This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity).
You're supposed to meet goals without compromising on integrity or quality. e.g. you can't ship buggy messes.
And you can't hire substandard employees. There are mechanisms ("bar raisers") in place to do this, at least at Amazon.
I suppose I can't speak for Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. But I'm pretty sure that it's exactly the same and what you're getting is a game of broken telephone where an ambitious goal in a high stakes environment gets re-interpreted as a quota.
BTW, you're supposed to fail ~20-30% of your goals at Amazon, or you didn't set ambitious-enough ones.
Then you have companies like Twitter that literally say on their hiring boards:
"Our vision for the future is clear.
50%.
At least half of our global workforce will be women.
25%
At least a quarter of our US workforce will be under-represented minorities."[0]
Key word "will", not "would like." How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?
Honestly I can't wrap my head around how Twitter believes 45% men / 55% women is the ideal and 55% men / 45% women would be unacceptable.
Also, if your takeaway from “at least half the employees will be women” as a goal, at a time when the breakdown is 43% women, and has been a lot lower for the past decade, is that “55% women is ok but 55% men is not”, it’s pretty obvious you’re arguing in bad faith.
It’s pretty obvious that’s a goal that at least half the workforce will be women in fewer than 4 years. What that actually means is that Twitter is likely gonna barely cross the 50% mark, if they are even gonna meet it.
The reality is that the moment they hit 50% they will ease off on the effort to recruit more women than men, which, thanks to structural factors that have led to the current unbalanced distribution of employees, will only make their hiring easier ans allow them to continue hiring equitably.
But not "Our future is clear, there will be ...".
There is a big difference.
> How do you interpret that as a goal as opposed to a clear quota?
They explicitly say it's a vision (goal).
(Still, goals and monetary incentives can have the same effect, it seems, looking at what thu2111 wrote nearby, about Google.)
But the goals were incentivised with money and what happens when you do that? The system was bent in all sorts of creative but illegitimate ways to try and get there. Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway. They were given the best interviewers that were preferred by the hiring committees, and men who were mis-interviewed were simply dropped on the floor instead of re-doing the process or filtering the bad interviewers out. I was told they were doing this by the recruiters themselves. They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.
More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.
But that was some years ago. Tech firms became much more extreme since then. A recruiter leaked YouTube's instructions to do biased hiring previously, and nothing happened. Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments, they're constantly attacked by an activist class who insist they do so - what do you think happens? Of course they are discriminating. How else could they achieve their goals? "Encouragement" is a fantasy, there aren't huge pools of women who are inexplicably refusing to apply to major tech firms.
"Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway." sounds like it but the next stage isn't an offer - it's the onsite interview. If Google's process is anything like Amazon's, there is a screen-OUT stage and a screen-IN stage.
The screen out stage is primarily there to make sure not to waste the time of the full onsite interview loop. It's highly subjective and you are SUPPOSED to err on the side of letting people go through. You're SUPPOSED to have the most senior engineers on the team do these screens. But people frequently don't. They introduce their own biases, and managers use phone screens as practice for their most junior interviews. The outcome is qualified candidates sometimes don't even get a chance to prove their worth in an onsite loop.
So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No, but there is no way to make this process truly fair at the scale that FAAMNG hires.
So long as the FINAL process is fair, that's all that you can really do and ensure you don't hire unqualified people.
> They organised hiring events from which men were forbidden from taking part. And so on.
That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities. Or HBCU's. Amazon also does "women's only" hiring events. They have lower hire ratios because there is a pipeline intake problem too in our whole industry. But that's okay.
> More problematically post-hiring there were no real controls, so women were unfireable. Women who caused so much trouble their team rejected them weren't fired like the men were, but rather were endlessly moved around between teams. Hiring isn't perfect so if you filter out the bad men and leave the bad women, it's the same as lowering the bar for women - the bar lowering just happens at a slightly different place.
I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable. It's extremely hard to get fired from a FAAMNG company once you're in. What you describe happens to all employees (being moved between teams).
> Firms have been given carte blance to discriminate against men by western governments
Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed? Making it easier for women to apply does not make it HARDER for Men. All the initiatives we discussed are IN ADDITION not INSTEAD OF.
You're interpreting this the way you want to. If given an identical interview a man would fail and the woman automatically gets interviewed more, that is bar lowering. If given identical behaviour the man is fired and the woman is promoted, that is bar lowering. What do you think the point of interviewing or firing people is? And for sure the only person who ever generated reactions in my teams of the form "how the hell did this person get hired and why aren't they fired yet", was a female engineer who was the darling of the manager's manager, another female engineer who thought getting more women into tech management was a high priority.
Now, again, that was years ago. There are plenty of people since who came forward and said yes, Google and other tech firms use quotas in hiring. Recruiters, people who would know.
So is it fair that some semi-qualified man didn't get a chance to prove their worth onsite but some semi-qualified woman did? No
It's good you admit this, because that's the core of the issue. Not if hiring can be made truly, perfectly fair (whatever definition is used), but if it's actively being made unfair by gender-biased policies. To which the answer is an absolute yes.
That sounds so much more insidious than it actually is. This is no more discriminatory than Women's Only universities
You claim it's not insidious and then say, well, this type of discrimination goes unpunished elsewhere so it's OK. That doesn't make it not insidious. It just proves the underlying argument: that our society is by this point systematically biased against men despite the theoretical existence of equality laws. Do you think male-only hiring events would be tolerated? Surely not.
I have serious doubts of the reality of this statement. PEOPLE are essentially unfireable
I understand why you might think that, but that certainly wasn't true when I was there and IMHO it clearly still isn't true. There were at least two guys who I directly worked with who got fired for being unproductive. I knew quite a few others who were put on PIPs for various reasons. Google did, maybe still does, operate a policy of "up or out" in which being fired is automatic if you don't get promoted. It was very much possible to get fired there, unless you were a woman, in which case HR would have preferred to sacrifice a goat than fire a woman. Remember, the firm had "goals" to keep the female:male ratio as high as they could, and it was explicitly phrased as a moral issue.
And of course, look at James Damore. Fired and viciously publicly attacked for spelling out the reality of the situation: these firms discriminate horrendously in favour of women and against men, and yet it's not working, that approach doesn't generate a torrent of happy women in tech. It generates angry men who, rightly, feel they're being treated unfairly for genetic reasons.
Just what way are you being discriminated against or oppressed?
I just gave you a list but maybe repetition will help:
- Men are being banned from senior executive roles.
- Men are being banned from board seats, in some parts of the world, by law.
- Men are being banned from recruiting events.
- Men are being banned from training programmes (e.g. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/news/articles/bbc-defends...)
- When women make an accusation against a man, they are automatically believed and their identity is protected. The same is not true for men. Again, in many parts of the world, this principle is enshrined in law: the law itself in unequitable.
- Men who point out obvious demographic truths backed by plenty of research are fired, like "women are less interested in computers than men". If women make claims directly contradicted by plenty of research, like "women are paid less than men due to discrimination", they are praised and rewarded.
- Men who want fair treatment of other men are routinely banned from "diversity committees", e.g. https://fortune.com/2015/01/23/diversity-work/ (but I saw this at my previous employer too). That's why the concept of diversity is so widely treated with derision. They want an absolute diversity of people who all hold their extremist beliefs.
- Beyond prizes in hiring-related competitions, there are bonus pots at firms set aside exclusively for women. This has been true at least since the early 90s at Microsoft.
- Job assessment is routinely biased against white men in ways that are obviously illegal, but again, men have no protection and SJW activists are so confident about this they actively boast about it in public. Consider this quote from an interview with someone at Atlassian on their new HR policies:
"A huge component for us was de-biasing the assessment process. There’s been a lot of talk and testing on de-biasing and we worked closely with our design team to remove bias from the process. What we realized were that systems weren’t designed to be anti-racist, for example, which isn’t the same as non-racist. We wanted to be actively conscious, for example, of being anti-racist"
This sort of list could go on all day. I know you really don't want to believe that because it undermines so many other beliefs that go along with the whole package, but women are lionised in our industry, men are second class citizens and the sexist/racist discrimination that occurs is all done by people who most loudly announce themselves as "anti-sexist" or "anti-racist". One day this whole ideology will be recognised by all as the dark evil it truly is. Until that day we have to point out its hypocrisies, every day.
