[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.