What the Kapors Have Learned from Years of Working on Diversity in Tech

Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No single thing can. At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.

I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.

Then state what they are so we can figure out why.

> And if you believe the pipeline is the only problem then our principles are irreconcilably different.

There is a difference between a problem being the only problem and being the biggest problem. Amdahl's law. You can't fix more of the problem than the thing you're changing represents. The pipeline problem is not the entire problem but it's a huge proportion of it. It's the sine qua non of fixing the overall problem. Without addressing it you're just rearranging the deck chairs.

> Of course you are right that this doesn't solve the pipeline problem. No single thing can.

It isn't that it doesn't solve it, it's that it hardly even addresses it. By the time you're at the interviewing stage you're already at the end of the pipeline.

> At least it gets the company to interview someone they normally wouldn't.

Do the math on this. There are nine overrepresented candidates for every underrepresented candidate and you would normally interview five people. Now everybody decides to make the fifth candidate the underrepresented candidate. The underrepresented candidate would have to do ~twice as many interviews to allow all the employers to make their quota but can still only be employed by one of them.

The only way this even does anything other than waste everybody's time doing interviews at companies where the underrepresented candidate won't end up working anyway is if in the alternative the underrepresented candidate wouldn't have found employment in the industry. But the demand for programmers is such that if you're qualified you can almost always find work. It's a solution aimed at a very small corner of the problem that rarely occurs, but has significant costs because everyone ends up doing many fruitless interviews when they could be interviewing candidates more likely to actually work there.

> I can't find the link now, but the EEOC gives an example. If a company only hires by referrals and all of the candidates are Mexican because all of the employees are Mexican then that is discriminatory.

Now you're talking about a different scenario where the makeup of the existing employees differs from the makeup of the overall pool of qualified applicants, both the employees and the referred candidates are completely homogenous, and the company hires only by referrals.

That scenario is a completely different kind of problem. It's an internal company problem vs. the industry-wide problem we have in tech. The internal company problem is easily solved by considering candidates from the broader pool of qualified applicants. The industry-wide problem is not helped by that at all because the skew is present in even the broadest pool of qualified applicants.

It's actually not that unexpected. If you take a majority-white population and distribute employees completely at random then you would expect to see several companies that are entirely or almost entirely white, because random is not the same thing as uniform. And then there are several benign things that tend to create clusters, like geography. (There is a lower proportion of Asians local to Boston than San Francisco etc.)

Diversity doesn't mean every company has every group in exactly the same proportion as the general population. That isn't diversity, it's uniformity. The only way you get that level of uniformity is authoritarian decree. Diversity is so much messier than that because natural diversity is a derivative of Darwinian forces. It doesn't care about made up unscientific nonsense like race, so the distribution of "races" in a completely egalitarian society is not uniform, it's completely arbitrary.

> In my experience most people who point at the pipeline problem are lazy.

Probably most people who point at the pipeline problem can see it plainly but don't know how to fix it. If you sit down in a computer science class your classmates might be 16 white men, 10 Asian men and one Asian woman. After four plus years of that, try to be shocked to hear that the industry doesn't employ very many black women.

The "problem" with the pipeline problem is that it doesn't have a center. There is no single thing that causes it and no organization responsible for it. So it's easy to point to it, because it's real, but how do you fix it? Pass a law prohibiting high school girls from ostracizing their peers who spend time learning about computers? It's a big problem but not an easy problem.