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791 points 317070 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.447s | source
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turc1656 ◴[] No.15010817[source]
"In the name of diversity, when we fill quotas to check boxes, we fuck it up for the genuinely amazing women in tech."

Precisely. 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. By doing this you treat both sexes fairly and give everyone an equal chance. Otherwise, you end up with "reverse sexism", which the author does not explicitly say, however she does essentially admit to in her description of the hiring loop:

"After some rounds of low to no success, we start to compromise and hire women just because we have to"

The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from that is she hired at least a few women over men which she thought were better candidates simply because "we have to". That's a problem.

Overall, though, I thought her piece was well written and she seems to get at the real issue and even has a possible solution that doesn't involve just hiring women for purposes of optics only - fighting the battle far earlier and getting girls interested young so that they choose to enter these fields at a higher rate than they currently are doing.

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1. MaysonL ◴[] No.15014563[source]
"the only mandate for the interview process would be to hire the best person"

The problem is, that hiring only "the best persons" will not create the best company. Diverse viewpoints and experiences create the best products.

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2. flukus ◴[] No.15014617[source]
But no one seems to care about hiring people with diverse viewpoints and experiences. The only diversity we care about is skin color and reproductive organs. I don't see anyone trying to fill their quota of people with an IQ of 90. I don't see anyone trying to fill their quota of people over 65. I don't see anyone trying to fill their quota of computer illiterate people.

Those types of diversity are much bigger than the difference between male and female computer geeks, they would have a much bigger impact on product design and yet no one is scrambling to implement it.