[neerkumar]

Anyone who has worked for a large tech company in SF in the last 3/4 years knows that this has happened everywhere.

In fairness, Google was one of the very last ones among large tech companies to play the quota game. But the problem is that that's a game that once the first company starts playing it, everyone else is forced to play it too.

Company X publishes a report with amazing diversity numbers and brands itself as a great company for certain minorities and diversity in general, along with some unbelievable BS about how they achieved that. At that point, you have to introduce quotas too to get similar numbers or your brand and recruiting will be strongly affected.

[netheril96]

This starts with the [diversity pledge](http://thehill.com/policy/technology/284517-white-house-pres...) pushed by Obama administration, including companies like Airbnb, Box, GitHub, GoDaddy, Intel, Lyft, Medium.

No wonder many Asians sigh relief when Clinton failed her presidency, or she surely would have pushed for more.

[spicymaki]

That is not accurate according to 2016 votes: http://aaldef.org/TheAsianAmericanVote2016-AALDEF.pdf 79% of Asians voted for Clinton.

[echevil]

New Asian immigrants moved to Bay Area for high paying tech jobs have very different views from those that were born in America or have lived here for a long time. Many of the new immigrants have no citizenship yet while the latter are simply much less impacted by these diversity movements overall

[apta]

You mean 70% of Asians who voted, voted for her.

[throwaway1584]

Anecdotally I only knew two Trump voters in the Bay Area. One is Chinese and the other Indian. Polling was not great in the last election, maybe because pollsters can mainly call people with landlines [1] which excludes large pools of people.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/03/12/t...

[cyphar]

> Polling was not great in the last election

Exit polls are different from opinion polls. The surveying techniques are entirely different, and in general exit polls are considered far more accurate than opinion polls -- because you're polling on a concrete question ("who did you vote for a few minutes ago") rather than a less concrete one ("who are you more likely to vote for").

[dogma1138]

Considering how many people were shamed for voting for trump I’m not entirely sure how accurate those exit polls were as most of them predicted a landslide for HRC before the count started.

[pas]

Could you show such exit polls?

[protomyth]

Out of curiosity, how did they get the cast ballots with the voters race to do their count? Polling, particularly in the last election, was atrocious.

[spicymaki]

How well do you suspect Trump’s anti-immigration and nationalist push play with the Asian community?

Making it difficult for families to immigrate together via family visa and reducing work visas does not play well.

The polling methodology is present in the report I posted.

[alanlovestea]

don't be fooled by the media. Trump supports legal immigration and is allocating more quota to legal immigrants. As a result, tons of legal immigrants support Trump.

[dragonwriter]

> Trump supports legal immigration and is allocating more quota to legal immigrants

Trump has proposed eliminating many of the major existing categories of legal immigration in the core, family-owned action based system. He's proposed replacing the eliminated categories with a small number of renewable non-immigrant (no path to citizenship or work permission) visas for parents of US citizens.

He's proposed no concrete increase in total permanent allocation in the remaining categories, though he's talked about cancelling the diversity visa lottery and reallocating the quota used there to help clear backlogs elsewhere.

[cyphar]

Exit polls are very different from opinion polls, it doesn't make sense to conflate the two.

[cjhopman]

IIRC, exit polling was just fine.

[cookiecaper]

It's not about recruiting. It's about lawsuits. Companies with more than 100 employees are legally obligated to report demographic information to the EEOC. The EEOC reviews this information when someone files a complaint alleging discrimination.

If similar companies in the same industry and geography have numbers that show a more diverse demographic profile, the EEOC is much more likely to consider a discrimination complaint non-frivolous, which is required to file a lawsuit alleging employer discrimination (as I understand it; not a lawyer).

Companies play this game a) to protect themselves against lawsuits; and b) to potentiate damage to competitors who are not yet explicitly playing this game, and therefore have correspondingly less demographic diversity.

[mkeedlinger]

I did not know that, and that brings a whole new dimension to my understanding of this issue. Thanks.

[wycs]

Then company X gets rightfully trounced by a Chinese firm 5 years from now which does not share our ridiculous racial taboos. Some crimes are self policing.

[HarryHirsch]

No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds. Let's face it: the top tech companies have sufficient applicants, so they can choose whoever they want, and most jobs are drone jobs.

[stcredzero]

No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds.

Many companies have failed due in part to internal politics. Also, weren't many of the companies involved in the financial crisis going along with the prevailing political winds, just before everything changed?

[whatyoucantsay]

> No company ever got trounced because they followed the prevailing political winds. Let's face it: the top tech companies have sufficient applicants

Many companies have been trounced by outsiders unconstrained by their political liabilities.

Let's face it: Ford, Chevy and Chrysler all had sufficient applicants, even as Toyota and Honda were building the processes and company cultures that would dethrone them.

[ghostcluster]

> Management techniques in NASA, the report said, discouraged dissenting views on safety issues and ultimately created “blind spots” about the risk to the space shuttle of the foam insulation impact.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077541/ns/technology_and_science-...

[notacoward]

Are you seriously trying to suggest that Chinese firms don't have their own racial taboos? Or gender issues? That directly contradicts every experience I've had or report I've heard. Aren't their crimes self-policing too?

[meetapoorvgupta]

All I know is that China has a huge, ambitious, STEM-focused workforce and a smaller economy. They could discriminate against applicants on any arbitrary basis ( I have no idea if they do, but that's irrelevant) and still continue to hire lots of intelligent, highly-qualified, and hard-working employees.

[vondur]

Yes, this is how companies start to decline.

[discoursism]

Is it? I'm not aware of any company in the history of the United States that has failed because it tried to increase its workforce's diversity. Would you mind providing an example?

[YouAreGreat]

Natural monopolist Google enjoys a "competitive moat" and collects monopoly rent. The combination allows for a lot of unpunished "inefficiency".

And scare quotes around "inefficiency" because I'm not convinced putting pressure on their productive white/asian male majority employees is actually inefficient for Google.

[Clanan]

Or, instead of giving in, these companies could actually use their impressive power and reach to halt such practices and not let their brand be so affected. (Hello marketing budgets.) Big_Co is not a victim here, and portraying them as such is vastly unfair to the actual people being adversely affecting by discriminatory hiring practices. These companies can and should do better than "well everyone else is doing it!"

[neerkumar]

I hope my comment didn't come across as I am portraying them as a victim. I saw first hand hiring based on quotas and I hated it (and I am an immigrant with dark skin).

I was just stating a fact about Google, that they were among the last to implement quotas in Silicon Valley, and why I think they started doing it.

[mesozoic]

It's a false logical conclusion really (just as most things related to postmodernism and enforced equality of outcome through diversity are).

You could just as easily reason that companies who aren't implementing these policies and actually hiring based on individual qualifications and not group identity will out compete their competitors in the free market. They'll surely get bad press for a while but eventually their haters will get tired and move on to the next news cycle. In the mean time the company has hired all of the "undesirable" straight white and Asian males (not intentionally but only because their value in the market has been artificially depressed) and they are easily outpacing the productivity of their rival firms.

As the postmodernists reject possible logical conclusions from their actions and claim organization power they will eventually come face to face with the free capitalist market and the firms they overtake will fail. That is of course if they can't act quickly enough in manifesting their utopian vision of the destruction of capitalism itself.