[thelock85]

Fascinating. It mostly seems you're company is taking a poor approach to diversity, and doing even worse at communicating and gaining buy-in from existing employees. With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse. So perhaps the real issue is that the hiring process allows for "many engineers who are barely competent at their job." And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants. But by your own admission, the bar is already low enough to admit false positives so I think you're conflating issues here. On a side note: holding your argument to be true, could the existence of barely competent engineers lead your article to a different title: "How my company is lowering the bar to accommodate privilege." I don't have that data, but could be an interesting followup!

[acctjustforyou]

>With the exception of #1, it seems all of these strategies are aimed at eliminating signals that skew heavily toward elite-educated men so that the top of your funnel is more diverse.

The top of a company's funnel could also be made more diverse by starting with "OK, there are 7+ billion people on the planet..." - that doesn't make it a good idea.

>And perhaps there aren't enough resources to improve said process and handle a greater volume of potentially unqualified applicants.

That's how you handle a great volume of applicants - you look for indicators of skill. None of them are necessary or sufficient; they just increase the likelihood that this will be a good hire a little bit. Giving every single person who is able to use the "resume" template in Microsoft Word an in-person interview would catch those false negatives you're missing, but it would be ridiculously inefficient.

Or am I to assume that when you want to hire a plumber you canvass your neighborhood door-to-door so you dont miss out on someone who might be qualified but just drummed out of the plumbing industry for institutional reasons?

Although I do like how you dismissed points 2-8 with a simple handwaving of "elite males are more likely to score higher on these points, so they're no good."

Not to mention the fact that that argument does virtually nothing to contracdict point #8. If youre someone who truly believes they're a Great Programmer Who's Not Being Given a Chance Due To White Male Supremacy, a github profile is the greatest arrow in your quiver that you could possibly dream of.

[thelock85]

I'm not following most of your points here (standalone maybe but not with respect to my comments). No one is saying you don't need to ID signals in the noise or define quality indicators of skill.

But if your company is taking on the diversity challenge then yes, start with the fact that there is 7+ billion people, (or at least the ones with Github profiles, to your point). And yes, canvas all available channels so you don't miss out on people "drummed out... for institutional reasons (there's an entire industry that does this). Then start over in defining your signals and indicators --in this case some sweet spot between the people they hope(!) exists and the false positives they wish they had missed.

If you're not willing to take these measures, simply sit back, do work and try to make money (or in this guy's case leave the company since he's not in charge). Otherwise, let's give retirement to diversity in this year's tech hall of fame.