Thursday, May 5, 2016

Lowering the bar

How diversity advocates lower the bar to employ women and minorities at the expense of more qualified white men:
How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

Back in November, Twitter VP of Engineering Alex Roetter got into some hot water by allegedly saying, “diversity is important, but we won’t lower the bar.” As someone who works in a similar situation at a large social network in San Francisco, I understand where Alex is coming from.

My company has recently formed a committee to improve how we hire. At first I was optimistic that we could improve our hiring process to ensure that we are hiring the best people for the job. Unfortunately my optimism was misplaced as the committee seems to be a place for diversity advocates to push hard to codify changes to lower the bar for members of certain favored groups.

Here is a list of all the bar lowering changes I’ve seen people push for at my company:






This is why SJW-converged organizations are doomed in the medium-to-long-term. Their specified objective is to hire lower-quality, less-experienced, and less-capable employees.


#7139 said...

In other words, reality is racist and sexist. Got it.

Vespasian said...

Perhaps #2 could be used against them. As fewer men enter college than women, it would lead that fewer men will hold degrees than women, and could be used as justification for hiring more men.

Aeoli Pera said...

Alex Roetter got into some hot water by allegedly saying...

Interesting use of the word "allegedly". OJ Simpson "allegedly" murdered his wife, Bill Clinton "allegedly" raped dozens of women, and Alex Roetter "allegedly" said that diversity hires are less qualified.

VFM #7634 said...


But only if they have a vagina and/or significant basal epidermal melanin.

Thomas Davidsmeier said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Richard Stone said...

#2 is legit, but not for the reason given.

Rational Thinker said...

This is why my response to people who ask "Imagine if the world was run by women" is always: We would still be living in caves.

Myles said...


You're mistakenly assuming SJWs follow their own logic and rules.

tz said...

Technically this is not just lowering the bar, it is considering everyone who manages to get over it as a gold-medal class winner.

Actually if it is a limbo contest, lowering the bar is the right thing to do.

Something that apparently does work (H/T the mostly converged is Auditioning, which I think dates to DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware, but in this case you make a conscious decision to contract them at a real rate for so many months to see how well they do, both technically and fitting in with the team.

(rant: How old is Peopleware? Mythical Man Month was older, but still I see people being added to overdue projects; we never learn).

In the full article you can tell - they have problems with their product in the Japanese market. Hire someone fully familiar with Japanese writing in all its forms, particularly a Japanese? No! We have too many Asians already!

The thing with Google and Apple is they can be converged but make enough money for now to create a potemkin village engineering department that is slow, does maintenance, is carefully checked, and then create generally hidden skunk-works to do the real work and heavy lifting. The problems will happen when they downsize and so they have to choose between the converged sloths and the excellent cheetahs. Think Yahoo! (low energy like Jeb!)

tz said...

@Rational Thinker - No, not caves, we wouldn't be living at all. The Survivor shows when doing the test show we would have gone extinct in short order.

But just as there are Gamma men, there are women who have enough reason to overcome and become fully equal and rational (and decide on Motherhood, or alternately that the Career will consume everything including her soul).

The problem is today's society allows women to remain as toddlers who get their way mainly by throwing tantrums, but after MGTOW, their tantrums have no meaningful audience. A daycare without a nanny.

tz said...

Another HT from Coding Horror: Approaching your Dev Team
Trump's "You're Fired" is far more effective and efficient.
The ebook is free but wants contact info, but when I want a laugh.

Mr. Bee said...

This kind of thing has been going on any industry that gets contracts from the government for 30 years. The defense industry in particular has been affirmative action hiring engineers, promoting them faster and giving them more money to the point where white males, at least where I work, are less than 30 percent of the engineering workforce - but 95 percent of the elite technical experts. What's happening now (white privilege!) Is an attempt to force the same system into the private sector.

FSK said...

Re auditioning:

That rules out anyone who already has a job. I'm going to quit my job for a 2-8 week tryout contract?

Rex Little said...

#2 is legit, but not for the reason given.

I agree completely. I spent 36 years working as an electrical engineer, and my degree was in EE, yet my college education was almost completely irrelevant to what I did at work. Companies would do themselves a service by looking for people who are bright and capable of learning on the job, but who haven't graduated college for one reason or another.

kurt9 said...

You will all note that Twitter's stock price has been declining for some time.

SQT said...

This has been going on for years. The only way to get fired at my husband's job is by being a white male. About 15-years-ago a group of women who were laid off for underperforming (sales oriented job) sued for discrimination and the company settled rather than chance any negative publicity. Since then hiring has been very stagnant and I'm sure that's part of the reason why.

One Fat Oz Guy said...

Being an Electrical Engineer who was let go last month over two women who did not know anything and two Asians who do, but will only work the minimum hours, I'm waiting for the s#%t to hit the fan at my old place of work.
One of the women actively avoided making decisions but cried sexism at every perceived offense.
Every job I applied for after had the "we're a diversity hire company", which usually meant I didn't get an interview on my name alone.

liberranter said...

@One Fat Oz Guy

Believe me, I feel your pain. Although I haven't been given the pinkslip yet,my employers have gotten into the habit of assigning me, one of the few middle-aged white males remaining, to projects "managed" (if you can stretch the term far enough to call it that) by affirmative action types (one man-hating hetero feminist, one man-hating lesbian feminist, and one millennial black male who is clearly out of his depth). It is almost as if I'm being subjected to the "AA test" to see how many incompetent preferred minorities I'll inevitably clash with before they can make an airtight case for letting me go.

I've developed a theory, born of experience and observation. Excellence, or even reasonable competence, is no longer a priority because it no longer has to be. Technologically and socioeconomically, the western world has reached a sort of plateau. We've advanced to the point where everyone is just comfortable enough to have had all of their essential needs met, plus a degree of leisure room built into the system where there is no longer any external incentive to excel. The fact that unqualified people are being placed into more and more jobs shows that the importance of these jobs is either grossly overstated or has greatly diminished with the advancement in technology of the last few decades.

Unfortunately, the trend cannot continue, as the laws of economics, like those of physics, are immutable. They can only be ignored for so long before consequences manifest themselves. Once progress grinds to a halt, when the forward momentum ceases, regression eventually begins. Those "preferred minorities" placed in key positions that once demanded actual ability lack the capability to reverse the decline and it is unlikely that sufficient numbers of white males wil either be available to rescue civilization, or be inclined to want to do so.. Eventually socioeconomic collapse occurs after the inevitable technological collapse.

Huggums said...

Absolutely insane. What could any honest person possibly expect to happen? Even if your goal is to eliminate and marginalize white people from every high level position, is this even a practical way to go about it? Of course not. What are they going for? What's the end game? Do they really believe it or have the SJWs simply calcified their hearts by constantly lying to themselves?

chris said...

For all those white men Engineers and Programmers here complaining about cultmarxists/SJW policies giving undeserved rewards to minorities and women, my response would be,

pick up and leave, and take your skills with you. Go to Russia. Russia is the main competitor to America/the SJW West. I'm sure they would love your engineering skills, and they are a white country to boot, full of plenty of beautiful white women where you can have a family (no SJW laws or Courts or even culture there either).

If all competent white men did this, then America would experience a brain drain as a result of their SJW policies and would either realise their error and change their ways or America/ the SJW West would lose more and more power relaive to Russia until they are finally replaced by the superior anti SJW Russian culture.

Really the only thing stopping you is learning Russian. And if you can memorise all the mathematical facts you needed in order to become an Engineer, you should be able to memorise all the words you need to become proficient in speaking Russian.

VFM #7634 said...

Working-age able-bodied white American men aren't desired as employees in their homeland yet no foreign country will take us and let us put our skills to use. If we were European we could find work in other EU countries. If Asian, in the Gulf states or North America. If Latin American, in the USA of course. But if you're white American, you're up sh!t creek.

AFAIK Russia only accepts us as English teachers since they don't want their own engineers thrown out of work.

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