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Tell HN: I think the diversity push is to distract from other bad practices

9 points by speeder ↗ HN
Lately a lot of companies in the software world has been strongly pro-diversity even when it makes no sense (I've seen companies in countries where 99% of the population belongs to the same group, pushing to have people from all groups).

Even the Brazillian Game Developer association created a "Diversity Seal", then I realized: Wait... but where is all the previous talk about crunch time, poor pay and lack of benefits?

Then I realized, the more companies are talking about diversity, the more they can hide their previous heinous behaviour.

Basically diversity is being used as "get out of jail for free" card, or a distraction, it is avoidance of future "EA Spouse" letters.

4 comments

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yuppie_scum
Just because a company has many problems (work life balance, lack of diversity, pay, bad management whatever) doesn’t make it wrong for them to bring attention to any specific problem (in this case diversity)
giantg2
Sort of. It depends if they are actually fixing the specific problem or just taking advantage of talking about it to be woke. Most companies aren't offering scholarships to minorities to go get a CS degree, or anything to really make a difference. At the same time, their positive press is allowing them to ignore things they have more control over, like pay, hours, review processes, etc.
giantg2
Pretty much. The company is going to try to get as much positive publicity and as many talking points as they can. Something like diversity is low hanging fruit and doesn't cost very much. Why would you fix pay, review processes, etc if you can distract from those things with stuff like positive diversity rhetoric?
whipaway
DEI is so obviously demagoguery and in practice the groups that profess it resemble a religion or cult.

Unsurprisingly the organizations that spearhead it are communists set on seeing that society as it exists today collapses.

The strict and all-encompassing moral code professed by DEI groups provides the perfect camouflage for sociopaths to fly under the radar and gain a foothold in organizations since the standard of morality is now a very clear set of token phrases to repeat.

On top of that - the whole sphere of DEI is essentially a luxury good for a bourgeois milieu, usually some of the most powerful workers in the economy - at the local level but even more appallingly at the global level.