Not OP but I could see this being short term savings related to the cost of sourcing/generating risk data leading to bonuses prior to the deficiencies in that risk model being exposed in claims long term.
> It's not clear to me that it is either good or bad for business. Why is this stated as a matter of fact. And please spare me links to studies funded by special interest groups.
Not the poster and going to try to read the last sentence with positive intent.
You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public. The design of products come from the vantage of who is designing them. Historically this has been products designed by men and made for men. From male crash test dummies, to PPE, and even medical treatments. The designers were not looking to exclude women in these cases, everyone simply has blind spots or things that they don't consider, leading to worse/less safe products.
Going back to tech. How many demographic text boxes are designed by people who are not accustomed to long surnames? Security/Admin controls by someone who has never been in an abusive relationship? UX that is unusable by anyone with a disability, or simply not accustomed to technology.
If you don't care about these groups using your product effectively, then it's likely fine for business. Heck, many companies don't see a problem and conclude that their customers are "wrong" or "dumb" when features are left unused or bugs are reported.
> Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?
Everyone is different but I statistically have more in common with a white male 21-35 than any other group (even if he played team sports). Could a particular person be a deeply different 25 year old white man born in Thailand, deeply poor, and raised Jewish? I suppose, but we're all doing heuristics out there. So we use the heuristics that are both good proxies to determine "diversity of thoughts and experiences" and are easy to know.
We all know that a leetcode question, or a system design interview, or a take home project isn't a perfect show of someone's technical skills, why should heuristics around diversity be any different?
> Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)
It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that. You ask most people on the street and few will say they judge people beyond their character/actions/intelligence/whatever. But we know that isn't true, people aren't that logical and detached.
It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us. Let's even ignore gender/race. I know many engineers that view front end code as "beneath them" and "not real software engineering". Are they really going to view me as a hardworking, intelligent engineer if that's what I'm doing?
Heck, am I a hard working, intelligent engineer if I focus some of my time on DEI initiatives? What if I can't invert a B-tree? What if I still got hired, what would you think of me?
> So we use the heuristics that are both good proxies to determine "diversity of thoughts and experiences" and are easy to know.
Who is "we"? I personally define "different background" very similarly to your parent poster, and anecdotally 90% of all people I chatted on the topic (several dozen) do so as well.
So don't act like you represent some bigger group. I'd like to see exhaustive and irrefutable numerical proof if you choose to double down on this flawed assertion.
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).
So let's stop normalizing a thought process that shouldn't even be called that. Would be a good start.
> It's easy to say that in the abstract, hard to actually live that.
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.
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".
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.
> You can find the benefits in most industries where you are providing a product to be used by the general public.
I have background as an engineer in consumer products in SV for 10+ years
Indeed the elephant in the room is that the people designing these products often have little in common with people using them (outside of the Bay Area anyway) Financial status, affluent, well educated immigrants from China, India, etc.
I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard.
> It also ignores what intelligent/hardworking means to each of us.
I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself.
It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
> I don’t see how DEI initiatives address any of that. It may actually be regressive in that regard.
I don't understand DEI initiatives enough to agree or disagree. The poster I was responding to seemed to be speaking of diversity in general so that was what I was intending to address.
> I think we agree on that part. But forcing a DEI model on hiring will take on the biases in the model itself.
It’s like delegating an individual’s bias to a group of people, who have their own bias. And it seems fruitless to me.
I view diversity in general as shifting biases, not eliminating them. It's just not possible to eliminate them.
We already know that certain groups are underrepresented based on historical selection criteria so we're going in with the assumption that they are capable of doing the job but are not given the opportunity.
To make it less open to misunderstanding I'll just use self-taught software engineer as an example. We can all imagine there is a 100x engineer that is self taught. But due to hiring practices (requires college degree, requires unrelated computer science fundamentals, etc) is never hired and given a chance to reach their potential.
Maybe we're not quite sure how to evaluate self taught engineers like we are with engineers that take a more traditional path, it's likely they work and learn differently. All we know is some part of our process is selecting them out.
I view the idealized vision of DEI sort of in those ways. We know there are some set of biases that are leading certain groups to be underrepresented in tech. We also know that our interview process isn't some grand objective measure of engineer competence.
DEI to me is accepting the existence of biases. While you try to address the ones you can, you cannot eliminate them all so you design processes with assumptions of bias.
I don't pretend to know what companies do specifically in their DEI to shift those weights. But let me pretend my company gives everyone score on 100 point scale. Now I'll shift to a genuinely controversial case.
The info I have:
A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.
But if I think they both can do the job reasonably well, is it right to tip the scales? Do I think my company can benefit from underrepresented people in tech? Is there some bias that caused her to get the lower score in the first place such that she is the better engineer? Etc etc.
> A black woman received a score of 80 and a white man received a score of 85. My company views anyone that receives a score above 70 as "acceptable to hire". Who do I hire? If I view my measure as completely objective, I should take the higher score. There is even fairness to doing so.
It is funny that all the biggest and most successful companies in the USA became such, before there was something like DEI. Or if you look at foreign successful companies which are basically monoliths in regards to DEI.
Success isn't binary, I'd argue many could have been more successful.
NASA was doing some good work for years before Katherine Johnson came along. Heck, I'm sure people at the time would say that NASA would accept anyone that was hardworking and intelligent. Would NASA have collapsed without her? Likely not, but it was made better because of her involvement. You don't know what you miss out on by not accepting people.
She was given the opportunity to show that she was good at the job. The reason she wasn't given this opportunity earlier was because of her skin color. Others that were not given this opportunity due to their skin color are lost to time.
"The women-led grocery store boycotts of the 1960s in the US were ultimately unsuccessful, and inflation was only stamped out years later by the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to punishing levels. But today’s consumers have a far more effective tool than placards — social media. "
K. So it hasn't worked in the past and Federal Reserve Hiking did?
"Leaving a one-star Google review for a price-gouging local business or a TikTok campaign against a bigger target might sound anti-business. But in fact it’s far better for the economy (and stock prices) than massive rate hikes that cause unnecessary unemployment. "
This borders on parody. Individuals are supposed to figure out what price increases are necessary and which are price gouging themselves. I hear people shout price gouging when a restaurant has to increase their burger prices, this is a nonstarter and will simply be noise.
"So far, consumers have mostly gone about tackling inflation quietly by, for example, switching from household-name brands to supermarkets’ cheaper private-label goods, turning to no-frills stores like Aldi and Lidl, or making products last longer."
So the brands that increase their prices too much suffer and the ones that don't lose customers. Why are you writing this article?
Also, notice how they specify leaving negative reviews for “local businesses”, and not focusing on the big companies that can afford to lower their margins. And then, continue on to say we are suffering “quietly” by reducing the money we give name brands.
This is an article trying (and failing) to convince people to complain on social media and continue to spend money on expensive name brand foods, rather than taking actions that hurt megacorp bottom lines.
The rate hikes just coincided with the energy crisis easing, which actually did resolve inflation, so I still strongly believe the hikes themselves didn’t do anything to help bring down inflation (but did cause unnecessary unemployment). But yeah, the grocery store boycotts wouldn’t have done anything either…
Communities take all different shapes, renters care about their community too. Personally growing up in a SFH was isolating and took away any sort of autonomy I had.
Want to go to a park? Well that's a 10 minute drive.
How about friends? Better hope I like my 3 neighbors (I didn't). Another 15 minute drive
My family and I live in a large apartment. My son has friends he can walk to see, a park he can walk to and we can relax in, and even a store where he can get treats with his allowance. I'm not his driver and he's more locked into the community than I ever was. All I knew in my community was who had a feud with who over a tree crossing into their yard.
True and within articles those experiences can serve to inform, which isn't a bad thing. It's actually sort of the point; interpreting the facts and outputting them through your lens of experience
And generally journalists are aware of their biases and good ones actively work against their impulse to favor one side.
The idea that journalists can be biased is not something the profession was somehow unaware of previously.
In the same way that scientists understand that they probably can make up data plausibly, they realize that they make their name with their credibility.
But of course society is presently at the adolescent phase of realizing you can physically say and do whatever you want...whether bad science and bad journalism are confronted by the social analog of thr prefrontal cortex is uncertain. Maybe repercussions will help (collapse of democracy and global warming being the two most likely)
> In the same way that scientists understand that they probably can make up data plausibly, they realize that they make their name with their credibility
Unless what they are saying (journalists and scientists) conform to the dominate politics of the day. Plenty of major media outlets run stories with anonymous, non-corroborated sources but since those stories fit the desired narrative of their consumers, they get away with it, credibility intact.
A conservative outlet can have corroborated evidence, multiple sources and be chastised strictly on the basis of their conservative angle, while an outlet like The NY Times can publish anonymous op-eds without any corroboration and it doesn’t make a dent in their credibility among the majority of their readers. How many anti-Trump stories feature “anonymous” sources without a single shred of on-the-record corroboration? Yet, since the story confirms the bias of the readership, again, credibility remains intact. The Supermicro story is another example: completely uncorroborated, yet I bet not a single person cancelled their terminal subscription because of it.
Credibility only matters if the writer is going against the biases of their readers.
As far as global warming, plenty of scandals, such as Climategate, but the credibility of the climate-alarmists hasn’t been affected one bit among those that are predisposed to believe that the sky is, in fact, falling. Climategate was a serious scandal that calls into question the entire premise upon which the climate industry is based, yet that probably changed not a single person’s mind. It’s would be like telling Christians that Jesus never existed. It wouldn’t convince anyone who is already a believer. Global Warming is the modern world’s version of “going to hell if you don’t repent.”
Credibility doesn’t matter as long as you affirm fashionable biases.
To be completely fair, this isn’t a leftist phenomenon: plenty of anti-Obama news outlets could play loose with the facts and still have “credibility” with those predisposed to have opposed Obama’s policies. Same for the anti-vax crowd, the anti-GMO crowd and every other crowd where any challenge of their reality is tantamount to sacrilege.
So controlled burns are definitely done, but it's difficult. There's issues with air quality after a burn, waiting for ideal conditions, and sometimes even losing control of the burns. Don't know how that compares with Australia.
All of these things are issues in Australia, though out of control prescribed burns are very uncommon.
Basically all of the northern areas in the Northern Territory are burnt once every two years or so.
One thing to consider is that Indigenous Australians have been doing regular burns for tens of thousands of years. It's pretty well understood how the land burns, how often it needs to be burnt and what good/safe conditions look like.
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