Recent affirmative action court cases left me wondering about my own record in hiring. Frankly I’ve never given any thought to whether I am meeting a diversity quota or hiring in proportion to the population. It’s always been a ‘best person for the job’ situation for me. I am a product of the post civil rights movement and I don’t subscribe to racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes. I figure it is worth pointing all of this out in advance because, as I write this, I’ve yet to list and tabulate my hiring’s over the years to see if my hiring record (in practice) is as colorblind as I would expect it to be.
I’ve held a few different management positions where I was directly responsible for hiring and firing. These days I consult so I’m not actively involved in hiring. A few words about the hiring I’ve done: 1) All of my hiring is for network engineering positions 2) Some hires were permanent and some were for long term government contracts. Since the pool of workers in the tech industry in the Washington DC area does not mirror the general population statistics it would not be unreasonable to expect that 50 hires might be of 50 males or have under and over represented minorities.
By my calculations I’ve probably directly hired about 50 people. So let’s go to the tale of the tape:
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