Hacker News Reader

Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

This is mostly empirically provable [1]. Diverse teams come up with better ideas that apply to a larger swath of markets (an immediate payoff for companies).

[1]: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-...

View on HN

The results on this are quite wishy-washy.

And the applicability of studies of the value of diversity in an executive team attempting to strategically position themselves in a market to a team building a compiler is questionable to say the least.

Even making your product appeal to a wide market often isn't recommended for small companies. We often see posts here about focusing on a specific winnable market and going from there.

In a vacuum, I'd imagine that having likeness between the customer and the developers to be far more effective than general cultural diversity. A team making a compiler is programmers making a tool for programmers, so it's an excellent fit. I could see cultural diversity becoming more effective once you're trying to reach the general public or niche markets.

Maybe the larger the body of employees, this becomes more and more the case.

But if you're hiring your second engineer on the team? Hire the absolute most productive engineer. Even if that turns out to be a white male.

And don't feel guilty.

Sadly, this is the crux of the problem. If you equate increasing diversity with lowering the bar, you're missing the point.

https://42hire.com/the-big-lie-tech-companies-and-diversity-...

Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive", because there is no reading of your comment which makes sense without the assumption that you believe this.

Congratulations, you've exposed yourself as possessing irrational biases and allowing them to influence how you'd hire, while showing no desire to eliminate, overcome or compensate for those biases. As a result you are unqualified to ever make a hiring decision.

>Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive"

>Congratulations, you've exposed yourself as possessing irrational biases

That's rich coming from someone who just made a completely biased reading of the parent comment to fuel their narrative.

So provide me with an interpretation of "just hire the best" -- as a response to critiques of the lack of diversity in tech -- which does not imply or require an assumption that currently-underrepresented groups are, by the nature of the people in those groups, less qualified and thus less likely to be "the best".

Because you can't provide that. "Just hire the best" is an excuse for biased interviewing and hiring processes which self-reinforce; you claim to "hire the best" and then actually hire based on your biases and claim those are "the best".

It turns out not to work:

http://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

http://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

There are less of them in tech, so if you hire the best, you've got more chances to hire a white male. It's a numbers game really.

The point is to question why that is -- other fields have stubbornly insisted they were purely merit-based, that women and various other minorities simply were predisposed not to like or be good at what the field was about, etc. etc.

And pretty much every time that's been shown wrong.

> Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive"

How on earth did it imply that?

In the context of "diversity", which is taken to imply increasing the population of currently-underrepresented groups in the industry, responding with "just hire the best" only makes sense if one believes those groups do not by definition contain "the best", since otherwise everyone who already claims to "hire the best" would have hired from those groups.

Money in Silicon Valley knows no prejudice. One of the companies that I consulted for offered 10K placement bonuses if you could recommend an engineer that stayed for just three months.

This idea that there's a group of hidden engineers just waiting to discovered and included, that they just haven't been shown a company that cares, that somehow if we just went to the right unrepresented areas or schools or groups they would be there they'd be waiting to add millions to the bottom line... Just isn't true.

If you're not showing off your skills, putting yourself out there with code, meetups, conferences, then no, you're not one of the best. Engineers can self-delude themselves all day in their cubicle with how clever their code is, but if you're not sharing it with the world then you're not doing enough to be included in the best.

"Money in Silicon Valley knows no prejudice."

Most of the money is very dumb and extremely prejudiced. Listening to women talk about fundraising is horrifying.

It's in the context of hiring though, "the best" means "the best available".

No, it means "the best we're willing to hire".

I work in an office full of people who kick ass but wouldn't make it past the phone screen at most "hire the best" places. Their loss is our gain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com