What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert?
In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way.
Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company.
However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview.
Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.
So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is valuable has changed, so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Progressives have forgotten in the last 10-15 years that the progress which we've won took generations not because our predecessors were weak and slow but because it inherently takes generations to effect lasting change. It's a slow, painful process, and if you think you accomplished it in a decade you're almost certainly wrong.
According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_, the first time having two black senators is now, school integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that we were even starting at a "good" place.
I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not like we're in that good of a place, never really were.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-...
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
Definitely agree nobody will vote for anything that costs them anything.
But my kids are mixed race partial African heritage and I do think it behooves us as Americans to think about rectifying that terrible wrong on my wife's side of the family. There are dozens of examples of horribly wrong headed ways to do that (Brazil had some really creative and disastrous ideas), but we should at least acknowledge the lingering effects that still impacts people today that are descendants of slaves.
Maybe I'm just sensitive because it feels like Florida, where I currently live, is trying to wipe away that history. Why inhibit discussion about it?
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
My take on your statement is similar to "If the economics of your area is not good, they can just move." Most areas where the economy is falling a person is incapable of selling their home since no one wants to buy their house. This leads to a stale mate of having to stay in the area because they cannot afford to move and doing so would just compound their poverty. Children are often the ones that leave because they are most likely have a near zero dept are more time to build up their economic mobility.
Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
The solutions between the two are the same. Social acceptance and assistance to provide economic mobility. Irony, is that these environments reduce social engagement producing tribalism like states where trust is lost between these groups. This is our problem and we need to stop thinking independently because this just leads to selfish behavior that harms our society.
Creating a better environment for others is a Win-Win versus creating a better environment just for you is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose resolution.
[0] https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highli...
They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution. Go look at the actual maps https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ and see for yourself. Typically, the redlined neighborhoods are conveniently located close to downtown.
> Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
In the context of redlining, observe that agricultural employment was already at around 20% when redlining started, and 5% when it ended, and also the redlined neighborhood were the ones with best commutes and job availability. This is still true, by the way: the ghetto parts of the American cities almost universally are centrally located, close to jobs and facilities, and they are well served by transportation infrastructure (in fact, this is one of the activists biggest complaints: that they're too close to freeways).
> They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution.
The study found:
> Across all included cities, redlined D-graded neighborhoods had 12.2 ± 27.2 wells km−2, nearly twice the density in neighborhoods graded A (6.8 ± 8.9 wells km−2).
So, just like I said, "more often", but that's still only less than twice as often as the most desirable neighborhoods. This is hardly a noticeable difference to residents.
Significance:
Our study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods.
Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts. "The presence of wells in historically redlined neighborhoods remains relevant, as many of these redlined neighborhoods have persistent social inequities and the presence of wells, both active and post-production, can contribute to ongoing pollution."
* Meant to say,"Redline districts are often near oil refiners and highly polluted."
Yes, 2x is clearly "disproportionate", but it's a far cry from being obviously significant. If you assume that pollution is not significant in best neighborhoods, then it's not greatly significant in worst, because twice something insignificant is still hardly significant. Replace oil wells with something else that's clearly harmful: murders. Imagine the worst neighborhoods had twice as many murders as the best ones. This would actually be improvement over the status quo: worst neighborhoods are far more dangerous than just 2x!
> Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts.
It does no such thing. It says that wells can contribute to ongoing pollution. That does not mean that it does, and it does not even quantify the contribution of wells to pollution, nor does it even show that the worst districts are significantly more polluted in the first place.
The point of this study is to corroborate the narrative of redlined district being significantly more polluted than the "best" districts, and that this is why residents of these districts and their descendants have worse outcomes today. It shows something that's not very interesting on its own (just twice the number of oil wells). However, it's clearly successful in building narrative, given that it convinced you that it provides evidence for it.
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
One thing that you definitely can't trace in the DNA is "that group of people tried to genocide my grandparents", but that seems like an important "ethnic group" distinction to you.
This is not to dispute your main point which I take to be that you stop fighting over "ethnic" distinctions by giving people a new unifying identity, but I still find myself thinking that something is lost in the process, even if it is a proven approach.
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
For an incredibly evolved version of this, check out a (brief summary of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India].
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups.
Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America.
My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.
Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work.
If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.
A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
I'm white and spend a lot of time in Korea. I can get around in Korean. Do I take offence when a Korean talks to me in English first? No, it wouldn't make sense. If they switch to English when they notice that my Korean is imperfect? Neither. I'd have unrealistic expectations about my fellow humans if I blamed people for easily explainable interactions. Better to presume good intentions than to take offence at the banality of such interactions.
Talk about an unusual life!
I’m not saying you should take offence - I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position. Being never seen as part of the culture does something to you, you feel apart, forever, even across generations.
I’m saying to give your fellow humans more consideration when you interact with them.
It might not affect you much because you didn’t build your whole life in Korea.
But imagine you are 3rd generation living there, your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country. It builds resentment and segregates the citizens which makes life harder for everyone.
The reverse is also true: it can be corrosive for the people on the other side of that equation. Of course the 3rd generation "foreign" descendant had no choice on where to be born, but you can imagine that for the generation of the "natives" that took in the immigrants, it might have felt strange to see among their community people that looked different, spoke a different language, and had different cultural customs. It's hard not to think that this was corrosive to the social fabric, especially for the people who didn't feel that they had agreed to that particular change in the social contract.
> your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country
Some immigrant groups don't integrate very well, even after generations. Naturally, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; do the immigrants not integrate because the natives reject them, or do the natives reject them because the immigrants don't integrate?
As an immigrant myself, I believe the onus is on the immigrant to integrate, and to raise one's children to be even further integrated. Again, it sucks for those who had no choice but to be born in a country as the descendants of immigrants, who nevertheless get judged as an immigrant unwilling to integrate; but that's not a problem particular to immigration. It always sucks to be judged not as an individual but as a member of a group.
We should all strive to judge people by who they are and not what group they belong to, which I suppose was your overall message; but I just want to point out that everything is a two-way street.
If 9 times out of 10 English is actually the correct choice, then it probably makes less sense to do this.
Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…
I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve.
It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.
I guess you mean the party which led by a women in a relationship with another women from Sri Lanka. You should probably start looking for other insults, racist and fascist are getting kind of boring.
The party is internally divided but a strong portion of it openly endorses facist “heroes” - for example calling the SS “all good people”. They try to hide it and purge their extremist members but it’s not working. Höcke and Gauland are very obviously racists as are many other less prominent members of the party.
>"Germany for the Germans". >referring to Germans of Turkish origin as "fatherless vermin" and "camel drivers", who should go back to their "mud huts" and "multiple wives".
Yea those are definitely not racist or facist statements /s
Edit: even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
Maybe what you think you know is wrong?
>> even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
Maybe because they don't consider AFD as far right enough?
There is something to be said of for the individual cultures being even stronger during those times. Perhaps the formation of the German nation state was a counter reaction to the Napoleonic wars?
Anyway, this has little to do with immigration from all over the world: All these kingdoms already had the same language and largely the same culture.
Have states such as France ethnically cleansed other peoples from within their borders? If so, then why isn't that mentioned in the well-known histories?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Inquisition]
It did somewhat calm down once the Republic’s formed, but even today there are large conflicts with ‘Normal’ French society and the large scale ghettos from (typically Muslim) immigrants and refugees in France.
The nation state of Turkey's establishment out of the ethnically diverse Ottoman Empire deployed all of the above.
> Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
If there are good sources to read about this occurring I would love to read them. Otherwise the insinuations are baseless.
That goes back to at least 1095. Or the Inquisiton? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition]
Notably, it was exceptionally common for Religion to overlap almost exactly with Ethnicity (for various reasons), so the fighting between different Sects was often a common proxy for fights between different Ethnic groups too.
Also, since different Ethnic groups tended to ‘own’ different countries, each time there was an invasion, one would either make ground, or get repelled ‘back where you came from’, which also tended to align ethnic groups by borders. Those efforts didn’t generally merit note. If ‘your side’ lost, even if you’d lived there for a couple of generations, of course you’d lose your land and need to flee ‘home’.
Paris is one somewhat notable exception though.
Language is also an interesting proxy for this. Spanish vs French vs German vs English, etc.
still, there was always the ‘European’ Spaniards, vs the Moorish Spaniards, eh? Splits within splits.
It was always a mix of different peoples - Celtic, then Romans when they invaded, then various Germanic peoples (including the Franks that gave the country it's name)... even the standardization of the French language is fairly modern. We had Occitan and Provincal and Breton spoken, it's only in the past ~200 years or so that industrialization has given a "uniform" culture.
In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise...
https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-cou...
Literally the Vikings [1].
> in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finn
Yes [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norwa...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_...
As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people.
When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.
Why? Are we talking population or space? On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M.
If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany.
Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again.
So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.
Their globalist friends want more immigration to drive down wages and increase rents.
This is nothing at all like in the U.S. The U.S. is huge and I'm green with envy when I see YouTubers owning whole estates in Idaho to make their private aircraft videos. Such things are completely impossible in Germany.
Then there is the cultural aspect of course. The U.S. has been an immigration country from the start. Europe had diverse hand highly advanced cultures in music, paintings, literature etc. Frankly, since the Americanization following WW2 neither Europe nor the U.S. have produced anything comparable.
What you call ethnostate, which is a derogatory term, other people call culture.
I don’t think America has been a melting pot from the start. It was Protestant whites and slaves for 100 years or more.
Letting in Catholics and Jews was a choice and controversial at the time. Then the same for East Asians, South Asians, MENAs, and the latest drama is Latinos. I probably forgot many other groups. Different choices could have been made at each juncture. Continuing on this trend was a choice.
Germany continuing to not be a melting pot is a choice just the same as deciding to become one.
European wages are a different issue and it is to me more a problem of thinking you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity. Letting in more or less immigrants isn’t the primary problem.
Why do Americans and foreigners want to start companies in the US so much? Where are the European startups? Are any Americans moving overseas to start companies? No new firm formation leads to no new job creation leads to lagging economic growth.
If you want to see some European racists, go to a soccer/football match between national teams. Or ask a Northern European what they REALLY think about the south. Or even a Northern Italian about Southern Italians. Or ask almost any of them about Eastern Europe or especially Roma.
In many cases immigrants bring their own racism to the US that white Americans are completely unaware of. One of the only direct "racism in the workplace" complaints I've been party to in the workplace was Indian on Indian. Former team lead was fired and replacement was an Indian guy, from one particular caste/region I don't recall. Anyway he immediately tried to due-diligence the caste/region of the only Indian on the team. The rest of us had no idea what was going on until our Indian colleague rapidly found another job and accused him on the way out the door.
I've even seen some crazy resentment in the workplace between patriotic CCP PRC enjoyers vs Taiwanese coworkers "you aren't Taiwanese, it's not a real country".
It's not to excuse any past or present faults in the US, but only to raise the relative performance to other countries&group / how achievable the utopian Star Trek vision is. Our technology and living conditions have evolved rapidly, but HumanOS remains the same. We move ever forward, but its slow.
One issue that often escapes our attention when we focus on group identities and historical grievances is just how much we collaborate across groups. When a white woman (Katalin Karikó, Hungarian) worked on mRNA, the end results of that research were used by all groups and social identities. We collaborate across much more than we like to acknowledge.
But, I fail to see how your lengthy diatribe about modern day racism, most of what I agree with, disputes my comment about reparations. Those are totally different things and that's what I'm pointing out.
After all, there are practical problems of who is eligible, how long, and who gets to decide that.
Not only that, but at that point there is now strong financial incentives to be in specific groups. At least while the money flows.
Not everyone can be eligible, or it loses all meaning. Someone has to pay, or it can’t be funded.
Someone has to be officially the victim, and officially the offender, or such a program can’t actually exist. Etc.
These aren’t modern problems either, and this isn’t ‘modern’ racism, whatever that is. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz]
If you are a white or Asian boy who likes computers, and have been playing with code ever since you were little, you get rejected at college admission with a higher score than a black kid. Why has anything to do with skin color, programming doesn't get any easier if you are white. Math problems are just as hard no matter how rich are your parents. If you achieve some level of understanding, it should not be wiped away by skin color, especially to redress a wrong that was made generations ago and not your fault.
Tying it back together, though, this is why I'm disappointed that there is so much backlash about DEI programs. I know first hand from my time at a Fortune 50 company that the lack of black people employed there was partially due to the fact that they had never recruited at any historical black college ever. When they hired a Chief Diversity Officer, we did (I went there). And there were good candidates.
I successfully recommended for hire the first black employee at the satellite office for that company. That (candidates being pushed that don't look like the current workforce) just simply doesn't happen when it is all white guys. We generally find other people that look like we do to recommend and hire, especially when we aren't aware of it. I'm sure Asian men suffer from the same myopia as I do. It doesn't stop unless I really think about my default behaviors.
That feels like the right way to do reparations. That's the best way, IMHO, to build generational wealth.
But, it's falling apart because angry white men like me are complaining that they are cut out of opportunities. I can understand, as a 51 year old white male I've seen how hard it is to find work the last few years. It's brutal. But I've always gotten most of my jobs through my personal network of other mostly white men that worked in tech. If you don't have that network because you aren't in a group heavily represented in tech, then your chances are slim even if it truly is a meritocracy.
At some point (when growth is not infinite), there are a limited number of positions after all.
Or did everyone evaluate the candidate without awareness of their color, and come to the decision?
Same as someone who was black, but otherwise qualified, would have if someone discriminated against them, yes? Like the folks who never got considered because they went to the wrong college. (Though notably, you apparently did get hired despite going to that college correct?)
Why shouldn’t those ‘angry white dudes’ be angry? Really?
Anymore than a black dude be angry when the same happens to him?
Because they ‘already had enough’? When should they stop being angry then? When they no longer have enough? Who decides that? And why should they let someone decide that for them?
I’m not saying either choice is good - I’m saying this is why making those choices this way fundamentally causes the problems it does.
But I’m also under no illusions that will change anytime soon.
The strong do what they will while they are strong, and it’s a fool that lets someone make them weak enough they are no longer strong eh?
And the weak will do what they can to be strong, and it’s a fool who lets themselves get talked out of that too.
The difference is if ‘us’ means people with a common nation, or a common color, or gender, or sex, or religion.
In your personal situation, how long would it take of not actually having opportunities before you’re willing to get angry enough to do something? Or lost potential income due to better opportunities you could have had, but didn’t.
Some people are less patient, and more violent than you likely are. And apparently, they just won the elections.
Frankly, they often do.
Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.
Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.
Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.
Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.
Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"
Some discrimination is perfectly fine (generally when it is a legitimate requirement of the job). For instance, hiring vivacious young women for a stripper job? Perfectly acceptable per the gov’t. Same with hiring only men of a specific age, and ‘build’ for male underwear models.
Some legally not fine criteria, would be for example if your wife threw out any black sounding names. Or any women that sounded young enough to be having kids soon. Or foreigners.
But many of those legally fine criteria are, practically, can be somewhat effective proxies for illegal discrimination, yes?
Someone not getting an opportunity because of some consistent criteria, especially a criteria they cannot change, and especially one that is not related to the actual performance of the job, is taking away an opportunity. You are quite right though, that it happens every day, and is a necessary part of hiring.
Civil rights laws are to help stop large classes of people from being from being consistently screwed because they are consistently losing opportunities based on some criteria that society judges should be protected. It’s a small list, but includes race, national origin, gender, etc.
DEI has come about (or chicken/egg? Resulted in?) a re-interpretation of Civil rights and labor law enforcement that says for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population, or that is de facto evidence of discrimination. I can link to some DOL consent decrees if you don’t believe me.
In some areas (like Gov’t contractors/employment), this has been required for decades. There are explicit Gov’t mandates for Affirmative Action, which requires employers who meet certain criteria to actively discriminate based on otherwise legally protected classes like race to ensure they hire enough of each category. It’s after all practically impossible to end up with X% of a certain race/gender/whatever if you never keep track of, or make decisions in hiring, based on it eh?
For larger companies, it’s generally been less required, and a more lenient ‘someone needs to have been explicitly using illegal discrimination’ standard was used. Until relatively recently.
A number of companies have gotten huge fines over the years (including Google, among others) because the composition of the employees hired and their pay did not align with expected population wide statistical norms. You’ve almost certainly heard it as one group being ‘overrepresented’.
Well, when hiring freezes/stops, or there are layoffs, guess what happens to that ‘over represented’ group disproportionately?
Notably, this entire post is because Trump is changing the criteria so that it is no longer required that companies meet the ‘in proportion to the population’ standard, and rather that someone has to prove they are actually discriminating illegally on race.
Which, since you have to actual discriminate on race to do affirmative action, seems to defacto make Affirmative Action illegal?
Or at least makes de facto (but not explicit) discrimination on an otherwise protected class just fine again for large companies.
But there are also personal preferences, and some groups have different average preferences than other groups. Look at rich countries, women often prefer non-STEM jobs if they have the choice, while poor countries can have more equality because women will pursue traditionally male jobs lacking other good options.
I hope we can build some common identity as “world citizens” or whatever- but the trend seems to go towards _more_ balkanisation and more division along class/wealth/privilege.
The ‘black community’, ‘Irish community’, ‘catholic community’. And those do often work - frankly, it’s often the only thing that works when that community does have some specific interest.
It’s for lobbying and other pressure tactics, yes?
Civil rights is a specific example of a universal interest: equality before the law. The rise of the Nazi party is an example of people forsaking their own interests for a facade of collective interest that covered over the personal interest of a few leaders - Nazi Germany was extraordinarily corrupt, and of course ruined the lives of and killed most of the people who it claimed to exist for the interest of.
It is interesting that you bring up "Catholic interests," because the Church is naturally opposed to concepts like "Irish interests." The Church doesn't want its members to divide themselves along ethnic or other lines because that would detract from their Catholicism. It is no accident that the Nazis - the most famous example of an "ethnic interest group" - had to destroy or subsume every other kind of organization to exist.
If you were an Irish immigrant in NYC in the 30’s, would you still say that about an Irish community group?
How about a Latino workers group in 70’s Los Angeles?
Or for that matter a ‘black community’ group in 70’s Los Angeles too.
LA has always had a lot of gang warfare, which divides itself along ethnic lines because that's the underbelly of human nature. Gang warfare is a great example of everybody doing things that are very bad for themselves and others because of a perceived division with little basis in fact. If there's enough gang warfare I guess you could see racially segregated unions, like in the deep south, but that is again against worker's interests just like how segregated churches oppose God.
It is very difficult to find even a selfish motive for segregation unless you are an actual slaveowner or apartheid government official.
There were also prevalent crime issues and ethnic gangs at the time. And many people (Irish in particular) DID go around saying those things you assert no one ever said.
For people who ‘looked Irish’ it was absolutely in their interest to align with these groups to some extent, or they’d be discriminated against and not have useful power to fight against it, and not have a group of people aligned with them that would provide housing, jobs, etc. to them.
In fact, near as I can tell, the only reason the Irish stopped being discriminated against so heavily is because of the political machines and gangs that punished groups for discriminating against them this way.
Same with the Catholics, actually.
So what are you actually talking about?
I don't think, for example, the "mafia" was a major contributor to equal rights for Italian immigrants. One obvious piece of evidence is that today, the mafia has been weakened thanks to the efforts of the police, but Italians haven't become persecuted as a result.
Membership in the Italian Mafia has turned out to be bad on net for the good of the people the families claim to represent. I think some people can get rich doing it but it is not a beneficial or admirable lifestyle.
If you want another example, where were all the Jewish gangs? I'm not aware of a single one. Some famous gangsters were Jewish (at least if you count the movies, I don't know about real life), and I don't think the cause of equal rights has suffered as a result. You have to read this with a smile even though the topic is very serious because the ideas involved would be at home on Saturday Night Live.
One final example is what could be the most hated organizations in America: the white nationalist gangs that only exist in prison. They are all in jail, and equal rights for people of European descent hasn't suffered at all. I'm surprised I ever participated in a conversation where I had a reason to write this, but white nationalists have no positive goals, not even for anybody.
The advancement of the universal recognition of equal rights for all is a much better explanation because unlike the rise of gangs, it hasn't been reversed.
Also your example of white nazi gangs in prison: they exist for the same reason- people need to band together to survive
As to your second point, not all Nash equilibria are beneficial. Gang formation is a lot like a Keynesian beauty contest in that appealing to the basest parts of our nature is the safest bet, and I think we can agree that this has nothing to do with anything good.
People do not need to "band together to survive" in that sense. Those gangs were mainly shaking down businesses in their own neighborhoods anyway, and everybody is a lot better off now that they're history.
Hey, you’re welcome to if you want. Time travel may be hard, but I’m sure someone would let you into your local Folsom equivalent if you asked.
Which is what you seemed to be rejecting?
It isn't right to view something like equality before the law as a matter of somebody else's self-interest, or to justify a ruthless pursuit of self-interest by recasting it as service of an imagined collective interest.
If a bunch of, say Catholics, get together to make a community group and lobby for something they want - how is that not that groups ‘special interests’ in every practical way?
Anyone who doesn't find that self-evident, I challenge to think of a single political opinion that is universal to members of any religious sect or ethnicity that is not universal to all human beings.
Dispensation for Orthodox Jews to observe Shabbat even when they would otherwise be compelled to break it due to civil duties.
The right for Muslims to take specific breaks for prayer when required, and have a place for such prayer.
And I can go on.
Or are you going to move the goal posts again?
> Humans are tribal. [...], I don’t think just pretending we’re all one [tribe] will work. [...] I hope we can build [a] common [tribe].
You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression.
So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US).
I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
I guess that what went wrong with them. Rather than generate systems to treat _evereyone_ equally the systems attempted very hard to 1. categorize people into predefined groups 2. after people are grouped, then treat each group individually.
What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
The DEI systems that were implemented were just policy theater, that were ineffective and alienating.
In US corps outside US (I worked for a subsidiary in Finland) the DEI stuff they implemented was just insane and non-helpfull almost in every aspect. "You can no longer use git repositories with the term master.." - that was hilarious. It's obvious nobody was serious about DEI. Management just hired bunch of consultants who sold them checklists so managament could check the box in their own checklist. An opportunity to actually help minorities was lost sadly.
The only good thing that came from the rigmarole were unisex toilets which are just common sense.
Interviewing for orchestras behind a screen, so the judges can't see the age/gender/race. That's a good way to go about equality.
I think you are correct, but it still misses the mark on framing. White people are indeed not punished, but they are being hindered by DEI mandates. At one point, it gets a little annoying, because we see no real benefit from it. If anything, demands seemed to escalate.
I will tell you my own personal 'fuck it' moment. Company meeting with chief diversity guy. Peak DEI moment. A suggestion is made after presentation that maybe 'we' should have 'black safe spaces', where only black people meet. It took everything in my power to remain silent at that time, because if I have ever heard of a racist policy, that was it and the company is lucky I did not pursue legal path. Someone else did cautiously raised it though and that concerned was dismissed with wordplay.
I am just one guy, but DEI breeds heavy, misunderstood and very much unseen resentment discussed in small local groups only, because you cannot even discuss it openly in company channels. If anything, people bond over 'fuck it' moment.
<< But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
shrug Does it mean we should exacerbate those issues by instituting restitution? Seems counterproductive.
When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.
When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.
When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.
That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"
If you don’t get enough candidates, or the candidates you do get don’t happen to exactly align quality wise on whatever other criteria you are using, of the right race, gender, etc. what do you think actually happens?
NOTE: I have been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that what happens is not what you assert. I have also been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that I should say what you are asserting if anyone asks.
You can't just dismiss the framing to dismiss the injustice it points to. Slavery wasn't meant to be a punishment either, doesn't mean we can omit the injustice it entails.
Skip explicit racial discrimination and help those who are most in need. It's that simple. Yes this group will have a specific racial makeup but it makes a world of difference to discriminate based on need rather than taking a racist approach.
Did you sleepwalk through literally every American history class you had growing up?
It boggles the mind that you can write "discrimination against people doesn't help the people who aren't discriminated against."
That is the point of discrimination: to benefit those who aren't discriminated against. That's why it was created, that's why it persists, and that's why people who benefit from the discrimination oppose its cessation. Look elsewhere in this discussion: the people who historically benefit from that oppression are saying its abatement is oppression directed back at themselves.
The harm is often second factor such as the abundance of cheap (or free) labor yields less bargaining power and you end up working for less than you otherwise would have (but also the psychological harm of living in an unfair society). But next to the harm caused to those who are indeed discriminated against, the harm is rather minute.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I mention this only to support the point you make above, not to virtue signal. Anyway, it's nothing my family did, it's just historical circumstance. But to my family, the insane amount of politics and drama around DEI and BLM in America still seems foreign to us, even a few generations later.
I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
MLK had one famous line in a speech that has been leveraged by reactionaries to use him as a weapon against advocates of racial liberation. But that is not an honest use of his beliefs.
The whole movement for racial equality, and thus liberation, in the USA grew from intensely Christian foundations. One of the core tenets of abolitionism was the idea that humans are created equal, and such attributes as race or skin color are irrelevant before God, and hence to the faithful, too. Christ specifically said that being a Greek or being a Jew does not matter before God, and being a slave or being a master also does not matter; all are equal.
So, certain amounts of colorblindness are inherent to the very idea of people of different origins being equal, as it emerged in the USA, and supposedly elsewhere in the Christian-dominated areas of the world.
Also, it's the idea of equality, equal worth (before God), not of fairness or compensation; the latter might come from atonement and Christian love to the neighbor.
Eventually other ideas took hold and somehow eclipsed the initial ideas, not just of 1860s but also of MLK's.
I also think that Christians specifically should be comfortable with the concept of generational sin and personal sacrifice for social justice rather than a vigorous defense that one's achievement's are solely their own and must be hoarded at all costs.
This is a false choice. They are not the only two options.
Calling MLK's values "colorblindness" in the way of "racial liberation" is the kind of double-speak the GP criticizes. Language that distances everyone from the capital-T Truth that MLK knew and died for, in favor of small truths that pretend to unite but actually divide.
It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
Could you inform Kamala Harris? She just ran a campaign which was largely predicated on the need for "equity", the goal of which she repeatedly described as meaning we need to take proactive measures to ensure that "we all wind up at the same place".
Yes? You're presenting this as some kind of gotcha but isn't that what the ultimate goal is?
I mean there's multiple ways to go about it; one that a lot of people object to is e.g. giving people jobs they're not qualified for. But another that I myself benefited from was a government that paid for everyone's education from elementary to university level, allowing me to go from a blue collar lower class to a comfortable middle class income level.
I have no problems with Tan suits for example.
Good people don’t tell you to hate, sure?
They do tell you to take care of yourself and to protect yourself. That some people are evil and should be stopped.
Bad people sound like good people and use different words to achieve the same goals.
That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it?
the only difference is in who the far left vs far right each believe "should be stopped".
yes, thats why I chose it.
I think the point slipped past, we started with you saying MAGA is innocent.
I pointed out that words have context. I gave an example of innocent words, which can be used by bad people, to sound just.
MAGA, is in this category.
Its not considered innocent, and most people will assume that you are being false or misleading when you say "i dont know why this is bad".
Its kinda like showing a Man U flag in an Arsenal town - its impolite. One is expected to have the awareness of how their team is behaving and perceived.
I mean, its your team, of course you should know everything about it, from its good PR to its bad PR.
A rich person descendant of slaves is very clearly advantaged against a poor person descendant of slave owners. This is so evident that even those thinking that the "historical inequalities" are the important bit can't help themselves but turn to money at every step of the way to fix then.
But we all know that there are innumerable stories of families and cultures that have suffered, struggled, been exploited, been abused, and been excluded for generations or centuries in ways that they still are deeply disadvantaged for today.
Who might see more impact from more opportunity though:
* the poverty-raised first-generation-collegiate grandchild of a Russian refugee whose family history is just hundreds of years of serfdom followed immediately by Soviet oppression
* the Stanford alum son of a middle class Chinese immigrant who came here to run a thriving import/export business
They both face structured disadvantages compared to some other people, but skin color doesn't do a good job of telling you where a helping hand might contribute to the more equitable future or which will add more diversity of perspective/culture to a workplace.
Programs like DEI often assume all PoC as similarly disadvantaged, and then contrast them against an archetype of an uncommonly successful and priveleged imaginary WASP. But the reality of history and equity involves far more dimensions and many more fine distinctions.
What’s more true is that people around the world are facing adversity of extreme severity, but due to proximity and cultural barriers we don’t hear about them.
And if you don’t care about these other forms of identity and mistreatment , then you are really saying DEI is a repayment for a particular historical wrong doing, and not an effort for greater empathy, fairness, or new ideas.
All the Fox News criticisms suddenly become relevant: which descendants were actually impacted, how much do we owe them. Let’s pay it off and stop talking about it.
I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not what we are trying to achieve.
The purpose of it within the USA is to address historical systemic discrimination within the USA, which certainly go beyond merely African slaves and their descendants but do not extend to discriminatory patterns in SE Asia.
The logical conclusion is the approach taken for native Americans, providing each tribe payments at certain ages, special programs, and scholarships.
The outcomes haven’t been great, but not due to lack of opportunity. It’s as much money and DEI programs can fix. Fixing lives requires solutions that don’t scale.
To GP's point, skin colour did not seem to be the salient factor there.
As someone who's been looking for a job that will take a chance on how I can grow to full their needs rather than already being a perfect match; I would really love someplace that had a 'career pivot' entry track and not just a recent / about to grad track.
Maybe something like a 1 week, then 1 month (3 more weeks), then 3 months (total), then every 3rd month evaluation track for working the job in a 'temp to hire' sense with a 1 year cutoff so they can't just keep hiring 'perma temps' like in the past.
I understand there's risks, and I understand it's very hard for both sides. However there's a ton of untapped potential and corporations are the ones who aren't offering a way of tapping it.
Ivy League schools in the US have been doing this for rather a long time now. Whether they are any good at it is subject to significant debate, but they certainly like to pretend that they can evaluate it. Their evaluations tend to show a strong belief in the hereditary properties of "potential", which is not well established in actual objective research.
Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s literally good enough for government work.
For example: When I was 18 I was completely overlooked by the NFL because I had never played gridiron football. Had I been coached professionally for 10 years I may have been a star.
I sat in an interview for an army officer scholarship once, acutely aware that the man testing me had an accent that made it clear he was from a higher social class than me. He mentioned that I was not properly prepared for the meeting, but I was given no notes as to what to prepare. I was told later that in the private schools that feed the majority of candidates to this route, that they coach their pupils specifically for this test.
So I would like to hear a test for potential that is not easily gamed by wealthy people
Whether it's learning the social mores of the institution you're trying to join, or grinding test prep, or whatever else.
Is that ideal? Probably not, but like I said nothing's perfect.
I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Many people alive today have parents that went to segregated schools in America. But my dad went to a school without walls in a Bangladeshi village. That’s almost certainly worse in terms of objective educational quality. But why does that path dependence mater anyway?
Yes.
> Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Because Black people are jailed at far higher rates than white people. The poor white potsmoker in Appalachia is likely to get a pass from the police while the Black man gets jailed for 10 years and sentenced to forced labor for pennies.
Now what would you call this exactly?
Race-related factoids in ACLU reports should be viewed with skepticism. It’s made-for-litigation advocacy, not science. People of different races differ on many other dimensions and it’s easy to cherry pick results for advocacy reasons.
For example, I was interested in this notion of a “bamboo ceiling”—the idea that Asians are underrepresented in management or as corporate directors. Turns out that effect disappears when you account for age (the median Asian is 36), language proficiency (most Asian Americans are foreign born, and only 57% of those are proficient in english).
Why do you think that is?
> The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44
Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?
> People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.
Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?
You said:
>I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
And I'm telling you, directly and upfront, why it matters. You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor. You have chosen to try and shift away from the argument when I brought up why it matters. The persistent effects of past bad acts is why it matters where you were born and of what skin color.
The incarceration rate for Appalachian whites is four times higher than the incarceration rate for Massachusetts whites. Why do you think that is?
> >The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44 > Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?
Asian Americans have a life expectancy at birth of 84.5. Whites are at 77.5, and black Americans are at 72.8. So the Asian-white gap is bigger than the white-black gap. Why do you think that is?
> Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?
The black/white incarceration disparity (2.3x) is smaller than the white/asian incarceration disparity (2.6x). Why do you think that is?
> You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor.
No, I asked why it matters why you were born where you were born. 62% of black people have a household income of $40,000 or below versus 40% of white people. As to that 62% and 40% who are in similar circumstances, why should it matter what historical facts led them to those circumstances?
It is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different in any way other than deontology.
We are not all the same. It is silly to suggest that. We share common form factor and there are things that bring us together, but pretending otherwise is how we end up where we are now.
Highly correlated with one race for a particular moment in history. New immigrants from Africa don't share the same disadvantage.
Is targeting a divisive proxy for disadvantage worth targeting when you can just target poverty itself?
That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place. In absence of a clear definition, people just fill in whatever they want.
Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means doesn't mean no one has defined it. This comment reminds me of the people who complain "the mainstream media isn't talking about XYZ" when they are, in fact, talking a lot about XYZ, but the complainant is only reading Facebook articles shared by their friends.
One might consider [this seminal paper](https://web.archive.org/web/20090612025522/http://bss.sfsu.e...) on the concept of social equity, and then google "equity" to see how institutions are using the term.
Most of them, you can see a connection between the ideas expressed in that paper and the definitions the modern institutions purport to believe in.
I also didn't bother to look up the meanings of equality, fairness or diversity. But those words are fairly straightforward and one learns them when one learns English.
"Equity" is one where the implied usage in corporate settings is pretty confusing given the standard meaning (see next para) of that word. So if my corporate bosses and HR are going to use that word, it is on them to educate and address the confusion of the audience.
Dictionary definitions of equity: "the quality of being fair and impartial", "the value of the shares issued by a company". Assuming it's the former, what does my HR even mean when they say we should be "fair and impartial"? On the one hand, that's a given, like saying "we should obey all the laws". On the other hand, if we are not being fair and impartial, then HR should lay out specific ways in which we are not and also the specific remedies.
It doesn’t make you like some sort of prodigal genius to cite some Marxist garbage and pretend like yeah if we only did it right this 270th time it’d be perfect. Like you think you can do it better than stalin, huh? And even if you could, what makes you think someone wouldn’t take you out.
You can never have equity because people will never work equal equally as hard. That is a fundamental fact of humanity.
I've been in the corporate DEI training courses. I've read the CRT papers and books that are the influences of the DEI types. They all define equity as EQUAL OUTCOMES not equal opportunity. And they all say that the ONLY reason why we don't get equal outcomes now is because of structural -isms.
There is NO concept of individual merit in the source materials that lead to DEI ideas because DEI/CRT are offshoots of 'critical theories' which are related to our favorite communism/Marxist ideologies. This is not hyperbole.
(Mark Cuban is absolutely wrong the way he describes DEI vs what the proponents are really demanding in case that's where you got your idea about DEI from.)
But at the same time, it's true that most companies use DEI for marketing and conveniently ignore the equity part because it would lay bare their hypocrisy when their CEO gets paid $50 million a year.
You can recognize this without accepting that an infrastructure of explicit racial discrimination is a good idea. Many, many people seem to miss this point.
You don't require that they all actually gain power, wealth and prestige (since that measures something else, which could be equally important or not, depending on your perspective).
If the only way to become a SCOTUS justice is to get into one of 2 or 3 law schools, and only people with a narrowly defined profile ever get into such schools, you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity. You can establish this even though in reality almost nobody ever becomes a SCOTUS justice.
If they're measuring the diversity and inclusion of the pipeline, they'll still end up failing. Warsaw (one of the most diverse Polish cities) doesn't have a significant black population. They might get a handful of Chinese or Vietnamese applicants. The bulk of the "foreign" population are Ukrainian (by a wide margin) followed by European.
The trouble with any metric used to prove DEI credentials is that the org starts changing behaviour to boost that metric.
Perhaps the metric should be aligned with availability. No idea how that would work in practice though.
The second thing to do would be to ask why only white makes are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that. That might involve some changes at the company, but more likely would require changes in the broader society.
The third thing to do would be to note that essentially no serious advocate of DEI goes beyond the idea that an ideal scenario is on average having work place representation roughly match the distribution in some broader social unit. If you have 0% black people in that broader social unit, nobody but people trying to ridicule DEI would suggest that you need to work towards more black people.
The criteria for what characteristics are considered by DEI efforts in a given context will vary. Gender, religion, "race", language, age ... these are others are all valid things that you might want to try to even up in workplaces to match the broader social context.
But this is exactly what I mean. You can try to make the job and the company sound appealing to females and minorities. But let's say 99.9% of the population around you is white and you just don't happen to get any female candidates applying because the number of females with those skills that are currently looking for work in your area happens to be zero. You could do a bunch of footwork and ask lots of "why". But if your small-to-medium sized company chiefly want to execute on a specific business goal, their focus will be on shipping product, beating the competition, keeping customers and employees happy. Who has pockets deep enough to fix some broader societal problem? How much of the budget should they spend on that? Is it even their obligation? What do the investors think?
This type of wider social problem should be tackled and funded by government: any department with a role in employment, equality etc. Responsibility for social issues cannot be left to private, profit-driven companies.
> ... the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".
Equal outcomes for everybody.
This is how you get 100lb women in the fire department who can't even control a fire hose at full pressure.
\1 Is this a real problem in actual fire deployments or simply a made up bit of Fox News DEI outrage?
\2 Here in the Western Australian rural bush fire service 100lb women and people in wheelchairs are valuable members that operate GIS terminals, coordinate aircraft, work as administrators and bookkeepers, etc.
It is verifiable fact that the LAFD has lowered the strength requirements considerable in order to allow for smaller people. And with the current fires, there is a plenty of footage of small people not being able to do the heavy physical stuff.
And certainly women (and small men) can do many other useful things, but they people that operate GIS terminals would not be "firefighters" in the categorical sense even if they are valuable parts of the fire fighting team.
Eight test events in 10 minutes 20 seconds. All events must be passed. No breaks. Candidates wear 50 pounds of weight through the whole test. Plus an additional 25 pounds for the stair climb. The events are all firefighting-related.
Here's a woman firefighter passing this test.[2] With two minutes to spare.
LA City Fire is about 3% female.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh3EoE1yJnQ
And 10 minutes, how about they test them for 8 hours of that kind of work?
Who is going to last a whole shift or 36 straight hours of fighting Palisades fires?
I'm a firefighter in NM. Your comments about firefighters are pathetic and ignorant.
It is widely understood and accepted that males and females differ in their physiology in ways that have dramatic impacts on their capabilities. However, the two groups form overlapping bell curves, and if you're seeking someone for a task you'd be a lot better off focusing on the attributes of the individual, which may be at either end of their group bell curve or anywhere in between.
Put differently, my wife, when she was a serious triathlete, would never have been able to beat the best males at any distance. But she could beat most of the males in a half ironman. So if you were interviewing her and some male to do something like a half ironman, you'd better make sure you ask a lot more than "what sex are they?". You'd better find out if the male is in the top X%, because if not, you should be hiring her instead.
All of that is true despite the group differences being real and significant.
Hiring is never about groups ... unless you're a racist/sexist/*ist ...
Somehow that doesn't go for trying to determine how (dis)advantaged someone is though?
Frankly this just reads like a cover story for "I don't want to have to care about this".
Equality of outcome is absolutely not a measure that ensures nondiscrimination. An extreme example, but imagine if we instituted a policy mandating equal outcomes in murder convictions with respect to gender. Would that make the justice system fairer?
In other words, equity and equal outcomes are not a goal, they're a heuristic. Same as how logical fallacies, while wrong, are still valuable heuristics.
My read on the past decade is that most DEI programs were adopted in blue[0] spaces primarily to redirect Progressive voices away from questions of economic justice and elite control. That is, businesses virtue-signal the most tolerable Progressive politics in order to distract rank-and-file Democratic voters away from questions like "isn't it fucked up that Mexico is basically a perma-scab to bust unions with" or "why are we just letting Facebook buy up all the social media".
To be clear, you're right that these companies want to engineer society from the top down. But it's not about handing out high-paying jobs to the unqualified for the lulz, it's about making Facebook into the new Boeing - a company that is so integral to the operation of the state that shipping software that murders people is considered an excusable mistake. If that means Facebook has to change political alliances every so often, then so be it.
[0] As in, "aligned with the Democratic Party leadership", not "left-wing"
Only if you assume that group-level differences can’t exist.
Or are you thinking they caused by genetics?
There's no evidence that this is true. Even if you take the extreme position (against which there is plenty of data) that different ethnic groups are more or less identically "genetically" capable at a group level, both in terms of the average member as well as the outliers, the fact that different groups have different cultural values and practices mean that those differences play out in considerable differences in results. And those differences get even more exaggerated at the outlying levels.
For example, the US population is roughly 14% black and 6% Asian, but among NFL players, it's 58% black and a 0.1% Asian. Even if you assume no group-level differences in inborn ability and potential, the fact that football is a much bigger part of black American culture than it is Asian American culture would mean that after generations of such cultural differences, you will end up with such a skewed distribution.
In real life, of course, there are group-level differences at the genetic level, which compound into culture and over time result in wildly different outcomes for members of those groups. Over nine-tenths of the world's top sprinters are of West African descent; same for the marathon and people of East African descent. You might easily imagine that a group of people composed of those who naturally run fast will develop cultural customs that involve running, which further develops the talent pool in that group.
Apply that over generations, and it results in such a big difference between groups that a naive observer concludes that external causes (i.e. racism) is the most reasonable explanation, coming from the faulty assumption that group-level differences do not exist outside of such external causes.
In fact, I would go a step further a claim that it's virtually impossible to take a subgroup of a broader population that precisely reflects the composition of the latter, along any lines.
-Jean-Luc Picard
Additionally, the Declaration of Independence states our fundamental philosophy as a nation that all men are created equal. We all start from the same line, but where life takes us and what we make of it is completely up to life and us the individual.
The story of universal suffrage isn't that clear cut.
To this day, we generally don't allow people to vote in an election if they aren't a citizen yet I reckon we don't consider non-citizens lesser human beings. The idea of allowing only those with property to vote (because they have stake in the country) or to only allow men (they will be fighting the wars) are outdated, but they aren't nonsensical.
It wasn't really that long ago that all/most societies believed that slavery was normal.
Just the IDEA that "all men are created equal" is intensely liberal. And that it was put into a document without qualifiers is miraculous. We can't judge the past only from a modern lens. YOU didn't do anything to help the world move towards liberal values. YOU are just the benefactor of thousands of years of conflict/learning/etc.
I argue that it hasn't; we say "man" both by itself and as part of another word (eg: manpower) in many contexts where gender is literally irrelevant.
What has changed is the likelihood of certain individuals engaging in sexism in the name of equality.
Man as in mankind. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
>1a(1): an individual human
>b: the human race : HUMANKIND
>c: a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate (see ARTICULATE entry 1 sense 1a) speech and abstract reasoning, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family
He was not the harmony flowers and rainbows he was white washed into.
Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
It's also become less and less common over time, as the focus on next quarter shareholder returns and hoarding of wealth even when past the point of ever being able to spend it all has increased every single year for decades. And this focus overrules everything else.
Syria had plenty of peaceful protests against Assad. Russia against Putin. China aginst the CCP. The participants generally aren't doing very well. Hong Kong had enormous, mass protests. Georgia (the country) has had big ones recently.
Occupy Wall Street was big and peaceful. What did that accomplish again? Everything they protested against has only intensified.
For something interesting consider the topical Roe v. Wade decision, both in its establishment and removal. That involved some significant questions of rights and was settled without violence. Protesting, on either side of the issue, was largely ineffective compared to small groups of organised people working to align the legal system over long periods of time.
He convinced one of his enemies, the USA, too eliminate one of his other enemies, Iraq's Sadam Hussein. (Or the US was incompetent enough to do that all by itself, hard for me to be sure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...
And the Taliban is back in charge of Afghanistan.
> Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
No, it didn't. On the other hand, it triggered such a response from Israel as to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many, and attempts at prosecution for genocide — something I have been told motivated some of the Israeli protesters against Netinyahu.
I mean this is not ancient history and lot of it at this point is public record.
How had it been going up until that point? Very poorly too. The idea that peaceful protests by Palestinians would've changed that would be so awfully naive that I've never even encountered that argument.
It's too easy to forget that even our beloved weekends were only achieved after bloodshed.
The people in power successfully managed to sell us the belief that we can achieve change by sitting on our asses and yelling really loud. If we spend 5 minutes thinking about the current power structures, it's clear that no amount of peaceful protesting will ever achieve any meaningful change.
The only real power we have is to withhold our labor on strikes, and somehow even those need permission (!) to run.
It passed through moral persuasion and nonviolent activism.
Your statement is factually incorrect. There are dozens of other examples.
My guess is that if race was determined at birth by chance (instead of genetics) we would have the same racial distribution on a societal level but race issues would move faster.
This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
That's a 50% increase.
Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...?
I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick.
I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started.
Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
That sounds proportional?
I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
Who is the "they" here. Whenever I see a pronoun (especially "they" it's always "they") with no referent, I ask this question.
None. I'm a third party HN commentator that dropped in to address the incorrect assertion that the sentence in question contained a "they" with no referent.
I have six decades of reading, writing, and speaking Commonwealth English and four or so with American English and felt the user who asked could use the grammar assist.
You must consider a man's race if this concerns something relevant to that consideration such as their medical history. This is not one of them; there are actually very few instances where asking a man's race is necessary.
A lot of factors go into proper hiring and terminations, most significantly the merits of the individual concerned. Such factors will lead to an employee racial composition that might not mirror that of social composition.
Certain hiring practices like favoring women for flight attendants and black men for basketball teams should be terminated with extreme prejudice, but to force employee racial composition and specifically that one way or any other is racism.
I put an example of another way in my last post. If you're creative, you can think of more.
Another one is seeking out people and inviting them to apply, at which point they enter the normal unbiased hiring process.
That's ludicrous. If I hire only from Harvard, but then I start hiring from state schools as well, the employee racial composition is highly likely to change.
The axiom presented is that the employee composition must mirror the surrounding social composition, ergo you are hiring for racial reasons because you must set quotas and then hire based upon satisfying (and not exceeding) those quotas.
As an example, if the social composition is composed of 40% Earthlings, 30% Martians, 20% Venusians, and 10% Mercurians and your workforce consists of 10 men: You cannot ever hire more than 4 Earthlings or 3 Martians or 2 Venusians or 1 Mercurian and must refuse or terminate any excess. If you cannot hire even 1 Mercurian at all you arguably can't hire anyone.
That's racist.
But the idea of quotas is something you pulled out of nowhere. It was not part of the conversation until you showed up.
It's a strawman.
Also the post up above was talking about statistics with error bars a thousand people wide. The idea of having a demographic match with 10 employees is... also a strawman.
In any case, none of that takes away from the crux of this conversation that programmes like mirroring surrounding demographics and others are discriminatory and have no place in free and civilized societies today.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
>1a(1): an individual human
>b: the human race : HUMANKIND
>c: a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate (see ARTICULATE entry 1 sense 1a) speech and abstract reasoning, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family
And "a man" doesn't refer to mankind/humankind.
and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently.
So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society.
But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ?
For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
If we talked less about skin color, and a bit more about the actual nature of people (I can accept positive discrimination towards former slave families, they deserve compensation), maybe we'd accept those DEI policies more ?
It's a complex debate everywhere anyway, we have the same in France with our own colonial crosses to bear, and like what to do with a Tunisian freshly arrived vs a descendent of a Tunisian family who's been French for 3 generations.
Brown person can be a descendant of the “Coolies” taken as Indentured servants to Fiji, Trinidad, Suriname, Malaysia, SA etc.
They could be people from French colonies like Algeria as well.
Brown doesn’t only mean an Indian from Calcutta, although they were heavily persecuted until recently (Check Bengal Famine)
If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though.
I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
I personally think that it is not helpful to subscribe to 'sins of the father belong to the son' view of the world. Apart from everything else, it rewards near-constant cries of perceived injustices that drown any point you may have had about descendants of slaves.
I feel we misbehaved in Africa, us French, for instance, and owe something, smaller and smaller every decade that passes sure, to these people we exploited.
A french guy raised in struggle will have as interesting a perspective as a brown guy raised the same way. They are both interesting and diverse hires regardless of their color.
See my point ? Diversity should be circumstance based and Im afraid sometimes, it's just sun-strength-on-the-skin-based. Maybe Im wrong there too ?
Most diversity programs actively harm Indians as over represented, as they fall under the broad “Asian” category (see Harvard).
But I guess Indians are easy pickings these days.
"A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that one-third of US Latinos identify as "mestizo", "mulatto", or another multiracial identity.[21] Such identities often conflict with standard racial classifications in the United States: among Latino American adults surveyed by Pew Research who identified as multiracial, about 40% reported their race as "white" on standard race question as used on the US Census; 13% reported belonging to more than one race or "mixed race"; while about 20% chose "Latino" as their race." - Wikipedia
The only thing I advocate for is on economic basis. Nothing else should matter.
If one is "poor" (for a socially acceptable definition of poor), we as a society must help them.
Skin color, historical persecution, country of origin,gender, sexual orientation or any of the thousand things that can be "different" , shouldn't matter.
I just find the american casual racism, both sides of the political spectrum, very ... american :D
In France we sort of pretend to ignore there s skin color. I d never describe someone as black, or no more than I d describe someone as blonde and I would almost never use a French word to describe it. It makes me nervous to reduce someone to this random attribute, when maybe his family came from Mali, or Martinique or the US and that's so much more interesting than the effect of the sun on his skin.
I am not an American, and I'm brown. I don't take issue if someone says I'm brown because I am brown! Maybe I cannot empathize with other races who've been extremely discriminated because of their skin color, but as you said, it is an attribute describing me, among hundred others. I also agree, color of skin by itself is not interesting at all, just like being blonde is not interesting at all - but may play into personal preferences, again, just like any of the hundreds of physical, personality attributes.
And yes, of course many African-Americans have certain cultural traits, some heritage etc. that sets them apart, but I would describe that as "African-American" and not "black" because I don't think that a Nigerian or a Sri Lankan would share those traits.
When Donald Trump insisted that Kamala Harris wasn't really black that just made no sense to me.
What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
If there’s continuing trauma, it isn’t caused by what happened 100 years ago, it’s because it is still being perpetuated somehow.
That might be what you are trying to say, but I had to read it a few times to see it.
Europe has not forgotten about that, other than in terms of formal politics.
Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
It does help somewhat that Germany has made really serious efforts to repudiate its own behavior, the culture that enabled it, and efforts to revive it. Much harder to say that about the equivalents for US slavery.
I feel that's overstating it a bit. But my mother (English) was definitely brought up in a context that had not forgotten about Napoleon - Napoleon was viewed/presented as comparable to Hitler.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-h...
I'd really like to see some differentiation between:
* a disproportionate number of people of Norman descent remain some of the wealthiest landowners in England
* a disproportion number of the wealthiest landowners in England are of Norman descent
Are there injustices being perpetrated by the institutions today? Lets call them out.
Injustices perpetrated generations ago belong in history books. We cant forget about them but Im not going to be held responsible for them.
Take redlining for instance. That happened a long time ago. Redlining systematically and intentionally deprived non-white families of home ownership, while helping white families to own homes. But wealth begets wealth, so owning a home lets someone borrow money against it to start a business. When these people die, their children will inherit their wealth. As a result, the (grand)children of a family are still denied opportunities that they would've gotten, if not for redlining.
The creator of VeggieTales has a great video on this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUwcs9qJXY
P.S. Yes, a family who was able to get a home loan (redlining didn't affect them) might have squandered this wealth gambling, or maybe they didn't pass it onto their children, so some people unaffected by redlining may still end up in a similar place. Similarly, some families that were affected by redlining have still managed to accumulate wealth in spite of redlining. My claim is that the family that squandered their money still got the chance to squander was was given to them, and the injustice is that the redlined family was denied that opportunity.
Right, but the median debate isn't about whether there was in fact past injustice done via discrimination on racial lines. The median person agrees. The debate is whether present discrimination on racial lines is required to "correct" that past injustice, and whether that would be a form of present justice. There's very little agreement on that.
Yes! welcome to black lives matter. But, that seems to have been labeled a terrorist group for some reason.
Only ever said by someone that’s part of the establishment.
Real change that will jot be classified that way has to happen by engaging with the process for change- though I definitely recognise that its a lot slower and more difficult.
So too is it more difficult to save up money instead of robbing a bank, but it doesn't mean you’re morally justified to rob a bank to give to charity vs working and giving a percentage of a paycheck.
Please use a different example
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/10/10/blm-chicago-under-fire-for-pro...
They celebrated an attack on Israel that resulted in deaths and kidnapping of hundreds of innocent music festival goers and kibbutznicks the day after that vicious attack.
The fact that you don’t care what I ( or people like me - whatever that means) think is irrelevant to the discussion
Every government wants to "forget". France maintained a viewpoint that Vichy was a "few bad apples" until the evidence of deporting Jews until their death was undeniable.
That's politics. Many Europeans are certainly still hurting from the trauma the wars caused. That includes later born generations.
Culturally, the two world wars have had a great impact, but that's another story.
My main point is that individually experienced trauma does transmit over generations, while great national narrative can change relatively quickly.
Germany paid massive amounts of reparations for the sins of the Nazis, and on top of that, Nazi leadership was executed.
It's simply ignorant to think a citation to post-war Germany is a winning argument for you.
Germany probably shouldn’t forget the genocide of millions of people from a variety of groups, just as the united states should not forget the systematic enslavement and repression of millions of people, who are also americans and their descendants are alive and numerous today. It doesn’t really make sense to me why people should forget that, and it cannot be forgotten by the people still living with the consequences of it today - but I’m not really willing to be baited into this type of discussion on a platform like this, so I’ll just say your fundamental premises in your post sound flawed if not extremely troubling in what you seem to be implying. It sounds completely unreasonable to say for instance, indigenous groups should forget they were pretty much wiped out by largely white colonizers. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just a matter of fact.
And if were to say "...but those colonizers are no longer alive, and neither are their children.", is that not also a fact?
Or is my wording a political statement but yours is not?
I don't know that we can be so uneven in our evaluation.
Doesn’t mean we should forget them. But getting angry at someone now because of something that his great grandfather did to your great grandfather is a great way for these grudges to never die.
No one is holding people responsible for actions they didn't take. YOu're just mis-perceiving assistance given to historically oppressed people as a personal slight against yourself.
Helping a black person is not punishing a white person, and you're showing your own ass when you suggest it is.
The thing about oppression is that it causes both long-lasting and recurring trauma. The people targeted will be hurt for a long time, and they will be the target of follow-up attacks because other bullies know they can get away with it.
In the specific case of Nazi Germany, exterminating the Jews was not an original idea of Hitler. Hitler's only original idea was taking shittons of methamphetamine. Martin Luther had done the legwork of radicalizing Germany into hating Jews; once Germany had become a functionally unified nation-state the Holocaust was a forgone conclusion. This is the core belief of Zionism[0]: that the only way to stop Jews from becoming victims is for those Jews to form their own nation-state that can commit its own atrocities.
BTW, this is the same logic the Japanese had in their head when they started invading and destroying the rest of East Asia, around the same time as Hitler. They wanted to be respected in the way that the Christian Bible would describe as "having the fear of God". The fact that this led to the horrific rape of China and Korea[1] would suggest that these victim narratives are morally self-defeating without some framework of reciprocal[2] tolerance and human rights to distinguish between justified self-defense and unjustified oppression.
But America at least sort of has that, so we can make that distinction. In fact, that's part of what makes American race relations so weirdly straightforward. In the "old world" you have complicated webs of peoples angry at each other for shit that happened anywhere from ten to ten thousand years ago. But in America, there's just one very deep wound that never seems to heal.
When does America "forget" slavery? Well, ideally, we don't 'forget', but we do 'forgive'. Practically, however, we can't. Every time a cop thinks it'd be a good idea to treat a criminal suspect like a demon in DOOM Eternal, and it hits social media, we get a huge reminder of "oh, there's still people in this country who think it's OK to do this to black people".
[0] I'm a Mormon[3], so I'm morally obligated to point out that we fell into this rhetorical trap, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre
[1] And yes, they still complain about it, too. It doesn't help that Japan's ruling LDP was run by a war crimes denialist for a decade and change.
[2] As in, "tolerate all except the intolerant." See also: the GNU General Public License.
[3] I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mormonism, is in fact, LDS/Mormonism, or as I've recently taken to calling it, LDS plus Mormonism. Mormonism is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning LDS system made useful by the LDS Doctrine & Covenants, the Old & New Testaments, and the Pearl of Great Price comprising a full testament as defined by Jesus.
2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA
50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
It's not like people in prison are actually all guilty of their convicted crime.
You'll see this double-standard a lot for minor offenses as well. How many times has MKHB been caught excessively speeding (including 90? in a school zone) and still have a license.
And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do.
Especially historically under represented groups.
It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well.
But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time.
Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc.
If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever.
Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path.
But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it.
So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons.
One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try.
East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs.
If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
This is not meant to be inflammatory. I’ve had many conversations with black men about this, they actually put the idea in my head.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-...
Anything else I missed? Probably a lot, huh.
Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces.
The same also applies to people of colour.
If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.
The Republicans in charge of two school districts near me have been trying to organize book burnings for the last two years.
Get back to me when it's the Democrats.
I keep hearing about Republican book bans, but I've only heard they don't want certain books to be available to children in schools, not that they should be banned in general. Compare this with liberals who got some Dr. Seuss and other books cancelled and removed from Amazon etc.
It's seems like both sides attempt to decrease accessibility to literature that they find objectional, but neither has achieved an actual ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
I guess if you think this is fine then that's what you think.
It's not about "what I think is fine." It's about equal rights to speech.
Donald Trump was re-elected. He has said that we should deport pro-palestinian protestors on college campuses and has sued multiple news outlets, both on tv and in paper, for their coverage during the election season. It's really hard to find any political figure who is more aggressively targeting speech he doesn't like than Trump.
But at the same time, both the progressives and the conservatives who are active on political social media (take your pick of platform) are very likely to actively attempt to silence the opposition and punish them for speaking.
It's less a political divide and more that most people are still tolerant of dissenting speech, so the people you know in person will tend to be tolerant. There's a loud minority that's vocal on the internet on both sides that advocates for silencing others.
Which side is often going to court (and losing) to dispute facts (like election integrity or sexual assault allegations)?
We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats.
2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.
I'm trying to put in flat terms, but fundamentally power matters. This is the base of democracy: give people the power to change things, there needs to be a fear that these people will exercise their power.
Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.
And also people are way more influenced by their everyday environments than nice speeches. Having a nation that values diversity helps more to also embrace these ideals, than living in a racist dictatorship and fighting at every corner to keep your minority voices in your heart.
> It's a slow, painful process
The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger. Women lost abortion rights over a few weeks (the leading to that was also long and slow, but when it finally happens it doesn't take much). Foreign people lost the right to return to their US home within days when the ban happened last time.
Power matters.
Yes. Probably multiple lifetimes. This is why I say that real change takes generations.
You cannot have a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs. You can either strip the people who hold reprehensible beliefs of the vote, or you can work diligently over generations to change the culture. But as long as you have a democracy, you will never be able to create change that sticks by simply wielding the power temporarily granted to you.
Wield that power too forcefully, and you'll get pushback, and unsavory politicians will ride that pushback to power. When that happens, as you observe, a lot of what was previously accomplished is undone.
I believe that democracy is the greatest good progressivism has ever accomplished. I'm not willing to sacrifice democracy in order to speed up the rate of change, even if it means that people suffer in the short term. And because I believe in democracy, I cannot support the heavy-handed use of power to try to force people to change. Not for their sakes, but because it simply doesn't work. As long as those people have the vote, they will resent you for your use of power and be able to strip it from you. That's the lesson of 2024.
That's not to say we can't do anything while in power, but it must be done with an eye towards the next century, not just the next election cycle.
> The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger.
The trap is accidentally triggering a reactionary movement by moving too hard too fast. Reactionaries aren't called that by accident—they react. It is within the power of progressives to avoid triggering them by staying within (whilst steadily changing) the national Overton window.
Voter suppression has repeatedly happened and has been mostly scuff free [0]. Working diligently through generation also means building the means to protect the advancement you achieve, and not just by having them in the rules, but to be able to enforce these rules.
My mental image of this is Tulsa: when you steadily but firmly create a vibrant place for your community for decades, to have it burn in flames within a day, with no significant reparation, no significant support, and just a footnote in some textbooks.
When I say "power" I don't mean in some limited framing, I mean anything that can actually leverage your position in a realistic way. Capital, cultural influence, military or political power come to mind, but whatever form it takes, I think a group needs to be able to stand its ground if it chalenges the status quo, whatever time frame it chooses to do it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
All people have some degree of racist tendencies - regardless of gender, sex, color, etc. And criminal tendencies. And other tendencies.
And what actual consequences will be applied that impact one group or another tend to go in cycles/pendulum back and forth (and hence impact what percent of the population is going to do x, and how many will see real consequences for those actions).
That is because when one group overdoes it (or is perceived to), enough people get tired of that group/outraged, and then things shift. And these patterns tend to be on coarse criteria like gender/sex/color/race/language, etc. because the most brazen users of any sort of shitty force/violence/shaming/whatever are exactly the type of people who are the shittiest. And every group of people have a percent that is shitty.
For instance, for many years now shame has been a major consequence, along with legal action.
So eventually, we end up with a group/leader essentially immune to shame and legal action, who is now going to use do all sorts of shameless and illegal things. Really, a large group of people like that. And who don’t mind violence (or the threat of it) as a potential consequence.
Eventually, being a shameless crook will fall out of fashion (or will have finally hurt/pissed off enough people), and another counter group will rise to take it’s place.
Often, when it gets particularly ugly/strong in one direction or another, there is also a corresponding backlash against the particularly strong users of the prior ‘fashion’ of power.
Sometimes beheadings, or ostracizing, or legal harassment, or whatever.
Weinstein getting what he got (as deserved as it was), was one swing. We’ll see who gets this next counter reaction.
Why do you think the dems and tech companies are going out of their way to be as friendly to the incoming admin as they are? They know the score, and are trying to avoid getting whacked.
Or, to quote an old western - ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it’.
This swinging pendulum is really the tough part, and the nazi trend coming back in force after a black president was there for 8 years is the most symbolic image of it.
In the current situation though, the money doesn't seem to be swinging around, so I wonder how far it could even swing back. That's part of what I mean by "power", the current changes we're witnessing are huge shifts of money in one specific camp, and I don't imagine heads rolling either, so outside of a completely unforseen even wildly resetting the scene, it looks kinda toast to me.
The largest tech companies in the world (which directly or indirectly control all modern media, and are > $4trln in market cap), just publicly ‘bent the knee’ to someone they quite publicly fought for almost a decade now - and which of all market segments, they were the most consistently against.
In many cases for personal identity reasons (Tim Cook being gay, for instance), but also because these companies are based in areas which are typically Liberal - west coast urban areas.
Most other market segment companies were never strongly Liberal in the same way.
And if you think Tech DEI programs may have been performative, I can assure you that initiatives in Construction, Heavy Industry, Finance, Transportation, etc. had far less actual backing. They just rarely got the press, because Tech == $$$ and visibility, and also Tech == historically incredibly naive when it comes to politics and power.
In my experience, at least FAANG Tech DEI programs actually weren’t performative - they really did work very, very hard to meet their goals, which actively made huge problems later in the cycle because there just weren’t enough candidates.
Major US tech companies all edged their bets and tend to push some amount of money in both camps at all times. I don't remember top companies fighting Trump when he was president, the only ones showing the middle finger where the small enough to do that.
Newspaper generally have a different slant, but that's not where the money is for a long time now.
> In many cases for personal identity reasons (Tim Cook being gay, for instance)
He was the very interface to Trump to let Apple keep sane relations with China. He's the very representation of the guy who left his personal ideals at home to prioritize the company's future. And that's of course his role as a CEO.
This was all before the most recent election, before Musk bought Twitter, etc. also stuff like [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/don...], [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/27/trump-google...], etc. etc.
Personally, I never heard so much wailing and gnashing of teeth when Trump won the first time (knowing a number of Google leadership folks).
There is going to be a lot of noise.
I'm in agreement on all of your points regarding Facebook and other platforms fighting hard to maintain their policies, and feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place with all the bullshit flying around while half of the population was looking very severly at their fact checking and moderation stance.
At the same time, these platforms were also essential in Trump's ascension [0] and the amount of discourse happening because of the controversies was also fundamentally beneficial to them. They ended up suspending Trump's account, but countless of other accounts were left to fill that gap in a more policy friendly way. Trump supporters were never faced with a situation where they've nowhere to go (one of the reason IMHO why Truth social and others never really took off).
In 2018 we saw the Cambride Analitica scandal, and while the FTC fined Facebook and there was all the "we're reviewing all our policies" theater, at its core facebook didn't have to do anything radical and we didn't see Trump's government actually doing anything to Facebook, when it could effectively have done whatever it wanted. And it sure didn't hurt that CA was laundering facebook data to political parties, so while a strong stance needed to be shown, I don't think any of the leaders on either side saw facebook as a problematic entity.
Twitter was I think another story, but at this point it's also dead.
Perhaps what I'm saying is there was a public stance of fighting back, but on the business side media platforms still embraced the incoming money and attention, while also being in enough good terms with the government to not get shut down the way TikTok for instance has been hit during last administration.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-no...
ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?
Things improve on their own over time too.
15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300026
In tech it might be a different story, but all I've seen where the stats decrease until 2020, and haven't seen much data covering the recent years. Was there any significant increase above what the other fields have seen ?
I've worked in Wall Street tech for 20 years, and while the demographics of my coworkers have changed, it largely had nothing to do with DEI or other recruitment efforts.
In the late 90s/early 00s it was FSU Russians&Ukrainians living in South Brooklyn & US born and/or raised Cantonese speaking Chinese from downtown. By late 00s, percent of Indians started to tick upwards. In 2010s, mainland Chinese students on visas ticked way up, and in 2020s one of the fastest growing groups was actually female mainland Chinese students. Campus recruiting may pat themselves on the back about finally growing the % of women, but this was largely downstream of enrollment & degree choices made by these women many years before.
In many ways it's gotten a lot better as all these different groups largely work wherever in the organization. 15-20 years ago there was a big problem with the Indian UI guy loading his team with Indians, the Chinese data guy loading his team with Chinese, and the Russian backend lead hiring all Russians. You could guess what team people were on by their face, and they'd often slip into their native languages at work. Not the best for collaboration.
Also agree that real change of hearts & minds is slow going over generations, and can't be legislated. That said we have made and continue to make a lot of progress. Anyone who has been alive more than 20 years should be able to recognize US culture in 2020s is so different than even 2008, 1999, 1990, or the 1980s..
I think some people mix 1) cultural change (acceptable words people use / ok jokes people make) with 2) legal changes (gay marriage rights / expanded legal protections from discrimination) and finally 3) outcome changes (higher % of group going to college / lower % of group being poor / etc). 1 moves faster than 2 which moves faster than 3. I think that's because each is downstream of the preceding change. You can't directly change outcomes in a short time span.
There are countless instances throughout history of lasting change being sparked by a single moment. Sure, that moment is frequently the culmination of some period of struggle, but you have to remember that the issues that came to a head and sparked those DEI initiatives a few years ago were exactly that—the product of literally centuries of struggle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a recent phase of that struggle.
So, I believe your emphasis is on the wrong side of the equation here. That is, it's not that there is an inherent deficiency in a trending moment or ascendant party giving rise to change. It's the explicit pushback against DEI that is responsible for its unwinding. And, this effort was not successful because the party that sponsored the pushback was ascendant. Instead, part of the party's ascension was due to it making an issue of the pushback. More specifically, the blowback was part of a divisive theme, along with illegal immigration and other issues.
Progress is not a one-way street and gains are not de facto insulated against erosion. Progress (and its security) is a product of the mores and culture of a time, and these can be influenced and manipulated. So, there is really not such a thing as "lasting change", and that's what we saw here. In some ways, the blowback has taken us not just back to our pre-DEI state, but to a pre-1960s mental footing.
You're right that there are tipping points, but they don't come at will, they come when the culture is ready for them. Push too soon, and as you note, you may actually undo progress that had already been truly won.
Culture behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: manipulate it gently and it flows smoothly. Apply too much stress too fast, and it turns into a solid and resists you. Trump did not invent that resistance, he simply untapped it and rode it to power. The progressive movement created the resistance by applying too much pressure to a culture that wasn't ready.
And, your claim argues against itself. The problem is that minds can be changed in either direction, and the people who "didn't believe in any of it" had been precondtioned to reach that position of non-support before DEI was even a thing.
Likewise, Trump was able to manipulate people based on age-old tactics or, as you put it, he "untapped" existing resistance. So how, exactly, do progressives convince these same people?
You're suggesting they do so by not moving too fast? That they wait for the "culture to be ready for change"?
If we waited for the culture to be ready, then schools in the South would still be segregated. Instead, they were integrated under the protection of men holding rifles.
Of course the status quo doesn't change without pressure. That's why it's the status quo. There is no amount of progressive pace calibration that would have addressed this. If there was, then 400 years should have been enough time.
Again, the problem is not with progressive pacing. The problem is on the other side.
Why not 4000 years or 40000 years?
Or never? There are simply no preordained guarantees.
Of course it was, and so is this latest effort from Meta. I'm sure if there was some anti-Brazilian group in power in Washington or something, you'd see Meta shutting down their offices in Rio.
AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
I've witnessed the DEI transformation from the inside - which amounted to a chief diversity officer being hired, a lot of incredibly sanctimonious online trainings got scheduled for us, and rainbow flags started popping up in the weirdest places.
A few coworkers I had, who checked a lot of the boxes got dragged into interviews and company events (which some found somewhat uncomfortable). Very little changed in practice, and if you didn't care to read the company newsletter (who does that anyway), then you didn't experience much of it.
What in the world are you talking about?
Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
This data came from workforce demographic reports submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by 88 S&P 100 companies
Hispanic individuals accounted for 40% of new hires, followed by Black (23%) and Asian (22%) workers
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash:
75.3% White alone
13.7% Black alone
1.3% American Indian and Alaska Native alone
6.4% Asian alone
0.3% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone
3.1% Two or More Races
19.5% Hispanic or Latino
58.4% White alone, not Hispanic or Latino
I don't think that's an entirely accurate narrative, but I do think it's probably at least part of this (e.g., that all of the best white people were already hired, while many POC people of equal caliber were not or not making as much). The job market was soaring in 2021 and looking for ways to hire new people without having to pay them more would likely be highly attractive. Now that the job market is not so competitive, there's not as much need to do so if you're just trying to find workers.
In my experience, DEI programs do the opposite. I've seen manager leave headcount unfulfilled because the qualified candidates they found were non diverse and hiring them would put them below their diversity target. If 20% of the workforce is women and your bonus is contingent on reaching 30%, you could recruit at Grace Hopper and try to hire more women. But if that doesn't get you to your quota, you need to hire fewer men to push up the proportion of women.
The incredulousness is valid, but the way you’ve posed this question is so inherently biased it reads as tone deaf, as if the parent couldn’t possibly have witnessed this.
Reality is a lot stranger than you might expect, if you can believe people can hold out for a junior engineer with 5+ years experience and a $50k salary: you can believe this.
Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
Why is that? Virtue signaling? Discrimination on males?
Think about it like this, if you'd use the same argument you gave me if the roles were reversed with men being 3-4x overrepresented in a well paying white collar career, everyone would cry sexism and discrimination and action being taken to "fix" that. So why isn't it when the genders are reversed?
Men occupy a position of institutional and societal power that makes such a comparison unhelpful, at best.
That doesn't justify discrimination. You're using the same argument Nazis used to genocide Jews: "they're overrepresented in positions of wealth and power so it's ok to discriminate and kill them all because it's obviously their fault for your problems".
You average man has no benefits in common with the top 1% of wealthy and powerful men who write the rules. The top 1% of Americans have more in common with the top 1% of Russians or Chinese then they do with your average Walmart American male.
Why punish men todays for the original sin? This only leads to extremism as backlash.
If there wasn't a demand for specifically female engineers they would cost the same as male engineers regardless of the supply because an engineer should be fungible with gender. Unless you think that women have some innate characteristic that makes them better than men?
To fix this sort of problem a wholistic approach is required. Whatever the approach it should apply to all equally so that the market is fair. Offhand, my historic recollection is that STEM generally is traditionally less appealing to those of the female sex (by Science/Biology definition of the phrase), and that there might (rightly?) be a perception of poor work / life balance and career tracks that don't pair well with fulfilling time limited biological imperatives. My personal opinion is that enforced labor regulation that provides sufficient parental leave, work / life balance generally, and generally promotes healthier recognition of employees as humans would be better for society overall.
I also recognize that we're probably not going to get that until the US gets rid of the 'first past the post' madness and adopts a voting system with literally _any_ form of IRV. There just won't be bandwidth for such an issue otherwise. Of said systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is my favorite, but I'd start with ANY IRV, they're (offhand) all less flawed than what we've got.
Bias of applicants is solved by making the job worth for all to do, not just from the positives but by removing the negatives.
I’m so old fashioned thinking your immutable characteristics shouldn’t be considered for employment.
One thing that's common is for people to recommend their friends for jobs. Most of the time, their friends look just like them, because that's the kind of friends that people make. If you base your hiring process around this easy source of candidates, you end up not talking to a lot of people that would be qualified for the position. "DEI" can be as simple as "in addition to employee referrals, we're going to hand out brochures at a career fair".
https://journalistsresource.org/education/race-neutral-alter...
EDIT, I'd also like to add: Why do you believe this tilt exists? I find it plausible to exist (especially because lots of people seem to make a lot of money talking about it), but where is the evidence for it? What I'm asking for isn't evidence that one group of people are doing better than another, I'm asking for evidence that a group of people are being discriminated against. E.g., if you took the exact same person and switched out their profile photo to showcase a Hispanic woman instead of an Asian man, they would end up with far fewer job offers. The thing is, people have tried doing exactly this, and every time it goes the other way! The exact same application, minus a name and photo change, has the reverse effect from what you would expect if the basis behind DEI initiatives was true.
I'm not sure of your point.
I'm pointing out the inherent racism in these efforts in practice.
The only really positive thing I saw was hiring more from HBCU's.
But that crowd never pointed out white people were underrepresented in tech. And that lots of the black people they claimed they were helping by hiring were actually Pacific Islanders, African immigrants and second generation African immigrants rather than ADOS that they claimed to be helping
I never thought that. That part of me was irrelevant to the degree, and I found it great that no one cared and were able to focus on the degree.
Forcing diversity topics in and making them a focus instead would have been hell.
What is the bias and causes it?
Because I don't think it's a systemic bias in the hiring system, so why not solve the problem rather than trying to patch the effect.
Given that many DEI programs specifically focus on "high skill" roles (like software engineers), it's unlikely that DEI accounted for this disparity while massive numbers of black and hispanic people being hired for low-skilled jobs had a larger impact.
Bloomberg's choosing to misrepresent the data here - this is not about jobs added, it's about changes in the employment composition.
Simple example: Company X has 950 white and 50 POC employes. 10% leave over the year (95 white, 5 POC). They hire 200 more at an even split (50% white, 50% POC). They now have 1100 people, 955 white, 145 POC. So they've gained net 100 folks - and the net change is +5 white, +95 POC. Voila, 95% people of color hired.
It's still a pretty stunning change with a large ramp up in hiring of POC, but it's much less an indicator of preferential hiring than the Bloomberg framing makes it sound.
> But it’s not possible from the data to say that those additional “people of color” took the 320,000 newly created positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs.
> A telltale sign that Bloomberg’s “percentage of the net increase” methodology is flawed, VerBruggen explained, is that, if the departures of whites had been just a little higher, the net change in whites would have been negative instead of the actual small growth of 20,000. Bloomberg’s methodology would then assert that whites took a negative percentage of the new 320,000 jobs, a mathematic impossibility.
> The percentage of new jobs that went to whites was likely about 46%, eight points below the 54% white makeup of companies’ existing workforces. That’s to be expected given demographic changes in the United States since the time that the currently-retiring baby boomer generation first entered the workforce.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bomb...
It’s a vague definition that is impossible to verify. Spain itself is a multicultural and multiethnic state. How do you prove that I don’t have deep affiliation with my basque ancestor who settled in Ireland after a shipwreck?
There was one notable exception: an org based in Virginia with something like 10% or 15%. I figured it was due to black former military and defense workers who had to be on-site in Virginia to work on a specific GovCloud project, part of the JEDI contract effort. I knew of one black engineer who worked on that compared to about ~5 others I knew who worked on that.
Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship before entering the work force? It's still pretty effective — there were lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
In the US, inferiority of blackness is so deeply ingrained and entrenched. it's like air, we (blacks, white and everything in between) have all breathed in and fully internalized that we don't even realize its there.
Reading things like The Color Purple, Black Like Me, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my childhood didn't remove that blind spot; if anything, the contrast tempted me to think that racism was pretty much a solved problem in the US, except for a few reactionaries. It wasn't until years of living something fundamentally different that I could start to notice how absurd and pervasive it was.
I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.
> Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship
Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then?
> lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.
I live in Latin America now, and the universities almost all suck. Latin America culturally has the idea that universities are for job training and are basically all equivalent. China and, generally speaking, India instead place very high value on education and on good universities, and China also has a massive research budget. Latin America, broadly speaking, has zilch. The result is that in lists like https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... the top 100 universities include 11 in China, 4 in Singapore (which is largely Chinese), and 0 in Latin America. Most of India's IITs don't appear on that list for some reason, but they should — and the ones that do appear are the wrong ones.
Here in Buenos Aires, the University of Buenos Aires was badly damaged by Perón demanding loyalty oaths from the professors, driving those who valued their intellectual freedom out of the university and often out of Argentina entirely. A few years later, it was damaged further by an anti-Peronist military dictatorship attempting to purge it of Peronists https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos. The first computer in Latin America was lost in the shuffle. Decades of such intermittent political violence disproportionately affected the intellectual classes; the last dictatorship, backed by the US in its secret mass murders of political dissidents, notoriously blamed society's drug problems on "an excess of thinking" among students: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro Those intellectuals who could move abroad often did so, including Favaloro, who invented heart bypass surgery after refusing to swear loyalty to Perón, and Chaitin, the discoverer of the random number omega at the heart of computability and the graph-coloring formulation of the compiler register allocation problem.
Despite all that, the University of Buenos Aires is still one of the best five or so universities in Latin America. That may give you a clue as to how bad the situation is in places like Ecuador, Venezuela, and Honduras, or even the poorer provinces of Argentina.
You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese? That says more about your imagination than it does America.
I don't know why you infer that from my comment. I am merely responding to the GP's post which I disagree with. I believe US, or at least Silicon Valley which I am very familiar with, is one of the least racist place. At the same time, it is also highly classist.
Unfortunately, race and class correlate for American blacks. Not so for, say, Nigerian blacks because the ones able to migrate from Nigeria to the US are already the privileged ones in their society. Same goes for immigrants from India, China, Philippines or Egypt.
Look at class, not race, if you really want to understand the SV demographics.
I don't think you are responding to the other poster's point at all. I think you made up your own, and that's exactly what I pointed out. Because it's so facially asinine.
>Look at class, not race, if you really want to understand the SV demographics.
Weird, I thought we are talking about American culture, not just SV? Anything else you want to swap in so you can make your obtuse points?
kragen's post literally starts with "As a white software engineer...", so I am addressing the context of being a software engineer, i.e. SV (the metaphorical place, not actual physical location). Broader American culture is besides the point here.
There are significant numbers of upper-middle-class black people in the US, and there have been for decades now. Their kids still don't end up as programmers in significant numbers. White rednecks' kids do; they're facing a pretty stiff uphill battle too, but a lot more of them prevail. That's racism, not just classism.
> Their kids still don't end up as programmers
I can see that there could be racism which prevents upper middle class black kids from becoming programmers. Do you think it's because of SV (metaphor) or because of racism in the pipeline leading to SV? If it's the latter, can SV even do anything about it?
There's clearly a pipeline problem. As Ibrahim Diallo's experience shows, it's not just a pipeline problem; it's also an SV problem: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53180073
This is nonsense.
There was not a single black student in my graduating class of Software Engineering from college.
So is the problem truly with hiring, or is it earlier on. It could also be both. But if none are graduating with a SE degree...
My company historically has had leveling issues and, sadly, they were definitely not meeting expectations for their level, or maybe even for the one below their level.
One was nudged out to another team. One currently on my direct team is being nudged out. One or two people want him to be fired (very curmudgeonly engineers who had worked with him), but me and the manager would rather find him new work within the company suited to his background in data science rather than software engineering. He's been dragging his feet; it's getting more and more difficult.
The company has a strong and vocal DEIB/social justice culture within certain parts of the company (though I suspect much less so among executives). It sometimes comes into play pretty directly in hiring. I've been in panels where someone calls out that the candidate is part of a disadvantaged population who've historically been under-leveled, though I haven't been in a panel where that made a difference in hiring or leveling.
The standard line is that the company doesn't compromise its hiring standards for diversity. I clearly have my doubts about whether that ends up happening in practice.
On the other hand, I've seen exactly 1 guy at the FANG I work at. What's the difference? I think it's companies like Northrop realizing that folks from under-represented communities have great value and prioritize that instead of whatever the current HackerRank-based interview process selects for
Where I've been, trying to get some DEI policy to influence who's hired would be impossible, since the panel has to agree, and there's no way they would agree to someone not qualified. Even with pressure like "we really need to hire someone before end of month or we'll lose the req", the response has always been "find better people then".
And yes, some of this is not solvable at the end of the funnel when hiring but as a society leaving a full class of people in less productive jobs due to race (or caste or whatever) is a waste of human potential.
It’s good you mention workers, because most people focus on the demographics of the population, which is bunk..
Available workers includes factors such as qualification, motivation, aptitude and smaller factors like “did they even apply”.
If your workforce demographics skew significantly from qualified applicants then there’s a problem. If you intentionally want to skew applicants then marketing to them or investing in their training and education is the way, not whatever the hell we seem to be doing.
And a dearth of leadership of a certain ethnicity will change over time, demographics shift over the course of a generation of workers, not in a quarter of a decade like I’ve seen people expect.
Although women do make about half of the population they do not make for half of the applicants in tech fields, in reality, a lot of women don't even get to the stage of studying STEM careers.
There's some interesting studies when it comes to girls own perceived perceptions on how well they will do in math. With girls perceiving they will not do as well in math subjects as their male peers (even though in assessments they're pretty much equal). This perception often comes from home and it's a significant factor in why girls don't eventually become STEM women.
I think there's probably similar factors at play when it comes to different ethnicities and putting an effort into changing these perspectives has led to some of these DEI measures.
Not to mention the fact that a degree of diversity is an asset when it comes to decision making, as groups with too similar backgrounds tend to fall into conventional thinking (the version of it that's applicable to their respective fields). So some diversity in teams leads to more dynamics dialogue between people which is key for creative problem solving.
I'm not sure, given that a lot of the data available seems to be poorly constructed, that DEI efforts have been too much. Certainly there's a conservative backlash but that doesn't really tell us if these DEI measures have been effective or not at achieving their objectives. Fundamentally, I think there are some people out there who don't really value diversity so they're against the objectives sought by DEI measures to begin with and these voices seem to quite loud lately. I don't think these are the kind of people who would change their minds if shown data and research anyway.
There are similar studies with women chess players. The results showed that when women knew they were playing against men, they played more defensively and performed more poorly. So much gender normalization is unseen and pervasive. It's everywhere from gender coded shows to gender coded toys to parents and relatives who reinforce those stereotypes. It's all throughout our media, even though we're in the Mary Sue age of cinematography.
When I was involved at the college hire and mentorship program at Microsoft, roughly 3/4ths of the women hired moved out of the company or into non-technical roles after their two year program. I can't say I blame them witnessing what many of them experienced and I can only imagine what I didn't see. It's sometimes small things like the director we were working with assigning one of our new women graduates who was hired as an SDE as the note taker and project manager at an internal company hackathon. To medium things like suddenly PRs become a lot more difficult for certain individuals to pass for some reason. Things which have never been brought up before are suddenly blocking issues, but only for certain developers. Sometimes it's very major things like a woman being stalked by a co-worker and constantly pressured to go back to his hotel room during a company offsite (with multiple witnesses). He didn't lose his job. She was transferred to another department.
1. Acme Inc. has 40,000 white employees and 10,000 employees of color on payroll. The statistic would be 20%, if Acme were hiring at a constant rate by the same demographics.
2. However, suppose Acme hired the bulk of its employees during its growth phase 10 years ago. Acme's hiring back then was proportional, but the population has changed. Now only 60% of applicants are white, compared to 80% back then.
3. Acme lays off 5,000 staff (at random), and hires 1,000 (proportionally.) So they've laid off 4,000 white people and 1,000 people of color. And they've hired 400 people of color and 600 white people.
I'm too lazy to do the math but I think that works out as hiring a negative % of white people, even though it's just representative of demographic shifts.
Also, in the US Asians, overall, are not economically disadvantaged like most Blacks and Latinos. So I don't think you can really put them together in this particular context. Notice that the largest group of Professionals were Asian (lots of engineers/programmers from India/China as usual).
(Also at the Executive job level, Whites still very on top.)
1. Violate the law more blatantly than anyone else. 94% of new jobs went to POC? So what, 50% of the population shared 6% of the jobs? This sounds like apartheid era South Africa.
2. Create a backlash where the largest population and richest segment is so angry, it uses all its resources to absolutely destroy this.
Nice going.
2) the significantly backlash is interesting, primarily because it centers around the bullshit statistics that companies pat themselves with. The hiring process is so nebulous and unknowable to the potential hiree that no person can really know whether they were denied a job due to dei policies. Yet we simultaneously assume that all non white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI, which really just undervalues the nonwhite population, as if they truly deserved none of the jobs, wouldn't have gotten any without the help. This combined into the rage that certain people feel about what really appears to be a back pat circle around naming a git branch and changing security terminology.
Add that to the list of why DEI is harmful. There will always be a potential asterisk next to minority hires as long as DEI is a thing. It’s unavoidable.
Their metrics I assume are zero / flat, around 'success' for DEI, derivatively.
To me this suggests the next best focus area for increased fairness of societal fiscal (opportunity) performance is regulation, perhaps driven by social change and social pressure.
I have next to no influence. Still I wonder if I'm naive?
ALSO, awesome work Ibrahim / firefoxd, you deserve to be honored for your experience and celebrated for meaningful efforts to make society better. I would not know about this without you:
> If you are black and take a group picture with your white colleagues [on Zoom] one evening, eventually someone will make the joke that all they see are your teeth. If you are black and hang out with your white colleague, people will always assume you are the subordinate.
A good DEI program should, IMHO, be indistinguishable from good management culture embedded at every level in an org.
- It should not be controversial to assert, and product management to insist, say, that products designed for humanity should be usable by humanity: men and women, for example - but we still have medicine and cars tested on male models, and software that is unusable if you have low vision or cant operate a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. That doesn't automatically mean one must hire 50:50 men:women, say (see legal rocks, above), but it certainly starts to smell like a missed opportunity if you don't have a single person on your staff or in your network of consultants who can explain what it feels like to wear a seatbelt when you are 1.5m and 50kg not 2m and 85kg. If you want better products, this seems like a no brainer, but it doesnt seem to happen.
- It must absolutely be a mandate for all managers to avoid cliques. All men? All women? All Indians? All Purdue grads? Close watching needed, especially when those groups hire and promote. Doesn't need a mandate, needs better managers of managers.
Tldr is that no amount of DEI will fix bad management culture.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/diverse-women-clinical-trials/...
Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that. Now they are using a more diverse set of dummies.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/improving-safety-for-women-...
I think I would still blame the management of NHTSA for setting that standard.
Are there no white people studying CS anymore or looking for jobs? Did they all stop applying?
Again, it’s only from personal experience. I never asked any of my coworkers a “hey, do you ever interview white people?”, so it could be a coincidence that I was never matched with any. But I don’t think that’s the most likely explanation…
The joke that white men are all named “Chad” is tired. You’ll notice I didn’t say everyone I interviewed was name DeShawn or whatever. Let’s move past that.
There’s nothing like gaining inspiration because someone you know growing up is doing it. e.g. It’s much easier to go camping for your first time when someone in your life is “the camping person” and can guide you through it. And the earlier you do it, the higher chance that you end up pursuing it.
In a lot of impoverished communities, they don’t have as many as those kinds of people. Especially not compared to a well-connected family in a wealthy suburb.
I don’t know how you would provide those resources and maybe these big companies already are, but the availability of professionals that young people surround themselves with should not be overlooked.
Even before we get to corporate demographics or college graduation, admittance, and application rates, there are millions of children growing up in poverty in the US. Relatively inexpensive social welfare investments can mitigate many of the worst effects, even for those who don't decide to become software engineers.
You’re right that single vs. two parent household is the largest contributing factor. You’re wrong that it means that no other factors matter at all.
Not discounting the material/economic conditions, obviously.
I hire developers. They are all white because theres no black people around here. It isnt a problem.
> Where is the problem?
Does this matter to you? This depends on the type of society you want to live in and be a part of. My take? None of us live in a vacuum in isolation; we live in a country of 300+ million people. My neighbor's are Iranian, Syrian, Turkish/German, French/Moroccan, Indian, East Asian and all lovely people.
The problem DEI programs should solve is a systemic one where hiring practices might otherwise pass on qualified minority candidates or may not even be presented to them in the first place. The implementation of many programs is questionable, but the objective and why have some form of policy that focuses on broader inclusivity in the hiring process should not be: I want a better America for everyone and not just some subset of Americans.
Whats next, you want to force more white people to become developers because ethnic Indian devs are becoming too populous in the industry.
In my country most of the blacks are in London and so we have no black devs in our office. We arent going to go out and find some to hire.
London: 54% white, 14% black
Manchester: 57% white, 12% black
Birmingham: 49% white, 11% black
Bristol: 81% white, 6% black
Leeds: 79% white, 6% black
Sheffield: 80% white, 5% black
Liverpool: 84% white. 4% black
Note: this excludes mixed black and white backgrounds, which make up a decent proportion of people who would describe themselves as black.
So if equal numbers of black people went into tech, and companies hired without bias, then you'd expect at least 1 in 20 people in most tech companies to be black.
You're right that fewer people from black backgrounds are applying to tech jobs, although I think it's a leap to say it's because they "don't want to". It could just as easily be that they find it intimidating, or don't believe they can do it, or they're socialised into other careers. As a company or hiring manager, if you do come across black applicants, it may well be the case that they have had to battle against a lot to get where they are, which shows grit, enthusiasm, and initiative.
Also using those stats is flawed because the majority of the people working in those cities don't live in them. The real number (of what % blacks constitute the available workforce within commute distance) will be less than 1% in most of them.
Respectfully, there is always a trade-off between how much money you make and how positive a social impact you have.
> The real number (of what % blacks constitute the available workforce within commute distance) will be less than 1%
Yes, as I said, it's not the case that black people are as likely to apply for tech jobs. And I agree with you that it's not your responsibility to make that happen. The problem is systemic and goes back to education and environment. However, your tone is a little disconcerting as it seems to suggest that you think everything is fine just the way it is.
The few blacks that are in almost all those cities you mention recieve the same education, are the same environment and socioeconomic group as the whites.
It is also a US obsession with US black people and their problems, and thinking everyone should join in on it. This is why when they tried to bring all the George Floyd protest stuff to this region, they were politely told where they could stick it. There are already enough social problems that should get attention and don't, that affect the people living here. Rather than protests about something that has no relevance to anyone living here.
Outside of London, black people are in no different an socioeconomic situation than the whites.
The proportion of black students at Russell Group unis is around 4%, roughly half of the proportion of black people in the 18-24 age range. Black students have higher dropout rates and are less likely to achieve first or second class honours. Black STEM leavers are more likely to be unemployed [0].
Black people in the UK are more likely than any other ethnicity (including white) to be living in a deprived neighbourhood [1]. Nearly half of households with a black head of household are in poverty, compared to 19% for whites [2]. Similar trends are reflected in London [3].
[0] https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/publications/2021/tr...
[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-popula...
[2] https://irr.org.uk/research/statistics/poverty/
[3] https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/poverty-and-ethnicity/
You managed to sneak in both a slippery slope fallacy and a straw man in the same argument here. No one said what you're claiming.
It’s all Indians and Chinese
It's like the southern Bay Area in general, the least black place I have ever lived. People call it diverse, but it's really just 4 ethnic groups that rarely intermingle. It's not diverse like LA or NYC are diverse.
I'm not doubting your companies' policies, but just throwing my data point in there too.
It's all very exhausting.
Ignorant investors check a box to put their money towards 'ethical' investments, leading companies to create DEI marketing departments to exploit the new investment pipeline.
Publicly traded companies operate under a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders (maximizing long-term shareholder value). For consumer-facing companies one could easily argue these initiatives are part of a broader marketing/corporate branding strategy that benefits shareholders. But, for large publicly-traded companies that don't rely on retail consumer sentiment, I presume DEI initiatives were primarily a strategy to attract investment from ESG funds and help quell potential regulatory action/political controversies
I'm ultimately not sure how reasonable my take is (I have no insider experience or knowledge) but would love to hear from someone with relevant first-hand knowledge and get their perspective
Obviously thats hard to do and still maintain a massive profit, so some did the next easiest thing to greenwashing: hiring some DEI consultants and PR people to take some photos of the three employees with blue hair and melanin.
ESG is still a thing, despite some finance bros making a fuss.
ESG ratings champion companies in industries killing millions: https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/how-tobacco-companies-are...
reminiscent of the comic of people being bombed in awe that 'They say the next [bombs] will be sent by a woman!'
But they can be more. Some companies I've worked for used their DEI programs to actively support local communities, organize volunteering efforts, collect donations. Even companies that HN might consider "Evil", I've seen have very strong and engaged DEI groups. It came down to two things: 1) they hired passionate people who took it upon themselves to organize internally and do more with the groups, and 2) they had leadership that (amazingly) gave the support needed for the group to make a positive impact.
But also, some companies I've worked for just had a 30 minute "movie lunch hour" and guest speaker and that was it. So it's obvious to me now when a DEI program is a PR dodge, and when it does real work.
[1] https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gende...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1203845886/women-tech-confere...
I did around 1000 interviews for my current company and about 200 for the previous one. I found that in IT in Europe there are not many candidates to meet DEI targetsand still hire the qualified ones. Even expanding to other continents, we barely made it; the last team I hired was one Latino, one Filipino and one white, 2 out of 3 were male. I interviewed around 30 candidates for these positions and I selected the top 3. These 3 were just above the lower limit of expertise to be hired, so I basically had zero choice, the alternative was to pull triple shifts myself to cover for the missing people.
Let's say you are the director of a steel plant. DEI targets are totally irrelevant, I never heard about a woman working on the plant floor, but I have many cousins who did. Dying at 45 or 50 years old due to lung or throat cancer is not something many women want to, but all my cousins did. I don't believe in DEI in these circumstances. But if you want DEI in "a day in life of a Microsoft /Twitter employee having free food and pointless meetings all day" videos, that is not fair.
So, I don't know why you were not able to place the developers, but think about DEI even more. We have several black people in my department, one of the best PMs I worked with is an older black woman, a good professional will find a place almost anywhere. Morgan Freeman shows that being black does not prevent one from magnificent results, but asking for rewards for being black is not the way.
(IE; Italians are "White" but Turks are non-white. Romanians ironically get the short end of the stick no matter the situation).
Mostly it centers on LGBTQ+ and Women though.
Hailing from Eastern Europe, I could tell so many stories, some of which happened to me, and some to others, which was kinda affirming to see that it was not self centered bias.
How it went for me - I built a super challenging, super advanced feature (involving graphics acceleration, video encoding etc. in a company where this was not a core competency), then I got put in a team where we had to deliver a shipping prototype on a short timescale, build up a team around it, etc.
Still I was not promoted - what I got was a clueless Western manager, who I had to hand dictate Jira tickets and Asana reports to. A year later he left for a high-level position at an A-list company. Out of curiosity, I submitted my CV to a regular dev position at the same company, and all I got was an automated rejection letter.
I also had an Ukrainian coworker who built super impressive development tooling to a huge delight to everyone - he quit in frustration, and they had to build an entire team (with similar hiring logic), and unsurprising they couldn't match half his velocity with a team of 5.
It's not really in your face, you are not really treated like dirt - but you are managed away from actual prestige and opportunities, especially if the project succeeds, they tend to forget about you - except when the bug reports come rolling in.
It really shows up in the org charts too - we used to joke that there was an 'iron curtain' on C-level minus two, as nobody from EE managed to get promoted that far. I aLso felt that the fact that the majority of engineering was in EE was treated as some 'shamful dark secret' that if found out, would cast a bad light on the firm.
This is especially super ironic considering the standard diversity spiel (you are all privileged white men) is still going on, ironically from someone who makes 5x as much as we do, and sits in London.
Are you suffering from the same condition, too?
This is an old phenomenon that keeps reoccurring in many forms.
I understand that it is important to raise social awareness about some things. People should not be afraid to talk about real issues. Freedom of speech, the need to listen to people/citizens/customers &c.
That said, the cheerful, forced vapidity in that video is embarrassing. None of those parroted statements is worth a tinker's cuss historically. And none of it is worth a damn in the present time either unless the corporation is going to give billions in reparation to the tribes that were permanently evicted.
Is the Land Acknowledgement Theatre really a strategic attempt to avoid paying damages in many potential class-action law suits?
Is that corporate fear really what drives most of these obsequious recognition statements and policies?
It's just part of the social fabric now, though not without its detractors.
But seriously, congratulations!
The negative effect of "fake diversity" is that it leaves everyone else wondering if the minority employees actually know what they're doing or if they were hired to make the company look good.
This is the most insidious thing, in my opinion. If you're already a hater, now you can unabashedly claim the moral high ground. "Did she interview well, or was she a diversity hire?"
And it seems like a lot of DEI teams are just completely blind to the latter mode. You sometimes hear about a team announcing an apparently minor change, like renaming something to sound more inclusive, and then go on about how they spent six months discussing it and gathering feedback, and it's very obvious that nobody involved ever asked themselves "when we announce this are we going to sound like a serious team that does valuable work?"
How much did you get paid for doing all those consulting gigs on DEI topics?
Just to point out, even as you highlight the hollowness of the trend passing through, you were a part of the industry it created and a beneficiary of people's sudden interest in the symbolism of it even if it achieved little. Tons of people who could justify some kind of vague contribution/expertise were glad to make money off of the political need to pursue this, and be seen doing it.
It sounds like you were one of the more respectable contributors. Others were hangers-on, making money or careers off people's fear of being accused of not toeing the new party line, regardless of how hollow it was. VPs/deans/executive directors of diversity and inclusion at whatever institutions they could sell their services to.
Whether it was good or not at its core, some people had a vested interest in it continuing. It happens equally with every new trend that is hard to set real goals against. (or achievable ones, until it's found out to be empty).
It was in the middle of a hiring spree. Why not spend that time interviewing black engineers instead?
So I don’t positively discriminate but, the most recent role I was looking to fill, I didn’t speak to that many candidates because applicant quality was overall poor, but getting on half of those I did speak with were from minorities.
In the end we decided not to hire for the time being because we couldn’t find anyone at the standard we needed (possibly due to time of year - November/December often aren’t great), but I’m surprised that you weren’t even getting people to interview. That, on the face of it, is quite concerning.
I have never seen anything more cringe or ridiculous than this video.
Bill Gates has said publicly that he's a fan of Silicon Valley, the tv show that pokes hard fun at the startup culture. But it's Microsoft that's beyond parody...
Your skin colour of course.
Do you know what the success rate is for non-DEI candidates? I believe there is some bias in the hiring process including racism, sexism, ageism, etc. But I also think that companies are hiring less than 1% of applicants in general. From what I have seen, companies are very bad at identifying the best candidates. But if you are getting 100 resumes a month and you hire 2-4 people a year, it's a roll of the dice just selecting the 20 resumes out of 400 to invite for an interview.
All of that is to say: don't get too discouraged. A 1% success rate would be remarkable. If you can achieve a 0.5% success rate you can increase diversity by 400%.
Personally, I'm a fan of meritocracy. I wish the most qualified people were surviving the roll of the dice. But I think it would be ideal if the most qualified people included a lot of diversity. As it is, employers' best chance to hire qualified people is to rely on human networks to help somebody stand out in the sea of resumes. So the more people of diversity you can land, the better chance there is for future candidates. And the better qualified your diverse candidates are, the more voice they'll get in future hiring influence. So keep pushing highly qualified diverse candidates. And while you're at it, push highly qualified non-diverse candidates so you aren't just seen as a diversity advocate. People might take your diverse candidates more seriously if they are perceived less for their diversity and more for their excellence. If 80% of your recommendations are diverse and 50% seem to be very high-quality, the 10% that are very high-quality non-diverse will change the perception of the 40% very high-quality diverse candidates.
I work at pseudo government organization where we take seminars every few months about dei, gender issues, etc... and it has made 0 difference when it comes to hiring. Ultimately my org is trying to reach out more, get to dei events, but that's as far as the effort goes. Once a job application is posted, it's the same old process. Maybe that's fair, but it felt disingenuous, and unnecessary, especially since we weren't great at hiring anyways.
Years ago, tech companies would promote such moves to improve their image, play intot heir role as being "outsiders" or "disruptors" and to attract staff, who tended to skew towards socially progressive issues. There was genuine belief in the missions of those companies. Google once touted its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
But now we're talking about trillion dollar companies that move in lockstep with US policy.
I tend to believe that every US company eventually becomes a bank, a defense contractor or both.
The biggest heel turn politically is probably Mark Zuckerberg, who now makes frequent donations to Republican candidates (and some Democrats, for the record) but we also have Meta donating $1M to Trump's inauguration (by comparison, there was no contribution to Biden's inauguration). Efforts of fighting misinformation are out. DEO is out.
If you work for Meta, you're now really no different to Tiwtter. Your employer now actively pushes right-wing propaganda and the right-wing agenda. There is no real support for minorities. But the sad truth is, every other big tech company is on the same path.
> But the sad truth is, every other big tech company is on the same path.
they didn't use the word "owned", only "occupied". The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership" and would think of it more like land alienation. As a Georgist, I'm personally very annoyed by these sort of empty indigenous land acknowledgements. I'm more excited about stuff like this Squamish Nation housing development in Vancouver, BC [1] where they actually get rights to use the land how they want even if it doesn't fit local expectations of "indigenous ways of knowing and being".
I doubt they had deeds to land. But they did fight inter-tribal wars over which territory belonged to which tribe.
Humans have a very well developed notion of "mine" and "not mine". Saying indigenous peoples did not have this is an extraordinary claim, and would need strong evidence.
Even in the US, commons-deeded land between multiple people is still a thing. Albeit one that lawyers hate to mess with because it's more work for them.
For purposes of this thread, exclusive control of an area, absent other claims, would certainly entitle indigenous American peoples to ownership of that land.
They impose a mutually agreed upon set of rules on everyone who owns land that is covered by the HOA (with one of the rules preventing severance of the property from the HOA).
None of this is guaranteed by 'ownership'.
It isn't splitting hairs. It's outright propaganda invented to justify stealing native land. The idea being if natives had no sense of property, we didn't really steal anything from them because they had no property to begin with.
The other trope justifying theft of the land is of the "dumb indians" who sold the land for cheap. Like indians selling manhattan for a handful of beads.
The notion of a lack of land ownership is just fetishization.
Even animals mark their territory and aggressively defend it.
Pueblo groups had extremely strong ideas about property lines, but those properties were often analogous to modern corporations where individual families could own "shares" in the property, and exchange those for other shares in other properties to reallocate ownership. Areas within a property could also be "rented" to others, or the entire property reclaimed by the government.
The best way I can summarize it is that native Americans tended to have much more fine-grained ideas about what property rights entail than our Western systems. Capabilities based security vs role based security, to really force the analogy into computing.
Possessing of enough military force to ignore others rights would be more historically descriptive.
Even if they had fully understood all the nuances of indigenous property rights, they still would have stolen the land. Confusion was just a fig leaf.
Not in a morally absolving the attacker way.
But in a you had agency and chose to underinvest in defense way.
That said, it's pretty unlikely the rest of the world could have defended against a technologically advanced Europe / Middle East / China, at their respective peaks, and especially after transoceanic sail enabled cross-sea logistics.
Capitalism has very fine-grained ideas about property rights. Consider corporations, for just one example. There are multiple kinds of shares about who owns what rights to the corporation. Then there are all the contractual obligations that, in essence, transfer specific property rights. There are the web of rights that workers have over it. Then there are the rights the government has over it, via tax obligations and regulations. Layer on the concept of "stakeholders" that layer on more ownership rights.
Societies on the hunter/gatherer spectrum also value their hunting grounds, but in far less strict ways.
I'm pretty sure the indigenous peoples that lived by farming had well developed concepts of land ownership, but they were the minority when Europeans arrived.
As in… we are the custodians now.
eg:
W.AUstralian Health acknowledges the Aboriginal people of the many traditional lands and language groups of Western Australia.
It acknowledges the wisdom of Aboriginal Elders both past and present and pays respect to Aboriginal communities of today.
is pretty generic for a handwave across the entire state.
In specific places, large tracts of land here, the terminology is current custodians - if you recall that whole deal with Mabo and Native Title there are large ares in which the traditional inhabitants are now the current owners under Commonwealth Law that once didn't acknowledge them as human and declared the land Terra Nullius.
Mabo decision: https://www.aph.gov.au/Visit_Parliament/Art/Stories_and_Hist...
We acknowledge the Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their continued connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to their Cultures, Country and Elders past, present and emerging.
We also acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we work and live, the land on which this exhibition was created, and the land on which Australian Parliament House is situated – an area where people have met for thousands of years.My point is that this is not the case for everybody. Some people prefer not to be called "she" even though I might guess that they're a woman.
Only would make sense when it's "she/they" or similar. Otherwise it's just redundant.
I'm curious why it took hundreds of candidates to not be hired before it dawned on you that it was not sincere? Wouldn't the first dozen have been enough?
Unless your financial interests intersected with those of the companies you consulted for this "show"...?
But, I applaud your bravery in calling these guys out after they stopped giving you work.
Bravo.
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
The problem with DEI-as-implemented is that it often not only contains overt discrimination against a group (based on a protected class), but also prohibits any criticism of this. When someone is being discriminated against, not subtly or silently but explicitly, intentionally and overtly, and then punished for daring to complain about it, that leads to a lot of resentment (both by the people directly affected and by other members of the same class that observe both the discrimination and the silencing).
I'd say that resentment is justified; unfortunately, I suspect the backlash will primarily hit the people that the DEI policies were supposed to help, rather than the perpetrators of the discrimination.
Agreed. This is the fundamental flaw of a lot of social theories borne out of academia when they land in the real world. They thrive in an academic world where hierarchy is bought into by students eagerly and are transplanted into a world where people must accept hierarchy to survive.
> I'd say that resentment is justified
Resentment never makes anything better, no matter how justified. Unfortunately.
I’d say it did make things better.
That might’ve drove a few people to donate huge sums of money to information campaigns that fomented hatred, division, and distrust among voters, but no: American voters were not voting on big tech DEI policies.
Feel free to post evidence otherwise.
White voters point to conversations about justice – for racial minorities, for the children of immigrants, for women worried about losing their reproductive rights, for transgender teenagers – and question why nobody ever talks about justice for them.
Few expect Trump to fix everything or believe him when he says he will. What they do believe is that the system is broken and corrupt, just as Trump says it is, and that a candidate who promises to tear it down and start again might just be on to something.
I think this goes in this direction. People don't care about "Meta's hiring policies" but they care about "wokeness", and news articles about the former lead to a perception that society has way too much of the latter and that it's a bad thing.
I'm a white male who was raised comfortably middle class. The more folks I've met and the more history I've studied, it's pretty clear I was born with a huge number of advantages many of my peers didn't enjoy. I don't mind them getting preferential treatment, even if I'm more qualified once in a while.
To really help, make sure the schools in poor areas are top notch, even better than upper class schools, and you will automatically fix the imbalance, without having to use equipment for darkness, dna samples to check the heritage and other clearly bizarre future paths.
I strongly agree, but sadly I think what you're saying here is probably almost incomprehensible to a broad swathe of middle-class white Americans, to whom being seen to be outwardly supportive of every DEI-ish cause has essentially become something like personal hygiene -- a thing you do perfunctorily and without thinking. It's just "what you do", "what a civilised person does", etc.
I'd be interested to hear more about what you have seen work and not work for economic development in these communities.
Could you please explain this part? I am not sure how you meant it. Is the main problem that the resources are not in the language of your tribe? Or is that a lack of educational resources regardless of language (e.g. simply not enough textbooks to give to each child)? What kind of educational resources do you wish you had?
So, what's the twist? Tribal schools tend to be administrated by the federal government which makes problems extremely slow and hard to address. With some asterisks, the local elementary school was basically provisioned as a consequence of a federal treaty with the US Senate, and is/was mostly administered by a the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which rolls up into a federal department that until 2020ish, had never been run by a native person. All of these things make it very tricky to work with.
In spite of that, believe it or not, this is a massive improvement: until relatively recently, the school was a mandatory boarding trade school meant to teach kids to be (basically) English-only maids. This lead to a substantial percentage of the population being either illiterate or semi-literate, with no meaningful work experience, and with very very few opportunities that were not menial work. That inertia is extremely challenging to overcome, and the most natural place to try is the education system, which generally is simply not up to it.
I am stating these as a neutral facts on purpose. Regardless of how we got here, the hand is ours to play. Some of us got out and whether we succeed in the next generation depends on whether we can mobilize the community to productively take advantage of the resources we do have. This is why it's painful to me to hear about, e.g., land acknowledgements. If you have seen this pain firsthand I just do not see how that can be the #1 policy objective.
Yeah.
English as a first language is a huge advantage (you have most of the internet at your disposal, with tons of educational resources), but illiteracy is a huge problem.
> hard to recruit good teachers
Good teachers are rare. I wonder if you could find some people to teach who are not teachers in the usual sense. People having a different job, or university students, who would just come and teach kids one lesson a week. It's not perfect, but it could be the most popular lesson, just because it is unusual.
But the important part would be to grow your own teachers; help the best kids become the teachers of the next generation. Maybe you could encourage kids to do this from the start; for example, take the best kids at each grade, and tell them to teach some younger kids one lesson a week.
I wish I could help, but I'm on the opposite side of the planet.
I'm not the OP but you could consider hypothetically as an example, would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?
> would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?
One possible reason is that some of them could be born there. Again, this differs between communities. Some of them respect their smartest members. Some kick them out.
raise the economic level of the community, and education rises with it
that's why I said the best way to improve the education is to improve the economic conditions of the community
So in my rural, predominantly white "Non DEI target" part of the country, this is the problem too except when these people apply to hundreds of jobs in software engineering they get crickets.
With all that said I do have a story of my own like this. In 2013 or so I wrote some stuff about spam detection and a Twitter engineer reached out about a job. I was an outgoing new grad from the University of Utah. When I got through with the loop the recruiter said, "How did you get here, we don't get many candidates from Utah." I still wonder what they wanted me to think when I heard that. What I actually felt was deeply out of place and uncomfortable. And it has affected every hiring process I've been apart of since.
The same people that are saying "a new way forward" or "make america great again" failed to put any money to help. Your community doesn't produce anything that those funding congress care about, means that you get nothing.
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.
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.
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.
Alas, the stock's future performance is unlikely to be tied to any of that. Stock prices are barely attached to reality at all.
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.
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.
Complex social games with rituals, vocabulary, etc are not, and act as class signaling mechanisms.
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.
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.
"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. :-(
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.
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?
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.
Palo Alto Networks & Arista, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, IBM, Netapp, Micron... Even World Bank has an Indian CEO.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations
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' (as it is being discussed here, i.e. quotas) 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 below ...
@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.")
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.
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.
Are we to think that the Republican party of 1990 - of the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Romneys - is the same as the Republican party of 2025 that has driven them out of the org?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That said, this is a concept car. It doesn't have to be practical.
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.
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.
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.)
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
Isn't that the same reason they were rolled out in the first place?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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).
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 ?
'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...
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.
A dei program labels those people for you.
Ironically this is exactly the reason why dei programs were considered illegal until a decade ago.
Disagree, right wingers will be satisfied by this performative posturing even though there's no real change to existing policy.
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...
When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.
I live on Long Island and we have a majority white population. Despite that we have 2 school districts that are almost 100% black. That is where the problem is. You are not giving these students a chance. When I am going through resumes I am not getting a diverse pool of qualified candidates because these poor people have been historically oppressed into a caste of poor schooling and neighborhoods.
This is true many places. But I think the "property tax explains everything" talking point is going to persist a long time, because it's very convenient.
EDIT: I was wrong, and explain it as a comment below.
(1) California property tax stays local, and is not pooled,
(2) However, due to Prop 13, property taxes are very small in California, and just over half of total funding for school districts comes from the state,
(3) Distribution of funding (either just the state funds or total funding) is not equal per-student across districts, with per student expenditures ranging widely across districts.
https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2012/tax/property-tax-primer-1129...
So yeah, it’s probably true that the US spends more per pupil because we have a higher GDP per capita, but it’s not clear that we should expect to get a lot more out of it.
Depends which state.
It's not funding (though that is A problem).
It's not attracting qualified, talented teachers (though that is A problem).
The main problem is parents and society. Individualism means parents know better than the schools, and teach their kids that attitude as well. This cuts across class, ethnicity, and any other demographic marker you can think of.
Am I right? I don't know, but I think I am.
Do any tech companies have programs to hire out of historically disadvantaged regions of the US?
This is in addition to what the other commenter said. I'm not very well informed about how other states fund their schools, but even if this blanket generalization is true in some places, there's enough evidence out there that funding isn't the only or maybe even the main problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...
The EU as a whole for example is around 4.7% https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
"Poor students" have the most support in the country: https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2024/are-poor-urban-districts-... Baltimore public schools get $30k per student. Carmel, IN public schools spend $10k per student.
You should look into heritability. There is no longitudinal impact on adult outcomes as a result of parenting/schooling practices.
It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school district to a richer school district, and they have children under 13, then those children are significantly more successful than children whose families remain in the poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be a slight negative effect.
There are other studies showing similar effedcts.
Summary: It's not genetics.
No one said its genetics. They're saying its not only funding.
If they didn’t mean genetic, then they really screwed up in their use of language.
i wish these analyses were pre-registered, but i recognize that is difficult to do for very long timespan studies like this
This is intentional because then DEI is intended to be a self-help religion for the corporate class designed to deflect the externalities that they produce, and not about actual material conditions. And that's at its best. At its worst, DEI is insulting and infantilizing to "marginalized communities."
It’s an incredibly natural thing for people to hire people like themselves, or people they meet their image of what a top notch software dev looks like. It requires active effort to counteract this. One can definitely argue about the efficacy of DEI approaches, but I disagree that JUST increasing the strength of applicants will address the issue.
There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!
Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.
You get similar complaints there.
What if it is actually fine for Asians to be under-represented in the NBA, and over-represented in software engineering?
https://interviewing.io/blog/voice-modulation-gender-technic...
UFC (and all other fighting sports) segment based on weight class. Plenty of flyweight fighters look scrawny when wearing a shirt. Also some of the most intense Muay Thai fighters I've ever sparred are skinny Thai guys from farming villages in Isaan who showed hallmarks of malnutrition (stunted height and extremely thin physique compared to Isaan Thai who grew up in BKK or even towns like Khon Kaen).
And this brings up a good point - you need to make an effort to build a pipeline from an fairness standpoint.
Not everyone has to be a SWE, but everyone should get an equal chance to try and become one. Plenty of kids end up in crap schools with few resources to succeed in a STEM major, or are limited by social or cultural norms from actually trying to major in STEM.
This goes both ways - women and African Americans are underrepresented in CS. No way around that. It should be solved. Same way men are underrepresented in teaching and nursing, and it should be solved as well.
This whole conversation around DEI became unneccesarily heated due to mutual political ambitions.
At the end of the day, everyone should have a fair chance at trying an industry or field, and because the world isn't a fair playing field, it doesn't hurt to try and build an ecosystem by incentivizing a pipeline.
I work in a wood shop with a bunch of men. It's a physical job, but there's no reason a woman couldn't do it, but guess how many women apply?
The lack of women in our shop is not because of discrimination, but if we had to get 50% representation with women without a passion for woodworking, the product would suffer, or those women might not enjoy it, or...
Disproportion does not always indicate discrimination.
I agree.
> I work in a wood shop with a bunch of men. It's a physical job, but there's no reason a woman couldn't do it, but guess how many women apply
Because it's a chicken and egg situation - if it's all guys you aren't necessarily sure whether or not it's because no women applied or because the shop purposely tried to make it difficult for women to join.
Even making a token statement that "hey, we aren't dicks - we'll accept anyone and everyone who has skills and is motivated" can at least signal to potentially interested women applicants that the shop is friendly.
And this is what plenty of DEI programs are in states like California that have strict laws and regulations against using race or gender based quotas. Plenty of organziations used a de facto quota system (eg. UNC) or treated DEI as struggle sesssions, but plenty of organizations tried to concentrate on the Equity part.
The whole naming of this as "DEI" was itself problematic. Just use simple English - it's about Equal Opportunity or Free Choice.
We're small, I know the owner. Women have worked there before. Somehow the default assumption is prejudice, where I think we should default to assuming good faith.
There may be social pressure that keeps women from wanting to be woodworkers, but that's not truly the responsibility of a small business is it?
Anyway, I don't think we're disagreeing here. Focusing on immutable traits over skill or interest is wrong, but I think people are to quick to see prejudice where there's is none
The scholarship is for students who would choose a certain program/specialization relevant for our industry and includes a paid summer internship at our company after their 2nd or 3rd year of study. Having mentored some of these students when they were interns (capable and bright students with promising futures), they said that this scholarship helped them choose this career path whereas otherwise they may have just tried to get into tech like many others at that university.
Note this was not in the USA but in New Zealand where we have a different colonial history we are reckoning with. The scholarship targeted women, Maori (our indigenous culture), and Pacific Islanders (a large ethnic minority in NZ). This less about meeting any ratios or quotas (we didn't have those), but rather we felt a distinct lack of e.g. Maori voices in our company and the industry which is a problem when you are frequently interacting with Maori stakeholders and landowners in energy project development (and indigenous relations and historical landonwership plays a large role in our consenting & planning process).
I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided. It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those careers, that's perfectly fine.
And I haven’t been trying exceptionally hard to avoid it.
If such jibes had happened those people would not have a job, point blank.
Given the average seniority for a full stack engineer is 10 years, I should have encountered at least one, or worked with someone who had been in such an environment.
I think chud behaviour is an excuse, because it’s not tolerated for at least my lifetime.
That sort of chud behavior is very much tolerated in many places: https://www.romerolaw.com/blog/2021/11/complaint-alleges-ram...
I don’t know a single engineer who doesn’t get imposter syndrome.
As a man, I have been openly derided for doing something stupid, if I were a woman I might internalise that as if it was sexism- so how do you deal with that? When people are so convinced that if anything critical could be based on gender?
At some point you're treating people like children.
Again I’ll say it: every single educational institution and workplace I have ever been in has intentionally mentioned that anything that could be perceived as misogyny or sexual harassment have a zero tolerance policy.
Am I really the outlier? I’ve worked so many places and across so many countries and industries…
Just because they say that doesn't mean they'll do that. People lie, they systematically sexually harass for years, and only if its made public will they actually do anything about it.
https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/uber-pay-44-million-resolve-ee...
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/activision-blizzard-gender-...
I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
On the other hand, I have often, often worked on teams that were (except for me) all men, but by and large they were men who had mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that they loved, and who therefore had no trouble relating to me with respect and affection. While it is true that some men treat women specifically badly, and that some men treat people generally badly, it is not true that men in general treat women badly. Quite the opposite.
It does take a moment, as a woman, to find your feet socially in an all male space. But does it not always take a moment to find your feet in any new space? I have generally found that what makes it go smoothly is the fact that we are all hackers. If anything, it is all the walking on eggshells about sexism that makes social integration awkward at first. People are trying to figure out how they are "supposed" to behave around me, worried that I will be aggressive socially and legally. When we focus on the work we do together and the love we have in common for the field, we become friends naturally and get along well.
I myself think all the hand-wringing over demographics has been a waste of time at best and counterproductive at worst. I think it makes more sense to focus on developing virtue, civility, and good leadership among the people who find themselves here.
In my teens my mom tried to reenter the workforce and got an office job, and she absolutely hated working with other women because of this. She wanted to work with men because in her experience, women were so much worse.
For a number of years I had the sense that I might be going crazy, because it seemed that throughout my whole working life I'd encountered good and bad people of both sexes, but never witnessed the kind of systematic targeting of women that both mainstream and alternative media sources told me was rife. How could it be that I couldn't see what was apparently right under my nose? So it's reassuring to know that there are also women who have had a similar experience.
FWIW, I do think most men with wives and/or daughters are generally thoughtful coworkers, but I'm not sure that's a majority in most tech workplaces, especially the ones that skew young. Thinking back to my own experience, I think, I was blind to a lot of the things I'm speaking about (or perhaps even resistant to the idea of calling it out) until I had a long-term partner.
Sure. One of the women I dated detailed a story about how a man at a conference she attended suggested it'd be more fun if she was roofies. To her face, in front of her co-workers (many of them women). She was in a majority female industry (healthcare).
Why do we just assume that men stop doing cringe stuff just because women are around?
I am passing along these anecdotes because they're more easy to empathize with than some of the more general arguments of why it can be hard to succeed in tech as a woman (but they really only tell part of the story). Some of my other anecdotes might also sound closer to things you've seen or heard at the work place, or perhaps it's easier to see how some of these things might have happened without you being aware of them, given their (relative) infrequency and the contexts in which they arise. All of them happened without an HR incident (like, really, should a guy who wrote a system called "naggy-wife" get in trouble? a choice was made like 20 years ago... and maybe the guy doesn't even work there anymore). But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up and contribute to the relatively common feeling among female engineers that they "don't belong".
Not really, TBH. I especially can't see why a woman experiencing these (to my mind, rather mild) interactions would think that things would be better in some other career path.
Let's say I, a man, went to work in a traditionally female-dominated field like nursing, and found that the other nurses there had named their cafeteria dishwasher "Hubby" as a joke because it took forever to work.
Would I, a grown man, consider changing my career because of this? No, I wouldn't.
OTOH, if the other nurses seemed to view me with disrespect or suspicion and I found I wasn't able to shift that perception through my actions, then I'd reconsider.
Actually, this issue is in nursing. If you talk to male nurse organizations they do actually have issues of e.g. constantly being saddled with the heaviest patients or most physical labor because they're assumed to be strong, not having sexual harassment taken seriously from patients, and to be expected to take one for the team in handling the patients that were sexually inappropriate with female nurses. It does grate over time!
Tech workers are one of the least sexist groups out of any. If you think techies are sexist, you’d never last a day in medicine, law, or finance. Yet, women sign up for those in far higher percentages. Genuinely, it is actually hard to find a more left/progressive leaning professional field. It is not sexism that is the one thing keeping women out of tech. It is that it’s not an attractive or high status field to women. The people working in it are not seen as socially competent, it is highly outsourced, and depending on role has relatively little socializing. It’s also insanely competitive and you have to fight to keep your job from an army of H1B workers invading the country due to CEOs looking for slave labor. There are so many reasons to not be in tech and sexism should be one of the lowest reasons out there.
I don’t know any women complaining about sexism in comparison to the level of “holy fuck, when will I ever get a break?” It is an unrelenting field that constantly has you worried you’ll lose your job next month. On top of requiring you study at least 500 leetcode problems before you do any interviews. Go figure, most women don’t enjoy that.
She was placed in a group overseen by another consultant. He was from the same firm. In fact he was a principle in the firm.
He immediately started undermining her. He gave her advice that she followed, and then he criticized her for following his advice. He was extremely helpful to women employees from the client, but a complete dick to her. There were many other things he did. She documented what was happening, and complained to the skip-level but he denied it, and they didn't believe her. It looked like she was going to be out.
Then there was a reorganization and several other women from the same consulting company were moved onto her team. They had much more history with the company. They were all high performers. He started doing the same shit to them. When they started reporting the same treatments and complaints management finally listened, and recalled him to the central office.
The story has a great ending though. Once back in the main office, said horrible man then made a wonderful mistake. He started sexually harassing the new corporate council. That ended very badly for him.
So, yeah, sexual harassment happens.
This sounds like what happens to other males too? I'm not sure if that's related to sexual harassment though.