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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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ryanobjc ◴[] No.15011144[source]
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".

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1. candiodari ◴[] No.15062419[source]
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.