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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

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.
  - pc86 2y ago
    Well "DEI vetos it" is obviously a problem. There's a discussion to be had around expanding candidate pools, expanding the pipeline, however you want to phrase it. These are good and noble goals but we're not talking about the pipeline we're talking about the candidates for a given role that we're hiring for right now. No department should be vetoing any hire in a different department. Having an engineer veto a hire in the DEI department is ludicrous on its face, but no more ludicrous than having a DEI department tell the engineering team they're not "allowed" to hire a qualified applicant because of their race or gender.
    - a1j9o94 2y ago
      It's HR's entire job to set policies for hiring. They can say a candidate has to have a college degree. Why wouldn't they have the right to set this policy as well?
      - asdasdsddd 2y ago
        You are confusing policies and qualifications, its on the engineers to decide the qualifications and HR to run policies on sourcing.
      - Manuel_D 2y ago
        Protected class cannot be used as a factor in hiring. Saying "we can't proceed with an offer until we've hired at least one woman and one URM" (which is what Meta's DSA entailed) is indeed using protected class as a factor in hiring.
  - 9rx 2y ago
    It is odd that the expected inclusion was so specific, though. What about a 14 year old white male? Do they not satisfy: "consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like."? I get it. I don't think a 14 year old looks suitable for a senior role either, but looking past that is the point. You never know what someone can offer.
- catlover76 2y ago
  [dead]
AlexandrB 2y ago
> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like. This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse". And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  > In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason Statically Asians in America outperform "White" people when it comes to education and salaries, which shows the fallacy in the whole white privilege thing. Therefore DEI policies pretend Asians don't exist.
  - arccy 2y ago
    there's still a "bamboo ceiling"
    - hollerith 2y ago
      Is there? The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Asians who did not even grow up in the US.
      - UncleMeat 2y ago
        Specific examples don't overcome the overall statistics.
        2y ago
jordanb 2y ago
> Do you actually have experience with those programs? I was hiring manager at a "woke" (media) company during and after peak DEI. The only policy of DEI that really affected me was that we had to have a "diverse slate of candidates" meaning, we had to interview at least one woman and (non asian) minority. This was actually a problem hiring engineers because we wouldn't be able to extend offers unless we'd satisfy the "diverse slate" meaning we'd miss out on candidates we wanted to hire while waiting for more people to interview. We could get exceptions but it'd be a fight with HR. Asians didn't count as diverse because, in tech, they are not underrepresented. Basically "diverse" hires were women, AA, hispanic, etc. Our company quietly walked back the "diverse slate" stuff years ago. In fact I think it was only in effect for like a year at the most. The DEI stuff rolling out was highly performative. It wasn't in place for really long and quietly walked back. Now, the loud walking back of policies that probably haven't been enforced in years is also performative. In both instances it's companies responding to the political moment.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  This was exactly my experience in a Big Tech company. I will say, a lasting (IMO good) effect we had was that hiring managers continued to consider diversity of candidates as a factor, but there was no gate in extending offers. Some hiring managers took this further and actually enforced diverse slate style hiring because they believed in it and others didn't care. It also meant that if a req was taking a long time to get filled, diverse slate just stopped being a factor.
snambi 2y ago
Not really true. We have been asked to hire women in our team. Thankfully we found an amazing person. But other teams were not so lucky. It was pure nonsense.
hombre_fatal 2y ago
> consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like. This sounds like a terminally online Twitter user's idea of how people do hiring. It's also funny to consider when 70%+ of H1Bs are Indian men. Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set. This kind of rhetoric is why we're seeing a pendulum swing in the other direction instead of a sane middle ground. But at least it's finally becoming trite to make these claims with a straight face.
- whynotminot 2y ago
  > Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set. Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers. Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers. I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.
gip 2y ago
This has been my experience as well as a director of engineering. I also think more diverse candidates is a good thing. The thing that was harder for me was working with the people hired to run the DEI recruiting programs. I never was able to establish a great working relationship with them even though I was able to do so with a good cross-section of the rest of the organization. Not really sure why tbh.
surgical_fire 2y ago
If that's what DEI did, I think that getting rid of it is positive. It seems to just add performative and inefficient bureaucracy to an already typically slow and laborious task which is hiring people. I am not even white by the way. I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. I am confident and proud of my skills, which I put a lot of effort to develop over decades. The color of my skin is as meaningless as the color of my shirts.
- userbinator 2y ago
  I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. That's exactly what was happening, and you can imagine the quality of work that resulted in. Now that the tide is turning, that hopefully won't be the case anymore.
- Plasmoid 2y ago
  One thing that started happening is that "diverse" candidates were aggressively head-hunted, for interviews. HR wasn't interested in hiring them, they just wanted to fill our their internal diversity quota and lubricate the hiring pipeline.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
blitzar 2y ago
The memo sent from on high (multiple years): You must put up for dismissal 15% of your reports, of those 10% will be dismissed. You may not select any female, ethnic minority, lgbtq or disabled employees.
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  This is terrible. It makes my blood boil just seeing this.
- maxwellg 2y ago
  Does anyone have any concrete proof of this actually happening? I find it extremely doubtful.
  - throwaway849593 2y ago
    [dead]
  - notahacker 2y ago
    Seems to be very loosely based on Jack Welch's actual maxim that 10% of the workforce should be arbitrarily fired every year in the hope that this performative beating would improve morale, and maybe productivity too. This sort of arbitrariness was actually popular with much of the right at the time, but it wasn't white men that Welch was explaining just needed to overdeliver and outperform (and definitely not have kids) to succeed in the long run...
    - blitzar 2y ago
      The overlords of my time were certainly schooled in the ways of Jack Welch, but also particularly inspired by the 2009 Netflix vision of a High Performing Workplace as seen in their culture document. It was mandatory and inspirational reading. When the performative beating and meritocracy absolutism collides with the sensitivities of the modern workplace the results are strangely unpredictable. The memos are tucked away somewhere with my NDA and the memories of crushing peoples hopes, dreams and aspirations.
hamandcheese 2y ago
My company did (still does? Not sure) have a policy similar to that, even for IC roles. We would frequently miss out on opportunities to hire qualified candidates because we couldn't make an offer until satisfying the interview quota. By the time we did, the candidate accepted another offer. I think it's probably a net positive for underrepresented people (it's kind of hard to argue harm to white people when they just get other offers elsewhere that are good enough to accept without waiting), but I'm really not sure if it's a net positive for the company (pre-ipo, still trying to grow a lot).
- gitremote 2y ago
  It's not a net positive for underrepresented groups, because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. They don't have infinite time, because they are real people. Would you prefer to be rejected because of your resume, or asked to attend an interview and then be rejected because of your resume?
  - hamandcheese 2y ago
    > because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. I suppose this is true, if you believe that hitting the additional quota is entirely performative. OTOH my company has better representation of women than anywhere else I've worked previously, so I don't think it is entirely performative.
- whimsicalism 2y ago
  Not commenting on the merits of AA in general, but multiple offers in hand in a timely manner is always better so losing out on that is definitely harmful.
BadCookie 2y ago
What most companies do is interview primarily referred candidates, which is arguably the opposite of DEI. It favors people in the social networks of the population already employed by the hiring company. And most people have social networks that look very similar to themselves in terms of race, gender, and economic class. Is that fair? It doesn’t seem fair. My fringe belief is that giving an edge to buddies of current employees ought to be illegal (at least at large companies) for many of the same reasons why nepotism is frowned upon.
- ip26 2y ago
  The "good old boys" network is a problem. But given how hard we all agree it is to interview effectively and determine who is a great fit for the role in a matter of a few hours, there's a lot of good sense in hiring people already widely known to be excellent by your team from years of past experience working together.
  - BadCookie 2y ago
    There’s tension between what is best for the company and what is most fair to applicants. I acknowledge that, but think that the onus should be on (large) companies to figure out a better interview process. I don’t see why references have to come from current (or past) employees. Colleges don’t make you get referred by alumni, but they do require letters of reference (usually). On a related note, it’s amusing to me when white men in tech on Reddit get mad about Indian men preferentially hiring other Indian men from their community. I assume that many of these same white men don’t see any problem when they preferentially hire their own friends using the rationale that you gave.
- cherrycherry98 2y ago
  Hiring managers love referrals. You can spend weeks going through resumes and doing interviews hoping to find that perfect candidate (and they better be as perfect as can because you won't be able to just get rid of them on a whim if they wind up being a dud). There's also nothing more frustrating than giving an offer to a great candidate and then losing our on them. Hiring referrals is great for both problems. The person is already vetted by someone your organization trusts. This is great because a referral is more likely to be someone that knows their stuff and thus pass the interview process. You also have someone vouching that this person is a good employee and not just a good interviewer. The candidate is more likely to accept when they have a contact on the inside that can vouch for the the company and team. This all assumes that the company is going to do their own independent evaluation of the referred candidate.

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.
- pc86 2y ago
  Well "DEI vetos it" is obviously a problem. There's a discussion to be had around expanding candidate pools, expanding the pipeline, however you want to phrase it. These are good and noble goals but we're not talking about the pipeline we're talking about the candidates for a given role that we're hiring for right now. No department should be vetoing any hire in a different department. Having an engineer veto a hire in the DEI department is ludicrous on its face, but no more ludicrous than having a DEI department tell the engineering team they're not "allowed" to hire a qualified applicant because of their race or gender.
  - a1j9o94 2y ago
    It's HR's entire job to set policies for hiring. They can say a candidate has to have a college degree. Why wouldn't they have the right to set this policy as well?
    - asdasdsddd 2y ago
      You are confusing policies and qualifications, its on the engineers to decide the qualifications and HR to run policies on sourcing.
    - Manuel_D 2y ago
      Protected class cannot be used as a factor in hiring. Saying "we can't proceed with an offer until we've hired at least one woman and one URM" (which is what Meta's DSA entailed) is indeed using protected class as a factor in hiring.
- 9rx 2y ago
  It is odd that the expected inclusion was so specific, though. What about a 14 year old white male? Do they not satisfy: "consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like."? I get it. I don't think a 14 year old looks suitable for a senior role either, but looking past that is the point. You never know what someone can offer.
catlover76 2y ago
[dead]

AlexandrB 2y ago

> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like. This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse". And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.

ChocolateGod 2y ago
> In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason Statically Asians in America outperform "White" people when it comes to education and salaries, which shows the fallacy in the whole white privilege thing. Therefore DEI policies pretend Asians don't exist.
- arccy 2y ago
  there's still a "bamboo ceiling"
  - hollerith 2y ago
    Is there? The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Asians who did not even grow up in the US.
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      Specific examples don't overcome the overall statistics.
      - 2y ago

jordanb 2y ago

> Do you actually have experience with those programs? I was hiring manager at a "woke" (media) company during and after peak DEI. The only policy of DEI that really affected me was that we had to have a "diverse slate of candidates" meaning, we had to interview at least one woman and (non asian) minority. This was actually a problem hiring engineers because we wouldn't be able to extend offers unless we'd satisfy the "diverse slate" meaning we'd miss out on candidates we wanted to hire while waiting for more people to interview. We could get exceptions but it'd be a fight with HR. Asians didn't count as diverse because, in tech, they are not underrepresented. Basically "diverse" hires were women, AA, hispanic, etc. Our company quietly walked back the "diverse slate" stuff years ago. In fact I think it was only in effect for like a year at the most. The DEI stuff rolling out was highly performative. It wasn't in place for really long and quietly walked back. Now, the loud walking back of policies that probably haven't been enforced in years is also performative. In both instances it's companies responding to the political moment.

Karrot_Kream 2y ago
This was exactly my experience in a Big Tech company. I will say, a lasting (IMO good) effect we had was that hiring managers continued to consider diversity of candidates as a factor, but there was no gate in extending offers. Some hiring managers took this further and actually enforced diverse slate style hiring because they believed in it and others didn't care. It also meant that if a req was taking a long time to get filled, diverse slate just stopped being a factor.

snambi 2y ago

Not really true. We have been asked to hire women in our team. Thankfully we found an amazing person. But other teams were not so lucky. It was pure nonsense.

hombre_fatal 2y ago

> consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like. This sounds like a terminally online Twitter user's idea of how people do hiring. It's also funny to consider when 70%+ of H1Bs are Indian men. Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set. This kind of rhetoric is why we're seeing a pendulum swing in the other direction instead of a sane middle ground. But at least it's finally becoming trite to make these claims with a straight face.

whynotminot 2y ago
> Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set. Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers. Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers. I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.

gip 2y ago

This has been my experience as well as a director of engineering. I also think more diverse candidates is a good thing. The thing that was harder for me was working with the people hired to run the DEI recruiting programs. I never was able to establish a great working relationship with them even though I was able to do so with a good cross-section of the rest of the organization. Not really sure why tbh.

surgical_fire 2y ago

If that's what DEI did, I think that getting rid of it is positive. It seems to just add performative and inefficient bureaucracy to an already typically slow and laborious task which is hiring people. I am not even white by the way. I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. I am confident and proud of my skills, which I put a lot of effort to develop over decades. The color of my skin is as meaningless as the color of my shirts.

userbinator 2y ago
I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. That's exactly what was happening, and you can imagine the quality of work that resulted in. Now that the tide is turning, that hopefully won't be the case anymore.
Plasmoid 2y ago
One thing that started happening is that "diverse" candidates were aggressively head-hunted, for interviews. HR wasn't interested in hiring them, they just wanted to fill our their internal diversity quota and lubricate the hiring pipeline.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

blitzar 2y ago

The memo sent from on high (multiple years): You must put up for dismissal 15% of your reports, of those 10% will be dismissed. You may not select any female, ethnic minority, lgbtq or disabled employees.

curtisblaine 2y ago
This is terrible. It makes my blood boil just seeing this.
maxwellg 2y ago
Does anyone have any concrete proof of this actually happening? I find it extremely doubtful.
- throwaway849593 2y ago
  [dead]
- notahacker 2y ago
  Seems to be very loosely based on Jack Welch's actual maxim that 10% of the workforce should be arbitrarily fired every year in the hope that this performative beating would improve morale, and maybe productivity too. This sort of arbitrariness was actually popular with much of the right at the time, but it wasn't white men that Welch was explaining just needed to overdeliver and outperform (and definitely not have kids) to succeed in the long run...
  - blitzar 2y ago
    The overlords of my time were certainly schooled in the ways of Jack Welch, but also particularly inspired by the 2009 Netflix vision of a High Performing Workplace as seen in their culture document. It was mandatory and inspirational reading. When the performative beating and meritocracy absolutism collides with the sensitivities of the modern workplace the results are strangely unpredictable. The memos are tucked away somewhere with my NDA and the memories of crushing peoples hopes, dreams and aspirations.

hamandcheese 2y ago

My company did (still does? Not sure) have a policy similar to that, even for IC roles. We would frequently miss out on opportunities to hire qualified candidates because we couldn't make an offer until satisfying the interview quota. By the time we did, the candidate accepted another offer. I think it's probably a net positive for underrepresented people (it's kind of hard to argue harm to white people when they just get other offers elsewhere that are good enough to accept without waiting), but I'm really not sure if it's a net positive for the company (pre-ipo, still trying to grow a lot).

gitremote 2y ago
It's not a net positive for underrepresented groups, because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. They don't have infinite time, because they are real people. Would you prefer to be rejected because of your resume, or asked to attend an interview and then be rejected because of your resume?
- hamandcheese 2y ago
  > because it assumes their time wouldn't be better spent applying for real job opportunities. I suppose this is true, if you believe that hitting the additional quota is entirely performative. OTOH my company has better representation of women than anywhere else I've worked previously, so I don't think it is entirely performative.
whimsicalism 2y ago
Not commenting on the merits of AA in general, but multiple offers in hand in a timely manner is always better so losing out on that is definitely harmful.

BadCookie 2y ago

What most companies do is interview primarily referred candidates, which is arguably the opposite of DEI. It favors people in the social networks of the population already employed by the hiring company. And most people have social networks that look very similar to themselves in terms of race, gender, and economic class. Is that fair? It doesn’t seem fair. My fringe belief is that giving an edge to buddies of current employees ought to be illegal (at least at large companies) for many of the same reasons why nepotism is frowned upon.

ip26 2y ago
The "good old boys" network is a problem. But given how hard we all agree it is to interview effectively and determine who is a great fit for the role in a matter of a few hours, there's a lot of good sense in hiring people already widely known to be excellent by your team from years of past experience working together.
- BadCookie 2y ago
  There’s tension between what is best for the company and what is most fair to applicants. I acknowledge that, but think that the onus should be on (large) companies to figure out a better interview process. I don’t see why references have to come from current (or past) employees. Colleges don’t make you get referred by alumni, but they do require letters of reference (usually). On a related note, it’s amusing to me when white men in tech on Reddit get mad about Indian men preferentially hiring other Indian men from their community. I assume that many of these same white men don’t see any problem when they preferentially hire their own friends using the rationale that you gave.
cherrycherry98 2y ago
Hiring managers love referrals. You can spend weeks going through resumes and doing interviews hoping to find that perfect candidate (and they better be as perfect as can because you won't be able to just get rid of them on a whim if they wind up being a dud). There's also nothing more frustrating than giving an offer to a great candidate and then losing our on them. Hiring referrals is great for both problems. The person is already vetted by someone your organization trusts. This is great because a referral is more likely to be someone that knows their stuff and thus pass the interview process. You also have someone vouching that this person is a good employee and not just a good interviewer. The candidate is more likely to accept when they have a contact on the inside that can vouch for the the company and team. This all assumes that the company is going to do their own independent evaluation of the referred candidate.