[bigfartchili]

So you end up with unqualified people in positions just to meet the quota. All of a sudden sterotypes about these people start and anyone from this group starts getting labeled as dumb because they are hiring candidates by appearance rather than qualification. Sounds like a real good idea.

[swampthinker]

There are hundreds, if not thousands of posts and comments on this very website about under qualified individuals working various positions in tech. This community preaches looking past impostor syndrome and recognizing that most people are technically underqualified, and that is the job of the company/superiors to nurture talent.

All of a sudden we don't want to extend this same treatment to people who face structural problems that inhibit participation?

[anon12345690]

there are more posts about mistakes and bad employees

yes there is a difference between skills and talents of people

[slg]

There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who could do most of our jobs adequately. The idea that hiring a diverse staff inherently means hiring an unqualified staff is laughable. It just takes a little more effort because the first qualified candidate to come across your desk is statistically (at least in our profession) more likely to be a straight white male. The qualified minority candidates exist if you put in a little work to find them.

[anon12345690]

diverse on skin color? thats racist

[yongjik]

I'll worry about that if it actually happens. Thanks to hundreds of years of discrimination, America has had tons of incompetent white males in high positions, simply because pretty much anybody in any position of power was white and male, regardless of whether they were competent or not.

For some reason, the racial stereotype of white males being unqualified lazy freeloaders didn't really take root, apart from maybe a small group of vocal idiots.

[whichdan]

Stop assuming that people from underrepresented groups are inherently unqualified.

[asdkhadsj]

> Stop assuming that people from underrepresented groups are inherently unqualified.

They're not. They are commenting how the criteria for hiring changed to include other attributes not related to skill.

If I hire people based on a mix of skill and how much they like baseball, I am inherently hiring on a different measuring stick. I could end up hiring someone with the most skill out of the hiring pool, but that doesn't matter - I'm not hiring based on skill, I'm hiring on some combination of skill and baseball.

It does not mean that the person who gets hired isn't the most skilled. But it also does not mean that the person who gets hired is the most skilled. I stopped caring about hiring the most skilled the moment I added a largely arbitrary hiring attribute into the requirements, how much they like baseball.

Generally I have a problem with this, but I think it's less of a problem than people make it out to be. Yes, we are not hiring based on skill alone.. but, we never were. We were hiring based on skill, attitude, work ethic, how they work with people, etc. A long laundry list of things we want a candidate to be, and difficult to figure out to boot. So yea, if we stop hiring whites because we've got too many, we may miss out on some skill - but when so many of the hiring requirements are vague, difficult to judge and largely a meta-game itself, we stopped caring about hiring skill long ago. Hell, even skill is difficult to judge.

Plus, eventually it'll even out. Suddenly we'll have to stop hiring minorities because there's too many in X company. Which is ironic heh. In the same way that males in some colleges are becoming a minority. Irony.

[gdy]

Imagine you have a pool of 10 candidates from a minority group and 100 white males.

Only 20% from each group are qualified enough.

If you need to hire 5 people and want them to be from the minority group, you end up hiring 2 qualified engineers and 3 - not so much.

Congratulations, you've met your diversity quota.

Also, the condional probability of a minority engineer being underqualified is 3/5 now, but this number is declared racist.

[oh_sigh]

That doesn't seem like the assumption OP was making. OP was making an assumption that people are racist though.