I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1].
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.
Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. These programs were never a victory for the principles or the people, they were marketing.
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.
I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread belief?
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-...
America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium.
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.
Your comment about white people that didn't have anyone to do with slavery doesn't seem entirely correct. I'm one of those people (great grandparents were German or Scottish immigrants). But my mom's house is in a neighborhood where black people were explicitly prohibited from buying houses (it was on the deed at the time). And, loans from the government were red lined. Isn't that government collusion that benefitted only me and harmed black people? It didn't help Latinos or Japanese immigrants in the twenties. I'm not sure if that counts as having nothing to do with slavery. That impact seems directly correlated to slavery, although the dragnet could have impacted recent African immigrants in the 1920s.
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?
Have you spent time in other countries?
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.
> America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery
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.
This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing. We are all harmed when we are amongst racist assholes refusing to coexist with others based on skin color.
> My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow.
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's ideals were not colorblindness. He explicitly supported race-specific reparations and policies that focused on repairing specific racial oppression and suffering.
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.
MLK was a minister (because Baptists don't have priesthood), Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He was profoundly Christian.
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.
But that line is what people agree with, not the commie stuff.
Yep, that's exactly why it became the thing he's known for.
what is the commie stuff?
Dunno but I wonder if Jesus would be considered a commie if he appeared incognito in 1950s America.
MLK was a communist who was killed for his views by the US Government.
He was not the harmony flowers and rainbows he was white washed into.
Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
>> 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.
This only ever happens when protesting those with fairly little power, very lower middle management, and those in actual power don't care.
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.
It won’t happen overnight. It’s not like violence beings best results that fast. What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ? Or the Islamic state? Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
Although the women’s suffrage movement in the United States did have some violence in the extremes, proposal, advocacy, and ratification of the Nineteenth amendment to the US Cobstitution (which granted women the right to vote in the US) was not driven by violence in anything but the most remote margins.
It passed through moral persuasion and nonviolent activism.
Your statement is factually incorrect. There are dozens of other examples.
Mind you, feminists had a woman, often several, in every household.
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.
King was a Christian, he considered communism atheistic.
Equity instead of equality. Sounded awful close to promoting equal outcomes over equal opportunity. I dont trust people who want to engineer society from the top down to be the result they think is fair and just.
This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
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.
> This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
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".
I think the voters already informed her about that. The campaign was shut down a few months ago.
I was surprised when you said "just ran a campaign largely predicated" because that wasn't how I saw her campaign. And this tweet is from 2020, not 2024, so it doesn't really prove your point. Trump and his MAGA friends might have framed it that way, but I need better evidence to believe what you are asserting. It might be that this proves you didn't pay attention to what she was saying and paid attention to what others said about her?
Why is make America great again so offensive? For African-Americans, the wealthiest they ever were was during the reconstruction era in the 1870s. That was because after the war, there was a shortage of skilled laborers and so they were in great demand. So this, Misnomer that make America great again is racist makes no sense. Good people don’t teach you to hate other people, remember that. You can’t do the same thing evil people do without becoming the thing that you hate. Morality is not relative. Morality is not Machiavellian
Without context nothing is offensive.
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.
Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Measure stuff you have an opportunity to see without human bias or algorithms that are easily gamed? Measure, what is a desirable outcome?
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.
> Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary.
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.
They mostly do it by measuring the family bank accounts!
Measuring potential isn’t particularly difficult. Everyone from the NFL to the US military does an adequate job of it.
Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s literally good enough for government work.
Most tests for potential are easily gamed by people who are taught how to pass the test, or simply avoided by people whose wealth and social status allows them to avoid the test.
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
> This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
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.
> That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place
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.
It’s the government’s job to make the playing field equal, it’s not the government’s job to make sure everybody ties. The fact that you don’t recognize that they swap the word equality for equity means that you’re missing something.. It wasn’t by accident.
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.
The challenge is that only some "historical inequalities" reduce to skin color, so it becomes easy to start favoring certain "historical inequalities" over others because of their political salience rather than their severity, intensity, extent, impact, etc. And that can very easily start to look like a kind of racism itself.
Which more severe or intense or extensive or impactful historical inequalities are you thinking of?
You can't really measure any of them in an indisputable and quantitative way, can you? That's kind of the point!
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.
The one that gave us the very word "slave"?
To GP's point, skin colour did not seem to be the salient factor there.
>historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race
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?
Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.
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?
> Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.
It is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different in any way other than deontology.
No, it's equal outcones, or worse, turn the tables. Racist hiring aka affirmative action illustrates this.
The gaslighting from the DEI types is unrelenting.
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.
How do you measure that other than equality of outcomes?
You measure how many people with different backgrounds (measured by a variety of metrics) gain entry to the pipelines that are recognized as the most common ways to gain power, wealth and prestige in a society.
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.
Let's say you have a company in Warsaw full of lovely people who want what's best for the company. They have an opening for an infrastructure engineer and need somebody with particular skills, but are willing to interview candidates who don't have those skills but show aptitude , interest and a willingness to learn. They throw the doors open wide and interview everybody who applies. They only get white males applying for the job.
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.
Yes, you do everything except measure merit.
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.
This is the actual test to get into firefighter training in California.[1] This is just to get into training. Graduating is tougher.
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
> 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.
> If the only way to become…you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity.
This assumes that there are no group-level differences. A very popular assumption, but contrary to the evidence.
> This assumes that there are no group-level differences
There is no one reading this comment who doesn't understand you really, really wanted to say "black people are just stupider than white people"
You think I'm afraid to say what I believe? It's a fact that the average black IQ is significantly lower than the average white IQ. There is no good reason to believe that this is entirely due to environment. So, yes, black people are on average less intelligent than white people, and some nonzero portion of the difference has to be inherent. It would be an incredible coincidence if it were 100% environmental given how persistent the gap is over time and in different places.
So now...what? You've won, because I've "outed" myself as "racist"? Sorry to have to break the bad news to you, but there are very few intelligent people who still believe that there are no genetic group differences. The intelligent people who hold onto the blank-slate and group-egalitarian ideas either haven't given it enough thought or just choose beliefs that don't make them uncomfortable.
Since you are qualifying what type of societal engineers you don't trust are there ones that you do?
Hip hop artists from the 90s I thought for a while. Nowadays not sure anymore. Folk artists from any decade are usually my more trusted societal engineers, going all the way back to maybe even before Jesus.
Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Or, more specifically, because outcomes are proportional to opportunity, there is only so much that can be explained by variability in knowledge, effort, or circumstances. When the system consistently hands out bad outcomes to one group of people, it's reasonable to at least assume there is analogous bias in the opportunities that were presented to that same group.
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"
> Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity.
Only if you assume that group-level differences can’t exist.
But, group-level differences are probably caused by inequality of opportunity.
Or are you thinking they caused by genetics?
I think that the most likely explanation is that both environment and genetics are factors. In order to view inequality of outcome as proof of inequality of opportunity, you have to believe that group differences are due entirely to environmental conditions. That's a rather extreme position to take.
Of course genetics play a role - some people can get by on long term sleep of 4-5 hours a night, while most people need more. Some people have fantastic health from genetics (and then work hard to maintain it), while others are born with a slew of minor ailments that make them less productive. Not to speak of inteligence or natural talents, height etc.
Unfortunately your alternative is a society engineered from the top down to be deliberately unfair.
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life."
-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.
Note it says "all men". Not "all men and women". Big difference
It is commonly understood that 'men' in that context and in the context of the time is a reference to 'mankind' or 'the race of men' which means the human race, not males specifically.
To copy myself from another sibling comment:
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
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
That's a 50% increase.
> I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade.
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.
> According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
According to this, the groups marked black and hispanic, bachelor's degrees are 27%, but it doesn't say what subject.
So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...?
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
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
> why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
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?
> 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?
the last known direct child of an american born into slavery died only a few years ago
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
You only need to go back 3 generations in my family to find someone born a slave. And I am not even middle aged. People don’t understand that hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations, it carries over in really strange and insidious ways.
> hundreds of years of enslavement and all the ensuing trauma doesn’t just go away after a few generations
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.
> This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago
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.
> If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago,
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.
> Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
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.
Exactly. The history is filled with injustices directed by everyone at everyone if we go back generations.
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.
Older injustice still has ramifications today.
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.
I can't help but notice (believe me, I'm trying not to notice!) that this comment is getting some downvotes. I'd love it if a downvoter could let me know why they're downvoting, and how I can improve!
I can't speak personally to why peeps are downvoting, just wanted to say I appreciate the comment - you explained the position well.
> Are there injustices being perpetrated by the institutions today? Lets call them out.
Yes! welcome to black lives matter. But, that seems to have been labeled a terrorist group for some reason.
I haven't heard that but in general tactics and threats could get your labelled terrorist? You may feel you have a just cause but it doesn't mean your goal justifies your actions.
> You may feel you have a just cause but it doesn't mean your goal justifies your actions.
Only ever said by someone that’s part of the establishment.
Black Lives Matter as an organization has lost any respect from me on October 8, 2023 when they celebrated the October 7th attack killing over a thousand Israelis on their X account [0]
Please use a different example
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/10/10/blm-chicago-under-fire-for-pro...
Insofar as Europe has "forgotten" about the Nazis, you might want to check out how Israel legged into this in the early 60s, basically getting Germany to back any of their militaristic objectives in return for full diplomatic engagement with all the symbolic power that implied.
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.
>sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
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.
> 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.
I think you are intentionally misreading this. My point is that we shouldn’t hold people responsible for actions they didn’t take. Sins of the father and all that.
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.
> My point is that we shouldn’t hold people responsible for actions they didn’t take
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.
> If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago
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.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but "getting more reparations out of Germany" is a constant refrain of Polish politics regardless of what wing, faction, or party is leading it.
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.
The grandson of the 10th US president is alive and well. That president was alive when George Washington was. This is a young country.
Into institutionalised slavery. Sadly slavery still exists, is live and well, and occurs throughout the planet (even rich countries). The difference is that it is not statutory now in most places.
Slavery is at an all-time high going back thousands of years
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
The 13th amendment allows for slavery as a punishment for crimes. It does not require that everyone in prison be a slave.
Ok?
Are you actually claiming that everyone in a US prison is a slave?
The constitution allows that they be used for slave labor, and many are.
But are they slaves by virtue of being in prison?
Don't commit the crime if you can't handle it. It's a punishment.
could you say more about this or provide resources for learning more?
plenty of forms of slavery still exist, perhaps we should focus on that
I’d add to that, the developed west still has a problem with non white people and pretty much all women.
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%
That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
It depends on how this percentage was raised. If they actually increased the black and brown talent pool by 50%, that would be an unequivocal success. What I suspect actually happens is that recruiters are incentivized to improve DEI metrics, so they simply hand out more interviews to underrepresented candidates. The end result is that higher tier companies simply poach these candidates from lower tier companies.
So, more "black and brown" people (your words not mine), and less, what, White and Yellow and Red people and Purple people? = success? That sounds a bit racist to me, just saying.
Apparently Indians don’t count as Brown.
In DEI parlance, black and brown refers to African-Americans and Latinos, although, curiously they also do accept African H1B visa holders in this group, despite them typically having high education, wealth from home, etc.
> curiously they
Who is the "they" here. Whenever I see a pronoun (especially "they" it's always "they") with no referent, I ask this question.
In standard English "they" clearly refers to those that use DEI parlance.
Achieving representation closer to that of the wider population is not racist.
Which population? FB hires from everywhere in the world and sponsors visas. Having an employee base that’s 30% Chinese and 30% indian should thus be the goal.
To start with, you can sort the employee records into a visa pile and a not-visa pile.
If you have to force something, it is. And it's being forced. If we made more white play in the NBA it might seem clearer.
You are explicitly considering a man's race, that is racism.
Are you serious? Measuring something is not discrimination.
You are explicitly considering a man's race for something that is irrelevant to that consideration, in this case to answer whether to hire/admit them.
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.
The person above was just saying that having a closer balance of hires to the greater population was a good thing. They didn't talk about how companies got there. We shouldn't just assume they got there by using race while deciding whether to hire or not. Maybe they did something else, or maybe they found some existing racism in hiring decisions and removed it.
The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis. The only way to force that composition to mirror social composition is to do so explicitly and strictly on racial basis.
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.
> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis
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.
But is the goal to hire from certain schools or to hire certain races?
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.
Using quotas like that would be 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.
I agree life is seldom as simple as the examples, the small numbers are just for sake of brevity.
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.
> The only way to change employee racial composition is to hire and terminate on a racial basis.
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.
Even school integration was largely motivated by red lining and even now by white flight.
The biggest issue for changing percentages like that, is that fundamentally the actual mindset/work required to do software engineering effectively kinda sucks.
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.
But you make a strange comment here: "black and brown" employees are both completely different people.
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.
This actually makes a lot of sense to me. It would be like trying to get more white-looking people in positions, when what you really want is to integrate the Irish or the Italians into more prominent positions in your culture. We don't even think about that anymore because our definition of white has expanded to include those people. But for a while they were on the outside trying to get in while the newly freed slaves weren't even at the door yet.
But being white is really random: how is it my problem that the weather is shit in Normandy and all my ancestors are pale ? I arrive in the US, people would tell me I'm privileged somehow, when all I do is work hard and do my best to contribute to companies. And the same goes to more sunny weather-born people.
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.
Disenfranchising Indians must be the new racist trend here. Please try to have some empathy.
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)
Coolies have nothing to do with America though.
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.
How is that a US issue? It's more of an issue for the French or the British.
I was simply pointing out an Indian deserve no more advantages than a Turkish or a Portuguese, while a descendent of slave might, since his family was wronged by the initial american invaders and they contributed, sometimes via back-breaking work, to the current state of the country.
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.
You're thinking in terms of group guilt and inter generational guilt, which frankly doesn't make sense. There is no rational basis to trace ancestry of people to find who descended from slaves or slave owners. It's non sensical. In a fair hiring environment, no one deserves any special preference. If you want to help economically poor groups, the time to intervene is much earlier in their childhood by providing them better education, communities, infrastructure etc. So tipping the scales by investing more in certain communities is alright, tipping them at the job interview isn't.
I am not sure where you are getting the idea that people of Indian origin are asking for or getting any special consideration compared to Turkish or a Portuguese or any other ethnic groups.
It should not make sense, but as long as discrimination is based on skin color, you will see efforts to address it also be based on skin color.
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 agree, but I think the constant division of people across vague color lines make people counter react in unproductive ways. Like (random example) talking about Obama as a black person hides so much nuances about who he truly is (and who his ancestors are) that it gives his opponents the impression that s all he is and his defenders not much else to defend him with.
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.
Yes, it is not optimal. Like I said, I don't subscribe how its handled either.
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.
I'm in Germany and I'm also puzzled by how Americans view race. To me, black, white, etc. are just phenotypes, no more important than e.g. being blonde (of course, I realise that some people discriminate based on skin colour). The idea that these skin-colour labels constitute separate "identities" is a bit weird to me.
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.
Brevity informs diction.
Your comment is too brief for me to figure out what you mean by it.
There are more brown people than Indians… Usually these initiatives push for underrepresented brown people, ie Hispanic/Latino Americans.
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.
This is an interesting response that points out ambiguity in it all. Depending on what you're reading / what statistic is being derived, often times you see Hispanic / Latino included as white and not brown.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Ask anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union about that one. The vast majority of people could see through the propaganda - even supposed party loyalists - but they understood the consequences of failing to toe the line. There wasn't a sudden moment of collective enlightenment that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, just a gradual breaking of a taboo. Imposition of an ideology through coercion is remarkably durable, right until it isn't.
And if you were in a large corporate environment, you could see through the bullshit as well. It is just a CLM (career limiting move) to call it out, so everyone gives it lip service.
You're moving the goal posts to try and tar your opponents with the "communist" brush. The Soviet definition of "silencing dissent" was far more extreme and violent (prison, death) than what the grandparent's comment is referring to.
silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do
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.
That's almost certainly a lie...but weird things happen.
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.
> 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.
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.
Shouting people down and canceling them is never a way to persuade people your cause is just.
> ...as progressives are wont to do these days.
Progressives I know are pretty tolerant. It's the conservatives that seem obsessed with free-speech-for-me-and-not-for-thee. Xitter is the loudest example.
Both the progressives I know and the conservatives I know are pretty tolerant of dissenting speech in that they disagree with it but don't advocate for it to be silenced.
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.
The sense I get is that those on the far right are worse than those on the far left, but those on the moderate left are much worse than those on the moderate right, to the point of being nearly insufferable.
> 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.
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.
The issue here is that power not exercised is power lost, and power fundamentally comes down to either perceived or actual consequences.
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’.
Yes.
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.
Not sure what you mean by money not swinging around?
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.
If DEI was only marketing, why has the number and proportion of women in tech been increasing over that time? I'm not trying to challenge you, I'm just curious if you have any insight.
ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?
It can be marketing and somewhat effective. I'm not trying to say that it didn't accomplish anything (though others are), I'm suggesting that it wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to accomplish something real for equity. And since the motivation was external pressure, a change in external pressure immediately triggers a pivot.
Oh ok, that makes sense. I can agree with that. Given that, I worry the number of women will stagnate or decrease without it, which, imho, would be a detriment to the industry.
I wanted a wider view of the trend, and it looks to me like after the covid dip the US is still not back at the 2000s level of participation.
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 ?
There’s no reason to believe it’s primarily due to the DEI programs until it gets worse again with them gone. That’s a basic ABA flow for testing causation.
Things improve on their own over time too.
This is true. I know the change wasn't just DEI, but I thought it might have been the biggest push. And yeah, after it's gone we will see how much it helped (or not), or other influences will muddy the data and we'll never really know (unless it's a really big trend). shrug
I've always found these loud DEI programs incredibly uncanny - every career website loudly how important diversity and inclusiveness is for them, but in flowery language, as implying they'd actually discriminate against non-diverse hires would be illegal in most places. Which begs the question of the point of these programs, considering of why they were needed this outwards messaging against discrimination, considering it was illegal in the first place.
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.
DEI was a ZIRP phenomenon, now you get unrestricted H1B (slave labor). Either way the average American tech worker is screwed.
> ...was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant.
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.
I remember watching some event around CHAD time, where white social justice warriors on stage where making lots of social justice outrage statements, on behalf of Native Americans, in front on this native America elder. Only to have him take the microphone after them, and he was having none of it, he went up to the mic and completely denigrated them. Then it dawned on me, that these white people where literally ruining his cause by trying to take it over. And there's long history of white people doing this, where they subvert and neuter a movement and insert themselves as leaders, but only temper the cause. The end result is a kind of moderation, where no effective change happens because of it. I guess I read a similar sentiment once, where Anarchists where claiming that it was them that changed course of human history, repeatedly, by throwing the wrench in the wheels of society, to cause the change. From that point of view, it would get annoying if there was someone taking the wrench out before the fall.
This is true, and unfortunately you can't say this to any colleagues at any of these companies without jeopardizing your future. Even still as the DEI programs are dying, the DEI social norms are still strong in most corporations
>so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
I think your analysis is missing some nuance.
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.
The methods chosen to push this and other recent changes assumed that those advocating change would stay in power, if not in government at least in the culture. They assumed that they could keep up the pressure to act in a particular way in spite of the fact that those so pressured didn't really believe in any of it. That was a critical and fatal flaw. You can't plan change on the assumption that you'll be able to apply pressure indefinitely.
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.
There's too much history arguing against what you're suggesting here.
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.
There hasn’t been a decade in the past 130 years of their existence that Progressives haven’t advocated for systemic racism.
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.
This is pretty spot-on. Whether they’re aware of it or not, most white liberals are motivated not by a desire to lift nonwhites up but rather by a desire to push “white trash” down.
A lot of people say DEI programs were purely performative and just for political points. But these policies did change the corporate landscape and affect hiring decisions.
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...
> Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
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 want to make too many assumptions here because it's a bit of a minefield, but... perhaps there's an entirely selfish and rational explanation for DEI hiring programs in a tight labor market? If you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.
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.
> you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.
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.
I suspect the conditions were the opposite at the time: competition for good non-white employees was fierce after BLM, making them harder to find. If I'm understanding the Bloomberg numbers correctly, a random non-white person would have 47x better odds of being hired than a white person at the S&P 100 companies.
Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
I had an interesting experience asking a startup I worked at why they had no female engineers. The answer was they couldn't afford them. They were in such demand that they commanded a significant premium over male engineers at the same level.
This is real. Female engineers are overrepresented in big tech something like 3-4x the graduation rate. There just aren't any left over for startups that can't afford FAANG rates.
That's absolute nonsense. We know it's almost completely a supply problem not a demand one.
And price is determined by both supply and demand.
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?
It can be both.
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.
None of that is combatting sexism, but reality.
Sexism is '(sex) Can't do x'. That's combated by successful examples being common.
Bias of applicants is solved by making the job worth for all to do, not just from the positives but by removing the negatives.
Before 2020, it was around 7-10x, so it doesn’t surprise me it went up after.
this is an incredibly misleading statistic skewed by the fact that almost all retiring corporate workers are white so lots of white jobs were “lost”
We are already in the backlash.
When the playing field is tilted you have to put a thumb on the other side to balance it out. This might annoy the ones who were tilting it in the first place.
How are the people without the jobs doing the tilting?
They aren't, but it's unfair from them to benefit from the tilt.
Why is skin colour or ethnicity when it comes to employment even relevent?
Because one of them is systemically suppressing the others. The point of DEI is (or at least should be) to counteract systemic bias; how can you do that without looking at the characteristics that are the determining factor of that bias?
tbf this should all start at the education level so that black/hispanic/indigenous girls/gays/whatevers aren't joining CS classes, looking around and thinking they don't belong there, but until that's reality all we can do is tackle it where it impacts people the most - hiring.
> tbf this should all start at the education level so that black/hispanic/indigenous girls/gays/whatevers aren't joining CS classes, looking around and thinking they don't belong there
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.
> counteract systemic bias
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.
> Because one of them is systemically suppressing the others.
Prove it.
No matter what people think the right thing to do is, making any hiring decision on the basis of a protected group is illegal in the US, no matter who is on what side of the equation.
People aren't making hiring decisions based on protected classes. Rather, they're looking for qualified candidates in new areas.
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".
> People aren't making hiring decisions based on protected classes. Rather, they're looking for qualified candidates in new areas.
But but, won't someone think of the poor white males?
They actually have been recently; Especially in academia where after racial-based Affirmative Action was ruled unconstitutional, wealth-based AA has been helping economically disadvantaged individuals—even including white men.
https://journalistsresource.org/education/race-neutral-alter...
This isn't pressing your thumb. This is throwing away half the scale
Looking at that article, it looks like for "Professional" degrees, it was about 25% white and 40% Asian. The "White 6%" figure came from a decrease in white workers in low-skilled roles and a massive increase in Hispanic people in those same roles.
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.
If only 25% of people hired for roles requiring professional degrees were white, that's still a remarkable number, given 2/3rds of people receiving professional degrees in 2021 where white, without even considering the total population of professional degree holders
The most imbalanced group in hiring were Asians, representing around 5% of the population but around 40% of the chart in that article. From my anecdotal experience with DEI programs, they generally don't target or encourage hiring Asians over black/Hispanic people. If we are purely talking about discrimination against white people, it's much more likely that an Indian or Chinese person is replacing a white person, not a "DEI hire" black person.
no it’s because the study is measuring net changes and most retiring professional degree workers are white
but Whites with a professional degree are much more likely to already be employed, or be able to retire (creating opening for new hires)
That data cannot support the conclusion drawn. You don't know what the turnover rate was.
Yes this is a wildly misrepresented statistic that has nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with demographic shifts in the U.S. population (specifically, that the "non Hispanic white" segment of the U.S. population is shrinking).
Thats true, and enhanced in places that reward that characteristic. Hispanic origin is tied to lineage, nationality, or country of birth for an individual or ancestors.
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?
affirmative action for hispanic people has always been uniquely absurd and exploited by effectively white europeans for as long as it has existed. my college counselor told me to mark "hispanic" on my college applications because I'm of Iberian descent, which I refused to do - but I know of multiple others who did and went to Harvard/MIT.
From my understanding that analysis is complete junk. From the Daily Wire of all people:
> 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...
But most of those new hires were the lowest level employees -- service workers, etc.
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.)
So it was racist?
Depends what the applicant pool looked like, but 94% seems almost certain to be an overcorrection.
The way it’s calculated is just based on the net change, so it doesn’t really match overall hiring practices. At the end of it all high status jobs were still disproportionately held by White people and Asian people.
What does that matter when all your newcomers are not white? eventually you'll end up with the polar opposite. You should hire based on skill not race or any other thing you have no control over.
Or it will reach a new stable equilibrium based on modern demographics, as things that add to 100% tend to do.
Right but part of that is asking why your workforce isn’t representative of the available workers. If you’re disproportionately hiring some types of people you probably are hiring on race and not skill.
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.
> why your workforce isn’t representative of the available workers.
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.
This point is very important particularly when it comes to gender disparities.
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.
Sorry do you actually think that 94% of new software engineering hires at fortune 500 companies during 2021 were black? It's statistical nonsense.
I dont think the people of color that got their foot in the door in tech would agree with you.
I would not be surprised while the OP were sending applications to DEI programmes, most of them went to Asians. Which I assume this still fits the PoC PoV of DEI.
In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE role. I have worked with literally hundreds of software engineers in my life.
As a black software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with another black software engineer.
As a white software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I only ever worked with one black software engineer. He was Nigerian. I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture; usually this was implicit racism (I only recall ever hearing one overtly racist remark against black people). I also worked with very few Hispanic people. But I worked with lots of Indian and Chinese people, plus Arabs, Pakistanis, etc.
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.
As a person who has been black elsewhere and black in America, the biggest advantage of being foreign born black person is having grown up in an environment where black excellence is not exceptional, it just expected.
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.
That rings true to me. I couldn't see it until I'd moved to Argentina for a few years, which is also very racist but in a way sufficiently different that I could see the absurdity of the US system of racism from the outside. Recognizing my own blindness to my own subconscious racism makes me totally disregard the opinions of people who have lived in the US all their lives on this matter, dangerous as that is.
> I believe that this is because the US has a profoundly racist culture
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.
If you've ever been Indian or Chinese in the US, you know the US is racist against you, just not in a way that excludes you from programming work. And, yeah, there's quite a bit of Indian-American senior leadership in Silicon Valley.
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.
>I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.
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.
> You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese?
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 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.
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?
> Weird, I thought we are talking about American culture, not just SV?
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.
I agree that SV (the actual physical location) and the US software industry are less racist than most of the rest of the US. But they're still way more racist than, say, Porto Alegre or Caracas, which are no egalitarian utopias either. And the reason for this is, in fact, the broader culture of the US. (Not “American culture” because that would affect Brazil and Venezuela just as much as the US.)
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.
I had a chance to see Amazon Hr's organizational dashboard which listed, among other things, the racial breakdown for each VP in the company. BLACK_NA (which I figured means american-born black employees?) in engineering organizations were generally at about 1%. I knew of one black American engineer in my org of about ~150.
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.
Did the software suffer? Did you suffer?
Hmm, what's missing from this list?
But this discussion is about it being a problem with hiring?
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...
Just replying to the above comment that seems to suggest that all these DEI jobs are being taken over by "black or Hispanic" people.
Northrop Grumman had a lot of folks from Crenshaw/Hawthorne/Carson when I was there, due to a partnership program with the local Cal State (Long Beach). All of the security staff was from that area too. Good folks, would 100% work with them again.
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
I've worked directly (that is, either on the same team or with an immediately neighboring team) with two black engineers.
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.
I'm software, but towards the hardware side of things, for decades, in silicon valley and elsewhere. I've worked with (as in, in the whole org) exactly zero software/firmware, and only one black hardware engineer (born and raised in Nigeria). I've interviewed a couple hundred people at this point, with only one being black.
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".
While I can think of at least five people I have worked with who were SDEs and black (two from Africa, three from I-don't-know-where-but-I-presume-American-born).
Wow
I recommend reading the WaPo article that goes along with it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/28/minoritie...
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.
In no way it is at all believable that 94% of all fortune 500 hiring during 2021 went to minorities. This is statistical mumbo-jumbo. Do you even work at a company like this? This statistic has to be misrepresentative of the conclusion you are suggesting because it is easily debunked by standing at the entrance to any midtown manhattan building during the morning rush hour.
I think the flaw works like this:
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.
Are you presenting this as a positive?
So this is an example of what not to do.
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.
1) it sounds crazy because it's actual statistical malpractice. See the many other comments explaining how it's bullshit
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.
I can only speak from personal experience, but since about 4 years ago, every candidate I’ve been asked to interview for a software engineering position has been Black, Hispanic, South Asian or East Asian. Not a single white American.
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…
That has not been my experience working for a big US tech company.
I also work for a big US tech company. If it’s not standard practice, I’m happy to hear it.
If you don't take them can you please forward me their resumes? It's extremely hard for me to find a candidate who isn't a 20s-30s white male named Chad.
My understanding is there’s a lot of outreach at HBCUs, so you may try that. Also H-1Bs.
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.
This is saying those businesses all used DEI for show, and suggests their efforts were half-hearted, if I read correctly.
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.
An alternate take: there are good DEI programs and poor ones. The poor ones fail because the planners dont really know what they are trying to do, but leadership thinks they ought to have one, and so they metric-ize it. And since (again, no clarity of thought) hard numbers in areas like hiring sail perilously close to large legal rocks, they whiff on the metrics and end up measuring something like "engagement". And, concomitantly, deliver a lot of low value chatter that provides ample ammunition to opponents of any kind of DEI programs, even the good ones.
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.
The particular issues around medicine and cars were more due to regulatory and liability issues than bad management culture or intentional discrimination. Pharmaceutical companies often didn't include women as subjects in clinical trials over fears that if one got pregnant and then had a baby with serious birth defects because of the drug that would be ethically problematic and potentially lead to huge monetary damages in a civil trial. The FDA has since changed their rules to require broader participation in clinical trials.
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-...
> 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.
I think I would still blame the management of NHTSA for setting that standard.
That's what I've seen in the metrics. DEI hiring has been an enormous failure. A lot of the concern in non-exclusively-left-leaning online spaces (including this one) about DEI hiring was and is way overblown given how drastically unsuccessful they are in practice. The default like is that "it's bad, but getting better" by showing difference year to year in sectors where the numbers look good, or even just reporting on noise.
To underscore your point, I've met 5 black engineers in 13 years as a software developer. To put this in perspective, my high school was 50% black, and my college was 30% black. Somehow I got where I am, but almost none of my classmates were able to do the same. I don't know what the solution is.
Why is a solution needed? Where is the problem?
I hire developers. They are all white because theres no black people around here. It isnt a problem.
I worked at Apple. In our org of 1000 people there were/are zero black leaders/senior managers
It’s all Indians and Chinese
But we'll call that "diversity" because they're not white.
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.
None of the companies I worked for considered Asian tech workers "diverse". One actually carved out a separate category for Asian males: ND. Negative Diversity.
I'm not doubting your companies' policies, but just throwing my data point in there too.
Where I was at there surely were internal "Asian" community groups with a budget and so on, for one. Don't think proposing a "White" or even "American" or "European" one would've gone over especially well.
Personally I feel if you want to make an impact, you need to provide resources early on when people are growing up and in school.
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.
It's why day care, head start, school lunch and the like are super important.
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.
None of this matters if the children grow up in a single-parent household. Keeping a two parent household has an outsized influence on the children's development and needs to be a cultural shift in our society.
"single parent households" are precisely why these levers are important: among other things, they help reduce the disadvantages some kids have due to being raised by an impoverished single parent, and gives those kids a leg up in a way which will foster more stable home life and less likelihood of themselves becoming single parents.
Not only that, but more resources and more stability help foster successful relationships. If you want more two-parent households, make it a lot easier to have and care for a child.
It can absolutely matter, and in fact it is all the more important in a single-parent household.
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.
Overlooked point but this is very very important. It's hard to understate the importance of good examples and role models while growing up. We are animals which learn essentially by imitation while growing up. We internalise what we see both consciously and subconsciously. It has a massive impact. And in places where good role models are scarce this self-perpetuates.
Not discounting the material/economic conditions, obviously.
> who owned the land where the campus was built
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?
Has anyone asked why so many companies seem to care so much about the appearance of DEI? And all at the same time? I know there’s cultural shifts towards that sort of thing, probably to fill the void left by religion, but does that explain why the world’s largest private equity firms push them so hard? Seems like something everyone just accepts without question, even though it’s completely out of character for people and entities who only exist to increase their own bottom line (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, it’s just so out of character to the point you’d think it would raise suspicion).
Could it be caused by ESG investments?
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.
I'm surprised I don't come across this perspective more often. ESG funds reached 15% of the total global securities market in assets under management (although much of this was merely a reclassification of existing investments). It seems very reasonable to conclude that ESG funds/scorings became the primary market incentive driving the corporate DEI initiatives we've seen rolled out this past decade.
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
Yes, this is asked a lot, and I've always assumed it was legal pressure. If a company doesn't have enough of X demographic, they can be sued for discrimination, while at the same time it has been illegal to hire based on race. This time the legal pressure in the opposite direction is more obvious.
It's marketing, they judge that they will gain more by the good will earned than it costs to hire those "DEI experts". Now that the reaction is in full swing across many territories they start to cut back (see tfa).
It's all very exhausting.
Companies care about attracting all segments of society because if they can expand their applicant pool they will pay less for labor. If I am the only person smart enough to recruit qualified graduates from HBCUs then I get to be more selective in hiring and I also get to offer less wages but still fill the position.
Companies also want to be in the middle of the pack when it comes to sociocultural norms. There is safety in numbers. When everyone was adopting DEI initiatives, it was the safest for you to do it too. Now that everyone is abandoning DEI initiatives, it's also the safest to abandon it. There is no upside in being the fastest when it comes to bucking society's norms.
Crowning yourself as an expert in a politically contentious field is very lucrative if you can make it stick.
DEI programs are simultaneously for PR and morale. You don't want to be "that company that doesn't even have a DEI program". But also you don't want your employees being pissed off that you don't have a DEI program, because they could leave, or complain and decrease morale, which could become a PR nightmare.
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.
Is this because truly doing race-based hiring has been illegal for a long time? I've noticed they'll target certain demographics for interviews and other opportunities, but identity can't be a factor in the interview itself. It's a fine line.
They will target certain demographics in ways that their lawyers can argue are legal such as giving more interviews to Grace Hopper attendees or schools with favorable demographics [1]. This is a great way to poach minorities from different companies without moving bringing any minorities to tech in any significant capacity. This is probably why men are increasingly going to Grace Hopper [2].
[1] https://blog.duolingo.com/how-duolingo-achieved-a-5050-gende...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1203845886/women-tech-confere...
maybe race-based hiring has been illegal and you might be able to win a civil case, but the DOJ certainly wasn't going after companies for not hiring enough white people or men.
Definitely. I think they just had to make sure not to decline a candidate for that reason explicitly. But it trickled down, e.g. interviewers were told not to ask anything remotely related to the candidate's identity and especially not to write it down, even gendered pronouns.
In Australia, that kind of "acknowledgement of country" is extremely common at the start of all kinds of speeches in different contexts. Slightly shorter, and fixed structure, but very similar content.
It's just part of the social fabric now, though not without its detractors.
Jeez, the most I ever got was called aside by the VP of Engineering on my last day to give him my opinion of their Diversity program ("since you're leaving, I figured you could be brutally honest with me"). Loved him for that, BTW :-)
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.
> 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?"
One of my theories about DEI programs is: the people running the programs see their only failure mode as "we fail to improve our metric", but the much more dangerous failure mode is "current employees see our program as a joke that creates no value and hires unqualified people".
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?"
Your story reminds me of my friend, also Black, went to engineering college with an overwhelmingly white population (me included). He was in more than half of the pamphlets pitching the school they give out to prospective students. It was so blatant.
I’ve noticed most academic places I’ve worked perpetually use photos of the same 1-2 black people that ever worked there in marketing materials. Including people that left or were pushed out years ago due to racism and unfair treatment. We have constant trainings and workshops on diversity and inclusion (taught exclusively by perpetually angry and abrasive middle aged white people), but everyone ignores me when I point out how specific aspects of the hiring process and work culture systematically exclude people from diverse backgrounds. In truth, at our supposedly “woke” and “DEI hire” academic institution, a black candidate still needs to be much much better than a white candidate to have any chance… and once they are here they will not feel welcome or included.
Yes, effecting actual change is hard, pulling employees into a meeting room for 45mins to show them some buzzword filled slides is much easier.
Green washing, security theatre, lip service, etc…
This is an old phenomenon that keeps reoccurring in many forms.
> https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4
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...
> Like what makes one an expert?
Your skin colour of course.
Thanks for sharing your experience
Since you seem relatively open minded and objective about it let me ask you this:
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).
Yes and the fun part is a lot of people see this "eager yet resistant" as a damnification of diversity initiatives instead of the calcification of current systemic problems.
Many DEI programs are hit hard by reality: there are only so many people of race X, gender Y or whatever metric Z interested and qualified for a job. The more difficult the job, the less diversity of candidates you have.
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.
Still bettsr than doing fascism with ethnic white nationLism.
Its not like jettisoning systemic racism would happen faster than a generation.
Yawn. Focus on being a great dev and not what your skin color is. I couldn’t care less where your ancestors were from or whether you have a penis or a vagina. If the code is good, let’s merge it. If it sucks, delete it.
> ... who owned the land ...
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".
> The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership"
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.
Thanks for this bit of sanity. Arguing that Native Americans didn't have a concept of land ownership, while still having the concept "I'm going to murder you and your compatriots so that I can occupy the land where you live.", seems a bit like splitting hairs.
It’s not splitting hairs. There’s a recognizable difference between a tribe collectively defending exclusive access to certain land, and the concept of transferable, heritable private land interest.
Yes and no.
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.
We even form corporations to try to deed land as a group. That's the entire purpose of an HOA -- to confer private ownership of community-owned land and equipment among the members of the community as their private land changes hands.
HOAs do not confer private ownership of land among members of a group.
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).
I'm pretty sure all of the common areas in HOAs that I used to live in were equally owned by all members.
Fine, but recall what started this discussion, this issue of land acknowledgements (which I agree are absolute peak stupidity which literally managed to piss off everyone on all sides - the right thought it was useless virtue signalling, and lots of actual indigenous people pretty much agreed, considering it a vacuous gesture). For all intents and purposes, native tribes owned that land before settlers kicked them off and said you couldn't live there anymore.
> transferable, heritable private
None of this is guaranteed by 'ownership'.
> seems a bit like splitting hairs.
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.
I don't think that's accurate. The historic colonizers fully understood that native Americans had a sense of property, which is why even the most blatant land grabs were almost always justified by a forced sale or treaty. I've only ever heard the idea that natives didn't own land from people promoting the myth of the noble savage.
Brett Devereaux talks about this in relation to the Mongols and other nomads. Yes they didn’t “own” land but if you trespassed on their grazing pastures they would absolutely use violence against you: https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-hord...
The notion of a lack of land ownership is just fetishization.
Also, OUR idea of ownership, at least legally, is based on the idea of usage and access. You may own a piece of land, but not the mineral rights. You can't prevent an aircraft from flying over your property etc. Ownership is a bundle of rights and exclusions. The idea of ownership meaning "who is allowed to hunt on this land" would fit right into our legal framework of ownership.
I'm also pretty sure that any tribe that built a village and farmed had a very strong notion of my house and my garden.
Even animals mark their territory and aggressively defend it.
You'd be surprised then. Indigenous property rights aren't homogenous. Many lacked the kind of exclusive ownership that we have in Western systems. (Some) Inuit recognized communal band lands for example, where a particular individual within that band might have rights to a particular resource location while they used it, but their usage was governed by complex systems of traditions and they couldn't necessarily exclude others from separate resources in the same physical location.
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.
Is that really different than traditional Western societies? Medieval European societies had complex systems governing shared rights and ownership of common grazing lands and forests, for example. Those rights changed over time (such as through the Inclosure Acts) but it's not a concept alien to western societies.
There's probably an interesting comparative discussion that I'm not remotely qualified to have on medieval European property rights, but there's enough history of colonial settlers wildly misunderstanding indigenous property systems that I don't know a better word than "alien".
"Misunderstanding" seems perhaps overly charitable to the colonial settlers.
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.
Developing defence capacity is a basic responsibility. Humans can scream foul if they lose out to machine hybrids or extraterrestrials.
So what, it’s your own fault if someone assaults you and takes away your things?
> 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.
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.
We need one title one owner. Shared ownership is confusion. Governmens shouldn't run interference between managers and stockholders.
Well, I feel like the "traditional way of life" argument is okay for why they should get special treatment. But why should anyone get special treatment if they are going to just, essentially, treat it as way to siphon tax revenue from the larger society?
Shouldn’t building dense housing in an area with a terrible housing shortage increase the tax base if anything?
I’m perfectly fine with modern corrective actions taken in response to past treaty violations. They were treated with as separate nations in the past and now there are mechanisms for limited forms of self rule on tribal land.
Because that society committed what are at least atrocities and probably more fairly described as genocide against those societies for like 400 years. A small casino empire seems like the least we could do lol
The institution of land ownership is very important in farming societies, where land is what produces wealth and health.
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.
Or really any permanent settlement. Look at say, Northern Inuit vs. Puebloans.
I have always disliked and told people I disliked land acknowledgements because they are designed to earn the social capital of giving the land back without ever having any intention of doing anything close to that.
funny because i feel that your comment plays into the exact same tropes about “indigenous ways of knowing” you critique
Here in Australia they use the carefully crafted phrase: “the previous custodians of this land”.
As in… we are the custodians now.
I've not seen "previous" used ..
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.What? No. The phrase is "the traditional owners" or sometimes "traditional custodians". Never previous.
Bad memory/paraphrasing on my part. Traditional and previous are near-synonyms.
I don't think that's true. Traditional can also carry the sense of ongoing.
Every single socially progressive initiative every company engages in is purely performative. If those initiatives potentially hurt their bottom line or hurt them politically, they will be dropped so fast your head will spin.
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.
Wow.
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.
I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society.
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.
> To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together
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.
I totally get it. A lot of our wounds are still open, too. I'm not here to tell people how to feel, I'm just advocating for deciding what is actually important to you and focusing all your attention on it until it is resolved. I happen to think that citizens of the US are worth more to each other as sometimes-conflicting allies than as complete adversaries, but that is for everyone to decide on their own.
> 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).
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.
> “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.” - Amílcar Cabral
> lack of educational resources
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?
Great questions. The kids mostly speak English as first language, and the schools are in English. With the exception of one huge twist, the schools have many educational difficulties you'll find in rural America generally—it's hard to get money for materials and curriculum, hard to recruit good teachers, hard to get students connected to people with practical advice/guidance, hard to get connected to opportunities, hard to reach escape velocity, and so on.
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.
in the US, schools in poor counties have less resources and less high quality teachers, and the children have much less of an education-focused environment in which they can flourish because of the parent's lack of resources
raise the economic level of the community, and education rises with it
Abbott districts in New Jersey are an obvious counterpoint to this. They are funded at levels equal to if not greater than the wealthiest districts in the state, despite being in some of the poorest parts of the state. I spite of this, over the four decades that Abbott districts have been in place, educational attainment gaps between them and the rest of the state have actually widened.
it's not just about the funding to the schools; it's about the economic situation of the parents and their ability to provide conditions where their children can thrive academically
that's why I said the best way to improve the education is to improve the economic conditions of the community
Interesting comment... I keep getting surprised by implicit first world assumptions on HN.
I'm not the OP but you could consider hypothetically as an example, would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?
Yes they would. It’s a beautiful part of the country. And I know great teachers that live there.
Unfortunately, our reservation is in central Oregon, which is less desirable. Even if we were not forced out of the ancestral homeland (what is now called the Columbia River Gorge), I'm not sure that would have been better. Although pretty, it is very out of the way, and people do not know that it is in the same class as the Yangtze (say).
Thank you for this wonderful message. As a fellow American, I can see you have our common interests at heart, as well as those of your tribe. That is a model for all of us.
Thank you for the response, I am very glad to hear that came through. I think these discussions tend to be fundamentally pessimistic towards the future and I really don't think they need to be. We control our destiny, and we can make it whatever we wish.
I don't have to be invested in a cause to know that diversity in problem solving can be a key component to success hence global technology companies, or that promoting the ideas of equity and inclusion are things most humans can benefit from. DEI is not about change or solving a particular problem, it's about awareness of perspective and seeking to understand others.
To be clear I am not arguing for or against working with a bunch of people from totally different backgrounds, demographics, etc. I am arguing that, because we can't do everything we should decide what really matters to us, commit to it in the long term, and invest in it to the exclusion of the many other completely worthy causes. I know it sounds obvious, but at least for the communities I belong to, the industry committed shallowly and as a result accomplished very little.
> "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"
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.
Well, just one data point for you (YMMV), but in "DEI" contexts I've been a part of, class diversity did actually come up somewhat regularly. I would not say corp diversity efforts I saw were all that successful in staffing that demographic—but they also weren't that successful in staffing minorities either. Mostly I think this reflects a consistent disconnect between what people wanted corp diversity efforts to be, and what they really were.
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.
Well, in the non-DEI world, we'll soon find out if the reason this happens was solely because of policies or if low educational attainment seeps into one's college, ones preparedness for a job, one's ability to get a job, etc.
>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.
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.
In our area, it is mostly resorts and casinos. Economic development gives everyone in the area jobs and opportunities. This has changed the picture from "Indians begging the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and local government for resources" to "we have a robust economic engine which is a critical part of the greater surrounding community, and which we'd mostly all like to succeed, but need to work through details on." It's not perfect and there's still conflict but it's much easier to work together in the latter situation.
I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such 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.
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
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.
You can be unbiased in hiring and still end up with an unrepresentative mix, because underprepresented minorities don't even apply, and outreach is a good way to get to improve that without lowering your standards. That's the theory, at least, but yes, in practice it's really hard and most of these efforts end up performative, and staffing DEI bureaucracies with minorities is a good way to make the dismal diversity statistics look less bad if you don't look too closely at the breakdown by roles and salary bands.
These DEI programs were not primarily about outreach. Outreach existed way before DEI (e.g. interns, new grads, Grace Hopper conference, etc) and will continue to exist. DEI introduced improper - discriminatory - systems with quotas and heavy prioritization of specific groups of people.
Not only that, the “diverse slate” requirement, which is mentioned in the Meta posting, is actively harmful to PoC jobseekers. When I was at a Microsoft, I I knew of multiple cases where a candidate was already essentially decided on, but they had to continue what was essentially “sham” interviews of at least one woman and one PoC in order to check the diverse slate box. Complete waste of time on all sides.
I know of a famous tech company where majority of workers were white, not even Asian and Indian people, who usually tend to over represent in tech. Around the BLM times they put in policy that they had to interview people of color. What most managers did was just interview people of color only to reject them, often judge the candidates too harshly to ensure no laws were broken. They often interviewed the same candidate for multiple positions, it was pretty obvious what they were doing. Obviously if they were investigated, nothing provable would ever come out. But stuff like that is pretty prevalent in tech.
Name and shame
Microsoft did this. I went through a DEI loop at Microsoft (found out later) and was ghosted by one manager, another manager asked a leetcode hard with 20 minutes to implement it, another asked a leetcode hard and DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE ANSWER until I walked them through it step by step (they had never seen the answer before).
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.
I used to work at Microsoft and was on the other side, unfortunately I had the exact opposite experience. I interviewed and rejected a candidate (due to poor technical performance) then had the hiring manager contact me asking if I would reconsider as he needed to "increase DEI" footprint of his team. He wanted me to lower the bar for DEI reasons.
>Seriously, sell your microsoft stock
Alas, the stock's future performance is unlikely to be tied to any of that. Stock prices are barely attached to reality at all.
What part of the org were you interviewing in?
> That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
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.
Aside: It appears the modern world is inflecting to OVERT (subversive) insular, erosion of fundamental values, with recent leveraging of power-structures to facilitate authoritarian thinking.
Not many people supported those "fundamental values" to begin with. The only people that wanted DEI policies were extremely loud liberals (that temporarily gained power by steamrolling the apathetic majority)
Now we are just seeing a return to reality.
Turns out the whole "culture" thing was made up. You just do what is best for your business.
I don't see how very real differences in hiring practice are performative, but maybe that's just me.
To be clear, the thing that’s keeping them from being disadvantaged against Musk/X is cozying up to the Trump and the government. That’s going to make a much bigger difference in stock performance than any personnel impact of these changes.
Surely nothing can go wrong with authoritarians backed by trillionaires with social media in their hands, rapidly talking over power. I doubt Orwell could have predicted how the 2020s are turning out.
"Trillionaire" media moguls were on board with the previous regime for at least the last decade. They are realigning now, not particularly surprising.
It only seems bizarre if you didn't consider DEI programs to be largely symbolic corporate puffery in the first place. For all of the hate they received from some political spheres they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start, especially in larger companies.
DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.
> If you were a woman of color in tech you’ve been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are.
Is that why there are so many women of color software engineers in tech?
Many woman of color are simply not entering the pipeline. But those who are there get wildly favorable treatment compared to people from other demographics with similar capabilities.
One of the solutions to the 'POC Pipeline Problem' was to overhire for non-technical roles that could be used to hit diversity goals.
I think there is a difference between diversity initiatives before 2020 and the DEI initiatives since 2020. As far as I can see, the latter is indeed is corporate puffery, where employees maybe join a half-hour seminar to talk about DEI every year, and perhaps there are new DEI groups for employees to discuss this. But the diversity hire initiative before 2020 was much more substantive that resulted in real meaningful changes to company demographics.
It was always puffery, just money was cheap before 2020. Engineering managers I worked with before then were gung ho to grow their head count, even if it meant hiring iffy engineers. After 2020, they got told new head count would be much more limited and hiring got a lot more selective.
I think it very much depends. When BLM happened, I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of discussions with executives from a variety of companies about diversity programs, and the things I heard...
"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. :-(
Half hour? Try a two day video on lesson.
are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.
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.
> are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.
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.
When you sit in on staff meeting, and the president explicitly says, "we are not hiring or promoting any more white men, only women of color and those of other marginalized groups", you absolutely know it for a fact. This in fact occurred, and continues to occur, as I can personally attest, at a for-profit college in NYC. And in fact, although ~10 people have been hired over the last few years, none of them have been white men.
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.
Must be the worst in Universities where there is no reality check in the form of having to make a profit (well, maybe decades later when the reputation craters). I can't imagine trying to be a white man in the humanities today, you've got no chance.
This perfectly fits my old big tech EM who was totally incompetent and made life miserable for everyone on her team to the point where all but 2 people left (team of 12)
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.
Do you actually have experience with those programs?
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".
> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
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.
> In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason
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.
there's still a "bamboo ceiling"
Is there? The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Asians who did not even grow up in the US.
Those CEOs are great examples, because they show the operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin or a McKinsey alum. I see less evidence for power networks based on race, or those power networks are doing less.
> operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin
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.
Specific examples don't overcome the overall statistics.
"bamboo ceiling" is not a statistic.
Underrepresentation of south and east asians in leadership roles is, though.
Can you provide the stats? I'm looking at the BLS data and I don't really see anything relevant.
The charitable interpretation of why Asian == white in these scenarios is that Asians are not typically underrepresented in the engineering field, company founders, prestigious schools, etc.
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.
Even following the charitable interpretation, grouping a dozen of cultures with very different educational and economic opportunities into a single "asian" designation is a bizarre practice.
There's often a separation between the people who bring in the candidates and the people who interview/approve the candidates.
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.
Years ago the software engineering field looked at this problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly proceeded to implement none of them.
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."
This has been demonstrably proven to make discrimination worse, not better.
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.
Has it been proven that people still manage to tell races of candidates apart after removing markers? Or is this all just conjecture?
Reminds of the infamous attempt to fight discrimination in orchestras by conducting blind auditions. Which ended up reducing diversity even further.
> Do you actually have experience with those programs?
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.
This was exactly my experience in a Big Tech company. I will say, a lasting (IMO good) effect we had was that hiring managers continued to consider diversity of candidates as a factor, but there was no gate in extending offers. Some hiring managers took this further and actually enforced diverse slate style hiring because they believed in it and others didn't care. It also meant that if a req was taking a long time to get filled, diverse slate just stopped being a factor.
If that's what DEI did, I think that getting rid of it is positive. It seems to just add performative and inefficient bureaucracy to an already typically slow and laborious task which is hiring people.
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.
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.
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.
One thing that started happening is that "diverse" candidates were aggressively head-hunted, for interviews. HR wasn't interested in hiring them, they just wanted to fill our their internal diversity quota and lubricate the hiring pipeline.
> consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
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.
> 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.
Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers.
Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers.
I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.
The memo sent from on high (multiple years):
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.
Does anyone have any concrete proof of this actually happening? I find it extremely doubtful.
Seems to be very loosely based on Jack Welch's actual maxim that 10% of the workforce should be arbitrarily fired every year in the hope that this performative beating would improve morale, and maybe productivity too. This sort of arbitrariness was actually popular with much of the right at the time, but it wasn't white men that Welch was explaining just needed to overdeliver and outperform (and definitely not have kids) to succeed in the long run...
The overlords of my time were certainly schooled in the ways of Jack Welch, but also particularly inspired by the 2009 Netflix vision of a High Performing Workplace as seen in their culture document. It was mandatory and inspirational reading.
When the performative beating and meritocracy absolutism collides with the sensitivities of the modern workplace the results are strangely unpredictable.
The memos are tucked away somewhere with my NDA and the memories of crushing peoples hopes, dreams and aspirations.
This is terrible. It makes my blood boil just seeing this.
There are example of DEI not being racist but the one you provided is extremely racist.
GP mentions race and gender, so this response isn’t making an impression on me.
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.
Well "DEI vetos it" is obviously a problem. There's a discussion to be had around expanding candidate pools, expanding the pipeline, however you want to phrase it. These are good and noble goals but we're not talking about the pipeline we're talking about the candidates for a given role that we're hiring for right now.
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.
It's HR's entire job to set policies for hiring. They can say a candidate has to have a college degree. Why wouldn't they have the right to set this policy as well?
You are confusing policies and qualifications, its on the engineers to decide the qualifications and HR to run policies on sourcing.
Why is breadth of candidates defined by race and gender instead of experience and expertise. If the DEI department improves breadth of experience and expertise, by looking into alternative hiring streams, thats great, but people who defend DEI always approach it from the race and gender first which is a tell tale sign that race and gender are the primary objectives. And in my experience, when race and gender are the goals, formal and informal quotas appear.
It is odd that the expected inclusion was so specific, though. What about a 14 year old white male? Do they not satisfy: "consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like."?
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.
well if a 14 year old has 10 years of (real) experience building software in an enterprise setting, of course they should be considered for a senior role
What about 10 years of experience building software translates to the director position being talked about? Would a 14 year old who has 10 years of (real) experience working on the family farm be equally suitable or is there something about software specifically that primes people for being directors?
sure, replace building software with leading large teams. The general point still stands
So you echo that until you find a 14 year old who has managed a large team for at least 10 years you haven’t tried hard enough? I don’t want to rest on my biases, but…
No, it is obvious that there are not any qualified 14 year olds, and it is also obvious that there are qualified minorities - if you can't find qualified minorities, you should look more closely at your recruitment pipelines.
It might be obvious based on your criteria, but remember that you invented that criteria based your arbitrary biases. Those with 10 years of real experience are statistically more likely to be qualified for the job, that is hard to disagree with, but being a white male also makes you statistically more likely to be qualified for the job in question. That is why the bias spoken of exists! But the point made at the business told about earlier is that statistical likelihood does not preclude outliers who deserve equal consideration.
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.
> being a white male also makes you statistically more likely to be qualified for the job in question
Source?
I find it interesting that being underage and in middle school is on the same level to you as being a woman. This comment reads like "You want us to interview WOMEN now? Why not teenagers? Or plants?!"
The request was to “consider people you normally wouldn’t for this role”
I normally wouldn’t consider a 14y/o for a senior position. I wouldn’t consider a child to run our armed forces either.
It is you who put women and other minorities into that group with this comment of yours. You are the one to compare being underage and in middle school to being on the same level of a woman.
Your biases applied to the comment may read that way. The comment itself doesn't say that at all. It is interesting that we are seeing the discrimination right here on HN too. I thought we were better than that?
My company did (still does? Not sure) have a policy similar to that, even for IC roles.
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).
It's not a net positive for underrepresented groups, because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. They don't have infinite time, because they are real people. Would you prefer to be rejected because of your resume, or asked to attend an interview and then be rejected because of your resume?
> because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities.
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.
Not commenting on the merits of AA in general, but multiple offers in hand in a timely manner is always better so losing out on that is definitely harmful.
What most companies do is interview primarily referred candidates, which is arguably the opposite of DEI. It favors people in the social networks of the population already employed by the hiring company. And most people have social networks that look very similar to themselves in terms of race, gender, and economic class. Is that fair? It doesn’t seem fair.
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.
The "good old boys" network is a problem. But given how hard we all agree it is to interview effectively and determine who is a great fit for the role in a matter of a few hours, there's a lot of good sense in hiring people already widely known to be excellent by your team from years of past experience working together.
This has been my experience as well as a director of engineering. I also think more diverse candidates is a good thing.
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.
> 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.
Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations
Not really true. We have been asked to hire women in our team. Thankfully we found an amazing person. But other teams were not so lucky. It was pure nonsense.
Agreed. Even if you desire, and want DEI programs to be meaningful, the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.
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.
> the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.
That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.
I’ve interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles. Not sure how that aligns with your narrative.
If a role is specifically set to be filled by diversity hires, I really don't understand how that's not racist (or choose your descriptor here) towards whoever has been excluded for that role.
It is racist. Proponents of such diversity hiring try to redefine racism in such a way that their definition excludes diversity hiring, but that's bad faith rhetorical tricks.
I've actually never seen a 'diversity hire' take place. When we set DEI policy and act on it, it was about trying to encourage a more diverse pool and a more diverse group of choosers.
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.")
OK, so it's "just" systematic racial discrimination then. Much better.
The definition of racism changed at some point to some people to have connotations about racial superiority
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
That's not what the original commenter was saying. There are very few roles I've ever seen target diversity hires. Those that I have seen are typically very high-level roles, for example, VP nominations will do things like target "midwest" or for Supreme Court targeting "female". But I don't see this sort of thing in your typical job hiring practice.
I think it's pretty obvious that SCOTUS and VP nominations aren't covered by EEOC and the like, and you're going to have a hard time ham-fisting "diversity hire" into those roles.
> > 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?
The first does have something to do with what he's commenting on. That said, the original poster can clarify since they're on HN, rather than us speculating.
You seem quite wrapped up in the idea of 'diversity hires'. I've never seen it work that way. Have you?
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?
> it wouldn't be racist to hire based on diversity as it's not done from a basis of racial superiority.
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.
Intent matters.
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.
Sure, intent matters. But you literally said:
> 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.
I'm genuinely not trying to be a schmuck here ... genuinely ... but can I direct you to any decent dictionary and to read up on the word 'racist'. Then read your comment again.
Thanks.
>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.
If you hire based on someone's race, that would appear to be racist.
Again, that's not how it works, or should work. But even if it did, it could be called a 'mistake'. But it's not '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.")
OK, so it's "just" systematic racial discrimination then.
There is a flame war preventer that disables replies for a short time depending on frequency and how deep the thread is. Wait a bit or find the post via another UI and it’s usually possible to reply.
> (it appears I've been blocked from replying here so:...
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.
Rumored? It’s a very real thing.
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 it has been about trying to encourage a more diverse pool to select from...
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 is a DEI specific role? Isn't that against EoE rules?
Someone tasked with making sure your site works on a screen reader? Adding alt tags to images? Plenty of inclusive roles are non-controversial.
That's called accessibility.
Which means being inclusive towards a diverse set of different conditions, so those people may equally access content others have access to?
The “E” doesn’t mean “equal”…
Change it to "equitably" if you prefer. The point remains the same.
Equality and Equity are vastly different things.
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.
> Equality and Equity are vastly different things.
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.
This is a semantic argument. Accessibility wasn't under DEI in the org chart, and preexisted DEI. That's all that matters.
DEI is a new name for and/or refinement of a long existing concept that gave us things like the abolitionists, suffragists, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
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...)
I disagree with this telling of history. DEI has much more in common with various affirmative action efforts in the 80s and 90s than it does with something like the Civil Rights Act and as such is a lot more controversial even among the groups it's meant to help.
> DEI has much more in common with various affirmative action efforts in the 80s and 90s
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.
If the ADA was being proposed today, Republicans would decry it as yet another woke DEI effort.
They're absolutely in the same category.
> If the ADA was being proposed today, Republicans would decry it as yet another woke DEI effort.
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.
Do you think there is a functional difference between those words?
I think you could easily describe accessibility efforts to be an attempt to provide both equal and equitable access to content.
Equity requires unequal treatment so do you have an example?
Sure.
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.)
Thank you, that seems a pretty good example.
It's part of making a product that works for a diverse group of people. The same way the XBox controller was made smaller for female and children hands. And how including darker skinned people in facial recognition systems is now standard practice.
At many companies accessibility and DEI are rolled into the same office.
I would classify that as a role tasked with ADA compliance, not "DEI".
One might readily describe the ADA as a DEI initiative, yes.
I would say that DEI has sucked a huge amount of oxygen out of the room on accessibility. It's all out of the same budget, but as you can see, most people don't think of accessibility when they think of DEI, they think of race, gender and sexuality.
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.
> I would say that DEI has sucked a huge amount of oxygen out of the room on accessibility
Which is a real shame because accessibility features and policies actually make things better and easier for everyone.
One would be objectively wrong, though.
Disabilities come in a diverse variety.
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.
Yes I see you doing this all over the thread italicizing the same words and using them slightly differently, I'm not sure what point you're trying to prove.
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?
It's called Motte and Bailey fallacy.
> Lots of people, including Republicans, support the ADA and support expanding its protections.
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.
Scroll up a couple lines from your link and take a look at the sponsor, who Republicans nominated to be President. So no, your partisan assertion is nonsense.
Tom Harkin? The Democrat?
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?
The ADA requires accommodation. E.g. a blind software developer should be given an interview that does not require sight. So a text-only description instead of a figure or sketch would be accomodation. It does not require specific levels of representation. It is not analogous to Meta's former "representation goals".
No, it's not that. DEI would be hiring a blind person, over a more qualified non-blind person.
> DEI would be hiring a blind person, over a more qualified non-blind person.
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.
No, that's a flat out lie.
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".
It is extremely telling that when you hear "DEI specific role" you wrongly imagint that refers to the identity of the person rather than someone who's role it is to work on issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Well I interpreted it the way you're saying and I still don't understand the real world need of that role in most companies. Why not simply hire the most qualified/best people for the job? If it ends up being diverse, great. If not well thats not really a big issue either as long as the hiring is fair.
What does that role provide outside of forced diversity i.e. racism. If it helps I am not a white male myself, but Mexican.
That's one interpretation but the next sentence doesn't really track with that. Of course there are roles in DEI departments, and roles focused on DEI. That doesn't do anything to weaken the argument the GP was making but that second sentence sounds like it should.
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.
> they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start
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.
My general experience was that this was much more a thing on the ground in ~2015-2020 and the internet / political rage machine is (as usual) a few years behind.
Symbols can have a lot of political power.
Right. For the large companies, and the majority of the workforce, they mean nothing. Then the small to mid size businesses with some whackadoo who goes "we're not hiring X anymore, underrepresented groups only!" get a ton of press and create political capital.
I'm curious, what gives you that kind of deep insight?
I'm skeptical too. I've worked at a series of smaller companies with strong DEI programs, and the "enlightened self-interest" part was that it gave us better products. Turns out I have a pretty good idea of how to build products and features that appeal to people with the same regional, race, gender, and other backgrounds as me. Working with people who are in different from me in some substantial way showed me how much of that is arbitrary.
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.
Alternatively, trying to appeal to everyone or really the lowest common denominator just ends up creating bland products that nobody likes. Which is quite apparent right in the AAA video game industry.
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.
Volvo had women design a car once.
OK, that fascinates me and it's a great example of things that would never occur to me. Run-flat tires aren't a big deal because I'm not bothered by the idea of changing my own tire by the side of the road. Ponytail indentations in the headrests? I have short hair that doesn't need it, but alright, I can see why that'd be great for people who do.
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.
So your accepting of something you don't need but could be useful to others is totally opposite of the design not having a hood. Just because these females don't need it, they made it so nobody could use it.
Did I say that everyone should have that? No. I like working on my own cars. My personal gearhead top achievement was when my alternator seized up, and I had a new one installed and working 45 minutes later (including a quick run to the parts store).
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.
so a small group of women made a unilateral decision that prevents others. again, it is just an example of one group making decisions without realizing (or caring) how it affects others.
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
That's ridiculous. You and I don't have to buy that car. But if it existed and were brought to market, people who do like it have the option. It gives them choices they wouldn't otherwise have without restricting our options.
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.
The fact that you think that removing the hood doesn't make it a worse product is baffling. If it has a hood and you choose to never open it, that does not make it a worse product. If you have no hood but have to incur extravagant service fees because of not having a hood definitely makes it a worse product.
I'm confused on how you accept A but not B
> If it has a hood and you choose to never open it, that does not make it a worse product.
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.
> Volvo had women design a car once.
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.
Volvo didn't design a car, people did. In this case the people were women.
Wow, the lack of a hood is baffling, was that actually a conscious design decision or an urban legend?
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 idea was that self service would be unneeded because you would take it to the service center when it told you to.
The BMW i8 also had a hood that could only be removed by 4 service techs and it went into production.
Right because the BMW i8's engine is mounted in front of the rear axle. You access it through the trunk, not the hood.
That said, this is a concept car. It doesn't have to be practical.
Looks like they have designed Tesla prototype.
https://www.automobilesreview.com/pictures/volvo/ycc-2004/wa...
Are there more pics? It seems kind of sleek.
I keep hearing this example, but it's hard for me to imagine how this works with companies that are not designing consumer-facing products.
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.)
Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
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.
> Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
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.
Worth noting the same basic incentives apply to certain corporations performatively dropping their policies as a declaration of fealty to an administration they hope will refrain from interfering too much with their ability to make profits as a result. Whether that is considered to be a "free market reason" is another question entirely.
> The companies we're talking about have DEI programs specifically because they believe they'll improve their profitability in one way or another
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.
Companies deciding not to spend money with X because consumers objected to ads there more than they bought products from ads there is "organized cartel like boycotts" and Zuck deciding to ditch decade old programmes because the new President hates them and him and his platform (and owns a rival platform too!) is freeing him to do what he believed all along!? I've heard it all now.
Bet Bezos has spent years dreaming of making that Melania documentary he's finally become free to spend $40m on too...
> Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
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.
Yeah, what people miss when they talk about hiring "the best person for the job" is that a company is not composed of well-defined roles and fungible people who do the job description and nothing else. Ideally, you're building a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if someone isn't the most proficient person on the planet for a given role, they might be better for your team as a whole.
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.
Alright, I can see that. DEI programs that actually change and improve the company are extremely valuable, in my opinion. Ones that check a box to say "look at how nice we are!" aren't so much.
I agree! But the problem is that many people are more invested in discrimination than they are in improving their team. At least according to their revealed preferences, a lot of people who claim to support meritocracy/yada yada would rather be on a worse-performing team with more white people/men/etc than a better-performing diverse one.
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.
Deep insight? It was completely obvious that it was performative. Why would huge companies like suddently care about black people or women if it was not to seek popular approval and get closer to power?
Minimization of regulatory risk and lawsuits. Compliance was _always_ about that - if leadership truly valued human dignity you’d see Gaza get a few orders of magnitude as much attention as BLM in corporate America, rather than a few orders of magnitude less.
It's not deep insight. I am for real DEI.
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.
I think part of the problem is that no one knows (or agrees on) what “real DEI” is. Is it quotas? Is it bias training? Is it a quarterly presentation from HR?
Even more broadly, what are the normative success and failure visions for DEI? At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?" To be charitable to the whole idea, it seems to be well-intentioned. But beyond that, it's empty in terms of what pratical outcomes it actually sought to make real.
Maybe I'm just not someone cut out to be an activist, but without articulated end-states, it strikes me as just teeing up for a perpetual struggle. That doesn't seem too fulfilling.
The problem is the end-state is complex and nuanced.
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.
> At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?"
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.
> At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?"
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.
I think the practical outcomes that are your KPIs are higher diversity from a leadership standpoint, and within the organization.
There's nothing empty about that. It's measured, and evaluated.
That's fair. I guess what I'm communicating is that the goals of larger diversity are worth effort, and attention, and the reality of them is bias training in the long list of mandatory trainings, and marketing at conferences.
I worked in a large company that had a lot of pro-LGBTQ corporate PR and "Bring your whole self to work", while most of my coworkers were openly homophobic (out of earshot from management) and LGBTQ people would not be safe to come out. Right-wingers would think our company was "woke" and that they were being discriminated against based on our company propaganda and executive messaging. The reality on the ground was the opposite.
Right-wingers are ready to believe companies are lying about some things but not about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
It's entirely reasonable to read this entire Meta post as "we had DEI programs, they were meaningful and effective, but now there's an administration in office that will use anti-trust laws to cut us into pieces unless our privately-held supports their political preferences."
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.
Trump previously threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life on trumped up charges (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-c...). He said in an interview that's probably why Meta changed their policies (https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l).
The initiatives were put in place to appease large institutional investors who were trying to score virtue points with the public and progressive lawmakers who generally aren’t that friendly to Blackrock, Vanguard, et al.
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.
> 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.
> you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape"
Isn't that the same reason they were rolled out in the first place?
> It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative 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 keeps diversity around
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.
ESG is just a jobs program for stock brokers.
> It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
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.
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place
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?
The DEI policies were effective, particularly the Diverse Slate Approach. But it's legally risky to continue with it under the current administration since it was a race and gender conscious policy. People can argue as to whether it was "discrimination" but it absolutely was conscious of candidate's protected class.
There were already actual commitments to diversity in most places, yes.
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.
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place
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.”
> in part because of the "political landscape,"
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.
It's not just that Trump is in power now. It's that Trump, unlike any US President before him (at least in the modern era) is highly and publicly vindictive.
American culture did not drastically change but mainstream media outlets and the entertainment industry attempted to make it seem as if it had shifted quite dramatically when it really had not. You can't simply say that all the people that voted for Harris support all this stuff. There were many people that voted for Harris or against Trump for many reasons but still don't fall into the far-left camp. It's just paying fealty. Is what has happened to AAA games and example of consumers paying fealty to Trump? Let's be serious.
I don't really follow what point you are trying to make. The stuff that Meta has reversed in the last few days is literally decades of slow cultural change. It isn't all DEI and trans folks. They are now allowing the use of "retard" for example. Almost every corner of mainstream American society outside those dominated by 13-year-old boys had left that word behind at least a decade ago.
Truth be speaking, that's not the direction the rest of the world outside the West has gone though, they'd actually be more aligned with those "13-year old" boys on those cultural issues.
A lot more people use that word in reality than you might think, as shocking as the that will seem.
> The "political landscape" here is the desire to pay fealty to an incoming administration in hopes of currying favor.
Exactly as it was when DEI practices were introduced.
You must have a short memory if you actually believe that. Diversity programs didn’t all coincidentally spring up in January 2021 the way they are coincidentally disappearing in January 2025. I won’t argue if you call them performative, but they absolutely weren’t just blatant appeals to an incoming presidential administration.
Was that in response to a new incoming administration, or a series of social and cultural events?
Actually, these practices were mostly introduced under Trump, and ramped up with the Floyd protests, which also took place under Trump.
I think that's the point. DEI is performative. A business cannot survive unless it hires the best person for the job.
Regardless of the first points you make, companies objectively do not need to hire the best person for the job. Lots of companies need programmers. 99% of them do not need world class software engineers.
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.
A few small holes will not sink the aircraft carrier, but eventually there will be enough holes. See Disney.
>why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
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 ?
> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place
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.
The honest message wound have been:
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.
These programs seem problematic.
'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...
They never cared about DEI. The difference is that now they don't feel pressure to pretend.
Took me way too long that PoC doesn't refer to proof-of-concept.
You need obvious people to fire in the next downturn without hurting productivity too badly.
A dei program labels those people for you.
Ironically this is exactly the reason why dei programs were considered illegal until a decade ago.
> unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
Disagree, right wingers will be satisfied by this performative posturing even though there's no real change to existing policy.
It's meant to please people who have a political opposition to the concept of DEI.
not only performative but discriminative and harmful hence the need of removal
Because both acts are performative, its just rarely we see corporations wanting to appear more racist.
Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none.
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.
The start of the funnel is also the most racist and class discriminatory. Almost every school in the USA takes pupils from districts where the property owners pay the taxes for the schools. Rich areas get much more resources and support. Poor students get put into less funded schools and suffer from not having mentorship or peers to look up to.
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.
Washington state pools property tax money and then redistributed it equitably across the state to pay for education on a per pupil basis. This mainly means poorer eastern Washington districts are subsidized by richer western Washington districts, and districts that lose students to private schools take a direct hit in their funding.
It doesn't help when the Seattle school superintendent told parents that if they didn't like their school policies, they could leave.
This is the same as California.
EDIT: I was wrong, and explain it as a comment below.
No, it isn't.
(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.
My mistake, I know that most of school funding came from the state but I thought it was because it was from property taxes being collected. In fact it's from state income tax and sales tax.
Property tax in California is a huge mess. In terms of K-12 funding there's also Prop 98 to contend with.
https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2012/tax/property-tax-primer-1129...
as someone who grew up attending a majority black school district, this is not really true.... underfunded majority minority districts typically more than have the gap made up by federal funds and the causal evidence on returns on education funding suggests extremely limited impact if any
That's just false. Nearly every state relies disproportionately on local property taxes to fund schools. Federal dollars tend to be supplemental and come in the form of food subsidies or Title grants. They absolutely do not "more than have the gap made up" unless you're in a state with an equity funding pool (like Washington).
I have heard that Baltimore school performance is the counterpoint here, but I have never dug into it myself. Do you happen to know if there is a material point there or obfuscation of some form?
In California funding is based upon attendance. The main place wealthy neighborhoods get extra money here is through PTAs rather than property taxes.
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.
America spends more money per student, in almost any school district, than any European country. The problem is not "resources and support". We've tried "resources and support" for 50 years, so the (a priori entirely fantastical) notion that just throwing more money at the problem would make it go away has been thoroughly disproven.
I don’t think that’s true. It looks like the US has pretty similar spending to European countries at least as a percentage of GDP: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Want to hear my hot take?
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.
If you condition on race, American students do better (e.g. on PISA) than almost any other country with a few exceptions like Hong Kong. American test cores are (slightly better than) what you expect given our demographics, which are by far the strongest predictor of population educational attainment.
Do you have a link to this analysis? I'm curious what "condition on race" actually means.
Most of what you said is just wrong.
"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.
I'm assuming you are not familiar with this study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...
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.
A lot of that has to do with who your kid goes to school with. If we take equally funded schools (in WA that’s easy since education is primarily funded by the state), the results are still different: districts with richer families do better probably because they get more support at home, but even lower income students do better since they feel like they need to keep up with their classmates.
Interesting. I've the same observation in Vietnam where I grew up. Maybe this is more universal than I thought.
Heritable doesn't mean genetic. Language and money are heritable.
Technically yes, but the poster also listed “parenting” practices not having an effect so I think we all know what he means.
> Summary: It's not genetics.
No one said its genetics. They're saying its not only funding.
They said heritability. They meant genetics.
Several people have told you that's not the case; don't assume other people's intents. Heritability is absolutely not congruent to genetics.
The genetic meaning is the most common usage of the word, which is evidenced by a Google search. It’s also the most obvious meaning when referring to racial minorities.
If they didn’t mean genetic, then they really screwed up in their use of language.
that is poor evidence for a school funding effect, but yes - environment is important. i will say that this is the first time i've ever seen MTO cited as a positive example of the impact, my understanding (not very informed) was that it is considered a negative result.
i wish these analyses were pre-registered, but i recognize that is difficult to do for very long timespan studies like this
Yes, class is the root divide. However, rejecting that fact is dogma for the people running these DEI programs.
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."
Mm. It’s certainly good to work at the other end of the funnel (thank you!) but it also won’t help address pattern matching that people do in hiring.
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.
Yes it will! That pattern matching is based on prior experience and if the entire makeup of candidates changes that'll cause people to pattern match differently. If old prejudices are taking a while to die out, it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
That's an efficient market theory, and it's extremely optimistic about how real people work.
> it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them
There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!
If the goal is to prevent people from being biased, why not anonymize candidate packets? Zoom interviews can also be anonymized easily. If it's the case that equally strong, or stronger, candidates are being passed over anonymization should solve this.
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.
If you anonymize applications you don't hire the 'right' ratio.
people can cheat in anon interviews?
Anonymization is probably an under tried idea. Various orchestras switched to blind auditions and significantly increased the number of women they hired.
People oppose efforts to make changes at the other end of the funnel too. This is the most popular post about Girls Who Code (the first organization that comes to mind, why I searched it): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431
You get similar complaints there.
There's a background assumption in this debate that society has a moral requirement to increase the representation of those who are underrepresented. I've never seen this assumption justified.
What if it is actually fine for Asians to be under-represented in the NBA, and over-represented in software engineering?
I guess it depends a lot on the reason why they're under represented. Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense. I'm not so sure companies and schools are just passive in a cultural preference environment. And by not so sure I mean I am pretty confident there is tons of discrimination, I've seen it.
> Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense
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.
That post is mostly factual observations, a reporting of lived experiences, if you will, not complaint.
i think that i've seen in my lifetime AA in hiring absolutely translate to shifts in undergrad composition. not sure if it spills over to highschool, but it definitely does when people are choosing what to do in college.
In my experience girls want to do CS but they lack confidence and are given too many opportunities to opt for something easier where they think they’ll be more successful. (I don’t know about any other of the diversity axes as much.)
interesting. not going to comment too much on this, but this idea would seemingly be belied by the well-known STEM gender-equality paradox.
I think these efforts need to be done at every level at the same time, and I agree that the "lower" or "earlier" levels need to be prioritized. Similar to how prevention is usually preferred to reaction.
This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black people at such a rate that there literally are not enough black people in the country to meet that quota. And yet, this sort of brainless activism continues unabated - why I can't begin to guess.
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.
One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel" isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't personally impact you?
I’m 35 now, at no point in my career have I ever been in an environment that would have tolerated that, school- college or workplace.
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.
One thing to pay attention to is how you influence those around you. I'm guessing, doesn't put up with that kind of shit. People who act like that probably don't act like that when you're around. Because of that, you get a sanitized view of the world.
That sort of chud behavior is very much tolerated in many places: https://www.romerolaw.com/blog/2021/11/complaint-alleges-ram...
Even if it's very uncommon, unfortunately even one incident like the one in GP's comment is enough to convince someone that they're unwelcome and abandon working in the field. In fact, an argument for workplace diversity initiatives is that it can re-assure people that they are welcome, and that kind behavior of is fireable. Personally the kind of "DEI" I most strongly support are the initiatives that lay out clear rules and expectations for what kind of employee behavior is allowed, and tell people who to go to if they see it occurring.
if everyone openly has your back, consistently, and for years yet you’re so fragile that a single dickhead (who will be fired) derails your entire career then honestly you were too fragile to do the job anyway..
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…
> 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.
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-...
> Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman?
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?
Your suggestion that bad behavior by all-male teams would be improved by the addition of women rests on a couple of assumptions that are not true: that women are inherently better behaved than men, and that women naturally see each other as being on the same team.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't think women are inherently better behaved than men, or that they naturally see themselves as being on the same team. It's that the dynamic where it feels fun or funny to tell a joke that makes a minority in a group feel bad is less likely to arise when there are multiple people who wouldn't be laughing, or perhaps even telling them to give it a rest. Nothing to do with comradery, just the natural tendency of people to not like when their personal identity is threatened in some way.
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.
It is always so refreshing to read this kind of thing.
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.
I hear stories like this, but now after 25 years in the industry, no place I've worked at would have ever tolerated this, nor have I seen or heard this happen from colleagues. Granted I've worked mostly in California, but still seems so foreign to me.
I have a first-hand experience once or twice a year that make me stop and think -- if I were a woman in this situation I'd probably be doubting my career path. The example I cited is particularly egregious, but I have seen several other examples from a variety of companies: - two guys on a zoom call joking that someone's camera was off because they were doing "weird stuff" - manager from another team drunkenly telling a 24 year old at a holiday party that he would leave his wife for her - software system named "naggy_wife" - coworker telling younger coworker to "not get married because you will never have sex again"
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".
>But you can also see how negative experiences like this can build up
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.
> 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.
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!
Those sound to me like genuine issues that need to be fixed. (To give an example of something I do think would need to be fixed in a gender-flipped scenario: Expecting only female employees to bring food to office parties, or clean up afterwards.)
This won’t be a popular sentiment among the woke mafia that puruses HN but I’ve seen far more women drop out of tech roles due to the general work environment than due to some sexist commentary. In fact, I don’t know any who left due to some sexist commentary. I know many who left due to how toxic the work environment is for everyone.
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.
My ex-partner was a consultant at a FANG. It was her first engagement at a customer site after six months of very successful work internally.
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.
> 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.
This sounds like what happens to other males too? I'm not sure if that's related to sexual harassment though.
Yeah, exactly. This is the difference. People in tech assume that when this happens to women that it’s sexually motivated. No. It’s motivated by knowing you’re stack ranked and the best way to get ahead is by tearing others down. The industry is insanely toxic and most men just deal with it silently.
How much of this opinion has been shaped by actually talking to the women whose experience you are summarizing? And specifically in a context where they'd give you an honest and candid answer, which probably wouldn't involve you saying stuff like "woke mafia" out loud (as it would put regular people on guard and they'd feel less comfortable being honest with you). I don't want you to answer question that literally, because it's the internet and you can just say "I've talked to 1000 women in tech and have summarized their tabulated their experiences in a spreadsheet on my computer." Just honestly take a quiet minute or so and think about it. If the answer is somewhere close to zero, ask yourself why you felt such a high degree of confidence in the assessment you gave above.
Even in Chicago 30 years ago I cannot imagine that happening where I worked. Women were pretty well represented in tech there, incidentally. My immediate supervisor was a woman and I was the only male on my team. This was in IT in financial services. I would guess the whole department was 60:40 male:female.
Seriously, every instance I'm aware of men having done something like that where I worked (and it's happened more than once), they've been fired either the next day or the same week.
The solution there has nothing to do with hiring more women, and everything to do with zero tolerance for a sexist environment.
I mean, that happening is just insane. This isn't the 1950's.
Extreme examples like this provide a nice attention-grabbing narrative, but they're not responsible for driving the central 99.5% of the workforce distribution
The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's just very difficult to affect these in the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole. Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered folks, come from how parents push their values onto their kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved interests because of ideas they had about masculinity and femininity.
My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."
I'm not sure that's entirely what's to blame when the countries with the least gender discrimination (Scandinavia) tend to be about 20% female in tech. I think that when people are free to choose their fields based purely on personal inclination, without major financial incentive, tech lands at about 20% female and early childhood education ends up being the opposite.
Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20% female and we easily end up with spirals where departments end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring in math instead of cs because of that process at my college.
Yeah I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the answers. You might be right.
I guess the interesting point of discussion here is "personal inclination". A lot of my female friends have stories about how their parents encouraged their brothers to fix things around the house, get their hands dirty, read manuals, and set up new appliances. They tell me how they were, conversely, encouraged to make friends, maintain relationships, and steered toward more aesthetic pursuits like art, drama, or music.
My sister, at an age when she had no strong interests of her own, was given paintbrushes and nice paper as gifts by our parents but not Legos because they felt like girls were more likely to enjoy aesthetic things than mechanical things. Funny enough, as an adult she has neither mechanical nor aesthetic interests. The question I guess is how much of "personal inclination" is driven by these small decisions of what options we give to kids.
I will say my experiences are colored by the fact that my family is a low-income immigrant family in the US from a culture with definite gender discrimination and so they hold stronger gender prejudices than probably a high-income Scandinavian family. My guess is also that younger generations have grown up with a much better idea of gender equality and will raise their kids with less of this prejudice.
I also observed in my school that a lot of women felt more comfortable in the math department than CS (though CS had much less prestige compared to now), so thanks for your story and background.
I think I may also have somewhat of a blind spot here because I grew up with a mom who is a software engineer herself and I was bought a bunch of electronics/building toys by engineer relatives on both sides. When I was 13 or 14 I was given the parts for a computer under the instruction to put it together and make sure to dual boot linux. I knew a fair number of other girls my age whose parents really wanted them to be engineers/devs and did similar things, but a lot of them were uninterested and went on to happy careers in other fields.
The math vs CS dept thing is concerning because at the foundations they're very similar fields. It's such a strange phenomenon that my graph theory elective in the math dept was 30 or 40% female, yet algorithms was 5% female. Definitely at my institution there were structural issues in the CS dept that didn't exist in the math dept.
Lol our CS and math departments had the exact same thing. I remember our algebraists were 50/50 men and women but the algorithms folks were 5% women.
> the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole.
The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.
BTW, if you condition PISA scores on racial groups, any racial group (black, white, asian, whatever) scores higher in the USA than in any other country, except Hong Kong.
> The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.
I've heard this, but will fully admit I don't know how real this is. For one, the US generally has the highest COL in the world, so it's bound to spend more per student than any other country. Moreover, the general concern I've seen is that badly funded school districts in the US are much worse off than well funded school districts. Moreover gender disparities are not as bad in well funded school districts.
I've seen that concern as well, but it's pretty clearly a zombie concern from the days when schools would be funded almost entirely by local property taxes. Most states now equalize funding between local districts.
I don’t know the picture in every state, but in CA schools still receive 31% of their funding from local taxes. That’s still quite a bit. Then there’s other sources of funding like the school PTA which does things like fund school supplies.
Again, the state equalizes. After the 2013 funding reforms, the state gives districts gives districts with high-need students more money to make up for local funding shortfalls. The statistics I've seen (e.g. https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...) indicate that this more than closes the gap.
> What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest
except that it's not, which is the problem that DEI initiatives tried to compensate for
Except fields often aren’t open to people in different demographics. Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified.
The problem is that when you quantify sexism in tech objectively, the results aren't what most people expect.
> Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified
Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.
Just noting for those interested to check out Microsoft TEALS.
You're absolutely correct and I think it's what drives all the resentment about DEI programs. People aren't dumb, when they see some group only makes up 3% of the population of engineers and they see a program trying to balance senior positions, they're going to feel its unfair bs. What's really interesting is that almost every woman I've worked with professionaly isn't from North America, they're all from India, Iran and Eastern Europe (Belarus, Bulgaria etc). There's something deeply wrong with the culture here that's screwing up the top of the funnel.
> There's something deeply wrong with the culture
Another possibility: Women in poorer countries enrol in CS out of necessity. In wealthy countries, they have more economic freedom and there are more jobs available higher up on Maslow's Hierarchy, so they enrol in what they actually want (which is not CS).
On average.
Entirely accurate, in ex-communist eastern europe some sort of math/engineering job was about the only way to live somewhat decent, so anyone remotely ambitious would go into that.
This tracks. I got a computer science degree from a large US university. Something like 75-80% of the major was male. The majority of the male CS students were Asian-American*, but not extremely. Way larger share on the female side, like 90%.
Several of my friends in CS said their parents wouldn't have supported their college education if they were getting a humanities degree, with the possible exception of law. Even business was unlikely.
* counting South and West Asian too
(~2018) In India, women represent 45% of total computer science enrollment in universities, almost three times the rate in the United States, where it is 18%.
And in Iran, it's even higher (1). It is not what you would expect from either country based on the stereotypes people have in their minds.
(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta...
The 70% statistic is very prominent, but some of my Iranian friends were incredulous of it. Some speculate that men tend to pick up skills during mandatory military service, so women make up a larger proportion of college graduates. Interestingly when you look for statistics on the workforce itself (rather than graduates with STEM degrees), you see familiar ratios of ~20-25%. E.g. https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/425963/23-percent-of-mobile...
"Women make up 48 percent of internet users, 45 percent of cellphone users, and 23 percent of mobile app developers in Iran, Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi said here on Sunday."
I can't seem to find stats on the aggregate gender breakdown of software developers in Iran.
The stereotype in my mind is that countries in Asia prioritize STEM a lot, so this makes sense to me. And they don't call it STEM, it's just school.
The stereotype in my mind ...
countries in Asia prioritize education a lot, prioritize good jobs and good careers a lot. Children are pushed towards the schooling that offers the best careers and STEM is it at the moment.
I did forget about lawyers, the other stereotypical Iranian-American career that isn't STEM. The part of my family from Iran jokes about this a lot, saying even lawyers unofficially go by the title "doctor" because of the status it holds, idk if that's true.
And then people wonder why Asians are overrepresented in high-paying careers in the US. Surely, it might be because of lack of DEI programs.
Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on down the funnel.
There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes elsewhere in the system... obviously.
I am a Black male and worked as a developer for mostly small unknown companies from 1996-2020.
I then pivoted to cloud+app dev strategic consulting when a job at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap. I now work for a third party consulting company as a staff software architect.
For the last 5 years, I have had customer facing jobs where I am either on video calls or flying out to customer sites working with sales.
When I first encountered the DE&I programs at Amazon, I couldn’t help but groan. The entire “allies” thing felt like bullshit.
The only thing that concerns me is that I hope companies still do outreach to colleges outside of the major universities and start partnering with them to widen the funnel and partnering with smaller colleges to help students learn what is necessary to be competitive and to pass interviews
Maybe you didn't feel like those programs existed once you were in, but I guarantee you that they're very active in "positive discrimination" at the hiring and promotion time.
Just last year Amazon in the UK was offering special referral bonuses to employees referring black people specifically for example. I saved the emails for posterity.
For managers of technical roles, they're also a strong push to promote women as fast as possible. My manager has told me about every woman in my team that he wanted to fast track their promotion. I've never heard the same about any of man, regardless of their skill. Of course I recognize that's more anecdotical than the referral thing, but it definitely exists.
> Read the memo from Meta in full:
That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very silly thing to do.
I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable, stable products when I buy things. Not the skin colour of who owns the business. To filter things based on the owner's identity (in the American sense of the word) may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. It would not be a sensible thing to do.
> may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse
One of the biggest wins for the anti-DEI crowd was convincing people that embracing DEI implicitly meant getting something of lesser quality or value.
Here, you assume that focusing on businesses owned by people of color necessitates lowering your standards of your suppliers below acceptable levels.
It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition, because in the absence of DEI pressure campaigns they'd have been selecting suppliers based on standards and quality by default. Any other criteria inherently trades off against that.
And you seem to know that's true because your claim slides smoothly from "getting something of lesser quality" to "lowering standards below acceptable levels" which aren't the same thing. The latter phrasing means the products are worse but you consider the lowered quality to be an acceptable tradeoff.
> It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition
It does not require it. My second point refers to the fact that people often talk about evaluating candidates/choices as if there’s a single, objectively measurable metric by which we can rank them. I argue that’s not how people really make decisions, but even if they did, who’s to say that the top three choices of suppliers are not all owned by minorities or women? You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.
I’ve personally never been a fan of stringent DEI requirements, especially those that came from companies that were clearly in it just for the optics, and I do think it can result in lower quality. It’s the way that some people almost take lower quality as a given if diversity is involved that doesn’t sit well with me.
"we have the same product/service, and charge the same price as all our competitors. But because we're owned/operated/benefits minorities, you should be choosing us as a form of guilt driven affirmative action"
I can tell you, even a massive corporation that makes medical devices definitely does NOT choose their suppliers just by quality, a LOT of the suppliers we used were thanks to "people who know people", such as the painter that sucked but was buds with the plant manager so we kept dumping money into his company to fix their deficiencies.
The biggest lie that they told you was that the world actually works on merit: it does not.
That’s not necessarily true. In fact, by not having DEI programs, companies could, because of leaders’ own biases, reject better suppliers based on owners or employees being minorities.
The optimum outcome comes if there's zero racism, i.e. we only look at the quality of the company. Let's say there's R amount of racism, and D amount of DEI to counter it (super hand-wavy of course). The optimum outcome is if R = D. If R > D, racism skews the outcome away from the optimum. If D > R, DEI skews the outcome away from the optimum.
The anti-DEI (and anti-affirmative action, etc) crowd is claiming that in 2024, D > R. They would probably also claim that in 1960, R > D, i.e. a black doctor is likely to be more qualified than his/her peers.
The irony is that he didn't say that at all and it's actually you who assumed this.
I’ll quote the parent comment again:
> To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse.
Filtering based on identity can hurt his business by making his products worse. The line between cause and effect that he’s drawing seems pretty clear to me. What other interpretation would you have for that?
And for the sake of completeness let’s ask a 3rd party.
ChatGPT prompt:
“”” Given the following sentence:
To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse.
To what is the reader attributing a potential lower quality in his products? “””
Response:
“””
The reader is attributing the potential lower quality of their products to the filtering based on the owner’s identity. This implies that restricting components based on who owns them could limit access to necessary or high-quality components, thereby negatively impacting the quality of the products they build. “””
Yes you need to read carefully and not let your own assumptions get in the way.
He did say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad. He did not say: Filtering based on the owner's identity is bad while that identity matches a person of color
This is disingenuous.
A few years back, suggesting these "sensible" changes would have you seen shunned and/or fired in many companies.
> This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses
This alone is abused to no end. In my small city, I've personally known three 'woman owned businesses' where the husband just put it in his wife's name to win contracts.
Like all things, what may have had good intentions justs gets abused by the adaptive.
Even giving preferential treatment to actually woman owned businesses is arguably bad in itself. Women shouldn't get preferential treatment at all when picking a business. Only the performance of the business should matter. Discriminating against male owners (equivalent to preferring female owners) is clearly not "good intentions".
Quality is determined by the competence of the people running the business. If two companies are of the same or similar quality then the race, not skin color, of the owner can be used as an indicator of their competence. Since it is well known that non-white races get less resources at every stage of personal development. When a company like Meta buys them the growth potential is much higher.
I would disagree, there is a huge and closely knit support community for black-owned businesses that has existed for some time, a community that provides everything from money to experience.
There is absolutely nothing like this for, say, Asian owned businesses or even White owned businesses. You're totally on your own.
Does this mean we can go back to using "master" as our git repo's default branch?
My controversial opinion is that I think "main" is more descriptive and intuitive than "master."
My controversial opinion is that I still use trunk as the branch name.
"master" makes sense if taken to mean a "master" as in a recording from which other records are made.
I’ve been working with a large European company and it surprises me that they insist on using “master”. They even make other master named branches on the repos as well.
my controversial opinion is that it never mattered, all that really mattered was that there was a universal word- changing it to anything would cause at least a few hundred hours of development work and a few hundred additional hours of changing documents and tutorials and stuff.
For what? Main isn’t better if the issue is racism, because “main” has some really negative connotations in Korea (“main” families having servant families).
And, for crying out loud. the tools name is literally a mild british swear word.
This.
What makes it worse:
- Each "bad" term gets replaced by multiple alternative terms, often non-obvious, so good luck figuring out what people mean now. For example, MitM (Man in the Middle) was a well established technical term. Everybody knew what was meant, the term had no acutal gender association in the meaning, but now you instead read "machine-in-the-middle, meddler-in-the-middle, manipulator-in-the-middle, person-in-the-middle (PITM), or adversary-in-the-middle (AITM)".
- The "it's more descriptive" excuse was used as a very thin veil of justification even though the actual reason for the change was clear. So not only do you get to deal with the extra hundreds of hours of overhead, but you also have people lie to your face about why you're being forced to do that.
- It never ends. First it was "master/slave", then "master" in any context, and once that battle was "won", proponents of such policies started finding new "offensive" words.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack#Notes
This is the first time I ever see any of these.
Count yourself lucky, I guess? This is debated so often that I feel your experience is the outlier!
I've noticed more wasteful surface level change than benefit, too. Ulterior motives abound
Fair point, I don't think it should have been changed in the first place. But it's been changed whether we like it or not. If it was "main" in the first place I think that's still a better name than "master."
“Master“ implies that the contents is authoritative somehow, as in “master copy” (meaning 13 in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/master#Noun). “Main” doesn’t have that connotation.
When one is willing to discard that connotation, then, if anything, “default” would be a more accurate name, because the fact that it is selected by default in certain situations is really the only technical difference compared to other branches.
> "Main" doesn't have that connotation.
It has had the connotation of "mainline", a synonym for "trunk", in version control since before Git existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(version_control)
Presumably this was originally due to the connotation of the railroad mainline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_line_(railway)
Good point about the number of dev hours dedicated to this.
and shorter
"master" was not a thing even before. While I get the farce of renaming it for "social justice" reasons, it's still a stupid name.
It's "trunk", as in "trunk and branches".
It could not matter less. It's a piece of technical jargon. You learn what it means and move on.
Depending on VCS and branching style, "master, "main", "mainline", or "trunk" might make more sense.
"Master" always made sense to me.
Yep master never made any sense
I hope not; "main" is shorter and more to the point, regardless of any DEI stuff.
I still rename my git remotes from origin to gh because less typing is nice.
Why not `g` then? Or `o`?
but you might have to change it back to main when the next president shows up.
I don't know. I was told reliably that he is a fascist and this will be the last election. That democracy is on stake. And democracy obviously lost. So it may be more permanent.
The damage had already been done for Git. The master -> main change was a totally ridiculous move and caused unnecessary breakages into many tools that use Git and in internal systems.
I'm still waiting for Mastercard to change their name to a less "offensive" name: [0] /s (They never did.)
Maincard
In my company some repos use `master` and some use `main` so there's definitely some diversity of terminology
No, I don't think you (most likely white) scrum master would allow you to work on that change.
Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals."
Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees,
members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:
For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and
respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company
the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract
and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our
success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.
Costco's always interested me as a company. Still the only place where I pay to be able to shop. It's a personal point of pride whenever I go there and spend less than $100.
> It's a personal point of pride whenever I go there and spend less than $100.
so you make two trips?
Ha! I was going to say, I haven't managed to spend less than $100 for weekly grocery since before COVID at Costco, wonder what his secret is.
You can go almost anywhere and spend less than $100. What's to be proud of? I went to Tommy Hilfiger and spent < $100.
it's a joke, because literally every time I go to Costco it's $150 bill because it's so fun to do "treasure hunts" with my wife lol
Interestingly, Costco’s core business model and marketing is built on membership gatekeeping practices which have disproportionate exclusionary effects along class and race lines.
They make up for it with the $1.50 hotdog and drink combo.
Did Costco ever have a diversity issue? I don't think people are worried about getting more representation among grocery store cashiers.
I don't see them as different to any other company, really. I could imagine diversity in their staff of buyers would be useful, for example, to ensure they're stocking products that represent the different desires of different groups.
> I don't see them as different to any other company, really.
The pool of qualified people, for a cashier, is basically everyone.
The pool of qualified people for, say, working at a tech company, is not as diverse [1], and don't match the general population.
[1] https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/people/talent-flows...
At the risk of stating the obvious here: Costco hires a great many people other than cashiers.
> I don't see them as different to any other company, really.
My point was in response to this. The idea is the available pool for a specific job may not match that of the general population. Different companies have different ratios of different jobs. So, assuming all things are equal, the diversity at different companies can only match the diversity of the qualified pool of workers. In that sense, different companies will be different.
For example, according to those statistics, Costco should be more diverse than, say, Netflix.
perhaps it goes without saying but they don’t only employ front line store staff.
The diversity isn't for you the customer, it's for the employees and the kind of corporate environment Costco wants to build.
Edit to add: A better corporate environment, of course, does tend to lead to a better customer experience, but the "visibility of diversity" should not be the goal but rather "genuinely fostering an inclusive environment where people are respected and feel willing to put in their best work," and I think that shows at Costco.
It certainly is not there for the customer, as their core business of exclusionary membership is a quintessential example of systemic racism and classism via disproportionate impact.
Can you expand on this?
The cost of a Costco membership is $65 per year (really half that if you can share the 2 membership cards you get between two families), available to everyone, and the prices they have there are so good that even my 3-person family saves money each year by shopping there. Every family I know here in my local area shops at Costco, rich or poor, because the prices are so good for many things. I don't see how any of that is exclusionary on racist or classist lines, it seems to me like Costco is one of the good corporations trying to give a good service/product and low prices.
If the time, effort, and incidental costs of procuring a state ID card is enough to render the prospect of Voter ID requirements systemically racist, classist, and exclusionary then so are Costco cards.
The argument goes as such: up-front tolls change behavior to the degree of deterring people from even trying otherwise beneficial arrangements, as people are not perfectly rational. Look at the impact of NYC’s new congestion pricing. Compare your impression of Walmart shoppers to Costco shoppers. If they don’t match there are disproportionate effects at play.
It’s possible that some mildly exclusionary policies can be worthwhile and create more societal good than bad, even if they have some incidentally disproportionate demographic impact. Perhaps endless yak shaving fixated on residual disproportionality should not have been entertained by the DEI field in the first place, and was part of what undermined its reputation.
Citizens have the right to vote, not to be a Costco member.
Costco is not the sole source for anything. You can live a happy and fulfilled life never having set foot in a Costco warehouse. I often think of that just before I do, in fact.
> Compare your impression of Walmart shoppers to Costco shoppers.
There is literally no difference where I live.
I shouldn’t have asked.
While WalMart - unsurprisingly - ended its DEI efforts.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-dei-programs-mcdonalds-wal...
The subject matter is nominally the same, but I don't know how comparable I would guess the situations are. I 100% could see Meta making a very similar statement still today.
Note the yaml formatted text string of their statement, very cs-forward (I assume newlines where stripped out by the web UI here.
Costco employees were never called to testify at congressional hearings. They do not need to worry about pr and political pushback like meta does.
Trump hasn't specifically threatened to put their CEO in prison for life either, AFAIK.
From the memo:
> We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your executive bonus will take into consideration how close you got to X." In a world like that, many (most/all) executives will do whatever they can to get to those goals -- even if it goes against other official (or even legal) policies.
And that certainly would explain a lot of the behavior I saw working at a large company during DEI peak. (Not to say that is any kind of proof of anything untoward).
At big tech company I used to work for ($3T) they did this in 2017, and my manager did not give a single offer to a man in years even when everyone said hire, and the next 14 of 14 offers were to women, several minorities, despite many having barely any “hire” votes.
Must be Microsoft, I don’t think Apple and Nvidia went hard on this
Nvidia has the polar opposite problem on their hands, they're one of the most Asian-overrepresented companies in America. 56% of employees are of Asian descent, in a country where Asians make up 6% of the population. Second largest market cap in the world. And yet, not a peep about it from the social justice folk, funny how that works.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1369578/nvidia-share-of-...
"problem". Looking at the $NVDA chart is not showing any problems to me
If you ever seen an inside of a CS auditorium at any prestigious university that wouldn’t be so surprising to you
Pretty sure every big tech company is Asian-overrepresented. Apparently almost 75% of tech employees in Silicon Valley are immigrants, no doubt the vast majority are Asian (East Asian and Indian).
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...
Apple went hard on it, especially culturally, and it led to the type of censorship and control you see on the iPhone. Like apps being required to match Apple’s moderation rules, or the gun emoji being removed, or whatever. You can’t be an Apple employee that isn’t aligned to their way. You’ll be fired.
It was.
As a mid-level manager in a prominent tech company, my VP (not current) explicitly asked me if there were any women or minorities for whom we could accelerate promotion. Not that were ready, but may be ready soon and we'll take the benefit of the doubt. I know that lots of women, minorities, and LGBTQ employees benefitted from that, but white male employees learned there wasn't budget for them.
Execs given a goal will do what it takes to meet the goal.
Confirming Google did this.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, Twitter, Netflix all did this. As far as I know, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google still do this. For hiring and promotion both.
"We're not discriminating or putting majority candidates at a disadvantage... but for candidates with a diverse background we have some leeway to exceed headcount limits."
Or, for a court-documented example of exactly what you're describing happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501663
Dropbox instituted this policy in 2019. We called it "opportunistic hiring". Not sure if it's still in force, as I've since left.
That title image looks like it is from the set of a sitcom starring Mark Zuckerberg.
DEI initiatives have always been a dog and pony show, not a thing executives have ever truly cared about and they are now in a political environment where they can show what they believe in. People will learn the hard way these companies have never cared about you.
The weirdest one I saw was when Uber Eats would highlight black owned businesses and ask you to order from them. Uber isn't going to lower its cut for these black businesses or donate to some charity for black people if you order. It just wants you to funnel money to them through a black business. Bizarre.
Well said. What we need is real DEI initiatives. But private dictatorships don't care about this stuff. Only what marketing value they can gain from it.
They may have been a dog and pony show but were definitely real and forced executives to change how they hire and promote in illegal, discriminatory ways.
Perhaps in your experience, I would be for them if they "forced executives to change how they hire".
From my perspective, that has not happened. My problem is their lack of teeth to do what they say they do.
There were teeth, in that your own performance review (as a leader) would be affected by it. Depending on your level, your own promotion would require certain stats for your teams for it to be approved. So people made all sorts of decisions - including hiring people they shouldn’t have hired - in order to push those numbers to where they were forced to. The same happened behind closed doors on promotions.
That was not the case in my experience. I am learning that we all have vastly different experiences on what the implementation was, making the discussion rather difficult because we are all talking from very different vantage points.
It would help the conversation if you expound on your experiences on implementation.
What exactly else did DEI initiatives do besides try to get people hired for their race instead of their competence?
In theory they try to get people hired for their competence rather than their network. A widely-cited anecdotal example of this reportedly working well is the Rooney Rule: https://www.espn.com/nfl/playoffs06/news/story?id=2750645
This thread also has a lot of anecdotal examples of failure modes of 'diverse slate' rules, though, such as people who have already decided who to hire still interviewing women candidates just to appease the rule, thus wasting everyone's time.
>Rooney Rule
Was there any evidence then or now that blacks weren't/aren't just statistically worse at coaching? How many White coaches that were known to be better than the black ones were passed up for interviews due to this crap?
Your definition of success is more of minority group being hired, you don't care if they're competent. In the example you gave, you would be happy if they instead hired a woman, regardless of whether she could do the job - the "failure mode" to you is not hiring a woman. Your ideology is cancer to a functioning society.
I think the only "dei" hire i saw was an administrative assistant that got fired ultimately. Let's not pretend eng hasn't had a massive gap in available hires for a very long time.
Coming from another continent, it feels the discourse in the US is poisoned by the word RACE. Back home, no one uses it. The best proxy for inequality is poverty. Make poor people richer with basic support like free education and health care. Tax the richer. That should solve the problem. If you wonder about woman, create support for working mum with after school program and free baby care. Sorry to state the obvious.
The really troubling news buried in this to me was the appointment of Dana White to the meta board of directors. Like seriously what purpose does he serve but to appease the new administration?
I'd recommend listening to the first hour of the podcast this is taken from just as he was more candid than I thought he would be.
Zuckerberg at points brings up how the EU as is very defensive and has taken social media companies to court for the sum of 30 billion (never mentioning why). He laments how the US government need to be more protective of US tech companies overseas specifically naming the EU. When talking about Dana he says how he will explicitly help with them work with difficult foreign governments (be that through how he did it with the UFC or his relationship with the new administration).
It sounded quite like they're preparing to more confrontational with the EU and he at one point mentions how he thinks the new admin is going to protect them more with foreign countries.
This requires us to trust what comes out of his mouth. If folk are still doing that after all this time, I've got a mighty large bridge you'd likely be interested in purchasing.
You're welcome to your opinion, but this view of adversarial views and people who hold them is building precisely no bridges from your silo.
Listening to someone talk it out for an hour or more, and flesh out their views without constant interruption really helps you understand something about their mind and their drives in life. Very few people can keep up a facade of rehearsed talking points and bullshit for 3 hours.
> When talking about Dana he says how he will explicitly help with them work with difficult foreign governments
Isn't this what Nick Clegg was an expert at?
I was thinking about this as well, and it makes sense if Meta is planning a big sports push. Using a Quest 3, the sports "coverage" I've seen has been compelling (virtual NBA courtside seats are pretty nifty), especially MMA. Zuck's an MMA enthusiast so it fits.
It would be silly to pretend politics plays no role in this, but it's not like they're putting Don Jr. on the board.
There’s also the factor that Zuck is becoming personal friends with Joe Rogan (according to Joe, they text each other memes and shit talk people) and Dana is Joe Rogan’s best friend.
Out with the DEI people appointed to appease the old administration in with Dana White to appease the new one I guess.
he beat his wife on video, that is who Zuck likes now, kinda strange
I was just watching Zuck explain that to Rogan. The bit: https://youtu.be/7k1ehaE0bdU?t=3579
tl/dw: amazing entrepreneur
Maybe Zuk wanted good seats to UFC fights.
That’s not news, just reiterating, this was announced separately earlier in the week
It's interesting seeing reactions to this. My first take was "of course he appointed Dana White, he's a big MMA dork now." The connection to Trump didn't occur to me til later.
He's Mark Zuckerberg's friend. They became close because Zuckerberg picked up MMA as a hobby. Zuckerberg has a majority stake in the company that can't be contested. He decided to throw his buddy a bone. That's it. Zuckerberg is tired of how much effort being "woke" takes. This is pretty easy to understand if you imagine being white and super-rich, and the closest exposure you have to any "real" adversity in life is your other super rich, multi-cultural friends and loved ones.
Wealth inequality is at its highest ever in the United States. He observed that the people he was supporting still hated him because he's disgustingly rich, so he's getting diminishing returns for his effort to "be cool". Meanwhile everyone else is having so much fun. When he complained to his other rich friends about this, they convinced him that they don't really have any biases, he doesn't owe anyone anything, and people are just jealous. So the metaphorical gloves come off. The next four years, and maybe even many more years beyond that because of the persisting judicial climate, are going to be filled with people coming unmasked in this regard.
I think it's somewhat important to understand meta and its products are _not_ tech products. Outside of React and llama and the like, Meta is not building for or speaking to the tech community. If what they do or say sounds like populism, it's because it is. It can be ham fisted, because the majority of people are only barely paying attention, and the majority of people is who facebook wants to please.
Like politics, things feel dumb and ham-fisted, because they are. They're playing at winning wide swaths of billions of people, and the majority of people aren't paying attention, so hypocrisy doesn't register as well as just being vaguely aligned with what's popular.
I don't mean any of this in an derogatory "unwashed masses" sort of way, it's just how it is.
Thank you for putting this so eloquently, especially “the majority of people are only barely paying attention”. It’s not necessarily bad, as you said, just the reality.
We may wish that reality were different or so, but we shouldn’t resent this fact.
I don't think Meta was in any danger of anything, either implementing pro or anti DEI policies. Zuck is still owner founder. He does whatever he wants, see: metaverse fiasco. The average person could not care less about meta's DEI policy, unlike Meta's content moderation policy. Meta was not in danger of being regulated by congress, who can't seem to even fund the government properly, less agree on any kind of regulations on tech hiring. Who does this pander to exactly? Meta's reputation isn't exactly stellar to begin with among all sides.
This feels like an incorrect read on the situation. More likely this is just a blank check to hire as many people on visa as they want without having to conflict with any official policies. Meta already has entire orgs staffed by people of certain countries (hint: not US).
On the contrary, if DEI really is meaningless performative bloat which is resulting in labor problems, this is just an easy way out. It may not be popular or even possible to effectively legislate against the supposed legalized discrimination inherent in DEI, but it is pretty easy to take the L and save a few million in not having an army of lecturers on staff.
The whole charade is telling for those who believe that businesses have any real mission other than to make money: with the carrot pulled out from in front of them and the sticks put away (and possibly other sticks being brandished as we speak) it’s not hard to see why something like this would happen every 4 or 6 years.
Yeah, I don't think the billions you are talking about care about Meta's hiring policies. I don't even think billions of people accurately understand what it means to work at "Meta" vs. Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp (and even then, I doubt majority know that Meta owns all three surfaces).
Are they rolling back Chinese and Indian managers only hiring Chinese and Indian folks, too?
That's the most egregious hiring practice I've actually seen. The white/black/hispanic/asian american managers all hire teams with multiple ethnicities based on the most qualified candidates for the job, while Indian born managers frequently seem to end up with teams that are 80+% Indian. I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white, even in roles that require US Citizenship, but 80% Indian happens frequently.
There’s a simpler non malicious explanation for this. Asians know other Asians in tech and hire based on who they are familiar with rather than their ethnicity. It’s also why women managers tend to have more women in their teams.
It’s not malicious. Just a side effect of people’s network. Should that change? Yes. You want a heterogenous team. And this is exactly why DEI is important hahaha
> I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white
I assure you this is very common in the industry, at least in the US. I can even go further: that 80% white team will usually also not have any women. 80% white men on a team describes most of the teams I've worked on over the decades.
Depends highly on the scale of the company from what I've seen. Megacorp can sponsor visas and end up with entire organizations of Indian or Chinese.
How many women were doing Comp Sci in your year at uni? Mine had 6 out of 110. And they mostly hated it and don't work in IT now the ones I know about.
> I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white
I have. But surely that won't convince you.
Never join one of these teams if you're not the modal race. This isn't the case for every team, but there will be important conversations in a language you don't know, and worst case, you were brought on so they have someone to let go when the company demands another 5%.
How do you know the conversation is important if you don't know the language?
you hear your boss's boss's name a few times, maybe your own name
Have you never noticed that you were left out of an important conversation, without hearing the conversation itself?
Well the case is different here.
OP was present in the conversation and was able to figure out it's important without knowing the language. Otherwise they can just say they had a very important conversation in a place where OP was not present.
Also curious what happened after OP figured it out and asked them to switch to English. Did they refuse? Did OP reach out to his manager? Did manager ignore OP? Did OP reach out to skip or HR about the manager?
Lot of missing details.
You want to...make their hiring more diverse?
No I think what they're saying is that they want ability to be the only (or at least by far the primary) metric used to evaluate the fitness of a candidate.
There's no magical measure for ability. People tend to hire people who look like them and act like them, simply because in their mind that is what seems correct. That's how humans have always behaved, and it isn't going to change.
Then they're saying specifically Chinese and Indian managers hire people who are less skilled than the best candidates available to them. It's a fishy claim that needs proof.
When you see a mediocre team of all H1Bs from the same country of origin as their manager, it seems pretty fishy to me.
Really, not one other candidate from a slightly different asian country hit your bar?
I've seen on occasion at FAANG.
> mediocre team of all H1Bs
More mediocre than other people in the company? Presumably the manager is themselves an immigrant, possibly also on a visa. OP's saying they deliberately saddle themselves with people who are worse on every dimension, and thereby make their own job harder. And only managers from 2 countries do this. That should be suspicious to anyone possessed with logic.
> Really, not one other candidate from a slightly different <group> hit your bar?
See now that's a very different question. Are you, like OP, also arguing for diversity considerations in hiring?
> from the same country of origin
But not any random country. Literally the 2 largest countries in the world, which produce massive quantities of software engineers. Preferentially hiring from your "in-group" is never morally or legally right. But why is there automatically a presumption of lower competence when that "in-group" is such an enormous hiring pool?
Preposterous!
Only if they stop making it cheaper to hire from offshore
Folks from a given country tend to network with and feel more comfortable with people from said country, affecting their hiring and promotion practices. That’s only natural.
There’s no data to prove this allegation. Are we resorting to hearsay and racist dog whistles at HN now?
what a disgusting comment
Is it true?
[flagged]
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Sounds like you want DEI for white people. That is not going to happen. Chinese and Indians in tech was already a stereotype in the 90s.
A few years ago I worked for a company obsessed with DEI. But, as a 40+, I knew their DEI programs where complete BS because they forgot the most important protected group: old people!
At this company we had plenty of groups for Muslims, blacks, Jews, Asians, etc, but I was one of the only people over 40.
People would laugh when I mentioned that we needed a DEI group for people over 40... but I wasn't entirely kidding. It's frankly bizarre that you can have 1000+ employees and only 2-3 are over 40!? I had worked in industries prior where the median age was > 40 and it did sincerely shock me that a publicly traded company would have almost 0 people in that age range.
The funny part is that while I will not ever be black, everyone of my younger coworkers (baring serious tragedy) will be in the 40+ protected group. So in theory, if anyone cares at all about DEI in a sincere way, they should care about people who are 40+ because they will be there.
So while we celebrated Ramadan with multiple company activities, there wasn't much respect for "I have to leave a bit early to pick up my teenage kid from my ex-wife's place".
If somebody is not a white man, you probably don't have to pay them more than if they were a white man.
If somebody is older, then you probably DO have to pay them more than if they were younger, because older candidates likely have more experience and have correspondingly higher salary expectations.
So there's that. Now suppose you have an older candidate who is not demanding high seniority pay. In that case they should be on equal footing with the younger candidates, right? Well, no. There's the double standard of "if you're so old, why aren't you above our pay grade? Shouldn't you be a manager or something?" That I don't know how to fix. Then there is the more overtly discriminatory "I'd rather hire the young candidate because old people are slow." Maybe what it really comes down to is "I don't want to work with my dad."
I know this topic has been beaten to death, but the shallow symbolic form Diversity takes in practice (college recruiting photos) confirms it's merely political.
Here are a few forms of "real diversity" I have run into that you will never see initiatives for at big tech, and it would not necessarily be taboo to publicly discriminate against them:
- Number of siblings
- Asian ethnic minorities (Miao, etc)
- Discriminated indian castes
- Parents vs childless
- University degrees
- American 19th century religions (JW, Mormon, 7th day adventists, etc)
- Military experience
- experience in manual labor jobs
- Sunni and Shia Muslims
- Russian ethnic distinctions (russkiye vs rossiyane)
Obviously we can't create programs for every possible form of identity. But you can look at 2 asian men and say there isn't any diversity, when actually their life experiences couldn't be more different.
Similarly, you can have all the skin colors in a room, but if they are all upper middle class, secular humanists, from the same handful of Universities, they aren't bringing new perspectives.
My experience with DEI at Microsoft was that the true believers really had their hearts in the right place. Almost all of the negative consequences I saw, came from people who saw DEI as a way to get ahead. I think the biggest problem with DEI initiatives is how much they seem to only benefit cynical people.
>true believers really had their hearts in the right place
it is usually the position of the brains of the true believers that is questionable. Road to hell is paved with good intentions and so on.
This is a pattern we see again and again. The true believers are fools because they don't anticipate how the implementation of their doctrine will be gamed.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Thomas Sowell had good counter arguments against DEI. I recommend reading his book(s) including Social Justice Fallacies. The neurodiverse hiring stuff never even got me an interview. Even though I qualified for the programs and have the tech skills plus ASD, ADHD etc
DEI was a song and dance that companies put on for the media, politicians, investors, employees, and the public at large.
Now anti-DEI is a song and dance for the exact same reason.
If you have been in the business long enough, you will know that the company has NO ONE's interests at heart. Never had and never will. They will discriminate against any race they have to, whether majority or minority, if it leads to an extra dollar on their balance sheet.
Sure, megacorps never had genuine interest in liberation at the very top.
But it is a genuine sign of renewed danger when megacorps are perceiving the general public as valuing reactionary politics instead of valuing diversity.
“Reactionary” is a pejorative and not an argument.
Reactionary is a pejorative usually used by Marxists, and implies drawing one side into their false us-vs-them dichotomy where the "them" has a "fair game doctrine" applied to them. Usually other epithets soon follow: racist, criminal, etc.
Not only is it not, as you note, an argument, it's a pejorative label designed to discount and demonize the opponent. It's also likely to be used by someone in a political cult (or "high demand new political movement" if you prefer).
George Orwell had a really fun article on "Politics and the English Language" which goes into some detail on the controlling nature of such language and the people who use it.
At the company I work at, IMO, their DEI initiatives are counter productive so they claim "we support DEI", but in actual practice they're making the problem worse not better. It might be true that removing DEI is performative, but at least at my job, removing DEI would be a net positive for actually diversity, equity, and inclusion.
There might be other things they could do proactively. But, the ones they actually chose are derisive, racist, and do nothing to actually make the world a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place.
> the company has NO ONE's interests at heart
Except for shareholder value
> Except for shareholder value
Well, it depends. Zuckerberg has controlling interest in Meta even though he owns a minority of it (<15%) because of its dual share structure. Meta will do what he wants it do.
Google has a similar structure.
Semantics. I'd replace "shareholder value" with "making a chunk of people insanely wealthy".
It's not semantics. Those founders have more voting power than their actual share in the companies, so they don't have the same incentives as regular shareholders.
the founders are also shareholders so they are still maximizing shareholder vlaue
Zuck's other financial and personal interests could compete with his money in the company. Unlikely at 1:1, but it's more possible the higher his vote multiplier is.
Isn't that more about the value of the shares they personally received as part of their compensation package?
If meta cared about shareholder value they wouldnt be spending 10 bil a year on VR. Decisions at meta are made with marks interests in mind
Not even really true anymore. It’s all about “stakeholder capitalism“ now, which boils down to management being able to prioritize whichever stakeholder it wants to in any given situation.
Shareholder primacy may not be perfect, but it at least constrains management instead of giving them completely free rein.
This take is cynical to the point of wilfull ignorance. My spouse works in DEI and I guarantee you her and her coworkers are sincere and trying to instill better, less biased hiring practices and to make everyone feel welcome and part of the team. Not everyone is going to be the same but that's like anything else. Being 100% dismissive is as much of a mistake as being 100% unquestioningly accepting.
I believe the comment is implying that having DEI programs at all was a song-and-dance put on by the C-suite; not that your spouse is insincere in their work.
Put differently: the C-suite set up these programs (and hired very sincere people to work in them) but never really actually cared about the outcomes.
The C-suite are humans and as humans, many of them have ideologies. It's very cynical to think executives have no goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
> but never really actually cared about the outcomes
To be clear, I'm referring to the outcomes of the DEI programs in and of themselves; not the outcomes that resulted from having those programs (and/or appearing to have them). And to be clear - some C-suites really might have cared about the programs because they believed in them.
> It's very cynical to think executives have no goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
I disagree, wholeheartedly. The majority of executives have shown, time and again, that they primarily care about money. A close second is power. It's not to say that they don't have goals beyond enriching themselves, but rather that does appear to be the goal they overwhelmingly choose when said values are in conflict.
Parent post is about capital not workers.
Companies are filled with workers, and plenty of them do care. But unless they work for a co-op employees are disposable, and ultimately they serve at the whims of capital.
When capital decides that equity doesn't sell, the workers striving to create more diverse workplaces will be discarded.
The only counter to this is government, but Americans just voted for a government that explicitly wants to increase disparities.
There is literally no counter to this in the private sector, save co-ops or non-profits that actually sell their principals as part of their brand (e.g. Patagonia).
I think both things are true: there are people who sincerely want to change things, but the organization and incentive structure for large public orgs means the corps will only do things that don't lower their profits.
How does she implement DEI, in terms of hiring practices?
Every time you try to right a wrong like this (DEI), it just makes things worse for everyone involved. Just find the best person for the job, no matter their skin color, sex, age, etc.
It's not that simple. Without DEI you end up with products created by white men for white men.
DEI means you end up employing some people who potentially aren't as technically qualified, but bring a different viewpoint to the team. Until I spent a long time living with Blacks (as a white) I never knew all the things they go through growing up, I never knew how their communities and families were organized, I never knew what sort of products they needed and what sort of products they bought. I never even watched BET in my life, or read Essence magazine, for instance. My life experience was a bubble that was cut off from a significant portion of the population.
Now add in Hispanics, Asians and every other culture and I am missing out on knowing how most of the world lives.
Why couldn't they build their own products then? Land of opportunity and all...
Framing hiring as a strategic decision like this makes sense. But that doesn't mean fast tracked C-suite promotions, etc. also do.
That’s the goal of DEI; recognizing that scenarios like two hundred years of all male, all white SCOTUS judges and Presidents and all the other top slots was probably not due to them being inherently better than every non-white, non-male otherwise eligible person in the country.
How is that applicable to Europe? Who knows.
As somebody who born and spent significant portion of my life in very homogenous country.
Reading these threads I always come to the very same conclusion: diversity IS the problem and creates problems instead of providing any tangible benifits.
DEI is attempted solution to the "problem" and yet creates even more of a problem where people aren't hired based on merit and being the best candidate for the job.
None of those things are a problem in homogenous country. They simply do not exist.
Similarly it doesn't make sense that a person with a different skin color could bring anything new to the table, after all skin color does not matter.
When I hear these sorts of arguments I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/808/
> The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing
The legal landscape isn’t changing—it just was never what companies like Meta thought it was. The civil rights laws never embraced a distinction between racism against white people versus racism against non-white people. A lot of what corporate America did between 2020-2024 was simply illegal. All that’s changed is now corporate counsel are now dealing up from their thrall and realizing they’d been giving bad advice to their clients.
Why does the skin color or gender matter if in the end they pick candidates that all went to the same top schools or have previously worked at the same top companies?
Diversity in training, education and work history vastly outweighs diversity in superficial physical features.
Top schools like ivy league in America exclusively discriminate against Asians and there was a lawsuit but its not being enforced.
This is a different issue that precedes DEI.
Harvard Law Asian admissions are up 30% 2023 to 2024. Maybe a sign the situation is improving.
i dont know where you work but my company actively diversified sourcing to other kinda of schools
Finally
Hopefully this means my company of 16 developers, all of whom are white and male, stops getting accused of being racist because ignorant people on the internet don't realise we are English and there are no black developers within 80 miles
Is not it a confession that DEI ideas were always political and Meta never truly believed in it?
You could clearly see it's all smoke and mirrors even ten years ago when Twitter handles of multi-national companies were celebrating LGBT pride except in the countries where LGBT is not allowed e.g. Saudi.
In Texas, effective January 2024 DEI activities by state universities were prohibited. Universities are still trying to understand the implications fully [1]. I am generally in support of DEI on the university campuses but there were a few unwanted outcomes of blind DEI pursuit. The first major bad outcome is it adds administrative bloat. Our universities are already admin heavy. DEI departments just inflated that bloat sucking up more resources that could be used for instruction. The other poor outcome was that they added a lot more paperwork in every hiring decision. I know of a university in northeast that had to wait two months to get their job ad approved by the DEI folks. Finally, DEI departments also added mandatory annual DEI training for everyone on the campus. A lot of these training modules were downright patronizing in most cases.
I’m at white middle aged male and in 10 years have had no call backs from meta hiring. This week I got contacted by a meta recruiter
Maybe you got better at your profession. Maybe they are discriminating non whites now. Or a position just opened that’s great for someone like you.
Or maybe they're discriminating against no one now?
That they decided to fold before even being challenged really shows you how deeply held their DEI beliefs were.
I'm not going to review the above, as I've had to much of DEI corp talk over the past decade. Given that, it’s likely no surprise that I’m glad to see it phased out. Throughout my experience, I witnessed underqualified engineers navigating FAANG companies due to DEI initiatives, accumulating significant wealth despite contributing little to released projects. I believe its departure is overdue.
Jesus.
DEI = Diversity, equity, and inclusion
(Not explained in the article)
DEI programs typically implemented in US companies are considered constitutionally illegal in other parts of the world, such as in France. Giving preferential treatment based on protected characteristics is not allowed in France, for ex. preferring a female hire over male, to meet female quotas.
That's unfortunately not true, it's actually the opposite. The EU is bringing in legally mandatory gender quotas for corporate boards right now, and some European countries have had such rules already at the national level.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...
The US does in fact ban discrimination like that, but the rules weren't enforced (or rather they were enforced in one direction only). The EU has simply changed the rules.
Parent post was talking about employment. Members of the board of directors are not employees. Management is also typically not covered by most employee protections in EU countries.
Was it true Meta had tampons in the men's room https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/meta-orders-removal-tampon...
Were they ever used and or how much?
Looks like they feel they don't have to tick boxes anymore.
> The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI.
Does anyone know what decisions he's referring to?
SFFA v Harvard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...) outlawed affirmative action in public institutions, but I think most legal observers assume that if someone brings a case against the same thing in private institutions to the Supreme Court, they'll outlaw it there too.
Ending affirmative action, I assume
Money always following power.
Power always following money.
So far, Zuckerberg (Meta), Pichai (Google), Bezos (Amazon),Cook (Apple), and Sarandos (Netflix) have all personally made the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring. That's all of the FAANG CEOs. Nadella and Altman phoned it in.
The Wall Street Journal has a long list.[1]
It works for Putin.
As an outsider looking at the US, this looks so dangerous. It feels like the whole democratic system is bending to the power of money.
Just a few weeks ago, an American friend was making the comparison between the number of billion $ companies in the EU vs the US. I was trying to tell them that it isn't necessarily a bad thing to have less of that - I rather have 1,000 million $ companies than a billion $ one. The concentration of financial power seems so unhealthy, and it looks like it's crippling the whole American system.
The US isn’t just home to the largest companies. You only hear about the multinational corporations when you’re in other countries, but all those companies operate in the US initially because the US is very friendly to small businesses relative to the rest of the world. I would be willing to place a substantial wager on the US having more operating businesses per capita than any large country in the EU.
Business in the US is underappreciated in so many ways.
Democracy being influenced by wealth has always been a thing.
I think what's most worrying here is Trump & co publicly exerting influence over these huge companies.
So the concentration of economic power has made the number of oligarchs he needs to capture quite manageable.
>I rather have 1,000 million $ companies than a billion $ one
Except in the real world the bn $ company will dump and outright buy the puny million dollar companies. It will do everything in its power, which is a lot, legally and illegally, to destroy the competition. That's just the way capitalism works.
I thought monopolies were bad for capitalism?
The CEOs you identified are all associated with for-profit companies (with the notable exception of OpenAI lol). Investors expect them to "make nice" with the current regime; this is a part of being a CEO of a public company worth billions.
The whole zero-sum, straw man depiction of DEI initiatives is intellectually lazy, even if we ignore the ideology. When I've put effort into it, it's looked like:
* blinding candidate names from take-home or resumé reviews
* writing structured interview rubrics
* defining concrete soft skills and behaviors we're looking for, instead of "culture fit"
I don't care whether who made the products I use is "diverse". I care about their quality, which has been sacrificed at the altar of DEI for far too long. Not surprising to see this happen once the population realised the truth. Finally a slow return to sanity.
Genuinely curious, which product’s quality has been sacrificed at the altar of DEI? Could you name some?
Just about every widely used software. Especially from Big Tech.
Care to provide any names, and some examples of how they were affected?
Zuck has been a laggard in taking high risk policy decisions. Musk, despite some bad decisions, has at least shown the spine to buck the trend and do what he believes in.
Every change came with pros and crons, I believe that you can't employ people based on personal characteristics, genre, race, and etc. But if person fit the requirements of the open job, what important is the skill.
I know that world ins't fair, and some people (like me by example) have to put more efforts that others, but this is life, we have to conquer our space and be pride by our achievements.
What is going to happen to James Damore now? Is he still canceled?
“I may have been early but I’m not wrong.”
“ITS THE SAME THING!”
Whatever they were doing at DEI was certainly not working. I worked at a major FAANG and rarely saw any black person, and when it happened it was from another country. So I can only conclude that it was really only a farcical display for outsiders.
No more discrimination! Choosing supplies based on race had to be illigal.
It is but Microsoft still does this and has a publicly announced program that they’ve bragged about which discriminates against suppliers based on race and gender.
I'm fortunate enough to have worked for Google during a period of time when Big Tech started to gain at least a modicum of self-awareness of its toxic culture and history of excesses and indiscretions. I arrived on the scene slightly late to witness the worst of it, but the stories were actively circulating, and the structure was very much still present. SRE teams had bars next to their desks, and office parties ended with ambulances. One of the first things I had to deal with as a new manager was a sexual harassment concern (which I was terribly unprepared to handle and it showed). And if you looked around the office, you saw a lot of people who looked a hell of a lot like me.
But as I said, there was some awareness creeping in. Along with that, the folks in charge had the courage and empowerment to do something about it. And when I say the folks in charge, I don't mean the CEO. This was a company that was still running on a sort of quasi-anarchy of conscientious under-management: my first impression in 2013 was that there was no clear power structure, but everyone was trying to do the right thing and it somehow worked out. And most importantly, people could speak up if something didn't seem right.
There are many examples, but to pick one, I remember my first trip to Dublin and being invited to join their local SRE managers' meeting. I watched someone bring up the topic of alcohol being omnipresently displayed around the office and how it was, at a bare minimum, not a good look. There followed a thoughtful and reasoned discussion that concluded with the decision to put it away. Not a ban on fun, but a firm policy that, among others to follow, helped SRE culture mature into something more appropriate for a workplace, while maintaining the essential feeling of camaraderie and mutual support.
There were also top-down initiatives with varying degrees of success. When an executive puts something into OKRs, there's a good chance that by the time it reaches 13 levels down the org chart, it has turned into your manager demanding that you cut the ends off of 4.5% more roasts by the end of Q3 so they can show leadership on their promo packet. Nevertheless, there were a lot of good ideas, and a lot of good things were implemented. Through my job, I had access to training on topics like privilege and implicit bias that I believe have had a lasting positive impact on me as a person and as a leader. I also had access to people who thought about and fought about these things on a far deeper level than I will ever be able to, and I am grateful if even a sliver of their courage rubbed off on me.
It wasn't just a song and dance. At least down near the bottom, we cared, and we tried very hard to make things better. We failed a lot of the time as well, in the sense that those top-down targets that were set were rarely achieved, which I suspect is at least part of the reason for dropping them. They've tried nothing and they're out of ideas.
What we're seeing now is just more of the slide in the wrong direction that, unfortunately, started a while ago. Google in the mid-2010s was a place where people spoke up, to a fault. Yes, they complained about the candy dispensers running low or not having a puppy room, but they also told a senior vice president that he had been saying "you guys" a lot and do you know what happened? He thanked them, apologized, and corrected himself. Google in the 2020s is a place where you keep your mouth shut, sit down, and do what you're told. I don't know what it's like inside Meta, but I'm not surprised at this turn, because they're basically all following the same playbook, handed to them by Elon.
I'm embarrassed that I've hesitated to speak my mind because I am looking for a job and what if someone reads this on my profile and decides I'm not a team player? Well, I'll say it clearly: I am on team try to be a good person and do the right thing and I am very much a team player. I believe that encouraging hate, and dropping DEI goals is wrong. And if that makes me not a good fit for your organization, I think we're on the same page.
> they also told a senior vice president that he had been saying "you guys" a lot and do you know what happened? He thanked them, apologized, and corrected himself.
And you look back on this as a nostalgic memory? Something useful and productive?
More than 10 years and the only major things are nebulous sexual harassment concern (without any details, of course), booze and “guys”. Remarkable achievement for DEI crowd.
What a sad story, you can’t say “courage”, “allyship” anymore and get a promotion!
James Damore spoke up then. What did Google then do to him?
Great, maybe we can instead focus on hiring based on merit instead of gender, etc.
It wouldn't be that hard to create a blind CV filtering process to avoid bias. And if the company is so racist they won't hire people with certain names, non white people probably wouldn't want to work there either.
Maybe we can even go back to not pretending everyone is equally good at everything. Men and women are different.
I'm a Chinese Malaysian, and I look at the DEI debacles in the US with a mixture of amusement and sadness.
In Malaysia, we have something similar to DEI that stretches back to 1970. We call it the New Economic Policy (NEP), which aims to "restructure society" to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities across different ethnic groups. The explicit aim of the NEP is to increase the participation of Bumiputera (the "natives") in the economy, sometimes at the expense of the non-natives, the Chinese and Indians. The key target was to achieve 30% Bumiputera equity ownership of Malaysia's domestic corporations.
30% only? Bumiputeras constitute a much larger population percentage than that, even at that time. Furthermore, there was an expiry date attached to the policy: 20 years. So, for a Chinese person, enduring slight injustice for 20 years so that our friends can catch up with us—isn't that a good thing? Life is about give and take, right?
Except that even after 20 years—in fact, after more than 50 years—in the eyes of politicians and policymakers, the objective of the NEP hasn't yet been accomplished, and it looks like it will continue indefinitely. That's right: despite the fact that all major companies require Bumiputera participation (never mind that it's a gambling conglomerate, which is supposed to remain forbidden (Haram) to Muslim Bumiputeras), and despite the fact that Bumiputeras now monopolize public sector posts, public university quotas, and administrative/teaching positions, and pretty much dominate every aspect of government institutions (the police, army, judiciary, and all are basically Bumiputera-dominated), the NEP must still continue, because it hasn't yet accomplished its goal.
It will never accomplish its goal.
Meanwhile, the side effects of the NEP are palpable. It's common agreement that Malaysia is lagging behind, especially when compared to our neighbor, Singapore. In 1970, it was 1 SGD vs. 1 RM, and now... it's 1 SGD vs. 3.3 RM. See how much our currency has declined compared to our neighbor. It's no secret that Singapore gladly welcomes Malaysian Chinese "refugees" who escape to that little island to avoid discrimination and frequent hate speech.
Affirmative actions are a double-edged sword. They come at the expense of sacrificing market efficiency and some degree of fairness. And it's not at all clear that anyone can wield them well. I'm sure that the NEP's creators did have noble intentions and did try to minimize the side effects, but you can see where it's gotten them.
JSON, no Javascript:
https://www.axios.com/api/axios-web/get-story/by-id/636ca008...
So setting aside the details of DEI-specific issues, I find it really ironic that the right really wants to claim that government shouldn't be telling people how to run their businesses through regulation, but businesses trying to improve relationships with the incoming administration are changing how they do business to match Trump's preferences. I.e. three-letter agencies regulating their areas is governmental dangerous overreach but Trump expressing a view and having companies restructure themselves to meet his whims to curry favor isn't a concern.
In politics no one believes in anything except power (hard and soft). Deregulate (by selectively removing regulations to help certain industries) or regulate (to selectively add regulations to help certain industries) it's all the same game.
That this is a brave counter-cultural stance shows how far we fell.
Were you also trying to figure out which countries you could move to, and which friends and family you were willing to leave to do so? Or was that just me?
I am actively doing this as well
Meta, maybe Zuck specifically, always seemed liked a pandering company trying to follow the social meta. VR gets popular, Meta goes all in. Twitter “dies”, Meta swoops in with Threads. Snapchat stories, FB stories. TikTok, FB shorts. Musk getting close to Trump, Zuck trying to get close. People say he’s a robot? Hey, he now has a chain, does jujitsu, and has a broccoli haircut. Puts Dana White on the board and does JRE. Now he’s removing fact checking and DEI as the left is losing power. It’s like Zuck just wants to be recognized as a cool kid in the group, but is clearly trying too hard. The last cool thing FB did was marketplace and then all the way back to timeline feature.
There are two things that are important to separate here:
1. In one hand, the rolling back of how DEI has/was implemented I think can be a good thing. I think lots of people, myself included, believe that it "went off the rails", but most importantly, I think it ended up being counterproductive to its end goals. Nearly everyone I know who wasn't part of the DEI cottage industry came to view many/most of these programs with cynicism, even if they weren't vocal about it.
2. Don't mistake the validity of number one for thinking that this is just pure and unadulterated pandering to the incoming administration. Meta would sacrifice small babies if they thought it would make them more money in the long run.
The reason I believe so strongly about number 2 is what happened with their content guidelines changes. I'm gay, and I'm actually fine with people calling me insane. But I also better be able to call lots of religious practices based around some invisible sky fairy insane too. The fact that the guidelines specifically called out "it's OK to call gay and transgender people mentally ill", and only those groups, is grossly despicable, and clearly shows Zuckerberg is just taint licking his new overlords.
And to people who still work at Meta, I also think that's fine - we all need a paycheck. But please don't try to convince yourself or anyone else that you're doing it for anything but the money. I'm so sick of these tech companies talking about their lofty goals (and honestly, have been for a while long before Trump) when it's so abundantly clear it's just about making money. And again, I think that's fine to only be about money - it's a business after all. Just don't pretend you're doing some sort of societal good.
I’m really disturbed the extent to which companies are in lockstep with the government, and this should be a conservative value? I’m glad to see a reset on DEI in general, it’s not going away but we’ve needed new ideas in the space and I suspect we’ll see a resurgence sooner than you’d think.
Big, oppressive, intrusive governments are fine as long as they praise Jesus, cut welfare, and lower taxes.
Corporate DEI seems unambitious to me - like expecting face-eating leopards to eat fewer faces if you can persuade them to wear make-up.
The real problem is corporate psychopathy. DEI is a band-aid on a monster.
And the first step to a solution is accepting that we are in fact dealing with monsters, not with organisations that have positive social aims and can be reasoned with.
They also got rid of some messenger themes: https://www.404media.co/meta-deletes-trans-and-nonbinary-mes...
You can argue about the proper way to do DEI or not and its effectiveness, but this is all blatantly political. I mean, if someone got some enjoyment out of having those themes, what's it to anyone else?
Wow, that example is even more blatant, and just goes to show how all this free speech talk is bullshit. Exactly as you put it, "what's it to anyone else"? And if anything, I'd be all for adding more themes: You want everything in MAGA red? Cool, knock yourself out.
I hope lots of people at Meta are in full-on quiet quitting mode.
Yeah it's common in politics. Free speech for me, but "cisgender" (a medical term, same as "transgender") is a slur. States' rights for slavery, but not for abortion.
"There must be an in-group who is protected by the law and not bound by it, and an out-group who is bound by the law but not protected by it."
Yeah, what the fuck do Messenger themes have anything to do with free speech, or company effectiveness?
It's a clear signal, along with the moderation changes that allow you to call LGBT+, and only LGBT+ people, mentally ill: Meta, the company, hates gay people.
It's incredibly honest that they went out of their way to say explicitly the groups that can be bullied.
Scary, but also honest.
Bad times in the short future for everyone...
Except the whole reason for governments to charter companies is the belief it's good for societal goals. Otherwise why allow private and public companies in the first place if their only goal is to make money, that you as a government create?
This idea that business has this singular goal is the result of brainwashing and shows a deep misunderstanding of both history and how things work today.
Good riddance!
The problem isn't evil, but the lack of any leader standing up for good (using simplistic terms). The evil is always there, in our souls and in our society, as is the good; we just need to choose and use the latter to check the former. Who of any serious stature is standing up to Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump, etc.? The absence - the empty stage - is shocking.
It is one of Biden's great responsibilities, but he has long abandoned the country and the world in this essential sense and bears great responsibility for the outcome.
As a simple example, who is standing up for the LA fire chief? Is the mayor, the governor, national leaders? If they have, they are highly ineffectual - I haven't heard a thing - which is also failure on their part.
It's the responsibilities of many others. It's the responsibility of people here, in our own small community. If you are the leader, and now we all are, it's not your role to toy with the latest thought experiment; it is to make a just community. This isn't hacking the new thing, it is building critical human-rated systems on which lives, freedom, justice, and the future depend.
It shouldn't be hard for organizations to implement just policies: Agree to eliminate anything that favors one group. Agree it should be equal to everyone. And that means majority and minority, powerful and vulnerable: Eliminate anything that favors a group, including what favors the powerful majority group - which is mostly what is favored.
> As a simple example, who is standing up for the LA fire chief?
Why should anyone stand up for her? She is doing an objectively bad job. If you’re the fire chief and your entire city burns down, you will rightly catch flak for it. You had one job.
> Why should anyone stand up for her?
Because people are attacking her sexuality, not her job performance.
> you’re the fire chief and your entire city burns down, you will rightly catch flak for it. You had one job.
I don't know anyone who thinks the LAFD could have prevented this problem. Maybe they should be given ultimate power over zoning!
Zuckerberg and Musk are billionaires, money always grants power.
What are Biden and Harris supposed to do when the swathes of land that vote for politicians, don't vote for them? And when Congress doesn't back them up? Should they just... say "Pweeeaase" louder?
This is why recently I've switched from "Progressive income taxes are good because we need to fund social programs, and rich people can afford to bear a greater tax burden" to "Taxing rich people is essential to democracy, since wealth can buy political power."
Biden and Harris aren't victims, they are leaders; they have have power. Their job is to guide people. They can frame the issues, inspire people, lead them. They can persuade people just as well as others, or better given their authority.
Musk and Zuckerberg and lots of others don't hesitate to lead.
> And when Congress doesn't back them up? Should they just... say "Pweeeaase" louder?
No, that's pretty ignorant about politics. Again, they aren't victims. They make things happen. There are ways to persuade the public and compel Congress. But the Dems have completely abdicated any such thing, as if they aren't politicians or leaders.
DEI was always inherently racist and discriminatory.
DEI, in my experience, was always getting hires from special programs (like black women coding bootcamps) and having them pushed as junior in your team, no choice about that. If you were their line manager, the responsibility of them succeeding was ultimately your. I'll let you imagine how much it helped the cause.
ITT a new step in the Gaslighting Slide just dropped!
5. It’s been pretend this whole time.
Previously:
1. It’s not happening.
2. It’s only happening a bit.
3. It’s good that it’s happening.
4. It’s the people complaining who are the problem.
I hope this extends to the media/movie industry. If there is one reason I would have voted for Trump that would have been to stop the flood of DEI in movies.
Couldn't watch a movie without a gay scene even if it had no sense in the movie. The exception became the norm.
DEI has ruined many people's careers and lives. I'm not sure I can recover.
You are a sore pathetic loser if you think DEI irrecoverably ruined your career. Those evil black people that took all the tech jobs from qualified candidates like you. /s
It's giving _Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard_
About time.
I worked at Meta, I am not sure the hiring was ever "diverse".
DEI always seemed like an activity they did for show. This changes nothing honestly.
This deluge of terrible things from Zuck over the past few days is so clearly 100% in deference to Trump. The fact that Zuck name-checked Twitter when explaining the change to Community Notes was also such an obvious tell. If he viewed Twitter as a competitor, he would have framed this shift in policy as something better than what Twitter does. But instead, "we're doing what they're doing" is a message that he is essentially collaborating with Musk on shared goals.
Gee, what goals might those be.
I had deleted Facebook years ago, but this has convinced to also delete my Instagram. Sincerely hoping an Instagram alternative starts to take shape, like what Bluesky is to Twitter.
Coming from a very homogenous country, all these diversity discussions are interesting to say the least
How do we get more Hispanic LGBTQ members? Actual conversation I've overhead in Japan of all places.
> Coming from a very homogenous country, all these diversity discussions are > interesting to say the least
After reading your username, the context of your comment changes a little bit
Meta have some of the most double speak I’ve seen.
They’ll say one set of virtuous sounding goals while completely undermining it in the same breath.
This is just them running with their tails between their legs before the new admin takes over.
Meta are willing to be downright evil if it's profitable. Just ask the Rohingya. They might have hired enough DEI people that there was a cadre of pro-DEI thought within the company, but at a higher level that was only ever preemption against regulatory action, and evidently they weren't ever allowed to take root.
> This is just them running with their tails between their legs before the new admin takes over.
They're not running away from this, they're running towards the new admin, mouths wide open to receive. This admin promises to be amazing for dead-eyed big tech fuckery and they want in. And it's a win-win for them as they can also save the expensive DEI and fact-checking cost center departments while they're at it.
I think this is the norm for any topic that is politicized. You could have ChatGPT or some other LLM write the memo and it wouldn't be much better or worse.
Suppose you made a bad policy decision and want to roll it back. How do you do that? Anything you do is going to piss someone off. I think they're trying to do it in a plausibly reasonable way without shitting on everyone who worked on it for a couple years.
It's funny how they suddenly realized and reversed every "wrong" policy decision made over many years just days before a new administration takes over. And these new policies are exactly aligned with what the administration wants.
Maybe you have the causality backwards — that the response to these kinds of unpopular policies are why a new administration was elected.
It was, after all, the federal government that forced Meta to do any DEI anything /s
Well, if you've made a bad decision, which is better, to reverse it for a bad reason, or to keep it for a not as bad reason?
They didn't have to announce shit, much less announce it right as the new regime is taking over. If they wanted to sunset these programs they could've slowly ramped these programs down without saying anything and nobody would've noticed.
This sends a very clear message about what they're trying to do and whose side they are on.
I disagree that silently rolling it back would not be noticed or create at least as big a shit-storm. Being public about the change was the only real option.
Goes way, way back—I remember announcements nearly 20 years ago where they were basically removing/setting bad defaults on what primitive privacy controls they had at the time, but calling it making things "more social."
Astute observers have been predicting a woke / DEI rollback ever since Claudine Gay got canned. Big tech companies are enmeshed with the state, so it helps to keep the wider political / geopolitical context in view.
Commies on a suicide watch.
> We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone.
The new(ly leaked) moderation guidelines might suggest otherwise...
Apparently they consider platforming hate speech to be beneficial because it could bolster sympathy for the groups being attacked. I wish I was joking.
https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-trans-guidelines-hate-s...
Alex Schultz, the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.
And a marketer too! My god.
Kind of an insane stance to take considering we've seen exactly what happens when queer people's friends and family members get pummeled with anti-gay and anti-trans hate campaigns... which is that half of them end up falling for it and turning on their friend/family members.
Is there anything that couldn't be justified with this style of thinking? Would this person support legalizing murder since more murders might raise awareness of how bad murder is?
Why would you compare hate comment posted online to murder?
[flagged]
Ultimately, kind of. There were some bumps along the road though.
Kind of? More like absolutely no.
The administration went on to go round up Jews and literally kill them.
Co-incidentally, that administration was friends with a far away island nation that attacked a 3rd party who ultimately assisted with removing the administration from power for completely non-jewish reasons.
And if somebody wants to point out the USSR's help with removing the administration; that was also not for jewish reasons.
I was being facetious, sorry.
I saw that, but that was a tough one to land.
Only a few million little bumps, no big deal...
A more recent example would be Gaza. People didn’t care till they saw images. Lately, the imagery has disappeared and people don’t care again.
> Lately, the imagery has disappeared and people don’t care again.
It is sad. Not many even is aware that it is very intentional.
Bullies important part of playground ecosystem, says bully lol
The world moved away from legitimate grievances to something else entirely. Hate speech in 2025 is not the same as it was in 2000. None for the better.
A company would have to put me at gunpoint to make me say something similarly as insane. I'd sooner quit and give the entire place a massive middle finger.
For anyone unfamiliar: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee...
> “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the revised company guidelines read.
An important thing to note is that this is an exception to the rule: you aren't allowed to call someone mentally ill, unless it's based on gender or sexual orientation.
https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/h...
> Do not post: [...]
> - Insults, including those about: [...]
> Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness. [...] We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation
Edit: I re-read it and I think you can normally call someone mentally ill if it's not because of a protected characteristic. It's still a targeted cutout to allow transphobia/homophobia specifically. So you can call someone mentally ill for liking pineapple on pizza, or being gay or trans, but not for being black.
Additionally they've unbanned the use of some slurs, such as calling other people "retarded". Not a nice feeling having grown up with that word directed at me almost every day.
Serious question: why does everything need to be banned? Why not just select for better friends or forums, and avoid people (not platforms) that say things you think are bad?
> Serious question: why does everything need to be banned?
No one said that, but when you ban some things and not others, the details can be fairly revealing. "No dehumanizing... unless it's trans people" certainly sends a specific message.
What a platform chooses to ban or allow decides the shape and direction that platform takes. It's the reason why you're on Hacker News and not 4chan right now, HN is a strongly moderated platform with expectations for how users should treat each other. We saw how quickly Twitter degraded when it became a free for all.
That said, I think having "open spaces" on the internet is important. 4chan used to be that kind of free-for-all space where anything goes and you had to leave your moral outrage at the door. Thing is that it was self-contained. Now it feels like the entire internet is being turned into 4chan. Facebook ideally for most people, is a place where you go to see your friends' baby and pet photos, not get called slurs by strangers.
This is practically a guideline to people who want to deploy hate speech against other minorities on the platform: just make a topic "controversial" enough.
> common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’
Are they still mad over the couch thing?
They are always incredibly upset about extremely mild "insults". There's a 50/50 chance you get downvoted for pointing out their weirdness.
"That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry."
Is this a reference to the changed TOS or something else?
The recent policy carve-out allowing "allegations of mental illness" towards LGBT people (but no other minority) definitely speaks to a lack of universality, but that's from Facebook itself: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/h...
The Intercept leaked more detailed internal guidelines:
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...
Holy shit.
God save us if they're updating their KPI from "engagement" to "impact"
Everyone will be insulted equally.
It is "everyone". Just like "all lives matter" is a deeply humanistic message about the sanctity of life of all human beings, nothing else.
Ha. Of course.
"impact" can mean all things
> 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.
At last, a corporation acknowledges it's _cognitive_ diversity that matters.
Most other forms of diversity are superficial, inherent human characterstics that are already equal under law, and make no difference to people's ability to use technology.
I'm so relieved to see "DEI" die. With two young boys who are white, heterosexual and normal in every way, I found it disturbing to know they'd be discriminated against in the workplace.
I knew this discrimination existed because I've been a hiring manager and had HR explicitly tell me I needed to focus on hiring female technologist.
Luckily I left that job and am now at a smaller company that doesn't discriminate on gender)
However, most large corporates I've worked at have pushed the DEI agenda (with the 'E' standing for "equity" as opposed to the more ethical "equality").
There may have been historic discrimination against women and other minorities, but I have NEVER witnessed any such discrimination in the present day.
We must avoid replacing one form of immoral discrimination with another form of immoral discrimination.
> two young boys who are white, heterosexual and normal in every way, I found it disturbing to know they'd be discriminated against in the workplace.
At least they will always feel welcome in their own country. I had that feeling about 10 years ago and I miss it.
I don't think that's true. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard "pale, male and stale" as a racist, sexist, ageist slur in the UK - against its own native population.
Internet Research Agency bots on social media
Are you serious that you’ve never witnessed any discrimination against women or minorities?
To the degree that I've seen non-URM males get discriminated against? Not even remotely. Here's some discrimination I've witnessed.
* I've worked at companies where the first thing we did was mark resumes by the candidate's demographics. Two stars for "double diverse" URM women (recruiters' words, not mine), one star for URM males and non-URM women, and "ND" for Asian Males. "Negative diversity".
* I worked at a company that cordoned off a segment of headcount and made it only available to women and URM candidates.
* I worked at companies that docked people's pay if they didn't hit a diversity quota. Remember a "bonus" is just another word for a penalty. If I have $X bonus conditional on reaching Y% women that's the same as a penalty if you don't hit the quota.
I'm sure women have had co-workers assume they weren't developers, or have meetings where they were talked over, etc. But not once have I witnessed a company deliberately try to set up a policy to disadvantage a woman or URM candidate. Whereas for non-URM men, it has been the norm rather than the exception.
In any company of a large size, you will always get bad people. But many companies in tech have a lot of good people that don't discriminate. I worked at Uber and it was one of the most progressive companies I've seen. Yes, Susan Fowler's experience was real and disgusting and should never have happened. But I know a dozen females personally that said that working at Uber was their best job ever and they never felt discriminated against ever.
I have witnessed:
* co-workers being extremely wary of offending them in any way
* superiors telling me to hire them
* corporate literature that focuses on promoting their interests
* corporate networks that grant them additional networking and social opportunities
I have worked at a hedge fund, market data company, American and Australian investment banks and a travel startup.
I have NEVER witnessed racism or sexism in the workplace. If I ever did, I would find it shocking and very weird.
Maybe try talking to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188
If you’re not witnessing it then that’s only because you’re not noticing it, unless you think a large chunk of the population is just a bunch of liars.
Also you need to explain why there is a huge racial imbalance in elite jobs.
Also you need to explain literal blinded studies demonstrating racism in callbacks based on resumes.
None of it excuses reverse discrimination but denying it is happening is just not based in reality.
> Also you need to explain why there is a huge racial imbalance in elite jobs.
For the same reason there is a huge racial imbalance in crime rates.
Yes, exactly. Because people in power decide to keep wealth for themselves and people who look like themselves, and because when minorities start to gain power, then the majority crushes them.
There are many countries where the white man (I know you're burning to write patriarchy) is in absolute minority and doing very well, without being in the top for crime rates. There is enough wealth "kept for themselves" with blacks also, this is just nonsense, you people love to point fingers since there is no other excuse but the white male for everything you have to experience. "People in power", what a lame argument.
> you need to explain why there is a huge racial imbalance in elite jobs.
Well, that's easily explained by demographic history.
Here in the UK, we only had mass immigration from the Middle East and Africa within the last couple of generations, and many of the people who came were emmigrating from countries with low rates of literacy.
We wouldn't expect white-collar roles to match the demographic makeup of the population in tight lock-step. We cannot ignore the differences in economic and educational background, and the time it takes to attain elite high responsibility jobs in terms of career tenure.
Luckily, children of ethnic minority immigrants are performing well in the UK school system, so hopefully over a generation or two we should naturally see the trend improve. But while our population is expanding at approx 900K per year, with many from low-income countries with poor education systems, we will continue to see demographic imbalances in elite roles.
> you need to explain literal blinded studies demonstrating racism in callbacks based on resumes.
I don't discount that racism exists. I simply pointed out that the only racism and sexism I've experienced in the workplace has been _against_ white people, as opposed to _perpetrated by_ white people.
DEI, by lowering the bar for certain genders and races, is actually promoting prejudice against those groups. It sends the message that these people need a leg up.
How would you experience racism and sexism in the workplace that is not targeted at you?
yes, it turned out to be a scam to conflate "diversity in thought" with skin color or gender. The term "diversity" became too toxic. The term "equity" was morally dubious / wrong to begin with. Inclusivity is still respectable. So, in the end, DEI must die... Meta is right to start deemphasizing it.
On a semi-related note, I believe they should still moderate lies and mythologies on their platform. 2016 was a horrible time to be a facebook user. We don't want to go back to those days where facebook is toxic mix of clicky lies, untruths and manipulation.
20 years from now we will look at this DEI era, the way we look at the soixant-huitards and their obsession with „decriminalizing“ incest and pederasty: Bafflement how the disgustingness wasn’t obvious then.
„White Straight Man Are Evil“ isn‘t a force for good, its sexist, racist – and by the way classic cultural imperialism as US academic social science departments pushed this crap down the throats of every country in America‘s orbit (and sometimes even more if it helped with regime change).
I'm most curious about the timing. Could this be related to the X narrative of LA fire response being compromised by DEI hiring? Zuck really sounds like he's mimicking X TPOT dialogues these days.
Diversity should never be a goal or initiative.
It’s a value. You wake up every day and practice diverse hiring practices.
The moment you put a tangible target to hit, is when you gamify diversity into something bad.
How do you make it happen? Relying on people to "wake up every day and practice diverse hiring practices" wasn't working.
How do you know its not working? Because there are statistical differences in outcomes between groups of people?
Is this anecdotal or do you have source where hiring doesn’t match the pool of qualified candidates(Eg: recent CS degrees graduates)?
It starts by hiring people who share your values. Don’t hire scumbags, liars, racists, Neo-Nazis, etc.
If someone demonstrates they don’t represent your company’s values, get rid of them or put them in non-decision making roles and keep an eye on them.
Company values are bullshit.
Corporations only care about making money, no matter the damage they cause in their profit-seeking motive. All else is fluff.
X doesn't seem too motivated to make money; Musk's decisions seem to pursue is values (power) and sacrifice revenue. It seems like Facebooks recent decisions may do the same.
I agree that it's a bad goal, in terms of how it being a goal corrupts the value itself. Like in Goodhart's law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". But managing a larger entity cannot realistically be done via values, I think. Different people have different interpretations of the same values, and not sharing the values 100% in the first place, so, the values will need to be formulated into more tangible things, like goals, limits, directives, laws, ect. Will not be ever perfect, but I doubt that we have better tools to achieve it.
There's also the Martin Luther King thing "...will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." A lot of DEI hiring seems to be about fashionable skin colours.
From the linked Article:
> Why it matters: The move is a strong signal to Meta employees that the company's push to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration isn't just posturing, but an ethos shift that will impact its business practices.
I would say the shift in policy is to avoid law suites, as the Federal Courts have held DEI programs are sometimes discriminatory... especially the equity parts. Diversity and Inclusion are important parts of existing civil rights laws, so those aspects of DEI programs are not very important except to actually ensure ethical hiring practices are in fact practiced (E.G. not being racist or sexist when hiring). But practicing equity, or sometimes called other things... like affirmative action, etc... are illegal (they are sometimes blatantly sexist or racist). I've been on technical teams blessed by the DEI hiring program, and it was alright... We got more ladies, and we hired people (who earned less) in other time zones around the world. It got weird, for a lot of weird reasons I won't go into, but the main point is the team stopped vibing like before, and that's fine to some extent but this was a disconcordant vibe, not a minor offbeat member of the band, but a bunch of folks playing their own tune...
The type of thread where best comments re at the bottom.
Good. It always has been a ZIRP scam.
As an elder millennial I have to cheer.
Why?
Feels great when a fever breaks.
> Sunsetting supplier diversity efforts
Why the hell would a company pick vendors based on the sexuality or skin color of the owner or whatever?
Many companies explicitly and publicly state these policies. The government does this too. It’s explicitly discriminatory and should be illegal. For private companies it is illegal.
The US Government is required to do this.
Its wrong!
Seems fine as it always appeared as virtue signaling to me. This is one less talking point that conservatives will use when literally anything happens.
This change is no less "virtue signaling" than the previous policy; it's just signaling to a different audience.
>This is one less talking point that conservatives will use when literally anything happens.
In this regards, I trust them to handle themselves well, even in a face of shortage. And it's not like grounded arguments matter in era that is being dubbed "post-truth politics".
They don't care about reality, watch them blame the democrats for everything wrong happening in the next 4 years, despite them no longer holding any meaningful power.
I am open to discussing the efficacy of DEI vs its harms.
BUT
The right wing media machine will never run out of silly things to tell its consumers to be angry about.
Why would any California based company take a chance on being sued by the California attorney general's office in such a way? Meta is the perfect target to pick for fighting the overreach of a Trumpian department of Justice and GQP congress set on reversing years of social progress
> Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged
These challenges are always in bad faith. It starts off by assuming this practice is exclusionary of white males. We know that's not true, because that would (obviously) be illegal (Title VII) and these companies are not dumb.
> there are other ways...
Like what? Why won't those "other ways" be immediately challenged by the same bad faith actors?
I wonder if Meta will hire James Damore now that the world is becoming sane and nuking this mind virus from the western civilization.
Calling gay people "mentally ill" is sane, but even implying that religious people are not all there being punishable is the "world becoming sane"?
pretty reductionist view of everything he wrote.
Let me get thsi right... Meta resolved issues with a performative DEI program with an even more performative act pandering to an incoming administration which is openly histile to POC... that's not better, it's worse.
You’re right, it’s all performative. Meta will do what it takes to keep regulators off its back and reduce friction. If Dems are in power then they’ll do fact checks and DEI. If they aren’t then they’ll get rid of it.
They’re like fair weather fans changing ball caps and jerseys based on the favored team. They’ll kiss the ring, throw some cash where it needs to be, make some meaningless changes that satisfy the current political party in power, and get back to making billions.
Good to hear. Racism / sexism has no place in hiring practices and was always illegal.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
What about this do you perceive to be flamebait or a generic tangent? I’m directly and sincerely commenting on the article. Plenty of other comments are expressing either support or criticism of the policy change.
The comment didn't respond to anything specific in the article. It just used it as a springboard to make a generic comment about a much more general topic. That's what I mean by generic tangent.
Generic tangents always make threads less interesting, because they take attention away from the specifics of what's new in an article and direct it instead to one of the large pre-existing topics that people tend to fixate on. I sometimes compare this to a spacecraft flying too close to a black hole and getting sucked in: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
It was flamebait in two ways: (1) Generic tangents on inflammatory topics are already flamebait; and (2) the comment makes a huge assumption (that the previous situation was "racism / sexism") and treats that as fact without substantiating it. Large unsubstantiated claims about inflammatory topics are also flamebait.
I feel like people who say this haven't read the research about our unconscious biases. My personal "hit me on the head" moment was reading about the Cincinnati Orchestra who started auditioning candidates behind a curtain and suddenly found their ratio of male:female went from 3:1 to 1:1. No one at that organization was consciously discriminating. Everyone thought as you did that they were acting without racism/sexism. And yet (at least) sexism was obvious once they removed it from the hiring equation.
And this leaves people in a quandary. How do you control for sexism when you can't just hide your candidate behind a curtain? The solution society has tried is to mandate ratios. Why they tried this makes sense. It's obvious downfalls make sense. I'm not aware of any other suggestion that is viable.
This is a funny example because some in the pro-DEI movement advocate for ending blind auditions to enhance diversity[1].
I think if we could somehow do "blind auditions" for any kind of work, that would be the ideal case of non-biased hiring. But if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board.
> if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board.
I really disagree with this. Obviously there are the extremists on the far end of the spectrum which this accurately describes, but the vast majority of people who support these types of programs arrive at it by observing 1) the literal centuries of examples like the one above and 2) the numerous visible day-to-day examples of racism/sexism one sees directly (not talking about silly microaggression shit)
It doesn't take an extreme viewpoint to come to the conclusion there are knobs that might need to be turned a bit more deliberately in our society to bring it closer to the blind evaluation model.
It's a shame how much of our discourse is people in the middle of the bell curve arguing principally against people on the far ends of it (or observing such arguments and wisely choosing to stay out of it).
Thing is, the "extremists" are the ones with strong beliefs, so they tend to be the ones actively promoting such programs and running them, not the middle of the ground people.
One is reminded of the famous debacle when GitHub canceled ElectronConf after using a blind review process to select talks, and ended up with al male speakers.
Sure but the DEI programs have only ever constituted a tiny, tiny portion of hiring/firing/economic activity in general.
You're behind the times- blind auditions have been disfavored by DEI-practitioners for years, on the grounds that they're not as effective as quotas.
> auditioning candidates behind a curtain
That anecdote is widely shared but inaccurate: https://reason.com/2019/10/22/orchestra-study-blind-audition...
DEI seems to me to be the _opposite_ of blind auditions though, where instead of hiding immutable characteristics in the hiring process, they are factored in
You should read the research because its actually good.
They studied the effect of telling people that they had an unconscious bias and it worked in eliminating it.
I would like to see that reproduced as it seemed like only certain demographics followed as you would expect; and primarily not the one you would like to hear. But it would be good to do something actually effective that doesnt introduce racism to fight racism.
Fire vs Fire style.
The claims about unconscious bias don't replicate:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...
and the claims about the orchestra also didn't replicate.
Actually DEI promoters hate blind hiring and usually try to kill it because when implemented it always raises the number of white men being hired - there is racism and sexism in society, it's just in the opposite direction to what DEI programmes claim, and it's not unconscious.
An interesting example of this kind of meltdown was the one attempt to organize a conference for Electron developers. They decided to select speakers using blind reviews of abstracts, because they believed the non-replicable pseudo-science you're repeating here. When the results were unveiled it turned out every speaker they had selected was a man (the expected outcome of blind auditions), so they cancelled the entire conference in fit of anger. The whole community lost, because the organizers had believed in these lies told by social studies academics.
I'm more worried because it's part of a big package of swinging to the right politically. The moderation rule about "You can only call someone mentally ill if they're also queer" seems particularly uhhh nuts, deranged, stupid even.
And we all know there was no racism or sexism before DEI programs.
Valid point. But the cure should not also be the disease.
DEI has so little effect on hiring. I'm much more concerned about H1B for cheaper work. It's a total non-issue.
This comment is based upon n two assumptions:
1) Twitter has imploded, and is on the road to Myspace level relevance
2) that implosion is due to a removal of moderation
I'll try to keep it politically neutral. But this and other Facebook announcements means inexorable collapse is on the medium term horizon, because they mirror what Twitter did
These actions could possibly be done with social network circa early to mid 2010s.
But since the rise of massive online campaigns of disinformation or propaganda, and then rocket fueled by AI...
It means not only will left-wing people run away in droves, but then toxicity explodes and successive waves of moderates and apolitical people get driven away.
It's interesting because people seem to have forgotten what the word moderation means.
It's keeping out the extremes. In particular, the extremes of emotions. Which then cloud any sort of productive discussion.
Without moderation, especially with the organized ai and misinformation and other social Network phenomena, The pure outrage cycle while individually effective for posts, very rapidly makes the overall ecosystem completely intolerable.
Because one thing at the political extremes I would argue more strongly on the right but definitely on the left, is intolerance.
> 1) Twitter has imploded, and is on the road to Myspace level relevance
Revenue is down, yes. But when a head of state wants to say something to the world, they put it in a tweet. 189 countries have an official presence on X.
Sure, but government bureaucracies are also famously slow to adapt and move on. Is it actually a vote of continued confidence?
Yes, it is. Here's a list of world leaders congratulating Trump on his election. Almost all of them did it on X.[1] Now that's market share.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/list-of-world-leaders-c...
I think you missed my point. Government policy right now is to use Twitter, yes, but is that because everyone has confidence in it, or because they are simply slow to change? Twitter is quickly losing it's claim to being the digital town square both as users flee it and it becomes more difficult to use. I can't even navigate twitter anymore because I don't have an account. I can see single tweets at best. A new default choice has yet to appear, but what are the odds everyone is going to stick around if Bluesky continues to gain a following? To me it seems like momentum more than anything else.
And really, if you were going to publicly congratulate the Tweeter in Chief and wanted to make sure he saw, how would you do it?
> And really, if you were going to publicly congratulate the Tweeter in Chief and wanted to make sure he saw, how would you do it?
Good point. The old approach was to broadcast something on your countries' official radio station. The CIA used to have something called the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, with people listening to Radio Albania and such, just in case somebody announced something important.
It's strange Facebook would follow in the path of Twitter explicitly, because at least on paper Facebook is (and has been) the more profitable of the companies.
But I do understand a willingness to abandon "moderation" and allow extremes, because things like extreme emotion could lead to arguments that lead to increased user attention and thus, platform usage.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/303681/twitter-users-wor... shows users down from 368 to 335 million. Down but not really imploded.
Musk has approx doubled his net worth from $200bn to $400bn.
It's not really Myspace.
What is there at this point that is going to stop FB from having the same advertising problems that Twitter has had?
You used to have major corporations advertising on Twitter but they bailed out when they realized that their ads were appearing amidst people posting insane bigoted screeds.
It would seem like there is now a severe risk of a revenue collapse at Facebook if advertising corporations behave the same way they did with Twitter.
I can't see FB becoming like X. If nothing else FB has a real names policy so everyone can see who said what whereas on X you can be anonymous or set up a million bot accounts or whatever.
We've already run the experiment on what an unmoderated discussion forum looks like once it grows beyond a trivial number of users. It's called 4chan, specifically /b/. Twitter/X is just reinforcing the previous findings as it rapidly shifts into being another version of /b/.
The shameless and the trolls push out the sensible people. It quickly devolves into conspiracy theories, grifts, porn, and propaganda.
4chan is moderated.
For some of the channels yes, but /b/ mostly stops at "delete the obvious child porn". Even the more moderated channels take a fairly light touch, only mostly removing off topic threads in addition to the blatantly illegal stuff.
I mostly agree. FB is trying to “sell” (the price is data / ads) a product. They have to decide if that will be a “moderate” product or an extreme product. But, I’m not excluding that they have reasonably concluded that a more extreme product will generate more revenue (perhaps from fewer people).
I created a new account on Twitter to see what new users see and the website is unusable. It's basically 4chan now with Elon Musk and sports.
Anyone defending people should try it. See how long you don't see and Elon Musk post or other hateful far right content.
I use it every day and my feed is full of intelligent, thoughtful analysis and discussion. Even the edgy humor is much more clever and subtle than what you'd find on Reddit or 4chan
Do you have an example of such account? Most of the thing I saw is engagement bait.
Read my post again. Try creating a new account and see the content you get.
by that same logic Bluesky should be overtaking X but it isn't
X is growing even bigger and has international reach which Bluesky doesn't
It simply hasn’t been long enough. I wouldn’t necessarily bet that it will, but X has lost net users and Bluesky is gaining them so if trends continue (they might not) Bluesky will overtake X, but Twitter also wasn’t built in a year.
Facebook already was a cesspool, now they add the shit into it.
> It means not only will left-wing people run away in droves, but then toxicity explodes and successive waves of moderates and apolitical people get driven away.
Left-wing people haven't left twitter. Some extreme Democratic Party partisans, many with histories on twitter too ugly and venomous to possibly clean up, have left twitter. Others have created accounts on Bluesky, but still post twice as often on twitter as they do on Bluesky.
Bluesky showed hockey stick active usage growth in the two weeks after Trump's election, peaked on November 20th, and has been steadily dropping ever since.
There was a little inauguration bump, but Bluesky should be at its pre-election activity level within a few months unless they do something drastic.
The real threat to Twitter is Threads, and only after this announcement. Zuckerberg is promising exactly what Musk promised, but is not as erratic as Musk (who is happy to attack users based on his own personal whims.) If he actually delivers, formally and professionally, a 2015 twitter experience, he'll win.
I'd be curious to see the same graphs for X / Threads, but I don't think we'll ever get that data.
It was always a sham anyway.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming: making $$$
I don't expect BigTech to care about people -- it's clear that they never have. BUT what makes me sick is that they pretend to care, pretend that they are "solving the world's problems", "building communities", etc. They're no better, and perhaps just as destructive, as WalMart.
15-20 years ago I was very excited about and supportive of these companies. I've grown to despise them.
It was always about $$$, despise commies who held companies hostage.
commies?
I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.
I keep hearing this about Twitter and Facebook but my experience is completely different. I believe the default experience is as you describe, but after I started following dozens of retrogaming groups, old games are all I see in both places. Even the ads became relevant and, believe it or not, interesting. I've clicked on a couple, which took me to small creators in the retrogaming and RPG areas.
The same is true with Reddit. The default feed is absolutely awful, but the bar required to curate something individually interesting and useful is too high for most new users, given the toxicity + banality of the default.
I finally quit my barren Twitter when the Musk takeover resulted in my feed being flooded with porn (including illegal content) and arabic carpet cleaning ads. I seriously doubt anyone's default Reddit front page has ever looked like that.
I keep seeing people say they've experienced this, but I've been on twitter for years (pre Musk and stayed post Musk) and I've never once seen porn on there. How does this happen by accident?
They're going to have a pretty developed and stable picture of you and what you respond to by now, especially of their view of you aligns with high- value placements already.
So they probably don't bother to audition that kind of content for you very often because they already have strategies that milk your attention, engagement, and wallet better.
When you hear other people share their experience as new or different users, keep in mind how customized all these platforms are and how idiosycratically optimized they'll already be for you as a long-time, engaged user.
Most people can't go back in time to get where you are, and don't have any sure (or worthwhile) road to get there.
In my case, my (now deleted) account (which was primarily read-only) would get several porn bot followers per day. If I didn't log in for a week, I'd have dozens of new "p#i#c#s#i#n#b#i#o" type accounts following me.
Towards the end, there would often be porn in replies of many posts on all kinds of topics, like politics, news, etc.
> several porn bot followers per day
Ah, ok, yeah, you're right, that did (and still does) happen to me. I had forgotten about that, I just ignore followers now.
I don't see any porn in my feed. Some of it is salacious, but not porn.
YouTube is nuts when not logged in as well. Those crazy clickbait thumbnails eg. Mr. Beast or whatever.
My logged-in YouTube shows me almost entirely 3blue1brown, Applied Science, and the like. Logged out it is 100% chum and garbage.
I wish the home was better showing the stuff you followed vs. having to go into subscriptions tab.
edit: there are a limited number of tiles to show but yeah
On reddit the defaults are shit and the rest of the site bans you by default until you've karmawhored yourself past an arbitrary threshold on those defaults. Trash website.
I used to use it years back. Some subreddits were really great but they all inevitability devolved so I lost any interest in maintaining active accounts there. r/skookum had really interesting content for a while but devolved into idiots reposting the same skookum brand wrenches over and over again.
I'm sorry but reddit is trash. Every subreddit, no matter how niche, is basically cringy phrases being repeated or photos of some "home set up" or said niche product someone bought who is looking for validation of their decision. It's so bad I blocked reddit from my search engine results.
Clearly we're using different subs. ymmv.
Provide an example of a sub that isn't like that?
Both /r/Science and /r/AskScience are very heavily moderated and verified industry experts discuss papers on it.
There's a lot of interesting discussions on r/science but like the rest of reddit it's such an echo chamber that you end up with bizarre one-sided arguments that discourage all opposing views.
Is there much space for opposing views on a forum answering science questions? Presumably the purpose is to answer from established science.
> Is there much space for opposing views on a forum answering science questions?
Perhaps more than anywhere. Science is a process of challenge and response, not a static body of knowledge.
> Presumably the purpose is to answer from established science.
"Established science", which is still subject to debate itself, isn't what link aggregators cover. They bias towarss stuff more like science news and novel study outcomes, which are nothing to do with established science except as a seed for critical discussion.
If something is "established" and has no "space for opposing views" it's the opposite of science. "Dogma", perhaps. In science, by contrast, every belief is at best contingent, subject to rejection when better evidence becomes available. That's what makes it science in the first place!
I don't see any benefit in entertaining flat-Earthers in discussion.
If you prohibit arguing about the shape of the Earth, you're banning people from explaining that EGM08 is generally more accurate than EGM96—and where it isn't. That is a significant harm. Trolls advocating obvious nonsense like flat-Earthism isn't a significant harm, because nobody over the age of 6 will be misled.
Even if you were right that debate on the shape of the earth had no benefit, forbidding it still wouldn't be science. Science is not coextensive with beneficial things.
Yeah the upvote based ranking basically means that every comment section is basically dogpile on the same points of view and every dissenting opinion is hidden... Terrible
Broadly appealing subs like that should be the last subs you cite if your goal is to provide evidince that Reddit isn't lowest common denominator trash.
Even in fairly niche subs I find that "surface level" content quality dominates and nuanced takes are frequently unpopular which is basically a recipe for anyone who knows anything to leave. I find the best subs are satire subs because having to know enough about something to be able to satirize it weeds out all the people who create and perpetuate surface level content. I assume there are some super niche subs that are similar.
/r/CreaturesGames/ - Discussion about the Creatures artificial life simulation games. I haven't seen anything particularly cringey on it.
Agreed. The X ads were terrible and annoying until I flipped on that "Let X ad track you" and at least I get tolerable ads on mobile. (uBlock Origin blocks them on desktop)
The For You feed varies week by week but is generally okay. I make heavy use of lists, mute words, etc to clean things up.
X is a train wreck, but an interesting and useful one, depending on who/what you follow.
I bought a premium account on X and the ads went away.
I bought a premium Prime account on Amazon, and yet some of their shows still have embedded commercials. grrrr.
I have Premium and I still get half the ads as free.
Plus, I get constant ads to upgrade to Premium+ for ads-free.
Premium+ is probably what you have.
I use bluesky and so far have no ads and lots of great journalism and academic lists to follow. Greatly enjoying it, feels like Twitter 2012 or so.
Use Firefox and you can block them on mobile as well.
I run a number of business X accounts which are post-only.
The very second the US election got underway all of our accounts started to heavily promote right-wing political content. Even though we specifically said when we signed up that we aren't interested in anything like that.
This happened to me on imgur, i explicitly filtered out politics but once the election got underway I started seeing it everywhere (except in imgur's case it was left-wing content). I turned off the politics filter and then turned it back on and they vanished for a time but then slowly leaked back in. If i reset the filter every week then i could keep political related content hidden for the most part.
same, people keep complaining that their twitter feeds are full of violence, porn & political bullshit but I get 0 of that
I haven't gone out of my way to restrict my timeline either, I follow ~1000 accounts I just don't follow or interact with accounts that post any of that crap.
Don't worry it will come, it takes a while but then you start getting sent outrage bait, stuff you will disagree with just to get you involved.
I don't understand why you were being flagged, it was actually my experience then deleted my account, of course it was some months ago, but still think that is the current one. (September of 2024)
are you suggesting the company's staffing policy influences what users post? I don't agree the arrow points in that direction. or that there's an arrow between those topics at all
They all suck. But the user experience is practically irrelevant to the business of selling ads and operating sentiment manipulation channels, which is the business that all of the large social media companies are in.
And whether their ideas and strategies are well-grounded or seem optimal or ethical to the rest of us, the top leadership at most of those companies lean strongly towards corporatist, libertarian political ideals and see most regulation (and preemptive self-regulation) as both philosophically immoral and an existential threat to their businesses.
> which is the business that all of the large social media companies are in.
I agree with you.
If this is the case and money is speech, can a well-intentioned organization just collect donations to advance their message? Like when Philip Morris uses this to sell cigarettes to kids we say that is bad. But what if the EFF used it to ensure net neutrality? Or if Planned Parenthood used it to add reproductive rights to the bill of rights?
Do my donations already pay for social media campaigns?
Do the ends justify the means?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658074.
You have to follow people you’re interested in, and continually curate that list. X is garbage in the same way /r/all is - you have to find the subreddits you like and aren’t too large
> It's completely unusable
I will rail on FB just as hard as the next guy, but realistically, from a business perspective, if facebook's wild popularity and 3 billion active monthly users still says "unusable" to you... well, do you really think most people would agree with you? And more importantly to the company... whose opinion matters the most?
The fact that you're being downvoted for accurate reporting that can be easily verified by anyone who makes a Twitter account.. lol
Before I deleted my Twitter account, I tried really hard to just block every account that posted content I felt was pol-tier.. it just doesn't work. That platform is FUBAR, and the prime example is the owner of the platform who has been completely brainrotted from staring into the orb for 12 hours a day.
It seems like public sentiment is trending towards rolling over and letting channers run society. We'll see how that goes.
I had my Twitter account for almost 15 years before deleting it.
I hadn't blocked ANYBODY for 13 of those years, but towards the end I was blocking dozens of users per day. Not not just, "I don't agree with this person" but "Wow this person is genuinely hateful and not contributing anything meaningful, and I would rather not see that."
Musk buying Twitter had a profound effect on the discourse. I don’t think this happens without him buying it. I don’t think Trump wins without it. People can speak freely and it’s just obvious some of these sacred cows were unpopular and only in place due to pressure. Overton window has shifted big time.
Except you can’t say anyone is cisgender, so not that freely.
Hopefully we can also rid the tech industry of the most long running and pernicious and hidden DEI/WOKE program in history; Affirmative Action for Zionists.
I suppose dang must be asleep, maybe a second mod would be a good idea
This is a conversation about DEI programs being cancelled. It is relevant.
Can you prove this exists? If doubt most hiring managers in tech know what a Zionist or that it is something they ever think about.
We Trump administration now.
"As it turns out, principles are for sale"
I remember meeting Maxine Williams on my first day at Facebook. She gave a strong introductory address that left me with a deep appreciation of the value of diversity not just as a moral good, but as a good business decision. Seeing her work denigrated and thrown under the bus to appease the bigotry of Trump, Elon, and their odious ilk is a gut blow.
We are in for some dark times.
They're bluffing
Zuckerberg single-handedly pulling the control rods out of a platform with three billion users may go down as the most consequential, catastrophic decision in human events.
The only good billionaire is a former billionaire.
Plenty of popes have made far more consequential decisions.
I previously assembled & managed a team of engineers at Microsoft.
Out of 10 employees on my team, I had:
- male and female (80/20 split)
- black, white, asian, latino
- engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s
- east coast, west coast
- ivy league, college and high-school graduates
That level of diversity was very rare at Microsoft, and even rarer at other tech companies.
It took a *lot* of work; with less effort I would have had a more uniform distribution (male, white/asian, younger, west coast)
>It took a lot of work
A lot of work rejecting talented candidates of the wrong color?
From a business perspective, did it work? Was the team more, less, or equally effective than one where you didn't expend the time and expense of hiring a more homogenous group? Was turnover better or worse?
I know you can't absolutely know the counter-factual, but I've always wondered this. Incidentally, when I was a young man and CS major, I changed majors and went into a different field because I wanted to be around more women, but I've never known if being outside that kind of monoculture actually is better for the business or not.
Is the business perspective the right one to go with?
Let's say it's legal to discriminate on race in hiring in the US. Then a Japanese restaurant hires only Japanese workers because they find customers prefer it. Do we want to have this?
It's a business. The business perspective is what's relevant.
The purpose of our state is to provide for its citizens. So we decided to use a market economy because it seems the most efficient way to do that. But we make up the rules that it runs by and we can change the rules as we see fit.
So it seems now we are saying DEI is not a good rule. Can we make a better rule or is the goal of that rule not good?
How did you get there? Did you have to make a conscious choice, for minority candidates, to prefer them to majority candidates?
I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI.
It could be close to blind if communication were only done through writing and the candidate names were not known.
> I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI.
Isn't the central point of DEI that whites prefer whites due to an unconscious bias?
Then, on one hand you have a very conscious decision to hire a minority just because he or she is a minority. On the other hand, you have an unconscious bias that might or might not be there but you can't really measure it by definition because it's unconscious. It's not the same.
I think it's more unsaid than unconscious. But putting that aside, if DEI is purposeful and deliberate while the "natural state" of things is not (unconscious bias), is that how we should leave it?
Should businesses have the freedom to exclude if it's unconscious?
> Should businesses have the freedom to exclude if it's unconscious?
Business should have the freedom to not hire for any reason. They shouldn't be forced to enter a business relationship they're not fully convinced of.
The problem with unconscious bias is that it's unobservable by definition: it might be there, it might not be there and if it's there it might be imperceptible or very strong; you don't know because it's unconscious. It might even be not existing, and the gaps in hiring explained by the fact that minorities have less access to higher education for economic reasons. Yet the response to this is always conscious.
For those living in countries that don't have majority white people (eg asian or african countries), do they have any DEI programs to hire more white people and all that?
I got a UC Regents Scholarship to UCSD bc my parents are southeast Asian. My grades and SAT score were lower than my Jewish best friend's grades and scores. He did not get a scholarship. I promptly lost my scholarship after failing Physics 2A because I skipped the final to make out with a girl. I didn't think twice about what I squandered until I had to get a job and ask my parents for money to pay for the next quarter.