The idea that companies don't hire based on merit is ludicrous. Every person we hire spends 8 hours being interviewed and quizzed. This was true at my last five companies. Two of them had more than 20k employees and four were U.S. owned and based. Even before my post-college career, it was clear that hiring was based either on ability or potential. If you aren't being hired based on ability then you are applying for a job that requires none.
Semiconductor, specifically design but hiring process is pretty similar for the other technical positions as well. I have not been involved in hiring administrative or other nontechnical staff.
There definitely used to be a tech industry exception - or rather the tech industry was flagrantly violating CR hiring rules and getting away with it because it was so new and shiny and prestigious. Google's famous interview questions were thinly disguised IQ tests and other companies had similar practices. Of course the result was massive disparate impact. However, Griggs vs Duke Power Co does allow employers to use tests narrowly tailored for the job, and possibly EEOC bureaucrats could not figure out how to argue that coding-based tests like Google's are not legitimate or that hiring good software engineers is not a compelling enough business interest to set aside disparate impact requirements.
I don't think the EEOC is being disingenuous when they think a company is discriminating. Their perspective is coming from the side that sees actual discrimination, often hidden behind convenient stories. Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
That said, I don't think the EEOC has an actual problem with merit tests like Google having someone write code for a coding job. They have a real problem with mission-creep tests (like requiring that coding test for lower level employees) or anything that might be a hidden way to discriminate.
I think they also have some true-believer "woke" types that really think that any disparate impact is hidden discrimination, but for legal reasons this is significantly less prevalent than in other "woke-adjacent" contexts.
> Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
...which was quite adequately remedied at the appeals court level. The plaintiffs got everything they could have reasonably wanted. But the EEOC didn't want to fix the problem they were ostensibly suing over; they wanted to use it as a premise to push their social agenda, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and we ended up with one of the most damaging rulings in history.
Also, if tech hiring is biased in any direction then it's primarily away from white people (and towards Asian/Indian people) so EEOC doesn't care so much.
The old Microsoft and Google questions (The IQ Brain Teasers) were bad interview questions. The switch to normal testing of skills that happened in the industry was better.
At least at that time, nothing like that kind of IQ Brain Teaser questions were ever used. It was pretty much 100% coding tasks.
The fact that the exact same questions were attributed to Microsoft earlier makes me pretty sure this is a viral myth that spreads because it's good story, not because it's true.
Oh, did you mean questions like "how many marbles fit inside a whale"? I meant exactly the coding quiz. Develop a priority heap on a blackboard, leetcode problems using twisted dynamic programming and other tricks, stuff like that. Speaking from experience, in practical software work you need to solve problems like that maybe once a year. Most often you just get an existing solution from the virtual shelf, or at worst implement an algorithm from a book.
I heard (at Samsung, from people fleeing Intel) that Samsung was still meritocratic in this way / the nepotism was all pro-Korean nationals in a way that totally ignored American racial categories, but that Intel had 'gone woke' in its hiring / promotion.
Because at the American fab, approximately none of the local hiring pool is Koreans, and so it's only relevant if you're trying to get very high up the corporate ladder.
Also because if some foreign-headquartered companies discriminate in favor of the nationality of their origin, that results in discrimination at various different directions at different companies, and (even if there is more such discrimination in favor of some groups than others, which is likely) yet other companies, such as domestic ones, practice no such discrimination, and (if they weren't incentivized to practice affirmation either) they would provide employment opportunities to whoever isn't favored at any of the foreign companies. That has much less overall effect on anyone's employment prospects than government-incentivized affirmative action all in favor of the same groups everywhere.
Ah, yes, the infallible Hanania “golden gut”. The anti-empiricism in the book is the tell-he is just writing another propaganda piece, designed to advance his priors. Sort of like Chris Rico, without the smarts or glibness.
Seems like one of those phenomena like Bullshit Jobs where everyone is certain it's happening, just not in their own job or anything they have direct experience with, but someone out there definitely
You can believe me or not, but I just got an email from someone in a pretty important field saying that affirmative actions and de facto quotas definitely happen there but they're too scared to post it publicly even under a pseudonym.
I used to work for a major DoD agency where the recruiters bragged about how many minority candidates they were able to attract … way beyond what would be proportionate.
There were obvious pressure and incentives to do well at that, and merely having the proportionate minimum would make one less competitive for promotions and such. Gotta exceed the standard!
There’s a whole little industry of recruiting companies that specialize in helping minority candidates land great tech jobs by finding and coaching them (veterans are also a legal minority here.) The companies really want qualified minorities for legal reasons if nothing else.
There are both material incentives and ideological motivations in play here for both any given org’s leadership and HR types. But those aren’t entirely separate variables because they feed off each other.
Do you really find an email from a random person to be convincing here? The people I see complaining about affirmative action at work are people who see less experienced/competent minorities doing better than them. However, the reason they, themselves, don't excel tends to be some mix of laziness, unreliability and antisocial behaviors. Their vehemence in objecting to affirmative action seems to be mostly a means to downplay their own shortcomings.
I think you're doing the bulverizing thing again - I've heard this from lots of different people, including hiring directors, and the person who sent the email seemed pretty successful. See also all the comments on this post; the above comment seems like an outlier.
The pattern you describe would also be present if there was a real, widely-known problem, but the people with more social skills and better impulse control were being proportionately more careful not to admit it anywhere a snitch might overhear. What sort of experiment would effectively distinguish those hypotheses?
I can vouch for that happening at a small federal contractor. We were told to track race of applicants and present that information upon demand. The implications were clear, even if not spelled out, and we followed through on hiring racial minorities as much as we were able.
Oh it is definitely happening in my world where I provide subcontractor consulting for the federal government a lot (for larger firms) and get involved in a lot of hiring at cities and states and to some extent the federal civil service.
I don't doubt you that someone said that. But as it doesn't match my own experience I have to doubt whether that person is reporting accurately, or whether their experience reflects general prevalence
The general problem with arguments that there's a large group of people who would agree but aren't saying anything is that they're unfalsifiable. Like false consciousness or a silent majority. The same evidence can be equally explained by a small number of people reporting who assume their experience generalizes.
It's obviously hard to definitively prove one way or the other of people are unwilling to speak publicly. Maybe a sufficiently anonymized survey would get at that? I imagine someone must have done one on a relevant question given how much of a hot political topic it has been
Sadly, there's rampant gaslighting going on on the subject of political topics these days, *and also* a very broad diversity of personal experiences, so either one is plausible and consistent with the facts.
Doesn't reflect my experience in either government or private sector. Though I'm not in California, which is plausibly an outlier on this given wider cultural trends. Also just general random selection, it's hard to get a sense of prevalence when we're just trading n=1 anecdotes.
When you say you see it everywhere what specifically are you seeing? I
I'm seeing extremely obvious and not-at-all-veiled hints that females, blacks, and latinos should be prioritised for hiring.
I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.
If me hearing about this sort of thing in all those places still somehow is so distant from your own personal experience that you'd qualify it as bullshit that people are making up... I just don't know what to say.
Admittedly, it seems they all have an oversized presence in California, and if somehow this phenomenon is 90% CA, and you've somehow never spoken to anyone who's ever experienced CA, I could see your ignorance of this being a distant possibility. But I also struggle to think that something that's nearly ubiquitous in CA is completely absent in the rest of the USA.
You're missing a gigantic chunk of what's happening to something like 90% of the populace. You might consider getting some information from outside your filter bubble, or talking to someone in one of those megacorps.
It really seems weird to me that he didn’t list academia as another example where people are so dedicated to getting their first choice rather than the second choice that they are willing to pay hugely for it. The prevalence of H1B visas and major international recruitment is a major sign.
There is huge racial and gender bias towards favored groups (racial minorities except Asians; women) in hiring in academia. International hiring is a sign that it's a global market, not that it's cut-throat meritocracy.
There’s a lot of people that people like to classify as bullshit jobs. Many people think of their own job as bullshit. But this is just Marx’s phenomenon of alienation, happening to white collar jobs now rather than just blue collar ones. Marx noted that step 17 of the assembly line for widgets doesn’t feel meaningful, and the same is true for email 346 in the compliance process. But that’s just because assembly lines and compliance processes are designed to get the job done, not to make the people doing the job (or the people around them) understand that what they’re doing matters.
Only the top 0.1% of society can derive “meaning” from their work because they’re the only ones who have enough money to cover every need imaginable. The other 99.9% have to give up on meaning or find it in a different area, such as spirituality.
This was true for the past 10 thousand years and will stay true as long as we have something resembling our current society.
Rather than announce “Mission accomplished” and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.
Meanwhile, center-right judges, such as Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell in the 1978 Bakke decision, banned simple, obvious methods to promote now-privileged groups such as outright quotas in favor of more occluded “goals,” with enforcement largely by lawsuits, public and private. This had the unintended result of making affirmative action, almost always a political loser for Democrats, less politically salient. Hanania notes:
Only when civil rights law cannot stealthily prefer some groups over others does it do so openly.
Over time, Democrats figured out that it was in their interest for corporations to be uncertain what exactly the governments’ rules are regarding race and sex. This avoided making clear to voters, who, even in California remain strongly opposed to racial preferences, how much of a thumb the government was putting on the scale.
The government tries to keep the public confused. For example, Hanania writes:
"The “EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] Is the Law” poster that a firm is required to place in a conspicuous place informs its workers, among other things, that “Executive Order 11246, as amended, prohibits job discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment.” In other words, major American institutions are required to declare within the same sentence both that they do not discriminate and that they practice affirmative action…. To do business with the federal government, one must participate in rituals that both legitimize the goals of the state while hiding the nature of the project."
Likewise, while the press constantly reprints plaintiff attorney’s arguments alleging discrimination against blacks based on dubious disparate impact allegations, the media mostly only reports on institutionalized racial discrimination against whites every five or ten years when a college admissions lawsuit makes it to the Supreme Court. So it is easy for the average American to remain oblivious to how the system works.
I was about to reply: "This needs to be a top-level post somewhere." Then I noticed your name. You probably did make this a top-level post somewhere. If not, I can't wait to see your post on this topic in the near future!
My view also. Also, I work in civil service and the idea that hiring is not based on merit is laughable. In fact, I have never witnessed a racial preference occurring in action.
I’m in the federal civil service (US), and hiring is on merit. Ive never seen anyone hired who wasn’t deemed qualified at the point of hire. Not everyone works out, of course. Just like the private sector.
My former agency was extremely concerned about imbalances in its minority and gender status and took specific steps to try fixing it. Having recruiters disproportionately focus on hiring minorities is a form of racial preference.
Some parts of government, like the Foreign Service, still have a testing regime similar to the classic one. Of course, so did the FAA and that didn’t turn out well.
Getting rid of the civil service exams lowered the ability to select on people good at testing. Inasmuch as you believe the well-established correlations between standardized testing, general intelligence, and job performance, you’ll be proportionately concerned.
It’s usually not the case that any given employer blatantly jettisons merit. The problem being alleged is more subtle than that.
The more difficult but more defensible options include actively advertising where you believe black applicants may see it, and ensuring (sometimes explicitly as policy, usually not) that black applicants make it to the interview.
Legally and morally, that's much better than an actual quota system, but it will put pressure on everyone involved to nudge a qualified-but-perhaps-not-as-much candidate over someone else. Whether this is a problem depends on your perspective, but it appears Hanania thinks so.
IDK, going from "Civil Rights laws indirectly cause companies to inefficiently allocate HR money advertising at HBCU" to "Civil Rights legislation undermined hiring for merit" seems like a motte and bailey to me.
Both have absolutely happened, though. The more straightforward is just to tell your hiring managers to select black applicants, but that's often too obvious. The less obvious way is to try to influence the candidate pool, but it takes a lot more work and may not actually result in additional qualified black applicants, so some companies don't rest their laurels on that approach.
From my view from slightly outside the civil service this claim is just laughably silly at several federal departments. I don't know maybe you work at a different one, the federal government is a big place. But in my area the diversity hiring/promotion is extremely noticeable, to the extent that the small number of white male staff often end up leaving.
Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. I used to interview candidates for software engineering roles. Usually I would do an interview with another colleague, and at the end we'd give our manager a thumbs up or thumbs down for a candidate.
I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.
I can't really say I blame the manager. We were in a client-facing consultancy group, and some potential clients do like to see diversity on a team.
I think cases like this are much more common than either completely ignoring race or merit. Assuming your interview process matches my experience of software interviews, it's not that surprising that the manager might review the feedback with more detail especially since you use the awkward phrase "he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed" and if I were the hiring manager and that was in the feedback I'd definitely consider collecting more information before passing on that candidate (this is based on both existing EEOC law as well as my personal morality opinions on diversity).
I said 20k employees in my comment. One was 30K when I started but only 6k when I left (19 years later). The other was actually closer to 18K when I started and trimmed down to maybe 16k before it was acquired.
In most government service, your vita won't even be considered if you don't have the professional background required for the post. This is why some who work in civil service are annoyed when politicians make appointments based solely on one's racial or ethnic or otherwise privileged identity -- with little regard for qualifications.
President Biden has dissed the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding so-called 'affirmative action', and has made cabinet appointments clearly based on social identity, rather than competence. Whether his choice to hire staff whose identity is more important than their qualifications remains to be seen. But voters do notice.
Well, the big obvious one is the Secretary of Transportation, who had no relevant experience in transportation, and proved it by sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing while a significant transportation disaster contaminated an American town.
Ones who had relevant experience but notably proved their utter unfitness for the role during the past few years include the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, and the Attorney General.
I work for an engineering firm. It’s definitely not “8 hours of quizzing” for all STEM positions. That being said, you basically admit this anecdote is useless in your next comment, so not worth responding to the rest.
What kind of engineering? I didn't say that it was 8 hours of quizzing for all STEM positions. I said it was 8 hours of quizzing for all Semiconductor Engineering positions I have familiarity with. I did not say that anecdotes are useless. If your position is that "X is true everywhere" and I can show you that "X is not true here," then you should consider that "X is not, in fact true everywhere."
Scotts post suggested that it was no longer possible to hire based on merit. One counterfactual should make you question that claim. I was providing that. I do not believe that every company works the way I have described. The later post where I was objecting to anecdotes was objecting to using them establish a universal theory.
I think you haven't quite digested Scott's statement of Hanania's point the way it was intended. Neither is trying to say that nobody hires based on merit anymore. The point is that, since it can be construed as technically illegal to hire on merit, the regulators have a broad ability to prosecute anybody they want. So, in fact, everybody is still hiring based on merit, mostly, but also doing as much supposed woke signaling and under-the-table discrimination as they can, to try and avoid the prosecution that everybody is vulnerable to.
Showing that organizations still hire based on merit reinforces their point, rather than weakening it.
Unlike many of Scott's posts, I found it somewhat difficult to determine where he actually stands on the issue. He did say, "It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit." This was what I was objecting to. I think it is at least an overstatement and possibly completely false. We have had a substantial part of the commenters state that their company hires based on merit. Are all those companies just playing Russian roulette with enforcement? Seems unlikely. My _suspicion_ is that the same people who especially dislike DEI also distrust the government and are thus assuming that it is government and not corporate decisions that are driving many DEI hiring decisions. This isn't to say that enforcement has no effect. And, it is just a suspicion.
EEOC only filed 25 systemic discrimination suits last year (and 13 in 2022). This does not seem like much of a deterrent.
I think that the argument that representational concerns have eroded merit considerations for hiring on the margins in some fields is plausible, but I agree with you that the widespread persistence of test-like screening and interview processes in a lot of major industries at least somewhat undermines a lot of arguments about the scale of the impact of Griggs v Duke. Now, as Scott notes, a lot of firms that do this are in high revenue-per-employee industries and can afford to lawyer up, but it’s worth noting that their lucrativeness also increases the potential financial rewards for successful litigation. The fact that the sources of the biggest potential anti-discrimination lawsuit jackpots aren’t really worried about this should probably lead us to update.
How widespread? I've been in the tech industry for a good long time, and changed jobs rather frequently, as is standard practice in this industry, and not once have I been given an IQ-style test as a part of the interview process, even in the one sector that's been specifically called out as an outlier where these things allegedly do still happen. (Even more specific coding-skill tests are relatively rare in my experience.)
Weird-- literally every technical-flavored job I've ever applied for has made me do some sort of coding or math assessment-- sometimes an interview where you answer brainteasers, sometimes a timed programming test, sometimes a technical interview, sometimes a homework assignment which involves a more complex task. These don't necessarily look like an IQ-style test, but the tasks involved are generally difficult enough to impose an effective IQ floor in practice. (Intelligence alone isn't sufficient to get through, but it usually is necessary.) I work in finance, but my friends who work as software engineers at large tech companies universally report having gone through similar assessment processes-- at least as long as they're applying for individual contributor rather than management-level jobs.
This is because giving an IQ test would be a terrible way to interview software engineers compared to the normal suite of coding/design interviews (the current suite is not the best possible and I expect changes as both the technologies involved change and people game the interview system but I'd much rather have a random SWE conduct a random LEET code whiteboard problem than have a IQ test administered by the best tester when choosing which engineer to hire)
This seems like a valid take. Also, I know nothing about EEOC, but the fact that they only filed suit against 25 companies last year ( for systemic discrimination) suggests that fear of lawsuits may be overstated as the cause for the trends we are seeing.
I have had to do two "test like" things for a job ever. Once where they gave us a paid for two week training course and then tested everyone to see how much they learned (I think just about everyone passed), and once where it was literally a "can you use excel at a basic level" test.
How do you explain the fact that certain large teams at big American companies somehow wind up getting staffed entirely by Indians or Chinese?
Employment discrimination surely _is_ a thing, which various merit-based assessments attempt to lessen but do not eradicate. Plenty of places for bias, whether subconscious or overt, to sneak in.
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)
The idea that companies don't hire based on merit is ludicrous. Every person we hire spends 8 hours being interviewed and quizzed. This was true at my last five companies. Two of them had more than 20k employees and four were U.S. owned and based. Even before my post-college career, it was clear that hiring was based either on ability or potential. If you aren't being hired based on ability then you are applying for a job that requires none.
I don't think he's saying that no merit is involved, just that it doesn't go as far as it used to in some industries.
What industry are you in?
Semiconductor, specifically design but hiring process is pretty similar for the other technical positions as well. I have not been involved in hiring administrative or other nontechnical staff.
As I said in the post, I think there might be a tech industry exception, though I don't know how much semiconductors resemble other tech companies.
There definitely used to be a tech industry exception - or rather the tech industry was flagrantly violating CR hiring rules and getting away with it because it was so new and shiny and prestigious. Google's famous interview questions were thinly disguised IQ tests and other companies had similar practices. Of course the result was massive disparate impact. However, Griggs vs Duke Power Co does allow employers to use tests narrowly tailored for the job, and possibly EEOC bureaucrats could not figure out how to argue that coding-based tests like Google's are not legitimate or that hiring good software engineers is not a compelling enough business interest to set aside disparate impact requirements.
I don't think the EEOC is being disingenuous when they think a company is discriminating. Their perspective is coming from the side that sees actual discrimination, often hidden behind convenient stories. Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
That said, I don't think the EEOC has an actual problem with merit tests like Google having someone write code for a coding job. They have a real problem with mission-creep tests (like requiring that coding test for lower level employees) or anything that might be a hidden way to discriminate.
I think they also have some true-believer "woke" types that really think that any disparate impact is hidden discrimination, but for legal reasons this is significantly less prevalent than in other "woke-adjacent" contexts.
> Read Duke Power sometime in detail - there's no doubt that the company was flagrantly discriminating and lying about it.
...which was quite adequately remedied at the appeals court level. The plaintiffs got everything they could have reasonably wanted. But the EEOC didn't want to fix the problem they were ostensibly suing over; they wanted to use it as a premise to push their social agenda, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and we ended up with one of the most damaging rulings in history.
I wrote about this in some detail last year: https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-most-significant-case-youve-never
Also, if tech hiring is biased in any direction then it's primarily away from white people (and towards Asian/Indian people) so EEOC doesn't care so much.
Does it matter? The market fixes this over time, for reasons discussed above.
The old Microsoft and Google questions (The IQ Brain Teasers) were bad interview questions. The switch to normal testing of skills that happened in the industry was better.
Bad in what way?
As someone who worked at Google 2006-2009:
At least at that time, nothing like that kind of IQ Brain Teaser questions were ever used. It was pretty much 100% coding tasks.
The fact that the exact same questions were attributed to Microsoft earlier makes me pretty sure this is a viral myth that spreads because it's good story, not because it's true.
Oh, did you mean questions like "how many marbles fit inside a whale"? I meant exactly the coding quiz. Develop a priority heap on a blackboard, leetcode problems using twisted dynamic programming and other tricks, stuff like that. Speaking from experience, in practical software work you need to solve problems like that maybe once a year. Most often you just get an existing solution from the virtual shelf, or at worst implement an algorithm from a book.
I heard (at Samsung, from people fleeing Intel) that Samsung was still meritocratic in this way / the nepotism was all pro-Korean nationals in a way that totally ignored American racial categories, but that Intel had 'gone woke' in its hiring / promotion.
Because at the American fab, approximately none of the local hiring pool is Koreans, and so it's only relevant if you're trying to get very high up the corporate ladder.
Also because if some foreign-headquartered companies discriminate in favor of the nationality of their origin, that results in discrimination at various different directions at different companies, and (even if there is more such discrimination in favor of some groups than others, which is likely) yet other companies, such as domestic ones, practice no such discrimination, and (if they weren't incentivized to practice affirmation either) they would provide employment opportunities to whoever isn't favored at any of the foreign companies. That has much less overall effect on anyone's employment prospects than government-incentivized affirmative action all in favor of the same groups everywhere.
Ah, yes, the infallible Hanania “golden gut”. The anti-empiricism in the book is the tell-he is just writing another propaganda piece, designed to advance his priors. Sort of like Chris Rico, without the smarts or glibness.
Did you mean to write "Chris Rufo"?
Seems like one of those phenomena like Bullshit Jobs where everyone is certain it's happening, just not in their own job or anything they have direct experience with, but someone out there definitely
You can believe me or not, but I just got an email from someone in a pretty important field saying that affirmative actions and de facto quotas definitely happen there but they're too scared to post it publicly even under a pseudonym.
I used to work for a major DoD agency where the recruiters bragged about how many minority candidates they were able to attract … way beyond what would be proportionate.
There were obvious pressure and incentives to do well at that, and merely having the proportionate minimum would make one less competitive for promotions and such. Gotta exceed the standard!
There’s a whole little industry of recruiting companies that specialize in helping minority candidates land great tech jobs by finding and coaching them (veterans are also a legal minority here.) The companies really want qualified minorities for legal reasons if nothing else.
There are both material incentives and ideological motivations in play here for both any given org’s leadership and HR types. But those aren’t entirely separate variables because they feed off each other.
Do you really find an email from a random person to be convincing here? The people I see complaining about affirmative action at work are people who see less experienced/competent minorities doing better than them. However, the reason they, themselves, don't excel tends to be some mix of laziness, unreliability and antisocial behaviors. Their vehemence in objecting to affirmative action seems to be mostly a means to downplay their own shortcomings.
I think you're doing the bulverizing thing again - I've heard this from lots of different people, including hiring directors, and the person who sent the email seemed pretty successful. See also all the comments on this post; the above comment seems like an outlier.
The pattern you describe would also be present if there was a real, widely-known problem, but the people with more social skills and better impulse control were being proportionately more careful not to admit it anywhere a snitch might overhear. What sort of experiment would effectively distinguish those hypotheses?
I can vouch for that happening at a small federal contractor. We were told to track race of applicants and present that information upon demand. The implications were clear, even if not spelled out, and we followed through on hiring racial minorities as much as we were able.
Oh it is definitely happening in my world where I provide subcontractor consulting for the federal government a lot (for larger firms) and get involved in a lot of hiring at cities and states and to some extent the federal civil service.
I don't doubt you that someone said that. But as it doesn't match my own experience I have to doubt whether that person is reporting accurately, or whether their experience reflects general prevalence
The general problem with arguments that there's a large group of people who would agree but aren't saying anything is that they're unfalsifiable. Like false consciousness or a silent majority. The same evidence can be equally explained by a small number of people reporting who assume their experience generalizes.
It's obviously hard to definitively prove one way or the other of people are unwilling to speak publicly. Maybe a sufficiently anonymized survey would get at that? I imagine someone must have done one on a relevant question given how much of a hot political topic it has been
A corporate lawyer friend told me about layoffs at a big company.
It was made very clear that those let go had to conform to racial quotas.
...wat
That you don't see this all the time everywhere confuses me.
Everything Hanania wrote is direct experience of mine. I've lived in several of the United States including two major parts of CA.
That you go further and claim it's illusory just makes me question whether you're being sincere.
I have personally witnessed it in the software industry.
We all have. That's why when someone claims it doesn't exist, we all go:
...wat
Sadly, there's rampant gaslighting going on on the subject of political topics these days, *and also* a very broad diversity of personal experiences, so either one is plausible and consistent with the facts.
Doesn't reflect my experience in either government or private sector. Though I'm not in California, which is plausibly an outlier on this given wider cultural trends. Also just general random selection, it's hard to get a sense of prevalence when we're just trading n=1 anecdotes.
When you say you see it everywhere what specifically are you seeing? I
I'm seeing extremely obvious and not-at-all-veiled hints that females, blacks, and latinos should be prioritised for hiring.
I may be n=1 person, but I've heard that similar things are happening at Apple, Disney, Dreamworks, several large game studios (you would have heard of them if you were in the space, but I won't mention them, because that industry is small), Google, Facebook/Meta... I'll just stop there, but suffice it to say, this isn't everything.
If me hearing about this sort of thing in all those places still somehow is so distant from your own personal experience that you'd qualify it as bullshit that people are making up... I just don't know what to say.
Admittedly, it seems they all have an oversized presence in California, and if somehow this phenomenon is 90% CA, and you've somehow never spoken to anyone who's ever experienced CA, I could see your ignorance of this being a distant possibility. But I also struggle to think that something that's nearly ubiquitous in CA is completely absent in the rest of the USA.
You're missing a gigantic chunk of what's happening to something like 90% of the populace. You might consider getting some information from outside your filter bubble, or talking to someone in one of those megacorps.
It really seems weird to me that he didn’t list academia as another example where people are so dedicated to getting their first choice rather than the second choice that they are willing to pay hugely for it. The prevalence of H1B visas and major international recruitment is a major sign.
There is huge racial and gender bias towards favored groups (racial minorities except Asians; women) in hiring in academia. International hiring is a sign that it's a global market, not that it's cut-throat meritocracy.
I mean this stuff is clearly happening in education, where admissions criteria have been getting progressively mushier (although in recent months a few schools have started bringing the SAT back) and the FAA thing is real. You also have stuff like this going on (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/seattle-tests-prospective-fire-lieutenants-woke-ideology-critical-race-theory-report).
I've seen Bullshit Jobs happening before my eyes, too.
I can name multiple people with BS jobs in my direct vicinity. I'd be surprised if most people can't.
There’s a lot of people that people like to classify as bullshit jobs. Many people think of their own job as bullshit. But this is just Marx’s phenomenon of alienation, happening to white collar jobs now rather than just blue collar ones. Marx noted that step 17 of the assembly line for widgets doesn’t feel meaningful, and the same is true for email 346 in the compliance process. But that’s just because assembly lines and compliance processes are designed to get the job done, not to make the people doing the job (or the people around them) understand that what they’re doing matters.
Only the top 0.1% of society can derive “meaning” from their work because they’re the only ones who have enough money to cover every need imaginable. The other 99.9% have to give up on meaning or find it in a different area, such as spirituality.
This was true for the past 10 thousand years and will stay true as long as we have something resembling our current society.
Rather than announce “Mission accomplished” and go find other work, the triumphant forces of the civil rights bureaucracy became instead the scourge of ever more esoteric forms of discrimination, such as disparate impact, hostile environment due to mean speech, sexual harassment, and disability access. They increasingly intervened in the American workplace in favor of complaining members of protected groups, which cultivated a culture of complaint.
Meanwhile, center-right judges, such as Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell in the 1978 Bakke decision, banned simple, obvious methods to promote now-privileged groups such as outright quotas in favor of more occluded “goals,” with enforcement largely by lawsuits, public and private. This had the unintended result of making affirmative action, almost always a political loser for Democrats, less politically salient. Hanania notes:
Only when civil rights law cannot stealthily prefer some groups over others does it do so openly.
Over time, Democrats figured out that it was in their interest for corporations to be uncertain what exactly the governments’ rules are regarding race and sex. This avoided making clear to voters, who, even in California remain strongly opposed to racial preferences, how much of a thumb the government was putting on the scale.
The government tries to keep the public confused. For example, Hanania writes:
"The “EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] Is the Law” poster that a firm is required to place in a conspicuous place informs its workers, among other things, that “Executive Order 11246, as amended, prohibits job discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment.” In other words, major American institutions are required to declare within the same sentence both that they do not discriminate and that they practice affirmative action…. To do business with the federal government, one must participate in rituals that both legitimize the goals of the state while hiding the nature of the project."
Likewise, while the press constantly reprints plaintiff attorney’s arguments alleging discrimination against blacks based on dubious disparate impact allegations, the media mostly only reports on institutionalized racial discrimination against whites every five or ten years when a college admissions lawsuit makes it to the Supreme Court. So it is easy for the average American to remain oblivious to how the system works.
I was about to reply: "This needs to be a top-level post somewhere." Then I noticed your name. You probably did make this a top-level post somewhere. If not, I can't wait to see your post on this topic in the near future!
I wrote a long review of The Origins of Woke last year:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-business-of-diversity/
My view also. Also, I work in civil service and the idea that hiring is not based on merit is laughable. In fact, I have never witnessed a racial preference occurring in action.
I’m in the federal civil service (US), and hiring is on merit. Ive never seen anyone hired who wasn’t deemed qualified at the point of hire. Not everyone works out, of course. Just like the private sector.
I did and I have.
My former agency was extremely concerned about imbalances in its minority and gender status and took specific steps to try fixing it. Having recruiters disproportionately focus on hiring minorities is a form of racial preference.
Some parts of government, like the Foreign Service, still have a testing regime similar to the classic one. Of course, so did the FAA and that didn’t turn out well.
Getting rid of the civil service exams lowered the ability to select on people good at testing. Inasmuch as you believe the well-established correlations between standardized testing, general intelligence, and job performance, you’ll be proportionately concerned.
It’s usually not the case that any given employer blatantly jettisons merit. The problem being alleged is more subtle than that.
The more difficult but more defensible options include actively advertising where you believe black applicants may see it, and ensuring (sometimes explicitly as policy, usually not) that black applicants make it to the interview.
Legally and morally, that's much better than an actual quota system, but it will put pressure on everyone involved to nudge a qualified-but-perhaps-not-as-much candidate over someone else. Whether this is a problem depends on your perspective, but it appears Hanania thinks so.
IDK, going from "Civil Rights laws indirectly cause companies to inefficiently allocate HR money advertising at HBCU" to "Civil Rights legislation undermined hiring for merit" seems like a motte and bailey to me.
Both have absolutely happened, though. The more straightforward is just to tell your hiring managers to select black applicants, but that's often too obvious. The less obvious way is to try to influence the candidate pool, but it takes a lot more work and may not actually result in additional qualified black applicants, so some companies don't rest their laurels on that approach.
From my view from slightly outside the civil service this claim is just laughably silly at several federal departments. I don't know maybe you work at a different one, the federal government is a big place. But in my area the diversity hiring/promotion is extremely noticeable, to the extent that the small number of white male staff often end up leaving.
Merit is important, but other factors are clearly taken into consideration. I used to interview candidates for software engineering roles. Usually I would do an interview with another colleague, and at the end we'd give our manager a thumbs up or thumbs down for a candidate.
I recall one case where we interviewed a guy from an underrepresented group, and both of us gave a thumbs down. The next week I was surprised to see him sitting at a desk because he'd been hired. I approached the manager just to make sure there wasn't a miscommunication in our interview feedback, and he just sort of shrugged it off and said he thought the guy was a good fit. It wasn't a meritless hire--he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed.
I can't really say I blame the manager. We were in a client-facing consultancy group, and some potential clients do like to see diversity on a team.
I think cases like this are much more common than either completely ignoring race or merit. Assuming your interview process matches my experience of software interviews, it's not that surprising that the manager might review the feedback with more detail especially since you use the awkward phrase "he was qualified, just not as impressive as some other folks we'd interviewed" and if I were the hiring manager and that was in the feedback I'd definitely consider collecting more information before passing on that candidate (this is based on both existing EEOC law as well as my personal morality opinions on diversity).
How big is the company?
I said 20k employees in my comment. One was 30K when I started but only 6k when I left (19 years later). The other was actually closer to 18K when I started and trimmed down to maybe 16k before it was acquired.
In most government service, your vita won't even be considered if you don't have the professional background required for the post. This is why some who work in civil service are annoyed when politicians make appointments based solely on one's racial or ethnic or otherwise privileged identity -- with little regard for qualifications.
President Biden has dissed the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding so-called 'affirmative action', and has made cabinet appointments clearly based on social identity, rather than competence. Whether his choice to hire staff whose identity is more important than their qualifications remains to be seen. But voters do notice.
Which cabinet appointments didn’t seem qualified for their job?
Well, the big obvious one is the Secretary of Transportation, who had no relevant experience in transportation, and proved it by sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing while a significant transportation disaster contaminated an American town.
Ones who had relevant experience but notably proved their utter unfitness for the role during the past few years include the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security, and the Attorney General.
I work for an engineering firm. It’s definitely not “8 hours of quizzing” for all STEM positions. That being said, you basically admit this anecdote is useless in your next comment, so not worth responding to the rest.
What kind of engineering? I didn't say that it was 8 hours of quizzing for all STEM positions. I said it was 8 hours of quizzing for all Semiconductor Engineering positions I have familiarity with. I did not say that anecdotes are useless. If your position is that "X is true everywhere" and I can show you that "X is not true here," then you should consider that "X is not, in fact true everywhere."
Scotts post suggested that it was no longer possible to hire based on merit. One counterfactual should make you question that claim. I was providing that. I do not believe that every company works the way I have described. The later post where I was objecting to anecdotes was objecting to using them establish a universal theory.
I think you haven't quite digested Scott's statement of Hanania's point the way it was intended. Neither is trying to say that nobody hires based on merit anymore. The point is that, since it can be construed as technically illegal to hire on merit, the regulators have a broad ability to prosecute anybody they want. So, in fact, everybody is still hiring based on merit, mostly, but also doing as much supposed woke signaling and under-the-table discrimination as they can, to try and avoid the prosecution that everybody is vulnerable to.
Showing that organizations still hire based on merit reinforces their point, rather than weakening it.
Unlike many of Scott's posts, I found it somewhat difficult to determine where he actually stands on the issue. He did say, "It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit." This was what I was objecting to. I think it is at least an overstatement and possibly completely false. We have had a substantial part of the commenters state that their company hires based on merit. Are all those companies just playing Russian roulette with enforcement? Seems unlikely. My _suspicion_ is that the same people who especially dislike DEI also distrust the government and are thus assuming that it is government and not corporate decisions that are driving many DEI hiring decisions. This isn't to say that enforcement has no effect. And, it is just a suspicion.
EEOC only filed 25 systemic discrimination suits last year (and 13 in 2022). This does not seem like much of a deterrent.
US only dropped two nukes on Japan ever. This does not seem like much of a deterrent.
I think that the argument that representational concerns have eroded merit considerations for hiring on the margins in some fields is plausible, but I agree with you that the widespread persistence of test-like screening and interview processes in a lot of major industries at least somewhat undermines a lot of arguments about the scale of the impact of Griggs v Duke. Now, as Scott notes, a lot of firms that do this are in high revenue-per-employee industries and can afford to lawyer up, but it’s worth noting that their lucrativeness also increases the potential financial rewards for successful litigation. The fact that the sources of the biggest potential anti-discrimination lawsuit jackpots aren’t really worried about this should probably lead us to update.
How widespread? I've been in the tech industry for a good long time, and changed jobs rather frequently, as is standard practice in this industry, and not once have I been given an IQ-style test as a part of the interview process, even in the one sector that's been specifically called out as an outlier where these things allegedly do still happen. (Even more specific coding-skill tests are relatively rare in my experience.)
I've had to do programming exercises, but nothing like the standardized tests I took before applying to college.
Weird-- literally every technical-flavored job I've ever applied for has made me do some sort of coding or math assessment-- sometimes an interview where you answer brainteasers, sometimes a timed programming test, sometimes a technical interview, sometimes a homework assignment which involves a more complex task. These don't necessarily look like an IQ-style test, but the tasks involved are generally difficult enough to impose an effective IQ floor in practice. (Intelligence alone isn't sufficient to get through, but it usually is necessary.) I work in finance, but my friends who work as software engineers at large tech companies universally report having gone through similar assessment processes-- at least as long as they're applying for individual contributor rather than management-level jobs.
Who mentioned IQ tests?
This is because giving an IQ test would be a terrible way to interview software engineers compared to the normal suite of coding/design interviews (the current suite is not the best possible and I expect changes as both the technologies involved change and people game the interview system but I'd much rather have a random SWE conduct a random LEET code whiteboard problem than have a IQ test administered by the best tester when choosing which engineer to hire)
This seems like a valid take. Also, I know nothing about EEOC, but the fact that they only filed suit against 25 companies last year ( for systemic discrimination) suggests that fear of lawsuits may be overstated as the cause for the trends we are seeing.
I think you may be missing how deterrence works.
I have had to do two "test like" things for a job ever. Once where they gave us a paid for two week training course and then tested everyone to see how much they learned (I think just about everyone passed), and once where it was literally a "can you use excel at a basic level" test.
That is it.
How do you explain the fact that certain large teams at big American companies somehow wind up getting staffed entirely by Indians or Chinese?
Employment discrimination surely _is_ a thing, which various merit-based assessments attempt to lessen but do not eradicate. Plenty of places for bias, whether subconscious or overt, to sneak in.
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)
Employment discrimination is a thing. On the other hand, Fully staffing Chinese and/or Indians would violate DEI. You are supposed to mimic the makeup of the general population and having enough protected groups is usually the concern. Neither East Indian nor Chinese are protected. Like my company (which hires outsized although still less than 5% from both groups), they are hired because they are cheap and capable of doing the job (which in our case involves an EE degree and solid technical skills)