Remix clone Hacker News

> and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.

It goes further than just fudging the metrics: By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas. This combined with the overall focus on DEI just ends up reinforcing racism/sexism when the quota-hires are more inept than the non-quota hires.

▲

harimau777 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think that necessarily follows. For example, if 20% of some minority are qualified and without quotas only 5% would be hired, then a quota requiring hiring 10% wouldn't result in unqualified candidates.

That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.

▲

Whoppertime 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We can use an actual example. Joe Biden going into the 2020 election pledged that he would choose a black woman as his running mate. This pledge excluded half the population on gender grounds, and 87% of the population on racial grounds. When you are only looking at half of 13% of the population you're going to be turning away a lot of qualified people. And we saw the consequences of Joe Bidens 2020 election pledge in the 2024 election

▲

Izkata 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I never said unqualified. I used relative terms like less skilled, for example the 5% in your example that wouldn't have been hired without quotas.

The non-quota'd hires in that example, that the additional 5% displaced, are now also more likely to be of higher average skill (since you need less of them and can drop the bottom of the candidates), making a bigger disparity between the quota'd group and the non-quota'd group. Which, as I said, just reinforces any racism/sexism such quotas attempted to offset.

▲

harimau777 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think that actually changes anything. Lets suppose that we can measure qualification on a 100 point scale.

Lets say that there are 5 people in a minority group with a qualification of 100 and 9 people in the non-minority group with a qualification of 100. If 1 person from the minority group gets hired and 13 people from the non-minority group get hired, then a 5 person minority group quota would result in an increase in the qualifications of the people hired.

Of course in reality is more complicated since companies don't always hire only the absolutely most qualified people in a given group and it's not easy to even define objectively who is the most qualified. However, that doesn't matter to the point that I'm making which is that even a quota (which again most proponents of DEI don't want) doesn't necessarily result in hiring less qualified candidates.

	▲	Izkata 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In your example, no quotas would result in all 14 hires being those with a qualification of 100. Congrats, got all 5 minorities without quotas! Now for some thing more realistic: Instead of making those 14 candidates all perfect, distribute them a bit more randomly and only hire the top 10. Without quotas you'll end up with around 4 from the minority group and 6 from the majority group. But if for example your quotas are for 50/50, you have to exclude 1 person from the majority group who is more qualified than the 5th person from the minority group to reach it.

▲

mcphage 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas.

What? By pulling from a larger pool of candidates, you’re more likely to get someone more skilled.

▲

20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

Izkata 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pulling from the 30% of applicants that matches the quota will always be a smaller pool than pulling from all 100% of applicants.

▲

mcphage 20 hours ago | parent [-]

Say you’re looking to hire 20 people. So you pick the 20 best, and you end up with the 17 best men and the 3 best women. Of course you claim to be gender-blind and it just happens that you got 17 men and only 3 women, these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault.

Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire the 11th - 17th rated men, and instead did hire the 4th - 10th rated women.

Now: maybe you think that’s not a fair system, and you’re probably right. But it would mean you’re hiring better candidates. You pass on some lower rated candidates that only made it through because they were guys, and instead got some higher rated candidates that you had passed on previously because they were women.

▲

AnthonyMouse 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're assuming the men and women being judged on a different scale is the only way you can get a disparity to begin with.

Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?

▲

harimau777 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it necessarily has to be all one thing or the other. For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring. Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.

▲

AnthonyMouse 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring.

That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.

> Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.

How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.

	▲	lazide 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And if you’ve ever been or been adjacent to oil workers or truck drivers - those daughters would be well served by listening, assuming they have any other options. They are brutal occupations that chew up and spit out the typically more physically robust men who make up the majority of those occupations on the regular.

▲

Izkata 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless the top 20 people only had 3 women, which is totally possible if there were 200 men and 30 women in the total applicants. In this case, you just discarded 7 more qualified men to get 7 less qualified women. Now in terms of average skill across your hires, it looks like men in general are more qualified than women and you're reinforcing the sexism, not fighting it.

▲

dude187 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You're narrowing the pool by only hiring specific races or sexes. Not widening it.

Do you believe that hiring currently excludes those races and sexes? Because that's explicitly illegal, and has been for a long time

▲

mcphage 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> Do you believe that hiring currently excludes those races and sexes?

Good lord yes. In software engineering almost everyone is a white male.

▲

sporkland 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Absolutely and unequivocally false. Unless you are casting Asian and Indian as white.

▲

mcphage 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s fair—I’m closer to the east coast, so around me it is mostly white dudes, but that might not be true elsewhere. But it is mostly men, at any rate.

	▲	fc417fc802 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The question was if you believe the hiring process is excluding the other groups. Another way of asking that is, are similarly qualified people from the other groups applying in sufficient number? Would they have been hired if they had?