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

"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.

Diversity hires in no way mean that less qualified DI candidates are hired over others. There is so much bias in hiring that I can't even see straight. From people giving pref treatment to nation of origin, sex, schools, political affiliation, etc.

The easiest, fairest, more productive solution is to post the job where MORE DI candidates will see it. The next one is to craft positions that aren't built entirely out of "tech-stuff" that are bullshit metrics anyways, the CS Olympiad questions that don't work.

The need for diverse (in all senses of the word) is necessary for successful products.

Where I work, the majority of folks got hired directly out of college, they don't know any other src of truth. They have never had a blue-collar summer job. They came from rich to upper middle class families and their view of the world is similarly filtered. I can immediately tell when someone has "life experience" after 30 seconds of talking with them. To me, this is the bigger problem.