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0 pointsdijit4y ago0 comments

I guess it depends "a lot", my previous job was _incredibly_ pro-diversity, so much so that it actually made me feel terribly inferior for being born white/male/straight. (yes, yes, fragile ego/masculinity, sure).

We struggled very hard to find BAME candidates that weren't from India (India is a nightmare to migrate people from) and Women just.. didn't exist. We fast tracked every woman to second level interviews but there were just pitifully few and the ones we did get were quite poor fits (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD), we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate (This was Sweden btw)) but that didn't pan out so well.

This was true in other teams too. Add to this: the few women we had were heavily promoted in social, photo and print media and some of them didn't like it (becoming essentially "token females") and quit on that basis, the culture that sprang up was quite toxic after that, outrage mobs trawled the main internal off-topic company mailing list so much it had to be shut down.

I hope I won't get crucified for saying this, it's my opinion and it is very obviously biased because I lived through it and feel somewhat burned; though nothing I have said is non-factual.

The point I'm making is: Women and minorities are hard to hire because they are in limited supply, almost by definition, and heavily promoting the ones you have leads (at least some of) them to be disenfranchised. Forcing the situation and hiring just anyone on those metrics alone seems to (in my single case) cause very politically motivated people into the company who then seek to bully others or spend countless company hours on shaming the company to spend money on political causes they support.

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Pokepokalypse4y ago

> (read: MS SQL DBAs where we used Linux/FreeBSD)

Just my opinion; as an aside. ANY engineer worth his or her salt, should be able to pivot from one to another. This is probably THE primary skill an engineer should have. Industry hiring practices mostly disqualify candidates based on this type of thing, and it's a terrible practice, and it leads to good qualified engineers getting pigeonholed into a skills-dead-end.

Most of the basic computer skills are applicable across all platforms. If they want to specialize in some skill set that you as an employer do not utilize, then they won't apply anyway.

So I'm saying; hire engineers who could use some professional development.

readonthegoapp4y ago

If you think MS-focussed people are generally low-skill and uninterested, it will be difficult to hire them for a non-MS skill (or any skill, for that matter).

But that can apply generally.

Need C# but they only know Java?

Cancel.

I'm fine with canceling people who are lazy or not smart or not interested, but canceling someone because of their stack just seems like finding plausible deniability.

Jemaclus4y ago

I, too, feel guilty sometimes about being in the position I'm in as a straight white man. But at the end of the day, I have two options: quit, or use my position to better change the world, for lack of a better term. Despite being a white male, I am also a marginalized member of society due to my disability. Because of this, I spend a lot of time thinking about diversity and what it means and how we can improve our workplaces to be more inclusive and welcoming to marginalized groups.

I feel you. Don't let it get you down. Let's try and use our privilege to make the tech industry a more inclusive and welcoming place for those who do not have our privileges. Good luck. :)

908B64B1974y ago

> we did make extended efforts to hire junior levels and train them (where we would have not done the same for a white male Swedish candidate)

That's incredibly racist.

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