[nnvvhh]

The argument you point out, about treating well-off groups equally as bad as those less well-off, is a bad argument and not what you should be thinking about. The practices you point out have nothing to do treating everyone equally bad. You are focusing on the unfortunate consequence of attempting to make right past injustices, rather than the effort to right past injustices. The goal is not to discriminate against young graduates. Rather, biasing hiring in favor of historically oppressed groups is an attempt to, in some small way, achieve a society we would have been in without things like racism and sexism. I understand this type of thing is frustrating for a qualified candidate who personally has a minuscule impact on society, yet is feeling the full brunt of a rejection. But I would encourage you to focus on the much more widespread similar feeling felt by those being helped up by such efforts.

[belorn]

Allowing a company culture that reduces people down to their race and gender during recruiting has a rather significant risk that it may spread to other part of the company.

Do we want a company cultures that operate based on biases and stereotypes? I don't. I also do not believe in collective punishment in order to improve society. The best thing we can do to society to remove biases and stereotypes is to encourage a culture of understanding, by seeing individuals as individuals rather than single bits information like skin color or gender identification. Be the change that society need to be, encourage others to do the same, and culture will slowly change in the same direction.

[nnvvhh]

You are not being charitable with the arguments of those you disagree with. People are not reduced down to their race or gender, those aspects are one factor among multiple. No company is hiring random people matching their desired profiles off the street simply because of those characteristics.

I have a lot to say about your views on this. First of all, I am not concerned about company cultures. There are way bigger concerns in life than company culture. And if that really matters to you and you don't like your company culture, go to a company you like.

Your phrasing of "collective punishment" is really telling. You seem to really focus on the hardship incurred by the candidates discounted a bit because they are historically privileged. I find it very easy not to dwell on the temporary misfortunes of well-qualified software engineers. They will be fine. It's not a big deal. I care much more about fixing the "collective punishment" that has been inflicted on certain groups for hundreds of years.

And to your point claiming you know how to fix these problems: I like what you advocate. I disagree that it will be sufficient. Nothing has worked. We need to try everything, because the problem is so hard. To me, what the OP describes is part of the price society has to pay for the ill-gotten gains we've enjoyed for hundreds of years. It's not a punishment, but it's like tech debt. We backed ourselves into a corner where things are so bad that the only feasible ways to address inequality among groups is hacky solutions like affirmative action. Nobody WANTS to do that. But the problem is just so old and stuck.

[belorn]

If an applicant is being thrown out on the sole attribute of their race and gender, then those individuals are being reduced down to only two bits of information. One can not look only on those not being discriminating. It would be as silly as saying that no university was selecting random people from the street matching the male gender in the 19th century.

The phrase I am borrowing is from Carl Sagan, where he is using the even less charitable argument that discrimination is simply lazy thinking. Instead of evaluating an individual as a full person we reduce them down to single bit of information like gender and race. It is what people do when they are unwilling to do the thinking needed to actually see a person. The result is nothing less than evil, historically and present.

You might not care about culture, but those being hired usually do. A culture of discrimination is a culture of distrust. On HN we see with a fairly common regularity articles where once being happy to have joined a company under those circumstances, the diversity hire find themselves very unhappy and leaves. The experience can so bad that people quit the profession itself, or determine that the only functional work culture is a mono-culture and joins a company with only their gender or race.

Last, I have a rather strong warning against trying to solve the ills of the past with ills of the present. It is less than a century ago that a country in Europe decided to go after a demographic that held a historical strong position in mercantile and banking. Resenting a demographic based on what their grand and grandgrand, and grandgrandgrand parents did is a very dark place to be.

> Nothing has worked

We do know what works, it just people are unwilling to do it. The way to address class differences between demographic is to raise the social support. Gender segregation is effectively reduced through support programs like mentorships, which raises understanding and cooperation. It is hard work. What does not work in both cases is more discrimination.

[raxxorrax]

You cannot undo these injustices anymore. You try to fix these injustices on the backs of others with racial discrimination. This is the objective thing you are doing. If you are white and believe corrections are in order, you have to step back and nobody else but you.

But since you probably won't, your proclamation to fight racism is very hollow. You might just like to discriminate, projecting your anger or vanity on others.

The goal is to reach equality and you are in the way of it. There aren't any metrics that could satisfy the strive to "diversity" anyway.

> But I would encourage you to focus on the much more widespread similar feeling felt by those being helped up by such efforts.

We teach 4 year olds about the problems with compensatory justice, but you are revealing yourself with that comment. Worse, you try to compensate for different generations. People championing diversity call themselves progressive but at the same time espouse ethics from the 17th century. But here racism is primarily a you problem, not a society problem.

[throwaway120398]

I'm afraid that, to my mind, it doesn't matter whether the goal is to discriminate or not. The discrimination itself is a problem, and we'd be better agreeing that this is a place we will not go to, no matter the end.

[nnvvhh]

The problem with this view, to me, is that it takes a really narrow view of discrimination. Why are you only concerned with the hiring process of software engineers? To me, bad-faith alarm bells go off when concern about discrimination only rears its head when the speaker's corner of the world is impacted. There are much more pernicious problems that need addressing than the quality of engineers at your job. How is the need for meritocratic software hiring more urgent and pressing than rectifying major societal problems? Are you OK with permanently setting in place the underclass, subjugated status of entire minority communities so your page loads are quicker?

[throwaway120398]

Somehow many people in this thread are jumping to rebut the idea of meritocratic hiring. I'm with you on that. I think meritocracy is a naive idea and it's actively damaging when hiring teams think they can boil the talent of candidates, and their effectiveness to do a job, down to some objective and comparable score of merit.

I also don't give a shit about making my page loads quicker. That's rarely what the world, or the business for that matter, needs.

What I'm talking about is the specific phenomenon of discriminating against a candidate based on their gender or race, and whether people think this is okay.

I'm concerned with the process of hiring software engineers because it's something I have to do daily, and have done for a very long time. I'm coming here to talk about it (rather than other social issues) because I think others here have experience in the same area.

[nnvvhh]

You can't discuss the topic you raised without discussing social issues because it IS a social issue. Affirmative action in hiring software engineers is not a distinct topic, you simply raised the topic of affirmative action among the tech community.

And I will say, it is fine to broach these subjects. Your concerns are legitimate. I simply choose to take a much broader view of things and feel that until we get much closer to making the world more equal and righting past injustices, we should try and use as many tools we have to close the wealth gap between majority and minority groups.

[butmuh]

As soon as you bias based on any trait YOU are the one discriminating.

You think you're helping correct society by helping one group over a perceived disadvantage, but all you are doing is enforcing a another kind of discrimination

You can't correct discrimination by discriminating back or tipping the scale one way or another, the only way to defeat discrimination is to throw away the scales.

Utopian societies are the motivation for all kinds of genocides.