Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.
I used to believe that, when I was younger, new to Google and basically naive about these things.
Having had direct experience of how it works over the years, absolutely, incompetent women are more likely to get through the process. You can't constantly, for years, tell everyone that reducing the proportion of men is a critical priority and not have people bend the rules and make exceptions as a consequence. They're only doing what they're told to.
If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male
Likely the proportion would be higher. But yes, it's hard to change the demographics in areas where hard skills are measurable and where women don't really want to be anyway. Probably that's why feminists are moving on from targeting engineering roles: their current thing is leadership positions where less tangible "soft" skills are more important, comp is higher (the ultimate goal) and it's easier to manipulate the recruiting process. Hence laws enforcing that women be allocated board seats, things like that.
And there lots of men have witnessed women being put into management roles in software they were completely unsuited for, over and over. I think most guys have a story like that by now.
I don't think that people care about how it is actually done, we are all in an in-demand sector. People care about the hypocrisy of companies saying, we only hire the smartest! We don't discriminate! Quickly turning around and saying we need to be more diverse (which is a good thing) so let's throw those CVs out.
And it's always HR... they aren't impacted at all with ok:ish hires.
