Re: Diversity for Diversity's sake?
Ok, here's the deal.
Everyone that gets through to a second round of interviews at Google is more than qualified to do the job.
And yet the people that actually get the jobs - having been interviewed by the people who they will work with - end up being disproportionately white men. And that is disproportionate according to the number of people that get to the second (or third, or fourth) round - not to the number of people in the world, or living in the Bay Area.
In short, for quite a long time now, tech companies have been concerned that the reason they remain dominated by white men is because white men are only hiring white men because they feel more comfortable with them.
There are a multitude of arguments put forward to justify this continued bias. The most common are that "you should just hire whoever is best for the job", and "we can't bring down our standards."
But here's the thing: Google wants and needs a broader group of people because its products and services are used by a broad group of people.
In the same way that many start-ups in Silicon Valley - especially apps - tend to cater for people exactly like themselves, so having mostly white male software engineers means that software will tend to cater for their needs because that's what and who they know.
This is not new or novel, it is basic business fact. Hence the long use of focus groups and so on.
But *despite* Google recognizing the need for more diverse engineers, despite it pointing out it needs these people, and despite those (highly qualified) people turning up for interviews, the company just can't stop its white male engineers from hiring white male engineers over and over again in preference to others.
The reason this "manifesto" created such a stink is because the very ugliest reason for this refusal to diversify was written down and justified: that some people are *inherently* not as good.
It is absolutely ridiculous to say that "women" "prefer social jobs" or that "women" are bad at asking for pay rises and then try to connect that to the precise issue of hiring someone for a specific job at your company.
It is also offensive to lump together and dismiss huge swathes of people. That's why people got so upset about this.
But, again, I will note two things:
1. My article is about the very ugly responses that some people had to the row that developed around this.
2. I don't agree that Google should have fired him. They should have seen it as an opportunity to learn and to teach on a topic that is clearly very difficult to handle and talk about. Google screwed up by not taking that opportunity.
That doesn't detract from how awful this memo was.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
