The ultimate aim of these diversity projects is to lower labor costs - either by psychologically manipulating people into accepting lower wages, by focusing on conflict and alignment along racial lines instead of class lines, or simply to expand the available pool of workers.
Very hot take. I couldn't disagree more. The ultimate aim of these diversity projects is to help members of disenfranchised communities find meaningful employment at good companies. This both strengthens the product and makes the company more attractive - implemented correctly, it can be come a powerful flywheel of benefits. Implemented incorrectly, and it can sink morale without actually empowering, supporting, or helping anyone.
Nobody argues that. The OP said “the ultimate goal is...” and many people would argue against decreasing labor costs as the ultimate goal. More like a side effect.
1) Unemployment for software engineers is negative, there's way more room to hire skilled people before salaries become the reason people switch amongst top companies.
2) The poster I replied to stated that lower labor costs were the primary goal - and I refuted that. You seem to think I am stating something I am not.
If diversity caused lower wages then we'd see a proactive push among corporations to create inclusive cultures to invite that situation. But we don't, because it doesn't.
>we'd see a proactive push among corporations to create inclusive cultures to invite that situation. But we don't
Wait, are you saying there has not been a push among corporations to increase diversity?
>In 2003, MIT professor Thomas Kochan noted that companies were spending an estimated $8 billion a year on diversity efforts. But since Trump’s election, and with the emergence of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the industry has exploded. A 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63% of the diversity professionals had been appointed or promoted to their roles during the past three years. In March 2018, the job site Indeed reported that postings for diversity and inclusion professionals had risen 35% in the previous two years.
watch the hands not the mouth - take a gander at the demographics of microsoft/facebook/google and you'll see how much they actually support diversity initiatives
We get it: you think that you (as a mediocre white man) will make more money if you continue to exclude minorities, and as such you want that to happen.
It fucking SUCKS that HN is so full of racists and bigots that y'all just talk about this stuff, and Daniel Gackle just sits there and says he's doing a great job so long as the racists use polite language.
Absolutely. It may be positive without being purely altruistic. Companies benefit from diversity directly in a number of ways.
* It reduces the number of those moments where you do something stupid and insensitive because a bunch of identical-looking people all nodded and said "Sure, I don't see any problems with that".
* It not only increases the talent pool, but gives that new talent a reason to think that they'll actually be accepted because there are already some faces like theirs.
* You get new perspectives on user needs and potential markets.
As, you say, it's easy to do it wrong. But the self-fulfilling prophecy where people hire those who look like themselves -- and then conclude that people who look like that must be the most successful -- is always going to make certain mistakes over and over. Always with the same shrug and "Well, what are you gonna do?"
African Americans and Hispanics are hired at lower rates into the IT sector because they have poorer outcomes in school, particularly for mathematics.
How does racially-biased hiring address that other than just placing unproductive workers into roles they are not qualified for, with flow-on negative impacts to the rest of the company and society?
Why is it that migrants from poor countries like Ghana, Nigeria outperform African Americans, when those migrants have no connections or local advantages?
It would seem to me that there are fundamental cultural problems in some ethnic groups in the US (eg. father absence, 'acting white' meme) that if addressed would actually yield improvements. Deciding not to hire White or Asian workers at Google does not - instead it diminishes the achievement or any Black or Hispanic worker who was hired based on their actual capability instead of just their skin color.
I've had a similar thought about really extreme "social justice warrior" stuff: I've seen it as a kind of unintentional troll that has worked to surface all the racism latent in the culture.
Yes, I do think a good number if "pomo" types and really extreme SJWs are nuts. No, there is nothing these people could say or do that would cause me to embrace Hitlerism, neo-monarchism, race nationalism, or any of the rest of this ludicrous nonsense. One thing being nuts does not make it reasonable to embrace other things that are nuts.
I see the fact that some non-trivial number of people have embraced these kinds of ideologies "in reaction" against SJW ideology as evidence that they were always latent racists and fascists to begin with. Either that or they're lazy thinkers who are easily provoked/trolled into taking irrational reactive positions. Either way the people who have jumped on these bandwagons have failed some kind of test: either a test for the decency of their beliefs or an IQ test.
No. The goal of white supremacists is to keep minority participation in high reward activities such as engineering low.
This is because mediocre white men are afraid that more talented minorities may gain access to the labor pool and they might start having to work harder for a living.
ReticentVote is fairly openly asserting that he wants less competition, because he is a mediocrity whose wages will suffer if forced to compete against minorities.
It saddens me that the very first comment here was from a white supremacist, but that is unsurprising given that Daniel Gackle works really fucking hard to ensure that HN is a "safe space" for white supremacists.
Congratulations dang, you've done it again. More bigoted white supremacists spreading their shit on your platform. The klansmen in your family would be proud of you.
>At this time, we think it’s important we put our money where our mouth is, and direct some of our discretionary funds — such as those typically used to fund a spot bonus program (which is separate and distinct of our annual bonus program) — to bolster our efforts to ensure our products and services are accessible to the people who need them,” she said. “This requires making a few small sacrifices, but why wouldn’t we do that?
So apparently they're spending from "spot bonuses" rather than the annual one, which is different than what the headline suggests, but still... With that much revenue, I find it hard to believe they couldn't allocate separate funds for this -- funds that (as the employees point out) would be recurring.
Yeah, it's a manufactured controversy tying together unrelated line items in the budget. "We can't afford mustard because we spent all that money on postage".
It doesn't seem manufactured. The company spokeswoman explicitly said this is what happened:
> “At this time, we think it’s important we put our money where our mouth is, and direct some of our discretionary funds — such as those typically used to fund a spot bonus program (which is separate and distinct of our annual bonus program) — to bolster our efforts to ensure our products and services are accessible to the people who need them,” she said.
The headline deliberately makes it sound like they suspended the annual bonuses that a lot of employees expect and budget around, which is not the case. This is a weasel headline designed to induce outrage where none (or at least nowhere near as much) is warranted.
Given the topic, you could even make the argument that this headline is designed to incite anger along racial lines, which IMHO has no place here or anywhere.
Silence is consent. And not a single person at Verily would be foolish enough to voice their disagreement on this issue. I hope yearly bonuses are next. Putting your money where you mouth is, as it were. The hypocrisy of Google with its 4% black workforce seems pretty staggering to me.
> The composition of the NBA is staggeringly disproportionate relative to the overall population. That's a problem, too, right?
Yes, and it's a symptom of the lack of opportunity for blacks. Why are blacks far more likely to make the necessary investment of time directed at that end with the extremely low probability that it pays off? Because they are far less likely than Whites to have much other opportunity that they are sacrificing to do that.
If it reflects reality, these executives are too stupid to remember to breath, because a diversity "investment" that robs the people you compensate is about as brave as an instagram posting.
Maybe the employees started saying Verily should spend more on diversity. Maybe this is a reaction to entitled staff demanding that the company spend money that wasn't allocated for this year on diversity initiatives. This story, as written makes no sense.
46 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 85.9 ms ] threadThis is economics 101.
A very American solution.
2) The poster I replied to stated that lower labor costs were the primary goal - and I refuted that. You seem to think I am stating something I am not.
Wait, are you saying there has not been a push among corporations to increase diversity?
>In 2003, MIT professor Thomas Kochan noted that companies were spending an estimated $8 billion a year on diversity efforts. But since Trump’s election, and with the emergence of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the industry has exploded. A 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63% of the diversity professionals had been appointed or promoted to their roles during the past three years. In March 2018, the job site Indeed reported that postings for diversity and inclusion professionals had risen 35% in the previous two years.
https://time.com/5696943/diversity-business/
It fucking SUCKS that HN is so full of racists and bigots that y'all just talk about this stuff, and Daniel Gackle just sits there and says he's doing a great job so long as the racists use polite language.
People who ignore how large their competition was to begin with tend to develop terminal exceptionalism.
This isn't even a strawman in this case, since the company in question is literally cutting pay to its workers for the sake of minorities.
The capitalists are very good at starting a race war to keep workers from uniting.
* It reduces the number of those moments where you do something stupid and insensitive because a bunch of identical-looking people all nodded and said "Sure, I don't see any problems with that".
* It not only increases the talent pool, but gives that new talent a reason to think that they'll actually be accepted because there are already some faces like theirs.
* You get new perspectives on user needs and potential markets.
As, you say, it's easy to do it wrong. But the self-fulfilling prophecy where people hire those who look like themselves -- and then conclude that people who look like that must be the most successful -- is always going to make certain mistakes over and over. Always with the same shrug and "Well, what are you gonna do?"
How does racially-biased hiring address that other than just placing unproductive workers into roles they are not qualified for, with flow-on negative impacts to the rest of the company and society?
Why is it that migrants from poor countries like Ghana, Nigeria outperform African Americans, when those migrants have no connections or local advantages?
It would seem to me that there are fundamental cultural problems in some ethnic groups in the US (eg. father absence, 'acting white' meme) that if addressed would actually yield improvements. Deciding not to hire White or Asian workers at Google does not - instead it diminishes the achievement or any Black or Hispanic worker who was hired based on their actual capability instead of just their skin color.
Yes, I do think a good number if "pomo" types and really extreme SJWs are nuts. No, there is nothing these people could say or do that would cause me to embrace Hitlerism, neo-monarchism, race nationalism, or any of the rest of this ludicrous nonsense. One thing being nuts does not make it reasonable to embrace other things that are nuts.
I see the fact that some non-trivial number of people have embraced these kinds of ideologies "in reaction" against SJW ideology as evidence that they were always latent racists and fascists to begin with. Either that or they're lazy thinkers who are easily provoked/trolled into taking irrational reactive positions. Either way the people who have jumped on these bandwagons have failed some kind of test: either a test for the decency of their beliefs or an IQ test.
This is because mediocre white men are afraid that more talented minorities may gain access to the labor pool and they might start having to work harder for a living.
ReticentVote is fairly openly asserting that he wants less competition, because he is a mediocrity whose wages will suffer if forced to compete against minorities.
It saddens me that the very first comment here was from a white supremacist, but that is unsurprising given that Daniel Gackle works really fucking hard to ensure that HN is a "safe space" for white supremacists.
Congratulations dang, you've done it again. More bigoted white supremacists spreading their shit on your platform. The klansmen in your family would be proud of you.
You're a Nazi if you want to get paid.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> “At this time, we think it’s important we put our money where our mouth is, and direct some of our discretionary funds — such as those typically used to fund a spot bonus program (which is separate and distinct of our annual bonus program) — to bolster our efforts to ensure our products and services are accessible to the people who need them,” she said.
The headline deliberately makes it sound like they suspended the annual bonuses that a lot of employees expect and budget around, which is not the case. This is a weasel headline designed to induce outrage where none (or at least nowhere near as much) is warranted.
Given the topic, you could even make the argument that this headline is designed to incite anger along racial lines, which IMHO has no place here or anywhere.
The HN title should be changed immediately.
Still really annoying, but also kinda click-baity title.
This phrase could doom your entire career in today's corporate America, if uttered publicly.
Yes, and it's a symptom of the lack of opportunity for blacks. Why are blacks far more likely to make the necessary investment of time directed at that end with the extremely low probability that it pays off? Because they are far less likely than Whites to have much other opportunity that they are sacrificing to do that.
If it reflects reality, these executives are too stupid to remember to breath, because a diversity "investment" that robs the people you compensate is about as brave as an instagram posting.
Maybe the employees started saying Verily should spend more on diversity. Maybe this is a reaction to entitled staff demanding that the company spend money that wasn't allocated for this year on diversity initiatives. This story, as written makes no sense.
There may be something worth discussing here, but there's basically zero chance of reasonable discourse unless the title is changed.