Why do you say Google discriminates on the basis of race? I used to work there and was involved in the hiring processes and never saw evidence for this
> Wilberg’s lawsuit targets Google and 25 unnamed Google employees who allegedly enforced discriminatory hiring rules, quoting a number of emails and other documents. It claims that for several quarters, Google would only hire people from historically underrepresented groups for technical positions. In one hiring round, the team was allegedly instructed to cancel all software engineering interviews with non-diverse applicants below a certain experience level, and to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline.” California labor law prohibits refusing to hire employees based on characteristics like race or gender.
Perception shaping is always unsavoury, but that's pretty dark.
As an employee of Google who is involved in hiring let me tell you the process is extremely rigorous and we work very hard to make it bias free. I am not an unbiased individual myself but when it comes to hiring, I work extra hard to ensure fairness regardless of other person's characteristics.
And as a former Googler who did hundreds of interviews there, let me tell you you're wrong. It wasn't bias free even years ago, and Google has gone much more hard-core SJW since then. It's still much better than at most companies, and the article we're discussing is so wrong about the way executives are hired. But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.
Ignore yourself. The system surrounding you is not unbiased and never was. Here are some things I'm aware of that happened at Google/other comparable tech firms:
1. Recruiters tracked the quality of interviewers (as judged by candidate and hiring committee feedback) and assign the best interviewers to women/minorities.
2. Sourcers could get much higher bonuses if they recruited women.
3. Comp can end up artificially higher for women, which obviously is a form of recruiting. At Microsoft managers were given bonus pots that could only be allocated to women.
4. Women who failed phone screens were presented for on-site interviews anyway in the hope that they could somehow make up for it. Men were dropped immediately.
5. Women are targeted with specialist recruiting teams, fought over to a dramatically higher extent than men.
6. Men are sometimes just excluded from recruiting events completely, e.g. "Code Jam to IO for Women".
And you seem to have chosen to ignore flashing red alarms like recruiters filing lawsuits with copies of emails where they were told to stop recruiting white men.
BTW, don't look at the firing process. Unlike hiring+promotion, engineers don't control that, HR does (PeopleOps or whatever it's called now). It's an open secret that at Google it's nearly impossible to get fired if you're a female engineer, even if your performance is terrible and your team hates you. At worst they'll start moving you around.
> But Google isn't some paragon of freedom from bias, far from it.
Not my claim that Google is bias free. I am not denying what you have claimed, it is just that I have not come across such incidents and if you are a qualified person it is extremely unlikely that I will not judge you performance properly because of your gender, race or ethnicity.
There is no doubt that Google has gone lala SJW route in last few years but then many of us put conscious efforts in fixing those problems.
Nothing you're referring to has anything to do with the actual hiring process. None of the issues you listed makes anyone more or less likely to pass the hiring committee. Offers are based on merit as much as they can be. You just have a problem with efforts to reach out to people who normally have a hard time making it into the industry.
Every one of those 6 points made have to do directly with the hiring process. Supporting education and outreach for underrepresented groups is a noble cause, but when it gets to the point of giving a group an easier interview path the hiring is by nature not merit based. In the long run, this will only undermine the efforts to get these groups involved by forcing experience to be viewed with the asterisk that they may or may not have earned their position.
Only one of those 6 suggests an "easier" interviewing path. And it doesn't happen at Google, so I'm still comfortable saying the process is meritocratic.
You're trying to argue that processes to encourage women to join somehow make it easier for them to be hired. Those aren't the same.
This line of reasoning doesn't hold up. It's just as easy to flip your conclusion on it's head currently; any given member of a majority group could be viewed as only being hired because of internal biases, not merit.
To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.
Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.
I used to believe that, when I was younger, new to Google and basically naive about these things.
Having had direct experience of how it works over the years, absolutely, incompetent women are more likely to get through the process. You can't constantly, for years, tell everyone that reducing the proportion of men is a critical priority and not have people bend the rules and make exceptions as a consequence. They're only doing what they're told to.
If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male
Likely the proportion would be higher. But yes, it's hard to change the demographics in areas where hard skills are measurable and where women don't really want to be anyway. Probably that's why feminists are moving on from targeting engineering roles: their current thing is leadership positions where less tangible "soft" skills are more important, comp is higher (the ultimate goal) and it's easier to manipulate the recruiting process. Hence laws enforcing that women be allocated board seats, things like that.
And there lots of men have witnessed women being put into management roles in software they were completely unsuited for, over and over. I think most guys have a story like that by now.
I don't think that people care about how it is actually done, we are all in an in-demand sector. People care about the hypocrisy of companies saying, we only hire the smartest! We don't discriminate! Quickly turning around and saying we need to be more diverse (which is a good thing) so let's throw those CVs out.
And it's always HR... they aren't impacted at all with ok:ish hires.
i've only seen 2 at my workplace. There are positive incentives for hitting women recruit goals but also there are no negative consequences for not doing so.
That's entirely a matter of perspective. The exact same policies can be phrased as "your full comp is not available if you hire men".
Fact is, hiring is in the instant a zero sum game. If recruiters are prioritising women it means they're putting men to the back of the queue in the hope they won't be forced to hire them. It's sexism, it's wrong and it makes a mockery of everything feminists claim to believe.
Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts. If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences. They would probably know better. All their interviews include an underrepresented candidate, so their sample size is probably larger :)
The active recruitment is to counterbalance the fact that referrals, one of the biggest sources of talent, is not a diverse pipeline. Everyone's network is mostly male and white or Asian. This is even true of engineers from underrepresented groups. If you want a shot at hiring qualified underrepresented candidates, you have to actively recruit them. Your existing workforce cannot help identify them. That's what's meant by diversity and inclusion.
Now whether you agree that diversity and inclusion are worthwhile is another discussion altogether.
> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts.
Other posts in this thread make claims oppose that.
One person says that bad phone screens for men? No call back... bad phone screens for women? call back and face-to-face to get them another chance.
that's the definition of "more attempts".
Whether said comment is real and honest is unknown (random internet comment) and whether "diversity and inclusion" are worth it (actively choosing ("recruiting") someone on race/color/etc to battle perceived racism is... a form of racism itself) is of course another battle...
I can't speak to other companies, but in my experience, inhouse recruiters have no incentive to pass bad candidates past the phone screen. I have no incentive to pass bad candidates to onsite. We want to spend as much time needed to find the right candidate and no more and we don't want miss out on anyone. But we don't want to waste our time either.
I just want to call out that diversity and inclusion are not about battling "perceived racism". Diversity and inclusion measures are to counterbalance the fact that professional (and personal) networks in tech are not diverse. The status quo left alone would bias itself toward white and Asian males irrespective of intent. By actively looking for underrepresented candidates, companies can counterbalance network effects in hiring.
> Underrepresented groups are actively recruited but don't get more attempts.
Yes they do. They are not subject to the same cool down period on a phone screen failure. Remember, google pitches it as “looking for a good signal” so retrying until the candidate passes isn’t lowering the bar in their mind (even though it is because phone screens are flawed but that’s another discussion).
> If you think otherwise just ask an engineer from an underrepresented groups about their recruiting experiences.
I have, I worked there when this started several years back. Several got a chance at a phone rescreen sooner than the normal back-off and one got an invite to come back for a second on-site because “the signal wasn’t clear” on the first.
Not sure why this got downvoted. Google publishes some pretty detailed stats (which I applaud), and the "thumb on the scale" could not be more obvious.
Whether or not you feel this is a problem, it's worth reviewing the data.
[And for the record, I've enjoyed every female or minority colleague I've ever worked with, and made efforts to ensure their success, whatever their ability. I don't particularly object to AA hiring, but I don't like wasting my time on "fake" interviews, so I think publication of stats like this should be required.]
Google told their recruiters to actively not hire white or asian males for certain roles.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...