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Microsoft laid off a DEI team, DEI is 'no longer business critical'
- inglor_cz 2y agoGood. DEI is a hangover from 2020 that, aside from buying some cheap publicity points, didn't do anything for anyone (except the DEI activists themselves). The very theory that skin-deep diversity helps businesses grow is based on extremely flimsy observations. It is likely non-reproducible. Notably, the most important competitors of US businesses in East Asia don't even pretend to care about diversity, and they thrive. If an opponent completely ignores something that you worship and isn't stricken by the gods for his insolence, chances are that your gods are false, or, at best, very weak.
- hkt 2y agoMaybe there's more to having values than competitive advantage. Just a thought.
- selectnull 2y agoWhat values? Those that say that a company should strive to achive certain ratio of black and white employees, no matter their real competencies?
- ImHereToVote 2y agoFor the neoliberal mind, values are just vibes.
- locopati 2y agoto say that a company should be aware of brospeak in their job postings if they want to have women applying for jobs. to say that a company shouldn't just rely on internal referrals if they want to diversify teams. your suggestion that diverse hiring equals less competent hiring is offensive.
- inglor_cz 2y ago"your suggestion that diverse hiring equals less competent hiring is offensive." Well, so was suggestion that the Earth revolves around the Sun, once. What really interests me is if it is true, not if it is offensive. Truth > Conformism, at least if you don't want to end up with an ossified society.
- locopati 2y agowhere are your facts to back this up then?
- selectnull 2y agoFacts to back what up, exactly? GP said two statements: 1) the Earth revolves around the Sun and 2) Truth > Conformism You are asking to facts about that?
- therouwboat 2y agoI guess the idea is that average black worker is just as good as white worker, so why do you have 3 black workers and 50 white workers? From what I have seen at work, gender or color of the skin has very little to do with how good worker someone is.
- selectnull 2y agoI agree with you that gender or color of the skin has nothing to do with how well can someone write code. Both gender nor skin color should not be any factor in hiring.
- f6v 2y ago> so why do you have 3 black workers and 50 white workers? Because race has correlation with low-income communities that prevent people from going to colleges. The pool of competent black employees will just be smaller. I’d argue that’s a state problem, not for a company to solve. It’s like a DEI recruiter wanted to have 50-50 men and women in software development at a company I worked for. I asked if there’re 50-50 of men and women in the total jobseeker pool. The answer was no(fewer women), but the person was determined to play a zero-sum game with other companies. It’s insane.
- nox101 2y agoAny maybe the types of DEI initiatives promoted and implemented over the last few are worse for actually achieving DEI. Just a thought
- inglor_cz 2y agoThe Amish have a very strong set of values, but don't expect the next Google to come from them. And I don't think that Microsoft or anyone else held DEI values deeply anyway. Corporations being the ultimate turncoats, they just did what was demanded of them in the heat of the moment. If, in 2040, there comes a strong wave of people identifying as pineapples, expect all the CEOs to wear pineapple suits for one summer or so. Except Musk, he will don a potato suit on purpose and move the HQ to Martian Sands.
- cm2187 2y agoPlus it was always illogical to tell the most successful corporations that DEI is essential to become one of the most successful corporations and that they aren't doing DEI right.
- Animats 2y ago> If an opponent completely ignores something that you worship and isn't stricken by the gods for his insolence, chances are that your gods are false, or, at best, very weak. That's one of the best theological arguments I've seen in some time.
- michaelmrose 2y agoA strict ordering of candidates by merit quantified however you please followed by selection of top n candidates ought to on average look exactly like candidate pool however since we are garbage at ranking people it often looks like the existing powers that be in culture gender and color. DEI provides impetus to select or at least give additional attention to candidates that otherwise might be overlooked. To put it simpler if you have to hire 100 people out of 1000 and 10% of your qualified candidate pool is black you likely have 10 qualified black people. DEI means you won't hire 99 white dudes and instead will try to select from the entire population. The statistical existence of the 10 qualitied black folks means that a diverse selection will on average trade someone from >100 ranking for someone <100 (better) ranking improving fitness. For smaller sizes a fair selection is more likely to diverge from population and your team of 5 doesn't have to look like a burger king commercial with one of each kind of kid but its on average apt to say fairness improves fitness and I say that as a white dude.
- hn-lurk 2y agoThat makes sense, you are just the right amount of racist when hiring
- michaelmrose 2y agoNo what it means is that instead of hiring bob's friend another white dude and then james that guys best bud you pull some resumes and do some interviews in hopes of not missing out on qualified people.
- hn-lurk 2y agoIssues with nepotism aside, I bet hiring on candidate merit (blind) would require not flexing your racism. You're willing to discard candidates that don't meet the skin color you prefer, that's some heavy stuff.
- michaelmrose 2y agoThere is no blind hiring or objective measurement of merit in most jobs just a biased subjective affair easily given to pre-judgment.
- sofixa 2y ago> Notably, the most important competitors of US businesses in East Asia don't even pretend to care about diversity, and they thrive. Their workforce pools are wildly different, and the only diversity they could realistically try to achieve would be to hire more women; the fact that they don't is part of the institutional sexism that is one of the main reasons driving those countries on a downward spiral of crumbling birth rates and maybe one day to extinction. Is that the best example to follow?
- horeszko 2y agohttps://archive.ph/3A7b3 https://archive.ph/3A7b3
- foobarkey 2y agoSanity starting to return
- rob74 2y agoWhat's really revealing is the herd mentality the whole tech industry seems to have: in 2020, everyone had to have a (specialized) DEI team, now they are (apparently) no longer needed, although not much has really changed. Same with hiring like there was no tomorrow a few years ago, and now layoffs. Same with encouraging remote working during the pandemic, and now trying to push through return to office mandates, no matter if it makes sense (for the individual, for the team or for the company) or not. Wonder what's next?
- rapsey 2y agoWasn't DEI being forced into corporate America by the government and by large funds like BlackRock and such?
- khazhoux 2y agoNo one can speak on behalf of all corporate America, but I didn't see that to be the case at all in tech.
- zpeti 2y agoIt depends, yes ESG was pushing these agendas, but I’m not sure how much influence blackrock and vanguard have in the tech sector. Although it seems many in the tech sector agreed with ESG and implemented it anyway.
- tomschlick 2y agoBlackrock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively own almost 20% of MSFT shares so they probably had a very large influence. https://www.techopedia.com/largest-microsoft-shareholders https://www.techopedia.com/largest-microsoft-shareholders
- lupusreal 2y agoMaybe to an extent, but I'm pretty sure they willingly adopted the garb of this ideology because it aligned with a vocal portion of their workforce, so the ideology could be used as a substitute for financial compensation. Basically a free way to make workers happier without having to pay them more.
- pharos92 2y agoFunny (and also great) how these ideologically insane and unproductive cultural trends are the first to fall to the wayside once the economic conditions worsen and interest rates rise. I don't like being gas-lit by my employer. I prefer the honesty that they only care about money. That way we all know where we stand.
- khazhoux 2y ago> ideologically insane and unproductive cultural trends There are certainly some cartoonish outcomes (like my company no longer calls team meetings "All Hands"... in case, you know, someone doesn't have hands). But there's nothing insane about a company thinking about what role it can play towards helping people up. I would be happy if my company donated computing equipment and resources to disadvantaged communities around the country. Having grown up in Appalachia with little computing resources nearby, my envy when I learned people my age had access to Sparc Stations and giant tech bookstores...
- starspangled 2y agoThis title is misleading. Microsoft did not say DEI is no longer business critical. The disgruntled lead of a fired DEI team accused the company of no longer considering it business critical. Microsoft's statement was the opposite, "Our D&I commitments remain unchanged [...]". Interesting they call it D&I now. I guess the E was always a bit awkward considering the CEO earns $40 million.
- zpeti 2y agoSigh. First of all, Nadella has created a trillion dollars of value over his leadership. His pay packet of $40m is nothing. Second, the E was never about equality of pay, or fairness. It’s equity. It was about quotas in hiring and equality of outcome, meaning active discrimination against certain groups. Which does cross a very dangerous line.
- blitzar 2y agoAn untrained chimp would have created 2 trillion dollars of value durring the same period sitting in that seat.
- ssijak 2y agoNo it would not
- zpeti 2y agoWhy didn’t IBM, oracle, or google or apple do it then? Or you? You do realise you are saying, if you haven’t done it, you are less than an untrained chimp yourself, just by the logic of your statement?
- blitzar 2y ago> Or you? Because I didnt take over Microsoft, a 40 year old company, with monopolies firmly entrenched in 2014.
- 2y ago
- brodo 2y ago> The email says the team was eliminated because of "changing business needs" as of July 1. It's unclear how many employees were affected. It would be interesting to know how big the team was and if similar teams existed or still exist in other countries. In Germany, "DEI" is usually part of HR. There has to be a person responsible for it by law. However, these people typically have other responsibilities too.
- koliber 2y agoThere is an important word in management: optics. It matters at all levels. It means "how things look from the outside to a person not familiar with what is happening inside." At one point, DEI was a high concern for the entire nation, and companies were compelled to do something about it. Some actually made a positive change. Many created a position or team and not much was done. Regardless of what actually happened, the optics were aligned with the priority, and that mattered too. This happens everywhere. The security theater after 9/11 is optics. The graph that you present to your VP showing an increase in code coverage is optics. There might be valuable work also happening, but the optics are important. Without them, people would not see that you are trying to do something.
- red_admiral 2y agoMaybe they care about diversity as much as before, but looked at what their DEI team had actually achieved and didn't find very much.
- davidmurdoch 2y agoBut they hosted some great parties in June! And they even updated their logo everywhere (except the middle east)!
- lupusreal 2y ago> (except the middle east)! Indeed. Such displays aren't meant to change what people believe, only to make people feel good by affirming what they already believe. In places where the majority don't feel that way, the display is omitted. It's cynical pandering, not earnest activism.
- mikrl 2y agoI remember in the last year or two, a lot of fury about a mod that de-DEIed a AAA video game. People were asking what kind of monster would do such a thing and it was pulled from the hosting site, but it turned out the modder just enabled the Mideast localization for American versions of the game, to make the streets of NYC more decked out with US flags than they were in the US localization. So, who’s the monster? The modder for distributing a patch which flipped an internal switch in the game, or the people who put the switch there in the first place?
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- fuzzythinker 2y agoDEI: diversity, equity and inclusion. Is it just me not knowing (article didn't define it)?
- ghusto 2y agoIt was never a genuine concern, and just covering their backs given the social climate. It's cute that this person took it seriously.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]