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Meritocracy at Scale

scale.com

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Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#61

Post by Manuel_D »

adamlett wrote: post #26

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart. We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual. That sounds great and all, but how? How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the j…

You can prevent discrimination by anonymizing interviews. You can't discriminate on the basis of race and gender if your interviewers can't discriminate between men and women, and between ethnicities. If bias was really the cause of the lack of "diversity" then anonymization will solve this. And if it doesn't then bias was not the cause of the lack of "diversity".

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#62

Post by Manuel_D »

gumbo wrote: post #27

[flagged]

3 out of 4 companies I've worked at, the DEI initiatives were plainly discriminatory. One designated a segment of headcount exclusive to "diverse" candidates. "Diverse" was defined as women and URM males. Another set a threshold of 40% in annual OKRs for women in all roles. Including software developers and electrical engineers (20% and 10% women respectively). The last mandated a certain percentage of on-site interviews be "diverse" before an offer was made. This resulted in unqualified candidates being scheduled for on-sites for the sake of fulfilling this requirement (the mandates were well above industry representation of "diverse" workers). Then HR noticed a lower hire rate for "diverse" candidates on the on-site, and not-so-subtly indicated that this was unacceptable. So in effect, it's a quota: X% of on-sites need to be "diverse" and those "diverse" candidates have to be hired a similar rate of non-diverse candidates.

I don't know what your personal experiences with DEI have been, but understand that for a lot of people "DEI" is effectively synonymous with "gender and racial discrimination".

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#63

Post by davidguetta »

RobotToaster wrote: post #20
verticalscaler wrote: post #8

[flagged]

DEI is fundamentally anti-marxist. The core principle of marxism is that capitalism cannot be reformed. DEI is an attempt to reform capitalism. Not to mention Marx was quite explicit that class (not nebulous identities) was the primary division in society. Proponents of DEI are radical liberals.

Yeah it's extremely weird to see 'marxist' thrown everywhere DEI appears.

Marx made it clear that the only real difference between people was money (and ~ power somehow).

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#64

Post by dang »

verticalscaler wrote: post #48
gumbo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now the burden is on you to provide the many examples of such a company that has been reshaped to the image of those minorities?

[flagged]

We've banned this account because you've continued to break the site guidelines egregiously after we just asked you to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(No, this isn't because of your views — we don't care about them and barely know what they are – and yes, we ban accounts with opposing views in just the same way, if they break the site guidelines the way you've been doing.)

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#66

Post by verticalscaler »

dang wrote: post #64
verticalscaler wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We've banned this account because you've continued to break the site guidelines egregiously after we just asked you to stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (No, this isn't because of your views — we don't care about them and barely know what they are – and yes, we ban accounts with opposing views in just the same way, if they break the site guidelines the way you've been doing.)

[dead]

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#68

Post by dissent »

adamlett wrote: post #26

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart. We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual. That sounds great and all, but how? How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the j…

You are assuming that diversity for diversity's sake is a worthwhile pursuit to begin with. When the metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric.

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#69

Post by dissent »

hurrdurr57 wrote: post #51
sneak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. > It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence. This isn’t about “hiring on merit”. This is a dogwhistle, saying to people “we are an anti-“woke” workplace”, s…

>A less charitable interpretation is that they are attempting specifically to recruit people who would prefer to work exclusively amongst people very similar to themselves. This is the case with pretty much everyone. When it comes to companies that have an aggressive DEI policy, you may end up with employees more diverse in terms of race and sex, but they are usually all required to adhere to the exact same ideology.…

This is really it. They feel safe doing it and will even openly brag about their discriminatory policies, safe in the knowledge that their brand of of discrimination is righteous. Where have we seen this before...

Re: Meritocracy at Scale

#70

Post by GrooveSAN »

adamlett wrote: post #26

That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart. We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual. That sounds great and all, but how? How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the j…

   > How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job?
I understood Scale’s stance as: « out of the candidates we have in front of us for any opened job position, we’ll select the one providing the best immediate value on their concrete field - as opposed to the one offering less of a direct outcome but more « indirect » value, such as helping make our workplace a diverse, intercultural and safe place. »

I’d bet this article answers very concrete decisions they had to take internally recently and the article’s writer simply decided to turn his opinion into a company « value ».

The exact opposite stance would’ve been possible (as in « we’re an intercultural, diverse place to work and we try to make the world a better and safe place for everybody, one hire at a time »), and companies usually mix a bit of the 2.

Don’t assume evil intentions or a big « socio-political » plan. That just looks like a company leader trying to make an opinionated decision public, so anyone working there could subscribe. Better in my opinion than nothing.

The MEI (as opposed to DEI) acronym is however unfortunate as it can easily raise unneeded binary conflicts, as seen on this forum ;)

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