[phroobster]

These are the times we live in. Thanks to widespread racist/sexist hiring practices, every time I see a woman or minority in an upper level position I can’t help but wonder if they are there because someone wanted to fill a diversity quota. The thought never even crossed my mind 10 years ago.

[majormajor]

This is a bizarre claim. People getting labeled as "diversity hires" and being assumed to be less competent than their peers is a decades-old thing.

It wasn't even a particularly new observation when South Park literally named a character after it almost 25 years ago.

(Probably many of the same people getting labeled that way for holding high-level positions today were similarly judged in their entry-level positions back then! But if people are no longer suspicious of women or minorities in "regular" roles and resume their judgement for upper-level roles, I guess that's a change in the right direction, at least. :| )

[dijit]

> This is a bizarre claim. People getting labeled as "diversity hires" and being assumed to be less competent than their peers is a decades-old thing.

The truth is that it kind of doesn't matter if it's new or not, it's a very hot subject right now and people are touchy about it.

I understand why; Women are facing a lot of abuse on the internet and it feels like many are coming forward with icky things that people have said/done.

On the other side it feels like there's been a cataclysmic overreaction- and many people get annoyed when we're asked to "make sure the next one you hire is a $under-represented" or getting overruled by HR when hiring otherwise.

(yes, this happened, and it was frustrating because the person we hired was not able to lead the project we needed and was hired anyway- she later left, burned out, nearly wrecked her career and I feel incredibly guilty for not being more vocal about it and keeping it mostly to myself for fear of being called a bigot)

[wwright]

Are you claiming that you couldn’t find any woman who was qualified for your project?

[ghufran_syed]

More likely that they couldn't find a woman who was qualified for the project and actually wanted to join at the price the company was willing to pay.

[dijit]

It was true, at the time.

I live in a third city in Sweden, in a slice of time that the company needed to find someone and we do not pay competitive wages.

I’m sure we could find someone qualified eventually and if we paid enough, and we have had good female candidates at other times albeit for different roles than this one, however they didn’t want to relocate.

Context being what it is, it takes us roughly 2 years to hire a new person to our team because people don’t want to live where we are or accept the rates we pay.

[wwright]

In that case, I would say HR is at fault not for asking that affirmative action be taken, but for not backing it up by making the job attractive in the first place.

If you can actually attract people to your company, then asking that you hire at least half women shouldn't be an issue; there are plenty of qualified women for any position. If you can't attract people to the job generally, I think any other factors would largely be noise versus the real problem.

[dijit]

> then asking that you hire at least half women shouldn't be an issue;

Application rates of women for our studio borders 8%, and our previous hiring rate of women was 8%; with aggressive affirmative action policies (mostly around marketing and bringing in female code academies such as pinkprogramming[0]) we have increased this to 12%.

You don't specify /why/ the job is less attractive, I stipulated primarily two reasons:

1) Location.

2) Salary.

You might agree that moving 700+ people is a little untenable.

My argument about salary is, and very much playing devils advocate for HQ: "We don't really care who does the job as long as the job gets done, if we can pay a man less, we should hire a man".

[0]: https://www.pinkprogramming.se/en/

[throwaway373438]

It's often hard to find anyone of any characteristic for many projects so it shouldn't be surprising that it's also hard to find people of a specific sub-group.

[SPBS]

Why are you jumping to that conclusion? The parent comment probably couldn't even find a person qualified to lead and you had to make it a gender thing.

[wwright]

The parent comment explicitly made it about gender. They explicitly said they had a man they liked but couldn't hire him because of HR.

[dijit]

For whatever it's worth we didn't have a man in line, we had nobody in line. But we had pressure to hire this person because it would increase the representation and the expectation was that we'd be able to train her on the job.

[Supermancho]

> This is a bizarre claim.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/05/alexis-ohanian-steps-down-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/us/california-boardroom-g...

This isn't new news. Diversity hiring and promotion is all over, alongside the recent BLM relevance.

[majormajor]

Yes, there's been ongoing activism, hand-wringing, counter-activism, legislation, etc, in this space for several decades.

So claiming that it's a phenomenon of just the last decade as a way to justify suspicion of merit is very bizarre. Where have you all been?

[iateanapple]

> Where have you all been?

The pressure on management to hire diverse candidates has increased 100 fold over the past decade.

[asveikau]

25 years ago it was already old news. I remember in my childhood even further back than that, the grownups would make comments about affirmative action hires.

If you think about it this is just one more layer of discrimination people face. If you are in one of those categories, no matter how smart, competent, and worthy you are, many people will assume you didn't get there on merit, and that you took the job from someone better. We ought to reject this.

[tialaramex]

Surely the weirder thing is to see, for example, a dozen member board for a global corporation where every single member is a middle aged white guy? Or an outfit where everybody in the C-suite went to the same school.

Like, it's not quite as astonishing as a "government committee on women's health" in which every single member is a man, but it's getting up there.

Diversity is an attribute you want unless you've got some weird demographic quirk as focus for your organisation. Just as you shouldn't try to solve "Two is one and one is none" by just purchasing duplicate tools, but instead look to duplicate functionality, you want senior management (and hires throughout but this pattern matters most at the top) to each have a different range of skill sets and life experiences not just be carbon copies of each other. If the most notable difference between the senior management team is their golf handicaps then they are going to miss all the same opportunities so why are you duplicating their salary cost?

It stands to reason that there are going to be women (in particular) with the innate abilities you want, but with a different set of life experiences that are valuable. If your rivals won't hire them then it's even more likely you can find them available than their male counterparts.

Now, like a "Rust programmers, must have at least 20 years Rust experience" bogus requirement, if you hire based on what people already did, not what you assess they can do in the future then sure, you're going to conclude that there aren't many women, or black people, or whatever in a role that has not historically hired women or black people or whatever. But that means now you're bad at hiring people too.

[basilgohar]

This might be unpleasant to say, but I don't think it's _weird_ that a C-suite is all middle-aged, white men. As in, it's pretty common and unsurprising. That is very different than saying that is what is _best_, which I would disagree with. There's a lot of inertia and it would be no doubt obvious that these middle-aged, white men have had more opportunities than women and have had greater chances to progress professionally. Again, I don't mean that's better or right, it just is what is for historical reasons.

The social and cultural shifts that would change this need years or even decades to play out before it stops becoming weird.

And, again, this doesn't mean middle-aged white men are just better or more suited for these kinds of positions – it's just that they've been in the best position, generally speaking, from an education, networking, and cultural position to get access to such positions in contrast to folks from a different background, race, or sex.

[tialaramex]

To me whether something is weird is distinct from it being usual or familiar.

It's weird that Americans tend to cheerfully eat cow meat but not horse meat for example. Much of natural language grammar such as the adjective order rules in English - pretty weird ("My old blue hat" is OK but "My blue old hat" is wrong!). The fact that there are five Fermat primes but then no other Fermat numbers seem to be prime is weird.

[iateanapple]

> It stands to reason that there are going to be women (in particular) with the innate abilities you want

Since when was hiring about innate abilities?

> if you hire based on what people already did, not what you assess they can do in the future

That’s literally how the majority of tech companies both hire and promote.

Good luck getting a promotion at Google (for example) based on potential.

[agustif]

Hiring !== Promoting

[wwright]

I think the widespread practices may be calling from inside the house.

[baddox]

Are you suggesting that tech or corporate culture now is more discriminatory in its hiring practices than it was 10 years ago?

[bzb3]

This is very sad but I share your sentiment. Thanks for having the courage to write this comment.

[Jestar342]

Jesus this is the kind of handwringing excuse Trump could only dream of coming up with on his own. So your own sexism is the fault of women or non-white men getting promoted on merit. That is weapons grade bullshit.

[sitkack]

You know what, when I see a woman in a male dominated field like infantile fcking tech, I have found they are literally 2x-10x better than their peers. That they can cut through bullshit, navigate metric tons of stupidity and still get their jobs done. They are in the position in spite of their sex, not because of it.

If you can't help think it, it is probably because you believe it. If you look for excuse you will find one.

Maybe you could illuminate another forum with your wisdom.

[iateanapple]

> I have found they are literally 2x-10x better than their peers.

So either your organisation is horribly sexist by not promoting these women or you are horribly sexist and think they are better because they are women.

[sitkack]

Those are the only two options?

[iateanapple]

> Those are the only two options?

Do you have another reason a developer 10x better than her peers isn’t promoted to senior, to principal, etc?

[agustif]

That 10x developer. or ninja, or unicorn, are just bullshit titles/prepositions by itself?