crumas2 said:
heruamon said:
@crumas2
One thing I've learn in organizational behavior training over the years...people tend to fall back on what's comfortable for them, and barring some mechanism to motive them to change their behavior, they will take the path of "least" resistance....that's just human nature. A perfect example is Xerox, which now has an African American female as the CEO (Ursala Burns), and she relieved a white female...that is really astounding, but it shouldn't be...it should be no big deal. My point is that if you look at the progression of Ms. Burns, and read about her path to getting to where she is...it was because of a corporate culture that valued diversity, and one that found that it was the right thing to do...not because of some AA laws on the books, but because it made great business sense. By promoting diversity as a corporate culture, you increase the pool of the talent pool you have to nurture into getting the long term benefits. So, in my corporate retreat this year, this topic was one of our focal points of discussion, and we pretty much when down the path of Xerox, in valuing the benefits of what diversity means, vice trying to answer the mail for some Federal mandates. The other thing it that somehow, diversity always seems to mean issues related to African Americans…as if Hispanics and Asian Americans, and even Women aren’t “minorities” in corporate America. |
I tend to be fairly color-blind in my hiring, both for permanent staff (well, as permanent as it gets these days) and for contractors... I let HR and our contracting vendor worry about balancing the selection pool, and I focus on hiring the best software engineers based on a number of dimensions, such as relevant experience, engineering background, ability to play well with others (there are several personality factors involved), etc. I feel it's my duty to the company to find the best people, not to artificially try and balance things racially, particularly considering I manage an information security engineering group, and the company is extremely reliant on the quality of our work to survive. And as I said before, I don't believe racial diversity always equates to a useful diversity in a business way. For example, I can't for the life of me figure out why a black or hispanic programmer who works on back-office software would have some sort of advantage, performance-wise, over a white programmer, or vice-versa, assuming they all have equivalent educational and work experience. I don't believe race gives anyone an inherit advantage over anyone else. I value relevant experience, general demeanor, and attention to detail over any sort of gender or racial leaning, etc. So I'm convinced after 30 years in my field that racial/gender balancing needs to be a tangental focus of hiring, and can never be placed above finding the "best" applicant if companies are to survive. Of course this is a generalization... having racial and gender diversity can be very useful in many other fields such as customer support, management, medicine, etc. I just don't see how it provides any kind of advantage in an engineering discipline.
The good news is that so far I've been able to find a very good mix of applicants across genders, races, etc. My best Web Services programmer so far is a black male, my best Java Servlets programmer is a white female, my best operational support engineer is a white female, my best Human Factors guy is a white male, etc. I don't see many applicants of oriental or hispanic descent, but that could be because I'm in the midwest and the percent of people of that heritage seems to be fairly low. Which brings up an interesting question... should a company be required to have a certain percentage minority employees, regardless of its geographical location? It would be much easier for a company to find highly qualified minority applicants in New York City, than in Holmes County, OH, for example (where a large percentage of the population is Amish). Personally, I feel quota systems are all flawed due to these kinds of factors.
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