That's an interesting question. I'm personally aware of several large companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate in favor of minorities and women.
The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is higher. That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job.
It's the opposite in my experience (at least outside of the bay area). All the engineers on my team seem to want to hire people who are like them, and are not incentivized to give minorities an easier time. The standards seem to be higher when the candidate isn't a white or Indian male.
Throughout my career I have only seen a desire for more women. Perhaps looking at those candidates a little more openly and giving then a chance.
I haven't seen a racial aspect where whites only hire whites either. I have worked in places that only hired white/black/asian and in others that only hired white/black/indian. I have never seen a true mix of asian and indian aside from government work. I've always wondered about that.
It feels like white/black/brown/yellow is not as acceptable yet. But various combos are.
A lot of it is nationalist or language based. A black person from the US is treated as the same as a white person from the US vs a white person for Europe generally because of language differences.
Throwaway because post-Damore, as a white male, this isn't a discussion I can be publicly involved in if I want to keep having a career in tech.
I've collected some of the more egregious things I've heard around women and minorities in tech.
At a well-known company, while it was small, regarding hiring an office manager, the female head of HR said "I don't want to say it, but I'm leaning towards [the female candidate over the black candidate] because she's a woman." She was hired and fired 3 months later.
At a company you haven't heard of, "basically, the next person we hire has to be woman."
I've seen recruiters search for common (white?) female names in LinkedIn for reachouts. Someone's going to subpoena LinkedIn searches and there's going to be an ugly class action suit against companies doing this.
"Now that we hired <male name>, we really need to ramp up hiring women."
A very competent women in a good role with a stay-at-home husband told me she has it easy because tech companies are bending over backwards to hire women.
At another well-known company, reviewing resumes, someone said "this resume would be a 'no' for a male."
I've also see a lot less focus on diverse racial hiring, and interestingly, at a number of companies, there are teams of 10 people who are either all Chinese or Indian. I've worked in one in my career, and it wasn't good. I obviously didn't belong.
This kind of behavior is appalling! Imagine if someone had ever said or behaved these ways to give men a leg up that they didn’t deserve! I certainly hope someone would keep the careful tally of a handful of anecdotes that you have.
The people bringing this sort of thing up are not pretending that men have not enjoyed advantages in the past and present. They are simply pointing out the occurrences on the other side.
Just to point out that retributive social justice is a major factor in the ideologies which brought about Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, and so on. Millions of people died because of "justified" retaliatory ideologies. That's not a mistake that needs to be made again.
I am personally attempting to make sure that equality of opportunity, rather than retribution, is the motivating factor. The earlier down the slope we cement that, the better.
To tack onto this: I know of mid level managers who are eagerly pushing their female direct-reports to higher positions in far less time and under far less qualification requirements than male counterparts in similar roles. The exact reasoning is because they are women.
Some of those women have expressed annoyance at this because they feel that they are being touted as poster-children for the managers. The women also express concern at how they are potentially being pushed into roles that they aren't necessarily qualified for and are unintentionally being set up to fail due to not having the necessary experience to fill a position.
It's important to remember that the women are absolutely not at fault for their managers' actions. Whenever this topic comes up in conversation, I always encourage them to learn as much as possible and jump on top of opportunities that come their way.
That said, I am lucky enough to be able to work with some incredibly respectable and talented women, some of who have skills FAR outshining mine.
If only we could go back to the good old days when things were a meritocracy and no one was getting promoted unfairly because of their race, gender, or relationships.
Are you too full of cynicism to see that that is exactly what I am advocating for or is your hatred of white men too much for you to think that someone can be both defending white men AND women AND minorities?
> I've also see a lot less focus on diverse racial hiring, and interestingly, at a number of companies, there are teams of 10 people who are either all Chinese or Indian. I've worked in one in my career, and it wasn't good. I obviously didn't belong.
This is incredibly common but HR and the usual diversity folk don't seem to touch on this topic much. Not being part of the in-group may result in a less-than-stellar performance review regardless of work output. Some of them purposely accumulate sacrificial lambs so they have more positive reviews to give out during stack ranking, and they need scapegoats to take the fall when the time for forced attrition comes.
If you're deciding between two similar candidates, the choice is pretty arbitrary anyway. As a white man, I've never been discouraged from pursuing my career in tech. A woman who is similarly qualified than I am probably overcame more and worked harder to get there than I did, so it's a reasonable tie breaker even if you don't value diversity for its own sake.
Even with these tie breakers, most large tech companies have about 10% women in engineering, so this discrimination isn't affecting the men that much. Are the companies you're thinking of different in this regard?
I’m at a 1000 person org and this is also how we hire. We have KPIs for “diversity” and the entire company gets a huge bonus when we meet all our targets, so there is a incentive all the way from the CEO to panel ICs.
The comment you are replying to mentions more than a diversity goal. It mentions a financial incentive for hiring minorities. Can you give an example of how that would not create discrimination?
It could exist in a world where people start with systemic encouragement to not hire minorities, and so the financial incentive to do so only manages to shift their practices enough to end the existing discriminatory habits.
“This is the way we hire”, but what you’re describing doesn’t at all match what the comment you’re replying to describes. It sounds like you both are interpreting two different sets of facts to tell yourself the same story of “blatant discrimination”. I don’t see it, personally.
Why are you unwilling to name the business, one with over 1000 employees. It would have been understandable if the company had 10 employees not 1000. Your claims fail the sniff test.
The downvotes on my comment show pretty clearly that there is sockpuppeting going on.
It would be nice to know that the Агентство интернет-исследований
(Internet Research Agency) has KPIs for “diversity”. It must be really hard to hire non-white and openly LGBTQ people in Saint Petersburg.
Do you have any evidence for this? Have you seen data covering hiring evals for many different candidates? Or is this just your own bias telling a story based on anecdotes and rumors?
I’m not saying this never happens, but it’s much easier to tell yourself that the reason you didn’t get a job was because of some unfair factor beyond your control than to admit maybe you just failed to meet the bar.
Here is some evidence (especially see the exhibits in the linked PDF at the end)
On January 29, 2018, YouTube technical recruiter Arne Wilberg filed a suit accusing Google “of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men.”
I know a lot of people. This is based on conversations with those involved in the hiring process at various companies. They are proud of it and see it as not only a plus, but a social benefit, which causes people to be very boastfully vocal in social situations
Very strange time we live in.
I do agree with your second paragraph, but this isn't regarding anything that has happened to me personally
Oh, we’re trading anecdotes? Well, I know a lot of people, including many involved in hiring at various large tech companies, including myself.
I’m sure they have programs to encourage diversity in hiring, but I seriously doubt they’re telling you they “blatantly discriminate” against white men and that white men have to perform much better in an interview in order to be hired. That’s an incomplete and simplistic story.
Referral bonuses for women and minorities, and especially female minorities, are 5x what they are for white men at my company. They may not say "go discriminate against white men," but they certainly say "we will pay you a lot more to get us somebody who isn't a white man." I'm someone who really likes having diverse engineering teams, but that sort of practice is pretty distasteful and obviously not meritocratic.
This is an excellent example of what I’m talking about. We tell ourselves stories about what’s going on here based on our own biases, not solely on the objective facts.
If you want diverse engineering teams but you have a serious pipeline problem where few minority and female engineers apply, what can you do? One answer is to encourage more referrals for those candidates by paying a higher referral bonus. It doesn’t seem like “blatant discrimination” to me, any more than having a recruiting fair at a historically black college would be.
Also, as a side note, what company is this? And how are bonuses 5x as high for women but also “especially” for minority women. Which is it?
Yeah the indignation is a bit over the top. If we’re going to complain about every little imbalance in the hiring playing field we have to first acknowledge how systematically unfair it’s been to certain groups and realize that there is a huge amount of subjectivity in qualifications for all white collar or creative work.
I’m not making a statement either way about your post. But something that happen on HN with the introduction of Apple WatchOS 5 gives an example of why diversity is importance.
Apple added a feature in the latest version that helped women track their cycles. A few posters here couldn’t fathom why that was important.
That seems like a weird policy. I’m not sure how a company can really justify ‘we made it more expensive for us to hire minority candidates who are referred by our existing staff’ as being a sound diversity practice.
In general referral bonuses are intended to provide a higher quality candidate pipeline at a lower price than a recruitment consultant, so I can see why throwing this incentive in there might seem like a good idea, but you need strong firewalls between the referral policy and the hiring decisionmaking to avoid perverse incentives. In particular it’s important the bonus doesn’t come out of the hiring team’s salary budget.
You don't need to beg to get us to believe you, simply provide some evidence. You're already disguising your identity behind a new anonymous account, which doesn't help your credibility, so why don't you disclose the name and location of the companies and more specific details, so we will have more information to go on than your anecdotes and personal interpretations?
It's not the companies that are proud of it per se. Not directly at least. The people who are proud of it are the ones directly involved, typically lower downs in HR or the public facing department.
The message gets translated when coming from the top down or when going into the public. It turns into something to the effect of how inclusive and diverse the company is. The higher ups especially turn a blind eye (or are in complete denial) of the actual practices which happen.
A handful of low level employees deliberately violating company policy is very far from your original statement of"several large companies in my area which, due to diversity pressure, blatantly discriminate"
Not just violating company policy; violating federal law.
There is little congruence between C-level and workers at a large company. It doesn't take many levels of separation for that to occur.
In this case, the discrepancy lies between people at the top saying that they value diversity and inclusion, then people who doing the hiring acting on that message based on their interpretation of it.
Companies do a LOT of things that are sketchy at best and overtly illegal at worst. The amount of time since the last public fiasco is generally a good indicator of how fast and loose they play (even more for companies which have never had a negative public incident).
Is the company in question now mostly composed of minority hires? I am personally opposed to diversity quotas, however, whenever I've heard the suggestion that a company is discriminating against white men, the company in question also happens to be staffed almost entirely by white men, so I wonder how that ends up happening.
> That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job.
You just described affirmative action there. Your previous sentence doesn’t follow from this though:
> The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is higher.
This is true if and only if there are other applicants who are not white or male. Imagine that two white dudes with similar qualifications apply for the same job. How do you decide which one gets hired? The answer is often something like “A is a better cultural fit” or “B has a more likable personality” or, though this one won’t be spoken aloud, “C is more physically attractive.” And that’s that, the only person who minds in this case is the one passed over.
The problem is that “cultural fit” and “personality” and “attractiveness” are judgments that we tend to apply differently to people who don’t look like ourselves. There’s a lot more baggage around race and sex in America that influences these decisions, and the result has been the systemic disenfranchisement of women and people of color, especially black people. Affirmative action policies—preferring to hire from historically disadvantaged groups when all else is equal—are intended to counteract that tendency.
That’s what these companies are doing. People disagree on whether or not it’s a good idea. I personally think it is, until the industry (or perhaps the workforce as a whole) gets a lot closer to matching the demographics of the population.
(Edit: subject-verb agreement in a windy sentence)
My company did a pan-company investigation into how much people were being paid, and found that in every job title Women were being paid on average 30% less then men.
With that in hand it's clear that it makes more sense to employ women.
It doesn’t have to be blatant or any one person acting in bad faith. That’s the whole meaning of systemic $x-ism.
It’s a well known phenomenon that men will apply for a job if they are only 60% qualified but women only apply for jobs for which they are 100% qualified (https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...). Also women don’t negotiate as hard.
In an ideal world, If two people have the same job and have the same skills and bring the same amount of internal knowledge to the company they should be paid the same. Their salary shouldn’t be affected by their negotiation ability.
As far as women not applying, that’s the classic pipeline problem. You have to get women to apply.
Also if jobs come from referrals, if men mostly know other men, they are going to recommend other men.
That’s the whole point of systemic $x-ism. The HR department is not purposefully excluding women and people are not purposefully referring men over women.
Anecdotally, working at small companies for over 20 years, I’ve only worked directly with 5 female developers that I know well enough to refer. When I was hiring contractors for a small department, only one female applicant came across my desk in over a year.
On the other hand, I worked with one female developer who was very good but didn’t want to leave for more money because of work life balance reasons and she had small kids. I’m well aware that women more often make that choice than men.
> Their salary shouldn’t be affected by their negotiation ability.
I can't disagree more with this statement. Salary is a negotiation process between an employee and an employer. Employers are always trying to keep costs as low as possible and employees are trying to sell themselves to gain as high a salary as possible.
This sounds awfully close to ideas I've heard from pro-Socialist types who would like pure equality of income across job titles not just in a company, but ACROSS companies. That is a world you do not want to live in.
Not employees, employers, NOR the general public want that future regardless of how much they unfoundedly believe it is helping anyone.
Isn’t it a stretch to call it “socialism” that the same job at the same company with two people who have the same set of skills “socialism”?
In that case though since a free market is conditioned on both sides having equal knowledge would you be okay if employees were forced to disclose all employees salaries?
It certainly begins to play into the realm of Socialism when one advocates that there should be laws in place which mandate salary laws which restrict an individual's ability to negotiate for themselves. I'm not saying that you're necessarily advocating for that because I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I have been involved in a number of discussions with people who are interested in exploring that path.
> In that case though since a free market is conditioned on both sides having equal knowledge would you be okay if employees were forced to disclose all employees salaries?
That is an interesting idea to think over. I would take out the word "forced". There are pros and cons to employees being knowledgeable about each other's salaries and many companies put the effort in to make salary discussion among employees a taboo.
The idea of a company reprimanding the mere discussion of salary is not a quality I would value, but would not necessarily turn me off to that company depending on numerous other factors: a prominent one being WHY that is the case at that particular company.
Also looking back at your comment again, I wouldn't say that I agree with the idea that "a free market is conditioned on both sides having equal knowledge". As a matter of fact, I don't see how that could be inferred. I would lean towards the idea that both parties should try and have as much information as possible. If that works out in my favor, then great. If it works out against me, then I obviously have more research to do.
certainly begins to play into the realm of Socialism when one advocates that there should be laws in place which mandate salary laws which restrict an individual's...
Strangely enough you were the only one to bring up anything about laws being passed.....
Are you also opposed to the government forcing products like cigarettes to have disclaimers where the buyer can decide to buy them or not knowing the risk involved?
Would you be okay with all of the products you buy having no prices and people getting better prices based on negotiation?
> Strangely enough you were the only one to bring up anything about laws being passed.....
How else are you proposing that we mandate equal salaries?
> Are you also opposed to the government forcing products like cigarettes to have disclaimers where the buyer can decide to buy them or not knowing the risk involved?
I think it is strange how arbitrary it is to mark cigarettes like this.
Why not put domestic abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, car accidents, and alcoholism pictures on every bottle of beer?
Why not put mutilated corpses of people who have died in the vehicle on the side of every car you look at buying?
Why is it just cigarettes that gets that treatment? Why should even cigarettes get that treatment?
There are a million things you can do that harm yourself and others. Freedom of choice + Education is key, NOT government mandate of whatever it decides is safe for your consumption.
> Would you be okay with all of the products you buy having no prices and people getting better prices based on negotiation?
That's exactly how the market works. You are constantly negotiating when you make any financial decision. If people decide that Store XYZ has bread that is too expensive, they can go to Store FGH. Just because many individual stores set prices doesn't mean that there aren't macro negotiations constantly happening. That's pretty much the definition of the free market.
Also micro negotiations are allowed to happen thanks to a free market. Sometimes you get ripped off, sometimes you get a good deal. Again, education is key. You get burned so you learn.
Funny how its 'blantant' when men are at a disadvantage. Where was this comment the other 99% of the places, when women and minorities are nearly non-existant? Not worth mentioning?
I know its an idealistic comment, that the world should be fair in every place. But because these comments come out only when men are not in their usual favored position, I cannot help but see them as a kind of 'institutional bias' for men.
> Funny how its 'blantant' when men are at a disadvantage. Where was this comment the other 99% of the places, when women and minorities are nearly non-existant? Not worth mentioning?
I'm not sure when or what you are talking about, but if there is injustice against anybody, I speak out against it. It just so happens that movements can go too far and become retaliatory, which is what I would like to prevent.
Women and minorities should OBVIOUSLY have equal opportunity, but the implementation of that cannot harm majority males BECAUSE::: that is not a good long term strategy for society. It WILL cause (and already has caused) resentment and anger and I do not want to see a USA devolve into an actual second civil war.
> I know its an idealistic comment, that the world should be fair in every place. But because these comments come out only when men are not in their usual favored position, I cannot help but see them as a kind of 'institutional bias' for men.
These comments do not ONLY come out in defense of men. Perhaps it is the particular posts you view, but to say there isn't overwhelming defense of women and minorities in the case of injustice is telling me that you aren't seeing the full picture.
I just explained in this post that MYSELF, a person wary of a situation disadvantaging white men, also speaks up when a minority or woman is disadvantaged for their sex or skin color.
And that sentiment comes out when men are threatened, but largely when women have issues, silence. That's my point.
The meme 'I fight injustice wherever I see it' is overused and weak - because so many occur just as some kind of correction is pursued to even out the field. Its ok to have equality, but whoa! not if even one man is affected negatively.
If I missed your defense of women being discriminated against, please list the links here! I'll eat crow.
This is NOT a common occurrence. Even if it was, white male American isn’t a protected category, so that would very unlikely be characterized as “discrimination”. AND we’d have “several large companies” with actual representation of minorities and women. There is none.
The reality is these groups remain underrepresented, and others even more so (latinos in the Bay Area are a second class “minority”, for instance).
I am also personally aware of several large tech companies hiring practices in California. The statement above is completely false. Race and gender is explicitly asserted as a non factor in evaluation.
Is it common for C-level positions? What’s the overall percentage of non white dudes as you go higher up the ladder at these places? How many of the VCs are not white men?
I ask because I think these questions are useful heuristics to look at how power is distributed within a company.
If it is a group of white guys who make most of the money, manage most of the people, and own most of the business, discriminating amongst hires of roughly equal ability for entry level roles, that is one thing, and has its own legitimate questions to be asked.
It would be pretty different from if a company, run, owned, and funded by women and people of color, was systematically discriminating against men with pale skin in all roles and positions and there were very few white guys at that company.
My informed guess would be that, in tech in the US, anything approaching what you describe describe is closer to the first scenario than the second.
Point being, if we are going to discuss discrimination, let’s discuss all of it, and not look at a painting through a microscope and call it red (unless it’s a Rothko ;) .
Isn't that just due to them having early push, mentors etc more than active discrimination?
Again, I like to think all people discriminate somewhat if they see someone not familiar or from their groups. It is biological, you can try eliminate it as much as possible but it's never enough. What we can do possibly is probably ask whether white guys you speak of are being more discriminatory than someone else from other racial segment in those positions.
Outside discrimination is a factor but what isn't talked about is the inter-discrimination due to the history of a specific culture, system etc. You will be discriminated for pursuing a different career choice in certain cultures or taking routes different than how your mentors did (which well was due to discrimination).
If you think it's somehow due to discrimination for a person coming from a culture where one is more attracted or nutured for certain jobs or positions you don't think are good, then isn't that odd?
Indians are often pushed into STEM engineering because of cultural notions alone without any more thought put into it than assuming it is a trip to high salary and rep. That oversimplication and gross attitude stops a lot of Indians from pursuing things they would have otherwise. White dude isn't discriminating them otherwise on those positions, the culture is.
I often wonder why is there such dependence on for-profit corporates to drive cultural and environmental changes. Just somewhat astounding to me. Why isn't there more done from the government or public as a whole? Why are non profits not as visible as x for-profit shill making it known they are fighting discrimination by hiring more than there is in the supply chain. How is that fighting against discrimination from the bottom.
Don't understand the focus on race either. The way everyone talks about millions or even billions of people being discriminated in the same way is a gross generalization or its ok somehow?
Like thinking for a bit, if your race has millions of people while the specific disease you have, interests, background or lot of other stuff that might not have millions in representation and people constantly discriminate based on that. You would be hard pressed to take the later more seriously because of the statistical chance of falling prey to being discriminated.
The performance required from a white man in an interview for the same job is higher. That is to say that a white man will be openly discarded in favor of a minority/woman with a similar background when applying for the same job.
This is a common occurrence.