Microsoft probed by US government over aim to double black staff numbers

Any affirmative action is by definition discriminating on the basis of race. If you want the best candidate for the job, you don't look at race, you look at their abilities to do the job. Period. Any bias towards hiring one race implies bias against hiring from other races. Why is it okay to have almost no Asian players in the NBA while a small percentage of black people in tech is a big fuss? It is all hypocrisy.

&gt; &quot;We are clear that the law prohibits us from discriminating on the basis of race,&quot; the firm&#x27;s lawyer Dev Stahlkopf blogged.<p>Pardon my ignorance... But I thought in the case of affirmative action, discrimination based on race was legal?<p>Reading on...<p>&gt; It has informed the tech giant that while companies can set affirmative action goals to boost employment of &quot;minorities and women&quot;, they &quot;must not engage in discriminatory practices&quot; to achieve them.<p>How is an &quot;affirmative action goal&quot; different from just a diversity goal? How can you achieve affirmative action if you can&#x27;t discriminate on the basis of race?

Microsoft (and every other tech company) = Jared in this scene <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Dek5HtNdIHY?t=18" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Dek5HtNdIHY?t=18</a>

Perhaps this is a cynical view, but as someone who spent a thousands of hours in MS offices throughout the world, they could hit this target essentially overnight if they brought many of the vendor employees on staff as FTE&#x27;s. Microsoft outsources an astonishing amount of their support roles to external companies and many (perhaps even most) of those employees are minorities. If MS brought some of those jobs in house and worked on creating opportunities for those employees to learn and advance their careers they I think they it could eventually yield some very positive results for all involved.

I&#x27;ve worked at places where I ended up realizing I was hired mainly because I&#x27;m black. Not that I&#x27;m not a good engineer, mind you, but some of these places just wanted a &quot;token black guy&quot; or they actually had quotas as part of some social responsibility&#x2F;inclusiveness BS.<p>You know what? I absolutely hated those places and didn&#x27;t last long there. I definitely don&#x27;t want to be excluded because of how I look, but I don&#x27;t want to be hired or treated differently because of it either. I&#x27;m much happier at my current employer where there is no such BS and black people are a very small minority, which is absolutely fine since we are also a very small minority of CS students where I live.<p>Also on the topic of education - don&#x27;t create quotas or special programs for people with a certain appearance or ethnic background. Instead, create programs for the disadvantaged.

At my work we simply do not have qualified black people applying very often. At all. We have one single black person in the 50ish management roles because that is all that we could hire. Our problem isn&#x27;t with them being rejected or discrimination during interviews, but simply that we cannot hire a person who doesn&#x27;t apply for an open position. Black people are not applying to our company. Does that make us non equal opportunity or discriminating for hiring 98% non-black workers?

Probably a lot of people with their fingers in the air until November.

This is clearly an explicitly discriminatory practice that uses race as a factor. No one should be supporting Microsoft in this endeavor.

Discrimination is discrimination no matter how you package it. It has been tried everywhere since probably first humans in a manner which “fit” opinions prevalent during particular times.

Not commenting about the merits of this specific probe, but here is a thought. African Americans are 13% of the US Population. Isn&#x27;t it reasonable to aspire to have at least 13% of African American staff (proportionally adjusted per state&#x2F;city populations)? This is a rhetoric question, what causes that to not be the case.<p>The article doesn&#x27;t mention the numbers but when a particular race is disproportionately less represented in corporations than its general population equivalent, then clearly there&#x27;s a broken piece somewhere in the equation.<p>I&#x27;m not even taking a political stance on this one. This is just the mathematical sound interpretation. If every person should have the same opportunities then the corporate populations should be a proxy of the general population proportions.