Google Fires Employee Behind Controversial Diversity Memo

> The right way to fix the imbalance is to increase the supply of white onions. In the real world, farmers would begin switching to white onions and the supply would increase.

I think you've got it backwards. In the real world, supply is increased to meet demand. Farmers aren't going to grow more white onions just to see what happens. They've got to believe it's going to be a more profitable crop because it is in demand.

To extend your food analogy, it's like when Paul Prudhomme introduced blackened redfish at fine dining establishment Commander's Palace in the 1980's. Redfish went from being a "trash" fish to a species overfished to the point of near extinction. Importantly, nothing changed about the redfish itself. What changed was a new emphasis on using it in a dish.

Similarly, lobster went from being a peasant or prisoner food to a delicacy when railways and canning helped extend the demand beyond the northeast US.

What if a big part of solving the pipeline problem is simply for companies to demand more diverse candidates because leadership finally start to recognize the research that suggests that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many metrics? I think this has to be the case because no one is getting into an employment pipeline that ends with what is perceived to be a hostile working environment.

People are not onions. People learn. Even if companies will lower the bar on entry for women they will be just forced to educate their employees more on the job. For people just out of school it might seem strange but jobs are where you get most of you useful education.

Is it additional burden on the companies? Sure. But we are fine with taxing companies and placing on them the burden of workers protections and environmental protection. This is just another protection. Protection against reinforcing inequality. I'm not saying it's good but additional education for less educated and more equality in society doesn't seem bad if the only cost is money from the richest corporations especially the ones that get most of their money from advertising which nowaydays is less about informing customer about your product existance and all about everything else.

One thing that bothers me as someone who works at Google (but is speaking purely his own opinion) is that this manifesto implies some pretty wrong things about our hiring process. In particular, it conflates diversity sourcing programs with a lower hiring bar.

As an engineer who's done a fair bit of volunteer recruiting work as well as conducted interviews, my experience has been that race- and gender-specific programs are used exclusively as outreach, sourcing, and mentorship tools. James claims there are "hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for “diversity” candidates by decreasing the false negative rate," which strikes me as untrue. Regardless of how they are sourced, once candidates are in the interview pipeline their are all treated exactly as rigorously as one another.

In other words, recruiters are responsible for finding, reaching out to, and advocating for candidates. Once they source the candidate they "throw them over the fence" to the cold, hard interview process, which involves experienced interviewers and a hiring committee of senior-tenure engineers. The aim is to ensure you can trust that those who make it out how the hiring committee to be top-notch.

After years and years of working at the company I haven't heard even a whisper of complaint among anyone about the quality of people we're hiring. After working with people of all stripes I can say I haven't met a single person where I thought to myself "how did this loser get through the filter."

I honestly can't understand most of the discussion. For me, the crucial point is only one:

What is the objective?

What are you aiming for? Google, governments, NGOs, eccetera have their own objectives.

What's Google purpose? Make money, lots of it, as simple as that.

Well, what do you have to do then? Really simple: optimise for profit! In regard to hiring, A/B test the mix of people that work best. Is a group of only minorities the best one? Hooray, hire only minorities and, when you can legally fire the "white males" just trash them as soon as possible. Have you found that there's a secret mixture of "white males", "black males", "white females", "esquimeses" that perform superbly? Well, keep on hiring them!

Are you the US government and need to optimise for general wealth? Perfect, then you should hire that woman, who needs to support her 4 children, and forget about that 19 year old Stanford PhD, he will make tons of money somewhere else.

Are you Google and need the general consensus of a particular group of people? Well, then just behave accordingly.

I laugh when I see "biological differences", not because it is untrue, but because it misses the real point.

What is the objective?