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Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

• namirez 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • nemo44x 2y ago
    They should statues of him and erect them all over the Bay Area. He was brave as evidenced by being witch hunted. There has been a lot of talk about “speaking truth to power” over the last few years and most of that is BS. What Damore did truly was.
• spondylosaurus 2y ago
  > We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone. The new(ly leaked) moderation guidelines might suggest otherwise...
  • jsheard 2y ago
    Apparently they consider platforming hate speech to be beneficial because it could bolster sympathy for the groups being attacked. I wish I was joking. https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-trans-guidelines-hate-speech/ https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-trans-guidelines-hate-s... Alex Schultz, the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased support for LGBTQ rights.
    • jandrese 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • dullcrisp 2y ago
        Ultimately, kind of. There were some bumps along the road though.
        • lesuorac 2y ago
          Kind of? More like absolutely no. The administration went on to go round up Jews and literally kill them. Co-incidentally, that administration was friends with a far away island nation that attacked a 3rd party who ultimately assisted with removing the administration from power for completely non-jewish reasons. And if somebody wants to point out the USSR's help with removing the administration; that was also not for jewish reasons.
          • dullcrisp 2y ago
            I was being facetious, sorry.
            • wussboy 2y ago
              [flagged]
            • eapressoandcats 2y ago
              I saw that, but that was a tough one to land.
        • NewJazz 2y ago
          Only a few million little bumps, no big deal...
      • deadbabe 2y ago
        A more recent example would be Gaza. People didn’t care till they saw images. Lately, the imagery has disappeared and people don’t care again.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
    • spondylosaurus 2y ago
      And a marketer too! My god. Kind of an insane stance to take considering we've seen exactly what happens when queer people's friends and family members get pummeled with anti-gay and anti-trans hate campaigns... which is that half of them end up falling for it and turning on their friend/family members.
    • fzeroracer 2y ago
      A company would have to put me at gunpoint to make me say something similarly as insane. I'd sooner quit and give the entire place a massive middle finger.
    • briansteffens 2y ago
      Is there anything that couldn't be justified with this style of thinking? Would this person support legalizing murder since more murders might raise awareness of how bad murder is?
      • wiseowise 2y ago
        Why would you compare hate comment posted online to murder?
    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      Bullies important part of playground ecosystem, says bully lol
    • say_it_as_it_is 2y ago
      The world moved away from legitimate grievances to something else entirely. Hate speech in 2025 is not the same as it was in 2000. None for the better.
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    For anyone unfamiliar: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-speech-rules-allow-users-call-lgbtq-people-mentally-ill-rcna186700 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee... > “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the revised company guidelines read.
    • jandrese 2y ago
      > common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’ Are they still mad over the couch thing?
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        "That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry."
      • pesus 2y ago
        They are always incredibly upset about extremely mild "insults". There's a 50/50 chance you get downvoted for pointing out their weirdness.
    • mossTechnician 2y ago
      This is practically a guideline to people who want to deploy hate speech against other minorities on the platform: just make a topic "controversial" enough.
    • returntocollege 2y ago
      [dead]
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    • segasaturn 2y ago
      Additionally they've unbanned the use of some slurs, such as calling other people "retarded". Not a nice feeling having grown up with that word directed at me almost every day.
  • mossTechnician 2y ago
    Is this a reference to the changed TOS or something else? The recent policy carve-out allowing "allegations of mental illness" towards LGBT people (but no other minority) definitely speaks to a lack of universality, but that's from Facebook itself: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/ https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/h...
    • jsheard 2y ago
      The Intercept leaked more detailed internal guidelines: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-hate-speech-content-moderation/ https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...
      • elsonrodriguez 2y ago
        Holy shit.
  • jazzyjackson 2y ago
    God save us if they're updating their KPI from "engagement" to "impact"
  • barbazoo 2y ago
    "impact" can mean all things
  • praptak 2y ago
    It is "everyone". Just like "all lives matter" is a deeply humanistic message about the sanctity of life of all human beings, nothing else.
    • spondylosaurus 2y ago
      Ha. Of course.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • wmf 2y ago
    Everyone will be insulted equally.
• JohnMakin 2y ago
  I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
  • pton_xd 2y ago
    > you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape" Isn't that the same reason they were rolled out in the first place?
  • jandrese 2y ago
    It only seems bizarre if you didn't consider DEI programs to be largely symbolic corporate puffery in the first place. For all of the hate they received from some political spheres they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start, especially in larger companies.
    • barbazoo 2y ago
      I'm curious, what gives you that kind of deep insight?
      • AndyNemmity 2y ago
        It's not deep insight. I am for real DEI. That is not what is actually happening. The net impacts are essentially marketing, which has value in it's own right for sure, but I'd prefer real change as opposed to marketing impacts, and forced trainings everyone must take.
        • whynotminot 2y ago
• dagmx 2y ago
  Meta have some of the most double speak I’ve seen. They’ll say one set of virtuous sounding goals while completely undermining it in the same breath. This is just them running with their tails between their legs before the new admin takes over.
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    I think this is the norm for any topic that is politicized. You could have ChatGPT or some other LLM write the memo and it wouldn't be much better or worse.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • macNchz 2y ago
    Goes way, way back—I remember announcements nearly 20 years ago where they were basically removing/setting bad defaults on what primitive privacy controls they had at the time, but calling it making things "more social."
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • loeg 2y ago
    Suppose you made a bad policy decision and want to roll it back. How do you do that? Anything you do is going to piss someone off. I think they're trying to do it in a plausibly reasonable way without shitting on everyone who worked on it for a couple years.
    • paxys 2y ago
      It's funny how they suddenly realized and reversed every "wrong" policy decision made over many years just days before a new administration takes over. And these new policies are exactly aligned with what the administration wants.
• ColdTakes 2y ago
  That title image looks like it is from the set of a sitcom starring Mark Zuckerberg. DEI initiatives have always been a dog and pony show, not a thing executives have ever truly cared about and they are now in a political environment where they can show what they believe in. People will learn the hard way these companies have never cared about you.
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    They may have been a dog and pony show but were definitely real and forced executives to change how they hire and promote in illegal, discriminatory ways.
    • AndyNemmity 2y ago
      Perhaps in your experience, I would be for them if they "forced executives to change how they hire". From my perspective, that has not happened. My problem is their lack of teeth to do what they say they do.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
        There were teeth, in that your own performance review (as a leader) would be affected by it. Depending on your level, your own promotion would require certain stats for your teams for it to be approved. So people made all sorts of decisions - including hiring people they shouldn’t have hired - in order to push those numbers to where they were forced to. The same happened behind closed doors on promotions.
        • AndyNemmity 2y ago
          That was not the case in my experience. I am learning that we all have vastly different experiences on what the implementation was, making the discussion rather difficult because we are all talking from very different vantage points.
• erulabs 2y ago
  I think it's somewhat important to understand meta and its products are _not_ tech products. Outside of React and llama and the like, Meta is not building for or speaking to the tech community. If what they do or say sounds like populism, it's because it is. It can be ham fisted, because the majority of people are only barely paying attention, and the majority of people is who facebook wants to please. Like politics, things feel dumb and ham-fisted, because they are. They're playing at winning wide swaths of billions of people, and the majority of people aren't paying attention, so hypocrisy doesn't register as well as just being vaguely aligned with what's popular. I don't mean any of this in an derogatory "unwashed masses" sort of way, it's just how it is.
  • jdiez17 2y ago
    Thank you for putting this so eloquently, especially “the majority of people are only barely paying attention”. It’s not necessarily bad, as you said, just the reality. We may wish that reality were different or so, but we shouldn’t resent this fact.
  • darkwizard42 2y ago
    Yeah, I don't think the billions you are talking about care about Meta's hiring policies. I don't even think billions of people accurately understand what it means to work at "Meta" vs. Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp (and even then, I doubt majority know that Meta owns all three surfaces).
  • jorblumesea 2y ago
    I don't think Meta was in any danger of anything, either implementing pro or anti DEI policies. Zuck is still owner founder. He does whatever he wants, see: metaverse fiasco. The average person could not care less about meta's DEI policy, unlike Meta's content moderation policy. Meta was not in danger of being regulated by congress, who can't seem to even fund the government properly, less agree on any kind of regulations on tech hiring. Who does this pander to exactly? Meta's reputation isn't exactly stellar to begin with among all sides. This feels like an incorrect read on the situation. More likely this is just a blank check to hire as many people on visa as they want without having to conflict with any official policies. Meta already has entire orgs staffed by people of certain countries (hint: not US).
• coldpepper 2y ago
  Money always following power. Power always following money.
• AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  This comment is based upon n two assumptions: 1) Twitter has imploded, and is on the road to Myspace level relevance 2) that implosion is due to a removal of moderation I'll try to keep it politically neutral. But this and other Facebook announcements means inexorable collapse is on the medium term horizon, because they mirror what Twitter did These actions could possibly be done with social network circa early to mid 2010s. But since the rise of massive online campaigns of disinformation or propaganda, and then rocket fueled by AI... It means not only will left-wing people run away in droves, but then toxicity explodes and successive waves of moderates and apolitical people get driven away. It's interesting because people seem to have forgotten what the word moderation means. It's keeping out the extremes. In particular, the extremes of emotions. Which then cloud any sort of productive discussion. Without moderation, especially with the organized ai and misinformation and other social Network phenomena, The pure outrage cycle while individually effective for posts, very rapidly makes the overall ecosystem completely intolerable. Because one thing at the political extremes I would argue more strongly on the right but definitely on the left, is intolerance.
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    by that same logic Bluesky should be overtaking X but it isn't X is growing even bigger and has international reach which Bluesky doesn't
    • eapressoandcats 2y ago
      It simply hasn’t been long enough. I wouldn’t necessarily bet that it will, but X has lost net users and Bluesky is gaining them so if trends continue (they might not) Bluesky will overtake X, but Twitter also wasn’t built in a year.
      • pkkkzip 2y ago
        > X has lost net users and Bluesky is gaining them X grew by about 47% last year so im not sure what net loss you are talking about Bluesky gained X users but that rate has now almost certainly slowed down Many who publicly advertised they were quitting X for Bluesky are back on X as they don't get anywhere near the engagement they are used to.
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  There are two things that are important to separate here: 1. In one hand, the rolling back of how DEI has/was implemented I think can be a good thing. I think lots of people, myself included, believe that it "went off the rails", but most importantly, I think it ended up being counterproductive to its end goals. Nearly everyone I know who wasn't part of the DEI cottage industry came to view many/most of these programs with cynicism, even if they weren't vocal about it. 2. Don't mistake the validity of number one for thinking that this is just pure and unadulterated pandering to the incoming administration. Meta would sacrifice small babies if they thought it would make them more money in the long run. The reason I believe so strongly about number 2 is what happened with their content guidelines changes. I'm gay, and I'm actually fine with people calling me insane. But I also better be able to call lots of religious practices based around some invisible sky fairy insane too. The fact that the guidelines specifically called out "it's OK to call gay and transgender people mentally ill", and only those groups, is grossly despicable, and clearly shows Zuckerberg is just taint licking his new overlords. And to people who still work at Meta, I also think that's fine - we all need a paycheck. But please don't try to convince yourself or anyone else that you're doing it for anything but the money. I'm so sick of these tech companies talking about their lofty goals (and honestly, have been for a while long before Trump) when it's so abundantly clear it's just about making money. And again, I think that's fine to only be about money - it's a business after all. Just don't pretend you're doing some sort of societal good.
  • mempko 2y ago
    Except the whole reason for governments to charter companies is the belief it's good for societal goals. Otherwise why allow private and public companies in the first place if their only goal is to make money, that you as a government create? This idea that business has this singular goal is the result of brainwashing and shows a deep misunderstanding of both history and how things work today.
  • techfeathers 2y ago
    I’m really disturbed the extent to which companies are in lockstep with the government, and this should be a conservative value? I’m glad to see a reset on DEI in general, it’s not going away but we’ve needed new ideas in the space and I suspect we’ll see a resurgence sooner than you’d think.
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • mempko 2y ago
    Which race? Which gender?
• Gys 2y ago
  DEI = Diversity, equity, and inclusion (Not explained in the article)
  • breakingrules3 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • karmasimida 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • npteljes 2y ago
      >racism and sexism is becoming less popular. In the world generally, I see the opposite, rising tensions.
• joduplessis 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    > Optimising for the majority over the minority is always good. Unless it's taxes.
    • joduplessis 2y ago
      Like, ja, obviously.
  • ubertaco 2y ago
    >Optimising for the majority over the minority is always good. That's the literal opposite of capitalism. Capitalism is optimizing for the minority (rich investors -- the "capital holders") over the majority (workers who have significantly less capital).
  • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    > Optimising for the majority over the minority is always good. Sweet. Socialized medicine when?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• hypeatei 2y ago
  Seems fine as it always appeared as virtue signaling to me. This is one less talking point that conservatives will use when literally anything happens.
  • unethical_ban 2y ago
    I am open to discussing the efficacy of DEI vs its harms. BUT The right wing media machine will never run out of silly things to tell its consumers to be angry about.
    • iforgot22 2y ago
      I honestly think race/gender-based hiring or school admission is a legitimate thing to be angry about. Democrats have been clear about their stance on this for decades, and they can always change it if they want. It's not like the Hillary Clinton email "scandal."
  • thrance 2y ago
    They don't care about reality, watch them blame the democrats for everything wrong happening in the next 4 years, despite them no longer holding any meaningful power.
  • npteljes 2y ago
    >This is one less talking point that conservatives will use when literally anything happens. In this regards, I trust them to handle themselves well, even in a face of shortage. And it's not like grounded arguments matter in era that is being dubbed "post-truth politics".
  • CurtHagenlocher 2y ago
    This change is no less "virtue signaling" than the previous policy; it's just signaling to a different audience.
• baq 2y ago
  Are they rolling back Chinese and Indian managers only hiring Chinese and Indian folks, too?
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • dang 2y ago
      "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • triceratops 2y ago
    You want to...make their hiring more diverse?
    • baq 2y ago
      Preposterous!
    • thepasswordis 2y ago
      No I think what they're saying is that they want ability to be the only (or at least by far the primary) metric used to evaluate the fitness of a candidate.
      • paxys 2y ago
        There's no magical measure for ability. People tend to hire people who look like them and act like them, simply because in their mind that is what seems correct. That's how humans have always behaved, and it isn't going to change.
      • triceratops 2y ago
        Then they're saying specifically Chinese and Indian managers hire people who are less skilled than the best candidates available to them. It's a fishy claim that needs proof.
• antithesis-nl 2y ago
  [flagged]
• loeg 2y ago
  Good to hear. Racism / sexism has no place in hiring practices and was always illegal.
  • thinkingtoilet 2y ago
    And we all know there was no racism or sexism before DEI programs.
    • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      Valid point. But the cure should not also be the disease.
  • wussboy 2y ago
    I feel like people who say this haven't read the research about our unconscious biases. My personal "hit me on the head" moment was reading about the Cincinnati Orchestra who started auditioning candidates behind a curtain and suddenly found their ratio of male:female went from 3:1 to 1:1. No one at that organization was consciously discriminating. Everyone thought as you did that they were acting without racism/sexism. And yet (at least) sexism was obvious once they removed it from the hiring equation. And this leaves people in a quandary. How do you control for sexism when you can't just hide your candidate behind a curtain? The solution society has tried is to mandate ratios. Why they tried this makes sense. It's obvious downfalls make sense. I'm not aware of any other suggestion that is viable.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • klooney 2y ago
      You're behind the times- blind auditions have been disfavored by DEI-practitioners for years, on the grounds that they're not as effective as quotas.
    • AlexandrB 2y ago
      This is a funny example because some in the pro-DEI movement advocate for ending blind auditions to enhance diversity[1]. I think if we could somehow do "blind auditions" for any kind of work, that would be the ideal case of non-biased hiring. But if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI advocates would be on board. [1] https://archive.is/iH2uh https://archive.is/iH2uh
• mempko 2y ago
  I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.
  • TSUTiger 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • afavour 2y ago
      IMO Twitter has a core failure in promoting premium accounts over regular ones, then compensating those users for the amount of traffic they generate. Almost any post that goes viral will be swarmed by trolling/low effort responses from premium users who are looking to capitalize on outrage clicks. It's an exhausting user experience, IMO. I don't miss it at all.
    • cableshaft 2y ago
      Disagree, I still have my account and check it periodically when I get linked to something on Twitter and the feed and trending are both pretty crap (maybe it would be different if I used it every day, but I never used it every day, even when I created the account ~10-ish years ago. But my feeds are way worse than they used to be). And it keeps putting things I really don't want to see in my feed, that aren't by anyone I follow. Facebook has also gotten worse with its feed as far as sometimes injecting things into it I don't want, but most of it is still decent or at least relevant to my interests, and usually product or harmless news related (I get a lot of Kickstarter and mobile game ads, or celebrity gossip for some reason, even though I couldn't care less about most celebrities' lives) instead of political outrage and misinformation like I tend to get on Twitter.
    • portaouflop 2y ago
      No thanks I won’t waste my limited lifetime tweaking some algorithm to serve me better ragebait. Haven’t used any of these platforms in the last 5 years and I haven’t missed it a single minute - you should try it sometime
• throwpoaster 2y ago
  That this is a brave counter-cultural stance shows how far we fell.
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Were you also trying to figure out which countries you could move to, and which friends and family you were willing to leave to do so? Or was that just me?
    • lobsterthief 2y ago
      I am actively doing this as well
    • anonfordays 2y ago
      What countries were you looking at?
• paxys 2y ago
  DEI was a song and dance that companies put on for the media, politicians, investors, employees, and the public at large. Now anti-DEI is a song and dance for the exact same reason. If you have been in the business long enough, you will know that the company has NO ONE's interests at heart. Never had and never will. They will discriminate against any race they have to, whether majority or minority, if it leads to an extra dollar on their balance sheet.
  • teeray 2y ago
    > the company has NO ONE's interests at heart Except for shareholder value
    • bhouston 2y ago
      > Except for shareholder value Well, it depends. Zuckerberg has controlling interest in Meta even though he owns a minority of it (<15%) because of its dual share structure. Meta will do what he wants it do. Google has a similar structure.
      • jjulius 2y ago
        Semantics. I'd replace "shareholder value" with "making a chunk of people insanely wealthy".
        • iforgot22 2y ago
          It's not semantics. Those founders have more voting power than their actual share in the companies, so they don't have the same incentives as regular shareholders.
          • zht 2y ago
            the founders are also shareholders so they are still maximizing shareholder vlaue
• bnetd 2y ago
  [dead]
• bhouston 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • toasteros 2y ago
    I don't know much about Axios. Can you elaborate on what the clear motivation is?
    • bhouston 2y ago
      Given it was leaked to what is primarily a national US political news outlet which is highly read by Washington DC, it seems like the cancelling of DEI was performative itself. I am saying it was done for political reasons and it was leaked to ensure that the politicos that would be interested in this move would see it.
  • loeg 2y ago
    This went out to 70,000 employees at the same time, it’s not a “leak” so much as a public policy.
• deadbabe 2y ago
  Diversity should never be a goal or initiative. It’s a value. You wake up every day and practice diverse hiring practices. The moment you put a tangible target to hit, is when you gamify diversity into something bad.
  • mmooss 2y ago
    How do you make it happen? Relying on people to "wake up every day and practice diverse hiring practices" wasn't working.
    • asdasdsddd 2y ago
      How do you know its not working? Because there are statistical differences in outcomes between groups of people?
    • deadbabe 2y ago
      It starts by hiring people who share your values. Don’t hire scumbags, liars, racists, Neo-Nazis, etc. If someone demonstrates they don’t represent your company’s values, get rid of them or put them in non-decision making roles and keep an eye on them.
      • surgical_fire 2y ago
        Company values are bullshit. Corporations only care about making money, no matter the damage they cause in their profit-seeking motive. All else is fluff.
        • mmooss 2y ago
          X doesn't seem too motivated to make money; Musk's decisions seem to pursue is values (power) and sacrifice revenue. It seems like Facebooks recent decisions may do the same.
        • deadbabe 2y ago
          If you don’t give a fuck about anything besides making money then why even pretend to care about diversity if you don’t have to? Seems like corporations will drop the mask in 2025.
• Animats 2y ago
  So far, Zuckerberg (Meta), Pichai (Google), Bezos (Amazon),Cook (Apple), and Sarandos (Netflix) have all personally made the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring. That's all of the FAANG CEOs. Nadella and Altman phoned it in. The Wall Street Journal has a long list.[1] It works for Putin. [1] https://archive.is/ozPQi https://archive.is/ozPQi
  • yoavm 2y ago
    As an outsider looking at the US, this looks so dangerous. It feels like the whole democratic system is bending to the power of money. Just a few weeks ago, an American friend was making the comparison between the number of billion $ companies in the EU vs the US. I was trying to tell them that it isn't necessarily a bad thing to have less of that - I rather have 1,000 million $ companies than a billion $ one. The concentration of financial power seems so unhealthy, and it looks like it's crippling the whole American system.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • janderson215 2y ago
      The US isn’t just home to the largest companies. You only hear about the multinational corporations when you’re in other countries, but all those companies operate in the US initially because the US is very friendly to small businesses relative to the rest of the world. I would be willing to place a substantial wager on the US having more operating businesses per capita than any large country in the EU. Business in the US is underappreciated in so many ways.
      • yoavm 2y ago
        Could be, but I don't think it changes my point about some companies (or people) acquiring too much wealth (aka power), in a way that risks democracy.
        • janderson215 2y ago
• romellem 2y ago
  Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals." Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics: For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe. [1]: https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/22160K/20241115/NPS_591967/INDEX.HTML?page=36 https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/22160K/20241115/NPS...
  • ericmcer 2y ago
    Did Costco ever have a diversity issue? I don't think people are worried about getting more representation among grocery store cashiers.
    • afavour 2y ago
      I don't see them as different to any other company, really. I could imagine diversity in their staff of buyers would be useful, for example, to ensure they're stocking products that represent the different desires of different groups.
      • renewiltord 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • afavour 2y ago
          Do you think this response contributed to the discussion?
• mmooss 2y ago
  The problem isn't evil, but the lack of any leader standing up for good (using simplistic terms). The evil is always there, in our souls and in our society, as is the good; we just need to choose and use the latter to check the former. Who of any serious stature is standing up to Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump, etc.? The absence - the empty stage - is shocking. It is one of Biden's great responsibilities, but he has long abandoned the country and the world in this essential sense and bears great responsibility for the outcome. As a simple example, who is standing up for the LA fire chief? Is the mayor, the governor, national leaders? If they have, they are highly ineffectual - I haven't heard a thing - which is also failure on their part. It's the responsibilities of many others. It's the responsibility of people here, in our own small community. If you are the leader, and now we all are, it's not your role to toy with the latest thought experiment; it is to make a just community. This isn't hacking the new thing, it is building critical human-rated systems on which lives, freedom, justice, and the future depend. It shouldn't be hard for organizations to implement just policies: Agree to eliminate anything that favors one group. Agree it should be equal to everyone. And that means majority and minority, powerful and vulnerable: Eliminate anything that favors a group, including what favors the powerful majority group - which is mostly what is favored.
  • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
    Zuckerberg and Musk are billionaires, money always grants power. What are Biden and Harris supposed to do when the swathes of land that vote for politicians, don't vote for them? And when Congress doesn't back them up? Should they just... say "Pweeeaase" louder? This is why recently I've switched from "Progressive income taxes are good because we need to fund social programs, and rich people can afford to bear a greater tax burden" to "Taxing rich people is essential to democracy, since wealth can buy political power."
    • mmooss 2y ago
      Biden and Harris aren't victims, they are leaders; they have have power. Their job is to guide people. They can frame the issues, inspire people, lead them. They can persuade people just as well as others, or better given their authority. Musk and Zuckerberg and lots of others don't hesitate to lead. > And when Congress doesn't back them up? Should they just... say "Pweeeaase" louder? No, that's pretty ignorant about politics. Again, they aren't victims. They make things happen. There are ways to persuade the public and compel Congress. But the Dems have completely abdicated any such thing, as if they aren't politicians or leaders.
• 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  "As it turns out, principles are for sale"
• gorgoiler 2y ago
  Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none. When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.
  • bigstrat2003 2y ago
    This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black people at such a rate that there literally are not enough black people in the country to meet that quota. And yet, this sort of brainless activism continues unabated - why I can't begin to guess. I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided. It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those careers, that's perfectly fine.
    • pavl- 2y ago
      One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel" isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't personally impact you?
• carabiner 2y ago
  I'm most curious about the timing. Could this be related to the X narrative of LA fire response being compromised by DEI hiring? Zuck really sounds like he's mimicking X TPOT dialogues these days.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• josefritzishere 2y ago
  Let me get thsi right... Meta resolved issues with a performative DEI program with an even more performative act pandering to an incoming administration which is openly histile to POC... that's not better, it's worse.
  • Pigalowda 2y ago
    You’re right, it’s all performative. Meta will do what it takes to keep regulators off its back and reduce friction. If Dems are in power then they’ll do fact checks and DEI. If they aren’t then they’ll get rid of it. They’re like fair weather fans changing ball caps and jerseys based on the favored team. They’ll kiss the ring, throw some cash where it needs to be, make some meaningless changes that satisfy the current political party in power, and get back to making billions.
• timmg 2y ago
  From the memo: > We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it. I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your executive bonus will take into consideration how close you got to X." In a world like that, many (most/all) executives will do whatever they can to get to those goals -- even if it goes against other official (or even legal) policies. And that certainly would explain a lot of the behavior I saw working at a large company during DEI peak. (Not to say that is any kind of proof of anything untoward).
  • az226 2y ago
    At big tech company I used to work for ($3T) they did this in 2017, and my manager did not give a single offer to a man in years even when everyone said hire, and the next 14 of 14 offers were to women, several minorities, despite many having barely any “hire” votes.
    • titanomachy 2y ago
      Must be Microsoft, I don’t think Apple and Nvidia went hard on this
      • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
        Nvidia has the polar opposite problem on their hands, they're one of the most Asian-overrepresented companies in America. 56% of employees are of Asian descent, in a country where Asians make up 6% of the population. Second largest market cap in the world. And yet, not a peep about it from the social justice folk, funny how that works. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1369578/nvidia-share-of-employees-by-race-ethnicity/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1369578/nvidia-share-of-...
        • pcbro141 2y ago
          Pretty sure every big tech company is Asian-overrepresented. Apparently almost 75% of tech employees in Silicon Valley are immigrants, no doubt the vast majority are Asian (East Asian and Indian). https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens-make-up-nearly-three-quarters-of-silicon-valley-tech-workforce-report-says/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...
• OrvalWintermute 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • mateus1 2y ago
    [flagged]
• throwpoaster 2y ago
  ITT a new step in the Gaslighting Slide just dropped! 5. It’s been pretend this whole time. Previously: 1. It’s not happening. 2. It’s only happening a bit. 3. It’s good that it’s happening. 4. It’s the people complaining who are the problem.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• firefoxd 2y ago
  I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1]. What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert? In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way. Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company. However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview. Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188 [2]: https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4?si=wtnQtBOE-fs4V7gR https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4?si=wtnQtBOE-fs4V7gR
  • krainboltgreene 2y ago
    Yes and the fun part is a lot of people see this "eager yet resistant" as a damnification of diversity initiatives instead of the calcification of current systemic problems.
  • ncr100 2y ago
    This is saying those businesses all used DEI for show, and suggests their efforts were half-hearted, if I read correctly. Their metrics I assume are zero / flat, around 'success' for DEI, derivatively. To me this suggests the next best focus area for increased fairness of societal fiscal (opportunity) performance is regulation, perhaps driven by social change and social pressure. I have next to no influence. Still I wonder if I'm naive? ALSO, awesome work Ibrahim / firefoxd, you deserve to be honored for your experience and celebrated for meaningful efforts to make society better. I would not know about this without you: > If you are black and take a group picture with your white colleagues [on Zoom] one evening, eventually someone will make the joke that all they see are your teeth. If you are black and hang out with your white colleague, people will always assume you are the subordinate.
• tantalor 2y ago
  > Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged These challenges are always in bad faith. It starts off by assuming this practice is exclusionary of white males. We know that's not true, because that would (obviously) be illegal (Title VII) and these companies are not dumb. > there are other ways... Like what? Why won't those "other ways" be immediately challenged by the same bad faith actors?
• alangibson 2y ago
  That they decided to fold before even being challenged really shows you how deeply held their DEI beliefs were.
• gusfoo 2y ago
  > Read the memo from Meta in full: That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very silly thing to do. I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable, stable products when I buy things. Not the skin colour of who owns the business. To filter things based on the owner's identity (in the American sense of the word) may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. It would not be a sensible thing to do.
  • fourside 2y ago
    > may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse One of the biggest wins for the anti-DEI crowd was convincing people that embracing DEI implicitly meant getting something of lesser quality or value. Here, you assume that focusing on businesses owned by people of color necessitates lowering your standards of your suppliers below acceptable levels.
    • Nathanba 2y ago
      The irony is that he didn't say that at all and it's actually you who assumed this.
      • fourside 2y ago
        I’ll quote the parent comment again: > To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. Filtering based on identity can hurt his business by making his products worse. The line between cause and effect that he’s drawing seems pretty clear to me. What other interpretation would you have for that? And for the sake of completeness let’s ask a 3rd party. ChatGPT prompt: “”” Given the following sentence: To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. To what is the reader attributing a potential lower quality in his products? “”” Response: “”” The reader is attributing the potential lower quality of their products to the filtering based on the owner’s identity. This implies that restricting components based on who owns them could limit access to necessary or high-quality components, thereby negatively impacting the quality of the products they build. “””
• j7ake 2y ago
  Why does the skin color or gender matter if in the end they pick candidates that all went to the same top schools or have previously worked at the same top companies? Diversity in training, education and work history vastly outweighs diversity in superficial physical features.
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    Top schools like ivy league in America exclusively discriminate against Asians and there was a lawsuit but its not being enforced. This is a different issue that precedes DEI.
    • loeg 2y ago
      Harvard Law Asian admissions are up 30% 2023 to 2024. Maybe a sign the situation is improving.
  • zht 2y ago
    i dont know where you work but my company actively diversified sourcing to other kinda of schools
  • superultra 2y ago
    A very obvious answer is that, for example, film was toned to white tones, which meant that film was not as good at capturing people with black skin on film or in lighting. Another example is of course facial sensors seeing white people but not seeing black people (which informs one of the funniest episodes of the defunct show Better Off Ted). You say these are superficial features and yet the reality is that skin color drastically impacts one’s experience of life in this world. Therefore if one is designing products, why would you exclude the perspective of people who would ultimately use your product?
    • Manuel_D 2y ago
      The issues with capturing images of dark skinned people is due to lower light reflected by dark skin tones. It's the same reason why an f-22 is harder for a radar to pick up than an f-16. To have "dark skin" is, quite literally, to have skin that's more radiation absorbent in the visible spectrum. The "racist" screen unlock works just as bad on dark skinned south Asians. Despite south Asians not exactly being underrepresented in tech. Front facing cameras have a tiny lens and image sensor, that's why a lot of phones started adding a front facing led to illuminate faces that were getting insufficient lighting. Eventually, more advanced techniques like IR cameras and depth sensing light grid arrays made the issue of skin tone irrelevant. This was a problem due to the fundamentals physics of sensing dark faces. It wasn't limited to Black people, a group that's considerably overrepresented in tech experienced the same issue. And this problem was solved without a big demographic change in the tech companies involved (what is the representation of Black engineers at Huawei and Samsung?). I always get a chuckle when people use this example as justification for DEI policies.
• NotYourLawyer 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • dang 2y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments? We've had to ask you this a bunch of times already. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    • NotYourLawyer 2y ago
      [flagged]
• moskie 2y ago
  This deluge of terrible things from Zuck over the past few days is so clearly 100% in deference to Trump. The fact that Zuck name-checked Twitter when explaining the change to Community Notes was also such an obvious tell. If he viewed Twitter as a competitor, he would have framed this shift in policy as something better than what Twitter does. But instead, "we're doing what they're doing" is a message that he is essentially collaborating with Musk on shared goals. Gee, what goals might those be. I had deleted Facebook years ago, but this has convinced to also delete my Instagram. Sincerely hoping an Instagram alternative starts to take shape, like what Bluesky is to Twitter.
• scarface_74 2y ago
  I am a Black male and worked as a developer for mostly small unknown companies from 1996-2020. I then pivoted to cloud+app dev strategic consulting when a job at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap. I now work for a third party consulting company as a staff software architect. For the last 5 years, I have had customer facing jobs where I am either on video calls or flying out to customer sites working with sales. When I first encountered the DE&I programs at Amazon, I couldn’t help but groan. The entire “allies” thing felt like bullshit. The only thing that concerns me is that I hope companies still do outreach to colleges outside of the major universities and start partnering with them to widen the funnel and partnering with smaller colleges to help students learn what is necessary to be competitive and to pass interviews
  • iLoveOncall 2y ago
    Maybe you didn't feel like those programs existed once you were in, but I guarantee you that they're very active in "positive discrimination" at the hiring and promotion time. Just last year Amazon in the UK was offering special referral bonuses to employees referring black people specifically for example. I saved the emails for posterity. For managers of technical roles, they're also a strong push to promote women as fast as possible. My manager has told me about every woman in my team that he wanted to fast track their promotion. I've never heard the same about any of man, regardless of their skill. Of course I recognize that's more anecdotical than the referral thing, but it definitely exists.
    • cdot2 2y ago
      That doesn't feel very "positive" if you're not in those groups
      • lurking_swe 2y ago
        of course it’s not. you don’t solve racism with more racism in the opposite direction. alas…DEI.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• GiorgioG 2y ago
  Every time you try to right a wrong like this (DEI), it just makes things worse for everyone involved. Just find the best person for the job, no matter their skin color, sex, age, etc.
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    That’s the goal of DEI; recognizing that scenarios like two hundred years of all male, all white SCOTUS judges and Presidents and all the other top slots was probably not due to them being inherently better than every non-white, non-male otherwise eligible person in the country.
    • gr3ml1n 2y ago
      When I hear these sorts of arguments I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/808/ https://xkcd.com/808/
    • wiseowise 2y ago
      How is that applicable to Europe? Who knows.
      • Johanx64 2y ago
        As somebody who born and spent significant portion of my life in very homogenous country. Reading these threads I always come to the very same conclusion: diversity IS the problem and creates problems instead of providing any tangible benifits. DEI is attempted solution to the "problem" and yet creates even more of a problem where people aren't hired based on merit and being the best candidate for the job. None of those things are a problem in homogenous country. They simply do not exist. Similarly it doesn't make sense that a person with a different skin color could bring anything new to the table, after all skin color does not matter.
        • ceejayoz 2y ago
          There are no homogenous countries. Skin color is just one of the many ways people get slotted into buckets. Your country has men and women. It has gay and bi people. It has trans people. Young and old. It has blind people. It has amputees. It has atheists and religious people. It has mentally ill and chronically sick and abused kids and all sorts of other diverse conditions that have to be addressed with various accommodations.
• OnionBlender 2y ago
  Does this mean we can go back to using "master" as our git repo's default branch?
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
      > Just the other day merely mentioning George Floyd's length criminal history and drug use But like what's the reason to bring it up unless to imply that he deserved to be killed?
      • arghnoname 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • davorak 2y ago
          Context matters. A rhetoric trick/trap often used is to include context, but not complete context. That trick/trap is pretty much the only way I have seen: > Floyd's length criminal history and drug use used. It a trick because people use the technique to trick people. It is a trap because people trap themselves with the technique, putting blinders on themselves.
        • magicalist 2y ago
          > Let's take a hypothetical Why? We already have an enormous amount of context and literal video. If you think bringing it up brings "nuance" to the conversation, just say why.
  • renegade-otter 2y ago
    "master" was not a thing even before. While I get the farce of renaming it for "social justice" reasons, it's still a stupid name. It's "trunk", as in "trunk and branches".
• tdiff 2y ago
  Is not it a confession that DEI ideas were always political and Meta never truly believed in it?
  • romanovcode 2y ago
    You could clearly see it's all smoke and mirrors even ten years ago when Twitter handles of multi-national companies were celebrating LGBT pride except in the countries where LGBT is not allowed e.g. Saudi.
• intalentive 2y ago
  Astute observers have been predicting a woke / DEI rollback ever since Claudine Gay got canned. Big tech companies are enmeshed with the state, so it helps to keep the wider political / geopolitical context in view.
• hackable_sand 2y ago
  They're bluffing
• thefaux 2y ago
  The really troubling news buried in this to me was the appointment of Dana White to the meta board of directors. Like seriously what purpose does he serve but to appease the new administration?
  • evilfred 2y ago
    he beat his wife on video, that is who Zuck likes now, kinda strange
  • tyleo 2y ago
    Out with the DEI people appointed to appease the old administration in with Dana White to appease the new one I guess.
  • aerostable_slug 2y ago
    I was thinking about this as well, and it makes sense if Meta is planning a big sports push. Using a Quest 3, the sports "coverage" I've seen has been compelling (virtual NBA courtside seats are pretty nifty), especially MMA. Zuck's an MMA enthusiast so it fits. It would be silly to pretend politics plays no role in this, but it's not like they're putting Don Jr. on the board.
    • kridsdale1 2y ago
      There’s also the factor that Zuck is becoming personal friends with Joe Rogan (according to Joe, they text each other memes and shit talk people) and Dana is Joe Rogan’s best friend.
  • CSSer 2y ago
    He's Mark Zuckerberg's friend. They became close because Zuckerberg picked up MMA as a hobby. Zuckerberg has a majority stake in the company that can't be contested. He decided to throw his buddy a bone. That's it. Zuckerberg is tired of how much effort being "woke" takes. This is pretty easy to understand if you imagine being white and super-rich, and the closest exposure you have to any "real" adversity in life is your other super rich, multi-cultural friends and loved ones. Wealth inequality is at its highest ever in the United States. He observed that the people he was supporting still hated him because he's disgustingly rich, so he's getting diminishing returns for his effort to "be cool". Meanwhile everyone else is having so much fun. When he complained to his other rich friends about this, they convinced him that they don't really have any biases, he doesn't owe anyone anything, and people are just jealous. So the metaphorical gloves come off. The next four years, and maybe even many more years beyond that because of the persisting judicial climate, are going to be filled with people coming unmasked in this regard.
• barrenko 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • pkkkzip 2y ago
    I disagree. DEI has nothing to do with an ancient empire.
    • int_19h 2y ago
      Not in an obvious way, but "meninist" far right is obsessed with the whole "Rome was great until them libruls ruined it" trope. Ironically, Rome was actually unusually diverse for its times, and not just by virtue of having conquered so many different peoples: https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-i-beginnings-and-legends/ https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
      • dijit 2y ago
        Not to belabour any specific point you're making, but Rome had three classes. * High-Romans - elected officials, ranked soldiers. * Romans (Or, Honorary Citizens in rare, exceptional cases). And... * Slaves, which were the result of conquest of those diverse lands. Ancient Rome, especially during the Republic and early Empire, wasn’t ethnically diverse when it came to fairness and equality at all. Citizenship was originally reserved for freeborn males of Latin descent, and while it expanded over time, it was usually about practicality and control, not inclusivity. Conquered peoples, like the Greeks and Gauls, were brought into the empire as subjects, not equals. Slavery was a huge part of Roman society, with enslaved people often coming from different ethnic groups, but they had no rights. Even when enslaved people were freed, they still faced heavy discrimination, and the upper classes worked hard to keep Latin culture and traditions dominant over everything else. It wasn’t until much later, around 212 CE, that Rome started to look more diverse in a way that also brought some measure of equity. That’s when Emperor Caracalla granted citizenship to all free people in the empire, regardless of their ethnicity. However, this wasn’t really about fairness—it was more about making tax collection easier and keeping the empire running. Even after that, inequality stuck around, with most power staying in the hands of the wealthy, Latin-speaking elites. While non-Italian emperors and leaders became more common in the later Empire, this shift was more about necessity as Rome struggled to maintain control, not a true embrace of diversity or equality - and if anything, something that people who are not fond of diversity can point to as a cause of Rome's fall (not that it actually is.)
• MattyMc 2y ago
  > The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. Does anyone know what decisions he's referring to?
  • paxys 2y ago
    Ending affirmative action, I assume
  • jdminhbg 2y ago
    SFFA v Harvard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._Harvard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...) outlawed affirmative action in public institutions, but I think most legal observers assume that if someone brings a case against the same thing in private institutions to the Supreme Court, they'll outlaw it there too.
    • iforgot22 2y ago
      Also, 2020 California Proposition 16 failed. It would have overturned a 1996 proposition that similarly banned affirmative action in the state.
    • kevinventullo 2y ago
      Harvard is a private institution.
• mips_avatar 2y ago
  My experience with DEI at Microsoft was that the true believers really had their hearts in the right place. Almost all of the negative consequences I saw, came from people who saw DEI as a way to get ahead. I think the biggest problem with DEI initiatives is how much they seem to only benefit cynical people.
  • hyperdunc 2y ago
    This is a pattern we see again and again. The true believers are fools because they don't anticipate how the implementation of their doctrine will be gamed.
    • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
      “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
  • ReptileMan 2y ago
    >true believers really had their hearts in the right place it is usually the position of the brains of the true believers that is questionable. Road to hell is paved with good intentions and so on.
• Eumenes 2y ago
  > Sunsetting supplier diversity efforts Why the hell would a company pick vendors based on the sexuality or skin color of the owner or whatever?
  • popcalc 2y ago
    The US Government is required to do this.
    • Eumenes 2y ago
      Its wrong!
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    Many companies explicitly and publicly state these policies. The government does this too. It’s explicitly discriminatory and should be illegal. For private companies it is illegal.
• epicureanideal 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • nemo44x 2y ago
    It will be seriously real when the NYT abandons it. Washington Post has started to and writers are fleeing to lesser publications. Need to continue to marginalize the wokes and push them to irrelevant spaces where they can do their thing and no one listens.
  • eapressoandcats 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • chimen 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • eapressoandcats 2y ago
        The most famous example of that was, as far as I can tell, entirely fabricated. Algeria is famously known for being friendly to trans people. Also you’re really equating street violence, murders, and suicide to losing a boxing match?
        • chimen 2y ago
          [flagged]
        • fiffled 2y ago
          [flagged]
          • chimen 2y ago
            Looking at your comments history I need to do this: GhatGPT test: send me a react component for a todo app.
• badgersnake 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • coliveira 2y ago
    They're all business savants that got lucky, either by birth or by association, and completely stupid otherwise. The rest of society means nothing for them.
  • dang 2y ago
    Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
    • badgersnake 2y ago
      If you don’t want this type of comment I kindly suggest you don’t post this kind of article. The atmosphere on the site of what you make it and if you promote this kind of racism and misogyny then you should expect an angry response.
      • dang 2y ago
        That's not how Hacker News works. Commenters are asked to follow the site guidelines regardless of how provocative an article is or they feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Ideological passions of every flavor trigger people into posting indignant, informationless things. It's up to you (<-- I don't mean you personally of course, but all of us) to metabolize reflexive reactions and make your substantive points reflectively. This is obviously doable, since many HN commenters do it. (It should be more, though.) https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
• curtisblaine 2y ago
  DEI, in my experience, was always getting hires from special programs (like black women coding bootcamps) and having them pushed as junior in your team, no choice about that. If you were their line manager, the responsibility of them succeeding was ultimately your. I'll let you imagine how much it helped the cause.
• nemo44x 2y ago
  Musk buying Twitter had a profound effect on the discourse. I don’t think this happens without him buying it. I don’t think Trump wins without it. People can speak freely and it’s just obvious some of these sacred cows were unpopular and only in place due to pressure. Overton window has shifted big time.
  • eapressoandcats 2y ago
    Except you can’t say anyone is cisgender, so not that freely.
• antics 2y ago
  I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society. To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done. We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better. When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them. To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
  • algebra-pretext 2y ago
    > “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.” - Amílcar Cabral
• cbeach 2y ago
  > At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. At last, a corporation acknowledges it's _cognitive_ diversity that matters. Most other forms of diversity are superficial, inherent human characterstics that are already equal under law, and make no difference to people's ability to use technology. I'm so relieved to see "DEI" die. With two young boys who are white, heterosexual and normal in every way, I found it disturbing to know they'd be discriminated against in the workplace. I knew this discrimination existed because I've been a hiring manager and had HR explicitly tell me I needed to focus on hiring female technologist. Luckily I left that job and am now at a smaller company that doesn't discriminate on gender) However, most large corporates I've worked at have pushed the DEI agenda (with the 'E' standing for "equity" as opposed to the more ethical "equality"). There may have been historic discrimination against women and other minorities, but I have NEVER witnessed any such discrimination in the present day. We must avoid replacing one form of immoral discrimination with another form of immoral discrimination.
  • eapressoandcats 2y ago
    Are you serious that you’ve never witnessed any discrimination against women or minorities?
    • cbeach 2y ago
      I have witnessed: * co-workers being extremely wary of offending them in any way * superiors telling me to hire them * corporate literature that focuses on promoting their interests * corporate networks that grant them additional networking and social opportunities I have worked at a hedge fund, market data company, American and Australian investment banks and a travel startup. I have NEVER witnessed racism or sexism in the workplace. If I ever did, I would find it shocking and very weird.
      • eapressoandcats 2y ago
        Maybe try talking to this guy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188 If you’re not witnessing it then that’s only because you’re not noticing it, unless you think a large chunk of the population is just a bunch of liars. Also you need to explain why there is a huge racial imbalance in elite jobs. Also you need to explain literal blinded studies demonstrating racism in callbacks based on resumes. None of it excuses reverse discrimination but denying it is happening is just not based in reality.
• smashah 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • dinkumthinkum 2y ago
    Can you prove this exists? If doubt most hiring managers in tech know what a Zionist or that it is something they ever think about.
  • Biganon 2y ago
    I suppose dang must be asleep, maybe a second mod would be a good idea
    • smashah 2y ago
      This is a conversation about DEI programs being cancelled. It is relevant.
• frob 2y ago
  I remember meeting Maxine Williams on my first day at Facebook. She gave a strong introductory address that left me with a deep appreciation of the value of diversity not just as a moral good, but as a good business decision. Seeing her work denigrated and thrown under the bus to appease the bigotry of Trump, Elon, and their odious ilk is a gut blow. We are in for some dark times.
• random_i 2y ago
  I previously assembled & managed a team of engineers at Microsoft. Out of 10 employees on my team, I had: - male and female (80/20 split) - black, white, asian, latino - engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s - east coast, west coast - ivy league, college and high-school graduates That level of diversity was very rare at Microsoft, and even rarer at other tech companies. It took a *lot* of work; with less effort I would have had a more uniform distribution (male, white/asian, younger, west coast)
  • curtisblaine 2y ago
    How did you get there? Did you have to make a conscious choice, for minority candidates, to prefer them to majority candidates?
    • mruniverse 2y ago
      I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI. It could be close to blind if communication were only done through writing and the candidate names were not known.
      • curtisblaine 2y ago
        > I think it's always conscious one way or the other. With or without DEI. Isn't the central point of DEI that whites prefer whites due to an unconscious bias? Then, on one hand you have a very conscious decision to hire a minority just because he or she is a minority. On the other hand, you have an unconscious bias that might or might not be there but you can't really measure it by definition because it's unconscious. It's not the same.
        • mruniverse 2y ago
          I think it's more unsaid than unconscious. But putting that aside, if DEI is purposeful and deliberate while the "natural state" of things is not (unconscious bias), is that how we should leave it? Should businesses have the freedom to exclude if it's unconscious?
• encoderer 2y ago
  As an elder millennial I have to cheer.
  • lobsterthief 2y ago
    Why?
    • encoderer 2y ago
      Feels great when a fever breaks.
• LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • coliveira 2y ago
    This is a society that openly supports and roots for billionaires. Most of them are getting what they deserve as subjects of the modern oligarchy.
    • LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
      Yeah, and it sucks. But Zuckerberg is still a sociopath, though. He has a tight grip on how Meta operates and is laser-focused on making his apps and the content they feed people worse so people enrage because they for all the fake lies and misinformation, or because it's rage bait for others.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• parasense 2y ago
  From the linked Article: > Why it matters: The move is a strong signal to Meta employees that the company's push to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration isn't just posturing, but an ethos shift that will impact its business practices. I would say the shift in policy is to avoid law suites, as the Federal Courts have held DEI programs are sometimes discriminatory... especially the equity parts. Diversity and Inclusion are important parts of existing civil rights laws, so those aspects of DEI programs are not very important except to actually ensure ethical hiring practices are in fact practiced (E.G. not being racist or sexist when hiring). But practicing equity, or sometimes called other things... like affirmative action, etc... are illegal (they are sometimes blatantly sexist or racist). I've been on technical teams blessed by the DEI hiring program, and it was alright... We got more ladies, and we hired people (who earned less) in other time zones around the world. It got weird, for a lot of weird reasons I won't go into, but the main point is the team stopped vibing like before, and that's fine to some extent but this was a disconcordant vibe, not a minor offbeat member of the band, but a bunch of folks playing their own tune...
• steele 2y ago
  [flagged]
• abeppu 2y ago
  So setting aside the details of DEI-specific issues, I find it really ironic that the right really wants to claim that government shouldn't be telling people how to run their businesses through regulation, but businesses trying to improve relationships with the incoming administration are changing how they do business to match Trump's preferences. I.e. three-letter agencies regulating their areas is governmental dangerous overreach but Trump expressing a view and having companies restructure themselves to meet his whims to curry favor isn't a concern.
  • fullshark 2y ago
    In politics no one believes in anything except power (hard and soft). Deregulate (by selectively removing regulations to help certain industries) or regulate (to selectively add regulations to help certain industries) it's all the same game.
• EasyMark 2y ago
  Why would any California based company take a chance on being sued by the California attorney general's office in such a way? Meta is the perfect target to pick for fighting the overreach of a Trumpian department of Justice and GQP congress set on reversing years of social progress
• coliveira 2y ago
  Whatever they were doing at DEI was certainly not working. I worked at a major FAANG and rarely saw any black person, and when it happened it was from another country. So I can only conclude that it was really only a farcical display for outsiders.
• justinl33 2y ago
  It's giving _Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard_
• masto 2y ago
  I'm fortunate enough to have worked for Google during a period of time when Big Tech started to gain at least a modicum of self-awareness of its toxic culture and history of excesses and indiscretions. I arrived on the scene slightly late to witness the worst of it, but the stories were actively circulating, and the structure was very much still present. SRE teams had bars next to their desks, and office parties ended with ambulances. One of the first things I had to deal with as a new manager was a sexual harassment concern (which I was terribly unprepared to handle and it showed). And if you looked around the office, you saw a lot of people who looked a hell of a lot like me. But as I said, there was some awareness creeping in. Along with that, the folks in charge had the courage and empowerment to do something about it. And when I say the folks in charge, I don't mean the CEO. This was a company that was still running on a sort of quasi-anarchy of conscientious under-management: my first impression in 2013 was that there was no clear power structure, but everyone was trying to do the right thing and it somehow worked out. And most importantly, people could speak up if something didn't seem right. There are many examples, but to pick one, I remember my first trip to Dublin and being invited to join their local SRE managers' meeting. I watched someone bring up the topic of alcohol being omnipresently displayed around the office and how it was, at a bare minimum, not a good look. There followed a thoughtful and reasoned discussion that concluded with the decision to put it away. Not a ban on fun, but a firm policy that, among others to follow, helped SRE culture mature into something more appropriate for a workplace, while maintaining the essential feeling of camaraderie and mutual support. There were also top-down initiatives with varying degrees of success. When an executive puts something into OKRs, there's a good chance that by the time it reaches 13 levels down the org chart, it has turned into your manager demanding that you cut the ends off of 4.5% more roasts by the end of Q3 so they can show leadership on their promo packet. Nevertheless, there were a lot of good ideas, and a lot of good things were implemented. Through my job, I had access to training on topics like privilege and implicit bias that I believe have had a lasting positive impact on me as a person and as a leader. I also had access to people who thought about and fought about these things on a far deeper level than I will ever be able to, and I am grateful if even a sliver of their courage rubbed off on me. It wasn't just a song and dance. At least down near the bottom, we cared, and we tried very hard to make things better. We failed a lot of the time as well, in the sense that those top-down targets that were set were rarely achieved, which I suspect is at least part of the reason for dropping them. They've tried nothing and they're out of ideas. What we're seeing now is just more of the slide in the wrong direction that, unfortunately, started a while ago. Google in the mid-2010s was a place where people spoke up, to a fault. Yes, they complained about the candy dispensers running low or not having a puppy room, but they also told a senior vice president that he had been saying "you guys" a lot and do you know what happened? He thanked them, apologized, and corrected himself. Google in the 2020s is a place where you keep your mouth shut, sit down, and do what you're told. I don't know what it's like inside Meta, but I'm not surprised at this turn, because they're basically all following the same playbook, handed to them by Elon. I'm embarrassed that I've hesitated to speak my mind because I am looking for a job and what if someone reads this on my profile and decides I'm not a team player? Well, I'll say it clearly: I am on team try to be a good person and do the right thing and I am very much a team player. I believe that encouraging hate, and dropping DEI goals is wrong. And if that makes me not a good fit for your organization, I think we're on the same page.
• cryptozeus 2y ago
  Good riddance!
• qwe----3 2y ago
  No more discrimination! Choosing supplies based on race had to be illigal.
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    It is but Microsoft still does this and has a publicly announced program that they’ve bragged about which discriminates against suppliers based on race and gender.
• thunder-blue-3 2y ago
  I'm not going to review the above, as I've had to much of DEI corp talk over the past decade. Given that, it’s likely no surprise that I’m glad to see it phased out. Throughout my experience, I witnessed underqualified engineers navigating FAANG companies due to DEI initiatives, accumulating significant wealth despite contributing little to released projects. I believe its departure is overdue.
  • mglikesbikes 2y ago
    Jesus.
• fixnord1 2y ago
  DEI programs typically implemented in US companies are considered constitutionally illegal in other parts of the world, such as in France. Giving preferential treatment based on protected characteristics is not allowed in France, for ex. preferring a female hire over male, to meet female quotas.
  • mike_hearn 2y ago
    That's unfortunately not true, it's actually the opposite. The EU is bringing in legally mandatory gender quotas for corporate boards right now, and some European countries have had such rules already at the national level. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/document/print/en/ip_25_22/IP_25_22_EN.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume... The US does in fact ban discrimination like that, but the rules weren't enforced (or rather they were enforced in one direction only). The EU has simply changed the rules.
    • Nemo_bis 2y ago
      Parent post was talking about employment. Members of the board of directors are not employees. Management is also typically not covered by most employee protections in EU countries.
      • slavik81 2y ago
        The GP is still generally correct. In Canada, there are now some job postings that are only open to candidates of the appropriate race, gender or sexual orientation. These job postings would be illegal in the United States, but are allowed in Canada as long as the discrimination is intended to correct for historical injustice.
  • cryptonector 2y ago
    In the U.S. racial discrimination is only prohibited for the State governments (see the 14th Amendment): | No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; [...] and then the courts have interpreted this to mean that the Federal government does have the right to "make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States". I.e., the Federal government may discriminate on the basis of race (as one example of that which is forbidden to the States), but only subject to statutory authorization (i.e., a bill passed by Congress which then becomes law). This is because in the aftermath of the Civil War the Radical Republicans in the North expected they'd have to force some discrimination against {White, Democrat} Southerners / for Black Southerners as part of Reconstruction. But statutory authorization for racial discrimination is still required, and by and large there is not much such statutory authorization left on the books. That means that almost every DEI program in the U.S. that uses racial discrimination is suspect if not outright illegal. With an incoming DoJ that's likely going to be sympathetic to that view, suddenly all these DEI programs have become a major liability.
• mlepath 2y ago
  I worked at Meta, I am not sure the hiring was ever "diverse". DEI always seemed like an activity they did for show. This changes nothing honestly.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• rvz 2y ago
  Good. It always has been a ZIRP scam.
• arghandugh 2y ago
  Zuckerberg single-handedly pulling the control rods out of a platform with three billion users may go down as the most consequential, catastrophic decision in human events. The only good billionaire is a former billionaire.
  • 77pt77 2y ago
    Plenty of popes have made far more consequential decisions.
• chimen 2y ago
  [flagged]
• pharos92 2y ago
  DEI was always inherently racist and discriminatory.
• nsoonhui 2y ago
  I'm a Chinese Malaysian, and I look at the DEI debacles in the US with a mixture of amusement and sadness. In Malaysia, we have something similar to DEI that stretches back to 1970. We call it the New Economic Policy (NEP), which aims to "restructure society" to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities across different ethnic groups. The explicit aim of the NEP is to increase the participation of Bumiputera (the "natives") in the economy, sometimes at the expense of the non-natives, the Chinese and Indians. The key target was to achieve 30% Bumiputera equity ownership of Malaysia's domestic corporations. 30% only? Bumiputeras constitute a much larger population percentage than that, even at that time. Furthermore, there was an expiry date attached to the policy: 20 years. So, for a Chinese person, enduring slight injustice for 20 years so that our friends can catch up with us—isn't that a good thing? Life is about give and take, right? Except that even after 20 years—in fact, after more than 50 years—in the eyes of politicians and policymakers, the objective of the NEP hasn't yet been accomplished, and it looks like it will continue indefinitely. That's right: despite the fact that all major companies require Bumiputera participation (never mind that it's a gambling conglomerate, which is supposed to remain forbidden (Haram) to Muslim Bumiputeras), and despite the fact that Bumiputeras now monopolize public sector posts, public university quotas, and administrative/teaching positions, and pretty much dominate every aspect of government institutions (the police, army, judiciary, and all are basically Bumiputera-dominated), the NEP must still continue, because it hasn't yet accomplished its goal. It will never accomplish its goal. Meanwhile, the side effects of the NEP are palpable. It's common agreement that Malaysia is lagging behind, especially when compared to our neighbor, Singapore. In 1970, it was 1 SGD vs. 1 RM, and now... it's 1 SGD vs. 3.3 RM. See how much our currency has declined compared to our neighbor. It's no secret that Singapore gladly welcomes Malaysian Chinese "refugees" who escape to that little island to avoid discrimination and frequent hate speech. Affirmative actions are a double-edged sword. They come at the expense of sacrificing market efficiency and some degree of fairness. And it's not at all clear that anyone can wield them well. I'm sure that the NEP's creators did have noble intentions and did try to minimize the side effects, but you can see where it's gotten them.
• sergiotapia 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • 77pt77 2y ago
    Calling gay people "mentally ill" is sane, but even implying that religious people are not all there being punishable is the "world becoming sane"?
    • sergiotapia 2y ago
      pretty reductionist view of everything he wrote.
• anal_reactor 2y ago
  Coming from a very homogenous country, all these diversity discussions are interesting to say the least
  • tjpnz 2y ago
    How do we get more Hispanic LGBTQ members? Actual conversation I've overhead in Japan of all places.
  • self_awareness 2y ago
    > Coming from a very homogenous country, all these diversity discussions are > interesting to say the least After reading your username, the context of your comment changes a little bit
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
  JSON, no Javascript: https://www.axios.com/api/axios-web/get-story/by-id/636ca008-c185-42d3-b567-4cca58c7125c https://www.axios.com/api/axios-web/get-story/by-id/636ca008...
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  It was always a sham anyway. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming: making $$$ I don't expect BigTech to care about people -- it's clear that they never have. BUT what makes me sick is that they pretend to care, pretend that they are "solving the world's problems", "building communities", etc. They're no better, and perhaps just as destructive, as WalMart. 15-20 years ago I was very excited about and supportive of these companies. I've grown to despise them.
  • wiseowise 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      commies?
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  I’m at white middle aged male and in 10 years have had no call backs from meta hiring. This week I got contacted by a meta recruiter
  • mmustapic 2y ago
    Maybe you got better at your profession. Maybe they are discriminating non whites now. Or a position just opened that’s great for someone like you.
    • gfe23aefg 2y ago
      Or maybe they're discriminating against no one now?
      • mmustapic 2y ago
        My man, Meta is full of middle aged white men. Do you think they’ve been discriminating the OP specifically for 10 years?
        • inemesitaffia 2y ago
          Asians are very significantly overrepresented. Especially women. Those people you mentioned are a minority. Zuckerberg is also from an even smaller minority
• malshe 2y ago
  In Texas, effective January 2024 DEI activities by state universities were prohibited. Universities are still trying to understand the implications fully [1]. I am generally in support of DEI on the university campuses but there were a few unwanted outcomes of blind DEI pursuit. The first major bad outcome is it adds administrative bloat. Our universities are already admin heavy. DEI departments just inflated that bloat sucking up more resources that could be used for instruction. The other poor outcome was that they added a lot more paperwork in every hiring decision. I know of a university in northeast that had to wait two months to get their job ad approved by the DEI folks. Finally, DEI departments also added mandatory annual DEI training for everyone on the campus. A lot of these training modules were downright patronizing in most cases. [1] https://compliance.utexas.edu/sb17 https://compliance.utexas.edu/sb17
  • bamboozled 2y ago
    I think this is all misguided honestly. There was a need for some of this, now because we’re claiming cost the democracy the election we need to tear it all up. Smells fishy to me.
• mark336 2y ago
  [flagged]
• lugu 2y ago
  Coming from another continent, it feels the discourse in the US is poisoned by the word RACE. Back home, no one uses it. The best proxy for inequality is poverty. Make poor people richer with basic support like free education and health care. Tax the richer. That should solve the problem. If you wonder about woman, create support for working mum with after school program and free baby care. Sorry to state the obvious.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • dijit 2y ago
    I agree all of this talk about equity inequality and race and gender. completely betrayed the fact that the biggest predictor of societal issues is poverty. it almost feels like the elites are pitting us against each other. again. I can’t think of any societal injustice that could not be undone simply by by floating opportunities opportunities to those in poverty.
    • rbetts 2y ago
      Median wealth of a US households by race: white $250k; black: $27k; asian: $320k https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups/ https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/wealth-gaps-across-ra...
      • _Tev 2y ago
        That actually shows that helping poor people would help black the most. So why not do it?
  • doom2 2y ago
    > it feels the discourse in the US is poisoned by the word RACE. Back home, no one uses it. I'm not sure where you're located, but as an American fan of European football, it seems like race is still very much an issue on other continents and not just as a proxy for some other inequality. Just in the last week, there have been at least two instances in the top 5 leagues of fans racially abusing players[1]. Maybe the US is too focused on race (I don't think so), but saying "no one uses it" seems like an indication of the opposite problem. [1] In Fulham vs Watford and Valencia vs Real Madrid
• yowayb 2y ago
  I got a UC Regents Scholarship to UCSD bc my parents are southeast Asian. My grades and SAT score were lower than my Jewish best friend's grades and scores. He did not get a scholarship. I promptly lost my scholarship after failing Physics 2A because I skipped the final to make out with a girl. I didn't think twice about what I squandered until I had to get a job and ask my parents for money to pay for the next quarter.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• urronglol 2y ago
  [dead]
• userbinator 2y ago
  I don't care whether who made the products I use is "diverse". I care about their quality, which has been sacrificed at the altar of DEI for far too long. Not surprising to see this happen once the population realised the truth. Finally a slow return to sanity.
  • cycrutchfield 2y ago
    Genuinely curious, which product’s quality has been sacrificed at the altar of DEI? Could you name some?
    • userbinator 2y ago
      Just about every widely used software. Especially from Big Tech.
      • cycrutchfield 2y ago
        Care to provide any names, and some examples of how they were affected?
• varelse 2y ago
  [dead]
• riwsky 2y ago
  The whole zero-sum, straw man depiction of DEI initiatives is intellectually lazy, even if we ignore the ideology. When I've put effort into it, it's looked like: * blinding candidate names from take-home or resumé reviews * writing structured interview rubrics * defining concrete soft skills and behaviors we're looking for, instead of "culture fit" In a world without, say, sexism, the above practices would still lead to better hiring decisions. It just happens to be the case that in our world, making your hiring process better tends to make it less sexist; everything that rises must converge.
  • inemesitaffia 2y ago
    That's all good but you're talking about you. What about others?
• 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
  About time.
• crystal_revenge 2y ago
  A few years ago I worked for a company obsessed with DEI. But, as a 40+, I knew their DEI programs where complete BS because they forgot the most important protected group: old people! At this company we had plenty of groups for Muslims, blacks, Jews, Asians, etc, but I was one of the only people over 40. People would laugh when I mentioned that we needed a DEI group for people over 40... but I wasn't entirely kidding. It's frankly bizarre that you can have 1000+ employees and only 2-3 are over 40!? I had worked in industries prior where the median age was > 40 and it did sincerely shock me that a publicly traded company would have almost 0 people in that age range. The funny part is that while I will not ever be black, everyone of my younger coworkers (baring serious tragedy) will be in the 40+ protected group. So in theory, if anyone cares at all about DEI in a sincere way, they should care about people who are 40+ because they will be there. So while we celebrated Ramadan with multiple company activities, there wasn't much respect for "I have to leave a bit early to pick up my teenage kid from my ex-wife's place".
  • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    If somebody is not a white man, you probably don't have to pay them more than if they were a white man. If somebody is older, then you probably DO have to pay them more than if they were younger, because older candidates likely have more experience and have correspondingly higher salary expectations. So there's that. Now suppose you have an older candidate who is not demanding high seniority pay. In that case they should be on equal footing with the younger candidates, right? Well, no. There's the double standard of "if you're so old, why aren't you above our pay grade? Shouldn't you be a manager or something?" That I don't know how to fix. Then there is the more overtly discriminatory "I'd rather hire the young candidate because old people are slow." Maybe what it really comes down to is "I don't want to work with my dad."
    • sethammons 2y ago
      Some of my early unconscious bias interview training helped me realize I assumed older candidates were vastly more experienced, and when they were "normal," then they must not be very good. Logically, that is silly because everyone is at different levels at different times with different areas of interest. 28 or 55, give the same interview against the same rubric and let the best candidate win.
• gcau 2y ago
  For those living in countries that don't have majority white people (eg asian or african countries), do they have any DEI programs to hire more white people and all that?
• throwaway431234 2y ago
  Was it true Meta had tampons in the men's room https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/meta-orders-removal-tampons-mens-rooms-amid-zuckerberg-post-election-shakeup-report https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/meta-orders-removal-tampon... Were they ever used and or how much?
• dalton_zk 2y ago
  Every change came with pros and crons, I believe that you can't employ people based on personal characteristics, genre, race, and etc. But if person fit the requirements of the open job, what important is the skill. I know that world ins't fair, and some people (like me by example) have to put more efforts that others, but this is life, we have to conquer our space and be pride by our achievements.
• sidcool 2y ago
  Zuck has been a laggard in taking high risk policy decisions. Musk, despite some bad decisions, has at least shown the spine to buck the trend and do what he believes in.
• 29athrowaway 2y ago
  What is going to happen to James Damore now? Is he still canceled?
  • paulcole 2y ago
    “I may have been early but I’m not wrong.” “ITS THE SAME THING!”
• thefounder 2y ago
  I hope this extends to the media/movie industry. If there is one reason I would have voted for Trump that would have been to stop the flood of DEI in movies. Couldn't watch a movie without a gay scene even if it had no sense in the movie. The exception became the norm.
• rayiner 2y ago
  > The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing The legal landscape isn’t changing—it just was never what companies like Meta thought it was. The civil rights laws never embraced a distinction between racism against white people versus racism against non-white people. A lot of what corporate America did between 2020-2024 was simply illegal. All that’s changed is now corporate counsel are now dealing up from their thrall and realizing they’d been giving bad advice to their clients.
• jongjong 2y ago
  DEI has ruined many people's careers and lives. I'm not sure I can recover.
  • nujabe 2y ago
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• Stephen_0xFF 2y ago
  Meta, maybe Zuck specifically, always seemed liked a pandering company trying to follow the social meta. VR gets popular, Meta goes all in. Twitter “dies”, Meta swoops in with Threads. Snapchat stories, FB stories. TikTok, FB shorts. Musk getting close to Trump, Zuck trying to get close. People say he’s a robot? Hey, he now has a chain, does jujitsu, and has a broccoli haircut. Puts Dana White on the board and does JRE. Now he’s removing fact checking and DEI as the left is losing power. It’s like Zuck just wants to be recognized as a cool kid in the group, but is clearly trying too hard. The last cool thing FB did was marketplace and then all the way back to timeline feature.
• ArthurStacks 2y ago
  Finally Hopefully this means my company of 16 developers, all of whom are white and male, stops getting accused of being racist because ignorant people on the internet don't realise we are English and there are no black developers within 80 miles
  • cindycindy 2y ago
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• wiseowise 2y ago
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• woodpanel 2y ago
  20 years from now we will look at this DEI era, the way we look at the soixant-huitards and their obsession with „decriminalizing“ incest and pederasty: Bafflement how the disgustingness wasn’t obvious then. „White Straight Man Are Evil“ isn‘t a force for good, its sexist, racist – and by the way classic cultural imperialism as US academic social science departments pushed this crap down the throats of every country in America‘s orbit (and sometimes even more if it helped with regime change).
• nprateem 2y ago
  Great, maybe we can instead focus on hiring based on merit instead of gender, etc. It wouldn't be that hard to create a blind CV filtering process to avoid bias. And if the company is so racist they won't hire people with certain names, non white people probably wouldn't want to work there either. Maybe we can even go back to not pretending everyone is equally good at everything. Men and women are different.
• drumhead 2y ago
  Looks like they feel they don't have to tick boxes anymore.
• b8 2y ago
  Thomas Sowell had good counter arguments against DEI. I recommend reading his book(s) including Social Justice Fallacies. The neurodiverse hiring stuff never even got me an interview. Even though I qualified for the programs and have the tech skills plus ASD, ADHD etc
• deleted 2y ago
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• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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• throwaway48305 2y ago
  As a current Meta engineer my perspective is this: - DEI at meta has been non-existent for the past 6 months or more anyways. They care far less than any FAANG I've seen about DEI beyond the lip service and yearly training. This is just the announcement of something that's already been in place for a while - Meta has very poor diversity. I go most days without seeing any black engineers. I see occasional latino engineers. Asians and Indians are extremely overrepresented. White people are a minority. Maybe 1/10 engineers are women. - This comes against the backdrop of Meta failing something like 98% of market tests for H1B immigrants. Word is getting out that Meta is not the place to go if you're trying to immigrate to the US. - There's the obvious pandering to the incoming administration (this is the third announcement this week, first Dana White on the board, then cancelling fact checking & moving some moderation people to Texas). Summary: meta has serious diversity problems it needs to address. Existing DEI problem was not helping. Hopefully they do something to hire more women and minorities. They face H1B headwinds that may drive hiring outside the US or (much less likely) increase hiring of americans.
  • l0t0b0r0s 2y ago
    Diversity is a dumb metric to strive for. Just hire the person who can do the job regardless of what they look like. Nothing else matters.
  • b0redatw0rk 2y ago
    insane to frame too many indians or asians as a problem. hopefully you get cut in the new stack ranking
• thunkingdeep 2y ago
  Meta being way ahead of the game as usual. Acknowledging race in job seeking makes for intrinsically tokenized contingents of people. I’m not just a PHP guy… I’m a BLACK PHP guy, etc. True equality imo is equivalent to a form of neutrality. Pay no mind to race at all and instead focus on hiring the best hackers available and let the educational markets figure out the rest.
• dark-star 2y ago
  For everyone like me who had to google that acronym: DEI: Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability.
• etchalon 2y ago
  There's apparently nothing more cowardly than a billionaire worried about being slightly less rich.
• b0bb1z3r0 2y ago
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• itissid 2y ago
  The only way to really solve the problem of historic discrimination is to solve the root problem of child poverty and lack of good developmental experiences as a kid. Not all, but a lot of it is about just requires money flowing to school districts. Most rich people know this, and it's impossible for them to fix this without giving up a part of their most valuable asset: land/home It is impossible to predict a kid who got all this, even though born in adverse circumstances, will care about DEI or support it at all(e.g. Clarence Thomas).
• itissid 2y ago
  Did you know positive discrimination is written into the Indian Constitution as an amendment(maybe there are more?). Reservations in school and colleges is likely the only way kids get in, but from my own personal experience it's been a mixed bag. I have seen relatively more people fail and some succeed in schools and jobs who can via reservation(more of them failing in high school or college). But perhaps that was not the point, the policy idea was to give them a chance. Public Policy and Skill at the job are not meant to align; It can create a shitty experience to work with someone who is not nearly as good as a they should be. But perhaps their future generations could do better.
• lm28469 2y ago
  It was all a trick in the first place, capitalism does what it feels is in its best interest, some days it's inclusion, some days it's world wars, every day it's self serving
• jeffrallen 2y ago
  I just hired two women into an all male team. It wasn't because of DEI, it was because the code bootcamp we recruited from had equal representation. I was delighted to increase diversity, because diverse teams do better work. But the fix was farther back in the pipeline.
• saos 2y ago
  It was all lip service from the start anyways. Nothing really changed
• billy99k 2y ago
  Almost all big companies are doing this now. It's never a good idea to hire someone based on skin color or gender rather than merit. The predecessor to this was affirmative action in colleges (this is basically affirmative action in the work place). New Jersey is seeing the direct result of this. Applicants couldn't pass a basic reading/writing/math test, so they were forced to get rid of these requirements. The direct result of this will be teachers that shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place and poor student results. More information here: https://www.njspotlightnews.org/video/nj-eliminates-redundant-test-for-teacher-certification https://www.njspotlightnews.org/video/nj-eliminates-redundan... They call it 'redundant', but I would rather have someone teaching my kids that actually knows the material, rather than someone that went to any number of low-quality colleges where I have no idea if they know the material or not.
  • blablabla123 2y ago
    I mean I'm speaking for me as a straight, white male, not even living in the US but EU. But some observations from my side: - no program will get support/taken seriously if it's just to tick a box - implementing DEI as positive discrimination seems a painfully stupid idea (and yes, large corporations also do that in the EU) - I'm surprised how many comments are celebrating scrapping this effort That being said, I don't really get why companies aren't working on actionable goals instead. There've been so many scandals related to this in the last years. One complaint from someone affected being taken seriously by HR seems like a bigger step than a purely box ticking endeavor. Again, I'm speaking from my non expert point of view but it seems a banal truth that a diverse workspace may also score better on innovation and perhaps offer a larger solution space for certain cultural problems. But this might be just my ignorant point of view.
    • wincy 2y ago
      Because the goal isn’t the actual goal. Which is why James Damore lost his job and created an uproar when he suggested very reasonable steps to achieving more diversity. The engineer problem solving mindset is very vociferously opposed in these circles and shut down aggressively.
• spirit-sparrow 2y ago
  DEI programs can be counter productive. The incorrect biases of the past can’t be fixed with opposite biases. Merit based equal representation should be the ideal state. For 10 positions if there are 50 applicants wearing blue and 50 applicants wearing red, knowing that the shirt colour doesn’t matter we should end up ~5 red and 5 blue new starters. Now if there are only 2 blue applicants, then we should look into if there is something preventing the blues to get to a point where they can apply. That usually doesn’t fall under the hiring company’s control.
• zkmon 2y ago
  Did someone say woke banks have fallen ....
• follower 2y ago
  I wonder how this page might look if people could only comment in support of policies that wouldn't lead to a direct personal financial benefit. (Disclosure: In such a situation I would be unable to post this comment--as, in our just world, this comment's insightfulness would undoubtedly lead to me being the beneficiary of significant financial remuneration.)
• ezst 2y ago
  I'm sorry for asking the obvious, which I put on account of not running a business in an oligarchy, but what the heck is the angle, here? What's to gain for Meta (and presumably others) when the new administration hasn't been inaugurated yet? They obviously can't say that they are compelled by law to do that, but they very much renege the eventually of saying "they forced us to do that" when the policy landscape will inevitably flip. This is pure signalling, with the effect of putting off about a half of the local population deemed progressive, and alienating most of the developed world. Whatever might be on the other side of that bargain must be disgustingly "generous". If I was an evil despot about to be crowned, I don't know how I would feel about that: true this is a bunch of sycophants willing to kiss the ring, on the other hand "who do you think they are?". Anyhow, I probably be a terrible despot, too.
• massung 2y ago
  I generally loathe DEI programs in the workplace, mostly because they are almost always just about appearances: "let's make sure we have at least 20% minority representation" or whatever. Early in my career I worked at a company where we only wanted to hire the "best" people. However, after several years many of us began to notice a slow, downward trend in the quality of our products (games) were and how well they were selling. One theory that we started floating around was that the "best" people we were interviewing for was actually more in line with "people who think like us". We were really good programmers, artists, and designers, so naturally people who thought and worked like us would be good, too, right? And they were. But that thinking also ignored the fact that people outside our bubble could be equally as good (or better), and bring new (and better) ideas that could expand the target audience. Later, when I worked at a biotech, there was no [explicit] DEI program, but from the very top (CEO) all the way down, we consistently were hiring for "different than us". We actually wanted different experience and different ways of thinking. When we'd follow-up with each other after someone interviewed, we'd ask "what does this candidate bring that currently don't have?" And it made such a huge difference! When creating drug studies, having a minority race (equally) represented on the team would result in meeting comments like "we also need enough genetic data from the latino population to ensure ...". Having women on the team meant getting challenged with knowledge like "mothers have a more difficult time participating in medical studies, so what can we do to remove those barriers for them so we can get a broader test population that includes women?" Having someone on the team with a relative who was anti-vax meant being always hyper aware of that audience and made us think about it. Could a team of all white men (I use that demographic simply because it's what I belong to) also recognize those same issues and address them? It's possible, but it's likely not going to happen by default. That's not out of malice; I believe everyone wants to do the best they can. But when people are working hard and moving fast, they naturally just fall back to their defaults for quick decision making and those defaults are born of their own personal experiences. Anyway, don't hire minorities and people different from you to tick some box (whether for legal reasons or not). Don't make the mistake of thinking "I'm awesome, so people like me are the awesome ones." Awesomeness comes in all shapes and sizes. Hire people who challenge you and your experiences and challenge them and theirs in return! You, your team, the product, and the company will be immeasurably better off for it.
• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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• andreyf 2y ago
  As a non-benefitting fan of DEI, it always seemed like too little and/or too late [1] and the current generation of efforts have paid the cost of perceived injustice that are obviously counter-productive. This change to only having diversity for corporate benefit is an understandable choice of weak leaders in the current political climate but also unwelcome by those of us who care to actually move the needle on mutual understanding and healing of past injustices. Other countries have actually done this to a great extent, I think -- healing and reconciliation on horrific historical injustices, so it's not like this is totally novel social research. Now to some extent but even more so if things get more "rude" for a lack of a more more specific but agreed on term, I think many educated and well rounded people with a choice in employment/location will lean towards working at employers which works more aggressively towards social justice, or move abroad to live in societies not plagues by this kind of un-healing racial strife. From my understanding of what it's like to be black elsewhere (UK, Canada), I'll be more and more surprised that people who have the means would choose to stay in the US much longer. 1. a 2019 study by Darrick Hamilton and colleagues estimated that eliminating the racial wealth gap in the U.S. could require a transfer on the order of $10 trillion: https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Running-the-Numbers-8.4.19-FINAL.pdf https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Run...