
How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity - rmartelli
https://medium.com/@josephswitzler/how-my-company-is-lowering-the-bar-to-increase-diversity-bfb887d0ad53
======
mseebach
> _My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving
> diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire
> people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with
> degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally
> qualified regardless of their education._

This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity
activist" might say something like that, but for a company of any sort of
quality to just accept it and implement it, that's unrealistic.

More realistically, what they may have implemented is something like accepting
that people without CS degrees from top universities may still be perfectly
capable software developers, which is true (being one, I'd like to think so,
at least), but if that's the case, the article is grossly misrepresenting it.

~~~
rmartelli
Sorry that it's hard to believe. My CEO was previously an activist so the
people brought in to talk are definitely outside what you would expect in
corporate America.

Unfortunately it's hard to find sources for this except for internal videos.

A quote from one of the trainers that gets at the same idea:

"In sourcing diverse candidates, it is imperative to avoid criteria that are
inherently biased, like using school selectivity and previous company as a
proxy for performance or as a signal that someone is a strong candidate.

Instead of focusing on previous companies or schools, which limits the talent
pool, you should focus on relevant skills. For example, if Google is typically
used as a signal that someone is a good candidate, push yourselves and your
clients to articulate why that's the case. Is it the experience working at a
large company that's useful?"

~~~
mseebach
There's nothing in that quote that goes anywhere near "assum[ing] that all
people are equally qualified regardless of their education".

------
eastbayjake
This is a strawman that doesn't even attempt a charitable summary of opposing
arguments. There is one link to an actual opponent's arguments and it's some
random consultant/speaker's blog, not anyone actually being paid to advise on
tech hiring diversity.

Here's an attempt at a charitable characterization: Lots of heuristics for
quickly evaluating programming skill may inadvertently toss out qualified
applicants or give an undeserved boost to unqualified applicants who tick off
superficial traits. Instead of leaning so heavily on heuristics that might
disproportionately favor white men, let's try to create hiring systems that
fairly evaluate people on their merits and give people full opportunity to
demonstrate their talents. We should also try to make people aware that humans
can make unconsciously-biased decisions based on some deeply-hardwired
evolutionary heuristics around race and gender, so they have the awareness and
mental tools to recognize when unconscious bias is influencing their
decisions.

------
ch4s3
I'm sorry, but this post seems totally fabricated or at least intentionally
misrepresenting what is happening. I spend a lot of time reading about
diversity initiatives in tech and I'm trying to set up an initiative where I
work. However, I've never heard anyone suggest lowering the bar in the ways
listed in this article. The whole thing is constructed as reductio ad
absurdum.

For example:

>Stop considering some colleges as better than other colleges because that’s
racist

No one says this, because it does not follow. One might say that it is
important to recruit outside of the Ivies/Stanford, because you will miss
qualified candidates who are otherwise pushed out of the industry despite
their talent.

Or:

>Stop looking for people with relevant industry experience because it is
sexist

No one says that, ever. I think the original kernel of advice may have been,
don't only post listings for people with 15 years of experience. Your crud app
doesn't require that, so give someone a little greener a chance.

I could go on, but this post is basically reactionary garbage.

*edit for formatting

~~~
rmartelli
Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is
80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. To
eliminate structural sexism, we must remove hiring criteria that favors men.
Let's tell our sourcers that looking for relevant industry experience is not
important.

For school I've been told that we should look if they have a degree or not,
and not consider which institution. This explicitly considers all colleges the
same.

Every point in the post is an actual suggestion made on how to improve
diversity. Obviously not all the suggestions have been implemented, but I'm
afraid the committee for improving hiring might do just that.

~~~
ubernostrum
It's awfully easy to make technically-true but misrepresentative statements
about this stuff, though.

For example, someone might argue that actively seeking out recent graduates of
coding bootcamps when hiring for junior positions will help find a more
diverse set of candidates. And there's truth here: bootcamps tend to have
better gender and somewhat-better racial balance than university CS
departments or existing tech shops, and bootcamp graduates on average seem to
be pretty good (there are selection and maturity and self-motivation effects
there which raise quality compared to the typical randomly-chosen bunch os
CVs).

But it's technically correct, so long as you don't mind completely misleading
connotations, to describe that approach as "to eliminate racism and sexism,
hire people who don't have CS degrees and don't have industry experience" and
imply it's "lowering the bar".

And anecdotally, when people make claims like the ones in the OP article, my
experience is that it's almost always the case that someone is carefully
choosing how they describe things in order to be technically truthful while
maliciously misrepresenting the situation in a way that suits their personal
axe-grinding.

------
iheatu
I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just
ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be
purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion,
it's simply bad business. What is needed are un-biased assessments and non of
these assessments are unbiased. They seem to try to correct the bias meter the
most quick fix manner possible. People without skills with only spoil the
diversity pool because they will poorly represent. I say this as an African
person as well. I would not want this for myself. It's insulting.

------
iheatu
I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just
ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be
purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion,
it's simply bad business at some point.

------
yarper
I've actually been given the same advice on HN regarding "not looking for a
portfolio" since it excludes women.

I think it's pretty disparaging to say women don't have the time for writing
some code outside of work because of childcare commitments (for everyone
involved - including the father of the child who's immediately and implicitly
branded as off-scene or not pulling his weight).

"Cultural fit" in my experience has been equated to "is this person someone I
can see five days a week, 8 hours a day without driving me potty". That seems
fairly legitimate to me - and completely inclusive of everyone.

~~~
danpalmer
I've been given the "not looking for a portfolio" one before, but it was
explained in more detail to me as - to put work up online opens yourself up to
criticism, and given the sexism in our industry, this criticism can more
easily become abuse when targeted at women, and therefore there are a not-
insignificant group of women who do not publish code on GitHub because of
abuse - this issue affects men less, therefore, a 'portfolio' is a biased
metric.

I think it's still a useful metric, but would now not take a lack of portfolio
as an outright negative, without other factors considered.

~~~
yarper
I agree that makes more sense than the childcare argument. I'd still wonder
though - what are this person's interests in tech? What do they do in pursuing
those interests?

I think these are legitimate questions, since one of the best metrics for
success in software is the level of interest you hold in it.

~~~
acctjustforyou
> _I think these are legitimate questions_

They are, and the fact that you even have to defend asking them is a non-
trivial indicator of how bat-shit crazy the thinking has gotten on this topic.

------
dclowd9901
OP is unbelievable.

> I completely agree. I’ve interviewed people from MIT who weren’t familiar
> with a hash table and the best software developer I’ve worked with never
> went to college. The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, didn’t go to a top CS
> school. However, it’s still the case that college and experience is an
> imperfect signal of ability.

In other words: Here's all of these great reasons I've found not to trust
someone's schooling as a good indicator of their ability, but I'm going to use
it anyway.

OP is what's wrong with tech hiring.

~~~
acctjustforyou
"There exists a young man with no legs who has a stellar collegiate wrestling
record.

There also exists an athlete in the most prestigious wrestling program in the
country who always loses because he never makes weight, and when he does make
weight, he gets defeated in seconds.

Therefore I can confidently conclude that 'number of limbs' has no correlation
whatsoever to wrestling ability."

Hmmm...

~~~
dclowd9901
Sounds like you get it.

------
thelock85
Fascinating. It mostly seems you're company is taking a poor approach to
diversity, and doing even worse at communicating and gaining buy-in from
existing employees. With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies
are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men
so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. So perhaps the real issue is
that the hiring process allows for "many engineers who are barely competent at
their job." And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process
and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. But by your
own admission, the bar is already low enough to admit false positives so I
think you're conflating issues here. On a side note: holding your argument to
be true, could the existence of barely competent engineers lead your article
to a different title: "How my company is lowering the bar to accommodate
privilege." I don't have that data, but could be an interesting followup!

~~~
acctjustforyou
> _With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at
> eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the
> top of your funnel is more diverse._

The top of a company's funnel could also be made more diverse by starting with
"OK, there are 7+ billion people on the planet..." \- that doesn't make it a
good idea.

> _And perhaps there aren 't enough resources to improve said process and
> handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants._

That's how you handle a great volume of applicants - you look for indicators
of skill. None of them are necessary or sufficient; they just increase the
likelihood that this will be a good hire a little bit. Giving every single
person who is able to use the "resume" template in Microsoft Word an in-person
interview would catch those false negatives you're missing, but it would be
ridiculously inefficient.

Or am I to assume that when you want to hire a plumber you canvass your
neighborhood door-to-door so you dont miss out on someone who might be
qualified but just drummed out of the plumbing industry for institutional
reasons?

Although I do like how you dismissed points 2-8 with a simple handwaving of
"elite males are more likely to score higher on these points, so they're no
good."

Not to mention the fact that that argument does virtually nothing to
contracdict point #8. If youre someone who truly believes they're a Great
Programmer Who's Not Being Given a Chance Due To White Male Supremacy, a
github profile is the greatest arrow in your quiver that you could possibly
dream of.

~~~
thelock85
I'm not following most of your points here (standalone maybe but not with
respect to my comments). No one is saying you don't need to ID signals in the
noise or define quality indicators of skill.

But if your company is taking on the diversity challenge then yes, start with
the fact that there is 7+ billion people, (or at least the ones with Github
profiles, to your point). And yes, canvas all available channels so you don't
miss out on people "drummed out... for institutional reasons (there's an
entire industry that does this). Then start over in defining your signals and
indicators --in this case some sweet spot between the people they hope(!)
exists and the false positives they wish they had missed.

If you're not willing to take these measures, simply sit back, do work and try
to make money (or in this guy's case leave the company since he's not in
charge). Otherwise, let's give retirement to diversity in this year's tech
hall of fame.

------
eva1984
I think I probably guessed which company this is.

But this doesn't smell right. Feels like a real-world version of this video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM)

~~~
angersock
Video is a bit of a caricature, but unfortunately with only a little poking
around one can find examples of similar behavior and views held online. :(

------
gtirloni
Some companies will rate applicants in a series of categories. Education and
experience are the usual. Lately, "fit" has become extremely important to HR
departments. It usually means people with the same culture, race, age, music
and sports tastes, etc.

If your company thinks it has a diversity problem, it's probably related to
"fit". My suggestion is to continue to filter people out based on education
and experience equally and give a boost in the "fit" category to categories of
people that are minorities in your company. I think that's perfectly fair to
offset internal biases.

EDIT: I get it some people are arguing that, by filtering on
education/experience, there won't be any minorities left to be "boosted" in
the "fit" category. If it is THAT bad, the company can try to expand who it's
reaching out to but I understand that's a bigger problem (e.g. company in SV
cannot afford relocation costs and thus has to look for local candidates only
will not help with the diversity issue).

------
pessimizer
Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them based
on where they're from, where they've worked, what school they went to, how
long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know is
equivalent to "lowering the bar."

[points 2,3,4,5,6,7,9]

In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them
is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade
boost.

[points 1,8]

edit: and about "open source" contributions; ethnic minorities and women are
far more likely to have worked in large corporations rather than in open
source or startups, because those companies are held to a higher standard in
their behavior towards minorities than the kind of self-assembling social
clubs that this article (and site) are focused on.

edit 2: I know (very closely) a woman who has been in IT for 40 years. She was
an English major, and has absolutely no involvement with open source. She
doesn't know people in startups. Why would someone presume that she doesn't
know the job?

~~~
acctjustforyou
> _Summary: not discriminating against applicants before speaking to them
> based on where they 're from, where they've worked, what school they went
> to, how long they've been in the profession, and who they know that you know
> is equivalent to "lowering the bar."_

So, suppose you had to fill an open position for a developer and you had two
candidates: an MIT grad with years of experience at Apple and Google, and a
homeless guy who never went to college and never worked in IT before.

You're honestly going to try to tell us that you have _no idea_ who might be
the better candidate?

And if hypothetically you could only interview one, you'd what? Be totally
stymied? Flip a coin maybe?

There's no possible way you can actually believe what you're saying.

>In addition, pretend like not ruling people out before you've spoken to them
is equivalent to not reviewing their work, or giving them a "diversity" grade
boost. [points 1,8]

I don't recall him mentioning ruling people out before speaking to them,
although once you get to a certain scale that has to happen at some point
since if an individual manager gets 1,000 applicants for one position on his
team he can't speak to them all. Or is math racist too?

The scale requirement becomes much smaller when talking about reviewing
someone's work, because that is much more involved than a resume scan or even
most phone screens.

Giving them a diversity grade boost is the definition of racism/sexism/*ism.
Funny how youve managed to find yourself on the same side as someone who gives
a buxom under qualified blonde a second interview because "we don't have any
hot chicks in this office."

~~~
pessimizer
Are you honestly going to try to tell me that you get a lot of homeless
applicants? If I get a homeless applicant, they're getting an interview.

~~~
acctjustforyou
If I get an applicant who cannot or will not understand what a thought
experiment is, they're not getting an interview - I don't care what college
they went to.

And yes, I registered this account because your comment was so breathtakingly
ill-informed.

------
nailer
The proper way to fix unconscious bias is blind hiring, at least until the
final stage. I know a bunch of people with CS degrees in the Unix world and
they can't program, I know a bunch of people without them who can.

The only test of skill is a test of skill. Blindly ask them both to make a
thing, leave them alone for forty minutes to make it, and see who makes it
better.

------
basseq
This article is what happens when you push diversity by fiat and don't extend
the initiative beyond recruiting. Even when programs like this are well-
intentioned, you can see the _extremely destructive_ fallout: the author and
those like him are going to look at all "diverse" employees and think, "You
got a free pass. You're not as good as everyone else."

Let's flip all these changes around to show how it's not about "lowering the
bar", it's about realizing that a one-size-fits-all "bar" isn't an effective
hiring method in the long run.

1\. Update your interview scoring methodology to account for non-traditional
backgrounds. (Extra points for ethnicity, e.g., are a detrimental hack that
shows how your system is broken.)

2\. Don't discount candidates because of their degrees. (While a CS degree may
be an indicator of qualification, its absence isn't a _disqualifier_.)

3\. Don't discount candidates because of their educational institutions.
(While a top college may be an indicator of quality, I'd rather hire the best
candidate from a second- or third-tier school than a middling candidate from
an Ivy.)

4\. Expand your outbound candidate search to non-traditional channels. (See
#3.)

5\. Don't discount non-traditional industry experience. (A developer outside
of the software industry may be just as good.)

6\. Don't discount candidates because of their previous employers. (An ex-
Googler may rightfully be an impressive candidate, but they also might be a
low-performer.)

7\. Don't conflate "years of experience" with "experience". (Very often, 15
years of experience is 1 year of experience repeated 15 times. No one has 15
years of experience in Node.js.)

8\. Don't discount a _lack_ of "extracurriculars" like OSS, volunteerism, or
other factors.

9\. Don't rely on referrals. (You can't staff a company entirely with
"friends-of-friends".)

All of these statements are focused on broadening your perspective and getting
away from statistics. Yes, a Stanford CS major with 15 years of experience at
Google and an awesome GitHub profile is _probably_ a good candidate. But a
developer from Temple with 8 years of experience in the retail industry may be
just as good.

Yes: it will take more effort to find those candidates, and your signal-to-
noise ratio may go down, but your reward comes in the form of awesome people
you never would have found before. Diversity will be a natural by-product, and
a way to measure your progress.

------
adomanico
Hiring should be the sum of a "Skill" score and a "Culture Fit" score.

"Diversity" shouldn't be apart of either of these scores. It shouldn't matter
what race, religion or color you are.

~~~
Grue3
"Culture Fit" is exactly where the bias creeps in, and what breeds
monoculture. Skill should be the only indicator.

------
alistproducer2
The author refers to African-Americans as "blacks" numerous times. In my
experience, the only people who use that terminology are racists. I can
guarantee you the author is a huge fan of "The Bell Curve." This anecdote is
clearly troll bait.

~~~
angersock
Your experience appears to be limited.

~~~
alistproducer2
Not at all. I've never heard "blacks" used by a non-black person in a context
that wasn't racially charged.

~~~
angersock
By the same logic, African-American never comes up without race being a
significant part of the context.

I'm mostly surprised because "African-American" is a mouthful compared to just
"blacks", so I'm suspicious that in common language it is somehow limited only
to racists.

"Blacks" is also more accurate if you just want to refer to people by skin
color (for whatever damn-fool reason).

------
meira
Just stop been an asshole, asshole.

~~~
vemv
Just learn to use argumentation.

------
darod
Not sure what this author is complaining about? The goal was to achieve
diversity and they seemed to have done it by hiring an ex-googler who is
female. The author seems to be giving a rant because he had to do more work
than calling up his buddy. BTW Temple University is not an HBCU

~~~
acctjustforyou
> _BTW Temple University is not an HBCU_

Which means that instead of one HBCU being ranked on the US News list of best
colleges for Computer Science [1] (albeit at the very bottom), there are
zero.[2]

[1] - [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
gradu...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-
schools/top-computer-science-schools/computer-science-rankings/)

[2] - [http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/...](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
colleges/rankings/hbcu)

