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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

Encouraging more applications from women and trans programmers doesn't mean they're turning you down because you are not those things. If they do succeed at widening their pool of applicants, that may mean more competition overall for jobs. Was it to your advantage when the applicant pool was perhaps more limited in some ways? Maybe.

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"we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire"

This is the part that bothers me. They have a predetermined image of who they want to hire, based on nonfunctional qualities, like race and gender. If a company said they had too many minorities working for them and the demographic they really wanted to hire was straight, white males, it seems like people would be up in arms over that. But the inverse seems acceptable.

Maybe, but the historical reality is that in many technical fields, women and minorities have been underrepresented due to deliberately exclusionary policies. There's not really a need to say, hey we want straight white dudes to apply, there's no shortage of such applicants.

Deliberately exclusionary policies? I've been around a long time. I've never known of a policy, at any place I worked, that discriminated based on race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Disclaimers: I've never been the hiring manager, so I've never read the actual policies. And there may have been discrimination that was not encoded in policies. But I have never, to my knowledge, been anywhere that had a deliberately exclusionary policy.

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