In large US corporations there's an emphasis on hiring "diversity" candidates and promoting them to leadership positions. At Microsoft this year a very large percentage of interns are underrepresented minorities or women, so presumably there was some preference in hiring that occurred there. What's the motivation here? Does this create a positive impact on the business, or is it strictly for PR, or for public good?
Yes, you get better talent this way.
No, you get more diverse talent, if anything - whatever that means. To get better talent, you simply hire based on competencies and skills that are needed, not caring about cultural background, gender, skin color. Maybe we'll get there one day...
Inclusion gets you better talent because you cast a wider net. Diversity of race in its own gets you points with the SJW crowd.
quota system. propelling a segment by giving preference based on other than competancy is bad in long run
Actually there is a considerable amount of research on the superior performance of diverse teams. There is also a considerable about of research on unconscious bias. You're assuming the people in roles now is due to competency and women/minorities are missing due to competency. It's actually the opposite. Talented people are unfairly locked out to the detriment of the business.
Let's see this research. Don't bother with the McKinsey report; it doesn't have any attempt at controlling for other factors, so it's just not science.
I've got a sincere question for diversity advocates. One thing I hear all the time is that "diverse teams build better products". But there seems to be a mountain of empirical evidence that suggests the exact opposite is true. Where are all the companies dominating the industry that have diverse cofounders? Shouldn't someone be able to exploit this whole diversity thing and gain an advantage over other companies that are homogeneous? Even entrepreneurs who support this whole diversity thing start their companies with people unlike them? Shouldn't Jack Dorsey have sought a black woman to start Square with? He apparently would have gained a huge advantage over Stripe which has the least diverse cofounders possible (brothers raised in the same home, it doesn't get less diverse than that). And yet these companies are worth billions of dollars. So where are all the diverse teams disrupting all these yucky homogeneously founded companies?
There's a big difference between what makes starting a company succeed and what makes running and growing a large company succeed. You can just search for "diversity impact study" and find the mountains of evidence about how outcomes end up better across the board, but this quote from an older Stanford analysis hits a key point: "... researchers found that informational diversity stirred constructive conflict, or debate, around the task at hand." The key here is that it's diversity in ways of thinking that are responsible. We falsely equate that with demographic diversity, but most of the time there really is pretty good overlap.
I don't know of research there is on products. However, there is plenty of research on the performance of teams. Besides your question assumes that the current composition of the industry are people who deserve to be there. That's not true. Many were simply hired due to pattern matching not competency. There are many diverse candidates who are as competent or more so who don't get opportunities due to the bias against them. Your problem is you are starting off with a false assumption.
Would you like to work in a company whose reputation is "all asian" " all males" or all "h1b" ?
I'd work in a company whose reputation is "we hire the best period"
promoting diversity doesnt translate to "best"
And another question: why diversity solely based on ethnicity? Doesn't cultural background correlate more with diverse perspectives, such that someone raised in Russia would be more valuable than someone that was born and raised in upper-middle class America, but that is African-American? I can see more of an argument for gender diversity, but this part really confuses me.
Because someone from Russia is far less likely to be systemically disadvantaged based on how things work today than even the richest black dude or woman. The fact that you don't understand this to be completely true means you don't know enough black people well enough to realize that being a rich black guy in America still makes you a n---a. Stop whining, you aren't even close to being a victim. I know a black dude with 68 patents who graduated at the top of his class at an elite CS department who wouldn't consider working for a typical valley giant like FB, google, etc. The Bay Area is surprisingly racist. He knew that but I didn't. This dude could out code anyone in our undergrad/graduate days. Even the special Russian and Asian people who arrogantly though they were genetically superior to the rest. This guy knew people looked down at him. Many of our projects were performance based. Best performance (scalability, algorithm out put, etc) got the best grade. It was insanely competitive. Just to completely humiliate people like you, he felt he not only needed to have the best code, but for his stuff to be orders of magnitude better than everyone else. After a while people would drop a class if he was in it (let's take compilers next semester). He did this over and over. It was like he was LeBron and everyone else was in high school. We worked on a few projects together early on cause all the racist asians and Indians assumed he was a dumb black guy. Was the fucking luckiest thing that happened to me since we ended up partnering on coding projects for the rest of college. Eventually people got a clue. He'd just walk around with droopy pants, headphones on listening to rap music, and just decimate people. We got to be pretty good friends to the point where he shared some experiences and talked about race which most black people won't talk about no matter how good friends you are. I was stunned at the consistent never ending string of racist bullshit he put up with in his career and in college. Once we created a CPU and we were graded on performance, functionality (extra points for self modifying code, pipelining, etc). As usually he destroyed everyone (we didn't end up on the same team for that one). His partner was an Indian dude who transferred from a crappy undergrad school. The racist Indian professor just assumed the Indian kid did all the work so he gave the black guy an F. Luckily the PhD student who was the TA, and was in the lab answering questions, knew that the black guy actually knew what he was doing and the Indian transfer didn't know shit. To his credit he went to the department head, and this went all the way to the dean. They changed his grade to an A+. The Indian transfer who got the benefit of the doubt flunked out of CS after the next semester. This is one example and I can give you many more for just this one guy. Get it? Go make some black friends and maybe you can speak from an informed perspective.
"here is my one example of a smart black guy" what the fuck was the point of that rant? you clearly don't have friends from Eastern Europe where there is a legitimate fear of having your children eaten by packs of wild dogs.
it does not help. it makes SJWs happy.
But there has to be something more to it. I would assume that CEOs don't care about making SJWs happy unless it has an impact on bottom line.
SJWs use this as carrot and stick..if you play by the rules you get good PR, if you stray you will get hit and that could affect your brand. CEOs just do it as show and pony, this is table stakes to be a big company now
Why can't black lesbian Muslim women reverse a linked list or serialize a tree? I never understood that...
Don't ask questions you don't want answered.
Diversity hires and promotions are pure PR and keeps the SJWs at bay. I'm not saying we shouldn't promote diversity on the whole but hiring and/or promoting strictly on diversity is detrimental. At Uber there are plenty of diversity promotions of people who weren't qualified to do the job they had let alone the promotion but because they're (insert race/sex/religion/etc) they are raised to levels above their competence.
this was my point above as well..it is a show with quota system benefiting elites
Are you stupid? Please PM me with the list of under represented minorities at Uber in tech roles who have received a promotion they didn't deserve? Uber tech leadership team is 0% Latino and 0% black. So please, what promotions? There are none. Engineering org is large so I don't know for sure but I do know that there isn't a single Latino product manager in the entire company. So what promotion? There literally aren't any. Are you telling me nundu and AGS were qualified to received the promotions they got? AGS got hired in by his Harvard college classmate Ed Baker to run the data platform and the guy no technical experience or education. Yeah, that looks like a meritocracy to me. The only people benefiting from all this diversity stuff are women, mostly white women. I know a black woman with a STEM degree from Harvard who went to a top 5 MBA program (had a 760 GMAT cause I'm sure you already were thinking she didn't belong) and she literally couldn't break into product management in the valley. But you telling me AGS with his degree in SOCIAL STUDIES was more qualified? Do some homework bro.
The idea behind "diversity" is that if you have multiple candidates who all meet the bar for a position, picking a brown person or a woman out of that group once in a while might not be a bad idea. Nobody in history has ever suggested hiring unqualified people to meet diversity requirements.
What do you consider a "very large" percentage? People look for diversity because different mindsets and ways of thinking are important to innovation. Different backgrounds leads to insights or perspectives that joe from the burbs might not see as clearly.
Genuine question as I am trying to understand this issue better - anecdotally haven't almost all successful startups including Facebook started by a near homogenous group? Look at the first 20 employees at FB for example or look at groups of founders anywhere else. So where does the data on your claim come from?
But if it's all about different ways of thinking (which I agree makes sense at least in product roles), why not focus on hiring based on diversity of culture rather than diversity of race? For example, in that case we'd prioritize hiring of Africans over African-Americans, or Russians and non-Anglo Europeans over white Americans. But right now it's "Caucasian" vs "Asian" vs "Hispanic", etc - superficial distinctions that don't delineate between different ways of thinking.