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Everybody's hiring practices are pretty broken. As a white male engineer, I've never really had any success even getting an interview with ordinary tech companies out of engineering school. Had to start my own. Going ok, has been for many years now, which leads me to think all those guys throwing my resume in the trash may have some false negatives in their system somewhere.

I think there are objective benefits to fixing some of the weird culture in tech, including but not limited to (at least) doubling the available talent pool. And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams.

I'm not so stupid as to think there aren't costs associated with bringing populations that aren't well represented in. There's gonna be catchup. You're going to have to develop talent. It is going to take a while. Engineering and entrepreneurship is absolutely a hard job, and most folks aren't cut out for it, not really. So widening the net is going to take work. And bigger, more established companies are probably better equipped to shoulder more of that investment, but smaller, hungrier companies can ALSO afford to take risks on talent that has potential, but isn't a 100% safe bet.

>And the objective truth that having more ideas and more viewpoints makes for much more effective teams.

This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered.

First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and socialists and libertarians.

Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and cohesion is actually more correlated with engineering success than diversity of thought.

Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.

I hate to go Godwin on you, but the Nazis also expelled a great number of jewish scientists that turned around and developed the atomic bomb for the US. So you have the V2 rocket on one hand and the atomic bomb on the other. I think your anecdote is decisively on the side of diversity.

We sell a lot of stuff to women. It's nice to have a couple in the shop someplace.

I'll say as somebody low enough on the food chain to need to work harder at hiring, but high enough that I do make those decisions, I actively seek out folks outside the usual boxes. I look real hard for people that aren't guaranteed first-round draft picks, and who may be overlooked by the system. There are tons of great hires who aren't getting any love, you just have to know what you're really looking for, do the work, and trust your instincts. I've seen a lot of sloppy, lazy, highly risk-averse work in hiring and talent development over the years. Everybody's trying to not look stupid, not to win.

Well there are a few other options.

Like that some people won't work in a place where there is only one demographic, or there is a VERY large imbalance.

Anecdotally I know a woman who refuses to work in a place where there aren't at least 2 other women that she will interact with on a daily basis. She's an amazing developer, but has been brought into male-only teams or teams with only one other female and it becomes an issue. And she's at a point in her life where she can require that of potential employers.

So by striving for a more diverse workforce, you could be opening up doors to exceptionally good employees who have the ability to set the bar for what they want in a company. To put it more concisely, diversifying your employees can increase your hiring pool.

This example is good but surely an edge case. Optimizing for edge cases is typically wasted effort.

I think a big question is why companies do it (there is a comment thread above tackling this).

A company's goal, in a capitalistic country, is to maximize profits, if you can prove that a 50/50 split does this (and getting there should be included in the cost), then great.

I wouldn't be so sure it's an edge case.

Would you want to work somewhere that nobody shared any interests? Maybe a language barrier? Perhaps a place where you would be bullied? or be talked down to constantly? If you had to choose between a place like that, or a place that you would "fit in" better, which would you choose?

It stands to reason that the "best" candidates are going to have a choice in where they work. Hell, even "slightly above average" candidates can often have a choice between multiple offers. So when you are looking for talented individuals, you are going to either need to pay more, offer some other benefits, or will need to ensure your workplace doesn't make them feel unwelcome.

Personally I think of diversifying your employees like buying a pingpong table for the break room, or paying for lunch a day or 2 a week. It's a small price to pay, that can pay off big time when hiring. And that seems like a big enough "reason" for me to want to do it.

> This example is good but surely an edge case.

Can you back that "surely" up with data or even anecdata, like a straw poll of things women are/aren't worried about when accepting offers? Anecdotally, I've heard numerous women say that they're worried about being the first woman hired on a team (and sometimes even the second) and they've made decisions to reject jobs based on that.

> A company's goal, in a capitalistic country, is to maximize profits, if you can prove that a 50/50 split does this (and getting there should be included in the cost), then great.

There's the classic story of Alan Greenspan's economic research firm, which prioritized hiring women because they were equally qualified but undervalued in the market, and they did pretty well (and in general I think that Alan Greenspan successfully doing a strategy is a sign that a capitalistic company should consider the strategy potentially valid).

I can imagine many scenarios where even without biasing your hiring that your company doesn't look, demographically, like your hiring pool. For example, if your candidate pool is 80% foreign and you have a limited number of visas to offer.

One can also imagine that if you are a particularly "female-friendly" company, word of mouth and primarily-female contact networks (e.g. women who know each other through female-only meetups or "girls who code" style events) would naturally bias your most qualified candidates towards being women, particularly if almost all your competitors are either seen as "female unfriendly" and/or don't have access to the primarily-female contact network.

How does one gain a reputation for being "female-friendly" (or hispanic-firendly, or gay-friendly, or whatever) without going through one of the three steps above? Personal networks are huge in hiring, but you have to have a lot of women working for you before you'll have access to a lot of female personal networks. And given how many companies in SV are scrambling to hire women, you have to work pretty damned hard to get them.

If you were running a company in SV and wanted to get the best ROI on your time and money, you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape. Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend.

Or, just throwing this out there: you could decide what you're really looking for in an employee and hire people who satisfy those criteria and ignore everything else. Perish the thought.

> you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape.

Yeah, but look at where Netscape is now. Why would I trust them?

I'm serious—I've worked for a lot of 50-year-old straight white men who wouldn't vote for anyone left of Kerry and have a resume of mediocre but famous companies, and they're genuinely not good at their jobs. Unless their job is making more mediocre but famous companies, of course, which I'm starting to suspect.

> Massive market inefficiencies exist in hiring. Zigging where your competitors zag is likely to pay off more than following the trend.

I think you're overestimating how many companies are genuinely putting effort into hiring women. Are you getting your data from news articles instead of walking around companies and looking at who's actually employed? The people that are zigging are those who are honest about trying to hire women / minorities instead of just looking for media attention.

> but you have to have a lot of women working for you before you'll have access to a lot of female personal networks.

You underestimate how well-networked women are. For most of us, before we take a new job, we extensively inquire through those networks about the company, the team, and the manager. And your reputation spreads - if your company is considered a good environment for women, word travels fast. (If it's a bad one, faster)

> you have to work pretty damned hard to get them.

Not really. You have to be a place that treats women with respect, is not socially dysfunctional, and doesn't tolerate harassment. That's it. Word will travel. And given SVs culture, that means a rather small set of companies.

> you'd probably be better off hiring 50 year old straight white men who vote Republican and have been at it since the days of Netscape

In terms of finding people, maybe. In terms of building a team - hell no. Not because any of these attributes are undesirable, but because monoculture is undesirable. (Well, it is for the kind of projects I care about. When it's purely about execution and has a very limited set of customers, it might be less of a problem)

>monoculture is undesirable.

I agree. I would also gently suggest that the Silicon Valley monoculture is not one of 50 year old Republicans.

I do not disagree with you. 25 year old white male libertarians from Stanford (or earnest 28 year old hippies) is a more likely description. Merely staying with the example given by the OP.

For that matter, I wouldn't want to be in a company of progressive women only, either. Any monoculture is a bad idea. I'm happy to have friends and colleagues who span the spectrum, thankfully.

Given the massive downvoting the comment got, that doesn't seem to be a concept that the HN crowd agrees with. I'm not surprised about that, either.

Have a public track record (company policy, actual actions) of preemptively dealing with the topics that those groups care about (sexual harassment, glass ceiling, transgender friendly accommodations, etc). I don't think that falls under any of the three items from above, unless you feel like taking those actions, and having those people seek your company out is a form of "get lucky".

So, off the top of my head, largely inspired by the Vox article on how to eliminate the wage gap [0]:

- Have strong sexual harassment policies and aggressively enforce them.

- Require employees to keep up-to-date documentation on everything they work on so somebody else can jump in and take over their stuff in an absence.

- Nobody should ever work more than 8 hours in a day. Even voluntary overtime should be strictly banned (if it's not banned, then people who work overtime voluntarily will look better on performance reviews than people who can only put in 8 hours).

- If there's truly an emergency situation where someone has to be called in, those emergencies should be exceedingly rare, should only happen when there is an existential threat to the company, and accompanied by a massive bonus and/or extra vacation days ("hey, I know it's Saturday, but the servers are on fire, and we'll get sued if they're not back up ASAP, so if you come in and fix them now we'll give you the next week off"). If anything actually needs 24/7 attention on the regular, then hire people to work in shifts instead of calling people in on their days off.

- Flexible hours. As long as an employee works ~8 hours a day, it doesn't matter what those 8 hours are. They don't even have to be contiguous. If you want to work 11:00-14:00, go home for a few hours, and then come back and work 19:00-22:00, you should be able to do that.

- Absences should only count against PTO if you take off at least four hours in a day. If you have to leave two hours early for your kid's doctor's appointment, it won't count against you. (this is actually policy at my employer, and it works very well)

- Allow people to work from home whenever they want. Imagine you're a parent, and your kid is stuck at home sick and needs you to stay home and keep an eye on them: you won't have to eat a vacation day to keep an eye on your kid.

- Avoid any other hallmarks of brogrammer culture I can't think of right now.

Basically you want to create an environment where women, especially mothers, would kill to work at.

[0] http://www.vox.com/2016/8/1/12108126/gender-wage-gap-explain...

Your first argument is satisfied by 2 and 3 of the post you replied to.

Your second argument boils down to, 'perhaps they have a larger female applicant pool than you suspect.' However, it doesn't really seem support an argument that the company will look different than the applicant pool.

Well, I'm assuming "applicant pool" means the pool of all people applying. My point was that even if women are a small portion of the applicant pool, they may represent a larger quality-weighted portion of the total applicant pool. I agree that if as your population becomes large, you should asymptotically be approaching the demographics of your quality-weighted applicant pool.

Note: By "quality-weighted" I really mean something more complicated like "ROI-weighted", since it could also be that because of your reputation as a "female-friendly" employer, high-quality female employees will be willing to work at a lower salary than they would otherwise demand at a "male-dominated" workplace (e.g. "Well, company X pays better, but I really like the culture/people/policies at company Y...")

I think a large assumption you've made is what the make up of their applicant pool is, which I too have no idea what that looks like.

It's not an assumption I'm making at all. It's an independent variable. I'm assuming that talent is more or less uniformly distributed among applicants. If that assumption is true, then an optimal hiring process will, with sufficient hires, produce a workforce that broadly resembles the pool of applicants.

More formally, under an optimal recruitment system, as the number of hires approaches infinity, the Levenshtein distance between the anatomical characteristics of the workforce and applicant pool approaches zero.

> If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.

Well, one, to first order everyone in the Valley has badly broken hiring practices.

Two, I don't think that's true. It's extremely common for, say, top universities' freshman classes to look nothing like their applicant pools, because their applicant pools are full of people who want to go to that university but genuinely wouldn't do well there. There are a lot of people who optimize for making good grades and a perfect SAT score and have nothing to characterize them otherwise, and I would expect there are way fewer of those people, by percentage, in the freshman classes. (And yes, the modern university application process came out of anti-Semitism and there are a lot of other indefensible things about it, but this effect, I think, is defensible.)

My personal hypothesis is that technical aptitude is pretty uncorrelated with demographics, but that due to (for lack of a better term) "the pipeline", certain demographics are more encouraged to stay with technical studies and apply to these roles than others. So you have demographic A, which consists of a large number of people of varying abilities, and demographic B, which is a smaller number of people who have done particularly well throughout the pipeline. A fair hiring process, that selects for people with high aptitude, would naturally reject many more people from group A (who weren't filtered out from the pipeline) than from group B.