11 ms·

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 "politic

• 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
        I think part of the problem is that no one knows (or agrees on) what “real DEI” is. Is it quotas? Is it bias training? Is it a quarterly presentation from HR?
        • AndyNemmity 2y ago
          That's fair. I guess what I'm communicating is that the goals of larger diversity are worth effort, and attention, and the reality of them is bias training in the long list of mandatory trainings, and marketing at conferences.
        • the_snooze 2y ago
          Even more broadly, what are the normative success and failure visions for DEI? At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?" To be charitable to the whole idea, it seems to be well-intentioned. But beyond that, it's empty in terms of what pratical outcomes it actually sought to make real. Maybe I'm just not someone cut out to be an activist, but without articulated end-states, it strikes me as just teeing up for a perpetual struggle. That doesn't seem too fulfilling.
          • AndyNemmity 2y ago
            I think the practical outcomes that are your KPIs are higher diversity from a leadership standpoint, and within the organization. There's nothing empty about that. It's measured, and evaluated.
          • AlexandrB 2y ago
            > At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?" Never, because then the DEI group's budget would be cut. The incentives for the people actually running these programs are completely out of whack with what would be good for the company and for the people they're actually meant to help.
          • kenjackson 2y ago
            The problem is the end-state is complex and nuanced. The qualitative objective for most companies should be something like: "Recruiting and hiring people with no bias against race, gender, religion, age, disability, etc... Treating those same people with no bias once hired, including pay, promotion, opportunities, and respect. Leveraging the diversity of perspective and skills of everyone in the company to maximize success of the company." How do you measure that? If you're a SW company and you have 2% Black engineers is that good or expected? If its not good, how should you improve it? I think these are legitimately important questions, but also exceptionally hard questions. I think the big problem though is that for the majority of the population there is little incentive to actually solve the problem. But I think money will eventually be what does it. Market inefficiencies will eventually lead people to want to solve this, but it can take a LONG time for these inefficiencies to manifest, since there are so many other factors at play. For example, look at college football. Alabama did not integrate black players until the 70s and they were fine until they played an integrated USC team -- and it took that long despite football being probably one of the places where inefficienes are squashed out pretty quickly.
    • coldpepper 2y ago
      Deep insight? It was completely obvious that it was performative. Why would huge companies like suddently care about black people or women if it was not to seek popular approval and get closer to power?
      • DAGdug 2y ago
        Minimization of regulatory risk and lawsuits. Compliance was _always_ about that - if leadership truly valued human dignity you’d see Gaza get a few orders of magnitude as much attention as BLM in corporate America, rather than a few orders of magnitude less.
        • gotoeleven 2y ago
          [flagged]
          • ceejayoz 2y ago
            You're conflating Gaza with Hamas. The vast majority of both Gaza and BLM have taken zero hostages and done zero raping.
            • anonfordays 2y ago
              The vast majority of Nazis rounded up zero Jews and killed no one.
              • ceejayoz 2y ago
                And as a result, we didn’t put most of Germany to death. We fed them, helped rebuild, and they’re now a close ally.
                • anonfordays 2y ago
                  Glad we're not putting most of Gaza to death either. Maybe after the dust settles, we'll feed, help rebuild, and they'll be a close ally.
    • kstrauser 2y ago
      I'm skeptical too. I've worked at a series of smaller companies with strong DEI programs, and the "enlightened self-interest" part was that it gave us better products. Turns out I have a pretty good idea of how to build products and features that appeal to people with the same regional, race, gender, and other backgrounds as me. Working with people who are in different from me in some substantial way showed me how much of that is arbitrary. For an extreme example, imagine a car company with zero women employees. I could imagine that their designs might look increasingly awesome to people who grew up playing with black, angular, high-powered cars (like me -- that's what I'd want!). And while there are plenty of women who'd like that, too, there are lots of women (and plenty of men!) who'd want something smaller, more brightly colored, and with better gas mileage. It they didn't have those varying opinions, or weren't even aware that people had other opinions, they'd be severely limiting their potential market and leaving huge amounts of money on the table. (My wife's a big F1 fan and wants to own a McLaren some day. I know that many, many women love fast cars, too, and that many, many men do not. That was meant to be illustrative, not a perfect analogy.) I am utterly convinced that getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable. Even if I didn't care about the societal ideals behind DEI programs, I'd still happily endorse them as a competitive edge.
      • throwaway48476 2y ago
        Volvo had women design a car once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_YCC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_YCC
        • stickfigure 2y ago
          [flagged]
          • throwaway48476 2y ago
            It was generally mocked. Car companies will do anything but build actually diverse teams of Mech Es, EEs, mechanics, human factors psychologists etc.
          • 2y ago
  • AndyNemmity 2y ago
    Agreed. Even if you desire, and want DEI programs to be meaningful, the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful. Reading the accomplishments in 2024 for our DEI program, it was essentially just marketing. Which has some level of value for sure, but the most valuable thing that came out of it was the number of conferences the head of the department went to.
    • nozzlegear 2y ago
      > the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful. That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.
  • notyourwork 2y ago
    I’ve interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles. Not sure how that aligns with your narrative.
    • edoceo 2y ago
      What is a DEI specific role? Isn't that against EoE rules?
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        Someone tasked with making sure your site works on a screen reader? Adding alt tags to images? Plenty of inclusive roles are non-controversial.
        • lotsofpulp 2y ago
          I would classify that as a role tasked with ADA compliance, not "DEI".
          • ceejayoz 2y ago
            One might readily describe the ADA as a DEI initiative, yes.
            • deleted 2y ago
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            • grues-dinner 2y ago
              I would say that DEI has sucked a huge amount of oxygen out of the room on accessibility. It's all out of the same budget, but as you can see, most people don't think of accessibility when they think of DEI, they think of race, gender and sexuality. And out of those, accessibility is the one that has actual measurable metrics and requires expensive technical skill and compromises with non-accessible functions to implement well. Everything else on the list is PR work.
  • rapsey 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • AndyNemmity 2y ago
      Is it possible that's happening somewhere? Certainly. Is that the reality I see? No... it's entirely symbolic. Different experiences, but I trust what i see in the real world versus anecdotes of people against it for political reasons.
      • lazycog512 2y ago
        Google HR is on the record doing this. I guess shutting one's eyes is an alternative way of seeing the real world, in a way.
        • AndyNemmity 2y ago
          You don't need to be uncharitable. I don't work at Google, and am unfamiliar with it's implementation. It doesn't require "shutting one's eyes". From my vantage point that I see, they are a marketing implementation. I personally would like them to have real teeth, and matter.
        • segasaturn 2y ago
          Source?
      • jazzyjackson 2y ago
        Consider that people may develop political responses to what they see in the real world.
        • vkou 2y ago
          History has also shown us that people develop political opinions based on whatever lies are repeated often enough in their media echo chamber. Consider the truly bizarre origins of antisemitism, for one. (And I'm not talking about people who have opinions on geopolitics in the ME. Think about how the other kind of antisemite, who doesn't give a rat's ass about what's going on 10,000 miles away reaches their political opinions.) Or, better yet, the gay satanic-panic currently gripping half the country, and the insane culture war being waged around it. You can't actually believe that all those people who have strong opinions about it have been somehow personally wronged by homosexuals. But they do turn on the telly to listen to some lunatic screaming about how there's a mass conspiracy to turn their children gay.
  • causi 2y ago
    Right. For the large companies, and the majority of the workforce, they mean nothing. Then the small to mid size businesses with some whackadoo who goes "we're not hiring X anymore, underrepresented groups only!" get a ton of press and create political capital.
  • gitremote 2y ago
    I worked in a large company that had a lot of pro-LGBTQ corporate PR and "Bring your whole self to work", while most of my coworkers were openly homophobic (out of earshot from management) and LGBTQ people would not be safe to come out. Right-wingers would think our company was "woke" and that they were being discriminated against based on our company propaganda and executive messaging. The reality on the ground was the opposite. Right-wingers are ready to believe companies are lying about some things but not about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
  • gitremote 2y ago
    [dead]
  • throwpoaster 2y ago
    Symbols can have a lot of political power.
  • dmazzoni 2y ago
    Do you actually have experience with those programs? Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience. As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like. If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired. That's just one example of what they do. You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".
    • brailsafe 2y ago
      > But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired. That's just one example of what they do. Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations
    • asdasdsddd 2y ago
      There are example of DEI not being racist but the one you provided is extremely racist.
      • fn-mote 2y ago
        GP mentions race and gender, so this response isn’t making an impression on me. The point the GP makes - why was the promo/hiring committee unable to find a breadth of candidates - is a troubling but real part of many of our daily lives. Maybe there weren’t any. That’s usually the reason/excuse given. That should still be a cause for concern.
        • 2y ago
  • mrandish 2y ago
    > they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start Yes, when they were widely introduced in my large company circa 2016-17 it was explained to senior managers as part of HR's efforts to "align with industry best practices". During the meeting introducing it to VPs and dept heads, there were skeptical questions as a lot of groups were under shipping pressure and short-handed. There was also already a lot of "HR overhead" like various mandatory compliance training sessions that all employees had to attend every year (unrelated to their actual work). The company was also clearly already highly diverse at all levels from the CEO on down and had been for a long time. The DEI training did end up becoming a yet another mandatory HR time sink and no one I know thought it was necessary or useful. The second year the program expanded to take even more time but the worst thing was they brought in outside trainers who started doing the "You're a racist and don't even know it" schtick along with weird tests and exercises. This became contentious and caused a lot of issues, especially because the context leaves people feeling like they can't openly disagree. There was a lot of negative push back but people felt like they couldn't use normal company channels so it was all in private conversations and small groups. Kind of the opposite of the intent of openness and communication. For me, that was when DEI went from "probably unnecessary (at our company) but just another 'HR Time Tax" to "This is disruptive and causing problems." I'm not surprised that some companies are realizing that the way many of these DEI initiatives were implemented wasn't effective in helping diversity and that they were also causing problems. It was the wrong way to pursue the right goal. At our company, we got rid of the old DEI program in early 2020, so this broad correction pre-dates the US election 8 weeks ago.
    • blitzar 2y ago
      My general experience was that this was much more a thing on the ground in ~2015-2020 and the internet / political rage machine is (as usual) a few years behind.
  • purplethinking 2y ago
    DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.
    • kccqzy 2y ago
      I think there is a difference between diversity initiatives before 2020 and the DEI initiatives since 2020. As far as I can see, the latter is indeed is corporate puffery, where employees maybe join a half-hour seminar to talk about DEI every year, and perhaps there are new DEI groups for employees to discuss this. But the diversity hire initiative before 2020 was much more substantive that resulted in real meaningful changes to company demographics.
      • code_biologist 2y ago
        It was always puffery, just money was cheap before 2020. Engineering managers I worked with before then were gung ho to grow their head count, even if it meant hiring iffy engineers. After 2020, they got told new head count would be much more limited and hiring got a lot more selective.
      • cbsmith 2y ago
        I think it very much depends. When BLM happened, I had the opportunity to sit in on a number of discussions with executives from a variety of companies about diversity programs, and the things I heard... "I thought after Obama was elected, that diversity was no longer a problem" "When we thought of diversity, we thought of it in terms of hiring more women" "We just don't get the applicants. There's nothing we can do." The whole BLM thing really shook up their thinking and approach to diversity. Now, I think a bunch of them did really engage in "corporate puffery", but I did see a lot of cases where tangible changes were made to diversity programs. ...and then more recently they seem to be firing their entire DEI teams. :-(
• swatcoder 2y ago
  > acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret. > 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. It's not about making users or bloggers happy. They don't care whether those people are "pissed" because they're just going to keep coming to stare at ads anyway. It was about keeping regulators disempowered by proactively tossing an agitated public some crumbs, but they don't need to worry about that for a while now. They're obviously just trying to keep their staffing strategies open and unshackled so that they can pursue whatever business objectives they see coming up in the next few years, and aren't at a disadvantage against competitors like Musk/X who resisted these kinds of things all along.
  • ncr100 2y ago
    Aside: It appears the modern world is inflecting to OVERT (subversive) insular, erosion of fundamental values, with recent leveraging of power-structures to facilitate authoritarian thinking.
    • xvector 2y ago
      Not many people supported those "fundamental values" to begin with. The only people that wanted DEI policies were extremely loud liberals (that temporarily gained power by steamrolling the apathetic majority) Now we are just seeing a return to reality.
  • fmajid 2y ago
    You can be unbiased in hiring and still end up with an unrepresentative mix, because underprepresented minorities don't even apply, and outreach is a good way to get to improve that without lowering your standards. That's the theory, at least, but yes, in practice it's really hard and most of these efforts end up performative, and staffing DEI bureaucracies with minorities is a good way to make the dismal diversity statistics look less bad if you don't look too closely at the breakdown by roles and salary bands.
• returntocollege 2y ago
  [dead]
  • 650REDHAIR 2y ago
    Do you have any sources for that opening statement?
    • jf22 2y ago
      I think being alive in 2020 is a good enough source for this one.
      • skywhopper 2y ago
        What about being alive before 2020?
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        George Floyd's being alive for part of 2020 debunks it, unless the various DEI programs predating 2020 were somehow created via a time machine.
        • jf22 2y ago
          Of course DEI existed before 2020 but Floyd's death certainly escalated the situation.
      • mlloyd 2y ago
        Yep. What this shows is that companies sway with what they perceive is public opinion. From Floyd to Trump, companies are shaping their internal public facing policies to mirror where they think the public is on social issues. Lesson taught and learned.
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    George Floyd's "incident" was in 2020. DEI efforts long predate that date. 2011: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13583 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13583 2019: https://time.com/5696943/diversity-business/ https://time.com/5696943/diversity-business/ > A 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63% of the diversity professionals had been appointed or promoted to their roles during the past three years. In March 2018, the job site Indeed reported that postings for diversity and inclusion professionals had risen 35% in the previous two years.
• transcriptase 2y ago
  The initiatives were put in place to appease large institutional investors who were trying to score virtue points with the public and progressive lawmakers who generally aren’t that friendly to Blackrock, Vanguard, et al. Now that it’s not social suicide to point out that codified racism to fight bias is absurd and outcomes have been questionable, the pendulum is headed back toward centre.
  • pessimizer 2y ago
    > the pendulum is headed back toward centre. That's not how a pendulum works. It's leading to a white terror, then it will swing back to a smaller red terror, then a smaller white terror, etc... Eventually some event will tap the pendulum again. The diversity scam was a way to pretend that Affirmative Action wasn't racist, and Affirmative Action was a way not to settle accounts with the descendants of slaves. All of this is about not dealing with slavery, and the children of slaves are not the slightest bit materially better off than before it started. The vast majority of the benefits of these programs went to white women, immigrants, and sexual minorities. We literally don't even keep statistics about the descendants of slaves, because they're too embarrassing. The only reason race was introduced into the census was to keep track of them, and now we're counting Armenians for some reason. Not dealing with slavery turned us all into race scientists. That being said, the white victimization story is a dumb one. White people are overrepresented. If some institution stopped hiring or admitting for diversity reasons, they wouldn't be hiring and admitting more white people, they'd just hire and admit fewer people. Anti-woke is a civil rights struggle on behalf of dumb people: the lowest ranked white people with absolutely no historical excuse. If one really believed in nature over nurture, or the degeneracy of culture, that's exactly where you would go looking for it. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/long-shadows-the-black-white-gap-in-multigenerational-poverty/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/long-shadows-the-black-wh... > Our headline finding is that three-generation poverty is over 16 times higher among Black adults than white adults (21.3 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively). In other words, one in five Black Americans are experiencing poverty for the third generation in a row, compared to just one in a hundred white Americans.
• ADeerAppeared 2y ago
  > It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. Keep in mind that these statements are made to pander to the incoming president. The implication that "DEI is discrimination against white people" is very much a part of that. > why the initiative in the first place? Ultimately this is the same answer as with the broader ESG incentives. It is in fact a good idea to have a diverse workforce for the exact same reasons evolution keeps diversity around. The pretense that it's "discrimination" is rather silly, especially for tech giants like Meta whose shortlists of qualified applicants number in the hundreds to thousands after initial selection.
  • inglor_cz 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • throwaway48476 2y ago
    ESG is just a jobs program for stock brokers.
    • deleted 2y ago
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  • mike_hearn 2y ago
    > evolution keeps diversity around Evolution has no built in preference for diversity and certain branches of the evolutionary tree wiping out others is a common occurrence throughout history. For instance, the Neanderthals. That's why there are so many rules about importing foreign plants at the border.
• matthewdgreen 2y ago
  It's entirely reasonable to read this entire Meta post as "we had DEI programs, they were meaningful and effective, but now there's an administration in office that will use anti-trust laws to cut us into pieces unless our privately-held supports their political preferences." I'm not saying that's the case (well, I do think it is) but if it is true, then trying to extract meaningful conclusions about the performance of DEI programs from it is a fool's errand.
  • throw16180339 2y ago
    Trump previously threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life on trumped up charges (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-could-165321790.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-c...). He said in an interview that's probably why Meta changed their policies (https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l).
• bubblethink 2y ago
  >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. The initiative was them bowing to public pressure and the zeitgeist of the time. We will never know if it was completely performative of if they did actual racism. They are obviously not going to admit to it one way or the other. But they are rolling it back and explicitly stating that they won't do racism. That seems fine. What's the problem ?
• llm_trw 2y ago
  You need obvious people to fire in the next downturn without hurting productivity too badly. A dei program labels those people for you. Ironically this is exactly the reason why dei programs were considered illegal until a decade ago.
• cyanydeez 2y ago
  [flagged]
• derefr 2y ago
  There were already actual commitments to diversity in most places, yes. DEI programs, on the other hand, were basically a symbolic "party badge" that many companies and organizations felt compelled to adopt to keep scary people — often their own employees! — from suing them for discrimination. That's the "political landscape" they are referring to — a political climate that allowed for even frivolous discrimination lawsuits to succeed, against companies already striving to minimize discrimination. These DEI programs weren't "performative" in the regular "performing caring" sense that companies often do; they were "performative" in the Red Scare "performing Very Visibly Not Being A Communist, even though you were never a Communist" sense.
• breakingrules3 2y ago
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• carabiner 2y ago
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• slg 2y ago
  > in part because of the "political landscape," People really should be more explicit about this. The "political landscape" here is the desire to pay fealty to an incoming administration in hopes of currying favor. American culture didn't drastically change. Trump got 3 million more votes in 2024 than he got in 2020 which is largely in line with overall population growth. That 3 million also amounts to less than 1% of the US population. If that causes you to drastically change your opinion of the culture of this country, you weren't paying very much attention beforehand. The only thing that markedly changed was who is going to be leading the government and thereby the regulators that Meta wants to butter up. That is all Meta is doing with these recent moves.
  • curtisblaine 2y ago
    > The "political landscape" here is the desire to pay fealty to an incoming administration in hopes of currying favor. Exactly as it was when DEI practices were introduced.
    • slg 2y ago
      You must have a short memory if you actually believe that. Diversity programs didn’t all coincidentally spring up in January 2021 the way they are coincidentally disappearing in January 2025. I won’t argue if you call them performative, but they absolutely weren’t just blatant appeals to an incoming presidential administration.
    • hydrogen7800 2y ago
      Was that in response to a new incoming administration, or a series of social and cultural events?
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Actually, these practices were mostly introduced under Trump, and ramped up with the Floyd protests, which also took place under Trump.
  • dinkumthinkum 2y ago
    American culture did not drastically change but mainstream media outlets and the entertainment industry attempted to make it seem as if it had shifted quite dramatically when it really had not. You can't simply say that all the people that voted for Harris support all this stuff. There were many people that voted for Harris or against Trump for many reasons but still don't fall into the far-left camp. It's just paying fealty. Is what has happened to AAA games and example of consumers paying fealty to Trump? Let's be serious.
• Eumenes 2y ago
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• jollyllama 2y ago
  > unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side. Disagree, right wingers will be satisfied by this performative posturing even though there's no real change to existing policy.
• deleted 2y ago
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• glitchc 2y ago
  I think that's the point. DEI is performative. A business cannot survive unless it hires the best person for the job.
  • pc86 2y ago
    Regardless of the first points you make, companies objectively do not need to hire the best person for the job. Lots of companies need programmers. 99% of them do not need world class software engineers. There are plenty of jobs where "can type JS into a computer for 30 hours a week and go to a couple meetings" is plenty to keep the business moving forward.
  • purplethinking 2y ago
    A few small holes will not sink the aircraft carrier, but eventually there will be enough holes. See Disney.
• deleted 2y ago
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• lazzlazzlazz 2y ago
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• whycome 2y ago
  > acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place The retraction in itself is performative as well. It’s trying to highlight that “we only did it because it was a necessary performative action at the time due to the political climate then — we didn’t really mean it.”
• mv4 2y ago
  These programs seem problematic. 'A former Facebook global diversity strategist stole more than $4 million from the social media giant “to fund a lavish lifestyle” in California and Georgia, federal prosecutors said.' Interestingly, similar fraud occurred at her next job. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/former-facebook-diversity-leader-pleads-guilty-to-fraud.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/former-facebook-diversity-le...
• deleted 2y ago
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• seydor 2y ago
  not only performative but discriminative and harmful hence the need of removal
• deleted 2y ago
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• santoshalper 2y ago
  They never cared about DEI. The difference is that now they don't feel pressure to pretend.
• az226 2y ago
  The honest message wound have been: Hi all, I wanted to share some changes we're making to our hiring, development and procurement practices. Before getting into the details, there is some important background to lay out: The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term "DEI" has also become charged, in part because it is gives preferential treatment of some groups over others. 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. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities which ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone. On top of that, we've always believed that no-one should be given - or deprived- of opportunities because of protected characteristics, except if they’re a man or white, or Asian man. Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we're making the following changes: On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop discriminating against white and Asian men. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds to build products that work for everyone. We have decreased the importance of meeting racist and sexist quotas and tying outcomes to compensation. Having quotas in place make hiring decisions based on race or gender. While this was our practice, we want to appear less sexist and racist. We are sunsetting our supplier discrimination efforts within our broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from Black-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those who were part of the supplier diversity program. Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.
• dmurray 2y ago
  > acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place That seems unnecessarily judgemental about the true effect of the program. Maybe it was really effective and made Meta more productive and also helped many people from historically underrepresented backgrounds people get good jobs, but they're falsely claiming it's ineffective because that's what they expect the current political leadership wants to hear?
  • Manuel_D 2y ago
    The DEI policies were effective, particularly the Diverse Slate Approach. But it's legally risky to continue with it under the current administration since it was a race and gender conscious policy. People can argue as to whether it was "discrimination" but it absolutely was conscious of candidate's protected class.
    • inemesitaffia 2y ago
      Did it note the particular ethnic group that's overrepresented in US Tech? Unlikely
      • Manuel_D 2y ago
        The diverse slate Approach'd criteria depended on the role. Ther are some roles where Asians are underrepresented so they'd count in that role. For tech, they're not underrepresented so they don't count towards the DSA.
        • inemesitaffia 2y ago
          Asians aren't overrepresented in US tech? You haven't seen the numbers? And where's the men in HR?
          • Manuel_D 2y ago
            Yes, Asians are overrepresented in tech. That's why the DSA is not fulfilled if an Asian male is part of the candidate slate for a tech role. The candidate slate needs either a woman or URM (underrepresented racial minority, AKA Black or Latin) in order to proceed. If there's a different role where Asians are underrepresented, then an Asian candidate could fulfill the DSA requirement.
• freejazz 2y ago
  It's meant to please people who have a political opposition to the concept of DEI.
• cbsmith 2y ago
  > It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. It only seems that way because it absolutely is an acknowledgement that the 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. No, it will please people who felt that DEI programs were hurting productivity and taking jobs away from more deserving candidates... and that's exactly why they'd make this announcement. I suspect there may have even been some pressure applied behind closed doors with the threat of lawsuits and government oversight on this matter. I'm confident there's a ton of people cheering about this. I just don't want to know those people.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place Right. And being open about it is by design, so that the new Overlords (Trump and Musk) know that Zuck's heart was never in that DEI stuff anyway, that he just had to do it because of the political climate, and they can count on his whole-hearted support for the next 4 years.
• kristofferR 2y ago
  Took me way too long that PoC doesn't refer to proof-of-concept.
• nailer 2y ago
  > I'm a PoC Are you a black American? East and south asians generally don’t use the term, and DEI focuses on the former and penalizes the latter (hence east and south asians avoiding the term).
• AdrianB1 2y ago
  It depends on the company, some are faking it, some are taking hard lines. For example, my company (>100,000 employees, American company, in top 100 Fortune 500) has a 60% women in IT in Europe (targets are by region or country). We exceeded that, by promoting purchasing assistants as IT Solution Architects. Zero expertise, zero experience (purchasing is a different dept, they have ~ 80-90% women without any targets, it's a job that naturally attracts women), moved to IT to meet dept targets and de-professionalizing the entire department. I have junior devs paid more than software architects with 30 years of experience, because the junior dev is a woman so it was promoted directly as "Digital Product Owner", which is a title with no meaning or responsibility, but it is one salary band higher than a software architect. This is one company I know very well, but I have friends and former colleagues in similar companies. Especially in non-IT companies, this happens a lot - check FMCG companies, for example, where innovation does not exist because most jobs are fake jobs but well known activist shareholders are strongly pushing for it, they don't care about profits in the pursue of political agenda.
• popalchemist 2y ago
  Corporations are by nature sociopathic, even moreso when the leader is someone barely human like Zuck. To wit: they may be fully aware that this statement would piss off thousands at their company, and are counting on those people quitting, so they can downsize without having to pay for severance.