Comment by thaumasiotes
3 months ago
> It’s an example of something that I’d seen rumblings of in left leaning media: that DEI was being implemented in the laziest and stupidest possible ways
That's not news; it's been true for several decades. There isn't another legal way to do it.
The least harmful thing you can do, assuming you need to meet hiring quotas, is to specify that you have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, and then hire by merit into those separate groups.
That's so clean that it was outlawed very quickly. So instead, you still have X slots for whites and Y slots for nonwhites, but you have to pretend that they're all available to everybody, and you have to stop using objective metrics to hire, because doing that would make you unable to meet quota.
And you have to call Asians "white".
You fell into the instant trap I was talking about by equating DEI to “hiring quotas.” That’s a lazy and stupid approach to the problem of increasing opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The solution is, unfortunately, much more difficult and requires work across society to achieve it.
You're imagining that there's ever been a meaning of DEI other than quotas, but there hasn't. That's the way it began and the only thing it's ever done or wanted.
Then maybe you should see how it’s done in other countries and companies. I’ve worked on hiring and we’ve never once lowered our standards just to get in a black candidate. What I’ve seen done is conscious outreach to increase diversity of applicants, changing language to increase applications from women, blind reviews where you can’t see the name or details of the applicant (to minimise subconscious bias).
All of these actually happen and, to a greater or lesser extent, do help without discriminating against white applicants. How do I know? I ended up only hiring two white men in that particular round!
21 replies →
Except that’s what it becomes in practice. As soon as you inject race into these decisions, it becomes de facto racial quotas and preferences: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...
It took like five minutes for Biden to start deploying SBA loans whites weren’t eligible for and for NASDAQ to create diversity quotas for boards. Racial gerrymandering is always the ultimate goal of this stuff.
In theory sure, in practice DEI = hiring quotas.
The definition you want DEI to have: Extra training for DEI students, does not exist in the real world. And if it did no one is complaining about it.
> That’s a lazy and stupid approach
Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.
To avoid repeating myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42945302
> Exactly. Which is why DEI has becomes such a negative term. You want a different definition, but that's simply not how it's used.
No, the reason has been the refusal of people in positions of power to engage thoughtfully with the genuine criticism.
It is kind of inevitable when you think of it. Regardless of how one implements DEI, its success is still going to be measured by looking at the demographic breakdown. So even if the implementation isn't literally quotas, the metric is - and once you have the metric, everything else is optimized around that. If quotas cannot be used directly, then other mechanisms will be introduced that amount to the same thing in practice (as with Harvard character assessment etc).
> there isn't another legal way to do it
The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.
This means making the effort to recruit at e.g. career fairs for Black engineers and conferences for women in STEM in addition to broader venues, and to do outreach at low-income high schools that makes it clear to bright kids trapped in poverty that there is a path to success for them.
The "clean" solution you have presented IS the lazy route.
> The least harmful way to improve hiring outcomes for qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups is to increase their representation in your hiring pool. That's fundamentally it.
Except that that won't actually improve hiring outcomes, if by "improve hiring outcomes" you mean "hire more individuals from historically marginalized groups".
You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's true. But every prior stage of the process, including the stage where children are too young to enroll in kindergarten, exhibits exactly the same pipeline problem. There is no point at which there are enough "qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups" to meet demand. If you want "improved" hiring outcomes, the only thing you can do is accept that better hiring means worse on-the-job performance.
> You're saying that hiring is a pipeline problem. And that's true. But every prior stage of the process, including the stage where children are too young to enroll in kindergarten, exhibits exactly the same pipeline problem. There is no point at which there are enough "qualified individuals from historically marginalized groups" to meet demand. If you want "improved" hiring outcomes, the only thing you can do is accept that better hiring means worse on-the-job performance.
So if we take a random assortment of preschool age children and give them all the the same resources and education we are still going to find when they come out of the other end of the pipeline as adults and ready to work those from historically marginalized groups are still going to be underrepresented unless we lower hiring standards?