[Paul_Dessert]

"I had expressed dismay before at our hiring practices. It seemed that whenever we had our monthly engineering all-hands meeting, the new hire announcements featured three more young white guys. I felt that we could do better."

So, because they are young, white males, you immediately dismissed them?

[spaceheeder]

In the next paragraph the author specifies that they were trying to attract a wider cross-section of candidates. The hires wouldn't have been on-boarded if they weren't the best candidates who applied, but there's no way to know if they were the best candidates available when the signals sent by the job postings disincentivize applicants along axes that do correlate to race or gender but not to job performance. That's literally the entire point of the article, as far as I understand it.

[Paul_Dessert]

Read this paragraph:

"Finally, I suggested that if we reached the final round of hiring without any viable women or minorities in the selection pool, we should take this as an indication that we had not done a good job at outreach. We would start the recruiting process over, and try harder to attract diverse candidates."

What she is saying is, if she didn't get the results she wanted, she'd toss aside ALL applicants (even if they were highly qualified) and start over until she found her version of the "acceptable" candidate.

That's just wrong.

[spaceheeder]

Arguably so. I'm sympathetic to her goal and that in particular stuck out to me as an over-correction. It doesn't undermine her point that simply changing the job listings can dramatically impact the makeup of your talent pool. That particular provision ended up being unnecessary, anyways; 75% of applicants for the newly posted position met the criteria for diversity hires.

Your point seems to be that explicit bias against groups that are historically over-represented in certain professional fields is of equal or greater moral concern than implicit bias against groups that are historically under-represented. I think that both can be bad, and that reasonable people can judge the magnitude of the harm on both a systematic as well as a case-by-case basis: Prior to the author of this article conducting her live experiment, 0% of non-white non-males were hired for an entry-level position; whereas in the course of her experiment, 25% of qualified applicants were white males, which doesn't sound far away enough from their makeup of the US population to trigger any alarm bells in my brain.

Even if you think that bias-by-writ is always worse than bias-by-complacency, it's still fair for a devil's advocate to put it to you: If this is not the way to solve the latter problem, then what is? If your answer is some version of "leave well enough alone," then I will be unmoved by your heightened rhetoric.

[Paul_Dessert]

Where does the article say this, "Prior to the author of this article conducting her live experiment, 0% of non-white non-males were hired for an entry-level position"?

She's female. She got hired.

[spaceheeder]

Quoting you, quoting the article:

> It seemed that whenever we had our monthly engineering all-hands meeting, the new hire announcements featured three more young white guys

[Paul_Dessert]

That does not say, "0% of non-white non-males were hired for an entry-level position".

[LennyCrop]

It's best to ask yourself, does someone who reads a single line of an article and sees that as the basis of the whole article a troll?

Please don't feed the trolls, they'll just move the goalposts and you'll be arguing about something completely unrelated in a bit

[Paul_Dessert]

A troll? The author is a hypocrite and I'm calling her out. The words above came directly from her article. And yes, I did read the entire thing.

If you don't see anything wrong with what she said/did, I feel sorry for you.

[spaceheeder]

Cursory posts -- whether they're posted by trolls or cynics or anyone else -- that are quickly read and just as quickly upvoted, but don't receive a thoughtful reply, tend to persuade the uninitiated.

[sdca]

That's ageist, racist and sexist.