Comment by silverquiet
Comment by silverquiet 11 hours ago
Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
Comment by silverquiet 11 hours ago
Most people (regardless of race) prefer to hire from within their network. It makes sense that Indians' networks would consist of other Indians.
Yeah, "racist" seems to fail the Occam test here. But at the same time that makes it clear that the now-suddenly-unpopular opinion is also wrong. Diversity takes work, and companies need to guard against this kind of decisionmaking. "DEI" protects the native-born too!
> ”racist" seems to fail the Occam test here
The word has lost meaning due to semantic overinclusivity.
By the Civil Rights era definitions, the process is racist. The people may not be. The process explicitly favours Indians. This isn’t some statistical mumbo-jumbo anti-racism construct, it’s the clear intent of the people involved and a clear effect of their actions.
What we can’t conclude from this is if the people involved think Indians are superior (versus just familiar).
This reminds me of the aphorism "The purpose of a system is what it does."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...
DEI arose to public consciousness around the same time that "whiteness" was often used as a synonym for bigotry and privilege. So long as academic circles (and those who come from them, such as the people now in HR departments) believe that having white skin is a sin, DEI will never be D, E or I.
The three words themselves are nice and generally good things to believe in, but the packaging philosophy it is wrapped up in is poisonous.
I've never met a single HR person that could be characterized as coming from, or even brushing up against, an academic circle.
> HR departments [...] believe that having white skin is a sin
Can we just stop? This is a meme, it's clearly never been true. It's extrapolating from a bunch of intemperate stuff said by oddball losers (yes, often in academic environments which encourage out-of-the-box thinking and speech[1]) to tar a bunch of extremely bland policies enacted by HR and hiring managers (to ensure that their masters don't get sued) with an ideological brush.
We people with "white skin" are very clearly doing just fine in the job market.
[1] Something that in other contexts we at HN think is a good thing!
One of the knock-on benefits of DEI is that it allows second rate minds to self-identify. Empathy is massively important in this line of work, and you need to be curious instead of confused and upset when you run into Chesterton's Fence.
Exactly, those without empathy for their fellow countrymen being unfairly discriminated against based on the color of their skin and gender identity really need to learn a hard lesson about judging others based on the character of the person and not their immutable characteristics.
It's a really good litmus test for finding those with empathy and good intellect, AKA the best kind of co-workers.
That's not what DEI does in practice. When you move away from merit hiring, you just end up hiring the minorities in your social network. Who, if they're from an "underprivileged" group, are usually even more privileged within that group than you are in yours, or else they wouldn't have met you.
i.e. you're in the top 20% of white people hiring from the top 1% of black people.
At Amazon how I saw this work out was that we hired African immigrants rather than ADOS African-Americans.
Hilariously, we had an executive who said that his goal was to have the demographics of his division more closely resemble that of America. Until someone realized that South Asians are approximately 2% of the US population and were 50% of his division.
It's been years since I checked, but for non-DC jobs, Amazon's demographics are significantly less white than America as a whole. That's mainly Asians being hired in place of ADOS African-Americans and hispanics.
Or ‘even better’, someone in the same circle who can somehow check the box you need. Harvard grads hiring other Harvard grads, etc.
Coarse grained attributes like race, gender, sex, religion, etc. are not useful predictors of individual behavior or background.
I wouldn’t say it’s people ‘preferring’ it. The fact is, finding people that are competent enough to be hired is easier through referrals than other ways. And if you are receiving referrals, why wouldn’t you put them through the hiring process to see if they’re talented enough to hire? Rejecting those because they share the same race as the hiring manager is itself racist (since it would be taking race/ethnicity as a factor). In most big companies the hiring process has enough checks and balances to prevent nepotistic hires anyways (for example hiring panels or bar raisers or whatever).