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Comment by arendtio | Hacker News Reader

I think your categories ('white male', 'Indian', ...) are a form of racism already. I mean, there are other categories you can use. Outsourcing, offshoring, and nearshoring all describe something similar (cutting costs by replacing the workforce) but do not categorize humans based on racial factors.

I understand this is not the core of your question, but I did not want to leave it uncommented because I think it is inappropriate.

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I can tell you anecdotally that I was treated differently for being a white male when interviewing with at a large tech company. I passed the interviews but had to wait two weeks as they interviewed “diverse candidates” to see if they could take the job instead of me.

They ended up offering me the job but I took a position elsewhere where the company didn’t treat me like a second class citizen.

Im pretty sure what they did was illegal according to the laws in this country, but Im not going to waste my time fighting it.

Many companies officially endorse systematic racism under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). They isn’t just trying to exclude white males to hire more of the opposite traits. Many will have support groups for non-whites and non-males for their specific issues, special training that can lead to promotions which whites can’t have, and put out posters or videos displaying non-whites to show how much they care [if you’re not white].

I ran into this quite a few times when looking for AI companies. They often put it prominently in the About Us pages or their annual report. Some organizations were also giving grants or mentoring only to minority members.

That DEI makes hiring decisions partly based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. means it shouldn’t surprise you at all that someone mentions it as a hiring factor. If they hired X non-whites, then up to X whites may have been rejected depending on the makeup of the candidate pool. That’s just how systematic racism works. It should be abolished.

I'm close with a principal engineering manager at a large tech company. At his level, bonuses are in part determined by hiring minorities (discriminating against whites, East Asians, men), and resumés are sorted by the same category to ensure some minimum of minorities are given an opportunity before a less racially desirable candidate even has a chance of being looked at.

IBM Red Hat is being sued for this, having stated workforce diversity goals of 30% female and 30% people of color. Executives have openly stated that bonuses are on the line if you hire too many white men.

For the last decade or so we haven't been able to state these things without being accused of racism or sexism. Ironically, my primary concern is that these sorts of policies make the problems of racism and sexism worse. Equality requires that we judge people on their merits.

At my FAANG company, our leadership is super unbalanced in favor of white/asian men.

We have some empty words about diversity but no goals or metrics, so nothing effective will actually change.

As a (white, male) manager, I have huge power over who gets to interview. My network is, sadly, largely white/asian and male. So if I don’t even think about it, I will perpetuate the imbalance.

I haven’t seen bonuses tied to diversity. I have seen a promo doc where a manager was praised for increasing diversity, with a greater percentage of women now in his department. I then discovered he had hired 1 woman and 26 men, raising his percentage of women from 0. I’m not kidding.

You could lead by example and replace your own role with a "diverse" candidate?

Yes. I’m now close to retirement and am grooming my successor to replace me next year.

For now, I’m focusing my mentorship energy on promising women and minorities, and helping them network.

I have seen this as well. We have "DEI" officers, whatever that means, whose job seems to be solely to email us about things like whatever native land our company's buildings exists on.

Sometimes the companies can't help it either. When you try to get business from government contracts or even large enterprises, they ask you your diversity in hiring in your org. You're excluded from applying if you're not diverse enough. So it's a chain.

This is from yesterday's X discourse regarding the H1B program. The amount of mistruths and racism on the platform was staggering.

Correct, but over simplified. I'm looking for people's experiences based on gender, age and race, as I stated in the post. This doesn't make the post inappropriate or racist. It might make some people uncomfortable, but it isn't a racist post.

Apologies if I implied that it was. I think it's fine to discuss these things in a reasonable and rational way. My point is that was not happened over on X.

That's not racism. I encourage you to research the term, you seem to be very confused.

It's also very important to realize that the majority of currently employed and potential candidates are "white males" in North America and Europe, for better or for worse. So when you say, "the people who are struggling are coincidentally mostly white men", with the implication that white men are somehow being discriminated against, you're being disingenuous at best and outright malicious at worst.

Majority of Americas workforce is white?

White males according to Bloomberg and others are disproportionately affected by the economic downturn. Thr majority of the American workforce is no longer white males (allegedly).

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