I see it too (but I'm a subscriber and read the article online).
There isn't much to see- Google/Alphabet (Pichai) has decided to align itself with the current government and eliminating these programs is a clear signal.
Not just you, archive today has a beef with cloudflare. I wasn’t even using cloudflare intentionally but iirc Firefox has a dns privacy setting that I had to disable.
Since May 2018[35][36] Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service would not resolve archive.today's web addresses, making it inaccessible to users of the Cloudflare DNS service. Both organizations claimed the other was responsible for the issue. Cloudflare staff stated that the problem was on archive.today's DNS infrastructure, as its authoritative nameservers return invalid records when Cloudflare's network systems made requests to archive.today. archive.today countered that the issue was due to Cloudflare requests not being compliant with DNS standards, as Cloudflare does not send EDNS Client Subnet information in its DNS requests
I remember reading his memo and agreed with many things he said. I think the public overreacted. He was right that DEI ignore the hard questions and discriminates another group.
I'm no Trump lover. However, I do think DEI was the wrong approach.
Many here work in tech. I'm sure some or many of us here have silently experienced unfair DEI hiring and promotion practices at least once. I've seen some truly incompetent people get hired and promoted purely to meet a certain DEI goal. It reminds me of Affirmative Action but for the work place.
This is coming from someone who absolutely hates the tech bro culture and hates that there aren't enough women in tech. No male tech worker likes environments where there are 10 guys to 1 girl and the insane gender imbalance in tech heavy cities that make dating impossible for a large portion of the population. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and turn the tech industry into 10 women for every 1 man. Believe me.
Damore’s letter was extremely balanced and had all the appropriate caveats about being applied to individuals. But what we’re seeing as the countervailing force to “woke” and “DEI” is unfortunately not like this. It’s as reactionary as the most egregious DEI programs.
This is pretty much the first half of the article (until the archive.is link starts working):
"Google is eliminating its goal of hiring more employees from historically underrepresented groups and reviewing some diversity, equity and inclusion programs, joining other tech giants rethinking their approach to DEI.
In an email to employees Wednesday, Google said it would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce.
In 2020, amid calls for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, Google set a target of increasing by 30% the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 2025.
Parent company Alphabet’s GOOGL -7.69%decrease; red down pointing triangle annual report released Wednesday omitted a sentence stating the company was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.” The sentence was in its reports from 2021 through 2024.
Google also said it was reviewing recent court decisions and executive orders by President Trump aimed at curbing DEI in the government and federal contractors. The company is “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply,” the email said...
“We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S.—and in many countries globally—but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals,” the email said... "
The complete rollover on this is kind of disheartening.
Were a lot of these programs a performative kabuki theatre that wasted time and money? Yes. Were companies ever going to fill their ranks with black, lesbian programmers? No.
On the other hand, now having worked my way up in the tech world, the idea that the C-suite decision makers are there through some sort of meritocracy is also equally laughable. These are exclusive circles, and your breeding (family, school, frat) already determines your access more than success ever will.
I don't think there is anything wrong with the ideal of giving more types of people a chance. But it was an issue of execution, not intent.
Read Judge Amit Mehta's ruling on their behavior gaming ad auctions to hit Revenue targets. Then think about non reaction of the Advertising Industry.
Achieving Monopoly and Domination requires kabuki performances.
There is no other route. These are mentally bankrupt one dimensional people. Other than survival and accumulation of status and wealth there is nothing much going on in their head.
Never listen to their words, only pay attention to their actions.
You hit it dead-on that a lot of these DEI initiatives were performance theater to appease some external force (as is most of business, when you really think about it). The existing leadership had zero intent to actually allow under-represented minorities into their ranks other than as a token or trophy figure who would kiss the ring and not rock the boat.
The real success (or failure) of DEI will be the next crop of leaders, not the current ones. The managers and leaders of tomorrow (who are the ICs and team leads of today) are acutely aware of how much of a Straight White Boy’s Club these leadership ranks are, and the vibe I get is increasing disgust at the proclamation of “merit” as justification for their tenure while (often minority) high performers are routinely exited out in favor of yet another H1B overseas.
I’m hoping this is just the last gasps of relevance from the status quo in the face of generational upheaval. Guess we’ll all find out together.
Well, they've already achieved diversity, haven't they? Whites were already under-represented at Google (and at 18/23 tech companies) back in 2017 [1]. If they've rolled over for anyone, it was for the Asian lobby, who is over-represented at 23/23 of those tech companies, and now won't be facing DEI pressures to reduce their numbers.
It's not. It's distraction culture war politics - turning a class issue into a race issue. The real cause isn't a corporate love of racial diversity, it's a cross company initiative to decrease wages and disempower workers by heavily using H1Bs that just happen to come from India.
Dead links owned by the very companies being reported on. If a company lets their diversity report 404, why do you hold this against statisticians that gathered the data when it was live?
> from different years
You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?
> without enough detail to actually assess the impact of any DEI program
The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.
> isn't it wonderful that Meta has achieved greater black representation through content moderators in Kenya
Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.
> Dead links owned by the very companies being reported on. If a company lets their diversity report 404, why do you hold this against statisticians that gathered the data when it was live?
Why should I trust data I can't verify?
> You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?
Junk in, junk out.
> The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.
So when you said "Well, they've already achieved diversity, haven't they", what did you mean?
> Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.
Have you tried? Does archive.org have those urls? Are there other reports on those companies' diversity? Have you checked their mandatory government EEO-1 diversity reports [1]? It rather seems that you're nitpicking, looking for an excuse to ignore what by all accounts looks like someone's honest work. Do you have, for these companies, reports suggesting wildly different demographics, that is making you so skeptical?
Who is actually making the claims here about these companies "achieving diversity"? Me? Do you want me to do your homework? It's quite easy to post specious data to support your specious claims on the internet. Quite easy to generate a desired reaction that way.
You're claiming the data is specious, but you have offered zero evidence to that end, only very shaky speculation. You say some of the links 404 - of the ones that do not, were their numbers significantly different from the table in the article?
Amazon in your table lists 21% black employees. Maybe a lot has changed since 2017, but it sure seems like that might be misrepresenting the picture when 79% of those black employees are listed as laborers in the EEO-1 from 2023. But who can say!
Akin to this, the 2023 EEO-1 says 47% of professional employees are Asian! Wow sure seems overrepresented. Do we know anything about the compensation packages of these employees? No. We don't. We have no ability to tell if these are offshored employees, H1-B, under-compensated, what their tenure is, or even what the actual role of these employees are besides an incredibly broad categorization for them.
Also hmm, interesting that number gets cut by more than half when looking at the percentage of first/mid-level managers. Again have no idea if there's pay equity or equal opportunity at different levels of management.
What can we actually say about diversity at Amazon? Well "mission accomplished" obviously.
The table you link shows that execs/senior level managers are 63% White (over-represented 1.09x compared to US population) and 24% Asian (over-represented 4.08x). Mid-level officials and managers are 50% White (under-represented 0.87x) and 19% Asian (over-represented 3.29x).
My claims that the main beneficiaries are Asians, and that Whites are generally under-represented, are accurate.
I think the real metric should be childhood household income. That transcends race or gender and universally inhibits the child in almost every measurable way.
On the contrary, targeting childhood household income will see representation of the groups you're trying to help drop to nearly zero. Impoverished white children outscore wealthy black children by a significant margin on standardized tests, and there are a lot more poor white children than poor black children.
There used to be programs like that, and they mostly helped the children of Chinese and Vietnamese refugees from communism. Low childhood household income doesn't really have much effect - "low income" in a US context is quite rich in a world context.
"childhood household income. That transcends race or gender"
vs
"targeting childhood household income will see representation of the groups you're trying to help drop to nearly zero"
Did you misunderstand the point? It seems right that if you want to help poor people, you should target poor people, how could that be counterproductive?
I don’t know. When Sweden reached 58% women in university, they stopped the gender equality programs. Why would you help men if everyone knows they are advantaged?
(Oh man, please answer, but we’re overdue for an overcorrection, and it might look as dangerous as 1934).
I think GP's point is that if the goal is to help those disadvantaged by childhood poverty, assuming similar levels of poverty, it will help white children who are relatively less disadvantaged and not help relatively more disadvantaged black children.
But that should be the goal. Using skin color as a proxy for being disadvantaged works only inasmuch the proxy is precise enough. If it's not, it's just another bias.
If you had a better metric that can be used to help people from marginalized cummunities, wherever they happen to be, you should be using those if the goal is to be more inclusive, more diverse and more equitable.
But the problem is that the very same psychological mechanisms that drive racism are the ones which drive these modern attempts at fixing racism.
I think there are two different but related angles at play:
1. Historical injustice. Racism against black communities in the USA has such a long and disgusting history that when new generations learn about that it's understandable that people want to wash that away and find ways to make amends and counterbalance things.
2. Since we live in a world where skin color is a visible marker that you literally wear on your skin, there is a sense that you're just being disadvantaged for being you and thus you need a more-than-normal counterbalance to set things straight.
We thus ended up in a situation where we destroyed the aspirations of a truly color-blind society. We need to keep reminding ourselves about the fact that color matters.
This is not helping defusing racism. This is feeding racism because despite the best intentions it operates in the worldview of racism.
Of all the words you Americans have purged from the language you kept the word race, a word that post WWII many European nations successfully defused.
I understand that anti-black racism is still a factor today.
I really fail to see how doubling in on the importance and reality of race and skin color in particular (as opposed to culture) everywhere is going to make that problem go away.
> It's telling that culture will instantly lump anyone successful into the "white" category.
They also do the inverse, insisting that obviously white Arabs and Persians can't be white because they don't live in successful countries. (On the other hand, Russians can be white despite not living in a successful country. Who knows. In this case, it looks like "white" actually means "Christian", except for Middle Eastern or Korean Christians.)
Kim Kardashian was supposed to be non-Caucasian, if you believe Twitter. Her name clearly identifies her as Armenian; you can't get much closer to the Caucasus than that. Although it is true that she's only half Armenian, with the remainder being Scottish and Dutch.
>Russians can be white despite not living in a successful country
Which is especially perverse when one considers how ethnically heterogeneous Russia is as a result of the USSR's policy of integrating ethnic Russians into minority areas and shipping some number of those minorities back to Russia (basically so they don't incite discontent in their native lands).
Where I'm from, racial statistics and profiling are forbidden since they're antithetic with republican universalism ; but even taking the US culture into account, this point of view seems extremely bigoted.
At Harvard (and I assume other places, but those other places were not subjected to the level of discovery that Harvard was in SFFA v Harvard), diversity meant less Asians. Representation of whites was about what you would expect given their test scores and grades.
In France it’s forbidden to filter by race. Guess how they filter by criteria? Well the population under 25 is incredibly diverse so they don’t care about filtering, they just donate to everyone under 25. Can’t believe we gave up our land like this, they’re not even nice or thankful.
DEI programs discriminate significantly against Asians, just like college admissions. If these programs didn’t exist, the proportion of Asian employees would be even higher than it is currently, simply based on merit.
Well, the top US engineering colleges which they're hiring from also has an under-representation of whites and this is due to the Asian disapora being higher from also international students' representation (thus, analyzing diversity metrics is less so relative to the US population and more so for the global population).
If you zoom out far enough, all these companies are making business decisions - not emotional ones. They have to kiss Trump's ring and bend the knee for Elon in order to not get destroyed. When they had DEI, it was created for business reason too - to be seen as socially just so you should buy their products. Now Google thinks it's better for business if they fall in line with what Trump wants.
> When they had DEI, it was created for business reason too - to be seen as socially just so you should buy their products.
You don't think that was "to not get destroyed" too? Such as when New York city was sued (and lost, having to pay out $1.8 billion) because too many minorities failed its test for teachers:
I think it is more than just Trump. We do have to remember that some companies are currently being sued by shareholders for attempting to keep DEI around. Or at least was threatened to be.
I don’t know if these lawsuits would win or not but given the current political climate I sure wouldn’t bet against it. From a purely business prospective on that alone, I can see why they would do it. And do it so quickly.
This is the latest symptom of a very powerful opposition that just gained almost unlimited power. Or at least unchecked power. To be clear here Trump is also a symptom, this didn’t come out of nowhere with him.
Be mad and hold these companies accountable but we also can’t afford to be distracted by the symptoms when those in power are going to make it so much worse.
Unironically, the comments such as yours are downvoted. I had an idealised view about our industry, but it has now shattered during the course of the last year.
College grads have an idealized view of tech industry. But it's all about money at the end of the day and tech is turning into something similar to other industries like oil or pharma.
There's a big difference between obeying laws (which all companies pretty much have to do if they want to stay in business) and voluntarilly aligning with what they think a new president wants without there being any specific law forcing them to do that.
I actually think the business reason FOR the DEI stuff (to appeal to customers by coming accross as fair and progressive) made more sense. Have the customers really changed their minds just because someone else is in the Whitehouse?
Appealing to customers by coming across as fair and progressive is great. But Google has a huge anti-trust lawsuit that can wreck them. Trump can probably make that go away.
If they stay more "woke", Trump is guaranteed to try to destroy Google.
Google has done the calculus and likely concluded that kissing Trump's ass is better for their shareholders than continuing to align more left.
I think this is a business decision, as it was for Meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Blame US citizens for giving so much power to Trump.
There are advantages to diversity by itself. These have been well documented. So setting aside any concern about excluded groups, it was a good business decision to aim for a diverse workforce.
But taking those concerns up again, almost no one perceives their own biases as biases. It's like you don't perceive your own accent, people of different racial backgrounds look similar, you can't smell your own breath, etc. So being a biased person feels just like being an unbiased person, but it makes you make biased decisions. A person against whom you harbor a prejudice applies for a job. Your bias causes you to discount their better qualities and double count their worse qualities. So you hire someone else. This hurts both you and the person you didn't hire.
A policy that works against well-known biases, if implemented correctly, achieves three ends: it reduces the harm to the person biased against, it reduces the harm to the company whose hiring policies are distorted by bias, and it helps the company by producing a more diverse workforce, which is an end in itself regardless of whether you care about harms to others. If implemented correctly, diversity hiring targets can produce the effect of hiring without prejudice despite the prejudice of those hiring.
If you are crossing a river and the wind blows you off course, you don't head to your goal but to the side. The net result is that you reach your goal. The diversity targets are just tacking against the wind.
>There are advantages to diversity by itself. These have been well documented. So setting aside any concern about excluded groups, it was a good business decision to aim for a diverse workforce.
They wanted to have a diverse workforce, and came up with an excuse for it post-hoc. The best defense I've seen of this is that diverse opinions are good for business. Of course, hiring racially diverse people while being antagonistic towards those with different ways of thinking does little to increase diversity of thought.
>But taking those concerns up again, almost no one perceives their own biases as biases.
Says the pot to the kettle. The way to prevent bias is to come up with objective factors to evaluate people based on, not intentionally injecting bias of your own.
>If you are crossing a river and the wind blows you off course, you don't head to your goal but to the side. The net result is that you reach your goal. The diversity targets are just tacking against the wind.
Alright, I'm going to take another swing at this. I will reorder things.
> Says the pot to the kettle.
That was my point. When I said "it's like an accent" I didn't mean I myself don't have an accent. It's that I don't perceive it. People do not perceive their own accents as accents. They don't perceive their own biases as biases.
But accents are still accents regardless of whether we perceive them. Biases are still biases.
My point wasn't that I am pure, free of sin. It wasn't about me at all. It was that biases are bad but often invisible.
> They wanted to have a diverse workforce, and came up with an excuse for it post-hoc. The best defense I've seen of this is that diverse opinions are good for business.
Is it true? If so, who cares whether it was post hoc?
I don't know whether you've done any machine learning. Nowadays all the news is about LLMs, but back in the day there were other algorithms -- decisions trees, support vector machines, logistic regression models, simple Bayesian models, etc. You had a mess of data. You defined feature vectors. You vectorized your data and threw it at the algorithm. You got a classifier. Or a regression model or whatever. Then there were also meta algorithms that took these base algorithms and combined them to make something more robust and accurate -- a random forest or something. This meta algorithm worked only if these sub-deciders differed. You make one decision tree, duplicate it 1000 times, and wrap it in a random forest and you get nothing but wasted effort. To achieve the gain you needed your deciders to have different opinions.
This is the theory behind diversity in an organization: you have multiple viewpoints plus some mechanism to combine them into a final decision. It has nothing to do with race or gender or anything. It is a provable way to get better decisions.
Did someone also want to lift up people historically beaten down? Maybe? Thats also a good thing! It's awesome if you can get better decisions and also make a more just society, right?
> We have a word for this: racism.
What? This is just a shibboleth. Is racism a good thing or a bad thing? Is trying to counteract racism just as bad as raw racism? It produces a more fair outcome, but it's forbidden! We must preserve the injustice because to counteract it would also be unjust!
This is a ludicrous position. The point of using a DEI mechanism is that it is just that, a mechanism. You set it up and let it decide so that flawed human judgment doesn't decide. Is the mechanism racist? I don't know, does it have ideas and intentions?
Perhaps it will be clearer if I try to do some perspective taking for you.
Imagine there is a company with a South Asian CEO, CTO, etc. They only trust South Asians. Only South Asians are a good cultural fit. North Americans are lazy, unmotivated, dumb, incurious, entitled. They are poor team players. They won't put in extra hours, or if they do, it will achieve nothing. And then if you interact with them there's always this tension, awkwardness. You can't tell the same stupid American jokes. It's a joke! They have no sense of humor.
Now you are a North American with skills. You actually are very talented and insightful. You have lots of energy, lots of ideas. You would be a great employee. But this company will not hire you. (You disgust them a little.) Is this racism? I've just inverted identities, but I think you would agree that the company is racist and this is unfair. And it's clear that this racism harms both you and the company. But if the company's HR or whatever recognized the possibility that racism was tainting their hiring practices and implemented DEI targets as an impartial mechanism to work against this bias, that would be racist against South Asians! So to maintain their moral purity they should preserve their original racism and deny you the job. [slaps dust off hands and calls it a day]
The loss of dei programs is bad but isn't the big bad. The big bad comes when businesses start being forced to prove that they arent doing dei. Every hire may soon have to be examined under inverse lenses: to prove that they are not dei. Real evils will then creep back into business culture. Be under no illusions. Those evils still lurk in every back office.
That’s not how DEI programs operated at places I’ve worked. They were more about expanding candidate searches to look for high quality people at other places than we’d been looking, reducing alcohol at company events etc
This is a minor detail but reducing or removing alcohol all together (my company) from social events for inclusion reasons is excluding people who like consuming alcohol at social events. We somehow pivoted to embracing restrictions in order to accommodate small groups of people, instead of offering alternatives (e.g. vegan options). This will always irritate other groups of people and is not a sustainable way to improve inclusion.
Sure and one answer to that was simply to ensure soft beverage availability in addition to alcohol. Which was an initiative borne from a DEI program. We’re debating specifics of DEI-relevant initiatives. What I’m saying is these discussions only happen when there is space for DEI consideration
I am not nitpicking and in general am in support of offering more diverse options. However, in my experience I can't remember a single event where soft drinks where not offered in additional to alcohol: pre DEI or during the DEI era.
As a vegetarian, I really struggled finding good non-meat options though.
> reducing or removing alcohol all together (my company) from social events for inclusion reasons is excluding people who like consuming alcohol at social events
Reducing or removing alcohol at social events is not done for "inclusion reasons" but for straightforward legal liability reasons: a drunk employee often has poor impulse control and may do or say shitty things that they wouldn't if they were sober, and with some probability this results in lawsuits against the company. No drunk people at social events -> fewer lawsuits.
Agree. As a parent to an Asian boy, I’m thankful that steps are being taken to ensure he isn’t discriminated against for school admissions and job applications.
This is a fantastical speculation based on no evidence other than political bias. We do have evidence, though, that candidates had to go through performative hiring practices to prove that they support "diversity".
A friend once said to me "that road doesnt need a speed limit anymore. It hasnt had a fatal accident for many years. And cars are safer now. Dont burden people with stupid restrictions." Evil is patient.
At Google? Where’s the evidence? Most DEI efforts come down to making sure you give a diverse candidate pool a chance to prove themselves instead of just hiring buddies that look and think and act exactly the same. That’s hardly “performative”.
Well, if businesses had to prove that each hire is related to dei, which was the previous state of affairs, many would argue that is when evil creeps into business culture.
“The survey highlights two interesting facts: 46% of tech employees have noticed an increase in DEI investments in 2020, and 51% companies now report on DEI metrics. However, the report also highlights the need for continued action. 14% of technology companies today do not invest in DEI programs and initiatives.”
I’ve found 5-10 more similar sources via a quick google search.
While the law did not compel a business to report dei metrics to my knowledge (besides boards of public companies via the SEC), the impact of mass virtual signaling had the practical effect of compelling businesses of embracing dei or face being labeled as racists or immoral, which is a form of coercion by itself. I’d argue it would have been be better if such actions were simply deemed as illegal rather than racists or immoral. So with that said, I would argue the previous state of affairs was significantly worse with dei measures in place.
Putting the power back to the law rather than to a group of loosely collected virtual signalers is a better world imo.
Would be great to be more resources put in at the very start of the pipeline (e.g. early childhood education). It's very hard to "solve" "diversity" at the time of hiring when candidates have already had decades of disadvantage.
Provinces handle it well enough but some better than others. The teaching curriculum did use to be less political but bringing federal politics would only make that worse. We have very diverse populations and needs from province to province. We generally rank well globally.
The goal was to ensure that there was a more balanced result of education across the country. California can afford to spend way more per child than Kentucky can, so without some sort of federal level balancing, California's children are just going to be more likely to prosper than Kentucky's. This doubly applies to funds for disabled or underdeveloped children who needs extra support from the school system to be successful. Those programs are going to be largely cut across the red states.
Canada handles this balancing problem with equalization payments between provinces. Which is well, sorta socialist, so it causes a great deal of consternation amongst certain people.
From what I understand it's a lot more hands-off, it's a bucket of money that goes in (or out) of the budget that is used for education, healthcare, and other items. The province gets to decide how its used and the federal government doesn't get to withhold or dictate conditions. Unlike for example, highway funding and drinking age in the USA?
Well, for what it’s worth, Kentucky has a stronger economy than Canada and we manage to find money to spend on education. The key part is to spend your money well, not spend more.
If spending is so important why are the most expensive districts the worst. Shouldn’t that money have helped them? And yet year after year, they remain the worst despite $20k+ per student.
The question is how much administration does the education system really need? Many of the admin tasks are local in nature so I’m doubtful that moving it across the country will get good results.
Good question. If the US is truly facing a "Sputnik moment" with regards to China nd AI, the US should bring back something like the "National Defense Education Act" (1958) which was aimed at bolstering American competitiveness in science and technology.
Well I suppose we should start hiring in science and technology then and not just stamp around saying how important it is to the future. All we have are layoffs right now. The signal the industry sends to would-be majors is to stay away.
we try in mississippi but the conservatives slowly take away funding piece by piece because they don't want to educate black people, because then they wouldn't be able to control them.
Which spending and headcount for has increased since its inception, with no actual improvement in education (per Cato Institute). God forbid some accountability and no more wasting of tax dollars.
The fair way is to do so at all levels of the pipeline because it turns out people can overcome their past if given the support and resources to do so. But it’s far easier and cheaper to invest early on. All that said, real structural racism and sexism and other prejudices continues to exist, and so the pipeline will always be a problem.
But a company like Google, which makes obscene profits every quarter, should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice, because if whole categories of people are unprepared to work at Google because of societal failures, that’s huge numbers of potentially fantastic employees Google is missing out on.
> should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice
Google is a big company that can do a lot of things, but I wouldn't expect them to solve societal problems that plenty of other very profitable companies are making almost no effort in.
The models Google is developing may end up being the most impactful innovation in learning since the printing press.
It's not that these diversity policies were effective at addressing the underlying issue, they looked ridiculous to someone from the outside. What is hilarious and scary at the same time, is how these global corporations, the supposed progressive forces, are reversing them in quick succession one after another one 2 weeks into Trump's presidency.
When I came over to the states to go to a tech conference at a NASDAQ listed billion dollar corp that bought us, the only black people I met were either working at the hotels (90% of that staff) or living in the nearby inner city.
I don't pretend to understand the USA, and maybe that conference wasn't representative, but to me it was quite shocking that the disparity was so clearly visible. So I think its a bit of a shame they're losing this, because from my perspective there was still a clear gap in terms of education outcomes which feed corporate and I would have liked to think these policies were helping to address that.
You will be told that any systemic initiatives to address that are racist against whites who deserve more of a share of whatever is being done for others. Likewise any policies or initiatives along class line divisions are taking resources away from others who deserve a share of what may be given for disenfranchised/impoverished classes
What you say is true, but these corporate diversity efforts are mostly used for PR and aren't actually making a difference to any race or community. The simple truth is that tech companies are going to hire any qualified engineer they can find, regardless of whether they are in a minority group or not and whether there is a DEI department at the company or not. So the question that should be asked is – why are black people (5-6% of CS graduates vs 15% of population), women (16-18% of CS graduates vs 50.5% of population), latinos (7% of CS graduates vs 20% of US population) etc. not pursuing STEM education and graduating with engineering degrees at the same rate as white and asian men? And what can we do to fix that? Diversity hiring at the corporate level is not the solution to the problem, education and training is.
You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests, and the only reason women are not studying computer science/car repair/welding is sexism.
Ultimately the onus is on the people claiming a genetic component to find it and prove it. There are known social issues and have been for quite some time, after all there are people alive today who experienced segregation.
So if there's some genetic bias at play, as long as the social issues are right there staring us in the face, you're going to need to advance the science of genetics to get the answer. Without that it just comes off "race science" and that kind of thing.
> You're assuming there is no genetic component whatsoever to human skills and interests
Are you seriously suggesting that black people are genetically less predispositioned to program? Explain the evolutionary advantage to that please because that sounds absolutely absurd.
A lot of conservatives and American libertarians do say that some races are genetically inferior including in terms of intelligence and that they get what they deserve given their subhumanity
That's some real Nazi shit right there and I thought y'all were on the side of the free world or whatever. How does someone exist in 2025 with such ignorant views? I don't get it. MLK was like 60 years ago.
Here's a strawman: White people are more likely to diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). If people with ASD are more likely to opt for CS degrees, by induction we'll have more white people in CS.
Except for the fact that people with ASD / Neurodiversity are often more likely to be passed over during interview and selection processes as they don't fit the social norms that hiring manager also expect.
So even if they are more likely to be diagnosed - and I presume you mean White 'Men' explicitly, as Women are even less likely to be - they're also more likely to not 'sell' themselves during applications in the expected corporate way, and therefore not get the high-paying jobs.
Diversity is not just Race or skin colour, but that's easier to see (and to consciously bias).
from my rudimentary understanding of genetics; i don't think that's true or even could be true. These concepts like "white" or "black" are too large and mixed to be meaningful. Remember that the average African American has around 25% euro dna for example.
Accommodations for people with autism who might have different needs for things like noise levels or interviewing procedures would be a classic DEI effort.
I think it may be just a lack of role models. When I went to high school in 2005 (30% black, 30% Latino) all of them basically modeled themselves after who they saw on tv. Blacks gravitated towards sports. Hispanics towards construction and woodworking. The whites in my school mostly came from military, first responders so lot of them went military/firemen. I being one of the few Indians at the school gravitated toward tech because that was what I saw men in my community going to (even before the parental pressure).
I don’t think any of them were dumb, just focused on the things they saw members of their community do.
from my very basic reading on the subject I believe the cause is a lack of black students coming through top universities. I have seen it stated that there are many black developers but many of them do not have degrees and learn to program outside of university. I found this particularly interesting because this is my background as well, I come from a nation less hung up on degrees and willing to accept experience as a substitute.
Corporations could help by considering interviewing developers who go to other universities or those with good experience but without degrees.
Part of DEI at Google is to engage with universities to understand why some prefer not to study STEM/PR/whatnot. Shutting it down at Google will also affect the education pipeline.
Agreed on PR (or avoidance of negative publicity) being the main driver for Pichai to engage in the discussion, but there are many people at Google who care.
I was expecting the US office to be more diverse than my UK office, given the large black population in the US, but that wasn't the case which surprised me.
Most of these megacorporations have no beliefs or values except their own profits and growth. Everything else is political expediency. This is just based on a lifetime of observing their behavior.
Where have DEI initiatives lowered standards of hiring at Google?
I think you’re making that up! Be specific, don't deflect and shift into general discourse topics. I am not talking about distractions at work, I'm asking about your specific claim that hiring standards were lowered.
> Where have DEI initiatives lowered standards of hiring at Google?
Other than DeepMind, almost everywhere at Google. For Google to be wasting time on useless initiatives instead of remaining competitive against other companies would have made the difference between survival in this AI race ever since their CEO (Sundar) panicked.
It is no wonder many ex-Googlers have lost confidence and left for their competitors who are solely focused on destroying Google after they lost the lead and created an opening.
> I think you’re making that up!
Really.
How exactly is DEI going to save Google in the very deep trouble that they are already in? Losing lots of *key* talent, potential anti-trust breakup, frontier AI companies like OpenAI going after them.
I don't think you are paying close attention. Will more DEI initiatives and hires save Google and stop their own CEO from panicking?
> Be specific, don't deflect and shift into general discourse topics. I am not talking about distractions at work, I'm asking about your specific claim that hiring standards were lowered.
You deflected and did not pay attention. My reply was very specific even after answering your strawman question. My question is very simple:
How is DEI hiring going to save Google right now given all the trouble that they are in?
The idea that there’s one specific axis on which to judge job candidates that’s 100% objective is a fantasy. Leetcode certainly doesn’t predict how well someone will do at Google, or what they can contribute to a team. If anyone actually believed that they wouldn’t even do interviews.
I worked on some DEI programs. The problem was mixed. Most companies (at least the ones with DEI programs) thought they had big DEI issues because minorities had worse outcomes. But if you looked hard, that wasn’t usually the case. It was merely that minorities were more represented at lower levels and lower levels had higher attrition and what not. On the whole, it tended to look like hiring, retention, and even promotions looked surprisingly equitable. That is, while it would take a long time, it did seem as if things would stop being crusty old white men at the top exclusively.
However there are some noteworthy qualifiers. First, the biggest thing these programs did successfully was just diversifying the entry points so that you could even begin to start conversations with people from other backgrounds. That’s huge and effective.
Second, and this one is more anecdata, but I never really felt the hiring pool of diverse candidates was randomly sampled at all. For all the groaning about meritocracy and white candidates getting shat on, I tended to find in my personal hiring that diverse candidates were often MUCH stronger candidates. I rarely saw unmotivated, underqualified minorities and women make it to an interview stage whereas there’s a ton of white and Asian guys that did. Getting these candidates was harder. Which is to say, without putting any intrinsic value on racial or cultural backgrounds, I do think DEI programs somehow greatly streamlined a meritocratic highlighting of talented folks from diverse backgrounds. Which is ironic because that’s often the opposite claim.
That is, given you are a minority applying to an advanced position, odds are you’re really strong.
> ...the biggest thing these programs did successfully was just diversifying the entry points so that you could even begin to start conversations with people from other backgrounds.
This. This was my experience with DEIA programs in the government. It was always about diverse recruitment, not hiring. People believe what they want to, though.
I was recruited through Google's diversity program twice.
The first time, what that meant was that they invited their diversity candidates to a small pre-interview preparation session which, oddly enough, didn't bother to touch on what they were looking for in interviews. I took the interviews and was informed that I'd failed them.
The second time, I paid for coaching from interviewing.io, and I learned what they were looking for in interviews. This was not cheap. (There are some surprises! For example, they don't care whether you can answer their questions. If you can't, you're supposed to ask them how. This is not a normal testing style.) I took their interviews, and my recruiter informed me that I had passed, wished me congratulations, and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the current hiring cycle (which was about six weeks away). In the meantime, I'd have a set of "team fit" interviews.
Then, they never contacted me again, except to say that they'd realized that on second thought my interview scores were too low for them to hire me. Not a single thing was scheduled until the hiring cycle ended and they let me know that while my scores were good enough to have passed their interviews, they weren't good enough to be hired after passing the interviews.
There was no obvious "diversity" angle to that one, but when I complained to a family friend working at Google, they looked up the recruiter and were surprised to see that she was specialized in diversity hiring.
All the talk about "diversity" in tech companies always reminds me of this Silicon Valley scene - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dek5HtNdIHY. Still the perfect representation of the entire effort.
Probably primarily a business and cost-cutting measure (certain there's loads of DEI-related staff; NOT DEI hires, roles that exist to foster DEI policies).
I've a prediction somewhat related to this.
We'll see, in the coming year(s), a large portion of positions at the FAANG(s) being moved overseas as cost-cutting measures. Paired with the impression that LLMs reduce the need for programmers, we (domestically) will see a substantial reduction in the number of developer (and related roles) in the States.
From what I've heard/seen wrt roles at these companies there's a substantial imbalance in locations for hiring (huge increases in India, Mexico, Brazil, and others) and less and less in the States.
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[ 1595 ms ] story [ 688 ms ] thread> You have been blocked.
Only me?
There isn't much to see- Google/Alphabet (Pichai) has decided to align itself with the current government and eliminating these programs is a clear signal.
Since May 2018[35][36] Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service would not resolve archive.today's web addresses, making it inaccessible to users of the Cloudflare DNS service. Both organizations claimed the other was responsible for the issue. Cloudflare staff stated that the problem was on archive.today's DNS infrastructure, as its authoritative nameservers return invalid records when Cloudflare's network systems made requests to archive.today. archive.today countered that the issue was due to Cloudflare requests not being compliant with DNS standards, as Cloudflare does not send EDNS Client Subnet information in its DNS requests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/google-k...
No Javascript, text-only:
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I'm no Trump lover. However, I do think DEI was the wrong approach.
Many here work in tech. I'm sure some or many of us here have silently experienced unfair DEI hiring and promotion practices at least once. I've seen some truly incompetent people get hired and promoted purely to meet a certain DEI goal. It reminds me of Affirmative Action but for the work place.
This is coming from someone who absolutely hates the tech bro culture and hates that there aren't enough women in tech. No male tech worker likes environments where there are 10 guys to 1 girl and the insane gender imbalance in tech heavy cities that make dating impossible for a large portion of the population. If I could, I would wave a magic wand and turn the tech industry into 10 women for every 1 man. Believe me.
"Google is eliminating its goal of hiring more employees from historically underrepresented groups and reviewing some diversity, equity and inclusion programs, joining other tech giants rethinking their approach to DEI.
In an email to employees Wednesday, Google said it would no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its workforce.
In 2020, amid calls for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd, Google set a target of increasing by 30% the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” by 2025.
Parent company Alphabet’s GOOGL -7.69%decrease; red down pointing triangle annual report released Wednesday omitted a sentence stating the company was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.” The sentence was in its reports from 2021 through 2024.
Google also said it was reviewing recent court decisions and executive orders by President Trump aimed at curbing DEI in the government and federal contractors. The company is “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply,” the email said...
“We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S.—and in many countries globally—but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals,” the email said... "
Except making more money with US government and military contracts.
Were a lot of these programs a performative kabuki theatre that wasted time and money? Yes. Were companies ever going to fill their ranks with black, lesbian programmers? No.
On the other hand, now having worked my way up in the tech world, the idea that the C-suite decision makers are there through some sort of meritocracy is also equally laughable. These are exclusive circles, and your breeding (family, school, frat) already determines your access more than success ever will.
I don't think there is anything wrong with the ideal of giving more types of people a chance. But it was an issue of execution, not intent.
Achieving Monopoly and Domination requires kabuki performances.
There is no other route. These are mentally bankrupt one dimensional people. Other than survival and accumulation of status and wealth there is nothing much going on in their head.
You hit it dead-on that a lot of these DEI initiatives were performance theater to appease some external force (as is most of business, when you really think about it). The existing leadership had zero intent to actually allow under-represented minorities into their ranks other than as a token or trophy figure who would kiss the ring and not rock the boat.
The real success (or failure) of DEI will be the next crop of leaders, not the current ones. The managers and leaders of tomorrow (who are the ICs and team leads of today) are acutely aware of how much of a Straight White Boy’s Club these leadership ranks are, and the vibe I get is increasing disgust at the proclamation of “merit” as justification for their tenure while (often minority) high performers are routinely exited out in favor of yet another H1B overseas.
I’m hoping this is just the last gasps of relevance from the status quo in the face of generational upheaval. Guess we’ll all find out together.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250127210140/https://informati...
Dead links owned by the very companies being reported on. If a company lets their diversity report 404, why do you hold this against statisticians that gathered the data when it was live?
> from different years
You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?
> without enough detail to actually assess the impact of any DEI program
The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.
> isn't it wonderful that Meta has achieved greater black representation through content moderators in Kenya
Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.
Why should I trust data I can't verify?
> You work with the data you have. Because the data isn't perfect, we should disregard it entirely and rely on your prejudice instead?
Junk in, junk out.
> The data is about the state of the companies, not the impacts of individual DEI programs.
So when you said "Well, they've already achieved diversity, haven't they", what did you mean?
> Given that this data shows Facebook employees as only 3% black, perhaps it does not count content moderators.
Who actually knows, which is precisely the point.
Have you tried? Does archive.org have those urls? Are there other reports on those companies' diversity? Have you checked their mandatory government EEO-1 diversity reports [1]? It rather seems that you're nitpicking, looking for an excuse to ignore what by all accounts looks like someone's honest work. Do you have, for these companies, reports suggesting wildly different demographics, that is making you so skeptical?
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/legal-requirem...
Amazon in your table lists 21% black employees. Maybe a lot has changed since 2017, but it sure seems like that might be misrepresenting the picture when 79% of those black employees are listed as laborers in the EEO-1 from 2023. But who can say!
Akin to this, the 2023 EEO-1 says 47% of professional employees are Asian! Wow sure seems overrepresented. Do we know anything about the compensation packages of these employees? No. We don't. We have no ability to tell if these are offshored employees, H1-B, under-compensated, what their tenure is, or even what the actual role of these employees are besides an incredibly broad categorization for them.
Also hmm, interesting that number gets cut by more than half when looking at the percentage of first/mid-level managers. Again have no idea if there's pay equity or equal opportunity at different levels of management.
What can we actually say about diversity at Amazon? Well "mission accomplished" obviously.
My claims that the main beneficiaries are Asians, and that Whites are generally under-represented, are accurate.
For most diversity purposes, Asians and Indians both count as white, if not "even more white".
Government programs, other than schools, are the main exception.
There used to be programs like that, and they mostly helped the children of Chinese and Vietnamese refugees from communism. Low childhood household income doesn't really have much effect - "low income" in a US context is quite rich in a world context.
vs
"targeting childhood household income will see representation of the groups you're trying to help drop to nearly zero"
Did you misunderstand the point? It seems right that if you want to help poor people, you should target poor people, how could that be counterproductive?
/s, I hope. :/
(Oh man, please answer, but we’re overdue for an overcorrection, and it might look as dangerous as 1934).
If you had a better metric that can be used to help people from marginalized cummunities, wherever they happen to be, you should be using those if the goal is to be more inclusive, more diverse and more equitable.
But the problem is that the very same psychological mechanisms that drive racism are the ones which drive these modern attempts at fixing racism.
I think there are two different but related angles at play:
1. Historical injustice. Racism against black communities in the USA has such a long and disgusting history that when new generations learn about that it's understandable that people want to wash that away and find ways to make amends and counterbalance things.
2. Since we live in a world where skin color is a visible marker that you literally wear on your skin, there is a sense that you're just being disadvantaged for being you and thus you need a more-than-normal counterbalance to set things straight.
We thus ended up in a situation where we destroyed the aspirations of a truly color-blind society. We need to keep reminding ourselves about the fact that color matters.
This is not helping defusing racism. This is feeding racism because despite the best intentions it operates in the worldview of racism.
Of all the words you Americans have purged from the language you kept the word race, a word that post WWII many European nations successfully defused.
This is not the case.
Once you understand this, it is easy to see that actual, first-order racism is what destroys the dream of a colorblind society.
I really fail to see how doubling in on the importance and reality of race and skin color in particular (as opposed to culture) everywhere is going to make that problem go away.
Makes sense?
They also do the inverse, insisting that obviously white Arabs and Persians can't be white because they don't live in successful countries. (On the other hand, Russians can be white despite not living in a successful country. Who knows. In this case, it looks like "white" actually means "Christian", except for Middle Eastern or Korean Christians.)
Kim Kardashian was supposed to be non-Caucasian, if you believe Twitter. Her name clearly identifies her as Armenian; you can't get much closer to the Caucasus than that. Although it is true that she's only half Armenian, with the remainder being Scottish and Dutch.
Which is especially perverse when one considers how ethnically heterogeneous Russia is as a result of the USSR's policy of integrating ethnic Russians into minority areas and shipping some number of those minorities back to Russia (basically so they don't incite discontent in their native lands).
https://about.google/belonging/diversity-annual-report/2023/
You don't think that was "to not get destroyed" too? Such as when New York city was sued (and lost, having to pay out $1.8 billion) because too many minorities failed its test for teachers:
https://www.thecollegefix.com/nyc-will-pay-out-1-8-billion-t...
I don’t know if these lawsuits would win or not but given the current political climate I sure wouldn’t bet against it. From a purely business prospective on that alone, I can see why they would do it. And do it so quickly.
This is the latest symptom of a very powerful opposition that just gained almost unlimited power. Or at least unchecked power. To be clear here Trump is also a symptom, this didn’t come out of nowhere with him.
Be mad and hold these companies accountable but we also can’t afford to be distracted by the symptoms when those in power are going to make it so much worse.
I actually think the business reason FOR the DEI stuff (to appeal to customers by coming accross as fair and progressive) made more sense. Have the customers really changed their minds just because someone else is in the Whitehouse?
If they stay more "woke", Trump is guaranteed to try to destroy Google.
Google has done the calculus and likely concluded that kissing Trump's ass is better for their shareholders than continuing to align more left.
I think this is a business decision, as it was for Meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Blame US citizens for giving so much power to Trump.
But taking those concerns up again, almost no one perceives their own biases as biases. It's like you don't perceive your own accent, people of different racial backgrounds look similar, you can't smell your own breath, etc. So being a biased person feels just like being an unbiased person, but it makes you make biased decisions. A person against whom you harbor a prejudice applies for a job. Your bias causes you to discount their better qualities and double count their worse qualities. So you hire someone else. This hurts both you and the person you didn't hire.
A policy that works against well-known biases, if implemented correctly, achieves three ends: it reduces the harm to the person biased against, it reduces the harm to the company whose hiring policies are distorted by bias, and it helps the company by producing a more diverse workforce, which is an end in itself regardless of whether you care about harms to others. If implemented correctly, diversity hiring targets can produce the effect of hiring without prejudice despite the prejudice of those hiring.
If you are crossing a river and the wind blows you off course, you don't head to your goal but to the side. The net result is that you reach your goal. The diversity targets are just tacking against the wind.
They wanted to have a diverse workforce, and came up with an excuse for it post-hoc. The best defense I've seen of this is that diverse opinions are good for business. Of course, hiring racially diverse people while being antagonistic towards those with different ways of thinking does little to increase diversity of thought.
>But taking those concerns up again, almost no one perceives their own biases as biases.
Says the pot to the kettle. The way to prevent bias is to come up with objective factors to evaluate people based on, not intentionally injecting bias of your own.
>If you are crossing a river and the wind blows you off course, you don't head to your goal but to the side. The net result is that you reach your goal. The diversity targets are just tacking against the wind.
We have a word for this: racism.
> Says the pot to the kettle.
That was my point. When I said "it's like an accent" I didn't mean I myself don't have an accent. It's that I don't perceive it. People do not perceive their own accents as accents. They don't perceive their own biases as biases.
But accents are still accents regardless of whether we perceive them. Biases are still biases.
My point wasn't that I am pure, free of sin. It wasn't about me at all. It was that biases are bad but often invisible.
> They wanted to have a diverse workforce, and came up with an excuse for it post-hoc. The best defense I've seen of this is that diverse opinions are good for business.
Is it true? If so, who cares whether it was post hoc?
I don't know whether you've done any machine learning. Nowadays all the news is about LLMs, but back in the day there were other algorithms -- decisions trees, support vector machines, logistic regression models, simple Bayesian models, etc. You had a mess of data. You defined feature vectors. You vectorized your data and threw it at the algorithm. You got a classifier. Or a regression model or whatever. Then there were also meta algorithms that took these base algorithms and combined them to make something more robust and accurate -- a random forest or something. This meta algorithm worked only if these sub-deciders differed. You make one decision tree, duplicate it 1000 times, and wrap it in a random forest and you get nothing but wasted effort. To achieve the gain you needed your deciders to have different opinions.
This is the theory behind diversity in an organization: you have multiple viewpoints plus some mechanism to combine them into a final decision. It has nothing to do with race or gender or anything. It is a provable way to get better decisions.
Did someone also want to lift up people historically beaten down? Maybe? Thats also a good thing! It's awesome if you can get better decisions and also make a more just society, right?
> We have a word for this: racism.
What? This is just a shibboleth. Is racism a good thing or a bad thing? Is trying to counteract racism just as bad as raw racism? It produces a more fair outcome, but it's forbidden! We must preserve the injustice because to counteract it would also be unjust!
This is a ludicrous position. The point of using a DEI mechanism is that it is just that, a mechanism. You set it up and let it decide so that flawed human judgment doesn't decide. Is the mechanism racist? I don't know, does it have ideas and intentions?
Perhaps it will be clearer if I try to do some perspective taking for you.
Imagine there is a company with a South Asian CEO, CTO, etc. They only trust South Asians. Only South Asians are a good cultural fit. North Americans are lazy, unmotivated, dumb, incurious, entitled. They are poor team players. They won't put in extra hours, or if they do, it will achieve nothing. And then if you interact with them there's always this tension, awkwardness. You can't tell the same stupid American jokes. It's a joke! They have no sense of humor.
Now you are a North American with skills. You actually are very talented and insightful. You have lots of energy, lots of ideas. You would be a great employee. But this company will not hire you. (You disgust them a little.) Is this racism? I've just inverted identities, but I think you would agree that the company is racist and this is unfair. And it's clear that this racism harms both you and the company. But if the company's HR or whatever recognized the possibility that racism was tainting their hiring practices and implemented DEI targets as an impartial mechanism to work against this bias, that would be racist against South Asians! So to maintain their moral purity they should preserve their original racism and deny you the job. [slaps dust off hands and calls it a day]
Do you see the ot...
As a vegetarian, I really struggled finding good non-meat options though.
Reducing or removing alcohol at social events is not done for "inclusion reasons" but for straightforward legal liability reasons: a drunk employee often has poor impulse control and may do or say shitty things that they wouldn't if they were sober, and with some probability this results in lawsuits against the company. No drunk people at social events -> fewer lawsuits.
So, it goes both ways, supposedly.
Source: https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/diversity-inclusion/news/51-of...
I’ve found 5-10 more similar sources via a quick google search.
While the law did not compel a business to report dei metrics to my knowledge (besides boards of public companies via the SEC), the impact of mass virtual signaling had the practical effect of compelling businesses of embracing dei or face being labeled as racists or immoral, which is a form of coercion by itself. I’d argue it would have been be better if such actions were simply deemed as illegal rather than racists or immoral. So with that said, I would argue the previous state of affairs was significantly worse with dei measures in place.
Putting the power back to the law rather than to a group of loosely collected virtual signalers is a better world imo.
Ontario is the wealthiest, most populous and most diverse. Are you happy with education there?
So then there is a federal "department" involved in education...
That would make far more sense if this was only about money.
But a company like Google, which makes obscene profits every quarter, should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice, because if whole categories of people are unprepared to work at Google because of societal failures, that’s huge numbers of potentially fantastic employees Google is missing out on.
Google is a big company that can do a lot of things, but I wouldn't expect them to solve societal problems that plenty of other very profitable companies are making almost no effort in.
The models Google is developing may end up being the most impactful innovation in learning since the printing press.
I don't pretend to understand the USA, and maybe that conference wasn't representative, but to me it was quite shocking that the disparity was so clearly visible. So I think its a bit of a shame they're losing this, because from my perspective there was still a clear gap in terms of education outcomes which feed corporate and I would have liked to think these policies were helping to address that.
So if there's some genetic bias at play, as long as the social issues are right there staring us in the face, you're going to need to advance the science of genetics to get the answer. Without that it just comes off "race science" and that kind of thing.
Are you seriously suggesting that black people are genetically less predispositioned to program? Explain the evolutionary advantage to that please because that sounds absolutely absurd.
He is the best example of how someone exists in 2025 with such ignorant views, and those who voted for him share that.
So even if they are more likely to be diagnosed - and I presume you mean White 'Men' explicitly, as Women are even less likely to be - they're also more likely to not 'sell' themselves during applications in the expected corporate way, and therefore not get the high-paying jobs.
Diversity is not just Race or skin colour, but that's easier to see (and to consciously bias).
I don’t think any of them were dumb, just focused on the things they saw members of their community do.
Corporations could help by considering interviewing developers who go to other universities or those with good experience but without degrees.
Agreed on PR (or avoidance of negative publicity) being the main driver for Pichai to engage in the discussion, but there are many people at Google who care.
Disclaimer: worked at Google in Europe.
Either you pass the threshold or you don't. No excuses.
I think you’re making that up! Be specific, don't deflect and shift into general discourse topics. I am not talking about distractions at work, I'm asking about your specific claim that hiring standards were lowered.
Other than DeepMind, almost everywhere at Google. For Google to be wasting time on useless initiatives instead of remaining competitive against other companies would have made the difference between survival in this AI race ever since their CEO (Sundar) panicked.
It is no wonder many ex-Googlers have lost confidence and left for their competitors who are solely focused on destroying Google after they lost the lead and created an opening.
> I think you’re making that up!
Really.
How exactly is DEI going to save Google in the very deep trouble that they are already in? Losing lots of *key* talent, potential anti-trust breakup, frontier AI companies like OpenAI going after them.
I don't think you are paying close attention. Will more DEI initiatives and hires save Google and stop their own CEO from panicking?
> Be specific, don't deflect and shift into general discourse topics. I am not talking about distractions at work, I'm asking about your specific claim that hiring standards were lowered.
You deflected and did not pay attention. My reply was very specific even after answering your strawman question. My question is very simple:
How is DEI hiring going to save Google right now given all the trouble that they are in?
However there are some noteworthy qualifiers. First, the biggest thing these programs did successfully was just diversifying the entry points so that you could even begin to start conversations with people from other backgrounds. That’s huge and effective.
Second, and this one is more anecdata, but I never really felt the hiring pool of diverse candidates was randomly sampled at all. For all the groaning about meritocracy and white candidates getting shat on, I tended to find in my personal hiring that diverse candidates were often MUCH stronger candidates. I rarely saw unmotivated, underqualified minorities and women make it to an interview stage whereas there’s a ton of white and Asian guys that did. Getting these candidates was harder. Which is to say, without putting any intrinsic value on racial or cultural backgrounds, I do think DEI programs somehow greatly streamlined a meritocratic highlighting of talented folks from diverse backgrounds. Which is ironic because that’s often the opposite claim.
That is, given you are a minority applying to an advanced position, odds are you’re really strong.
This. This was my experience with DEIA programs in the government. It was always about diverse recruitment, not hiring. People believe what they want to, though.
This has been my experience as well. It’s sad that it feels like the contrarian opinion. Thanks for taking the time to write a sane accounting.
The first time, what that meant was that they invited their diversity candidates to a small pre-interview preparation session which, oddly enough, didn't bother to touch on what they were looking for in interviews. I took the interviews and was informed that I'd failed them.
The second time, I paid for coaching from interviewing.io, and I learned what they were looking for in interviews. This was not cheap. (There are some surprises! For example, they don't care whether you can answer their questions. If you can't, you're supposed to ask them how. This is not a normal testing style.) I took their interviews, and my recruiter informed me that I had passed, wished me congratulations, and told me to expect a job offer by the end of the current hiring cycle (which was about six weeks away). In the meantime, I'd have a set of "team fit" interviews.
Then, they never contacted me again, except to say that they'd realized that on second thought my interview scores were too low for them to hire me. Not a single thing was scheduled until the hiring cycle ended and they let me know that while my scores were good enough to have passed their interviews, they weren't good enough to be hired after passing the interviews.
There was no obvious "diversity" angle to that one, but when I complained to a family friend working at Google, they looked up the recruiter and were surprised to see that she was specialized in diversity hiring.
I've a prediction somewhat related to this.
We'll see, in the coming year(s), a large portion of positions at the FAANG(s) being moved overseas as cost-cutting measures. Paired with the impression that LLMs reduce the need for programmers, we (domestically) will see a substantial reduction in the number of developer (and related roles) in the States.
From what I've heard/seen wrt roles at these companies there's a substantial imbalance in locations for hiring (huge increases in India, Mexico, Brazil, and others) and less and less in the States.