[asuffield]

All I am free to say about this is that we look hard at diversity issues in hiring and put a lot of effort into eliminating them, and that I personally believe we do a better job of stamping this out than any other company I have worked for in my career. I suspect, but cannot prove, that our process gives better diversity results than most of the ideas which are "popular" on HN at present.

I do some work on this personally. I'm just not allowed to discuss the details at present.

(The reasons why I'm not allowed to discuss this are due to tedious bureaucracy, not anything interesting. I have tried to get that changed, but it would require more effort than I am willing to expend on a problem that will go away in time.)

[joewee]

I perform a lot of data analysis and separately I've been involved in hiring decisions. I've seen two common issues: 1) humans make decisions based on statistically insignificant sample sizes 2) we are incapable of identifying our biases without data.

Even when large organization do look at the data, they are reluctant to share it, even internally. I applaud your efforts and hope are tracking the results.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

It shouldn't be very hard to do well in diversity, however you choose to define it.

For instance, say you notice your workforce is strongly biased against one population group, like female software engineers [1].

In that case:

a) Set a target for the proportion of female software engineers you want to hire.

b) Stop hiring male engineers at the point where hiring more would make you miss your female-engineer target.

c) Keep hiring only female engineers until you hit your target.

In principle, that might cause some concern among male engineers who could feel discriminated against.

In practice however, google and all other tech companies are already employing that process, except they do so informally (one hopes) and the groups they hire for are not the ones usually included in "diversity"- for instance, according to [1] 72% of tech workers at google are male, vs 50% ish in the general population.

Additionally, when it comes to google specifically, recruiters are supposed to actively go after "the best", so it shouldn't be a problem for that company in particular to go after the best female people.

In fact, that google targets its hires and yet it ends up with a strong bias towards a specific kind of engineer is a very good example of how not to do diversity.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/20/9179853/tech-diversity-sco...

[vilmosi]

>>> when it comes to google specifically, recruiters are supposed to actively go after "the best", so it shouldn't be a problem for that company in particular to go after the best female people.

The problem with your idea is that it's illegal and a law suit waiting to happen.

You simply can't hire someone because of their sex.

[alexeiz]

What's the point of such forced diversity? Diversity of gender or race doesn't promote diversity of ideas.