Doesn't a policy of preferentially hiring certain groups necessarily imply that employees who are part of those groups are less capable? Like, helping folks pass the bar implies that they aren't above it - otherwise, why would they need help?
No. It’s actually a policy of no longer favouring certain groups (e.g., white men). There is systemic discrimination in favour of white men in software engineering, and only policies and procedures that change hiring away from those things which encourage such discrimination will fix the balance.
You don’t have to “lower the bar” at all, because it turns out that the average “bar” is the wrong standard for anything but the most independent of programming (which is not modern software engineering, thanks). My own hiring standard looks for people who love learning, don’t mind shifting contexts and languages, and can work well in a group. Some of the “smart guys” who have interviewed with us have been poor choices because they are bad culture fits—cowboys and jerks.
I'm all for reducing systemic discrimination but is the way to do it discrimination in the other direction (which you construe diversity hiring as being)? If that answer to that question is no, then the only way to deal with the system discrimination is to work hard to undo biases in people who do hiring. That's a hard/unsolvable problem, due to the difficulty/impossibility of actually changing people's minds.
Could you be more specific with what you mean by "bar"? Because if it's purely meritocratic/skills-based then your second point is very off-putting to me, it seems you're implying that minorities love learning, shifting contexts and languages, and work well in groups, but some of the actual skilled people you interviewed were all white, and cowboys/jerks. That implication is in and of itself pretty inflammatory, minorities are just as capable of being "smart guy" cowboys/jerks.
If there is systemic discrimination in favour of group A, then the only way to fix that discrimination is to eliminate it. To the members of group A (in this case, mainly white men), that feels like discrimination. It isn’t discrimination, but that’s what the loss of power and representation feels like. Even if you step it down through affirmative action programs, group A feels like it’s being discriminated against…
…which is only true if removing of unearned privileges is discrimination. (It isn’t.)
By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap. There’s a bunch of nonsense talked through on a whiteboard that has nothing to do with day-to-day programming or anything you’ll find on a job…and white men tend to do exceedingly well at that sort of crap. There’s an overrepresentation of specific skills required to pass the “technical” interview that are equally underrepresented in the technical execution of day-to-day work.
People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself. What I’m saying is that in my own hiring practice, I do have a technical exercise. But it’s not one that requires that a developer “complete” it successfully, because the folks who measure the success are not looking for amazing technical solutions… they are members of the team who you’d be working with. They are assessing whether you listen to technical instruction; if you know more, how you express yourself to someone junior to you; if you know as much, how well you work with them. It’s a soft-skills developer test, because if you can demonstrate the ability to work through this problem with the other people in there with you—even if you don’t complete the test, you will probably fit on the team.
And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed. (It’s valuable in part because I’ve had to implement the exact exercise for a job once because a language runtime did not have the data structure I needed.)
If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
> By “bar”, I mean that most hiring practices are crap.
Agreed.
> People pretend that it’s skills-based, but it’s skills-based with a bias toward people like yourself.
Presumably, you mean the bias is toward white males. But then you go on to say your preferred method is a soft-skills developer test that the team who'd be working with the hire evaluates.
Great--that's how hiring should be done anyway.
> And the reality is that in ~40 interviews over the last two years, the real jerks have been white men (maybe two interviews total), including one who questioned the value of the technical exercise that I developed.
Okay, if that's how it worked out for you, great. The whole point of any hiring process is to determine which people will be the best fit for your needs. If your method does this, then it's a good method.
> If you’re only measuring on what you think is a meritocratic skills-based solution, you are supporting the systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because they are always judged as less capable than white men.
This is where your argument breaks down. You started out talking about unearned privileges, but your whole argument is about how you test for desired skills, and then somehow in the end, you make it about race again (but this time as it relates to meritocratic hiring, not unearned privilege).
So...where does race fit in to your hiring process? To me, that part of it just sounds like pandering, since your actual process sounds like it's all skill-based anyway.
Basically just said the same things -- see my response.
I think what they were trying to get across was that BECAUSE of the broken testing, tests that were supposed to be meritocratic are just checking for certain groupthink.
My response there was if that's the case, the problem is just making better (actually strictly meritocratic) tests.
I agree with your point that systemic discrimination is a problem, but I'm not sure that affirmative action programs are as simple as "stepping it down". I get that as things normalize group A will feel like they're being discriminated against, but I think that's precisely the reason affirmative action programs are controversial -- they're hard to distinguish from just discrimination in the other direction. Maybe that's the only option available, that discussion is long and nuanced.
I also agree that most hiring practices are crap, and that interviews don't properly reflect day-to-day work. I also agree with a point (I think) you made that a bunch of the "meritocratic" tests that are developed today are a lot of the time just checking if one was groomed in the same way (learned about algorithms the same way, learned the same practices, etc) and not necessarily pure can-you-get-shit-done tests.
Your point gets a little hazy towards the bottom, for me, I can't tell if you're against supposedly meritocratic tests altogether and suggesting that people test for team-fit more. Your last sentence seems to have that same off-putting insinuation, just crystalized, but I think I understand your point, maybe I can rephrase it:
"If you're measuring a candidate with what you think is a meritocratic skills based tests, it's easy to be blinded by inherent bias and support systematic discrimination against women and minorities, because many seemingly meritocratic skills based tests have more to do with confirming shared experiences/biases than checking actual skill."
If I did indeed read your point well, my response would be to conduct better interviews, and create an actually meritocratic interview process, the onus is on the company.
Affirmative action programs are controversial because people who have privilege generally don’t like other people getting that privilege (because then they are no longer special).
As an analogous situation, men often claim that women talk too much. There’s fairly strong evidence that the claim is merely sexist nonsense[1].
So forgive me if I’m unwilling to give a crap about whether people who look like me (white men) feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick because there are people like me working to end the special privileges that they have gotten literally for decades. Especially since so many of them really aren’t all that. The London School of Economics makes it clear that gender quotas actually improve meritocracy by squeezing out mediocre men[2].
Your rephrasing is mostly correct, but I would go so far as to say that if you don’t know how to see your own biases, you cannot design a meritocratic interview process that doesn’t inherently have bias against women and/or minorities. As this entire discussion on the firing of the author of the screed shows…there’s a lot of people who can’t see that they have biases.
(And yes, I have biases. I have to work very hard to prevent those biases from causing me to discriminate. This is largely why I involve my team in hiring and constantly discuss the problems with bias blindness with them, too.)
The article in your second reference uses income as proxy for competence. Are you sure you want to support a study that's based on that assumption? That measurement would probably rank Trump to be highly competent among politicians.
> Asians people are over-represented in Silicon Valley
Some Asians are foreigners, hired by SV firms at lower-than-market salaries. They may be hired because they're less expensive (because they need sponsorship so badly). These types of people make this a much more complicated analogy.
> yet I don't hear anyone demanding we hire less Asian people
Affirmative action policies sometimes do impact Asian applicants, making it less likely for them to be hired.
Well he lists several things. Why do you think that a special hiring queue for diversity hires and special classes for diversity hires is setting an equal bar?
Yes, software companies hire more white men than they should, given how many people are white men. The key question is whether companies are hiring more white men than they should, given the candidates available for hire. I don't think it's appropriate to use evidence about the first to make decisions about the second - a company's moral responsibility for playing fair largely stops at the boundaries of their org chart.
I have zero opposition for efforts to educate and train women and minorities. I want the actual problem to be fixed, not just used as an excuse to advance one group's interests at the expense of another in zero-sum games.
Yes, except for the case where they are already past the bar but not being considered because of biases of people doing the hiring. I think that's the case that the prevailing amount of diversity-related efforts try to solve.
You're right though, and it's actually really insulting to insinuate that certain groups need help passing the bar. You can easily identify people who think like this if you ask a question (politely) like "would you hire a candidate that was more 'diverse' but less technically skilled than another candidate?". People who would choose the more "diverse" candidate but without a principled reason are probably just virtue signalling.
Note that 'diverse' can mean anything -- like comparing a developer who used to work in construction before being turned on to programming to a developer who came out of an ivy school (assuming they have comparable skill levels).
People also wrote fiction about traveling to the moon for a very long time before it actually happened. And Star Trek is credited with inspiring a lot of modern developments that are now ubiquitous, like cell phones and automatic doors.
(The automatic doors on Star Trek were being pulled open using ropes by hidden prop guys. The actors had to walk confidently forward as if they expected them to open when this was not guaranteed. They sometimes smacked right into them)
The problem with meritocracy isn't something that technology or science can solve, though. It's that there's no reasonable, objective definition of "merit".
Is it how smart you are? That sounds a lot like eugenics, and we know where that slippery slope leads. Besides, most humans have a loved one who isn't very smart, so we're not going to be happy in a world that defines merit as intelligence.
Is it how hard-working you are? Many of the same issues apply. Why does someone have less merit if they're born with mutations that make them able to produce 80% of the value of someone else?
Is it how humanitarian you are? Again, that's a totally subjective standard.
Even if you could decide what dimensions to measure merit on, these are all impossible things to quantify.
My assumption is that meritocracy would apply at work, not to society as a whole. If you assume we are talking about a country, sure, it is all kinds of fucked up and broken and will never fly.
But, currently, women, people of color, etc, seem to be "last hired, first fired" plus generally paid less for reasons that appear to be something other than their objective ability to do the job. I would like to see people hired because they can do the job and paid what they are worth and not some discounted value based on skin color or gender. To me, that would be a meritocracy.
What is merit at work, though? How do you measure it? There aren't many employees (outside salespeople) who have revenue explicitly tied to their performance.
What if you have an employee who works in your data center and averts 3 days of downtime? Maybe that person provided $100,000 of value and no one will ever know except for her.
