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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#401

Post by ponow »

faeriechangling wrote: post #385
rrradical wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice I agree, it is incoherent for people to say that certain racial groups being over-represented doesn't mean the system isn't fair, but blacks suddenly being hired is evidence the system isn't fair. >So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel With racism... and honestly this entire process is annoyingly indi…

> it is incoherent for people to say that certain racial groups being over-represented doesn't mean the system isn't fair, blacks suddenly being hired is evidence the system isn't fair

Incorrect, for these aren't the same thing: one has existed for a long time and the other is a sudden change. The latter begs an explanation, and it's there: deliberate management manipulation of the candidate pool. It's therefore understandable that co-workers will see such hires/promotions as based in part on factors beyond performance.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#402

Post by Noumenon72 »

PKop wrote: post #254

Why would anyone support a system that explicitly dis-empowers them in preference to other identity groups who themselves are perfectly fine to pursue their own self interest? After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum aspect to this. The cultural brainwashing that ther…

Even though you're advocating for your own submission and a bit hot-tempered about it, now that I've followed the link, I'd say it does deliver quality factual content about an important topic. Thanks.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#403

Post by sascha_sl »

Manuel_D wrote: post #368
ealexhudson wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blinding an interviewer by changing pitch/modulating the voice does little to erase the actual disadvantage. Few are arguing "people that sound like women are discriminated against", they're saying that the systems are set up in such a way that there is a bias against women that encompasses the evaluation of their experience, their work profiles, the topics they're interested in, the projects they've completed previo…

> there is a bias against women that encompasses the evaluation of their experience, their work profiles, the topics they're interested in, the projects they've completed previously, etc. Actually, studies specifically aimed at measuring tech jobs indicate preferences favoring women candidates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644 People frequently compare the rates of women in tech relative to the general p…

Silicon Valley is hardly representative of tech as a whole.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#404

Post by topaz0 »

colordrops wrote: post #62
bigbacaloa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear as day that some culturally contingent notion of race isn't a good way of measuring merit.

Absolutely - there aren't clearly defined lines between cultural notions of race, and the scientific community doesn't even recognize race as anything but a social construct [1]. So in the end it's either how someone self-identifies, or the arbitrary superficial judgement of race by the hiring team, which is patently ridiculous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization) "Modern science regards rac…

"Rules made by society" is exactly why it is relevant here.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#405

Post by sebazzz »

andirk wrote: post #83
paxys wrote: post #32

It's telling that this person posted a job listing, interviewed dozens of candidates, realized they couldn't proceed because they hadn't interviewed any minority candidate, tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one , and the take away wasn't that they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.

My friend works at PayP[redacted] and as a white female, _she_ was the minority hire. Somehow, in the SF Bay Area, almost all of their recruits that get to interview are [country of origin redacted]. It sounds like blatant discrimination, BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?

> BUT if no one's complaining, is there an issue?

Maybe no-one dares to complain, because it is easily perceived as racism.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#406

Post by badpun »

fzeroracer wrote: post #378
badpun wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point me to your sources on companies shifting hiring strategies to focus specifically on hiring men? It's the first time I'm hearing about this.

In the '60s the common way programmers were interviewed were through aptitude tests. The standard at the time was the IBM Programmer Aptitude Test, but in the 70s and 80s that shifted to a new personality profile that inherently favored men [1] [2] [3] by Cannon and Perry. This became the new institutional standard and was used to determine who was a 'viable' programmer or not. This is where the traditional 'programm…

Interesting. If that was truly the case and was widespread in the 80s, it died with the eighties, as in the late nineties companies came back to truly meritorous hiring that doesn't care about personality (i.e. whiteboarding/leetcoding people to death, or doing weird pseudo-IQ question such as "how many gas stations are there in Manhattan"). Why couldn't women come back in then? The argument that they couldn't, because the field was stereotypically dominated by men by then is not convincing, because the reverse wasn't true (i.e. men moved into women dominated IT in the 80s without a problem, against the field stereotypes that it's for women).

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#407

Post by president »

Dig1t wrote: post #382

I work at a different FAANG and it seems like more and more the only news that we get from corporate is related to DEI. Also a lot of hiring details are now hidden from ICs. It used to be that you would be apart of the interview panel as an interviewer and then you would get together with your team afterwards and everyone on the team would vote yes/no and that would pretty much be it. Now it’s made by a manager elsew…

It reminds me when my childhood friend's parents moved to LA so he could attend an inner-city high school so that his scores from a lower ranking school were more heavily weighted for college admissions. They were wealthy immigrants from the middle east.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#408

Post by thaumasiotes »

Manuel_D wrote: post #277
sascha_sl wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> You addressed the wrong argument. The intent is to give groups that are disadvantaged in the hiring process a chance. The intent is equity. Your example distorts that by shifting the balance in favor of an already advantaged group. Then anonymize the resumes so that recruiters can't tell which candidates are men or women, or which is white, Asian, Black, etc. You don't eliminate discrimination by setting caps on ho…

> curious why you focus on whites despite Asians being far more overrepresented, by the way

Asians are often referred to as "white" or "lily-white" in the context of hiring and college admissions.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#409

Post by missingrib »

tptacek wrote: post #245
Manuel_D wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 directly responds to the comment even without the quoted sentence.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#410

Post by VirusNewbie »

hintymad wrote: post #117

Maybe the question is why the leftists are so influential that for-profit companies are willing to comply with their ideology. Isn't the best way to increase the representation of minorities is to increase the funnel? Better schools, better teachers, more rigorous curriculum for all instead of for the elite students, a whole new culture that values curiosity and geekiness in general, and eventually a larger number of…

You're missing the obvious answer, it's a zero sum game. If a company pays top of market, they can absolutely find enough qualified candidates any way they wish to subdivide them (by race/gender/background etc).

The rest of the companies won't be able to however, and now they look bad so they either have to (possibly) lower their standards or have bad PR.

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