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Comment by DandyDev | Hacker News Reader

It absolutely does not have to come at the cost of merit based hiring. When you want to focus on DEI in hiring, you can pick the following trade-offs:

- Take more time finding suitable candidates

- Invest money in external recruiters

- Lower the bar

Only in the last case does it come at the cost of merit

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In the first two cases as well, because if you take more time and invest more money for search, in expectation you find more qualified people without optimizing for the DEI tradeoff. We can't compare "DEI + more search" with "no DEI". We have to hold the amount of search constant for an objective comparison.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.

The comparison is simple: given that you want to hire a fixed number of people and you don’t want to lower the bar (hire based on merit), you can either not invest in DEI or spend extra time/money on getting diverse hires without lowering the bar.

No that's the wrong comparison.

- Either you do not spend extra money/time in finding hires. Then you find better ones if you don't optimize for DEI.

- Or you do spend extra time/money in finding hires. Then you also find better ones if you don't optimize for DEI.

Disagree. You’re assuming that the quality of hires is limitless. In practice it doesn’t work like that. Unless you have a good reason to want the next Einstein or even Jeff Dean, you can hire a more that good enough person with limited time and resources and even a diverse and good enough person if you throw in some extra time and/or resources.

The assumption is that more competent hires do a better job on average. Aerospace is not an easy field, but even in much more simple jobs competence matters.

You’re not reading my comments.

Yes, more competent hires do a better job. But there is a limit to how much competence you can hire per person. That means there is a limit - or at least severe diminishing returns - to how much more competence money will buy you.

That means you can opt to spend that money on DEI without losing out on competence

What limit? If you optimize for DEI your hires will be less competent on average. Possibly substantially less competent. The difference can mean the difference between life and death.

You’re forgetting the third option: HR invents some new bullshit to justify their jobs.

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