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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#561

Post by BryantD »

catiopatio wrote: post #541
BryantD wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that’s easy. Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better. You’re 100% right about the funnel, but here’s the thing: junior positions are part of the funnel. About ten years ago I realized that I was screwing up massively by interviewing for current skill level instead of p…

> Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better. What evidence do you have to support the claim that DIE-focused companies outcompete merit-focused companies?

False dichotomy. I spent a couple of paragraphs talking about this. Please read my post and try again if you really want to have a conversation.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#563

Post by catiopatio »

BryantD wrote: post #561
catiopatio wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better. What evidence do you have to support the claim that DIE-focused companies outcompete merit-focused companies?

False dichotomy. I spent a couple of paragraphs talking about this. Please read my post and try again if you really want to have a conversation.

You made a pretty bold claim about the inherent value of diversity; if you cannot support it with evidence, the failure isn’t with me.

Efforts to increase diversity this late in the pipeline come at the cost of other priorities, including (and perhaps especially) merit, and are, almost without exception, advanced through patently discriminatory practices.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#564

Post by fallingknife »

notch656a wrote: post #276
fallingknife wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the whole interview. Just the first part of many questions. You have to print a string abcdefghij... like abcd efgh ijkl... And you would be surprised by the number of people who it takes 20 minutes to do that. Doing it in 2 minutes doesn't mean you're competent, but taking 20 damn sure means you're not

I've been coding for over a decade including things 1000x as complicated as that (think embedded systems from the ground up). I could easily take 20 minutes or even fail doing such a task because I'm literally never asked to code things in a professional environment with 3+ strangers breathing down my neck and judging me based on some simplified fizzbuzz. I'm convinced white board / live coding interviews don't do mu…

Maybe so (though I don't really believe you couldn't) but I gotta evaluate people somehow. And my job is to prevent false positives. False negatives are less damaging.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#565

Post by paperwasp42 »

omginternets wrote: post #419
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…

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 genera…

> 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.

As a women in tech, I am feeling the backlash. I have seen a huge increase in the amount of skepticism of my abilities that I face from people who haven't worked with me before. And the worst part of it is that there's actually logic behind the bigotry, because it is extremely true that my company continues to hire incompetent people just because they are women.

Bigotry itself is very difficult to combat, but when you add in a solid logical grounding for the bigotry, it becomes dang near impossible to eradicate. I worry that companies are causing more harm than good with the change in hiring practices these past couple years. I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#566

Post by mikkergp »

fallingknife wrote: post #139
mikkergp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I do an interview, and someone can complete a simple coding exercise in 2 minutes, I feel very good about my ability to say they are better than someone who takes 20 mins on the same question. Honestly? My gut reaction is you're not very thorough in measuring abilities if you offer a coding exercise that can be completed in two minutes by anybody. > And even if you were right, doing promotions based on coin fl…

It's not the whole interview. Just the first part of many questions. You have to print a string abcdefghij... like abcd efgh ijkl... And you would be surprised by the number of people who it takes 20 minutes to do that. Doing it in 2 minutes doesn't mean you're competent, but taking 20 damn sure means you're not

I could bikeshed on this, but I think this is missing the overall point. It's not that nothing is measurable, obviously some tech skills are measurable and obviously some people are going to do better on those things, but those things are less measurable as you move up the ladder, and less measurable for leadership skills over technical skills, and less measurable among groups of people with relatively similar levels of experience. I'm not saying nothing can be measured so you might as well hire the mailperson to the principal engineers job. The point is that you can have a fairly large group of equally qualified people for a job.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#567

Post by mikkergp »

bigbacaloa wrote: post #40
mikkergp wrote: post #18

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…

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

Yes.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#568

Post by pedrosorio »

omegaworks wrote: post #507
pedrosorio wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we have here is not explicit racial segregation, but a system operating via capital and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant segment of the American economy Microsoft - Satya Nadella Google - Sundar Pichai Twitter - Parag Agrawal None of these men is white or even born in the USA, and somehow they managed to arrive at posi…

All Brahmin, members at the top of a caste system established by British colonizers[1]. A system causing its own set of problems in Silicon Valley[2]. 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734 2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...

So, what's the mechanism here? The white Americans in power are fans of the caste system established by the British colonizers and decided to make an exception to their white supremacy to allow some Brahmins to control some of the most important US tech companies?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#569

Post by genrilz »

woojoo666 wrote: post #553
genrilz wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who decide which attributes are relevant are the higher ups in the company. These people are making their decisions based off traits that they believe unfairly disadvantage people. The reason for that belief is the political advocacy of people who have those traits. Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the hiring managers would be making p…

I think what's more important is transparency. Tell us the modifiers used in the hiring process. Are black people a 1.25x or 1.5x modifier? What are the modifiers for impoverished individuals? Then we can start to come to a consensus as a society, how much we want each modifier to be. But as long as these weights and biases are kept behind closed doors, we'll be left spouting speculation until the end of time.

Currently, the hiring process is opaque in pretty much every respect. I think this probably is a benefit to companies, since if they list the metrics they use, candidates will optimize for those metrics instead of actually being good at the job (Goodhart's law)

Thus, I don't think we can expect the hiring process to become transparent anytime soon. It is known that the (opaque) hiring process does discriminate based on race. If I had to guess, the policy mentioned in the article is a direct response to papers like [1], which show that simply changing a person's name to be more "ethnic" results in their application being considered less. Thus I don't mind if someone tries to opaquely enforce a rule like the one in the article to counterbalance this.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29053

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#570

Post by catiopatio »

BryantD wrote: post #444
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…

Oh, that’s easy. Because you wind up with a better, more productive company when you put forth the considerable effort necessary to increase diversity. It’s winning in the marketplace because it’s better. You’re 100% right about the funnel, but here’s the thing: junior positions are part of the funnel. About ten years ago I realized that I was screwing up massively by interviewing for current skill level instead of p…

> … people who will insist that cancel culture is bad because we have to invite all the viewpoints …

Are we to understand that, given your espoused commitment to viewpoint diversity, that you also oppose cancel culture on this basis?

Either you also agree that “cancel culture is bad”, or you don’t actually believe viewpoint diversity is valuable, and yours is just an ethics-of-convenience argument.

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