Where does the profits and dividends sent off to the idle class aristocracy fit into this constellation? Your resentment seems to mostly be that some dufferent people might be at the workplace.
I am annoyed by the fact that DEI is not targeted by layoffs but ostensibly contribute less to the company than engineering. I find it ridiculous that no one can criticize these initiatives without being labeled racist and fired by HR.
Do with that info what you will.
My resentment stems from the fact that I have witnessed people being hired with 3x more lenient interviews and end up doing 5-10% of what I do while being paid 80-90% of the money. Of course I will resent that. Every working person would be resentful of that.
I'm not a fan of corporate and especially tech DEI initiatives either, I don't think they're an effective way to achieve their stated goals. But the hiring bar thing just does not match my experience at all. Some of the worst teams I've been on have been behind some of the most grueling & "selective" interview processes and some of the best teams have had lax ones. Given how poor we are at actually predicting who is going to be a good coworker we might as well allow some other backgrounds in.
By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether. But for every team I've worked at, hiring bars clearly worked. We filter out maybe 95% of candidates and none of them would work for our team. Everyone on our team is incredible at what they do.
When I had to lower the hiring bar, it was destructive. We hired a person that was inexperienced and could not keep up with the rest of us. They did not have the domain knowledge others on our team had. They were eager, friendly, and personable, but they required a longer period of extensive coaching get up to a level we would consider adequate.
Did they end up being productive, and hopefully worth the effort?
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As a data point I'm ok when hiring new people with less-than-desired level of experience (within reason ;>), as long as their general attitude and willingness to learn are solid.
Those last two mean they'll get the hang of things given some appropriate guidance, so it works out ok.
I don't think the parent comment is negating the need to hiring bars. IMO two important points :
1 - DEI and hiring bars are not opposed to one another. Actually well designed DEI program are meant to make sure the hiring bar are free of un neccesasary blockers.
2 - I think that mostly what the parent comment was trying to say, "hiring bars" is a nebulous term thrown around. Every team "saying/thinking" they have ha hiring bar doesn't mean that there actually have one. Just rejecting 99% percent of the candidate doesn't imply a good hiring bar... since you might selecting the bottom 1%...
Where have you worked, if you don't mind me asking?
Since we are throwing random samples of 1 on the internet, having been involved into some of those initiative at a large big tech company : Not lowering the bar was pretty much always top of mind, and we always made sure to be fair to ALL candidate.
Most of the initiative where around reaching a larger pool of candidate (for example reaching out to more school than we use too) and also addressing what looked to us like information deficiencies : Someone in an IVY league school for example just by osmosis will absorb a lot of the what/why/how companies look for in an employee and therefore can better show the required characteristics.
Every generation of engineer always feels like the engineer after them are somewhat the consequence of lowering the bar... We used to think this when we started recruiting outside of ivy league, then we started lowering the importance of formal education at all ettc... etc...
You would be amazed at the difference good interview preps makes to someone who was never exposed to it.
> What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit
From experience, those type of feeling are usually a consequence of lack of information and exposure of what actually goes on in the meetings. You mentioned you worked at the companies with those initiative, but i am not sure how many time you have actually been involved in the design of those programs.
Tech jobs in large tech companies is very competitive job. Everything is always framed as a competitive advantage and can sometime wrap one's perceptions. Companies spend a bunch of moneys on all kind of weird stuff.
And finally let me be clear, i am a software engineer myself. I do believe that pretty much anything HR does that's not purely the day to day of employee is a grift. Hell the bigger the companies, the more grift around : from management "training" that somewhat requires fancy restaurant. Team building exercise that somewhat require a bunch of very introverted engineer to go to a concert non of them are interested in etc... etc...
DEI is not different, yes grifter gonna grift and some people are just in it for themselve.
So can DEI be better/ more efficient : yes, is there a lot of virtue signaling and fakeness around yes, are we somewhat lowering the bar because we like having diverse people around NO, and for having witness the difference that those program can be in the lives of young and new people in the industry... i think they worth keeping around even if a better more pragmatic form.
RED HAT ALLYSHIP COMMANDMENTS
1. Openly acknowledges PRIVILEGE and SYSTEMIC racism exist in trauma
2. Never questions the REALITY of our BLACK friends and colleagues
3. Rejects the idea that race is political
4. Accepts that WHITE people are responsible for dismantling racism
5. Only WHITE people are racist
6. Knows the BLACK community owes us nothing in this work
7. Requires acknowledgment and repair of inevitable MISTAKES
8. Is never rooted in WHITE SAVIORISM
9. Sees the black community as a group of individuals and not a MONOLITH
10. Does NOT seek recognition or praise for a job well doneGenuinely, if you have a point to make i am happy to hear it and discuss it.
What an incredibly biased take by the author, who clearly has not worked at one of these companies and seen DEI in action. Having actually worked at big tech companies with DEI initiatives, there have been many instances when we have had to lower the hiring bar to meet diversity requirements.
What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit, and in times of layoffs, is often not targeted over engineering functions due to politics and PR. The whole DEI profession feels like a grift on top of the hard work of those that actually drove a company to success.
This is not to say a company shouldn't consider the diversity of users when building a product, UX, etc, but it's absurd when you're hiring a backend engineer and your team has to meet some vague diversity quota.