> Well for one there sure were a lot of anecdotes on X from people claiming their companies literally refused to hire white people.

The existence of a large propaganda campaign on X is not itself proof of the claims of that campaign, and in any case that if there were firms doing that it is both already explicitly and unambiguously illegal and is also very much not what DEI proponents advocate for.

Is it possible that's happening somewhere? Certainly.

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 that people may develop political responses to what they see in the real world.

History has also shown us that people develop political opinions based on whatever lies are repeated often enough in their media echo chamber.

Consider the truly bizarre origins of antisemitism, for one. (And I'm not talking about people who have opinions on geopolitics in the ME. Think about how the other kind of antisemite, who doesn't give a rat's ass about what's going on 10,000 miles away reaches their political opinions.)

Or, better yet, the gay satanic-panic currently gripping half the country, and the insane culture war being waged around it. You can't actually believe that all those people who have strong opinions about it have been somehow personally wronged by homosexuals.

But they do turn on the telly to listen to some lunatic screaming about how there's a mass conspiracy to turn their children gay.

> Or, better yet, the gay satanic-panic currently gripping half the country, and the insane culture war being waged around it. You can't actually believe that all those people who have strong opinions about it have been somehow personally wronged by homosexuals.

Or the satanic panic over Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. One of the cops ("school resource officers") in the middle school I went to still believed in that nonsense and it was the early 2000s by that point.

I can tell you that my change in political leanings, from a pretty far left stance to a center-right is based on personal experience. What you see happen in reality far outweighs what people claim online.

So, your political views have shifted from that of a fringe left Democrat to that of a core-establishment Democrat?

That is believable.

What would be less believable is your lived experience sending you on the crazy train ride that the far right party is currently on. I really can't understand how that can happen without a media bubble, but if it did, I'm genuinely interested.

This cuts both ways. If you listen to leftie media you'd believe that trans people are going to be literally rounded up and killed in the streets after Trump takes power. Saying that "people" develop political opinions based on media lies but then excluding yourself and those that agree with you from these "people" is awfully convenient rhetorically.

Leftie media in that case is usually just reprinting what people on the right say they intend on doing, though.

We are currently in a world where you can be banned from certain rights wing echo chambers for, verbatim, quoting the more deranged and unhinged things a major right wing political figure has said.

It's not really alarmist or hyperbolic when some of the newer deranged things include not needing to vote anymore, or annexing Canada and Greenland.

You have to, like, take this seriously. Its not just some reddit troll running his mouth, and it's borderline gaslighting to suggest some both-sides-equivelancy between the two.

Google HR is on the record doing this.

I guess shutting one's eyes is an alternative way of seeing the real world, in a way.

You don't need to be uncharitable. I don't work at Google, and am unfamiliar with it's implementation.

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.

Source?

There are over three hundred million people in the USA. If you search - or are in a suitable bubble - there are ‘a lot of anecdotes on X’ about most anything imaginable.

But if you peeked in on the Monday morning new employee orientation at those companies they would be full of white men starting their new jobs.

Beyond the ones who were just making stuff up for political points, there were also people who didn't get a job they wanted and blamed minorities instead of themselves.

Idk about how it is now, probably the same, but a few years back, at Microsoft hiring managers would need a VP permission to hire a straight white male candidate if their "diversity" quotas weren't yet met.

I was a part of an interesting convo at Google as well, about 9 years or so ago, back when women were at the top of the DEI hierarchy. A female hiring committee member told me that they often give "a second look" to female candidates, while men never get such preferential treatment. I tried to convince her that this is discrimination but never got anywhere.

And yes I get it, it's "anecdotal" etc. But surely you don't expect companies to willingly disclose plainly illegal discrimination themselves?

There was a flagged post here on HN recently from some right wing grievance YouTube channel, it was talking about how Microsoft refuses to hire white people, but the evidence for this clearly incorrect claim was coming from a guy who says on LinkedIn that he is a principal software engineer, at Microsoft. So, it doesn't exactly scan.

DEI programs in software companies boil down to this: if you only hire your friends from Stanford then you are going to severely under-represent Black candidates and massively over-represent Asian candidates, because you are simply copying and pasting the entrenched bias of that institution. To compensate, you go and set up your recruiting table at the job fair at Howard. It's all actually quite straightforward.

A guy I worked for 20 years ago goes on rants on LinkedIn about how he can't find a job as a recruiting manager because of his age and DEI. Maybe if he wasn't such an overt racist crybaby, then he'd have more success at finding a job.