Do quotas actually help minorities? To me it sends the signal that everyone from a top N school at my FAANG who is a white or asian male is here because he's qualified. The others who knows? Maybe the recruiter was so close to hitting his incentive that he lowered the bar.
[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youtube-hiring-for-some-positio...
I mean, yeah, unless there is a wide-spread feeling that tech hiring is broken and nobody knows how to tell if anyone really is any good through the hiring process which is the feeling that almost every hiring, interviewing, test-taking focused post on HN elicits.
Because I mean all the stuff on HN I read leads me to think we can't be sure about if someone is qualified for a job until they are actually in the job. My own personal experience is that people can even be technically qualified for a job and still not be qualified for all sorts of other things.
They are cargo-culted to death, since everyone wants to be like FANG but won't pay they do the one thing they can afford from their playbook and execute poorly on it.
Truth is, from having conducted interviews, it's a real sink or swim situation where some folks won't be able to complete a simple wordcount implementation in 30+ minutes. A real whiteboard is a toy problem where you have to use an algorithm or a data structure, write a few test cases and some code on the board and explain why/how you did it, not some rote learning exercise.
At the senior band they shouldn't even be used, if the candidate is coming from a reputable company. But at the college level what else are you going to interview applicants about? You know everyone has done an algorithm class.
I generally see take home tests getting the heat, because people are being expected to give up an extra 4-6 hours of their life to the job process without getting compensation. And maybe the person doing 4 hours gets beat out by the person doing 8, and the people with kids are screwed.
It's disappointing to see this kind of comment in 2020.
If this was a meritocracy, you would expect a proportionate number of every ethnicity and religion represented in the workforce of large corporations. But we don't see that, because the network is old, and it is extremely white. Pile that on top of glaring inequalities across the board, and here we are.
In my experience as a subcontractor for few extremely large corporations (including one of the "A"s), the largest roadblock was usually an incompetent VP. How'd they get there? Well, they had connections, friends or family or both. In SMB world, it's even more obvious. I've seen millions of dollars wasted on projects and POCs that existed only because one of these folks didn't "believe" the research and the vendor specs. And I've seen a room full of VPs all afraid to tell the boss that the product demo isn't going well because the product -- the very idea of it -- was garbage.
So, worst case scenario, there are a few more incompetent people in corporations already brimming with bad hires and waste, and they come from different backgrounds. What's the problem?
By this logic we should expect the NBA, NFL, NHL etc. to look like a random sample of the US population. If the source subpopulations differ by even small amounts on mean or variance those on the extreme tails of distributions will look very different from the general population. So the ranks of men who have ever run 100m in under ten seconds are basically all black and elite marathon runners are about half Kalenjin, an ethnic group of fewer than ten million.
Also, going straight to comparisons of athletic ability and ethnicity is basically a hundred year old argument made by people you probably don't want to associate with.
Tech exacerbates this problem even further. How can you get anywhere as a kid if your parents don't have a computer, and neither does your school? And that's just one example.
In tech, there's the pipeline issue too. You can't really double the percentage of senior engineers of a certain group overnight. You'd have to magically go back to the 90's and try to get more diverse folks to apply! Same way the class of 2021 they are hiring from now can't really suddenly change.
Well no, that would be assuming that whatever traits help one be meritorious are equally distributed among all the populations, which seems highly unlikely given what we see literally everywhere else (e.g. athletic pursuits).
What I think is more important than nailing some magical quota or ratio or percentage, is ensuring that the individual is judged as an individual instead of as a subset of a group.
Regardless of how a specific trait is distributed among a human population, you are bound to find individuals within each group that display it. The problem comes when you discard individuals because they don't belong to the group you want, or when you take in individuals without the trait you're looking for just because they belong to the group you do want.
