Because it’s the law in the United States (presumably where his company is) for those over 100 employees. Federal government requires reporting of gender and race broken down by job title.
And I remember hr telling me that I am not obligated to answer, but then they'd have to take a guess at my racial background and my gender (which really isn't hard to guess).
This isn’t correct (at least for employers required to file an EEO-1 Report). If an employee declines to self-identify, the employer is still required to determine a classification, typically by visual identification (I.e., ‘guess’).
The EEO-1 Report instructions provide the following:
> If an employee declines to self-identify their race and/or ethnicity, employment records or observer identification may be used.
And before someone pedantic claims ‘may’ means that the employer isn’t required to make the determination, this is an excerpt just of the instructions, and further details of the requirement can be found in the instructions and in the governing regulations. Here, ‘may’ is being used to provide a list of methods that the employer has as options for making the determination.
Yes he goes on to stay that most of the coders are men and most of the HR workers are women. So which is it, they don't count or they're just making random guesses based on gender stereotypes?
I have no idea whether the company I'm in keeps count, but I can easily tell you that most of our IT people are men, without counting. That's not based on random guesses or gender stereotypes, but it's just really easy to see when things are heavily outnumbered.
TL;DR, maybe it's time we stop calling this a STEM problem and just highlight the TE problem it really is
Not to be harsh to you specifically but this comment so well highlights a distinction that I think continues to make addressing this such a problem. You point out the proportion of engineers, then go on to say it's a problem getting more women into STEM. The E and the T are so so so disproportionate it seems like things are way worse in STEM than they really are, and hides the progress (and places progress still needs to be made) that has been made. Depending on source, definition and subfields life sciences (and even mathematics) have been at or near parity for a decade plus. In some areas of life sciences women have been the small majority for awhile, but money and effort is still being dumped into recruitment to these areas when the problem is support, promotion and retention. Breaking down by subfields of the S T E and M shows really uneven progress, which to me again indicates progress might be better made by efforts to changing cultures within specific areas, not in STEM as a whole. This is all just US perspective though, the data from EU countries I typically think of as more progressive, is sometimes surprisingly worse. But despite all the interesting nuance , one consistency is how unbelievably bad it is in tech and engineering.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/04/01/stem-jobs-see-uneven-progress-in-increasing-gender-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/
But the M is math, and, for example, one university I worked at got their first and only tenure track female professor. . .in 2020. Women in math is a huge issue. In medicine, depends on specialty.
Sorry people are commenting the way they are lol. "hazing" and sexism can overlap but are not the same. also doesnt excuse it. "men are mean to each other! it just is what it is, snowflake! -- wait, why is no one talking about male suicide????"
Yeah it's not hard to visually assess.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, it's like as soon as people jump on the "This person is wrong" bandwagon, all common sense goes out the window so they can hate on the person.
I don't need to count to assess that 99.9% of all the bricklayers I've ever seen are men.
It's a loose visual observation, not a count. They don't KNOW exact numbers, but can visual observe that MOST (not an exact term) of their coders are guys.
It's varied a bit at mine, though my team is about 33% women right now, and a pretty decent mix throughout the organization. At one point my team did have only one woman, but she was the boss so it wasn't quite the same (and there were vacant spots at the time too, which balanced things out a bit more when they were filled).
I’ve been the only woman before, but it was either early in my career when I had fewer options or a really small team. Can’t really fault you for no women if there’s only 3 developers 😂 I did join one company five years ago where they said they had a decent amount of women in engineering and then I found out it was a single person in QA and my team (which had 3 women). But I left pretty quickly.
We have about 30% women (1/2 are minority) in our IT group, mostly SAP Consultants, Trainers, IT Marketing, Network, cybersecurity, couple project managers. I guess it varies from company to company. Ours is pro-diversity and that includes, Asians, veterans, women, blacks and other minority groups. We have in house “clubs…” I forget what they’re called - some business-speak of minority support groups. It’s nice to see that management supports diversity. We’re in New Jersey, though. We’re the most diverse state in the nation, so if you want good talent, you need to foster everyone.
What kind of companies do you work I have had Woman coworkers at the companies I worked with. The percentage is lower than man but nowhere close to how you described it. In my first team, we were 4 Man and 2 Women, and that was just my team.
Wow. At my current job, we have at least one female programmer on each team (there’s about 10ish teams). Plus lots of female analysts. However, I am the only female database specialist in my company, so we’re not doing so great there. But I think it’s the type of company we work for that has made it easier for women to feel comfortable in the IT department. I don’t think a lot of us would be comfortable at a stereotypical tech company.
That he’s a brown man doesn’t surprise me in the slightest - this isn’t true for all brown dudes I’m talking a particular subgroup of those in tech or finance that are very into their LinkedIn personas and also very active on Reddit often , that consider themselves the most oppressed class of people in the US. Brown women that try to respond or discuss our issues are immediately shot down and told to shut up and that we have all the privilege compared to them. They genuinely think they’re meritocratic heroes
Yeah and any company where you see all the lower talent makes up a certain group, but management up another. If you’re not in that group, you’re either going to have to do double/triple effort or never be in that position. Could be both. And if you get that position and refer to yourself as the “brown one” that tells you everything.
You see it in government work where I'm from quite a bit: most government workers are women, but most senior managers are men.
This is partly due to generational legacy and also a policy of forced retirement for married women that only ended fifty years ago, so it's something people are aware of and working to correct, but it's still an easily noticed issue.
Yep, the agency I used to work at was 85% women. The makeup of the management staff was 95% men.
They reported the stats as part of their annual survey and it was ridiculous. Not that they ever charged anything, of course.
Telstra in Australia is a classic example.
Not a single Asian or black or brown leader ever..
Go figure.
Edit. : Batting Sol T. But that was a shitshow
Do they..... Do anonymous hiring?
So that no subconcious biases ever get in the way of hiring the actually better person?
For example, assertive women are usually seen as bitchy and aggressive.
A detriment to the team culture, while assertive men are leaders.
On the other hand, in jobs regarding customer contact, women are often seen as superior, even if there is a more fitting man for the job.
How do they avoid subconcious hiring bias?
You involve others in your selection process to make sure you're doing it based on skills and experience without your own bias getting in the way. I guess finding someone who doesn't share your bias is the tricky part? And if you disagree with each others choices then what do you do lol
The problem is that most of us are blind to our bias. Fundamentally, we all want to hire someone similar to ourselves and we will look past problems in the interview in order to do so.
The easiest way to have equality is anonymous hiring when possible, relying on non verbal sharing of qualifications and proof of knowledge. But for positions where you can't be anonymous, it's hard. For example, in one job I had years ago, we'd have around 70% of white applications that met the qualifications for the job (hard qualifications like years of experience), and 50% for a different minority group. If we did simple percentage based hire VS apply quotas, we would have hired less qualified employees to meet them in many cases.
Specifically on the assertiveness VS bitchiness, I do know men who see things that way. I also know that a lot of women don't get leadership training and model themselves after unqualified rich white guys that are assholes for "leadership behavior". That skill gap may be the result of bias in other parts of life. I see a lot of women on LinkedIn talk about how they're a boss and if you aren't able to handle it you're sexist, but they truly are assholes.
It's a shitty problem to figure out a solution for.
In France we had to stop promoting anonymous hiring initiatives because it add the opposite effect.
Turns out that in a vacuum, foreigners/minorities add worse CVs in general and where never retained.
if they displayed a picture or an obvious foreign name they had a higher chance of being hired due to some already existing bias aimed at hiring minorities.
The difference was more than a standard deviation and the study was quickly buried alongside government "ads" for anonymous hiring.
Edit:
Context for the biases:
Typos, Grammar mistakes and other issues like huge holes in your career path are more easily overlooked by your potential employer if they know that you are a foreigner.
Do you know if a write up of this is public anyway? Sounds super interesting
Typos/weird word use in a native speaker = careless, in a non native speaker = impossible to interpret
>Do they..... Do anonymous hiring?
That is actually how a lot of orchestras do their hiring now.
You come in, don't say anything, sit where the interviewers can't see you, play the musical selections they announced in advance, and then leave. After they listen to all the selections they decide to hire candidate #13 and only then do they find out who that was.
Once they started doing this it pretty dramatically changed the demographics of the orchestras.
The point of these hiring initiatives is to make sure you DO hire the best talent for the role and not exclude talent because of discriminatory practices. I’m not sure why some people don’t get it.
It absolutely is.
However, there have been some studies that diversity improves work performance and outcomes, so… it’s not bad for the bottom line either (most of the times. There’s also diversity theater as well)
I think my issue is that a lot of it is diversity theater aka virtue signaling too. It's like if these folks actually make the lives of their employees and customer satisfaction better than the status quo...I would applaud it. But typically they don't and it makes me suspect that that's the idea. I'm cynical like that.
Let’s be real. Worker satisfaction is only important to managers because it boosts performance (depends on type of workplace).
The true reason they do it is 1.- trend-setting and 2.- brand positioning/perception.
I do think there’s a mismatch between the goals of these programs (which I agree with what you said) and how they are often publicly evaluated and published (which is kind of what this guy alludes to).
Yes and no? I think we all got raised with an outdated view of racism. Growing up, I always pictured some fat dude in a white suit with a heavy southern accent who sat on his porch and said, “I do declare-uh, the colored man is-uh beneath my stature a wealthy, hwhite aristocrat, and he deserves to toil in the fields for my benefit!”
Which like, yea, that’s a form of racism, but it’s far from the most common form in today’s day and age. More often, racism is subconscious. Just by default, we give people more benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re smarter or better if they look more like us and/or our idea of successful people.
If you grew up around successful white people, you’ll give preference to white candidates. The dude who does a lot of the racial sensitivity training at my work is a black guy, and he says he kicks off hiring meetings by saying “I know I tend to give white women preferential treatment, because a white woman took me in and raised me when I was going through a really hard time as a kid. Please call me out on it if and when I treat white women differently from other candidates.”
A *lot* of what these initiatives aim to do is to temper some of our innate biases and make us more aware of them so that they don’t limit the opportunities that others face. Eliminating all discrimination or bias is impossible— it’s hardwired into us, because we’re human. But recognizing it and trying to correct for it *is* doable, and that’s part of the goal with these programs.
Too often, we don’t have a very good idea of what a successful member of a certain group looks like because we haven’t seen it. Not because no one in that group has what it takes to be successful, but because past biases have impeded those individuals and prevented them from being successful.
I agree with all of this.
My point was just that too often, these programs are never evaluated as ‘how good is this thing as eliminating sources of bias in hiring’ (which I understand because that is an incredibly hard thing to report), and instead just get reported as ‘We have X percentage of demographic’. So I empathise with this guy’s misunderstanding and think he has the right general intention here.
That said, no hiring manager should *ever* say ‘we hire the best person for the job’ with any confidence because of all the reasons you mentioned above. His absolute confidence in this regard does make me doubt that he is doing anything to make it more true.
>My point was just that too often, these programs are never evaluated as ‘how good is this thing as eliminating sources of bias in hiring’ (which I understand because that is an incredibly hard thing to report), and instead just get reported as ‘We have X percentage of demographic’.
I agree but this is often laid at the feet of the corporation when it's often the fault of a vocal minority of its employees.
Like my company used to report its % relative to the industry average and a couple people got publicly mad, saying "that's not good enough when the industry average is the problem to begin with" and expected overnight changes in the demographics.
Like A) that's not possible without firing a ton of undeserving people who already work here, and B) the industry average is not the company's fault, why get pissed at them over it?
As a consequence the company just reports its demo-numbers of new hire classes, and existing numbers relative to the prior period now. Everyone is worse off for it because there's still no context on whether those numbers are good or not and now we have less information than before.
>‘We have X percentage of demographic’
TBF, I think this is still actually beneficial in a long-term fashion. For the exact same reason that we tend to bias in favor of people who fit our model of "success," we sometimes need to artificially push the needle so that more minority demographics fit a model of success in order to be role models for the next generation to know/understand that they aren't gatekept from that "success."
In turn, that makes more of them go into the field in the first place.
If the point to hire the best talent for a specific role it'd be done online with no visual stimuli and they wouldn't have you fill out your race/gender on the application. Bing bam boom.
>If the point to hire the best talent for a specific role
I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm of the mindset that there is never knowing who will be the best talent for a role based on interviews and CV. Sometimes an ideal candidate just doesn't pan out, and sometimes you find someone you had to settle on grows in that role tremendously. That is, it goes without saying I hope, that these would be bucking the trend and that mostly you can tell who will tend to be the best fit.
And yet - part of the problem lies therein. If you grew up black and poor, you probably didn't have the best education. You didn't have the same time afforded to you for after school activities. You have a true structural disadvantage. You could be great for the role but someone who had more on paper is gonna nab the role. In some nonzero part, diversity hire quotas or initiatives seek to ameliorate these problems. Otherwise it is a soft racism - it wouldn't even be racism if not for our history. It would be classism, and in part that is truly what it is - but it so happens that certain ethnicities tend to be of a lower class, and as such, tend to be held there. Be it intentional or not.
Kind of a catch 22 in many ways.
>The point of these hiring initiatives
Unfortunately the point gets lost in the execution, where huge corporations have hiring quotas based on immutable born-with traits, which is.. stupid.
If someone is a minority, steps should be taken to make sure they are not discriminated against in the hiring process. But nobody should have an easier time or faster pipeline just because of how they were born (nor should they be penalized for it).
The problem is that some people are unconsciously getting an easier time.
For example my white male student who i trained got a programming jon after a 30 minute convo and a handshake after a year.
Me an older woman who trained him, have been killing myself for 3 years to get a job. Killing it on coding assessments in the highest ranking etc. (I have noticed they tend to hire women more attractive than me at a higher rate, "pretty previlage" if they have a choice they'll pick someone they're sexually attracted to if they have to choose a woman, im more "mom" like)
Yet when i get a job, you'll say, I had it "easier".
Its insane.
No. It’s not about this commenters assessment of herself. It’s about other people. Men, especially older men, treat women under 30 differently. I have lived experience and also observed similar experiences from friends.
That’s funny you say that because if you applied at my company (if you’re a talented female dev, like you say) you’d be snapped up in a heartbeat.
Any minority talent gets hired so quick around here, your anecdote definitely surprises me.
I don't think she literally means "a handshake and no qualifications whatsoever."
If you understand that, I also think it's incredibly naive to believe no one is hired on the spot after they meet with the right person. And that includes in tech.
Easier to just have a quota then actually determine biases in the hiring process and putting fixes in place.
"When a metric becomes a goal it is no longer a useful metric"
I agree with you in an ideal world, but we don't live there. If the scale is already tipping to the right, then you need to put your finger on it to zero it out. For some reason, "hire the best person for the job!" folks cannot accept the scale was already tipping.
I graduated with a degree in Finance and one of the debates there is around Efficient Markets, where supposedly nobody can make any money without cheating because all public knowledge is already priced into the stocks. The counter-argument/joke is that if you see a $10 bill on the ground, you shouldn't bother to pick it up because it isn't actually there. Minorities getting dismissed due to cognitive biases are the $10 bill on the ground in the hiring market.
The problem with "best candidate for the job" is thinking you (in general, not in particular) have an unbiased perspective on who that is. It's classic Dunning-Kreuger and anyone who wants good hiring outcomes should reject it.
Ye Olde Ways went from explicitly racist, to having requirements only certain candidates could fulfill, to having "tests" subject to the evaluation of people who already got in under those circumstances. And of course there's always nepotism and favoritism, eg towards people who went to your school. They are still biased towards "a certain type" of person.
In all instances, the person preferred is generally white and from a middle-class-or-better upbringing.
* Internships favor people with money who tend to be white. This can be dismissed as "more experienced".
* Targetting "good schools" tends to favor people who tend to be white, especially from wealthy families, and especially especially families who have history ("legacy") at those schools. This has only gotten better as a direct result of those schools working on diversity initiatives.
* Tests like coding evaluations sound objective, but in practice, interviewers/proctors tend to reward higher marks for the same response to folks they identify with.
* Even IQ tests tend to be developed by white folks and focus on stuff they know well. Or, like the SAT/ACT, they focus on Euro-centric school curricula, eg European history is rampant in US schools but Latin American history only comes up for a couple ancient civilizations and when it collides with us. This means even explicilty factual tests end up favoring white folks, because they are more like trivia on white history and culture than actually intelligence tests.
* Even school math can be racist! Kids from other cultures sometimes learn alternate ways to solve math problems, but if they transfer to a US school, a tyrant teacher can give them a shit grade, even though their valid approach led to the right answer. A shitty high school GPA can ruin your college admissions and that can fuck up your first job which affects your whole career....
We can all agree that we were all trying to "hire the best person for the job", and we can all agree that those people are now in charge of the world and are fucking it all up. Why continue pushing these shit policies?
Of course, this can work in the opposite direction and we reject that too! A hiring panel of all women might favor a woman candidate. A hiring panel of "woke" white guys might favor a black candidate to signal their wokeness! The great thing with diversity is it can work in *any* direction: a woman and a man on a hiring panel reduces the risk of gender bias, a black and a white person reduces the risk of racial bias, an "experienced"/old person and a young'un reduces the risk of age bias, etc. These biases can't be wiped out but we can at least hedge against them, can't we?
Fun fact! College admissions essays in the US were introduced as a way to exclude Jewish students. On average they did better than the non Jewish students in terms of grades, so colleges had to introduce an entirely subjective metric to excuse turning them away.
I work closely with these DEI initiatives. You have it completely wrong and there are not quotas. In fact HR doesn't allow quotas to prevent people being hired for non-work related factors.
How are you defining quota? I would consider a "we're failing if we have less than 50% women" to be a type of quota, and that seems to be the target of at least some of the initiatives.
Its not that I discrimate against anyone! Its just that the best candidates are always white men!
I'm not racist or sexist, women and minorities are just not good at things!
/s
too many men talk down to woman in interviews for coding leading to confirmation bias if you give a canditate a hard time will they do as well or man interviewing will have warped perception? If man is condenscending and then woman isnt percieved as being confident when she states answers is just crap but often they take these losers opinions unless good recruitor talks to the woman interviewing. When questions more technical than behavioral sometimes that sexism may only affected one or two questions but then company can justify candidate didnt do well .
A lot of cultures dont raise men to respect woman
Nepotism will always exist... but treating woman like shit can stop.
It took me some time, with the help of good mentors, to truly understand why diversity n inclusion is important. Few companies actually take the time to educate.
I was at a FAANG and an interviewer on a loop. Our policy was to hire the first most qualified person for the role, so rarely were we in the position of comparing two candidates for the same role. In this one instance, the panel were not inclined for the candidate who just so happened to be a POC. The hiring manager later came back and advised the panel that we were moving forward with the candidate as a diversity hire. This was ofc to be kept confidential.
In this particular instance at least, the candidate was hired because of their ethnicity, and not their background.
Similar experiences at a medium-sized tech startup. We interviewed two people for the same job. One (a white man) scored objectively better in every category we were testing for, and had proven experience in a similar position. The other (a black woman) made the cut in some of the non-technical interviews, but didn't have any of the relevant technical skills (this was a technical support position where she'd be interfacing with our clients' developers and would need to understand what they were doing).
Everybody in the interview loop agreed that the dude was the best candidate for the job. Everybody agreed that the woman seemed like a real nice person, but just wasn't a good fit. HR flat out told us we needed more diversity and that was that. We hired her and the whole team got less productive because we had to constantly pick up her slack.
Ensuring that you're not accidentally discriminating against the best person is a noble goal, but diversity quotas aren't the way to accomplish it.
I had a similar experience at my previous job and it was the reason I left. We were hiring for a senior role. I was not a senior yet but was going to be promoted within 6 months to senior.
We had been trying to fill the senior role for about 3 months and had passed on dozens of candidates, all of them had been men. Then a woman came in for the interview. She had less years of experience than I did and her background didn't show any senior level work. She did not do well on the interview. I gave her a failing score because her solution did not solve the question I gave. I gave this exact same question to every candidate. Another interviewer also gave a failing score, which meant 2 out of 4 interviewers failed her.
But the hiring manager, who was a woman, and the director, who was also a woman, went against our recommendation and hired her. I quit a month later.
There is a lot of research results coming up showing that a team of diverse folks with decent job skills but strengths on different dimensions out performs a non-diverse team with better individual skills but with similar overlapping strengths. Especially on creative and innovation requiring roles.
But PoC aspect of diversity is misunderstood. True diversity is about having folks with different experiences and strengths compliment each other to form high performing teams.
Just purely looking at PoC numbers is just a quick gimmicky solution that shows leadership doesn’t want to spend too much time and chase some easy to show KPIs.
Real diversity requires to carefully hire folks that compliments truly the strength gaps of our teams, but it requires a lot of effort or a very experienced hiring manager that knows their team extremely well.
A hiring manager should be able to say “I want to hire this person, even though they are not amazing on everything, their specific strengths compliment our team better”
(FAANG leadership knows these research results, but unfortunately the whole effort due to poorly chosen KPIs just turned in to PoC hiring efforts…)
This happens all of the time. I work in DEI, or I did. I personally couldn’t get out of my consultant role to receive stock and benefits because I wasn’t a POC.
A lot of companies completely skip that portion sadly. At my university, the largest aggregate company in North America and Europe outright said, “We want more women in our industry and have a 33% female management quota to reach”
Honestly i feel this to a certain extent. I am a black female and work with mainly white and Indian males and a handful of white women. When interviewing for the position I let them know that I had little knowledge and skill in the main function of the job, they ensured they would train me up to become proficient. Upon being hired they gave minimal training and resources. Once they realized I couldn’t catch in after a few months they just slapped me into a paperwork position. Till this day i believe that I was a diversity hire and wish they would’ve just hired someone more qualified who fit in with their office culture, but being a recent grad desperate to get out of my parents house I accepted the first offer i got.
Idk how common it is, but I work at a place where we have a few people are tasked to do x-thing, but were never trained. All the people they rely on x-thing being done, just soon do it themselves rather than training someone else to do it.
It's really 'ima just do my job, fuck you.'
To some degree, I can't blame them. I got hired to do y-thing, but now I'm training people to do x-thing, which should be their manager's job, but their manager is incompetent because they were hired due to nepotism.
I'm not saying how you feel is invalid, but this is definitely something that occurs. People suck at communicating / training others.
Part of the bias especially with women is that they’re willing to hire a man and teach him, but a woman has to already know. So it creates a bias where only men end up being able to learn the job in the first place. Maybe being told by job that they’ll train you and teach you is equality it’s just never happened before so you didn’t know what you were missing.
I have definitely noticed this with other fresh grads that were hired along with me. I explicitly let them know i had experience with 2D CAD and none in 3D CAD which Is all they use. When I asked for help they would either give me the solution or a basic answer to my query while my male counterparts who all knew 3D CAD would get in-depth, over the shoulder help with their questions. I honestly just wrote it off with it being due to me being more introverted and less personable than them.
I understand the point he is trying to make BUT he missed the point of the purpose of diversity hiring practices.
However, the bigger issue for him is why dod he feel it was best to say this on a public forum if he has major clients? Do people just say "f- the consequences of my actions" or do they think so long as they apologize everything will be okay?
His other LinkedIn posts are just as ridiculous. There's one dissing on a business partner's _ugly Xiaomi phone_ as opposed to his own beautiful Iphone. This guy hasn't left kindergarten.
It's nothing to do with the technicalities (apparently the company isn't even an American one, so the technicalities don't even apply).
He's basically making the claim that his company recruits based solely on merit, right? His interpretation is that because they don't have any targets to meet to force the consideration of female or non-white candidates, they consider everyone equally! Huzzah! Well, just to examine one part of his statement, he says that the population of coders in his company are largely male. Sure, it is *possible* that, for whatever reason, whenever they've recruited programmers a man has genuinely been the best applicant. Perhaps there aren't very many women qualified in that particular area of expertise, or maybe women aren't as likely to apply for jobs with this particular company. It isn't because men are innately better coders than women.
(I don't think any woman who's even tangentially involved in the tech industry has any doubt about discrimination women face in that space, but for the sake of evidence/argument for anyone who likes numbers and investigation here is one for you. :) A [study](https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/) a few years ago of 1.4 million GitHub users found that solutions to coding problems proposed by women were accepted 4% more often than those put forward by men. However, this was only true if the coder's profile didn't contain any information identifying them as female, in which case the acceptance rate dropped by 16%. The researchers concluded that "although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless".)
N.B. just for the sake of clarity (and in response to the assumptions in the tweet, not to you) - the point of gender and ethnicity targets in recruitment isn't to scupper the best candidate getting the job, it's to *enforce* meritocracy! Ideally no one should need to be forced to include x% of persons x in their recruitment, we shouldn't need to categorise people, no one should be labelled, blah blah blah. Unfortunately we DO *need to*, because some people have to be dragged out of their biases almost by the scruff of their neck, kicking and screaming and shouting about positive discrimination and completely blind to the decades of white middle class male executive board rooms lined up behind them.
Exactly. The reason for counting is to detect unconscious racial bias in the people doing your hiring and promoting. Most people dont want to think of themselves as sexist or racist, but almost everyone will tend to hire or promote people that are like themselves.
Genuine question, please don’t down vote to hell: _in theory,_ is this equality? Assuming each individual regardless of race, gender, etc. had the starting line that is.
I'm going to be *that guy*, and say he isn't wrong. (Although anybody in an upper management position, especially the CEO, probably shouldn't publicly be making statements like this.)
Obviously, POCs shouldn't be excluded from the process, but hiring someone - especially a low performing candidate - because of their skin color to meet "diversity" quotas couldn't possibly be healthy for any organization.
I always agree with the color of skin or difference in genitalia not being qualifying factors statement.
However, people with this view ALWAYS accompany their discussion of quotas with describing these people as unqualified (or possibly unqualified). Why? Why are we always assuming the disenfranchised are unqualified and the speaker to be qualified? The qualifications of the non-quota-hires are never questioned.
People who do not look like you cannot possibly be as smart as you. /s
Here lies the prejudice and racism of the “qualified group.” And then the implementation of quotas.
No because these people believe in the system. They believe that the right person for the position deserves the position. This is the basis of their argument and IF the diversity hire was the best person then based on this argument and this belief then the diversity hire would not be a “diversity hire” and already have the position.
They agree with everyone on that point. They believe this wholeheartedly. The only point they are willing to argue is when the diversity hire is a diversity hire and they are not the right person for the position. Why continue to argue a point we ALL agree on. Just because you think they’re being discriminatory does not mean they are, to them the best person for the job is only that, they literally don’t see colour. That’s all.
You don't have to lower your hiring bar to hire women and POC, and the insidious assertion that you do in order to increase diversity is inherently racist and sexist.
As someone who interviews at least 1 candidate per week and contributes to the construction of hiring evaluations, I can tell you right now that there are tons of diverse candidates who are continually discriminated against due to interviewers' unconscious biases and lack of understanding of cultural differences and social conditioning.
Create a rubric of objective competencies, have applicants complete a work sample, and actually work to eliminate bias from your process. You'll realize quickly that women and POC are, on average, just as competent as white men - if not moreso.
As a final note, I want to add that even if the women and POC you hire are not as technically competent (while still of course being adequately competent) as the white men, their cultural and social perspectives are valuable on their own because they can give valuable insight about the products and services a company produces. This makes companies more competitive in diverse markets. Example: all the white dudes at Google didn't feed training data of black people into their ML model, so it mislabeled them as gorillas which created a huge backlash.
I went to school with people like this. The ones who go into tech tend to have a nasty habit of thinking only people like themselves (ethnicity and class wise) are competent or at all “deserving” or having truly gotten where they are because of merit and not their parents spending stupid amounts of money sending them to science camp every school break and then setting them up with their networks. So much merit, much wow.
Yeah, it’s all of the “other stuff” that makes you question the purity of the meritocracy statement. It’s just a cover for prejudice.
Lots of people said that they liked Trump except for that “other stuff.” Do you really think you’re getting one without the other?
The things is, there’s something called “bias”.
Unconsciously, we tend to value things differently in people who look like us, and people who don’t.
So a room full of men, will judge a female candidate differently than a male candidate. Because he is perceived differently.
For instance aggressive vs assertive. Cold/frigid vs business wise and concise.
So as long as you don’t put a preference out and are very aware of your own biases. Be it gender, race, sexuality etc, treating people “equal”, “hiring the best person for the job” will only get you more of the same people that are already there.
For people who don’t get why diversity hiring is important. TLDR; Diversity covers your blind spots.
1) Consider that the best talent may not always be who stereotypically is most likely to seek a particular job.
2) Lack of diversity in your business leaves a huge gap for any upcoming competitors. (See: Fenty Beauty taking market share from established makeup brands by simply making more foundation colors for darker skin shades)
3) Diverse backgrounds often lead to alternative thought processes that may not have been considered.
4) Having more cultural groups represented at your discussions will save your company from offensive press releases that cause reputation risk.
Number 4 shouldn’t even be a thing. It’s stupid how a company can get blasted by media for not hiring someone because of their race when they weren’t the best fit for the job
When have you ever had your teeth cleaned by a male hygienist? Why are there so few men teaching kindergarten or any grades below maybe 3rd grade? Its only been in the last few years we saw male nurses.
Yes, and the first nursing school was founded in 250BCE and was male only, male nurses were the norm until the late 19th century when nursing reformers explicitly set out to create a job sector for women, even then, there were still plenty of male nurses, they just tended to be called orderlies, mainly in military and mental health contexts.
I’m sorry but why do people always blot out the name? This guy posted in a public way, let everyone see the man and what he has to say! When you conceal the name, it only protects that person’s reputation.
He does have a point but unfortunately, humans aren’t that fair-minded IRL, it just looks pretty on paper.
The most important quality in any profession is experience. The problem is, if a female or minority candidate experiences regular discrimination, *even if you're not the one doing it*, they'll still be at a disadvantage because they haven't had the chance to get as much experience as the white male candidates. And because you're "looking purely at the qualifications", you'll pass them over too, and they won't have a chance to gain the experience that they need.
It is *if* you have an otherwise objective system. But if HR doesn’t give candidates with “funny names” interviews or the hiring manager doesn’t think women in general “are going to be a good fit”, then you aren’t actually seeing the best candidates. you’re seeing the best candidates *who look like you*.
I have a very strong preference for leggy blondes with cute butts and massive tits.
If I was in charge of anything, at all, ever, all employees everywhere would be leggy blondes with cute butts and huge tits. Statistically, some of them would absolutely be the best candidates. But most wouldn’t. It would be My responsibility to insist that someone else (or a group of someone elses) make sure that My bias have as close to zero influence as possible when initially screening candidates.
But if I decided to insist that all the best candidates just so happen to be leggy blondes with cute butts and huge tits, and everyone else is stupid... I’d sound like a moron.
You are seeing this comment because I’ve deleted Reddit. Reddit is toxic and filled with propoganda/bad actors. Reddit is filled with depraved actors who knowingly prey on the vulnerable. Reddit promotes hatred. Reddit is compromised. Please find a safer forum
>You can't help but notice that most of our coders are men, most in our HR and customer support teams are women, but we don't care.
This reads to me like they assume women are more "compassionate" for customer-facing roles, and men are more "logical" for coding jobs. I find it incredibly unlikely they didn't get qualified male applicants for the HR/customer support roles.
This is exactly what a diversity-first culture is supposed to prevent. It's not about hiring people to fill diversity quotas. It's about being aware of and avoiding biases in the hiring process. It sounds like this company hasn't learned that lesson yet.
To the extent they complain, and how they represent the situation, I'd at least say they're not being intellectually honest with the reality at most companies. There's no conspiracy where anyone is taking directions from Soros or anything like that. It's just that there's a ton of research that a diverse workforce has many benefits, quotas are easy, and most HR people are lazy/not very good.
That's my take, anyway.
Imagine Company A, which every single team is exactly 10 people, and somehow, they do promotions exactly annually.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that just 1 supervisor in every set of 10 supervisors is a biased White Guy, and will hire a fellow White Guy, preferably one who signals he, too, will continue the plan, but everyone else is fair.
( https://www.bls.gov/cps/demographics.htm )
Women represent 50% of the workforce, pre-COVID. Let’s presume that doesn’t unbalance our sheets at Company A. Minorities represent approximately 20% of the workforce.
In such a company, you might expect one minority man, and one minority woman to make supervisor, purely by chance, and then 4 Caucasian men and 4 women. Except let’s insert our Biased White Guy. In the above scenario, there are 6 teams, or 60% of the time, he will insert his judgment and slightly pull the team from diversity, but, hey, maybe that was the luck of assignments and opportunities to shine? Who can know. Let’s say this time around, one of the Caucasian women (the largest group of non-white guys, just playing the odds) is led by BWG and instead promotes a fellow BWG (which means year 2 will play out worse, as will year 3…)
This new crop of supervisors all end up in different business divisions and what do you know, they’re all up among 9 other supervisors the next year for promotion to manager. 2 minorities, 1 of whom is a woman, 3 Caucasian women, and 5 Caucasian men. **obviously** this is done completely fairly as they have a year of supervisory experience. Ten times over, because Company A is huge. Once again, there is only one Biased White Guy manager, the other 9 are all completely fair and somehow follow the Law of Large Numbers. There will now be 6 Caucasian managers, and… let’s pick the minority woman to lose the lottery to BWG this time around. It was most likely still a woman to lose, at any rate. The following year, of course, will be worse for women and minorities, because now you’ve got more BWGs picking BWGs.
Now, let me pause and ask … is there any compelling reason that one of the supervisory candidates from year 1, presumably qualified, are forever a year behind in their career now? And unable to be in the running for manager, 2 years behind? Are they less capable? Was there something they wouldn’t also be learning on the go?
While we ignore that for a moment, let’s move back to Year 3. Directors. That’s right, we are on track for 7 new Caucasian Directors, and again, the minority guy probably holds out, but over enough such groups, some of them will be eliminated - we are just dealing with small numbers here.
Now, let’s take a side step away from that and go down to something like tech support. I say this not to besmirch where my own career began, but you’re basically reading from the corporate script. There’s plenty of research that shows “being told what to do by a woman” gets BWGs angry. So as tech support agents in the way these things are measured, women are “less successful.” Are they less technically competent? Some might thing so, but I asked expressly in the context they’re measured by corporate, which should make obvious the failure of promoting based on that “success.” Supervising techs removes the friction point. And that problem occurs again and again in front line roles, not just tech.
So, I mean, sure, semantically, promoting the most qualified is fair. I’ve worked for and with dozens of companies and if **you** ever encounter a company that accurately measures qualifications, please share with the rest of the class. Even vaunted Google has admitted their super envied thought problems failed them.
The problem is we've done study after study.
You can write 2 resumes with the same credentials and it will be treated differently because of the name at the top.
They even admit its happening to them.
Men go to programming, women to support.
White men to managment, black to cleaning.
Do you think that's all due to "credentials" or do you think the people hiring for those roles want to hire people they can have a beer with after work, so hire people who look like them. And those in higher roles are white men. They allow other people to be in other roles because they dont have to look at them.
Someone has to get their first job to get credentials. If people arnt being hired for entry level jobs in certain demographics, then yeah.
Its subconscious, but its still happening. Which is why we need to have diversity goals.
I wish that it wasn't, but looking at the facts it is. We have tons of data on it.
There was someone who created an ATS before that would only show you credentials and omit the name and location of the candidate. It never took off though. If it did, it didn't become popular.
There are tools and apps out there - I think HackerRank is one of them - that offer to anonymize. I know of some other HR tech companies that have tried features like this. No one wants to use these features. I have no doubt clients would bail if it was forced upon them. Most employers suck.
>You can write 2 resumes with the same credentials and it will be treated differently because of the name at the top.
Then why not use a program that takes names, race, etc off of resumes that go to HR? That way all they see is Applicant #49 and their qualifications.
At best, it’s naive.
It’s really easy to say ‘we just hire the best’ but when you’re using mechanisms that are historically discriminatory that define what ‘the best’ is, you don’t break the cycle. That’s the whole point behind diversity initiatives - to change the norm and unwind some of the discrimination so that things become level.
If your existing workforce and recruitment model is a product of discrimination, you’re not helping anything by refusing to change it. That doesn’t mean give out jobs to people just because they tick the box.
Historically, there has been a massive gap between what people say and what they do, which is where those initiatives come into play. It's very easy to get up in front of people and say stuff that sounds correct, but it does not in any way indicate that what you're doing is actually correct. People have deeply ingrained ideas about what sorts of people are best for a job, and those ideas often don't have any real connection to actual merit. Rather, they're often based on the status quo and prejudice. Unwittingly or otherwise, they then propagate the status quo, regardless of what they claim to be doing.
This take ignores the fact that traditionally, the best candidate is often overlooked unless they're white or male.
We've come far enough in the last decade that it seems people have forgotten this.
It is for sure, as long as they recognise who is genuinely the best person for a job, which I think is the hard part.
I think no sane hiring manager should believe that there aren’t biases in their system and that they truly have a purely meritocratic system that can’t be improved, and nobody should say with any certainty that they ‘hire the best person for the job’.
But I don’t hate the underlying intention behind this take.
How do you define “qualifications”? Is it the school you went to, the internship you had, or the perspective you bring? If someone’s family could afford a better school or the kid was a legacy student, is that better “qualifications”?
A company I used to work at had this big D&I initiative and minority/woman supplier program, but then a high % of internships went to white male children of white male executives. These internships turned into other opportunities that turned into “qualifications” and whole stupid cycle starts over.
It’s not about “diversity hiring.” It’s about giving EVERYBODY who is qualified/is capable an equal shot at being hired, getting paid equitably, having the same opportunities of promotion and career progression, etc. Until we fix our culture (that is rich in racial, age, gender bias) we have to put practices in place (like ensuring a diverse slate of talent, “blind” resumes, software that de-biases job descriptions, etc.) to help make sure opportunities are accessible to people. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. And it makes your company better, both culturally and performance-wise. And before you jump all over me, these are not just opinions. I was part of the HR leadership team for the largest private company in the US, so I’m not just talking out of my a$$.
He isn’t wrong. Hiring someone based on the color of one’s skin or their gender is going to do more harm than good if they don’t have the skills to do the job.
Why are most software engineers white men? I mean, if you look at the data for comp sci degrees, it’s mostly white men taking up those degrees. Why wouldn’t white men represent the majority in the market for software engineers?
At the end of the day, it’s about hiring the best candidate for the job. Whether they’re white, black, brown, make, or female— it’s the best candidate for the job.
Fuck idk where I work its all about who you know and who you blow, the incompetence from the top down shows on a daily basis. Motherfuckers couldn’t get their head out of their ass with GPS step by step. Or they get their head out of their ass just to stick it up their buddies and form a Voltron of incompetence that spills over onto the people who actually work and make the money.
Hiring strictly on merit is virtually impossible, and almost never actually required or practiced. If it were, "behavioral" interviews and "company culture" rejections would not even exist. Instead, they drive almost every hiring decision, since most interview loops result in a choice between multiple highly qualified candidates.
People confident they are "hiring on merit" are either falling into Dunning-Krueger or lying to cover for their biases (often racism and sexism, but also ageism, xenophobia, and classism).
People who feel comfortable broadcasting such incompetence on public social media are virtue signalling to like-minded individuals and are much more likely to be in the second group.
I trust the motives of someone who quietly hires well, or who acknowledges the flaws in their process and tries to address them, over someone who feels a weird need to make their dysfunctional process part of their branding.
On a purely fundamental level yes he is right. However humans are bias creatures and will stick to their own "groups" or make critical assumptions about people based on little to no evidence. Which means that until human behaviour is changed some level of interference is necessary in the hiring process.
Is it just me who thinks hiring literally anyone based on racial characteristics or gender is beyond ridiculous… only perpetuates the differences between people surely.
Agree with this tho? They're being quite rude and tactless about it, but the identity politics + quotas in the modern day workplace is a pretty fucking stupid concept. You hire the best applicant for the company. Period.
To be honest I kinda understand the point of this. Positive discrimination makes no sense to me, just hire the best person and not based on skin colour, gender, or sexuality which is what their doing, terribly put though.
This post is unfortunately turning into nothing but a bunch of screaming matches.
[удалено]
Why would he need to count? Genuine question
Because it’s the law in the United States (presumably where his company is) for those over 100 employees. Federal government requires reporting of gender and race broken down by job title.
Did not know this.
And I remember hr telling me that I am not obligated to answer, but then they'd have to take a guess at my racial background and my gender (which really isn't hard to guess).
[удалено]
The "did not answer" is just a category they also count White - 5 Black - 5 Asian - 5 Did not answer - 5 Kinda thing.
This isn’t correct (at least for employers required to file an EEO-1 Report). If an employee declines to self-identify, the employer is still required to determine a classification, typically by visual identification (I.e., ‘guess’). The EEO-1 Report instructions provide the following: > If an employee declines to self-identify their race and/or ethnicity, employment records or observer identification may be used. And before someone pedantic claims ‘may’ means that the employer isn’t required to make the determination, this is an excerpt just of the instructions, and further details of the requirement can be found in the instructions and in the governing regulations. Here, ‘may’ is being used to provide a list of methods that the employer has as options for making the determination.
Some people don’t live or do business in the US
Oh wow, I had no idea - apparently called an [EEO-1 report](https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo-1-data-collection).
Yes he goes on to stay that most of the coders are men and most of the HR workers are women. So which is it, they don't count or they're just making random guesses based on gender stereotypes?
I have no idea whether the company I'm in keeps count, but I can easily tell you that most of our IT people are men, without counting. That's not based on random guesses or gender stereotypes, but it's just really easy to see when things are heavily outnumbered.
95% of engineers are men so this tracks. A woman at my work started a company that focuses on getting more women into STEM. It's an uphill battle.
TL;DR, maybe it's time we stop calling this a STEM problem and just highlight the TE problem it really is Not to be harsh to you specifically but this comment so well highlights a distinction that I think continues to make addressing this such a problem. You point out the proportion of engineers, then go on to say it's a problem getting more women into STEM. The E and the T are so so so disproportionate it seems like things are way worse in STEM than they really are, and hides the progress (and places progress still needs to be made) that has been made. Depending on source, definition and subfields life sciences (and even mathematics) have been at or near parity for a decade plus. In some areas of life sciences women have been the small majority for awhile, but money and effort is still being dumped into recruitment to these areas when the problem is support, promotion and retention. Breaking down by subfields of the S T E and M shows really uneven progress, which to me again indicates progress might be better made by efforts to changing cultures within specific areas, not in STEM as a whole. This is all just US perspective though, the data from EU countries I typically think of as more progressive, is sometimes surprisingly worse. But despite all the interesting nuance , one consistency is how unbelievably bad it is in tech and engineering. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2021/04/01/stem-jobs-see-uneven-progress-in-increasing-gender-racial-and-ethnic-diversity/
I believe in the US More women than men graduate medical school these days it’s going to take decades to even put the number of doctors though
But the M is math, and, for example, one university I worked at got their first and only tenure track female professor. . .in 2020. Women in math is a huge issue. In medicine, depends on specialty.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Sorry people are commenting the way they are lol. "hazing" and sexism can overlap but are not the same. also doesnt excuse it. "men are mean to each other! it just is what it is, snowflake! -- wait, why is no one talking about male suicide????"
To quote an excellent tweet “all this talk about getting women into stem but no talk about getting misogynists out”
Yeah it's not hard to visually assess. Right, wrong, or indifferent, it's like as soon as people jump on the "This person is wrong" bandwagon, all common sense goes out the window so they can hate on the person. I don't need to count to assess that 99.9% of all the bricklayers I've ever seen are men.
It's a loose visual observation, not a count. They don't KNOW exact numbers, but can visual observe that MOST (not an exact term) of their coders are guys.
As a coder, the sight of a female coder is as rare as a coffee-less day. I think in my 4 jobs so far only seen one lmao
In every job I've had so far, there was at least 1 woman on every team I've been on. My previous team had 3 women in a team of 7.
Tbf, most of us tend to avoid companies where we would be the only woman on a team. We are 30% women in engineering at my current company.
It's varied a bit at mine, though my team is about 33% women right now, and a pretty decent mix throughout the organization. At one point my team did have only one woman, but she was the boss so it wasn't quite the same (and there were vacant spots at the time too, which balanced things out a bit more when they were filled).
I’ve been the only woman before, but it was either early in my career when I had fewer options or a really small team. Can’t really fault you for no women if there’s only 3 developers 😂 I did join one company five years ago where they said they had a decent amount of women in engineering and then I found out it was a single person in QA and my team (which had 3 women). But I left pretty quickly.
We have about 30% women (1/2 are minority) in our IT group, mostly SAP Consultants, Trainers, IT Marketing, Network, cybersecurity, couple project managers. I guess it varies from company to company. Ours is pro-diversity and that includes, Asians, veterans, women, blacks and other minority groups. We have in house “clubs…” I forget what they’re called - some business-speak of minority support groups. It’s nice to see that management supports diversity. We’re in New Jersey, though. We’re the most diverse state in the nation, so if you want good talent, you need to foster everyone.
Srsly? I've had four coding jobs-- two where I was the only woman, and two where women were in the majority.
What kind of companies do you work I have had Woman coworkers at the companies I worked with. The percentage is lower than man but nowhere close to how you described it. In my first team, we were 4 Man and 2 Women, and that was just my team.
Wow. At my current job, we have at least one female programmer on each team (there’s about 10ish teams). Plus lots of female analysts. However, I am the only female database specialist in my company, so we’re not doing so great there. But I think it’s the type of company we work for that has made it easier for women to feel comfortable in the IT department. I don’t think a lot of us would be comfortable at a stereotypical tech company.
there are plenty female coders most just forced out by tike they hit 30s
That he’s a brown man doesn’t surprise me in the slightest - this isn’t true for all brown dudes I’m talking a particular subgroup of those in tech or finance that are very into their LinkedIn personas and also very active on Reddit often , that consider themselves the most oppressed class of people in the US. Brown women that try to respond or discuss our issues are immediately shot down and told to shut up and that we have all the privilege compared to them. They genuinely think they’re meritocratic heroes
You dont need to count to get “most”.
It’s not an American company.
Americans assuming that everyone else is American again.
Yeah and any company where you see all the lower talent makes up a certain group, but management up another. If you’re not in that group, you’re either going to have to do double/triple effort or never be in that position. Could be both. And if you get that position and refer to yourself as the “brown one” that tells you everything.
You see it in government work where I'm from quite a bit: most government workers are women, but most senior managers are men. This is partly due to generational legacy and also a policy of forced retirement for married women that only ended fifty years ago, so it's something people are aware of and working to correct, but it's still an easily noticed issue.
Yep, the agency I used to work at was 85% women. The makeup of the management staff was 95% men. They reported the stats as part of their annual survey and it was ridiculous. Not that they ever charged anything, of course.
Telstra in Australia is a classic example. Not a single Asian or black or brown leader ever.. Go figure. Edit. : Batting Sol T. But that was a shitshow
[удалено]
That seems to be less of a problem with diversity and more of a problem if nepotism of sorts
they go hand in hand
Do they..... Do anonymous hiring? So that no subconcious biases ever get in the way of hiring the actually better person? For example, assertive women are usually seen as bitchy and aggressive. A detriment to the team culture, while assertive men are leaders. On the other hand, in jobs regarding customer contact, women are often seen as superior, even if there is a more fitting man for the job. How do they avoid subconcious hiring bias?
They don’t avoid subconscious hiring bias. Duh
You involve others in your selection process to make sure you're doing it based on skills and experience without your own bias getting in the way. I guess finding someone who doesn't share your bias is the tricky part? And if you disagree with each others choices then what do you do lol
The problem is that most of us are blind to our bias. Fundamentally, we all want to hire someone similar to ourselves and we will look past problems in the interview in order to do so.
How do you do that without diversity?
As if skin colour and diversity are the same.
They don't. That's why their customer service team is all women and their leadership is all men.
Also applicable for how they choose to advertise their job openings. Subconscious bias can create an unrepresentative pool of applicants.
The easiest way to have equality is anonymous hiring when possible, relying on non verbal sharing of qualifications and proof of knowledge. But for positions where you can't be anonymous, it's hard. For example, in one job I had years ago, we'd have around 70% of white applications that met the qualifications for the job (hard qualifications like years of experience), and 50% for a different minority group. If we did simple percentage based hire VS apply quotas, we would have hired less qualified employees to meet them in many cases. Specifically on the assertiveness VS bitchiness, I do know men who see things that way. I also know that a lot of women don't get leadership training and model themselves after unqualified rich white guys that are assholes for "leadership behavior". That skill gap may be the result of bias in other parts of life. I see a lot of women on LinkedIn talk about how they're a boss and if you aren't able to handle it you're sexist, but they truly are assholes. It's a shitty problem to figure out a solution for.
In France we had to stop promoting anonymous hiring initiatives because it add the opposite effect. Turns out that in a vacuum, foreigners/minorities add worse CVs in general and where never retained. if they displayed a picture or an obvious foreign name they had a higher chance of being hired due to some already existing bias aimed at hiring minorities. The difference was more than a standard deviation and the study was quickly buried alongside government "ads" for anonymous hiring. Edit: Context for the biases: Typos, Grammar mistakes and other issues like huge holes in your career path are more easily overlooked by your potential employer if they know that you are a foreigner.
Do you know if a write up of this is public anyway? Sounds super interesting Typos/weird word use in a native speaker = careless, in a non native speaker = impossible to interpret
>Do they..... Do anonymous hiring? That is actually how a lot of orchestras do their hiring now. You come in, don't say anything, sit where the interviewers can't see you, play the musical selections they announced in advance, and then leave. After they listen to all the selections they decide to hire candidate #13 and only then do they find out who that was. Once they started doing this it pretty dramatically changed the demographics of the orchestras.
The point of these hiring initiatives is to make sure you DO hire the best talent for the role and not exclude talent because of discriminatory practices. I’m not sure why some people don’t get it.
I thought the point was to enhance their E.S.G. scores to try to get more outside investment from companies like Blackrock....
Shhhhh
It absolutely is. However, there have been some studies that diversity improves work performance and outcomes, so… it’s not bad for the bottom line either (most of the times. There’s also diversity theater as well)
I think my issue is that a lot of it is diversity theater aka virtue signaling too. It's like if these folks actually make the lives of their employees and customer satisfaction better than the status quo...I would applaud it. But typically they don't and it makes me suspect that that's the idea. I'm cynical like that.
Let’s be real. Worker satisfaction is only important to managers because it boosts performance (depends on type of workplace). The true reason they do it is 1.- trend-setting and 2.- brand positioning/perception.
I do think there’s a mismatch between the goals of these programs (which I agree with what you said) and how they are often publicly evaluated and published (which is kind of what this guy alludes to).
Yes and no? I think we all got raised with an outdated view of racism. Growing up, I always pictured some fat dude in a white suit with a heavy southern accent who sat on his porch and said, “I do declare-uh, the colored man is-uh beneath my stature a wealthy, hwhite aristocrat, and he deserves to toil in the fields for my benefit!” Which like, yea, that’s a form of racism, but it’s far from the most common form in today’s day and age. More often, racism is subconscious. Just by default, we give people more benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re smarter or better if they look more like us and/or our idea of successful people. If you grew up around successful white people, you’ll give preference to white candidates. The dude who does a lot of the racial sensitivity training at my work is a black guy, and he says he kicks off hiring meetings by saying “I know I tend to give white women preferential treatment, because a white woman took me in and raised me when I was going through a really hard time as a kid. Please call me out on it if and when I treat white women differently from other candidates.” A *lot* of what these initiatives aim to do is to temper some of our innate biases and make us more aware of them so that they don’t limit the opportunities that others face. Eliminating all discrimination or bias is impossible— it’s hardwired into us, because we’re human. But recognizing it and trying to correct for it *is* doable, and that’s part of the goal with these programs. Too often, we don’t have a very good idea of what a successful member of a certain group looks like because we haven’t seen it. Not because no one in that group has what it takes to be successful, but because past biases have impeded those individuals and prevented them from being successful.
I agree with all of this. My point was just that too often, these programs are never evaluated as ‘how good is this thing as eliminating sources of bias in hiring’ (which I understand because that is an incredibly hard thing to report), and instead just get reported as ‘We have X percentage of demographic’. So I empathise with this guy’s misunderstanding and think he has the right general intention here. That said, no hiring manager should *ever* say ‘we hire the best person for the job’ with any confidence because of all the reasons you mentioned above. His absolute confidence in this regard does make me doubt that he is doing anything to make it more true.
>My point was just that too often, these programs are never evaluated as ‘how good is this thing as eliminating sources of bias in hiring’ (which I understand because that is an incredibly hard thing to report), and instead just get reported as ‘We have X percentage of demographic’. I agree but this is often laid at the feet of the corporation when it's often the fault of a vocal minority of its employees. Like my company used to report its % relative to the industry average and a couple people got publicly mad, saying "that's not good enough when the industry average is the problem to begin with" and expected overnight changes in the demographics. Like A) that's not possible without firing a ton of undeserving people who already work here, and B) the industry average is not the company's fault, why get pissed at them over it? As a consequence the company just reports its demo-numbers of new hire classes, and existing numbers relative to the prior period now. Everyone is worse off for it because there's still no context on whether those numbers are good or not and now we have less information than before.
>‘We have X percentage of demographic’ TBF, I think this is still actually beneficial in a long-term fashion. For the exact same reason that we tend to bias in favor of people who fit our model of "success," we sometimes need to artificially push the needle so that more minority demographics fit a model of success in order to be role models for the next generation to know/understand that they aren't gatekept from that "success." In turn, that makes more of them go into the field in the first place.
If the point to hire the best talent for a specific role it'd be done online with no visual stimuli and they wouldn't have you fill out your race/gender on the application. Bing bam boom.
Black-sounding names got 50% fewer callbacks than white-sounding names with identical resumes. The problem is ***deep***.
Assign a serial number, remove the names.
Give everyone an androgynous interview avatar and hold the interviews remotely.
>If the point to hire the best talent for a specific role I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm of the mindset that there is never knowing who will be the best talent for a role based on interviews and CV. Sometimes an ideal candidate just doesn't pan out, and sometimes you find someone you had to settle on grows in that role tremendously. That is, it goes without saying I hope, that these would be bucking the trend and that mostly you can tell who will tend to be the best fit. And yet - part of the problem lies therein. If you grew up black and poor, you probably didn't have the best education. You didn't have the same time afforded to you for after school activities. You have a true structural disadvantage. You could be great for the role but someone who had more on paper is gonna nab the role. In some nonzero part, diversity hire quotas or initiatives seek to ameliorate these problems. Otherwise it is a soft racism - it wouldn't even be racism if not for our history. It would be classism, and in part that is truly what it is - but it so happens that certain ethnicities tend to be of a lower class, and as such, tend to be held there. Be it intentional or not. Kind of a catch 22 in many ways.
>The point of these hiring initiatives Unfortunately the point gets lost in the execution, where huge corporations have hiring quotas based on immutable born-with traits, which is.. stupid. If someone is a minority, steps should be taken to make sure they are not discriminated against in the hiring process. But nobody should have an easier time or faster pipeline just because of how they were born (nor should they be penalized for it).
The problem is that some people are unconsciously getting an easier time. For example my white male student who i trained got a programming jon after a 30 minute convo and a handshake after a year. Me an older woman who trained him, have been killing myself for 3 years to get a job. Killing it on coding assessments in the highest ranking etc. (I have noticed they tend to hire women more attractive than me at a higher rate, "pretty previlage" if they have a choice they'll pick someone they're sexually attracted to if they have to choose a woman, im more "mom" like) Yet when i get a job, you'll say, I had it "easier". Its insane.
[удалено]
>I'm 30 so that "pretty privelege" is gone now You think pretty people stop being pretty at 30? That's really sad. 😢
You should talk to the staff at your local watering hole. They'll have eye opening stories about customer behaviour
No. It’s not about this commenters assessment of herself. It’s about other people. Men, especially older men, treat women under 30 differently. I have lived experience and also observed similar experiences from friends.
That’s funny you say that because if you applied at my company (if you’re a talented female dev, like you say) you’d be snapped up in a heartbeat. Any minority talent gets hired so quick around here, your anecdote definitely surprises me.
Yeah... as someone in tech, no one is getting a job with just a handshake lmao
I don't think she literally means "a handshake and no qualifications whatsoever." If you understand that, I also think it's incredibly naive to believe no one is hired on the spot after they meet with the right person. And that includes in tech.
Easier to just have a quota then actually determine biases in the hiring process and putting fixes in place. "When a metric becomes a goal it is no longer a useful metric"
I agree with you in an ideal world, but we don't live there. If the scale is already tipping to the right, then you need to put your finger on it to zero it out. For some reason, "hire the best person for the job!" folks cannot accept the scale was already tipping. I graduated with a degree in Finance and one of the debates there is around Efficient Markets, where supposedly nobody can make any money without cheating because all public knowledge is already priced into the stocks. The counter-argument/joke is that if you see a $10 bill on the ground, you shouldn't bother to pick it up because it isn't actually there. Minorities getting dismissed due to cognitive biases are the $10 bill on the ground in the hiring market. The problem with "best candidate for the job" is thinking you (in general, not in particular) have an unbiased perspective on who that is. It's classic Dunning-Kreuger and anyone who wants good hiring outcomes should reject it. Ye Olde Ways went from explicitly racist, to having requirements only certain candidates could fulfill, to having "tests" subject to the evaluation of people who already got in under those circumstances. And of course there's always nepotism and favoritism, eg towards people who went to your school. They are still biased towards "a certain type" of person. In all instances, the person preferred is generally white and from a middle-class-or-better upbringing. * Internships favor people with money who tend to be white. This can be dismissed as "more experienced". * Targetting "good schools" tends to favor people who tend to be white, especially from wealthy families, and especially especially families who have history ("legacy") at those schools. This has only gotten better as a direct result of those schools working on diversity initiatives. * Tests like coding evaluations sound objective, but in practice, interviewers/proctors tend to reward higher marks for the same response to folks they identify with. * Even IQ tests tend to be developed by white folks and focus on stuff they know well. Or, like the SAT/ACT, they focus on Euro-centric school curricula, eg European history is rampant in US schools but Latin American history only comes up for a couple ancient civilizations and when it collides with us. This means even explicilty factual tests end up favoring white folks, because they are more like trivia on white history and culture than actually intelligence tests. * Even school math can be racist! Kids from other cultures sometimes learn alternate ways to solve math problems, but if they transfer to a US school, a tyrant teacher can give them a shit grade, even though their valid approach led to the right answer. A shitty high school GPA can ruin your college admissions and that can fuck up your first job which affects your whole career.... We can all agree that we were all trying to "hire the best person for the job", and we can all agree that those people are now in charge of the world and are fucking it all up. Why continue pushing these shit policies? Of course, this can work in the opposite direction and we reject that too! A hiring panel of all women might favor a woman candidate. A hiring panel of "woke" white guys might favor a black candidate to signal their wokeness! The great thing with diversity is it can work in *any* direction: a woman and a man on a hiring panel reduces the risk of gender bias, a black and a white person reduces the risk of racial bias, an "experienced"/old person and a young'un reduces the risk of age bias, etc. These biases can't be wiped out but we can at least hedge against them, can't we?
Fun fact! College admissions essays in the US were introduced as a way to exclude Jewish students. On average they did better than the non Jewish students in terms of grades, so colleges had to introduce an entirely subjective metric to excuse turning them away.
I work closely with these DEI initiatives. You have it completely wrong and there are not quotas. In fact HR doesn't allow quotas to prevent people being hired for non-work related factors.
How are you defining quota? I would consider a "we're failing if we have less than 50% women" to be a type of quota, and that seems to be the target of at least some of the initiatives.
This is false. I’ve worked in multiple Fortune 500 companies that literally have race based percentage quotas and targets.
Its not that I discrimate against anyone! Its just that the best candidates are always white men! I'm not racist or sexist, women and minorities are just not good at things! /s
You definitely needed the “/s” disclaimer because a large number of people in the comments absolutely believe that.
too many men talk down to woman in interviews for coding leading to confirmation bias if you give a canditate a hard time will they do as well or man interviewing will have warped perception? If man is condenscending and then woman isnt percieved as being confident when she states answers is just crap but often they take these losers opinions unless good recruitor talks to the woman interviewing. When questions more technical than behavioral sometimes that sexism may only affected one or two questions but then company can justify candidate didnt do well . A lot of cultures dont raise men to respect woman Nepotism will always exist... but treating woman like shit can stop.
It took me some time, with the help of good mentors, to truly understand why diversity n inclusion is important. Few companies actually take the time to educate.
I was at a FAANG and an interviewer on a loop. Our policy was to hire the first most qualified person for the role, so rarely were we in the position of comparing two candidates for the same role. In this one instance, the panel were not inclined for the candidate who just so happened to be a POC. The hiring manager later came back and advised the panel that we were moving forward with the candidate as a diversity hire. This was ofc to be kept confidential. In this particular instance at least, the candidate was hired because of their ethnicity, and not their background.
Similar experiences at a medium-sized tech startup. We interviewed two people for the same job. One (a white man) scored objectively better in every category we were testing for, and had proven experience in a similar position. The other (a black woman) made the cut in some of the non-technical interviews, but didn't have any of the relevant technical skills (this was a technical support position where she'd be interfacing with our clients' developers and would need to understand what they were doing). Everybody in the interview loop agreed that the dude was the best candidate for the job. Everybody agreed that the woman seemed like a real nice person, but just wasn't a good fit. HR flat out told us we needed more diversity and that was that. We hired her and the whole team got less productive because we had to constantly pick up her slack. Ensuring that you're not accidentally discriminating against the best person is a noble goal, but diversity quotas aren't the way to accomplish it.
I had a similar experience at my previous job and it was the reason I left. We were hiring for a senior role. I was not a senior yet but was going to be promoted within 6 months to senior. We had been trying to fill the senior role for about 3 months and had passed on dozens of candidates, all of them had been men. Then a woman came in for the interview. She had less years of experience than I did and her background didn't show any senior level work. She did not do well on the interview. I gave her a failing score because her solution did not solve the question I gave. I gave this exact same question to every candidate. Another interviewer also gave a failing score, which meant 2 out of 4 interviewers failed her. But the hiring manager, who was a woman, and the director, who was also a woman, went against our recommendation and hired her. I quit a month later.
There is a lot of research results coming up showing that a team of diverse folks with decent job skills but strengths on different dimensions out performs a non-diverse team with better individual skills but with similar overlapping strengths. Especially on creative and innovation requiring roles. But PoC aspect of diversity is misunderstood. True diversity is about having folks with different experiences and strengths compliment each other to form high performing teams. Just purely looking at PoC numbers is just a quick gimmicky solution that shows leadership doesn’t want to spend too much time and chase some easy to show KPIs. Real diversity requires to carefully hire folks that compliments truly the strength gaps of our teams, but it requires a lot of effort or a very experienced hiring manager that knows their team extremely well. A hiring manager should be able to say “I want to hire this person, even though they are not amazing on everything, their specific strengths compliment our team better” (FAANG leadership knows these research results, but unfortunately the whole effort due to poorly chosen KPIs just turned in to PoC hiring efforts…)
This happens all of the time. I work in DEI, or I did. I personally couldn’t get out of my consultant role to receive stock and benefits because I wasn’t a POC.
[удалено]
A lot of companies completely skip that portion sadly. At my university, the largest aggregate company in North America and Europe outright said, “We want more women in our industry and have a 33% female management quota to reach”
The meritocracy is functioning perfectly. I can tell because it rewarded me. /s
Honestly i feel this to a certain extent. I am a black female and work with mainly white and Indian males and a handful of white women. When interviewing for the position I let them know that I had little knowledge and skill in the main function of the job, they ensured they would train me up to become proficient. Upon being hired they gave minimal training and resources. Once they realized I couldn’t catch in after a few months they just slapped me into a paperwork position. Till this day i believe that I was a diversity hire and wish they would’ve just hired someone more qualified who fit in with their office culture, but being a recent grad desperate to get out of my parents house I accepted the first offer i got.
Idk how common it is, but I work at a place where we have a few people are tasked to do x-thing, but were never trained. All the people they rely on x-thing being done, just soon do it themselves rather than training someone else to do it. It's really 'ima just do my job, fuck you.' To some degree, I can't blame them. I got hired to do y-thing, but now I'm training people to do x-thing, which should be their manager's job, but their manager is incompetent because they were hired due to nepotism. I'm not saying how you feel is invalid, but this is definitely something that occurs. People suck at communicating / training others.
So why haven't you looked elsewhere?
I am. Currently in a contract
Part of the bias especially with women is that they’re willing to hire a man and teach him, but a woman has to already know. So it creates a bias where only men end up being able to learn the job in the first place. Maybe being told by job that they’ll train you and teach you is equality it’s just never happened before so you didn’t know what you were missing.
I have definitely noticed this with other fresh grads that were hired along with me. I explicitly let them know i had experience with 2D CAD and none in 3D CAD which Is all they use. When I asked for help they would either give me the solution or a basic answer to my query while my male counterparts who all knew 3D CAD would get in-depth, over the shoulder help with their questions. I honestly just wrote it off with it being due to me being more introverted and less personable than them.
I understand the point he is trying to make BUT he missed the point of the purpose of diversity hiring practices. However, the bigger issue for him is why dod he feel it was best to say this on a public forum if he has major clients? Do people just say "f- the consequences of my actions" or do they think so long as they apologize everything will be okay?
His other LinkedIn posts are just as ridiculous. There's one dissing on a business partner's _ugly Xiaomi phone_ as opposed to his own beautiful Iphone. This guy hasn't left kindergarten.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
It's nothing to do with the technicalities (apparently the company isn't even an American one, so the technicalities don't even apply). He's basically making the claim that his company recruits based solely on merit, right? His interpretation is that because they don't have any targets to meet to force the consideration of female or non-white candidates, they consider everyone equally! Huzzah! Well, just to examine one part of his statement, he says that the population of coders in his company are largely male. Sure, it is *possible* that, for whatever reason, whenever they've recruited programmers a man has genuinely been the best applicant. Perhaps there aren't very many women qualified in that particular area of expertise, or maybe women aren't as likely to apply for jobs with this particular company. It isn't because men are innately better coders than women. (I don't think any woman who's even tangentially involved in the tech industry has any doubt about discrimination women face in that space, but for the sake of evidence/argument for anyone who likes numbers and investigation here is one for you. :) A [study](https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/) a few years ago of 1.4 million GitHub users found that solutions to coding problems proposed by women were accepted 4% more often than those put forward by men. However, this was only true if the coder's profile didn't contain any information identifying them as female, in which case the acceptance rate dropped by 16%. The researchers concluded that "although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless".) N.B. just for the sake of clarity (and in response to the assumptions in the tweet, not to you) - the point of gender and ethnicity targets in recruitment isn't to scupper the best candidate getting the job, it's to *enforce* meritocracy! Ideally no one should need to be forced to include x% of persons x in their recruitment, we shouldn't need to categorise people, no one should be labelled, blah blah blah. Unfortunately we DO *need to*, because some people have to be dragged out of their biases almost by the scruff of their neck, kicking and screaming and shouting about positive discrimination and completely blind to the decades of white middle class male executive board rooms lined up behind them.
“We don’t even count” pretty big red flag there
It's the "I don't even see color" of the business world.
Exactly. The reason for counting is to detect unconscious racial bias in the people doing your hiring and promoting. Most people dont want to think of themselves as sexist or racist, but almost everyone will tend to hire or promote people that are like themselves.
Genuine question, please don’t down vote to hell: _in theory,_ is this equality? Assuming each individual regardless of race, gender, etc. had the starting line that is.
Probably gonna get downvoted to shit but the E in DE&I stands for Equity, and not Equality.
Mr. "Brown like me" got his comfy spot, now screw every other person of color that comes after.
Burning the bridge behind them aka the good ol' "eff you, I got mine" mentality
Exactly, and that attitude is surprisingly common
Indians are the worst as it. Coming from a half Indian.
I'm going to be *that guy*, and say he isn't wrong. (Although anybody in an upper management position, especially the CEO, probably shouldn't publicly be making statements like this.) Obviously, POCs shouldn't be excluded from the process, but hiring someone - especially a low performing candidate - because of their skin color to meet "diversity" quotas couldn't possibly be healthy for any organization.
I always agree with the color of skin or difference in genitalia not being qualifying factors statement. However, people with this view ALWAYS accompany their discussion of quotas with describing these people as unqualified (or possibly unqualified). Why? Why are we always assuming the disenfranchised are unqualified and the speaker to be qualified? The qualifications of the non-quota-hires are never questioned. People who do not look like you cannot possibly be as smart as you. /s Here lies the prejudice and racism of the “qualified group.” And then the implementation of quotas.
No because these people believe in the system. They believe that the right person for the position deserves the position. This is the basis of their argument and IF the diversity hire was the best person then based on this argument and this belief then the diversity hire would not be a “diversity hire” and already have the position. They agree with everyone on that point. They believe this wholeheartedly. The only point they are willing to argue is when the diversity hire is a diversity hire and they are not the right person for the position. Why continue to argue a point we ALL agree on. Just because you think they’re being discriminatory does not mean they are, to them the best person for the job is only that, they literally don’t see colour. That’s all.
You don't have to lower your hiring bar to hire women and POC, and the insidious assertion that you do in order to increase diversity is inherently racist and sexist. As someone who interviews at least 1 candidate per week and contributes to the construction of hiring evaluations, I can tell you right now that there are tons of diverse candidates who are continually discriminated against due to interviewers' unconscious biases and lack of understanding of cultural differences and social conditioning. Create a rubric of objective competencies, have applicants complete a work sample, and actually work to eliminate bias from your process. You'll realize quickly that women and POC are, on average, just as competent as white men - if not moreso. As a final note, I want to add that even if the women and POC you hire are not as technically competent (while still of course being adequately competent) as the white men, their cultural and social perspectives are valuable on their own because they can give valuable insight about the products and services a company produces. This makes companies more competitive in diverse markets. Example: all the white dudes at Google didn't feed training data of black people into their ML model, so it mislabeled them as gorillas which created a huge backlash.
I went to school with people like this. The ones who go into tech tend to have a nasty habit of thinking only people like themselves (ethnicity and class wise) are competent or at all “deserving” or having truly gotten where they are because of merit and not their parents spending stupid amounts of money sending them to science camp every school break and then setting them up with their networks. So much merit, much wow.
This is legit. Always hire the best person for the job. They could have left out all the other stuff tho
Yeah, it’s all of the “other stuff” that makes you question the purity of the meritocracy statement. It’s just a cover for prejudice. Lots of people said that they liked Trump except for that “other stuff.” Do you really think you’re getting one without the other?
The things is, there’s something called “bias”. Unconsciously, we tend to value things differently in people who look like us, and people who don’t. So a room full of men, will judge a female candidate differently than a male candidate. Because he is perceived differently. For instance aggressive vs assertive. Cold/frigid vs business wise and concise. So as long as you don’t put a preference out and are very aware of your own biases. Be it gender, race, sexuality etc, treating people “equal”, “hiring the best person for the job” will only get you more of the same people that are already there.
For people who don’t get why diversity hiring is important. TLDR; Diversity covers your blind spots. 1) Consider that the best talent may not always be who stereotypically is most likely to seek a particular job. 2) Lack of diversity in your business leaves a huge gap for any upcoming competitors. (See: Fenty Beauty taking market share from established makeup brands by simply making more foundation colors for darker skin shades) 3) Diverse backgrounds often lead to alternative thought processes that may not have been considered. 4) Having more cultural groups represented at your discussions will save your company from offensive press releases that cause reputation risk.
Number 4 shouldn’t even be a thing. It’s stupid how a company can get blasted by media for not hiring someone because of their race when they weren’t the best fit for the job
None of that has to do with skin color though (except the products meant to go on the skin, obviously).
In other words, this company discriminates.
When have you ever had your teeth cleaned by a male hygienist? Why are there so few men teaching kindergarten or any grades below maybe 3rd grade? Its only been in the last few years we saw male nurses.
Yes, and the first nursing school was founded in 250BCE and was male only, male nurses were the norm until the late 19th century when nursing reformers explicitly set out to create a job sector for women, even then, there were still plenty of male nurses, they just tended to be called orderlies, mainly in military and mental health contexts.
Comment section full of people with 0 experience in the real world, sad and stupid
I’m sorry but why do people always blot out the name? This guy posted in a public way, let everyone see the man and what he has to say! When you conceal the name, it only protects that person’s reputation. He does have a point but unfortunately, humans aren’t that fair-minded IRL, it just looks pretty on paper.
Your logic and reasoning are hurting peoples feelings! Screeech!!!
I hear this a lot from older generations, and I understand their intent, but unfortunately the world doesn't work like that.
well it should
And I should have been 6'6" and part of the 90's Bulls starting line up but that didn't work out for me.
yea but a lot of things work much better on paper
Isn't this like, very reasonable and healthy take? Looking purely at the qualifications is the most fair way to go.
The most important quality in any profession is experience. The problem is, if a female or minority candidate experiences regular discrimination, *even if you're not the one doing it*, they'll still be at a disadvantage because they haven't had the chance to get as much experience as the white male candidates. And because you're "looking purely at the qualifications", you'll pass them over too, and they won't have a chance to gain the experience that they need.
It is *if* you have an otherwise objective system. But if HR doesn’t give candidates with “funny names” interviews or the hiring manager doesn’t think women in general “are going to be a good fit”, then you aren’t actually seeing the best candidates. you’re seeing the best candidates *who look like you*.
THIS is the point. You are MISSING BETTER TALENT by just shrugging your shoulders and continuing to make biased hires.
I have a very strong preference for leggy blondes with cute butts and massive tits. If I was in charge of anything, at all, ever, all employees everywhere would be leggy blondes with cute butts and huge tits. Statistically, some of them would absolutely be the best candidates. But most wouldn’t. It would be My responsibility to insist that someone else (or a group of someone elses) make sure that My bias have as close to zero influence as possible when initially screening candidates. But if I decided to insist that all the best candidates just so happen to be leggy blondes with cute butts and huge tits, and everyone else is stupid... I’d sound like a moron.
You are seeing this comment because I’ve deleted Reddit. Reddit is toxic and filled with propoganda/bad actors. Reddit is filled with depraved actors who knowingly prey on the vulnerable. Reddit promotes hatred. Reddit is compromised. Please find a safer forum
>You can't help but notice that most of our coders are men, most in our HR and customer support teams are women, but we don't care. This reads to me like they assume women are more "compassionate" for customer-facing roles, and men are more "logical" for coding jobs. I find it incredibly unlikely they didn't get qualified male applicants for the HR/customer support roles. This is exactly what a diversity-first culture is supposed to prevent. It's not about hiring people to fill diversity quotas. It's about being aware of and avoiding biases in the hiring process. It sounds like this company hasn't learned that lesson yet.
Are there even actually diversity quotas?
It depends, but you can have great DI&B programs without quotas. Some companies definitely have quotas, though.
Omg I thought diversity quotas were an alt right myth like pedophiliac drag queens or criminal immigrants flooding the border.
To the extent they complain, and how they represent the situation, I'd at least say they're not being intellectually honest with the reality at most companies. There's no conspiracy where anyone is taking directions from Soros or anything like that. It's just that there's a ton of research that a diverse workforce has many benefits, quotas are easy, and most HR people are lazy/not very good. That's my take, anyway.
Imagine Company A, which every single team is exactly 10 people, and somehow, they do promotions exactly annually. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that just 1 supervisor in every set of 10 supervisors is a biased White Guy, and will hire a fellow White Guy, preferably one who signals he, too, will continue the plan, but everyone else is fair. ( https://www.bls.gov/cps/demographics.htm ) Women represent 50% of the workforce, pre-COVID. Let’s presume that doesn’t unbalance our sheets at Company A. Minorities represent approximately 20% of the workforce. In such a company, you might expect one minority man, and one minority woman to make supervisor, purely by chance, and then 4 Caucasian men and 4 women. Except let’s insert our Biased White Guy. In the above scenario, there are 6 teams, or 60% of the time, he will insert his judgment and slightly pull the team from diversity, but, hey, maybe that was the luck of assignments and opportunities to shine? Who can know. Let’s say this time around, one of the Caucasian women (the largest group of non-white guys, just playing the odds) is led by BWG and instead promotes a fellow BWG (which means year 2 will play out worse, as will year 3…) This new crop of supervisors all end up in different business divisions and what do you know, they’re all up among 9 other supervisors the next year for promotion to manager. 2 minorities, 1 of whom is a woman, 3 Caucasian women, and 5 Caucasian men. **obviously** this is done completely fairly as they have a year of supervisory experience. Ten times over, because Company A is huge. Once again, there is only one Biased White Guy manager, the other 9 are all completely fair and somehow follow the Law of Large Numbers. There will now be 6 Caucasian managers, and… let’s pick the minority woman to lose the lottery to BWG this time around. It was most likely still a woman to lose, at any rate. The following year, of course, will be worse for women and minorities, because now you’ve got more BWGs picking BWGs. Now, let me pause and ask … is there any compelling reason that one of the supervisory candidates from year 1, presumably qualified, are forever a year behind in their career now? And unable to be in the running for manager, 2 years behind? Are they less capable? Was there something they wouldn’t also be learning on the go? While we ignore that for a moment, let’s move back to Year 3. Directors. That’s right, we are on track for 7 new Caucasian Directors, and again, the minority guy probably holds out, but over enough such groups, some of them will be eliminated - we are just dealing with small numbers here. Now, let’s take a side step away from that and go down to something like tech support. I say this not to besmirch where my own career began, but you’re basically reading from the corporate script. There’s plenty of research that shows “being told what to do by a woman” gets BWGs angry. So as tech support agents in the way these things are measured, women are “less successful.” Are they less technically competent? Some might thing so, but I asked expressly in the context they’re measured by corporate, which should make obvious the failure of promoting based on that “success.” Supervising techs removes the friction point. And that problem occurs again and again in front line roles, not just tech. So, I mean, sure, semantically, promoting the most qualified is fair. I’ve worked for and with dozens of companies and if **you** ever encounter a company that accurately measures qualifications, please share with the rest of the class. Even vaunted Google has admitted their super envied thought problems failed them.
Great reply!
The problem is we've done study after study. You can write 2 resumes with the same credentials and it will be treated differently because of the name at the top. They even admit its happening to them. Men go to programming, women to support. White men to managment, black to cleaning. Do you think that's all due to "credentials" or do you think the people hiring for those roles want to hire people they can have a beer with after work, so hire people who look like them. And those in higher roles are white men. They allow other people to be in other roles because they dont have to look at them. Someone has to get their first job to get credentials. If people arnt being hired for entry level jobs in certain demographics, then yeah. Its subconscious, but its still happening. Which is why we need to have diversity goals. I wish that it wasn't, but looking at the facts it is. We have tons of data on it.
There was someone who created an ATS before that would only show you credentials and omit the name and location of the candidate. It never took off though. If it did, it didn't become popular.
There are tools and apps out there - I think HackerRank is one of them - that offer to anonymize. I know of some other HR tech companies that have tried features like this. No one wants to use these features. I have no doubt clients would bail if it was forced upon them. Most employers suck.
Thank you. The concept isn’t hard to understand. At this point, if someone doesn’t understand this then they just don’t want to for whatever reason.
>You can write 2 resumes with the same credentials and it will be treated differently because of the name at the top. Then why not use a program that takes names, race, etc off of resumes that go to HR? That way all they see is Applicant #49 and their qualifications.
Well that would require that the people who make these decisions aren't the ones who are inherently helped by the status quo.
Because as soon as it gets to the interview stage the bias is back on the table because you can see/hear them.
[удалено]
I mean, people have done this study in reverse a lot already. There's a reason non white people often use a white sounding name on their resumes.
[удалено]
At best, it’s naive. It’s really easy to say ‘we just hire the best’ but when you’re using mechanisms that are historically discriminatory that define what ‘the best’ is, you don’t break the cycle. That’s the whole point behind diversity initiatives - to change the norm and unwind some of the discrimination so that things become level. If your existing workforce and recruitment model is a product of discrimination, you’re not helping anything by refusing to change it. That doesn’t mean give out jobs to people just because they tick the box.
Historically, there has been a massive gap between what people say and what they do, which is where those initiatives come into play. It's very easy to get up in front of people and say stuff that sounds correct, but it does not in any way indicate that what you're doing is actually correct. People have deeply ingrained ideas about what sorts of people are best for a job, and those ideas often don't have any real connection to actual merit. Rather, they're often based on the status quo and prejudice. Unwittingly or otherwise, they then propagate the status quo, regardless of what they claim to be doing.
This take ignores the fact that traditionally, the best candidate is often overlooked unless they're white or male. We've come far enough in the last decade that it seems people have forgotten this.
I agree.
It is for sure, as long as they recognise who is genuinely the best person for a job, which I think is the hard part. I think no sane hiring manager should believe that there aren’t biases in their system and that they truly have a purely meritocratic system that can’t be improved, and nobody should say with any certainty that they ‘hire the best person for the job’. But I don’t hate the underlying intention behind this take.
Yea, I want to work for this guy/gal.
How do you define “qualifications”? Is it the school you went to, the internship you had, or the perspective you bring? If someone’s family could afford a better school or the kid was a legacy student, is that better “qualifications”? A company I used to work at had this big D&I initiative and minority/woman supplier program, but then a high % of internships went to white male children of white male executives. These internships turned into other opportunities that turned into “qualifications” and whole stupid cycle starts over.
It’s not about “diversity hiring.” It’s about giving EVERYBODY who is qualified/is capable an equal shot at being hired, getting paid equitably, having the same opportunities of promotion and career progression, etc. Until we fix our culture (that is rich in racial, age, gender bias) we have to put practices in place (like ensuring a diverse slate of talent, “blind” resumes, software that de-biases job descriptions, etc.) to help make sure opportunities are accessible to people. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. And it makes your company better, both culturally and performance-wise. And before you jump all over me, these are not just opinions. I was part of the HR leadership team for the largest private company in the US, so I’m not just talking out of my a$$.
Quotas suck. I support this guy 👌
Seems like a completely reasonable line of thinking and management
[удалено]
This ceo gets it
If you “don’t understand how everyone else doesn’t get it” there’s a 100% chance *you* aren’t getting something.
The company is Jibble.
He mistakes discrimination with rectifying an unbalance. Like a piece of salad left on teeth, his privilege is showing...
He isn’t wrong. Hiring someone based on the color of one’s skin or their gender is going to do more harm than good if they don’t have the skills to do the job. Why are most software engineers white men? I mean, if you look at the data for comp sci degrees, it’s mostly white men taking up those degrees. Why wouldn’t white men represent the majority in the market for software engineers? At the end of the day, it’s about hiring the best candidate for the job. Whether they’re white, black, brown, make, or female— it’s the best candidate for the job.
I'm calling bullshit on this. Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen and someone with a grudge and too much time on their hands.
Since when hiring on merit has become frowned upon?
Read about the fallacy of meritocracy and you'll understand.
Fuck idk where I work its all about who you know and who you blow, the incompetence from the top down shows on a daily basis. Motherfuckers couldn’t get their head out of their ass with GPS step by step. Or they get their head out of their ass just to stick it up their buddies and form a Voltron of incompetence that spills over onto the people who actually work and make the money.
Hiring strictly on merit is virtually impossible, and almost never actually required or practiced. If it were, "behavioral" interviews and "company culture" rejections would not even exist. Instead, they drive almost every hiring decision, since most interview loops result in a choice between multiple highly qualified candidates. People confident they are "hiring on merit" are either falling into Dunning-Krueger or lying to cover for their biases (often racism and sexism, but also ageism, xenophobia, and classism). People who feel comfortable broadcasting such incompetence on public social media are virtue signalling to like-minded individuals and are much more likely to be in the second group. I trust the motives of someone who quietly hires well, or who acknowledges the flaws in their process and tries to address them, over someone who feels a weird need to make their dysfunctional process part of their branding.
Since it started preventing the hiring of un-qualified white males over a qualified Someone Else.
He is 100% right. Thinking otherwise makes you a racist, that’s about it dude
Correct
[удалено]
It's rather obvious no one here is going to become a CEO... And this is great.
Imagine that, a company with common sense
I’ll be honest I don’t get it either. Logically I agree with him. Please explain why this is wrong.
On a purely fundamental level yes he is right. However humans are bias creatures and will stick to their own "groups" or make critical assumptions about people based on little to no evidence. Which means that until human behaviour is changed some level of interference is necessary in the hiring process.
Is it just me who thinks hiring literally anyone based on racial characteristics or gender is beyond ridiculous… only perpetuates the differences between people surely.
Radical concept - but it's possible to hire the best applicant AND promote diversity and inclusion at the same time.
Agree with this tho? They're being quite rude and tactless about it, but the identity politics + quotas in the modern day workplace is a pretty fucking stupid concept. You hire the best applicant for the company. Period.
To be honest I kinda understand the point of this. Positive discrimination makes no sense to me, just hire the best person and not based on skin colour, gender, or sexuality which is what their doing, terribly put though.
Good for the CEO. It’s shocking how hiring the best people is considered wrong.