
Microsoft staff are openly questioning the value of diversity - augustocallejas
https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questioning-the-value-of-diversity/
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zzo38computer
I think that you should be hiring whoever is qualified, not based on
gender/ethnicity/etc.

If you have many people then you will have diversity, because they are
different people and therefore they have all different experience and ideas
from each other. They should neither to try to only to hire people of same
gender nor to try to hire everyone all difference gender/skins (doing so can
be relevant to a movie set perhaps, but not for a computer programming job).

If women are less interested or less capable for this job by average (although
I do not actually know whether or not this is true) then by your interviewing
to see who is qualify then you can hire someone, by statistics it is likely
that less women will be hired and that is not your fault and is not your
problem. But you should not try to hire less women, nor more; see if they are
competent at the job rather than their gender.

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DanBC
It's interesting that you assume that white men are i) capable of doing the
job ii) interested in doing the job and iii) are the best candidates for the
job, while women and POC are probably i) less capable ii) less interested and
iii) not the best candidates.

But you're oblivious to your bias.

~~~
zzo38computer
I do not assume that; I only mention it as hypothetically the case, and then
try to say that whether or not it is true on average (I think it probably
isn't), it doesn't matter anyways due to the reasons I specified, because you
should not hire someone based on their gender or skin (except perhaps if you
are hiring a actor; but, if you are hiring a computer programming then it
doesn't matter your gender/skin). (Sorry if I was being unclear.)

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eindiran
> Many women simply aren’t cut out for the corporate rat race, so to speak,
> and that’s not because of ‘the patriarchy,’ it’s because men and women
> aren’t identical.

Everytime there is a discussion of this, it gets bogged down because of claims
like these. In general, I think that the equality of opportunity people would
be more effective at reaching the ears of the equality of outcome people if
they skipped over the whole "why are there fewer of some group working in this
field" issue entirely, and focused on the harms of not having equality of
outcome. I see why they go to these arguments (to communicate that equality of
outcome as a value might be misguided if inequality of outcome wasn't driven
by bias), but people frequently jump ship and stop listening when they hit
something like this in the argument.

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Justsignedup
it is a weird problem.

on one hand we want more diversity.

on the other i saw companies offer ludicrous offers to people heavily
underqualified for the offers because they are a woman. Like a 2 year of
experience lady with bad instincts (just lack of experience) but tons of
potential. And offering her a senior engineer, same as we'd offer a 10 year
veteran.

Point is, from the white male side, it seems insulting. I am not suggesting
women are less capable, but they are having money thrown at them in ways males
can't even approach.

But I suppose the price we pay for having so few women engineers.

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nojvek
I’ve seen this at BigCos. I just found it hard to figure out why someone got
promoted and someone didn’t. It wasn’t a fair game where everyone was measured
with same yard stick.

I guess this is what happens when we optimize for a metric.

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milsorgen
It's a worthy conversation. I've never understood the push for equality of
outcome over equality of opportunity. I applaud people for starting that
discussion.

~~~
Gibbon1
There are two problems and they are different.

One is opportunity due to preloaded factors. For instance in my case. My four
grandparents were middle class and college educated. As were my parents. No
shit that's an advantage I got that others didn't.

The other is discrimination due to biases. The same biases that underlie
affinity scams. As in this guys dresses talks and looks like Mark Zuckerberg,
lets give his company $100 million vs that brown skinned lady who doesn't.

While society should try to reduce these as much as possible they can't be
gotten rid of completely perhaps even mostly.

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eindiran
I think the issue is deeper than equality of outcome and opportunity being two
different problems: as we have seen equality of outcome implemented so far, it
explicitly violates the conditions that need to exist for equality of
opportunity. That is, the implementation of equality of outcome solutions has
been exclusively (to my knowledge) based on providing additional opportunities
to some groups and/or denying opportunities to other groups.

Perhaps there are implementations of equality of outcome solutions that allow
you to approximates both, but so far that doesn't seem possible.

~~~
Gibbon1
> it explicitly violates the conditions that need to exist for equality of
> opportunity.

That is a pipe dream.

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mips_avatar
I didn’t read that as questioning the value of diversity. But questioning
unfair management incentives that openly discriminates on gender and race.

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TimothyBJacobs
I don't see how you can get that read given the first paragraph.

> Because women used to be actively prohibited from full-time employment many
> decades ago, there is now the misguided belief that women SHOULD work, and
> if women AREN’T working, there’s something wrong…. Many women simply aren’t
> cut out for the corporate rat race, so to speak, and that’s not because of
> ‘the patriarchy,’ it’s because men and women aren’t identical, and women are
> much more inclined to gain fulfillment elsewhere.

~~~
mips_avatar
Because that paragraph aligns with my personal experience. My mother was a
successful software engineer when I was a kid. And because her company had
this attitude that required every employee needed to work 40 hours on normal
weeks and 60 hours when a bug patch was needed, she always said it was her
biggest regret that she kept working after me and my sister were born. I don’t
see how preferential treatment towards hiring women helps diversity, when in
my experience the biggest hindrance to diversity is the business expectations
on employees. And how different would it be today if someone was in my mothers
position at Microsoft? I know they pay lip service to all these but I don’t
think she would be respected if she asked for 15 hour work weeks for 8 years.
My mom would love to get back into software engineering now, but since she
wasn’t allowed to take on a lighter load, she’s lost skills and can’t find
good work.

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GoodDreams
"Women in tech are a hot commodity," I heard one recruiter say to another.

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anarchop
Sorry, where is the “pseudoscience” from Damore?

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RenRav
You either discriminate without diversity, or discriminate with diversity.

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sadris
Makes sense. HR firms have known for decades it's a net negative. Note that
this is generally within departments only, not within the entire organization.

> Williams and O’Reilly (1996) review dozens of studies showing that ethnic
> diversity has a negative impact on group performance. In the two decades
> since, more research has reinforced that result. Alesina and La Ferrara
> (2005) find that increasing ethnic diversity from 0 (only one ethnic group)
> to 1 (each individual is a different ethnicity) would reduce a country’s
> annual growth by 2 percent. Multiple studies (La Porta et al., 1999; Alesina
> et al., 2003; Habyarimana et al., 2007) have shown that ethnic diversity
> negatively affects public good provision. Stazyk et al. (2012) find that
> ethnic diversity reduces job satisfaction among government workers. Parrotta
> et al. (2014a) find that ethnic diversity is significantly and negatively
> correlated with firm productivity

[https://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-
diversit...](https://economicsdetective.com/2016/07/costs-ethnic-diversity-
garett-jones/)

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jacques_chester
The linked article is talking about gender, not ethnicity.

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PKop
No, it's talking about politically correct diversity, which includes race.

“Does Microsoft have any plans to end the current policy that financially
incentivizes discriminatory hiring practices? To be clear, I am referring to
the fact that senior leadership is awarded more money if they discriminate
against Asians and white men,” read the original post by the Microsoft program
manager on Yammer, a corporate messaging platform owned by Microsoft."

