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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Last spring, YouTube recruiters were allegedly instructed to cancel interviews with applicants who weren’t female, black or Hispanic, and to “purge entirely” the applications of people who didn’t fit those categories, the lawsuit claims.

Anyone from Google or YouTube--or people who applied to work at either org in this time frame--have perspectives to add regarding this claim?

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Towards the end of last year I actually did apply to Google in Mountain View for Software Engineering.

I believe my on-site went excellent technically overall, but I had a hard time meshing with a couple of my interviewers and wasn't surprised about my rejection. Nothing strange about that personally.

However, another Google recruiter reached out to me for two other potential positions, said I would be an excellent fit, and said they would set up the interviews for me.

A couple weeks passed and I pinged, no response. A month passed and I pinged, no response. Still haven't had a response from two separate recruiters to this day.

I don't wish to stir the pot -- Anything could have happened, there are some stories about Google recruiters forgetting their candidates, maybe they think I'm just annoying and not a good candidate, but in light of these specific circumstances this is certainly intriguing news.

Apparently all the large technical companies do this. I had this happen after I did 2 phone interviews with one of the big silicon valley tech companies after their recruiters called me for 3 years. They had a position they were interested in me for specifically but were waiting for the manager to get back from leave. Said they'd call when she was back. Didn't hear anything. Months later got a call asking how it went and if I was still interested. Told them I'd never heard anything and was still interested. Never heard back again. I've had friends say Twitter is the worst at this, followed by Google, then Facebook. Amazon, too. It's the nature of using so many different recruiters. My friends have said that the companies all seem to treat potential candidates badly and you only get the job if you pro-actively call back again and again and again.

> you only get the job if you pro-actively call back again and again and again

Seems like a way to filter for people with low market value.

Friend of mine had setup interview at Google London, he flew in, came into the office and they completely forgot about him! :D He was just sitting there for a few hours, then left.

In my youth, these things were simply not done. They were inexcusable. Now, people think nothing of blowing you off.

He was pretty furious; we talked before interview about how he should prepare, I gave him some puzzlers to solve, and after "interview" I was curious how did that go, and he was like: "they completely forgot about me!" :D He now works for their competitor.

Bing ?

This happens all the time in recruiting. Companies leave candidates hanging indefinitely. Hell, I've had it happen to me even for an internal position at a company I've worked for.

It used to be that this was just not done. However, the Bay Area and Silicon Valley seem to have adopted much degraded standards. When I was young, a company that did such things would have been marking itself as being comprised of immoral rubes.

Are you sure you aren't pining for a non-existent past? Or is it due to changes in recruiting practices (e.g. using mostly contract "talent partners")

Are you sure you aren't pining for a non-existent past?

It never happened to me until I moved to the Bay Area.

> Anyone from Google or YouTube--or people who applied to work at either org in this time frame--have perspectives to add regarding this claim?

I'm a white male and received a Google offer 8 month ago (turned it down to go work at twitch, because I love gaming). So this is not an across the board discrimination against EVERYONE, if that is what you were implying.

I am just 1 person among thousands, though, so I guess you'd have to get info from someone who applied exactly in the spring, to youtube, and had their interview cancelled.

Maybe. So after you complete on-site interviews you are reviewed by a hiring committee which goes over the scores in each stage of the process, and decide whether you should move on to project matching. Typically passing hiring committee means you've made it. However this wasn't the case for me in Spring 2017 where after on-sites they told me they would not extend an offer but could not explain why. Oddly, a year later I reapplied and got the job without any further technical interviews (but a recommendation might have factored into this). I found this pretty bizarre and hiring for diversity might be a plausible explanation considering I'm a white male, though what's inconsistent with the story is that they certainly didn't purge my application. They were hounding me with emails to reapply ever since they turned me down.

There are probably a lot of boring reasons this could've happened as well. It's probably boring.

What happens if you are 1/2 white and 1/2 Hispanic? Who is in charge determining race?

The US gov considers Hispanic an ethnicity, not a race. So if you don't consider yourself one of the 5 races (white, black, American Indian, Asian, Pacific Islander) then you'd select other.

Racial identity for Hispanics seems to be a complex personal decision.

The EEO-1 Instruction Booklet [1] that underpins all diversity and inclusion programs do not have an 'other' category, but it has a 'Decline to State'. The EEO-1 booklet states that if a person decline to state their race and/or ethnicity the employer is allowed to classify them on their own.

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.c...

You specify your "race"/"gender" during application (or refuse to answer). It's up to you how you want to move forward I guess.

Then I wonder why poeple just don't lie? EG just put down: disabled autistic transgender native american. Everyone wins. Google gets to check a bunch of boxes and helps you jump to the top of the list. I doubt they would check your parents race and examine your privates.

I think you might find many do. What more surprises me is how few do.

The end result of all this sort of game playing is not going to be pretty.

native american

That strategy has been shown to work. And people are more angry about the beneficiary being called out about it, than they are that they stole a reserved spot in the first place.

I imagine your surname would carry a lot of weight.

I know an Indian guy with a Spanish name. Not sure if he recently decided to be trans as well ;-) I guess YMMV.

Spanish or Portuguese?

There's a lot of Indian people with Portuguese surnames from around Goa, but I'd think that Spanish would be very uncommon, unless it's their first name.

Definitely Spanish, both first name and surname.

What about all the Filipinos (Asians) with Spanish names. I've got two guys at my work with the same last name, one from Philippines, one from Cuba.

People have mistaken my Dutch last name for Mexican (I know Mexican is Spanish, but they said Mexican). I think I'm in luck.

This is incredibly hard to answer fairly, as those who applied and may not have been qualified may now believe they were discriminated against and it's basically impossible to know.

I mean, I've interviewed with google and my application got "lost", when the interview process restarted I identified that I had already been phone screened and the suggestion from the recruiter was: "Oh, ok, I guess we'll follow up in six months".

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