[ramensea]

I agree that the left and the rights reaction over the memo has been overblown. However I am unsure whether or not you think the Googler's opinion is novel. You state both, "that Damore’s skepticism about current practices is widespread" and "imperfect his attempt, he was fired, in short, for thinking on his own". As someone who works in the tech industry let me tell you his beliefs were not novel. Its a commonly held belief in the tech industry. I have heard countless renditions of the same argument with vary degrees of sexism.

I'm not sure whether or not he deserved to get fired. Sundar's response was well written and is worth reading Damore, however childish his written seems, is not young and has worked at Google for four years. He's by no means a junior engineer. At the very least the lack of understand of software development speaks for something.

"And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must be made here, not a logical deduction from data. Is diversity important enough for you to temporarily tolerate an increased risk of not hiring the most qualified person? That’s the trade-off nobody seems willing to spell out."

This is not how "affirmative action" works. "Affirmative action" states that if you have two "equally" qualified candidates you favor the least represented in your society or company. Thus there should be no added risk.

[lloydde]

> This is not how "affirmative action" works. "Affirmative action" states that if you have two "equally" qualified candidates

If you can quantify candidates' capabilities, please start your money printing press.

[ramensea]

Then then why would affirmative action lead to less capable employees?

[panda88888]

I'll bite.

It can happen if the target diversity ratio is different from that of the candidate pool. For example, trying to have software engineer distribution that matches that of the general population, or even just college graduates.

Let's assume men and women are equal in the distribution of their ability to perform tasks required as a software engineer, i.e. same mean, same standard deviation, etc.

Let's also assume the female candidate pool targeted by affirmative action is smaller than that of male candidate pool, i.e. more male applicants than female, hence underrepresented relative to general population.

Let's say the hiring bar is such that top 10% from either gender meets the bar, since the distributions are the same.

Now, if male pool has 1000 applicants, and female pool has 400 applicants, this would mean there are 100 qualified male candidates, and 40 qualified female candidates.

If the company wants 60/40 representation, with the understanding that 50/50 desirable but not probable, as long as the company only needs 100 hires, the company can hit the target without lowering the bar (60 male + 40 female). However, if the company wants to hire more employees and still maintain diversity target, it would be necessary to hire female candidates that are not within the top 10%.

Again, this is assuming the target diversity is _not_ the same as the candidate pool, but rather some other demographics that the company is trying to match (like local population demographics).

Since Google gets so many qualified applicants (and even more applicants in general), most engineers are probably overqualified anyway regardless of gender, so unqualified female engineer is most likely not issue at all. However, more qualified male engineer would be rejected (in the case of 100 hires, 40 male engineers would be rejected vs none for female engineers). And this is probably where the reduced false negative rate for applicants that fall under affirmative action umbrella comes from in Damore's memo.

[lloydde]

The OP used the term "qualified" and not "capable". I also find the OP's writing effective as they demonstrate their own conflict and lack of clarity on the topic.

Previously in the thread my response is in protest of the reduction both of the OPs related writing and the topic.

[ramensea]

I'm sorry I'm not following what you're saying.

[etchalon]

There's shockingly little evidence it does, which is something AA opponents want to avoid talking about.

There's a perception it does, based on anecdotal evidence.

[collyw]

Isn't it up to proponents to prove that it does work? Rather than opponents needing to demonstrate that it produces negative results?

[jeswin]

> This is not how "affirmative action" works. "Affirmative action" states that if you have two "equally" qualified candidates you favor the least represented in your society or company. Thus there should be no added risk.

Your definition of affirmative action is not entirely accurate. Affirmative action does not kick in merely as a tie-breaker. In practice, affirmative action almost always causes a better qualified person to lose out.

However, that's fine. We have to take a long term view of the benefits of affirmative action. So corporates, especially those not under as much scrutiny as the Fortune 100, are not automatically incentivized to do this. Which is one reason why mandating it by law might be worth considering.

[ramensea]

I don't think you're correct. However I do not have a lot of experience hiring people, so I can only argue over the philosophy of the subject.

[panda88888]

It really just comes down to the difficulty in assessing candidate capability and predict future performance. Couple that with pressure from executive to improve diversity numbers, reinforce it with bonus tied to hitting diversity numbers, now there's a lot of incentives to hire minority candidate that's good enough and pass on a stronger, non-minority candidate (better by how much, who knows? Interviews are notoriously unreliable indicator of future job performance anyway). :P

Edit: note that if the minority candidate is as strong or stronger than non-minority candidate, it is a no-brainer decision and win-win for all involved. :)