Why are you assuming that I haven't hired anyone before? And any reasonable observer would agree that you are falsely equivocating the literacy tests of yester century with the modern day objective hiring practices of FAANG companies.
What distinction does a throwaway account make on an otherwise-anonymous online forum? No need to take discussion offline. Within the next decade, I am in confident the pendulum will swing the other way, and the people who are able to vocalize their opinions now in public will be the ones needing throwaway accounts.
Instead of dismissing the argument with a tawdry negated statement and a book suggestion, do you have some thoughts of your own with this matter, or at least some kind of summary?
Sure, and we are discussing the existence of racial discrimination in engineering hiring at top tech companies, not American history or South Asian culture. Asian immigrants on H1-B conducting coding tests as interviewers at FAANG did not involve themselves in the American Jim Crowe south, for example. It's saddening to see America's own past being used to justify discrimination in the present, even to people who aren't originally from the US.
You might not share the beliefs of others that are gainfully rallying behind diversity as a cause to justify penalizing some minority groups for "doing too well" and bolstering others (the literal definition of discrimination), but it IS happening -- and certainly more people than "nobody" are backing it, provoking my original statements. Someone had to put Prop 16 on the ballot, for example (which was thankfully voted against by a large margin of fellow CA Democrats).
No, coding tests are not the "literacy tests" you have described, and if they were, why would some minorities be performing even better than Caucasians on them?
Coding tests examine the type of work actually required to be done on the job (as coders), and they have been correlated with post-hire performance successfully. Someone who is not familiar with efficient data structures will not write scalable code and will end up creating a burden on their teammates during on-call, for example. Asking someone to solve an engineering problem with a provably correct answer is an objective test for hiring engineers, and I will have a difficult time continuing to engage with anyone who counteracts this basis of reality and truth.
When I was hired there were three coding test rounds and one interpersonal round. You might argue that the latter is where racial discrimination seeps in, as well as the recruiter outreach step itself, but somehow I am optimistic that a bunch of tolerant Californians have moved past applying a Literacy Test here already by hiring a majority immigrant / minority workforce. In my situation, my recruiter was also an Asian-American minority.
I know people in the Bay Area who spent two or three hours a day commuting before moving back out to the mid-west again for remote work. This is a typical commute from SF to Mountain View, for example.
Even people with degrees are locked out of those high paying or leadership roles. Meanwhile, others can make it just fine by learning a trade. As a junior engineer, I was making the same amount as my degree less counterparts working in the oil industry were.
There's this unfortunately prevailing attitude that you aren't successful in America if you aren't living in New York or San Francisco. It's absolutely bonkers. There are many other great places in this country besides those two cities.
Why not? My point is that it should! What percentage of the US population is from South / East Asia? How does it compare to the representation of others? If it's similar or less, and it still somehow doesn't "count," then we have a diversity problem.
While I certainly understand bad PR (a surprising number of people lack critical thinking skills), what is wrong or biased about hiring for coding positions based on merit-based performance on an objective coding test? Anybody regardless of background or group membership that passes will be hired, meaning it is fair and unbiased, by definition -- that is the diversity program, and if there is some lack of objectivity, that is what needs to be addressed. If that is not the case, then yes, I agree with you, the hiring process would be biased.
This is a contrarian take that may get me downvoted and unfairly labeled, but I encourage critical thinking instead:
I've struggled with people telling me that these FAANG companies have "diversity problems," as a person of color myself. A majority of software engineers are female and male immigrants from East Asia and South Asia. These population centers are some of the most diverse regions of the world. The engineers who have been hired by preparing for and passing these companies' selective merit based coding tests had to overcome adverse conditions in their home countries as well, including extreme poverty, starvation, and totalitarian regimes.
Why do they not count toward diversity, to some white and white-adjacent critics? What message are we sending to people who are ethnic minorities from certain groups who earned their spots through merit and have also been targeted in recent newsworthy attacks, just as others have, when we make these kinds of accusations? What does a non problematic ethnic composition look like? What are these companies doing right toward some minority groups and wrong towards others?