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 progra…
Just to clear things up. A false negative is someone qualified who gets rejected. A false positive is someone unqualified who gets hired. He claimed that diversity candidates have a lower false negative, not a higher false positive. The "cold, hard interview process" you refer to is both technically challenging but also has a degree of arbitrariness to it. Google gets so many applicants that it makes sense to design a process that has as few false positives as possible without regard to the false negatives.
I knew someone that applied to Google because our former manager had gone to Google and wanted to hire him again. He did really well in the interviews (he was recommended by all of them) but was rejected because the hiring committee felt his GPA, for an art degree unrelated to the work he'd be doing at Google, was too low. Our former manager brought him on as a contractor instead and he eventually transitioned to full-time and he has been very successful there for almost a decade since. Most people never find out the reason they weren't hired. The only reason he ever did is because he knew the hiring manager personally and, even then, he didn't learn the reasoning until after he'd transitioned to FTE. Aside from the fact that his manager was able to circumvent the hiring process to, over the course of a year, bring someone he wanted in, this is a rare example of a known false negative.
As an outsider with no access to Google's hiring records, I can't say for sure how many false negatives there are, but I have to assume there are a lot more people like him that don't get hired. I've met good engineers during my career that were rejected by Google. And I've worked with enough former-Google engineers that weren't that impressive. The only thing I can say is that I've never met an engineer who worked or works for Google that I felt was terrible, which is more than I can say for most companies.
It sounds like the complaint being made is that Google used a situation almost no other company has, a constant surplus of people passing their interview process and took the expedient route to increasing their minority hiring...they're just ensuring that minorities aren't cut from that last, somewhat arbitrary stage of the hiring process. They know that committee is mostly deciding between candidates who would all be good hires because the process up to that point will have already eliminated the unqualified candidates. It's both a reasonable strategy to quickly increase the number of minority hires without sacrificing on quality and it's a lower bar.