What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft • Hacker News Board

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#671

Post by leereeves » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:14 AM UTC

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #653

telltruth wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a silver lining. This DEI thing is now causing massive influx of sub-par employees in big tech. This is not because minority is sub-par but because hiring practices incentivize sacrificing quality over diversity to make your numbers and get your bonuses. Everyone winks at others and they say we don't sacrifice quality but it is not possible when you have limited window for headcount and your VP is sending yo…

Assuming you’re right and not unfairly discounting people who look or think different due to your prejudices, this just hurts mega-businesses profitability right? What’s the measurable material harm to you exactly? Can you prove it or do you just feel it? Still assuming you’re right, and not prejudiced, why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad? Won’t at least some of them thrive and…

> why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad?

Policies like this don't really change the number of disadvantaged people who are hired. To do that, they'd have to reduce the number of elites who are hired, and that doesn't happen.

Instead, these policies help disadvantaged people of some races by shutting out disadvantaged people of other races.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#672

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:16 AM UTC

rrradical wrote: post #493

tomp wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Has there ever been a poor person that has succeeded in our society? Of course. Therefore I proved money doesn't matter. (Do you see how stupid this argument is?)

[deleted]

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#673

Post by strix_varius » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:16 AM UTC

runako wrote: post #452

One of the key insights I think people are missing is that for most roles, not having a diverse slate of applicants in a country as diverse as America is a "process smell." The smell is that you're not casting a wide enough net to even know whether you're getting the best applicants. Some easy examples: if you're hiring for most programming roles and you don't have any qualified women applying, your pipeline sucks. I…

I'm sorry, but this is completely wrong.

In 2021, 9% of computer science graduates were black (1). 18% were women (2). These numbers are the ceiling of what you might expect for a senior pipeline, since women attrit at a higher rate than men (3).

In a typical senior hiring pipeline for a Microsoft-scale company, while you'll have loads of applicants, you might have a dozen who make it through initial screening and are at least qualified on paper. I've been a hiring manager at companies slightly larger, and slightly smaller, than MS, and this was true at both.

So of those 12, you'd expect perhaps 1 to be black, and perhaps 2 to be women - optimistically. But every company, but especially high-profile fortune 100s, are trying to increase their D&I numbers. Qualified minority candidates rarely come through applications - instead, they're recruited, since everyone wants to somehow turn that 18% into 30% in order to get their D&I-linked bonus.

Blaming a hiring manager or company for their "pipeline" when they fail to hit impossible targets is absurd, and mathematically dishonest.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/04/01/stem-jobs-see...

2. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

3. http://edge.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/WomenInT...

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#674

Post by QuarterReptile » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:16 AM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #532

thegrimmest wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is that thing? The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor. There are plenty of minority groups who at one point didn't have any stuff, and were discriminated against (Jews, Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). The main difference seems to be cultural values that prioritize the nuclear family and educational attainment. The SAT…

"The people who study this stuff seriously end up concluding that cultural and domestic factors are the biggest predictor." Wasn't there a Harvard study that concluded the biggest factor was a 2 parent household?

Of course, this has been known for very long. Moynihan was getting in trouble for saying it back in the 60s. It's also the reason why the Civil Rights Act includes women; a particularly angry racist congressman from Virginia added women to the bill (which was widely understood to be aimed at strengthening black fathers to keep families together) to get the whole thing killed (though some publications have argued that Smith was the Baptist rather than the bootlegger in the group that got women added to the bill). The bill was still destroyed by it, if not in the way originally pictured, since it passed.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#675

Post by swader999 » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:18 AM UTC

telltruth wrote: post #638

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…

There is a silver lining. This DEI thing is now causing massive influx of sub-par employees in big tech. This is not because minority is sub-par but because hiring practices incentivize sacrificing quality over diversity to make your numbers and get your bonuses. Everyone winks at others and they say we don't sacrifice quality but it is not possible when you have limited window for headcount and your VP is sending yo…

Naw, they'll just lobby up barriers to entry.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#676

Post by telltruth » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:19 AM UTC

maldev wrote: post #529

lr4444lr wrote: post #145

The current U.S. Supreme Court, though perhaps more ideologically bent than I'd like on many other issues, is certainly well poised to start slapping down some of these policies which brazenly dance on the wrong side (gray area at best) of Civil Rights law.

There's a group of Republican AG's that are suing public companies who do this. Along with DI&E investing, as it's not in the shareholders financial interest to invest in these thing, which is all that matters. So hopefully that will end these polcies.

I am not sure how legal argument can work unless you show that it breaks equal employment laws. DE&I actually is beneficial in many roles such as design, customer advocacy, sales, support, UX and so on. It helps achieve a better representation of population and diverse ideas in the group. Even for managerial roles, DE&I helpful to have representation for minorities at org level. So there are a lot of provable benefits of encouraging DE&I. However, for many technical roles, for example database administrator, I am not sure how DE&I will yield same benefits. One of my pet peeve is not including disabled people in DE&I group. Most big tech only mandates racial and gender minorities for DE&I targets.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#677

Post by strix_varius » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:21 AM UTC

etchalon wrote: post #213

outside1234 wrote: post #29

This is a real thing. It is hard for anyone that is not "diverse" to get promoted at the highest levels of Microsoft. Almost all CVP promotions are "diverse" now in a way that is pretty overt. I am a huge proponent of D&I, but it is hard not to feel discriminated against and feel like there isn't much of a career trajectory for me.

The majority of managers at Microsoft remain white, and male (page 13): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/a...

And yet, with women representing just 18% of CS graduates (1), still 200% as much as would be expected as an extrapolation of the population.

1. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#678

Post by slt2021 » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:23 AM UTC

nonethewiser wrote: post #438

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…

> Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right? In the US? Well yeah. Black people comprise 1% of college graduates. White people are 60%. It doesn't help when students are under-qualified for the schools that they get into. It hurst every party.

Black people are being scammed by colleges. Colleges happily admit everyone and hand out diplomas in return for ridiculous tuition (only made possible thanks to student loans) and graduate folks with very little prospect of getting jobs and repaying loans.

In the end black people with diplomas end up college educated with fancy but useless degree, still underemployed, with giant student loans accruing % every day and living paycheck to paycheck.

Literally modern servitude reinvented, what an irony

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#679

Post by NoImmatureAdHom » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:26 AM UTC

pedrosorio wrote: post #630

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. A couple hairs to split: I wouldn't say more "prone to risk", I'd say they have different risk preferences. It's not like one or the other attitude towards risk is better or worse, they're just more or less adaptive given a certain environment. I also wouldn't say men are disposable, as the story you tell at the group level is weak selection compared to at the individual level, but the gist is correc…

> but women are limited to ~13 max Make that ~70: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-prol...

Lol

Lawd, all right, 95th%ile is 13 or something :-D

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#680

Post by moistly » Wed, Oct 12, 2022, 3:29 AM UTC

moistly wrote: post #587

tomp wrote: 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.

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