Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts • Hacker News Board

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#301

Post by throwaway1584 » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:18 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #269

to3m wrote: post #9

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551

This one has been flagged out also. It’s beginning to look like HN really doesn’t like this story, since it’s the third time in the last 24 hours they’ve blown it off the front page.

Personally I wanted to discuss the article yesterday, but it was moved off the front-page too fast despite high interest. It is very common on HN for articles that does not agree with or points out problems in the prevailing viewpoint to be blown off the front page.

I think this is emblematic of how tyrannical some of the people subscribing to the prevailing Silicon Valley viewpoint are.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#302

Post by decorator » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:19 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #262

decorator wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems counterfactuals can be known (according to the downvotes). It must be clear how truth-values can be obtained. I must have missed the news about A/B testing reality. Silly me.

Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent. In combination with the dismissive tone, it's not a good contribution to the discussion. Piling on by being presumptive about the reason for downvotes doesn't help.

> But that’s because of aggressive efforts to recruit women, as well as lawsuits, in the 1980s and 1990s, to counteract the long history of discrimination (the field as 95% men in the 1960s). If people back then hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be getting the “best person” today.

Is that not a counterfactual?

> Your comment may be factually correct, but doesn't make clear how it applies to its parent.

I didn't realise it wasn't clear. Maybe I should have defined the term & pointed out exactly where it was:

Counterfactual: 'Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case.'.

Then again I expected people to be able to connect the two things together.

I guess my tone was because I'd expect someone who works in corporate law to know better. Maybe I should have outlined that as well. I could have explained that I was shocked. That's what I thought the tone conveyed. Surprise: Really?

Does that not convey surprise?

I guess it could be dismissive, but dismissing what? I'm asking a question.

I'm sorry if I was dismissive to the corporate lawyer regarding his use of a counterfactual (with the presumption that I'm correct). I probably could have pointed out I thought they were wrong in a nicer way.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#303

Post by realbarack » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

0xfeba wrote: post #182

gpm wrote: post #87

People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including: A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups. Another stating in part > And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. It also tells us that thi…

I don't understand how this didn't raise red flags from legal/HR. From the article: > In a statement, Google said [...] it has a "clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity. At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles[...]" You can't have it both ways. You're either based solely on merit, or on merit and how non-male and non-whi…

I think the challenge is how to correct for unconscious bias (e.g. the classic NBER finding that "black" names have to send in 150% of the resumes of "white" names to get the same interviews[0]) without over-correcting. When people think they're making objective, merit-based judgements, they are actually being racist, sexist, classist, etc.

So how do you fix this? One way is what you suggested: "companies ... should be completely blind to their workforce's background. This is doable in the interview process; for example a test which results in an offer if passed. (Though normal interview processes are not like this.)

But recruiting is more difficult, because right it involves humans reaching out to other humans who they judge to be a good fit. So being truly merit-based there requires some correction of one's own intuition.

I mean, if recruiters were really instructed to "purge the hiring pool" of non-diverse candidates then that's obviously pretty blatant. But I just wanted to note that being 100% merit-based is not easy.

[0] http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#304

Post by jerf » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

jknoepfler wrote: post #292

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management is responsible for the environment that is created in a company. Please don't blame employees that are complaining about stressful working environments - their plate is already full.

people should take ownership of the consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are part of their professional identity and are reasonably within their control. Google is by almost no account a "stressful" working environment in the sense that its employees are well paid even within the context of a wealthy developed nation, have the freedom to leave, have ample access to health care, sick days, and…

"people should take ownership of the consequences of their actions, especially when those actions are part of their professional identity and are reasonably within their control."

That's a normative statement, which I personally agree with, along with the rest of your post, so this is by no means disagreement with anything you said. But it's really easy for people to rationalize away normative statements.

I prefer something a bit more direct: Nobody else is going to save you. Whether or not it "should" be your job to manage your own happiness is an interesting philosophical discussion that happens to have absolutely no bearing on your life, because in your real life, it's on you.

If you are that unhappy with your job, do something. Nobody else will.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#305

Post by magnetic » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:20 PM UTC

wheaties wrote: post #107

gpm wrote: post #87

People should check out the actual complaint [0]. It includes a lot of things the article doesn't including: A screenshot of an email from Allison Alogna to "Team" stating > Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically unrepresented groups. Another stating in part > And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups. It also tells us that thi…

This definitely changes the tone of things. That's pure discrimination. It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all. Sounds like someone above the manager is responsible for this and the manager is carrying out orders. You don't get a historic paper trail like that by not being told to continue on.

> It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all.

Any sufficiently low quota is equivalent to exclusion (ie a quota of 1 is pretty much like a quota of 0, which really means "nobody"). The very notion of quota implies exclusion (of those who are "past the quota").

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#306

Post by Slansitartop » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:22 PM UTC

memo_ree wrote: post #236

Slansitartop wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm not so surprised. A lot of stuff about employment Google reads like hagiographies. Maybe it was that way in the distant past, but its most notable perks (20% time, etc.) have been cut and it's big and publicly traded now, so rot has definitely had time to set in.

20% projects have been cut? I wish someone told me that before I started a 20% project which spanned multiple quarters, and still did well in my last performance review. If an engineer isn't doing well on their 80% project, a 20% project might be frowned upon, that is true.

I guess the policy has changed. My impression was in the early days you could work 20% on your own stuff (no/few approvals necessary) and 80% on your corporate assignments. That's changed into something that, frankly, isn't very unique:

https://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-did-google-abandon-2...:

> Why did Google abandon 20% time for innovation?

> In 2012 the firm began requiring engineers who wished to work on individual projects to run their proposals by their managers first. This was a significant change from the firm’s previous policy.

> In 2013 it was reported that managers had clamped down on staff taking ’20% time’ so as to avoid their teams falling behind in Google’s internal productivity rankings. Managers are judged on the productivity of their teams—Google has a highly developed internal analytics team that constantly measures all employees’ productivity—and so time spent on ’20% time’ projects would impact this.

2013 Google sounds like pretty much every other major company, in this area.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#307

Post by chrisseaton » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:23 PM UTC

gigatexal wrote: post #275

chrisseaton wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are fresh from an undergraduate degree, the thing people care about is what you have shown you can actually do in the industry. And showing what you can do will in most cases instantly identify who you are. As soon as I say what projects I've worked on or what my skills are anyone recruiting me will know exactly who I am. How do you get around that?

“Built micro services that served millions of api calls per second in golang” how is that self identifiable?

But how are you going to use something as bland and generic like that to differentiate your applicants?

You've got twenty applicants, and they've all built a production API using Go or some equivalent language and they used some design pattern like micro-services or something else. Now what?

Plus in my field even something as generic as that would identify me.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#308

Post by hindsightRegret » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

ComputerGuru wrote: post #174

masterleep wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be one thing to set quotas that favor a group, it's another to exclude any group at all. Both of those are illegal.

Affirmative action is definitely not illegal, regardless of whether it should or shouldn’t be.

Not for jobs, but for higher education it is in a few states already. So there is precedent.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#309

Post by memo_ree » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

Eridrus wrote: post #283

memo_ree wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20% projects have been cut? I wish someone told me that before I started a 20% project which spanned multiple quarters, and still did well in my last performance review. If an engineer isn't doing well on their 80% project, a 20% project might be frowned upon, that is true.

The refrain I hear is that you can do 20% projects, but you have to do it on top of your 100% project, which isn't contradicted by what you say.

So that refrain seems to imply the 20% project must be done as additional work after spending 40 hours a week on the 100% project. My point was you actually can spend roughly 32 hours a week on your main project, if you are performing well, and then roughly 8 hours a week on your 20% project, and still get high performance ratings.

Re: Ex-Google recruiter: I was fired because I resisted “illegal” diversity efforts

#310

Post by rayiner » Fri, Mar 02, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

colmvp wrote: post #126

I have to say, as an Asian male I found this comment by dirtyid in the article to be succinct and all too true: > "Pour one out for Asian males. Get screwed by affirmative action in education, media representation and now employment but can't get screwed on dating apps." Asian men constantly get grouped as a single entity when it comes to tech and aren't considered an added element of diverseness within the industry…

People don’t care about Asian males (and I am one) because they’re the highest earning demographic in the country. In a country where you die if you can’t afford health care, it’s quite reasonable to take the tack that economic challenges are in a different league than dating challenges.

Combatting discrimination isn’t about some platonic abstraction. It’s about money, wealth, jobs, health and criminal justice outcomes.

And when economic concerns are implicated (e.g. advancement into leadership roles), I definitely have seen the media address Asians. E.g. https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/almID/1202779428743/.