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Comment by rolltiide | Hacker News Reader

I think the cultural ideal of meritocracy needs to be addressed, and this is conflating two separate issues:

1) People of certain backgrounds want to and need to prove they CAN compete.

2) People of certain backgrounds should be helping make decisions even without credentials.

so there are both competent and less competent people that need to be included.

"wait what why? I wasted way too much of my life to accept why less competitive people should have such lucrative roles"

because the profit engine doesn't really need to care about the human worker's competency, it only needs to expand the addressable market. having already reached peak engagement, the business processes have already reached the evolutionary zenith for the incumbent nepotism and meritocrat talent's way of tapping into human consumptive conscious. Expanding that market further requires perceptions that people in those markets can relate to.

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The idea that a push for diversity is somehow in conflict with a meritocracy is deeply flawed because it relies on the idea that people with diverse backgrounds either haven't shown they are capable or that there are no people with diverse backgrounds that are capable. A good diversity program does two things:

1. It identifies and removes certain unnecessary credentials that might rule out people with diverse backgrounds. Requiring a college degree for applicants when a degree provides no benefit on the job is one example.

2. It makes an active effort to find and pursue diverse candidates. Odds are there are plenty of people who are competent enough to do the job. Let's imagine you are hiring 5 engineers from a pool of 100 qualified people. If there are only 10 diverse candidates in that pool and you just hired the first random qualified candidate you find, there is roughly a 60% chance that you end up with zero diversity on the team. If you actively work to get diverse candidates to apply and maybe get 10 additional diverse candidates added to the previous pool, you can still hire the first random qualified person but your odds drop to roughly 35% of having a team with zero diversity.

TL;DR - You don't have to hire less qualified people to have diversity, it just takes a little more thought and effort to make diversity a priority.

That’s a fantasy. The reality is that there aren’t enough diverse candidates to reach the diversity goals of every company without hiring incompetent people.

If every company wants 50% women and the graduates with interests in CS come out at a 4:1 male to female ratio, the strive for diversity either needs to give up and hire what the pool provides or start giving underqualified women.

TL;DR - Companies absolutely need to lower the bar for minorities if they want ratios that don’t match the pools. This problem is only made worse by the popularity of these very diversity programs.

The pipeline problem is a concern long term, but I don’t think it is the primary problem at the moment for a couple reasons.

First, it assumes that the pool of diverse candidates has already been exhausted. Anecdotally I have not seen evidence of that. If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts. There is no evidence that is happening. This will eventually be a problem once every company tries to be more diverse than the pool of candidates, but right now there does not seem to be enough companies prioritizing diversity to an extent that this is an issue.

Secondly one of the causes of the pipeline problem is not having enough visibly successful diverse people in the industry. The more diverse candidates that are put in positions to succeed, the more visible they become to the next generation, and the more likely the next generation believes that this career can be a path they can successfully pursue.

> If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts.

You lost me here. Why is this the case?

Simple supply and demand. If the demand for women exceeded the supply of women, then the naturally result is a bidding war for the available women that would drive up their salary. The fact that women in this industry don't make more than men disproves the idea that companies are currently prioritizing the hiring of women to an extent that the talent pool of available women cannot meet.

Why do you expect the demand for women to be different from the demand for similarly qualified men?

I don't, that was the idea I was arguing against. The comment I replied to put forward the hypothetical regarding every company wanting to hire 50% women in a world with only 20% of CS graduates being women. That would result in a world in which the demand for women is equal to men but the supply of women is much smaller than the supply of men. The natural result of that is that women have a higher salary than men. We know this isn't true so this is a modus tollens argument that disproves the original hypothetical.

I don’t think anyone was making the argument you were arguing against...

Why assume that the only thing a companies can use in a bidding war for employees is money?

We could use the same fact to prove that giving women more money than men do not increase the ration of women, as otherwise companies would have already done that.

No, the other option is to hire incompetent women at a competent salary. That’s one of the major complaints with diversity programs. You can’t pay more to be able to fill the unfillable quota, so you just hire incompetent people at competent salaries instead.

So yes, incompetent minorities make more than the competent majorities.

I'm not sure companies could legally pay women more than men. Sex is a protected class.

And yet, men and women doing the same job don't always get the same salary.

Hardly anyone doing the same job gets the same salary, with notable exceptions.

I certainly didn't make the same amount of money as my coworker at my old job.

> If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts.

Or it just means one of the other stated assumptions is wrong, e.g., that companies don't really want 50% women. Every company I've worked for has been happy to hire women for any job, but none has ever made it a quota.

Invest in people and that problem goes away.

> The idea that a push for diversity is somehow in conflict with a meritocracy is deeply flawed because it relies on the idea that people with diverse backgrounds either haven't shown they are capable or that there are no people with diverse backgrounds that are capable

I’m saying thats only part of the dilemma and is muddied by that specific binary approach

People talk about interest in certain fields amongst demographics, pipeline problems, resent any perception of undermining a meritocratic process and this hurts everyone

But the kicker is that its not JUST about proving that a proportional distribution of people in a currently underrepresented demographic is competent, there and in the pipeline

Its that companies wont grow to address larger markets if meritocratic diversity is the only thing they look for and try to approve

People - like what you expressed - are barking up just one of multiple trees. Even if you reach peak underrepresented minority, you’ve still failed to bring diverse ideas to the market

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