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Comment by federererer | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards.

If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit.

But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent, and/or experience necessary for the job. The person was hired not based on merit, but based on some other, unrelated factor.

Hiring based on something other than merit automatically means that standards were lowered, or at best they were merely ignored.

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I don't understand this argument, unless you are making an assumption that a company has infinite open positions.

If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit. So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic, and there's a company policy that encourages me to extend five offers to that one-third, I'm still keeping my standards right where they've always been.

In fact, it is precisely because there are more than enough candidates with technical merit that we have other measures like "culture fit".

Are you saying that among those 30 qualified candidates, they're all at exactly the same level of skill/talent/experience, or are otherwise completely interchangeable?

I find that hard to believe, at least for any realistic scenario.

Even if all of those candidates exceed the minimum level of merit required for the job, it's very likely that some will still have more or better skill/talent/experience than the others. There will still be an ordering based purely on merit.

Ignoring this ordering when choosing the 10 successful candidates would be a case of ignoring merit, which would indicate a lowering of standards.

In practice, there just isn't a total ordering among candidates like that. You'll find some who are better at some things than others, but you need a mix of strengths for the team anyway.

And I'm not aware of any company that actually manages to rank all candidates by their exact position relative to other candidates. Interviewers tend to get to say just "hire" / "no-hire", not all candidates talk to the same interviewers, etc.; that loss of information isn't, in practice considered an unacceptable lowering of standards.

So, given that standards have already been lowered in the real world from this ideal, affirmative action is certainly not lowering them any more.

I definitely agree on there not being a total ordering. Part of it for me is the mix of strengths thing. But I noticed two other factors:

One is just the small amount of information gleaned. Last time I hired, I ended up spending ~5 hours with each candidate who made it all the way through. But that's 0.1% of how much time I hope to spend with them, and it's them attempting to put their best foot forward. Any score I might give them would have big error bars.

The other is the extent to which ranking candidates is personal and nearly arbitrary. This time we did blinded reviews of code and it amazed me to see how often each reviewer valued different things. We would eventually converge with discussion, but I don't have a lot of faith that the parallel-universe versions of ourselves would be particularly consistent. And that's without reviewers even knowing the identities of the code writers.

The whole "lowered standards" thing strikes me as built upon a fantasy of clarity that is nothing like my actual experience of hiring.

You're making an assumption here, which is that diversity does not provide value in and of itself. Yet there is ample research that shows that more diverse teams are more creative in problem solving and have better outcomes with tasks that require such creativity. Therefore, picking someone who can't whiteboard quite as well as another guy, but clearly has the skills necessary to do the job and adds diversity, is potentially a net win for the company.

> Yet there is ample research that shows that more diverse teams are more creative in problem solving and have better outcomes with tasks that require such creativity.

Could you point to some of this research? I'd be interested to learn more about research that has been done.

Affirmatibe action means that you take action to diversify your applicant pool. It's back from when you couldn't just apply online.

Not that you hire anyone based on race / etc. you still hire the best candidate.

I forget that the words affirmative action mean something different to a younger generation who mostly have encountered a weird perversion of the original meaning in higher education.

> Affirmative action means that you take action to diversify your applicant pool.

Wikipedia describes it differently:

"Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group [...]. The nature of affirmative action policies varies from region to region. Some [...] use a quota system, whereby a certain percentage of jobs or school vacancies must be reserved for members of a certain group."

Wouldn't using a quota system be lowering the bar?

Using your definition, if I recruit in California, and I expand to begin recruiting in Oregon, then I have diversified my applicant pool. Have I successfully employed affirmative action?

Well, I went to a magnet school that routinely has the discussion around diversity and affirmative action year after year. Certain parts of the county had far more representation than the poorer parts. They diversified by making sure they picked more people from around the county. It did not improve numbers of disadvantaged groups, however.

> you take action to diversify your applicant pool.

Wait I don't understand - how exactly do you do that without letting race influence your hiring decisions?

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