Comment by arkwin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkwin | Hacker News Reader

To the people defending the reduction in Google's DEI program, I want to tell you that you are missing the point.

For some reason, they think DEI means some unqualified woman or minority is taking the position over someone more qualified. That is not the case.

DEI was created because corporate leadership structures were "the good old boys club" where less qualified people were hired because they knew someone or were related to someone in the company over a more qualified candidate.

Still today, qualified job candidates do not get calls back because their name sounds foreign. [1, 2]

There are many reasons why qualified candidates cannot even get into the interview process.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/23/516823230...

In theory, I'm a proponent of DEI. But your description is every description: "People have bias when hiring." That's the easy part to explain. A clear summary of how the solution can be fair is never quite spelled out (either because it isn't fair, or because explaining it clearly and briefly is intractable). "The fair amount of each of type person" is impossible to define, so there's no way to fairly get us there.

I.e. we can demonstrate that the scale is unfair, but we can't measure exactly how. The results of the bias are apparent, but the bias itself is unobservable. But when we put a thumb on it, that's highly observable, and we know the thumb doesn't know exactly whom to prefer over whom. You can't possibly expect humans to not revolt against that.

More practically speaking: Yes, the loud assholes focus on unqualified people theoretically being hired, but even if you dismiss them, there are still a bunch of people who won't be able to ignore the fact that, while DEI will cause the best candidate to sometimes be hired when they otherwise wouldn't, it intuitively causes the still-qualified-but-not-as-qualified candidate to be hired at least as often. Additionally, being denied by human bias (unconscious bias, charitably) is less angering than being denied by policy.

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