Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
However, when I have to join a cheesy townhall once a month to discuss diversity hires, it makes me feel like I have no right to feel proud of any accomplishments I've made within the company.
"Why should I feel proud of my accomplishments, when the accomplishments were spoon-fed to me by the company because of my skin color? If I were a white man with the same experience, I might not even be here?"
In my opinion, it would be beneficial if DEI initiatives were confidential and kept "hush hush" within a company. Diversity is able to be seen. If you're actually a diverse company, then people will notice.
I could understand publishing a quarterly report, but creating townhall meetings and parading your black/brown employees around like show ponies is nothing short of corporate virtue signaling.
I realize this isn't the type of content posted to HN usually, and I realize it is in 'rant' territory, but I know a lot of managers in a lot of influential companies hangout here, so I figured posting this could spark some meaningful discussion.
897 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadAnother issue is that senior minorities constantly get dragged into (useless, time-wasting, chore-like) committees that have representation quotas.
> In my opinion, it would be beneficial if DEI initiatives were confidential and kept "hush hush" within a company.
That would be great: "do the right thing but don't brag about it". Unfortunately, "keep doing the wrong thing but pretend otherwise loudly" seems more common.
DEI is something that is easy to talk about but actually kinda hard to implement. Part of the problem is the makeup of the industry in general. In tech for example it would be physically impossible for companies to be 50/50 male/female because the broader industry doesn't break down that way, same goes for any race, religion, background, etc. Companies love to scream from the rooftops about DEI because yelling about it is significantly easier than actually doing it.
Because you’re trying to hire from a small pool of candidates (minority software developer or whatever) that EVERY OTHER tech company is trying to get in a desperate attempt to not look bad (because not having a sufficient number of minorities on staff is a sin).
It’s simply a question of numbers. There’s only so many minorities, and only a fraction of them are sufficiently talented, and everyone wants them. Your company may not be a big enough name to woo these folks. So it’s not necessarily the fault of your leadership to act on their principles.
Now there’s a whole OTHER can of worms associated with DEI, which is that everyone wants minority employees => there’s a lack of them => let’s lower our standards to widen the pool we have to choose from, and your company certainly could go down that route if you think they’re not doing enough.
The solution here is to drive more black people into the tech field, in order to raise that 20% figure that would then get reflected among tech companies. This is something that an individual company cannot solve, even at Google or Apple scale, it would have to be at the government level and even that is a complete crapshoot.
TL;DR: Diversity quotas are hard.
What's funny is everyone will agree the pool of available candidates to choose from is incredibly small due to (among other things) issues in education, but those same people won't cut companies any slack if they don't hit a certain percentage of minority employees. It then becomes a game of brute forcing minorities into every part of society where they're under-represented, all at once -- because the "real fix" will take decades.
Diversity quotas are wrong.
If you hire the black candidate because you have a quota to fill. How is that morally different to hiring a white person just because they're white?
The only situation where I can think of quotas being a 'good' is to rectify a past self sustaining imbalance. If you made the case that the police are racist, because they're all white, therefore black people don't want to join, I would say that's a good candidate. But it isn't a good thing in and of itself, and shouldn't be an ongoing thing. Because it's corrosive in its own right.
I would rather Google/apple/Amazon put effort into education if they feel there's an issue. I would guess the issue is one of poverty rather than colour per se. Targeting and helping schools in poor areas would actually be helping where it mattered, giving people the best start in life whatever their colour, rather than someone who already had that start, but happens not to be white.
Quotas are the boogey/strawman that get trotted out when DEI initiatives are mentioned.
Quotas _must_ be filled, and this serves no one, not the companies doing the hiring (because there aren't enough qualified candidates, and hiring unqualified candidates is bad for business), nor the candidates themselves (because they didn't get hired on their own merits, and imposter syndrome).
Hiring _targets_, on the other hand, should be attained but can be missed due to lack of qualified candidates. When these misses occur, if the company is serious and capable about DEI initiatives, there's an investigation into why that is and if there's anything that can be done to remedy it, e.g. supporting educational/industrial pipelines, creating internship/apprenticeship programs or training opportunities for those changing careers, and so on.
How do you determine what those targets should be? This implies the we can determine the correct % of X race/gender/etc.
If that's the measure, then I think it's not done well in a lot of places (possibly most). Some places are biased one way; other places biased the other way; relatively few are dead-centered.
How does that look in practice? In most companies it seems that means that under-represented people get green lighted at the resume screen step at a much higher percentage than over-represented people. But the bar is the same at the interview stage.
But don't you see how that is a big dis-advantage for the median over-represented applicant?
If the bar is sufficiently high, the median applicant, over- or under-represented, won't get the job anyway. I've heard from people who work at companies (specifically big tech) that have diversity interview quotas (but not hiring quotas). In practice, you just end up interviewing more people: the candidates you would have interviewed anyway, plus some diverse candidates with closer-to-the-median resumes. And then you end up hiring the people you would have anyway, because interviews are much harder to pass than resume screens. It's a fairly pointless exercise that mostly disadvantages the interviewers, who have to spend more time interviewing, and the "lucky" candidates, who almost never outperform expectations in the interview.
* Make sure you have a campus presence on a diverse set of universities. I'm not American, but as I understand it that could mean Historically Black Universities, and not just the Ivy League or a place where the current workforce went
* In line with that, think through which organizations you partner with. An employer that traditionally hired from/sponsored fraternity-like organizations that are mostly white, could also work with student associations that represent a broader spectrum of potential talent, or that specifically represent underrepresented groups
* One job ad I saw had a line "Did you know women are less likely to apply if they don't meet all criteria, whereas men are more likely to apply when they meet a few? If you think you can add value to our team, we encourage everyone to apply". I thought that was helpful.
Anyone can still apply, and the best candidate gets picked. Just not the one that happens to come from a specific background.
>Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.
[0] https://onlinepublichealth.gwu.edu/resources/equity-vs-equal...
I'd really rather it stop at equal opportunity also but the world of finance -- where it really counts -- is all in on DEI, and companies demonstrating insufficient virtue will get clobbered on their ESG scores and hence, stock valuations.
I like seeing real diversity at all levels of a company, and not the fake diversity pushed by DEI initiatives.
Aren’t those the wurst? It’s like they could at least include vegetables, like aubergine or something.
But as a story of "DEI" in real practice vs a company who fakes it:
I worked as a system engineer for a gov contractor SaaS company with 4 C-levels. 2 were men, and 2 were women. The CEO was a second generation Italian. The CFO was a guy. The 2 women were in charge of the core part of the business: development lifecycle (design, dev, QA), and customer experience (helpdesk, consultants, sysads). The lady responsible for dev was also a developer and designer, and a damned sharp one at that. The lady responsible for customer experience was a systems engineer by trade. More than a few times I consulted with her about company direction for our infrastructure and growth plans.
There never really was public vocalizations in the company for DEI - it was about actually getting people from a wide background and putting them in power. And to that, our group reviewed potential hires, with all demographic details wiped. It was just the facts what they had done, to prevent us from focusing on demographics unchangable by us.
When BLM hit news hard, our CEO said bluntly in our monthly meeting "We're not able to hire most black candidates because police regularly harass their communities, give them an arrest record or a criminal record, and that prevents getting a public trust clearance. We are also powerless to change this by ourselves." I've *NEVER* heard spokespeople say even close to that, and here's our CEO pulling the curtains aside to look at the meat grinder.
Aside that terrible fact, the company did its best to hire diversely, promote from within, and put a diverse group of people in charge at leadership positions. Federal regulations GREATLY hamper good people with asinine decisions and local governmental harassment.
Sadly, this company a year prior got in bed with a venture (vulture) capitalist. They, after assuring "no real changes will happen (HAH!)", sold us like a Pokemon card to a terrible company. You could feel the grease off of this place. Felt like a used car lot combined with a county carnival/fair.
There were 8 C level positions in this 600 person company. For 7 of them it was "White male". The "DEI Officer" was a black woman. Doing this shows me you absolutely do not care about actual diversity, but only the thinnest veneer as not to be called out by other companies. (See? We have a token Black Woman on our C levels!) Like... You just "bought" a 200 person company with 2 scary sharp women as proven C level leadership... and threw them away as their newest acquisition.
I'm sorry to hear your federally regulated employer headed by an Italian, a guy and two scary sharp women who were ladies was bought out and sold to a terrible company.
In our town people went past "Black Lives Matter" to a lot of cheap pandering to the effect that "Black people are awesome" and maybe all of them are right out of Wakanda Forever. It comes across as not based in reality, not really sincere, and not really attending to black people in the community.
I voted an Alumni Trustee ballot on the weekend and there were two black people on the ballot. One was a woman who'd done some of the biggest jobs in the biggest banks, the other was a man who'd leapfrogged from one "diversity officer" job to another. The first one was someone who proved black people could get it done, I'm afraid the second one may be perpetuating the problems of that community. You know who I voted for.
This phrasing suggests an base expectation that a black person needs to prove they could get it done [like a white person could].
What I think DEI tries[1] to do is normalize the idea that anyone of sufficient ability /can/ do the work by giving more opportunity to people who 'traditionally' have not received those opportunities. And in so doing, remove the [often] unconscious perception that says a black person needs to 'prove' something extra in the first place
[1] at its best, which it often isn't.
Your response suggests a base expectation that a white person doesn't have to prove they can get it done. The realities of the job market suggest otherwise. Turns out, with a /very narrow/ set of exceptions based on direct nepotism, white people too must go through interviews, demonstrate some capability to do the job, and undergo performance reviews which might lead to termination if their performance is lacking on the job.
A common occurrence in DEI circles is to look at the experiences of the top 0.01% of society, notice that these extraordinarily wealthy families have children who go on to have absolute silver-spoon up ass level privilege in the workplace, and then extrapolate that for the many millions of people who constitute the other 99.9% of society. It doesn't matter in America if you're white or a man, it does matter if your daddy has a last name that is known publicly as part of high society and your family net worth starts with a B.
The basic reality is that EVERYONE must prove themselves. With the exception of the most wealthy and privileged minority of society, nobody is given shit just for being born.
But the op did not say, "The first one was someone who proved she could do the job". They said, "The first one was someone who proved black people could get it done".
HR departments should not be cultural enforcers, and while you may enjoy it now or think positively of DEI, it can flip around just as easily to something not very nice
"...is nothing short of corporate virtue signaling."
It might be most beneficial for individuals if it's kept-low key. It's best for the company to scream it to the world. Or at least that's what the leaders think right now.
Personally, I think any medium to large company that talks about DEI and isn't addressing the supply side issues are just just marketing. Without addressing that, it's just companies trying to outbid each other, and not using money but using virtue signaling. They should be putting their money where their mouth is and sponsoring scholarships/internships/apprenticeships. Instead of asking you talk at town halls, maybe they should be asking you to talk at high schools so the students can ask questions about your career journey. But hey, I'm just a dev so what do I know that these highly intelligent and highly trained CEOs/HR don't...
I worked at a BigCo that did all the usual DEI garbage and their only initiative that actually had results was the one where they spent a bunch of money sponsoring "women in stem" stuff at the high-school and college level.
Weird how there’s programs for the majority (women) when the minority (men) succeed — but no help for the minority (men) in any form. And this isn’t some new issue… men have been the minority in education longer than I’ve been alive.
The women hired as a result were far more socially diverse than people from the other hiring pipelines and I think that is of greater value than the fact that they were women.
This is a big non-FAANG tech company FWIW
At least in the case of an intern we had, she went to some other company. Which in fairness, was the better choice. In the conversation we were having, the manager even told her to go to any other company if she has the option because they will pay more. One of the best managers I've seen and he wasn't even my manager. Of course he left for another company shortly after.
In a work conversation, a coworker mentioned recruiting more women to work for us. I basically said we're never going to win against FAANG companies competing for the limited pool of women software engineers, and he didn't have a response to that.
Some companies may not be diverse because they don't want to hire from under represented categories, but because candidates from those categories have better offers.
IME, a bunch of them were sweetheart good deals and giveaways to BigCo's own daughters, cousins, sister-in-laws. And the money sloshes around amongst the wealthy inner crowd.
Instead, companies are better off focusing on making the later parts of the pipeline less leaky. Minorities tend to leave tech at a higher rate than average due to factors the company has some control over.
They should have outreach programs in high schools, partner with schools to offer intro to coding, or even help sponsor some students for after school coding classes. Sure, these won't necessarily convert these individuals into employees. But it would be part of being a good corporate citizen even if those students end up going to other companies. So there are things they can do. They aren't completely powerless.
Here's the thing: by the time students reach high school, a lot of weeding out has already happened. I recall such a program where where they had something like 7% black students. All but one were children of wealthy Nigerian immigrants. The rest of the class was actually more Asian and White than the district.
Well, some people think when a company says "pipeline problem" it's a PR-vetted way to announce they ain't going to do shit.
Whether you think that's true probably depends on how cynical you are.
To take one obvious example: there's massive under-performance of black men (vs. any other group) at every stage of the educational ladder up to the tertiary level. There simply aren't enough qualified candidates for engineering jobs for firms to be representative of the relative populations at a national level.
36% of white men have at least a bachelors degree; only 19% of black men do. Black college graduates choose STEM majors at only two-thirds the rate of white graduates, and one-third the rate of Asians.
Also, the GP did say they can do scholarships and such, there's that. Also (shudder) consider hiring from state schools and don't filter on where you got your degree, but the quality of education, which yes is much harder to judge. Also, fucking train your own hires, don't expect them to be brill out of the gate.
There is a lot they can do that really is actually quite colorblind on the surface that will lift all boats, but will actually disproportionately lift PoC since they skew worse on the metrics, as you stated.
I came to this conclusion by watching what the California government has done in the SF Bay Area over last decade or so.
They keep narrowing commuter corridors, which disproportionately impacts low income workers. They only allow high density housing to be built far from transit corridors and walkable downtowns. They explicitly keep housing scarce via zoning restrictions, then have special ghetto projects for low income families.
Public education has gone from top ten to bottom five in the country, but rich areas have excellent public schools because they let parents pay to add back educational programs that have been defunded in the poor public schools.
Oakland has a special privatized police force for its downtown commercial district area so that the businesses there don’t have to “subsidize” police coverage for the other (mostly black) parts of the city.
[0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
[1] https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...
After sitting in a room where we were told we needed to increase our “minority representation in upper management” (and I’m a mostly white manager). There were already 20% apparently, they wanted 40%.
I asked my boss, “so what does that mean to me? To me it seems like you don’t want me”
Boss: “oh no, you’re fine”
Me: “I don’t know, pretty obvious you want a higher representation of people not like me”
I quit after that. I was manager of one of the most productive research teams, created the most IP for the company, had the top projects, and yeah — lost me to this bs. I was joined by several other top people. Now they have a “diverse”, but less passionate, less competent team. Good luck with this stuff.
Boss: "You need to build a more diverse team."
Me: "What are you talking about? I'm 1 of only 2 white people on the entire 12 person team."
Boss: "Indians and Asians don't count as diverse."
Me: "Really? I did not know that. I do have 2 Hispanics on the team though."
Boss: "You're not hearing me. You don't have any black people and only have 2 women."
It became clear that "diversity" was not the goal, but rather something much more specific, likely because the metric the company was tracking specified it that way.
Indeed, it's not about "diversity" in the classic sense.
First, yes I'd say that is ridiculous. There are shorter NBA players, the fact we target "bigs" shows a lazy coach who's incapable of assessing the best way to form a team.
Second, size does play a factor [one of many] in basketball; In coding, neither the amount of melanin, hair color, eye color, nor gender play a role. We can argue a diversity of ideas or backgrounds are good. That's why we hired people with degrees in different fields; we hired people with different work experience. You don't want to say "we need less white people" or "we need less green eyed people". Sorry, but in your example it's equivalent to saying "I want more blonds in basketball" -- there is no relation.
> The fact that you didn’t get that would make me question if I wanted you on the team
I did not want to work with bigots of any kind.
The fact that you speak so confidently about a topic you clearly know almost nothing about I think speaks to why maybe your old team seemed OK to let you go.
> You don't want to say "we need less white people" or "we need less green eyed people". Sorry, but in your example it's equivalent to saying "I want more blonds in basketball" -- there is no relation.
You clearly missed the point of the analogy. The point was that you can look for one attribute, while still having a need for another. You seem to have conflated this with an unrelated point. Maybe not surprising.
But now lets talk about your latter point. You seem to miss one of the main points of DEI. Let's use another basketball example :-)
Jeremy Lin. He went largely unrecruited in HS, despite winning the California state championship over powerhouse Mater Dei, winning Nor Cal player of the year and was 1st team all state. And basically had no D1 offers. Why? Largely because he was Asian.
So, he goes to Harvard and has a good career there. He went undrafted despite great measurables -- including being one of the fastest people in the combine -- think Kyrie quickness and John Wall speed. He was in many ways a generational athlete. He eventually signed as a free agent after summer league to languish on the bench.
It wasn't until one night, at the end of his contract, when he was likely done with his NBA career did he play and he played with a "if I'm ever gonna do it, I gotta do it now attitude". And he went on one of the most impressive runs in NBA history -- Linsanity. Go look it up.
Now I tell this story because his whole life he was discriminated against because he was Asian. He never asked to be played over people that were better than him. Simply to give him a chance. He would never show up in a referral from John Wall or Kobe Bryant. He doesn't run in those circles. His last name doesn't evoke images of a ridiculous skilled guard. But he was.
DEI is about saying, "you've done a sufficiently good job of demonizing everything that comes from POC -- so that you immediately discount the way they walk, talk, where they go to HS, go to college, etc... But set aside these biases and try to let some in the front door to at least give them a chance at the interview. Try not to assume because they went to Howard they are less than." Lin went to Harvard because no other D1s would give him a spot. He was a Duke level player at a low-level non-scholarship school.
And the thing is that sports/basketball are among the most meritocratic activities on this planet. Yet racial bias reared its heard. You don't think this happens everyday in investment banking? Or for consulting? All the places where its so much harder to objectively measure the quality of work done.
If you're a GM in basketball and you're not saying, "we need to look at more Asian player. We need to look around the globe for talent" then you're not doing your job. And coincidentally its now arguable that the four best basketball players in the NBA are all international: Giannis, Luka, Jokic, and Embid. Peoople had to open their eyes and see that it wasn't just an inner city game.
Teams are trying to sell seats. Businesses are trying to target various markets, but more importantly raise capital and get cheap labor.
You could argue the same thing in my case, and that’s fine. I won’t play the race game. For reference, me and others were offered an exorbitant amount to stay. But to your point, give those opportunities to others, who by definition didn’t earn their place.
When you view everything through a racist lens, that's all you'll see -- it'll consume you.
I was proposing an alternative way to read the racism in the NBA (rather than overcoming racism, it was used as a ploy to increase revenues - oh hey, they opened the Chinese markets in 2010 https://lawaspect.com/nba-expansion-china/). In fact, in your prior post you were discussing all these forms of racism Lin faced without clear evidence (i.e. an email, paper trail, etc). That's what DEI is, people utilizing their race to shame others in attempt to gain wealth, power, etc. Ultimately, it's about claiming something is deserved due to your race; which in fact is no different than the opposite. From your prior post:
> DEI is about saying, "you've done a sufficiently good job of demonizing everything that comes from POC -- so that you immediately discount the way they walk, talk, where they go to HS, go to college, etc... But set aside these biases and try to let some in the front door to at least give them a chance at the interview. Try not to assume because they went to Howard they are less than."
Almost everyone agrees you should set aside the bias, but why give someone an interview based on their race? Why not equally pick at random from people at that point?
Regardless, what we were talking about were diversity quotas in management. Typically, that means promotions from within. Everyone had interviews, everyone has been working. DEI in the example I gave was a way to extract more power / wealth for a given group in the name of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion -- at the exclusion of others.
> And you thought your old boss was a bigot??
When you promote [or don't] based on race, what are you?
> the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism
You love to dismiss anything with the appearance of racism, except when it negatively might impact white males. Than racism and bigotry is suddenly a huge problem.
And like Lin, people aren’t saying to promote based on race. But rather don’t neglect people based on race which is exactly what people like you do. I’d love to see the candidate pool randomly drawn from the general population. I bet you’d find problems with it.
This has nothing to do with eliminating hiring discrimination or whatever; it's part of a political patronage network. You hire our most dedicated people, we don't bring the hammer down.
The irony is that DEI as a worldview promotes and condones racial discrimination in many forms -- that is, treating people differently because of the color of their skin, not the content of their character, their skills, or their physical ability (for physically demanding jobs).
Martin Luther King Jr. said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Based on statements like this, I believe he would be publicly against DEI if he were still alive (and he'd probably have been de-platformed by now).
The best thing you can do is speak up and make sure your opinion is heard in a way that is simple and direct. Doing it on HN is fine but that won’t change your immediate situation, you need to talk to your leadership.
They are, problem is those black women they consult are mostly DEI people. Who are very different from the actual worker.
Too complicated ;).
DEI is all about dividing poor people based on immutable characteristics so they don't have a way to effectively organize against the wealthy elites. There's a reason DEI is most popularly held and enforced by elites with high levels of education, and not by those who are the working masses.
Frankly, it's /exactly/ the same stuff that was done to create white vs PoC racism in the US prior to the civil rights era to divide the working class to prevent labor organization. It's just the other side of that same coin, and basically the same tactics with a veneer of paint.
Socioeconomic class has always been the primary leading indicator of outcomes for people born in the US, and that has not changed significantly in the last 30 years as DEI rose to prominence.
But the resistance to dealing with race and class together is real, in part because class is seen as individual problem. Race is seen as more cultural, systemic, or the province a minority running around with sheets on their heads.
I've personally only seen strong efforts to dissect them both, in earnest, at the same time, in the margins of society.
There really wasn’t talk about sexuality/gender beyond someone being gay vs straight, or some group of kids being in a gang (there were a few subgroups depending on ethnicity, which they proclaimed themselves)
He’s nearly out of high school, and now it’s very much focused on DEI. After the states standardized testing is accomplished, most focus is on equality of outcome talk, about how he being a young white male has oppressed groups of people unconsciously, and that he should feel guilty.
Fortunately he’s smart, and questioned this at a young age. And a family that accepts him and helps him. But I fear this stuff could make less well off kids feel excluded, shunned, and guilty, and could ferment vengeful ideologies against society, which we need far less of.
It’s sad how divided as a country we are. I hope for us to get past this, even as cliche this sounds, for the children.
At least some of this is probably cultural, it's part of our foundational myth that we broke the rigid class structures of the old world countries and we want to believe that is true. There is of course at least some kernel of truth to it, in some sense, for some kinds of people, historically speaking.
The other reason is that there has been a multi-generational extremely well funded initiative to cultivate media and public opinion against the idea. It's everywhere and is the basis of much of the "culture war" signaling we see around us. Examples include the idea that driving a pickup truck or avoiding lattes is some kind of meaningful class marker, rather than things like who owns and controls the capital of this country.
That effort has been highly effective, in part because it's been well executed and in part because of the total collapse of the concept of a labor party in this country, leaving us with two parties ruled by different professional classes.
The thought leaders of intersectionality, by virtue of their thought-leadership, have a privilege and a reach almost nobody else has. This does not discredit them, but it's awkward to acknowledge that those who preach about privilege are sometimes meaningfully more privileged than the people they preach to.
When people point out this privilege it looks like derailing from their perspective. Because when unprivileged people talk about oppression nobody pays attention to them, but when privileged people talk about it their privilege is then used to discredit their arguments. They can't win!
This exact effect poisons discussions about wealth inequality. When poor people talk about inequality they're ignored because they're sore losers. Rich people are ignored because they must be virtue-signaling hypocrites.
There are similar orgs for consulting and law. Not heard of any for the FAANG/start-up/tech world.
Race and gender are probably just really easy to quantify vs "we have a program to make sure we hire people who are dumb, ugly and socially awkward".
Unfortunately, I've never heard a good rebuttal to this argument. As long as such a system is in place, the potential beneficiaries of such programs cannot be sure if they are there because of merit or just to fill quotas; potentially causing harm to the exact people you're trying to help.
DEI doesn't prescribe monthly townhalls about to discuss diversity lol Why are you blaming the failings of your company on DEI?
I can understand how DEI initiatives might undermine your self-esteem and I'm sorry you are made to feel this way, but take solace in the fact that you have a job. Imagine how the white guy who was excluded from employment because of his skin color feels. That's who the real victim is here - the person who was racially discriminated against.
> In my opinion, it would be beneficial if DEI initiatives were confidential and kept "hush hush" within a company.
Personally, I prefer companies to be loud and proud about their DEI initiatives so that I know which companies engage in racial discrimination, rather than it all happening behind closed doors.
If disagreeing with making hiring decisions on the basis of skin colour is racist, then I suppose I'm racist.
Which part of the parent's message says that he does?
What it does say that if an organisation gives preferential treatment to a certain group based on their skin color, then it follows, inevitably, that people with non-preferred skin color will lose to those with the preferred one, all else being equal. And thus, there will inevitably be "the white guy who was excluded from employment because of his skin color" (or sex, or both). Whether it was OP or someone else who was preferred to that guy is unknowable, and thus ultimately irrelevant. But that must take place in an organisation that is truly committed to DEI; because otherwise this abbreviation is meaningless.
1. There are fewer qualified black and Hispanic candidates per capita (i.e. without a college degree, without the right experience, etc.) than white and Asian candidates. The cause of this is irrelevant to the argument, it is factually true.
2. There are a finite amount of positions at any given company paying any given amount.
3. If companies hire a larger percentage (beyond a certain margin of error) of black and Hispanic candidates than actually exist in the hiring pool then they must commit racial discrimination against whites and Asians in order to accomplish this. You can try to redefine racism and discrimination as "prejudice plus power" or whatever you want to justify the fact that you mistreat people on the basis of their skin color, but factually that is what is being done.
I think posts of this nature (including OP) reflect a fear of not belonging to the dominant ‘caste’ and of being seen as either losing status (dominant caste men not getting jobs they are ‘the best’ for); or, alternatively, lower caste men wanting to be seen as valuable in a space they continually feel they do not belong in.
I say this as a someone who is a minority who regularly is discriminated against - and who has easily attained markers of success. There is no way to avoid feeling like we do not belong, but returning us to poverty and shutting us out of jobs is definitely not a way to attain a feeling of belonging.
Finally, DEI initiatives are very public - nepotism, alma mater connections etc are not. Let’s be careful in assuming that the only non-LEET code metric used to hire people is the color of the skin or their biological sex.
These sorts of initiatives are trying to cure a racial or sexual bias with a different sort of racial or sexual bias. How does the question "why they exist" help those of us who think, in Kant's deontological terms, that racial or sexual biases are wrong?
Please consider an old house you may buy if you live in New England or Europe. Sure, if you were building a new house everything should be plumb and level. But the house you’re able to buy in old cities is not brand new. So what does one do if you wish to have a level floor? We add shims to obtain some objective reasonable result, accepting that to get to a this result we must try to address systemic problems that are not our fault, but are now our responsibility.
Let me offer you a different metaphor about levels :-) In Greek mythology, there was a character named Procrustes. He had an iron bed of a certain size, to which he strapped his captives, and if they happened to be taller than the bed was long, he cut off their legs to fit the bed; whereas if they were shorter, he stretched them to fit the bed tearing their sinews and muscles. That's what I think of when I hear about arbitrary levels applied to living people.
In fact, this practice only really ended in the 1960s; controversially, one might even say that this practice continues to today.
So what do we do when confronted with an anecdote from antiquity versus system inequities from our modern era?
I guess, in the spirit of the analogy, your options are to either stop cutting off body parts from anyone, or to start cutting them off those who look like people who engaged in body cutting two or more generations ago. DEI prefers the second option. Some people would rather see the first.
problems that are not our fault but are now our responsibility
That’s a very nice, concise way of summarizing the essence of the issue.
For example a white friend in South Africa has a daughter who years ago, when looking at university applications, was distraught because to study to be a doctor she had to hit over 90% in her exams, vs 70% for her black South African classmates. Does it matter to her that this wasn't meant to happen? Or is reality also worth talking about?
How does a nation overcome that legacy with its accompanying negative effects on people of color? We aren’t all equal when the effects of centuries of policies and attitudes can still be seen. I don’t know the answer but I think it is OK for companies to be cognizant of these issues and attempt to go out of their way to hire qualified people of color.
It sucks for one to feel they didn’t get a job because they are white but I think this doesn’t happen in statistically significant numbers. It’s known that people with “black sounding” names are less likely to get interviews. I don’t know the solution. I suspect that if we didn’t tie health care to employment and had a better system for unemployed people then the issue of reverse discrimination would largely go away.
You are right about something, affirmative action is racist, but I feel it is absolutely necessary to try to balance out current inequities. I strongly believe people making arguments like yours, people fighting against affirmative action need to propose an alternative rather than just complain about it.
There are lots of people alive today that couldn't drink from the same fountain or use the same bathroom as white people, and people who had friends and family members lynched (and in the eyes of many George Floyd's death was a lynching). Their neighborhoods were bulldozed to make the highways and they were systematically excluded from housing by redlining. You won't convince me for a second that their children and grandchildren got an equal opportunity. There is so much evidence of systemic disadvantaging of PoC communities today too, underfunded schools because of how we fund schools with local property taxes, turning lots of the public school system into effectively fancy private schools for families well off enough to live in rich neighborhoods.
So I will say it again, I do think at the surface level affirmative action is racist, but it's such a simple thing to realize it seems extremely pointless to even bring up. It is fighting centuries of truly heinous racism and genocide with just a tiny bit of an attempt at positive racism and white people still find a way to be pissed off they aren't getting everything the "deserve".
Not only is an alternative proposed, it's already implemented for quite a while: discrimination is illegal. Equal outcome vs equal opportunity. You can argue for any side you want, just don't pretend you don't see or don't understand the other position.
Or no because the statute of limitations expires while white government was busy refusing to entertain the idea?
Support for reparations is table stakes for anyone talking about "equal opportunity".
This thread is depressing as fuck and really is making me rethink how often I ought come to this site, and interact with this community. And I really didn't realize how much this toxic bullshit was pervasive in tech. I am going to be participating more in DEI initiatives going forward, while taking the feedback and criticism of the OP into account.
As for "simple and misguided" - that is exactly how I see affirmative action where the recipients are selected by skin color and not by socioeconomic status and where the help comes in the form of outcomes and not opportunities.
Or is that not what you meant?
> Imagine how the white guy who was excluded from employment because of his skin color feels. That's who the real victim is here - the person who was racially discriminated against.
White guys are not discriminated against in tech. This is such a racist take.
I bet you also think that reparations for slavery and Jim Crow -- literally, the government actually discriminating and harming people for their skin color -- would be bad because they somehow "hurt" white folks today.
If you are a minority and get hired, and the company has an explicit policy of hiring N% of minorities, then you will always wonder (as will all other employees) whether you were hired because of your minority status or because of your actual skills. This is very bad for morale and self worth.
I don't think the minorities themselves were consulted. Perhaps it is being instituted by a minority, but they do not represent the preferences of people they purport to help with these policies.
I think the UC university system has it right because they ban racial preferences for admitting students. While overall the percentage of certain racial minorities is lower there, those that do get in feel accomplished and deserving. This is a better outcome for society and personal self worth.
Thus it perpetuates the in-group, and causes the symptoms you’ve mentioned with equality of outcome derived solutions.
Give those groups equal opportunity and it's unsurprising when an inequality of outcomes is perpetuated, observe that inequality of outcomes long enough and you start to foment the idea that maybe those people aren't actually intrinsically equal.
Our office has a similar problem as a woman-owned business... The WBENC seal is valuable for winning bids in the government and aerospace industries, where regulatory measures encourage taking contracts with us over those that are still in the "old boys' club." Are we actually providing more value than our competition? Are we as innovative and sharp as we think we are? Or is much of the work we build together only selected because it satisfies some regulatory checkbox?
I don't know, but I'd rather suffer that social strife and doubt for a few decades in my generation, wondering about my own accomplishments and worthiness, than kick the can down the road and leave the inequality unaddressed. I believe that temporarily creating equal outcomes, while temporarily problematic, will be a much faster route towards long-term equality than doing nothing.
In California, the equality of outcome groups in Sacramento are trying to lower the educational bar to the federally mandated minimum. The result is that most people reading this with kids in California will use their wealth to supplement public education (or pay for private schools), while people in poorer districts won’t have that option. They already defunded science and art, state wide, and the equity brigade tried to defund high school calculus last year.
What if by that point men are doing categorically worse in employment and entrepreneurship than women, and demand their own compensatory programs?
Where does it end?
Much more humane to just provide equal opportunity to all and then let people decide for themselves what they want to do for a living.
Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans...
In Martin Luther King's day, the line was that all that was needed was equality of opportunity.
If you actually read and/or listen to King's speeches and writings, rather than just passively consume the propaganda image constructed by exactly the forces King railed against, you would know that it wasn't, at least not the way you seem to be thinking. King explicitly saw as necessary radical redistribution to acheive much greater equality of material condition (see, e.g., the “Three Evils” speech); he did not buy into the idea that material conditions that are the outcome of systems of distribution of scarce resources could be cleanly severed from “opportunity”, such that you could have even rough equality of the latter with gross inequality of the former.
You can't compare an immigrant group, which is _most likely_ elite in their home countries (it is very expensive and very difficult to immigrate to the united states), to minorities in America who have seen their family units destroyed as recently as 60 years ago.
You can point to the success of Nigerian-Americans; one of, if not the most educated[1] racial group in the US. If you are an immigrant from Nigeria, the second richest country in Africa by GDP, the US as a result of its immigration policies simply selects for the best and brightest.
Minorities "lacking a value system" (??), isn't something innate to their culture. It's been a purposeful policy for America for most of it's lifetime. Just look at the Tulsa Race Massacre; it was an incredible destruction of future generational and cultural wealth for the people who you now say "lack a value system".
>minorities really need is internal support to reform their cultural systems
There are multiple ways to approach this but it tends to be labeled as socialism, woke-ism, CRT, or DEI.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-10-13/it-isn...
The UC system only did so because they were mandated to by law (specifically a voter initiative), and they still try to use as many proxies for race as possible in order to try and be racist in their admissions policies.
But that's completely legitimate. If black people (for example) are systemically poorer than white people as a group, it makes sense to give them more help.
It's favoring a wealthy black person over a poor white person, that's arguably problematic.
Every color of person is capable of performing at the same level as any other. However, not every person is capable of performing at the level some universities require. There are dummies and geniuses in every color/racial group. There are high achievers and low achievers in every group. Every single human attribute is a bell curve in the general population. By not picking the best of the lot regardless of how the result looks we are damaging the ability of the nation to compete.
As an Asian man, i'll agree. Except instead of levelers, these are usually used as bludgeons to punish groups rather than leveling groups. Based on the UMich and other college lawsuits, what we found out was that Asians were held to higher standards, except Jewish people werent. Neither were wealthy Protestants. Neither were well connected white people.
The "Progressive" systems used the excuse of DEI to help discriminate against Asians and others they didnt like.
Now, you ask the same policy makers, can I as an Asian man be allowed into the basketball or football team, and they look at you like "but youre not qualified"
Found the Harvard admissions officer.
You can make a case that descendants of slaves and victims of Jim Crow laws and red lining policies deserve some kind of compensation.
But arbitrarily engineering the racial and gender composition of universities and industries is treating a symptom, not the underlying causes of current disparities.
references:
https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2011/07/14/ii-mexican-a...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-jews-getting-younger-on-ave...
I've seen DEI hiring initiatives abused to paradoxical ends. Once department administration got into an attempt to basically hire someone using funds set aside for DEI, essentially with the plan to terminate them later, just to collect the support monies that came along with the position. The situation was complex but none of this had to do with hires' actual competence, it had to do with the available pool and this zealotry in unit aims at the time (basically the minority applicants were all working in areas different from the types of projects administration thought people should be working on).
In any event, it created this disturbing situation where an attempt to increase DEI by the higher powers that be was actually having the opposite effect on a hire arguably, by creating this opportunity for unit management to use them for support funds with no actual intent to support them in their career or keep them around long term.
Yep. But the damage has already been done.
At least you have a voice. I recommend using it to change what bothers you.
It doesn't just undermine the self-esteem of a PoC, it undermines the self-esteem of white folks, too. Hiring or promoting people due to their skin color is just wrong, no matter what skin color that is. As a white dude, seeing my PoC teammates in the past celebrated not for their accomplishments, but for something they had no control over (their skin color) is sad.
"John in Engineering is really talented, and works his tail off daily. He has come up with some really ingenious solutions to tough problems that have allowed us to grow as a company....but we're celebrating him because he's black, not because he's a kickass engineer". Seen things like this before, which make no sense. Celebrating an employee who is awesome at their job for being awesome at their job is great. You're a company, after all, not a social club. The goal is to grow and make money. Celebrate anyone who can do help with that, regardless if they are black, white, yellow, orange, green, pink, whatever.
Diversity is cool, but when it's put into practice and not shouted from the rooftops, it's even better.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
> White folks
I just want to mention that one of the worst aspects of all this is trying to sort people according to (here apparently a binary) label. There is not really such thing as either of these categories - it's stereotyping of the worst kind, and takes us back many generations
I think that's a huge and extremely valuable lesson.
That's because there is no such thing as "white" ethnicity. It is a word used to categorize us vs other. This is not my theory, afaik it's a fact. A fact which seems to upset a lot people. Based on previous conversations, it appears to be the most controversial knowledge which I posses.
The generally accepted "white" ethnic groups have changed over time. Irish people were once not "white" in the USA. Neither were Slavic people. These two groups have the some of the lightest colored skin known to man.
No one is white. Some people pass for white.
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?psid=85&...
> What is perhaps most striking about Franklin's essay today is his sophisticated use of "social science" data to convince the British ministry to alter its colonial policies. Particularly jarring, however, is Franklin's plea that America be maintained as an entirely Anglo-Saxon society.
*This was probably a few centuries before one would use the word “white” in this context. Too many pale folk who don’t qualify. It was more about calling out ethnicities directly as people still do in Europe.
Also white is a color and white people are not even white, but pink [1].
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29650790
[1]https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Pink_skin
After living and working with asians for decades in the Bay area, I have yet to meet a yellow one. To my eye, they're on the same white(pink)-brown-black spectrum as the rest of humanity.
White people are pale to darkly tanned
Natives Americans are brown, not red
Black people are brown, not black, some not even very brown
Indian people are shades of brown too, and yet can be far darker than "black" people.
Japanese people are brown, not yellow
None of the colloquial color terms for races are accurate when you sit down and think about it.
The one time it might have been accurate is redheads are often pale enough to be white, so of course we call them gingers/redheads.
It's all a bit silly.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/dahleen-glanton/ct-da...
"While the distinctions can be complicated, the information is readily available for anyone willing to seek it out. That means reading and having meaningful conversations with people of different races."
Asia is half of earths population, so “Asian” cannot possibly mean anything.
TFA I linked to explicitly addresses this.
Instead of simply saying the reason is 'X' or even providing a link to a resource that explains why. You have linked to an article that can be fairly summarized as "Educate yourself".
This is possible even less helpful than LMGTFY link.
And crucially, provides a reading list for doing so. I posted this understanding that anyone not interested in educating themselves is not going to find prescriptive recommendations for doing so useful.
Give it another decade, and I promise you that BIPOC will be a racial slur. I've just ditched it ahead of time, so I won't have to write apologies about how I "didn't know better back then."
I can only imagine what it would feel like to be a PoC in a company that has openly stated that their goal is to achieve a certain racial/ethnic composition regardless of standards. How would I not always have a sneaking suspicion that I was hired to fulfill some quota rather than on my own merits? Worse, I would feel that all of my colleagues are looking at me and wondering the same thing.
Excuse the cynicism, but I think the reason these companies have to shout about their DEI initiatives from the rooftops is because they care less about diversity and helping disadvantaged groups and more about signalling their virtue to the rest of the world.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...
The software interview process in particular is already so capricious that I feel absolutely no shame in tilting it in my favor in any way that I can.
Personally, I think the problem should be pushed upstream whenever possible. (More funding for minority elementary and high schools, and candidate quotas for recruiters but not hires both are good examples of effective approaches).
Get in however you can and then work your ass off so no one doubts you.
The irony here is that if we all just accept the line of thinking you're using our society will go back to the exact "white male patriarchy" this DEI stuff is supposedly trying to fight. The only difference is that BiPOC or LGBTQ will replace the white male as the superior class. The next step is we can just ensure white males don't get a vote and can't own land or credit cards right?
Despite what you might've read on Tumblr or Fox News, I'm not planning to oppress anyone or commit white genocide.
When I'm doing interviews or looking at resumes, I'll give an extra moment of consideration to anyone born in the USA who seems to have pulled him/herself up by their bootstraps. I personally think that's enough DEI from me, and I don't think it's something you should be too incensed about.
My comment is just about what it leads to if we have a society that bases their hiring on specific skin colors. It seems like you're failing to differentiate between exactly what you're personally doing and the society wide affect of sitting back and accepting race based hiring.
To attempt to salvage this subthread: What I'm personally doing is exactly what DEI is for the most part. BigCo gives you a yearly training that says "Make sure you give someone a fair shot even if they don't wow you with their resume". BigCo sends out a slideshow with some examples of certain minorities succeeding at their jobs. Done.
No, it's not and if you think this is true you've been burying your head in the sand for the last 5 years. Companies don't create specific Diversity/Equity coordinators and entire DEI departments just to tell you to occasionally look closer at some people you think aren't getting a fair shot.
You're just gaslighting now or blissfully ignorant of the current state of things. The OP is black man literally telling everyone this isn't the case for him and there are multiple other commenters saying the same.
I am deeply troubled by racial discrimination favoring Latin people, despite benefitting from it in a narrow and immediate sense, because it makes people justified in carrying out their own discrimination potentially to my detriment.
Black and Hispanic people do face more active discrimination. That has to do more with outward appearance and last names.
Vets on the other hand are an example of a lop-sided outcome. It was discovered a while back that most vets often went into blue collar professions and didn't really climb that many ladders. They instituted a rule where campaign badge holders and disabled vets must have their resumes reviewed first. Working on the west coast I can attest it's rare to see vets at all. I've met more vets from non-US military in the tech world than I have from my own country (not complaining, but worth noting). There's definitely a small contingent of people who would put their political disposition into hiring if they saw a candidate was a vet, but military are coached to chop their military experience from their resume once they have a stack of experience to avoid this.
All that to say, if I were OP I would not be okay with what you proposed just on a facade basis. If it incorporated class distinctions I might agree.
Unlike military service which has a discrete set of experiences and criteria, race is just something you're born with.
It also stands out in my mind that most of these statistics rely on self-identification. I don't know if anyone's dug into the validity of self-identification.
Harvard would like a word with you.
But in all seriousness, Asians face the discrimination of being perceived as foreign and “the other” more so compared to other racial minorities. So the claim that they generally don’t face discrimination is not true.
This isn't a great take because there's tons of in-group advantages going on today that are deeply rooted in racial discrimination.
The U.S. is still reeling from its deeply racist housing policies. What does this have to do with this DEI thread?:
- Wealth is the highest indicator of educational attainment, and in turn education is a high indicator of wealth. [1]
- Zoning laws were explicitly racist and meant to keep out certain races from white neighborhoods. My parent's home built during the WWII era in the SFBAY had covenants attached to it that stated under no uncertain terms that no PoC may live in the home (No longer enforceable of course). The racist roots of these laws is not a matter of speculation.
- Most household wealth is through homeownership. [2]
- High quality education is tied to housing via school districts, more expensive houses are located in schools with better funding and higher quality education.
- Many zoning rules such as absurdly large minimum lot sizes, high setbacks, height limits (Designed to make it more expensive to buy for PoC in particular) remain in place today. It's a positive feedback loop where those who had an advantage are more likely to retain that advantage.
As OP stated, life isn't fair, and the rules are indeed rigged to favor those in power. Rebuking a group for using their limited advantages while ignoring the plethora of advantages for those up top isn't very equitable.
[1] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2017....
[2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
I just wanted to say that I don't think anyone should feel bad or like an impostor if they manage to get their foot in the door some way other than the traditional routes: you get lucky on a coding quiz, your dads meet at the country club, you bust your hump for 10 years in crappy jobs to work your way up to a good one, etc.
Ideologues who are a tiny minority, which is overwhelmingly white, don't care tho.
The Atlantic - Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture - https://archive.ph/OXs6F
It's a bit sad how little discussion it generated, because this data should be pretty damning.
> 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”
> So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are.
> While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it.
8 percent of US population, who knows how tiny proportion of EU population (we're also on the Internets, you know). And they constantly pretend their views are default, and try to marginalize others online. With some success, sadly.
Also, they blatantly discriminate against neurodivergent people - and if there's a single obviously beneficial diversity program, it'd be increasing neurotype diversity. Ways of thinking, not surface characteristics.
Example: Damore, who was an aspie. You know, the disability where you have trouble with unclear communication that normies rely on. Which causes sth like 90% afflicted to be unemployed - because people insist on ignoring their issues. Tech is one of the areas where they can thrive - except in the name of "diversity", left wants to push them out. I don't understand how's that coherent. Who decides which identity group are worthy of protection?
See "The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech": https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e2a71bf7e0ab3ba886c...
> Administrators assume that the most vulnerable ‘snowflakes’ are always listeners, and never speakers.
> Autism spectrum disorders are central to the tension between campus censorship and neurodiversity. This is because there’s a trade-off between ‘systematizing’ and ‘empathizing’. Systematizing is the drive to construct and analyze abstract systems of rules, evidence, and procedures; it’s stronger in males, in people with autism/Asperger’s, and in STEM fields. Empathizing is the ability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, and to respond with ‘appropriate’ emotions and speech acts; it’s stronger in females, in people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and in the arts and humanities. Conservative satirists often mock ‘social justice warriors’ for their ‘autistic screeching’, but Leftist student protesters are more likely to be high empathizers from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, than high systematizers from the hard sciences or engineering.
> Consider th...
You put your finger on it right here: "I could understand publishing a quarterly report, but creating townhall meetings and parading..." Women and minorities in tech have their networks and know what's what. Accurate reporting of positive results is what makes a company welcoming to applicants.
I get this... but is the contrary worse? you've very possibly missed out on jobs at the expense of a less qualified white person. There's some evidence that even having a "black sounding name" results in resumes being looked over.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...
Inclusivity initiatives can be problematic, but prior to their existence a lot of the time it was "continue not even being fully aware that you only hire white people"
Play this logic game: besides racism, why do you think these resumes are passed over?
There have been multiple experiments run using resumes with identical experience but different names, and it seems that "black sounding" names are consistently called back less often, in some cases 50% less.
https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
This makes me feel like some kind of hard requirement like a quota might actually be corrective given that there are measurable biases in who gets called back for an interview?
Or maybe to put it in a different lens, given this is a narrow scope of data that doesn't do much to support the vague idea of a "diversity initiative" — perhaps the better approach would be anonymizing resumes during the initial outreach process?