46 ms·

What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

• logicalmonster 4y ago
  According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far exceeding their overall representation in the US population. Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please help me understand if I'm missing something obvious.
  • pengaru 4y ago
    > Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? Parents matter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting
    • killjoywashere 4y ago
      In that case, systemic racism matters too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism
    • PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      I actually don't think Tiger parenting is more special than, say, just investing in your kids more broadly. You don't have to be an authoritarian and still get excellent results by caring about the success of your children in society and also having the resources and means in which to perform that investment. More likely is that filters for immigration are very high, which means the average immigrant is more educated, wealthier, dedicated, etc. than the average born-citizen.
      • darkwizard42 4y ago
        While parent's comment was certainly to some degree tongue-in-cheek, they are likely agreeing with you. Investment in your parents AND likely a higher than average weight on "a good life" being grounded in employment, education, and certain values are contributing factors to the end results
      • chimineycricket 4y ago
        Tiger parenting is one way of investing in your kid. I agree, there are multiple ways to invest in your kid. >More likely is that filters for immigration are very high Don't agree with this, there are lots of ways to immigrate and I don't think most of them have a sort of wealth/education filter. For example refugees.
        • colinmhayes 4y ago
          Self selection among immigrants is easily the largest factor behind their higher rates of success. Even as a refuge, there were tons of applicants, there is almost surely a reason you are the one who made it. It's in no way an easy process.
        • int_19h 4y ago
          Refugees are pretty much the only category that doesn't have some kind of wealth filter, if only because immigration paperwork costs a fair bit of money (esp. when you look at it from the perspective of someone in a country where cost of living is much lower than in US). And the majority of immigrants in US aren't refugees.
  • googlryas 4y ago
    I think an important question is how many of those Asians are drawn from abroad, vs our American homegrown Asians? If they're homegrown, then clearly they're over-represented. But if they're poached from abroad, they are actually under-reprsented. One would assume 60% of employees of a global workforce would be Asian.
    • JamesBarney 4y ago
      If you're assuming a global workforce this would mean the representative share of African Americans would be 0.5%
      • googlryas 4y ago
        Sure, but a black percentage of ~13%, which is actually exactly in line with the ratio of black americans to americans.
        • JamesBarney 4y ago
          One of the biggest arguments for DEI is to undo the damage the US government and culture has done to it's own black citizens. I don't think filling a bunch of VP positions with highly qualified African immigrants does that.
          • LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
            A cynical person would think DEI was invented precisely because solving that would be hard but treating everyone the same by skin color allows for easier solutions such as simply importing non-aggrieved people to replace our marginalized ones.
  • CurtHagenlocher 4y ago
    At least in the parts of the company I've worked -- always on product teams -- the majority of my coworkers were not born in the United States. Given that, even if all the other parts of the world were represented proportionally you'd expect a large percentage of people from China and the Indian subcontinent.
  • throwawaysleep 4y ago
    Asian parents give a shit whether their kids show up for school.
    • thatguy0900 4y ago
      Down voted for this but it's really a reality. Talk to teachers, if the parent doesn't value school then it takes a truly exceptional kid to direct themselves through it.
      • Jcampuzano2 4y ago
        Anecdotal of course but I believe this is very much true. I'm Latino if it matters much. I'm the oldest of three brothers and was the one who was most pushed/expected to excel in education. My parents became a lot more lax on my younger brothers because they thought they pushed me too hard growing up. I think they changed in part because our relationship was very strained as I was growing up and even today isn't anywhere near as close as my two siblings are with my parents. But on the other-hand, we're all adults now and I am the only one to graduate college and have a career in a typical "high-paying" profession/job. I don't fault my brothers for this and am close with them, but it is pretty stark the difference in career path/"traditional success" between the three of us simply based on this emphasis/value.
    • outworlder 4y ago
      'asian' parents from which country? They are not all the same. It's a huge chunk of the planet.
      • cuteboy19 4y ago
        But it is true. Chinese and Indian people have nothing else in common but their parenting styles are the same. Historical accident maybe, but it's true
  • kazinator 4y ago
    What you're missing is that a company cannot just hire to meet racial quotas which reflect population percentages in order to be free of bias. That's not what bias means. What bias means is that if there are two equally qualified candidates (as in almost exactly, so that it's a coin toss between them), then one from a certain background is consistently chosen. If more applicants are available that happen to be from a certain ethnic group, and tend to be better qualified, then that's what the organization has to work with. That is a societal problem; you can't just dump it onto the shoulders of an organization and require hiring quotas: "please fix the decades-long problem which brought these people to your door, with the qualifications they have, in the proportions you see".
    • OrangeMonkey 4y ago
      I think your statement is the issue. If you have two equally qualified candidates - one anglo saxan male from boston, and one african american female from georgia - at many places, one is going to be consistently chosen. I agree - that is absolutely bias based on protected characteristics. Do you?
      • ryan93 4y ago
        Evidence that one is going to be consistently chosen?
        • dvngnt_ 4y ago
          there's a few studies regarding resume names and getting call backs
        • commandlinefan 4y ago
          Written, documented company policy?
        • rjbwork 4y ago
          While I do think GP is correct at many places, my team literally hired a black woman from Georgia and turned down a white dude from Boston, lol. I am not a fan of the overbearing top down policies like Microsoft is talking about, but I have become friendly with aforementioned hire, and some of the stories of discrimination and just people being really rude to her in the professional world are mind blowing to me. I can definitely believe that a lot of workplaces do actively discriminate against various minority groups.
  • outworlder 4y ago
    > Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? What _are_ the groups? "Asian" can mean anything. From India, China, Japan, many countries in Oceania, etc. I think the classification is fundamentally flawed.
    • TremendousJudge 4y ago
      As an outsider, it's obvious looking in that racial classification in the US is just crazy -- they took some racial stereotypes from 100 years ago, gave them neutral sounding names, and started pretending it's not racist to group everybody south of Texas as "hispanic". And then build official policy on top of these simplistic classes that fail to describe reality in any meaningful way, only serving to reveal to everybody else in the world what the people in the US think about them. At least the people calling anybody with slanted eyes "Chinese" and anybody that's slightly brown "Mexican" are being sincere in their ignorance.
      • outworlder 4y ago
        I myself have to mark a checkbox saying "Hispanic OR Latino". I'm Latino, but NOT Hispanic. But I can also check "white". One is a skin color, another is ancestry, and yet another is geographical location...
        • killjoywashere 4y ago
          My (least?) favorite anecdote on this was when we were running stats demographics and found there was one more African American than Black. Turns out it’s a rich white kid who was born in South Africa. He’s not wrong…
          • glandium 4y ago
            Elon Musk and Charlize Theron are African Americans too.
        • cuteboy19 4y ago
  • heavyset_go 4y ago
    US immigration policy selects for high earners, the highly educated, the highly skilled and experienced, and the already wealthy. My guess is that there are a lot of immigrants from Asia that fall into any of those camps.
    • Qtips87 4y ago
      In theory it is, in practice it is not. The intention is to let in talents that the US native population otherwise cannot provide. The reality is that the US tech visa have been heavily abused and let in people that shouldn't be let in.
  • orangepurple 4y ago
    The South Asia Subcontinent has about 2 billion people. A different part of Asia has more than 2 billion people. Identifying as Asian is utterly meaningless, except to perhaps generalize as (non-white & non-black). Madness.
  • Manuel_D 4y ago
    > Why are Asians doing so well? "Asians" are 60% of the world population and encompass a huge variety of cultures, as I'm sure many will point out. That said, it's viable to consider trends and averages, especially when scoped-down to Asian Americans specifically, despite the potential for generalization. Two main reasons that are given: Higher overall academic investment and achievement [1]. As per the study, Asians study about twice as much as white students and this shows in grades, SAT scores, and college admissions. Second, a culture that places higher prestige on meritocratic and high-paying jobs. This is obviously a coarse-grained generalization of a very diverse set of cultures, but there's some truth to the stereotype that Asian kids have 3 career choices: doctor, engineer, lawyer. My impression is that this isn't disrespect for artistic and cultural jobs, but rather a realistic assessment of the chances of success in these fields. You want to get into art, fashion, photography, or journalism? It takes a lot of connections, luck, or both to land a good job in these fields. Doctor, lawyer, or engineer is a more reliable path to success.
    • bjt2n3904 4y ago
      There's a third you're completely missing. Present fathers that raise and discipline their children.
    • tylerhou 4y ago
      Please don’t reduce Asian-Americans to the myth of the model minority. The truth is more nuanced. The income gap between poor and rich Asians in the US is the highest out of any ethnic group. One reason for this is that recent Asian immigration has selected for largely been wealthy and/or well educated populations. So what you call “Asian culture” will have a natural bias towards the preferences of people who value money and education. Also, stereotyping “Asian culture” as a culture which values education implies (in a racist way) that “other cultures” (hint hint) don’t value education. I don’t think you were intending this, but it can be viewed as veiled white-supremacist rhetoric.
      • Manuel_D 4y ago
        The "model minority myth" occurs when someone takes population-wide trends and applies it on an individual level: e.g. "he's Asian, so he must be good at math". That's stereotyping. Pointing at demographic trend in academic achievement isn't the model minority myth, it's an empirical observation. Conflating objective facts with the model minority myth is perhaps well intentioned, but it comes off as a shallow attempt to deny real world observations. Asians Americans, on average do spend more time on academics, and do enter fields like medicine and engineering at higher rates. This is an empirical observation, not the model minority myth. Similarly, there's nothing racist or white supremacist about examining disparities in time spent on academics. If someone takes this data and then judges individuals for population-wide averages, then that's stereotyping and I do not condone that. I'm not sure what your intent was with your last paragraph, but it comes off as an overzealous attempt to portray any analysis of time spent on academics as racist. I certainly wouldn't want someone to assume I'm personally less intelligent than my Asian co-worker because I'm Cuban. But I trust that most people are able to understanding that averages are not the same as individuals. And I find the pattern of people being worried that I'd be offended by data on Latin americans' academic achievement condescending. I am smart enough to understand that data saying Latin Americans on average spend less time on academics than whites or asians is not an attack on me personally, thank you very much.
  • skrbjc 4y ago
    Who's "WE" in your view? There was not top-down effort to get Asians to excel in the US, it was due to their own desires and efforts. I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?
  • dddaaa34 4y ago
    intelligence doesn't have the same distribution across groups.
  • screye 4y ago
    > Why are Asians doing so well? Are they ? Or is it merely a reflection of statistics and biased sampling ? ~50% of the world's population lives in Indian subcontinent + China. Ofc they represent a majority of skilled immigrants in the western world. The reason Indians and Chinese are the most accomplished immigrants in the US is because the US does not allow any Indians or Chinese to immigrate unless they are already on-track to be highly accomplished. The Indians that aren't doing well are all back in India. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the US raises the standards for the kinds of Indians and Chinese that can immigrate to the US, you are sampling from smarter and smarter sub-groups. This leads to soft-eugenics where children of Chinese and Indian immigrant groups will inevitably be smarter than resident populations. Additionally, because only certain kinds of Indians and Chinese are allowed to succeed in this country (high skilled STEM immigrants), it forms insular elite-STEM peer groups and resulting relationships mimic eugenic patterns that would make Hitler proud. (This would be valid for both nature and nature proponents) > Why can't we replicate this for other groups? Assuming that this is some combination of nature and nurture, it must first start at trying to observe these with some level of granularity. Is there anything noticeably different in the 'nature' side of Indian and Chinese immigrants? Yes, the US only allows incredibly high-IQ Indians and Chinese immigrants to come here. Have we tried observing how similar filters have worked out for immigrants from other racial groups ? Indian and Chinese families in the US have well known group-level differences in how children are nurtured. Have we tried observing success rates for low-achievement immigrant groups with similar nurture methods ? The answer for both is a big 'No'. If you don't try to run even the most basic of controlled studies across groups, then how can you ever observe correlations let alone causality for differences in group level performance ? Good faith social studies on group level differences must go into with the intellectual curiosity to allow for outcomes that violate the current academic ideological status-quos. I suspect that no one in academia wants to risk their careers by doing a study that might report: "differences between groups persist even after accounting for systemic differences in opportunity". So they just refuse to do the research instead. On the other hand, genomics keeps quietly trudging along with society-altering results, while pretending as if there is nothing to see here.
    • Qtips87 4y ago
  • hintymad 4y ago
    "So well" as in academically or in STEM fields, right? One reason is the selection process. Or put it bluntly, genes matter. Asians, at least the FOBs in the STEM fields, mostly came to the US for graduate degrees first. They are, statistically speaking, already the top students who have a knack in STEM. If you are a techie in the Bay Area, try to count how many people are PhDs in a social gathering. I have yet encountered anyone in my circle in the bay area who had any difficulty with high-school math, and none who did not excel at least most of college-level STEM classes. On the other hand, many of my coworkers are medalists in national or international competitions of maths/physics/chemistry/informatics, or they were in the top 2% for those college entrance exams. The bias was so strong that I used to think that tutoring was useless and the education in the US was pathetic because many high school students couldn't understand simple things like factoring polynomials. So, of course they do well, statistically speaking. On the other hand, not all Asians do well in other fields, especially in business and politics. Indians are more diverse in that regard, but people from mainland China didn't have a large enough presence, partly because only universities in China tended to select the nerdiest people for STEM, or so per my China friends.
  • ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    > Why are Asians doing so well? What is the average household income of the parents of these Asian people that comprise those data points? Did they grow up in apartments or homes? What quality was their elementary and high schools?
  • lenocinor 4y ago
    For black people, at least, they were enslaved in the US in much larger numbers than any other ethnic group. This is bound to hurt their opportunities relative to other ethnic groups, among many other problems.
• ParksNet 4y ago
  • googlryas 4y ago
    • theow7384iri 4y ago
• sn0w_crash 4y ago
  It’s really amazing how these companies are treating people from disadvantaged groups as “a number on a spreadsheet” and patting themselves on the back for it. History will not look kindly on this moment in time.
• rvz 4y ago
  TLDR: It still means nothing.
• crackercrews 4y ago
  I read the comments then read the article, then came back to find it dead. But why? This post contains new information that is relevant to the tech industry. Its claims are not outlandish. And it brings receipts (screenshots). If this is what a major tech company is doing, isn't it worthy of discussion here? I hope the comments can be civil, and I've seen more contentious topics surface high-quality comments on HN.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• Supermancho 4y ago
  Bypass paywall: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cspicenter.com%2Fp%2Fwhat-diversity-and-inclusion-means https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cspicenter.com%2Fp...
  • cryptonector 4y ago
    Or turn off JS.
• Manuel_D 4y ago
  A previous, related, brew up on Yammer (microsoft's internal forum): https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questioning-the-value-of-diversity/ https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questionin... Despite the positive spin of QZ.com, it seems like there's overt incentives for discrimination.
• mikkergp 4y ago
  Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diversity into an already squishy process is the least of your worries. They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. Do I think those senior black leaders earned it? Probably. For certain levels of leadership probably 50% of leaders qualified for the position are ready, 20% are exceptional and 5% will be promoted. Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    >Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It sounds like you're agreeing with the author here, because he says, >I fear that when large companies hire and promote people based on group identities, it discourages individuals from cultivating their abilities. It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives.
    • mikkergp 4y ago
      > It is only one logical step to go from one to the other. The idea that the promotion process is so random that the introduction of an additional random factor (D&I status is totally uncorrelated to performance) can't make it any worse would nullify anyone's faith in performance incentives. It is only one logical step to assume the opposite as well, that a company that thinks holistically about the hiring process, and questions whether or not managers are acting in a truly meritocratic way will give people confidence that cultivating their abilities won't be for naught if they have a racist/sexist manager. The article states a lot of things based on feels but the one tangible point they make is that HR is not in fact insisting he hire someone based on an "additional random factor" just that they considered all the candidates.
• bedobi 4y ago
  I hate articles like these and their appeals to "meritocracy". Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men. Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best" candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not. My current team is a diverse group of well-rounded people. Some women, some men, some younger, some older, from many ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Guess which is the higher performing? Guess which has a safe atmosphere with zero dick measuring? Guess which is the most pleasant to be a part of? Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior? etc etc Sure, there's lots of room for improvement in how tech businesses actually implement diversity vs just paying lip service to it and slicing numbers. But don't pretend like diversity isn't sorely needed in the industry.
  • delusional 4y ago
    Anyone with their head out their asses who has ever worked a real job knows that the "meritocracy" is bullshit. Plenty of under performers get jobs. Plenty of overachievers get run down for a variety of factors. The idea that the worthy somehow rise above adversity is confirmation bias at its very worst. I don't even think you want a "meritocracy". I want a world where people are happy. If that means they're all doing jobs they suck at, then so be it.
  • chernevik 4y ago
    > "If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much you tell yourself it's not." Yes, it's true. There has never been a strong team of young, white nerdy men. Never happened. Technological and engineering progress was at a baffling standstill for centuries until the wisdom of diversity, inclusion and equity dawned upon us.
    • stonogo 4y ago
      Your sarcasm would work better if anyone understood what the hell you were trying to refer to. You seem to ascribe "technological and engineering progress" exclusively to teams of young, white, nerdy men in this comment, which is clearly something only an idiot would do, so I presume you are trying to make a different, better point. Feel free to let us know what that might be.
• milesskorpen 4y ago
  "I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the annual D&I report look good." Statements like this carry a lot of weight in this essay: He's "pretty sure" and "assumes" an awful lot. He also seems fairly ineffective at navigating bureaucracy. Taken to extremes, lots of corporate policies can seem a bit overbearing. This essay reads to me like he's reading corporate D&I policies to be maximally inflexible and frustrating in ways that are unlikely to be the case (at least from based on my personal experience working in large corporations + a short stint at MSFT many years ago).
  • geraldwhen 4y ago
    Very recently I was only allowed to hire a black person. The assumptions here are probably correct. Search linkedin for “diversity recruiter”. It’s a role. Companies post specific reqs that state you must belong to a marginalized group in job posts often enough that it’s a bit stomach churning. I’ve personally had to deal with HR for having too many white men on my teams. For software developers in America.
    • oceanplexian 4y ago
      These kinds of policies are also massively unfair to the exact people you are trying to hire. I know lots of engineers who would fit into the cliche "diversity" categories who are skilled and deserving of their job. But now they have to wonder if they were hired for merit or to meet some sort of a quota. The whole thing breeds resentment and drives teams further apart, in fact it creates the exact problems DEI is purported to solve.
      • crackercrews 4y ago
        Does make you wonder if heavy-handed affirmative action breeds imposter syndrome among its beneficiaries.
        • geraldwhen 4y ago
• Decker87 4y ago
  At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong color/gender.
  • franczesko 4y ago
    This. Saying "no" to people based on their physical appearance is a discrimination.
    • chrischattin 4y ago
      It's also illegal.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • version_five 4y ago
        I'm not sure about in the US, I know in Canada we've had lots of university faculty positions advertised recently that are explicity for women or some other groups. I don't understand how it's legal but it is.
        • richbell 4y ago
          In Canada the definition of "visible minority" is essentially anyone who isn't a white male. https://www.canada.ca/en/public-service-commission/jobs/services/gc-jobs/employment-equity.html https://www.canada.ca/en/public-service-commission/jobs/serv...
        • yieldcrv 4y ago
          > I don't understand how it's legal but it is. Are you sure? Many countries require being harmed by an action and then bringing that action before a court, before anyone ever compares that action to any specific law at all. So you can see how many actions become de facto legal if nobody ever does that.
• mnd999 4y ago
  It kinda makes me sad. It’s great that companies want to improve D&I but, assuming everything in that article is true, they’re making a hash of it. They’ve forgotten Goodhart’s law, and as such they’ve create a metric everyone is trying to game which ends up being counterproductive and unfair to everyone. Let’s not forget it’s equally unfair to promote someone before they are ready and then stack rank them against more experienced colleagues as it is not to promote someone who is ready.
• theow7384iri 4y ago
• fallingknife 4y ago
  These practices are explicitly against federal law. When are judges going to start enforcing the law? > It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer - (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. edit: not letting me reply down chain. source is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
  • tflinton 4y ago
    Just curious; where's the source on this? Is this in the US? If so, is it state or federal law, and which law? Edit: Nevermind, it's the 1964 Title VII [Section 703] of the Civil Rights Act. https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-1964 https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196...
• truetotest 4y ago
• outside1234 4y ago
  This is a real thing. It is hard for anyone that is not "diverse" to get promoted at the highest levels of Microsoft. Almost all CVP promotions are "diverse" now in a way that is pretty overt. I am a huge proponent of D&I, but it is hard not to feel discriminated against and feel like there isn't much of a career trajectory for me.
  • etchalon 4y ago
    The majority of managers at Microsoft remain white, and male (page 13): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/annual-report https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/inside-microsoft/a...
    • strix_varius 4y ago
      And yet, with women representing just 18% of CS graduates (1), still 200% as much as would be expected as an extrapolation of the population. 1. https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-science/ https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
      • etchalon 4y ago
        Why would you need a CS degree in HR, Marketing, Product, etc?
• outworlder 4y ago
  > Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they got to where they are because of their accomplishments? And then they show a graph where only 5.6% of the execs are black (up from 3.7%). It's a pitiful number. Yes, it's still more likely they got there because of their accomplishments, bigot. > From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft’s AI Platform division. Wow. A whole year. In large companies that's barely enough time to understand all the unspoken lines of communication, let alone pass judgment on a company's culture.
  • qwytw 4y ago
    Well only 4.5% of all people in Washington are black. If we go by country wide population white people white people are not really over presented in MS leadership, Asians are though, as much as blacks are underrepresented.
    • 7speter 4y ago
      How many black people from elsewhere in the country can afford to move to seattle, where most of the tech jobs in Washington are?
• giantg2 4y ago
  I mean, a lot of the hiring issues are really symptoms of other issues earlier in the progress, and thus most (not all) of the fixes at that stage will not actually address the true issue and may even cause other problems. To fill a position, you need candidates. To have candidates, you need students of that discipline. There are numerous issues that could skew the demographics of the students (some are problematic, but some may be natural/acceptable!). And of course this applies to domestic workers. Global workers and importing talent via visas have different benefits and issues. All that said, in my experience most DEI company policies are more about not getting sued and avoiding bad press. They create policies, but many of them are ignored or just turned into a spineless checklist. As an example, the article didn't seem to address why the Microsoft metrics are meaningful, or what the targets are and their justifications. There's no systems thinking approach to explaining why or how the metrics/policies are beneficial, rather it's assumed.
• paxys 4y ago
  It's telling that this person posted a job listing, interviewed dozens of candidates, realized they couldn't proceed because they hadn't interviewed any minority candidate, tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one, and the take away wasn't that they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.
  • thegrimmest 4y ago
    Why do you suppose that a non-broken recruiting pipeline would result in more diverse candidates? Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all times?
    • guhidalg 4y ago
      I think this really varies for each position, but most SWE positions really don't require special skills beyond a CS degree from a 4-year program. Sure, there may be special industry knowledge that you need to know but I'm not talking about languages, frameworks, databases, etc... if you studied CS, I expect you to have the capacity to learn this shit. You can learn the problem domain in well enough in 6 months and rely on your PMs and boss to fill in the details. If you are truly in a domain where you cannot hire CS graduates, then D&I is going to put a lot of burden on your recruitment team to find candidates to meet slating requirements. But you probably aren't...
    • colinmhayes 4y ago
      > Do you really think all candidate pools in all professions, and in all locations, are as diverse as the population at all times? No but I think you should be able to find a single minority candidate over the course of months.
      • thegrimmest 4y ago
        Why do you think so? I have a hard enough time finding a qualified candidate of any variety.
    • 4y ago
• implements 4y ago
  It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that. But, … another part of me is uneasy with the idea that there is such as thing as a racialised or gendered (for example) engineer - engineers are individuals, and shouldn’t be under an implied expectation of being recognisably distinct from each other - so I don’t really know how to avoid the ‘entrenched discrimination via sensitivity to fixed identities’ problem.
  • NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
    >It seems to me that a large nationally sited organisation should be naturally representatively diverse and inclusive, and if it isn’t that organisation should take steps to identify why and address whatever issues lie behind that. This seems to assume that preferences don't vary with race and gender, which isn't true. This is extremely well-documented with respect to gender, and it's called "The paradox of gender equality"[0]. TL;DR: Men and women are different from each other in lots of ways, including what they prefer to work on. As you increase gender equality in a society (moving from, for instance, Saudi Arabia at one extreme to Norway at the other), you see a systematic /increase/ in the difference in what men and women end up working on. More gender equality --> fewer women engineers, more women doing child care. Edit: oh,and I would encourage anyone looking in to the literature to view it in the correct light: the field is overtly hostile to this data, and that greatly skews what gets published. And here it is anyway. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox
    • implements 4y ago
      It could be the case that in societies where women aren’t arbitrarily discriminated against they seek greater engagement with the careers gender socialisation attract them to ie “women are better actualised as women in societies where female success isn’t artificially stifled by glass ceilings”. A factor in that could be that there’s a recognition that those ceilings may still exist in STEM fields, so career minded women choose non STEM paths to maximise their potential. My inner (male) second wave feminist still suspects that “Men and women are [innately] different from each other in lots of ways” is false, and the differences are cultural and rooted in socialisation that we, the the name of true individualistic inclusivity, should seek to minimise.
• yellsatclouds 4y ago
  this person seem to not understand how microsoft's business stays on track. they seem to really think that individual contributions truly affect Microsoft's fullfilment of their self-appointed mission; but I highly doubt this. Microsoft is really huge. No single individual can really detract, nor add too much, to the company's overall mission.
  • creato 4y ago
    I guess MS should just pick people to hire in a lottery then.
    • yellsatclouds 4y ago
      I somehow suspect they wouln't fare any worse.
• therobot24 4y ago
  a lot of comments here recognize what a discussion of 'diversity and inclusion' on this forum (HN) is likely to contain -- i.e., HN should recognize it's own stereotypes of tech culture being toxic which only reinforces _any_ company from trying to curb that toxicity (whether it's the perfect approach to doing so or not)
• kiddz 4y ago
  • kiddz 4y ago
    • kiddz 4y ago
  • crackercrews 4y ago
    > a nice thought experiment would be to ask "how much would someone have to pay you to be the same person but black in your organization?" These days, it would be the other way around. I'd bet many devs would pay a one-time fee of $10k to be a black dev in their organization. The payback period would be very short and would pay dividends for years.
  • throwingitaway9 4y ago
    > White people are over represented across the workforce because America is not a meritocracy -- benefits of economic class are correlated with race because of white supremacy. Be careful because white people are actually under-represented[1] at Microsoft relative to their makeup of American population[2] (48% at Microsoft vs 75% country-wide). It's really important to understand this because otherwise DEI initiatives may counter-intuitively increase representation of white people. See school admissions for an example: https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-science-race-and-ethnicity-education-b02f6ed353ef89258e0eadf7eabec24d https://apnews.com/article/hispanics-racial-injustice-scienc... [1] Page 9 of https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWNrak https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW... [2] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221
• PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  The increase from 3.7% to 5.6% black executives as a sign of lowering standards, when black people are 14% of the population in the country... Can we first establish what percentage of managers people genuinely think got their job based on merit as a baseline? An equal explanation might be that because Microsoft forced people to actually interview black people at all, more qualified black candidates were hired.
  • truetotest 4y ago
  • seti0Cha 4y ago
    That represents the population at large, not the percentage of job applicants. Without knowing that number, you can't know how reasonable such a rule is.
    • PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      Yeah, neither can we know how reasonable the implication of lack of merit is in that case.
      • seti0Cha 4y ago
        The claim is that there may be a lack of availability. Lack of availability does not imply lack of merit. Prior discrimination, for example, could explain a lack of availability.
  • BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    Yes, but if you are looking at the population of rust dev with a background in system coding, or telecom engineer with ciso certification, the stats don't look like the ones of the general population at all. In my university, in the whole class, we had 0 non white, and a single woman. Now, you may argue that we should fix that. But that's another debate, the thing is, people are hiring from the pool we have right now.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  I experienced this in two different roles: - One applying to one role at github/microsoft: After ton of meetings, I would have to talk with their diversity manager, it was a 60 minutes meeting, which i just didn't feel well to go through after some googling. - As hiring manager (in another FAANG) company, I couldn't hire the best candidates, until all other 20 more diverse were interviewed. Everyone, regardless of qualified or not, had to be interviewed, before we could hire someone less diverse (aka not "white", not European, not "Man"). The position was for senior developer, and I had to go through a tedious set of interview with people straight of coding boot camp.. We ended up hiring one (guy), which wasn't in our top 5. All top 5 were able to get a new job, since our process took almost 6 month, from starting the process up to onboarding him. It was frustrating and actually the main reason why I left the team, to become architect. The process was called "agile/fair hiring", how ironic..
  • pelasaco 4y ago
    note that I quoted "Man" and "White". That's because we don't have a color palette to say how white is ok and we don't ask question to know how Manly someone is. That was so ridiculous, that most our team members didn't want to help me with the interviews...
• slowhadoken 4y ago
  I think if diversity leads to lower profit but better work experience tech companies will get rid of it.
• grammers 4y ago
  Maybe Microsoft managers think it's enough if everybody can decide for themselves about their pronouns.
• artec 4y ago
  Companies that want more diverse workforces need to grow them through, education and training. Remove the barriers to learning in these POC communities and map out clear pathways to knowledge.
• CincinnatiMan 4y ago
  I don’t work at Microsoft, but another large corporation, and have been told by my manager that right now it is difficult for a white male to get promoted and that we may need to do some strange maneuvers to make it happen if I’m interested in a promo. Was kind of taken aback by the bluntness.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • sblom 4y ago
    I _do_ work at Microsoft, and judging by the recent crop of promotions (early September) there was still plenty of opportunity for white males (and everyone else).
  • nathanaldensr 4y ago
    Assuming you're in the United States, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the EEOC are mere suggestions nowadays. There is no willingness in our DEI-co-opted government to tackle these issues and hold these blatantly illegal and unethical actors accountable.
    • mblatt2 4y ago
  • version_five 4y ago
    I've experienced this too, and in practice DI&E reminds me of the kind of rules advocated for by people who live on a lake, ostensibly to protect the lake but in reality to preserve their own property value and make sure nobody can build near them. Making rules than mean explicit support and sponsorship are needed to get somebody though means that employees end up serving and being promoted at the pleasure of whoever is currently in power, giving them more power. There are many ways this works but all-in, it ends up just consolidating power, not achieving any of the ostensible aims (whether or not you think those aims are worthy)
  • NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
• andirk 4y ago
  As of 2022, the only protected status one is allowed to discriminate against without new acronyms or hashtags or any uproar is age. We tend to hire people we want to befriend, which means people similar to us, which leads to a lot of this discrimination. See: "culture fit".
• hintymad 4y ago
  Maybe the question is why the leftists are so influential that for-profit companies are willing to comply with their ideology. Isn't the best way to increase the representation of minorities is to increase the funnel? Better schools, better teachers, more rigorous curriculum for all instead of for the elite students, a whole new culture that values curiosity and geekiness in general, and eventually a larger number of people who are willing to toil for years to study STEM? But oh no, by merely asking such questions I'm a far right, a racist, and of course, a fascist (I can be wrong, of course, but I should be free to ask questions and propose alternative solutions). My theory? CRT in workplace is popular because it's effective at suppressing questions and at making it easy for organizations to avoid working on hard problems.
  • postsantum 4y ago
  • dvngnt_ 4y ago
    my assumption is that the left is actually in support for better education in inner cities. i mostly hear about Republicans banning books
    • onos 4y ago
      Have you also heard of “decolonizing” the libraries?
      • dvngnt_ 4y ago
        I haven't. I have heard more republican outcry in response to Biden's student loan forgiveness > A recent analysis by the Census Bureau said Black and Hispanic women could benefit the most from the one-time cancellation policy, as both groups hold a disproportionate share of education debt relative to their peers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/27/lawsuit-student-loan-forgiveness/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/27/lawsuit-...
      • nvr219 4y ago
• phillipcarter 4y ago
  Ugh, another one of these. > There weren’t any quotas around how many of these “diverse” candidates I had to actually hire, but I was pretty sure my corporate vice president would be more likely to promote people who had hired more of them and thus made his contribution to the annual D&I report look good. Correct, there aren't quotas, but of course that doesn't stop the author from speculating that there might be, and basing the rest of the article on that. > Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy. Missing here is how BIPOC and women have been systemically under-promoted relative to their work output, and yes, although there is no quota, someone is checking in to make sure a manager (i.e., someone who has power over their reports' lives) is aware of systemic biases when approaching their decision-making. What is terrible about this exactly?
• jansan 4y ago
  If you want racial equity, you have to start at school or even earlier. Get rid of private schools, improve the public school system. Then you can actually get good people from all kinds of backgrounds that are not looked upon as "diversity hires".
  • bioemerl 4y ago
    > Get rid of private schools There are good steps that can be taken, but objectively harming some students is not the way forward. Improve public schools and try to get more money into the poor regions. Do not erase private ones.
    • kthejoker2 4y ago
      Why not the way forward? Depends on the "some" being "harmed." This is a systemic problem, systemic measures will be taken, there will be winners and losers.
      • bioemerl 4y ago
        > Depends on the "some" being "harmed." How does harming anyone help? No it does not depend on the some. Life isn't a zero sum game. Pull people down and you don't distribute their value to others, you only destroy it.
        • kthejoker2 4y ago
          You are begging the question, I don't believe eliminating private schooling harms anyone, nor will it "pull people down." Inequity in schooling is already harming others.
          • bioemerl 4y ago
            But in the comment I'll responded to you said and I quote " It depends on the some who are being harmed" "There will be winners and losers" That doesn't sound to me like someone who believes eliminating private schools harms nobody, That sounds to me like someone who is being a little bit reactionary and doesn't care. You aren't harming anyone, but there will be losers?
• comex 4y ago
  > You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with similar resumes do not get. So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. On average, those candidates would have started with a disadvantage in getting their foot in the door for several reasons – including outright discrimination, and the cumulative effect of past discrimination, but also softer factors such as being less likely to have helpful personal connections. This applies not just to the Microsoft job at issue, but to the previous jobs that would have populated their resumes (and for younger candidates, even schools). Compensating for that sounds like a good policy to me. Now, the post also suggests there is pressure to actually hire or promote less-qualified candidates, which might be a problem, but in that area the post is more vague and speculative.
  • gnerkus 4y ago
    How would this policy work for non-minority candidates who start with a disadvantage?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      I would also support a policy that supports at least considering disabled or impoverished candidates.
      • CoastalCoder 4y ago
        I'm interested in the question of who decides which attributes are relevant, and which values of those attributes shall be favored. I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  The current U.S. Supreme Court, though perhaps more ideologically bent than I'd like on many other issues, is certainly well poised to start slapping down some of these policies which brazenly dance on the wrong side (gray area at best) of Civil Rights law.
  • maldev 4y ago
    There's a group of Republican AG's that are suing public companies who do this. Along with DI&E investing, as it's not in the shareholders financial interest to invest in these thing, which is all that matters. So hopefully that will end these polcies.
    • telltruth 4y ago
      I am not sure how legal argument can work unless you show that it breaks equal employment laws. DE&I actually is beneficial in many roles such as design, customer advocacy, sales, support, UX and so on. It helps achieve a better representation of population and diverse ideas in the group. Even for managerial roles, DE&I helpful to have representation for minorities at org level. So there are a lot of provable benefits of encouraging DE&I. However, for many technical roles, for example database administrator, I am not sure how DE&I will yield same benefits. One of my pet peeve is not including disabled people in DE&I group. Most big tech only mandates racial and gender minorities for DE&I targets.
      • cuteboy19 4y ago
        I don't think this logic holds. It is true that a sales rep job benefits from diversity eg having hispanic employees talk to Spanish speaking customers. However the same role can be performed equally well by a fluent Spanish speaker of any race. So a job requirement for a Hispanics sales rep would be racial discrimination for no good reason. You could construct similar arguments for most instances of diversity hiring. Additionally Diversity is not the same as DEI. Diversity is a statistical concept whereas DEI is a religious belief
      • maldev 4y ago
• wafflestomp 4y ago
  I’ve seen active encouragement to violate the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Specifically Title VII section 703, (d) - Training Programs. “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer, labor organization, or joint labor-­management committee controlling apprenticeship or other training or retraining, including on­-the-­job training programs to discriminate against any individual because of his race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.” By specifically allowing Women to attend the Grace Hopper Conference on company time, funded by the company. Men, are not allowed to attend (unless not male presenting), and thus being discriminated against based upon their sex. At the Grace Hopper conference, there are plenty of sessions which could be argued are training. If the attendees were going for recruiting purposes, I could see it not necessarily violating the law. However, Women are attending to go to the conference (training?) without any recruiting duties. I expect there are similar conferences for POC, which equally violate the Civil rights act.
• noasaservice 4y ago
  So, let me guess.... It means in practice hiring BiPOC and women in "diversity positions", all the while keeping them away from engineering and engineering management (you know, the positions that pay $$$$$$). I've seen BiPOC and women candidates turned down time and again because they "fit" better in the bullshit diversity spots. And then there's a rant about "fit" also known as "we want to discriminate on illegal or unethical things but we cant actually say that".
• mikaeluman 4y ago
  This categorization of human beings by race and sex is such a large step back in the opposite direction of how I would like society to be. Like many others, I simply hope this "goes away".
• BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  The problem is those filters are applied in the wrong order. If it was "promote diversity hiring once you have a pool of talented candidates to pick from", it would work. But right now, it's the reverse: filter out non diverse candidates, and try to find a good one in the remaining. Yet, it's already hard to hire talent, even with no filter at all. So now I have clients I assist for interviews, looking desperately for good devs, but when they find one, which is already a rare event, they often can't hire him (yes, him, because the hiring pool is mostly males in IT in 2022) thanks of those blockers. Of course, they already have a ton of hiring constraints to match for, so this compounds. This week, I'm going to interview the one candidate that could make it through the diversity policy. His resume is a train wreck, and I already know it's going to be a waste of time. So they are going to go through those shenanigans for the next year or so before finding their mythical creature, the same one their competitors are fighting for in this very competitive market. Of course, this means their projects are going to be delayed a lot. It's good for me, I get on the payroll for longer. And I'm a diversity bonus for them, being from another country, so they won't get rid of me any time soon. But I don't envy them, they are set up for failure.
• nyxtom 4y ago
  We seem to have gone full circle somehow. It is ironic that in its intent to ensure employers hire based on merit, academic or physically qualified abilities so that people could obtain those jobs without being discriminated against - we have arrived back at a point where companies consider their identity to make sure they meet "quotas" - thus implementing discriminatory policies.
• balls187 4y ago
  "Imagine you work under a black executive at Microsoft. Does a graph like this one make you more or less likely to think they got to where they are because of their accomplishments? " This is the same "affirmative action hire" argument conservatives have been making since affirmative action was implemented.
  • etchalon 4y ago
    "We can't fix racism because of racism."
• superjan 4y ago
  I think it is great that microsoft has a diversity policy and is making clear to everyone there that it matters. It is quite ham-handed, but that is kind of the default in corporations of that size. I can imagine the frustration having to deal with such policies, but he apparently did not reach out to get diverse candidates.
• koziserek 4y ago
  Microsoft was always on my blacklist
  • jimbobimbo 4y ago
    It's "disallowlist" or a "blocklist". ;-)
• etchalon 4y ago
• temptemptemp111 4y ago
• aaroninsf 4y ago
  Most of the top comments are literally recapitulating all the received unexamined "common sense meritocracy" talking points which are systematically examined and dismantled as the first order of business in such training. Depressing, but not suprising.
• yashap 4y ago
  Affirmative Action is always going to be a very controversial topic. Personally I'm for it, but I understand why people dislike it. I do strongly believe that, even with Affirmative Action policies, it's still a lot harder to succeed as a non white male than it is as a white male, today. For example, no matter how you slice it, white Americans are ~3-4x more likely to become millionaires than black or hispanic Americas (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-millionaire-odds/). I think there's a TONNE of reasons for race and gender based inequality, but IMO most of them have to do with "momentum". If you grow up in a wealthy family, you've got easy access to great education, mentors, role models, capital, etc. If you grow up in a poor family you have way less of all of this. It wasn't long ago that racism and sexism were much, much worse than they are today (and there's still lots of conscious and unconscious bias today), so white families are a lot wealthier today than minority families, and that propagates to the next generation, and the one after that, etc. Slavery wasn't abolished in America until 1865, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision (ending racial segregation of schools) came in 1954, Rosa Parks was 1955, Jim Crow laws weren't really sweepingly overturned until 1965. If you're a black American in their 40s today, your parents were probably born in the Jim Crow era, where the impediments to their financial success were immense. If, as a society, we don't try to actively help non white males reach an equal footing in terms of opportunity, it'll be really, really hard to close these "momentum" gaps. I view Affirmative Action as a temporary approach to narrowing these gaps. It's realizing that it's too hard to succeed financially as a minority in America, and temporarily giving minorities a leg up on hiring and promotions to help even the wealth/opportunity gap. Once the gap more or less goes away, you remove the Affirmative Action policies, but that'll take time. If you hire based purely on qualifications, education, experience, etc., the gap isn't going away for an extremely long time, because white families are a lot wealthier than minority families today, so a disproportionate number of kids from those families are going to have those advantages, and the gap persists.
  • rhacker 4y ago
    What I don't understand is, that if it's purely skin color and upbringing and background, why is most of SV absolutely dominated by Indian people: My dad is Indian and grew up with his family in a single room. He is in his 80s now and has a net worth in California of probably $3M. I'm half Indian and half white. At my age (42) he was doing way better than myself (accounting for inflation of course). When my dad was going through all the same stuff, 50 years back there was no affirmative action yet he still grew in the ranks. He's not a "black person" but his skin color is the same. I think there is a lot of perceived racism when in reality people are promoting strong individuals already. Look at head of Google, Twitter, and a series of other companies. For some reason people shy away from calling out racism when it comes to people from India because of their American success story. But again, if it's about skin color - how did this happen?
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  from what I can tell, nobody knows how to interpret the civil rights acts and nobody wants to have a discussion on how to compliantly do so. all you have to do is start recruiting in places that were overlooked. just stop obsessing over Stanford pedigrees and recruit at the same Tier 3 universities that the intelligence community recruits from. fund your own coding academies and executive workshops and create your own pipeline, physically located in neighborhoods that have people you want representation from. everyone is going to keep messing this up and discriminating on the hiring process, without a framework about how to do it.
• layer8 4y ago
  > would you rather work at Google on Gmail or at Microsoft on Outlook? Actually, Outlook is much more usable than GMail, but apparently that doesn’t translate to developer prestige.
• danielodievich 4y ago
  Back in 2020, I interviewed at Github for a professional services customer facing position. One of the steps in the interview was D&I, where I had 2 white males interview me, another white male, about what I do and will do for diversity, whatever that means. It was clear that they had a scripted checklist that they were going on and it was just a formality. They were visibly uncomfortable which this interview and so was I.
  • Glide 4y ago
    There are plenty of places where they aren’t uncomfortable with those questions.
• PKop 4y ago
  Why would anyone support a system that explicitly dis-empowers them in preference to other identity groups who themselves are perfectly fine to pursue their own self interest? After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Either you take your own side, or no one will. There is a clear zero-sum aspect to this. The cultural brainwashing that there is virtue in supporting this against your own interests is just Nietzschean slave-morality propaganda. You don't have to apologize for or pathologize being capable, successful and doing what is best for yourself, dare I say even for your own identity group. You can simply reject this nonsense; the emperor truly has no clothes here. Related: my most recent submission [0] titled "Wikimedia is funding political activism" received over 20 points in 30 minutes, but of course was quickly flagged without discussion. Quite a bit of censorship around these parts regarding these particular topics with huge impact on all of us within the tech industry. [0] https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633 https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1579776106034757633
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • bobkazamakis 4y ago
    >After years of this, are the "privileged" getting the picture yet? You are a target for elimination in popular society. Are you afraid of not having privilege? Do you think that's a symptom of how we treat the unfortunate, or the cause?
    • PKop 4y ago
      Setting aside the connotation/framing of the word itself, tell me, is not having privilege good or bad? One could define "privilege" as the accumulation of inheritance of ancestors, economic, culturally, biological, geopolitical, power. All coming together in "good ways" for descendants. But back to the question, is bad to not have it and good to have it yes? Then why would anyone support not having it, willingly giving it up, expect those who take it from you to not then also abuse power against you etc etc. If bad, why choose not to keep it? In terms of abstract ideological values, I support merit, some sort of meritocracy. But in concrete terms this will never avoid conflict of group interests. That is politics and an unavoidable aspect of human competition over resources, wealth, power, prestige. So let's stop pretending, is my point, that there is some achievable neutrality in all this. Because we all agree not being on top is bad. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. At the very least having cultural power like those implementing all these policies throughout Western corporations is a good thing to have. It is bad not to have it. What else is there to say?
• spearson23 4y ago
  This policy sounds like exactly what it should be. This is to make up for things like this (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-applicants-with-black-names-still-less-likely-to-get-the-interview https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli...), but having a black sounding name makes you less likely to get an interview. If society doesn't put some effort into overcoming its biases, those biases will always exist.
• freedom-fries 4y ago
  At just 5.6% they are not doing enough! Capitalism has made "unwanted" people the outliers and capitalism can fix it! One way to improve hiring could by legislating that for-profit companies should do away with drug tests and background verification. Systemic & instituitional racism means a lot of people of the wrong race/color are simply ineligible to be hired just because they have drug charges or they have a record because once took a loaf of bread from Kroger. Billion-dollar corporations can afford to hire them, mix them with existing teams, have them learn on the job from the best people in the industry and turn them to be a productive person of the society. In the short term, yes it can cause pain and loss of productivity, but in the long-term, as the society we all can come ahead!
  • boppo1 4y ago
    I think the satire is being lost on people.
• AngeloR 4y ago
  What always bothered me about DE&I initiatives is that they are trying to wring diversity out of their existing hiring pool. If your indeed job posts didn't bring diverse candidates then, why do you think it would now? Because you added a "Please apply if you're DiVeRsE" line to it? Don't be ridiculous. If you want diversity of candidates you can't keep going back to the same talent pools. You have to diversify where you're drawing talent. If your college program is primarily getting white/asian males, you can't suddenly expect it to start throwing in women & poc as well. You can't suddenly expect it to start giving you LGBTQ+ candidates. If you want diverse candidates, you have to look at diverse hiring pools. Look at the bootcamps that focus on diverse groups you're targeting. Look at schools that focus on diverse groups you're targeting. If you're really interested in diverse candidates, you can't keep expecting them to just show up if you add a "We want diversity!" to your job description - you have to change where you look for them.
  • Analemma_ 4y ago
    A big part of the issue here is that, even though the predomaninance of white and Asian men in CS is very obviously a pipeline problem, for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy", they have to undergo these absurd contortions to try and have a DEI program that can't say where the lack of DEI is coming from. Naturally it ends up being a mess of contradictions and confused thinking, because everyone has to pretend to ignore the obvious root cause.
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > for whatever reason Twitter has decided that nobody is allowed to say it's a pipeline problem, and they'll excoriate you if you try. So since most of these initiatives have the primary aim of "keep Twitter happy" Given that Twitter takes an active role in censoring particular ideas, I think it's worth being careful to distinguish "Twitter has decided this isn't allowed" from "a lot of Twitter users have decided this isn't allowed".
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
• sys32768 4y ago
  I think a large part of society panicked after we killed racism, and they have been performing CPR on racism ever since.
  • president 4y ago
    There is a large multi-million dollar industry supporting DEI now. If there are people benefiting from racism continuing, it's people that work in this industry.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • wildrhythms 4y ago
    I'd like to see evidence that racism was ever 'killed' in society.
• irrational 4y ago
  I've been at a particular company for 20 years. For most of those years our main focus was our core mission, but over the past few years D&I has risen to be our main focus. I've seen people hired who clearly are not qualified and often are not trainable to become qualified. An example is a woman who refused to take any hard assignments and usually made no progress on the easy stuff she was assigned. She was certainly able to do the work, but just didn't do it. Then she started taking standup zoom calls from the ski slopes in winter and hiking trails in the summer. Well, you would think this would be enough to at least get her onto some sort of remediation program, but nope, HR said we could do nothing to her. So she basically earns a six figure salary and does absolutely nothing, other than fulfill a D&I quota.
  • ourmandave 4y ago
    Apparently fulfilling the D&I quota is worth 6 figures to the company.
    • tablespoon 4y ago
      > Apparently fulfilling the D&I quota is worth 6 figures to the company. Or the company is rich enough not to really care about the waste at this point. I doubt such a person would last through one round of layoffs if there was real pressure to reduce costs.
      • irrational 4y ago
        This is pretty much it. We are a huge Fortune 100 company that, apparently, prizes D&I over money.
  • pelagicAustral 4y ago
    Fuck me! I wish I was more diverse.
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• DebtDeflation 4y ago
  This is how literally everything in corporate America works. You start with a good idea. It gets turned into a metric. Targets for this metric are assigned at various levels in the management hierarchy. Bonuses are made dependent upon meeting the target for the metric. Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and just focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting, client satisfaction is obviously very important, leadership made the determination that NPS is the best way to measure csat, we all have NPS targets, our bonuses are tied to them, so what does everyone do? They only send NPS surveys to specific clients they know will give a good score and then they spend time and effort to make sure the client follows up and does in fact give a good score. Everyone manages the metric, same as with the DE&I stuff.
  • max51 4y ago
    You missed the part where after a few years of cheating the metric, getting "above average" satisfaction (4 out of 5) from a client is considered a failure and a manager 3 levels above you will personally come asking what went wrong with this client.
    • Terretta 4y ago
      If you don't give 5 of 5 in any gig economy app (from cars to delivery to AirBnB), it's like you're scalping babies.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    Spot on, other than it was never a good idea.
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• int0x2e 4y ago
  I absolutely want to work in a diverse team. I want to be challenged by different perspectives and ideas. I want to have the best team members out there, regardless of their backgrounds. I however, think many D&I ideas fail to work when written into policies, and I think many times, higher-ups seem to write policy out of the best of intentions, yet fail to see how they can easily lead to abuse and poor results. Two examples from a corporate job a friend shared with me - 1. A friend was interviewing senior software engineers for an open position, then got a candidate who was grossly irrelevant (I won't bore you with the details, but she has ~1 year of experience at best, and this position was targeting a minimum of 5 years, 8+ years preferred). Turns out, that specific hiring manager had recently lost a (male) top candidate because they didn't have a female candidate in that candidate's pipeline - the manager learned his lesson and now always dumps 1-2 female candidates that have no chance of making it into any senior position, just to meet the "diverse slate" requirement of their D&I policy. 2. Another example, this time not related to diversity - during the recent economic downturn, a company decided that on top of an aggressive hiring freeze, for any employee that is fired or quits, their position goes away with them, then gets re-assigned to where the higher-ups think the need is greatest. At first glance, that sounds like a good idea - kind of a CI/CD for re-orgs with minimal "slack". But of course, if you're a smart enough manager, that means your biggest hope is to remain static through this period, which means you'll never fire (or even challenge) anyone. You'll even promote mediocre folks to keep them on, then fire them afterwards. Naturally, the most talented will still get plenty of offers and move / leave at some point, and then the slightly less talented folks get hit with all of their work and eventually move on as well, and over time the average talent level of that team will slide down considerably, and as we all know - hiring a top performer into a mediocre team is a challenge. Nice policy in theory, but in practice - it will cause the company to lose tons of great talent, in a way that will take years to recover from.
  • Manuel_D 4y ago
    I've heard of similar diversity backfires. For instance, a company started making bonuses for execs contingent on reaching representation targets. This meant that diverse workers were almost never approved to transfer to a different org, because execs were worried about dropping below their bonus threshold. End result was that Asian and White men had a lot more internal mobility than diverse employees.
• kasajian 4y ago
  It's obvious the writer of the article felt what he was asked to do was a mere distraction, made obvious by his statement that he would rather go back to "focusing on producing great software" This would have sense if it wasn't for the fact that the company that he works for, the folks that are paying him to be there, are actually asking him to do the thing that he is paying lip-service to. I would hate to have an employee who doesn't do what they're directed to do because they thought they knew better. Unless it's something illegal, if you're going to collect a paycheck, you either do what you're asked to do or you leave. You don't continue to take their money but do something other than what they're asking for. Ridiculous.
• Dig1t 4y ago
  I work at a different FAANG and it seems like more and more the only news that we get from corporate is related to DEI. Also a lot of hiring details are now hidden from ICs. It used to be that you would be apart of the interview panel as an interviewer and then you would get together with your team afterwards and everyone on the team would vote yes/no and that would pretty much be it. Now it’s made by a manager elsewhere and you have no idea why the decision was made. I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older. We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all. Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us. It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome. To quote Kamala Harris’ recent remarks “to make sure everyone ends up in the same place”, i.e. “equity”
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  • president 4y ago
    It reminds me when my childhood friend's parents moved to LA so he could attend an inner-city high school so that his scores from a lower ranking school were more heavily weighted for college admissions. They were wealthy immigrants from the middle east.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    > I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older. 1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse. 2. There is nothing wrong with your kids being in a majority demographic. It sounds like you're more worried about the world discriminating based off race and other traits. I suspect you agree with all of this but it's a little scary how insidious these policies are. Even in your dissent you're seeing things from their perspective.
    • PKop 4y ago
      It is always useful and prudent to see things from the perspective of those attacking you. "Know your enemy.." You can argue over definitions and terms as much as you want, but the uniform you wear is often defined by your opposition. In other words, it may not be completely relevant what you or OP think diverse is or isn't. It is very relevant what the power structures and people implementing these policies think it means, no? If someone has a kid that potentially is going to be quota'ed out of jobs or education, why wouldn't they worry about it?
• jimbobimbo 4y ago
  In 2022 you couldn't pay me enough to be a people manager in an F500 company, precisely because of BS like this article describes.
• diebeforei485 4y ago
  How does Tesla manage to be diverse without having an internal bureaucracy micromanaging everyone at D&I?
• TedShiller 4y ago
  Serious question: I've worked with incredibly diverse (compared to the national demographic) teams that consisted mostly of Indians and Asians from various countries throughout Asia. Under the Microsoft D&I definition this would not count as diverse. Why do they define diversity in such an arbitrary way?
• dogman144 4y ago
  The thing is, there are not many companies or jobs where you can save $1mil+ in under 4 years, especially if you’re Dual Income or pre-kids. Especially at a 9-5 where I am in pajamas more often than not. Hunker down, leverage to the opp to do boring tech at an interesting large scale and and earn a mountain. Find your non-enterprise, pure meritocracy Ayn Rand bonanza engineering experience at a pre-Series C. I can’t understand why engs expect FAANGs to operate like anything but an enterprise now, and then complain about that behavior! We can save $1mil in under 4 years while wearing pajamas. The blind spots of the extreme relative privilege in this job and anchoring on articles like this as serious grievances blows my mind.
• runako 4y ago
  One of the key insights I think people are missing is that for most roles, not having a diverse slate of applicants in a country as diverse as America is a "process smell." The smell is that you're not casting a wide enough net to even know whether you're getting the best applicants. Some easy examples: if you're hiring for most programming roles and you don't have any qualified women applying, your pipeline sucks. If your company is in California, and you don't have any qualified Latinos applying for most of your jobs, your pipeline sucks. Et cetera. If you're not casting a wide enough net to find qualified Latinos on the west coast(!), I guarantee you're also missing qualified white men in whom you would be interested. Ultimately, this is why Microsoft cares; they have an interest in their overall process being the best it can be.
  • zozbot234 4y ago
    > your pipeline sucks The pipeline sucks for everyone, we all know that. Let's not pretend that this is just a matter of a single company having substandard processes.
    • runako 4y ago
      Right, but here we're talking about Microsoft, one of the most valuable/profitable companies on the planet. Microsoft doesn't have to make do with a crappy pipeline. In fact, they have the resources to make it harder for the rest of us to have good pipelines. And again -- I am talking about process smells. Women, Latinos, Black people, etc. are gainfully employed in roles where they ship software. (If you work in tech, you know the "CS Majors only" objection is a red herring given the breadth of roles at large tech firms.) If your process is unable to find them, that speaks to your process specifically (because someone else did find & hire them!). Understanding why your process is bad is a good thing that every team should continually work towards.
      • slt2021 4y ago
        1. Microsoft salaries are on the lower end compared to other FAANGs, this is well known fact. 2. Higher paying firms like goog fb are able to sweep the labor market and get the most of folks from tiny population of well qualified minority candidates. Making pipeline issues worse for everybody else. 3. At this point if you are minority and is qualified - you have no problem getting top tier job and top tier pay relatively easy, especially when compared to asian male population.
• atlgator 4y ago
  This is all part of the public-private alliance between big corporations and left-wing politicians. They can't implement Marxism outright because of State authority to override, so they are using companies to do it and killing small business competition in return. This is also why some corporations get larger and larger without any real antitrust enforcement. This is happening at every F50 company. If you are thinking "not my company" right now, you're just not high enough in leadership.
• nsxwolf 4y ago
  I shut my mouth at work and go along with this stuff because I have no choice. I have a family to take care of. I've accepted this. But man, why do they always throw in the line about striving to make the workplace a "diverse and inclusive culture where everyone can bring their full and authentic self"? Everyone knows that's a goddamn lie. I almost want to cry when I read that - it makes me so angry. I haven't been anything like myself in the workplace for over a decade now and I'm sure I'll never be again. I live a lie when I'm here and so do many, many others.
  • ploppyploppy 4y ago
    It stops if people refuse to live within the lie. Read Vaclav Havel's "Power of the powerless".
  • neonsunset 4y ago
    Same here, and it's not just the job, intellectually participating in any community larger than "small and heavily guarded" seems to be subject to the same rules - all of them eventually collapse due to the same reason except people have easier time voting with their feet.
  • torstenvl 4y ago
    > Everyone knows that's a goddamn lie. I almost want to cry when I read that "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him." Racism is anti-racist. Objective thinking is biased. Burning down cities is mostly peaceful protest.
    • hintymad 4y ago
      If your allegiance is not absolute, then you absolutely do not have allegiance. So, don't question. Do.
    • drewbug01 4y ago
• therusskiy 4y ago
  I find it puzzling why people are split by their skin color rather than their country of origin. There are only marginal differences between a white and a black person born in US, while myself, being a white male born in Russia, cultural experiences and background have barely anything in common with a white person born in US except for the color of my skin. The same applies for a black guy from US and a black guy from Nigeria or something. Other people have already brought it up, but Asian is such a vague term as well. There are Asians from 1st world Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, Singapore) and from 3rd world countries (Vietnam and etc). By diversity logic you really should have quotas for every flavor of color and birth, but you can imagine it's going to lead to madness, so people just choose an easy way out and do this as a PR stunt.
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  • telltruth 4y ago
    Puzzling thing for me is why people are split by genders. In developed countries like USA, women is as free as men. There are zero cultural aspects like in Saudi Arabia or other countries that prevents women from getting education or apply for jobs they want. Still, vast number of women gravitates to jobs like teachers, nurses, hygenists, hair saloon, waiting staff and so on. It is not that they were forced to take on those jobs. It is what they chose by their own will. Female participation in labor market is now well over 40% so almost everyone has chosen to do some job. But we still complain about lack of women in tech and we blame it on bias. I am certain bias is definitely there for women but is it the only reason, or even most prominent, why we have so few women choosing tech instead of those other very low paying jobs? I think people should be putting much more effort at incentivizing girls to pursue tech career paths than force upon artificial DEI targets on management hierarchy.
• bennysonething 4y ago
  I'm hoping one day everyone wakes up and realises that the emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately DI is a virtue status game. It's easier to play that than delivering real value in your job. It's pretty much a religion with its own dogmas and lingo. For more fresh madness see what the the UKs financial conduct authority is proposing: https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-finalises-proposals-boost-disclosure-diversity-listed-company-boards-executive-committees https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/fca-finalises-pro...
• maldev 4y ago
  All this does is make it so certain groups appear to be REALLY dumb at certain companies. In my experience at my work places, only one in 10 women are actually qualified, and the rest are so utterly incompetent that they just end up taking up money. It's not because they're women, it's because they just don't belong there due to their skill level, but got a diversity hire. I enjoy having women in my office, but because of DI&E I don't interview at places that have to many, since 9/10 times it's a big indicator the department or company is going under due to incompetence. Exact same thing applies to skin color. This shouldn't be the case, but this is all policies like this do, and it's going to whiplash REALLY hard once the cultural pendulum is over.
• FrontierPsych 4y ago
  • itsdrewmiller 4y ago
    In the US the EEOC has a standard set of questions to ask applicants: https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/what-are-eeo-questions-why-do-we-have-them https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/what-are-eeo-questions-why... Hiring managers shouldn't see individual results for these - they should be used for aggregate reporting to ensure the overall process is unbiased.
    • FrontierPsych 4y ago
      OK, but all I see is how companies hiring managers are looking to hire females and minorities - anyone but white men, basically. I read this everywhere, it is ubiquitous how companies seek out women and POC. Recently, a law was passed in California that corporate board of directors are required to be 50% women. I'm not sure why it was only women, and not equal representative amounts of hispanic, black, asian, middle eastern, Polish, Australian aborigines, gay, trans, atheists, 18-25 year olds, etc. But in any case, it seems like companies can and do screen positively for women and POC. Is this NOT the case?
      • itsdrewmiller 4y ago
        https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/state-and-local-updates/pages/california-court-overturns-law-requiring-women-on-boards-of-directors.aspx https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/... Companies can't legally prefer hiring applicants based on protected characteristics, including sex or race. They are allowed to do sourcing work to increase the diversity of their pipeline, but not to go so far as to effectively exclude people based on protected characteristics. I am not a lawyer.
• Qtips87 4y ago
• blahblah1234567 4y ago
• gcau 4y ago
  In other places, like Africa or Asia, or just anywhere without a white majority, does the inverse exist? E.g. giving white people special treatment in hiring because they're a minority there? If the idea is logically consistent, based on diversity and inclusion and not racism, it should exist? Maybe it does? Never heard of it.
  • dijonman2 4y ago
    It doesn’t exist. Curiously my company employs few folks of Asian descent but I never see this raised anywhere in D&I material.
• NautilusWave 4y ago
  I think it's valiant for a company to strive to create diversity within the organization that's reflective of their locale, but it seems many are trying to simply hire people with certain combinations of demographics and qualifications that are rare or non-existent. A more far-sighted solution is required, where private industry starts investing in education (in an equity-focused manner) to create the diverse, qualified workforce that they need.
• Georgelemental 4y ago
  Wokeness is first and foremost a legal phenomenon. You must check the box, because your manager must check the box, because the VP must check the box, because otherwise some regulator or lawyer might get angry and sue. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation, we should all be grateful for that. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous tumor that is metastasizing and infecting everything. https://richardhanania.substack.com/i/36007039/wokeness-is-government-policy https://richardhanania.substack.com/i/36007039/wokeness-is-g...
  • jablongo 4y ago
    This is wrong, the civil rights legislation from the 60s is now being used by Asians in current discrimination suits against colleges. The CRM legislation was colorblind, and therefore will be an enduring protection against discrimination towards any group.
    • Georgelemental 4y ago
      The text of the laws is colorblind. But the institutions the laws created were hijacked by radicals. In the federal agencies, univerities, and HR departments, those who serve the laws and organizations hemselves won out over those who served the ostensible purposes of the laws and organizations.
  • PubliusMI 4y ago
    The Civil Rights legislation was blatantly unconstitutional and we should not be surprised at the modern consequences.
• abigail95 4y ago
  The civil rights act, as written makes this form of discrimination illegal. However the supreme court undid this in United Steelworkers v Weber. I do not understand how Americans find it acceptable that you can vote for people, they can pass clear statutory language that says you cannot discriminate and then SCOTUS can come along, and read the complete opposite meaning into the statute.
  • wafflestomp 4y ago
    The dissent’s argument - “Were Congress to act today specifically to prohibit the type of racial discrimination suffered by Weber, it would be hard pressed to draft language better tailored to the task than that found in § 703(d) of Title VII:” Is pretty spot on. SCOTUS needs to revisit this issue. Or congress needs to revise the Civil Rights act to correct the wording cited by the Supreme Court majority on their opinion. Their argument is that the statue states that it’s not “required”, but doesn’t state “required, or allowed”, thus suggesting that congress intended to allow this racial based decisions. And yet Congress included 703(d). Absurd court case which is the source of this ongoing insanity.
• pyuser583 4y ago
  Diversity and Inclusion are very different things. You can do top down diversity. If you can hire or fire, you can increase diversity. Not easy, but doable. Inclusion is a very different thing. After someone is hired, they have to be see their employer as an accepting place. This is accomplished mostly by peer to peer interactions. You can’t top-down force inclusion.
• svillar 4y ago
  Long time HN lurker here - some of the comments are being blown out of proportion. Statistically speaking, these are called “minorities” for a reason, there simply aren’t enough of them in STEM related fields. Diversifying your team/group with one or two female or foreign born individuals won’t dramatically impact the overall productivity of your team - assuming this person is not already a very hard working and/or bright individual, which many/most are. The fact that this person made it to the interview phase and passed the initial filters (which are typically gender/race blind) indicates that they are potentially qualified for the role. Keep in mind, interviewing is hard - for both parties involved, for different reasons but especially hard for candidates. There is a significant “luck” component involved. Many interviewers are inexperienced and focus solely on finding ways to disqualify candidates as opposed to figuring out how a given person could “fit in” and contribute/help level up the team. I ask that you have an open mind and show some empathy. We still have a lot of work to do to create a more diverse and inclusive society.
  • bobsmooth 4y ago
    >Statistically speaking, these are called “minorities” for a reason, there simply aren’t enough of them in STEM related fields. What's the correct ratio of white to brown? To male to female? Do employee demographics need to mirror society demographics?
  • telltruth 4y ago
    This is not how it works dude. Right now, in big tech, teams have target of 30% diversity, i.e., 1/3rd of the team. There is literally not that many "diverse" people available to hire. You would be lucky to even fill these positions with competent non-diverse candidates. If your team works on networking stack, how many well qualified female/black/latino folks are out there who will apply to your post at that point in time? VPs then come to you and tell you to hire "diverse" candidate any way with no experience in networking and ask you to train them later. They do this to protect their bonuses. Now your 30% of the team is filled with people who have no business of being there. Besides experience, most don't even have any passion for the field. They just walk-in flashing their diversity cards. This is massive drain on teams productivity. How does this team would compete with lean and mean startups? The truth is they won't. The DEI is great initiative to sunset aging big tech and replace them with new blood.
• tdeck 4y ago
  Oh, it's that right-wing culture war grievance blog that coincidentally chose the same initials as the Center for Science in the Public Interest and calls itself a think tank.
• soueuls 4y ago
  I left the western world several years ago, partly because of this. I could not live in an idiocracy where some people hire based on skin colors or genitals. Thankfully, I have faith in capitalism. I never thought I would say such an obvious thing, but we are entering an era where « hiring the most competent » is going to give an unfair advantage to smaller companies. I am already seeing this with cinema. Sure the US is still producing a lot of interesting stuff, you still have very talented filmmakers. But you are literally losing market share to Korea (which should have never happened) just because you made your mission to transform every possible well known character into black characters for the sake of it. I haven’t seen any interesting Netflix original show about Zulu, or how people competed for power in Egypt. But I sure have seen plenty of black washing (even on non white historical figures)
• allisdust 4y ago
  This happening in tech is actually benign. In a lot of countries there are mandated quotas for minorities and socially backward communities in fields such as medicine, civil engineering etc, where the cost of mistakes is much higher. I do feel all this would be temporary in nature and eventually as these sections of society get more prosperity due to these policies, they will end up increasing their competency levels overall (but may not be in the same generation).
• firstSpeaker 4y ago
  We are a European enterprise and we have contracts with special recruitment firm for DEI quota. We had the opportunity to hire some amazing and technical folks through them. People with special hobbies and interests that would really make a different and add a new dimension to conversations. The growing issue is the increasing number of employees coming in with skillset below 50% of current peers. Not all from EDI source, but for sure majority. Higher skilled engineers are leaving because they need to do more and more work to keep up the systems operational and that results in more and more of the skilled folks leaving. Trying to explain this to VPs and directors and they would just say dont choose them! The interview system is set in a way that we get a bunch of resume without names and we need to stack them. HR contact as many of them as they feel good about and there goes the round of interviews. After the interviews we stack the results and hand it over to the management. And they decide whom to hire based on the stacked results and their own infallible judgment. Sadly it also reflects poorly on people who are good and come in with DEI budget. They need to spend more times earning trust.
• cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  So it sounds like I will not rise to the top in big tech regardless of my hard work and talent, what are the best alternative employers that don't do this?
• psyfi 4y ago
  DEI policies are pure racism but in the other direction.
• psd1 4y ago
  _sigh_ The common theme I see in all these happy HN contributors getting their panties in a twist over affirmative action is that transactions exist in America that discriminate against white people: for a given promotion, a black person is advanced over a white person who is better qualified. It's like some idiot plugging away at debugging a single query timing out, while the cluster is down. Just take a step back. It's a really important intellectual ability. Are you a Grandmaster if you won all your matches starting with a material advantage? - attend school with class sizes of 60: start minus four pawns - limited role models in middle-class jobs: start minus a bishop - generational effects from iniquitous zoning laws: minus a rook Affirmative action is an attempt to give back the bishop. Other strategies are also needed. The theme I'm bristling at is, approximately, complaining that you lost a piece because your opponent was given a bishop.
  • cuteboy19 4y ago
    If you think of AA as restitution, fine, that is a noble goal. Now the issue is that there are not two races. So what about the Asians? They are discriminated against both by actual racism AND affirmative action. In fact AA discriminates harder against Asians than whites. Mixed race Asian (white+Asian) are regularly recommended to report their race as white. Surely this is doubly unfair?
  • dijit 4y ago
    I would be up for a points based system like you said. I had a really difficult childhood; fatherless, impoverished schools, welfare, surrounded by crime (heroin addiction, prostitution, violence), I was quiet and bookish so I got abuse from all angles. I had food most days and a home made of bricks so I had it better than most. But if you're going to assume my life is easier because I have a certain skin tone I'm going to be annoyed, because my life was decidedly not easy in the early stages and I only got my "leg up" by being willing to throw myself into extremely uncomfortable situations.
  • raxxorraxor 4y ago
    So it is indeed racial discrimination in your opinion. I think DEI proponents fail to grasp the whole picture and miss how they are increasing racism. And that picture isn't even that large. Pretty important skill to have as you said too.
• nottorp 4y ago
  Seriously, what's with that newsletter popup that has no close button? I'm starting to see it everywhere on blog posts linked from HN. Are "influencers" that desperate?
• amai 4y ago
  Outside of the US the race/ethnicity of a person is not even allowed to be asked for or even stored. I actually believe that this leads to many problems in the first place and actually promotes racial segregation. The first time I had to think about what race I am was when I moved to the US. Stop asking people what race they are, stop storing their race. And do the same for gender and religion. Just treat your people as humans. And problems like this will just disappear. As a start you can anonymise applications of candidates: https://wol.iza.org/articles/anonymous-job-applications-and-hiring-discrimination/long https://wol.iza.org/articles/anonymous-job-applications-and-...
• aabreu 4y ago
  Didn't many people predict exactly this? Go back to Alex Jones videos from 2010 and apologize.
• jasec57322 4y ago
  Microsoft makes their products difficult to repair: Microsoft calls this a 'security measure'. Microsoft has a bigoted hiring policy which cares more for your skin tone & nipple size than your skillset: Microsoft calls this 'diversity and inclusion'.
• jleyank 4y ago
  What about ageism? It’s prevalent, is that ok? How about women or even men trying to renter the workforce after having children? Groups made of inexperienced young folks tend to make products for inexperienced young folks. People code what they know. While marketeers would support this, there’s still a lot of money out there that’s help by less desirable groups of people. And needs that aren’t relatable to these developers.
• jleyank 4y ago
  If white people want to learn about racism, fail to know French and try to work in Quebec. Black as soon as you open your mouth…
• hgsgm 4y ago
• KETpXDDzR 4y ago
  And that's why I tell any employer that I'm LGBTQ+ and identify as black Hispanic. What a clown world we live in... And while D&I advocates are busy, the reality diverges. There are large teams at Amazon et al that only speak Hindi or Chinese. Imagine what group of persons are not hired because they aren't a "cultural fit". It's good that many (mostly born in a western country) are aware of racism and try to prevent it. However, that usually doesn't apply to people with a different cultural background. E.g., I saw many times that Indians treated other Indians differently based on their caste. That happened in silicon valley companies in the US.
• silexia 4y ago
  DEI is the new racism and sexism. It's just as bad as the old racism and sexism. The fundamental issue is we have lost our freedoms. We live in a socialist society where we have to follow party lines. It all starts with laws that sound fantastic, but took away freedoms of speech.