The software interview process in particular is already so capricious that I feel absolutely no shame in tilting it in my favor in any way that I can.
Personally, I think the problem should be pushed upstream whenever possible. (More funding for minority elementary and high schools, and candidate quotas for recruiters but not hires both are good examples of effective approaches).
Get in however you can and then work your ass off so no one doubts you.
The irony here is that if we all just accept the line of thinking you're using our society will go back to the exact "white male patriarchy" this DEI stuff is supposedly trying to fight. The only difference is that BiPOC or LGBTQ will replace the white male as the superior class. The next step is we can just ensure white males don't get a vote and can't own land or credit cards right?
Despite what you might've read on Tumblr or Fox News, I'm not planning to oppress anyone or commit white genocide.
When I'm doing interviews or looking at resumes, I'll give an extra moment of consideration to anyone born in the USA who seems to have pulled him/herself up by their bootstraps. I personally think that's enough DEI from me, and I don't think it's something you should be too incensed about.
My comment is just about what it leads to if we have a society that bases their hiring on specific skin colors. It seems like you're failing to differentiate between exactly what you're personally doing and the society wide affect of sitting back and accepting race based hiring.
To attempt to salvage this subthread: What I'm personally doing is exactly what DEI is for the most part. BigCo gives you a yearly training that says "Make sure you give someone a fair shot even if they don't wow you with their resume". BigCo sends out a slideshow with some examples of certain minorities succeeding at their jobs. Done.
No, it's not and if you think this is true you've been burying your head in the sand for the last 5 years. Companies don't create specific Diversity/Equity coordinators and entire DEI departments just to tell you to occasionally look closer at some people you think aren't getting a fair shot.
You're just gaslighting now or blissfully ignorant of the current state of things. The OP is black man literally telling everyone this isn't the case for him and there are multiple other commenters saying the same.
I am deeply troubled by racial discrimination favoring Latin people, despite benefitting from it in a narrow and immediate sense, because it makes people justified in carrying out their own discrimination potentially to my detriment.
Black and Hispanic people do face more active discrimination. That has to do more with outward appearance and last names.
Vets on the other hand are an example of a lop-sided outcome. It was discovered a while back that most vets often went into blue collar professions and didn't really climb that many ladders. They instituted a rule where campaign badge holders and disabled vets must have their resumes reviewed first. Working on the west coast I can attest it's rare to see vets at all. I've met more vets from non-US military in the tech world than I have from my own country (not complaining, but worth noting). There's definitely a small contingent of people who would put their political disposition into hiring if they saw a candidate was a vet, but military are coached to chop their military experience from their resume once they have a stack of experience to avoid this.
All that to say, if I were OP I would not be okay with what you proposed just on a facade basis. If it incorporated class distinctions I might agree.
Unlike military service which has a discrete set of experiences and criteria, race is just something you're born with.
It also stands out in my mind that most of these statistics rely on self-identification. I don't know if anyone's dug into the validity of self-identification.
Harvard would like a word with you.
But in all seriousness, Asians face the discrimination of being perceived as foreign and “the other” more so compared to other racial minorities. So the claim that they generally don’t face discrimination is not true.
This isn't a great take because there's tons of in-group advantages going on today that are deeply rooted in racial discrimination.
The U.S. is still reeling from its deeply racist housing policies. What does this have to do with this DEI thread?:
- Wealth is the highest indicator of educational attainment, and in turn education is a high indicator of wealth. [1]
- Zoning laws were explicitly racist and meant to keep out certain races from white neighborhoods. My parent's home built during the WWII era in the SFBAY had covenants attached to it that stated under no uncertain terms that no PoC may live in the home (No longer enforceable of course). The racist roots of these laws is not a matter of speculation.
- Most household wealth is through homeownership. [2]
- High quality education is tied to housing via school districts, more expensive houses are located in schools with better funding and higher quality education.
- Many zoning rules such as minimum lot sizes, high setbacks, height limits (Designed to make it more expensive to buy for PoC in particular) remain in place today. It's a positive feedback loop where those who had an advantage are more likely to retain that advantage.
As OP stated, life isn't fair, and the rules are indeed rigged to favor those in power. Rebuking a group for using their limited advantages while ignoring the plethora of advantages for those up top isn't very equitable.
[1] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017....
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
I just wanted to say that I don't think anyone should feel bad or like an impostor if they manage to get their foot in the door some way other than the traditional routes: you get lucky on a coding quiz, your dads meet at the country club, you bust your hump for 10 years in crappy jobs to work your way up to a good one, etc.
Ideologues who are a tiny minority, which is overwhelmingly white, don't care tho.
The Atlantic - Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture - https://archive.ph/OXs6F
It's a bit sad how little discussion it generated, because this data should be pretty damning.
> 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”
> So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are.
> While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it.
8 percent of US population, who knows how tiny proportion of EU population (we're also on the Internets, you know). And they constantly pretend their views are default, and try to marginalize others online. With some success, sadly.
Also, they blatantly discriminate against neurodivergent people - and if there's a single obviously beneficial diversity program, it'd be increasing neurotype diversity. Ways of thinking, not surface characteristics.
Example: Damore, who was an aspie. You know, the disability where you have trouble with unclear communication that normies rely on. Which causes sth like 90% afflicted to be unemployed - because people insist on ignoring their issues. Tech is one of the areas where they can thrive - except in the name of "diversity", left wants to push them out. I don't understand how's that coherent. Who decides which identity group are worthy of protection?
See "The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech": https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e2a71bf7e0ab3ba886c...
I can only imagine what it would feel like to be a PoC in a company that has openly stated that their goal is to achieve a certain racial/ethnic composition regardless of standards. How would I not always have a sneaking suspicion that I was hired to fulfill some quota rather than on my own merits? Worse, I would feel that all of my colleagues are looking at me and wondering the same thing.
Excuse the cynicism, but I think the reason these companies have to shout about their DEI initiatives from the rooftops is because they care less about diversity and helping disadvantaged groups and more about signalling their virtue to the rest of the world.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...