681–690 of 972 posts
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And yet, I'll bet you the majority of your corporation's management layers are white males.
At Google (in Silicon Valley), 7 out of 8 people in my reporting chain were Indian males. Go figure!
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> 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…
A single person can be diverse relative to a group, though. Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men, for instance. When we talk about diversity in recruiting, usually we mean diversity of the candidate relative to the makeup of the company.
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 was wondering why the US is so obsessed with diversity alone the line of race and gender instead of social-economical status, education background, career background, and etc? If I'm developing a statistical model, wouldn't it make more sense if my diversity means having in my team people who have statistics background, people who study statistical physics, people who are great at maths, people who are great at bui…
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> Everyone knows that's a goddamn lie. I almost want to cry when I read that "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him." Racism is anti-racist. Objective thinking is biased. Burning down cities is mostly peaceful protest.
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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 ar…
- as is frequently noted here, programming positions do not always require CS degrees.
- companies that produce software typically are composed of lots of roles. Microsoft has 100k engineers, but even more of their staff is not engineers. (That is: less than half the jobs at Microsoft are "engineers," and some of their engineers do not have CS degrees.) Many/most of those other roles translate quite well into tech. Just to take a few functional examples, the Finance function under the CFO, the HR function under the top people officer, the sales function, and the marketing function are not typically run by CS grads or staffed with programmers. Companies do not have to hit their DEI targets solely in their Engineering functions.
But back to your assertions, you seem to agree with me.
> So of those 12, you'd expect perhaps 1 to be black, and perhaps 2 to be women - optimistically.
Yes, if this is your slate for a programming role (again, assuming you are not somehow running a pipeline that somehow misses the enormous Latino population), you are probably doing okay. (Microsoft et. al. are able to aim for better than okay, but that's a business decision.)
Edit: I want to expand a little on the Latino/Hispanic component as well, as it's common in debates on this site to exclude them. But add them back in using the numbers on your first link. So we could expect 1 Black applicant, 1 Latino applicant, and 2 women (optimistically!). That's a third of your set of 12, using your data sources, for a programming role. This is optimistic, but nobody managing a F100 is asking their leadership to do easy things.
But it does sound like you generally agree that if you get sets of 12 applicants and they are all consistently white men in each set that there is a process defect? Similarly, if you are hiring for another role, your definition of a "diverse" set of applicants would be different.
> Qualified minority candidates rarely come through applications - instead, they're recruited
This is the activity that management is trying to encourage. Given industry history, it is not surprising that companies have to put in extra effort to try to change the perception of who is welcome. Microsoft is not new to this, having spent tons of money rehabilitating the image of Windows as an insecure, unreliable OS. Fixing a business process takes work, this is not surprising.
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Over 1B dollars in damage. https://www.axios.com/2020/09/16/riots-cost-property-damage
Especially important to note because my original comment was in reply to someone claiming that cities had burned to the ground.
It’s an overstated claim that functions as a dog whistle.
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…
"Seems", "like" "more and more", "only"... I sometimes wonder if people are downplaying it so others may not be as offended in a social situation, or are those words really what they meant?
We are in late 2022, at this (late) stage of the cycle, Big tech has been throwing DEI, ESG at our face for 5+ years. Both Internally and Externally via PR and Consumer Trade Show / Conference. We have got to a point they are actually "dialling" back a bit already.
>It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome.
I do not have data to judge how many people are on the side wants "equality of opportunity". Which is a very sane thing to do. But I can assure you there will be plenty of evidence the media ( Mainstream or not, ) has been arguing for equality of outcome for a very VERY long time. This isn't, and shouldn't be news.
Reading the above comment being Top Voted on HN gives me hope, but on the other hand also felt sad the realisation came so late.
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…
Diversity metrics are simple. The society they work on is not.
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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…
>Still assuming you’re right, and not prejudiced, why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad this is simply not true. Hiring must be all about merit, not handouts for some noble social purpose. Secondly, lowering bar for one race while keeping the same bar other races is blatant racism. It is conveniently called affirmative action, but in reality it is racism against more qualified can…
They might genuinely be awesome and yet they sit there and doubt and ask “am I only doing well because of something not related to my work”
I don’t work at Microsoft, but another large corporation, and have been told by my manager that right now it is difficult for a white male to get promoted and that we may need to do some strange maneuvers to make it happen if I’m interested in a promo. Was kind of taken aback by the bluntness.
And yet, I'll bet you the majority of your corporation's management layers are white males.