Hyundai is investigating 12.6 billion dollars in Georgia, and the response is to raid the facility and arrest ~500 people working there. How does that benefit Americans? Korea is pumping money into our economy, and we throw the people working there in jail. For what? Working?
If Hyundai's operations keep getting disrupted, they can't justify spending billions here. Other international companies also won't waste their time investing and building infrastructure here. They'll spend it somewhere else. What is pro-American about this? Is the Republican party now anti-money? Anti-capitalism? How is this a win for Americans or Republicans or conservatives or anyone?
What is so bad about hiring people who are legally allowed to work in the US? Why requiring this would be so disruptive? What is so bad about following the law?
I get that only talking politics can be exhausting, but I think not talking about politics is the trap. If a hurricane can destroy my life, I should prepare for that before it impacts me: pay for home insurance, buy a generator, weatherproof my home, talk to neighbors.
I should prepare for politics that can destroy my life before it impacts me, and preparing for it means talking to other people about it.
If people don't vaccinate, and my baby gets measles before I can vaccinate her, she could die. If I have a complicated pregnancy, I could be forced to wait it out and get sepsis and die. If my friends get deported, they lose their jobs, homes, cars and I lose my connection to them. If I have to pay more for goods because of tariffs that is less money I can spend on my family.
If I wait until my baby has measles, I have sepsis, or my friends get deported to talk about these issues and convince others, then I haven't adequately prepared for politics that can destroy my life.
Well said. I like the hurricane analogy. It's naive to think that it can be ignored. It will come around and affect you, and at that point, it might be too late.
> I should prepare for politics that can destroy my life before it impacts me, and preparing for it means talking to other people about it.
> If people don't vaccinate, and my baby gets measles before I can vaccinate her, she could die. If I have a complicated pregnancy, I could be forced to wait it out and get sepsis and die. If my friends get deported, they lose their jobs, homes, cars and I lose my connection to them. If I have to pay more for goods because of tariffs that is less money I can spend on my family.
> If I wait until my baby has measles, I have sepsis, or my friends get deported to talk about these issues and convince others, then I haven't adequately prepared for politics that can destroy my life.
I don't really understand this.
It makes sense that public policies affect one's risk of contracting measles or whether or not people get deported. What isn't clear is that one person has any measurable effect on those policies, or the opinions of others for that matter.
Generally in the US, people are pretty much on their own and would do best to take direct action to mitigate risks.
You say that 3/4 of companies you are familiar with used discrimination to achieve numeric thresholds of 40% women software developers. I can't name a single medium or large tech company that is 40% women software developers. Can you?
Only one company had 40% threshold, the others had 33% and 30% respectively. They also didn't always hit those thresholds. But yes, the recruiters explicitly had 40% women in tech roles as one of their OKRs at one of my previous employers.
The only company I know of that has over 40% women software developers is ThoughtWorks. But they are an Australian company and it is legal for them to discriminate against men in that country. They are transparent about their use of a strict 1:1 gender quota: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-es/insights/blog/beyond-quot...
On Hacker news I see this question mostly asked about desirable fields. In education, there is a huge push to recruit more men. I can't speak for sanitation specifically, but I have seen efforts to get more women into stable, well paying blue collar professions.
Women didn't become the majority of pediatricians until the 2000s, so up until quite recently yes we did expect pediatricians to be 50% or more men.
I get why the majority of jobs that require a lot of upper body strength (lumberjacks as you mentioned) would continue to be majority male, but in other jobs to me it seems like it's mainly networks and socialization that causes gender imbalances. There's no reason more men can't become pediatricians or school teachers. They can obviously do the job, and did in the past!
For tech jobs, I often see people saying that men are more interested in numbers and things, so it's biological that men would gravitate towards tech. I used to think that sounded like a plausible explanation, but then I read that women make up 60% of accountants, and other examples like that. Seems like accounting was just more socially accepting of women, otherwise by that argument accounting would be majority male too.
One example that I thought was quite interesting was that 65% of realtors are women, but in commercial real estate it's only 35% women. It would be quite a stretch to come up with a biological argument for the real estate example.
In my view, a non-discriminatory hiring process is one that accounts for the very real human behaviours that 1) people feel more comfortable with people who are similar to them, and 2) when jobs skew dramatically towards one gender/race it creates a social barrier to people from outside that group getting hired and accepted by the team. If we just completely ignore how humans actually behave, we accidentally end up with a discriminatory hiring process without anyone wanting do anything bad. I have no doubt that some implementations of affirmative action are terrible and discriminatory. But I think ignoring human tendency to feel drawn to people similar to themselves, and thus inadvertently discriminate is a mistake as well.
I'd be more than happy to have an anonymized hiring process. If you're right that in-group preference is what drives the gender disparity, we should expect an anonymized hiring process to produce an employee base that's closer to gender parity. Some companies have experimented with this [1]. But interesting no tech DEI advocate I've met in real life has been supportive of anonymized hiring. More than a few have actively disapproved, saying that anonymization tends to make the representation worse.
Of course, because the problem that's trying to be solved is that the tech industry has default, implicit biases in its hiring processes, which tend to favor the majority. Anonymization acts as a force multiplier for those defaults/biases.
I don't understand. If gender discrimination is the cause of the disparity, anonymization should eliminate the disparity. Under an anonymous hiring process, you can't know the gender of the applicants and so you can't discriminate on the basis of gender.
If coding interviews were done with cameras off, and voice masked so gender can't be known, how would that be more subject to bias than with the camera on and the gender known to the interviewer?
When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators, that made the process more biased? That's new to me.
Anonymization wouldn’t work. Turns out people are very very good at picking up subtle signals that might hint at the anonymized identity likely is. What ends up happening is more discrimination rather than less. If you don’t anonymize, people will still discriminate, but they are always aware their decisions may be illegal or unacceptable. But when you anonymize, they just discriminate against anyone that has any hint of belonging to the discriminated class. And now you have given them an out plausible deniability by anonymizing.
This has been demonstrably shown to be true over and over again. Anonymizing is an elementary school student solution to a complex phD level type problem
Some interviews I've encountered consisted of uploading code that gets executed on a remote server. Grading is exclusively done on the correct output, runtime, and memory usage. This is a truly anonymous interview that cannot be biased with regards to protected class. How does such an interview pick up on the protected classes of the candidate?
The hostility to anonymized interviews stems from the fact that one cannot discriminate in favor of particular demographics. This is the goal of the above commenter, as stated here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42830509
I think we're talking past each other. Tech hiring biases, implicitly, for stuff that's considered to be culturally normative. That's not just about gender labels or how someone looks. It's also about stuff like how the applicant phrases and delivers answers to questions. The high-confidence and authoritative tone used by many western white male engineers tends to be -- again, implicitly -- preferred, over, for example, a more nuanced and lower-confidence response that might be delivered by a non-western woman engineer.
Every company I worked at grades interviews based once correctness and performance. A candidate that fails to produce a working solution at all receives a worse score than one that produces a working, but inefficient solution, which get a worse score than one that has a working and optimal solution.
And again, if the bias comes from people's tone then the interview can be conducted over text. Or have a transcript of the interview that is used by the hiring committee, to ensure that a "high confidence and authoritative tone" doesn't introduce bias. Bias can be eliminated. And if the disparity remains the same, the disparity is not due to bias.
You continue to focus very narrowly on the specific details of the hiring process. I'm trying to make points about higher-level stuff, related to the intent and scope of DEI-type initiatives. From these few comments, I gather that you're not really interested in talking about any of those higher-level things, so I'll stop trying to explain them.
The specific details of the hiring process are in question. You are running away from grappling with the (increasingly likely) possibility that bias wasn't the (only) driver in hiring disparity.
The point I'm trying to make is that the details of any specific hiring process aren't really germane to the overall discussion. Hiring disparity is a metric that's measured at a much higher level than any individual organization.
> Hiring disparity is a metric that's measured at a much higher level than any individual organization.
And how do we know if the hiring disparity is due to bias? The details of the hiring process are absolutely relevant, because the notion that the hiring disparity is due to bias is a claim about the details of the hiring process.
My main issue with a lot of DEI programs is that they don't try to eliminate bias. They just assume disparities are due to bias and work towards "fixing" those assumed biases with explicit discrimination. The problem is that when you actually try to measure and quantify bias in tech, the results often aren't what DEI advocates assume. E.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
This is why there's such a a strong pushback against anonymizing interviews and other bias mitigation measures. What happens if your interviews and applications are all anonymized and the hiring disparity remains? The justification for "fixing" the representation is now a lot weaker since it's harder to claim it's due to bias. "Let's address bias in our hiring process" is a lot more popular than "let's set quotas". So the people who want quotas try to claim that they're just fixing bias by setting quotas.
You don't eliminate biases by focusing on the gender ratio of the orchestra. You eliminate biases by putting a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators. We all know this, but some people feel compelled to pretend that they're working towards eliminating biases when in reality they're working towards achieving certain demographics outcomes.
You’ve explained your position and OP exposed the holes in your logic. Please don’t pretend to take the high road when someone has engaged with good faith discussion that didn’t end the way you hoped.
This silly solution is often suggested by tech bros who have a really rudimentary understanding of social problems. I guess it makes sense to someone who doesn’t fully understand social issues and thinks of how they would solve it if it was a technical problem. It’s not. Anonymizing does not reduce discrimination. It demonstrably makes it worse. The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.
It's not that the "tech bros" don't understand the problem. It's that DEI advocates tend to misstate the problem they're trying to solve.
> The only things that do reduce discrimination in the short term is rules that deliberately relatively advantages the discriminated class and in the long term, socio-cultural shift.
This isn't reducing discrimination. This is deliberately engaging in discrimination to change demographic outcomes.
We could have avoided a lot of confusion if DEI advocates were honest that their goals are not to eliminate discrimination but rather to employ employ affirmative action to achieve more equitable outcomes. If that's your goal, then of course anonymized hiring doesn't work: if you can't tell which candidate belongs to which demographic, then you don't know who to give advantage to.
Because that's where many good paying jobs are. If I buy a home in a lower cost of living area, and my employer decides to do away with remote work, I may not be able to find another job that can pay the mortgage even though it is in a cheaper area.
A house in a cheaper area may not require a Bay area salary to cover the mortgage. If employers did away with remote work, getting a job that pays less but doesn't require moving can be a viable choice but it is all a matter of lifestyle choices and priorities.
Sure, it almost certainly won't unless you buy a mansion. However, a job is still required to pay a mortgage, save for retirement, have health insurance, and cover living expenses. In a lower cost area, there are fewer job opportunities. If I spend 40+ hours a week at my job, I'd prefer it to be a job where I don't spend my days looking at the clock waiting for the day to be over every single day.
A $10 gift card after messing up millions of devices and stranding tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people...this seems completely tone deaf. Giving people a $10 gift card feels worse than just apologizing.
It's like crashing someone's car and then giving them a bag of Skittles for the trouble. Sure you can't uncrash the car, but the bag of Skittles trivializes the whole thing and makes a genuine apology feel cheap.
A $10 gift card after messing up millions of devices and stranding tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people...this seems completely tone deaf. Giving people a $10 gift card feels worse than just apologizing. It's like crashing someone's car and then giving them a bag of Skittles for the trouble. Sure you can't uncrash the car, but the bag of Skittles trivializes the whole thing and makes a genuine apology feel cheap.
I agree that the word "trauma" is overused and exaggerated to describe situations that are not really traumatic. Ironically, I think that the word "outrage" is similarly misused. I couldn't help but giggle at the irony of "outrage" being used as the word to describe the response to this.
If Hyundai's operations keep getting disrupted, they can't justify spending billions here. Other international companies also won't waste their time investing and building infrastructure here. They'll spend it somewhere else. What is pro-American about this? Is the Republican party now anti-money? Anti-capitalism? How is this a win for Americans or Republicans or conservatives or anyone?