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Comment by simonhfrost | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion it was more from the perspective that minorities may have a more empathetic view on problems, after likely experiencing dealing with problems other more privileged people don't have to.

In this case: one of the biggest benefits of hiring minorities... ending up being the reason you fire them.

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> In my opinion it was more from the perspective that minorities may have a more empathetic view on problems, after likely experiencing dealing with problems other more privileged people don't have to.

It's best to avoid making generalizations about people based on the color of their skin - even when you think it's a compliment.

I think he may have meant what I said in my sister comment but I think you're probably right about that being a factor. I googled "are minorities more likely to speak against injustice" hoping to find some threads of discourse or studies, but everything was coronavirus related... perhaps another time when search engines aren't trying to decide what I need to see.

Counterpoint: Since many companies are under (public?) pressure to fill in some minority quota, they with end with relatively incompetent people from the minority group.

Also my personal observation: an incompetent person from a minority group is likely to see a failed transaction through their own colored 'minority' lens. Eg. a woman who has been turned down for a job will attribute it to her being a woman and no other reason. For a white guy who has been turned down - it's life as usual.

I've seen plenty of white guys blame minority quotas and nothing else after being turned down for a job. There is also little evidence that companies are hiring hoards of incompetent people to fill minority quotas. If they were, then why does every tech company still struggle with a lack of diversity in the workplace? It would be easy to just hire whoever can tick a diversity box and fix those numbers, but they're not actually doing that because that would be stupid.

Diversity quotas are absolutely real, and publicly documented all over the place. Activist shareholders are filing resolutions and threatening companies with lawsuits and bad PR. I was involved in hiring at some large tech companies and we had very specific targets to meet, ”or else”. I don’t know how anyone can still deny that this is happening.

Re-read again, OP did not deny that minority quota exists. OP refuted the somewhat popular opinion that incompetent people are being hired BECAUSE of minority quotas.

Well first of all, literally everyone in the world sees everything through their own colored lens. It's called personal bias, and we all have it. It's part of why minorities get turned down for jobs for reasons other than their technical experience. Or why they get turned down in spite of their technical experience.

Second, it's my personal observation that 'many companies' don't end up with 'incompetent minorities', because, anecdotally, I and everyone I know who has worked with 'minorities' at multiple jobs has found them as competent or more so than their 'majority' peers. But a 'colored lens' is what takes your personal experience and turns it into whatever you want to see, not necessarily what is actually there. So who knows if either of us is right if all we're doing is looking with our personal biases?

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