> If you rebel against some of the precepts of this new ideology by espousing a contrary view as James Demore did at Google when he offered an alternative explanation on female representation
The article starts off well, with a contrast between work environments where expansion is rewarded and those that end up fighting among themselves for control of an existing revenue stream. The latter phenomenon is common in petro-states, for example; arguably that is why Russia is so dysfunctional.
.. then the author takes a sharp right turn to blame it on "diversity", i.e. the idea that people who aren't white guys should be given a shot at the wealth, and it goes downhill from there. The rest of the blog is devoted to complaining about e.g. the existence of women's basketball or cosplaying aristocracy of the early 20th century.
(diversity discussion on HN is .. not likely to go well)
I suspect you missed the point: not "diversity", that is not what the author is blaming. He blames the cultural shift from the revenue creation to revenue management with little to no attention outside the firm, as if the prior institutionalized revenue streams are forevermore assets. The author picks "diversity" has his "economic indicator" of this systematic transition.
> The author picks "diversity" has his "economic indicator" of this systematic transition.
.. which is an instant red flag.
They could have talked about e.g. Google's many chat apps or tendency to shut down products, or Facebook's abandoned "metaverse" project, as indicators that the company has switched from providing new ways to win revenue and serve users to new ways to spend revenue on conspicuous consumption.
Instead they rant about "diversity".
To expand on the author's metaphor, the problem with the Wild West is that some of the "building" was in fact theft, murder, and genocide; and the problem with Versailles was the incredible conspicuous consumption while failing to address the problems and starvation outside the magic castle walls, leading to an uprising of the public and middle-elites which got the entire aristocracy murdered.
The unsympathetic reaction to the SVB crisis is a hint to SV that some of the proletariat might be massing outside the walls. Their approach to "diversity", "ESG", and other social issues is the beginning of a glimmer of recognition that they have a responsibility to broader society, but combined with a very poor ability to actually listen to people they consider not as smart.
Whatever you think about diversity discourse, it’s surely a reasonable point that supporting diversity is not in fact how Google or FB got rich. Presumably now that times are tough, they are having to focus more on their core competencies.
Totally reasonable. But as a large established company their core competencies change a bit: Protecting existing revenue streams is a different skill set from creating new ones - and now they need both and the former might indeed have more of an "Versailles vibe" about it.
>and the problem with Versailles was the incredible conspicuous consumption while failing to address the problems and starvation outside the magic castle walls, leading to an uprising of the public and middle-elites which got the entire aristocracy murdered.
The author feels that big corps are not focused on the reason they exist but simply they are concerned to distractions outside of their objective.
Big corporations need to be seen to address certain things at certain times - so they are not in a vacuum. The c-suite doesn't have a free pass to ignore the world around them because their shareholders won't either.
Set aside your political bone to pick for a few seconds and think about it. The author isn't "blaming" anything on diversity.
Diversity is just the "thing of the minute" in the context in which the author is writing about. In the 1950s he could write the same article and substitute in anticommunism. The "thing of the minute" will probably always be some broadly appealing subset of the culture and politics of the society and time in which the organization exits. It doesn't matter what the virtue everyone is professing is. What matters is that the virtue is at best ancillary to whatever the organization's goals are and resources directed at it are resources not directed at keeping the business running and prepared for the future.
But that is a misunderstanding of the forces acting on a large corporation - they cannot abscond from society so to speak. The resources directed at the thing of the moment are meant to enhance long-term survival probability. Can it become disproportionate, sure.
There are also pretty hard elements to this. For example, clients might now start to assume that if your firm cannot attract women then maybe that is a sign of a bigger issue somewhere and that will impede sales.
If this article was written in the 1950s, the author would be blaming people of color and "that damnable civil rights act". I don't think this author is coming from a place of good faith when he starts off the article saying he was among the privileged few who was given a rare chance to possibly be a billionaire, if he just played his cards right. And then frames it as a real shame that his good (if not perfect!!!) ideas were ignored.
Suppose the author wasn't Probably One Of Those People, and didn't apparently have some kind of axe to grind about whatever bee in their bonnet buzzes about, constantly tickling their lips? Then they'd phrase it more like your second paragraph! More meat, less spice. Decent meat doesn't need much spice.
But: they didn't.
(I also second the other person's comment about anti communism probably not being the example this particular writer would have chosen, were they writing in the 50s.)
that sure is pithy but as a general rule every company I've ever encountered says that their output is wealth, and some of them say that diversity is part of a strategy for achieving wealth.
I would probably invest in a company whose overall strategy for achieving wealth sounds the most likely to succeed.
Sometimes ESG is specifically asked for by investors, all the way up to BlackRock.
It depends on your investment timeframes, as well. And a presumption of invincibility. Versailles was wealth-maximising until it was cancelled by the woke mob.
Calling people fighting for REAL issues "woke" is incorrect. Poverty is real and affected the majority of the population. Current woke issues do not affect the majority of the population, to say the least.
I am outright stating that issues immediately affecting physical well being, e.g. starvation in France before the revolution are way more important than preferred pronouns.
I am outright stating that issues affecting the majority are more important than issues not affecting the majority. If you disagree, check which production issue your PO/director prioritizes next.
The remarkable thing is how issues which are easy to address - just use the pronouns, it's active effort not to - are instead blown up into huge issues that take over the legislature, because this prevents discussion of anything more material-conditions based. Anti-woke hysteria is incredibly effective. People don't want to talk about boring issues affecting the majority, they want to pile in on a target minority instead.
Again - it's a bit more nuanced than that - adults in same bathrooms with opposite gender children. Men in women's sports, etc. The other problem people have with the "woke" crowd is that they have made it a job. The same applies to anti-woke as well. These groups are no longer out to solve the problem, they are out to perpetuate the conflict to cash in on views / reads / controversy which they actively take too far. But again, I will try to reply in a very limited manner because this argument won't be solved here.
The same applied to topics that were here before the work term - climate change, religion, violent video games, etc. They paved away for career crusaders, rather than ideological ones.
Climate change is probably the ultimate example of a problem that's (a) real and (b) affects everyone but (c) on a long enough timescale that it's not this generation's problem.
So you state that there are at least two axes -- severity of the problem and how widespread the problem is -- that influence whether a problem is worth addressing (or whether it is a "real" problem, as you put it). I agree so far.
For instance, we can probably agree that slavery was an issue that, in the US, affected a small minority of the population, but that was extremely severe so worth addressing and a "real" problem.
In the same vein, I would state that police brutality towards black people (typically categorized as a "woke" topic) in the US is a problem that affects a minority but that is very severe. Not as severe as slavery, but severe enough to be a "real" problem worth addressing.
Not using preferred pronouns is perhaps another rung down on the severity ladder compared to police brutality, and affects fewer people. But I think it's still a topic worth talking about because it scores very highly on a third axis we've omitted so far: how easy it is to address the problem. Not using preferred pronouns is done exclusively out of callousness. It is similar to other forms of bullying: it only affects a fairly small subset of people and the damage is "only" psychological, but the solution is: just don't bully/misgender people.
I agree with everything up to the last paragraph. Even there, I don't outright disagree, but would make some nuanced comments that have been covered a 1000 times in these types of discussions.
Started out interesting but devolved into a anti-"woke" soapbox. Can you prove that attention to diversity negatively impacted companies? The only evidence here seems to be more of a correlation-causation fallacy
Sure one can overdo "diversity" to the point of hiring incompetent people for diversity's sake. But striving for diversity can also be a way of finding and developing untapped human potential in less represented groups.
I agree with your review. I enjoyed the Wild West vs Versailles take, but then the 100% focus on diversity took it sideways. The politics at these large companies is still driven by getting senior leadership to like you and see that you are moving their agenda forward. But even in that case, it’s not 100% politics, for the most part you need to be able to both deliver and play the game to advance. His whole focus on diversity was not well reasoned or an accurate portrayal of what goes on at these companies.
> "diversity", i.e. the idea that people who aren't white guys should be given a shot at the wealth
As a non-white guy, I find the "diversity" propaganda in SV over the last 5-6 years problematic. If that was truly about giving everyone a shot at wealth and increasing inclusion as you say, I would wholeheartedly support it. But after observing it closely for many years, I just saw empty virtue-signalling and no concrete action. Moreoever, there was no actual "diversity" of inputs and opinions - rather it was all groupthink.
It reminds me of those VCs who only do "warm" introductions (hello Versailles), but use their cold introduction mailbox as a measure of success, the more plebeians they leave screaming at the gates, the happier they feel.
As others have noted, using diversity as an indicator seems like confirmation bias. If you look for something hard enough you will see it (like faces in a cloud) and correlation is not causation.
Now, I don't care much for diversity/dei stuff, i believe in reasonable (not puritanical) meritocracy but when someone picks on dei it shows you how they think.
Obviously the author is not claiming diversity is the cause of decline at these companies. He is claiming it as an indicator of a court of bersailles culture shift where people pay lip service to DEI but he chose analyst calls which are not by tech workers or producers in FB. This is a call by managers/execs and traders. DEI lip service has been a thing in corporate america long before 2020, I remember having to endure bs DEI townhalls in companies that have nothing to do with tech and that were and still are very profitable as long ago as 2014-15.
The fact is, a public call or company wide townhall is set up to pay lip service to bullshit. You can't take that as a reflection of internal culture. They probably stopped talking about it on analyst calls because they had more pressing items like loss of share value and their plans to reassure shareholders.
If a FB tech worker claimed they get promoted based on attendance of a diversity seminar I would change my mind but the author picked on diversity similar to how republicans say "woke" as a dogwhistle to what they really mean.
It's not that I care about bullshit diversity lipservice bu random corporations but when you use that to make your point about the overall decline of a company now you are not paying lip service, your anti-diversity propaganda will have actual effects in excluding people.
Another HN post was saying things like "you shouldn't have committ hooks for a diversity committee meeting" I keep seeing this as a dogwhistle, the new "maga".
Show me evidence that diversity lipservice, as bullshit as it maybe, is being used in place of actual performance of employees that aren't in HR or managers at the middle-manager and higher level and I will take back what I said. Until then, this is a nicely concealed racial dogwhistle.
I remember clearly my highschool teacher telling the class how corporate america is "is still great, mostly white" and no one batter an eye lol. I know where this sentiment comes from no matter how well it is concealed these days.
The court of versailles vs wild west analogy lacks a lot of nuance. HR will usually be to the versailles extreme and SWEs to the wild west in any company.
What I have noticed on the other hand is execs are influenced by marketing, legal, investors, anyone but their core product people and that's when you see a decline. Google for example became a "buy another company instead of build it in house" type of a company which is why they were caught off guard.
Microsoft got past all that after shedding steve ballmer. They're not the 90s Microsoft but they are very innovative and even when they take over a company they show wisdom in not destroying the culture/people right away.
It's a shame, the article started out nice but I think the author let their bias leak/influence their conclusion.
The problematic parts of the court is in my opinion not the current flavour of social self aggregandization, but the priesthood of the holy cow that giveth the revenue stream. If at microsoft, all must be windows. If at google all compareth horribly to search. If at apple, does it look good and can be sold at store.
The company internal wild-west eco system continus to produce more often then not, but the priesthood feels attacked by the idea of other power centers, aka revenue streams emerging inside the company.
Article takes a pretty wacky direction blaming diversity. I was at FB during the period they describe, nobody was getting promos for going to diversity seminars.
If you look at other posts on the site, seems to be a theme with this author. Everything is about how progressive politics are making the world harder for them.
I don't disagree with the authour but isn't this just a nice metaphor for small companies (where you have to be good at doing things) vs large ones (where politics rule).
I've worked at quite a few small/medium/large companies now, and watched companies grow from the former to the latter and it is always that way isn't it?
I've said before that FAANGs used to be start ups. And did very well to keep that mindset for as long as they did. But they are not that anymore. They are corporations. Drucker said the same thing before I was born or most FAANGs existed.
This is just the lifecycle of any enterprise. Even the French nobility were once a rag-tag, battle winning, bunch of Franks. The fact it has taken so much less time for Tech (however you define that) to go from rebels to empire is just modern life...
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread> If you rebel against some of the precepts of this new ideology by espousing a contrary view as James Demore did at Google when he offered an alternative explanation on female representation
Eh.
.. then the author takes a sharp right turn to blame it on "diversity", i.e. the idea that people who aren't white guys should be given a shot at the wealth, and it goes downhill from there. The rest of the blog is devoted to complaining about e.g. the existence of women's basketball or cosplaying aristocracy of the early 20th century.
(diversity discussion on HN is .. not likely to go well)
.. which is an instant red flag.
They could have talked about e.g. Google's many chat apps or tendency to shut down products, or Facebook's abandoned "metaverse" project, as indicators that the company has switched from providing new ways to win revenue and serve users to new ways to spend revenue on conspicuous consumption.
Instead they rant about "diversity".
To expand on the author's metaphor, the problem with the Wild West is that some of the "building" was in fact theft, murder, and genocide; and the problem with Versailles was the incredible conspicuous consumption while failing to address the problems and starvation outside the magic castle walls, leading to an uprising of the public and middle-elites which got the entire aristocracy murdered.
The unsympathetic reaction to the SVB crisis is a hint to SV that some of the proletariat might be massing outside the walls. Their approach to "diversity", "ESG", and other social issues is the beginning of a glimmer of recognition that they have a responsibility to broader society, but combined with a very poor ability to actually listen to people they consider not as smart.
Whatever you think about diversity discourse, it’s surely a reasonable point that supporting diversity is not in fact how Google or FB got rich. Presumably now that times are tough, they are having to focus more on their core competencies.
The author feels that big corps are not focused on the reason they exist but simply they are concerned to distractions outside of their objective.
Diversity is just the "thing of the minute" in the context in which the author is writing about. In the 1950s he could write the same article and substitute in anticommunism. The "thing of the minute" will probably always be some broadly appealing subset of the culture and politics of the society and time in which the organization exits. It doesn't matter what the virtue everyone is professing is. What matters is that the virtue is at best ancillary to whatever the organization's goals are and resources directed at it are resources not directed at keeping the business running and prepared for the future.
There are also pretty hard elements to this. For example, clients might now start to assume that if your firm cannot attract women then maybe that is a sign of a bigger issue somewhere and that will impede sales.
But: they didn't.
(I also second the other person's comment about anti communism probably not being the example this particular writer would have chosen, were they writing in the 50s.)
I would probably invest in a company whose overall strategy for achieving wealth sounds the most likely to succeed.
It depends on your investment timeframes, as well. And a presumption of invincibility. Versailles was wealth-maximising until it was cancelled by the woke mob.
I am outright stating that issues affecting the majority are more important than issues not affecting the majority. If you disagree, check which production issue your PO/director prioritizes next.
The same applied to topics that were here before the work term - climate change, religion, violent video games, etc. They paved away for career crusaders, rather than ideological ones.
For instance, we can probably agree that slavery was an issue that, in the US, affected a small minority of the population, but that was extremely severe so worth addressing and a "real" problem.
In the same vein, I would state that police brutality towards black people (typically categorized as a "woke" topic) in the US is a problem that affects a minority but that is very severe. Not as severe as slavery, but severe enough to be a "real" problem worth addressing.
Not using preferred pronouns is perhaps another rung down on the severity ladder compared to police brutality, and affects fewer people. But I think it's still a topic worth talking about because it scores very highly on a third axis we've omitted so far: how easy it is to address the problem. Not using preferred pronouns is done exclusively out of callousness. It is similar to other forms of bullying: it only affects a fairly small subset of people and the damage is "only" psychological, but the solution is: just don't bully/misgender people.
Sure one can overdo "diversity" to the point of hiring incompetent people for diversity's sake. But striving for diversity can also be a way of finding and developing untapped human potential in less represented groups.
Source: I have worked in big tech
As a non-white guy, I find the "diversity" propaganda in SV over the last 5-6 years problematic. If that was truly about giving everyone a shot at wealth and increasing inclusion as you say, I would wholeheartedly support it. But after observing it closely for many years, I just saw empty virtue-signalling and no concrete action. Moreoever, there was no actual "diversity" of inputs and opinions - rather it was all groupthink.
Now, I don't care much for diversity/dei stuff, i believe in reasonable (not puritanical) meritocracy but when someone picks on dei it shows you how they think.
Obviously the author is not claiming diversity is the cause of decline at these companies. He is claiming it as an indicator of a court of bersailles culture shift where people pay lip service to DEI but he chose analyst calls which are not by tech workers or producers in FB. This is a call by managers/execs and traders. DEI lip service has been a thing in corporate america long before 2020, I remember having to endure bs DEI townhalls in companies that have nothing to do with tech and that were and still are very profitable as long ago as 2014-15.
The fact is, a public call or company wide townhall is set up to pay lip service to bullshit. You can't take that as a reflection of internal culture. They probably stopped talking about it on analyst calls because they had more pressing items like loss of share value and their plans to reassure shareholders.
If a FB tech worker claimed they get promoted based on attendance of a diversity seminar I would change my mind but the author picked on diversity similar to how republicans say "woke" as a dogwhistle to what they really mean.
It's not that I care about bullshit diversity lipservice bu random corporations but when you use that to make your point about the overall decline of a company now you are not paying lip service, your anti-diversity propaganda will have actual effects in excluding people.
Another HN post was saying things like "you shouldn't have committ hooks for a diversity committee meeting" I keep seeing this as a dogwhistle, the new "maga".
Show me evidence that diversity lipservice, as bullshit as it maybe, is being used in place of actual performance of employees that aren't in HR or managers at the middle-manager and higher level and I will take back what I said. Until then, this is a nicely concealed racial dogwhistle.
I remember clearly my highschool teacher telling the class how corporate america is "is still great, mostly white" and no one batter an eye lol. I know where this sentiment comes from no matter how well it is concealed these days.
The court of versailles vs wild west analogy lacks a lot of nuance. HR will usually be to the versailles extreme and SWEs to the wild west in any company.
What I have noticed on the other hand is execs are influenced by marketing, legal, investors, anyone but their core product people and that's when you see a decline. Google for example became a "buy another company instead of build it in house" type of a company which is why they were caught off guard.
Microsoft got past all that after shedding steve ballmer. They're not the 90s Microsoft but they are very innovative and even when they take over a company they show wisdom in not destroying the culture/people right away.
It's a shame, the article started out nice but I think the author let their bias leak/influence their conclusion.
The company internal wild-west eco system continus to produce more often then not, but the priesthood feels attacked by the idea of other power centers, aka revenue streams emerging inside the company.
If you look at other posts on the site, seems to be a theme with this author. Everything is about how progressive politics are making the world harder for them.
I don't disagree with the authour but isn't this just a nice metaphor for small companies (where you have to be good at doing things) vs large ones (where politics rule).
I've worked at quite a few small/medium/large companies now, and watched companies grow from the former to the latter and it is always that way isn't it?
I've said before that FAANGs used to be start ups. And did very well to keep that mindset for as long as they did. But they are not that anymore. They are corporations. Drucker said the same thing before I was born or most FAANGs existed.
This is just the lifecycle of any enterprise. Even the French nobility were once a rag-tag, battle winning, bunch of Franks. The fact it has taken so much less time for Tech (however you define that) to go from rebels to empire is just modern life...
Upvoted anyway, because it IS a nice metaphor.