Google’s hiring pool is determined by who is qualified for their business. I can accept - indeed, I heartily endorse - the idea that, all things being equal, you should select for diversity once you reach a certain level of ability and qualification. But diversity shouldn’t ever be an excuse for relaxing qualifications; doing so endangers the competitiveness of the company and the longevity of the project anyway.
Frankly, as other posters have noted, Google seems to be somewhat ahead of the curve given their available hiring pool of EE and CS people for technical staff, and that’s good. It’s also true that the way to do things is to start to address this far before you get to the point before you might be hired by Google - something neither this site nor the linked article even try to address. This is not an either-or situation, this is an all-of-the-above situation.
But that’s not what this article was about. What this article was about was anti-Google concern trolling with out-of-context numbers, when as @catgrin noted, they appear to be doing much better than the default. And that still bothers the hell out of me.
I was thrown by your reference to “elite colleges” – that made me think of selective hiring pools, and there’s no excuse for selecting pools with lousy levels of differentiation. I’d like to upvote your well-documented response more than once.
You’re crazy. That doesn’t follow at all. Why would you feel guilty about something that isn’t your fault?
Lots of people are capable of simultaneously holding two thoughts in their heads:
“I have it better than a lot of other people because of my gender/sexual orientation/color of my skin.”
“It’s not actually my fault that I am this gender/sexual orientation/skin color.”
Feeling guilty is different from taking responsibility for helping to improve the situation which is what those durn PC liberals are actually advocating for in most cases, at least as far as I can tell.
I think @mallyboon was responding the the trolly response from above in which the commentator noted that he is white and don’t feel guilty fer nuthin’ dadgummit!
I have sympathy for that sort of trolly response, honestly. I don’t want to dismiss the understandable outrage of people who have become aware of the lasting damage that racism and sexism and various other -isms have done and continue to do. But when you’ve heard people tell you a few thousand times that the color of your skin makes you a villain, and that anything you’ve tried to do is insufficient, and that nothing you have was earned, you get tired of it, even if you’re in a privileged group and really ought to just suck it up.
As a member of a mixed race family I consider myself to be an equal opportunity offender - I’m willing to call anybody out, and sometimes I do. When I hear a black man insist that it’s impossible for a member of an oppressed ethnic group to be racist, I’ll laugh in his face. When I hear a rich white man insist that he could have been just as successful with the same amount of effort even if he’d been born in an inner-city ghetto, I laugh in his face too.
Sometimes you have to laugh, since the alternative is to weep for our people.
