[tptacek]

Or, the emergent result of our hiring processes (alienating and near-untenable interviews coupled with fast tracks for sponsored candidates) is that cultural outsiders (women, people of color, older workers) are effectively locked out of higher-status resume-building jobs, and when companies try to fix those processes even a little, engineers are confronted with culturally unfamiliar potential coworkers and experience the human default of hypervigilance in unfamiliar social situations, which creates a false perception that reformed, rationalized hiring processes are "lowering the bar" when in fact the opposite would probably be happening, with a long term net result that nothing changes, and our industry remains structurally biased against people who can't pass for proto-Zuckerbergs.

[eradicatethots]

I call affirmative action policies lowering the bar. If you are intentionally seeking people based on criteria like race or gender, then you are less likely to find the best candidates, unless you believe those are relevant criteria.

[sethev]

What does intention have to do with it? Are you saying that if you unintentionally seek people based on criteria like race or gender you're more likely to find the best candidates? Affirmative action, as you call it, is an intentional effort to overcome the sort of unintentional bias that tptacek described.

By the way, one reason people react strongly to objections like yours is that a very direct interpretation is that you believe the distribution of people in high status jobs actually does accurately reflect differences based on race and gender. Not sure if you intended that.

[sinxoveretothex]

> By the way, one reason people react strongly to objections like yours is that a very direct interpretation is that you believe the distribution of people in high status jobs actually does accurately reflect differences based on race and gender.

I think this is partly true. But then, a similar interpretation of "pro-affirmative action" is that one believes that whatever bad thing happens to a minority is never their fault.

I think both are only partly true.

The problem with affirmative action is that it (I don't know if it's always the case, but it seems to be often so) specifically considers minority status. It is obvious, I think, that this is not the kind of criteria a computer, say, would consider if it were to look only for the most qualified applicants.

On the other hand, you or someone else in the thread made a good point: this pro-minority bias can be seen as an effort to counter the systematic bias against "outgroups".

The problem is that I don't think we know the effect size of each of those: how strong is this systematic bias? In a protected status agnostic society, would all professional fields perfectly mirror population rates?

I don't think so. We know there are metal disorders/illnesses that impact cognitive functions (Down's syndrome) and obviously genetics is partly responsible (do Down syndromers have similar rates of Down syndrome babies?). Similarly, I don't think the success of Asians and Jews is due to some form of societal bias in their favor.

In the end, the question is whether the anti-bias bias is correcting towards 0 or in the other direction (i.e.: protected status is very important, just the other way).

I don't know what the answer to this one is.

[jacalata]

False. If you believe that the best candidates are spread across genders/races and your current hiring practices are overlooking those not in a specific set, affirmative action policies would be raising the bar. You call it lowering the bar because you believe that all the best candidates are already being hired under the current system.

[tptacek]

This isn't responsive to anything I wrote. Please don't use my comments as a coat rack to hang ideological arguments on.

[eradicatethots]

Its a response to your comments on why people call these things lowering the bar. It seems like a direct reply to me.

[tptacek]

You misread my comment, and in fact took away kind of the opposite intervention and perceived response to the intervention that I was referring to.

I don't blame you for not following, because I was sort of glibly/ironically summarizing a lot of other things I've written about[1] as a single very complicated sentence. However, I sort of do blame you for jumping at the opportunity to litigate affirmative action on this thread.

If you re-read my comment and come to understand what I mean by this, would you please take a moment and write a short comment to acknowledge that? Thanks.

[1] a starting point: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/

[forapurpose]

> I call affirmative action policies lowering the bar.

To turn around the vocabulary a little, isn't the fact that most jobs in SV are effectively (rarely in a formalized sense and sometimes even unconsciously) 'reserved' for white and Asian males - isn't that the overwhelming majority of 'affirmative action' cases?

Very likely, many white and Asian guys who get hired are not the best candidates. Baseball is a simpler example because the number of jobs is strictly defined (25 per team, N number of teams): Before it was integrated, starting with Jackie Robinson in 1947, a lot of minor-league-level white guys had major league jobs for which they were unqualified, and it was because of what was effectively a huge 'affirmative action' program for white players. Imagine if for some horrible reason baseball re-segregated today, eliminating all non-white players (Latinos were banned before 1947 too): Who would take the jobs of all the qualified non-white major leaguers? White-skinned minor leaguers. Beyond a doubt, the quality of baseball would suffer greatly - which, if you think about it, seems very likely to be true of the quality of SV companies' talent pools.

If you care about merit, then the current system is a failure.

> If you are intentionally seeking people based on criteria like race or gender, then you are less likely to find the best candidates

Agreed, but evidently that is what is happening already on an overwhelming basis, except it is white-skinned and Asian people who get special treatment.

Real-world hiring isn't so meritocratic and discrimination has always overwhelmed merit (again, look at baseball, or all hiring processes back then - the same happens now). Beyond merit, how are people really selected?: 1) People hire those they know or are in their network, and white people tend to network with other white people (because that is who they work with and went to school with, due to past discrimination -- it's self-reinforcing). 2) People are prejudiced, some overtly, more covertly, and very many without realizing it. 3) People hire to not fail - the decision-maker doesn't want to stick their neck out and bring in someone unpopular; they want to fit in with their co-workers and not be the social crusader. 4) People tend to hire others who are like themselves; when someone told me about this tendancy, I realized I'd unconsciously been doing it for years.

Affirmative action-like programs balances those forces a little (not much, looking at outcomes).