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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

I work at Apple and we have a policy (new in 2024) where we are not allowed to make an offer for a manager position to a candidate unless we have interviewed a PoC or a woman for the roll. The stated goal for this policy is “diverse managers hire diverse teams”. So right off the bat we are discriminating based on race and gender.

Look at the published diversity data on the Apple website, the company is now 50% Asian in North America (they stopped publishing the data after 2022 but internally that’s the number now), because it’s cheaper to hire H1B’s and they can’t leave the company.

It’s not surprising that Americans are having trouble finding jobs right now, they are being squeezed by both DEI and cheap labor from abroad.

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IMO the difference between "interviewed" and "hired" here is crucial. I had a similar rule at my previous job. If anything I felt the risk was that this would be abused to the detriment of the URM candidate. If you have a strong candidate coming through but haven't met the URM interview retirement yet, it's tempting to not look for a "real" candidate but just go through the motions with the next candidate who matches the DEI requs. Fortunately, I can say I'd never have to give in to that temptation but the real loser would be the person who got to waste a ton of time and nervous on an interview for which they were set up to haul from the get go.

idk it seems illegal to me.. the civil rights act says in very plain language that it's illegal to discriminate based on immutable characteristics during hiring.

Break down a hypothetical scenario:

1. Post a job, anyone can apply.

2. Candidate applies, goes through the hiring process, the team likes them and wants to make an offer.

3. Not a woman or PoC so not allowed to make an offer yet.

So at this point lets say you go out and interview a woman or PoC.

a. If you like the woman or PoC and want to give them the job, then the first person was discriminated against because if they had been a different race or gender they would have got the job.

b. If you don't give them the job then you can check the box saying you interviewed the diverse candidate, but this is at best purely performative because the other outcome was discriminating against the first person.

Logically, it is impossible to have this policy and not be breaking both the spirit and letter law in my opinion.

Also the implication of "diverse managers hire diverse teams" is that the diverse managers will discriminate based on race and gender.

Not a legal expert, but suffice to say it's not without it's challenges. In practice, as a hiring manager, I've had the luck that it hadn't made a difference either way since I always had some promising URMs in the pipeline. (Edit: I take that back. At one point I had 4 reqs and the first candidate was a real unicorn and we hadn't interviewed a URM yet. My VP gave me an exemption on the condition that the other three reqs have to go the proper route. I got the exemption because he knew for a long time and trusted me and because of the remaining, identical reqs)

Edit: To some degree it's a variation of the same old goals/metrics spiel. Ideally you'd have managers who want to give URMs a chance. In practice creating this metric to force it makes nothing better but likely everything worse for everyone in the system.

>it's not without it's challenges

This is a nice way of saying that we are breaking the law.

> URM

underrepresented minority

(Not from USA so I don't know many diversity acronyms)

Would Asians still fall into this category? OP mentioned that Apple is at 50%.

Good feedback thanks.

Why is this downvoted? The man is stating a fact!

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