What’s the actual argument here? I just see a lot of handwaving but no actual argument or point?
Local to the job, anyway, is the answer, and the rest is a bunch of obfuscatory nonsense. If the job is in the UK, but can be teleworked, then you have the UK as your base. It’s not discriminatory to pick within a country (it may become that way if we ever get teleporters or something but that’s a way out). If it’s based in London and needs physical presence, well London is your area.
As for “black people are diverse”, etc., uh-huh, but the problem is that black people as a group are discriminated against in a pretty flat way. Racism doesn’t care if you’re from London, Nigeria, Jamaica, or South Africa. So the main thing of importance is to give black candidates at least a solid chance.
Ironically the only issue I can see here is an inverse one. In the UK, Indian people actually on average, per working person, earn a bit more than white people. Whereas Pakistani people, on average, earn less than white people. So you have some complex discrimination issues there. But if slightly further advantage Indian people with your BAME process, as long you’re getting other BAME candidates, you’re probably doing good overall.
You mean admitting what already happens? That’s how it works right now. Hiring is absolutely not based on merit. It’s based on a lot of factors, but generally speaking how “culturally appropriate” you are to a firm is a major one. I say this having clearly benefited from this.
They definitely do not. That you’re saying this is bizarre, given the scandals that emerged with Google’s hiring AI recently, where it was found to be hideously racist, to the point where they had to shut it down. Do you follow the news on this sort of subject at all?
No. They poach people who are already successful. This is very different to “hiring the best” in a more genuine way. If you only hire people who are already successful, you will strongly bias your pool towards people who will succeed at what you want them to. That does not mean that they were actually the best candidate, at all.
Further, both companies have had issues with their hiring practices of a fairly serious nature. Google has been particularly bad.
“I guess we should try”.
Yeah exactly. This sort of defeatist “Welllll l guess it happens nothing we can really do except “try” I guess…!” attitude leads to exactly nothing meaningful happening. Put some Yoda on that. There is no try, there is only do.
Actually do something.
No, that’s bollocks, not a “documented sex difference”, that’s a cheap grade-school assumption based on “boys like trains, girls like dolls!” (which isn’t even really true - even to the degree it is, it’s like 60/40, not 90/10 like the games industry tends to be, or worse). If you look at the history of computer programming, rather than doing facile guesswork based on modern scenarios, you will see up until the late 1960s/1970s, it is quite sex-balanced, even perhaps female-biased. In the 1960s, there was huge push by the US government to re-educate male workers (specifically male workers - “breadwinners”) to do tech jobs which were to some extent perceived as “women’s work” or “unmanly”. Other countries had similar, if less aggressive efforts. And the effort was extremely successful - they got companies to actively put men into these positions, so that they could “support their families” and essentially kicked out women, because “men would support them”. This isn’t even that long ago. It still took a long, long time to get as gender-unbalanced as it did in the 1990s and 2000s. Even in the 1980s and earlier 1990s it was a lot better than it got to be later on.
Entrenched sexism is extremely well-documented and comes up all the time even now. Riot Games got into a lot of trouble for it and had to massively reform their workplace culture just recently.
It’s a lot less of an issue outside game dev now, but you still see companies keen to put women in certain positions but not others (leadership roles and management, sure - actual programming, regardless of how good they are? Less so).
So you missed the whole deal with Google having guy doing exactly this at some length for years, and finally, after it got particularly egregious, getting fired? And yet still getting a lot of support from colleagues, and bosses unwilling to outright condemn him. If you’ve ever worked in game dev, you know that there are people like this. If you haven’t, that kind of ignorant blind “let’s pretend everything is fine until someone loses an eye” knee-jerk defence is a huge part of perpetuating the problem. I’ve got firsthand experience of this stuff, too, note, so trying to tell me it doesn’t happen, when I’ve directly seen it happen, and heard countless similar accounts is pretty special