Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

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No, this is bad. Because the whole point of a diversity program is to reduce hiring based on race[0].

If a business is, say, 100% white men, it's extremely unlikely for this to have happened purely by chance. Like, "all the fast molecules in a can of air moving to one side" levels of impossible. If you want to argue that the problem is education or qualifications instead of overt refusal to hire minorities, that's one thing[1], but that's not an argument against measuring the company's diversity at all. That's an argument against affirmative action policies.

As far as I'm concerned, deleting this page is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear and shouting "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" at the problem.

[0] Or sex, gender, class, caste, sexual orientation, etc...

[1] Though I will disagree vehemently with the idea that it's purely an education problem. The minorities are here, they just don't stick around because big tech treats them like garbage.

The crucial piece you're missing is that the problem is further upstream. Most American commercial pilots are white men. Most job applicants are too.

Forcing airlines to hire people who are not qualified just to meet a quota is the absolute worst way to solve this problem. In fact, it exacerbates it. What do you think happens when you force employers to hire people who are unqualified, and those people are all women or minorities? Well, now you just might create a perception that women and minorities are inherently less capable. Obviously untrue. But let's fix the pipeline instead of mandating "equity".

We should also work towards accepting that people are different and they have different drives and passions in their life. I imagine most Hindu women do not aspire to being professional rappers, or construction workers, for example.

There's a difference between having a quota and having a target.

Targets can be missed, and reasons for the miss can be explored, e.g. were there sufficient qualified candidates in the pipeline? If not, what can be done about it. The hope is that over time, a target will be hit.

That said, I agree with you that quotas are problematic. They are the wrong solution for the problem of lack of diversity.

> Targets can be missed, and reasons for the miss can be explored, e.g. were there sufficient qualified candidates in the pipeline? If not, what can be done about it. The hope is that over time, a target will be hit.

And if it's not, surely the company can find a hiring manager "a bit more motivated to hit company diversity targets".

If you run a mom and pop shop and need a new employee, sure, this strategy is great. Codifying it at major corporations creates all of the same bad incentives as quotas, just implicitly.

No, "fixing the pipeline" is also a red herring. The problem isn't "tech businesses should hire more women just for their gender" or "more women need to get CS degrees". The way you get to, say, all white men in your field is from attrition; i.e. all the women and minorities burning out and changing careers. That burnout comes from exploitative labor practices and workplace harassment, which are rampant in the tech industry - and especially in games development.

If your business is able to properly enforce workplace rules against harassment, then you will have more women and minorities than other firms purely because they will remain at the company. No need for quotas, diversity hires, or affirmative action.

> If a business is, say, 100% white men, it's extremely unlikely for this to have happened purely by chance.

Affirmative action is indeed based on this fundamentally flawed premise. Such statistical bias occurs quite frequently, even in the absence of racism/discrimination. This is, among other things, evidenced by some minority groups being disproportionally successful in many societies. I strongly recommend Thomas Sowell's book on the topic: "Discrimination and Disparities".

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