News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I'm not familiar with the example you're referencing. Was it stated this person was only hired for their pronouns or just due to a diversity initiative?
There are people who reveal themselves to be unqualified and incompetent through all types of hiring practices all the time. That does not invalidate the methodology entirely because none is perfect. If it was doing so consistently in a way that can be documented, that'd be different. But if that were the case, for profit companies would drop it on their own without external pressure.
The problem is it doesn't matter what you call it. Affirmative action, DEI, whatever. The people who complain about DEI will complain about that new term. I'm not sure there's a neutral way to describe that if two candidates are about equal, you'll pick the one from a disadvantaged/underrepresented background. Even if you said you're looking for unique perspectives, if it's not a white man who ends up making the mistake, some people will complain that unique perspectives are anti white and racist and hurting the country.
So is having that policy even worth it? I would argue doing blind remote interviews without knowing the persons race and background would be almost as effective without giving ammunition to hate-mongers.
It's not like you have roughly equal candidates for a position often in the first place. And it could also help against nepotism and other unfair practices.
The problem is the size of the gulf. If we were talking about, for instance, there only being 5% more white male executives compared to their share of the population, then compete blindness would more or less erase the problem given time.
When the gulf is large, the time period to erase that even with completely background-agnostic selection in any direction is many generations. It doesn't sound fair to say, "OK, the racist stuff was wrong. We stopped (we didn't totally). Your great-great-great grandchildren will see parity! Stop complaining." You're basically saying nobody alive will ever see something approaching equity.
Part of DEI is reassessing the metrics used to evaluate candidates. People often unconsciously will be more forgiving of shortcomings in people they identify with. So they can certainly write candidate evaluations that make one candidate seem clearly better than the other. But jobs are rarely so simple that you can list out and check boxes on every possible pro or con, and it's easy to miss the pros if you aren't looking for them.
Also, I will say having been on the hiring side for many positions, there are definitely plenty of cases where a couple candidates are roughly equal. That literally happened in the last position we filled. Maybe we're outliers.
Why? Am I missing something? I would expect it to be completely gone in a generation, once every non-blind hire was replaced.
Part of the problem with the hypothetical is not everyone in one of these positions is truly hired. I mean if we completely got rid of inherited wealth so nobody could pass on their company to their kids, that'd certainly accelerate the timeline.
Background-agnostic will also still miss the knock-on effects. If someone goes to a high quality college with a name because their rich parents can afford it that leads to an attractive internship that lands them a career job, on paper they got their current job because they had good qualifications.
Or, if the company has a history of only white men in positions of power and goes background-agnostic with zero outreach to marginalized communities, you're not going to get a lot of applicants from there. They may not even know the company exists, while every kid of those powerful white men sure do, and they know which skills are most necessary to look good in a job interview.
DEI is not just handing out roles to unqualified people because they're not white men. It's about access, outreach, thinking differently, being welcoming. It's complex. It's certainly easy to rabble rouse over because dumb people don't want to take the time to understand complicated things. I don't believe we should abandon nuance because some people refuse to attempt to understand it. They'll just do that with the next thing until everything is dumb and simple.
I was speaking very specifically about DEI hiring policies, not the rest.
As I mentioned in a different thread, I think outreach or even something of the kind "let's try to get x people from different backgrounds to an interview" is a good idea. Just the final hiring decision should be background-agnostic.
Unless I am missing something, DEI as it currently exists also does not help here? It does not redistribute ownership of companies. And since it is not mandatory, it does not prevent nepotism from company owners either.
Isn't the issue there with the education system? Besides, if you need college education for a spot, you shouldn't hire a person incapable of doing the job. If it is not necessary, then requiring college is problem itself. You just push people to waste money and time getting over-educated for the position.
Those are all inseparable parts of a whole for DEI. Frankly, they are the most significant parts. Much of the time, companies have zero DEI policy at the hiring step. It's part of why the griping about it is confusing to me. Most of the companies I am familiar with are already where you seem to want them. But I guess they have to pretend to throw it out and call it something different to appease the complainers.
I never said it was a silver bullet. I explained why doing away with an effort like it and achieving a fantasy of background agnostic hiring will not solve the problem in a generation, since you were not sure why generations of institutional racism would go away with one generation of blind hiring practice.
There is also a very large difference between no college education and just not going to an exclusive institution, which is explicitly what my example was about. The people who go to state schools also get a quality college education believe it or not.
One can be critical and consider if the candidate has some attractive points because they are truly more capable or they just had better opportunities. More questioning beyond that may reveal that they truly are great or just had it easier. The problem is a lot of traditional hiring stops at taking things at face value.