Google Diversity Report Straight Out of 'How To Lie With Statistics' Playbook 287
theodp writes: Among the books recommended by Bill Gates for beach reading this summer is How to Lie With Statistics, the published-in-1954-but-timely-as-ever introduction to the (mis)use of statistics. So, how can one lie with statistics? "Sometimes it is percentages that are given and raw figures that are missing," explains the book, "and this can be deceptive too." So, does this explain Google's just-released Diversity Report and the accompanying chock-full-o-percentages narrative (find-all-%-image), which boasts "the Black community in grew [sic] by 38 percent", while the less-impressive raw figures — e.g., the number of Google employees increased by 5,928, but the ranks of Black females only increased by 35 (less than 0.6% of the net increase) — are relegated to a PDF of its EEO-1 Report that's linked to in the fine-print footnotes? To be fair to Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple and Amazon didn't want people to see their EEO-1 numbers, either.
Diversity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Diversity (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much.
What color a person's skin is, or what equipment they keep between their legs isn't as important as the knowledge they have in their head and their skill at utilizing it.
Slotting someone into a position ahead of a worthier candidate, simply because they're a certain race/gender, rather than because they're the best candidate is idiocy of the highest order.
It's not Google/Apple/whoever's problem that a given race or gender has historically been downtrodden. Google/Apple/Whoever didn't do the treading, so why should they be guilt-tripped into settling for mediocrity for some lie about "equality"?
Because what's being pushed here is not about "equal" treatment. It's about "special" treatment.
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And perhaps when such assessments of worthiness become as exact a science as you presume them to be, such nonsense can be done away with. My experience with getting jobs in tech — and my hearing of interviews in other fields of employment — suggest at best a loose relationship between most interviewing techniques and many skills actually relevant to completing projects in a corporate environment.
The folks that run these companies are bright people, and they're more than able to decide if it furt
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And perhaps when such assessments of worthiness become as exact a science as you presume them to be, such nonsense can be done away with. My experience with getting jobs in tech — and my hearing of interviews in other fields of employment — suggest at best a loose relationship between most interviewing techniques and many skills actually relevant to completing projects in a corporate environment.
Yes, but that's a completly different matter, usually based on outsourcing the first candidate screening to HR, or basing the whole recruiting process on mindlessly copying what someone read in a magazine on how (ironically) Google does their recruitment process to find the best and most creative tech skills.
I haven't heard either that (in large enough corporations) gender or skin color were part of the interview process either.
Re:Diversity (Score:5, Insightful)
While a company like Google likely has all sorts go through their doors, I can tell you what my experience with hiring is.
Working in a small company, I frequently have quite a bit of exposure to the raw talent pool. Sometimes HR gets involved, but just as often, I am talking to the recruiters myself.
There is the occasional woman. There is the occasional black man. What there is not are both black and female. Google having only 35 black females mirrors my experience. The percentage of resumes of black females, even for junior positions, is likely so low to begin with that I never see one and Google probably only sees a few hundred.
And that is even before any question of their skills or experience come up.
I'm wary of a scenario where the first black female resume in my 5 years as a manager will someday come across my desk and she just happens to not have the skills I require for the job and don't hire her. Am I suddenly discriminating in my hiring practices because I have rejected 100% of my black female candidates? Do I hire her because "diversity"?
More to the point, if I had two identically skilled candidates, and one happened to be a black female, do I derive an advantage from hiring her over the other person?
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The argument, as I understand it, is that women provide a "different perspective" and offer possibilities for "new solutions".
Which is bunk, really (at least in STEM fields; in other more creative fields, a change in perspective might make a difference). Because if women consistently offered such successful outside-the-box thinking, all women would be worthy of promotion just for showing up*. This also assumes that most men think alike and if given a certain problem will always come to the same conclusion
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It might well do that. Get a lot of similar people together, and they're likely to focus on the same solutions. (Not that racial diversity necessarily means anything: when my son was in a University daycare, we met some of the other parents. All sorts of skin colors, nationalities, religions, etc., and we all thought similarly in many ways.) Moreover, if a company hires based on irrelevant factors, they probably don't get the best possible people, and in some situations the numbers suggest suboptimal
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There are biases. Conscious or sub-conscious and everyone has them. People like to fool themselves into thinking that they are objective and that they can fight their own prejudices. And it's not just about race or gender. When I hear folks with those thick Southern accents, I find myself considering them of lesser intelligence.
And what about the prejudice against age? Zuckerberg actually said that older people "don't get it" - which I find funny since old people love facebook since they can be a part of
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I still think a big part of it is location. SF has large asian and white communities and only tiny African American and Hispanic communities. Oakland's African American community is also shrinking but Oakland never had a large educated African American community.
If Google wants a more diverse workforce it needs to open centers in areas with more diversity like Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and South Florida. Places where you have "Traditionally Black Colleges" and or a long established Hispanic community.
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Google should have telecommuting for all its employees, then it could attract talent from all over.
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As an Atlantan, I'll tell you that while black people are common, black software engineers are still pretty rare. Of the three black people [in technical roles] I work with, two are actual immigrants from Africa and the third is a QA person, not a developer. I think black engineers are more common in other fields, such as civil engineering.
Also, the historically black colleges around here, such as Morehouse and Spelman, are excellent places to look if you want to hire a doctor, lawyer or businessperson, but
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Frankly I would like to see them open one in the Palm Beach area of Florida but yes Atlanta would IMHO probably help attract a more diverse workforce as well.
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I don't think trying to create more diversity in SF by hiring people from further away and bringing them in is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe bad for housing, a separate issue, but rather than going to where the concentrations are I think it's better to try to reduce the concentrations by encouraging people to move around.
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" but rather than going to where the concentrations are I think it's better to try to reduce the concentrations by encouraging people to move around."
Ever think that an African American might not want to move away from where his culture is? Or a Hispanic person?
Frankly I would hate to live in the SF area. I like the level of diverse culture that South Florida offers. Not just in race but economics and urban and rural lifestyles.
The Bay area just does not seem like a place I would want to live and I bet a lo
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Because it's in their own financial and quality reasons for doing so. Look, I know this is an unpopular stance here on Slashdot, where middle class white man-children think they invented the universe because they can use emacs, but if a group of people is "historically discriminated against," and there is no ACTUAL genetic or biological reason which you can point to th
Re:Diversity (Score:4, Informative)
But that's fiction. Black kids aren't being told that at all. Instead, many deliberately avoid academic and STEM fields because their own peers disapprove of it.
The poverty and lack of achievement associated with African Americans is not primarily a consequence of discrimination or lack of outreach.
You can't address a problem if you don't understand its causes.
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But that's fiction. Black kids aren't being told that at all. Instead, many deliberately avoid academic and STEM fields because their own peers disapprove of it.
Just to be pedantic, that would mean that they are being told that they can't (or at least shouldn't) do it. It doesn't necessarily have to be an adult that teaches children what jobs their gender, ethnicity, etc. can and cannot do. "Peer pressure" has been an issue at least since I was in grade school.
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>> many deliberately avoid academic and STEM fields because their own peers disapprove of it.
Break it down. Where do you get your information from? The addressing of any problems
requires understanding the framework in which they work, which begs the question.
Institutional discrimination, impoverishment from colony establishment, obfuscated history,
and extremely biased education create the problems you speak of.
In some ways, yes, the black kids you talk of are being told they cannot achieve, in
wide-sca
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If these people are "perfectly capable", let them apply like any other prospective employee.
I have zero issue with capable people filling positions. I don't care WHAT their background is. I'm just concerned with "can they do the job", and "can they convince me they'll do it *better* than the other 500 applicants"? Whether it's some Ivy League schmuck or a guy who put himself through a vo-tech. Black, white red, yellow, green, blue, whatever. Man/woman/???, whatever.
I simply think that the positions oug
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And on the other side of the argument, I'd hate to think that I was hired to meet a quota, especially in a place where the reputation of those already hired under the same system results in poor candidates.
Because people would automatically assume that I, too, was poor right from the gate.
And even worse, might blow smoke at me for how "good" my performance was in case my predecessor on the quota list did a particularly great deal of tongue-wagging to HR, who, being the good little set of diversity-promoting
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I agree with much of what you say, but I don't know that there are any problems with Google hiring practices. Google can only hire people who apply, and if the pool of competent applicants is heavily slanted there's not much they can do about it. (They do have some diversity initiatives.) From a national point of view, we're doubtless losing out on a lot of good software people who are discouraged for some reason or another, but it looks like most of the discouragement happens before they apply for jobs
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Slotting someone into a position ahead of a worthier candidate, simply because they're a certain race/gender, rather than because they're the best candidate is idiocy of the highest order.
*sigh*
I don't know how many times this has to be said, but that isn't what they are doing or what anyone is suggesting. The selection process is still done on merit alone, no question. All the effort goes into getting more people from under-represented groups up to the necessary standard and to actually apply for the jobs in the first place.
For example, if you look at a network liked LinkedIn you find that in workplaces that are mostly male the people working there are mostly connected to other males. So wh
Re:Diversity (Score:4, Informative)
The selection process is still done on merit alone, no question
As someone that has been involved in the hiring process at a large tech company that has not been my experience.
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You raise a very interesting question. The current supply of under-represented candidates is known to be low, but exactly how low is a matter of debate. Some argue that better recruiting techniques bring more of them in, but others like yourself argue that they are just stealing them away from other companies. There is some evidence in the studies that have been done that suggests many candidates are being attracted into the industry, or back to it after they left (because there used to be more), but I don'
Re:Diversity (Score:4, Insightful)
Slotting someone into a position ahead of a worthier candidate, simply because they're a certain race/gender, rather than because they're the best candidate is idiocy of the highest order.
But not as idiotic as denying someone a position simply because they're a certain race/gender.
Re:Diversity (Score:5, Informative)
Your comment is absolutely true. But that's not the whole story... in a study a few years back, "applicants with white-sounding names were 50% more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with black-sounding names." [chicagobooth.edu] This is a real problem that affects minorities, so while preferential treatment is also a problem the biases have to change quite far before it's likely that minorities are getting actual preferential treatment.
Re:Diversity (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually done this using my real name and a variation of it. My real name didn't get an interview, the fake "English" sounding one did. I didn't go, but man it was depressing.
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I recall way back when at U-Mich talking to a fellow near-savant (for lack of a better term, full of ourselves). We were discussing intelligence and he was convinced it was almost entirely genetics.
For a while, this theory was being popularized by William Shockley. His push mostly ended when he got on the radio, and the host asked him if his own kids were smart. Apparently old Bill didn't think they were.
Diversity or rote political correctness? (Score:3, Interesting)
Related to that, however, is the question of what hormonal influences may arise. For one example (of many possible), with males, you often see more aggression, and (obviously) with females, less. Pretending there can be no relevant differences WRT job performance is not an optimum approach. Furthermore, interactions between the people of significantly different sexual identity are of inherently different natures. Much as the incoherent would like you not to believ
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Pretending otherwise doesn't make such things go away.
Pretending those matter though doesn't mean they do. If one accepts the hypothesis that gender has some effect on the ability to write computer programs then if you aggregate together many members of each gender and figure out their ability there will be some statistically significant difference.
If then, one were in the odd position of making blind hires with no information other gender, then if the hypothesis is true, you'd get best results by hiring p
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Actually, that's just mathematically simplistic. Here's what your reasoning does not account for: There are leanings, abilities and competencies that do not exist in isolation from other influences. Gender can be o
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Actually, that's just mathematically simplistic. Here's what your reasoning does not account for: There are leanings, abilities and competencies that do not exist in isolation from other influences.
How does it not account for that? Gender gives you a probability density function over performance, which gives you a prior on someone's performance in the absence of further information. Once you have a measurement of the performance the prior PDF doesn't yield anything extra.
For instance, the air force has defi
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Re:Diversity (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the lie is that somehow diversity is somehow going to help your business. "It will open us up to new ideas and a new audience" usually just turns into "Everyone is walking on eggshells around the new hire, the new hire isn't as qualified or hard-working as candidates we passed over, and if we ever try to fire the new hire we're going to get sued for discrimination."
Re:Diversity (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone is walking on eggshells around the new hire
Balls. Grow some. I don't care if you're pink, purple, and green all over in the worst re-imagining of Picasso. You either have the technical chops and willingness to learn & work, or you don't. Nothing else is relevant.
As an aside, I'd rather work with someone who was a complete asshole, but often right, than a person who was always nice, but often incorrect.
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You say that now, wait until you have gone through the diversity training and have been reconditioned...
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I'd rather work with someone who was a complete asshole, but often right, than a person who was always nice, but often incorrect.
Personally, I prefer people who are both nice and right, but maybe I'm just an old hippy.
The fact is that it is much easier to be an asshole all the time, than right all the time.
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As an aside, I'd rather work with someone who was a complete asshole, but often right, than a person who was always nice, but often incorrect.
I wouldn't. When the asshole is incorrect, they'll still be an asshole. They'll probably be an even bigger asshole because you dared challenge their wisdom.
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isn't as qualified or hard-working as candidates we passed over, and if we ever try to fire the new hire we're going to get sued for discrimination
I've worked with four people 100% exactly like this, from the CS engineer who didn't understand what a directory was to the un-fireable person who showed up to work maybe 20 minutes/week.
You probably need to work in organisations with half decent performance appraisal and HR systems then.
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The first two people I hired to work at my business were females. The first was a stenographer/secretary. The second was a programmer of some note that I stole from a buddy (he did not mind too much) who owned his own company as well. The third was a black male who was also a programmer. Then came a bunch of females as a sales force - being held accountable to a female. For quite some time my other business friends called my shop, "The Bunny Ranch."
Actually, the first person I hired was Amerindian, Black, a
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... not to those who make their living championing the issue.
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What evil is Google perpetrating, exactly? Trying to present irrelevant data in a positive light to people who pretend it is relevant?
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In this case (there are certainly others), they are using deceptive reporting to mislead people on the current state of affairs. Ask yourself why they would do this. The answer isn't "because they are angels."
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You are under the impression that people tell the truth. Very rarely do people tell the truth. The whole Political Correctness gig is simply a "how to avoid telling the truth". We are lied to daily, by almost everyone that has media outreach, from broadcasters to politicians to advertisements to government officials to business leaders.
The fact that most Americans still "trust" anyone at this point is a testament that lying still works. AND If you say it convincingly enough (wagging finger ... "I did not ha
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Did you miss fyngyrz's whole comment about how it's still bad to behave badly, no matter what others are doing?
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I didn't miss that at all. If we accept bad behavior isn't that actually worse?
Re:Pop culture mental fugue (Score:4, Interesting)
In this case (there are certainly others), they are using deceptive reporting to mislead people on the current state of affairs. Ask yourself why they would do this. The answer isn't "because they are angels."
Probably because they, like many other tech companies, are getting incessantly railed on an issue that is out of their control.
I don't know about you or any of these other SJWs, but I went to college for an IT career, and I only recall seeing at most one or two black people to a class the size of about 30 in any of my technology classes. In other classes I took (mainly the general requirement classes) there were more. (Most of the ones I met were either going for legal or service industry management careers.)
For whatever reason, most of them don't care to pursue a career related to technology. That isn't Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or anybody else's fault. Meanwhile they have to catch shit about it all the time, and pay ransom money to Al Sharpton (who himself is the real lying sack of shit.)
The same can be said of women, by the way. As another anecdote, two of my cousins are currently wanting to get IT jobs, but their sister wants to become a dentist, and that isn't due to any different treatment by their parents (they buy her as much computer stuff as they buy for her brothers. In fact she often asks for and receives more expensive Apple phones/tablets where they get Android devices.)
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In this case (there are certainly others), they are using deceptive reporting to mislead people on the current state of affairs. Ask yourself why they would do this. The answer isn't "because they are angels."
Nope. It's because it was a USA Today hit piece from 6 months ago, and educators, parents, and guidance counselors don't want to take responsibility for the input to the pipeline, and it's a slow news day.
They don't release the numbers because they don't want to be blamed for them, when they can only take whatever output comes out of the pipeline.
It's not like there are huge numbers of PhD CS people in the underrepresented minorities just sitting around twiddling their thumbs: everyone knows that the only
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...jackass...
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Google is being evil here. No slack for this should be contemplated whatsoever.
How are they being evil? What individual was harmed? Is there any evidence that black applicants were treated differently than white applicants?
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See here [slashdot.org]
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I clicked the link hoping for actual evidence, but I got more speculation.
To answer the questions posed at the post linked, what's happening is that gender lunatics along with other special interest groups are simply hammering tech right now with the equivalent of "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
As far as racial issues, hoo boy. Yes, there are quite real problems here, but the problems are at the K-12 stage, not at the workplace. If these groups were serious about changing things, they'd be out i
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Google is being evil here.
So, you are a racist and/or sexist person, supporting race and/or sex discrimination, for privileges based on race and/or sex!
Am I right, or am I right?
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You seem fringe left to me. But hey, perhaps you're just trolling. Difficult to tell.
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You seem fringe left to me. But hey, perhaps you're just trolling. Difficult to tell.
I am NOT trolling...
(replacing my last "Am I right, or am I right?" phrase with just "Right?")
my revised reply to you:
Google is being evil here.
So, you are a racist and/or sexist person, supporting race and/or sex discrimination, for privileges based on race and/or sex!
Right?
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As English is your second language, your word choice isn't making it obvious what side you're taking. It is not clear to me if you are using sarcasm or are actually calling someone out as a racist.
I'm thinking sarcasm, but I could be wrong. Others will not bother to think about it and think you just called them a racist, which will get you an angry response. As you have seen.
Yes, i struggle with my bad English, but as a RACIST AND SEXIST Greek i think i know about sarcasm and how to use it for OTHER racist and/or sexist persons, supporting race and/or sex discrimination, for privileges based on race and/or sex... plus, my signature is: Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Re:Pop culture mental fugue (Score:5, Insightful)
"Google is being evil here"
Uh, Yah... they are being real evil.
They should fire a bunch of white people and hire a bunch of non-white people based solely on the color of their skin.
That would make them not evil.
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What they should do is publish relevant and clear statistics on the issue instead of attempting to obfuscate the relevant issues at hand.
Try to keep up. It's really not that difficult.
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What is the distribution of skin colors of Google's employees possibly ever relevant to?
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What is the distribution of skin colors of Google's employees possibly ever relevant to?
Its relevant to knowing if their hiring practices are biased for or against people with a certain skin colour, for example...
Re:Pop culture mental fugue (Score:5, Insightful)
Its relevant to knowing if their hiring practices are biased for or against people with a certain skin colour, for example...
No, it's not. To do that, you'd need an analysis that includes much more than just who is working there now. Two huge variables you're leaving out:
1) How many minorities actually applied for a job there?
2) Of those, how many were actually qualified?
Go take your zero knowledge SJW outrage to twitter and/or wordpress where it belongs.
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Google provided the numeric information, although I can't see any real use for it without additional information that may not be available even inside Google. If you'd like to suggest a use for it, without other information we're not going to get, feel free.
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Except that now you are talking about a very expensive and difficult report to create. You would end up creating a team of people whose sole job is to collect, organize and report this information while providing no benefit back to Google. Why do you feel Google owes this to you? Sorry, not doing that does not make them evil.
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Reading between the lines is the following at Google HQ.
They hire a lot of men as engineers. Not an incredible surprise.
People have picked up on that and want to call them out on that, so they pressure them to release their diversity stats.
The stats say what everyone knows: there's a lot of men at Google. Many are white or possibly Asian. Just like in the rest of the IT industry.
Google sees where this is going, and it does its best to spin the stats as a good thing. Especially the significant portion o
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The part that gets me is the internal inconsistency of all of these initiatives.
I hear a lot of drum-pounding over how hostile tech environments are to women and minorities (they MUST be, or else there would be more of them in these environments*). But, let's make it so more of them want to head into the jaws of the wolf anyway?
What am I missing here?
*Yes, I am well aware that research dictates those candidates are self-selecting out of careers in STEM for other reasons, but I'm playing devil's advocate he
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To be demographically representative of the US population, they would have to fire lots of Asians, and hire more Caucasians and African Americans, since the latter two groups are both statistically underrepresented.
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Suppose I said "To be fair to [a murderer], [other murderer1], [other murderer2], [other murderer3] and [other murderer4] didn't [fail to murder], either."
Suddenly it becomes (or should become) obvious that there is nothing relevant whatsoever about the other entity's actions that involves being "fair" to the entity being examined.
Google is being evil here. No slack for this should be contemplated whatsoever. It is irrelevant to our consideration of Google if/that others are being evil as well. The metric shouldn't in any way be "everyone does it", it should be "this company is doing bad things, and they should stop."
You rarely hear anyone say that Jack the Ripper was an evil person, but Charles Manson was really a nice guy that was just misunderstood.
In this case, though, you may get a large number of fanboys of other technology companies spouting about how this makes Google the most evil company in the history of the world.
Not a popular opionion, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you imagine that you are tired of hearing about it as a reader or tech employee, just imagine how it might be for the people whose job it is to make this bettter at the supposedly forward thinking tech giants.
How are those numbers coming, Jim?
Well, we've hired as many somewhat qualified people as we can find, and it's still not enough. Can we count the cafeteria employees again this year?
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Or they could do what Google is doing, and start educational programmes aimed at improving the situation. Away from sensationalist headlines, people with an actual interest in this subject understand that while the numbers now are not brilliant Google is making a genuine effort to improve things that will take at least a few years to really make a substantial difference.
Also, do you have any evidence that they hire "somewhat qualified" people? Their stated policy is to hire the best candidate, and efforts a
Statistics in School (Score:4, Informative)
My father told me that when I took math classes in college, that Statistics I will teach me everything I really needed to know about the subject, but that Statistics II would teach me how to lie with what I learned. He was not incorrect. There's so many ways to manipulate the data that I find it very, very difficult to trust ANY stats that I find in the news without also having access to the raw data, the methodology, questions used, selection process, etc., etc., etc.
Re:Statistics in School (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nice example.
I prefer statistically, there are usually 1.4 popes per square kilometer living in the Vatican State. And current rate is even up to 2.8!
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There is no statistically significant conclusion that all people die. Out of the roughly hundred billion people who have ever lived, about ninety-three billion are dead. That's not significant at the .05 level.
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It's from what I remember from when the last one resigned: That was such an unusual event that they had to find a new title for him. He is now "Papa emeritus", Which boild down to "a retired pope is still a pope".
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I've always used an example of how statistics can be deceiving. If you put 99 rocks and a chicken egg in a box, and a baby chick walks out, there was a 99% chance that it came out of one of the rocks.
No, there is not.
There is a 100% chance the chicken came out of the egg and a 0% chance that it came out of one of the rocks.
There is not an equal probability that a rock and an egg will produce a chick.
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Do you want a diversity hire? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google hires people based on talent. Women and minorities are under-represented in the technical and engineering community. That is a fact of life. Until more women and minorities CHOOSE to enter this field, getting a "diverse workforce" would have to mean you exclude more qualified white males in order to hire less qualified minorities and women.
Think about that for a moment. Suppose hospitals did things this way? If you need critical brain or heart surgery, do you want your surgeon to be one of the best in his or her field, or one that was a "diversity hire"?
Until you're comfortable with the second option, this "diversity" idiocy needs to stop. It's one thing to exclude perfectly qualified candidates because they're female or minority. It's another thing to make that the primary reason you're hiring them instead of making sure they're the best qualified for the job.
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Just you wait until hospitals are run by the government and hire this way... well, you can see it now, it is called the VA.
Where they improved their time-to-wait appointment statistics by canceling and rescheduling appointments and/or putting them on off-the-books waiting lists.
Some day, we will all get equal medical service of this same quality.
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I have the feeling that this is going to be a long post as I have a lot to say on this subject so this is a novella warning - TL;DR Ahead!
My Experiences, Observations, and Gathered Data Concerning the Veteran's Administration Hospitals.
Do you have experience with the VA? I have, a lot. There are some hospitals which are the exception to the rule (on either end of the spectrum) but my personal experience has shown that the only issues I have had were long wait times at the emergency check-in because of triag
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Google hires people based on talent. Women and minorities are under-represented in the technical and engineering community. That is a fact of life. Until more women and minorities CHOOSE to enter this field, getting a "diverse workforce" would have to mean you exclude more qualified white males in order to hire less qualified minorities and women.
But if possible, companies should take measures to make the tech community more "diverse" (or "equal-rights" or "whatever"). But some stupid quota hiring is not helping.
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The truth is that, in the absence of evidence that (say) black lesbians are inherently incapable of doing "X", you would expect that the number of your employees who are black lesbians is roughly in line with the proportion of black lesbians in society as a whole. If not, it means there is some sort of unconscious bias going on.
The problem with a lot of tech people is that they think
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The truth is that, in the absence of evidence that (say) black lesbians are inherently incapable of doing "X", you would expect that the number of your employees who are black lesbians is roughly in line with the proportion of black lesbians in society as a whole. If not, it means there is some sort of unconscious bias going on.
But the "bias" may not be on the part of the employer. Consider the possibility that black lesbians are just not interested in the job you are hiring for. (Maybe they are smarter than those who do want that job.)
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The problem with a lot of tech people is that they think their jobs are this mysterious "X" that for some reason only white males can do, and that tech companies therefore have some sort of exemption from behaving like everyone else.
That's just not true. Law is the biggest boy's club in the world. Ask almost any female lawyer, and they will tell you that they bone up on typical male interests like sports, cigars, bourbon, etc. So it must be dominated by men, right? It's not. Law is almost an even distr
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Google hires people based on talent.
ITYM google hires people based on an obscure interviewing process which requires you to be able to recite details of algorithms you'd only learn in a CS course, but without reference to any reference material.
It's a substitute for talent, which biases them towards hiring people who have very recently finished a CS degree. And are therefore young.
This explains the astonishing level of churn in their "products" and why they seem to value nuking something that works and repl
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Until more women and minorities CHOOSE to enter this field, getting a "diverse workforce" would have to mean you exclude more qualified white males in order to hire less qualified minorities and women.
Do you think the marketing guys at Coke say "until more people device to drink Coke, getting more people to buy our product would have to mean poisoning all the wells and reservoirs"? Or do they perhaps try to encourage people to drink Coke, because historically that has worked quite well?
That's what Google is doing. Encouraging under-represented groups to apply for their jobs, but still hiring the best candidate in the end.
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Google doesn't care about diversity, but those democrats do. So Google makes reports of diversity in exchange for favors from politicians. That's the reason you've been hearing so much about it lately.
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where everyone is "free" to make such choices, with no peer pressure and no social stereotypes to infer their decisions.
It is going to take a bit of thinking, but that would actually be really terrible if things such as peer pressure and social stereotypes didn't exist. That is literally the definition of culture.
You may want your culture to change, but don't do anything so stupid as to think you want it not to exist, or even that that would be possible.
Everyone is ignoring the most important number! (Score:2)
Everyone is ignoring the most important number!
Difference between percantage of [minority] employees and percentage of [minority] applicants.
Heck if you only have 2% white employees, that makes you the most diverse employer ever if only 0.5% of applicants were white.
It would take some steam out of this whole discussion to have a look at those numbers.
Granted, with numbers as in my hypothetical example would definitely point out a problem (or at least an interesting statistical anomaly), but outside the scop
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Shouldn't be such a big difference if unqualified applications are distributed evenly among relevant minorities. But would be a really interesting research subject, too.
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OK, that work day is down the drain anyway. I declare my last post as "open season for anecdotal evidence". Keep the good stories comming.
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Increase in # employees 5,968, not 5,928 (Score:2)
Oops, I did slightly understate the denominator (couldn't cut-and-paste numbers), but results are close to same (actually a pinch worse). From the linked-to Google EEO-1 filing: (Current # Black Female Employees (250) - Prior # Black Female Employees (235)) / (Current Overall Total # Employees (32,527) - Prior Total # Employees (26,559)) = 35 / 5,968 = 0.0058646113, or about 0.59%.
All techies will be H1Bs soon enough (Score:2)
At google and every other big tech company.
Diversity Drones are asking the wrong question.... (Score:2)
The question should not be "What percentage of your IT staff is African American?".
The question should be "What percentage of qualified African American IT applicants were hired?".
If Google is only getting 5 AA applicants for every 100 white applicants (or asian, or whatever...) then it puts Google in a tough position. Should they be expected to hire all 5 AA applicants, regardless of merit, to give the appearance of "evening things out"? Even if they do hire all 5 then someone will still complain that only
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Well your resume looks very good, unfortunately to maintain our SJW quota we're looking for a paraplegic transsexual from Romania.
Yes, that is exactly how minority groups end up with all the best jobs.
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Unless you'd care to present your genetic research which demonstrates that black women are rendered incapable of understanding math and science by some inherent biological or genetic flaw?
I would only need to present the number of black women taking the courses needed for the field compared to the total. It doesn't matter if they are perfectly capably of doing the job if they were educated in it if they aren't getting the education in the right fields. However, the stats show they avoid engineering degrees like the plague and swarm sociology like it were the second coming.
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So the holy grail of diversity is finding a mentally handicapped, physically disabled, lesbian black woman with an impoverished background?
No, the holy grail of diveresity is that if that person can actually do the job as well as anyone else then there is no reason to exclude her from consideration.