[R0b0t1]

Not meaning to attack your comment, but want to point out that race quota systems are racist per a supreme court ruling. That's why colleges use a point system (which is still arguably racist by basically being the same thing, but a different topic).

[throwaway007071]

I work at a FANG company and I can guarantee you that there are quotas and no one is willing to speak out about it.

I was literally CC'ed on an email that said "[...] I want to remind everyone that the hiring season for 2021 is not complete and we are still missing our target for diversity [...]. For those who already reached their headcount for 2021 there will always be more budget for a candidate that brings more diversity to our workplace".

So forget it, it's just a new name for discrimination.

[908B64B197]

First time I heard about "minority quotas" I just didn't believe it. But then YouTube got sued for doing exactly that [0]

Do quotas actually help minorities? To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. The others who knows? Maybe the recruiter was so close to hitting his incentive that he lowered the bar.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...

[bryanrasmussen]

>To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified.

I mean, yeah, unless there is a wide-spread feeling that tech hiring is broken and nobody knows how to tell if anyone really is any good through the hiring process which is the feeling that almost every hiring, interviewing, test-taking focused post on HN elicits.

Because I mean all the stuff on HN I read leads me to think we can't be sure about if someone is qualified for a job until they are actually in the job. My own personal experience is that people can even be technically qualified for a job and still not be qualified for all sorts of other things.

[908B64B197]

It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat.

They are cargo-culted to death, since everyone wants to be like FANG but won't pay they do the one thing they can afford from their playbook and execute poorly on it.

Truth is, from having conducted interviews, it's a real sink or swim situation where some folks won't be able to complete a simple wordcount implementation in 30+ minutes. A real whiteboard is a toy problem where you have to use an algorithm or a data structure, write a few test cases and some code on the board and explain why/how you did it, not some rote learning exercise.

At the senior band they shouldn't even be used, if the candidate is coming from a reputable company. But at the college level what else are you going to interview applicants about? You know everyone has done an algorithm class.

[bryanrasmussen]

>It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat.

I generally see take home tests getting the heat, because people are being expected to give up an extra 4-6 hours of their life to the job process without getting compensation. And maybe the person doing 4 hours gets beat out by the person doing 8, and the people with kids are screwed.

[nicoffeine]

> Do quotas actually help minorities?

It's disappointing to see this kind of comment in 2020.

If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are.

In my experience as a subcontractor for few extremely large corporations (including one of the "A"s), the largest roadblock was usually an incompetent VP. How'd they get there? Well, they had connections, friends or family or both. In SMB world, it's even more obvious. I've seen millions of dollars wasted on projects and POCs that existed only because one of these folks didn't "believe" the research and the vendor specs. And I've seen a room full of VPs all afraid to tell the boss that the product demo isn't going well because the product -- the very idea of it -- was garbage.

So, worst case scenario, there are a few more incompetent people in corporations already brimming with bad hires and waste, and they come from different backgrounds. What's the problem?

[barry-cotter]

> If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations.

By this logic we should expect the NBA, NFL, NHL etc. to look like a random sample of the US population. If the source subpopulations differ by even small amounts on mean or variance those on the extreme tails of distributions will look very different from the general population. So the ranks of men who have ever run 100m in under ten seconds are basically all black and elite marathon runners are about half Kalenjin, an ethnic group of fewer than ten million.

[nicoffeine]

This is a ridiculous comparison. There are around 500 NBA players during a given season. Amazon alone just passed one million workers. You're going to have odd results if your sample size of society is absurdly tiny.

Also, going straight to comparisons of athletic ability and ethnicity is basically a hundred year old argument made by people you probably don't want to associate with.

[YuriGrinshteyn]

That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work. Instead, much of it is about access to training opportunities, coaches, having parents who can afford to send you to various camps, drive you to weekend tournaments, and buy you the equipment necessary.

Tech exacerbates this problem even further. How can you get anywhere as a kid if your parents don't have a computer, and neither does your school? And that's just one example.

[jl2718]

Maybe this is true about tech, but you really must have never met anybody that even made it to pro camp in the NFL or NBA. I was pretty close with a dude that had only one year of football before being drafted and then won the NFL rushing title the next year. On the other hand, I played since I was 7, won a state title at 9, and put everything into it for years afterward, but it wasn't long before I couldn't be drafted to carry water bottles for a real team.

[barry-cotter]

> That's only if you assume that getting to that level is nothing but a matter of natural ability, talent, and hard work.

That and luck are well over 90%, yes. Otherwise the scions of the wealthy would be vastly more prominent in sports with low entry barriers. In practice the most decorated Olympian ever is the son of a police officer and a middle school principal[1]. The best basketball player ever comes from a less distinguished background[2]. College sports specially chosen to be niches to maximize the chance of being a recruited athlete are so competitive the children of hedge fund managers routinely fail to get in that way[3]. The outer extremities of talent distributions are people who are staggeringly talented, hard working and lucky. Then they complete with each other and the ones who win are better than that .

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/squash-...

[908B64B197]

> If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are.

In tech, there's the pipeline issue too. You can't really double the percentage of senior engineers of a certain group overnight. You'd have to magically go back to the 90's and try to get more diverse folks to apply! Same way the class of 2021 they are hiring from now can't really suddenly change.

[runawaybottle]

Well why is that? Wasn’t everyone and there mother going into CS and IT around the dotcom bubble? Not sure why we even have a pipeline problem (which is real).

[tenpies]

> > If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations.

Well no, that would be assuming that whatever traits help one be meritorious are equally distributed among all the populations, which seems highly unlikely given what we see literally everywhere else (e.g. athletic pursuits).

What I think is more important than nailing some magical quota or ratio or percentage, is ensuring that the individual is judged as an individual instead of as a subset of a group.

Regardless of how a specific trait is distributed among a human population, you are bound to find individuals within each group that display it. The problem comes when you discard individuals because they don't belong to the group you want, or when you take in individuals without the trait you're looking for just because they belong to the group you do want.

[confidantlake]

Where I am as a lowly IC in a non FAANG company most software engineers are not white. Majority are Indian with white or Chinese second. This has been the case at multiple places. Maybe it is different at FAANG?

[tylersmith]

Not get into the politics, but this seems like an interesting potential incentive misalignment where a team is incentivized to fill up their budget with non-diverse employees so they can try to hire even more (diverse) help with "overflow" budget.

[jkaplowitz]

The Supreme Court rulings didn't say whether race quota systems are racist since that's not a concept known to the law - they merely judged legality. The set of racist things includes both legal things and illegal ones (e.g. in the US calling someone a racial slur is usually racist but not itself illegal); so does the set of non-racist things (e.g. explicitly refusing to hire people over age 40 is usually illegal but not itself racist).

Anyway, it's not as if most of the tech industry cares about strict adherence to the law in other areas, such as Uber running roughshod over many jurisdictions' pre-existing transport-for-hire legislation, Airbnb doing the same for short-term rental/hotel legislation, and the whole "gig economy" bringing their gig workers close enough to the definition of misclassified employee that many rulings say they're past the line.

If this one case of powerful tech companies ignoring the law is working in favor of hiring more suitably qualified members of minority demographics than they otherwise would, then I'm happy they're doing it as long as they're generally willing to violate laws for worse purposes.

[R0b0t1]

Racism is a concept known to the legal system because it is a type of discrimination and quotas are illegal. It took me a second but the ruling is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v....

[jkaplowitz]

That ruling did overturn the specific rigid quota system which that university used as unconstitutional and therefore illegal discrimination, but that is different than ruling that it was racist because racism is not illegal in the US. Literally, going up to someone on the street and using a racial slur at them is not illegal in the US, despite it being very classically racist. As another example, the federal law against race-based discrimination in employment does not apply to employers with fewer than 15 employees who meet certain frequency-of-work requirements; mere failure to meet that statutory threshold does not eliminate the racist character of racist behavior, but it does make it legal in the absence of a relevant state or local law.

Many specific racist behaviors are of course either sometimes or always illegal, but those concepts are individually known to the law, not outlawed as racism per se.

What's more, the ruling you linked did not address the kind of quotas which the FANG company was discussing in the quoted email. The university was setting aside a certain percentage of the total and rejecting white people who might otherwise have qualified to keep room for racial minorities, which was key to the ruling. The FANG company was evaluating white people just as it would have done without the quotas, but it was simply allowing extra hiring of racial minorities beyond the normal budgets until certain targets/quotas were met. Whether this is legal or not is out of scope of that ruling. (Maybe other rulings have addressed this; I'm not sure.)

[R0b0t1]

Fair enough, I guess I was referring to legal entities acting in outwardly racist ways as racism. I should have been more specific. I am aware most of the protected class laws had some kind of exception.

I'm aware of the specificity of the ruling but the basis on which the ruling was made is much more general. Depending on the entity different laws would be in question; a fully private entity would probably be violating the civil rights act of 1964, while in the case of university admissions and funding the current systems are still in violation of the equal protection clause. Interpretations of the civil rights act of 1964 that advantage groups for no reason other than race are also unconstitutional.

Note this is a lot different than allowing race to be a factor of a multifaceted evaluation -- it's inappropriate to have race at all be part of the evaluation. Instead substitute it for socioeconomic background.

I'm not sure yet how to fully clarify this, so consider the Missouri government's statutory commitment to spend X% of the budget with women or minority owned businesses. In a degenerate case this means e.g. even the most unqualified candidate could be awarded a contract solely on the basis of race, violating the equal protection clause.

(Practically this expenditure law means larger companies have "independent" women and minority owned businesses as subcontractors who might contract the work back to a business owned by the larger company that can do the work.)

[jkaplowitz]

> Note this is a lot different than allowing race to be a factor of a multifaceted evaluation -- it's inappropriate to have race at all be part of the evaluation.

My understanding of the state of the law is that race is currently allowed to be considered as a factor in university admissions if available workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice, and that (as of 2016) the University of Texas at Austin's policy of using race as such a factor was found to be constitutional for this reason.

More reading on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_v._University_of_Texas_...

The viability of this precedent is highly uncertain since it was a 4-3 ruling (one SCOTUS seat vacant at the time and one justice recused), and since its majority was four of the liberal justices of whom one (the late RBG) has now been replaced by the conservative Justice Barrett. But it hasn't yet been overruled, and it was a SCOTUS majority ruling and not dicta, so it's likely to be followed by lower courts unless and until it's overruled by SCOTUS.

Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.

[R0b0t1]

I'm aware of the current rulings. I am explaining why they should be considered invalid.

>Questions of being inappropriate are, of course, a personal opinion-based judgment call and not a question of legality.

Disingenuous. If the law is not agreeable soon it will be unenforceable. I consider the rulings inappropriate both on the basis of constitutionality and on the basis of construction an egalitarian society.

Again, see my example about Missouri statutory expenditures on the basis of gender and race. Many states have laws like this. They plainly violate the equal protection clause. You can try to claim the state has an overwhelming interest to ignore the protection clause, but then can't it just have an overwhelming interest to violate whatever parts of the constitution it wants? Where does it stop?

[dang]

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947325.

[R0b0t1]

I wasn't trying to incite anything and it got some well thought out replies. I'm not really sure that was appropriate.

[R0b0t1]

Ah, sorry, thought you hid it.

[xenadu02]

I'm a manager at a FAANG company who has gone through the hiring process a number of times now. I was at a startup before that where we grew from 30 to 200 people and I was involved in hiring for quite a few positions. I can assure you 100% that there is no quota system anywhere I've ever worked. It is absolutely prohibited. We are not even allowed to post something like "do you come from an under-represented group? we're hiring!". Anything along those lines is a big ol' nope. I suggest even if that email thread was real if the legal department found out about it they'd shut it down very quickly. (FWIW we're not allowed to ask about lots of stuff during an interview either like marital or parental status).

I'll also note that every team I know of at any FAANG company is desperate to find really great candidates. The idea that a team would willingly refuse to hire an excellent <insert group here> candidate to instead fill some kind of diversity quota slot for <other group here> is so bananas to me I can't even comprehend it. It's so wrong I can't even laugh at it. Every manager I know has a backlog of important work a mile long and is desperate to fill open reqs. I've never once seen or heard rumor of anyone from upper management to HR to execs discussing anything even remotely like a "diversity quota". Not even water-cooler gossip.

Whenever I ask for proof of a diversity quota system there is no evidence. When you look at the stats on who is hired (for companies that publish it) to the degree the needle is moving it is moving very slowly. So slowly if there were a quota system it would mean they're very very bad at it. So as far as I can tell from personal experience and my discussions with my peers "diversity quotas" are by-and-large either made up or being run illegally by a small group that gets shut down immediately once legal gets wind of it.

"Diversity quota" could be an attempt to stir up race or gender resentment: 'you didn't get that job because one of "those" people stole it' or some such notion. Having worked at plenty of other software jobs over the years I've met more than my share of developers who were garbage at their jobs but thought they were God's gift to programming. They were also the same people who tended to have complaints about "diversity quotas". I'm sure blaming "those other people" is an attractive way to justify not getting what you think you deserve. It's an old trope but one that keeps being re-used over thousands of years because it works. Just convince people that "those others" are the enemy and have stolen what is rightfully yours and you can justify anything.

It's also a really cheap way to tear down someone else - just dismiss them as a "diversity hire". You need a certain amount of insecurity, cruelty, or hate in your heart to act out like that. I prefer to judge people based on their job performance but YMMV.