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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse".

And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.

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> In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason

Statically Asians in America outperform "White" people when it comes to education and salaries, which shows the fallacy in the whole white privilege thing. Therefore DEI policies pretend Asians don't exist.

there's still a "bamboo ceiling"

Is there? The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Asians who did not even grow up in the US.

Specific examples don't overcome the overall statistics.

"bamboo ceiling" is not a statistic.

Underrepresentation of south and east asians in leadership roles is, though.

Do you have anything to back that up with, as far as I understood it Indian CEOs are responsible for significantly higher percentage of market valuations than their population percentage in the US.

Palo Alto Networks & Arista, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM, Netapp, Micron... Even World Bank has an Indian CEO.

Can you provide the stats? I'm looking at the BLS data and I don't really see anything relevant.

Those CEOs are great examples, because they show the operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin or a McKinsey alum. I see less evidence for power networks based on race, or those power networks are doing less.

> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin

eh, what? Why would US corporate culture give a shit about Hindu castes? Google and Microsoft boards appointed Sundar and Satya, but I don't think those boards could tell a Brahmin from a non-Brahmin.

seems myopic to focus on final promotions in decades-long world-class careers

> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin

What evidence do you have that Sundar or Satya used any power network to progress in their career?

Could it not be that being a Brahmin in India was not all that promising to an ambitious young Indian man and in response he decided to start fresh in another country where he had very little in the way of useful network connections?

The charitable interpretation of why Asian == white in these scenarios is that Asians are not typically underrepresented in the engineering field, company founders, prestigious schools, etc.

The less charitable interpretation is that DEI programs aren't being pushed for by Asians and they're designed to help people who look like the people starting the programs.

Even following the charitable interpretation, grouping a dozen of cultures with very different educational and economic opportunities into a single "asian" designation is a bizarre practice.

There's often a separation between the people who bring in the candidates and the people who interview/approve the candidates.

If HR passes me a stack of resumes then that's who I interview; if all the people HR passes me are white, then I'm left to either assume that these were all the qualified candidates who applied (or at least, to operate under that assumption).

If the process gets bounced back because the stack that was passed to me was filtered by HR's unconscious (or conscious) biases, that forces them to give me more diverse candidates to choose from; the best candidate may still be the middle class white dude, but ensuring that the hiring manager is presented with a broad range of options and not just Chad, Biff, and Troy helps the whole pipeline.

Years ago the software engineering field looked at this problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly proceeded to implement none of them.

Resumes need to be filtered to remove age, race, gender, name, even what school someone went to. Then ideally the first filtering round of an interview is also completely anonymous, a take home test or a video interview with camera off and a voice filter in place. Heck modern AI tools could even be used to remove accents.

HR has biases, those biases need to be removed.

It only takes a few moments of thinking to realize these techniques are a better way to hire all around. Nothing good can come from someone in HR looking at a resume and thinking "oh that isn't a college I recognize, next candidate."

Reminds of the infamous attempt to fight discrimination in orchestras by conducting blind auditions. Which ended up reducing diversity even further.

This has been demonstrably proven to make discrimination worse, not better.

Apparently, people like to discriminate. Where there are overt markers, there is still a chance that people fear the legality of their discrimination. And when you remove overt markers of discrimination, people look for subtle markers, and those exist, and then still end up discriminating.

End result, even fewer qualified members of the discriminated class gets hired.

Has it been proven that people still manage to tell races of candidates apart after removing markers? Or is this all just conjecture?

Of course the "answer" is never that people were biased in favor of DEI groups in the first place, and removing said overt markers of their race just removed that bias because individuals could no longer discriminate. No, the answer was obviously then is that people found "secret" and "subtle" markers instead because they just have to discriminate and don't like DEI groups.

Occams razor comes to mind.

If "subtle markers" can still identify someone's race or gender, then remove those markers too. You can test of this works by giving employees bonuses to correctly guess the candidates' demographics and see if they can predict reliably.

If anonymization reduced the representation of certain demographics maybe it doesn't make discrimination worse, but rather you were wrong about which groups are discriminated against?

Do you have links to any studies that removing names and other obvious markers from resumes (college name, employment dates, etc) somehow increases discrimination in HR screening?

I honestly fail to how that could happen.

For example, if HR is throwing away all resumes that aren't from an Ivy League, then removing cities and schools from the resume can only help.

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