I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1].
What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert?
In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way.
Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company.
However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview.
Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.
I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society.
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
> To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together
The problem with DEI-as-implemented is that it often not only contains overt discrimination against a group (based on a protected class), but also prohibits any criticism of this. When someone is being discriminated against, not subtly or silently but explicitly, intentionally and overtly, and then punished for daring to complain about it, that leads to a lot of resentment (both by the people directly affected and by other members of the same class that observe both the discrimination and the silencing).
I'd say that resentment is justified; unfortunately, I suspect the backlash will primarily hit the people that the DEI policies were supposed to help, rather than the perpetrators of the discrimination.
I totally get it. A lot of our wounds are still open, too. I'm not here to tell people how to feel, I'm just advocating for deciding what is actually important to you and focusing all your attention on it until it is resolved. I happen to think that citizens of the US are worth more to each other as sometimes-conflicting allies than as complete adversaries, but that is for everyone to decide on their own.
> that leads to a lot of resentment (both by the people directly affected and by other members of the same class that observe both the discrimination and the silencing).
Agreed. This is the fundamental flaw of a lot of social theories borne out of academia when they land in the real world. They thrive in an academic world where hierarchy is bought into by students eagerly and are transplanted into a world where people must accept hierarchy to survive.
> I'd say that resentment is justified
Resentment never makes anything better, no matter how justified. Unfortunately.
That resentment drove people to vote for powers that forced FB and other bigtech to reduce the discriminations that were creating those resentments
I’d say it did make things better.
It wasn't the driving force of that at all, but I'll rephrase if you want to be pedantic. Resentment is rarely ever only channeled in good ways
DEI was a major Republican talking point. This is a thing well beyond Big Tech, like in other industries and in college admissions.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-...
White voters point to conversations about justice – for racial minorities, for the children of immigrants, for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, for transgender teenagers – and question why nobody ever talks about justice for them.
Few expect Trump to fix everything or believe him when he says he will. What they do believe is that the system is broken and corrupt, just as Trump says it is, and that a candidate who promises to tear it down and start again might just be on to something.
I think this goes in this direction. People don't care about "Meta's hiring policies" but they care about "wokeness", and news articles about the former lead to a perception that society has way too much of the latter and that it's a bad thing.
Isn't the point of affirmate action and some DEI measures to correct for centuries of systemic injustice? If so I don't see why groups that have benefited and reinforced their advantages for generations are now so easily offended by efforts to rebalance the scales.
I'm a white male who was raised comfortably middle class. The more folks I've met and the more history I've studied, it's pretty clear I was born with a huge number of advantages many of my peers didn't enjoy. I don't mind them getting preferential treatment, even if I'm more qualified once in a while.
So you are born in the middle class, then it is a class issue? Will Smiths son Jaden had it way better than you. The axis for where to look is just bizarre.
To really help, make sure the schools in poor areas are top notch, even better than upper class schools, and you will automatically fix the imbalance, without having to use equipment for darkness, dna samples to check the heritage and other clearly bizarre future paths.
> “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.” - Amílcar Cabral
>to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on.
I strongly agree, but sadly I think what you're saying here is probably almost incomprehensible to a broad swathe of middle-class white Americans, to whom being seen to be outwardly supportive of every DEI-ish cause has essentially become something like personal hygiene -- a thing you do perfunctorily and without thinking. It's just "what you do", "what a civilised person does", etc.
I'd be interested to hear more about what you have seen work and not work for economic development in these communities.
In our area, it is mostly resorts and casinos. Economic development gives everyone in the area jobs and opportunities. This has changed the picture from "Indians begging the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and local government for resources" to "we have a robust economic engine which is a critical part of the greater surrounding community, and which we'd mostly all like to succeed, but need to work through details on." It's not perfect and there's still conflict but it's much easier to work together in the latter situation.
> lack of educational resources
Could you please explain this part? I am not sure how you meant it. Is the main problem that the resources are not in the language of your tribe? Or is that a lack of educational resources regardless of language (e.g. simply not enough textbooks to give to each child)? What kind of educational resources do you wish you had?
Great questions. The kids mostly speak English as first language, and the schools are in English. With the exception of one huge twist, the schools have many educational difficulties you'll find in rural America generally—it's hard to get money for materials and curriculum, hard to recruit good teachers, hard to get students connected to people with practical advice/guidance, hard to get connected to opportunities, hard to reach escape velocity, and so on.
So, what's the twist? Tribal schools tend to be administrated by the federal government which makes problems extremely slow and hard to address. With some asterisks, the local elementary school was basically provisioned as a consequence of a federal treaty with the US Senate, and is/was mostly administered by a the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which rolls up into a federal department that until 2020ish, had never been run by a native person. All of these things make it very tricky to work with.
In spite of that, believe it or not, this is a massive improvement: until relatively recently, the school was a mandatory boarding trade school meant to teach kids to be (basically) English-only maids. This lead to a substantial percentage of the population being either illiterate or semi-literate, with no meaningful work experience, and with very very few opportunities that were not menial work. That inertia is extremely challenging to overcome, and the most natural place to try is the education system, which generally is simply not up to it.
I am stating these as a neutral facts on purpose. Regardless of how we got here, the hand is ours to play. Some of us got out and whether we succeed in the next generation depends on whether we can mobilize the community to productively take advantage of the resources we do have. This is why it's painful to me to hear about, e.g., land acknowledgements. If you have seen this pain firsthand I just do not see how that can be the #1 policy objective.
Land acknowledgements are easy. They're not a policy objective. Most DEI stuff, it's the result of being in a room where you're trying to get some real change accomplished and you just give up with the decisionmakers and say "OK, whatever, do nothing about this problem, but could you at least admit that the boarding schools were bad?" And they agree because it gets them out of the conversation. And no, it's not going to solve everything, it might not even solve anything, but it's nice to at least have some agreement on things that we definitely shouldn't do again, even if we have no idea how to fix the damage.
Interesting comment... I keep getting surprised by implicit first world assumptions on HN.
I'm not the OP but you could consider hypothetically as an example, would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?
Yes they would. It’s a beautiful part of the country. And I know great teachers that live there.
Unfortunately, our reservation is in central Oregon, which is less desirable. Even if we were not forced out of the ancestral homeland (what is now called the Columbia River Gorge), I'm not sure that would have been better. Although pretty, it is very out of the way, and people do not know that it is in the same class as the Yangtze (say).
in the US, schools in poor counties have less resources and less high quality teachers, and the children have much less of an education-focused environment in which they can flourish because of the parent's lack of resources
raise the economic level of the community, and education rises with it
Abbott districts in New Jersey are an obvious counterpoint to this. They are funded at levels equal to if not greater than the wealthiest districts in the state, despite being in some of the poorest parts of the state. I spite of this, over the four decades that Abbott districts have been in place, educational attainment gaps between them and the rest of the state have actually widened.
it's not just about the funding to the schools; it's about the economic situation of the parents and their ability to provide conditions where their children can thrive academically
that's why I said the best way to improve the education is to improve the economic conditions of the community
You make this to be a financial problem, but I think actually it is a cultural problem. Maybe lack of row models or not valuing education sufficiently. Having too much money can be a hinderance to educational motivation too.
Thank you for this wonderful message. As a fellow American, I can see you have our common interests at heart, as well as those of your tribe. That is a model for all of us.
Thank you for the response, I am very glad to hear that came through. I think these discussions tend to be fundamentally pessimistic towards the future and I really don't think they need to be. We control our destiny, and we can make it whatever we wish.
> "The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete"
So in my rural, predominantly white "Non DEI target" part of the country, this is the problem too except when these people apply to hundreds of jobs in software engineering they get crickets.
Well, just one data point for you (YMMV), but in "DEI" contexts I've been a part of, class diversity did actually come up somewhat regularly. I would not say corp diversity efforts I saw were all that successful in staffing that demographic—but they also weren't that successful in staffing minorities either. Mostly I think this reflects a consistent disconnect between what people wanted corp diversity efforts to be, and what they really were.
With all that said I do have a story of my own like this. In 2013 or so I wrote some stuff about spam detection and a Twitter engineer reached out about a job. I was an outgoing new grad from the University of Utah. When I got through with the loop the recruiter said, "How did you get here, we don't get many candidates from Utah." I still wonder what they wanted me to think when I heard that. What I actually felt was deeply out of place and uncomfortable. And it has affected every hiring process I've been apart of since.
I always bring this up to extremely woke people. I grew up at the poverty line in rural Minnesota with a blue collar truck driver father, divorced parents, in a trailer park. I don’t say this to get sympathy, I am proud I overcame it. But DEI and other race based (vs economically/financially based) affirmative action is just racism in a different outfit. Are the white people living below the poverty line all across America “privileged”? Certainly not, and as you said, on top of that they are immediately disqualified from so many types of aid. Imagine applying for college and seeing every other minority under the sun have scholarships specifically for them: women, black people, Asians, etc. White male from poverty? lol not you, you’re privileged. It’s ridiculous and it’s been going on since I was in college over 10 years ago.
Well, in the non-DEI world, we'll soon find out if the reason this happens was solely because of policies or if low educational attainment seeps into one's college, ones preparedness for a job, one's ability to get a job, etc.
but you do see the problem here. Its not the "DEI targets" that are at fault, its the systematic roll back of any protection for any poor community.
The same people that are saying "a new way forward" or "make america great again" failed to put any money to help. Your community doesn't produce anything that those funding congress care about, means that you get nothing.
I don't have to be invested in a cause to know that diversity in problem solving can be a key component to success hence global technology companies, or that promoting the ideas of equity and inclusion are things most humans can benefit from. DEI is not about change or solving a particular problem, it's about awareness of perspective and seeking to understand others.
To be clear I am not arguing for or against working with a bunch of people from totally different backgrounds, demographics, etc. I am arguing that, because we can't do everything we should decide what really matters to us, commit to it in the long term, and invest in it to the exclusion of the many other completely worthy causes. I know it sounds obvious, but at least for the communities I belong to, the industry committed shallowly and as a result accomplished very little.
It sounds like you're confusing affirmative action with DEI. A broader perspective benefits everyone. Different lived experiences contribute to a broader perspective. It's not about checking boxes or filling quotas and it's not specific to any particular group.
I’m happy to continue this conversation, but I think we’re not on the same page about what I am saying, which makes it hard to say how to proceed. To your specific point here, I’m not sure what this has to do with the discussion.
lol I have been saying similar things here in Minnesota for years. A lot of extremely liberal, wealthy progressives like to try to change landmarks around here to the native language version. I have no issue with this at face value. What I do have an issue with, is these people acting like this is doing anything to help the local Native American tribes. Why would they care if a lake they probably never visit and a flag they barely look at are changed? Especially when they weren’t even asking for it? What does that do at all to actually help our local Native communities struggling with the things you listed above? Absolutely nothing. It’s all a parade to make these people feel like they’re doing something while having to sacrifice absolutely nothing from their own lives. It’s honestly pathetic.
This is such a superficial take.
Oh I think we have very good empirical reasons to believe that’s not true. If this was indeed common knowledge, DEI as a movement would not be mired with the issues it has, specifically relating to performative activism and focus. If that’s not good enough for you, we can evaluate your claim further by surveying people and seeing if this advice is actually well-known. I encourage you to try this yourself, I think what you’ll find is that the vast majority of people who participate in these systems find what I’ve written surprising and unintuitive. And that’s one reason why this comment has 250 upvotes, which is more than almost all HN stories on a given day. YMMV, happy to hear about how this turns out for you.
I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
> This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
It's not about making users or bloggers happy. They don't care whether those people are "pissed" because they're just going to keep coming to stare at ads anyway. It was about keeping regulators disempowered by proactively tossing an agitated public some crumbs, but they don't need to worry about that for a while now. They're obviously just trying to keep their staffing strategies open and unshackled so that they can pursue whatever business objectives they see coming up in the next few years, and aren't at a disadvantage against competitors like Musk/X who resisted these kinds of things all along.
You can be unbiased in hiring and still end up with an unrepresentative mix, because underprepresented minorities don't even apply, and outreach is a good way to get to improve that without lowering your standards. That's the theory, at least, but yes, in practice it's really hard and most of these efforts end up performative, and staffing DEI bureaucracies with minorities is a good way to make the dismal diversity statistics look less bad if you don't look too closely at the breakdown by roles and salary bands.
These DEI programs were not primarily about outreach. Outreach existed way before DEI (e.g. interns, new grads, Grace Hopper conference, etc) and will continue to exist. DEI introduced improper - discriminatory - systems with quotas and heavy prioritization of specific groups of people.
I worked with a talented engineer who happened to be female and she was constantly behind because she had to attend each interview this small company did. Even she, a big supporter of these efforts, had to laugh about it.
The company i work for does not have any quota and neither does meta. There is no lowering of standards to hire somebody, just more effort to get wider application pool and outreach programs to schools. Also DEI is not just based on colour or ethnicity. There are other groups like mothers, neuro divergent people etc.
I know of a famous tech company where majority of workers were white, not even Asian and Indian people, who usually tend to over represent in tech. Around the BLM times they put in policy that they had to interview people of color. What most managers did was just interview people of color only to reject them, often judge the candidates too harshly to ensure no laws were broken. They often interviewed the same candidate for multiple positions, it was pretty obvious what they were doing. Obviously if they were investigated, nothing provable would ever come out. But stuff like that is pretty prevalent in tech.
Name and shame
I used to work at Microsoft and was on the other side, unfortunately I had the exact opposite experience. I interviewed and rejected a candidate (due to poor technical performance) then had the hiring manager contact me asking if I would reconsider as he needed to "increase DEI" footprint of his team. He wanted me to lower the bar for DEI reasons.
>Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock.
Well, if they were only interviewing you for performative box-checking reasons so they could hire the person they really wanted to hire then they would have a strong incentive to come across as somewhere you didn't want to work at. A disinterested interviewer is going to come across as not so bright. So this is hardly a fair assessment of the talent at Microsoft.
OTOH my professional interactions with Microsoft employees has always been positive. They've always been extremely capable and have gone the extra mile for me.
>Seriously, sell your microsoft stock
Alas, the stock's future performance is unlikely to be tied to any of that. Stock prices are barely attached to reality at all.
Okay but you can’t rely blame this on DEI or racism for sure. Plenty of people have had the same experience (myself included) with tons of companies and their hiring processes, it’s not like being given unfair conditions in interviews definitively amounts to racism or Microsoft being performatively woke. It happens to everyone. Even your anecdotal experience with the other companies being “better” is just that, random chance. I’ve had great interviews and bad ones, and 99% of the time all it comes down to is the mood of the interviewer and how much they like me personally.
What part of the org were you interviewing in?
> That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
Which is fine. But are they then suggesting that bias/etc was never a problem in the first place? Or, are they suggesting that DEI was not the solution, and if so, then why aren’t they suggesting a new solution?
There isn’t a satisfying answer here, to me anyway.
Aside: It appears the modern world is inflecting to OVERT (subversive) insular, erosion of fundamental values, with recent leveraging of power-structures to facilitate authoritarian thinking.
Not many people supported those "fundamental values" to begin with. The only people that wanted DEI policies were extremely loud liberals (that temporarily gained power by steamrolling the apathetic majority)
Now we are just seeing a return to reality.
To be clear, the thing that’s keeping them from being disadvantaged against Musk/X is cozying up to the Trump and the government. That’s going to make a much bigger difference in stock performance than any personnel impact of these changes.
Surely nothing can go wrong with authoritarians backed by trillionaires with social media in their hands, rapidly talking over power. I doubt Orwell could have predicted how the 2020s are turning out.
Hardly. Social media algorithms optimising for engagement is surely one of the main reasons we're in this hyper-polarised environment. So yes, their marketing said DEI, but their algos pushed far-right propaganda onto my screen.
Yes it's called boiling the frog + shifting the Overton window. Threatening to invade allies, or having an unelected halftrillionaire direct the government of the US and openly push for regime change across Western Europe (to give two examples from just the past week), would be unthinkable in 2015. Now it's just "oh there's this guy again, anyway what's on" / "mild political irritation".
So yes, you're right that it's a bad strategy to keep the alarmism on 11 for a decade (because this normalisation is what eventually happens), but wrong to think that it's not actually a true problem.
Turns out the whole "culture" thing was made up. You just do what is best for your business.
Which as it turns out, is also easier for employees to reason about and navigate.
Complex social games with rituals, vocabulary, etc are not, and act as class signaling mechanisms.
I don't see how very real differences in hiring practice are performative, but maybe that's just me.
It only seems bizarre if you didn't consider DEI programs to be largely symbolic corporate puffery in the first place. For all of the hate they received from some political spheres they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start, especially in larger companies.
DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.
> If you were a woman of color in tech you’ve been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are.
Is that why there are so many women of color software engineers in tech?
Wildly favorable treatment according to who, exactly? Or are you just being slightly subtle about your actual point here?
Explain it to me since I've been in the industry for quite some time here and I can't say I've seen what you're hinting at.
One of the solutions to the 'POC Pipeline Problem' was to overhire for non-technical roles that could be used to hit diversity goals.
This perfectly fits my old big tech EM who was totally incompetent and made life miserable for everyone on her team to the point where all but 2 people left (team of 12)
She also took back to back maternity leave throughout her time at the company, 3 times in a row, before leaving. Didn't even know it was possible to have kids that fast.
Conferences bend over backwards to have her speak. She has no clue what she is talking about but at least she gets to put it on her LinkedIn I guess.
I think there is a difference between diversity initiatives before 2020 and the DEI initiatives since 2020. As far as I can see, the latter is indeed is corporate puffery, where employees maybe join a half-hour seminar to talk about DEI every year, and perhaps there are new DEI groups for employees to discuss this. But the diversity hire initiative before 2020 was much more substantive that resulted in real meaningful changes to company demographics.
It was always puffery, just money was cheap before 2020. Engineering managers I worked with before then were gung ho to grow their head count, even if it meant hiring iffy engineers. After 2020, they got told new head count would be much more limited and hiring got a lot more selective.
I think it very much depends. When BLM happened, I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of discussions with executives from a variety of companies about diversity programs, and the things I heard...
"I thought after Obama was elected, that diversity was no longer a problem" "When we thought of diversity, we thought of it in terms of hiring more women" "We just don't get the applicants. There's nothing we can do."
The whole BLM thing really shook up their thinking and approach to diversity. Now, I think a bunch of them did really engage in "corporate puffery", but I did see a lot of cases where tangible changes were made to diversity programs.
...and then more recently they seem to be firing their entire DEI teams. :-(
Half hour? Try a two day video on lesson.
are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.
Ask a "woman of color" how much of this perceived advantage they actually enjoy in real life, especially from their perspective. You will be shocked the gap between what you presume and what the reality is.
Must be the worst in Universities where there is no reality check in the form of having to make a profit (well, maybe decades later when the reputation craters). I can't imagine trying to be a white man in the humanities today, you've got no chance.
> are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.
As a hiring manager in a fortune 100 who saw firsthand the delta between white men and everyone else in terms of the amount of justification required for hiring, promoting, and firing... yes, I do know this for a fact.
Mentioning that a poc is successful only because of their colour is harsh. Maybe they bring value and have qualities that other candidates did not have. DEI only widens the pipeline, no private company lowers their standards.
The "well" has been poisoned for all such groups of people, and DEI as a concept will eventually be held accountable to the harm it did to the groups they supposedly aimed to help. DEI as a concept was a leech to society, feeding on good will and injecting itself everywhere. To the detriment of both sides, and almost never to the detriment of actual prejudiced individuals.
Do you actually have experience with those programs?
Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.
As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.
That's just one example of what they do.
You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".
> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse".
And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.
there's still a "bamboo ceiling"
Even following the charitable interpretation, grouping a dozen of cultures with very different educational and economic opportunities into a single "asian" designation is a bizarre practice.
Years ago the software engineering field looked at this problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly proceeded to implement none of them.
Resumes need to be filtered to remove age, race, gender, name, even what school someone went to. Then ideally the first filtering round of an interview is also completely anonymous, a take home test or a video interview with camera off and a voice filter in place. Heck modern AI tools could even be used to remove accents.
HR has biases, those biases need to be removed.
It only takes a few moments of thinking to realize these techniques are a better way to hire all around. Nothing good can come from someone in HR looking at a resume and thinking "oh that isn't a college I recognize, next candidate."
> Do you actually have experience with those programs?
I was hiring manager at a "woke" (media) company during and after peak DEI.
The only policy of DEI that really affected me was that we had to have a "diverse slate of candidates" meaning, we had to interview at least one woman and (non asian) minority. This was actually a problem hiring engineers because we wouldn't be able to extend offers unless we'd satisfy the "diverse slate" meaning we'd miss out on candidates we wanted to hire while waiting for more people to interview. We could get exceptions but it'd be a fight with HR.
Asians didn't count as diverse because, in tech, they are not underrepresented. Basically "diverse" hires were women, AA, hispanic, etc.
Our company quietly walked back the "diverse slate" stuff years ago. In fact I think it was only in effect for like a year at the most.
The DEI stuff rolling out was highly performative. It wasn't in place for really long and quietly walked back. Now, the loud walking back of policies that probably haven't been enforced in years is also performative. In both instances it's companies responding to the political moment.
This was exactly my experience in a Big Tech company. I will say, a lasting (IMO good) effect we had was that hiring managers continued to consider diversity of candidates as a factor, but there was no gate in extending offers. Some hiring managers took this further and actually enforced diverse slate style hiring because they believed in it and others didn't care. It also meant that if a req was taking a long time to get filled, diverse slate just stopped being a factor.
If that's what DEI did, I think that getting rid of it is positive. It seems to just add performative and inefficient bureaucracy to an already typically slow and laborious task which is hiring people.
I am not even white by the way. I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. I am confident and proud of my skills, which I put a lot of effort to develop over decades. The color of my skin is as meaningless as the color of my shirts.
I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do.
That's exactly what was happening, and you can imagine the quality of work that resulted in. Now that the tide is turning, that hopefully won't be the case anymore.
One thing that started happening is that "diverse" candidates were aggressively head-hunted, for interviews. HR wasn't interested in hiring them, they just wanted to fill our their internal diversity quota and lubricate the hiring pipeline.
> consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
This sounds like a terminally online Twitter user's idea of how people do hiring.
It's also funny to consider when 70%+ of H1Bs are Indian men. Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.
This kind of rhetoric is why we're seeing a pendulum swing in the other direction instead of a sane middle ground. But at least it's finally becoming trite to make these claims with a straight face.
> Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.
Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers.
Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers.
I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.
The memo sent from on high (multiple years):
You must put up for dismissal 15% of your reports, of those 10% will be dismissed. You may not select any female, ethnic minority, lgbtq or disabled employees.
Seems to be very loosely based on Jack Welch's actual maxim that 10% of the workforce should be arbitrarily fired every year in the hope that this performative beating would improve morale, and maybe productivity too. This sort of arbitrariness was actually popular with much of the right at the time, but it wasn't white men that Welch was explaining just needed to overdeliver and outperform (and definitely not have kids) to succeed in the long run...
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This is terrible. It makes my blood boil just seeing this.
There are example of DEI not being racist but the one you provided is extremely racist.
Well "DEI vetos it" is obviously a problem. There's a discussion to be had around expanding candidate pools, expanding the pipeline, however you want to phrase it. These are good and noble goals but we're not talking about the pipeline we're talking about the candidates for a given role that we're hiring for right now.
No department should be vetoing any hire in a different department. Having an engineer veto a hire in the DEI department is ludicrous on its face, but no more ludicrous than having a DEI department tell the engineering team they're not "allowed" to hire a qualified applicant because of their race or gender.
Why is breadth of candidates defined by race and gender instead of experience and expertise. If the DEI department improves breadth of experience and expertise, by looking into alternative hiring streams, thats great, but people who defend DEI always approach it from the race and gender first which is a tell tale sign that race and gender are the primary objectives. And in my experience, when race and gender are the goals, formal and informal quotas appear.
It is odd that the expected inclusion was so specific, though. What about a 14 year old white male? Do they not satisfy: "consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like."?
I get it. I don't think a 14 year old looks suitable for a senior role either, but looking past that is the point. You never know what someone can offer.
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My company did (still does? Not sure) have a policy similar to that, even for IC roles.
We would frequently miss out on opportunities to hire qualified candidates because we couldn't make an offer until satisfying the interview quota. By the time we did, the candidate accepted another offer.
I think it's probably a net positive for underrepresented people (it's kind of hard to argue harm to white people when they just get other offers elsewhere that are good enough to accept without waiting), but I'm really not sure if it's a net positive for the company (pre-ipo, still trying to grow a lot).
> because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities.
I suppose this is true, if you believe that hitting the additional quota is entirely performative.
OTOH my company has better representation of women than anywhere else I've worked previously, so I don't think it is entirely performative.
Not commenting on the merits of AA in general, but multiple offers in hand in a timely manner is always better so losing out on that is definitely harmful.
What most companies do is interview primarily referred candidates, which is arguably the opposite of DEI. It favors people in the social networks of the population already employed by the hiring company. And most people have social networks that look very similar to themselves in terms of race, gender, and economic class. Is that fair? It doesn’t seem fair.
My fringe belief is that giving an edge to buddies of current employees ought to be illegal (at least at large companies) for many of the same reasons why nepotism is frowned upon.
Hiring managers love referrals. You can spend weeks going through resumes and doing interviews hoping to find that perfect candidate (and they better be as perfect as can because you won't be able to just get rid of them on a whim if they wind up being a dud). There's also nothing more frustrating than giving an offer to a great candidate and then losing our on them.
Hiring referrals is great for both problems. The person is already vetted by someone your organization trusts. This is great because a referral is more likely to be someone that knows their stuff and thus pass the interview process. You also have someone vouching that this person is a good employee and not just a good interviewer. The candidate is more likely to accept when they have a contact on the inside that can vouch for the the company and team.
This all assumes that the company is going to do their own independent evaluation of the referred candidate.
There’s tension between what is best for the company and what is most fair to applicants. I acknowledge that, but think that the onus should be on (large) companies to figure out a better interview process.
I don’t see why references have to come from current (or past) employees. Colleges don’t make you get referred by alumni, but they do require letters of reference (usually).
On a related note, it’s amusing to me when white men in tech on Reddit get mad about Indian men preferentially hiring other Indian men from their community. I assume that many of these same white men don’t see any problem when they preferentially hire their own friends using the rationale that you gave.
This has been my experience as well as a director of engineering. I also think more diverse candidates is a good thing.
The thing that was harder for me was working with the people hired to run the DEI recruiting programs. I never was able to establish a great working relationship with them even though I was able to do so with a good cross-section of the rest of the organization. Not really sure why tbh.
> But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired. That's just one example of what they do.
Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations
Not really true. We have been asked to hire women in our team. Thankfully we found an amazing person. But other teams were not so lucky. It was pure nonsense.
Agreed. Even if you desire, and want DEI programs to be meaningful, the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.
Reading the accomplishments in 2024 for our DEI program, it was essentially just marketing. Which has some level of value for sure, but the most valuable thing that came out of it was the number of conferences the head of the department went to.
> the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.
That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.
I’ve interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles. Not sure how that aligns with your narrative.
If a role is specifically set to be filled by diversity hires, I really don't understand how that's not racist (or choose your descriptor here) towards whoever has been excluded for that role.
I've actually never seen a 'diversity hire' take place. When we set DEI policy and act on it, it was about trying to encourage a more diverse pool and a more diverse group of choosers.
That's it. Then let the talent speak.
However, let's assume a 'diversity hire' did take place in the negative scenario you imagine. Quota's, I imagine. It still wouldn't be racist as it wouldn't be based on racial superiority.
You can call it something else, if you like. But it wouldn't be racist. A 'mistake' perhaps.
There are many out there who beat their chest and say that 'the word racist is overused so as to become meaningless'.
You've just fallen into that hole.
EDIT: (it appears I've been blocked from replying here so to my children, lol:
@Shawabawa: "For as long as I've been conscious and with a dictionary (40 years), 'racism' has always been about a belief in the superiority and supremacy of one race over the other, and the actions that stem from that. Sure, your simple version is included also, but the fundamental (and meaningful) definition was always about supremacy. But really ... based on some of the comments here and the prevailing political climate in the US, let's call it quits. It really doesn't matter. The 'winners' write the history, as they say."
@seryoiupfurds: "Well, better than your first attempt. But the thrust of your comment is still that 'diversity hiring' is the norm. My experience says it's not - and certainly not in the way we apply DEI.")
I think it's pretty obvious that SCOTUS and VP nominations aren't covered by EEOC and the like, and you're going to have a hard time ham-fisting "diversity hire" into those roles.
> > I've interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles.
This means one of two things. Either they're interviewing for roles on the DEI team, or "I had a role to fill and was told I had to hire a [black, hispanic, female, non-white] person."
The first one doesn't really have anything to do with the comment they're replying to. The second one is blatantly illegal but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And the next sentence and its tone supports that interpretation.
Is there a third interpretation I'm missing?
> it wouldn't be racist to hire based on diversity as it's not done from a basis of racial superiority.
If you hire someone over someone else due to an immutable quality such as their skin colour, sexual orientation (which shouldn't even be a thing to discuss on a job interview), hair colour, sex, gender etc than that is discrimination, and in the case of race, racist. Just because the majority of racism happens in one way, does not mean it's not racism in the other way.
Unless the immutable quality somehow makes the person physically better for the job, such as males typically having better muscle/bone mass which gives them an advantage for physical work (e.g. oil rigs), or employing a black female actor to play a black female character.
>And, to be clear, even if 'diversity hires' did take place in the way you seem to imagine it, it wouldn't be racist to hire based on diversity as it's not done from a basis of racial superiority.
If you hire based on someone's race, that would appear to be racist.
> In my experience it has been about trying to encourage a more diverse pool to select from...
In my experience, the DEI office rejected the results of an interview panel after the interview-and-candidate-selection stage because the candidates selected by the interviewers and interviewing panel to receive offers were "insufficiently diverse". This resulted in Corporate closing the job requisition because they didn't feel like dealing with the hassle (and expense) of repeating the process. (This sucked because we fucking needed that hole to be filled... but there's no arguing with Corporate.)
This is an N=1 report, and I'm sure there are other companies that aren't so super-fucked, but at this particular company, this is how it went down.
This scenario doesn't meet the strict definition of "diversity hire", but it sure does feel like actions motivated by the same sort of reasoning.
What is a DEI specific role? Isn't that against EoE rules?
Well I interpreted it the way you're saying and I still don't understand the real world need of that role in most companies. Why not simply hire the most qualified/best people for the job? If it ends up being diverse, great. If not well thats not really a big issue either as long as the hiring is fair.
What does that role provide outside of forced diversity i.e. racism. If it helps I am not a white male myself, but Mexican.
That's one interpretation but the next sentence doesn't really track with that. Of course there are roles in DEI departments, and roles focused on DEI. That doesn't do anything to weaken the argument the GP was making but that second sentence sounds like it should.
The reasonable interpretation then is that this isn't the right interpretation. The only other one I can think of is having prescribed immutable characteristics you're hiring for.
It was me telling you I'm ignorant. Was it telling something else?
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That's called accessibility.
I would classify that as a role tasked with ADA compliance, not "DEI".
No, it's not that. DEI would be hiring a blind person, over a more qualified non-blind person.
> they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start
Yes, when they were widely introduced in my large company circa 2016-17 it was explained to senior managers as part of HR's efforts to "align with industry best practices". During the meeting introducing it to VPs and dept heads, there were skeptical questions as a lot of groups were under shipping pressure and short-handed. There was also already a lot of "HR overhead" like various mandatory compliance training sessions that all employees had to attend every year (unrelated to their actual work). The company was also clearly already highly diverse at all levels from the CEO on down and had been for a long time.
The DEI training did end up becoming a yet another mandatory HR time sink and no one I know thought it was necessary or useful. The second year the program expanded to take even more time but the worst thing was they brought in outside trainers who started doing the "You're a racist and don't even know it" schtick along with weird tests and exercises. This became contentious and caused a lot of issues, especially because the context leaves people feeling like they can't openly disagree. There was a lot of negative push back but people felt like they couldn't use normal company channels so it was all in private conversations and small groups. Kind of the opposite of the intent of openness and communication.
For me, that was when DEI went from "probably unnecessary (at our company) but just another 'HR Time Tax" to "This is disruptive and causing problems." I'm not surprised that some companies are realizing that the way many of these DEI initiatives were implemented wasn't effective in helping diversity and that they were also causing problems. It was the wrong way to pursue the right goal. At our company, we got rid of the old DEI program in early 2020, so this broad correction pre-dates the US election 8 weeks ago.
My general experience was that this was much more a thing on the ground in ~2015-2020 and the internet / political rage machine is (as usual) a few years behind.
Right. For the large companies, and the majority of the workforce, they mean nothing. Then the small to mid size businesses with some whackadoo who goes "we're not hiring X anymore, underrepresented groups only!" get a ton of press and create political capital.
I'm curious, what gives you that kind of deep insight?
I'm skeptical too. I've worked at a series of smaller companies with strong DEI programs, and the "enlightened self-interest" part was that it gave us better products. Turns out I have a pretty good idea of how to build products and features that appeal to people with the same regional, race, gender, and other backgrounds as me. Working with people who are in different from me in some substantial way showed me how much of that is arbitrary.
For an extreme example, imagine a car company with zero women employees. I could imagine that their designs might look increasingly awesome to people who grew up playing with black, angular, high-powered cars (like me -- that's what I'd want!). And while there are plenty of women who'd like that, too, there are lots of women (and plenty of men!) who'd want something smaller, more brightly colored, and with better gas mileage. It they didn't have those varying opinions, or weren't even aware that people had other opinions, they'd be severely limiting their potential market and leaving huge amounts of money on the table.
(My wife's a big F1 fan and wants to own a McLaren some day. I know that many, many women love fast cars, too, and that many, many men do not. That was meant to be illustrative, not a perfect analogy.)
I am utterly convinced that getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable. Even if I didn't care about the societal ideals behind DEI programs, I'd still happily endorse them as a competitive edge.
Alternatively, trying to appeal to everyone or really the lowest common denominator just ends up creating bland products that nobody likes. Which is quite apparent right in the AAA video game industry.
I'd argue that a specialised company that focuses and hones in on catering to black, angular high-powered cars OR smaller, more brightly coloured cars will have a healthier long term outlook than a company that tries to appeal to every market.
OK, that fascinates me and it's a great example of things that would never occur to me. Run-flat tires aren't a big deal because I'm not bothered by the idea of changing my own tire by the side of the road. Ponytail indentations in the headrests? I have short hair that doesn't need it, but alright, I can see why that'd be great for people who do.
And a key takeaway is that those things don't make the car worse for me. I know there are tradeoffs with run-flat tires but that doesn't make it less good, and while I can change tires, it'd be nice not to have to. And the ponytail indent makes it nicer for some people without affecting me whatsoever. Those make a more appealing product for buyers with different needs from mine, in ways I couldn't have anticipated.
> Volvo had women design a car once.
To be more specific, Volvo designed a car specifically for women and chose to staff that team entirely with women. This is quite different than asking a team of women to design a car for everyone, and I feel that’s important context when considering the design decisions they made.
Wow, the lack of a hood is baffling, was that actually a conscious design decision or an urban legend?
Because in the case of the former I find it unbelievable that no one on the team, or even at Volvo that dropped by to see how the project is coming along (I assume they weren't shipped off to some isolated island to complete their work in complete secrecy) didn't say something. The first question at least 80% of people I know would have when looking over a car to buy for the first time is, "Can you pop the hood?" Not to mention getting at the engine to adjust or replace consumables like belts, fluids, plugs or even minor repairs.
I'm far more willing to believe this is just a small detail that simplified the production process for a one off prototype than that anyone thought this was actually a good idea.
Looks like they have designed Tesla prototype.
https://www.automobilesreview.com/pictures/volvo/ycc-2004/wa...
Are there more pics? It seems kind of sleek.
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> Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
The companies we're talking about have DEI programs specifically because they believe they'll improve their profitability in one way or another. Meta is scaling their program back, not ending it, so they still believe it's good for the company in some way.
Now, I may be skeptical of the purity of their goals, in this case suspecting that they're more concerned about looking to be the "right level" of diverse than actually achieving it. Regardless, no one's making them do it. They're doing it for those free market reasons.
> Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
Free market capitalism: (1) does not exist, (2) structurally cannot stably exist (because economic power and political power are fundamentally the same thing), (3) is a utopian propaganda concept created in response to and to deflect critiques of the way that the capitalism that can and does actually exist works.
I keep hearing this example, but it's hard for me to imagine how this works with companies that are not designing consumer-facing products.
Will "getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds" make their servers not fail with 500 errors? Or make them actually deliver features at a reasonable rate? Or will it prevent them not having a major bug every other release? Because that's what the customers complain about, and that's what company needs for major growth.
(I am suspect that hiring Rachel of rachelbythebay.com will help with this, but this will be because she is a great engineer, not because of her gender.)
Alright, I can see that. DEI programs that actually change and improve the company are extremely valuable, in my opinion. Ones that check a box to say "look at how nice we are!" aren't so much.
I’m not usually one to complain about downvotes but it’s pretty funny to downvote this post specifically.
Like, what’s the actual counterargument here? “No, I think companies should hire the most qualified individual in the world for the job on paper even if it harms the team as a whole. Risking the bottom line is what meritocracy is all about!”
Deep insight? It was completely obvious that it was performative. Why would huge companies like suddently care about black people or women if it was not to seek popular approval and get closer to power?
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It's not deep insight. I am for real DEI.
That is not what is actually happening. The net impacts are essentially marketing, which has value in it's own right for sure, but I'd prefer real change as opposed to marketing impacts, and forced trainings everyone must take.
Even more broadly, what are the normative success and failure visions for DEI? At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?" To be charitable to the whole idea, it seems to be well-intentioned. But beyond that, it's empty in terms of what pratical outcomes it actually sought to make real.
Maybe I'm just not someone cut out to be an activist, but without articulated end-states, it strikes me as just teeing up for a perpetual struggle. That doesn't seem too fulfilling.
That's fair. I guess what I'm communicating is that the goals of larger diversity are worth effort, and attention, and the reality of them is bias training in the long list of mandatory trainings, and marketing at conferences.
Symbols can have a lot of political power.
I worked in a large company that had a lot of pro-LGBTQ corporate PR and "Bring your whole self to work", while most of my coworkers were openly homophobic (out of earshot from management) and LGBTQ people would not be safe to come out. Right-wingers would think our company was "woke" and that they were being discriminated against based on our company propaganda and executive messaging. The reality on the ground was the opposite.
Right-wingers are ready to believe companies are lying about some things but not about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
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> Well for one there sure were a lot of anecdotes on X from people claiming their companies literally refused to hire white people.
The existence of a large propaganda campaign on X is not itself proof of the claims of that campaign, and in any case that if there were firms doing that it is both already explicitly and unambiguously illegal and is also very much not what DEI proponents advocate for.
Is it possible that's happening somewhere? Certainly.
Is that the reality I see? No... it's entirely symbolic.
Different experiences, but I trust what i see in the real world versus anecdotes of people against it for political reasons.
History has also shown us that people develop political opinions based on whatever lies are repeated often enough in their media echo chamber.
Consider the truly bizarre origins of antisemitism, for one. (And I'm not talking about people who have opinions on geopolitics in the ME. Think about how the other kind of antisemite, who doesn't give a rat's ass about what's going on 10,000 miles away reaches their political opinions.)
Or, better yet, the gay satanic-panic currently gripping half the country, and the insane culture war being waged around it. You can't actually believe that all those people who have strong opinions about it have been somehow personally wronged by homosexuals.
But they do turn on the telly to listen to some lunatic screaming about how there's a mass conspiracy to turn their children gay.
You don't need to be uncharitable. I don't work at Google, and am unfamiliar with it's implementation.
It doesn't require "shutting one's eyes". From my vantage point that I see, they are a marketing implementation.
I personally would like them to have real teeth, and matter.
Source?
But if you peeked in on the Monday morning new employee orientation at those companies they would be full of white men starting their new jobs.
Beyond the ones who were just making stuff up for political points, there were also people who didn't get a job they wanted and blamed minorities instead of themselves.
There are over three hundred million people in the USA. If you search - or are in a suitable bubble - there are ‘a lot of anecdotes on X’ about most anything imaginable.
There was a flagged post here on HN recently from some right wing grievance YouTube channel, it was talking about how Microsoft refuses to hire white people, but the evidence for this clearly incorrect claim was coming from a guy who says on LinkedIn that he is a principal software engineer, at Microsoft. So, it doesn't exactly scan.
DEI programs in software companies boil down to this: if you only hire your friends from Stanford then you are going to severely under-represent Black candidates and massively over-represent Asian candidates, because you are simply copying and pasting the entrenched bias of that institution. To compensate, you go and set up your recruiting table at the job fair at Howard. It's all actually quite straightforward.
Idk about how it is now, probably the same, but a few years back, at Microsoft hiring managers would need a VP permission to hire a straight white male candidate if their "diversity" quotas weren't yet met.
I was a part of an interesting convo at Google as well, about 9 years or so ago, back when women were at the top of the DEI hierarchy. A female hiring committee member told me that they often give "a second look" to female candidates, while men never get such preferential treatment. I tried to convince her that this is discrimination but never got anywhere.
And yes I get it, it's "anecdotal" etc. But surely you don't expect companies to willingly disclose plainly illegal discrimination themselves?
A guy I worked for 20 years ago goes on rants on LinkedIn about how he can't find a job as a recruiting manager because of his age and DEI. Maybe if he wasn't such an overt racist crybaby, then he'd have more success at finding a job.
It's entirely reasonable to read this entire Meta post as "we had DEI programs, they were meaningful and effective, but now there's an administration in office that will use anti-trust laws to cut us into pieces unless our privately-held supports their political preferences."
I'm not saying that's the case (well, I do think it is) but if it is true, then trying to extract meaningful conclusions about the performance of DEI programs from it is a fool's errand.
Trump previously threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life on trumped up charges (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-c...). He said in an interview that's probably why Meta changed their policies (https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l).
The initiatives were put in place to appease large institutional investors who were trying to score virtue points with the public and progressive lawmakers who generally aren’t that friendly to Blackrock, Vanguard, et al.
Now that it’s not social suicide to point out that codified racism to fight bias is absurd and outcomes have been questionable, the pendulum is headed back toward centre.
> the pendulum is headed back toward centre.
That's not how a pendulum works. It's leading to a white terror, then it will swing back to a smaller red terror, then a smaller white terror, etc... Eventually some event will tap the pendulum again.
The diversity scam was a way to pretend that Affirmative Action wasn't racist, and Affirmative Action was a way not to settle accounts with the descendants of slaves. All of this is about not dealing with slavery, and the children of slaves are not the slightest bit materially better off than before it started. The vast majority of the benefits of these programs went to white women, immigrants, and sexual minorities.
We literally don't even keep statistics about the descendants of slaves, because they're too embarrassing. The only reason race was introduced into the census was to keep track of them, and now we're counting Armenians for some reason.
Not dealing with slavery turned us all into race scientists.
That being said, the white victimization story is a dumb one. White people are overrepresented. If some institution stopped hiring or admitting for diversity reasons, they wouldn't be hiring and admitting more white people, they'd just hire and admit fewer people. Anti-woke is a civil rights struggle on behalf of dumb people: the lowest ranked white people with absolutely no historical excuse. If one really believed in nature over nurture, or the degeneracy of culture, that's exactly where you would go looking for it.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/long-shadows-the-black-wh...
> Our headline finding is that three-generation poverty is over 16 times higher among Black adults than white adults (21.3 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively). In other words, one in five Black Americans are experiencing poverty for the third generation in a row, compared to just one in a hundred white Americans.
> you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape"
Isn't that the same reason they were rolled out in the first place?
> It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
Keep in mind that these statements are made to pander to the incoming president. The implication that "DEI is discrimination against white people" is very much a part of that.
> why the initiative in the first place?
Ultimately this is the same answer as with the broader ESG incentives. It is in fact a good idea to have a diverse workforce for the exact same reasons evolution keeps diversity around.
The pretense that it's "discrimination" is rather silly, especially for tech giants like Meta whose shortlists of qualified applicants number in the hundreds to thousands after initial selection.
> evolution keeps diversity around
Evolution has no built in preference for diversity and certain branches of the evolutionary tree wiping out others is a common occurrence throughout history. For instance, the Neanderthals. That's why there are so many rules about importing foreign plants at the border.
ESG is just a jobs program for stock brokers.
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> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place
That seems unnecessarily judgemental about the true effect of the program. Maybe it was really effective and made Meta more productive and also helped many people from historically underrepresented backgrounds people get good jobs, but they're falsely claiming it's ineffective because that's what they expect the current political leadership wants to hear?
The DEI policies were effective, particularly the Diverse Slate Approach. But it's legally risky to continue with it under the current administration since it was a race and gender conscious policy. People can argue as to whether it was "discrimination" but it absolutely was conscious of candidate's protected class.
Did it note the particular ethnic group that's overrepresented in US Tech?
Unlikely
Asians aren't overrepresented in US tech?
You haven't seen the numbers? And where's the men in HR?
> It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
It only seems that way because it absolutely is an acknowledgement that the DEI program was performative in the first place.
> This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
No, it will please people who felt that DEI programs were hurting productivity and taking jobs away from more deserving candidates... and that's exactly why they'd make this announcement. I suspect there may have even been some pressure applied behind closed doors with the threat of lawsuits and government oversight on this matter.
I'm confident there's a ton of people cheering about this. I just don't want to know those people.
It depends on the company, some are faking it, some are taking hard lines. For example, my company (>100,000 employees, American company, in top 100 Fortune 500) has a 60% women in IT in Europe (targets are by region or country). We exceeded that, by promoting purchasing assistants as IT Solution Architects. Zero expertise, zero experience (purchasing is a different dept, they have ~ 80-90% women without any targets, it's a job that naturally attracts women), moved to IT to meet dept targets and de-professionalizing the entire department. I have junior devs paid more than software architects with 30 years of experience, because the junior dev is a woman so it was promoted directly as "Digital Product Owner", which is a title with no meaning or responsibility, but it is one salary band higher than a software architect.
This is one company I know very well, but I have friends and former colleagues in similar companies. Especially in non-IT companies, this happens a lot - check FMCG companies, for example, where innovation does not exist because most jobs are fake jobs but well known activist shareholders are strongly pushing for it, they don't care about profits in the pursue of political agenda.
> in part because of the "political landscape,"
People really should be more explicit about this. The "political landscape" here is the desire to pay fealty to an incoming administration in hopes of currying favor. American culture didn't drastically change. Trump got 3 million more votes in 2024 than he got in 2020 which is largely in line with overall population growth. That 3 million also amounts to less than 1% of the US population. If that causes you to drastically change your opinion of the culture of this country, you weren't paying very much attention beforehand. The only thing that markedly changed was who is going to be leading the government and thereby the regulators that Meta wants to butter up. That is all Meta is doing with these recent moves.
It's not just that Trump is in power now. It's that Trump, unlike any US President before him (at least in the modern era) is highly and publicly vindictive.
> The "political landscape" here is the desire to pay fealty to an incoming administration in hopes of currying favor.
Exactly as it was when DEI practices were introduced.
You must have a short memory if you actually believe that. Diversity programs didn’t all coincidentally spring up in January 2021 the way they are coincidentally disappearing in January 2025. I won’t argue if you call them performative, but they absolutely weren’t just blatant appeals to an incoming presidential administration.
Was that in response to a new incoming administration, or a series of social and cultural events?
Actually, these practices were mostly introduced under Trump, and ramped up with the Floyd protests, which also took place under Trump.
American culture did not drastically change but mainstream media outlets and the entertainment industry attempted to make it seem as if it had shifted quite dramatically when it really had not. You can't simply say that all the people that voted for Harris support all this stuff. There were many people that voted for Harris or against Trump for many reasons but still don't fall into the far-left camp. It's just paying fealty. Is what has happened to AAA games and example of consumers paying fealty to Trump? Let's be serious.
I don't really follow what point you are trying to make. The stuff that Meta has reversed in the last few days is literally decades of slow cultural change. It isn't all DEI and trans folks. They are now allowing the use of "retard" for example. Almost every corner of mainstream American society outside those dominated by 13-year-old boys had left that word behind at least a decade ago.
Truth be speaking, that's not the direction the rest of the world outside the West has gone though, they'd actually be more aligned with those "13-year old" boys on those cultural issues.
A lot more people use that word in reality than you might think, as shocking as the that will seem.
There were already actual commitments to diversity in most places, yes.
DEI programs, on the other hand, were basically a symbolic "party badge" that many companies and organizations felt compelled to adopt to keep scary people — often their own employees! — from suing them for discrimination.
That's the "political landscape" they are referring to — a political climate that allowed for even frivolous discrimination lawsuits to succeed, against companies already striving to minimize discrimination.
These DEI programs weren't "performative" in the regular "performing caring" sense that companies often do; they were "performative" in the Red Scare "performing Very Visibly Not Being A Communist, even though you were never a Communist" sense.
I think that's the point. DEI is performative. A business cannot survive unless it hires the best person for the job.
Regardless of the first points you make, companies objectively do not need to hire the best person for the job. Lots of companies need programmers. 99% of them do not need world class software engineers.
There are plenty of jobs where "can type JS into a computer for 30 hours a week and go to a couple meetings" is plenty to keep the business moving forward.
A few small holes will not sink the aircraft carrier, but eventually there will be enough holes. See Disney.
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place
The retraction in itself is performative as well. It’s trying to highlight that “we only did it because it was a necessary performative action at the time due to the political climate then — we didn’t really mean it.”
They never cared about DEI. The difference is that now they don't feel pressure to pretend.
> I'm a PoC
Are you a black American? East and south asians generally don’t use the term, and DEI focuses on the former and penalizes the latter (hence east and south asians avoiding the term).
The honest message wound have been:
Hi all, I wanted to share some changes we're making to our hiring, development and procurement practices. Before getting into the details, there is some important background to lay out:
The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term "DEI" has also become charged, in part because it is gives preferential treatment of some groups over others.
At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities which ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone. On top of that, we've always believed that no-one should be given - or deprived- of opportunities because of protected characteristics, except if they’re a man or white, or Asian man.
Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we're making the following changes:
On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop discriminating against white and Asian men. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds to build products that work for everyone. We have decreased the importance of meeting racist and sexist quotas and tying outcomes to compensation. Having quotas in place make hiring decisions based on race or gender. While this was our practice, we want to appear less sexist and racist. We are sunsetting our supplier discrimination efforts within our broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from Black-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those who were part of the supplier diversity program. Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.
>why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
The initiative was them bowing to public pressure and the zeitgeist of the time. We will never know if it was completely performative of if they did actual racism. They are obviously not going to admit to it one way or the other. But they are rolling it back and explicitly stating that they won't do racism. That seems fine. What's the problem ?
These programs seem problematic.
'A former Facebook global diversity strategist stole more than $4 million from the social media giant “to fund a lavish lifestyle” in California and Georgia, federal prosecutors said.'
Interestingly, similar fraud occurred at her next job.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/former-facebook-diversity-le...
It's meant to please people who have a political opposition to the concept of DEI.
Took me way too long that PoC doesn't refer to proof-of-concept.
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place
Right. And being open about it is by design, so that the new Overlords (Trump and Musk) know that Zuck's heart was never in that DEI stuff anyway, that he just had to do it because of the political climate, and they can count on his whole-hearted support for the next 4 years.
You need obvious people to fire in the next downturn without hurting productivity too badly.
A dei program labels those people for you.
Ironically this is exactly the reason why dei programs were considered illegal until a decade ago.
> unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
Disagree, right wingers will be satisfied by this performative posturing even though there's no real change to existing policy.
not only performative but discriminative and harmful hence the need of removal
Corporations are by nature sociopathic, even moreso when the leader is someone barely human like Zuck. To wit: they may be fully aware that this statement would piss off thousands at their company, and are counting on those people quitting, so they can downsize without having to pay for severance.
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George Floyd's "incident" was in 2020.
DEI efforts long predate that date.
2011: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13583
2019: https://time.com/5696943/diversity-business/
> A 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63% of the diversity professionals had been appointed or promoted to their roles during the past three years. In March 2018, the job site Indeed reported that postings for diversity and inclusion professionals had risen 35% in the previous two years.
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Do you have any sources for that opening statement?
I think being alive in 2020 is a good enough source for this one.
Of course DEI existed before 2020 but Floyd's death certainly escalated the situation.
Yep. What this shows is that companies sway with what they perceive is public opinion. From Floyd to Trump, companies are shaping their internal public facing policies to mirror where they think the public is on social issues.
Lesson taught and learned.
What about being alive before 2020?
You have a completely distorted view of the history of these programs which LONG predate 2020. Unfortunately so do a lot of people.
I think they may confused because 1) the specific phrase "diversity, equity, inclusion" and term "DEI" only really started to be common around 2019-2020, and 2) DEI only really entered the public discourse in the past couple years.
This is causing people who were not that aware of these topics before to jump to the incorrect conclusion that because they weren't seeing discussion of "DEI" before that period, corporate diversity programs in general must be recent, whereas in reality it's only this specific name for them that is recent.
Not the OP, but I think that it would be fair to say that these ideas peaked during that time.
For me, the photo of Wells Fargo managers kneeling in front of their huge money safes will always be the icon of that time. You cannot really get more performative than that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-sna...
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Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none.
When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.
The start of the funnel is also the most racist and class discriminatory. Almost every school in the USA takes pupils from districts where the property owners pay the taxes for the schools. Rich areas get much more resources and support. Poor students get put into less funded schools and suffer from not having mentorship or peers to look up to.
I live on Long Island and we have a majority white population. Despite that we have 2 school districts that are almost 100% black. That is where the problem is. You are not giving these students a chance. When I am going through resumes I am not getting a diverse pool of qualified candidates because these poor people have been historically oppressed into a caste of poor schooling and neighborhoods.
Washington state pools property tax money and then redistributed it equitably across the state to pay for education on a per pupil basis. This mainly means poorer eastern Washington districts are subsidized by richer western Washington districts, and districts that lose students to private schools take a direct hit in their funding.
It doesn't help when the Seattle school superintendent told parents that if they didn't like their school policies, they could leave.
NJ is even more extreme, the poor districts get more funding and it's been that way for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district
This is true many places. But I think the "property tax explains everything" talking point is going to persist a long time, because it's very convenient.
This is the same as California.
EDIT: I was wrong, and explain it as a comment below.
My mistake, I know that most of school funding came from the state but I thought it was because it was from property taxes being collected. In fact it's from state income tax and sales tax.
America spends more money per student, in almost any school district, than any European country. The problem is not "resources and support". We've tried "resources and support" for 50 years, so the (a priori entirely fantastical) notion that just throwing more money at the problem would make it go away has been thoroughly disproven.
I don’t think that’s true. It looks like the US has pretty similar spending to European countries at least as a percentage of GDP: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Because a lot of it is salaries and other employee benefits.
what would we normalize it to? not saying you are wrong in any way, just curiously wondering?
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
Depends which state.
Want to hear my hot take?
It's not funding (though that is A problem).
It's not attracting qualified, talented teachers (though that is A problem).
The main problem is parents and society. Individualism means parents know better than the schools, and teach their kids that attitude as well. This cuts across class, ethnicity, and any other demographic marker you can think of.
Am I right? I don't know, but I think I am.
Do you have a link to this analysis? I'm curious what "condition on race" actually means.
as someone who grew up attending a majority black school district, this is not really true.... underfunded majority minority districts typically more than have the gap made up by federal funds and the causal evidence on returns on education funding suggests extremely limited impact if any
That's just false. Nearly every state relies disproportionately on local property taxes to fund schools. Federal dollars tend to be supplemental and come in the form of food subsidies or Title grants. They absolutely do not "more than have the gap made up" unless you're in a state with an equity funding pool (like Washington).
I have heard that Baltimore school performance is the counterpoint here, but I have never dug into it myself. Do you happen to know if there is a material point there or obfuscation of some form?
Title 1 schools can get a ton of money. Smartboards in every class, school supplies fully stocked, not the usual "grim downward spiral" feel of a public school.
Places like Baltimore often have substantially more funding than many suburban districts
Much of our economic disparity in this country remains regional. We have states full of poor White and Black people. Of course, I have never worked anywhere that "diverse" wasn't only about skin color and gender, which means kids in West Virginia and Alabama are treated like they grew up in Malibu. It's gotten worse where I live in recent years since those historically disadvantaged schools are also 50% English as a second language now with no new resources.
Do any tech companies have programs to hire out of historically disadvantaged regions of the US?
In California funding is based upon attendance. The main place wealthy neighborhoods get extra money here is through PTAs rather than property taxes.
This is in addition to what the other commenter said. I'm not very well informed about how other states fund their schools, but even if this blanket generalization is true in some places, there's enough evidence out there that funding isn't the only or maybe even the main problem.
US ranks very high in the world in gov spending on education at 6% of GDP. Higher than Canada, France, Germany, UK, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...
The EU as a whole for example is around 4.7% https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Most of what you said is just wrong.
"Poor students" have the most support in the country: https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2024/are-poor-urban-districts-... Baltimore public schools get $30k per student. Carmel, IN public schools spend $10k per student.
You should look into heritability. There is no longitudinal impact on adult outcomes as a result of parenting/schooling practices.
I'm assuming you are not familiar with this study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...
It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school district to a richer school district, and they have children under 13, then those children are significantly more successful than children whose families remain in the poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be a slight negative effect.
There are other studies showing similar effedcts.
Summary: It's not genetics.
Interesting. I've the same observation in Vietnam where I grew up. Maybe this is more universal than I thought.
Technically yes, but the poster also listed “parenting” practices not having an effect so I think we all know what he means.
They said heritability. They meant genetics.
that is poor evidence for a school funding effect, but yes - environment is important. i will say that this is the first time i've ever seen MTO cited as a positive example of the impact, my understanding (not very informed) was that it is considered a negative result.
i wish these analyses were pre-registered, but i recognize that is difficult to do for very long timespan studies like this
Yes, class is the root divide. However, rejecting that fact is dogma for the people running these DEI programs.
This is intentional because then DEI is intended to be a self-help religion for the corporate class designed to deflect the externalities that they produce, and not about actual material conditions. And that's at its best. At its worst, DEI is insulting and infantilizing to "marginalized communities."
Mm. It’s certainly good to work at the other end of the funnel (thank you!) but it also won’t help address pattern matching that people do in hiring.
It’s an incredibly natural thing for people to hire people like themselves, or people they meet their image of what a top notch software dev looks like. It requires active effort to counteract this. One can definitely argue about the efficacy of DEI approaches, but I disagree that JUST increasing the strength of applicants will address the issue.
Yes it will! That pattern matching is based on prior experience and if the entire makeup of candidates changes that'll cause people to pattern match differently. If old prejudices are taking a while to die out, it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
> it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!
That's an efficient market theory, and it's extremely optimistic about how real people work.
If the goal is to prevent people from being biased, why not anonymize candidate packets? Zoom interviews can also be anonymized easily. If it's the case that equally strong, or stronger, candidates are being passed over anonymization should solve this.
Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.
If you anonymize applications you don't hire the 'right' ratio.
Anonymization is probably an under tried idea. Various orchestras switched to blind auditions and significantly increased the number of women they hired.
people can cheat in anon interviews?
They can cheat non-anonymous interviews too. An alternative is to have candidates go in person to an office to interview, but the grading and hiring panel only sees anonymized recordings of the interview.
People oppose efforts to make changes at the other end of the funnel too. This is the most popular post about Girls Who Code (the first organization that comes to mind, why I searched it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431
You get similar complaints there.
There's a background assumption in this debate that society has a moral requirement to increase the representation of those who are underrepresented. I've never seen this assumption justified.
What if it is actually fine for Asians to be under-represented in the NBA, and over-represented in software engineering?
I guess it depends a lot on the reason why they're under represented. Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense. I'm not so sure companies and schools are just passive in a cultural preference environment. And by not so sure I mean I am pretty confident there is tons of discrimination, I've seen it.
How about advocating for more objective hiring processes then? You could use AI to mask someone's voice and visage during a video interview. This was actually tried btw, see if you can predict the result:
https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...
If under-representation is because of preference and not discrimination, then there is no problem to be solved.
I work in a wood shop with a bunch of men. It's a physical job, but there's no reason a woman couldn't do it, but guess how many women apply?
The lack of women in our shop is not because of discrimination, but if we had to get 50% representation with women without a passion for woodworking, the product would suffer, or those women might not enjoy it, or...
Disproportion does not always indicate discrimination.
That post is mostly factual observations, a reporting of lived experiences, if you will, not complaint.
This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black people at such a rate that there literally are not enough black people in the country to meet that quota. And yet, this sort of brainless activism continues unabated - why I can't begin to guess.
I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided. It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those careers, that's perfectly fine.
One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel" isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't personally impact you?
I’m 35 now, at no point in my career have I ever been in an environment that would have tolerated that, school- college or workplace.
And I haven’t been trying exceptionally hard to avoid it.
If such jibes had happened those people would not have a job, point blank.
Given the average seniority for a full stack engineer is 10 years, I should have encountered at least one, or worked with someone who had been in such an environment.
I think chud behaviour is an excuse, because it’s not tolerated for at least my lifetime.
One thing to pay attention to is how you influence those around you. I'm guessing, doesn't put up with that kind of shit. People who act like that probably don't act like that when you're around. Because of that, you get a sanitized view of the world.
That sort of chud behavior is very much tolerated in many places: https://www.romerolaw.com/blog/2021/11/complaint-alleges-ram...
if everyone openly has your back, consistently, and for years yet you’re so fragile that a single dickhead (who will be fired) derails your entire career then honestly you were too fragile to do the job anyway..
I don’t know a single engineer who doesn’t get imposter syndrome.
As a man, I have been openly derided for doing something stupid, if I were a woman I might internalise that as if it was sexism- so how do you deal with that? When people are so convinced that if anything critical could be based on gender?
At some point you're treating people like children.
Again I’ll say it: every single educational institution and workplace I have ever been in has intentionally mentioned that anything that could be perceived as misogyny or sexual harassment have a zero tolerance policy.
Am I really the outlier? I’ve worked so many places and across so many countries and industries…
Your suggestion that bad behavior by all-male teams would be improved by the addition of women rests on a couple of assumptions that are not true: that women are inherently better behaved than men, and that women naturally see each other as being on the same team.
I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
On the other hand, I have often, often worked on teams that were (except for me) all men, but by and large they were men who had mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that they loved, and who therefore had no trouble relating to me with respect and affection. While it is true that some men treat women specifically badly, and that some men treat people generally badly, it is not true that men in general treat women badly. Quite the opposite.
It does take a moment, as a woman, to find your feet socially in an all male space. But does it not always take a moment to find your feet in any new space? I have generally found that what makes it go smoothly is the fact that we are all hackers. If anything, it is all the walking on eggshells about sexism that makes social integration awkward at first. People are trying to figure out how they are "supposed" to behave around me, worried that I will be aggressive socially and legally. When we focus on the work we do together and the love we have in common for the field, we become friends naturally and get along well.
I myself think all the hand-wringing over demographics has been a waste of time at best and counterproductive at worst. I think it makes more sense to focus on developing virtue, civility, and good leadership among the people who find themselves here.
> I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
In my teens my mom tried to reenter the workforce and got an office job, and she absolutely hated working with other women because of this. She wanted to work with men because in her experience, women were so much worse.
It is always so refreshing to read this kind of thing.
For a number of years I had the sense that I might be going crazy, because it seemed that throughout my whole working life I'd encountered good and bad people of both sexes, but never witnessed the kind of systematic targeting of women that both mainstream and alternative media sources told me was rife. How could it be that I couldn't see what was apparently right under my nose? So it's reassuring to know that there are also women who have had a similar experience.
I don't think women are inherently better behaved than men, or that they naturally see themselves as being on the same team. It's that the dynamic where it feels fun or funny to tell a joke that makes a minority in a group feel bad is less likely to arise when there are multiple people who wouldn't be laughing, or perhaps even telling them to give it a rest. Nothing to do with comradery, just the natural tendency of people to not like when their personal identity is threatened in some way.
FWIW, I do think most men with wives and/or daughters are generally thoughtful coworkers, but I'm not sure that's a majority in most tech workplaces, especially the ones that skew young. Thinking back to my own experience, I think, I was blind to a lot of the things I'm speaking about (or perhaps even resistant to the idea of calling it out) until I had a long-term partner.
> Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman?
Sure. One of the women I dated detailed a story about how a man at a conference she attended suggested it'd be more fun if she was roofies. To her face, in front of her co-workers (many of them women). She was in a majority female industry (healthcare).
Why do we just assume that men stop doing cringe stuff just because women are around?
I hear stories like this, but now after 25 years in the industry, no place I've worked at would have ever tolerated this, nor have I seen or heard this happen from colleagues. Granted I've worked mostly in California, but still seems so foreign to me.
>But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up
Not really, TBH. I especially can't see why a woman experiencing these (to my mind, rather mild) interactions would think that things would be better in some other career path.
Let's say I, a man, went to work in a traditionally female-dominated field like nursing, and found that the other nurses there had named their cafeteria dishwasher "Hubby" as a joke because it took forever to work.
Would I, a grown man, consider changing my career because of this? No, I wouldn't.
OTOH, if the other nurses seemed to view me with disrespect or suspicion and I found I wasn't able to shift that perception through my actions, then I'd reconsider.
This won’t be a popular sentiment among the woke mafia that puruses HN but I’ve seen far more women drop out of tech roles due to the general work environment than due to some sexist commentary. In fact, I don’t know any who left due to some sexist commentary. I know many who left due to how toxic the work environment is for everyone.
Tech workers are one of the least sexist groups out of any. If you think techies are sexist, you’d never last a day in medicine, law, or finance. Yet, women sign up for those in far higher percentages. Genuinely, it is actually hard to find a more left/progressive leaning professional field. It is not sexism that is the one thing keeping women out of tech. It is that it’s not an attractive or high status field to women. The people working in it are not seen as socially competent, it is highly outsourced, and depending on role has relatively little socializing. It’s also insanely competitive and you have to fight to keep your job from an army of H1B workers invading the country due to CEOs looking for slave labor. There are so many reasons to not be in tech and sexism should be one of the lowest reasons out there.
I don’t know any women complaining about sexism in comparison to the level of “holy fuck, when will I ever get a break?” It is an unrelenting field that constantly has you worried you’ll lose your job next month. On top of requiring you study at least 500 leetcode problems before you do any interviews. Go figure, most women don’t enjoy that.
Even in Chicago 30 years ago I cannot imagine that happening where I worked. Women were pretty well represented in tech there, incidentally. My immediate supervisor was a woman and I was the only male on my team. This was in IT in financial services. I would guess the whole department was 60:40 male:female.
Seriously, every instance I'm aware of men having done something like that where I worked (and it's happened more than once), they've been fired either the next day or the same week.
The solution there has nothing to do with hiring more women, and everything to do with zero tolerance for a sexist environment.
I mean, that happening is just insane. This isn't the 1950's.
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Extreme examples like this provide a nice attention-grabbing narrative, but they're not responsible for driving the central 99.5% of the workforce distribution
The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's just very difficult to affect these in the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole. Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered folks, come from how parents push their values onto their kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved interests because of ideas they had about masculinity and femininity.
My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."
I'm not sure that's entirely what's to blame when the countries with the least gender discrimination (Scandinavia) tend to be about 20% female in tech. I think that when people are free to choose their fields based purely on personal inclination, without major financial incentive, tech lands at about 20% female and early childhood education ends up being the opposite.
Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20% female and we easily end up with spirals where departments end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring in math instead of cs because of that process at my college.
I'm basing this off departmental demographics for CS at Aarhus and Copenhagen Universities.
Scientists and engineers overall include a lot of disciplines that are not CS. Biology in particular is frequently majority female.
I think I may also have somewhat of a blind spot here because I grew up with a mom who is a software engineer herself and I was bought a bunch of electronics/building toys by engineer relatives on both sides. When I was 13 or 14 I was given the parts for a computer under the instruction to put it together and make sure to dual boot linux. I knew a fair number of other girls my age whose parents really wanted them to be engineers/devs and did similar things, but a lot of them were uninterested and went on to happy careers in other fields.
The math vs CS dept thing is concerning because at the foundations they're very similar fields. It's such a strange phenomenon that my graph theory elective in the math dept was 30 or 40% female, yet algorithms was 5% female. Definitely at my institution there were structural issues in the CS dept that didn't exist in the math dept.
> the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole.
The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.
BTW, if you condition PISA scores on racial groups, any racial group (black, white, asian, whatever) scores higher in the USA than in any other country, except Hong Kong.
I've seen that concern as well, but it's pretty clearly a zombie concern from the days when schools would be funded almost entirely by local property taxes. Most states now equalize funding between local districts.
> What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest
except that it's not, which is the problem that DEI initiatives tried to compensate for
Except fields often aren’t open to people in different demographics. Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified.
> Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified
Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.
The problem is that when you quantify sexism in tech objectively, the results aren't what most people expect.
I think these efforts need to be done at every level at the same time, and I agree that the "lower" or "earlier" levels need to be prioritized. Similar to how prevention is usually preferred to reaction.
You're absolutely correct and I think it's what drives all the resentment about DEI programs. People aren't dumb, when they see some group only makes up 3% of the population of engineers and they see a program trying to balance senior positions, they're going to feel its unfair bs. What's really interesting is that almost every woman I've worked with professionaly isn't from North America, they're all from India, Iran and Eastern Europe (Belarus, Bulgaria etc). There's something deeply wrong with the culture here that's screwing up the top of the funnel.
> There's something deeply wrong with the culture
Another possibility: Women in poorer countries enrol in CS out of necessity. In wealthy countries, they have more economic freedom and there are more jobs available higher up on Maslow's Hierarchy, so they enrol in what they actually want (which is not CS).
On average.
Entirely accurate, in ex-communist eastern europe some sort of math/engineering job was about the only way to live somewhat decent, so anyone remotely ambitious would go into that.
This tracks. I got a computer science degree from a large US university. Something like 75-80% of the major was male. The majority of the male CS students were Asian-American*, but not extremely. Way larger share on the female side, like 90%.
Several of my friends in CS said their parents wouldn't have supported their college education if they were getting a humanities degree, with the possible exception of law. Even business was unlikely.
* counting South and West Asian too
(~2018) In India, women represent 45% of total computer science enrollment in universities, almost three times the rate in the United States, where it is 18%.
And in Iran, it's even higher (1). It is not what you would expect from either country based on the stereotypes people have in their minds.
(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta...
The 70% statistic is very prominent, but some of my Iranian friends were incredulous of it. Some speculate that men tend to pick up skills during mandatory military service, so women make up a larger proportion of college graduates. Interestingly when you look for statistics on the workforce itself (rather than graduates with STEM degrees), you see familiar ratios of ~20-25%. E.g. https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/425963/23-percent-of-mobile...
"Women make up 48 percent of internet users, 45 percent of cellphone users, and 23 percent of mobile app developers in Iran, Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said here on Sunday."
I can't seem to find stats on the aggregate gender breakdown of software developers in Iran.
The stereotype in my mind ...
countries in Asia prioritize education a lot, prioritize good jobs and good careers a lot. Children are pushed towards the schooling that offers the best careers and STEM is it at the moment.
Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on down the funnel.
There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes elsewhere in the system... obviously.
I definitely recognize what you're saying and it's fantastic, but hiring managers and execs do indeed need to be active on this too.
The channels to reach out to more diverse candidate are more often than not different to those recruiters use to find your "average white guy in a hoodie". That's decreasingly the case for women (and I use that term very intentionally; I'm not talking generally "non-male" here), but social media and professional networking is quite hostile and/or intimidating to other groups. While the business benefits of putting in this extra effort in are obvious (it's a no brainer to seek out overlooked top talent, let alone the benefits of culture and diverse experiences), those benefits aren't always aligned with the hiring team who are incentivized in most companies to hit numbers. The business goals need to be driven from above by DEI initiatives or - if not - hiring manager allies who'll put their foot down.
i think that i've seen in my lifetime AA in hiring absolutely translate to shifts in undergrad composition. not sure if it spills over to highschool, but it definitely does when people are choosing what to do in college.
In my experience girls want to do CS but they lack confidence and are given too many opportunities to opt for something easier where they think they’ll be more successful. (I don’t know about any other of the diversity axes as much.)
interesting. not going to comment too much on this, but this idea would seemingly be belied by the well-known STEM gender-equality paradox.
Just noting for those interested to check out Microsoft TEALS.
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I am a Black male and worked as a developer for mostly small unknown companies from 1996-2020.
I then pivoted to cloud+app dev strategic consulting when a job at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap. I now work for a third party consulting company as a staff software architect.
For the last 5 years, I have had customer facing jobs where I am either on video calls or flying out to customer sites working with sales.
When I first encountered the DE&I programs at Amazon, I couldn’t help but groan. The entire “allies” thing felt like bullshit.
The only thing that concerns me is that I hope companies still do outreach to colleges outside of the major universities and start partnering with them to widen the funnel and partnering with smaller colleges to help students learn what is necessary to be competitive and to pass interviews
Maybe you didn't feel like those programs existed once you were in, but I guarantee you that they're very active in "positive discrimination" at the hiring and promotion time.
Just last year Amazon in the UK was offering special referral bonuses to employees referring black people specifically for example. I saved the emails for posterity.
For managers of technical roles, they're also a strong push to promote women as fast as possible. My manager has told me about every woman in my team that he wanted to fast track their promotion. I've never heard the same about any of man, regardless of their skill. Of course I recognize that's more anecdotical than the referral thing, but it definitely exists.
That doesn't feel very "positive" if you're not in those groups
of course it’s not. you don’t solve racism with more racism in the opposite direction. alas…DEI.
> The only thing that concerns me is that I hope companies still do outreach to colleges outside of the major universities and start partnering with them to widen the funnel
I can assure you they think that is bullshit as well.
> Read the memo from Meta in full:
That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very silly thing to do.
I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable, stable products when I buy things. Not the skin colour of who owns the business. To filter things based on the owner's identity (in the American sense of the word) may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. It would not be a sensible thing to do.
> may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse
One of the biggest wins for the anti-DEI crowd was convincing people that embracing DEI implicitly meant getting something of lesser quality or value.
Here, you assume that focusing on businesses owned by people of color necessitates lowering your standards of your suppliers below acceptable levels.
It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition, because in the absence of DEI pressure campaigns they'd have been selecting suppliers based on standards and quality by default. Any other criteria inherently trades off against that.
And you seem to know that's true because your claim slides smoothly from "getting something of lesser quality" to "lowering standards below acceptable levels" which aren't the same thing. The latter phrasing means the products are worse but you consider the lowered quality to be an acceptable tradeoff.
> It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition
It does not require it. My second point refers to the fact that people often talk about evaluating candidates/choices as if there’s a single, objectively measurable metric by which we can rank them. I argue that’s not how people really make decisions, but even if they did, who’s to say that the top three choices of suppliers are not all owned by minorities or women? You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.
I’ve personally never been a fan of stringent DEI requirements, especially those that came from companies that were clearly in it just for the optics, and I do think it can result in lower quality. It’s the way that some people almost take lower quality as a given if diversity is involved that doesn’t sit well with me.
> You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.
That is bypassing competition, instead sorting by identity first. Competition is how the world found the best services/products for the best price for over a century and the foundation of our economy. Supporting that idea is how the west became as dominant and wealthy as it was. Only recently have large organization and gov bypassed that for social justice experiments and using ranked systems, similar to giving preferential treatment for 'national security' (aka keeping zombies like Boeing alive).
Even massive US defense contracts are being forced to contract out to minority owned businesses first. It's not an optional thing where the decision maker gets leeway, they are required to start there and narrows the options by definition.
> You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.
There's no hidden genius in technocractic top down manipulation when it comes to purchasing decisions. The options are what they are. The less options you have the harder it will be to find the best. Like being forced to choose between 2 gov-backed monopoly ISPs for your internet here in Canada.
If all the competitors have the same quality and price then you're always going to be using some subjective criteria to decide between them. Why is choosing a minority supplier worse than any other criteria in this case?
I can tell you, even a massive corporation that makes medical devices definitely does NOT choose their suppliers just by quality, a LOT of the suppliers we used were thanks to "people who know people", such as the painter that sucked but was buds with the plant manager so we kept dumping money into his company to fix their deficiencies.
The biggest lie that they told you was that the world actually works on merit: it does not.
That kind of nepotism is the exception, not the rule, and it stands out like a sore thumb when it happens.
You’re right that success (as a company, or individual) is not only based in merit though. There’s plenty of examples of people continuing to do business with Oracle to prove that point.
Making a good enough product, at a good enough price point and make the executive with money happy enough with the trade-offs: and you’re successful. Same as B2C, really.
That’s not necessarily true. In fact, by not having DEI programs, companies could, because of leaders’ own biases, reject better suppliers based on owners or employees being minorities.
There's no reason to believe pure meritocracy is somehow the default state and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Humans are naturally biased in how we make choices and "this person looks and sounds like me" is probably one of the most common and deep rooted subconscious (or sometimes conscious) preferences. This isn't just a workplace hiring problem either. Humans are objectively bad at making purely objective decisions, even when they think they're doing so.
This isn't to say DEI programs as implemented today are the best solution to this problem, or even an effective one. I personally think more broad anti-bias training and programs could be a good alternative since race and gender are hardly the only biases that lead to bad decision making (e.g. hiring someone just because they went to the same school as you is also bad). But it seems silly to pretend bias doesn't exist or that it doesn't take active effort to counter, although I understand the appeal of doing so especially for uncomfortable topics like race.
> It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition
This assumption works if and only if you assume that the highest quality products are always (and categorically) produced by the folks that DEI initiatives do not target.
To say that it lowers standards _by definition_ is identical to saying that the system that disproportionately advances straight white guys is _by definition_ optimal and creates the best products — the simpler way of rewriting that sentiment is to simply say “straight white guys make the best stuff _by definition_”
As an aside it reminds me of something I saw a while ago — “There are two genders: men and ‘Political’, two races: white and ‘Political’, and two sexual orientations: straight and ‘Political’
It is funny to see people argue this with a straight face.
Reading this, it's like reading someone disagreeing with the commutative property just because they don't want it to be true. You're arguing with a trivially provable fact, not an opinion.
If you're shopping for a car and your top criteria is reliability, then your spouse overrides that and says your top criteria is now fuel efficiency, you have, by definition, lowered your requirements for reliability from first to second place.
> Here, you assume that focusing on businesses owned by people of color necessitates lowering your standards of your suppliers below acceptable levels.
And it does. Otherwise, the movement would be simply named: "focus on businesses with the best product".
The irony is that he didn't say that at all and it's actually you who assumed this.
I’ll quote the parent comment again:
> To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse.
Filtering based on identity can hurt his business by making his products worse. The line between cause and effect that he’s drawing seems pretty clear to me. What other interpretation would you have for that?
And for the sake of completeness let’s ask a 3rd party.
ChatGPT prompt:
“”” Given the following sentence:
To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse.
To what is the reader attributing a potential lower quality in his products? “””
Response:
“””
The reader is attributing the potential lower quality of their products to the filtering based on the owner’s identity. This implies that restricting components based on who owns them could limit access to necessary or high-quality components, thereby negatively impacting the quality of the products they build. “””
Yes you need to read carefully and not let your own assumptions get in the way.
He did say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad. He did not say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad while that identity matches a person of color
The optimum outcome comes if there's zero racism, i.e. we only look at the quality of the company. Let's say there's R amount of racism, and D amount of DEI to counter it (super hand-wavy of course). The optimum outcome is if R = D. If R > D, racism skews the outcome away from the optimum. If D > R, DEI skews the outcome away from the optimum.
The anti-DEI (and anti-affirmative action, etc) crowd is claiming that in 2024, D > R. They would probably also claim that in 1960, R > D, i.e. a black doctor is likely to be more qualified than his/her peers.
This is disingenuous.
A few years back, suggesting these "sensible" changes would have you seen shunned and/or fired in many companies.
> This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses
This alone is abused to no end. In my small city, I've personally known three 'woman owned businesses' where the husband just put it in his wife's name to win contracts.
Like all things, what may have had good intentions justs gets abused by the adaptive.
Even giving preferential treatment to actually woman owned businesses is arguably bad in itself. Women shouldn't get preferential treatment at all when picking a business. Only the performance of the business should matter. Discriminating against male owners (equivalent to preferring female owners) is clearly not "good intentions".
Quality is determined by the competence of the people running the business. If two companies are of the same or similar quality then the race, not skin color, of the owner can be used as an indicator of their competence. Since it is well known that non-white races get less resources at every stage of personal development. When a company like Meta buys them the growth potential is much higher.
I would disagree, there is a huge and closely knit support community for black-owned businesses that has existed for some time, a community that provides everything from money to experience.
There is absolutely nothing like this for, say, Asian owned businesses or even White owned businesses. You're totally on your own.
Coming from another continent, it feels the discourse in the US is poisoned by the word RACE. Back home, no one uses it. The best proxy for inequality is poverty. Make poor people richer with basic support like free education and health care. Tax the richer. That should solve the problem. If you wonder about woman, create support for working mum with after school program and free baby care. Sorry to state the obvious.
> it feels the discourse in the US is poisoned by the word RACE. Back home, no one uses it.
I'm not sure where you're located, but as an American fan of European football, it seems like race is still very much an issue on other continents and not just as a proxy for some other inequality. Just in the last week, there have been at least two instances in the top 5 leagues of fans racially abusing players[1]. Maybe the US is too focused on race (I don't think so), but saying "no one uses it" seems like an indication of the opposite problem.
[1] In Fulham vs Watford and Valencia vs Real Madrid
I agree all of this talk about equity inequality and race and gender. completely betrayed the fact that the biggest predictor of societal issues is poverty.
it almost feels like the elites are pitting us against each other. again.
I can’t think of any societal injustice that could not be undone simply by by floating opportunities opportunities to those in poverty.
Median wealth of a US households by race: white $250k; black: $27k; asian: $320k
https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-ra...
That actually shows that helping poor people would help black the most. So why not do it?
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I agree that OP's idea glosses over and ignores a lot of things, but ill-spirited sarcasm is the quickest way to get someone to be defensive and argumentative rather than open to a different viewpoint/perspective had you kindly offered one.
Thank you for the lecture.
I genuinely hope that you have a wonderful weekend and that you're able to find some peace. :)
From the memo:
> We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your executive bonus will take into consideration how close you got to X." In a world like that, many (most/all) executives will do whatever they can to get to those goals -- even if it goes against other official (or even legal) policies.
And that certainly would explain a lot of the behavior I saw working at a large company during DEI peak. (Not to say that is any kind of proof of anything untoward).
As a mid-level manager in a prominent tech company, my VP (not current) explicitly asked me if there were any women or minorities for whom we could accelerate promotion. Not that were ready, but may be ready soon and we'll take the benefit of the doubt. I know that lots of women, minorities, and LGBTQ employees benefitted from that, but white male employees learned there wasn't budget for them.
Execs given a goal will do what it takes to meet the goal.
Confirming Google did this.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, Twitter, Netflix all did this. As far as I know, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google still do this. For hiring and promotion both.
At big tech company I used to work for ($3T) they did this in 2017, and my manager did not give a single offer to a man in years even when everyone said hire, and the next 14 of 14 offers were to women, several minorities, despite many having barely any “hire” votes.
Must be Microsoft, I don’t think Apple and Nvidia went hard on this
Nvidia has the polar opposite problem on their hands, they're one of the most Asian-overrepresented companies in America. 56% of employees are of Asian descent, in a country where Asians make up 6% of the population. Second largest market cap in the world. And yet, not a peep about it from the social justice folk, funny how that works.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1369578/nvidia-share-of-...
"problem". Looking at the $NVDA chart is not showing any problems to me
If you ever seen an inside of a CS auditorium at any prestigious university that wouldn’t be so surprising to you
Pretty sure every big tech company is Asian-overrepresented. Apparently almost 75% of tech employees in Silicon Valley are immigrants, no doubt the vast majority are Asian (East Asian and Indian).
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...
Apple went hard on it, especially culturally, and it led to the type of censorship and control you see on the iPhone. Like apps being required to match Apple’s moderation rules, or the gun emoji being removed, or whatever. You can’t be an Apple employee that isn’t aligned to their way. You’ll be fired.
I don’t think it’s as bad as you imagine in west coast faang. I’ve worked at a few of them. When we do talk about politics (offline, in small groups), discussions are nuanced and people have their own opinions. If you’re able to speak respectfully, and not attack people who disagree with you or have lifestyles different from what you’d choose, you would do fine.
If you have an habit of announcing controversial and extreme opinions in widely-subscribed comms channels, you would not do so well.
It was.
"We're not discriminating or putting majority candidates at a disadvantage... but for candidates with a diverse background we have some leeway to exceed headcount limits."
Or, for a court-documented example of exactly what you're describing happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501663
Dropbox instituted this policy in 2019. We called it "opportunistic hiring". Not sure if it's still in force, as I've since left.
Does this mean we can go back to using "master" as our git repo's default branch?
My controversial opinion is that I think "main" is more descriptive and intuitive than "master."
My controversial opinion is that I still use trunk as the branch name.
"master" makes sense if taken to mean a "master" as in a recording from which other records are made.
my controversial opinion is that it never mattered, all that really mattered was that there was a universal word- changing it to anything would cause at least a few hundred hours of development work and a few hundred additional hours of changing documents and tutorials and stuff.
For what? Main isn’t better if the issue is racism, because “main” has some really negative connotations in Korea (“main” families having servant families).
And, for crying out loud. the tools name is literally a mild british swear word.
This.
What makes it worse:
- Each "bad" term gets replaced by multiple alternative terms, often non-obvious, so good luck figuring out what people mean now. For example, MitM (Man in the Middle) was a well established technical term. Everybody knew what was meant, the term had no acutal gender association in the meaning, but now you instead read "machine-in-the-middle, meddler-in-the-middle, manipulator-in-the-middle, person-in-the-middle (PITM), or adversary-in-the-middle (AITM)".
- The "it's more descriptive" excuse was used as a very thin veil of justification even though the actual reason for the change was clear. So not only do you get to deal with the extra hundreds of hours of overhead, but you also have people lie to your face about why you're being forced to do that.
- It never ends. First it was "master/slave", then "master" in any context, and once that battle was "won", proponents of such policies started finding new "offensive" words.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack#Notes
This is the first time I ever see any of these.
Fair point, I don't think it should have been changed in the first place. But it's been changed whether we like it or not. If it was "main" in the first place I think that's still a better name than "master."
> "Main" doesn't have that connotation.
It has had the connotation of "mainline", a synonym for "trunk", in version control since before Git existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(version_control)
Presumably this was originally due to the connotation of the railroad mainline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_line_(railway)
I agree that if it was main before it shouldn’t have been changed.
The whole branch naming thing is still only half implemented fwiw. Lots are still master, the default for new branches seems to be main. At my company it is “develop” for git.
Other VCS software uses a totally different name, perforce uses main for example.
I don’t really care what it was, it could have been “killwhitey” and I still would have been against changing it because of the effort involved in changing every repo on earth and the invalidation of every tutorial in existence.
Good point about the number of dev hours dedicated to this.
I’ve been working with a large European company and it surprises me that they insist on using “master”. They even make other master named branches on the repos as well.
My uncontroversial opinion is that it's the worst when your company uses both, and you have to juggle a dozen different repos that have it this way or that.
and shorter
The damage had already been done for Git. The master -> main change was a totally ridiculous move and caused unnecessary breakages into many tools that use Git and in internal systems.
I'm still waiting for Mastercard to change their name to a less "offensive" name: [0] /s (They never did.)
Maincard
"master" was not a thing even before. While I get the farce of renaming it for "social justice" reasons, it's still a stupid name.
It's "trunk", as in "trunk and branches".
It could not matter less. It's a piece of technical jargon. You learn what it means and move on.
Depending on VCS and branching style, "master, "main", "mainline", or "trunk" might make more sense.
"Master" always made sense to me.
Disagree, it has been 'a thing'. Both music and film use the term 'master' for production and release. One would make new releases/mixes from masters. Much like one may branch with a repository.
Now, I'll entertain conspiracy for just a moment. There might be concerning roots here with property or ownership... but if that's the case, the problem isn't with the language being descriptive of the system in which it operates.
We won't 'kill all masters' by getting rid of the word. My real conspiracy theory is this is one of many attempts to sow division. Nation-state nonsense.
Having been in the TV industry as well, it would be virtually impossible to "root out" the word "master" by any woke movement. The word is deeply entrenched there. It's everywhere. I was a little surprised when it showed up as a branch name, however.
Note that there is another instance where this is used much more explicitly with "master-slave" replication. Most people don't even pause to think about that.
Yep master never made any sense
I hope not; "main" is shorter and more to the point, regardless of any DEI stuff.
I still rename my git remotes from origin to gh because less typing is nice.
Why not `g` then? Or `o`?
In my company some repos use `master` and some use `main` so there's definitely some diversity of terminology
And diversity was the goal all along, after all.
More seriously though, it should be a policy that the change is atomic; complete or not at all.
but you might have to change it back to main when the next president shows up.
I don't know. I was told reliably that he is a fascist and this will be the last election. That democracy is on stake. And democracy obviously lost. So it may be more permanent.
I think you may have reliably heard he is a fascist, which is objectively true, and confused that with unserious people saying this will be the last election.
He’s a right wing populist who advocates punishing political opponents, opposes the press, is extremely anti-immigrant, and advocates for adversarial territory expansion.
This is by the book fascism.
John Kelly did say he fit the definition. The book banning thing some his base has pursued helped attach that label, imo.
No, I don't think you (most likely white) scrum master would allow you to work on that change.
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> Just the other day merely mentioning George Floyd's length criminal history and drug use
But like what's the reason to bring it up unless to imply that he deserved to be killed?
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> Let's take a hypothetical
Why? We already have an enormous amount of context and literal video. If you think bringing it up brings "nuance" to the conversation, just say why.
Context matters. A rhetoric trick/trap often used is to include context, but not complete context. That trick/trap is pretty much the only way I have seen:
> Floyd's length criminal history and drug use
used.
It a trick because people use the technique to trick people. It is a trap because people trap themselves with the technique, putting blinders on themselves.
Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals."
Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees,
members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:
For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and
respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company
the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract
and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our
success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.
Costco's always interested me as a company. Still the only place where I pay to be able to shop. It's a personal point of pride whenever I go there and spend less than $100.
> It's a personal point of pride whenever I go there and spend less than $100.
so you make two trips?
Ha! I was going to say, I haven't managed to spend less than $100 for weekly grocery since before COVID at Costco, wonder what his secret is.
You can go almost anywhere and spend less than $100. What's to be proud of? I went to Tommy Hilfiger and spent < $100.
it's a joke, because literally every time I go to Costco it's $150 bill because it's so fun to do "treasure hunts" with my wife lol
Interestingly, Costco’s core business model and marketing is built on membership gatekeeping practices which have disproportionate exclusionary effects along class and race lines.
They make up for it with the $1.50 hotdog and drink combo.
I thought their model was cheap/bulk products
Did Costco ever have a diversity issue? I don't think people are worried about getting more representation among grocery store cashiers.
I don't see them as different to any other company, really. I could imagine diversity in their staff of buyers would be useful, for example, to ensure they're stocking products that represent the different desires of different groups.
> I don't see them as different to any other company, really.
The pool of qualified people, for a cashier, is basically everyone.
The pool of qualified people for, say, working at a tech company, is not as diverse [1], and don't match the general population.
[1] https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/people/talent-flows...
> I don't see them as different to any other company, really.
My point was in response to this. The idea is the available pool for a specific job may not match that of the general population. Different companies have different ratios of different jobs. So, assuming all things are equal, the diversity at different companies can only match the diversity of the qualified pool of workers. In that sense, different companies will be different.
For example, according to those statistics, Costco should be more diverse than, say, Netflix.
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Yeah, I do. You don’t need race diversity to have product diversity. My wife is Taiwanese. But her friend who is Korean said “I wish there were Taiwanese noodles at Costco”. How did she do it? She’s Korean. Is it possible for her to know that Taiwanese food is nice. I don’t know. But she pulled off the nigh impossible.
The diversity isn't for you the customer, it's for the employees and the kind of corporate environment Costco wants to build.
Edit to add: A better corporate environment, of course, does tend to lead to a better customer experience, but the "visibility of diversity" should not be the goal but rather "genuinely fostering an inclusive environment where people are respected and feel willing to put in their best work," and I think that shows at Costco.
It certainly is not there for the customer, as their core business of exclusionary membership is a quintessential example of systemic racism and classism via disproportionate impact.
If the time, effort, and incidental costs of procuring a state ID card is enough to render the prospect of Voter ID requirements systemically racist, classist, and exclusionary then so are Costco cards.
The argument goes as such: up-front tolls change behavior to the degree of deterring people from even trying otherwise beneficial arrangements, as people are not perfectly rational. Look at the impact of NYC’s new congestion pricing. Compare your impression of Walmart shoppers to Costco shoppers. If they don’t match there are disproportionate effects at play.
It’s possible that some mildly exclusionary policies can be worthwhile and create more societal good than bad, even if they have some incidentally disproportionate demographic impact. Perhaps endless yak shaving fixated on residual disproportionality should not have been entertained by the DEI field in the first place, and was part of what undermined its reputation.
That's interesting. Every company I worked at that instituted DEI policies claimed that achieving a workforce representative of the customer base helped the customer.
perhaps it goes without saying but they don’t only employ front line store staff.
While WalMart - unsurprisingly - ended its DEI efforts.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-dei-programs-mcdonalds-wal...
Costco employees were never called to testify at congressional hearings. They do not need to worry about pr and political pushback like meta does.
Trump hasn't specifically threatened to put their CEO in prison for life either, AFAIK.
The subject matter is nominally the same, but I don't know how comparable I would guess the situations are. I 100% could see Meta making a very similar statement still today.
Note the yaml formatted text string of their statement, very cs-forward (I assume newlines where stripped out by the web UI here.
What are you talking about? A "yaml formatted string" is just a string. And the Costco shareholder meeting notes/ballots that the GP posted is not YAML either, it's a pdf.
That title image looks like it is from the set of a sitcom starring Mark Zuckerberg.
DEI initiatives have always been a dog and pony show, not a thing executives have ever truly cared about and they are now in a political environment where they can show what they believe in. People will learn the hard way these companies have never cared about you.
The weirdest one I saw was when Uber Eats would highlight black owned businesses and ask you to order from them. Uber isn't going to lower its cut for these black businesses or donate to some charity for black people if you order. It just wants you to funnel money to them through a black business. Bizarre.
https://merchants.ubereats.com/us/en/black-owned-restaurants...
Not bizarre, capitalism. Uber Eats should expand their offerings else someone else will take that market segment.
They may have been a dog and pony show but were definitely real and forced executives to change how they hire and promote in illegal, discriminatory ways.
Perhaps in your experience, I would be for them if they "forced executives to change how they hire".
From my perspective, that has not happened. My problem is their lack of teeth to do what they say they do.
There were teeth, in that your own performance review (as a leader) would be affected by it. Depending on your level, your own promotion would require certain stats for your teams for it to be approved. So people made all sorts of decisions - including hiring people they shouldn’t have hired - in order to push those numbers to where they were forced to. The same happened behind closed doors on promotions.
It would help the conversation if you expound on your experiences on implementation.
What exactly else did DEI initiatives do besides try to get people hired for their race instead of their competence?
I think the only "dei" hire i saw was an administrative assistant that got fired ultimately. Let's not pretend eng hasn't had a massive gap in available hires for a very long time.
Well said. What we need is real DEI initiatives. But private dictatorships don't care about this stuff. Only what marketing value they can gain from it.
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The threshold is when ideals meet actionable outcomes.
And it's not a utopian system.
You don't even require Communism for economic Equity. That's possible within capitalism.
We're pretty far off the discussion at this point though.
I think it's somewhat important to understand meta and its products are _not_ tech products. Outside of React and llama and the like, Meta is not building for or speaking to the tech community. If what they do or say sounds like populism, it's because it is. It can be ham fisted, because the majority of people are only barely paying attention, and the majority of people is who facebook wants to please.
Like politics, things feel dumb and ham-fisted, because they are. They're playing at winning wide swaths of billions of people, and the majority of people aren't paying attention, so hypocrisy doesn't register as well as just being vaguely aligned with what's popular.
I don't mean any of this in an derogatory "unwashed masses" sort of way, it's just how it is.
I don't think Meta was in any danger of anything, either implementing pro or anti DEI policies. Zuck is still owner founder. He does whatever he wants, see: metaverse fiasco. The average person could not care less about meta's DEI policy, unlike Meta's content moderation policy. Meta was not in danger of being regulated by congress, who can't seem to even fund the government properly, less agree on any kind of regulations on tech hiring. Who does this pander to exactly? Meta's reputation isn't exactly stellar to begin with among all sides.
This feels like an incorrect read on the situation. More likely this is just a blank check to hire as many people on visa as they want without having to conflict with any official policies. Meta already has entire orgs staffed by people of certain countries (hint: not US).
On the contrary, if DEI really is meaningless performative bloat which is resulting in labor problems, this is just an easy way out. It may not be popular or even possible to effectively legislate against the supposed legalized discrimination inherent in DEI, but it is pretty easy to take the L and save a few million in not having an army of lecturers on staff.
The whole charade is telling for those who believe that businesses have any real mission other than to make money: with the carrot pulled out from in front of them and the sticks put away (and possibly other sticks being brandished as we speak) it’s not hard to see why something like this would happen every 4 or 6 years.
Thank you for putting this so eloquently, especially “the majority of people are only barely paying attention”. It’s not necessarily bad, as you said, just the reality.
We may wish that reality were different or so, but we shouldn’t resent this fact.
Yeah, I don't think the billions you are talking about care about Meta's hiring policies. I don't even think billions of people accurately understand what it means to work at "Meta" vs. Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp (and even then, I doubt majority know that Meta owns all three surfaces).
The really troubling news buried in this to me was the appointment of Dana White to the meta board of directors. Like seriously what purpose does he serve but to appease the new administration?
I'd recommend listening to the first hour of the podcast this is taken from just as he was more candid than I thought he would be.
Zuckerberg at points brings up how the EU as is very defensive and has taken social media companies to court for the sum of 30 billion (never mentioning why). He laments how the US government need to be more protective of US tech companies overseas specifically naming the EU. When talking about Dana he says how he will explicitly help with them work with difficult foreign governments (be that through how he did it with the UFC or his relationship with the new administration).
It sounded quite like they're preparing to more confrontational with the EU and he at one point mentions how he thinks the new admin is going to protect them more with foreign countries.
This requires us to trust what comes out of his mouth. If folk are still doing that after all this time, I've got a mighty large bridge you'd likely be interested in purchasing.
You're welcome to your opinion, but this view of adversarial views and people who hold them is building precisely no bridges from your silo.
Listening to someone talk it out for an hour or more, and flesh out their views without constant interruption really helps you understand something about their mind and their drives in life. Very few people can keep up a facade of rehearsed talking points and bullshit for 3 hours.
Exactly this. We've had two decades of watching whether or not his words match his actions. I'm glad that someone might enjoy listening to another person wax poetic relatively unchallenged for three hours, but there have been 156,966 hours since Facebook went public on 2/4/06. That's a much larger dataset.
"But wait, there's more!"
>According to him, neither he nor the board, an international group of experts in law, human rights and journalism, were not told about the new policy ahead of time.
>Meta executives, however, allegedly informed Trump officials about the change in policy prior to the announcement, a source with knowledge of the conversations told the New York Times.
Yes, if we're going to make moves to fight EU regulations and other international matters, let's not talk to the group of experts in international relationships before making this move!
That's a pretty glaring example of his actions this week not matching the words of his "fleshed out" three-hour interview.
Boy, that facade you mentioned sure crumbled pretty fast, huh?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/mark-zuckerbergs-meta-board-co...
> When talking about Dana he says how he will explicitly help with them work with difficult foreign governments
Isn't this what Nick Clegg was an expert at?
Dana works with quite a different set. UAE, Saudi’s , etc
White is very pro-Trump. I don't think that we need to look any further for an explanation of TFA and White on the board than this:
> Former President Donald Trump writes in a new book set to be published next week that Mark Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and said the Meta chief executive would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did it again.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/28/trump-zuckerberg-el...
I wonder where that 30 billion figure comes from, could you have misheard?
Meta was fined for €1.2 billion (the largest fine ever) for mishandling user data in violation of GDPR. The other fines they had add up to less than two billion:
1. $800M for antitrust violations with Marketplace
2. $400M for collecting children's data on Instagram
3. $200M + $180 in Ireland for forcing users to accept new advertisement/personalization terms
4. $200M for a personal data leak
5. $200M for WhatsApp "unclear privacy policies"
6. $60M for failing to allow opt-out of third-party tracking
The law allows up to 4% of global revenue but it you stack fines it does start looking a bit ridiculous (especially #5). Though, as an EU resident, I'm happy someone is fighting for privacy and more a humane internet - even if that feels like a lost battle already.
I think $30billion was in reference to a fine that was thought could've been imposed on Apple last year. I don't think that actually happened, though.
https://gizmodo.com/apple-30-billion-violating-eu-digital-ma...
I was thinking about this as well, and it makes sense if Meta is planning a big sports push. Using a Quest 3, the sports "coverage" I've seen has been compelling (virtual NBA courtside seats are pretty nifty), especially MMA. Zuck's an MMA enthusiast so it fits.
It would be silly to pretend politics plays no role in this, but it's not like they're putting Don Jr. on the board.
There’s also the factor that Zuck is becoming personal friends with Joe Rogan (according to Joe, they text each other memes and shit talk people) and Dana is Joe Rogan’s best friend.
Out with the DEI people appointed to appease the old administration in with Dana White to appease the new one I guess.
Maybe Zuk wanted good seats to UFC fights.
He already gets a cageside seat, right next to Dana.
I was just watching Zuck explain that to Rogan. The bit: https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=3579
tl/dw: amazing entrepreneur
he beat his wife on video, that is who Zuck likes now, kinda strange
It's interesting seeing reactions to this. My first take was "of course he appointed Dana White, he's a big MMA dork now." The connection to Trump didn't occur to me til later.
That’s not news, just reiterating, this was announced separately earlier in the week
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He's Mark Zuckerberg's friend. They became close because Zuckerberg picked up MMA as a hobby. Zuckerberg has a majority stake in the company that can't be contested. He decided to throw his buddy a bone. That's it. Zuckerberg is tired of how much effort being "woke" takes. This is pretty easy to understand if you imagine being white and super-rich, and the closest exposure you have to any "real" adversity in life is your other super rich, multi-cultural friends and loved ones.
Wealth inequality is at its highest ever in the United States. He observed that the people he was supporting still hated him because he's disgustingly rich, so he's getting diminishing returns for his effort to "be cool". Meanwhile everyone else is having so much fun. When he complained to his other rich friends about this, they convinced him that they don't really have any biases, he doesn't owe anyone anything, and people are just jealous. So the metaphorical gloves come off. The next four years, and maybe even many more years beyond that because of the persisting judicial climate, are going to be filled with people coming unmasked in this regard.
Are they rolling back Chinese and Indian managers only hiring Chinese and Indian folks, too?
That's the most egregious hiring practice I've actually seen. The white/black/hispanic/asian american managers all hire teams with multiple ethnicities based on the most qualified candidates for the job, while Indian born managers frequently seem to end up with teams that are 80+% Indian. I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white, even in roles that require US Citizenship, but 80% Indian happens frequently.
There’s a simpler non malicious explanation for this. Asians know other Asians in tech and hire based on who they are familiar with rather than their ethnicity. It’s also why women managers tend to have more women in their teams.
It’s not malicious. Just a side effect of people’s network. Should that change? Yes. You want a heterogenous team. And this is exactly why DEI is important hahaha
This isn't just a meta phenomenon, it happens at all the big tech companies and it's always asians and indians that form insular groups (indians slightly less so). It is common and not an accident.
Are you sure? there are particular combinations of ethnicity and gender for which people seem to be quite convinced it's "malicious" when hirers stick to their own
> I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white
I assure you this is very common in the industry, at least in the US. I can even go further: that 80% white team will usually also not have any women. 80% white men on a team describes most of the teams I've worked on over the decades.
Depends highly on the scale of the company from what I've seen. Megacorp can sponsor visas and end up with entire organizations of Indian or Chinese.
How many women were doing Comp Sci in your year at uni? Mine had 6 out of 110. And they mostly hated it and don't work in IT now the ones I know about.
At my university it looks like the CS program is currently just shy of 40% women. This is higher than it was when I went. But the degree is a red herring.
Most of the engineering teams I have worked with have had members who did not have CS degrees. In fact, it's unusual in my experience for e.g. project managers, QA, or design to have CS degrees. Most performing engineering organizations include people who did not study computer science at a university, and that is a good thing.
Quite a number of good engineers do not have CS degrees. Whether or not a person studied CS at age 20 has almost no bearing on their capability to excel at engineering at age 30. Checking degrees is not a useful gauge in the field, and doing so often makes one appear snobbish.
You’re right. This article describes many lawsuits of how U.S. citizens would get replaced with Indians on H1B.
> Insiders Tell How IT Giant Favored Indian H-1B Workers Over US Employees
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-cognizant-h1b-visas-...
I do not understand why the H1B visas are skewed towards Indian men. It isn’t fair to Indian women nor people from other countries.
> The latest data showed around 72% of visas were issued to Indian nationals, followed by 12% to Chinese citizens. [2]
> About 70% of those who enter the US on H-1B visas are men, with the average age of those approved being around 33. [2]
> I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white
I have. But surely that won't convince you.
Never join one of these teams if you're not the modal race. This isn't the case for every team, but there will be important conversations in a language you don't know, and worst case, you were brought on so they have someone to let go when the company demands another 5%.
How do you know the conversation is important if you don't know the language?
Have you never noticed that you were left out of an important conversation, without hearing the conversation itself?
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Noting you seem to be the only person on the team surprised when important news is shared more broadly later.
you hear your boss's boss's name a few times, maybe your own name
Yeah, could be
You want to...make their hiring more diverse?
No I think what they're saying is that they want ability to be the only (or at least by far the primary) metric used to evaluate the fitness of a candidate.
There's no magical measure for ability. People tend to hire people who look like them and act like them, simply because in their mind that is what seems correct. That's how humans have always behaved, and it isn't going to change.
Then they're saying specifically Chinese and Indian managers hire people who are less skilled than the best candidates available to them. It's a fishy claim that needs proof.
> mediocre team of all H1Bs
More mediocre than other people in the company? Presumably the manager is themselves an immigrant, possibly also on a visa. OP's saying they deliberately saddle themselves with people who are worse on every dimension, and thereby make their own job harder. And only managers from 2 countries do this. That should be suspicious to anyone possessed with logic.
> Really, not one other candidate from a slightly different <group> hit your bar?
See now that's a very different question. Are you, like OP, also arguing for diversity considerations in hiring?
> from the same country of origin
But not any random country. Literally the 2 largest countries in the world, which produce massive quantities of software engineers. Preferentially hiring from your "in-group" is never morally or legally right. But why is there automatically a presumption of lower competence when that "in-group" is such an enormous hiring pool?
Preposterous!
Only if they stop making it cheaper to hire from offshore
Folks from a given country tend to network with and feel more comfortable with people from said country, affecting their hiring and promotion practices. That’s only natural.
I’m an immigrant and I’ve never felt that way. The U.S. has a melting pot of cultures with everyone able to relate to everyone in some way shape or form. Generally with food. Americans eat German food, Italian food, Indian food, Cantonese food etc. and best of all, we fusion them together…curry pizza for ex.
Thought we were supposed to hire on merit. These folks are lowering the bar.
what a disgusting comment
Is it true?
the onus is on the person making the allegation
There’s no data to prove this allegation. Are we resorting to hearsay and racist dog whistles at HN now?
Sounds like you want DEI for white people. That is not going to happen. Chinese and Indians in tech was already a stereotype in the 90s.
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"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Almost all big companies are doing this now. It's never a good idea to hire someone based on skin color or gender rather than merit.
The predecessor to this was affirmative action in colleges (this is basically affirmative action in the work place).
New Jersey is seeing the direct result of this. Applicants couldn't pass a basic reading/writing/math test, so they were forced to get rid of these requirements. The direct result of this will be teachers that shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place and poor student results.
More information here:
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/video/nj-eliminates-redundan...
They call it 'redundant', but I would rather have someone teaching my kids that actually knows the material, rather than someone that went to any number of low-quality colleges where I have no idea if they know the material or not.
I mean I'm speaking for me as a straight, white male, not even living in the US but EU. But some observations from my side:
- no program will get support/taken seriously if it's just to tick a box
- implementing DEI as positive discrimination seems a painfully stupid idea (and yes, large corporations also do that in the EU)
- I'm surprised how many comments are celebrating scrapping this effort
That being said, I don't really get why companies aren't working on actionable goals instead. There've been so many scandals related to this in the last years. One complaint from someone affected being taken seriously by HR seems like a bigger step than a purely box ticking endeavor.
Again, I'm speaking from my non expert point of view but it seems a banal truth that a diverse workspace may also score better on innovation and perhaps offer a larger solution space for certain cultural problems. But this might be just my ignorant point of view.
Becau
Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. These programs were never a victory for the principles or the people, they were marketing.
So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is valuable has changed, so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Progressives have forgotten in the last 10-15 years that the progress which we've won took generations not because our predecessors were weak and slow but because it inherently takes generations to effect lasting change. It's a slow, painful process, and if you think you accomplished it in a decade you're almost certainly wrong.
I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread belief?
According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_, the first time having two black senators is now, school integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that we were even starting at a "good" place.
I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not like we're in that good of a place, never really were.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-...
America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium.
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
Say you inherit your mom’s house which is worth more as a result of historical redlining, and your wife inherit’s her mom’s house and it’s worth less. So there is some persistent economic disparity as a result of past actions. But both houses probably are worth more than my wife’s grandmother’s house, which is a modular house in rural Oregon. And my dad’s family house is a tin roof building in a third world village that didn’t have electricity last time I was there in the late 1980s.
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
As to teaching history, the question is how you do it. Growing up in Virginia, I learned about slavery as a cautionary tale: we treated people in the past differently, and that was bad, and we strive to treat everyone the same now. That’s good history.
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
Have you spent time in other countries?
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
For an incredibly evolved version of this, check out a (brief summary of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India].
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
Of course you think that. You(r family) would monetarily benefit from it. Not to mention you’d get to double dip and enjoy the perks of the neighborhood as well as get your free money. Completely bonkers that you were able to type that without seeing the blatant hypocrisy.
"DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity)"
I guess that what went wrong with them. Rather than generate systems to treat _evereyone_ equally the systems attempted very hard to 1. categorize people into predefined groups 2. after people are grouped, then treat each group individually.
What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
The DEI systems that were implemented were just policy theater, that were ineffective and alienating.
In US corps outside US (I worked for a subsidiary in Finland) the DEI stuff they implemented was just insane and non-helpfull almost in every aspect. "You can no longer use git repositories with the term master.." - that was hilarious. It's obvious nobody was serious about DEI. Management just hired bunch of consultants who sold them checklists so managament could check the box in their own checklist. An opportunity to actually help minorities was lost sadly.
The only good thing that came from the rigmarole were unisex toilets which are just common sense.
<< White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
I think you are correct, but it still misses the mark on framing. White people are indeed not punished, but they are being hindered by DEI mandates. At one point, it gets a little annoying, because we see no real benefit from it. If anything, demands seemed to escalate.
I will tell you my own personal 'fuck it' moment. Company meeting with chief diversity guy. Peak DEI moment. A suggestion is made after presentation that maybe 'we' should have 'black safe spaces', where only black people meet. It took everything in my power to remain silent at that time, because if I have ever heard of a racist policy, that was it and the company is lucky I did not pursue legal path. Someone else did cautiously raised it though and that concerned was dismissed with wordplay.
I am just one guy, but DEI breeds heavy, misunderstood and very much unseen resentment discussed in small local groups only, because you cannot even discuss it openly in company channels. If anything, people bond over 'fuck it' moment.
<< But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
shrug Does it mean we should exacerbate those issues by instituting restitution? Seems counterproductive.
> White people aren't being punished.
When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.
When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.
When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.
>You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
You can't just dismiss the framing to dismiss the injustice it points to. Slavery wasn't meant to be a punishment either, doesn't mean we can omit the injustice it entails.
Skip explicit racial discrimination and help those who are most in need. It's that simple. Yes this group will have a specific racial makeup but it makes a world of difference to discriminate based on need rather than taking a racist approach.
This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing. We are all harmed when we are amongst racist assholes refusing to coexist with others based on skin color.
My issue is the metrics constantly parroted to show inequality wouldn't (shouldn't) stand muster to an Econ 101 student.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How about the English? I'm a second-generation 'white' American citizen. My grandfather was a Canadian citizen from London, Ontario who migrated to the USA in the mid 1920s as a boy. The English, largely due to the influence of Wilberforce, passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which outlawed slavery in the British Empire and predated the American Civil War.
I mention this only to support the point you make above, not to virtue signal. Anyway, it's nothing my family did, it's just historical circumstance. But to my family, the insane amount of politics and drama around DEI and BLM in America still seems foreign to us, even a few generations later.
The Tusla Race Massacre took place in 1921!
> My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow.
I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
MLK was a minister (because Baptists don't have priesthood), Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He was profoundly Christian.
The whole movement for racial equality, and thus liberation, in the USA grew from intensely Christian foundations. One of the core tenets of abolitionism was the idea that humans are created equal, and such attributes as race or skin color are irrelevant before God, and hence to the faithful, too. Christ specifically said that being a Greek or being a Jew does not matter before God, and being a slave or being a master also does not matter; all are equal.
So, certain amounts of colorblindness are inherent to the very idea of people of different origins being equal, as it emerged in the USA, and supposedly elsewhere in the Christian-dominated areas of the world.
Also, it's the idea of equality, equal worth (before God), not of fairness or compensation; the latter might come from atonement and Christian love to the neighbor.
Eventually other ideas took hold and somehow eclipsed the initial ideas, not just of 1860s but also of MLK's.
I agree with the sibling's point: MLK's ideals transcend ideology. He understood that all men of all colors were equal before God; a belief which he instilled in his movement. He did not play the motte-and-bailey game of "some are more equal than others", that was so popular last decade.
Calling MLK's values "colorblindness" in the way of "racial liberation" is the kind of double-speak the GP criticizes. Language that distances everyone from the capital-T Truth that MLK knew and died for, in favor of small truths that pretend to unite but actually divide.
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This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
Since you are qualifying what type of societal engineers you don't trust are there ones that you do?
Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Or, more specifically, because outcomes are proportional to opportunity, there is only so much that can be explained by variability in knowledge, effort, or circumstances. When the system consistently hands out bad outcomes to one group of people, it's reasonable to at least assume there is analogous bias in the opportunities that were presented to that same group.
In other words, equity and equal outcomes are not a goal, they're a heuristic. Same as how logical fallacies, while wrong, are still valuable heuristics.
My read on the past decade is that most DEI programs were adopted in blue[0] spaces primarily to redirect Progressive voices away from questions of economic justice and elite control. That is, businesses virtue-signal the most tolerable Progressive politics in order to distract rank-and-file Democratic voters away from questions like "isn't it fucked up that Mexico is basically a perma-scab to bust unions with" or "why are we just letting Facebook buy up all the social media".
To be clear, you're right that these companies want to engineer society from the top down. But it's not about handing out high-paying jobs to the unqualified for the lulz, it's about making Facebook into the new Boeing - a company that is so integral to the operation of the state that shipping software that murders people is considered an excusable mistake. If that means Facebook has to change political alliances every so often, then so be it.
[0] As in, "aligned with the Democratic Party leadership", not "left-wing"
Unfortunately your alternative is a society engineered from the top down to be deliberately unfair.
Equity is more like... wheelchair ramps. Or chirpers at traffic lights for blind folks. Or subtitles.
>> Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
Although the women’s suffrage movement in the United States did have some violence in the extremes, proposal, advocacy, and ratification of the Nineteenth amendment to the US Cobstitution (which granted women the right to vote in the US) was not driven by violence in anything but the most remote margins.
It passed through moral persuasion and nonviolent activism.
Your statement is factually incorrect. There are dozens of other examples.
King was a Christian, he considered communism atheistic.
> the first time having two black senators is now
This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
That's a 50% increase.
> I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade.
I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick.
I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started.
Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
> According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
According to this, the groups marked black and hispanic, bachelor's degrees are 27%, but it doesn't say what subject.
So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...?
https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72
>FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%
That sounds proportional?
I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%
That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
It depends on how this percentage was raised. If they actually increased the black and brown talent pool by 50%, that would be an unequivocal success. What I suspect actually happens is that recruiters are incentivized to improve DEI metrics, so they simply hand out more interviews to underrepresented candidates. The end result is that higher tier companies simply poach these candidates from lower tier companies.
Apparently Indians don’t count as Brown.
Achieving representation closer to that of the wider population is not racist.
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
> a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently.
So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
> do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
Even school integration was largely motivated by red lining and even now by white flight.
^mitigated, not motivated
Abysmal? You think that Meta is going to compromise its quality of work to meet a statistic they knew would only be temporary? If they had changed the demographic to 30%+ they would have had to hire subpar people and bypassed people in the top of their field who truly deserved and had the experience to qualify for the job. This whole DEI bs never should have been started.
What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
the last known direct child of an american born into slavery died only a few years ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
> hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations
This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
If there’s continuing trauma, it isn’t caused by what happened 100 years ago, it’s because it is still being perpetuated somehow.
That might be what you are trying to say, but I had to read it a few times to see it.
Slavery is at an all-time high going back thousands of years
2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA
50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
plenty of forms of slavery still exist, perhaps we should focus on that
The grandson of the 10th US president is alive and well. That president was alive when George Washington was. This is a young country.
The biggest issue for changing percentages like that, is that fundamentally the actual mindset/work required to do software engineering effectively kinda sucks.
And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do.
Especially historically under represented groups.
It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well.
But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time.
Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc.
If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever.
Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path.
But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it.
So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons.
One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try.
East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs.
If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
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I must be the only idiot to think that education and money aren’t the issue in the black community. Two-parent households and stability would sort a lot of things out in a generation. Dreams, goals, ambitions, and opportunities follow from stability. Money doesn’t fix emotional vacuums.
This is not meant to be inflammatory. I’ve had many conversations with black men about this, they actually put the idea in my head.
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I don’t know why I’ve been down voted.
Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces.
The same also applies to people of colour.
If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
But you make a strange comment here: "black and brown" employees are both completely different people.
What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society.
But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ?
For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
But being white is really random: how is it my problem that the weather is shit in Normandy and all my ancestors are pale ? I arrive in the US, people would tell me I'm privileged somehow, when all I do is work hard and do my best to contribute to companies. And the same goes to more sunny weather-born people.
If we talked less about skin color, and a bit more about the actual nature of people (I can accept positive discrimination towards former slave families, they deserve compensation), maybe we'd accept those DEI policies more ?
It's a complex debate everywhere anyway, we have the same in France with our own colonial crosses to bear, and like what to do with a Tunisian freshly arrived vs a descendent of a Tunisian family who's been French for 3 generations.
Coolies have nothing to do with America though.
If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though.
I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
I was simply pointing out an Indian deserve no more advantages than a Turkish or a Portuguese, while a descendent of slave might, since his family was wronged by the initial american invaders and they contributed, sometimes via back-breaking work, to the current state of the country.
Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
How is that a US issue? It's more of an issue for the French or the British.
This is an interesting response that points out ambiguity in it all. Depending on what you're reading / what statistic is being derived, often times you see Hispanic / Latino included as white and not brown.
I agree, but I think the constant division of people across vague color lines make people counter react in unproductive ways. Like (random example) talking about Obama as a black person hides so much nuances about who he truly is (and who his ancestors are) that it gives his opponents the impression that s all he is and his defenders not much else to defend him with.
I just find the american casual racism, both sides of the political spectrum, very ... american :D
In France we sort of pretend to ignore there s skin color. I d never describe someone as black, or no more than I d describe someone as blonde and I would almost never use a French word to describe it. It makes me nervous to reduce someone to this random attribute, when maybe his family came from Mali, or Martinique or the US and that's so much more interesting than the effect of the sun on his skin.
> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds.
Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
>And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.
And if you were in a large corporate environment, you could see through the bullshit as well. It is just a CLM (career limiting move) to call it out, so everyone gives it lip service.
You're moving the goal posts to try and tar your opponents with the "communist" brush. The Soviet definition of "silencing dissent" was far more extreme and violent (prison, death) than what the grandparent's comment is referring to.
silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do
The Republicans in charge of two school districts near me have been trying to organize book burnings for the last two years.
Get back to me when it's the Democrats.
>In February 2021 some religious communities in the United States have started holding book burning ceremonies to garner attention and publicly denounce heretical beliefs. In Tennessee pastor Greg Locke has held sermons over the incineration of books like Harry Potter and Twilight.[86] This trend of calling for the burning of books one's ideology conflicts with has continued into the political sphere. Two members of a Virginia school board Rabih Abuismail, and Kirk Twigg, have condoned the burning of recently banned books to keep their ideas out of the minds of the public.[87][88] In September 2023, Missouri State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Bill Eigel showed off a flamethrower at a campaign event and vowed to burn "woke pornographic books [...] on the front lawn of the governor's mansion" if elected.[89]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
I guess if you think this is fine then that's what you think.
> And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
Donald Trump was re-elected. He has said that we should deport pro-palestinian protestors on college campuses and has sued multiple news outlets, both on tv and in paper, for their coverage during the election season. It's really hard to find any political figure who is more aggressively targeting speech he doesn't like than Trump.
> ...as progressives are wont to do these days.
Progressives I know are pretty tolerant. It's the conservatives that seem obsessed with free-speech-for-me-and-not-for-thee. Xitter is the loudest example.
If it's mostly only online then why did left leaning papers self censor, on the orders of their rich owners?
Which side is often going to court (and losing) to dispute facts (like election integrity or sexual assault allegations)?
The sense I get is that those on the far right are worse than those on the far left, but those on the moderate left are much worse than those on the moderate right, to the point of being nearly insufferable.
Shouting people down and canceling them is never a way to persuade people your cause is just.
The goal is not to persuade them but to sideline them; to prevent them to propagating their viewpoint.
I remember watching some event around CHAD time, where white social justice warriors on stage where making lots of social justice outrage statements, on behalf of Native Americans, in front on this native America elder. Only to have him take the microphone after them, and he was having none of it, he went up to the mic and completely denigrated them. Then it dawned on me, that these white people where literally ruining his cause by trying to take it over. And there's long history of white people doing this, where they subvert and neuter a movement and insert themselves as leaders, but only temper the cause. The end result is a kind of moderation, where no effective change happens because of it. I guess I read a similar sentiment once, where Anarchists where claiming that it was them that changed course of human history, repeatedly, by throwing the wrench in the wheels of society, to cause the change. From that point of view, it would get annoying if there was someone taking the wrench out before the fall.
There hasn’t been a decade in the past 130 years of their existence that Progressives haven’t advocated for systemic racism.
We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats.
2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.
This is pretty spot-on. Whether they’re aware of it or not, most white liberals are motivated not by a desire to lift nonwhites up but rather by a desire to push “white trash” down.
> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds.
I'm trying to put in flat terms, but fundamentally power matters. This is the base of democracy: give people the power to change things, there needs to be a fear that these people will exercise their power.
Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.
And also people are way more influenced by their everyday environments than nice speeches. Having a nation that values diversity helps more to also embrace these ideals, than living in a racist dictatorship and fighting at every corner to keep your minority voices in your heart.
> It's a slow, painful process
The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger. Women lost abortion rights over a few weeks (the leading to that was also long and slow, but when it finally happens it doesn't take much). Foreign people lost the right to return to their US home within days when the ban happened last time.
Power matters.
> Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.
Yes. Probably multiple lifetimes. This is why I say that real change takes generations.
You cannot have a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs. You can either strip the people who hold reprehensible beliefs of the vote, or you can work diligently over generations to change the culture. But as long as you have a democracy, you will never be able to create change that sticks by simply wielding the power temporarily granted to you.
Wield that power too forcefully, and you'll get pushback, and unsavory politicians will ride that pushback to power. When that happens, as you observe, a lot of what was previously accomplished is undone.
I believe that democracy is the greatest good progressivism has ever accomplished. I'm not willing to sacrifice democracy in order to speed up the rate of change, even if it means that people suffer in the short term. And because I believe in democracy, I cannot support the heavy-handed use of power to try to force people to change. Not for their sakes, but because it simply doesn't work. As long as those people have the vote, they will resent you for your use of power and be able to strip it from you. That's the lesson of 2024.
That's not to say we can't do anything while in power, but it must be done with an eye towards the next century, not just the next election cycle.
> The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger.
The trap is accidentally triggering a reactionary movement by moving too hard too fast. Reactionaries aren't called that by accident—they react. It is within the power of progressives to avoid triggering them by staying within (whilst steadily changing) the national Overton window.
> You cannot have a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs. You can either strip the people who hold reprehensible beliefs of the vote, or you can work diligently over generations to change the culture. But as long as you have a democracy, you will never be able to create change that sticks by simply wielding the power temporarily granted to you.
Voter suppression has repeatedly happened and has been mostly scuff free [0]. Working diligently through generation also means building the means to protect the advancement you achieve, and not just by having them in the rules, but to be able to enforce these rules.
My mental image of this is Tulsa: when you steadily but firmly create a vibrant place for your community for decades, to have it burn in flames within a day, with no significant reparation, no significant support, and just a footnote in some textbooks.
When I say "power" I don't mean in some limited framing, I mean anything that can actually leverage your position in a realistic way. Capital, cultural influence, military or political power come to mind, but whatever form it takes, I think a group needs to be able to stand its ground if it chalenges the status quo, whatever time frame it chooses to do it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
The issue here is that power not exercised is power lost, and power fundamentally comes down to either perceived or actual consequences.
All people have some degree of racist tendencies - regardless of gender, sex, color, etc. And criminal tendencies. And other tendencies.
And what actual consequences will be applied that impact one group or another tend to go in cycles/pendulum back and forth (and hence impact what percent of the population is going to do x, and how many will see real consequences for those actions).
That is because when one group overdoes it (or is perceived to), enough people get tired of that group/outraged, and then things shift. And these patterns tend to be on coarse criteria like gender/sex/color/race/language, etc. because the most brazen users of any sort of shitty force/violence/shaming/whatever are exactly the type of people who are the shittiest. And every group of people have a percent that is shitty.
For instance, for many years now shame has been a major consequence, along with legal action.
So eventually, we end up with a group/leader essentially immune to shame and legal action, who is now going to use do all sorts of shameless and illegal things. Really, a large group of people like that. And who don’t mind violence (or the threat of it) as a potential consequence.
Eventually, being a shameless crook will fall out of fashion (or will have finally hurt/pissed off enough people), and another counter group will rise to take it’s place.
Often, when it gets particularly ugly/strong in one direction or another, there is also a corresponding backlash against the particularly strong users of the prior ‘fashion’ of power.
Sometimes beheadings, or ostracizing, or legal harassment, or whatever.
Weinstein getting what he got (as deserved as it was), was one swing. We’ll see who gets this next counter reaction.
Why do you think the dems and tech companies are going out of their way to be as friendly to the incoming admin as they are? They know the score, and are trying to avoid getting whacked.
Or, to quote an old western - ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it’.
Not sure what you mean by money not swinging around?
The largest tech companies in the world (which directly or indirectly control all modern media, and are > $4trln in market cap), just publicly ‘bent the knee’ to someone they quite publicly fought for almost a decade now - and which of all market segments, they were the most consistently against.
In many cases for personal identity reasons (Tim Cook being gay, for instance), but also because these companies are based in areas which are typically Liberal - west coast urban areas.
Most other market segment companies were never strongly Liberal in the same way.
And if you think Tech DEI programs may have been performative, I can assure you that initiatives in Construction, Heavy Industry, Finance, Transportation, etc. had far less actual backing. They just rarely got the press, because Tech == $$$ and visibility, and also Tech == historically incredibly naive when it comes to politics and power.
In my experience, at least FAANG Tech DEI programs actually weren’t performative - they really did work very, very hard to meet their goals, which actively made huge problems later in the cycle because there just weren’t enough candidates.
Largely agreed DEI was a bit of a workplace recruiting marketing/signaling exercise than something that changed demographics at work.
I've worked in Wall Street tech for 20 years, and while the demographics of my coworkers have changed, it largely had nothing to do with DEI or other recruitment efforts.
In the late 90s/early 00s it was FSU Russians&Ukrainians living in South Brooklyn & US born and/or raised Cantonese speaking Chinese from downtown. By late 00s, percent of Indians started to tick upwards. In 2010s, mainland Chinese students on visas ticked way up, and in 2020s one of the fastest growing groups was actually female mainland Chinese students. Campus recruiting may pat themselves on the back about finally growing the % of women, but this was largely downstream of enrollment & degree choices made by these women many years before.
In many ways it's gotten a lot better as all these different groups largely work wherever in the organization. 15-20 years ago there was a big problem with the Indian UI guy loading his team with Indians, the Chinese data guy loading his team with Chinese, and the Russian backend lead hiring all Russians. You could guess what team people were on by their face, and they'd often slip into their native languages at work. Not the best for collaboration.
Also agree that real change of hearts & minds is slow going over generations, and can't be legislated. That said we have made and continue to make a lot of progress. Anyone who has been alive more than 20 years should be able to recognize US culture in 2020s is so different than even 2008, 1999, 1990, or the 1980s..
I think some people mix 1) cultural change (acceptable words people use / ok jokes people make) with 2) legal changes (gay marriage rights / expanded legal protections from discrimination) and finally 3) outcome changes (higher % of group going to college / lower % of group being poor / etc). 1 moves faster than 2 which moves faster than 3. I think that's because each is downstream of the preceding change. You can't directly change outcomes in a short time span.
If DEI was only marketing, why has the number and proportion of women in tech been increasing over that time? I'm not trying to challenge you, I'm just curious if you have any insight.
ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?
It can be marketing and somewhat effective. I'm not trying to say that it didn't accomplish anything (though others are), I'm suggesting that it wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to accomplish something real for equity. And since the motivation was external pressure, a change in external pressure immediately triggers a pivot.
Oh ok, that makes sense. I can agree with that. Given that, I worry the number of women will stagnate or decrease without it, which, imho, would be a detriment to the industry.
There’s no reason to believe it’s primarily due to the DEI programs until it gets worse again with them gone. That’s a basic ABA flow for testing causation.
Things improve on their own over time too.
Honestly I think a lot more of it has to do with the perceived status of engineers in society - particularly teenage girls are hyper aware of social status.
15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.
I wanted a wider view of the trend, and it looks to me like after the covid dip the US is still not back at the 2000s level of participation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300026
In tech it might be a different story, but all I've seen where the stats decrease until 2020, and haven't seen much data covering the recent years. Was there any significant increase above what the other fields have seen ?
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This is true, and unfortunately you can't say this to any colleagues at any of these companies without jeopardizing your future. Even still as the DEI programs are dying, the DEI social norms are still strong in most corporations
I think your analysis is missing some nuance.
There are countless instances throughout history of lasting change being sparked by a single moment. Sure, that moment is frequently the culmination of some period of struggle, but you have to remember that the issues that came to a head and sparked those DEI initiatives a few years ago were exactly that—the product of literally centuries of struggle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a recent phase of that struggle.
So, I believe your emphasis is on the wrong side of the equation here. That is, it's not that there is an inherent deficiency in a trending moment or ascendant party giving rise to change. It's the explicit pushback against DEI that is responsible for its unwinding. And, this effort was not successful because the party that sponsored the pushback was ascendant. Instead, part of the party's ascension was due to it making an issue of the pushback. More specifically, the blowback was part of a divisive theme, along with illegal immigration and other issues.
Progress is not a one-way street and gains are not de facto insulated against erosion. Progress (and its security) is a product of the mores and culture of a time, and these can be influenced and manipulated. So, there is really not such a thing as "lasting change", and that's what we saw here. In some ways, the blowback has taken us not just back to our pre-DEI state, but to a pre-1960s mental footing.
The methods chosen to push this and other recent changes assumed that those advocating change would stay in power, if not in government at least in the culture. They assumed that they could keep up the pressure to act in a particular way in spite of the fact that those so pressured didn't really believe in any of it. That was a critical and fatal flaw. You can't plan change on the assumption that you'll be able to apply pressure indefinitely.
You're right that there are tipping points, but they don't come at will, they come when the culture is ready for them. Push too soon, and as you note, you may actually undo progress that had already been truly won.
Culture behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: manipulate it gently and it flows smoothly. Apply too much stress too fast, and it turns into a solid and resists you. Trump did not invent that resistance, he simply untapped it and rode it to power. The progressive movement created the resistance by applying too much pressure to a culture that wasn't ready.
Who says ‘ 400 years should have been enough time’?
Why not 4000 years or 40000 years?
Or never? There are simply no preordained guarantees.
> ...was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant.
Of course it was, and so is this latest effort from Meta. I'm sure if there was some anti-Brazilian group in power in Washington or something, you'd see Meta shutting down their offices in Rio.
>so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
I've always found these loud DEI programs incredibly uncanny - every career website loudly how important diversity and inclusiveness is for them, but in flowery language, as implying they'd actually discriminate against non-diverse hires would be illegal in most places. Which begs the question of the point of these programs, considering of why they were needed this outwards messaging against discrimination, considering it was illegal in the first place.
I've witnessed the DEI transformation from the inside - which amounted to a chief diversity officer being hired, a lot of incredibly sanctimonious online trainings got scheduled for us, and rainbow flags started popping up in the weirdest places.
A few coworkers I had, who checked a lot of the boxes got dragged into interviews and company events (which some found somewhat uncomfortable). Very little changed in practice, and if you didn't care to read the company newsletter (who does that anyway), then you didn't experience much of it.
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H1 Visa has existed since 1952. The 65,000 per year cap (H1B) has existed since 1990. The 20,000 quota for Masters/PhD holders has existed since 2004.
What in the world are you talking about?
A lot of people say DEI programs were purely performative and just for political points. But these policies did change the corporate landscape and affect hiring decisions.
Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
This data came from workforce demographic reports submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by 88 S&P 100 companies
Hispanic individuals accounted for 40% of new hires, followed by Black (23%) and Asian (22%) workers
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
> Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash:
[1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224I don't want to make too many assumptions here because it's a bit of a minefield, but... perhaps there's an entirely selfish and rational explanation for DEI hiring programs in a tight labor market? If you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.
I don't think that's an entirely accurate narrative, but I do think it's probably at least part of this (e.g., that all of the best white people were already hired, while many POC people of equal caliber were not or not making as much). The job market was soaring in 2021 and looking for ways to hire new people without having to pay them more would likely be highly attractive. Now that the job market is not so competitive, there's not as much need to do so if you're just trying to find workers.
What kind of role did you occupy that you saw "manager leave headcount unfulfilled because the qualified candidates they found were non diverse"? Have you considered it may all just be the appearance you are interpreting in your head, but it doesn't map out to reality?
I had an interesting experience asking a startup I worked at why they had no female engineers. The answer was they couldn't afford them. They were in such demand that they commanded a significant premium over male engineers at the same level.
> a random non-white person would have 47x better odds of being hired than a white person at the S&P 100 companies.
I’m so old fashioned thinking your immutable characteristics shouldn’t be considered for employment.
Before 2020, it was around 7-10x, so it doesn’t surprise me it went up after.
this is an incredibly misleading statistic skewed by the fact that almost all retiring corporate workers are white so lots of white jobs were “lost”
We are already in the backlash.
When the playing field is tilted you have to put a thumb on the other side to balance it out. This might annoy the ones who were tilting it in the first place.
People aren't making hiring decisions based on protected classes. Rather, they're looking for qualified candidates in new areas.
One thing that's common is for people to recommend their friends for jobs. Most of the time, their friends look just like them, because that's the kind of friends that people make. If you base your hiring process around this easy source of candidates, you end up not talking to a lot of people that would be qualified for the position. "DEI" can be as simple as "in addition to employee referrals, we're going to hand out brochures at a career fair".
They aren't, but it's unfair from them to benefit from the tilt.
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This isn't pressing your thumb. This is throwing away half the scale
Looking at that article, it looks like for "Professional" degrees, it was about 25% white and 40% Asian. The "White 6%" figure came from a decrease in white workers in low-skilled roles and a massive increase in Hispanic people in those same roles.
Given that many DEI programs specifically focus on "high skill" roles (like software engineers), it's unlikely that DEI accounted for this disparity while massive numbers of black and hispanic people being hired for low-skilled jobs had a larger impact.
If only 25% of people hired for roles requiring professional degrees were white, that's still a remarkable number, given 2/3rds of people receiving professional degrees in 2021 where white, without even considering the total population of professional degree holders
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
The most imbalanced group in hiring were Asians, representing around 5% of the population but around 40% of the chart in that article. From my anecdotal experience with DEI programs, they generally don't target or encourage hiring Asians over black/Hispanic people. If we are purely talking about discrimination against white people, it's much more likely that an Indian or Chinese person is replacing a white person, not a "DEI hire" black person.
no it’s because the study is measuring net changes and most retiring professional degree workers are white
but Whites with a professional degree are much more likely to already be employed, or be able to retire (creating opening for new hires)
I recommend reading the WaPo article that goes along with it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/28/minoritie...
Bloomberg's choosing to misrepresent the data here - this is not about jobs added, it's about changes in the employment composition.
Simple example: Company X has 950 white and 50 POC employes. 10% leave over the year (95 white, 5 POC). They hire 200 more at an even split (50% white, 50% POC). They now have 1100 people, 955 white, 145 POC. So they've gained net 100 folks - and the net change is +5 white, +95 POC. Voila, 95% people of color hired.
It's still a pretty stunning change with a large ramp up in hiring of POC, but it's much less an indicator of preferential hiring than the Bloomberg framing makes it sound.
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OK, thanks for sharing.
From my understanding that analysis is complete junk. From the Daily Wire of all people:
> But it’s not possible from the data to say that those additional “people of color” took the 320,000 newly created positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs.
> A telltale sign that Bloomberg’s “percentage of the net increase” methodology is flawed, VerBruggen explained, is that, if the departures of whites had been just a little higher, the net change in whites would have been negative instead of the actual small growth of 20,000. Bloomberg’s methodology would then assert that whites took a negative percentage of the new 320,000 jobs, a mathematic impossibility.
> The percentage of new jobs that went to whites was likely about 46%, eight points below the 54% white makeup of companies’ existing workforces. That’s to be expected given demographic changes in the United States since the time that the currently-retiring baby boomer generation first entered the workforce.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bomb...
That data cannot support the conclusion drawn. You don't know what the turnover rate was.
Yes this is a wildly misrepresented statistic that has nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with demographic shifts in the U.S. population (specifically, that the "non Hispanic white" segment of the U.S. population is shrinking).
affirmative action for hispanic people has always been uniquely absurd and exploited by effectively white europeans for as long as it has existed. my college counselor told me to mark "hispanic" on my college applications because I'm of Iberian descent, which I refused to do - but I know of multiple others who did and went to Harvard/MIT.
In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE role. I have worked with literally hundreds of software engineers in my life.
As a black software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with another black software engineer.
I had a chance to see Amazon Hr's organizational dashboard which listed, among other things, the racial breakdown for each VP in the company. BLACK_NA (which I figured means american-born black employees?) in engineering organizations were generally at about 1%. I knew of one black American engineer in my org of about ~150.
There was one notable exception: an org based in Virginia with something like 10% or 15%. I figured it was due to black former military and defense workers who had to be on-site in Virginia to work on a specific GovCloud project, part of the JEDI contract effort. I knew of one black engineer who worked on that compared to about ~5 others I knew who worked on that.
As a person who has been black elsewhere and black in America, the biggest advantage of being foreign born black person is having grown up in an environment where black excellence is not exceptional, it just expected.
In the US, inferiority of blackness is so deeply ingrained and entrenched. it's like air, we (blacks, white and everything in between) have all breathed in and fully internalized that we don't even realize its there.
> I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture
I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.
> Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship
Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then?
> lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.
Hmm, what's missing from this list?
But this discussion is about it being a problem with hiring?
There was not a single black student in my graduating class of Software Engineering from college.
So is the problem truly with hiring, or is it earlier on. It could also be both. But if none are graduating with a SE degree...
Just replying to the above comment that seems to suggest that all these DEI jobs are being taken over by "black or Hispanic" people.
I've worked directly (that is, either on the same team or with an immediately neighboring team) with two black engineers.
My company historically has had leveling issues and, sadly, they were definitely not meeting expectations for their level, or maybe even for the one below their level.
One was nudged out to another team. One currently on my direct team is being nudged out. One or two people want him to be fired (very curmudgeonly engineers who had worked with him), but me and the manager would rather find him new work within the company suited to his background in data science rather than software engineering. He's been dragging his feet; it's getting more and more difficult.
The company has a strong and vocal DEIB/social justice culture within certain parts of the company (though I suspect much less so among executives). It sometimes comes into play pretty directly in hiring. I've been in panels where someone calls out that the candidate is part of a disadvantaged population who've historically been under-leveled, though I haven't been in a panel where that made a difference in hiring or leveling.
The standard line is that the company doesn't compromise its hiring standards for diversity. I clearly have my doubts about whether that ends up happening in practice.
Northrop Grumman had a lot of folks from Crenshaw/Hawthorne/Carson when I was there, due to a partnership program with the local Cal State (Long Beach). All of the security staff was from that area too. Good folks, would 100% work with them again.
On the other hand, I've seen exactly 1 guy at the FANG I work at. What's the difference? I think it's companies like Northrop realizing that folks from under-represented communities have great value and prioritize that instead of whatever the current HackerRank-based interview process selects for
I'm software, but towards the hardware side of things, for decades, in silicon valley and elsewhere. I've worked with (as in, in the whole org) exactly zero software/firmware, and only one black hardware engineer (born and raised in Nigeria). I've interviewed a couple hundred people at this point, with only one being black.
Where I've been, trying to get some DEI policy to influence who's hired would be impossible, since the panel has to agree, and there's no way they would agree to someone not qualified. Even with pressure like "we really need to hire someone before end of month or we'll lose the req", the response has always been "find better people then".
Idk wtf companies you're working at but in my short career in a small city in the middle of the country where most people are white by a good percentage Ive worked wkth a ton of black developers.
While I can think of at least five people I have worked with who were SDEs and black (two from Africa, three from I-don't-know-where-but-I-presume-American-born).
So it was racist?
Depends what the applicant pool looked like, but 94% seems almost certain to be an overcorrection.
What does that matter when all your newcomers are not white? eventually you'll end up with the polar opposite. You should hire based on skill not race or any other thing you have no control over.
I dont think the people of color that got their foot in the door in tech would agree with you.
I would not be surprised while the OP were sending applications to DEI programmes, most of them went to Asians. Which I assume this still fits the PoC PoV of DEI.
In no way it is at all believable that 94% of all fortune 500 hiring during 2021 went to minorities. This is statistical mumbo-jumbo. Do you even work at a company like this? This statistic has to be misrepresentative of the conclusion you are suggesting because it is easily debunked by standing at the entrance to any midtown manhattan building during the morning rush hour.
I think the flaw works like this:
1. Acme Inc. has 40,000 white employees and 10,000 employees of color on payroll. The statistic would be 20%, if Acme were hiring at a constant rate by the same demographics.
2. However, suppose Acme hired the bulk of its employees during its growth phase 10 years ago. Acme's hiring back then was proportional, but the population has changed. Now only 60% of applicants are white, compared to 80% back then.
3. Acme lays off 5,000 staff (at random), and hires 1,000 (proportionally.) So they've laid off 4,000 white people and 1,000 people of color. And they've hired 400 people of color and 600 white people.
I'm too lazy to do the math but I think that works out as hiring a negative % of white people, even though it's just representative of demographic shifts.
But most of those new hires were the lowest level employees -- service workers, etc.
Also, in the US Asians, overall, are not economically disadvantaged like most Blacks and Latinos. So I don't think you can really put them together in this particular context. Notice that the largest group of Professionals were Asian (lots of engineers/programmers from India/China as usual).
(Also at the Executive job level, Whites still very on top.)
This is true, but that was a one or two year phenomenon, driven by BLM protests, and at the end of it, ended with white people still having a disproportionate share of senior and management positions.
Are you presenting this as a positive?
So this is an example of what not to do.
1. Violate the law more blatantly than anyone else. 94% of new jobs went to POC? So what, 50% of the population shared 6% of the jobs? This sounds like apartheid era South Africa.
2. Create a backlash where the largest population and richest segment is so angry, it uses all its resources to absolutely destroy this.
Nice going.
1) it sounds crazy because it's actual statistical malpractice. See the many other comments explaining how it's bullshit
2) the significantly backlash is interesting, primarily because it centers around the bullshit statistics that companies pat themselves with. The hiring process is so nebulous and unknowable to the potential hiree that no person can really know whether they were denied a job due to dei policies. Yet we simultaneously assume that all non white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI, which really just undervalues the nonwhite population, as if they truly deserved none of the jobs, wouldn't have gotten any without the help. This combined into the rage that certain people feel about what really appears to be a back pat circle around naming a git branch and changing security terminology.
> Yet we simultaneously assume that all non white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI
Add that to the list of why DEI is harmful. There will always be a potential asterisk next to minority hires as long as DEI is a thing. It’s unavoidable.
Wow
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This is saying those businesses all used DEI for show, and suggests their efforts were half-hearted, if I read correctly.
Their metrics I assume are zero / flat, around 'success' for DEI, derivatively.
To me this suggests the next best focus area for increased fairness of societal fiscal (opportunity) performance is regulation, perhaps driven by social change and social pressure.
I have next to no influence. Still I wonder if I'm naive?
ALSO, awesome work Ibrahim / firefoxd, you deserve to be honored for your experience and celebrated for meaningful efforts to make society better. I would not know about this without you:
> If you are black and take a group picture with your white colleagues [on Zoom] one evening, eventually someone will make the joke that all they see are your teeth. If you are black and hang out with your white colleague, people will always assume you are the subordinate.
An alternate take: there are good DEI programs and poor ones. The poor ones fail because the planners dont really know what they are trying to do, but leadership thinks they ought to have one, and so they metric-ize it. And since (again, no clarity of thought) hard numbers in areas like hiring sail perilously close to large legal rocks, they whiff on the metrics and end up measuring something like "engagement". And, concomitantly, deliver a lot of low value chatter that provides ample ammunition to opponents of any kind of DEI programs, even the good ones.
A good DEI program should, IMHO, be indistinguishable from good management culture embedded at every level in an org.
- It should not be controversial to assert, and product management to insist, say, that products designed for humanity should be usable by humanity: men and women, for example - but we still have medicine and cars tested on male models, and software that is unusable if you have low vision or cant operate a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. That doesn't automatically mean one must hire 50:50 men:women, say (see legal rocks, above), but it certainly starts to smell like a missed opportunity if you don't have a single person on your staff or in your network of consultants who can explain what it feels like to wear a seatbelt when you are 1.5m and 50kg not 2m and 85kg. If you want better products, this seems like a no brainer, but it doesnt seem to happen.
- It must absolutely be a mandate for all managers to avoid cliques. All men? All women? All Indians? All Purdue grads? Close watching needed, especially when those groups hire and promote. Doesn't need a mandate, needs better managers of managers.
Tldr is that no amount of DEI will fix bad management culture.
The particular issues around medicine and cars were more due to regulatory and liability issues than bad management culture or intentional discrimination. Pharmaceutical companies often didn't include women as subjects in clinical trials over fears that if one got pregnant and then had a baby with serious birth defects because of the drug that would be ethically problematic and potentially lead to huge monetary damages in a civil trial. The FDA has since changed their rules to require broader participation in clinical trials.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/diverse-women-clinical-trials/...
Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that. Now they are using a more diverse set of dummies.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/improving-safety-for-women-...
https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies
> Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that.
I think I would still blame the management of NHTSA for setting that standard.
That's what I've seen in the metrics. DEI hiring has been an enormous failure. A lot of the concern in non-exclusively-left-leaning online spaces (including this one) about DEI hiring was and is way overblown given how drastically unsuccessful they are in practice. The default like is that "it's bad, but getting better" by showing difference year to year in sectors where the numbers look good, or even just reporting on noise.
I can only speak from personal experience, but since about 4 years ago, every candidate I’ve been asked to interview for a software engineering position has been Black, Hispanic, South Asian or East Asian. Not a single white American.
Are there no white people studying CS anymore or looking for jobs? Did they all stop applying?
Again, it’s only from personal experience. I never asked any of my coworkers a “hey, do you ever interview white people?”, so it could be a coincidence that I was never matched with any. But I don’t think that’s the most likely explanation…
Your experience is very different from mine. I rarely interviewed white candidates, but they were still more common than Hispanic and Black ones. The majority of the candidates were Asian.
That has not been my experience working for a big US tech company.
I also work for a big US tech company. If it’s not standard practice, I’m happy to hear it.
If you don't take them can you please forward me their resumes? It's extremely hard for me to find a candidate who isn't a 20s-30s white male named Chad.
My understanding is there’s a lot of outreach at HBCUs, so you may try that. Also H-1Bs.
The joke that white men are all named “Chad” is tired. You’ll notice I didn’t say everyone I interviewed was name DeShawn or whatever. Let’s move past that.
Personally I feel if you want to make an impact, you need to provide resources early on when people are growing up and in school.
There’s nothing like gaining inspiration because someone you know growing up is doing it. e.g. It’s much easier to go camping for your first time when someone in your life is “the camping person” and can guide you through it. And the earlier you do it, the higher chance that you end up pursuing it.
In a lot of impoverished communities, they don’t have as many as those kinds of people. Especially not compared to a well-connected family in a wealthy suburb.
I don’t know how you would provide those resources and maybe these big companies already are, but the availability of professionals that young people surround themselves with should not be overlooked.
It's why day care, head start, school lunch and the like are super important.
Even before we get to corporate demographics or college graduation, admittance, and application rates, there are millions of children growing up in poverty in the US. Relatively inexpensive social welfare investments can mitigate many of the worst effects, even for those who don't decide to become software engineers.
None of this matters if the children grow up in a single-parent household. Keeping a two parent household has an outsized influence on the children's development and needs to be a cultural shift in our society.
Not only that, but more resources and more stability help foster successful relationships. If you want more two-parent households, make it a lot easier to have and care for a child.
It can absolutely matter, and in fact it is all the more important in a single-parent household.
You’re right that single vs. two parent household is the largest contributing factor. You’re wrong that it means that no other factors matter at all.
Overlooked point but this is very very important. It's hard to understate the importance of good examples and role models while growing up. We are animals which learn essentially by imitation while growing up. We internalise what we see both consciously and subconsciously. It has a massive impact. And in places where good role models are scarce this self-perpetuates.
Not discounting the material/economic conditions, obviously.
To underscore your point, I've met 5 black engineers in 13 years as a software developer. To put this in perspective, my high school was 50% black, and my college was 30% black. Somehow I got where I am, but almost none of my classmates were able to do the same. I don't know what the solution is.
Why is a solution needed? Where is the problem?
I hire developers. They are all white because theres no black people around here. It isnt a problem.
Does this matter to you? This depends on the type of society you want to live in and be a part of. My take? None of us live in a vacuum in isolation; we live in a country of 300+ million people. My neighbor's are Iranian, Syrian, Turkish/German, French/Moroccan, Indian, East Asian and all lovely people.
The problem DEI programs should solve is a systemic one where hiring practices might otherwise pass on qualified minority candidates or may not even be presented to them in the first place. The implementation of many programs is questionable, but the objective and why have some form of policy that focuses on broader inclusivity in the hiring process should not be: I want a better America for everyone and not just some subset of Americans.
I decided to look up the demographics on Wikipedia. London does indeed have a higher percentage black population than the rest of the country, but Manchester and Birmingham are very similar, whilst other major cities where you're likely to find the most tech companies have around 5%.
London: 54% white, 14% black
Manchester: 57% white, 12% black
Birmingham: 49% white, 11% black
Bristol: 81% white, 6% black
Leeds: 79% white, 6% black
Sheffield: 80% white, 5% black
Liverpool: 84% white. 4% black
Note: this excludes mixed black and white backgrounds, which make up a decent proportion of people who would describe themselves as black.
So if equal numbers of black people went into tech, and companies hired without bias, then you'd expect at least 1 in 20 people in most tech companies to be black.
You're right that fewer people from black backgrounds are applying to tech jobs, although I think it's a leap to say it's because they "don't want to". It could just as easily be that they find it intimidating, or don't believe they can do it, or they're socialised into other careers. As a company or hiring manager, if you do come across black applicants, it may well be the case that they have had to battle against a lot to get where they are, which shows grit, enthusiasm, and initiative.
> Whats next, you want to force more white people to become developers because ethnic Indian devs are becoming too populous in the industry.
You managed to sneak in both a slippery slope fallacy and a straw man in the same argument here. No one said what you're claiming.
I worked at Apple. In our org of 1000 people there were/are zero black leaders/senior managers
It’s all Indians and Chinese
But we'll call that "diversity" because they're not white.
It's like the southern Bay Area in general, the least black place I have ever lived. People call it diverse, but it's really just 4 ethnic groups that rarely intermingle. It's not diverse like LA or NYC are diverse.
None of the companies I worked for considered Asian tech workers "diverse". One actually carved out a separate category for Asian males: ND. Negative Diversity.
I'm not doubting your companies' policies, but just throwing my data point in there too.
Where I was at there surely were internal "Asian" community groups with a budget and so on, for one. Don't think proposing a "White" or even "American" or "European" one would've gone over especially well.
Has anyone asked why so many companies seem to care so much about the appearance of DEI? And all at the same time? I know there’s cultural shifts towards that sort of thing, probably to fill the void left by religion, but does that explain why the world’s largest private equity firms push them so hard? Seems like something everyone just accepts without question, even though it’s completely out of character for people and entities who only exist to increase their own bottom line (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, it’s just so out of character to the point you’d think it would raise suspicion).
It's marketing, they judge that they will gain more by the good will earned than it costs to hire those "DEI experts". Now that the reaction is in full swing across many territories they start to cut back (see tfa).
It's all very exhausting.
Could it be caused by ESG investments?
Ignorant investors check a box to put their money towards 'ethical' investments, leading companies to create DEI marketing departments to exploit the new investment pipeline.
I'm surprised I don't come across this perspective more often. ESG funds reached 15% of the total global securities market in assets under management (although much of this was merely a reclassification of existing investments). It seems very reasonable to conclude that ESG funds/scorings became the primary market incentive driving the corporate DEI initiatives we've seen rolled out this past decade.
Publicly traded companies operate under a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders (maximizing long-term shareholder value). For consumer-facing companies one could easily argue these initiatives are part of a broader marketing/corporate branding strategy that benefits shareholders. But, for large publicly-traded companies that don't rely on retail consumer sentiment, I presume DEI initiatives were primarily a strategy to attract investment from ESG funds and help quell potential regulatory action/political controversies
I'm ultimately not sure how reasonable my take is (I have no insider experience or knowledge) but would love to hear from someone with relevant first-hand knowledge and get their perspective
Loads of companies saw a fresh source of capital. but it had strings, you couldn't be an evil mining company, use exploitative labour practices or generally be shitty.
Obviously thats hard to do and still maintain a massive profit, so some did the next easiest thing to greenwashing: hiring some DEI consultants and PR people to take some photos of the three employees with blue hair and melanin.
ESG is still a thing, despite some finance bros making a fuss.
Companies care about attracting all segments of society because if they can expand their applicant pool they will pay less for labor. If I am the only person smart enough to recruit qualified graduates from HBCUs then I get to be more selective in hiring and I also get to offer less wages but still fill the position.
Companies also want to be in the middle of the pack when it comes to sociocultural norms. There is safety in numbers. When everyone was adopting DEI initiatives, it was the safest for you to do it too. Now that everyone is abandoning DEI initiatives, it's also the safest to abandon it. There is no upside in being the fastest when it comes to bucking society's norms.
Yes, this is asked a lot, and I've always assumed it was legal pressure. If a company doesn't have enough of X demographic, they can be sued for discrimination, while at the same time it has been illegal to hire based on race. This time the legal pressure in the opposite direction is more obvious.
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DEI programs are simultaneously for PR and morale. You don't want to be "that company that doesn't even have a DEI program". But also you don't want your employees being pissed off that you don't have a DEI program, because they could leave, or complain and decrease morale, which could become a PR nightmare.
But they can be more. Some companies I've worked for used their DEI programs to actively support local communities, organize volunteering efforts, collect donations. Even companies that HN might consider "Evil", I've seen have very strong and engaged DEI groups. It came down to two things: 1) they hired passionate people who took it upon themselves to organize internally and do more with the groups, and 2) they had leadership that (amazingly) gave the support needed for the group to make a positive impact.
But also, some companies I've worked for just had a 30 minute "movie lunch hour" and guest speaker and that was it. So it's obvious to me now when a DEI program is a PR dodge, and when it does real work.
Crowning yourself as an expert in a politically contentious field is very lucrative if you can make it stick.
Is this because truly doing race-based hiring has been illegal for a long time? I've noticed they'll target certain demographics for interviews and other opportunities, but identity can't be a factor in the interview itself. It's a fine line.
They will target certain demographics in ways that their lawyers can argue are legal such as giving more interviews to Grace Hopper attendees or schools with favorable demographics [1]. This is a great way to poach minorities from different companies without moving bringing any minorities to tech in any significant capacity. This is probably why men are increasingly going to Grace Hopper [2].
[1] https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gende...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1203845886/women-tech-confere...
maybe race-based hiring has been illegal and you might be able to win a civil case, but the DOJ certainly wasn't going after companies for not hiring enough white people or men.
Definitely. I think they just had to make sure not to decline a candidate for that reason explicitly. But it trickled down, e.g. interviewers were told not to ask anything remotely related to the candidate's identity and especially not to write it down, even gendered pronouns.
Many DEI programs are hit hard by reality: there are only so many people of race X, gender Y or whatever metric Z interested and qualified for a job. The more difficult the job, the less diversity of candidates you have.
I did around 1000 interviews for my current company and about 200 for the previous one. I found that in IT in Europe there are not many candidates to meet DEI targetsand still hire the qualified ones. Even expanding to other continents, we barely made it; the last team I hired was one Latino, one Filipino and one white, 2 out of 3 were male. I interviewed around 30 candidates for these positions and I selected the top 3. These 3 were just above the lower limit of expertise to be hired, so I basically had zero choice, the alternative was to pull triple shifts myself to cover for the missing people.
Let's say you are the director of a steel plant. DEI targets are totally irrelevant, I never heard about a woman working on the plant floor, but I have many cousins who did. Dying at 45 or 50 years old due to lung or throat cancer is not something many women want to, but all my cousins did. I don't believe in DEI in these circumstances. But if you want DEI in "a day in life of a Microsoft /Twitter employee having free food and pointless meetings all day" videos, that is not fair.
So, I don't know why you were not able to place the developers, but think about DEI even more. We have several black people in my department, one of the best PMs I worked with is an older black woman, a good professional will find a place almost anywhere. Morgan Freeman shows that being black does not prevent one from magnificent results, but asking for rewards for being black is not the way.
What does DEI even mean in Europe? Do you hire stand-in versions of US racial groups?
European doesn't count unless your skin colour is sufficiently different.
(IE; Italians are "White" but Turks are non-white. Romanians ironically get the short end of the stick no matter the situation).
Mostly it centers on LGBTQ+ and Women though.
Yeah - it's mindboggling how insanely (actually) racist Western Europeans are towards Eastern Europeans.
Hailing from Eastern Europe, I could tell so many stories, some of which happened to me, and some to others, which was kinda affirming to see that it was not self centered bias.
How it went for me - I built a super challenging, super advanced feature (involving graphics acceleration, video encoding etc. in a company where this was not a core competency), then I got put in a team where we had to deliver a shipping prototype on a short timescale, build up a team around it, etc.
Still I was not promoted - what I got was a clueless Western manager, who I had to hand dictate Jira tickets and Asana reports to. A year later he left for a high-level position at an A-list company. Out of curiosity, I submitted my CV to a regular dev position at the same company, and all I got was an automated rejection letter.
I also had an Ukrainian coworker who built super impressive development tooling to a huge delight to everyone - he quit in frustration, and they had to build an entire team (with similar hiring logic), and unsurprising they couldn't match half his velocity with a team of 5.
It's not really in your face, you are not really treated like dirt - but you are managed away from actual prestige and opportunities, especially if the project succeeds, they tend to forget about you - except when the bug reports come rolling in.
It really shows up in the org charts too - we used to joke that there was an 'iron curtain' on C-level minus two, as nobody from EE managed to get promoted that far. I aLso felt that the fact that the majority of engineering was in EE was treated as some 'shamful dark secret' that if found out, would cast a bad light on the firm.
This is especially super ironic considering the standard diversity spiel (you are all privileged white men) is still going on, ironically from someone who makes 5x as much as we do, and sits in London.
Are you suffering from the same condition, too?
Green washing, security theatre, lip service, etc…
This is an old phenomenon that keeps reoccurring in many forms.
> who owned the land where the campus was built
I understand that it is important to raise social awareness about some things. People should not be afraid to talk about real issues. Freedom of speech, the need to listen to people/citizens/customers &c.
That said, the cheerful, forced vapidity in that video is embarrassing. None of those parroted statements is worth a tinker's cuss historically. And none of it is worth a damn in the present time either unless the corporation is going to give billions in reparation to the tribes that were permanently evicted.
Is the Land Acknowledgement Theatre really a strategic attempt to avoid paying damages in many potential class-action law suits?
Is that corporate fear really what drives most of these obsequious recognition statements and policies?
In Australia, that kind of "acknowledgement of country" is extremely common at the start of all kinds of speeches in different contexts. Slightly shorter, and fixed structure, but very similar content.
It's just part of the social fabric now, though not without its detractors.
Jeez, the most I ever got was called aside by the VP of Engineering on my last day to give him my opinion of their Diversity program ("since you're leaving, I figured you could be brutally honest with me"). Loved him for that, BTW :-)
But seriously, congratulations!
The negative effect of "fake diversity" is that it leaves everyone else wondering if the minority employees actually know what they're doing or if they were hired to make the company look good.
> The negative effect of "fake diversity" is that it leaves everyone else wondering if the minority employees actually know what they're doing or if they were hired to make the company look good.
This is the most insidious thing, in my opinion. If you're already a hater, now you can unabashedly claim the moral high ground. "Did she interview well, or was she a diversity hire?"
One of my theories about DEI programs is: the people running the programs see their only failure mode as "we fail to improve our metric", but the much more dangerous failure mode is "current employees see our program as a joke that creates no value and hires unqualified people".
And it seems like a lot of DEI teams are just completely blind to the latter mode. You sometimes hear about a team announcing an apparently minor change, like renaming something to sound more inclusive, and then go on about how they spent six months discussing it and gathering feedback, and it's very obvious that nobody involved ever asked themselves "when we announce this are we going to sound like a serious team that does valuable work?"
That reminds me of a big company around that time. They changed master to main in git, which cost each engineer many hours on average, which translated into many engineer years (decades?) of wasted time.
It was in the middle of a hiring spree. Why not spend that time interviewing black engineers instead?
Since you seem relatively open minded and objective about it let me ask you this:
How much did you get paid for doing all those consulting gigs on DEI topics?
Just to point out, even as you highlight the hollowness of the trend passing through, you were a part of the industry it created and a beneficiary of people's sudden interest in the symbolism of it even if it achieved little. Tons of people who could justify some kind of vague contribution/expertise were glad to make money off of the political need to pursue this, and be seen doing it.
It sounds like you were one of the more respectable contributors. Others were hangers-on, making money or careers off people's fear of being accused of not toeing the new party line, regardless of how hollow it was. VPs/deans/executive directors of diversity and inclusion at whatever institutions they could sell their services to.
Whether it was good or not at its core, some people had a vested interest in it continuing. It happens equally with every new trend that is hard to set real goals against. (or achievable ones, until it's found out to be empty).
I had my day job. This was something I did just to help. I did not request any payment for the work I did. The DEI teams where in house while I was an outside consultant.
You say you only placed one? Did you get any feedback on the rejections or were they just cold/ghosted?
So I don’t positively discriminate but, the most recent role I was looking to fill, I didn’t speak to that many candidates because applicant quality was overall poor, but getting on half of those I did speak with were from minorities.
In the end we decided not to hire for the time being because we couldn’t find anyone at the standard we needed (possibly due to time of year - November/December often aren’t great), but I’m surprised that you weren’t even getting people to interview. That, on the face of it, is quite concerning.
I sympathize with your frustration. A 1% success rate is extremely discouraging.
Do you know what the success rate is for non-DEI candidates? I believe there is some bias in the hiring process including racism, sexism, ageism, etc. But I also think that companies are hiring less than 1% of applicants in general. From what I have seen, companies are very bad at identifying the best candidates. But if you are getting 100 resumes a month and you hire 2-4 people a year, it's a roll of the dice just selecting the 20 resumes out of 400 to invite for an interview.
All of that is to say: don't get too discouraged. A 1% success rate would be remarkable. If you can achieve a 0.5% success rate you can increase diversity by 400%.
Personally, I'm a fan of meritocracy. I wish the most qualified people were surviving the roll of the dice. But I think it would be ideal if the most qualified people included a lot of diversity. As it is, employers' best chance to hire qualified people is to rely on human networks to help somebody stand out in the sea of resumes. So the more people of diversity you can land, the better chance there is for future candidates. And the better qualified your diverse candidates are, the more voice they'll get in future hiring influence. So keep pushing highly qualified diverse candidates. And while you're at it, push highly qualified non-diverse candidates so you aren't just seen as a diversity advocate. People might take your diverse candidates more seriously if they are perceived less for their diversity and more for their excellence. If 80% of your recommendations are diverse and 50% seem to be very high-quality, the 10% that are very high-quality non-diverse will change the perception of the 40% very high-quality diverse candidates.
Yes and the fun part is a lot of people see this "eager yet resistant" as a damnification of diversity initiatives instead of the calcification of current systemic problems.
> https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4
I have never seen anything more cringe or ridiculous than this video.
Bill Gates has said publicly that he's a fan of Silicon Valley, the tv show that pokes hard fun at the startup culture. But it's Microsoft that's beyond parody...
Your story reminds me of my friend, also Black, went to engineering college with an overwhelmingly white population (me included). He was in more than half of the pamphlets pitching the school they give out to prospective students. It was so blatant.
At the end of the day companies want employees with talent. Yes, they were using DEI as a marketing, and kept hiring using merit, not DEI principles, which I find nice.
Why hire a candidate because of their skin color? Shouldn’t employees be hiring for skills and company value fit?
> Like what makes one an expert?
Your skin colour of course.
Maybe the candidates you presented weren't high quality enough?
> Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company
I work at pseudo government organization where we take seminars every few months about dei, gender issues, etc... and it has made 0 difference when it comes to hiring. Ultimately my org is trying to reach out more, get to dei events, but that's as far as the effort goes. Once a job application is posted, it's the same old process. Maybe that's fair, but it felt disingenuous, and unnecessary, especially since we weren't great at hiring anyways.
I’ve noticed most academic places I’ve worked perpetually use photos of the same 1-2 black people that ever worked there in marketing materials. Including people that left or were pushed out years ago due to racism and unfair treatment. We have constant trainings and workshops on diversity and inclusion (taught exclusively by perpetually angry and abrasive middle aged white people), but everyone ignores me when I point out how specific aspects of the hiring process and work culture systematically exclude people from diverse backgrounds. In truth, at our supposedly “woke” and “DEI hire” academic institution, a black candidate still needs to be much much better than a white candidate to have any chance… and once they are here they will not feel welcome or included.
Yes, effecting actual change is hard, pulling employees into a meeting room for 45mins to show them some buzzword filled slides is much easier.
Thanks for sharing your experience
Yawn. Focus on being a great dev and not what your skin color is. I couldn’t care less where your ancestors were from or whether you have a penis or a vagina. If the code is good, let’s merge it. If it sucks, delete it.
Every single socially progressive initiative every company engages in is purely performative. If those initiatives potentially hurt their bottom line or hurt them politically, they will be dropped so fast your head will spin.
Years ago, tech companies would promote such moves to improve their image, play intot heir role as being "outsiders" or "disruptors" and to attract staff, who tended to skew towards socially progressive issues. There was genuine belief in the missions of those companies. Google once touted its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
But now we're talking about trillion dollar companies that move in lockstep with US policy.
I tend to believe that every US company eventually becomes a bank, a defense contractor or both.
The biggest heel turn politically is probably Mark Zuckerberg, who now makes frequent donations to Republican candidates (and some Democrats, for the record) but we also have Meta donating $1M to Trump's inauguration (by comparison, there was no contribution to Biden's inauguration). Efforts of fighting misinformation are out. DEO is out.
If you work for Meta, you're now really no different to Tiwtter. Your employer now actively pushes right-wing propaganda and the right-wing agenda. There is no real support for minorities. But the sad truth is, every other big tech company is on the same path.
> ... who owned the land ...
they didn't use the word "owned", only "occupied". The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership" and would think of it more like land alienation. As a Georgist, I'm personally very annoyed by these sort of empty indigenous land acknowledgements. I'm more excited about stuff like this Squamish Nation housing development in Vancouver, BC [1] where they actually get rights to use the land how they want even if it doesn't fit local expectations of "indigenous ways of knowing and being".
[1] https://senakw.com/
> The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership"
I doubt they had deeds to land. But they did fight inter-tribal wars over which territory belonged to which tribe.
Humans have a very well developed notion of "mine" and "not mine". Saying indigenous peoples did not have this is an extraordinary claim, and would need strong evidence.
Thanks for this bit of sanity. Arguing that Native Americans didn't have a concept of land ownership, while still having the concept "I'm going to murder you and your compatriots so that I can occupy the land where you live.", seems a bit like splitting hairs.
Yes and no.
Even in the US, commons-deeded land between multiple people is still a thing. Albeit one that lawyers hate to mess with because it's more work for them.
For purposes of this thread, exclusive control of an area, absent other claims, would certainly entitle indigenous American peoples to ownership of that land.
Fine, but recall what started this discussion, this issue of land acknowledgements (which I agree are absolute peak stupidity which literally managed to piss off everyone on all sides - the right thought it was useless virtue signalling, and lots of actual indigenous people pretty much agreed, considering it a vacuous gesture). For all intents and purposes, native tribes owned that land before settlers kicked them off and said you couldn't live there anymore.
> transferable, heritable private
None of this is guaranteed by 'ownership'.
I don't think that's accurate. The historic colonizers fully understood that native Americans had a sense of property, which is why even the most blatant land grabs were almost always justified by a forced sale or treaty. I've only ever heard the idea that natives didn't own land from people promoting the myth of the noble savage.
Brett Devereaux talks about this in relation to the Mongols and other nomads. Yes they didn’t “own” land but if you trespassed on their grazing pastures they would absolutely use violence against you: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
The notion of a lack of land ownership is just fetishization.
Also, OUR idea of ownership, at least legally, is based on the idea of usage and access. You may own a piece of land, but not the mineral rights. You can't prevent an aircraft from flying over your property etc. Ownership is a bundle of rights and exclusions. The idea of ownership meaning "who is allowed to hunt on this land" would fit right into our legal framework of ownership.
You'd be surprised then. Indigenous property rights aren't homogenous. Many lacked the kind of exclusive ownership that we have in Western systems. (Some) Inuit recognized communal band lands for example, where a particular individual within that band might have rights to a particular resource location while they used it, but their usage was governed by complex systems of traditions and they couldn't necessarily exclude others from separate resources in the same physical location.
Pueblo groups had extremely strong ideas about property lines, but those properties were often analogous to modern corporations where individual families could own "shares" in the property, and exchange those for other shares in other properties to reallocate ownership. Areas within a property could also be "rented" to others, or the entire property reclaimed by the government.
The best way I can summarize it is that native Americans tended to have much more fine-grained ideas about what property rights entail than our Western systems. Capabilities based security vs role based security, to really force the analogy into computing.
Well, I feel like the "traditional way of life" argument is okay for why they should get special treatment. But why should anyone get special treatment if they are going to just, essentially, treat it as way to siphon tax revenue from the larger society?
Shouldn’t building dense housing in an area with a terrible housing shortage increase the tax base if anything?
I’m perfectly fine with modern corrective actions taken in response to past treaty violations. They were treated with as separate nations in the past and now there are mechanisms for limited forms of self rule on tribal land.
Because that society committed what are at least atrocities and probably more fairly described as genocide against those societies for like 400 years. A small casino empire seems like the least we could do lol
I have always disliked and told people I disliked land acknowledgements because they are designed to earn the social capital of giving the land back without ever having any intention of doing anything close to that.
The institution of land ownership is very important in farming societies, where land is what produces wealth and health.
Societies on the hunter/gatherer spectrum also value their hunting grounds, but in far less strict ways.
I'm pretty sure the indigenous peoples that lived by farming had well developed concepts of land ownership, but they were the minority when Europeans arrived.
Or really any permanent settlement. Look at say, Northern Inuit vs. Puebloans.
Here in Australia they use the carefully crafted phrase: “the previous custodians of this land”.
As in… we are the custodians now.
I've not seen "previous" used ..
eg:
~ https://www.health.wa.gov.au/Improving-WA-Health/About-Abori...is pretty generic for a handwave across the entire state.
In specific places, large tracts of land here, the terminology is current custodians - if you recall that whole deal with Mabo and Native Title there are large ares in which the traditional inhabitants are now the current owners under Commonwealth Law that once didn't acknowledge them as human and declared the land Terra Nullius.
Mabo decision: https://www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Art/Stories_and_Hist...
What? No. The phrase is "the traditional owners" or sometimes "traditional custodians". Never previous.
I don't think that's true. Traditional can also carry the sense of ongoing.
funny because i feel that your comment plays into the exact same tropes about “indigenous ways of knowing” you critique
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You might put "they/them" next to your name if you prefer not to be referred to by a gendered pronoun.
Not putting pronouns next to my name, doesn't mean I don't want to be referred by a gendered pronoun. I'm pretty sure people can guess correctly my gender.
That's fine, too. I typically don't specify a pronoun. Call me what you like.
My point is that this is not the case for everybody. Some people prefer not to be called "she" even though I might guess that they're a woman.
Can also be helpful for names that are commonly male or female. Or foreign names. But there's not really a need to list multiple pronouns like "they/them/theirs", is there? Doesn't "they" say it all?
Only would make sense when it's "she/they" or similar. Otherwise it's just redundant.
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That's a bizarre take. Something doesn't have to be useful forever to be of use. And mechanical printing presses were probably one of the most significant inventions ever, even if they're obsolete now.
Wow.
I'm curious why it took hundreds of candidates to not be hired before it dawned on you that it was not sincere? Wouldn't the first dozen have been enough?
Unless your financial interests intersected with those of the companies you consulted for this "show"...?
But, I applaud your bravery in calling these guys out after they stopped giving you work.
Bravo.