science to figure out how to do this, although if you want it, it was all worked out and written down in the 1950s.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#296

Post by notch656a »

etchalon wrote: post #282
notch656a wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No post body was provided.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#297

Post by bioemerl »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #230
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.

Nope. Get rid of all of them. Private schools are just legal segregation. Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will give their parents a huge incentive to lobby for the increased quality of public schools. Lottery systems would make it even better. Education and healthcare being made available to everybody at the exact same availability and quality level would majorly improve both sys…

> Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will ...

Cause rich families to blanket refuse to live anywhere near neighborhoods with poor kids and contribute massively to the segregation between well off and impoverished neighborhoods.

Just live in a place where every home in a 45 minute radius is over a million dollars to purchase.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#298

Post by somedude895 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #221
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also support a policy that supports at least considering disabled or impoverished candidates.

I'm interested in the question of who decides which attributes are relevant, and which values of those attributes shall be favored. I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.

Agree. A white person from a trailer park home and a black person from a government housing home are much more alike than a group of like-skinned people among each other.

I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to address originally was that a hiring manager might choose a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal I don't know, but it's not fairness.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#299

Post by faeriechangling »

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.

I'd have less of a problem with D&I policies if they were justified in the following way.

"Black people are this percentage of the company. We need to show minorities respect and ensure they're doing well economically by ensuring that we hire a certain percentage of minorities, and then hire the best among them. This is something they fought for through the political system, and it's something every group can benefit from if they ever find themselves under-represented"

I'd be like, well I don't like my asian friend Clive is not getting hired after trying so hard in school, I might disagree with it, but I would at least understand where it's coming from. However how these policies are actually justified is nonstop racism. "white privilege, "You were only hired because of unconscious bias", so on and so forth as people are paraded into mandatory racism training seminars. I'm just sick and tired of the racism from the DEI bigots and the way they parade around as anti-racists honestly makes me want to projectile vomit.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#300

Post by yamtaddle »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #230
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.

Nope. Get rid of all of them. Private schools are just legal segregation. Forcing rich people's kids to go to school with poor and average kids will give their parents a huge incentive to lobby for the increased quality of public schools. Lottery systems would make it even better. Education and healthcare being made available to everybody at the exact same availability and quality level would majorly improve both sys…

This will only work if you also forbid rich people from homeschooling (= private tutors supplemented with sports & social clubs full of other rich kids—and very-well-funded rich-parent homeschooling support groups would probably start to look an awful lot like private schools themselves) and from sending their kids out of the country for school.

Day school rates for good private schools (there are way, way more bad private schools than good ones) are in like the $20k-$60k/yr range. That's a lot of money to put toward avoiding public school, even if US private schools themselves are outlawed. You'd have to also mandate public school attendance, no alternatives whatsoever.

You'd also have to do something to prevent rich people from effectively buying whole school districts and turning them into private schools. There are already districts kinda like this—unleash the entire upper-middle and upper class on the current public school system, and pretty soon there will be a few dozen districts nationwide where it's impossible to buy a house for under a million dollars and the schools may as well be private schools.

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