931–940 of 972 posts
At just 5.6% they are not doing enough! Capitalism has made "unwanted" people the outliers and capitalism can fix it! One way to improve hiring could by legislating that for-profit companies should do away with drug tests and background verification. Systemic & instituitional racism means a lot of people of the wrong race/color are simply ineligible to be hired just because they have drug charges or they have a recor…
I hate articles like these and their appeals to "meritocracy". Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men. Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best" candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much yo…
This is clear racial prejudice.
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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.
Please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I share your concern... Started as a manager in a successful scale-up and as usual our engineering staff is white & male (we are hiring from European Timezone). In order to secure the funding round, the higher management has introduced a diversity targets, which is driven aggressively by HR. Funny enough lots of the European laws forbid asking if the candidate is a member of an "unrepresented" group, so I guess we'll…
hold up you need DIE to convince investors? how does this make sense; wouldn't they be more concerned about your company's cold, hard numbers?
Many institutional investors - the largest ones - have announced their funding is dependent on ESG scores. I'm fascinated that people on this site can be unaware of this.
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> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we…
> 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…
I have seen exactly zero people suggest that. That's how I know it's made up.
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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…
wow .... when was a rich brahmin hired instead of an inner city American kid .... are you really sure ... that the Indians working in the US tech industry have gotten those positions thru affirmative action? I keep seeing this being repeated everywhere. let me clarify Indians are NOT getting into US companies because of a colour quota. I will tell you how they are getting in. There are two ways 1. Thru outsourcing/bo…
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Quick thoughts: 1) You are correct, but this does not speak to the need for Microsoft to have sub-optimal processes in any aspect of its business. Separately, all of the big tech companies including Microsoft pay significantly more than typical employers in places where there are no big tech offices (this is most of the country). 2) This is just incorrect. Those firms cannot sweep the labor market because their US cu…
1. process is not suboptimal, market conditions are different. Why would any well qualified minority go to msf for 120k in Atlanta if they can get 240 in Mountain view + relocation bonus? Plus most of qualified minority candidates are hired from top tier engineering programs are across the country. Local market is irrelevant at this point 2. You are wrong again, facetime is irrelevant, because of relocation. Very few…
Because their family is in the Southeast, and because that $120k leads to a better overall living standard than $240k in Mountain View. Especially if one is raising/planning on raising children, proximity to family is a really important variable.
A process that systematically skips people who won't relocate to the West Coast is suboptimal in a world where we know remote work works.
> facetime is irrelevant, because of relocation. Very few will stay at MSFT in Atlanta for 100k if they can double pay + relo to CA/Seattle. Google does have office in atlanta, btw.
Reed Hastings and Tim Cook, among others, disagree with you. Google does have an Atlanta office, but most of FAANG does not have significant engineering presence there (Microsoft does). Notable that Google expects engineers in Atlanta to come to their office, even though their teams will likely be in other cities. This is the canonical definition of face-time.
And again, $100k in Atlanta or Dallas is roughly equivalent to $200k in the Bay or Seattle. Add in externalities like family and climate (everybody does not like the Bay climate!) and it's not as straightforward as you make it.
> because in Minneapolis metro is about 3.5M people and Target can tap from talent pool of 3.5M, while places like Bay Area can tap from global talent pool (7B people)
If you think everyone wants to move to the Bay, I probably can't convince you otherwise. But please consider that some people a) don't like the climate b) are married to people whose jobs are elsewhere c) prefer a lifestyle that includes homeownership.
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That would be true if people didn't sound different.
You can alter the audio signal to mask gender: https://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-ma... Similar tech could be used to mask accents. I suspect the real reason people are so hesitant to anonymize interviews is that the disparities will persist - or even grow larger - and it'll be more difficult to ascribe it to racism or sexism.
If technology could be developed which masked pitch, accent, idioms, patterns and approach, I suspect it would change hiring rates.
I suspect the reason you think such technology wouldn’t improve the situation is because you’re a bigot.
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Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?
While I do think GP is correct at many places, my team literally hired a black woman from Georgia and turned down a white dude from Boston, lol. I am not a fan of the overbearing top down policies like Microsoft is talking about, but I have become friendly with aforementioned hire, and some of the stories of discrimination and just people being really rude to her in the professional world are mind blowing to me. I ca…
What is "literally hired"; does your organization figuratively hire most of the time, except for the surprising odd time when it is, wow, literal?
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I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed, perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I concept and move forward with complete blindness to race, culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals of operations of a company – i.e., just focus on…
What kind of statement is this? D&I is supposed to be comparatively balanced to the society is serves. Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success. D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations withi…
Yes.