Hacker News Reader

Comment by renlo | Hacker News Reader

Most eye opening experience in my personal development was attending HR conferences (we sold an HR product but I am an engineer), where speakers were openly saying this out loud. I know you won’t believe me given your statement, but using codewords they said they were trying to hire “diverse candidates”, retain “diverse candidates”, explicitly mark “non-diverse candidates” leaving as non-regrettable churn, filtering and searching for diverse employees within the company to fast track for promotion, etc. I was in shock how brazenly they were saying the quiet part out loud, and breaking the law. This was 10 years ago, there were no repercussions for it, in fact they were all lauded.

View on HN

It wasn’t even coded in many cases. I’ve had pitch meetings where I had to explain how I was brown as part of an express consideration of the business decision. White people talked about my race to my face more in 2020-2021 than during seven years in the south starting right after 9/11.

Some “DEI” was high level measures like recruiting at a broader set of universities. But in the last 5 years it routinely got down to discussing the race of specific individuals in the context of whether to hire them or enter into business relationships.

It's funny how everyone brings up all these anecdotes, but then the reality is that there are plenty of studies that show that if your name is associated with being black you have much lower chances to be invited to an interview.

So seems like all this talk by HR people didn't really change any hiring practices. It's also funny how everyone is outraged by the DEI programs, instead of the real discrimination that is happening in hiring.

Hint: if everyone has such anecdotes, they are no longer anecdotes.

No, they're still anecdotes.

   anecdote   /'ænɪk,doʊt/
   noun
   short account of an incident (especially a biographical one)

It's enough to show that something isn't ultra rare, but it's not enough to show whether it's happening at 0.1% of companies or 90% of companies or where in between.

If someone is racist in a manner that's outweighed 10:1 by opposite racist practices, that's something we do want to stop, but it shouldn't be top priority and definitely shouldn't be treated as the example of what racism looks like these days.

There is very little evidence of those “opposite racist practices” that are supposedly 10 times more common, at least in large corporations and universities. Microsoft was out there promising to double the percentage of black executives. Where is the big corporations promising to double the number of white executives?

As mentioned a couple comments up, something like this: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/A-Discri... is way more impactful then some CEO choices.

I can't find the Microsoft thing, but apparently among fortune 500 companies only 1.6% of CEOs are black. Even double that would still be an extremely low number. So unless you think some truly cosmic random odds happened here, that 1.6% is evidence of lots of racism.

These studies are misleading, because they try to create race signals by using names that are also class signals: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-study-suggests-resea....

Also, the study suggests that, even with this flawed methodology, a bulk of industries are in the least discrimination category with only a 3% lower callback rate for “black sounding names.”

Do you have any numbers for trying to correct for that factor?

And the bulk are not at 3%, the bulk are between 5 and 10. 3 was the absolute lowest.

Also you didn't mention the CEO thing, does that mean my numbers were sufficient to address that worry?

As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%. Those are all the industries in green. These are small differences in a study that’s not well designed to begin with.

The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti.... A black applicant to Harvard with an academic index in the 5th decile had an 800-900% higher chance of admission than a white or asian candidate with the same qualifications. This isn’t just CEOs. The pattern was similar at UNC, a state school.

> As I read it, the industries were grouped into three categories. “Least discriminatory” was at 3%.

The least single industry was 3%. And each single industry is a very noisy data point, based on a couple companies and needing more data points. By the time you aggregate into more solid data, like those bigger categories, it's more than 3%.

But the whole thing could use better methods and more data for sure.

> The explicit discrimination in universities against whites and asians is huge in comparison

In comparison to this specific resume effect it's pretty big, but that was just a basic example, not an attempt to list the biggest issue.

In comparison to the fortune 500 CEOs the overall effect here is smaller (no I'm not going to look at 5th decile in isolation).

Also even after this bias was applied, they're admitting a below-population-average amount of black students and a far above-population-average amount of asian students. So there's a bunch of other data necessary to properly analyze what's going on and how bad it is. Should there be a super tight correlation to academic decile? There are huge differences in school quality that muddy the signals, and those differences often correlate with race.

I'm not saying they did nothing wrong, but I'm saying it's unclear what the numbers should have been.

Why is that a low number? What is the correct percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs to be black, or any other specific ethnic background.

What do you think happens when one level of leadership sets a metric as a goal, and likely ties someone's bonus to that goal?

The metric-goal gets pushed down to lower hierarchy levels, and from then on, all it takes is turning a blind eye and you get the results we've seen in the court case I cited above. The smart ones just don't put it in writing.

A lot of the contemporary formal scientific process is done incredibly badly, for a variety of reasons including overt political bias on the part of individual scientists working in the academic system, pressure to publish any results including poor ones, and outright laziness and fraud. In general we shouldn't assume that if a bunch of public scientific studies purport to show that some phenomenon is happening, that that phenomenon is actually happening. It takes substantial time, effort, and experience to evaluate whether a claimed scientific result is valid; and all the moreso when that result has immediate political policy implications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com