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Comment by qaq | Hacker News Reader

Going on a tangent I am tired of diversity theater at most companies. You know how I know you don't really care? I look at your C level (excluding Chief Diversity Officer) and you board.

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Years and breadth/depth of experience is far from everything, but it's also far from nothing.

I'd sort of expect the CxOs at most major companies to be ~25-40 years into their career. I'd therefore expect them to look a lot like the white collar workforce new entrants looked in 1982-1997.

Are you for real largest SV companies can't find a single "diverse" board member or C level but spend 100s of millions evangelizing how they care about diversity and on employee diversity training?

Is the hiring task

  SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates WHERE DIVERSE = 1 ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC

  SELECT TOP 1 * FROM Candidates ORDER BY Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered DESC

There could be valid reasons to employ either strategy, but I suspect most firms are trying to apply the second and your disbelief that the first query returns zero rows is more a mismatch with the firms' hiring strategy than anything else.

I am not suggesting they have to employee 1st or 2nd strategy. But if you do go with the 2nd don't go down the path of by-weekly employee diversity trainings and diversity being the corner stone of your "values" and communication strategy.

IMO, diversity contributes to, but does not define (the high-order bit of) Candidate_Value_All_Things_Considered.

That doesn't make sense in the global marketplace. A ton of american companies have Indian ceos these days.

Pick an Indian CEO of a major American company. When did they start their career? How many of their fellow Indians started in the same timeframe? (I think "a lot!")

Some major tech company Indian CEOs:

  Sundhar Pichai (Alphabet) ~1993
  Satya Nadella (Microsoft) ~1990
  Parag Agrawal (Twitter) ~2011 (with PhD, but still an outlier even discounting that)
  Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) ~1986
  Arvind Krishna (IBM) ~1990
  Sanjay Mehrotra (Micron) ~1979
  Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto) ~1992

My comment was in reference to yours and the parent combined.

It should be easy to look at the C-board and find diversity because in a global economy there are tons of people with the experience as you've proved with your great example.

OK, if GGP agrees that those companies are diverse at the top by virtue of those CEOs, then are we all aligned that there's no issue there?

yep

This is an extremely shallow and dismissive take, IMO. As someone who has recruited engineers, I can tell you there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. At the C-level, it only gets worse. It takes years to even get to the C-suite, which means that white men inherently have a head start, and that it's one of the last places you'd expect to see the effects of diversity initiatives.

That isn't to say there aren't companies that have Chief Diversity Officers who aren't taken seriously, but that's a completely different story.

> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself.

So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"

It's not possible to measure a counterfactual where teams at a given company just suddenly become diverse. But, it is pretty well known that there are some advantages to diversity in the workplace. Take, for instance, this reasonably well source article which lists 10 advantages: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefi...

Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subcontinent are also well represented in tech (perhaps over represented -- I'm not sure).

+1 here, and yeah it's definitely not just white men. Where I work, it's ALL Indian or Asian, you'd be hard pressed to even find white people where I work that are actually in engineering.

They dont want diversity in its true meaning. They just want to hire whoever they want, from wherever they want. And "diversity" is the camouflage they hide behind.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220218114915/https://quillette...

I didn't go through and click all the links in the article, I was mainly interested in the problem-solving section. However, that one links to a Harvard Business Review study that drops this quote:

> Received wisdom is that the more diverse the teams in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, the more creative and productive they are likely to be. But having run the execution exercise around the world more than 100 times over the last 12 years, we have found no correlation between this type of diversity and performance.

They go on to say that when they say "diverse teams solve problems faster", they mean cognitive diversity:

> Cognitive diversity has been defined as differences in perspective or information processing styles. It is not predicted by factors such as gender, ethnicity, or age.

Intuitively this makes much more sense than the race-based stuff I've been hearing about. You want people who can look at a problem from a different angle from you. It's sort of like having a team of specialists (one guy is good at UI, one at performance, one at tooling, etc.) except on the level of cognitive processes and not specific skills.

I believe that maybe these studies arose saying "diverse teams are better" and people misunderstood it to mean "racial diversity" and ran with it (kind of like the Hungarian notation fiasco).

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