5 ms·

I think you need to make a case for DEI being “one of the industry’s greatest strengths”. It’s not obvious to me.

bmarnane 5mo ago
If your product is used bya cross-section of society, then having a cross-section of society build it should lead to a better product no?
- userbinator 5mo ago
  A million monkeys will never equal a single Einstein.
- noitpmeder 5mo ago
  If a qualification for the role is "appreciation for certain less represented cultures/ideas/..." then sure. Otherwise, for a backend c++ engineer the benefits are significantly less obvious, to the point it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill. The goal should be to hire the best team for the use case, regardless of gender/race/culture/background.
  - crote 5mo ago
    Appreciation isn't always enough, lived experience provides a lot of value as well. See all the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names/Addresses/Birthdays/Phone Numbers/Time Zones/etc, for example. Do you want a backend engineer who designs a 64-character ascii text field for legal name and have everyone nod in agreement, or would you rather have one who knows that it isn't going to work for their cousin "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso"? > it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill It doesn't. The goal of DEI has always been to attract a diversity of perspectives, all else being equal. Nobody ever proposed choosing a woefully unqualified diverse candidate over an obviously-qualified Generic White Guy. The only people who would oppose that would be the unqualified Generic White Guy who just happens to be the nephew of the CEO's golf buddy.
    - CaptainNegative 5mo ago
      I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires. Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.
  - vineyardmike 5mo ago
    > why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill It was never trumping skill. This is just a willful rewrite of history perpetuated for some political goal. The goal was always to ensure that skill had adequate opportunity to be displayed without bias.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
- lsdajsadsfdakl 5mo ago
  Just like people are judged by a jury of their peers, planes should be designed by your peers. We should just get a representative sample of the population and give them equal say in the design of the plane, engines, etc.
crote 5mo ago
How well would the tech industry do if they fired all the autistic people for "not being team players"? How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person, or socially awkward geek?
- noitpmeder 5mo ago
  If you're not a team player I'd expect you to be on the chopping block regardless of underlying race, mental, culture, ...
  - ceejayoz 5mo ago
    It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry. I’ve worked with several excellent “just leave me alone” sysadmin types.
    - noitpmeder 5mo ago
      I'm not saying there can't be very clear counter examples, I guess the overall sense though is that "being a team player' is generally considered an attractive quality in any employee. If A is a team player and B isn't, and they're otherwise equivalent, you're probably going to take/keep A. It's not like (most) hiring managers put "not a team player" in the pro column.
    - paranoidrobot 5mo ago
      > It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry. Perhaps I'm missing something here. To me "individual contributor" means anyone who is NOT: A (technical) "Lead", "Chief", "Architect", or (possibly) "Staff" anything, and has no management or team-leader responsibilities.
      - Terr_ 5mo ago
        Yeah, it doesn't mean a 1-person-team, it means your job doesn't include supervising someone else.
threecheese 5mo ago
It’s easy to make an objective case for how ‘D’ is a strength, however E and I are imo more values which intend to attract diversity.
- thin_carapace 5mo ago
  there do exist objective arguments for the pursuit of diversity. there do also exist objective arguments otherwise. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12641 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12641 heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this case. on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings, therefore social behaviours could be assumed to a higher degree. reference behavioural encodings drastically diverge across cultures (as embodied by religious value sets, or at a different meta level, the idea of low trust vs. high trust societies). based on this drastic divergence, predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity. so i see that jacking up societal entropy leads to lowered societal cohesion. but thats just my stance and id love to hear yours.
  - birdsink 5mo ago
    I couldn't disagree more. "predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity"? I feel like this is just a fancy way of saying that you're uncomfortable with people being different from you. The social tension you're describing is in your own head. Even the article you're citing doesn't even agree with what you're saying.
    - thin_carapace 5mo ago
      your post is an ad hominem without substance to back the personal accusations within. i said there were arguments both in favor of and against diversity. the article i posted showed arguments both in favor of and against diversity. obviously some contradictions will present when looking at both sides. diverse, millenia old, genetically encoded behavioural structures exist in our shared reality. id love to discuss this idea and the exact types of behaviours that can be encoded, down to the generational timespans required for encoding. that way we can talk about my idea in objective good faith. 'its all in your head' isnt objective good faith. applying the golden rule, you clearly accept bad faith ... man you couldnt tolerate a dissenting idea even momentarily before bringing out social ostracization and logical fallacies! sounds pretty similar to the behaviour of a racist, were you projecting? that was said facetiously. im not trying to accuse you of anything, rather to show how it feels to be accused. to conclude i think its pretty easy to predict what my neighbours are eating for dinner at home and pretty hard in the city so youre gonna have to try a bit harder to convince me that the evidence of my eyes and ears is wrong.
dangus 5mo ago
McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-matters-even-more-the-case-for-holistic-impact https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... Landing page: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals can't understand customers as well as a workforce of people who represent the diversity of those customers. This isn't just diversity of race or gender, it's also diversity of thought and background. Also critical and under-emphasized: the E and I in DEI, equity and inclusion. Power distance and lack of inclusion can railroad companies into giving the people with the most power the most influence on decisions, rather than giving the best ideas a chance to breathe. In business a classic example might be "men designing women's clothing." How are you going to understand your customers if none of your employees and leadership resemble those customers? Perhaps you can figure it out and make some decent products but your competitor who has more diversity in their workforce is likely to outperform you, which is exactly what McKinsey's studies have demonstrated. I will also point out that the only reason anyone started questioning this obviously true business concept and changing opinions into being against DEI is because the Republican Party's strategists figured out that they could appropriate and leverage the term "DEI" and attach it to the latent reactionary racism that much of the US still holds dear. You can get away with saying "I don't like DEI" in public but if you say "I don't like black people" or "I don't think women should get hired for important roles" [1] that is obviously not acceptable, even though a large percentage of Americans feel that way. Right wing media twisted a largely innocent term into a useful dogwhistle. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X251369844 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X251369844
- Squarex 5mo ago
  Not to agree or disagree, but the McKinsey has been heavily criticised as bogus. For example https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.pdf?mimetype=pdf https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p....
- 5mo ago

If your product is used bya cross-section of society, then having a cross-section of society build it should lead to a better product no?

userbinator 5mo ago
A million monkeys will never equal a single Einstein.
noitpmeder 5mo ago
If a qualification for the role is "appreciation for certain less represented cultures/ideas/..." then sure. Otherwise, for a backend c++ engineer the benefits are significantly less obvious, to the point it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill. The goal should be to hire the best team for the use case, regardless of gender/race/culture/background.
- crote 5mo ago
  Appreciation isn't always enough, lived experience provides a lot of value as well. See all the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names/Addresses/Birthdays/Phone Numbers/Time Zones/etc, for example. Do you want a backend engineer who designs a 64-character ascii text field for legal name and have everyone nod in agreement, or would you rather have one who knows that it isn't going to work for their cousin "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso"? > it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill It doesn't. The goal of DEI has always been to attract a diversity of perspectives, all else being equal. Nobody ever proposed choosing a woefully unqualified diverse candidate over an obviously-qualified Generic White Guy. The only people who would oppose that would be the unqualified Generic White Guy who just happens to be the nephew of the CEO's golf buddy.
  - CaptainNegative 5mo ago
    I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires. Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.
- vineyardmike 5mo ago
  > why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill It was never trumping skill. This is just a willful rewrite of history perpetuated for some political goal. The goal was always to ensure that skill had adequate opportunity to be displayed without bias.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
lsdajsadsfdakl 5mo ago
Just like people are judged by a jury of their peers, planes should be designed by your peers. We should just get a representative sample of the population and give them equal say in the design of the plane, engines, etc.

crote 5mo ago

How well would the tech industry do if they fired all the autistic people for "not being team players"? How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person, or socially awkward geek?

noitpmeder 5mo ago
If you're not a team player I'd expect you to be on the chopping block regardless of underlying race, mental, culture, ...
- ceejayoz 5mo ago
  It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry. I’ve worked with several excellent “just leave me alone” sysadmin types.
  - noitpmeder 5mo ago
    I'm not saying there can't be very clear counter examples, I guess the overall sense though is that "being a team player' is generally considered an attractive quality in any employee. If A is a team player and B isn't, and they're otherwise equivalent, you're probably going to take/keep A. It's not like (most) hiring managers put "not a team player" in the pro column.
  - paranoidrobot 5mo ago
    > It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry. Perhaps I'm missing something here. To me "individual contributor" means anyone who is NOT: A (technical) "Lead", "Chief", "Architect", or (possibly) "Staff" anything, and has no management or team-leader responsibilities.
    - Terr_ 5mo ago
      Yeah, it doesn't mean a 1-person-team, it means your job doesn't include supervising someone else.

threecheese 5mo ago

It’s easy to make an objective case for how ‘D’ is a strength, however E and I are imo more values which intend to attract diversity.

thin_carapace 5mo ago
there do exist objective arguments for the pursuit of diversity. there do also exist objective arguments otherwise. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12641 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12641 heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this case. on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings, therefore social behaviours could be assumed to a higher degree. reference behavioural encodings drastically diverge across cultures (as embodied by religious value sets, or at a different meta level, the idea of low trust vs. high trust societies). based on this drastic divergence, predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity. so i see that jacking up societal entropy leads to lowered societal cohesion. but thats just my stance and id love to hear yours.
- birdsink 5mo ago
  I couldn't disagree more. "predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity"? I feel like this is just a fancy way of saying that you're uncomfortable with people being different from you. The social tension you're describing is in your own head. Even the article you're citing doesn't even agree with what you're saying.
  - thin_carapace 5mo ago
    your post is an ad hominem without substance to back the personal accusations within. i said there were arguments both in favor of and against diversity. the article i posted showed arguments both in favor of and against diversity. obviously some contradictions will present when looking at both sides. diverse, millenia old, genetically encoded behavioural structures exist in our shared reality. id love to discuss this idea and the exact types of behaviours that can be encoded, down to the generational timespans required for encoding. that way we can talk about my idea in objective good faith. 'its all in your head' isnt objective good faith. applying the golden rule, you clearly accept bad faith ... man you couldnt tolerate a dissenting idea even momentarily before bringing out social ostracization and logical fallacies! sounds pretty similar to the behaviour of a racist, were you projecting? that was said facetiously. im not trying to accuse you of anything, rather to show how it feels to be accused. to conclude i think its pretty easy to predict what my neighbours are eating for dinner at home and pretty hard in the city so youre gonna have to try a bit harder to convince me that the evidence of my eyes and ears is wrong.

dangus 5mo ago

McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-matters-even-more-the-case-for-holistic-impact https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... Landing page: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc... It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals can't understand customers as well as a workforce of people who represent the diversity of those customers. This isn't just diversity of race or gender, it's also diversity of thought and background. Also critical and under-emphasized: the E and I in DEI, equity and inclusion. Power distance and lack of inclusion can railroad companies into giving the people with the most power the most influence on decisions, rather than giving the best ideas a chance to breathe. In business a classic example might be "men designing women's clothing." How are you going to understand your customers if none of your employees and leadership resemble those customers? Perhaps you can figure it out and make some decent products but your competitor who has more diversity in their workforce is likely to outperform you, which is exactly what McKinsey's studies have demonstrated. I will also point out that the only reason anyone started questioning this obviously true business concept and changing opinions into being against DEI is because the Republican Party's strategists figured out that they could appropriate and leverage the term "DEI" and attach it to the latent reactionary racism that much of the US still holds dear. You can get away with saying "I don't like DEI" in public but if you say "I don't like black people" or "I don't think women should get hired for important roles" [1] that is obviously not acceptable, even though a large percentage of Americans feel that way. Right wing media twisted a largely innocent term into a useful dogwhistle. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X251369844 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X251369844

Squarex 5mo ago
Not to agree or disagree, but the McKinsey has been heavily criticised as bogus. For example https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.pdf?mimetype=pdf https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p....
5mo ago