Yeah I look at it from a top level. Say that in the tech industry, 20% (totally made up number BTW) of your workers are black. It would be possible for some companies to have >20% of their workforce be black, but if you look at the top employers (GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, AAPL, etc), there would be physically impossible for them to hire >20% black workers because there are simply not enough of them out there in the broader workforce.
The solution here is to drive more black people into the tech field, in order to raise that 20% figure that would then get reflected among tech companies. This is something that an individual company cannot solve, even at Google or Apple scale, it would have to be at the government level and even that is a complete crapshoot.
> The solution here is to drive more black people into the tech field
What's funny is everyone will agree the pool of available candidates to choose from is incredibly small due to (among other things) issues in education, but those same people won't cut companies any slack if they don't hit a certain percentage of minority employees. It then becomes a game of brute forcing minorities into every part of society where they're under-represented, all at once -- because the "real fix" will take decades.
Agreed that DEI initiatives are hard, but the picture is a bit incomplete.
Quotas are the boogey/strawman that get trotted out when DEI initiatives are mentioned.
Quotas _must_ be filled, and this serves no one, not the companies doing the hiring (because there aren't enough qualified candidates, and hiring unqualified candidates is bad for business), nor the candidates themselves (because they didn't get hired on their own merits, and imposter syndrome).
Hiring _targets_, on the other hand, should be attained but can be missed due to lack of qualified candidates. When these misses occur, if the company is serious and capable about DEI initiatives, there's an investigation into why that is and if there's anything that can be done to remedy it, e.g. supporting educational/industrial pipelines, creating internship/apprenticeship programs or training opportunities for those changing careers, and so on.
If you hire the black candidate because you have a quota to fill. How is that morally different to hiring a white person just because they're white?
The only situation where I can think of quotas being a 'good' is to rectify a past self sustaining imbalance. If you made the case that the police are racist, because they're all white, therefore black people don't want to join, I would say that's a good candidate. But it isn't a good thing in and of itself, and shouldn't be an ongoing thing. Because it's corrosive in its own right.
I would rather Google/apple/Amazon put effort into education if they feel there's an issue. I would guess the issue is one of poverty rather than colour per se. Targeting and helping schools in poor areas would actually be helping where it mattered, giving people the best start in life whatever their colour, rather than someone who already had that start, but happens not to be white.
Quotas are a straw/boogeyman. Most companies have hiring targets. The difference is that quotas must be filled (which doesn't make business or social sense) whereas hiring targets are goals (which aren't required to be attained).
Except those "targets" are often tied to things like pay and promotion. That really blurs the line between "quota" and "target". For example Intel docked people's pay unless they hit their totally-not-a-quota target of 40% women and URM hires: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34679982
The solution here is to drive more black people into the tech field, in order to raise that 20% figure that would then get reflected among tech companies. This is something that an individual company cannot solve, even at Google or Apple scale, it would have to be at the government level and even that is a complete crapshoot.
TL;DR: Diversity quotas are hard.