An inclusive interviewing process does not mean that you hire everyone. It means you reduce the weight of people's biases as part of identifying who you hire (because people turn out to be quite bad at prediction in hiring).
Sure, but if you are lucky enough to have an entire team of interviewers who have this much experience, you're probably not having the same hiring conversation that's happening in this thread.
- The companies that make an effort get a lot closer to population baselines than the ones that just give up.
- Organizational pressures are something leadership and management should be steering. I'd rather have hiring practices be an explicit choice than something that "just happens"
If the % of woman developers is 10% and management creates hiring goal of 50% it detorts reality. It means hr has to work harder at filling those female roles which often reduce their checkboxes while increasing the checkboxes for everyone else. Now you have to leaving positions unfilled longer in hopes of finding a candidate who matches a gender. You've turned the hiring process into a broken mess and require 1000 times more candidates.
Let's say you are successful. Let's say a class of companies are successful at this strategy. Lets use the example of faangs which are desirable places in terms of salary/brand. If faangs were successful at this that would reduce the % of female developers in other industry and assuming faangs are taking the best candidates that leaves the worst ones. Which then creates this reality where male programmers outclass female developers in these other industries. That makes it harder for women in general and makes this false impression that females are not as good as males.
To help women you really need to treat them equally. Trying to reach a goal of unhealthy unnatural % industry wide means women will left holding the bag when the music stops.
ipaddr is right that he described the actual situation with FAANGs scooping up all of high caliber underrepresented minority candidates (think black/women ivy league comp sci grads with high GPA).
But this also creates a positive feedback loop when more and more women decide to switch industries and pursue IT/Engineering jobs via bootcamps, college degrees, etc. I noticed the number of female candidates in UX/UI, fullstack, QA, Data Analytics - has increased in last several years.
Partly because the demand is still high for these professionals, partly because there is entire cottage industry of bootcamps churning out IT specialists en masse, partly these diversity hiring practices that opened up doors for women
Regardless of whether you're coming from educational elitism, you're still making sweeping claims about big groups of people based on extremely limited evidence.
I'm a bootcamp grad, and would not have gotten into the field if bootcamps did not exist. I'm about four years into my career now, currently working at a major well-reputed tech company, and haven't gotten an average-or-below annual performance review yet. (And one reason for that is that I tend to be cautious, critical, and thoughtful in my technical decisions.) There are a number of other people from my bootcamp class with similar results.
I am making a generalisation, based on having interviewed over 200 developers in the past 2 years as part of technical screening.
80%+ of the bootcampers were rubbish and shocked to be told their knowledge was way below where they thought it was.
A classic is a 6 week JavaScript bootcamp grad claiming to be an "expert in JavaScript" (their words) and couldn't explain the JS type system or basics of variable scope. That was the norm. That kind of rubbish.
I'm happy you're an exception and everyone gets a fair chance with me, regardless of background, but I am never shocked when I have to bin yet another bootcampers CV
"Everyone gets a fair chance with me, regardless of background" is an _extremely_ different statement than "anyone with an ounce of technical hiring ability avoids those bootcampers like wildfire".
If you mean "in my experience, bootcampers fail technical screens at much higher rates", then say that, instead of implying that you're stupid if you even consider hiring someone who went to a bootcamp.
if your goal is 50% women then you have to lower standards to achieve that.
You don't have to. But you'd remove them from the job market, making the pool smaller for other companies. IOW, a few companies can target 50% women, but that'll make it that much harder for other companies.
Thinking of it in terms of race might indicate more about how you view things. As an example, think about how frequently throughout history people in power have claimed that women "can't handle" the positions of power that men had. They cite all kinds of nonsense like "emotional" or "hysterical"... conveniently ignoring all of the hysterical and emotional men throughout history.
Think about how something like that would affect how companies are formed. Things seem much better now, but I merely wanted to highlight one of many kinds of biases that are actively affecting our society, even if they are hard to qualify.
Inclusive hiring practices, in my experience, strive to have a diverse funnel whereby under-represented groups get to be in consideration, but you still hire the best out of the pool. It may take longer to fill that pool, but many agree that it is worth it.
You can exclude mediocrity while also being exclusionary on other axes.
They are unrelated issues. In fact, I’ve even heard of exceptional people being abused/bullied for belonging to the wrong group to the point of being told “you couldn’t have done that” which itself is an assertion of their supposed mediocrity for exclusionary reasons.
Don’t assume you need to be bigoted to exclude mediocrity. Discriminating, yes, but not discriminatory against groups that inclusive hiring policies attempt to protect.
This take assumes a priori that inclusive hiring results in mediocrity. Sounds more like a reflection of biases, to be honest. Inclusive hiring means expanding your search criteria beyond "hire those that look like me, speak like me, have awesome education like me, and are basically smart like me". It turns out there are plenty of exceptional people outside of that narrow band.
> have awesome education like me, and are basically smart like me
At least this is meritocracy, the kind of thing that people (e.g. eugenicists) can make a serious argument for.
> look like me, speak like me
...is something that can't be justified except by terrible people. Even worse is "likes the same music and movies that I do" or "we coincidentally have mutual friends."
> Project 100,000 soldiers included those unable to speak English, those who had low mental aptitude or minor physical impairments, and those who were slightly over- or underweight.
You are moving the goalpost from mediocrity to disability.
Thats a contradiction in terms. Building something exceptional always involves excluding mediocrity