there's a massive discussion raging about diversity. and it seems that some companies try to force diversity quotas in hiring, while others just try to put in a broader effort in recruiting so that they have a diverse pool to choose from. what are your thoughts? (you can pick multiple)
I think diversity is used as a tool to lower wages and divide workers reducing their power against the company
That's an interesting viewpoint. How so
[[ Chapo Intensifying]]
Diversity of thought can be good. Unfortunately most “diversity” in corporate America is hiring different colored people that think the same as everyone else at the company.
Oh dude... Let's not get into echo Chambers! 🙄
Diversity is just a fancy word invented because they don’t want to say discrimination. Call it racial/gender quota instead.
Yeah. Diversity never comes up in female/URM dominated fields
Just like diversity never comes up in non white majority countries
Options in the poll suck. Where is the option for “I’m happy for us to being in a diverse set of candidates as long as we hold the same hiring bar.” You used the word “quota” in your first two options. I’m not going to say diversity is a mistake, I don’t know that. I’m not going say it makes better products, no one knows that. We should try to attract a diverse set of candidates. We should interview them all with the same bar. That’s all we can reasonably do.
If diversity was possible with same hiring bar, then the issue would never have came up in the first place.
My take on this has always been that the hiring bar should not move. But before we start interviewing, the recruiting team should ensure a diverse set of candidates. Whenever I've done hiring, I never move to interviews until there's at least one woman and one person of colour (Indians and Asians don't count. They are not underrepresented) then proceed as normal. Just give some others a seat at the table is all. Then hire based on merit.
My intent was that in the option for diversity in recruiting, it's just about getting more people to the table. But the table stays where it is. Should the intent be diversity in hiring, then that's where maybe that bar gets moved as you need to meet quotas. I could never imagine lowering a bar just to gain diversity. But I STRONGLY support throwing out a broader net to gain more diverse candidates.
Diversity in recruiting is good. Quotas in recruiting or hiring, not good.
Fuck diversity (racism ) in recruiting. When I apply for jobs I have to look up the companies and build a network and apply directly for jobs. Recruiters dont automatically find me. It's like youre assuming some minorities are too dumb to find their own jobs like everyone else.
How does a diverse company make better products. Are you saying iPhone was cool because there was diversity in Apple? I see most of them were whites, not that i know all of them who were involved. If it means you’ll get to know what features are needed by other communities, you would generally do a market research and not just expect your employees to come up with that. Also, how would a diverse set of SDE help you. I have never given suggestions based on my ethnicity or gender. What i see in reality is that when a company is small, they come up with a cool product, and once they are established and can afford to hire more employees than they actually want, they start the diversity program to get a good PR. You can argue that diversity is good for a society and how it helps everyone, but saying that the company itself needs it is a stretch.
I see what you are saying, it makes sense. I will agree that diversity does not help in all positions. Pick sports for example, do we want to put diversity in team formation? With that said, it does helps in products that represent a wider population. Take seat belts for example: when designed, it was designed for a healthy male. Women have statistically higher chances of death or injury in an accident as a result. https://saferide4kids.com/blog/history-of-seat-belts-effective/ Similarly, the use of Deep Learning models for example. Because the dataset collected is only from a segment of folks, it should not perform racial profiling based on that segment to majority as that’s incorrect. Again, not all projects take benefit of diversity, but some projects do need diversity to help the team realize about the differences
The argument that the workforce diversity is necessary for building products with a wide audience is not that strong. All product decisions should come from market survey. The software engineers should then just build whatever the market wants. You dont need to be a woman to build an ecommerce site for women clothing. You just need to take high-level system requirements and features and implement that idea as code. Agreed that the features for a women clothing website will be different from a mens clothing website. But a competent data scientist / product manager should be able to find that out using market research.
I hate the idea of quotas. Encourage diverse hiring, increase training to be aware of hidden biases, invest in minority programs, collect data to ensure interviews are as merit based as possible....et cetera. But do not fight hidden racism and biases with explicitly codified racism and bias (quotas).
Do you believe that there are people out there... without bias?
The fact that folks on this thread keep equating diversity-driven hiring tactics to mean racism is incredibly concerning. Google is a resource we all have access to, feel free to learn what racism actually means.
Yeah. That's why I started it. That other thread was going nuts and I realized that there are lots of people who think that diversity means "lower bar and hire shitty candidate cause... Diverse!" As opposed to ensuring that we at least interview a broad spectrum of folks to give them a shot. What's intriguing is that plenty of folks seem ready to bet the farm that the former is happening all the time. I wonder if that's really the case or if it's just that a greater effort is being put into finding more diverse candidates and they are getting hired... And Peele think they're ONLY getting hired cause... Diverse!
Yeah totally agree with you - the level of ignorance being displayed here is concerning - to think, folks on this thread are probably considered brilliant in their hard capabilities, but clearly lack in all things EQ, common sense. Let’s all try to be a little less like techlead, please🙄
More important question: define “diversity”. Are you only caring about boy/girl, and black/white/brown, Or do you care about diversity of experience, social upbringing, economic status, minority communities in Indian North East states or only black americans etc.
Diversity is by it's nature an attempt to make the lanscy inside the workplace look like the landscape outside the workplace. And where possible to reflect your intended customers. Is your workplace all men of the same colour? That's an issue. Nobody knows what the right mix is, and the correct answer is going to vary all over the world. But we know what the wrong mix looks like! All I know... Too many white dudes. Far too few women, black folks, and indigenous folks are nowhere to be seen. Over time you figure it out.
“Is your workplace all men of the same colour” “Thats an issue” Why? What if they have different upbringings, are from different countries, lived in different places, have different political thoughts, etc. You equating them to being equal based on colour is racist