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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#711

Post by hbrn »

rrradical wrote: post #693
hbrn wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if a slate of candidates were all black. That would seem kind of odd, right? Why would that be odd? It does happen in sport, and nobody cares (nor should they). > So a good thing to do is apply some pressure Why is it good? Author talks about not being able to hire for several months due to lack of DIE candidates in the pipeline. Of course a giant like Microsoft can afford to waste resources, but for a lot…

> Why would that be odd? It does happen in sport, and nobody cares (nor should they). Why would that be odd? You just quoted the author as saying they looked for months to find non-white candidates and failed. Do you work in tech? That's the norm. If someone tried to hire for a tech position and got a slate of entirely non-white candidates, that would be entirely remarkable. > Why is it good? It's good because if you…

> if your hiring funnel doesn't represent the general population then it is biased

So 0.1% of engineers in the funnel should be Amish and 18% should be younger than 14.

There might be a flaw in your logic.

Jokes aside, this is maliciously reductive. There's too many factors contributing to the funnel (location, sourcing channels, employer, job preference, hiring market state) that makes predictions about funnel virtually impossible. But you already know it. You're not here for the truth, you're here to push your ideology.

> It's good because we enslaved a population for generations

My ancestors were thousands of miles away from US territory when slavery happened. In fact, it is quite likely they were slaves themselves. And yet you're saying I'm supposed to pay the price for your crimes just because of my skin color.

That sounds quite racist to me. Luckily, my skin is not only white, it's also thick.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#712

Post by nullc »

implements wrote: post #35

It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that. But, … another part of me is uneasy with the idea that there is such as thing as a racialised or gendered (for example) engineer - engineers are individuals, and shouldn’t be under an impli…

Before diversity programs were all the range most large companies being discussed here had populations that reflected their applicants reasonably well. But not necessarily their communities.

So where does your thinking go when the issues are outside of the company?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#713

Post by nonethewiser »

fzeroracer wrote: post #284
badpun wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and t…

> And men care about both money and technical things much more than women Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong. In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being f…

Guess women are just easily manipulated by the evil Big Computer Science Lobbyists.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#714

Post by nonethewiser »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #292

This is how literally everything in corporate America works. You start with a good idea. It gets turned into a metric. Targets for this metric are assigned at various levels in the management hierarchy. Bonuses are made dependent upon meeting the target for the metric. Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and just focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting, client satisfaction is obviously very…

Spot on, other than it was never a good idea.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#715

Post by JamesBarney »

googlryas wrote: post #209
JamesBarney wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're assuming a global workforce this would mean the representative share of African Americans would be 0.5%

Sure, but a black percentage of ~13%, which is actually exactly in line with the ratio of black americans to americans.

One of the biggest arguments for DEI is to undo the damage the US government and culture has done to it's own black citizens. I don't think filling a bunch of VP positions with highly qualified African immigrants does that.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#716

Post by [deleted] »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #325
irrational wrote: post #280

I've been at a particular company for 20 years. For most of those years our main focus was our core mission, but over the past few years D&I has risen to be our main focus. I've seen people hired who clearly are not qualified and often are not trainable to become qualified. An example is a woman who refused to take any hard assignments and usually made no progress on the easy stuff she was assigned. She was certainly…

Fuck me! I wish I was more diverse.

[deleted]

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#717

Post by slt2021 »

mostertoaster wrote: post #689
slt2021 wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I’ve actually heard from many friends that even though they are in a “favored” group, because of their skin color or gender, they hate it because they suffer from even worse impostor syndrome than the average developer. 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 would like to think of it as first, second order effects.

First order effect of DEI:

- Bar is lowered in the name of DEI, to bring more diverse employees

- Managers/CEOs/HRs get their bonuses for meeting DEI metrics

Second order effects:

- Hired minority employees find it hard to perform to the expected(or peer) level

- Because lot more minority candidates were hired than if it were without DEI, performance issues start to become bigger and more noticeable problem. More importantly performance issues cluster around minority candidates

Third order effect:

- Long-term workplace perception of all minority candidates is harmed, regardless of skill.

- We are back to square one, where in order to compensate for 2nd order effects all minorities are subjected to unfair discrimination based on race, regardless of skill

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#718

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

uup wrote: post #612
nonethewiser wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men

Yes or, for another example, an Israeli would add diversity to a group of Americans (of various colours).

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#719

Post by runako »

strix_varius wrote: post #696
runako wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few common problems in your analysis: - 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 t…

> 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. Let's please keep this conversation mathematically honest. I don't know if you're intentionally trying to misrepresent statistics, or if you don't understand them, but: - for three non-mu…

> given participation in a set (1, 1, 2)

When the set is of 12, that's 4 of 12, which is exactly one third, assuming independent participation (which obviously is what makes the number optimistic/ a ceiling).

> Given a sample size of one pipeline

Fair! If the OP only ever hires one person, you are correct. At Microsoft's scale, they are more like "the house" at a casino, and so their ratios should more closely approximate the population.

I am making the larger point that yes, in one instance, this hiring manager could have experienced a challenge building a diverse pipeline, but that this experience is not generalizable to Microsoft or the industry as a whole. And the related takeaway that if your pipeline is routinely not presenting you with the significant plurality represented by "diverse" candidates, then you have a solvable process problem.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#720

Post by soueuls »

I left the western world several years ago, partly because of this. I could not live in an idiocracy where some people hire based on skin colors or genitals.

Thankfully, I have faith in capitalism.

I never thought I would say such an obvious thing, but we are entering an era where « hiring the most competent » is going to give an unfair advantage to smaller companies.

I am already seeing this with cinema. Sure the US is still producing a lot of interesting stuff, you still have very talented filmmakers. But you are literally losing market share to Korea (which should have never happened) just because you made your mission to transform every possible well known character into black characters for the sake of it.

I haven’t seen any interesting Netflix original show about Zulu, or how people competed for power in Egypt.

But I sure have seen plenty of black washing (even on non white historical figures)

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