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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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411–420 of 972 posts

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#411

I think a large part of society panicked after we killed racism, and they have been performing CPR on racism ever since.

There is a large multi-million dollar industry supporting DEI now. If there are people benefiting from racism continuing, it's people that work in this industry.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#412
post #365

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…

This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people use this perverted logic. But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism. Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty. So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.

> Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty.

This is false. But let me charitably engage your argument and ask you the following -- if your premise is correct, that means that lower access to education and economic attainment among under represented people of color has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with...something. What is that thing? Why would it be the case that, as Philosopher Liam Bright says, "the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by"?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#414
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…

> I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.

1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse. 2. There is nothing wrong with your kids being in a majority demographic. It sounds like you're more worried about the world discriminating based off race and other traits.

I suspect you agree with all of this but it's a little scary how insidious these policies are. Even in your dissent you're seeing things from their perspective.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#415

Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diver…

By now, America is so racially mixed that "race" of a certain person is even harder to quantify than "merit".

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#416
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.

Even Lebron James children have to deal with racism. Someone spray painted the n word on his house. Are poor people more disadvantaged? Obviously. But all else equal, being black or brown in this country means you face more adversity.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#417
post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, becau…

It's because the stereotype changed, like I said. The new gold standard had the average programmer be 'male, nerdy, antisocial' and that was reflected by the rise of home computing being an almost exclusively young boy thing. The stereotype shifted in the 80s to computing being an activity for men, rates of women whom were computer science majors plummeted and it hasn't quite recovered. It hasn't quite died out because people still perpetuate the stereotype that the 1960s research study created.

You can see here in the chart that women were nearing 40% of all computer science majors in the mid-80s, followed by a sharp drop-off into below 20% today [1]. There's about a 15ish year lag period for changes in hiring, perception and stereotypes to catch up as people graduate, join the work force and cycle out.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#418
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people use this perverted logic. But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism. Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty. So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.

> Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty. This is false. But let me charitably engage your argument and ask you the following -- if your premise is correct, that means that lower access to education and economic attainment among under represented people of color has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with...some…

Do Obama's daughters have lower access to education?

No.

So it's not about race. (I just gave you proof.)

It's about wealth and social class. Sure, those might correlate with race, and even be caused by racism (past or present), but virtually all real world consequences are downstream of wealth (in particular the ones mentioned: where you live, what you can afford, the amount of free time you have, your health, your nutrition, access to education/jobs, ...).

If you ignore wealth and focus on race, you're racist.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#419
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…

Relatedly: I cannot defend the kind of "diversity" that would rather hire a rich brahmin than an inner-city American kid in need of a leg-up, just to fulfill some backwards skin-color quota. It's obscene, and insulting to all parties involved.

I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#420

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…

> 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…

> By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates.

Maybe, maybe not. In either case, two wrongs don't make a right. If you want to eliminate discrimination then you need to stop discriminating. The solution is not to counter-discriminate, it's to remove the discrimination further up the funnel, to use your analogy.

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