4 ms·

Damn, that's where diversity initiatives become too much for me. Hiring people for the sake of diversity only perpetuates negative stereotypes about women in te

Damn, that's where diversity initiatives become too much for me. Hiring people for the sake of diversity only perpetuates negative stereotypes about women in tech.

busterarm 4y ago
I don't want anyone I hire to be set up to be in a situation where they will surely fail, but that does seem to be where this is going. DEI seems to care about short term efforts/results but not long term. My team has huge demands put on it as a result of product development and most of the time we need to hire entirely self-sufficient people. That's simply not possible without a significant amount of in-field experience. Having inexperienced people shoveled into our pipeline is a complete counter-productive waste of time. OTOH it also takes like two years of dedicated peformance coaching in my org to fire anyone so the DEI folks are getting exactly what they want in the end anyway.
- pas 4y ago
  > DEI folks are getting exactly what they want in the end anyway. serious question: what do they want exactly? give money to disadvantaged folks? give them training? check quota boxes? do they personally care?
  - busterarm 4y ago
    A staff that is both dependent on and united by having the same, consistent politics throughout the company (and all companies). More eloquently put by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053801
    - pas 4y ago
      wow. that's ... so foreign to everything that I could imagine. (I'm from Europe, never worked at a big company.) How does this allegiance manifests in these "diversity hires"? Do you have some experience with this? Could you explain this somehow?
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        I think actual diversity hires are a different thing and the parent post is more about demanding tribal allegiance in the non-diverse hires.
        busterarm 4y ago
        This exactly.
    - giardini 4y ago
      So these individuals are like potential spies inside the organization? To whom would they report? I've seen a considerable number of people hired who seemed to have no productivity but the idea that they might have a reporting function outside the usual "chain-of-command" (e.g., like communist party political officers in the military) never occurred to me.

Damn, that's where diversity initiatives become too much for me. Hiring people for the sake of diversity only perpetuates negative stereotypes about women in tech.

busterarm 4y ago

I don't want anyone I hire to be set up to be in a situation where they will surely fail, but that does seem to be where this is going. DEI seems to care about short term efforts/results but not long term. My team has huge demands put on it as a result of product development and most of the time we need to hire entirely self-sufficient people. That's simply not possible without a significant amount of in-field experience. Having inexperienced people shoveled into our pipeline is a complete counter-productive waste of time. OTOH it also takes like two years of dedicated peformance coaching in my org to fire anyone so the DEI folks are getting exactly what they want in the end anyway.

pas 4y ago
> DEI folks are getting exactly what they want in the end anyway. serious question: what do they want exactly? give money to disadvantaged folks? give them training? check quota boxes? do they personally care?
- busterarm 4y ago
  A staff that is both dependent on and united by having the same, consistent politics throughout the company (and all companies). More eloquently put by this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33053801
  - pas 4y ago
    wow. that's ... so foreign to everything that I could imagine. (I'm from Europe, never worked at a big company.) How does this allegiance manifests in these "diversity hires"? Do you have some experience with this? Could you explain this somehow?
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      I think actual diversity hires are a different thing and the parent post is more about demanding tribal allegiance in the non-diverse hires.
      - busterarm 4y ago
        This exactly.
  - giardini 4y ago
    So these individuals are like potential spies inside the organization? To whom would they report? I've seen a considerable number of people hired who seemed to have no productivity but the idea that they might have a reporting function outside the usual "chain-of-command" (e.g., like communist party political officers in the military) never occurred to me.