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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

>She wore a hijab and the company had just hired its first “diversity officer” so maybe that’s why

At what point does forced diversity hiring become a perverse incentive, with regards to needing to run a company with qualified individuals regardless of affiliation? (This may be a cynical question, but I'm not trolling. I'm aware that there are tangible benefits to more diversity. What I'm wondering if there's some calculus here at work, such as "try to be diverse unless the diversity results in more than 10% loss of <some metric> because at that point it costs more than the 5% (or whatever) benefit in <some other metric> that diversity provides us")

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> tangible benefits to more diversity

People say that a lot, and even say it's been researched, but outside of product focus groups, I've never seen the actually research that supports that claim.

There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity.

But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.

Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.

Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc"

If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.

Which one was that?

IIRC: Al Capone.

Probably hard to research.

How would you measure it for software engineering? Number of bugs? Number of features requested after initial project launch? Time to completion? All of those things have too many variables involved for any given organization. We already have a hard time measuring ability/quality of software engineers as it is.

I've seen various "innovation" studies that show more diverse teams come up with more ideas and are more productive, but less diverse teams think they are more productive. A quick internet search turns up https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/09/09... for example.

For software, for example, there are plenty of characteristics that some engineers may think are constant that are definitely not. For example, the number of systems I've encountered that have baked in the idea that first/last name can not be changed (even though names are changed by not only trans people, but also any married woman in many cultures), or assumed people only had 2-3 names (some cultures as many as 4 last names are common), is long. When the name is used as part of a permanent key for all other data about an individual, fixing the issue can be a huge hassle.

Sure, a product focus group might eventually point these issues out, but no one's changing their name in a short-term focus group study.

Using that definition, isn't every pre-product-market-fit startup a focus group?

I don't believe there is any actual research about it. It doesn't even pass the smell test; why would a company of people who have a hard time relating to one another and socially meshing perform better? If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does), why are we trying to create the opposite situation in a company?

Why would a company choose to do anything that didn't directly make money or cut cost? Companies often have to be compelled to do things where the ROI is measured in decades no?

My guess is that is it possible to have great diversity of thought and experience while still having high social cohesion.

During the height of immigration in the US, there was high social cohesion within communities of people who came from the same country while still having great diversity of ideas across the nation as a whole.

My personal take on this is that it's the dark side of multiculturalism. The loss of the melting pot as a cultural meme was probably a sign of this. Social cohesion depends on a set of shared values. The "melting pot", for it's issues, provided the shared national myth to align and unify the disparate cultures.

Take that away, and you get the natural result of multiple cultures with drastically different moral codes, and no core to form around.

Interesting point on drastically different moral codes. I'm curious if, during the height of immigration to the US, the "melting pot" tended to consist of people immigrating from areas with mostly similar moral codes.

It appears that many immigrants retained much of their culture while still integrating in ways that let different cultures work together, but maybe that is because the moral foundation was similar enough to allow cohesion as a whole while retaining some sense of cultural identity.

> If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does)

Strong claim requires strong evidence, please.

> Profitability is, of course, necessary to keep any business alive, and studies show that racial, ethnic, and gender diversity contribute to business success. A McKinsey & Company study of 366 companies revealed a statistically significant connection between diversity and financial performance. The companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have financial returns that were above their national industry median, and the companies in the top quartile for racial/ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their national industry median.

https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-sho...

Cynically, couldn't these results be due to lower average wages offered to women and minorities?

Are there any studies demonstrating causality? I can think of plenty of reasons diversity would correlate with success. For example, being based in a large city will have a lot of advantages for many businesses, along with having a more diverse hiring pool available that will naturally lead to a more diverse staff. But this doesn't suggest to me that adding a diversity quota or similar policy, all else being equal, will help a company succeed.

Confounded by the fact that succesful companies are located in growing areas (or move there), which is where immigrants also want to go. E.g. San Francisco.

I want to see this with some serious attempt to reduce the confounding.

Also it doesn't demonstrate cause and effect as stated in the quote. It's perfectly possible in this data that diversity makes companies less successful - but being successful in the first place is what creates the 'slack' that leads to a company pursuing diversity policies. They only go diversity when they can afford the cost incurred.

Would the study have been published if it came out the other way? If not, you have a form of inadvertent p hacking.

I can say this as someone with ADHD, neurodiversity specifically allows me to approach problems in radically different manners than my coworkers which sometimes makes things an absolute cake walk for me and sometimes makes them nearly insurmountable. This is a result of my approach to problem solving which has been trained on the problems I've experienced in the past and my natural disposition. I think an entirely homogeneous company would have issues with tunnel vision - they might be excellent at dealing with some issues and absolutely flabbergasted with others... having a more diverse team ensures that you've got more varied experiences to draw on when approaching problems.

Aside from all that, I think that diversity makes teams more healthy to work within - if everyone looks the same (straight white male) you're likely going to have cliquish social assumptions form in your team that will prevent you from hiring an excellent candidate that doesn't happen to fit the mold and might force out people who aren't what they appear: trans men, gay men and asians that appear white. As a company it's important to keep your workplace friendly to all potential employees and having a homogeneous company makes it more likely that a closed off social culture will form that makes life difficult for new employees.

I have never seen any studies to support this but thought I'd add at least a well reasoned opinion.

Anecdotally speaking, it doesn’t seem like it would be hard to find examples of companies doing stupid things that could have been avoided with a more diverse decision-making team.

Apple famously took forever to add a menstrual cycle tracking feature to their Health app, e.g.

Or Google Photo that tagged Black people as gorilla. Clearly, developers must have tested with their own photos (on top of generic datasets) and if they had had more diversity within their dev team, they would have caught that sooner.

I don't know, but it must be horrible not knowing whether you got the job on your own merit, or if you were just hired to tick a box, if a company has some cynical hiring policy.

Whatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on "merit."

The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?

This conversation is referring to a specific phenomenon that has become strongly noticeable in the last 5 years or so.

That problems of nepotism, or cronyism have already existed to some extent, is another conversation.

I also don't know why "merit" is in quotes. Hiring based on merit is going to be the main goal for companies that are not corrupt.

Corruption should also be discouraged e.g. by stopping companies becoming "too big to fail", or by being anti-competitive, or by actually creating legislation that actually protects against discrimination, rather than by perpetuating it.

That corruption exists, is not an argument to ignore corruption in another form.

I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature.

"Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit" almost always means something different or is a secondary consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse" doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a member of the same country club I am," though why it gets a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.

> Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions.

What would be an example of a company where “those people” (who comprise the company) are not making “the ultimate decisions”?

This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed.

If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.

> I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours

Please read some autobiographies of people from diverse backgrounds trying to break into atypical careers, the topic of imposter syndrome and anxieties about wanting to be taken on one's own merits regularly features.

I don't disagree, but my point was that they shouldn't. Clarence Thomas famously wrote about believing that his own success was tainted by affirmative action, and later he was indeed appointed to the Supreme Court primarily because he was a black conservative. That doesn't mean he was unqualified or less fit for the court than previous appointees, no matter what his own insecurities were, and it also doesn't mean that he or our society would have somehow been better served by Clarence Thomas not being given any of the opportunities affirmative action programs may have afforded him.

The deeper problem is that there isn't really a solution here. The old system wasn't neutral and instead actively discriminated against huge swathes of the population. That the beneficiaries of that system never doubted their worthiness doesn't make the old system better, and any change that impacts them will suffer from the same aspersions about a lack of "merit" that we are seeing now.

I don't think the majority of hires at large companies in the past were corrupt. Certainly that hasn't been my experience hiring people at large tech orgs in the present, and the process hasn't changed terribly much really. Given the scarcity of technical ability, we simply can't afford the corruption.

You seem to be discounting the meritocratic process by which people end up graduating from high-ranking schools. Prestigious law firms for instance will only consider graduates from specific institutions, specifically because they act as a filter for talent and ability.

You also seem to be conflating the hiring of people who are culturally similar to corruption. In fact there are many benefits in collaborating in a culturally homogenous environment. Maintaining such an environment in order to reap those benefits has merit too.

I guess it depends on your definition of "corrupt" and where you draw the line between corrupt and not corrupt. Would it be the tech recruiter's fault if there were, for instance, a pipeline problem that sharply limited the diversity of their candidate pool? I don't think so, but that wouldn't change the reality that the pool itself is a reflection of corruption elsewhere in the system. I don't know how you could possibly argue otherwise when black people and women were effectively excluded from many industries until relatively recently.

The "meritocratic process" is laughable. Legacy admissions have always been a critical component of those systems, especially once wealth was no longer an adequate filter; allowing a few newbies through the sieve in order to conceal the real purpose of the ivies—perpetuation of an elite caste—has been the game for a long time. As universities are pressured from the left (getting rid of standardized testing) and right (getting rid of any sort of racial consideration in admissions), legacy will only become more important as an attribute. That a few people beat the odds doesn't at all imply that the system is fair or that that solution is scalable.

"Culture fit" is realistically both important and historically has been a really problematic thing to conflate with or consider alongside "merit." It is a tough problem and I don't have a great answer to it.

These legacy admissions are also the reason most Ivies can afford to do need-blind admissions.

Even granting that the current admissions truly are need-blind (which I think it is reasonable to dispute), the smallest Ivy endowment is still over $4 billion. We’re not talking about a state university using full freight foreign students to subsidize in-state students because they have no other choice.

There’s no reason sticker price tuition at Brown needs to be almost $60k a year, and it is scandalous that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale charge tuition at all.

I would define "corrupt" as hindering the profitability or stated objectives of the organization[1]. If a team hired to get the job done happens not to be diverse, that doesn't mean the hiring is corrupt. For instance, winning NBA teams don't tend to be very diverse, but I don't see anyone seriously suggesting the NBA draft is corrupt.

By that token, if your company tends to hire a certain sort of person, that is by no means an indication of corruption. I certainly don't see what's inherently corrupt about submitting a job application, going through interviews, and ultimately being hired, mostly by strangers.

When you say you want the solution to be "fair", what do you mean exactly? If a Chinese restaurant staffed entirely by Chinese people hires only additional Chinese people, with the intent of maintaining the efficiency of a culturally homogenous environment, is it fair? Does it matter? It certainly isn't corrupt. Doesn't this apply to every business and any culturally discriminatory hiring criteria?

1. This does a pretty good job of describing cronyism https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/

Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire. It's not a theory; their show used a diversity hiring program through NBC, where if you hire a white person, it comes out of your show's budget; but if you hire a minority member, then NBC pays for their salary. So The Office had her on the writing staff basically for free. The catch was the program only paid for one year, so she knew from the first day that she had exactly one year to prove that she was worth the same salary as the other staff. Obviously she did, and was quickly elevated to on-screen talent, and her star just kept climbing.

But knowing she was a diversity hire made her try harder; that sort of thing can be very motivating to a certain type of person.

It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse".

There has been this trend of diversity reporting to list Whites and Asians together in stats. Google has been notorious for this [0] and others are following the trend when it seems convenient [1].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu...

[1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...

> It's interesting because she's asian and yet was was considered "diverse".

Asians are current and historic targets of discrimination. This sometimes gets masked in outcome stats because lots of Asians in the US are themselves or first generation descendants of immigrants through programs which filter for the top end of the socioeconomic, and more particularly recently technical skills, spectrum.

> basically for free

Well they got a bargain. She's immensely talented. She hates my politics but damn can she write. Her first memoir is one of the funniest things I've ever read

> She hates my politics

What does that mean?

> Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor from The Office) is a famous diversity hire.

Ironically, Mindy's brother pretended to be a black man to get into Med school.

On the other hand it must be nice getting paid above your abilities, which is (one of) the common outcomes of diversity hiring, isn't it?

What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability? But somehow, that isn't a problem for you?

> What's interesting is that in average, Black people (and many other group) get paid less than their counterpart for the same job. Same for men vs women. Isn't that nice to be paid above your ability?

Is it actually same ability though? IIRC the men vs women difference disappears once you control for hours worked, for example.

The only tangible benefit I've ever heard of was qualifying for contracts with diversity quotas.

Similar for setting up 49% subsidiaries where the wife (wives) of the owners collectively own 51%, to qualify for minority ownership for fed govt contracts.

What is that saying about "tell me what your incentives are and I'll tell you how you'll act"?

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