I'm confused why this was focused on so much. I guess "people that use DEI for hiring". Or when I was speaking of heuristics generally that could be "hiring managers in general".
> So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
There are an infinite number of factors that go into a person and there will always be something missed with whatever way we slice it. "common-sensical" criteria in that world will end up as a wishy washy "we hire those with diverse opinions and backgrounds". But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
> I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity. It can be lobbed at literally any position one takes.
> It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
You're blowing by that I was responding to
"Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person"
If we're talking about company culture now, then we're talking about something different.
> Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
The comment I was responding to spoke generally so I spoke generally. I applied it to both tech and nontech with examples though.
> It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
OK. That is true. And? Your point being?
> But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Yes, that happens very often. What's the problem? Are you really having the goal of being able to get inside any company out there and tell them you know better who's a better fit for their specific team? If not, what's your angle / point / goal?
> Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
Sounds like you're looking what to be outraged at, I am saying this genuinely and apologies if it comes across as blunt but I am old enough to stop caring about sugar-coating stuff.
Point me at the exact problem in your quote above and tell me what you want changed?
> Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity.
Indeed, I am not at all curious about what do privileged people are looking to feel guilty about this week. (And yes you and I are privileged, there are no two ways about it.)
It is not your fault that a potential next John von Neumann happened to be born in Bangladesh and only used his wits to steal fruit and bread so as not to starve, for his entire life, and never managed to get educated enough to rise above such life circumstances. You can't be everywhere. Hell, you can't even be at 0.00001% of places. Let go and stop looking for injustices. If anything, our world is 99.9% injustice, if one bothers to look carefully enough just for a few months of their entire life spans.
> You're blowing by that I was responding to
OK, then I didn't understand your point there, which is the case for most of your comment anyway.
---
In general, I found your entire original comment super puzzling. It sounded like you are looking for problems where there might be none or they are impossible to fix (yet). OK, women are different and have different lives than you and me... and?
Yes people out there discriminate black people. I'd like that to stop as well. What are you doing to stop it, exactly? Surely you realize talking on a very niche forum like HN isn't going to achieve that, right?
Modern DEI got warped into an unrecognizable mess and nowadays it's mostly weaponized against white males by trying to play on their guilt (kill me if I know where does that guilt even comes from...) in order to gain convenient shortcuts to lucrative positions.
As such, I am neither impressed by modern DEI, nor do I support it. When its proponents chase away the leeches I'll be one of the first people to get on the line to donate and try to help. Until then, I'll just shake my head in disgust at what DEI has become.
I'm going to drop the inline quotes and respond more holistically.
I think you're pigeon-holing me a bit into a spot where you view me taking a moral stance with no external logic. Eg. I am a well meaning but ultimately naive savior-person that wants to create fairness and this doesn't help the company, the product, or the team. I feel like I'm becoming a projection for frustrations you have with those on a moral crusade.
I disagree that there is no logic to DEI. Specifically the idealized version of DEI, not whatever implementation company A has. I think a diverse team creates better products. I think diversity around gender/racial lines are stronger indicators of diverse experience than a wishy-washy "diversity of thought" angle that I see going around.
I also assert that, honestly, from a practical standpoint race/gender selection is easier to select for than most other forms of diversity. We use inexact tools as a heuristic for technical ability (leetcode, take home project, system design, CS fundamentals, etc), why would diversity be any different?
I assert that our interview tools and processes are inexact and consistently leave talented people off the table due to biases. The reality is if I have 10 candidates for a CRUD position I assert I could pick a name out of a hat and they'd be able to do the job most of the time. I think people pretend they can determine person A is 10% better of a developer than person B in an interview when they really can't. The reality is you could have probably picked B and it wouldn't have been a noticeable change once on the job. I think seeing these "successes" lead people to think they are better at interviews than they really are.
DEI to me is understanding the hiring process has bias + blindspots and taking the gamble that selecting in a differently biased way gets me better odds of getting that "Bangladeshi John von Neumann". And even if it's not a home run like that, that there is still an overall benefit to the added diversity to the team vs taking the person that did 10% better on our leetcode question.
Bangladeshi John von Neumann is probably going to be discriminated against by DEI policies because Asians are overrepresented is most tech companies. When I attended a career fair at Dropbox, Asian male applicants were marked with "ND" on their resumes. I later found out this stood for "negative diversity". Asian males are even worse than white males in the DEI policies used by most of the companies I've worked at.
The thing that most people don't like to talk about is, at many tech companies Black, Latin, and white people are underrepresented in tech roles. The only race that is overrepresented is Asians. And if the goal is equity, you can connect the dots.
I can't speak to specific implementations of DEI or Dropbox but if my engineering department was 95% Chinese American males, I would say it isn't a diverse team. The targets should be company dependent. The whole point is to select from candidate pools that your company isn't typically pulling from (due to bias whether in employee selection, type of interview, etc)
I don't really care what the idealized DEI policy is. I care about what companies actually put into practice. If companies submitted test resumes that were similar besides details identifying race and gender, and a disparity was noticed then I would be totally supportive of rectifying that bias. I'd similarly be totally supportive of anonymizing resumes, turning videos off in Zoom interviews and masking voices. But that's the total opposite of every DEI policy I've encountered. The problem is that a non-discriminatory recruiting system does produce an equitable outcome, but it's equitable with respect to the workforce not the general population. And if other companies in the field are engaging in hiring preferences, non-discriminatory recruitment will actually yield less because the diverse talent is siphoned off to those less scrupulous companies.
In the real world, I've consistently seen DEI policies that call for X% URM engineers and Y% women engineers. And these figures for X and Y were substantially higher than the percentage of URM and women in the software development workforce (at Dropbox the gender target was 33% women in spring of 2019). This led recruiters to be much more selective when hiring white and especially Asian men. It didn't eliminate bias, it incentivized bias for the desirable races and genders. We didn't expand our candidate pools, we contracted them. We stopped interviewing non-URM men from boot camps any only advanced URM and women from bootcamps. We did the same with non-engineering majors. Women and URM men who majored in a non-tech field but practiced programming on the side were interviewed, men in the same situation were not.
Pretty much every attempt to make a company more "equitable" that I've witnessed has followed the same arc. Leadership assures people this isn't discrimination, it's just broadening candidate pools. They send recruiters to Grace Hopper, HBUs, etc. But this doesn't yield any change, because there's no untapped pool of women and URM engineers. Then the company sets quotas (under euphemisms like "inclusion targets", "diversity goals", etc.) and turns a blind eye to discrimination.
The whole reason why we use euphemisms like "DEI" is because nobody wants to discuss these phenomenons in concrete terms. We use euphemisms like "diverse" because we'd cringe if we just explained our policies in plain English terms (and it'd land us in lawsuits). If DEI really was about anonymizing applications, trying to identify and eliminate biases, and preventing discrimination then I'd be all for it. But that's to polar opposite of what DEI really is.
I'm confused why this was focused on so much. I guess "people that use DEI for hiring". Or when I was speaking of heuristics generally that could be "hiring managers in general".
> So if "we" can't be bothered to use very common-sensical criteria on what actually being "diverse" means then the DEI initiatives will keep being hijacked by opportunistic individuals (as it currently seems to be the case).
It's not controversial to say that women have largely different life experience/background than men. It's not controversial to say those of different races/cultures have largely different life experiences/background than a young white suburban software engineer (which has historically been the majority of the industry).
There are an infinite number of factors that go into a person and there will always be something missed with whatever way we slice it. "common-sensical" criteria in that world will end up as a wishy washy "we hire those with diverse opinions and backgrounds". But really that means I'm just going to hire the person I get along with best that answers the questions I happen to have, biases included.
Does it feel good that I am not focused on in DEI as a young white man? No, it sucks to be reduced to something I can't change. But I'm not arrogant enough to pretend that I'm not commonly represented at all levels of tech.
> I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
Asking for an "irrefutable numerical proof" isn't an invitation for debate or speaking from curiosity. It can be lobbed at literally any position one takes.
> It's extremely easy in tech in fact. After being an interviewer and an interviewee for 22 years, I have seen this shake out dozens of times: a round of interviews establishes with 80-90% certainty that (a) the candidate is capable and (b) matches the company's culture.
You're blowing by that I was responding to
"Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person"
If we're talking about company culture now, then we're talking about something different.
> Not sure why you and others are constantly trying to shift goal posts to other areas when the original article clearly qualifies its statement with the word "tech".
The comment I was responding to spoke generally so I spoke generally. I applied it to both tech and nontech with examples though.