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.
Not only that, the “diverse slate” requirement, which is mentioned in the Meta posting, is actively harmful to PoC jobseekers. When I was at a Microsoft, I
I knew of multiple cases where a candidate was already essentially decided on, but they had to continue what was essentially “sham” interviews of at least one woman and one PoC in order to check the diverse slate box. Complete waste of time on all sides.
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.
Microsoft did this.
I went through a DEI loop at Microsoft (found out later) and was ghosted by one manager, another manager asked a leetcode hard with 20 minutes to implement it, another asked a leetcode hard and DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE ANSWER until I walked them through it step by step (they had never seen the answer before).
Less you think I'm complaining about algorithmic interviews, I passed Google and Netflix technical rounds just fine.
Microsoft managers were the most disinterested group I've ever interviewed with, and it was only later that I found out I was picked to interview for multiple teams because of a DEI recruiter, and then found out that MS had initiatives forcing managers to interview people from underrepresented backgrounds.
Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock. The IQ difference between the people at Netflix and Google compared to MSFT was astounding.
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.
No, they were not smart engineers.
one literally interrupted me to say “you can’t solve this using recursion, you need a for loop”. I clarified if they meant for stack space reasons and they said “no, it just doesn’t work recursively”.
The system design round, they got confused with some basic queueing concepts. It was a shit show.
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.
> 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)
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.
if we are in a dangerous political situation I wouldn’t know because trump alarmism has been turned up to 100 since 2015, so I have to discount what your saying to “mild political irritation”.
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.
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.
Many woman of color are simply not entering the pipeline. But those who are there get wildly favorable treatment compared to people from other demographics with similar capabilities.
To put it another way - I have seen a lot of Claudine Gay's at work. Generally smart women, checking all the DEI boxes, given juicy opportunities way beyond their abilities. People from other demographics have to struggle a lot to get such opportunities.
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. :-(
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.
When you sit in on staff meeting, and the president explicitly says, "we are not hiring or promoting any more white men, only women of color and those of other marginalized groups", you absolutely know it for a fact. This in fact occurred, and continues to occur, as I can personally attest, at a for-profit college in NYC. And in fact, although ~10 people have been hired over the last few years, none of them have been white men.
Obviously that isn't to say women of color have it easy (nobody has it easy these days), but it is beyond dispute that this sort of discrimination is rampant in certain industries (like higher education) and in certain cities.
And for people who say this is illegal (and perhaps it is), when a white man (not me), who was a victim of this policy (many accolades, highest performance reviews, seniority), was repeatedly passed over for promotion by women of color and other "marginalized" people, filed a complaint with the NYC EEOC office, he was met with derision.
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.
> In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason
Statically Asians in America outperform "White" people when it comes to education and salaries, which shows the fallacy in the whole white privilege thing. Therefore DEI policies pretend Asians don't exist.
Those CEOs are great examples, because they show the operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin or a McKinsey alum. I see less evidence for power networks based on race, or those power networks are doing less.
> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin
What evidence do you have that Sundar or Satya used any power network to progress in their career?
Could it not be that being a Brahmin in India was not all that promising to an ambitious young Indian man and in response he decided to start fresh in another country where he had very little in the way of useful network connections?
> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin
eh, what? Why would US corporate culture give a shit about Hindu castes? Google and Microsoft boards appointed Sundar and Satya, but I don't think those boards could tell a Brahmin from a non-Brahmin.
Do you have anything to back that up with, as far as I understood it Indian CEOs are responsible for significantly higher percentage of market valuations than their population percentage in the US.
Palo Alto Networks & Arista, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM, Netapp, Micron... Even World Bank has an Indian CEO.
The charitable interpretation of why Asian == white in these scenarios is that Asians are not typically underrepresented in the engineering field, company founders, prestigious schools, etc.
The less charitable interpretation is that DEI programs aren't being pushed for by Asians and they're designed to help people who look like the people starting the programs.
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.
There's often a separation between the people who bring in the candidates and the people who interview/approve the candidates.
If HR passes me a stack of resumes then that's who I interview; if all the people HR passes me are white, then I'm left to either assume that these were all the qualified candidates who applied (or at least, to operate under that assumption).
If the process gets bounced back because the stack that was passed to me was filtered by HR's unconscious (or conscious) biases, that forces them to give me more diverse candidates to choose from; the best candidate may still be the middle class white dude, but ensuring that the hiring manager is presented with a broad range of options and not just Chad, Biff, and Troy helps the whole pipeline.
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."
This has been demonstrably proven to make discrimination worse, not better.
Apparently, people like to discriminate. Where there are overt markers, there is still a chance that people fear the legality of their discrimination. And when you remove overt markers of discrimination, people look for subtle markers, and those exist, and then still end up discriminating.
End result, even fewer qualified members of the discriminated class gets hired.
Of course the "answer" is never that people were biased in favor of DEI groups in the first place, and removing said overt markers of their race just removed that bias because individuals could no longer discriminate. No, the answer was obviously then is that people found "secret" and "subtle" markers instead because they just have to discriminate and don't like DEI groups.
Do you have links to any studies that removing names and other obvious markers from resumes (college name, employment dates, etc) somehow increases discrimination in HR screening?
I honestly fail to how that could happen.
For example, if HR is throwing away all resumes that aren't from an Ivy League, then removing cities and schools from the resume can only help.
If "subtle markers" can still identify someone's race or gender, then remove those markers too. You can test of this works by giving employees bonuses to correctly guess the candidates' demographics and see if they can predict reliably.
If anonymization reduced the representation of certain demographics maybe it doesn't make discrimination worse, but rather you were wrong about which groups are discriminated against?
> 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.
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...
The overlords of my time were certainly schooled in the ways of Jack Welch, but also particularly inspired by the 2009 Netflix vision of a High Performing Workplace as seen in their culture document. It was mandatory and inspirational reading.
When the performative beating and meritocracy absolutism collides with the sensitivities of the modern workplace the results are strangely unpredictable.
The memos are tucked away somewhere with my NDA and the memories of crushing peoples hopes, dreams and aspirations.
GP mentions race and gender, so this response isn’t making an impression on me.
The point the GP makes - why was the promo/hiring committee unable to find a breadth of candidates - is a troubling but real part of many of our daily lives.
Maybe there weren’t any. That’s usually the reason/excuse given. That should still be a cause for concern.
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.
It's HR's entire job to set policies for hiring. They can say a candidate has to have a college degree. Why wouldn't they have the right to set this policy as well?
Protected class cannot be used as a factor in hiring. Saying "we can't proceed with an offer until we've hired at least one woman and one URM" (which is what Meta's DSA entailed) is indeed using protected class as a factor in hiring.
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.
well if a 14 year old has 10 years of (real) experience building software in an enterprise setting, of course they should be considered for a senior role
What about 10 years of experience building software translates to the director position being talked about? Would a 14 year old who has 10 years of (real) experience working on the family farm be equally suitable or is there something about software specifically that primes people for being directors?
So you echo that until you find a 14 year old who has managed a large team for at least 10 years you haven’t tried hard enough? I don’t want to rest on my biases, but…
No, it is obvious that there are not any qualified 14 year olds, and it is also obvious that there are qualified minorities - if you can't find qualified minorities, you should look more closely at your recruitment pipelines.
It might be obvious based on your criteria, but remember that you invented that criteria based your arbitrary biases. Those with 10 years of real experience are statistically more likely to be qualified for the job, that is hard to disagree with, but being a white male also makes you statistically more likely to be qualified for the job in question. That is why the bias spoken of exists! But the point made at the business told about earlier is that statistical likelihood does not preclude outliers who deserve equal consideration.
Your original comment suggests you come from the software industry, in which case you know full well that there are programmers who have been at it for a few years who can program circles around those who have been doing it for 10. Not everyone progresses at the same rate. Years of experience across a wide population will provide positive correlation, but is not anywhere close to being an accurate measuring device and says nothing down at the individual level. To discount someone with less years of experience than your arbitrarily chosen number before you have even talked to them is the very same lack of inclusion being talked about.
Your previous comment. You spoke to the recruitment pipelines that are more likely to find white men, which means that when there are more white men in earlier career stages, there will be comparatively more white men ready to move into next level career stages. That is simple mathematics. Of course, you already knew this as this is exactly why DEI initiatives began. Why act like you don't know what is going on with an exceptionally tired meme?
I find it interesting that being underage and in middle school is on the same level to you as being a woman. This comment reads like "You want us to interview WOMEN now? Why not teenagers? Or plants?!"
The request was to “consider people you normally wouldn’t for this role”
I normally wouldn’t consider a 14y/o for a senior position. I wouldn’t consider a child to run our armed forces either.
It is you who put women and other minorities into that group with this comment of yours. You are the one to compare being underage and in middle school to being on the same level of a woman.
Your biases applied to the comment may read that way. The comment itself doesn't say that at all. It is interesting that we are seeing the discrimination right here on HN too. I thought we were better than that?
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).
It's not a net positive for underrepresented groups, because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. They don't have infinite time, because they are real people. Would you prefer to be rejected because of your resume, or asked to attend an interview and then be rejected because of your resume?
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.
The "good old boys" network is a problem. But given how hard we all agree it is to interview effectively and determine who is a great fit for the role in a matter of a few hours, there's a lot of good sense in hiring people already widely known to be excellent by your team from years of past experience working together.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is racist. Proponents of such diversity hiring try to redefine racism in such a way that their definition excludes diversity hiring, but that's bad faith rhetorical tricks.
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.")
The definition of racism changed at some point to some people to have connotations about racial superiority
Before that, it simply meant judging a person by their race or skin colour, which having a hiring quota based on race clearly is
You can have an argument that in some cases racist DEI policies are beneficial to counter even worse racism, and that's not necessarily untrue, but it's dishonest to try and claim it's not racist
That's not what the original commenter was saying. There are very few roles I've ever seen target diversity hires. Those that I have seen are typically very high-level roles, for example, VP nominations will do things like target "midwest" or for Supreme Court targeting "female". But I don't see this sort of thing in your typical job hiring practice.
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.
The first does have something to do with what he's commenting on. That said, the original poster can clarify since they're on HN, rather than us speculating.
You seem quite wrapped up in the idea of 'diversity hires'. I've never seen it work that way. Have you?
In my experience it has been about trying to encourage a more diverse pool to select from, and a more diverse pool of choosers, and that's it. After that, it's selecting the best person.
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.
How about 'choose your descriptor here' based on an actual understanding of the words. Is it 'woke' now to ask people actually understand the words they're using.
Considering you don't understand what the word 'racist' means, do you understand what 'DEI policies' are?
> 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 I'd ask you to focus on the rest (or the whole) of my comment as you've spent most of your comment discussing it as if I approve of 'diversity hiring' (as it is being discussed here, i.e. quotas) when it should be obvious I neither engage in it nor approve of it.
> 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.
To change up the words a bit to make it more clear:
> 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 [race] as it's not done from a basis of racial superiority.
"It's not racist to be racist, if it's not done from a basis of racial superiority."
To be brutally frank, it is racist to be racist. The outcome of being racist _can_ be good! It absolutely can be good! But, it's critically important for the folks who are developing and implementing racist policies in order to produce genuinely good outcomes to be brutally honest with themselves about what they're doing so that they also implement deliberate, honest review into their policies so that they know when they can stop being racist.
Without building in a "Okay, our mission is accomplished and we're done. Let's go back to treating everyone equally again." decision point, policies like these mutate into nothing more than getting your turn with the proverbial boot stamping on a human face forever.
I'm genuinely not trying to be a schmuck here ... genuinely ... but can I direct you to any decent dictionary and to read up on the word 'racist'. Then read your comment again.
> prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.
Not giving someone a job based on their skin colour (a racial group) is discrimination, therefore meets the definition.
You're using the word 'discrimination' in the neutral / identifying-distinction manner of the word. To discriminate ... between red and blue, or hot and cold. In relation to racism, I only see the word 'discrimination' in the negative.
Thought experiment: two candidates are completely equal, one is black one is white. If one made the decision to give the job to the black person for reasons of diversity or some other possibly positive reason, that wouldn't be a decision made in the negative sense of the word. And so it fails to meet the definition for me.
However, at this point I accept we're straying into generous nuance, and this is no place for that.
So, let's say I give you that.
It's moot. Why?
I'll repeat for the third or fourth time here. I don't, and have never, supported giving someone a job based on skin colour (or racial group) as your last sentence states, nor do I believe it is common or widespread.
DEI, for me, is only about encouraging a more diverse pool of candidates and hirers, where possible. The end .... Scandalous, right? Racist? How? It's just been weaponised by the usual suspects.
To them, DEI means the assumption of just automatically choosing black over white, or female over male ... and it's just ... boring at this point.
For example, if I'm not mistaken, I understand that the Supreme Court has explicitly ruled against quotas based on skin colour.
> If one made the decision to give the job to the black person for reasons of diversity or some other possibly positive reason, that wouldn't be a decision made in the negative sense of the word.
No, preferring a candidate because of their skin colour is racism and discrimination, alas is wrong. It has no relevance to the job.
In such situation, rolling a dice would even be a fairer option.
> You're using the word 'discrimination' in the neutral / identifying-distinction manner of the word. To discriminate ... between red and blue, or hot and cold. In relation to racism, I only see the word 'discrimination' in the negative.
There are people who have been fighting for and supporting remedial racism and sexism programs for no less than fifty years. The causes that DEI (and its predecessor, "social justice") claims to be fighting for aren't new... this is an old and ongoing fight.
The thing is, redefining the abhorrent things that you're doing as not-at-all-abhorrent because one's ingroup is doing them is what loses support from folks who have been fighting for (for many decades) the same thing one's ingroup claims to be fighting for. Moreover, claiming that a subset of those preexisting fighters are -at best- entirely unaware of the plight of whom they fight for or -at worst- actively complicit in creating and sustaining that plight just because the sexual and/or racial characteristics of those fighters generally match those of the Hated Outgroup is how one torches the bridges between one's organization and not only those fighters, but everyone who supports those fighters. [0]
However, it is true that marketing one's organization as doing nothing but good, virtuous, totally-correct things sure is how you amass a ton of "cheerleader" (or "lifestyle")-type participants, and make an assload of money for highly-priced-consultants and folks doing speaking engagements.
If anything, I have to commend the DEI proponents (and their "social justice" predecessors) for the positive developments that their hamfisted and tragically offensive recruiting efforts made possible. Were it not for them alienating folks who had been agitating and fighting for equal treatment and equal rights since before many of the newcomers were in diapers, the "Is fourty-six years long enough to be doing remedial sexism and racism?" question in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (that you bring up in your commentary) probably wouldn't have been posed.
[0] The really insidious thing about adopting the "This thing that's inherently bad (and that we claim to be fighting to erase) isn't bad when my ingroup does it to members of the outgroup." philosophy is that... well... that's taking the Boot of Oppression and putting it on one's own foot and getting right back to stamping on the faces of your fellow humans. If you're going to use The Boot, own up to it. If you're not going to use The Boot, join the fight to launch it into the goddamn Sun where noone can reach it.
>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.
Again, that's not how it works, or should work. But even if it did, it could be called a 'mistake'. But it's not 'racist'.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding the word. And it's sad because people
(perhaps you) will go around and say that the word 'racist' is overused and has lost it's meaning.
And yet, you (and co) are the ones mistakenly using it here.
EDIT:
(it appears I've been blocked from replying here so to the below ...
@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.")
There is a flame war preventer that disables replies for a short time depending on frequency and how deep the thread is. Wait a bit or find the post via another UI and it’s usually possible to reply.
> We tend to call it the 'overheated discussion detector' these days, since it detects more than flamewars.
> Scott and I get emailed every time that software trips so we can quickly look at which threads are being penalized and reverse the penalty when it isn't helpful
> 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.
It is extremely telling that when you hear "DEI specific role" you wrongly imagint that refers to the identity of the person rather than someone who's role it is to work on issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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.
If a program treats people equally, that's a good thing. If you want equal outcomes (regardless of many very real factors), that by definition will require unequal treatment.
> Equality and Equity are vastly different things.
But related.
I was at a museum that had a full-sized submarine on display. There was a touchable model and audio description for blind people.
Equal, as much as possible - a Braille variant of a novel, for example, provides a fairly equal experience. Equitable, when perfect equal results are not possible. You can't fix a person's severed optic nerve, but you can certainly attempt to give them fair access to things.
DEI is a new name for and/or refinement of a long existing concept that gave us things like the abolitionists, suffragists, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
I disagree with this telling of history. DEI has much more in common with various affirmative action efforts in the 80s and 90s than it does with something like the Civil Rights Act and as such is a lot more controversial even among the groups it's meant to help.
> DEI has much more in common with various affirmative action efforts in the 80s and 90s
Affirmative Action was from Executive Order 11246 (1965) -- concurrent with and part of the same movement as civil rights legislation -- applying to federal contracting; it largely spread to large organizations that weren't direct federal contractors through subcontracting relationships and through state governments adopting similar requirements in their contracting.
> If the ADA was being proposed today, Republicans would decry it as yet another woke DEI effort.
A lot of the culture war entities which now dominate the GOP did so (obviously, with different language, as "woke" and "DEI" weren't the current generic epithets for things the Right doesn't like) at the time, but (1) were mollified in some cases with special exclusions, like religious schools being excluded from the definition of covered public accommodations, and (2) otherwise were less politically powerful within the party.
No, I’m describing equity in opportunity to learn.
Equal outcomes for all is not equity - it is inequitable for a deliberately lazy person to succeed when a hard working person does not, just because of something they were born with.
Giving every student the same printed packet is equal treatment, but unjust and inequitable to the blind student.
> Social equity within a society is different from social equality based on formal equality of opportunity. For example, person A may have no difficulty walking, person B may be able to walk but have difficulties with stairs, while person C may be unable to walk at all. Social equality would be treating each of those three people in the same way (by providing each with the same aids, or none), whereas social equity pursues the aim of making them equally capable of traversing public spaces by themselves (e.g. by installing lifts next to staircases and providing person C with a wheelchair).
It's part of making a product that works for a diverse group of people. The same way the XBox controller was made smaller for female and children hands. And how including darker skinned people in facial recognition systems is now standard practice.
I would say that DEI has sucked a huge amount of oxygen out of the room on accessibility. It's all out of the same budget, but as you can see, most people don't think of accessibility when they think of DEI, they think of race, gender and sexuality.
And out of those, accessibility is the one that has actual measurable metrics and requires expensive technical skill and compromises with non-accessible functions to implement well. Everything else on the list is PR work.
Yes I see you doing this all over the thread italicizing the same words and using them slightly differently, I'm not sure what point you're trying to prove.
ADA predates DEI by a couple decades. Lots of people, including Republicans, support the ADA and support expanding its protections.
This is a pretty standard tactic of partisans when their pet issue becomes unpopular - take something unrelated, or at best tangentially related, and pretend it's related or that that's what they've been advocating for all along.
I don't care if you support the ADA or you don't. I don't care if you support DEI or you don't. But they're different, they've never been related, and any attempt by partisans on the left to lump them together is just trying to reframe the issue as "against DEI == against the ADA" because of course everyone on the right hates disabled people right?
Scroll up a couple lines from your link and take a look at the sponsor, who Republicans nominated to be President. So no, your partisan assertion is nonsense.
Are we to think that the Republican party of 1990 - of the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Romneys - is the same as the Republican party of 2025 that has driven them out of the org?
The ADA requires accommodation. E.g. a blind software developer should be given an interview that does not require sight. So a text-only description instead of a figure or sketch would be accomodation. It does not require specific levels of representation. It is not analogous to Meta's former "representation goals".
> DEI would be hiring a blind person, over a more qualified non-blind person.
No, it wouldn't.
DEI might be things like expending resources for outreach to and soliciiting applications from the blind community because there were almost no blind applicants, when blind people could reasonably do the work even if, on average, blind people would be at a disadvantage compared to the sighted given the job responsibilities.
DEI would be concerned with encouraging applicants by and consideration of blind people to a role they can still effectively perform.
It's based on the generally logical idea that if your company with 10k people is staffed with 99% white males in a place where that doesn't reflect the workforce, the most logical conclusion is probably not "only white males can perform this role".
> Maybe men are indeed better firefighters than women generally?
On average? Maybe! The woman in that video looks like she could severely kick my ass; I strongly suspect she could carry me. (I also suspect there are multiple roles in a fire call, and "carry big man" may be balanced by "squeeze into tight spot" tasks at times.)
If you can't hear the joking tone in that statement in the video, I'm not sure how to help you. "You're in a fire, I'm helping you, don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
Yes, she is making fun of people who say that increasing the number of women firefighters will result in more people dying. I think firefighting is an extreme example, where the actual job competence should be the most important qualification, and DEI should absolutely have no place.
> I think firefighting is an extreme example, where the actual job competence should be the most important qualification, and DEI should absolutely have no place.
DEI simply posits "there are probably some women just as qualified (or more!) as some of the men you already hire, so be open to it and perhaps encourage their consideration". Very few organizations manage to hire the absolute best person on the planet for a particular role and over-estimate the extent to which their interview process manages to successfully filter for it.
There are absolutely differences between men and women, but there's a lot of overlap. The absolute six-sigma ends of the bell curves likely matter if you're, say, at the Olympics, but my local fire department has visibly overweight men in their 60s on staff.
And that's fine! But it probably tells you that quite a few women (like the one in your video) are also capable of doing what they do - of which a significant portion is not carrying unconscious people out of burning houses.
(I've selected male/female simply as an example here. There'll be different excuses offered for not hiring black firefighters or gay firefighters in reasonable proportions.)
It is known that the physical strength distributions of women and men have very little overlap. Only the strongest of women are stronger than the weakest of men. This matters because firefighters are usually selected with physical tests, and most men would fail these tests. If women can pass the same tests, obviously they should be selected. As said in the video, 5% of firefighters are women, which sounds fine.
However, this is not what DEI is about. DEI is about seeing that 5% as a too small number, and trying to increase the number by lowering standards for women. Letting everyone apply is enough.
It's impressive that not only do you post the most asinine of rage bait possible but you also somehow took the quote out of context and wildly misrepresented said quote as well.
> 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 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.
So your accepting of something you don't need but could be useful to others is totally opposite of the design not having a hood. Just because these females don't need it, they made it so nobody could use it.
Did I say that everyone should have that? No. I like working on my own cars. My personal gearhead top achievement was when my alternator seized up, and I had a new one installed and working 45 minutes later (including a quick run to the parts store).
That said, I've done nothing under the hood of our family minivan other than changing air filters. It wouldn't break my heart if I had to let the shop do that for me when I was there getting the oil changed every 2 (!!!) years. I can totally see why a lot of people, probably most people, would consider that a great tradeoff.
By the way, "these females" is not the preferred nomenclature. "Women", please.
so a small group of women made a unilateral decision that prevents others. again, it is just an example of one group making decisions without realizing (or caring) how it affects others.
the point is that every single decision can be construed as denying something to someone else when it was only made as a convenience for someone else. it's very strained here as not having a hood is just odd. Even if you only take the car in every 2 years, that cost of that service is going to be much higher because of the labor involved on removing the front just to access the engine rather than just popping the hood. We already have plenty of examples of cars where this has been the case
That's ridiculous. You and I don't have to buy that car. But if it existed and were brought to market, people who do like it have the option. It gives them choices they wouldn't otherwise have without restricting our options.
Tying this back to my earlier point, working on a product with people who weren't exactly like me made a better product for everyone. It didn't make it a worse product for older white guys like myself, while making it more useful for everyone else who isn't my twin. That's pretty cool, and customers rewarded us for it.
Without the input of diverse opinions, I wouldn't have thought of the simple changes we could make to expand its reach, again, without making it worse for me and people like me. The end result was universally better. That's a good thing for our users and our investors. Literally everyone involved was better off for it.
The fact that you think that removing the hood doesn't make it a worse product is baffling. If it has a hood and you choose to never open it, that does not make it a worse product. If you have no hood but have to incur extravagant service fees because of not having a hood definitely makes it a worse product.
> If it has a hood and you choose to never open it, that does not make it a worse product.
This is only true if having a hood has no negative ramifications, the argument from Volvo was that removing it made forward visibility better. For some people trading a hood they never use, against better forward visibility, could be well worth it. Especially for short people, where forward visibility can be more of a problem than for the rest of us.
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.
If the i8 suffers from a similar problem (I'm not familiar with the design of that car) that's equally baffling to me on BMW's part.
A car telling someone not willing to maintain it itself that it's time to take it to a service center is fine and all and probably would avoid a lot of headaches for people that aren't mechanically inclined. But a design that encourages tacking on labor charges or being unable to give your car a quick look over yourself seems awful.
Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
In the example of a car company with zero women employees, if the market doesn't want "black, angular, high-powered cars", then they will lose market share to companies that produce cars that the market does want.
And if "getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable" is a true statement, then capitalism will prove it because the most diverse companies will naturally become better and more profitable than non-diverse companies.
> 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.
Worth noting the same basic incentives apply to certain corporations performatively dropping their policies as a declaration of fealty to an administration they hope will refrain from interfering too much with their ability to make profits as a result. Whether that is considered to be a "free market reason" is another question entirely.
> The companies we're talking about have DEI programs specifically because they believe they'll improve their profitability in one way or another
Definitely not. I've been exposed to the rationale for these. Profit and effectiveness have nothing to do with it. CEOs put them in place because otherwise left wing employees or board members will try and destroy them, and Democrat-run regulators will support them in that goal even if it means breaking the rules. There have been many examples of such things in action - look at the organized cartel-like boycotts of X after Musk upset left wing marketing execs.
CEOs don't want that to happen to them. That's why this is happening now, the moment Trump won a major victory. The fact that the left has lost power comprehensively makes it safer to stand up for what Zuckerberg believed in all along.
Companies deciding not to spend money with X because consumers objected to ads there more than they bought products from ads there is "organized cartel like boycotts" and Zuck deciding to ditch decade old programmes because the new President hates them and him and his platform (and owns a rival platform too!) is freeing him to do what he believed all along!? I've heard it all now.
Bet Bezos has spent years dreaming of making that Melania documentary he's finally become free to spend $40m on too...
> 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.)
Yeah, what people miss when they talk about hiring "the best person for the job" is that a company is not composed of well-defined roles and fungible people who do the job description and nothing else. Ideally, you're building a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if someone isn't the most proficient person on the planet for a given role, they might be better for your team as a whole.
What I'm skeptical of is that DEI programs in bigger companies were ever anything more pandering. There was an "enlightened self-interest", but it was that the regulatory and cultural environment made it difficult to attract talent without at least paying lip service to DEI. Now the winds have shifted, and — surprise! — their "enlightened self-interest" no longer includes pretending to care about it.
This isn't a critique of DEI programs specifically, by the way. I think any social initiative at a company fulfills basically the same function: environmental pledges, etc. The point is to make your company look better without actually changing anything.
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 agree! But the problem is that many people are more invested in discrimination than they are in improving their team. At least according to their revealed preferences, a lot of people who claim to support meritocracy/yada yada would rather be on a worse-performing team with more white people/men/etc than a better-performing diverse one.
Dan Luu has a good article on this: [1]
> A problem is that it's hard to separate out the effect of discrimination from confounding variables because it's hard to get good data on employee performance v. compensation over time. Luckily, there's one set of fields where that data is available: sports.
> ...
> In baseball, Gwartney and Haworth (1974) found that teams that discriminated less against non-white players in the decade following de-segregation performed better. Studies of later decades using “classical” productivity metrics mostly found that salaries equalize. However, Swartz (2014), using newer and more accurate metrics for productivity, found that Latino players are significantly underpaid for their productivity level. Compensation isn't the only way to discriminate -- Jibou (1988) found that black players had higher exit rates from baseball after controlling for age and performance. This should sound familiar to anyone who's wondered about exit rates in tech fields.
> ...
> In tech, some people are concerned that increasing diversity will "lower the bar", but in sports, which has a more competitive hiring market than tech, we saw the opposite, increasing diversity raised the level instead of lowering it because it means hiring people on their qualifications instead of on what they look like. I don't disagree with people who say that it would be absurd for tech companies to leave money on the table by not hiring qualified minorities. But this is exactly what we saw in the sports we looked at, where that's even more absurd due to the relative ease of quantifying performance. And yet, for decades, teams left huge amounts of money on the table by favoring white players (and, in the case of hockey, non-French Canadian players) who were, quite simply, less qualified than their peers. The world is an absurd place.
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?
Minimization of regulatory risk and lawsuits. Compliance was _always_ about that - if leadership truly valued human dignity you’d see Gaza get a few orders of magnitude as much attention as BLM in corporate America, rather than a few orders of magnitude less.
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.
I think part of the problem is that no one knows (or agrees on) what “real DEI” is. Is it quotas? Is it bias training? Is it a quarterly presentation from HR?
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.
> At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?"
Never, because then the DEI group's budget would be cut. The incentives for the people actually running these programs are completely out of whack with what would be good for the company and for the people they're actually meant to help.
The problem is the end-state is complex and nuanced.
The qualitative objective for most companies should be something like: "Recruiting and hiring people with no bias against race, gender, religion, age, disability, etc... Treating those same people with no bias once hired, including pay, promotion, opportunities, and respect. Leveraging the diversity of perspective and skills of everyone in the company to maximize success of the company."
How do you measure that? If you're a SW company and you have 2% Black engineers is that good or expected? If its not good, how should you improve it?
I think these are legitimately important questions, but also exceptionally hard questions. I think the big problem though is that for the majority of the population there is little incentive to actually solve the problem. But I think money will eventually be what does it. Market inefficiencies will eventually lead people to want to solve this, but it can take a LONG time for these inefficiencies to manifest, since there are so many other factors at play. For example, look at college football. Alabama did not integrate black players until the 70s and they were fine until they played an integrated USC team -- and it took that long despite football being probably one of the places where inefficienes are squashed out pretty quickly.
> At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?"
I feel like this mindset is the same as CEOs reducing the IT budget because “We’ve recovered from our last critical outage and our systems are working fine now.”
I think there’s a valid place for a DEI-like group within HR ensuring a company’s hiring and promoting policies are fair in an ongoing manner.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Or the satanic panic over Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. One of the cops ("school resource officers") in the middle school I went to still believed in that nonsense and it was the early 2000s by that point.
I can tell you that my change in political leanings, from a pretty far left stance to a center-right is based on personal experience. What you see happen in reality far outweighs what people claim online.
So, your political views have shifted from that of a fringe left Democrat to that of a core-establishment Democrat?
That is believable.
What would be less believable is your lived experience sending you on the crazy train ride that the far right party is currently on. I really can't understand how that can happen without a media bubble, but if it did, I'm genuinely interested.
This cuts both ways. If you listen to leftie media you'd believe that trans people are going to be literally rounded up and killed in the streets after Trump takes power. Saying that "people" develop political opinions based on media lies but then excluding yourself and those that agree with you from these "people" is awfully convenient rhetorically.
We are currently in a world where you can be banned from certain rights wing echo chambers for, verbatim, quoting the more deranged and unhinged things a major right wing political figure has said.
It's not really alarmist or hyperbolic when some of the newer deranged things include not needing to vote anymore, or annexing Canada and Greenland.
You have to, like, take this seriously. Its not just some reddit troll running his mouth, and it's borderline gaslighting to suggest some both-sides-equivelancy between the two.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
The diverse slate Approach'd criteria depended on the role. Ther are some roles where Asians are underrepresented so they'd count in that role. For tech, they're not underrepresented so they don't count towards the DSA.
Yes, Asians are overrepresented in tech. That's why the DSA is not fulfilled if an Asian male is part of the candidate slate for a tech role. The candidate slate needs either a woman or URM (underrepresented racial minority, AKA Black or Latin) in order to proceed.
If there's a different role where Asians are underrepresented, then an Asian candidate could fulfill the DSA requirement.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.”
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.
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).
>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 ?
'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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
