I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

So, from the context of Google, you are implying that is not what Google does (hires only to the bar). However, that is exactly what Google does. To get hired you have to pass the 5-interview in-person panel. Period.

What the original memo author was railing about, incorrectly, is the perception that spending more time widening the recruiting funnel for "diversity candidates" was lowering the bar. That is not true.

The reason is simple, Google doesn't hire people to fill positions, we hire people who are awesome/pass the interview bar. If there are 10 awesome people, we hire them. If there are 11, we hire them. There are always more positions than qualified candidates.

If you want to talk about if the bar is the correct measurement, etc, that's a completely separate conversation and wasn't part of the little "anti-diversity memo".

I think you may have misread what I wrote, or perhaps what I wrote was a bit confusing or vague. I didn't mean that any of this was part of the anti-diversity memo. I meant that what this woman wrote was very similar in content to my own comments on that thread about the Google employee. I agree with you that what she has written is very different than what the Google employee wrote. And I wasn't making specific comments about Google's hiring process. I have never worked for Google and have never interviewed with them. Only thing I know about their hiring process is that it's supposedly one of the best and very difficult. My comments were about diversity in general and not specific to Google.

Hope that clarifies my thoughts a bit.

EDIT: grammatical mistake.

You are dead wrong in regards to what the memo author was railing about.

Thanks for that illumination. That was helpful.

I think you should be aware your words imply that you believe Google is doing quota based hiring or different hiring bars based on 'diversity'. You said, exactly quoted:

"This goes directly to the core of the issue and what I had brought up on the thread recently about the Google employee who got fired. Specifically, if companies were truly interested in fairness, the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person, no exceptions. "

The first sentence talks about Google. The second sentence you talk about how "companies" should hire the best person, no exceptions. Implying you believe Google does not do that. Because even though they are separate sentences they are part of the same chain of thought. So the second sentence seems to apply to Google despite your use of "companies" (which includes Google, since Google is a company).

So just be aware, if you raise A then B, then people are, naturally led into thinking that A and B are related in your mind some way.

This is why you can't write a memo like the original anti-diversity one, you are conflating too many issues. You can't dispassionately discuss how to change the diversity programs to be more inclusive in the same thought body that says "effectively lowered the bar for diversity candidates". That signals to people that you think these two things are related. Given that he has been embraced by the alt-right, and he has encouraged that, it should be giving people a pretty clear sign that the original 'anti-diversity memo' wasn't actually argued in good faith.

She pointed out directly what she was doing, as the hiring manager, in order to sway the 5-interview panel and subsequent committee:

She wrote appeals to the committee. Quote:

> to make cases for cross-functional candidates who would be great assets to Google, even though a (typically) male dominated software engineering interview crew did not find these candidates up to snuff.

It worked, too:

> I had a 90+% success rate changing the hiring decision for these candidates.

Given that appeals exist and managers writing support for a particular candidate having such a success rate does mean that (what we all sort-of knew already) Google's hiring process is nowhere near as "clean" as advertised.

I read other places that the initial reaction to the diversity problem consisted of having the committees work without knowing names, ethnicities and/or genders and this actually made the problem worse, not better.