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

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

#371

Post by seanmcdirmid »

to3m wrote: post #367
throwaway1584 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that is correct it does not make it a just way of fighting for your cause. Voting for articles on the front-page of HN is equivalent to a vote in a democracy. If you removed the opposing party candidate from the ballot you might reach your short-term goal, but at the cost of a functioning democracy. In this case the article was marked as a dupe, but this specific article was not posted twice and previous arti…

I expect the moderators, or whoever it is that looks after this stuff, decided that since it was discussing the same case as the other articles then it counted as one in principle. Sometimes multiple articles relating to a particular issue are posted. When these links don't attract much discussion, this isn't much of a problem. But when they do, it's probably best to try to centralize the discussion, lest the entire…

Those articles were all flagged off the front page, not many people got the chance to see them in the first place. Whoever claimed this was a dupe was just being dishonest and possibly malicious.

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

#372

Post by southphillyman »

throwaway1584 wrote: post #361
southphillyman wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well every one except for me apparently. I've literally never worked with a (non-white) hispanic or black engineer before, so I have no personal anecdotes there. Female engineers are rare but I have worked with some and they mostly have been good (only 1 exception ime). The irony in all this hoopla is that literally every engineer who has been so bad that I wondered how the heck they made it past the interview stage…

> The irony in all this hoopla is that literally every engineer who has been so bad that I wondered how the heck they made it past the interview stage has been......drumroll ... white or asian male. I work with a lot of engineers of all backgrounds, and no group has been without bad apples. > But this argument that there are floods of under qualified minorities and women engineers getting jobs is hilarious. You are m…

>I work with a lot of engineers of all backgrounds, and no group has been without bad apples.

Indeed. So it's only natural that the demographic that represents the vast majority of the candidate pool is also going to represent the vast majority of false positives. Where is all the outrage over white and asian males who can't code their way out of a wet paper bag yet some how keep getting jobs? Hiring managers literally need to employ silly openers like fizzbuzz because these unqualified candidates keep getting opportunities presented to them by recruiters!

>The argument is that there is explicit discrimination in the hiring and promotion process which comes at the cost of equal opportunity.

The numbers don't bear this out though. Companies don't purposely hire unqualified candidates for the sake of diversity. Is it equal opportunity when referrals get interviewed, how about the graduates who come from a handful of universities? Recruiting pipelines are just that, restricted channels to a specific segment of candidates.

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

#373

Post by CWuestefeld »

JustAnotherPat wrote: post #357
CWuestefeld wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My objection, at least, is that I think for both of jerf's eras, the intended end state is still a race-blind society. And it seems perverse to map out a course to that goal that explicitly requires us to be conscious of race.

So you think it is possible to condition people to look at another person and have them never consciously or unconsciously understand them to be white, black, asian, or any other race?

No, and I don't think that's what's sought.

I think what we're looking for is that it's just another attribute, no different from whether the person has blue or green or brown eyes, or what style shoes they're wearing.

In a conversation with my boss the other day, a newly-hired AWS engineer came up. I've met him just once, and helped him get situated because his desk is near my team. I realized that although I'd interacted with him to that degree, I had absolutely no recollection of what his race was (describing him was a logical part of that conversation). I think this is what's sought.

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

#374

Post by abadaba »

walshemj wrote: post #157
rvshchwl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is the first big company that I actually rejected after receiving an offer from them. I had a really bad experience, and just felt like the company was looking for things I am much more qualified from. I was interviewed by engineers who were all just recent college grads, no managers, tech leads, or anyone I felt were probably more qualified to interview me. The environment felt toxic. Most people I talked to…

Is strange the US being such a litigious country that they let "civilians" with apparently no training interview people. I worked for a FTSE 100 company and unless you had passed a hard 3 day residential course you could not interview anyone.

At Google this is not the case. New employees are barred from interviewing for the first 6 to 12 months of employment. Afterwards they attend several training lectures, and shadow multiple interviews before becoming eligible to interview on their own.

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

#375

Post by chapill »

driverdan wrote: post #237
izacus wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but it's also a very biased view with events that take place in most of large companies (you can find these reports for Amazon, Apple, etc. etc.) And yet others seem to get a free pass while Google is targeted by wrath of HN. Why?

Amazon has been highly criticized here. Apple much less so for reasons that aren't clear to me.

Mostly because Apple has legions of fanatics which are well established here. Apple gets criticism, you just don't get to see it unless you change your prefs to show flagged/dead posts.

It's ironic, because Apple fans were painted as carrying the sledge hammer of inconvenient truth, not acting like the grey drones who oppress all differences of opinion in the 1984 commercial.

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

#376

Post by koonsolo »

xxcode wrote: post #85

I work at Google. It is the most unpleasant place to work, largely because work evaluation is almost 80% politics (might be 100%). I am a senior engineer. You get stuck here because the pay you better than elsewhere, but I think it is a very bad and very sad place to work. My stomach curdles every morning before going to work and I wonder if it is worth it. Many of my peers talk in the same vein. Please consider not…

Imagine that you find a job that excites you, and you look forward to working on challenging stuff every week.

So the question you have to ask yourself is this: Is the difference in pay between these two jobs really worth it?

The times when I asked myself this question, the answer was always really clear.

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

#377

Post by grzm »

forgottenpass wrote: post #368
hncensorship wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think HN was one of the better forums, but after recently trying to post a rebuttal to this [0] with multiple experiences from my workplace, and seeing my response vanish moments later, alongside the speed to which these threads have been flagged out of visibility (whilst anecdotal stories concerning women still rank very highly despite having far less age and far higher votes), I've lost faith both in the…

I vouched that one (and this) for ya, buddy. I don't think either were particularly strong positions or poorly spoken. It probably doesn't help that the automated rulesets here aren't kind to downvoted first posts by new users.

There are some anti-abuse features on HN which cause some new accounts to be banned when they're created. Such comments will be marked [dead], not [flagged][dead]. I suspect that's what's happened with both 'hncensorship and 'throwaway12395 (though I didn't see the status of the latter's comment before it was vouched). Some people get caught by this feature unintentionally: if they suspect this is the case, the mods have been very open about whitelisting such accounts. You can email them via the Contact link in the footer.

Note that this is different from people being flagged or down voted by members because of content. I can imagine it's very frustrating, but they are different behaviors. In one, specific action has been taken by members; in another, one has been caught by automated anti-abuse measures.

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

#378

Post by throwaway1584 »

to3m wrote: post #367
throwaway1584 wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that is correct it does not make it a just way of fighting for your cause. Voting for articles on the front-page of HN is equivalent to a vote in a democracy. If you removed the opposing party candidate from the ballot you might reach your short-term goal, but at the cost of a functioning democracy. In this case the article was marked as a dupe, but this specific article was not posted twice and previous arti…

I expect the moderators, or whoever it is that looks after this stuff, decided that since it was discussing the same case as the other articles then it counted as one in principle. Sometimes multiple articles relating to a particular issue are posted. When these links don't attract much discussion, this isn't much of a problem. But when they do, it's probably best to try to centralize the discussion, lest the entire…

You can’t both flag an article on a topic off the frontpage so few in the audience see it and get to claim that another article on the topic is a dupe for the audience.

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

#379

Post by yomly »

err4nt wrote: post #369
yomly wrote: post #202

Something I have been mulling over lately is, how "progressiveness" encodes bias in and of itself. Let's reason out a (very naive and overly simplistic) thought experiment: You are BigCo and want to promote diversity. Part of your cultural strategy is nurture a culture that is "progressive". Therefore you implement a litmus test behavioural question that implicitly tests the candidate's attitudes to sexism as part of…

Any time a principle is applied to a culture at a specific point in time, when you look back from an even better place the original improvement can look barbaric. An example: killing animals to eat them. In the ancient world I heard that it was common to tie up an animal and cut off one limb at a time, keeping the animal alive as long as possible to keep the rest of the meat 'fresh'. When you got hungry, you would go…

Your anecdote is both valid and interesting, I suppose (having had a bit of time to reflect on my post) what interests me is:

some measures to improve diversity and counter privilege will ironically favour people who are privileged.

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

#380

Post by gigatexal »

chrisseaton wrote: post #307
gigatexal wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

No system is perfect but it’s at least a step in the right direction for obfuscating gender and race.
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