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.
Now we are just seeing a return to reality.
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.
So they probably don't bother to audition that kind of content for you very often because they already have strategies that milk your attention, engagement, and wallet better.
When you hear other people share their experience as new or different users, keep in mind how customized all these platforms are and how idiosycratically optimized they'll already be for you as a long-time, engaged user.
Most people can't go back in time to get where you are, and don't have any sure (or worthwhile) road to get there.
Towards the end, there would often be porn in replies of many posts on all kinds of topics, like politics, news, etc.
Ah, ok, yeah, you're right, that did (and still does) happen to me. I had forgotten about that, I just ignore followers now.
edit: there are a limited number of tiles to show but yeah
I used to use it years back. Some subreddits were really great but they all inevitability devolved so I lost any interest in maintaining active accounts there. r/skookum had really interesting content for a while but devolved into idiots reposting the same skookum brand wrenches over and over again.
Even in fairly niche subs I find that "surface level" content quality dominates and nuanced takes are frequently unpopular which is basically a recipe for anyone who knows anything to leave. I find the best subs are satire subs because having to know enough about something to be able to satirize it weeds out all the people who create and perpetuate surface level content. I assume there are some super niche subs that are similar.
Perhaps more than anywhere. Science is a process of challenge and response, not a static body of knowledge.
> Presumably the purpose is to answer from established science.
"Established science", which is still subject to debate itself, isn't what link aggregators cover. They bias towarss stuff more like science news and novel study outcomes, which are nothing to do with established science except as a seed for critical discussion.
Even if you were right that debate on the shape of the earth had no benefit, forbidding it still wouldn't be science. Science is not coextensive with beneficial things.
I am not, in fact, denying you space for your views. I'm giving you the space for your views and explaining to you why they are incorrect.
If you assume that all opposing opinions come from flat-earthers and idiots that couldn't possibly be right about anything you will never even think about changing your opinion on anything. You'll continue to chat with other reddit yes-men and pat yourselves on the back about how you're all so right.
The upvote / downvote self-censorship system simply does not work for any serious discussions. It might be ok for sorting the snarkiest comment under an article but that's about it
The For You feed varies week by week but is generally okay. I make heavy use of lists, mute words, etc to clean things up.
X is a train wreck, but an interesting and useful one, depending on who/what you follow.
I bought a premium Prime account on Amazon, and yet some of their shows still have embedded commercials. grrrr.
Plus, I get constant ads to upgrade to Premium+ for ads-free.
Premium+ is probably what you have.
On Bluesky, I pretty much follow the people I followed before they fled Twitter. However, they complain a lot about politics, Elon Musk and the US President Elect on their timelines. I could unfollow, and do in some cases, but that would pretty much leave me with nothing to read on Bluesky.
That, and the weird tech people I get the most value from still post primary on X, so I deal with it.
They will likely complain about other things in the future :)
I'm more interested in ideas on how to adapt and move forward and be resilient. To be honest, I kind of like to have my beliefs challenged as well, and X provides that.
The very second the US election got underway all of our accounts started to heavily promote right-wing political content. Even though we specifically said when we signed up that we aren't interested in anything like that.
I haven't gone out of my way to restrict my timeline either, I follow ~1000 accounts I just don't follow or interact with accounts that post any of that crap.
And whether their ideas and strategies are well-grounded or seem optimal or ethical to the rest of us, the top leadership at most of those companies lean strongly towards corporatist, libertarian political ideals and see most regulation (and preemptive self-regulation) as both philosophically immoral and an existential threat to their businesses.
I agree with you.
If this is the case and money is speech, can a well-intentioned organization just collect donations to advance their message? Like when Philip Morris uses this to sell cigarettes to kids we say that is bad. But what if the EFF used it to ensure net neutrality? Or if Planned Parenthood used it to add reproductive rights to the bill of rights?
Do my donations already pay for social media campaigns?
Do the ends justify the means?
Before I deleted my Twitter account, I tried really hard to just block every account that posted content I felt was pol-tier.. it just doesn't work. That platform is FUBAR, and the prime example is the owner of the platform who has been completely brainrotted from staring into the orb for 12 hours a day.
It seems like public sentiment is trending towards rolling over and letting channers run society. We'll see how that goes.
I hadn't blocked ANYBODY for 13 of those years, but towards the end I was blocking dozens of users per day. Not not just, "I don't agree with this person" but "Wow this person is genuinely hateful and not contributing anything meaningful, and I would rather not see that."
I will rail on FB just as hard as the next guy, but realistically, from a business perspective, if facebook's wild popularity and 3 billion active monthly users still says "unusable" to you... well, do you really think most people would agree with you? And more importantly to the company... whose opinion matters the most?
Haven’t used any of these platforms in the last 5 years and I haven’t missed it a single minute - you should try it sometime
If you don't want to use the site there's no problem with that, just don't use it. But this is in direct response to a claim "this site [with a brand new user account with no history] is unusable" which - if your goal is to use the site - is easily fixed.
If your goal is just to go "well I don't even use the site and you should try it and be as Good a person as I am" then it doesn't really matter either way.
The promotion of blue-ticks above everything has completely ruined it as the blue-tick has no correlation to quality - often the inverse.
And it keeps putting things I really don't want to see in my feed, that aren't by anyone I follow.
Facebook has also gotten worse with its feed as far as sometimes injecting things into it I don't want, but most of it is still decent or at least relevant to my interests, and usually product or harmless news related (I get a lot of Kickstarter and mobile game ads, or celebrity gossip for some reason, even though I couldn't care less about most celebrities' lives) instead of political outrage and misinformation like I tend to get on Twitter.
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.
Alas, the stock's future performance is unlikely to be tied to any of that. Stock prices are barely attached to reality at all.
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.
The system design round, they got confused with some basic queueing concepts. It was a shit show.
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.
Complex social games with rituals, vocabulary, etc are not, and act as class signaling mechanisms.
"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. :-(
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.
Is that why there are so many women of color software engineers in tech?
Explain it to me since I've been in the industry for quite some time here and I can't say I've seen what you're hinting at.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Palo Alto Networks & Arista, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM, Netapp, Micron... Even World Bank has an Indian CEO.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
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.
Occams razor comes to mind.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers.
Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers.
I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.
The 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Source?
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.
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.
Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations
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).
I suppose this is true, if you believe that hitting the additional quota is entirely performative.
OTOH my company has better representation of women than anywhere else I've worked previously, so I don't think it is entirely performative.
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.
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 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.
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.
That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.
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.")
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
> > I've interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles.
This means one of two things. Either they're interviewing for roles on the DEI team, or "I had a role to fill and was told I had to hire a [black, hispanic, female, non-white] person."
The first one doesn't really have anything to do with the comment they're replying to. The second one is blatantly illegal but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And the next sentence and its tone supports that interpretation.
Is there a third interpretation I'm missing?
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?
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' 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.
Thanks.
> 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.
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.
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.
Ok, while we're here, there is no 'preferring' about it. There are hypothetical 'reasons' for it that may have value.
Anyway, at this point, I realise this is going absolutely nowhere.
All best,
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.
If you hire based on someone's race, that would appear to be 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 person below: "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.")
You probably haven't been blocked, you've probably run into one of the rumored "conversation slower-downer' mechanisms.
If you select the specific comment that you wish to reply to so that it opens in a page on its own, you should be able to reply to that comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
> 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
- Quotes by Dang
In my experience, the DEI office rejected the results of an interview panel after the interview-and-candidate-selection stage because the candidates selected by the interviewers and interviewing panel to receive offers were "insufficiently diverse". This resulted in Corporate closing the job requisition because they didn't feel like dealing with the hassle (and expense) of repeating the process. (This sucked because we fucking needed that hole to be filled... but there's no arguing with Corporate.)
This is an N=1 report, and I'm sure there are other companies that aren't so super-fucked, but at this particular company, this is how it went down.
This scenario doesn't meet the strict definition of "diversity hire", but it sure does feel like actions motivated by the same sort of reasoning.
What does that role provide outside of forced diversity i.e. racism. If it helps I am not a white male myself, but Mexican.
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.
Also that just makes the entire argument meaningless. Is the idea we should maintain DEI hiring because that way people doing the DEI hiring have a job?
What kind of circular logic is that.
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.
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.
As with "negro" and "colored", the new positive term eventually became a slur via concerted efforts from its opponents. ("DEI mayor": https://www.npr.org/2024/04/04/1242294070/baltimore-key-brid...)
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.
They're absolutely in the same category.
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.
Equal is giving everyone a printout.
Equity is giving the blind student a Braille version.
The latter is an attempt at providing equal access to the contents to those with different needs, so that they may learn equitably.
(The alternative term JEDI might argue that this is the just result.)
Equity would be mandating that blind students pass at the same rate as sighted students regardless of their scores.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_equity?wprov=sfti1
> 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).
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.
Which is a real shame because accessibility features and policies actually make things better and easier for everyone.
People with disabilities wanted to be included in society.
The goal of the Act was to provide a more equitable society for those people.
It would absolutely be derided as "woke DEI nonsense" if proposed today.
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?
Now, sure. At the time? Same sort of bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Ac...
Both are rooted in the same concept - that people should have fair opportunity to participate in society even if different in some ways.
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".
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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'm confused on how you accept A but not B
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.
https://www.automobilesreview.com/pictures/volvo/ycc-2004/wa...
Car companies will do anything but build actually diverse teams of Mech Es, EEs, mechanics, human factors psychologists etc.
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.
The BMW i8 also had a hood that could only be removed by 4 service techs and it went into production.
That said, this is a concept car. It doesn't have to be practical.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
Bet Bezos has spent years dreaming of making that Melania documentary he's finally become free to spend $40m on too...
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'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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's nothing empty about that. It's measured, and evaluated.
Right-wingers are ready to believe companies are lying about some things but not about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
The existence of a large propaganda campaign on X is not itself proof of the claims of that campaign, and in any case that if there were firms doing that it is both already explicitly and unambiguously illegal and is also very much not what DEI proponents advocate for.
Is that the reality I see? No... it's entirely symbolic.
Different experiences, but I trust what i see in the real world versus anecdotes of people against it for political reasons.
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 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.
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.
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.
I guess shutting one's eyes is an alternative way of seeing the real world, in a way.
It doesn't require "shutting one's eyes". From my vantage point that I see, they are a marketing implementation.
I personally would like them to have real teeth, and matter.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Isn't that the same reason they were rolled out in the first place?
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.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/long-shadows-the-black-wh...
> Our headline finding is that three-generation poverty is over 16 times higher among Black adults than white adults (21.3 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively). In other words, one in five Black Americans are experiencing poverty for the third generation in a row, compared to just one in a hundred white Americans.
'A former Facebook global diversity strategist stole more than $4 million from the social media giant “to fund a lavish lifestyle” in California and Georgia, federal prosecutors said.'
Interestingly, similar fraud occurred at her next job.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/former-facebook-diversity-le...
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.”
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.
Exactly as it was when DEI practices were introduced.
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 ?
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.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
Disagree, right wingers will be satisfied by this performative posturing even though there's no real change to existing policy.
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.
DEI efforts long predate that date.
2011: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13583
2019: https://time.com/5696943/diversity-business/
> A 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63% of the diversity professionals had been appointed or promoted to their roles during the past three years. In March 2018, the job site Indeed reported that postings for diversity and inclusion professionals had risen 35% in the previous two years.
Lesson taught and learned.
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.
For me, the photo of Wells Fargo managers kneeling in front of their huge money safes will always be the icon of that time. You cannot really get more performative than that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/banks-sna...
A dei program labels those people for you.
Ironically this is exactly the reason why dei programs were considered illegal until a decade ago.
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.
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?
Unlikely
You haven't seen the numbers? And where's the men in HR?
If there's a different role where Asians are underrepresented, then an Asian candidate could fulfill the DSA requirement.
Make of that what you will
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.
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.
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).
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.