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Comment by dreamdu5t | Hacker News Reader

Removing barriers to particular ethnicities in hiring? Great. Making it clear in marketing and outreach that all ethnicities are welcomed and encouraged? Great. Establishing a quota of X % of employees should be a certain race? Uh... okay. Should asians be turned down from a job because they've hit the asian quota and need more blacks? I didn't realize companies practiced affirmative action like this.

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I'm pretty sure they don't. There are PRs campaigns saying they would like to get closer to those quotas, but I don't think any engineering management is actually going to let their interview process be changed.

At companies I've worked at I've seen the leadership cheerleading race & gender diversity, but not interfering with engineering management's hiring practices. I assume that the leadership is just playing the Public Relations game, because being seen as a proponent for diversity is good press, but not letting it actually change anything. If I'm being even more cynical, then leadership is just clueless, and is also clueless that they shouldn't be averaging engineering with marketing in order to say that we have a good gender ratio.

Google actually changed their policy: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/google-hiring-non-graduate...

> I didn't realize companies practiced affirmative action like this.

I'm surprised that you're surprised.

I'm Chinese, and I don't appreciate your attempt at pitting Asians against Blacks.

I'm pretty sure it's a reductio ad absurdum argument.

It was... but check it: If you established targets based on population percentages (or user ethnicity percentages), and (AFAIK) Asians are typically over-represented by population in tech and blacks under-represented, does that mean if they have qualified Asian candidates they turn them down so it doesn't harm their target numbers? Or is that illegal so they focus on reducing Asians early in the pipeline?

I really don't understand how this racial hiring quota stuff works...

I think it's pretty clear. Except in the dramatically unlikely case that the racial quotas are precisely tuned to have no effect at all, then having racial quotas necessarily means that more qualified applicants of one race are rejected in favor of less qualified applicants of another race, explicitly because of their race. If you're in a jurisdiction in which this is illegal (such as the U.S.) then racial quotas or preferences are illegal. Why no one else seems to realize this is illegal (as well as immoral) is beyond me.

Edit: Downvotes are nice, but refutations are better.

But seriously, in order to achieve proper racial quotas, we're gonna fire most of the asians. #getready

It isn't pitting any race at another. It is a real concern with quotas. One only needs to look at what an Asian needs to score on the SAT compared to what a Caucasian (no need to bring up other races) to see how it can become a problem.

A good reference on this phenomenon: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-asian-race...

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