How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

The fact that a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good programmer does not mean it is a worthless data point.

Sorry that it's hard to believe. My CEO was previously an activist so the people brought in to talk are definitely outside what you would expect in corporate America.

Unfortunately it's hard to find sources for this except for internal videos.

A quote from one of the trainers that gets at the same idea:

"In sourcing diverse candidates, it is imperative to avoid criteria that are inherently biased, like using school selectivity and previous company as a proxy for performance or as a signal that someone is a strong candidate.

Instead of focusing on previous companies or schools, which limits the talent pool, you should focus on relevant skills. For example, if Google is typically used as a signal that someone is a good candidate, push yourselves and your clients to articulate why that's the case. Is it the experience working at a large company that's useful?"

>edit: and about "open source" contributions; ethnic minorities and women are far more likely to have worked in large corporations rather than in open source or startups, because those companies are held to a higher standard in their behavior towards minorities than the kind of self-assembling social clubs that this article (and site) are focused on.

Open source software is probably the single most meritocratic resume-building opportunity I've ever seen in any industry.

If you don't like the fact that many minorities and women, far from being denied this opportunity, are simply declining to take advantage of it (as most developers do, by the way), then to paraphrase Richard Feynman, perhaps you should go find another universe where the conditions are more appealing to your sensibilities.

Or to put it another way, if you think that a submission on github containing a great new feature and some long overdue bugfixes for an open source project would get rejected because the submitter was black, then the part of your mind that desperately needs certain groups of people to be Irreparably Downtrodden is causing you to lose a great deal of your grip on reality.

One of the societal/cultural factors I'm talking about is the caregiver's burden. Children, the elderly, and the infirmed are typically(at least in the US) cared for by women. This is a significant time suck. I'm just saying you shouldn't penalize a woman for not doing side projects, she may have more important shit to do in her nonworking hours.

And for that matter, you shouldn't penalize anyone for not writing a ton of code in their free time, there are other things in life, and more demands on your time the older you get. And anecdotally, some of the better developers I know write 0 lines of code in their off hours, they are consummate professionals but leave it at work.

>With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse.

The top of a company's funnel could also be made more diverse by starting with "OK, there are 7+ billion people on the planet..." - that doesn't make it a good idea.

>And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants.

That's how you handle a great volume of applicants - you look for indicators of skill. None of them are necessary or sufficient; they just increase the likelihood that this will be a good hire a little bit. Giving every single person who is able to use the "resume" template in Microsoft Word an in-person interview would catch those false negatives you're missing, but it would be ridiculously inefficient.

Or am I to assume that when you want to hire a plumber you canvass your neighborhood door-to-door so you dont miss out on someone who might be qualified but just drummed out of the plumbing industry for institutional reasons?

Although I do like how you dismissed points 2-8 with a simple handwaving of "elite males are more likely to score higher on these points, so they're no good."

Not to mention the fact that that argument does virtually nothing to contracdict point #8. If youre someone who truly believes they're a Great Programmer Who's Not Being Given a Chance Due To White Male Supremacy, a github profile is the greatest arrow in your quiver that you could possibly dream of.