[pesenti]

Legality aside, this is a terrible and naive way to think of DEI. Candidates recruited this way will have a stigma attached to them (“they were recruited because they were X”).

A better way is to enforce DSA - Diverse Slate Approach - which ensure that you don’t recruit anybody without having considered multiple genders and/or ethnicity before making the offer.

The goal of DSA is to recruit the best candidate for the role, but ensure a broad set of candidates has been considered. It’s a win win for all and it works.

[zdragnar]

I have to disagree that this is a win-win. My friend recently went through another round of interviews trying to find a job.

He got tons of follow up interviews, only to be told that the company decided to hire internally, or some other excuse that strongly implied they already had another candidate in mind.

My friend, it ought not surprise you to discover, fits into several "minority" categories. The worst industry for this was academia, though his last round in the private sector was also tough.

Moral of the story: if you find a candidate that you want to hire, just hire them. Don't bring in a bunch of DEI candidates and make them feel like show dogs just so you can tick a checkbox that says you pretended to care about DEI.

[Spivak]

This isn't necessarily a DEI thing and more that the company has some dumb policy that you have to have job descriptions posted publicly for $x number of weeks and interview at least $y candidates. And then you make internal promotions go through the same process because reasons.

Source: have worked for companies that have this policy, academia especially is famous for this level of institutional incompetence.

[the_lonely_road]

Not sure why this guy is downvoted. His comment is 100% true in at least some contexts. In a past life I worked at a state university. Greater than 80% of positions during my tenure were filled by nepotism. Friends and family of a currently employed person. Every time they would post the job, bring in 2 poor sobs to interview alongside the friend or family member, and then hire the friend or family member even when they were glaringly weaker (the most egregious example I remember was for a position running a copy center for one of the colleges and one of the passed over interview candidates had 10 years of experience at a local Kinkos like shop. The actual person hired had been a stay at home mom for the last 10 years, and worked in retail before that. She was also a close friend of one of the people at the college where the copy shop was located. Both were asking for commensurate pay.)

[zdragnar]

Yes, academia and private can both be bad about this, but because of DEI initiatives, my friend got sent to many second and third interviews even though they didn't plan on hiring him.

Had he been a vanilla white guy, fewer places would have wasted his time. Instead they used him. Universities were especially bad about doing this, though not the only ones.

[zdragnar]

What was most aggregating is that, because my friend fit the DEI categories, he always got passed through to subsequent interviews even though they had no intention of hiring him, all so they could pad their DEI checklists.

Had be been your run of the mill white guy, far fewer of them would have wasted his time.

[waterhouse]

I've heard of a mechanism with similar results where certain positions (government contractors?) are required to be "offered" to domestic candidates, although the company would rather hire a foreigner because they're generally cheaper. So they technically post an ad somewhere (ideally in a place no one will read) and they'll technically interview domestic candidates who apply, even though they plan to say no.

Regardless of the reason, it wastes people's time and is somewhat dishonest.

[int0x2e]

The issue with DSA is that some hiring managers will inevitably try to game the system. A friend once shared a strategy he saw at BigCorp - a hiring manager would fill the pipeline with 10 quality applicants, but if none of them matched the diversity requirement, that manager would add 2-3 diversity candidates that were horrible fits. They still started the interview loop, but failed miserably compared to a normal candidate, and no interviewer could really be ignore the difference in the CVs.

I personally really want be part of a diverse and inclusive team, but so far, all attempts to "enforce" D&I I've seen or heard of inevitably failed in some form or another. I would argue that the biggest issue has to do with supply, not demand for diverse talent, and resolving that will take a while sadly.

[janto]

Supply will never be fully resolved from a minority pool; there are less of them - the definition of a minority.

[int0x2e]

The supply of diverse talent can only be sourced from candidates with a diverse background. In that sense - they are the majority, not the minority.

[janto]

I think those pushing DEI in the US would take issue if you are selecting from the majority.

[rajin444]

> this is a terrible and naive way to think of DEI

No, it isn’t. OP is describing the intended use of DEI. A proper merit based approach would have 0 knowledge of race, gender, etc. DSA as well requires prior knowledge of irrelevant attributes of a candidate because its goal is to increase the representation of people with those attributes, not hire the best candidates.

Any process trying to select for the best developer does not need to know about race, gender, etc. Any process that asks for those is not looking for the best developers.

[themarkn]

Hmm. Without actively taking steps to widen the net and account for those irrelevant attributes, those attributes instead act as the first filter in your hiring process. IMO the process that ignores this is the one that’s not looking for the best developers. In order to make those attributes truly irrelevant we have to correct for the massive, obvious influence they have in human decision making (on both sides of the hiring equation). Accepting the status quo is actually letting those attributes rob you of good hires.

[rjspotter]

" In order to make those attributes truly irrelevant we have to correct for the massive, obvious influence they have in human decision making"

Which is exactly what blind-hiring / blind-auditions are meant to do. The problem, from my perspective having tried to implement it, is that it requires a real cognitive leap from people who are most successful for their social acumen and don't regularly make decisions based on hard evidence. Often those kinds of people have a title with Manager or Officer in it.

[rajin444]

What’s the correct breakdown of software developers by race / gender / etc? I think if we can answer that question we can then accurately assess whether or not those attributes are acting as filters. However, without knowing those breakdowns, taking any action to correct those breakdowns is wrong. We can’t accurately say there is a problem.

The best we can do is remove any bias we find at an individual level (ie a blind hiring process). Looking at aggregate level metrics is nearly useless because we cannot accurately account for all the factors contributing to them.

[themarkn]

> However, without knowing those breakdowns, taking any action to correct those breakdowns is wrong. We can’t accurately say there is a problem.

You’re arguing a different point. I’m talking about the filter on candidates, not eventual hires. Though of course, people who don’t become candidates will never become hires so there’s a relationship there.

It would be easy to see whether doing X to increase candidate diversity (opening up the filter) led to more diverse hires. Especially combined with blind hiring process or whatever at the individual level. But the individual work alone is not worth much if the candidate pool itself is too limited.

If changing the candidate pool leads to more diverse candidates, and then employees as a whole end up more diverse, it would follow that some of those people brought in at the candidate level out-competed their peers & that the overall standard of hires has increased, or at least is no different.

This is not about a target ratio of employed people. Though I think observations about such ratios compared to the general population and to other similar companies can be informative.

To get at the point you thought I was making though… How I feel about quotas is: they might be an ok temporary measure, especially if managed gently, not “must be a woman” for X role, cause yikes. Hiring is capricious a lot of the time anyway, especially at the margin when there is more than one acceptable candidate and all have different backgrounds and experience. All sorts of stuff will come into play. Good people will still be in demand regardless of their race. But if you lose a couple things because you aren’t from an underrepresented group and another acceptable candidate was, who actually cares. If it wasn’t that, it would be some other nonsense like the guy was the same race as you but supports the same football team as the interviewer, or your interview took place before lunch and the other person’s was after.

Since it’s already capricious and full of coin flips, I don’t care at all that sometimes it’s capricious for a relatively good reason like giving somebody else a shot. Fine.

I disagree completely that we have to be 100% certain about a problem before we take action. We just have to know that, more likely than not, there is a problem, and take measured, cautious steps to address it. To me it would be an extraordinary, mind-boggling, coincidence if it turned out that the status quo was working perfectly to get the best candidates hired.

[anaisbetts]

Yep, I have to agree. Candidates (rightly!) are upset when they are explicitly considered the "token" hire and avoid these roles - some companies even have the gall to put this in their job listing!

The real solution to diverse hiring is to actively recruit from sources that have the kind of people you're looking for. Your (not you parent comment, but the anonymous "you") current candidate sources are probably not very diverse so the end result is that your hiring is mirroring that.

Actively recruit and go after diverse candidate sources, and you'll hire diverse candidates.

[walterclifford]

> don’t recruit anybody without having considered multiple genders and/or ethnicity before making the offer.

There are downsides to this approach as well.

My previous company had such a policy (no offer could be extended until at least one female or under-represented minority had been interviewed) - and we had someone who interned with us twice while in school and he was amazing, everybody on the team thought he was great and wanted to bring him on full-time once he graduated. So as he neared graduation our manager got us an open req and we extended him a (verbal) offer without interviewing him but HR blocked us from extending a formal offer because this exceptional engineer had the misfortune of being born male and Indian. HR told us we could extend an offer to him only after interviewing (on-site) a female or under-represented minority. And so we brought in and interviewed a female applicant wasting five hours of her time and ours as she had virtually zero chance of getting the job.

Generally it also meant female candidates were almost guaranteed to make it to the onsite, regardless of how they performed during the phonescreen because if you tried to pass on a female candidate you'd get pushback from the recruiter and/or manager, because with this policy we needed to interview at least one on-site before extending an offer to anyone.

I do genuinely applaud efforts at increasing diversity in tech, but I don't think policies like this are the right approach. We should probably be looking at other historically male dominated professions that now have gender-parity like medicine and law and emulate what they did to increase diversity (I have no idea what that is/was, but I'm guessing it's not what we're spinning our wheels on, since as far as I can tell we've barely moved the needle despite a very concerted effort).

[wyager]

You can dress it up however you like; the goal is to tip the scales in favor of certain types of candidates.

If you're hiring for a particular position and you only get qualified white and Asian male applicants, for example, your three options are to either nuke the position, recruit somewhere that specifically selects against white and Asian men, or lower your qualification standards. Either way, the net result is that A) you don't fill the job and discriminate against all the applicants you got B) you spend more money on recruiting and outsource discrimination against the current applicant pool (e.g. to a women's college) C) you hire a worse employee and discriminate against the applicants who are a better fit for the job. This is not a "win win".

[a30b40]

This is just what OP is experiencing with extra steps. Here's why:

1. Find merit based, good, but (unfortunately) majority candidate. 2. Position is held open, the meritorious engineer is waiting for an offer. 3. A few minority position trickle in that are nearly as good but not quite. 4. DEI argues you should choose the minority and uses an excuse like "they're trainable" to justify racist hiring practices.

In both these systems you really only wanted to use racist recruiting practices to hire non-white non-males. But to get around the legal concern step (4) gives you plausible deniability.

It is no surprise that your average person thinks these hiring practices are racist and they lead to tokenization of the very group you're trying to protect. Consequently all the "hidden bias" DEI bleets on about is brought on by them. Things like "they were only hired/promoted because they fit in X category" where X is something innate and uncontrollable. It is not "racist" to look at a minority coworker differently if you know for the fact they weren't hired on merit. No different than the CEO's son getting a promotion to VP. Both people are undeserving.

I am in the "majority" and have been passed up on promotions and probably not hired in several jobs because of things like this. Thanks to step (4) it is difficult to sue, but it would bring me great pleasure to take a company to court because of this.

DEI should be renamed DIE to reflect it's true nature at a company. The extremist, racist, wing of HR.

[virtue3]

It's not racism it's prejudice.

"According to the sociological perspective, members of privileged groups can experience prejudice, but their experience will be different than the experience of someone who experiences systemic racism."

One could argue that being in the majority you would have an easier time getting a lateral promotion than someone as a minority.

[jjoonathan]

    rac·ism
    /ˈrāˌsizəm/
    noun
    prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people 
    on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, 
    typically one that is a minority or marginalized.

[zozbot234]

Racism is literally defined as prejudice + discrimination + unequal power relationship. It's quite undeniable that a majority-race person who gets rejected solely because of DIE practices in a bureaucratic hiring process is experiencing all three - in particular, she is in an unequal power relationship with the people who are deciding whether or not to hire her.

[drdeca]

Just another attempt to exert power over others by (an attempt at) imposing a definition used by one group, on the rest of society.

The common understanding of the term is not “incorrect”.

[blululu]

This is one of those ‘well actually’ type of statements that assumes that there is a single correct definition of a concept and it is defined by a consortium of researchers 5 years ago. The the term already had common definition and widespread use for 50 years. Saying people don’t know what the concept means because they were taught a different definition since the age of 6 is not going to move the discussion forward.

[dude187]

Racism is a much more apt word for it than prejudice

[Zababa]

Systemic racism is one form of racism, but not the only one. Just because you don't experience systemic racism doesn't mean that you don't experience racism at all.

I would say that only hiring non-white people would be prejudice if and only if you consider that only hiring white people is prejudice and not racism too.

[systemvoltage]

What good is diversity when everyone thinks alike and they just look different (skin pigmentation)? IMO diversity is about diversity of thought. If they happen to look different, fine. If I were to grow our team, I would want people with diverse range of convictions and opinions.

DEI crowd in silicon valley has no diversity of thought. It is a monoculture.

Also, depending on industry or company objectives, sometimes you don't want diversity of thought at all. You want coworkers that are aligned on a particular niche objective and have similar opinions especially if the company is trying to do something unconventional. Diversity hurts there and having people with various backgrounds is a disadvantage.

[giantg2]

God, if only.

I'm at a non-tech company nowhere near SV. Diversity of thought is a joke. The company tells us to be candid, which is also a joke. I've been punished, both directly and indirectly, for speaking my mind and bringing up inconsistencies (respectfully).

[e67f70028a46fba]

It all starts to make sense when you understand that it is really a intra-white social hierarchy contest, rooted in ethnic origins: anglo-Puritan virtue signaling, etc.

[systemvoltage]

I think DEI needs to be tackled at the fundamental level. Improving minority conditions, education opportunities, etc. Top-down approach of DEI is creating more problems than solving. Progressives love to make fun of Trickle down economics, but they turn a blind eye to Trickle down DEI practices which create a toxic work environment ironically.

[bluescrn]

Just make sure that the diverse slate includes diversity of age, experience, and educational background - diversity of the mind, not just of the body.

[janto]

The E in DEI is for Equity, not Equality. It is outcome focused, and not about equal opportunity. DSA would technically be insufficient if you were maximizing DEI.

[donw]

Precisely.

OP should share the name of his employer. It’s win-win. People his leadership considers undesirable will know not to apply. Big time saver all around.

[Bostonian]

Since time is finite, with DSA you will likely deny interviews on the basis of race and sex, and that is morally and legally wrong too.