5 ms·

I interviewed at a company based out of SF last week. The HR person had this long comment about diversity and how that is important at their company and asked w

I interviewed at a company based out of SF last week. The HR person had this long comment about diversity and how that is important at their company and asked what I've done in my career to support diversity. I told him a story about how a company I was at had decided to outsource some of the QA work to India and when the first employee in India came to the US to onboard I was very welcoming and did everything I could to help him feel welcome and part of the team including hanging out after work. This HR guy said "Is that really diversity though?" I guess he was looking for a more symbolic or virtue signaling example and with another minority group other than Indians. Something like "I was the first person at my company to put a BLM sticker on my cube."

moneywoes 6y ago
How big is this company
- mdgrech23 6y ago
  yea wondering the same thing - a lot of small companies allow toxic liberalism to linger.
- bob33212 6y ago
  over 100B
  - carmen_sandiego 6y ago
    Might as well name and shame them then...
prostoalex 6y ago
"By relocating our manufacturing facility to China and laying off the corresponding employees domestically we have been able to vastly improve workforce diversity numbers".
- panda88888 6y ago
  IIRC East Asians don’t count toward diversity number.
  - Moodles 6y ago
    Yeah because equal outcomes and partitioning based on race and other irrelevant characteristics is a really great idea. Sarcasm is on a roll this evening.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    Ridiculous that "diversity" explicitly excludes the people that don't fit that narrative the left wants to push.
  - spoonjim 6y ago
    East Asians aren’t white enough to be invited to the tee time and they’re not diverse enough to get special quotas so they keep doing what they have always done which is study harder and perform better.
ojnabieoot 6y ago
The HR guy was probably looking for an answer that wasn’t “we hired this nonwhite person specifically because he was cheaper than someone in the United States.”
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I don't think it's symbolic or virtue signalling. In the SF area, "diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female". (You'll often see people say things like "we'd like 40% of our candidate pool to be diverse", which only really make sense under that definition.) The idea of building a welcoming environment for people from all walks of life is usually referred to as "inclusion".
- jariel 6y ago
  No, it's not symbolic, just the opposite, it's Orwellian newspeak/totalitarianism. By your very own words: ""diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female"", i.e. a completely subjective, odd, and contextual local moralism. The problem is that these folks believe that any 'questioning' of their methods or approach are in fact 'questioning' of the underlying positive impetus of their motivation (i.e. we all agree 'not being racist' is good, but that doesn't mean we have to buy into any specific moralisms about diversity). But anyone who asks that kind of question in an interview is either a clown or a pill-swallowing victim, and it's definitely a massive 'Red Flag' in that you're entering into a dystopian social nightmare where you'll need special help 'interpreting' thew Newspeak. People from outside the West are already having enough trouble keeping up with the basic PC stuff, this is getting ridiculous. It's a sign of social decay, and that SF has 'peaked' in terms of it's relative importance. Thanks to COVID, the rise of China, Trumpian foreign policy which has engendered a lot of mistrust, the 'decentralization' has begun in earnest. I work with developers in E. Europe and 20 years ago they would have jumped at the chance to move to the US, now they have a strong preference for staying home - the only motivation is money, but since there's massive Purchase Power differential, even their low salaries offer them fairly high standard of living - and their economies are growing consistently 4-7%/year. The story really is not about 'people leaving SF' - it's about 'The End of Short-lived SF Mecca'. Note that SF proper was not a 'centre' of anything really until about 2010: Google, FB etc. are all 'Valley'companies, not until the rise of Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe did we see 'SF Values' come to start to infiltrate the definition of 'Silicon Valley'. The Bay will remain important, possibly even the 'most' important, but much like broad relative US decline (i.e. 40% of global GDP in 1960, 25% today), the relative influence will wane. The 2010's were 'peak SF'. Edit: I should add - a regular from outside the Angloshpere upon hearing the question 'what have you done to support diversity' would basically be baffled and probably have no real idea what the interviewer was asking. I don't think many Americans in these situations realize how hyper-American (at very least Anglo/American or Western) these kinds of things are. Imagine asking that question of someone from Hong Kong, Delhi, or god forbid the true capital of 'complicated diversity', Lebanon.
JamesBarney 6y ago
Does just showing up to work count? At most of the places I've worked I've been the only white guy on my team.

moneywoes 6y ago

How big is this company

mdgrech23 6y ago
yea wondering the same thing - a lot of small companies allow toxic liberalism to linger.
bob33212 6y ago
over 100B
- carmen_sandiego 6y ago
  Might as well name and shame them then...

prostoalex 6y ago

"By relocating our manufacturing facility to China and laying off the corresponding employees domestically we have been able to vastly improve workforce diversity numbers".

panda88888 6y ago
IIRC East Asians don’t count toward diversity number.
- Moodles 6y ago
  Yeah because equal outcomes and partitioning based on race and other irrelevant characteristics is a really great idea. Sarcasm is on a roll this evening.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  Ridiculous that "diversity" explicitly excludes the people that don't fit that narrative the left wants to push.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  East Asians aren’t white enough to be invited to the tee time and they’re not diverse enough to get special quotas so they keep doing what they have always done which is study harder and perform better.

ojnabieoot 6y ago

The HR guy was probably looking for an answer that wasn’t “we hired this nonwhite person specifically because he was cheaper than someone in the United States.”

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I don't think it's symbolic or virtue signalling. In the SF area, "diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female". (You'll often see people say things like "we'd like 40% of our candidate pool to be diverse", which only really make sense under that definition.) The idea of building a welcoming environment for people from all walks of life is usually referred to as "inclusion".

jariel 6y ago
No, it's not symbolic, just the opposite, it's Orwellian newspeak/totalitarianism. By your very own words: ""diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female"", i.e. a completely subjective, odd, and contextual local moralism. The problem is that these folks believe that any 'questioning' of their methods or approach are in fact 'questioning' of the underlying positive impetus of their motivation (i.e. we all agree 'not being racist' is good, but that doesn't mean we have to buy into any specific moralisms about diversity). But anyone who asks that kind of question in an interview is either a clown or a pill-swallowing victim, and it's definitely a massive 'Red Flag' in that you're entering into a dystopian social nightmare where you'll need special help 'interpreting' thew Newspeak. People from outside the West are already having enough trouble keeping up with the basic PC stuff, this is getting ridiculous. It's a sign of social decay, and that SF has 'peaked' in terms of it's relative importance. Thanks to COVID, the rise of China, Trumpian foreign policy which has engendered a lot of mistrust, the 'decentralization' has begun in earnest. I work with developers in E. Europe and 20 years ago they would have jumped at the chance to move to the US, now they have a strong preference for staying home - the only motivation is money, but since there's massive Purchase Power differential, even their low salaries offer them fairly high standard of living - and their economies are growing consistently 4-7%/year. The story really is not about 'people leaving SF' - it's about 'The End of Short-lived SF Mecca'. Note that SF proper was not a 'centre' of anything really until about 2010: Google, FB etc. are all 'Valley'companies, not until the rise of Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe did we see 'SF Values' come to start to infiltrate the definition of 'Silicon Valley'. The Bay will remain important, possibly even the 'most' important, but much like broad relative US decline (i.e. 40% of global GDP in 1960, 25% today), the relative influence will wane. The 2010's were 'peak SF'. Edit: I should add - a regular from outside the Angloshpere upon hearing the question 'what have you done to support diversity' would basically be baffled and probably have no real idea what the interviewer was asking. I don't think many Americans in these situations realize how hyper-American (at very least Anglo/American or Western) these kinds of things are. Imagine asking that question of someone from Hong Kong, Delhi, or god forbid the true capital of 'complicated diversity', Lebanon.

JamesBarney 6y ago

Does just showing up to work count? At most of the places I've worked I've been the only white guy on my team.