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> 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

• 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.
  • chrislongss 2y ago
    These DEI programs were not primarily about outreach. Outreach existed way before DEI (e.g. interns, new grads, Grace Hopper conference, etc) and will continue to exist. DEI introduced improper - discriminatory - systems with quotas and heavy prioritization of specific groups of people.
    • sgerenser 2y ago
      Not only that, the “diverse slate” requirement, which is mentioned in the Meta posting, is actively harmful to PoC jobseekers. When I was at a Microsoft, I I knew of multiple cases where a candidate was already essentially decided on, but they had to continue what was essentially “sham” interviews of at least one woman and one PoC in order to check the diverse slate box. Complete waste of time on all sides.
      • jvanderbot 2y ago
        I worked with a talented engineer who happened to be female and she was constantly behind because she had to attend each interview this small company did. Even she, a big supporter of these efforts, had to laugh about it.
    • themiddleupper 2y ago
      The company i work for does not have any quota and neither does meta. There is no lowering of standards to hire somebody, just more effort to get wider application pool and outreach programs to schools. Also DEI is not just based on colour or ethnicity. There are other groups like mothers, neuro divergent people etc.
• eapressoandcats 2y ago
  To be clear, the thing that’s keeping them from being disadvantaged against Musk/X is cozying up to the Trump and the government. That’s going to make a much bigger difference in stock performance than any personnel impact of these changes.
  • andrepd 2y ago
    Surely nothing can go wrong with authoritarians backed by trillionaires with social media in their hands, rapidly talking over power. I doubt Orwell could have predicted how the 2020s are turning out.
    • chrislongss 2y ago
      "Trillionaire" media moguls were on board with the previous regime for at least the last decade. They are realigning now, not particularly surprising.
      • andrepd 2y ago
        Hardly. Social media algorithms optimising for engagement is surely one of the main reasons we're in this hyper-polarised environment. So yes, their marketing said DEI, but their algos pushed far-right propaganda onto my screen.
    • liontwist 2y ago
      if we are in a dangerous political situation I wouldn’t know because trump alarmism has been turned up to 100 since 2015, so I have to discount what your saying to “mild political irritation”.
      • andrepd 2y ago
        Yes it's called boiling the frog + shifting the Overton window. Threatening to invade allies, or having an unelected halftrillionaire direct the government of the US and openly push for regime change across Western Europe (to give two examples from just the past week), would be unthinkable in 2015. Now it's just "oh there's this guy again, anyway what's on" / "mild political irritation". So yes, you're right that it's a bad strategy to keep the alarmism on 11 for a decade (because this normalisation is what eventually happens), but wrong to think that it's not actually a true problem.
• whimsicalism 2y ago
  I don't see how very real differences in hiring practice are performative, but maybe that's just me.
• darth_avocado 2y ago
  I know of a famous tech company where majority of workers were white, not even Asian and Indian people, who usually tend to over represent in tech. Around the BLM times they put in policy that they had to interview people of color. What most managers did was just interview people of color only to reject them, often judge the candidates too harshly to ensure no laws were broken. They often interviewed the same candidate for multiple positions, it was pretty obvious what they were doing. Obviously if they were investigated, nothing provable would ever come out. But stuff like that is pretty prevalent in tech.
  • sakex 2y ago
    Name and shame
    • VirusNewbie 2y ago
      Microsoft did this. I went through a DEI loop at Microsoft (found out later) and was ghosted by one manager, another manager asked a leetcode hard with 20 minutes to implement it, another asked a leetcode hard and DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE ANSWER until I walked them through it step by step (they had never seen the answer before). Less you think I'm complaining about algorithmic interviews, I passed Google and Netflix technical rounds just fine. Microsoft managers were the most disinterested group I've ever interviewed with, and it was only later that I found out I was picked to interview for multiple teams because of a DEI recruiter, and then found out that MS had initiatives forcing managers to interview people from underrepresented backgrounds. Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock. The IQ difference between the people at Netflix and Google compared to MSFT was astounding.
      • 1over137 2y ago
        >Seriously, sell your microsoft stock Alas, the stock's future performance is unlikely to be tied to any of that. Stock prices are barely attached to reality at all.
      • Jagerbizzle 2y ago
• superultra 2y ago
  > That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret. Which is fine. But are they then suggesting that bias/etc was never a problem in the first place? Or, are they suggesting that DEI was not the solution, and if so, then why aren’t they suggesting a new solution? There isn’t a satisfying answer here, to me anyway.
• throwawayq3423 2y ago
  Turns out the whole "culture" thing was made up. You just do what is best for your business.
  • liontwist 2y ago
    Which as it turns out, is also easier for employees to reason about and navigate. Complex social games with rituals, vocabulary, etc are not, and act as class signaling mechanisms.