1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse. 2. There is nothing wrong with your kids being in a majority demographic. It sounds like you're more worried about the world discriminating based off race and other traits.

I suspect you agree with all of this but it's a little scary how insidious these policies are. Even in your dissent you're seeing things from their perspective.

You can argue over definitions and terms as much as you want, but the uniform you wear is often defined by your opposition. In other words, it may not be completely relevant what you or OP think diverse is or isn't. It is very relevant what the power structures and people implementing these policies think it means, no?

If someone has a kid that potentially is going to be quota'ed out of jobs or education, why wouldn't they worry about it?

diverse is code word for non straight White male. Slightly more diverse would be straight White female.

Obviously OP is simply saying, as a White man, he worries his children through no fault of their own by virtue of birth would be excluded or limited by these cultural trends.

Blame on their kid? What sense does this make? He's blaming the system.

There's a manager/HR somewhere saying "hold my beer"...

Not just optically. Even slightly different cultures can result in novel ways of thinking or world views that bring something new.

Diverse viewpoints are more likely to arise from introducing 3 black women to a group of 3 white men than if you introduced 3 more white men.

> it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity,

Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?

People with different backgrounds are "better" at diversity than people who look dissimilar, for sure. The wealthy black woman who went to school at Stanford alongside all the other white men on your team does not bring any meaningful difference in viewpoint. The tribesman from Kenya, on the other hand, comes with a very different outlook.

Of course, something akin to "Must be a US Citizen" is attached to most jobs because we don't actually care about diversity, just optics.

Yes or, for another example, an Israeli would add diversity to a group of Americans (of various colours).

Meanwhile, the person who is self made (real diversity in this situation) and successfully bootstrapped themselves gets passed over because thier skin color is too bright.

Qualified diverse people are rare (no relation to skin color "diversity"). That is why everyone is cracked out over skin color and gender because there is an actual population of people that the HR secretariat pool can EASILY identify by just taking a glance. Thier mission, of course, is to please thier white male executives.

Compare and contrast with people saying "neurodiverse" when they mean "neurodivergent". I think there is general agreement that a single person should be described as "neurodivergent" rather than "neurodiverse". Some people say the wrong word just because the two words are so similar and are happy to be corrected.

On the other hand, if we're talking about other kinds of diversity then I don't think there's a similar pair of terms. "The addition of this gender-divergent person increases the gender-diversity of the team"? I don't think so!

According to the plain old-fashioned definition, this is true. According to the modern political definition, “diverse” is approximately a synonym for “non-white”.

I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.

As a women in tech, I am feeling the backlash. I have seen a huge increase in the amount of skepticism of my abilities that I face from people who haven't worked with me before. And the worst part of it is that there's actually logic behind the bigotry, because it is extremely true that my company continues to hire incompetent people just because they are women.

Bigotry itself is very difficult to combat, but when you add in a solid logical grounding for the bigotry, it becomes dang near impossible to eradicate. I worry that companies are causing more harm than good with the change in hiring practices these past couple years. I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.

I have been hiring for many years, and I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity. Now I am forced to.

It’s an insult to those who earned their position. It’s an insult to me as I am less and less likely to get a new job because I won’t fit quotas.

There is resentment all around.

I feel bad for the minorities who have worked hard to earn their positions, you are right that it undermines their work and trivializes their commitment to their work.

It’s gone way too far.

What are your thoughts on implicit bias?

You should think about legal recourse here. If this isn't stomped out it can result in real racism pretty quickly. It has to, because people aren't treated fairly and it creates adversary between people of different skin color.

This is bad management that needs to be replaced.

As a man in tech, I've been a part of countless hush-hush conversations that would never be repeated within earshot of a woman or untrusted man. It's as grim as you say, and worse.

I'm really sorry that things have become like this.

The efforts to explicitly reign in the sexism in tech are quite recent (late 2000, early 2010, and even later in France where I live).

My point is that what you perceive as a recent reaction might be the same old sexist culture continuing to spread, ruin life’s and block careers (which is a definition of backlash: reactionary fight against feminist advances)

There seem to be a few classic stories that have been spun:

- that a gender imbalance in students or employees automatically implies sexism

- that being casual about sex is automatically sexist

- that not favoring a feminine, talkative, consensus-first working style is sexist

- that women deciding to leave tech means they are being "chased out"

I don't find any of these arguments particularly convincing. It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment.

What you may be referring to from the early 2010s is that a few activists of the Adria Richards type found that all they had to do was cry sexism, and a bunch of naive geeks stood ready to self flaggelate about how sexist all the other men were, but not them, no no no.

Which of course means that tech is not particularly sexist at all, certainly not compared to media or finance.

If there is one thing that is unabashedly sexist, it's western feminism, which has had 50 years to show its homework, and has revealed itself to not be interested in gender equality, but only in advancing female interests and positing women's rights, preferences and working styles as superior to those of men.

Strangely, despite this long track record, feminists still haven't realized that they are the status quo and they do everything they can to maintain a monopoly on gender discussions and issues. The use of words like "reactionary" is meant to emphasize this: that anyone who does not agree with them is trying to go backwards. But this is a lie, because despite their "gender studies" we understand men and women worse than ever before. Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is, but they are all sure that women have it worse. Funny that.

But I'll say right away - starting your post with "What evidence of sexism do you have?" is a bit laughable. There's a lot of evidence of sexism in our industry. But it seems that you are unwilling to consider any of it. If you truly believe that western feminism is the REAL sexism, do you think there is a chance to find any middle ground or agreement on this discussion?

I have something to say about almost everything you wrote, but I'll pick the thread on one spot that I think has the most potential:

> It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment

Well...yeah? If there is a concept, or behaviour that men happen to not mind, but women on average/generally/mostly do, and an environment that contains mostly men either actively promotes that concept/behaviour, or tacitly ignores it by looking the other way, that is going to create an environment that is hostile to women!

Now you might say, that's not inherently a problem. But what if this is an environment that doesn't inherently benefit from an imbalanced gender ratio. Then those behaviours, that hostility, is actually actively funnelling viable capable women out of the environment, and there is no meritocracy to ensure that it can occur.

> Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is,

Casual transphobic dog whistle? Disappointing.

There are some very opinionated engineers, but they are an exception and quite rare. They might bark a little from time to time but it doesn't have any real repercussions.

Sure, if you are one of the few women in tech, you might face some difficulties getting into established groups, but that isn't due to sexism for the most part. Far more often it is some misplaced courtesy or something else in my experience.

Compared to medicine for example, tech is pretty harmless. Medicine has a lot of women, but that doesn't mean much. Surgeons for example are know to have their elitist clubs and it often is exclusively men. I have yet to hear similar "locker room talk" or what you call it in any tech circle. Probably exists but it has to be quite rare.

To my knowledge the diagnosis for tech was pretty much that there are far more men here. But that isn't indicative of sexism. So I don't understand what you mean by "extremely sexist" at all.

Like being told to hire a bash programmer for a database admin position. Because person was trans.

Thinking back on if. I’ve never had a regular white woman pushed on me.

I’ve hired woman before. But that was because they were qualified.

Now I’m considered evil for looking at merit.

Words never have entirely cleanly defined meanings, but broadly I think bigotry is often used to speak specifically of all-out irrational dogmatic beliefs. Prejudice is more often used where there is some partly rational judgement about a group of people, together with moral problems caused by applying that logic to a particular person. Of course, often our prejudices are very fallible: "rational" prejudices turn out to be wrong, and in that sense are functionally equivalent to bigotry. But holding a "rational" belief that all prejudice is irrational also does not make us infallible!

Some prejudice seems hard to criticize morally: for example, everybody makes prejudiced judgements say based partly on clothing, age, and sex if they find themselves in close proximity to a group of young men in a city at night. On the other hand, at work, one tries hard to not judge based on whatever preconceived group notions one has -- I think almost everybody thinks that's a good thing (which as you say can be harmed by identity-based hiring). I don't have a good abstract explanation of what makes the difference between "good" and "bad" prejudice, and I wish I did, so would love to hear of good writing about it if somebody can recommend some!

In the company I worked for recently, perhaps even a majority of the more capable programmers around me happened to be women. But wherever we do start hiring based on identity, it's hard to see how prejudice can be avoided, even if bigotry were entirely absent.

This “DIE” stuff is repulsive. Other than the obvious hiring of incompetent people simply to fill a quota, it also creates frictions in relationships when some job post hires one family member simply because they are brown or black while excluding their sibling simply because they are white. I can’t explain how disgusting these policies feel to me.

Diversity metrics are simple. The society they work on is not.

I keep seeing this being repeated everywhere. let me clarify Indians are NOT getting into US companies because of a colour quota.

I will tell you how they are getting in. There are two ways 1. Thru outsourcing/body shopping 2. A lot of Indians get in by doing Masters courses in the US. Most of them would have already worked for tech in India. For US companies they can hire experienced people at US fresher salaries.

Will you defend “diversity" that would rather hire a rich inner-city American kid versus a poor brahmin in need of a leg-up?

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/diversity.google/...

I honestly encourage you to find one policy in the US that prefers rich Indians.

Meanwhile, you should also consider looking up what an anecdote means.

I'm not sure what your point is, aside from implying that we should take public corporate statements at face value.

That comment implies you take for granted that your kids will get into a school, and will have a job.

Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.

> Just about anyone can get into a school, or get a job.

Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes, it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and therefore no reason to worry.

I expect that all parents, regardless of demographic factors, worry about their kid getting a good job and going to school.

All people (including whites and heterosexual males) can be the targets of negative discrimination. No one wants to see themselves or their kids be intentionally disadvantaged based solely on the colour of their skin or their sexuality. Any attempt to create ANY exception to this rule is disingenuous and does nothing but further damage the very thing you claim to be trying to resolve.

I’ve met a lot of people from different backgrounds and one thing I notice is how much we have in common. I worked with people who make less than a few dollars a day in developing nations and it was interesting how the parent stories are almost the same. Pictures of kids and grandkids. Stories about successful kids. Plans for kids to have education and jobs. The scale varies but the concerns are very similar.

And true, parents do want their kids to succeed in life. But I also worry about how the world will treat my kids, because historically black and brown kids don't get treated well.

I’m pretty sure all parents worry about how the world will treat their kids.

There’s pros and cons to everything. If you’re in the US or Europe, you’re in a very privileged position compared to others in less privileged countries.

To imagine that someone who is not-white will know how all not-white parents think is silly. Even within a small demographic sliver, it seems weird to generalize my thoughts to all people who have my race or culture (eg, it’s lack of critical thinking to think “I’m Vietnamese and my kids are Vietnamese so I know the mind of all Vietnamese parents”)

There is a lot of racism toward black and brown kids and it’s the worst for poor black and brown kids. Hopefully, since you’re reading on HN you have a tech job and make some money. Historically, and presently, poor kids don’t get treated well.

Worrying about going to a good school and getting a good job is a nice worry to have.

Worrying that your kid will be the next Trayvon Martin is the reality that many-non white parents worry about. I understand you won't ever have to worry about your children like in that manner. That is one of the benefits of being white.

And white people can scream as loud as they want about how it's unfair they are being discriminated against, in reality they just don't get to enjoy all the advantages they had in prior years for being white.

I'm not concerned about that. A workplace that cares about diversity will not discriminate based on where you went to school.

If businesses are imposing fake diversity measures, my child is doomed regardless of schooling.

It only seems that way to you if you can't empathize with others. The OP makes a valid point. Any group that is caught in the crosshairs of discrimination will naturally be worried for their kids. It's not a "nice problem to have", as you put it, regardless of the group being targetted.

> Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes, it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and therefore no reason to worry.

Equality of outcomes? It's just a fact that some people excel at work/school (for various reasons) or that some people receive different pay (again, for various reasons). The point is that we shouldn't discriminate against things like sex, gender, and skin colour. That means I don't consider gender when I hire... but I also don't consider it when I fire, either.

Aka the "All Lives Matter" argument.

Do your typical ethnic minority immigrant parents worry about anything else _apart_ from their childrens' job prospects and education?

Why are "decent" schools and "good" jobs so rare that we are competing for them against each other, instead of a standard anyone can reach with effort? Even schools! The very source of opportunity that we hope to equalize!

Think of how impossibly naive and utopian this is though, and I don't mean to personally attack just to condemn the idea this is possible in any way whatsoever. Is it possible economically? How about resource wise, or geographically can we all possess equal territory? How about military power? How about physical attributes such as height or beauty? How about intelligence?

On which axes of consequences can we equalize things; how do we do it? Zero sum conflicts are everywhere that demands for equalization exist.

There is only competition over limited resources, power and prestige. There is cooperation amongst allies and friends, but only in so far as feelings are mutual and the efforts of both are in each others interest, which goes with out saying includes in you or your family/tribe/groups interests.

Is anyone trying to take money and power out of you or your children's hands a friend or ally, or are they competing with you for their own interests at your expense?

The propaganda you believed was intended to take advantage of your good nature. As long as someone brow-beats you with moralism over the downtrodden they can convince you of doing anything to dis-empower you, if you believe the nonsense that "privilege" or power are bad things, which those scheming you certainly don't as they pursue both.

It is bad to not have privilege or power. It is good to have them. It is this simple.

Of course, it is not possible to implement this in any grand, all-encompassing, perfect manner. But that does not mean that it shouldn't be a goal.

However that problem becomes a feature if the actual goal is not the stated goal.

So this is a distinction without much of a difference. Certainly rule of law and various good faith attempts to provide opportunity are understandable. But when the outcomes simply are not equal along various group identity lines or this or that interest group achieves less wealth and power than another, no one is going to give up that game and say "OK, fair play, we lost the outcome."

No, pursuit of human self interest does not ever stop. So there's no endgame to any of this.

i dont want to be right about it but i am not going to be shocked if i start seeing such bubble up as a reaction to this kind of short sighted strategy.

Or why not by my birth origin? Say, India? India is a huge country with diverse languages, cultures, histories, religions, and social structures. I guarantee you that I had such a unique background among the other 10,000 ones in India because I grew up in this particular family in this particular town of this particular state in this particular union territory.

Smart dudes need to opt out of the game entirely.

  > I was wondering why the US is so obsessed with diversity alone the line of race and gender instead of social-economical status, education background, career background, and etc?

Perfect equality of opportunity can only be achieved if everyone has 0 opportunity and the same outcome. Because if you can work hard to give your children a better life, that means that someone with parents who don't work hard will start worse off, with fewer opportunities. Optimizing solely for equality of opportunity inevitably leads to commie hellhole; instead, optimize for absolute opportunity (both average and minimum).

So many people I know fall into the latter at least you are questioning how we got here.

He, this seems to be quite accurate. I wonder how companies come up with that blindness. Internal politics?

I don't believe you have to be the best hacker to start a successful business at all, but some companies try to go out of their way to make working there unattractive.

this is simply not true. Hiring must be all about merit, not handouts for some noble social purpose.

Secondly, lowering bar for one race while keeping the same bar other races is blatant racism. It is conveniently called affirmative action, but in reality it is racism against more qualified candidates (like asians, jews, etc).

Third, just looking at skin color and handing out jobs does not accomplish intended goal (helping disadvantaged people), instead it only reinforces negative perceptions of minorities as unqualified and not deserving of high paying jobs.

Fourth, a lot of people who take advantage of DEI programs to get into high pay jobs/colleges - are not disadvantaged at all. I am talking about people from middle-class/high income families, kids from medium/high net worth families who also happened to be in a minority race. Also middle class/rich immigrants from Africa/Latin America, who never experienced many disadvantages that under represented minorities face in the US.

If you really really want to help underrepresented minorities get into tech - you should specifically target people from low income/poor neighborhoods, poor rating/high crime school districts - and to help them become qualified and deserving of jobs, not just handing out "Chief Diversity Officer" type token jobs that have no real impact, and are not really bona fide jobs. That also obviously includes white kids from poor neighborhoods, and becomes income targeted program, rather than racial profiling program.

>> What exactly is so terrible about helping people grow into roles instead of following the semi recent practice of only hiring perfectly qualified candidates?

Imagine your son was rejected for a job he perfectly was qualified for, and instead someone from another race was hired who was less qualified. Just because of race. Once you flip the situation to yourself and become on the other end of the "affirmative action" you will understand. You can't fix past discrimination with another discrimination.

They might genuinely be awesome and yet they sit there and doubt and ask “am I only doing well because of something not related to my work”

First order effect of DEI:

- Bar is lowered in the name of DEI, to bring more diverse employees

- Managers/CEOs/HRs get their bonuses for meeting DEI metrics

Second order effects:

- Hired minority employees find it hard to perform to the expected(or peer) level

- Because lot more minority candidates were hired than if it were without DEI, performance issues start to become bigger and more noticeable problem. More importantly performance issues cluster around minority candidates

Third order effect:

- Long-term workplace perception of all minority candidates is harmed, regardless of skill.

- We are back to square one, where in order to compensate for 2nd order effects all minorities are subjected to unfair discrimination based on race, regardless of skill

Assessing merit is something we still suck at.

Implicit bias nearly always plays a part.

No wonder DIE initiatives face pushback as they do not make any sense and are plain harmful to all parties involved

Policies like this don't really change the number of disadvantaged people who are hired. To do that, they'd have to reduce the number of elites who are hired, and that doesn't happen.

Instead, these policies help disadvantaged people of some races by shutting out disadvantaged people of other races.

I put a lot of work into my life to get where I am. I did a lot of things I didn't want to and sacrificed a lot. I had a really good hour long interview at Microsoft last week and was told at the end that they are looking to diversify their team more and best of luck to you.

Not have the same opportunities as the founders of Google and Microsoft due to the mediocre employees abusing their positions to engage in advocacy in the wider world that serves the purpose of keeping them employed.

Stuffing big firms with idiots is one way you get idiocracy, since those firms have influence far beyond what the idiots could get on their own.

You are seeing a trend of FAANG employees, leaving the company to create their own start-ups. This trend won't slow down that progress at least...

Get bought out then have their company warped beyond recognition once they become big enough. That, or sued into oblivion for patent infringement.

That’s silly. You should stay focused on ensuring that your kids become well rounded, educated, and cultured people fit for the society of tomorrow and prepared for problems you can’t imagine.

"Seems", "like" "more and more", "only"... I sometimes wonder if people are downplaying it so others may not be as offended in a social situation, or are those words really what they meant?

We are in late 2022, at this (late) stage of the cycle, Big tech has been throwing DEI, ESG at our face for 5+ years. Both Internally and Externally via PR and Consumer Trade Show / Conference. We have got to a point they are actually "dialling" back a bit already.

>It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome.

I do not have data to judge how many people are on the side wants "equality of opportunity". Which is a very sane thing to do. But I can assure you there will be plenty of evidence the media ( Mainstream or not, ) has been arguing for equality of outcome for a very VERY long time. This isn't, and shouldn't be news.

Reading the above comment being Top Voted on HN gives me hope, but on the other hand also felt sad the realisation came so late.

Many institutional investors - the largest ones - have announced their funding is dependent on ESG scores. I'm fascinated that people on this site can be unaware of this.

Some state authorities and companies like Microsoft are racist. You have to call them that even if there are people behind these programs that just mean well. But you cannot compromise on that accusation. If you do, you will lose that discussion. Simple politics and management 101 and this is just a dirty political game.

Yes, Microsoft is a racist company. Exposé 1 is that they hire people by skin color. It cannot be more direct than that. Again, you cannot compromise on that accusation. It is rational and formally correct. Most people are too nice to defend against this management pressure Microsoft tries to put forward.

Not that there are many young people that would want to work at MS these days. But again, Microsoft employs racist hiring schemes and the people in support behind this are real racists and this is always how real racial discrimination starts. Microsoft as a company is a fascist authoritarian organisation that collaborates with the state against citizens.

You might think that is a bit too much, but you have to start with this if your opponent in a discussion opens with accusations of systemic issues that require racial quotas. Otherwise you will lose. Just repeat it and the situation should again normalize and Microsoft hopefully has to pay the price for their little racist adventure.

How can they be racist when they call themselves anti-racist?

They are the opposite of racist! They say so themselves. They are moral anti-racist crusaders. They changed master branch to main branch! They use the words diversity and inclusion. They do land acknowledgments.

It's evil genius. It absolved Microsoft and other Woke Inc institutions of their sins. They're the good guys now. Not the anti competitive monopoly that smothers startups by copying their product and bundling it. Not the giant corporation with regulatory capture. Nope. Main branch. Check it out.

That is wildly optimistic.

Next they will come for your already taxed wealth and money if you aren’t “diverse” enough.

People in the US need to be more aware of similar trajectories in other countries in the past.

I did not come from a family of engineers. For most of their lives, my parents had to struggle to survive as immigrants, living in a fairly rough area, and making ends meet.

I was lucky enough to go to university for STEM. I saw the huge difference between myself and students who came from families that had even one parent experienced in any sort of engineering (let alone both parents). Not only did they always have someone to consult, but they knew what they were getting into, they were much better prepared, and for the most part, they were building the toolset from their early teens.

It dawned on me that similarly, people coming from very wealthy families are likely to be better prepared to create or at least sustain wealth, in a way that might be completely taken for granted, but is actually the result of years and years of mentoring and picking up on behavioral hints at home.

This is the meaning of inequality. It's literally the family you're born into. Your kids will make it either way way because you have already paved much of the path and can show them the way. For schools and jobs to insist on hiring people who are not born into this circle, is a good thing.

Another thing to mention is that I am far from being a touchy politically correct person. I don't really care about minutiae such as naming your git brach this way or that. But in inclusion I feel I've seen inequality from both sides of the coin. And I definitely support letting more people into the party.