Hacker News Reader

Comment by HeyLaughingBoy | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think one is at odds with the other?

If you are selecting for anything besides competence, your chances of getting competence is effectively random. It says nothing about one group of people being more or less competent than another.

I have observed that selecting for competence leads to diversity, and I believe that diversity is a strength. But it is best achieved organically.

Personally I think the shortcomings we have with achieving diversity is in the framing stage, not the hiring stage.

Can you speak more about the framing? I think diversity should be encouraged, but I also believe to some extent that people of color have been left out of STEM education and jobs due to poor education and opportunities. Maybe a middle ground is to hire for both. Bring in women, people of color, and others who may not be as educated or experienced, but make a serious effort to pair them with more experienced employees and train them up to where they should be. Rather than hire and replace, as some have suggested, hire and partner to diversify and holistically improve the entire organization.

I think you are right about starting early in education and exposing disadvantaged children to things they wouldn't otherwise have available to them, and supporting them throughout their education. This would benefit organizations that want to achieve good performance and is worth them investing in themselves, although government support is a decent second option that I agree with. However it's important to note that this is primarily an economic differentiation, not a racial one.

Training can help but it is not sufficient for many tasks. You also need aptitude and desire.

Culture is more about what is valued and rewarded in a society, and I think the primary driver of the desire component.

What I meant about framing was that our economies, governments and businesses are framed in a cultural context, anglo-protestant american capitalism in this case. African-american/black communities have a challenging relationship with this for obvious reasons. Certain immigrant populations can integrate or interoperate more effectively than others. I think the key to achieving better results as a society and a planet is to incorporate more cultural diversity, allowing a broader range of desires and outcomes to be seen as valid and worth pursuing. I'm sorry I don't have more time to go into this right now, I hope it gives an idea what I was referring to.

In some industries when you have diversity targets you need to lower the standards a lot. Why? Because the competence-based hiring and promotion process will not get you enough good candidates to meet the diversity targets, so you take shortcuts like Boeing did with QC.

According to StackOverflow survey a few years ago with a huge (relevant) number of answers, about 8% of people in the domain were women. Some companies have targets of 50 to 70% women. How do you think these targets are met? My company had 70% target and we are close; we hired any woman that ever applied, no questions asked, no tech interview. I managed the IT recruiting for an entire region over 5 years, I quit that role when the tech interviews were forbidden in order to meet targets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com