4 ms·

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 s

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.
      - whynotminot 2y ago
        > At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?" I feel like this mindset is the same as CEOs reducing the IT budget because “We’ve recovered from our last critical outage and our systems are working fine now.” I think there’s a valid place for a DEI-like group within HR ensuring a company’s hiring and promoting policies are fair in an ongoing manner.
- 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
        [deleted]
        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. :-(

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.
    - whynotminot 2y ago
      > At what point does an organization say "DEI mission accomplished?" I feel like this mindset is the same as CEOs reducing the IT budget because “We’ve recovered from our last critical outage and our systems are working fine now.” I think there’s a valid place for a DEI-like group within HR ensuring a company’s hiring and promoting policies are fair in an ongoing manner.
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
        [deleted]
      - 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. :-(