Wow, flagged, killed, resurrected in a VERY short amount of time. This is spicy.
Diversity is a trope that I've yet to see any evidence for other than using it as a kudgel to force a single viewpoint on a bunch of people by threatening their salary.
To be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't hire other races, or prefer one race above the other. But having been both in tech and university I can tell you by and large these programs are feel good and do almost nothing to forward their goal.
If the goal is to improve racial diversity, then you can do it trivially by simply selecting non-white races. This is, by definition, racist, but for some reason we've retermed this form of racism as "affirmative action". In a lot of sectors this ends up becoming a racial quota. Some tech companies even seem to gleefully promote it as such. These quotas do nothing to improve the bottom line or improve diversity. It feels more like revenge than progress and I don't think that's effective or sustainable.
If the goal is to improve ideological diversity then race shouldn't be controlled for. As the author rightly points out, a white person from a poor neighborhood will have a "more diverse" viewpoint than a black person from a middle class neighborhood. However, one may wonder how increased ideological diversity would help solve a problem in software that doesn't directly lean on one of those ideologies. There has never been a point in my decades long career as a backend engineer where my political/racial/religious identity ever influenced my code. I can say this with absolute certainty.
It feels like a sham to me. Suddenly in the last decade we've seen the marked rise of "diversity consultants" who by and large are simply diversity hustlers. This includes the new title "chief diversity officer" who, to this day, I am unsure what they even contribute in terms of driving profitability. Of course, these diversity hustlers will promote direct-action diversity efforts as the panacea to all of our sins because it's profitable to them. I have yet to see data that implies when controlling for education, race is a determining factor in ability. The idea itself seems false on its face but this is the exact idea they are promoting.
A business seeks first to optimize profit. Meritocracy is the single best way to insure this. If you wish to reduce hiring bias develop systems for double-blind reviews of candidates and compare results. These problems can be at least partially ameliorated with statistics. But instead, it seems we choose the most inefficient and outright questionably legal method instead. Promoting these ephemeral hard to measure metrics like "X <trait> has a more diverse opinion and is therefore better than Y <trait>" is just an end-around to bigotry at the corporate and university level. We can do better to fix hiring pipeline biases, etc, but this is not the way.
Diversity is a trope that I've yet to see any evidence for other than using it as a kudgel to force a single viewpoint on a bunch of people by threatening their salary.
To be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't hire other races, or prefer one race above the other. But having been both in tech and university I can tell you by and large these programs are feel good and do almost nothing to forward their goal.
If the goal is to improve racial diversity, then you can do it trivially by simply selecting non-white races. This is, by definition, racist, but for some reason we've retermed this form of racism as "affirmative action". In a lot of sectors this ends up becoming a racial quota. Some tech companies even seem to gleefully promote it as such. These quotas do nothing to improve the bottom line or improve diversity. It feels more like revenge than progress and I don't think that's effective or sustainable.
If the goal is to improve ideological diversity then race shouldn't be controlled for. As the author rightly points out, a white person from a poor neighborhood will have a "more diverse" viewpoint than a black person from a middle class neighborhood. However, one may wonder how increased ideological diversity would help solve a problem in software that doesn't directly lean on one of those ideologies. There has never been a point in my decades long career as a backend engineer where my political/racial/religious identity ever influenced my code. I can say this with absolute certainty.
It feels like a sham to me. Suddenly in the last decade we've seen the marked rise of "diversity consultants" who by and large are simply diversity hustlers. This includes the new title "chief diversity officer" who, to this day, I am unsure what they even contribute in terms of driving profitability. Of course, these diversity hustlers will promote direct-action diversity efforts as the panacea to all of our sins because it's profitable to them. I have yet to see data that implies when controlling for education, race is a determining factor in ability. The idea itself seems false on its face but this is the exact idea they are promoting.
A business seeks first to optimize profit. Meritocracy is the single best way to insure this. If you wish to reduce hiring bias develop systems for double-blind reviews of candidates and compare results. These problems can be at least partially ameliorated with statistics. But instead, it seems we choose the most inefficient and outright questionably legal method instead. Promoting these ephemeral hard to measure metrics like "X <trait> has a more diverse opinion and is therefore better than Y <trait>" is just an end-around to bigotry at the corporate and university level. We can do better to fix hiring pipeline biases, etc, but this is not the way.