[dmazzoni]

Do you actually have experience with those programs?

Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.

As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.

That's just one example of what they do.

You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".

[AlexandrB]

> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse".

And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.

[ChocolateGod]

> In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason

Statically Asians in America outperform "White" people when it comes to education and salaries, which shows the fallacy in the whole white privilege thing. Therefore DEI policies pretend Asians don't exist.

[arccy]

there's still a "bamboo ceiling"

[hollerith]

Is there? The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Asians who did not even grow up in the US.

[code_biologist]

Those CEOs are great examples, because they show the operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin or a McKinsey alum. I see less evidence for power networks based on race, or those power networks are doing less.

[hollerith]

> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin

What evidence do you have that Sundar or Satya used any power network to progress in their career?

Could it not be that being a Brahmin in India was not all that promising to an ambitious young Indian man and in response he decided to start fresh in another country where he had very little in the way of useful network connections?

[RestlessMind]

> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin

eh, what? Why would US corporate culture give a shit about Hindu castes? Google and Microsoft boards appointed Sundar and Satya, but I don't think those boards could tell a Brahmin from a non-Brahmin.

[UncleMeat]

Specific examples don't overcome the overall statistics.

[rufus_foreman]

"bamboo ceiling" is not a statistic.

[cyberax]

Can you provide the stats? I'm looking at the BLS data and I don't really see anything relevant.

[pc86]

The charitable interpretation of why Asian == white in these scenarios is that Asians are not typically underrepresented in the engineering field, company founders, prestigious schools, etc.

The less charitable interpretation is that DEI programs aren't being pushed for by Asians and they're designed to help people who look like the people starting the programs.

[chrislongss]

Even following the charitable interpretation, grouping a dozen of cultures with very different educational and economic opportunities into a single "asian" designation is a bizarre practice.

[danudey]

There's often a separation between the people who bring in the candidates and the people who interview/approve the candidates.

If HR passes me a stack of resumes then that's who I interview; if all the people HR passes me are white, then I'm left to either assume that these were all the qualified candidates who applied (or at least, to operate under that assumption).

If the process gets bounced back because the stack that was passed to me was filtered by HR's unconscious (or conscious) biases, that forces them to give me more diverse candidates to choose from; the best candidate may still be the middle class white dude, but ensuring that the hiring manager is presented with a broad range of options and not just Chad, Biff, and Troy helps the whole pipeline.

[com2kid]

Years ago the software engineering field looked at this problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly proceeded to implement none of them.

Resumes need to be filtered to remove age, race, gender, name, even what school someone went to. Then ideally the first filtering round of an interview is also completely anonymous, a take home test or a video interview with camera off and a voice filter in place. Heck modern AI tools could even be used to remove accents.

HR has biases, those biases need to be removed.

It only takes a few moments of thinking to realize these techniques are a better way to hire all around. Nothing good can come from someone in HR looking at a resume and thinking "oh that isn't a college I recognize, next candidate."

[chrislongss]

Reminds of the infamous attempt to fight discrimination in orchestras by conducting blind auditions. Which ended up reducing diversity even further.

[naijaboiler]

This has been demonstrably proven to make discrimination worse, not better.

Apparently, people like to discriminate. Where there are overt markers, there is still a chance that people fear the legality of their discrimination. And when you remove overt markers of discrimination, people look for subtle markers, and those exist, and then still end up discriminating.

End result, even fewer qualified members of the discriminated class gets hired.

[zo1]

Of course the "answer" is never that people were biased in favor of DEI groups in the first place, and removing said overt markers of their race just removed that bias because individuals could no longer discriminate. No, the answer was obviously then is that people found "secret" and "subtle" markers instead because they just have to discriminate and don't like DEI groups.

Occams razor comes to mind.

[DangitBobby]

Has it been proven that people still manage to tell races of candidates apart after removing markers? Or is this all just conjecture?

[com2kid]

Do you have links to any studies that removing names and other obvious markers from resumes (college name, employment dates, etc) somehow increases discrimination in HR screening?

I honestly fail to how that could happen.

For example, if HR is throwing away all resumes that aren't from an Ivy League, then removing cities and schools from the resume can only help.

[Manuel_D]

If "subtle markers" can still identify someone's race or gender, then remove those markers too. You can test of this works by giving employees bonuses to correctly guess the candidates' demographics and see if they can predict reliably.

If anonymization reduced the representation of certain demographics maybe it doesn't make discrimination worse, but rather you were wrong about which groups are discriminated against?

[jordanb]

> Do you actually have experience with those programs?

I was hiring manager at a "woke" (media) company during and after peak DEI.

The only policy of DEI that really affected me was that we had to have a "diverse slate of candidates" meaning, we had to interview at least one woman and (non asian) minority. This was actually a problem hiring engineers because we wouldn't be able to extend offers unless we'd satisfy the "diverse slate" meaning we'd miss out on candidates we wanted to hire while waiting for more people to interview. We could get exceptions but it'd be a fight with HR.

Asians didn't count as diverse because, in tech, they are not underrepresented. Basically "diverse" hires were women, AA, hispanic, etc.

Our company quietly walked back the "diverse slate" stuff years ago. In fact I think it was only in effect for like a year at the most.

The DEI stuff rolling out was highly performative. It wasn't in place for really long and quietly walked back. Now, the loud walking back of policies that probably haven't been enforced in years is also performative. In both instances it's companies responding to the political moment.

[Karrot_Kream]

This was exactly my experience in a Big Tech company. I will say, a lasting (IMO good) effect we had was that hiring managers continued to consider diversity of candidates as a factor, but there was no gate in extending offers. Some hiring managers took this further and actually enforced diverse slate style hiring because they believed in it and others didn't care. It also meant that if a req was taking a long time to get filled, diverse slate just stopped being a factor.

[surgical_fire]

If that's what DEI did, I think that getting rid of it is positive. It seems to just add performative and inefficient bureaucracy to an already typically slow and laborious task which is hiring people.

I am not even white by the way. I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. I am confident and proud of my skills, which I put a lot of effort to develop over decades. The color of my skin is as meaningless as the color of my shirts.

[userbinator]

I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do.

That's exactly what was happening, and you can imagine the quality of work that resulted in. Now that the tide is turning, that hopefully won't be the case anymore.

[Plasmoid]

One thing that started happening is that "diverse" candidates were aggressively head-hunted, for interviews. HR wasn't interested in hiring them, they just wanted to fill our their internal diversity quota and lubricate the hiring pipeline.

[hombre_fatal]

> consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

This sounds like a terminally online Twitter user's idea of how people do hiring.

It's also funny to consider when 70%+ of H1Bs are Indian men. Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.

This kind of rhetoric is why we're seeing a pendulum swing in the other direction instead of a sane middle ground. But at least it's finally becoming trite to make these claims with a straight face.

[whynotminot]

> Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.

Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers.

Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers.

I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.

[blitzar]

The memo sent from on high (multiple years):

You must put up for dismissal 15% of your reports, of those 10% will be dismissed. You may not select any female, ethnic minority, lgbtq or disabled employees.

[maxwellg]

Does anyone have any concrete proof of this actually happening? I find it extremely doubtful.

[notahacker]

Seems to be very loosely based on Jack Welch's actual maxim that 10% of the workforce should be arbitrarily fired every year in the hope that this performative beating would improve morale, and maybe productivity too. This sort of arbitrariness was actually popular with much of the right at the time, but it wasn't white men that Welch was explaining just needed to overdeliver and outperform (and definitely not have kids) to succeed in the long run...

[blitzar]

The overlords of my time were certainly schooled in the ways of Jack Welch, but also particularly inspired by the 2009 Netflix vision of a High Performing Workplace as seen in their culture document. It was mandatory and inspirational reading.

When the performative beating and meritocracy absolutism collides with the sensitivities of the modern workplace the results are strangely unpredictable.

The memos are tucked away somewhere with my NDA and the memories of crushing peoples hopes, dreams and aspirations.

[curtisblaine]

This is terrible. It makes my blood boil just seeing this.

[asdasdsddd]

There are example of DEI not being racist but the one you provided is extremely racist.

[fn-mote]

GP mentions race and gender, so this response isn’t making an impression on me.

The point the GP makes - why was the promo/hiring committee unable to find a breadth of candidates - is a troubling but real part of many of our daily lives.

Maybe there weren’t any. That’s usually the reason/excuse given. That should still be a cause for concern.

[pc86]

Well "DEI vetos it" is obviously a problem. There's a discussion to be had around expanding candidate pools, expanding the pipeline, however you want to phrase it. These are good and noble goals but we're not talking about the pipeline we're talking about the candidates for a given role that we're hiring for right now.

No department should be vetoing any hire in a different department. Having an engineer veto a hire in the DEI department is ludicrous on its face, but no more ludicrous than having a DEI department tell the engineering team they're not "allowed" to hire a qualified applicant because of their race or gender.

[a1j9o94]

It's HR's entire job to set policies for hiring. They can say a candidate has to have a college degree. Why wouldn't they have the right to set this policy as well?

[Manuel_D]

Protected class cannot be used as a factor in hiring. Saying "we can't proceed with an offer until we've hired at least one woman and one URM" (which is what Meta's DSA entailed) is indeed using protected class as a factor in hiring.

[asdasdsddd]

You are confusing policies and qualifications, its on the engineers to decide the qualifications and HR to run policies on sourcing.

[asdasdsddd]

Why is breadth of candidates defined by race and gender instead of experience and expertise. If the DEI department improves breadth of experience and expertise, by looking into alternative hiring streams, thats great, but people who defend DEI always approach it from the race and gender first which is a tell tale sign that race and gender are the primary objectives. And in my experience, when race and gender are the goals, formal and informal quotas appear.

[9rx]

It is odd that the expected inclusion was so specific, though. What about a 14 year old white male? Do they not satisfy: "consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like."?

I get it. I don't think a 14 year old looks suitable for a senior role either, but looking past that is the point. You never know what someone can offer.

[matteotom]

well if a 14 year old has 10 years of (real) experience building software in an enterprise setting, of course they should be considered for a senior role

[9rx]

What about 10 years of experience building software translates to the director position being talked about? Would a 14 year old who has 10 years of (real) experience working on the family farm be equally suitable or is there something about software specifically that primes people for being directors?

[matteotom]

sure, replace building software with leading large teams. The general point still stands

[danudey]

I find it interesting that being underage and in middle school is on the same level to you as being a woman. This comment reads like "You want us to interview WOMEN now? Why not teenagers? Or plants?!"

[pests]

The request was to “consider people you normally wouldn’t for this role”

I normally wouldn’t consider a 14y/o for a senior position. I wouldn’t consider a child to run our armed forces either.

It is you who put women and other minorities into that group with this comment of yours. You are the one to compare being underage and in middle school to being on the same level of a woman.

[9rx]

Your biases applied to the comment may read that way. The comment itself doesn't say that at all. It is interesting that we are seeing the discrimination right here on HN too. I thought we were better than that?

[hamandcheese]

My company did (still does? Not sure) have a policy similar to that, even for IC roles.

We would frequently miss out on opportunities to hire qualified candidates because we couldn't make an offer until satisfying the interview quota. By the time we did, the candidate accepted another offer.

I think it's probably a net positive for underrepresented people (it's kind of hard to argue harm to white people when they just get other offers elsewhere that are good enough to accept without waiting), but I'm really not sure if it's a net positive for the company (pre-ipo, still trying to grow a lot).

[gitremote]

It's not a net positive for underrepresented groups, because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. They don't have infinite time, because they are real people. Would you prefer to be rejected because of your resume, or asked to attend an interview and then be rejected because of your resume?

[hamandcheese]

> because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities.

I suppose this is true, if you believe that hitting the additional quota is entirely performative.

OTOH my company has better representation of women than anywhere else I've worked previously, so I don't think it is entirely performative.

[whimsicalism]

Not commenting on the merits of AA in general, but multiple offers in hand in a timely manner is always better so losing out on that is definitely harmful.

[BadCookie]

What most companies do is interview primarily referred candidates, which is arguably the opposite of DEI. It favors people in the social networks of the population already employed by the hiring company. And most people have social networks that look very similar to themselves in terms of race, gender, and economic class. Is that fair? It doesn’t seem fair.

My fringe belief is that giving an edge to buddies of current employees ought to be illegal (at least at large companies) for many of the same reasons why nepotism is frowned upon.

[ip26]

The "good old boys" network is a problem. But given how hard we all agree it is to interview effectively and determine who is a great fit for the role in a matter of a few hours, there's a lot of good sense in hiring people already widely known to be excellent by your team from years of past experience working together.

[BadCookie]

There’s tension between what is best for the company and what is most fair to applicants. I acknowledge that, but think that the onus should be on (large) companies to figure out a better interview process.

I don’t see why references have to come from current (or past) employees. Colleges don’t make you get referred by alumni, but they do require letters of reference (usually).

On a related note, it’s amusing to me when white men in tech on Reddit get mad about Indian men preferentially hiring other Indian men from their community. I assume that many of these same white men don’t see any problem when they preferentially hire their own friends using the rationale that you gave.

[cherrycherry98]

Hiring managers love referrals. You can spend weeks going through resumes and doing interviews hoping to find that perfect candidate (and they better be as perfect as can because you won't be able to just get rid of them on a whim if they wind up being a dud). There's also nothing more frustrating than giving an offer to a great candidate and then losing our on them.

Hiring referrals is great for both problems. The person is already vetted by someone your organization trusts. This is great because a referral is more likely to be someone that knows their stuff and thus pass the interview process. You also have someone vouching that this person is a good employee and not just a good interviewer. The candidate is more likely to accept when they have a contact on the inside that can vouch for the the company and team.

This all assumes that the company is going to do their own independent evaluation of the referred candidate.

[gip]

This has been my experience as well as a director of engineering. I also think more diverse candidates is a good thing.

The thing that was harder for me was working with the people hired to run the DEI recruiting programs. I never was able to establish a great working relationship with them even though I was able to do so with a good cross-section of the rest of the organization. Not really sure why tbh.

[brailsafe]

> But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired. That's just one example of what they do.

Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations

[snambi]

Not really true. We have been asked to hire women in our team. Thankfully we found an amazing person. But other teams were not so lucky. It was pure nonsense.