> How could anyone be against the very concept of setting or codifying expectations?

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

Yes, it sounds good on paper, but in my experience, a code of conduct is used as a veil of legitimacy on top of partisan decisions.

Even when a CoC exists, it is ignored or twisted to use as a justification for kicking someone out of a project based on their unconventional sex life (BDSM): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13935918

A frequently used code of conduct is explicitly used to invalidate others complaints. For example the Open Code of Conduct says: "We will not act on complaints regarding: ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’" I'm Asian and I hate that discrimination against Asians is still institutionalized behavior (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16497551) and codes of conduct seek to silence any complaints.

We have situations like Opalgate where someone not associated with a project, dug through a contributors old tweets to find one instance where he said something politically contentious about trans people to try to get him kicked off the project. A code of conduct would encourage more behavior like this: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

In my own experience, I was participating in a computer science organization which had a code of conduct. A speaker went on stage and gave passionate speech about how Fascists are invading our city, and we need to resist and join Antifa.

I wrote an email to the organizer explaining how this goes against their code of conduct which states that they are to be inclusive to all people no matter their beliefs. I mentioned that the group the speaker was encouraging people to join would likely be engaging in violence against peaceful protesters. Of course it turned out as expected: https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/901910682030882816 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/2...

But of course the organizer ignores behavior that breaks the code of conduct as long as it suits them.

You can find the brief here: https://www.scribd.com/document/372751852/Wilberg-v-Google-R...

A screenshot from an email says (p28): "Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only continue with L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups"

At least for phone interviews, the bias doesn't exist or goes the other way:

From http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... :

After running the experiment, we ended up with some rather surprising results. Contrary to what we expected (and probably contrary to what you expected as well!), masking gender had no effect on interview performance with respect to any of the scoring criteria (would advance to next round, technical ability, problem solving ability). If anything, we started to notice some trends in the opposite direction of what we expected: for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.

Good point. We need more research on this.

"he was calling out undocumented and transgendered students by name; not just talking about what he dislikes about these groups"

This was a controversial case where a transgender person gave her name while she was on Milwaukee's TMJ4 News to talk about how she felt she was discriminated against.

She was kicked out of the sauna. She said "At this point I don't look very female", and that her drivers license reflects a male identity and she hadn't started hormone therapy.

Milo disagrees with her view and included a screenshot of that news clip to give some context of what someone's reaction may be when encountering her in an private setting.

I would not call taking a critical stance on a controversial news topic as violence. If you are undecided, it's not hard to find the presentation on YouTube and make your own judgement about what he said instead of reading other people's opinion.

It's not doxxing unless you believe TMJ4 also doxxed her when it displayed her name as she told her side of the story.

For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of him. But I like to correct the record when other people give a misleading spin.

Yes, the coding challenges and interviews are the same. But they are graded differently even before the packet is seen by the hiring committee.

I've talked to many interviewers at my company, and many people talk about how they bump up the score of "diversity candidates" even though management says that we don't lower the bar. This is talked about openly.

I've only seen this at a Bay Area company. Other companies I have worked at have had a very strong stance against using race or gender as a basis of making hiring decisions.

It's also the case that the hiring pipelines can be biased in other ways. For instance if a woman fails a phone screen she may be given a second phone screen anyway, or even on-sites anyway, "just in case", whereas the man would have been canned at the first stage. Was definitely told this was happening by recruiters in the past.

Interesting. We have done that for people of any gender in grad programs before when hiring for targeted roles suited for their specialty, but not to my knowledge for candidates by gender.

I'm not sure why we should assume that lowering the bar is even in the best interest of the women/minorities.

If I was hired for a position I that I wasn't qualified enough to get myself, I would likely not perform as well, and I'd become disheartened, and would be more likely to quit.

For example, race-based affirmative action for law school admits students to schools they otherwise wouldn't get admitted to. Although it is a good gesture, the students end up much worse off because they pass the bar at a much lower rate and end up with student loans they can't afford.

Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist. To eliminate structural sexism, we must remove hiring criteria that favors men. Let's tell our sourcers that looking for relevant industry experience is not important.

For school I've been told that we should look if they have a degree or not, and not consider which institution. This explicitly considers all colleges the same.

Every point in the post is an actual suggestion made on how to improve diversity. Obviously not all the suggestions have been implemented, but I'm afraid the committee for improving hiring might do just that.

It's awfully easy to make technically-true but misrepresentative statements about this stuff, though.

For example, someone might argue that actively seeking out recent graduates of coding bootcamps when hiring for junior positions will help find a more diverse set of candidates. And there's truth here: bootcamps tend to have better gender and somewhat-better racial balance than university CS departments or existing tech shops, and bootcamp graduates on average seem to be pretty good (there are selection and maturity and self-motivation effects there which raise quality compared to the typical randomly-chosen bunch os CVs).

But it's technically correct, so long as you don't mind completely misleading connotations, to describe that approach as "to eliminate racism and sexism, hire people who don't have CS degrees and don't have industry experience" and imply it's "lowering the bar".

And anecdotally, when people make claims like the ones in the OP article, my experience is that it's almost always the case that someone is carefully choosing how they describe things in order to be technically truthful while maliciously misrepresenting the situation in a way that suits their personal axe-grinding.

>Their argument typically looks like this: Choosing a candidate pool that is 80+% men (>X years experience as a developer) is inherently sexist.

I'm not saying this wasn't said, but I've literally never encountered this before today. Perhaps your company is approaching diversity the wrong way for the wrong reasons.

To the point about the rankings of the colleges, it may matter less than you think. If you look at salary numbers over the lifetime of graduates, the ranking of their undergraduate has only a small effect for STEM majors. If you consider salary to be at least somewhat tethered to performance, this suggests that in the long run, the institution doesn't matter as much as the individual. There's some research around this, but I don't recall the authors at the moment. And, perhaps I'm wrong. I can imagine the differences are greater for recent grads.

Again, if they're all "actual suggestions," that seem strange to me. I never see or hear those suggestions, and they seem to run counter to the way people who are writing thoughtfully about tech diversity approach the issue.

Sorry that it's hard to believe. My CEO was previously an activist so the people brought in to talk are definitely outside what you would expect in corporate America.

Unfortunately it's hard to find sources for this except for internal videos.

A quote from one of the trainers that gets at the same idea:

"In sourcing diverse candidates, it is imperative to avoid criteria that are inherently biased, like using school selectivity and previous company as a proxy for performance or as a signal that someone is a strong candidate.

Instead of focusing on previous companies or schools, which limits the talent pool, you should focus on relevant skills. For example, if Google is typically used as a signal that someone is a good candidate, push yourselves and your clients to articulate why that's the case. Is it the experience working at a large company that's useful?"

There's nothing in that quote that goes anywhere near "assum[ing] that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education".