I can tell you that about 90% of candidates I speak to are male, about 80% are white, Eastern European, or South & East Asian. The demographics of the hiring pool are very much aligned with the demographics of the workforce.

In terms of "cultural" fit, you're right. I do a lot of work with Hindu Indians and Muslim Pakistanis, because I have an enormous "cultural" overlap with them as a white male from Southern California. Oh, wait, I actually hired them because they were excellent engineers.

I think what people are saying is that they don't believe you when you say that hiring in IT is only utilitarian. You think you are being utilitarian, but instead you are leaning on your biases. In the same way the person in the article said that they hired women because there are some jobs they only feel comfortable giving to women. This is a utilitarian perspective -- women are better at X, I want X to be done well, I will give X to a woman. In the article this was described as "grunt work".

Someone might think, "I need to hire an ivy league graduate to do the algorithms work" and feel they are being utilitarian. After all, there must be some value in the incredible price tag of that education.

For me, that's still feeling a bit iffy, but much more reasonable. The more we discriminate, the more discrimination we embrace. At what point is discrimination good and at what point is it bad?

There are clearly protected classes where we are not legally allowed to discriminate. There are classes where we can discriminate, but shouldn't. And there are classes where we must discriminate, otherwise we would just be hiring random people off the street.

And even though I completely agree with everything you wrote, I think there is value in reflecting on what it means to be discriminatory and what focusing on utility might bring us. While I think it is very much beside the point of your post (which I thought was excellent), there is a bit of hubris to gloss over the issue of hiring for utility without examining how this is problematic.

Before you ask -- a different model may be not to hire for utility, but rather to consider hiring as a responsibility you take on. Your responsibility is to help that person be successful. Are you able to do it it? That, in my experience, is a far better view than hiring for utility.

The problem I have with the allegation of "leaning on biases" is that it is impossible to disprove. You can never get out from under that allegation no matter how hard you try! NO ONE is without bias, no one is completely objective because we make decisions based on past experience and there's no way to create past experiences that are identical for everyone. I know from past traumas in my own life that I have heavy biases towards lots of things and I will never betray those because to do so is to deny how much pain was caused. That is life and it's time we grew up and got over it already.

I think the key is not to try to avoid biases (which sounds like strange advice, I admit). Discrimination is how to separate bad from good. Everyone also has preferences which help us select good (for us) results. We have experience which guides us to choices that have been successful in the past. All of that is bias -- it influences our choices and not all of it is bad.

It isn't bias, per se, that is problematic. What creates difficulty are the consequences for poor choices. What we colloquially call "discrimination" is really someone being blind (or uncaring) to the results of their own poor judgement. All poor judgement is harmful, but there are some classes that we single out for special treatment in society.

There are many examples in society where we make "allowances" based on discrimination. We might accept smaller women fire fighters than we do men. We might accept people from certain religions to wear slightly different uniforms. We might allow people with a physical impairment to have an aide for taking a test. By and large, these are choices that are meant to create good consequences, but they are discriminatory nonetheless. Indeed, it is societal bias which determines which allowances are considered to have good consequences and which are not (I expect that some people would question or reject one or two of my points, for example).

Of course, not everyone is good at making judgements. Additionally we sometimes have cultural biases which encourage us to make certain poor judgements. It's important to realise that all poor judgement is harmful. Honestly, it doesn't matter if you make my life a misery because of my skin colour or because you don't like the way I talk. It doesn't even matter if you do it simply because you are unskillful and don't realise (or care) that you are doing it.

But you can't make it illegal to be a jerk. Everybody would be in jail at one time in their life. Because there are some classes of problems that are pervasive in society, we can address the problem there. We can address specific problems with large classes of sufferers. The other potential benefit is that hopefully people will start to realise that their behaviour is undesirable. So if they think, "I can't use sexual innuendo as a way to politically lock out a female rival", they might start realising that politically locking out any rival is not really a beneficial strategy.

I say might. I'm not really expecting that much, but one can live in hope ;-)

Sorry for the book. I feel frustrated in the same way that I imagine you do. I just think that we need to help people steer away from the "thought crime" of bias and start getting them to focus on the "real crime" of harassment. If we complain too much about "bias" (or the allegation of bias), I think we risk people getting stuck on that point and never getting around to discussing how we learn to act better to each other.

None of what you said counters the comment you're replying to.