Diversity in backgrounds, not diversity in skills. You don’t hire incompetent board members to check a box anymore than you hire programmers who can’t program to check a box.
If we were ever at the point where companies were hiring the best people for the job, this wouldn't be necessary as the companies would already have a diverse board.
Has there been any studies to determine that a diverse board is actually valuable? I'm genuinely asking, because I subscribe to the "get the best people for the job" theory of doing things. I find it to be racist/sexist/whatever discriminatory word applies to have a hard line in the opposite. In my experience, forced diversity is a good way to shoe horn people into roles they won't be successful in.
None of that is to say that there isn't discrimination, but there is not an equal distribution of individuals in each field.
Why do companies hire all these diversity administration in the first place? It burns epic amounts of money, and sows discontent, when there message and answer to everything is we need more diversity for all leadership and tech positions,(aka quotas of people with subpar skillsets). Instead of merely hiring on skill.
Oh man! The irony of this. Diversity hiring doesn’t help anyone. What if you had gotten the job and your peers thought you were only there because of being Black. They don’t take your technical arguments and code seriously?
Why does including race or gender as a factor in the evaluation of a candidate exclude ability? All hiring is based on a variety of factors, not just 'ability'.
Availability for the position, quantity of experience, leadership skill, willingness to learn, familiarity with the problem space, quality of personal references, interpersonal skills... all that along with 'how good are you at writing code'. What is the huge negative impact of adding 'diversity' to that set of evaluation factors? Are you arguing that adding diversity would actually push the most qualified candidates to the bottom of the pile somehow? If all things are truly equal, adding diversity to the sort has no impact on the ability of qualified candidates to get hired.
Diversity for the sake of diversity is not good. Naturally occurring diversity due to discrimination being removed is good. Forcing people to have teams comprised of x percent of y minority leads to weaker teams as the hiring manager is forced to hire for race not skills. I work at a large company and was attempting to hire an engineer. The resourcing group just kept sending me only black candidates. I don't care that they are black but I do care if they don't have the skills I am looking for. 5 black candidates in a row without the requested skillset is a statistical anomaly. I never asked if this is why these candidates were being sent my way as to do so would probably cost me my job.
Out of interest, why did you want a different answer? Do you think "diversity hires" don't exist? Whether they do or don't, it doesn't have any bearing on the "diverse" people being hired on the basis of their technical or professional abilities.
Let companies avoid older programmers at their peril. The companies that do hire them will do much better by avoiding reinventing wheels, repeating the mistakes of the past, and losing valuable tribal knowledge due to high turnover rates. I firmly believe that nothing "needs to be done" about lack of diversity in work places because the penalty for avoiding candidates based on gender or ethnicity will levied slowly over time.
Interviews should be conducted online without any indication what race or gender the applicant is. Their work and expertise should speak for itself. I also think trying to find people who "fit the culture" is a terrible way to hire. On the surface it seems to make sense because interpersonal communication is half the battle, but it's usually code for "hire people like us" so even though you may try to hire more diverse people on a visual basis, you'll end up hiring less diverse people on a personality basis which can be just as bad.
As a counter-example. Out of the 5 people that I tried to hire last year, 2 of them were black.
There are very good black programmers out there but I don't think any startup in their right mind will trade skill for diversity. It's strictly business, not personal.
I've seen plenty of white guys blame minority quotas and nothing else after being turned down for a job. There is also little evidence that companies are hiring hoards of incompetent people to fill minority quotas. If they were, then why does every tech company still struggle with a lack of diversity in the workplace? It would be easy to just hire whoever can tick a diversity box and fix those numbers, but they're not actually doing that because that would be stupid.
Companies like Microsoft want the best people. It's not brick laying, there's no "qualified for the job" tick box. The effects in software are non-linear, and one brilliant hire can create more value than 100 mediocre ones. These companies are actively hurt by having to hire second-best diversity hires, even if they're technically qualified for the job (whatever that means).
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who could do most of our jobs adequately. The idea that hiring a diverse staff inherently means hiring an unqualified staff is laughable. It just takes a little more effort because the first qualified candidate to come across your desk is statistically (at least in our profession) more likely to be a straight white male. The qualified minority candidates exist if you put in a little work to find them.
Ensuring diversity is obviously a terrible goal. The only sane and ethical goal is ensuring equality. If everyone got exactly the same opportunity and the best based on skill got hired, job done.
But surely, objectively hiring developers based purely on skill guarantees a base level of diversity. So, you can't fault hiring managers for valuing skills over other parameters.
> Skills and experiences should be the only way to choose who you hire, not race or gender.
Exactly. The issue should not be how many percent are what "race", but if companies are dumb enough to leave good programmers, managers etc waiting tables, manning the help desk etc because they doesn't fit our stereotypes.
Or: If if companies does spectacularly bad hires because of political correctness.
You're making an assumption here, which is that diversity does not provide value in and of itself. Yet there is ample research that shows that more diverse teams are more creative in problem solving and have better outcomes with tasks that require such creativity. Therefore, picking someone who can't whiteboard quite as well as another guy, but clearly has the skills necessary to do the job and adds diversity, is potentially a net win for the company.
Where I work, we just hire the best applicants for the job. As it happens, at least in the dev side of things, the workforce is approximately equal in diversity with the community we're in. The same was true with my previous employer as well.
reply