[HN Gopher] Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
___________________________________________________________________
Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
Author : bsilvereagle
Score : 519 points
Date : 2025-01-10 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| > We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products
| accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone.
|
| The new(ly leaked) moderation guidelines might suggest
| otherwise...
| jsheard wrote:
| Apparently they consider platforming hate speech to be
| beneficial because it could bolster sympathy for the groups
| being attacked. I wish I was joking.
|
| https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-trans-guidelines-hate-s...
|
| _Alex Schultz, the company's chief marketing officer and
| highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post
| that people seeing their queer friends and family members
| abused on Facebook and Instagram could lead to increased
| support for LGBTQ rights._
| jandrese wrote:
| [flagged]
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Ultimately, kind of. There were some bumps along the road
| though.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Kind of? More like absolutely no.
|
| The administration went on to go round up Jews and
| literally kill them.
|
| Co-incidentally, that administration was friends with a
| far away island nation that attacked a 3rd party who
| ultimately assisted with removing the administration from
| power for completely non-jewish reasons.
|
| And if somebody wants to point out the USSR's help with
| removing the administration; that was also not for jewish
| reasons.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| I was being facetious, sorry.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| I saw that, but that was a tough one to land.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Only a few million little bumps, no big deal...
| deadbabe wrote:
| A more recent example would be Gaza. People didn't care
| till they saw images. Lately, the imagery has disappeared
| and people don't care again.
| nicce wrote:
| > Lately, the imagery has disappeared and people don't
| care again.
|
| It is sad. Not many even is aware that it is very
| intentional.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| And a marketer too! My god.
|
| Kind of an insane stance to take considering we've seen
| exactly what happens when queer people's friends and family
| members get pummeled with anti-gay and anti-trans hate
| campaigns... which is that half of them end up falling for it
| and turning on their friend/family members.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| A company would have to put me at gunpoint to make me say
| something similarly as insane. I'd sooner quit and give the
| entire place a massive middle finger.
| briansteffens wrote:
| Is there anything that couldn't be justified with this style
| of thinking? Would this person support legalizing murder
| since more murders might raise awareness of how bad murder
| is?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Bullies important part of playground ecosystem, says bully
| lol
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| The world moved away from legitimate grievances to something
| else entirely. Hate speech in 2025 is not the same as it was
| in 2000. None for the better.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| For anyone unfamiliar: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-
| media/meta-new-hate-spee...
|
| > "We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality
| when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and
| religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and
| common non-serious usage of words like 'weird,'" the revised
| company guidelines read.
| jandrese wrote:
| > common non-serious usage of words like 'weird,'
|
| Are they still mad over the couch thing?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry."
| pesus wrote:
| They are always incredibly upset about extremely mild
| "insults". There's a 50/50 chance you get downvoted for
| pointing out their weirdness.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| This is practically a guideline to people who want to deploy
| hate speech against other minorities on the platform: just
| make a topic "controversial" enough.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Additionally they've unbanned the use of some slurs, such as
| calling other people "retarded". Not a nice feeling having
| grown up with that word directed at me almost every day.
| daveidol wrote:
| Serious question: why does everything need to be banned?
| Why not just select for better friends or forums, and avoid
| people (not platforms) that say things you think are bad?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Serious question: why does everything need to be
| banned?
|
| No one said that, but when you ban _some_ things and not
| others, the details can be fairly revealing. "No
| dehumanizing... unless it's trans people" certainly sends
| a specific message.
| segasaturn wrote:
| What a platform chooses to ban or allow decides the shape
| and direction that platform takes. It's the reason why
| you're on Hacker News and not 4chan right now, HN is a
| strongly moderated platform with expectations for how
| users should treat each other. We saw how quickly Twitter
| degraded when it became a free for all.
|
| That said, I think having "open spaces" on the internet
| is important. 4chan used to be that kind of free-for-all
| space where anything goes and you had to leave your moral
| outrage at the door. Thing is that it was self-contained.
| Now it feels like the entire internet is being turned
| into 4chan. Facebook ideally for most people, is a place
| where you go to see your friends' baby and pet photos,
| not get called slurs by strangers.
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| An important thing to note is that this is an exception to
| the rule: you aren't allowed to call someone mentally ill,
| _unless_ it 's based on gender or sexual orientation.
|
| https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-
| standards/h...
|
| > Do not post: [...]
|
| > - Insults, including those about: [...]
|
| > Mental characteristics, including but not limited to
| allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental
| illness. [...] We do allow allegations of mental illness or
| abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation
|
| Edit: I re-read it and I think you _can_ normally call
| someone mentally ill if it 's not because of a protected
| characteristic. It's still a targeted cutout to allow
| transphobia/homophobia specifically. So you can call someone
| mentally ill for liking pineapple on pizza, or being gay or
| trans, but not for being black.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| Is this a reference to the changed TOS or something else?
|
| The recent policy carve-out allowing "allegations of mental
| illness" towards LGBT people (but no other minority) definitely
| speaks to a lack of universality, but that's from Facebook
| itself: https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-
| standards/h...
| jsheard wrote:
| The Intercept leaked more detailed internal guidelines:
|
| https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-
| meta-...
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| God save us if they're updating their KPI from "engagement" to
| "impact"
| barbazoo wrote:
| "impact" can mean all things
| praptak wrote:
| It is "everyone". Just like "all lives matter" is a deeply
| humanistic message about the sanctity of life of all human
| beings, nothing else.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Ha. Of course.
| wmf wrote:
| Everyone will be insulted equally.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On
| the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives
| in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were
| already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and
| good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems
| to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that
| such DEI program was performative in the first place. This kind
| of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to
| please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about
| this in any way shape or form, on either side.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'm curious, what gives you that kind of deep insight?
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Volvo had women design a car once.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_YCC
| NewJazz wrote:
| Are there more pics? It seems kind of sleek.
| kstrauser wrote:
| OK, that fascinates me and it's a great example of things
| that would never occur to me. Run-flat tires aren't a big
| deal because I'm not bothered by the idea of changing my
| own tire by the side of the road. Ponytail indentations
| in the headrests? I have short hair that doesn't need it,
| but alright, I can see why that'd be great for people who
| do.
|
| And a key takeaway is that those things don't make the
| car worse for me. I know there are tradeoffs with run-
| flat tires but that doesn't make it less good, and while
| I _can_ change tires, it 'd be nice not to _have_ to. And
| the ponytail indent makes it nicer for some people
| without affecting me whatsoever. Those make a more
| appealing product for buyers with different needs from
| mine, in ways I couldn 't have anticipated.
| dylan604 wrote:
| So your accepting of something you don't need but could
| be useful to others is totally opposite of the design not
| having a hood. Just because these females don't need it,
| they made it so nobody could use it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Did I say that _everyone_ should have that? No. I like
| working on my own cars. My personal gearhead top
| achievement was when my alternator seized up, and I had a
| new one installed and working 45 minutes later (including
| a quick run to the parts store).
|
| That said, I've done nothing under the hood of our family
| minivan other than changing air filters. It wouldn't
| break my heart if I had to let the shop do that for me
| when I was there getting the oil changed every 2 (!!!)
| years. I can totally see why a lot of people, probably
| _most_ people, would consider that a great tradeoff.
|
| By the way, "these females" is not the preferred
| nomenclature. "Women", please.
| dylan604 wrote:
| so a small group of women made a unilateral decision that
| prevents others. again, it is just an example of one
| group making decisions without realizing (or caring) how
| it affects others.
|
| the point is that every single decision can be construed
| as denying something to someone else when it was only
| made as a convenience for someone else. it's very
| strained here as not having a hood is just odd. Even if
| you only take the car in every 2 years, that cost of that
| service is going to be much higher because of the labor
| involved on removing the front just to access the engine
| rather than just popping the hood. We already have plenty
| of examples of cars where this has been the case
| kstrauser wrote:
| That's ridiculous. You and I don't have to buy that car.
| But if it existed and were brought to market, people who
| _do_ like it have the option. It gives them choices they
| wouldn 't otherwise have without restricting our options.
|
| Tying this back to my earlier point, working on a product
| with people who weren't exactly like me made a better
| product _for everyone_. It didn 't make it a worse
| product for older white guys like myself, while making it
| more useful for everyone else who isn't my twin. That's
| pretty cool, and customers rewarded us for it.
|
| Without the input of diverse opinions, I wouldn't have
| thought of the simple changes we could make to expand its
| reach, again, _without making it worse for me and people
| like me_. The end result was universally better. That 's
| a good thing for our users _and_ our investors. Literally
| everyone involved was better off for it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The fact that you think that removing the hood doesn't
| make it a worse product is baffling. If it has a hood and
| you choose to never open it, that does not make it a
| worse product. If you have no hood but have to incur
| extravagant service fees because of not having a hood
| definitely makes it a worse product.
|
| I'm confused on how you accept A but not B
| einarfd wrote:
| > If it has a hood and you choose to never open it, that
| does not make it a worse product.
|
| This is only true if having a hood has no negative
| ramifications, the argument from Volvo was that removing
| it made forward visibility better. For some people
| trading a hood they never use, against better forward
| visibility, could be well worth it. Especially for short
| people, where forward visibility can be more of a problem
| than for the rest of us.
| woobar wrote:
| Looks like they have designed Tesla prototype.
|
| https://www.automobilesreview.com/pictures/volvo/ycc-2004
| /wa...
| tanaros wrote:
| > Volvo had women design a car once.
|
| To be more specific, Volvo _designed a car specifically
| for women_ and chose to staff that team entirely with
| women. This is quite different than asking a team of
| women to design a car for everyone, and I feel that's
| important context when considering the design decisions
| they made.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Yeah, what people miss when they talk about hiring "the
| best person for the job" is that a company is not
| composed of well-defined roles and fungible people who do
| the job description and nothing else. Ideally, you're
| building a team that is _greater than the sum of its
| parts_. Even if someone isn 't the most proficient person
| on the planet for a given role, they might be better for
| _your team as a whole_.
|
| What I'm skeptical of is that DEI programs in bigger
| companies were ever anything more pandering. There was an
| "enlightened self-interest", but it was that the
| regulatory and cultural environment made it difficult to
| attract talent without at least paying lip service to
| DEI. Now the winds have shifted, and -- surprise! --
| their "enlightened self-interest" no longer includes
| pretending to care about it.
|
| This isn't a critique of DEI programs specifically, by
| the way. I think any social initiative at a company
| fulfills basically the same function: environmental
| pledges, etc. The point is to make your company _look
| better_ without actually changing anything.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Alright, I can see that. DEI programs that actually
| change and improve the company are extremely valuable, in
| my opinion. Ones that check a box to say "look at how
| nice we are!" aren't so much.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| I agree! But the problem is that many people are _more
| invested in discrimination_ than they are in improving
| their team. At least according to their revealed
| preferences, a lot of people who claim to support
| meritocracy /yada yada would rather be on a worse-
| performing team with more white people/men/etc than a
| better-performing diverse one.
|
| Dan Luu has a good article on this: [1]
|
| _> A problem is that it 's hard to separate out the
| effect of discrimination from confounding variables
| because it's hard to get good data on employee
| performance v. compensation over time. Luckily, there's
| one set of fields where that data is available: sports._
|
| _> ..._
|
| _> In baseball, Gwartney and Haworth (1974) found that
| teams that discriminated less against non-white players
| in the decade following de-segregation performed better.
| Studies of later decades using "classical" productivity
| metrics mostly found that salaries equalize. However,
| Swartz (2014), using newer and more accurate metrics for
| productivity, found that Latino players are significantly
| underpaid for their productivity level. Compensation isn
| 't the only way to discriminate -- Jibou (1988) found
| that black players had higher exit rates from baseball
| after controlling for age and performance. This should
| sound familiar to anyone who's wondered about exit rates
| in tech fields._
|
| _> ..._
|
| _> In tech, some people are concerned that increasing
| diversity will "lower the bar", but in sports, which has
| a more competitive hiring market than tech, we saw the
| opposite, increasing diversity raised the level instead
| of lowering it because it means hiring people on their
| qualifications instead of on what they look like. I don't
| disagree with people who say that it would be absurd for
| tech companies to leave money on the table by not hiring
| qualified minorities. But this is exactly what we saw in
| the sports we looked at, where that's even more absurd
| due to the relative ease of quantifying performance. And
| yet, for decades, teams left huge amounts of money on the
| table by favoring white players (and, in the case of
| hockey, non-French Canadian players) who were, quite
| simply, less qualified than their peers. The world is an
| absurd place._
|
| [1]: https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/
| airforce1 wrote:
| Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this
| though?
|
| In the example of a car company with zero women
| employees, if the market doesn't want "black, angular,
| high-powered cars", then they will lose market share to
| companies that produce cars that the market _does_ want.
|
| And if "getting input from lots of people with various
| backgrounds makes a company much better and more
| profitable" is a true statement, then capitalism will
| prove it because the most diverse companies will
| naturally become better and more profitable than non-
| diverse companies.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this
| though?
|
| Free market capitalism: (1) does not exist, (2)
| structurally cannot stably exist (because economic power
| and political power _are fundamentally the same thing_ ),
| (3) is a utopian propaganda concept created in response
| to and to deflect critiques of the way that the
| capitalism that can and does actually exist works.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this
| though?
|
| The companies we're talking about have DEI programs
| specifically because they believe they'll improve their
| profitability in one way or another. Meta is scaling
| their program back, not ending it, so they still believe
| it's good for the company in some way.
|
| Now, I may be skeptical of the purity of their goals, in
| this case suspecting that they're more concerned about
| looking to be the "right level" of diverse than actually
| achieving it. Regardless, no one's making them do it.
| They're doing it for those free market reasons.
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > the actual implementations don't actually do anything
| useful.
|
| That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all
| cases, across all businesses.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I've interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles. Not sure
| how that aligns with your narrative.
| edoceo wrote:
| What is a DEI specific role? Isn't that against EoE rules?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I would classify that as a role tasked with ADA
| compliance, not "DEI".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| One might readily describe the ADA as a DEI initiative,
| yes.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| 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.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| > I would say that DEI has sucked a huge amount of oxygen
| out of the room on accessibility
|
| Which is a real shame because accessibility features and
| policies actually make things better and easier for
| everyone.
| pc86 wrote:
| One would be objectively wrong, though.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Disabilities come in a _diverse_ variety.
|
| People with disabilities wanted to be _included_ in
| society.
|
| The goal of the Act was to provide a more _equitable_
| society for those people.
|
| It would absolutely be derided as "woke DEI nonsense" if
| proposed today.
| pc86 wrote:
| Yes I see you doing this all over the thread italicizing
| the same words and using them slightly differently, I'm
| not sure what point you're trying to prove.
|
| ADA predates DEI by a couple decades. Lots of people,
| including Republicans, support the ADA and support
| expanding its protections.
|
| This is a pretty standard tactic of partisans when their
| pet issue becomes unpopular - take something unrelated,
| or at best tangentially related, and pretend it's related
| or that that's what they've been advocating for all
| along.
|
| I don't care if you support the ADA or you don't. I don't
| care if you support DEI or you don't. But they're
| different, they've never been related, and any attempt by
| partisans on the left to lump them together is just
| trying to reframe the issue as "against DEI == against
| the ADA" because of course everyone on the right hates
| disabled people right?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Lots of people, including Republicans, support the ADA
| and support expanding its protections.
|
| Now, sure. At the time? Same sort of bullshit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities
| _Ac...
|
| Both are rooted in the same concept - that people should
| have fair opportunity to participate in society even if
| different in some ways.
| pc86 wrote:
| Scroll up a couple lines from your link and take a look
| at the sponsor, who Republicans nominated to be
| President. So no, your partisan assertion is nonsense.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Tom Harkin? The Democrat?
|
| Are we to think that the Republican party of 1990 - of
| the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Romneys - is the same
| as the Republican party of 2025 that has driven them out
| of the org?
| dalmo3 wrote:
| It's called Motte and Bailey fallacy.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| That's called accessibility.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Which means being _inclusive_ towards a _diverse_ set of
| different conditions, so those people may _equally_
| access content others have access to?
| throwpoaster wrote:
| The "E" doesn't mean "equal"...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Change it to "equitably" if you prefer. The point remains
| the same.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Do you think there is a functional difference between
| those words?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I think you could easily describe accessibility efforts
| to be an attempt to provide both equal and equitable
| access to content.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Equity requires unequal treatment so do you have an
| example?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure.
|
| Equal is giving everyone a printout.
|
| Equity is giving the blind student a Braille version.
|
| The latter is an attempt at providing _equal_ access to
| the _contents_ to those with different needs, so that
| they may learn _equitably_.
|
| (The alternative term JEDI might argue that this is the
| _just_ result.)
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Thank you, that seems a pretty good example.
| flatpepsi17 wrote:
| Equality and Equity are _vastly_ different things.
|
| If a program treats people equally, that's a good thing.
| If you want equal outcomes (regardless of many very real
| factors), that by definition will require unequal
| treatment.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Equality and Equity are vastly different things.
|
| But related.
|
| I was at a museum that had a full-sized submarine on
| display. There was a touchable model and audio
| description for blind people.
|
| Equal, as much as possible - a Braille variant of a
| novel, for example, provides a fairly _equal_ experience.
| Equitable, when perfect equal results are not possible.
| You can 't fix a person's severed optic nerve, but you
| can certainly attempt to give them fair access to things.
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is a semantic argument. Accessibility wasn't under
| DEI in the org chart, and preexisted DEI. That's all that
| matters.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| DEI is a new name for and/or refinement of a long
| existing concept that gave us things like the
| abolitionists, suffragists, the Civil Rights Act of 1964
| and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
|
| As with "negro" and "colored", the new positive term
| eventually became a slur via concerted efforts from its
| opponents. ("DEI mayor":
| https://www.npr.org/2024/04/04/1242294070/baltimore-key-
| brid...)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I disagree with this telling of history. DEI has much
| more in common with various affirmative action efforts in
| the 80s and 90s than it does with something like the
| Civil Rights Act and as such is a lot more controversial
| even among the groups it's meant to help.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| If the ADA was being proposed today, Republicans would
| decry it as yet another woke DEI effort.
|
| They're absolutely in the same category.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If the ADA was being proposed today, Republicans would
| decry it as yet another woke DEI effort.
|
| A lot of the culture war entities which now dominate the
| GOP did so (obviously, with different language, as "woke"
| and "DEI" weren't the current generic epithets for things
| the Right doesn't like) at the time, but (1) were
| mollified in some cases with special exclusions, like
| religious schools being excluded from the definition of
| covered public accommodations, and (2) otherwise were
| less politically powerful within the party.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > DEI has much more in common with various affirmative
| action efforts in the 80s and 90s
|
| Affirmative Action was from Executive Order 11246 (1965)
| -- concurrent with and part of the same movement as civil
| rights legislation -- applying to federal contracting; it
| largely spread to large organizations that weren't direct
| federal contractors through subcontracting relationships
| and through state governments adopting similar
| requirements in their contracting.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| At many companies accessibility and DEI are rolled into
| the same office.
|
| https://blog.google/authors/eve-andersson/
| kenjackson wrote:
| It's part of making a product that works for a diverse
| group of people. The same way the XBox controller was
| made smaller for female and children hands. And how
| including darker skinned people in facial recognition
| systems is now standard practice.
| Geee wrote:
| No, it's not that. DEI would be hiring a blind person,
| over a more qualified non-blind person.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, that's a flat out lie.
|
| DEI would be concerned with encouraging applicants by and
| consideration of blind people to a role they can still
| effectively perform.
|
| It's based on the generally logical idea that if your
| company with 10k people is staffed with 99% white males
| in a place where that doesn't reflect the workforce, the
| most logical conclusion is _probably_ not "only white
| males can perform this role".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > DEI would be hiring a blind person, over a more
| qualified non-blind person.
|
| No, it wouldn't.
|
| DEI might be things like expending resources for outreach
| to and soliciiting applications from the blind community
| because there were almost no blind applicants, when blind
| people _could_ reasonably do the work _even if_ , on
| average, blind people would be at a disadvantage compared
| to the sighted given the job responsibilities.
| ttpphd wrote:
| It is extremely telling that when you hear "DEI specific
| role" you wrongly imagint that refers to the identity of
| the person rather than someone who's role it is to work
| on issues around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| You're not the op here.
|
| Also that just makes the entire argument meaningless. Is
| the idea we should maintain DEI hiring because that way
| people doing the DEI hiring have a job?
|
| What kind of circular logic is that.
| pc86 wrote:
| That's one interpretation but the next sentence doesn't
| really track with that. Of course there are roles in DEI
| departments, and roles focused on DEI. That doesn't do
| anything to weaken the argument the GP was making but
| that second sentence sounds like it should.
|
| The reasonable interpretation then is that this isn't the
| right interpretation. The only other one I can think of
| is having prescribed immutable characteristics you're
| hiring for.
| Jcampuzano2 wrote:
| Well I interpreted it the way you're saying and I still
| don't understand the real world need of that role in most
| companies. Why not simply hire the most qualified/best
| people for the job? If it ends up being diverse, great.
| If not well thats not really a big issue either as long
| as the hiring is fair.
|
| What does that role provide outside of forced diversity
| i.e. racism. If it helps I am not a white male myself,
| but Mexican.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| If a role is specifically set to be filled by diversity
| hires, I really don't understand how that's not racist (or
| choose your descriptor here) towards whoever has been
| excluded for that role.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| It is racist. Proponents of such diversity hiring try to
| redefine racism in such a way that their definition
| excludes diversity hiring, but that's bad faith
| rhetorical tricks.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I've actually never seen a 'diversity hire' take place.
| When we set DEI policy and act on it, it was about trying
| to encourage a more diverse pool and a more diverse group
| of choosers.
|
| That's it. Then let the talent speak.
|
| However, let's assume a 'diversity hire' did take place
| in the negative scenario you imagine. Quota's, I imagine.
| It still wouldn't be racist as it wouldn't be based on
| racial superiority.
|
| You can call it something else, if you like. But it
| wouldn't be racist. A 'mistake' perhaps.
|
| There are many out there who beat their chest and say
| that 'the word racist is overused so as to become
| meaningless'.
|
| You've just fallen into that hole.
|
| EDIT: (it appears I've been blocked from replying here so
| to my children, lol:
|
| @Shawabawa: "For as long as I've been conscious and with
| a dictionary (40 years), 'racism' has always been about a
| belief in the superiority and supremacy of one race over
| the other, and the actions that stem from that. Sure,
| your simple version is included also, but the fundamental
| (and meaningful) definition was always about supremacy.
| But really ... based on some of the comments here and the
| prevailing political climate in the US, let's call it
| quits. It really doesn't matter. The 'winners' write the
| history, as they say."
|
| @seryoiupfurds: "Well, better than your first attempt.
| But the thrust of your comment is still that 'diversity
| hiring' is the norm. My experience says it's not - and
| certainly not in the way we apply DEI.")
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| OK, so it's "just" systematic racial discrimination then.
| Much better.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| The definition of racism changed at some point to some
| people to have connotations about racial superiority
|
| Before that, it simply meant judging a person by their
| race or skin colour, which having a hiring quota based on
| race clearly is
|
| You can have an argument that in some cases racist DEI
| policies are beneficial to counter even worse racism, and
| that's not necessarily untrue, but it's dishonest to try
| and claim it's not racist
| kenjackson wrote:
| That's not what the original commenter was saying. There
| are very few roles I've ever seen target diversity hires.
| Those that I have seen are typically very high-level
| roles, for example, VP nominations will do things like
| target "midwest" or for Supreme Court targeting "female".
| But I don't see this sort of thing in your typical job
| hiring practice.
| pc86 wrote:
| I think it's pretty obvious that SCOTUS and VP
| nominations aren't covered by EEOC and the like, and
| you're going to have a hard time ham-fisting "diversity
| hire" into those roles.
|
| > > I've interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles.
|
| This means one of two things. Either they're interviewing
| for roles on the DEI team, or "I had a role to fill and
| was told I had to hire a [black, hispanic, female, non-
| white] person."
|
| The first one doesn't really have anything to do with the
| comment they're replying to. The second one is blatantly
| illegal but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. And the
| next sentence and its tone supports that interpretation.
|
| Is there a third interpretation I'm missing?
| kenjackson wrote:
| The first does have something to do with what he's
| commenting on. That said, the original poster can clarify
| since they're on HN, rather than us speculating.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| You seem quite wrapped up in the idea of 'diversity
| hires'. I've never seen it work that way. Have you?
|
| In my experience it has been about trying to encourage a
| more diverse pool to select from, and a more diverse pool
| of choosers, and that's it. After that, it's selecting
| the best person.
|
| And, to be clear, even if 'diversity hires' did take
| place in the way you seem to imagine it, it wouldn't be
| racist to hire based on diversity as it's not done from a
| basis of racial superiority.
|
| How about 'choose your descriptor here' based on an
| actual understanding of the words. Is it 'woke' now to
| ask people actually understand the words they're using.
|
| Considering you don't understand what the word 'racist'
| means, do you understand what 'DEI policies' are?
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| > it wouldn't be racist to hire based on diversity as
| it's not done from a basis of racial superiority.
|
| If you hire someone over someone else due to an immutable
| quality such as their skin colour, sexual orientation
| (which shouldn't even be a thing to discuss on a job
| interview), hair colour, sex, gender etc than that is
| discrimination, and in the case of race, racist. Just
| because the majority of racism happens in one way, does
| not mean it's not racism in the other way.
|
| Unless the immutable quality somehow makes the person
| physically better for the job, such as males typically
| having better muscle/bone mass which gives them an
| advantage for physical work (e.g. oil rigs), or employing
| a black female actor to play a black female character.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Intent matters.
|
| And I'd ask you to focus on the rest (or the whole) of my
| comment as you've spent most of your comment discussing
| it as if I approve of 'diversity hiring' (as it is being
| discussed here, i.e. quotas) when it should be obvious I
| neither engage in it nor approve of it.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| >And, to be clear, even if 'diversity hires' did take
| place in the way you seem to imagine it, it wouldn't be
| racist to hire based on diversity as it's not done from a
| basis of racial superiority.
|
| If you hire based on someone's race, that would appear to
| be racist.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Again, that's not how it works, or should work. But even
| if it did, it could be called a 'mistake'. But it's not
| 'racist'.
|
| You're fundamentally misunderstanding the word. And it's
| sad because people (perhaps you) will go around and say
| that the word 'racist' is overused and has lost it's
| meaning.
|
| And yet, you (and co) are the ones mistakenly using it
| here.
|
| EDIT: (it appears I've been blocked from replying here so
| to the below ...
|
| @seryoiupfurds: "Well, better than your first attempt.
| But the thrust of your comment is still that 'diversity
| hiring' is the norm. My experience says it's not - and
| certainly not in the way we apply DEI.")
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| OK, so it's "just" systematic racial discrimination then.
| simoncion wrote:
| > (it appears I've been blocked from replying here so:...
|
| You probably haven't been blocked, you've probably run
| into one of the rumored "conversation slower-downer'
| mechanisms.
|
| If you select the specific comment that you wish to reply
| to so that it opens in a page on its own, you should be
| able to reply to that comment.
| pests wrote:
| Rumored? It's a very real thing.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16020089
|
| > We tend to call it the 'overheated discussion detector'
| these days, since it detects more than flamewars.
|
| > Scott and I get emailed every time that software trips
| so we can quickly look at which threads are being
| penalized and reverse the penalty when it isn't helpful
|
| - Quotes by Dang
| pests wrote:
| There is a flame war preventer that disables replies for
| a short time depending on frequency and how deep the
| thread is. Wait a bit or find the post via another UI and
| it's usually possible to reply.
| simoncion wrote:
| > In my experience it has been about trying to encourage
| a more diverse pool to select from...
|
| In my experience, the DEI office rejected the results of
| an interview panel _after_ the interview-and-candidate-
| selection stage because the candidates selected by the
| interviewers and interviewing panel to receive offers
| were "insufficiently diverse". This resulted in
| Corporate closing the job requisition because they didn't
| feel like dealing with the hassle (and expense) of
| repeating the process. (This sucked because we fucking
| needed that hole to be filled... but there's no arguing
| with Corporate.)
|
| This is an N=1 report, and I'm sure there are other
| companies that aren't so super-fucked, but at this
| particular company, this is how it went down.
|
| This scenario doesn't meet the strict definition of
| "diversity hire", but it sure does feel like actions
| motivated by the same sort of reasoning.
| causi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Symbols can have a lot of political power.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| There are example of DEI not being racist but the one you
| provided is extremely racist.
| fn-mote wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| 9rx wrote:
| 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.
| danudey wrote:
| I find it interesting that being underage and in middle
| school is on the same level to you as being a woman. This
| comment reads like "You want us to interview WOMEN now?
| Why not teenagers? Or plants?!"
| 9rx wrote:
| Your biases applied to the comment may read that way. The
| comment itself doesn't say that at all. It is interesting
| that we are seeing the discrimination right here on HN
| too. I thought we were better than that?
| pests wrote:
| The request was to "consider people you normally wouldn't
| for this role"
|
| I normally wouldn't consider a 14y/o for a senior
| position. I wouldn't consider a child to run our armed
| forces either.
|
| It is you who put women and other minorities into that
| group with this comment of yours. You are the one to
| compare being underage and in middle school to being on
| the same level of a woman.
| matteotom wrote:
| well if a 14 year old has 10 years of (real) experience
| building software in an enterprise setting, of course
| they should be considered for a senior role
| 9rx wrote:
| What about 10 years of experience building software
| translates to the director position being talked about?
| Would a 14 year old who has 10 years of (real) experience
| working on the family farm be equally suitable or is
| there something about software specifically that primes
| people for being directors?
| matteotom wrote:
| sure, replace building software with leading large teams.
| The general point still stands
| 9rx wrote:
| So you echo that until you find a 14 year old who has
| managed a large team for at least 10 years you haven't
| tried hard enough? I don't want to rest on my biases,
| but...
| matteotom wrote:
| No, it is obvious that there are not any qualified 14
| year olds, and it is also obvious that there are
| qualified minorities - if you can't find qualified
| minorities, you should look more closely at your
| recruitment pipelines.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| Why is breadth of candidates defined by race and gender
| instead of experience and expertise. If the DEI
| department improves breadth of experience and expertise,
| by looking into alternative hiring streams, thats great,
| but people who defend DEI always approach it from the
| race and gender first which is a tell tale sign that race
| and gender are the primary objectives. And in my
| experience, when race and gender are the goals, formal
| and informal quotas appear.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| The charitable interpretation of why Asian == white in
| these scenarios is that Asians are not typically
| underrepresented in the engineering field, company
| founders, prestigious schools, etc.
|
| The less charitable interpretation is that DEI programs
| aren't being pushed for by Asians and they're designed to
| help people who look like the people starting the
| programs.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| there's still a "bamboo ceiling"
| hollerith wrote:
| Is there? The CEOs of Microsoft and Google are Asians who
| did not even grow up in the US.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Specific examples don't overcome the overall statistics.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| "bamboo ceiling" is not a statistic.
| code_biologist wrote:
| Those CEOs are great examples, because they show the
| operative power networks are things like being a Brahmin
| or a McKinsey alum. I see less evidence for power
| networks based on race, or those power networks are doing
| less.
| danudey wrote:
| There's often a separation between the people who bring
| in the candidates and the people who interview/approve
| the candidates.
|
| If HR passes me a stack of resumes then that's who I
| interview; if all the people HR passes me are white, then
| I'm left to either assume that these were all the
| qualified candidates who applied (or at least, to operate
| under that assumption).
|
| If the process gets bounced back because the stack that
| was passed to me was filtered by HR's unconscious (or
| conscious) biases, that forces them to give me more
| diverse candidates to choose from; the best candidate may
| still be the middle class white dude, but ensuring that
| the hiring manager is presented with a broad range of
| options and not just Chad, Biff, and Troy helps the whole
| pipeline.
| com2kid wrote:
| Years ago the software engineering field looked at this
| problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly
| proceeded to implement none of them.
|
| Resumes need to be filtered to remove age, race, gender,
| name, even what school someone went to. Then ideally the
| first filtering round of an interview is also completely
| anonymous, a take home test or a video interview with
| camera off and a voice filter in place. Heck modern AI
| tools could even be used to remove accents.
|
| HR has biases, those biases need to be removed.
|
| It only takes a few moments of thinking to realize these
| techniques are a better way to hire all around. Nothing
| good can come from someone in HR looking at a resume and
| thinking "oh that isn't a college I recognize, next
| candidate."
| jordanb wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is terrible. It makes my blood boil just seeing
| this.
| maxwellg wrote:
| Does anyone have any concrete proof of this actually
| happening? I find it extremely doubtful.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| 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).
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the
| first place.
|
| That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a
| secret.
|
| > This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and
| unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that
| cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
|
| It's not about making users or bloggers happy. They don't care
| whether those people are "pissed" because they're just going to
| keep coming to stare at ads anyway. It _was_ about keeping
| regulators disempowered by proactively tossing an agitated
| public some crumbs, but they don 't need to worry about that
| for a while now. They're obviously just trying to keep their
| staffing strategies open and unshackled so that they can pursue
| whatever business objectives they see coming up in the next few
| years, and aren't at a disadvantage against competitors like
| Musk/X who resisted these kinds of things all along.
| ncr100 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't see how very real differences in hiring practice are
| performative, but maybe that's just me.
| pton_xd wrote:
| > you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part
| because of the "political landscape"
|
| Isn't that the same reason they were rolled out in the first
| place?
| transcriptase wrote:
| The initiatives were put in place to appease large
| institutional investors who were trying to score virtue points
| with the public and progressive lawmakers who generally aren't
| that friendly to Blackrock, Vanguard, et al.
|
| Now that it's not social suicide to point out that codified
| racism to fight bias is absurd and outcomes have been
| questionable, the pendulum is headed back toward centre.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the pendulum is headed back toward centre.
|
| That's not how a pendulum works. It's leading to a white
| terror, then it will swing back to a smaller red terror, then
| a smaller white terror, etc... Eventually some event will tap
| the pendulum again.
|
| The diversity scam was a way to pretend that Affirmative
| Action wasn't racist, and Affirmative Action was a way not to
| settle accounts with the descendants of slaves. All of this
| is about not dealing with slavery, and the children of slaves
| are not the slightest bit materially better off than before
| it started. The vast majority of the benefits of these
| programs went to white women, immigrants, and sexual
| minorities.
|
| We literally don't even keep statistics about the descendants
| of slaves, because they're too embarrassing. The only reason
| race was introduced into the census was to keep track of
| them, and now we're counting Armenians for some reason.
|
| Not dealing with slavery turned us all into race scientists.
|
| That being said, the white victimization story is a dumb one.
| White people are overrepresented. If some institution stopped
| hiring or admitting for diversity reasons, they wouldn't be
| hiring and admitting more white people, they'd just hire and
| admit _fewer people._ Anti-woke is a civil rights struggle on
| behalf of dumb people: the lowest ranked white people with
| absolutely no historical excuse. If one really believed in
| nature over nurture, or the degeneracy of culture, that 's
| exactly where you would go looking for it.
|
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/long-shadows-the-black-
| wh...
|
| > Our headline finding is that three-generation poverty is
| over 16 times higher among Black adults than white adults
| (21.3 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively). In other words,
| one in five Black Americans are experiencing poverty for the
| third generation in a row, compared to just one in a hundred
| white Americans.
| ADeerAppeared wrote:
| > It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and
| acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the
| first place.
|
| Keep in mind that these statements are made to pander to the
| incoming president. The implication that "DEI is discrimination
| against white people" is very much a part of that.
|
| > why the initiative in the first place?
|
| Ultimately this is the same answer as with the broader ESG
| incentives. It is in fact a good idea to have a diverse
| workforce for the exact same reasons evolution keeps diversity
| around.
|
| The pretense that it's "discrimination" is rather silly,
| especially for tech giants like Meta whose shortlists of
| qualified applicants number in the hundreds to thousands after
| initial selection.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| ESG is just a jobs program for stock brokers.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It's entirely reasonable to read this entire Meta post as "we
| had DEI programs, they were meaningful and effective, but now
| there's an administration in office that will use anti-trust
| laws to cut us into pieces unless our privately-held supports
| their political preferences."
|
| I'm not saying that's the case (well, I do think it is) but if
| it is true, then trying to extract meaningful conclusions about
| the performance of DEI programs from it is a fool's errand.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| Trump previously threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life
| on trumped up charges (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-
| warns-mark-zuckerberg-c...). He said in an interview that's
| probably why Meta changed their policies
| (https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l).
| bubblethink wrote:
| >why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're
| doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI
| program was performative in the first place.
|
| The initiative was them bowing to public pressure and the
| zeitgeist of the time. We will never know if it was completely
| performative of if they did actual racism. They are obviously
| not going to admit to it one way or the other. But they are
| rolling it back and explicitly stating that they won't do
| racism. That seems fine. What's the problem ?
| llm_trw wrote:
| You need obvious people to fire in the next downturn without
| hurting productivity too badly.
|
| A dei program labels those people for you.
|
| Ironically this is exactly the reason why dei programs were
| considered illegal until a decade ago.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Because both acts are performative, its just rarely we see
| corporations wanting to appear more racist.
| derefr wrote:
| There were already actual commitments to diversity in most
| places, yes.
|
| DEI _programs_ , on the other hand, were basically a symbolic
| "party badge" that many companies and organizations felt
| compelled to adopt to keep scary people -- often their own
| employees! -- from suing them for discrimination.
|
| That's the "political landscape" they are referring to -- a
| political climate that allowed for even _frivolous_
| discrimination lawsuits to succeed, against companies already
| striving to minimize discrimination.
|
| These DEI programs weren't "performative" in the regular
| "performing caring" sense that companies often do; they were
| "performative" in the Red Scare "performing Very Visibly Not
| Being A Communist, even though you were never a Communist"
| sense.
| slg wrote:
| > in part because of the "political landscape,"
|
| People really should be more explicit about this. The
| "political landscape" here is the desire to pay fealty to an
| incoming administration in hopes of currying favor. American
| culture didn't drastically change. Trump got 3 million more
| votes in 2024 than he got in 2020 which is largely in line with
| overall population growth. That 3 million also amounts to less
| than 1% of the US population. If that causes you to drastically
| change your opinion of the culture of this country, you weren't
| paying very much attention beforehand. The only thing that
| markedly changed was who is going to be leading the government
| and thereby the regulators that Meta wants to butter up. That
| is all Meta is doing with these recent moves.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| > The "political landscape" here is the desire to pay fealty
| to an incoming administration in hopes of currying favor.
|
| Exactly as it was when DEI practices were introduced.
| slg wrote:
| You must have a short memory if you actually believe that.
| Diversity programs didn't all coincidentally spring up in
| January 2021 the way they are coincidentally disappearing
| in January 2025. I won't argue if you call them
| performative, but they absolutely weren't just blatant
| appeals to an incoming presidential administration.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| Was that in response to a new incoming administration, or a
| series of social and cultural events?
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| American culture did not drastically change but mainstream
| media outlets and the entertainment industry attempted to
| make it seem as if it had shifted quite dramatically when it
| really had not. You can't simply say that all the people that
| voted for Harris support all this stuff. There were many
| people that voted for Harris or against Trump for many
| reasons but still don't fall into the far-left camp. It's
| just paying fealty. Is what has happened to AAA games and
| example of consumers paying fealty to Trump? Let's be
| serious.
| jollyllama wrote:
| > unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that
| cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
|
| Disagree, right wingers will be satisfied by this performative
| posturing even though there's no real change to existing
| policy.
| glitchc wrote:
| I think that's the point. DEI is performative. A business
| cannot survive unless it hires the best person for the job.
| pc86 wrote:
| Regardless of the first points you make, companies
| objectively do not need to hire the best person for the job.
| Lots of companies need programmers. 99% of them do not need
| world class software engineers.
|
| There are plenty of jobs where "can type JS into a computer
| for 30 hours a week and go to a couple meetings" is plenty to
| keep the business moving forward.
| purplethinking wrote:
| A few small holes will not sink the aircraft carrier, but
| eventually there will be enough holes. See Disney.
| whycome wrote:
| > acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the
| first place
|
| The retraction in itself is performative as well. It's trying
| to highlight that "we only did it because it was a necessary
| performative action at the time due to the political climate
| then -- we didn't really mean it."
| mv4 wrote:
| These programs seem problematic.
|
| 'A former Facebook global diversity strategist stole more than
| $4 million from the social media giant "to fund a lavish
| lifestyle" in California and Georgia, federal prosecutors
| said.'
|
| Interestingly, similar fraud occurred at her next job.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/13/former-facebook-diversity-le...
| seydor wrote:
| not only performative but discriminative and harmful hence the
| need of removal
| santoshalper wrote:
| They never cared about DEI. The difference is that now they
| don't feel pressure to pretend.
| az226 wrote:
| The honest message wound have been:
|
| Hi all, I wanted to share some changes we're making to our
| hiring, development and procurement practices. Before getting
| into the details, there is some important background to lay
| out:
|
| The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity
| and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The
| Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions
| signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms
| longstanding principles that discrimination should not be
| tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics.
| The term "DEI" has also become charged, in part because it is
| gives preferential treatment of some groups over others.
|
| At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be
| achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in
| knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives,
| and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving
| complex problems and identifying new opportunities which
| ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products
| that serve everyone. On top of that, we've always believed that
| no-one should be given - or deprived- of opportunities because
| of protected characteristics, except if they're a man or white,
| or Asian man.
|
| Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we're making the
| following changes:
|
| On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different
| backgrounds, but we will stop discriminating against white and
| Asian men. This practice has always been subject to public
| debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are
| other ways to build an industry-leading workforce and leverage
| teams made up of world-class people from all types of
| backgrounds to build products that work for everyone. We have
| decreased the importance of meeting racist and sexist quotas
| and tying outcomes to compensation. Having quotas in place make
| hiring decisions based on race or gender. While this was our
| practice, we want to appear less sexist and racist. We are
| sunsetting our supplier discrimination efforts within our
| broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from
| Black-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our
| efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that
| power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be
| available to all qualified suppliers, including those who were
| part of the supplier diversity program. Instead of equity and
| inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus
| on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate
| bias for all, no matter your background.
| dagmx wrote:
| Meta have some of the most double speak I've seen.
|
| They'll say one set of virtuous sounding goals while completely
| undermining it in the same breath.
|
| This is just them running with their tails between their legs
| before the new admin takes over.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I think this is the norm for any topic that is politicized. You
| could have ChatGPT or some other LLM write the memo and it
| wouldn't be much better or worse.
| macNchz wrote:
| Goes way, way back--I remember announcements nearly 20 years
| ago where they were basically removing/setting bad defaults on
| what primitive privacy controls they had at the time, but
| calling it making things "more social."
| loeg wrote:
| Suppose you made a bad policy decision and want to roll it
| back. How do you do that? Anything you do is going to piss
| someone off. I think they're trying to do it in a plausibly
| reasonable way without shitting on everyone who worked on it
| for a couple years.
| paxys wrote:
| It's funny how they suddenly realized and reversed every
| "wrong" policy decision made over many years just days before
| a new administration takes over. And these new policies are
| exactly aligned with what the administration wants.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, if you've made a bad decision, which is better, to
| reverse it for a bad reason, or to keep it for a not as bad
| reason?
| loeg wrote:
| Maybe you have the causality backwards -- that the response
| to these kinds of unpopular policies are why a new
| administration was elected.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| It was, after all, the federal government that forced
| Meta to do any DEI anything /s
| JeremyNT wrote:
| They didn't have to announce shit, much less announce it
| right as the new regime is taking over. If they wanted to
| sunset these programs they could've slowly ramped these
| programs down without saying anything and nobody would've
| noticed.
|
| This sends a very clear message about what they're trying to
| do and whose side they are on.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Meta are willing to be downright evil if it's profitable. Just
| ask the Rohingya. They might have hired enough DEI people that
| there was a cadre of pro-DEI thought within the company, but at
| a higher level that was only ever preemption against regulatory
| action, and evidently they weren't ever allowed to take root.
|
| > This is just them running with their tails between their legs
| before the new admin takes over.
|
| They're not running away from this, they're running towards the
| new admin, mouths wide open to receive. This admin promises to
| be amazing for dead-eyed big tech fuckery and they want in. And
| it's a win-win for them as they can also save the expensive DEI
| and fact-checking cost center departments while they're at it.
| ColdTakes wrote:
| That title image looks like it is from the set of a sitcom
| starring Mark Zuckerberg.
|
| DEI initiatives have always been a dog and pony show, not a thing
| executives have ever truly cared about and they are now in a
| political environment where they can show what they believe in.
| People will learn the hard way these companies have never cared
| about you.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| They may have been a dog and pony show but were definitely real
| and forced executives to change how they hire and promote in
| illegal, discriminatory ways.
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| Perhaps in your experience, I would be for them if they
| "forced executives to change how they hire".
|
| From my perspective, that has not happened. My problem is
| their lack of teeth to do what they say they do.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| There were teeth, in that your own performance review (as a
| leader) would be affected by it. Depending on your level,
| your own promotion would require certain stats for your
| teams for it to be approved. So people made all sorts of
| decisions - including hiring people they shouldn't have
| hired - in order to push those numbers to where they were
| forced to. The same happened behind closed doors on
| promotions.
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| That was not the case in my experience. I am learning
| that we all have vastly different experiences on what the
| implementation was, making the discussion rather
| difficult because we are all talking from very different
| vantage points.
| ColdTakes wrote:
| It would help the conversation if you expound on your
| experiences on implementation.
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| Well said. What we need is real DEI initiatives. But private
| dictatorships don't care about this stuff. Only what marketing
| value they can gain from it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Some also say that real Communism has never been tried.
|
| Where is the threshold of being "real enough" in case of
| utopian systems?
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| The threshold is when ideals meet actionable outcomes.
|
| And it's not a utopian system.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think it is. Theoretical Communism was basically
| economic Equity.
| AndyNemmity wrote:
| You don't even require Communism for economic Equity.
| That's possible within capitalism.
|
| We're pretty far off the discussion at this point though.
| erulabs wrote:
| I think it's somewhat important to understand meta and its
| products are _not_ tech products. Outside of React and llama and
| the like, Meta is not building for or speaking to the tech
| community. If what they do or say sounds like populism, it's
| because it is. It can be ham fisted, because the majority of
| people are only barely paying attention, and the majority of
| people is who facebook wants to please.
|
| Like politics, things feel dumb and ham-fisted, because they are.
| They're playing at winning wide swaths of _billions_ of people,
| and the majority of people _aren 't paying attention_, so
| hypocrisy doesn't register as well as just being vaguely aligned
| with what's popular.
|
| I don't mean any of this in an derogatory "unwashed masses" sort
| of way, it's just how it is.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| Thank you for putting this so eloquently, especially "the
| majority of people are only barely paying attention". It's not
| necessarily bad, as you said, just the reality.
|
| We may wish that reality were different or so, but we shouldn't
| resent this fact.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think the billions you are talking about care
| about Meta's hiring policies. I don't even think billions of
| people accurately understand what it means to work at "Meta"
| vs. Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp (and even then, I doubt
| majority know that Meta owns all three surfaces).
| coldpepper wrote:
| Money always following power.
|
| Power always following money.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| This comment is based upon n two assumptions:
|
| 1) Twitter has imploded, and is on the road to Myspace level
| relevance
|
| 2) that implosion is due to a removal of moderation
|
| I'll try to keep it politically neutral. But this and other
| Facebook announcements means inexorable collapse is on the medium
| term horizon, because they mirror what Twitter did
|
| These actions could possibly be done with social network circa
| early to mid 2010s.
|
| But since the rise of massive online campaigns of disinformation
| or propaganda, and then rocket fueled by AI...
|
| It means not only will left-wing people run away in droves, but
| then toxicity explodes and successive waves of moderates and
| apolitical people get driven away.
|
| It's interesting because people seem to have forgotten what the
| word moderation means.
|
| It's keeping out the extremes. In particular, the extremes of
| emotions. Which then cloud any sort of productive discussion.
|
| Without moderation, especially with the organized ai and
| misinformation and other social Network phenomena, The pure
| outrage cycle while individually effective for posts, very
| rapidly makes the overall ecosystem completely intolerable.
|
| Because one thing at the political extremes I would argue more
| strongly on the right but definitely on the left, is intolerance.
| lokar wrote:
| I mostly agree. FB is trying to "sell" (the price is data /
| ads) a product. They have to decide if that will be a
| "moderate" product or an extreme product. But, I'm not
| excluding that they have reasonably concluded that a more
| extreme product will generate more revenue (perhaps from fewer
| people).
| Animats wrote:
| > 1) Twitter has imploded, and is on the road to Myspace level
| relevance
|
| Revenue is down, yes. But when a head of state wants to say
| something to the world, they put it in a tweet. 189 countries
| have an official presence on X.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Sure, but government bureaucracies are also famously slow to
| adapt and move on. Is it actually a vote of continued
| confidence?
| Animats wrote:
| Yes, it is. Here's a list of world leaders congratulating
| Trump on his election. Almost all of them did it on X.[1]
| Now that's market share.
|
| [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/list-of-world-
| leaders-c...
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I think you missed my point. Government policy right now
| is to use Twitter, yes, but is that because everyone has
| confidence in it, or because they are simply slow to
| change? Twitter is quickly losing it's claim to being the
| digital town square both as users flee it and it becomes
| more difficult to use. I can't even navigate twitter
| anymore because I don't have an account. I can see single
| tweets at best. A new default choice has yet to appear,
| but what are the odds everyone is going to stick around
| if Bluesky continues to gain a following? To me it seems
| like momentum more than anything else.
|
| And really, if you were going to publicly congratulate
| the Tweeter in Chief and wanted to make sure he saw, how
| would you do it?
| Animats wrote:
| > And really, if you were going to publicly congratulate
| the Tweeter in Chief and wanted to make sure he saw, how
| would you do it?
|
| Good point. The old approach was to broadcast something
| on your countries' official radio station. The CIA used
| to have something called the Foreign Broadcast
| Information Service, with people listening to Radio
| Albania and such, just in case somebody announced
| something important.
| jandrese wrote:
| We've already run the experiment on what an unmoderated
| discussion forum looks like once it grows beyond a trivial
| number of users. It's called 4chan, specifically /b/. Twitter/X
| is just reinforcing the previous findings as it rapidly shifts
| into being another version of /b/.
|
| The shameless and the trolls push out the sensible people. It
| quickly devolves into conspiracy theories, grifts, porn, and
| propaganda.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| 4chan is moderated.
| jandrese wrote:
| For some of the channels yes, but /b/ mostly stops at
| "delete the obvious child porn". Even the more moderated
| channels take a fairly light touch, only mostly removing
| off topic threads in addition to the blatantly illegal
| stuff.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| It's strange Facebook would follow in the path of Twitter
| explicitly, because at least on paper Facebook is (and has
| been) the more profitable of the companies.
|
| But I do understand a willingness to abandon "moderation" and
| allow extremes, because things like extreme emotion could lead
| to arguments that lead to increased user attention and thus,
| platform usage.
| mempko wrote:
| I created a new account on Twitter to see what new users see
| and the website is unusable. It's basically 4chan now with Elon
| Musk and sports.
|
| Anyone defending people should try it. See how long you don't
| see and Elon Musk post or other hateful far right content.
| rendang wrote:
| I use it every day and my feed is full of intelligent,
| thoughtful analysis and discussion. Even the edgy humor is
| much more clever and subtle than what you'd find on Reddit or
| 4chan
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It means not only will left-wing people run away in droves,
| but then toxicity explodes and successive waves of moderates
| and apolitical people get driven away.
|
| Left-wing people haven't left twitter. Some extreme Democratic
| Party partisans, many with histories on twitter too ugly and
| venomous to possibly clean up, have left twitter. Others have
| created accounts on Bluesky, but still post twice as often on
| twitter as they do on Bluesky.
|
| Bluesky showed hockey stick active usage growth in the two
| weeks after Trump's election, peaked on _November 20th_ , and
| has been steadily dropping ever since.
|
| https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
|
| There was a little inauguration bump, but Bluesky should be at
| its pre-election activity level within a few months unless they
| do something drastic.
|
| The real threat to Twitter _is_ Threads, and _only after this
| announcement._ Zuckerberg is promising exactly what Musk
| promised, but is not as erratic as Musk (who is happy to attack
| users based on his own personal whims.) If he actually
| delivers, formally and professionally, a 2015 twitter
| experience, he 'll win.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I'd be curious to see the same graphs for X / Threads, but I
| don't think we'll ever get that data.
| stockerta wrote:
| Facebook already was a cesspool, now they add the shit into it.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| by that same logic Bluesky should be overtaking X but it isn't
|
| X is growing even bigger and has international reach which
| Bluesky doesn't
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| It simply hasn't been long enough. I wouldn't necessarily bet
| that it will, but X has lost net users and Bluesky is gaining
| them so if trends continue (they might not) Bluesky will
| overtake X, but Twitter also wasn't built in a year.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| What is there at this point that is going to stop FB from
| having the same advertising problems that Twitter has had?
|
| You used to have major corporations advertising on Twitter but
| they bailed out when they realized that their ads were
| appearing amidst people posting insane bigoted screeds.
|
| It would seem like there is now a severe risk of a revenue
| collapse at Facebook if advertising corporations behave the
| same way they did with Twitter.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| There are two things that are important to separate here:
|
| 1. In one hand, the rolling back of how DEI has/was implemented I
| think can be a good thing. I think lots of people, myself
| included, believe that it "went off the rails", but most
| importantly, I think it ended up being counterproductive to its
| end goals. Nearly everyone I know who wasn't part of the DEI
| cottage industry came to view many/most of these programs with
| cynicism, even if they weren't vocal about it.
|
| 2. Don't mistake the validity of number one for thinking that
| this is just pure and unadulterated pandering to the incoming
| administration. Meta would sacrifice small babies if they thought
| it would make them more money in the long run.
|
| The reason I believe so strongly about number 2 is what happened
| with their content guidelines changes. I'm gay, and I'm actually
| fine with people calling me insane. But I also better be able to
| call lots of religious practices based around some invisible sky
| fairy insane too. The fact that the guidelines specifically
| called out "it's OK to call gay and transgender people mentally
| ill", and _only_ those groups, is grossly despicable, and clearly
| shows Zuckerberg is just taint licking his new overlords.
|
| And to people who still work at Meta, I also think that's fine -
| we all need a paycheck. But please don't try to convince yourself
| or anyone else that you're doing it for anything but the money.
| I'm so sick of these tech companies talking about their lofty
| goals (and honestly, have been for a while long before Trump)
| when it's so abundantly clear it's just about making money. And
| again, I think that's fine to only be about money - it's a
| business after all. Just don't pretend you're doing some sort of
| societal good.
| mempko wrote:
| Except the whole reason for governments to charter companies is
| the belief it's good for societal goals. Otherwise why allow
| private and public companies in the first place if their only
| goal is to make money, that you as a government create?
|
| This idea that business has this singular goal is the result of
| brainwashing and shows a deep misunderstanding of both history
| and how things work today.
| techfeathers wrote:
| I'm really disturbed the extent to which companies are in
| lockstep with the government, and this should be a conservative
| value? I'm glad to see a reset on DEI in general, it's not
| going away but we've needed new ideas in the space and I
| suspect we'll see a resurgence sooner than you'd think.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Big, oppressive, intrusive governments are fine as long as
| they praise Jesus, cut welfare, and lower taxes.
|
| Corporate DEI seems unambitious to me - like expecting face-
| eating leopards to eat fewer faces if you can persuade them
| to wear make-up.
|
| The real problem is corporate psychopathy. DEI is a band-aid
| on a monster.
|
| And the first step to a solution is accepting that we are in
| fact dealing with monsters, not with organisations that have
| positive social aims and can be reasoned with.
| davidw wrote:
| They also got rid of some messenger themes:
| https://www.404media.co/meta-deletes-trans-and-nonbinary-mes...
|
| You can argue about the proper way to do DEI or not and its
| effectiveness, but this is all blatantly political. I mean, if
| someone got some enjoyment out of having those themes, what's
| it to anyone else?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Wow, that example is even more blatant, and just goes to show
| how all this free speech talk is bullshit. Exactly as you put
| it, "what's it to anyone else"? And if anything, I'd be all
| for adding _more_ themes: You want everything in MAGA red?
| Cool, knock yourself out.
|
| I hope lots of people at Meta are in full-on quiet quitting
| mode.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Yeah it's common in politics. Free speech for me, but
| "cisgender" (a medical term, same as "transgender") is a
| slur. States' rights for slavery, but not for abortion.
|
| "There must be an in-group who is protected by the law and
| not bound by it, and an out-group who is bound by the law
| but not protected by it."
| pityJuke wrote:
| Yeah, what the fuck do Messenger themes have anything to do
| with free speech, or company effectiveness?
|
| It's a clear signal, along with the moderation changes that
| allow you to call LGBT+, and only LGBT+ people, mentally ill:
| Meta, the company, hates gay people.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| On the one hand, I am very happy to see Meta (and others) reject
| the "equity" part of DEI, which has led to programs that involve
| explicit discrimination. If you are a senior leader in a big tech
| company (or any big company at this point) or have friends who
| are, you've probably heard of the ways in which secret (never
| documented) quotas for hiring, promotion, suppliers, etc have
| created a practice of systemic discrimination on race and gender.
|
| The part I find dishonest here is that they claim they never
| actually practiced discrimination in the past and that it was
| only an "impression". Meta definitely did. It's just so well
| known and I've heard this corroborated by several people, who had
| to deal with high pressure reviews of their team's statistics (by
| race, gender, etc). The other suspicious aspect is timing. Why
| didn't this happen earlier? Why not later? It seems like it is
| timed to build favor with the new administration and avoid
| regulatory attention on issues like competition, privacy, etc.
| mempko wrote:
| Which race? Which gender?
| Gys wrote:
| DEI = Diversity, equity, and inclusion
|
| (Not explained in the article)
| hypeatei wrote:
| Seems fine as it always appeared as virtue signaling to me. This
| is one less talking point that conservatives will use when
| literally anything happens.
| thrance wrote:
| They don't care about reality, watch them blame the democrats
| for everything wrong happening in the next 4 years, despite
| them no longer holding any meaningful power.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I am open to discussing the efficacy of DEI vs its harms.
|
| BUT
|
| The right wing media machine will never run out of silly things
| to tell its consumers to be angry about.
| npteljes wrote:
| >This is one less talking point that conservatives will use
| when literally anything happens.
|
| In this regards, I trust them to handle themselves well, even
| in a face of shortage. And it's not like grounded arguments
| matter in era that is being dubbed "post-truth politics".
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| This change is no less "virtue signaling" than the previous
| policy; it's just signaling to a different audience.
| baq wrote:
| Are they rolling back Chinese and Indian managers only hiring
| Chinese and Indian folks, too?
| triceratops wrote:
| You want to...make their hiring more diverse?
| baq wrote:
| Preposterous!
| thepasswordis wrote:
| No I think what they're saying is that they want _ability_ to
| be the only (or at least by far the primary) metric used to
| evaluate the fitness of a candidate.
| paxys wrote:
| There's no magical measure for ability. People tend to hire
| people who look like them and act like them, simply because
| in their mind that is what _seems_ correct. That 's how
| humans have always behaved, and it isn't going to change.
| triceratops wrote:
| Then they're saying specifically Chinese and Indian
| managers hire people who are less skilled than the best
| candidates available to them. It's a fishy claim that needs
| proof.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| annzabelle wrote:
| That's the most egregious hiring practice I've actually seen.
| The white/black/hispanic/asian american managers all hire teams
| with multiple ethnicities based on the most qualified
| candidates for the job, while Indian born managers frequently
| seem to end up with teams that are 80+% Indian. I don't think
| I've ever seen a team that's 80% white, even in roles that
| require US Citizenship, but 80% Indian happens frequently.
| runako wrote:
| > I don't think I've ever seen a team that's 80% white
|
| I assure you this is very common in the industry, at least in
| the US. I can even go further: that 80% white team will
| usually also not have any women. 80% white men on a team
| describes most of the teams I've worked on over the decades.
| loeg wrote:
| Good to hear. Racism / sexism has no place in hiring practices
| and was always illegal.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| And we all know there was no racism or sexism before DEI
| programs.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Valid point. But the cure should not also be the disease.
| wussboy wrote:
| I feel like people who say this haven't read the research about
| our unconscious biases. My personal "hit me on the head" moment
| was reading about the Cincinnati Orchestra who started
| auditioning candidates behind a curtain and suddenly found
| their ratio of male:female went from 3:1 to 1:1. No one at that
| organization was consciously discriminating. Everyone thought
| as you did that they were acting without racism/sexism. And yet
| (at least) sexism was obvious once they removed it from the
| hiring equation.
|
| And this leaves people in a quandary. How do you control for
| sexism when you can't just hide your candidate behind a
| curtain? The solution society has tried is to mandate ratios.
| Why they tried this makes sense. It's obvious downfalls make
| sense. I'm not aware of any other suggestion that is viable.
| klooney wrote:
| You're behind the times- blind auditions have been disfavored
| by DEI-practitioners for years, on the grounds that they're
| not as effective as quotas.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is a funny example because some in the pro-DEI movement
| advocate for ending blind auditions to enhance diversity[1].
|
| I think if we could somehow do "blind auditions" for any kind
| of work, that would be the ideal case of non-biased hiring.
| But if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not
| result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI
| advocates would be on board.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/iH2uh
| llamaimperative wrote:
| > if the outcomes of this kind of blind hiring did not
| result in a "diverse" workforce, I don't think many DEI
| advocates would be on board.
|
| I really disagree with this. Obviously there are the
| extremists on the far end of the spectrum which this
| accurately describes, but the vast majority of people who
| support these types of programs arrive at it by observing
| 1) the literal centuries of examples like the one above and
| 2) the numerous visible day-to-day examples of
| racism/sexism one sees directly (not talking about silly
| microaggression shit)
|
| It doesn't take an extreme viewpoint to come to the
| conclusion there are knobs that might need to be turned a
| bit more deliberately in our society to bring it closer to
| the blind evaluation model.
|
| It's a shame how much of our discourse is people in the
| middle of the bell curve arguing principally against people
| on the far ends of it (or observing such arguments and
| wisely choosing to stay out of it).
| int_19h wrote:
| Thing is, the "extremists" are the ones with strong
| beliefs, so they tend to be the ones actively promoting
| such programs and running them, not the middle of the
| ground people.
|
| One is reminded of the famous debacle when GitHub
| canceled ElectronConf after using a blind review process
| to select talks, and ended up with al male speakers.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Sure but the DEI programs have only ever constituted a
| tiny, tiny portion of hiring/firing/economic activity in
| general.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > auditioning candidates behind a curtain
|
| That anecdote is widely shared but inaccurate:
| https://reason.com/2019/10/22/orchestra-study-blind-
| audition...
| alickz wrote:
| DEI seems to me to be the _opposite_ of blind auditions
| though, where instead of hiding immutable characteristics in
| the hiring process, they are factored in
| dijit wrote:
| You should read the research because its actually good.
|
| They studied the effect of _telling people_ that they had an
| unconscious bias and it worked in eliminating it.
|
| I would like to see that reproduced as it seemed like only
| certain demographics followed as you would expect; and
| primarily not the one you would like to hear. But it would be
| good to do something actually effective that doesnt introduce
| racism to fight racism.
|
| Fire vs Fire style.
| honkycat wrote:
| DEI has so little effect on hiring. I'm much more concerned
| about H1B for cheaper work. It's a total non-issue.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I'm more worried because it's part of a big package of swinging
| to the right politically. The moderation rule about "You can
| only call someone mentally ill if they're also queer" seems
| particularly uhhh nuts, deranged, stupid even.
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mempko wrote:
| I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like.
| It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content
| that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive
| advantage you are talking about.
| swatcoder wrote:
| They all suck. But the user experience is practically
| irrelevant to the business of selling ads and operating
| sentiment manipulation channels, which is the business that all
| of the large social media companies are in.
|
| And whether their ideas and strategies are well-grounded or
| seem optimal or ethical to the rest of us, the top leadership
| at most of those companies lean strongly towards corporatist,
| libertarian political ideals and see most regulation (and
| preemptive self-regulation) as both philosophically immoral and
| an existential threat to their businesses.
| mulmen wrote:
| > which is the business that all of the large social media
| companies are in.
|
| I agree with you.
|
| If this is the case and money is speech, can a well-
| intentioned organization just collect donations to advance
| their message? Like when Philip Morris uses this to sell
| cigarettes to kids we say that is bad. But what if the EFF
| used it to ensure net neutrality? Or if Planned Parenthood
| used it to add reproductive rights to the bill of rights?
|
| Do my donations already pay for social media campaigns?
|
| Do the ends justify the means?
| glimshe wrote:
| I keep hearing this about Twitter and Facebook but my
| experience is completely different. I believe the default
| experience is as you describe, but after I started following
| dozens of retrogaming groups, old games are all I see in both
| places. Even the ads became relevant and, believe it or not,
| interesting. I've clicked on a couple, which took me to small
| creators in the retrogaming and RPG areas.
| eitally wrote:
| The same is true with Reddit. The default feed is absolutely
| awful, but the bar required to curate something individually
| interesting and useful is too high for most new users, given
| the toxicity + banality of the default.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| I'm sorry but reddit is trash. Every subreddit, no matter
| how niche, is basically cringy phrases being repeated or
| photos of some "home set up" or said niche product someone
| bought who is looking for validation of their decision.
| It's so bad I blocked reddit from my search engine results.
| eitally wrote:
| Clearly we're using different subs. ymmv.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| Provide an example of a sub that isn't like that?
| ColdTakes wrote:
| Both /r/Science and /r/AskScience are very heavily
| moderated and verified industry experts discuss papers on
| it.
| qqqult wrote:
| There's a lot of interesting discussions on r/science but
| like the rest of reddit it's such an echo chamber that
| you end up with bizarre one-sided arguments that
| discourage all opposing views.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Is there much space for opposing views on a forum
| answering science questions? Presumably the purpose is to
| answer from established science.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > Is there much space for opposing views on a forum
| answering science questions?
|
| Perhaps more than anywhere. Science is a process of
| challenge and response, not a static body of knowledge.
|
| > Presumably the purpose is to answer from established
| science.
|
| "Established science", which is still subject to debate
| itself, isn't what link aggregators cover. They bias
| towarss stuff more like science news and novel study
| outcomes, which are nothing to do with established
| science except as a seed for critical discussion.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yeah the upvote based ranking basically means that every
| comment section is basically dogpile on the same points
| of view and every dissenting opinion is hidden...
| Terrible
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Broadly appealing subs like that should be the last subs
| you cite if your goal is to provide evidince that Reddit
| isn't lowest common denominator trash.
|
| Even in fairly niche subs I find that "surface level"
| content quality dominates and nuanced takes are
| frequently unpopular which is basically a recipe for
| anyone who knows anything to leave. I find the best subs
| are satire subs because having to know enough about
| something to be able to satirize it weeds out all the
| people who create and perpetuate surface level content. I
| assume there are some super niche subs that are similar.
| filchermcurr wrote:
| /r/CreaturesGames/ - Discussion about the Creatures
| artificial life simulation games. I haven't seen anything
| particularly cringey on it.
| lupusreal wrote:
| On reddit the defaults are shit and the rest of the site
| bans you by default until you've karmawhored yourself past
| an arbitrary threshold on those defaults. Trash website.
|
| I used to use it years back. Some subreddits were really
| great but they all inevitability devolved so I lost any
| interest in maintaining active accounts there. r/skookum
| had really interesting content for a while but devolved
| into idiots reposting the same skookum brand wrenches over
| and over again.
| evantbyrne wrote:
| I finally quit my barren Twitter when the Musk takeover
| resulted in my feed being flooded with porn (including
| illegal content) and arabic carpet cleaning ads. I
| seriously doubt anyone's default Reddit front page has ever
| looked like that.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I keep seeing people say they've experienced this, but
| I've been on twitter for years (pre Musk and stayed post
| Musk) and I've never once seen porn on there. How does
| this happen by accident?
| swatcoder wrote:
| They're going to have a pretty developed and stable
| picture of you and what you respond to by now, especially
| of their view of you aligns with high- value placements
| already.
|
| So they probably don't bother to audition that kind of
| content for you very often because they already have
| strategies that milk your attention, engagement, and
| wallet better.
|
| When you hear other people share their experience as new
| or different users, keep in mind how customized all these
| platforms are and how idiosycratically optimized they'll
| already be for you as a long-time, engaged user.
|
| Most people can't go back in time to get where you are,
| and don't have any sure (or worthwhile) road to get
| there.
| SmirkingRevenge wrote:
| In my case, my (now deleted) account (which was primarily
| read-only) would get several porn bot followers per day.
| If I didn't log in for a week, I'd have dozens of new
| "p#i#c#s#i#n#b#i#o" type accounts following me.
|
| Towards the end, there would often be porn in replies of
| many posts on all kinds of topics, like politics, news,
| etc.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > several porn bot followers per day
|
| Ah, ok, yeah, you're right, that did (and still does)
| happen to me. I had forgotten about that, I just ignore
| followers now.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I don't see any porn in my feed. Some of it is salacious,
| but not porn.
| ge96 wrote:
| YouTube is nuts when not logged in as well. Those crazy
| clickbait thumbnails eg. Mr. Beast or whatever.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| My logged-in YouTube shows me almost entirely
| 3blue1brown, Applied Science, and the like. Logged out it
| is 100% chum and garbage.
| ge96 wrote:
| I wish the home was better showing the stuff you followed
| vs. having to go into subscriptions tab.
|
| edit: there are a limited number of tiles to show but
| yeah
| runjake wrote:
| Agreed. The X ads were terrible and annoying until I flipped
| on that "Let X ad track you" and at least I get tolerable ads
| on mobile. (uBlock Origin blocks them on desktop)
|
| The For You feed varies week by week but is generally okay. I
| make heavy use of lists, mute words, etc to clean things up.
|
| X is a train wreck, but an interesting and useful one,
| depending on who/what you follow.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Use Firefox and you can block them on mobile as well.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I bought a premium account on X and the ads went away.
|
| I bought a premium Prime account on Amazon, and yet some of
| their shows still have embedded commercials. grrrr.
| runjake wrote:
| I have Premium and I still get half the ads as free.
|
| Plus, I get constant ads to upgrade to Premium+ for ads-
| free.
|
| Premium+ is probably what you have.
| tomrod wrote:
| I use bluesky and so far have no ads and lots of great
| journalism and academic lists to follow. Greatly enjoying
| it, feels like Twitter 2012 or so.
| qqqult wrote:
| same, people keep complaining that their twitter feeds are
| full of violence, porn & political bullshit but I get 0 of
| that
|
| I haven't gone out of my way to restrict my timeline either,
| I follow ~1000 accounts I just don't follow or interact with
| accounts that post any of that crap.
| celticninja wrote:
| Don't worry it will come, it takes a while but then you start
| getting sent outrage bait, stuff you will disagree with just
| to get you involved.
| threeseed wrote:
| I run a number of business X accounts which are post-only.
|
| The very second the US election got underway _all_ of our
| accounts started to heavily promote right-wing political
| content. Even though we specifically said when we signed up
| that we aren 't interested in anything like that.
| chasd00 wrote:
| This happened to me on imgur, i explicitly filtered out
| politics but once the election got underway I started
| seeing it everywhere (except in imgur's case it was left-
| wing content). I turned off the politics filter and then
| turned it back on and they vanished for a time but then
| slowly leaked back in. If i reset the filter every week
| then i could keep political related content hidden for the
| most part.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| The fact that you're being downvoted for accurate reporting
| that can be easily verified by anyone who makes a Twitter
| account.. lol
|
| Before I deleted my Twitter account, I tried really hard to
| just block every account that posted content I felt was pol-
| tier.. it just doesn't work. That platform is FUBAR, and the
| prime example is the owner of the platform who has been
| completely brainrotted from staring into the orb for 12 hours a
| day.
|
| It seems like public sentiment is trending towards rolling over
| and letting channers run society. We'll see how that goes.
| TranquilMarmot wrote:
| I had my Twitter account for almost 15 years before deleting
| it.
|
| I hadn't blocked ANYBODY for 13 of those years, but towards
| the end I was blocking dozens of users per day. Not not just,
| "I don't agree with this person" but "Wow this person is
| genuinely hateful and not contributing anything meaningful,
| and I would rather not see that."
| Xunjin wrote:
| I don't understand why you were being flagged, it was actually
| my experience then deleted my account, of course it was some
| months ago, but still think that is the current one. (September
| of 2024)
| Rumudiez wrote:
| are you suggesting the company's staffing policy influences
| what users post? I don't agree the arrow points in that
| direction. or that there's an arrow between those topics at all
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > It's completely unusable
|
| I will rail on FB just as hard as the next guy, but
| realistically, from a business perspective, if facebook's wild
| popularity and 3 billion active monthly users still says
| "unusable" to you... well, do you really think most people
| would agree with you? And more importantly to the company...
| whose opinion matters the most?
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| You have to follow people you're interested in, and continually
| curate that list. X is garbage in the same way /r/all is - you
| have to find the subreddits you like and aren't too large
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42658074.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| That this is a brave counter-cultural stance shows how far we
| fell.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Were you also trying to figure out which countries you could
| move to, and which friends and family you were willing to leave
| to do so? Or was that just me?
| paxys wrote:
| DEI was a song and dance that companies put on for the media,
| politicians, investors, employees, and the public at large.
|
| Now anti-DEI is a song and dance for the exact same reason.
|
| If you have been in the business long enough, you will know that
| the company has NO ONE's interests at heart. Never had and never
| will. They will discriminate against any race they have to,
| whether majority or minority, if it leads to an extra dollar on
| their balance sheet.
| teeray wrote:
| > the company has NO ONE's interests at heart
|
| Except for shareholder value
| bhouston wrote:
| > Except for shareholder value
|
| Well, it depends. Zuckerberg has controlling interest in Meta
| even though he owns a minority of it (<15%) because of its
| dual share structure. Meta will do what he wants it do.
|
| Google has a similar structure.
| jjulius wrote:
| Semantics. I'd replace "shareholder value" with "making a
| chunk of people insanely wealthy".
| iforgot22 wrote:
| It's not semantics. Those founders have more voting power
| than their actual share in the companies, so they don't
| have the same incentives as regular shareholders.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Isn't that more about the value of the shares they personally
| received as part of their compensation package?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| If meta cared about shareholder value they wouldnt be
| spending 10 bil a year on VR. Decisions at meta are made with
| marks interests in mind
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Not even really true anymore. It's all about "stakeholder
| capitalism" now, which boils down to management being able to
| prioritize whichever stakeholder it wants to in any given
| situation.
|
| Shareholder primacy may not be perfect, but it at least
| constrains management instead of giving them completely free
| rein.
| greenthrow wrote:
| This take is cynical to the point of wilfull ignorance. My
| spouse works in DEI and I guarantee you her and her coworkers
| are sincere and trying to instill better, _less biased_ hiring
| practices and to make _everyone_ feel welcome and part of the
| team. Not everyone is going to be the same but that 's like
| anything else. Being 100% dismissive is as much of a mistake as
| being 100% unquestioningly accepting.
| lantry wrote:
| I think both things are true: there are people who sincerely
| want to change things, but the organization and incentive
| structure for large public orgs means the corps will only do
| things that don't lower their profits.
| drewbug01 wrote:
| I believe the comment is implying that having DEI programs at
| all was a song-and-dance put on by the C-suite; not that your
| spouse is insincere in their work.
|
| Put differently: the C-suite set up these programs (and hired
| very sincere people to work in them) but never really
| actually cared about the outcomes.
| nearbuy wrote:
| The C-suite are humans and as humans, many of them have
| ideologies. It's very cynical to think executives have no
| goals or ideologies beyond enriching themselves.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| How does she implement DEI, in terms of hiring practices?
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Parent post is about _capital_ not _workers_.
|
| Companies are filled with workers, and plenty of them _do_
| care. But unless they work for a co-op _employees are
| disposable_ , and ultimately they serve at the whims of
| capital.
|
| When capital decides that equity doesn't sell, the workers
| striving to create more diverse workplaces will be discarded.
|
| The only counter to this is government, but Americans just
| voted for a government that explicitly wants to _increase_
| disparities.
|
| There is literally no counter to this in the private sector,
| save co-ops or non-profits that actually sell their
| principals as part of their brand (e.g. Patagonia).
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Sure, megacorps never had genuine interest in liberation at the
| very top.
|
| But it is a genuine sign of renewed danger when megacorps are
| perceiving the general public as valuing reactionary politics
| instead of valuing diversity.
| nox101 wrote:
| At the company I work at, IMO, their DEI initiatives are
| counter productive so they claim "we support DEI", but in
| actual practice they're making the problem worse not better. It
| might be true that removing DEI is performative, but at least
| at my job, removing DEI would be a net positive for actually
| diversity, equity, and inclusion.
|
| There might be other things they could do proactively. But, the
| ones they actually chose are derisive, racist, and do nothing
| to actually make the world a more diverse, equitable, and
| inclusive place.
| bnetd wrote:
| We Trump administration now.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Diversity should never be a goal or initiative.
|
| It's a value. You wake up every day and practice diverse hiring
| practices.
|
| The moment you put a tangible target to hit, is when you gamify
| diversity into something bad.
| mmooss wrote:
| How do you make it happen? Relying on people to "wake up every
| day and practice diverse hiring practices" wasn't working.
| asdasdsddd wrote:
| How do you know its not working? Because there are
| statistical differences in outcomes between groups of people?
| deadbabe wrote:
| It starts by hiring people who share your values. Don't hire
| scumbags, liars, racists, Neo-Nazis, etc.
|
| If someone demonstrates they don't represent your company's
| values, get rid of them or put them in non-decision making
| roles and keep an eye on them.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree that it's a bad goal, in terms of how it being a goal
| corrupts the value itself. Like in Goodhart's law, "When a
| measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". But
| managing a larger entity cannot realistically be done via
| values, I think. Different people have different
| interpretations of the same values, and not sharing the values
| 100% in the first place, so, the values will need to be
| formulated into more tangible things, like goals, limits,
| directives, laws, ect. Will not be ever perfect, but I doubt
| that we have better tools to achieve it.
| Animats wrote:
| So far, Zuckerberg (Meta), Pichai (Google), Bezos (Amazon),Cook
| (Apple), and Sarandos (Netflix) have all personally made the
| pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring. That's all of the
| FAANG CEOs. Nadella and Altman phoned it in.
|
| The Wall Street Journal has a long list.[1]
|
| It works for Putin.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/ozPQi
| yoavm wrote:
| As an outsider looking at the US, this looks so dangerous. It
| feels like the whole democratic system is bending to the power
| of money.
|
| Just a few weeks ago, an American friend was making the
| comparison between the number of billion $ companies in the EU
| vs the US. I was trying to tell them that it isn't necessarily
| a bad thing to have less of that - I rather have 1,000 million
| $ companies than a billion $ one. The concentration of
| financial power seems so unhealthy, and it looks like it's
| crippling the whole American system.
| romellem wrote:
| Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1]
| to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the
| risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies
| and goals." Our success at Costco Wholesale has
| been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees,
| members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and
| inclusion follow our code of ethics: For our employees,
| these efforts are built around inclusion - having all of our
| employees feel valued and respected. Our efforts at
| diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with
| everyone at our Company the importance of creating
| opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our
| capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our
| business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our
| success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.
|
| [1]:
| https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/22160K/20241115/NPS...
| ericmcer wrote:
| Did Costco ever have a diversity issue? I don't think people
| are worried about getting more representation among grocery
| store cashiers.
| afavour wrote:
| I don't see them as different to any other company, really. I
| could imagine diversity in their staff of buyers would be
| useful, for example, to ensure they're stocking products that
| represent the different desires of different groups.
| nomel wrote:
| > I don't see them as different to any other company,
| really.
|
| The pool of _qualified_ people, for a cashier, is basically
| _everyone_.
|
| The pool of _qualified_ people for, say, working at a tech
| company, is _not_ as diverse [1], and don 't match the
| general population.
|
| [1] https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/people/talent-
| flows...
| spike021 wrote:
| perhaps it goes without saying but they don't only employ
| front line store staff.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| The diversity isn't for you the customer, it's for the
| employees and the kind of corporate environment Costco wants
| to build.
|
| Edit to add: A better corporate environment, of course, does
| tend to lead to a better customer experience, but the
| "visibility of diversity" should not be the goal but rather
| "genuinely fostering an inclusive environment where people
| are respected and feel willing to put in their best work,"
| and I think that shows at Costco.
| cocacola1 wrote:
| Costco's always interested me as a company. Still the only
| place where I pay to be able to shop. It's a personal point of
| pride whenever I go there and spend less than $100.
| m463 wrote:
| > It's a personal point of pride whenever I go there and
| spend less than $100.
|
| so you make two trips?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Costco employees were never called to testify at congressional
| hearings. They do not need to worry about pr and political
| pushback like meta does.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| Note the yaml formatted text string of their statement, very
| cs-forward (I assume newlines where stripped out by the web UI
| here.
| caturopath wrote:
| The subject matter is nominally the same, but I don't know how
| comparable I would guess the situations are. I 100% could see
| Meta making a very similar statement still today.
| mmooss wrote:
| The problem isn't evil, but the lack of any leader standing up
| for good (using simplistic terms). The evil is always there, in
| our souls and in our society, as is the good; we just need to
| choose and use the latter to check the former. Who of any serious
| stature is standing up to Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump, etc.? The
| absence - the empty stage - is shocking.
|
| It is one of Biden's great responsibilities, but he has long
| abandoned the country and the world in this essential sense and
| bears great responsibility for the outcome.
|
| As a simple example, who is standing up for the LA fire chief? Is
| the mayor, the governor, national leaders? If they have, they are
| highly ineffectual - I haven't heard a thing - which is also
| failure on their part.
|
| It's the responsibilities of many others. It's the responsibility
| of people here, in our own small community. If you are the
| leader, and now we all are, it's not your role to toy with the
| latest thought experiment; it is to make a just community. This
| isn't hacking the new thing, it is building critical human-rated
| systems on which lives, freedom, justice, and the future depend.
|
| It shouldn't be hard for organizations to implement just
| policies: Agree to eliminate anything that favors one group.
| Agree it should be equal to everyone. And that means majority and
| minority, powerful and vulnerable: Eliminate anything that favors
| a group, including what favors the powerful majority group -
| which is mostly what is favored.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Zuckerberg and Musk are billionaires, money always grants
| power.
|
| What are Biden and Harris supposed to do when the swathes of
| land that vote for politicians, don't vote for them? And when
| Congress doesn't back them up? Should they just... say
| "Pweeeaase" louder?
|
| This is why recently I've switched from "Progressive income
| taxes are good because we need to fund social programs, and
| rich people can afford to bear a greater tax burden" to "Taxing
| rich people is essential to democracy, since wealth can buy
| political power."
| mmooss wrote:
| Biden and Harris aren't victims, they are leaders; they have
| have power. Their job is to guide people. They can frame the
| issues, inspire people, lead them. They can persuade people
| just as well as others, or better given their authority.
|
| Musk and Zuckerberg and lots of others don't hesitate to
| lead.
|
| > And when Congress doesn't back them up? Should they just...
| say "Pweeeaase" louder?
|
| No, that's pretty ignorant about politics. Again, they aren't
| victims. They make things happen. There are ways to persuade
| the public and compel Congress. But the Dems have completely
| abdicated any such thing, as if they aren't politicians or
| leaders.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| "As it turns out, principles _are_ for sale "
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the
| funnel. It's why I went into teaching and I'm proud to say after
| what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time ("they grow
| up so fast" etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the
| work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none.
|
| When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a
| turnaround at the funnel _entrypoint_ in as little as only five
| years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone
| teacher could hope to be.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common
| sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a
| lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's
| literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist.
| Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I
| recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists
| were trying to demand that companies there hire black people at
| such a rate that there literally are not enough black people in
| the country to meet that quota. And yet, this sort of brainless
| activism continues unabated - why I can't begin to guess.
|
| I do think that trying to shape job demographics is misguided.
| It doesn't matter that we get more women in tech, it doesn't
| matter that we get more men in nursing, and so on. What matters
| is that the fields are open to anyone with an interest, not the
| resultant demographics. If people aren't interested in those
| careers, that's perfectly fine.
| pavl- wrote:
| One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her
| first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an
| afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a
| strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some
| nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce
| barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think
| focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still
| result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel"
| isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think
| such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team
| with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be
| "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal
| experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition
| for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't
| personally impact you?
| gedy wrote:
| I hear stories like this, but now after 25 years in the
| industry, no place I've worked at would have ever tolerated
| this, nor have I seen or heard this happen from colleagues.
| Granted I've worked mostly in California, but still seems
| so foreign to me.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Seriously, every instance I'm aware of men having done
| something like that where I worked (and it's happened
| more than once), they've been fired either the next day
| or the same week.
|
| The solution there has nothing to do with hiring more
| women, and everything to do with zero tolerance for a
| sexist environment.
|
| I mean, that happening is just insane. This isn't the
| 1950's.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Even in Chicago 30 years ago I cannot imagine that
| happening where I worked. Women were pretty well
| represented in tech there, incidentally. My immediate
| supervisor was a woman and I was the only male on my
| team. This was in IT in financial services. I would guess
| the whole department was 60:40 male:female.
| pavl- wrote:
| I have a first-hand experience once or twice a year that
| make me stop and think -- if I were a woman in this
| situation I'd probably be doubting my career path. The
| example I cited is particularly egregious, but I have
| seen several other examples from a variety of companies:
| - two guys on a zoom call joking that someone's camera
| was off because they were doing "weird stuff" - manager
| from another team drunkenly telling a 24 year old at a
| holiday party that he would leave his wife for her -
| software system named "naggy_wife" - coworker telling
| younger coworker to "not get married because you will
| never have sex again"
|
| I am passing along these anecdotes because they're more
| easy to empathize with than some of the more general
| arguments of why it can be hard to succeed in tech as a
| woman (but they really only tell part of the story). Some
| of my other anecdotes might also sound closer to things
| you've seen or heard at the work place, or perhaps it's
| easier to see how some of these things might have
| happened without you being aware of them, given their
| (relative) infrequency and the contexts in which they
| arise. All of them happened without an HR incident (like,
| really, should a guy who wrote a system called "naggy-
| wife" get in trouble? a choice was made like 20 years
| ago... and maybe the guy doesn't even work there
| anymore). But you can also see how negative experiences
| like this can build up and contribute to the relatively
| common feeling among female engineers that they "don't
| belong".
| bradlys wrote:
| This won't be a popular sentiment among the woke mafia
| that puruses HN but I've seen far more women drop out of
| tech roles due to the general work environment than due
| to some sexist commentary. In fact, I don't know any who
| left due to some sexist commentary. I know many who left
| due to how toxic the work environment is for everyone.
|
| Tech workers are one of the least sexist groups out of
| any. If you think techies are sexist, you'd never last a
| day in medicine, law, or finance. Yet, women sign up for
| those in far higher percentages. Genuinely, it is
| actually hard to find a more left/progressive leaning
| professional field. It is not sexism that is the one
| thing keeping women out of tech. It is that it's not an
| attractive or high status field to women. The people
| working in it are not seen as socially competent, it is
| highly outsourced, and depending on role has relatively
| little socializing. It's also insanely competitive and
| you have to fight to keep your job from an army of H1B
| workers invading the country due to CEOs looking for
| slave labor. There are so many reasons to not be in tech
| and sexism should be one of the lowest reasons out there.
|
| I don't know any women complaining about sexism in
| comparison to the level of "holy fuck, when will I ever
| get a break?" It is an unrelenting field that constantly
| has you worried you'll lose your job next month. On top
| of requiring you study at least 500 leetcode problems
| before you do any interviews. Go figure, most women don't
| enjoy that.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| >But you can also see how negative experiences like this
| can build up
|
| Not really, TBH. I especially can't see why a woman
| experiencing these (to my mind, rather mild) interactions
| would think that things would be better in some other
| career path.
|
| Let's say I, a man, went to work in a traditionally
| female-dominated field like nursing, and found that the
| other nurses there had named their cafeteria dishwasher
| "Hubby" as a joke because it took forever to work.
|
| Would I, a grown man, consider changing my career because
| of this? No, I wouldn't.
|
| OTOH, if the other nurses seemed to view me with
| disrespect or suspicion and I found I wasn't able to
| shift that perception through my actions, then I'd
| reconsider.
| dijit wrote:
| I'm 35 now, at no point in my career have I ever been in an
| environment that would have tolerated that, school- college
| or workplace.
|
| And I haven't been trying exceptionally hard to avoid it.
|
| If such jibes had happened those people would not have a
| job, point blank.
|
| Given the average seniority for a full stack engineer is 10
| years, I should have encountered at least one, or worked
| with someone who had been in such an environment.
|
| I think chud behaviour is an excuse, because it's not
| tolerated for at least my lifetime.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Even if it's very uncommon, unfortunately even one
| incident like the one in GP's comment is enough to
| convince someone that they're unwelcome and abandon
| working in the field. In fact, an argument for workplace
| diversity initiatives is that it can re-assure people
| that they _are_ welcome, and that kind behavior of is
| fireable. Personally the kind of "DEI" I most strongly
| support are the initiatives that lay out clear rules and
| expectations for what kind of employee behavior is
| allowed, and tell people who to go to if they see it
| occurring.
| dijit wrote:
| if everyone openly has your back, consistently, and for
| years yet you're so fragile that a single dickhead (who
| _will_ be fired) derails your entire career then honestly
| you were too fragile to do the job anyway..
|
| I don't know a single engineer who doesn't get imposter
| syndrome.
|
| As a man, I have been openly derided for doing something
| stupid, if I were a woman I might internalise that as if
| it was sexism- so how do you deal with that? When people
| are so convinced that if anything critical could be based
| on gender?
|
| At some point you're treating people like children.
|
| Again I'll say it: every single educational institution
| and workplace I have ever been in has intentionally
| mentioned that anything that could be perceived as
| misogyny or sexual harassment have a zero tolerance
| policy.
|
| Am I _really_ the outlier? I've worked so many places and
| across so many countries and industries...
| Dove wrote:
| Your suggestion that bad behavior by all-male teams would
| be improved by the addition of women rests on a couple of
| assumptions that are not true: that women are inherently
| better behaved than men, and that women naturally see each
| other as being on the same team.
|
| I have been through some really awful experiences in the
| workplace in the last few years, and some of the most
| egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women
| can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in
| particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are
| not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to
| other women.
|
| On the other hand, I have often, often worked on teams that
| were (except for me) all men, but by and large they were
| men who had mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that
| they loved, and who therefore had no trouble relating to me
| with respect and affection. While it is true that some men
| treat women specifically badly, and that some men treat
| people generally badly, it is not true that men _in
| general_ treat women badly. Quite the opposite.
|
| It does take a moment, as a woman, to find your feet
| socially in an all male space. But does it not always take
| a moment to find your feet in any new space? I have
| generally found that what makes it go smoothly is the fact
| that we are all hackers. If anything, it is all the walking
| on eggshells about sexism that makes social integration
| awkward at first. People are trying to figure out how they
| are "supposed" to behave around me, worried that I will be
| aggressive socially and legally. When we focus on the work
| we do together and the love we have in common for the
| field, we become friends naturally and get along well.
|
| I myself think all the hand-wringing over demographics has
| been a waste of time at best and counterproductive at
| worst. I think it makes more sense to focus on developing
| virtue, civility, and good leadership among the people who
| find themselves here.
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| It is always so refreshing to read this kind of thing.
|
| For a number of years I had the sense that I might be
| going crazy, because it seemed that throughout my whole
| working life I'd encountered good and bad people of both
| sexes, but never witnessed the kind of systematic
| targeting of women that both mainstream and alternative
| media sources told me was rife. How could it be that I
| couldn't see what was apparently right under my nose? So
| it's reassuring to know that there are also women who
| have had a similar experience.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's
| just very difficult to affect these in the US education
| system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole.
| Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered
| folks, come from how parents push their values onto their
| kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged
| daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved
| interests because of ideas they had about masculinity and
| femininity.
|
| My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with
| Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."
| annzabelle wrote:
| I'm not sure that's entirely what's to blame when the
| countries with the least gender discrimination
| (Scandinavia) tend to be about 20% female in tech. I think
| that when people are free to choose their fields based
| purely on personal inclination, without major financial
| incentive, tech lands at about 20% female and early
| childhood education ends up being the opposite.
|
| Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20%
| female and we easily end up with spirals where departments
| end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that
| pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring
| in math instead of cs because of that process at my
| college.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Yeah I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the
| answers. You might be right.
|
| I guess the interesting point of discussion here is
| "personal inclination". A lot of my female friends have
| stories about how their parents encouraged their brothers
| to fix things around the house, get their hands dirty,
| read manuals, and set up new appliances. They tell me how
| they were, conversely, encouraged to make friends,
| maintain relationships, and steered toward more aesthetic
| pursuits like art, drama, or music.
|
| My sister, at an age when she had no strong interests of
| her own, was given paintbrushes and nice paper as gifts
| by our parents but not Legos because they felt like girls
| were more likely to enjoy aesthetic things than
| mechanical things. Funny enough, as an adult she has
| neither mechanical nor aesthetic interests. The question
| I guess is how much of "personal inclination" is driven
| by these small decisions of what options we give to kids.
|
| I will say my experiences are colored by the fact that my
| family is a low-income immigrant family in the US from a
| culture with definite gender discrimination and so they
| hold stronger gender prejudices than probably a high-
| income Scandinavian family. My guess is also that younger
| generations have grown up with a much better idea of
| gender equality and will raise their kids with less of
| this prejudice.
|
| I also observed in my school that a lot of women felt
| more comfortable in the math department than CS (though
| CS had much less prestige compared to now), so thanks for
| your story and background.
| annzabelle wrote:
| I think I may also have somewhat of a blind spot here
| because I grew up with a mom who is a software engineer
| herself and I was bought a bunch of electronics/building
| toys by engineer relatives on both sides. When I was 13
| or 14 I was given the parts for a computer under the
| instruction to put it together and make sure to dual boot
| linux. I knew a fair number of other girls my age whose
| parents really wanted them to be engineers/devs and did
| similar things, but a lot of them were uninterested and
| went on to happy careers in other fields.
|
| The math vs CS dept thing is concerning because at the
| foundations they're very similar fields. It's such a
| strange phenomenon that my graph theory elective in the
| math dept was 30 or 40% female, yet algorithms was 5%
| female. Definitely at my institution there were
| structural issues in the CS dept that didn't exist in the
| math dept.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| Except fields often aren't open to people in different
| demographics. Sexism and racism are both very real and
| objectively quantified.
| npteljes wrote:
| I think these efforts need to be done at every level at the
| same time, and I agree that the "lower" or "earlier" levels
| need to be prioritized. Similar to how prevention is usually
| preferred to reaction.
| morkalork wrote:
| You're absolutely correct and I think it's what drives all the
| resentment about DEI programs. People aren't dumb, when they
| see some group only makes up 3% of the population of engineers
| and they see a program trying to balance senior positions,
| they're going to feel its unfair bs. What's really interesting
| is that almost every woman I've worked with professionaly isn't
| from North America, they're all from India, Iran and Eastern
| Europe (Belarus, Bulgaria etc). There's something deeply wrong
| with the culture here that's screwing up the top of the funnel.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI
| programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of
| the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on
| down the funnel.
|
| There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at
| senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes
| elsewhere in the system... obviously.
| blitzar wrote:
| (~2018) In India, women represent 45% of total computer
| science enrollment in universities, almost three times the
| rate in the United States, where it is 18%.
| morkalork wrote:
| And in Iran, it's even higher (1). It is not what you would
| expect from either country based on the stereotypes people
| have in their minds.
|
| (1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-
| to-ta...
| iforgot22 wrote:
| The stereotype in my mind is that countries in Asia
| prioritize STEM a lot, so this makes sense to me. And
| they don't call it STEM, it's just school.
| blitzar wrote:
| The stereotype in my mind ...
|
| countries in Asia prioritize education a lot, prioritize
| good jobs and good careers a lot. Children are pushed
| towards the schooling that offers the best careers and
| STEM is it at the moment.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| This tracks. I got a computer science degree from a large US
| university. Something like 75-80% of the major was male. The
| majority of the male CS students were Asian-American*, but
| not extremely. It seemed like a far greater majority of the
| female CS students were Asian-American, probably 95%.
|
| Several of my friends in CS said their parents wouldn't have
| supported their college education if they were getting a
| humanities degree.
|
| * counting South Asian and Middle Eastern
| kevinh wrote:
| People oppose efforts to make changes at the other end of the
| funnel too. This is the most popular post about Girls Who Code
| (the first organization that comes to mind, why I searched it):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980431
|
| You get similar complaints there.
| like_any_other wrote:
| That post is mostly factual observations, a reporting of
| lived experiences, if you will, not complaint.
| kenferry wrote:
| Mm. It's certainly good to work at the other end of the funnel
| (thank you!) but it also won't help address pattern matching
| that people do in hiring.
|
| It's an incredibly natural thing for people to hire people like
| themselves, or people they meet their image of what a top notch
| software dev looks like. It requires active effort to
| counteract this. One can definitely argue about the efficacy of
| DEI approaches, but I disagree that JUST increasing the
| strength of applicants will address the issue.
| subarctic wrote:
| Yes it will! That pattern matching is based on prior
| experience and if the entire makeup of candidates changes
| that'll cause people to pattern match differently. If old
| prejudices are taking a while to die out, it won't be long
| until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of
| qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as
| others and hires them
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's
| whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the
| same offers as others and hires them
|
| There's an argument to be made that this is _exactly_ what
| pipeline-level DEI programs are!
| specialp wrote:
| The start of the funnel is also the most racist and class
| discriminatory. Almost every school in the USA takes pupils
| from districts where the property owners pay the taxes for the
| schools. Rich areas get much more resources and support. Poor
| students get put into less funded schools and suffer from not
| having mentorship or peers to look up to.
|
| I live on Long Island and we have a majority white population.
| Despite that we have 2 school districts that are almost 100%
| black. That is where the problem is. You are not giving these
| students a chance. When I am going through resumes I am not
| getting a diverse pool of qualified candidates because these
| poor people have been historically oppressed into a caste of
| poor schooling and neighborhoods.
| polski-g wrote:
| Most of what you said is just wrong.
|
| "Poor students" have the most support in the country:
| https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2024/are-poor-urban-
| districts-... Baltimore public schools get $30k per student.
| Carmel, IN public schools spend $10k per student.
|
| You should look into heritability. There is no longitudinal
| impact on adult outcomes as a result of parenting/schooling
| practices.
| jyounker wrote:
| I'm assuming you are not familiar with this study: https://
| scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...
|
| It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school
| district to a richer school district, and they have
| children under 13, then those children are significantly
| more successful than children whose families remain in the
| poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be
| a slight negative effect.
|
| There are other studies showing similar effedcts.
|
| Summary: It's not genetics.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| In California funding is based upon attendance. The main
| place wealthy neighborhoods get extra money here is through
| PTAs rather than property taxes.
|
| This is in addition to what the other commenter said. I'm not
| very well informed about how other states fund their schools,
| but even if this blanket generalization is true in some
| places, there's enough evidence out there that funding isn't
| the only problem.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Washington state pools property tax money and then
| redistributed it equitably across the state to pay for
| education on a per pupil basis. This mainly means poorer
| eastern Washington districts are subsidized by richer western
| Washington districts, and districts that lose students to
| private schools take a direct hit in their funding.
| carabiner wrote:
| I'm most curious about the timing. Could this be related to the X
| narrative of LA fire response being compromised by DEI hiring?
| Zuck really sounds like he's mimicking X TPOT dialogues these
| days.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Let me get thsi right... Meta resolved issues with a performative
| DEI program with an even more performative act pandering to an
| incoming administration which is openly histile to POC... that's
| not better, it's worse.
| timmg wrote:
| From the memo:
|
| > We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic
| minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions
| are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been
| our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
|
| I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a
| large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your
| executive bonus will take into consideration how close you got to
| X." In a world like that, _many_ (most /all) executives will do
| whatever they can to get to those goals -- even if it goes
| against other official (or even legal) policies.
|
| And that certainly would explain a lot of the behavior I saw
| working at a large company during DEI peak. (Not to say that is
| any kind of proof of anything untoward).
| throwpoaster wrote:
| ITT a new step in the Gaslighting Slide just dropped!
|
| 5. It's been pretend this whole time.
|
| Previously:
|
| 1. It's not happening.
|
| 2. It's only happening a bit.
|
| 3. It's good that it's happening.
|
| 4. It's the people complaining who are the problem.
| firefoxd wrote:
| I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and
| being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published
| on BBC [1].
|
| What immediately followed, every large company reached out to
| have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found
| it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place
| already. Like what makes one an expert?
|
| In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying
| to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their
| successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I
| was met with resistance every step of the way.
|
| Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented,
| I've managed to place just one developer in a company.
|
| However, most these companies were happy to change their social
| media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They
| sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated.
| But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me
| they never even got to do a technical interview.
|
| Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that
| gives the impression that important work is being done. Like
| Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built
| [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of
| "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188
|
| [2]: https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4?si=wtnQtBOE-fs4V7gR
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Yes and the fun part is a lot of people see this "eager yet
| resistant" as a damnification of diversity initiatives instead
| of the calcification of current systemic problems.
| ncr100 wrote:
| This is saying those businesses all used DEI for show, and
| suggests their efforts were half-hearted, if I read correctly.
|
| Their metrics I assume are zero / flat, around 'success' for
| DEI, derivatively.
|
| To me this suggests the next best focus area for increased
| fairness of societal fiscal (opportunity) performance is
| regulation, perhaps driven by social change and social
| pressure.
|
| I have next to no influence. Still I wonder if I'm naive?
|
| ALSO, awesome work Ibrahim / firefoxd, you deserve to be
| honored for your experience and celebrated for meaningful
| efforts to make society better. I would not know about this
| without you:
|
| > If you are black and take a group picture with your white
| colleagues [on Zoom] one evening, eventually someone will make
| the joke that all they see are your teeth. If you are black and
| hang out with your white colleague, people will always assume
| you are the subordinate.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| An alternate take: there are good DEI programs and poor ones.
| The poor ones fail because the planners dont really know what
| they are trying to do, but leadership thinks they ought to
| have one, and so they metric-ize it. And since (again, no
| clarity of thought) hard numbers in areas like hiring sail
| perilously close to large legal rocks, they whiff on the
| metrics and end up measuring something like "engagement".
| And, concomitantly, deliver a lot of low value chatter that
| provides ample ammunition to opponents of any kind of DEI
| programs, even the good ones.
|
| A good DEI program should, IMHO, be indistinguishable from
| good management culture embedded at every level in an org.
|
| - It should not be controversial to assert, and product
| management to insist, say, that products designed for
| humanity should be usable by humanity: men and women, for
| example - but we still have medicine and cars tested on male
| models, and software that is unusable if you have low vision
| or cant operate a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. That
| doesn't automatically mean one must hire 50:50 men:women, say
| (see legal rocks, above), but it certainly starts to smell
| like a missed opportunity if you don't have a single person
| on your staff or in your network of consultants who can
| explain what it feels like to wear a seatbelt when you are
| 1.5m and 50kg not 2m and 85kg. If you want better products,
| this seems like a no brainer, but it doesnt seem to happen.
|
| - It must absolutely be a mandate for all managers to avoid
| cliques. All men? All women? All Indians? All Purdue grads?
| Close watching needed, especially when those groups hire and
| promote. Doesn't need a mandate, needs better managers of
| managers.
|
| Tldr is that no amount of DEI will fix bad management
| culture.
| nradov wrote:
| The particular issues around medicine and cars were more
| due to regulatory and liability issues than bad management
| culture or intentional discrimination. Pharmaceutical
| companies often didn't include women as subjects in
| clinical trials over fears that if one got pregnant and
| then had a baby with serious birth defects because of the
| drug that would be ethically problematic and potentially
| lead to huge monetary damages in a civil trial. The FDA has
| since changed their rules to require broader participation
| in clinical trials.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/consumers/diverse-women-clinical-
| trials/...
|
| Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single
| standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average
| sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that. Now they
| are using a more diverse set of dummies.
|
| https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/improving-safety-for-
| women-...
|
| https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies
| bko wrote:
| A lot of people say DEI programs were purely performative and
| just for political points. But these policies did change the
| corporate landscape and affect hiring decisions.
|
| Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570
| (94%) went to people of color
|
| This data came from workforce demographic reports submitted to
| the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by 88 S&P 100
| companies
|
| Hispanic individuals accounted for 40% of new hires, followed
| by Black (23%) and Asian (22%) workers
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e...
| linotype wrote:
| So it was racist?
| thfuran wrote:
| Depends what the applicant pool looked like, but 94% seems
| almost certain to be an overcorrection.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| The way it's calculated is just based on the net change,
| so it doesn't really match overall hiring practices. At
| the end of it all high status jobs were still
| disproportionately held by White people and Asian people.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| What does that matter when all your newcomers are not
| white? eventually you'll end up with the polar opposite.
| You should hire based on skill not race or any other
| thing you have no control over.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| Right but part of that is asking why your workforce isn't
| representative of the available workers. If you're
| disproportionately hiring some types of people you
| probably are hiring on race and not skill.
|
| And yes, some of this is not solvable at the end of the
| funnel when hiring but as a society leaving a full class
| of people in less productive jobs due to race (or caste
| or whatever) is a waste of human potential.
| dijit wrote:
| > why your workforce isn't representative of the
| available workers.
|
| It's good you mention workers, because most people focus
| on the demographics of the population, which is bunk..
|
| Available workers includes factors such as qualification,
| motivation, aptitude and smaller factors like _"did they
| even apply"_.
|
| If your workforce demographics skew significantly from
| _qualified applicants_ then there's a problem. If you
| intentionally want to skew applicants then marketing to
| them or investing in their training and education is the
| way, not whatever the hell we seem to be doing.
|
| And a dearth of leadership of a certain ethnicity will
| change over time, demographics shift over the course of a
| generation of workers, not in a quarter of a decade like
| I've seen people expect.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Or it will reach a new stable equilibrium based on modern
| demographics, as things that add to 100% tend to do.
| miles wrote:
| > Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies,
| 302,570 (94%) went to people of color
|
| Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from
| census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority
| seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash:
| 75.3% White alone 13.7% Black alone 1.3% American
| Indian and Alaska Native alone 6.4% Asian alone
| 0.3% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone
| 3.1% Two or More Races 19.5% Hispanic or Latino
| 58.4% White alone, not Hispanic or Latino
|
| [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224
| grahamj wrote:
| When the playing field is tilted you have to put a thumb on
| the other side to balance it out. This might annoy the ones
| who were tilting it in the first place.
| programjames wrote:
| How are the people without the jobs doing the tilting?
| dsajames wrote:
| This isn't pressing your thumb. This is throwing away
| half the scale
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Why is skin colour or ethnicity when it comes to
| employment even relevent?
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| No matter what people think the right thing to do is,
| making any hiring decision on the basis of a protected
| group is illegal in the US, no matter who is on what side
| of the equation.
| foota wrote:
| I don't want to make too many assumptions here because it's
| a bit of a minefield, but... perhaps there's an entirely
| selfish and rational explanation for DEI hiring programs in
| a tight labor market? If you feel like you've hired all of
| the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're
| cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make
| sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that
| you feel have been underutilized (or historically
| underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the
| perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could
| be a way of achieving this.
|
| I don't think that's an entirely accurate narrative, but I
| do think it's probably at least part of this (e.g., that
| all of the best white people were already hired, while many
| POC people of equal caliber were not or not making as
| much). The job market was soaring in 2021 and looking for
| ways to hire new people without having to pay them more
| would likely be highly attractive. Now that the job market
| is not so competitive, there's not as much need to do so if
| you're just trying to find workers.
| nearbuy wrote:
| I suspect the conditions were the opposite at the time:
| competition for good non-white employees was fierce after
| BLM, making them harder to find. If I'm understanding the
| Bloomberg numbers correctly, a random non-white person
| would have 47x better odds of being hired than a white
| person at the S&P 100 companies.
|
| Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's
| methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
| droptablemain wrote:
| We are already in the backlash.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| this is an incredibly misleading statistic skewed by the
| fact that almost all retiring corporate workers were white
| so lots of white jobs were "lost"
| wbl wrote:
| That data cannot support the conclusion drawn. You don't know
| what the turnover rate was.
| dahinds wrote:
| Yes this is a wildly misrepresented statistic that has
| nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with
| demographic shifts in the U.S. population (specifically,
| that the "non Hispanic white" segment of the U.S.
| population is shrinking).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Thats true, and enhanced in places that reward that
| characteristic. Hispanic origin is tied to lineage,
| nationality, or country of birth for an individual or
| ancestors.
|
| It's a vague definition that is impossible to verify.
| Spain itself is a multicultural and multiethnic state.
| How do you prove that I don't have deep affiliation with
| my basque ancestor who settled in Ireland after a
| shipwreck?
| cmdli wrote:
| Looking at that article, it looks like for "Professional"
| degrees, it was about 25% white and 40% Asian. The "White 6%"
| figure came from a decrease in white workers in low-skilled
| roles and a massive increase in Hispanic people in those same
| roles.
|
| Given that many DEI programs specifically focus on "high
| skill" roles (like software engineers), it's unlikely that
| DEI accounted for this disparity while massive numbers of
| black and hispanic people being hired for low-skilled jobs
| had a larger impact.
| derektank wrote:
| If only 25% of people hired for roles requiring
| professional degrees were white, that's still a remarkable
| number, given 2/3rds of people receiving professional
| degrees in 2021 where white, without even considering the
| total population of professional degree holders
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72
| cmdli wrote:
| The most imbalanced group in hiring were Asians,
| representing around 5% of the population but around 40%
| of the chart in that article. From my anecdotal
| experience with DEI programs, they generally don't target
| or encourage hiring Asians over black/Hispanic people. If
| we are purely talking about discrimination against white
| people, it's much more likely that an Indian or Chinese
| person is replacing a white person, not a "DEI hire"
| black person.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| no it's because the study is measuring net changes and
| most retiring professional degree workers are white
| enragedcacti wrote:
| From my understanding that analysis is complete junk. From
| the Daily Wire of all people:
|
| > But it's not possible from the data to say that those
| additional "people of color" took the 320,000 newly created
| positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part
| of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that
| were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs.
|
| > A telltale sign that Bloomberg's "percentage of the net
| increase" methodology is flawed, VerBruggen explained, is
| that, if the departures of whites had been just a little
| higher, the net change in whites would have been negative
| instead of the actual small growth of 20,000. Bloomberg's
| methodology would then assert that whites took a negative
| percentage of the new 320,000 jobs, a mathematic
| impossibility.
|
| > The percentage of new jobs that went to whites was likely
| about 46%, eight points below the 54% white makeup of
| companies' existing workforces. That's to be expected given
| demographic changes in the United States since the time that
| the currently-retiring baby boomer generation first entered
| the workforce.
|
| https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-
| bomb...
| freejazz wrote:
| In no way it is at all believable that 94% of all fortune 500
| hiring during 2021 went to minorities. This is statistical
| mumbo-jumbo. Do you even work at a company like this? This
| statistic has to be misrepresentative of the conclusion you
| are suggesting because it is easily debunked by standing at
| the entrance to any midtown manhattan building during the
| morning rush hour.
| sterlind wrote:
| I think the flaw works like this:
|
| 1. Acme Inc. has 40,000 white employees and 10,000
| employees of color on payroll. The statistic would be 20%,
| if Acme were hiring at a constant rate by the same
| demographics.
|
| 2. However, suppose Acme hired the bulk of its employees
| during its growth phase 10 years ago. Acme's hiring back
| then was proportional, _but the population has changed._
| Now only 60% of applicants are white, compared to 80% back
| then.
|
| 3. Acme lays off 5,000 staff (at random), and hires 1,000
| (proportionally.) So they've laid off 4,000 white people
| and 1,000 people of color. And they've hired 400 people of
| color and 600 white people.
|
| I'm too lazy to do the math but I think that works out as
| hiring a negative % of white people, even though it's just
| representative of demographic shifts.
| dsajames wrote:
| So this is an example of what not to do.
|
| 1. Violate the law more blatantly than anyone else. 94% of
| new jobs went to POC? So what, 50% of the population shared
| 6% of the jobs? This sounds like apartheid era South Africa.
|
| 2. Create a backlash where the largest population and richest
| segment is so angry, it uses all its resources to absolutely
| destroy this.
|
| Nice going.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| 1) it sounds crazy because it's actual statistical
| malpractice. See the many other comments explaining how
| it's bullshit
|
| 2) the significantly backlash is interesting, primarily
| because it centers around the bullshit statistics that
| companies pat themselves with. The hiring process is so
| nebulous and unknowable to the potential hiree that no
| person can really know whether they were denied a job due
| to dei policies. Yet we simultaneously assume that all non
| white people hired are being _hired because_ DEI, which
| really just undervalues the nonwhite population, as if they
| truly deserved none of the jobs, wouldn't have gotten any
| without the help. This combined into the rage that certain
| people feel about what really appears to be a back pat
| circle around naming a git branch and changing security
| terminology.
| typon wrote:
| In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to
| work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role
| like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE role. I have worked
| with literally hundreds of software engineers in my life.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| As a black software engineer, in my entire career working
| for US companies, I have yet to work with another black
| software engineer.
| kragen wrote:
| As a white software engineer, in my entire career working
| for US companies, I only ever worked with one black
| software engineer. He was Nigerian. I believe that this
| is because the US has a profoundly racist culture;
| usually this was implicit racism (I only recall ever
| hearing one overtly racist remark against black people).
| I also worked with very few Hispanic people. But I worked
| with _lots_ of Indian and Chinese people, plus Arabs,
| Pakistanis, etc.
|
| Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against
| people who had first-class opportunities at education and
| mentorship before entering the work force? It's still
| pretty effective -- there were lots of times I had Indian
| and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
| pixxel wrote:
| Did the software suffer? Did you suffer?
| nomel wrote:
| I'm software, but towards the hardware side of things, for
| decades, in silicon valley and elsewhere. I've worked with
| (as in, in the whole org) exactly zero software/firmware,
| and only one black hardware engineer (born and raised in
| Nigeria). I've interviewed a couple hundred people at this
| point, with only one being black.
|
| Where I've been, trying to get some DEI policy to influence
| who's hired would be impossible, since the panel has to
| agree, and there's no way they would agree to someone not
| qualified. Even with pressure like "we really need to hire
| someone before end of month or we'll lose the req", the
| response has always been "find better people then".
| SirMaster wrote:
| But this discussion is about it being a problem with
| hiring?
|
| There was not a single black student in my graduating class
| of Software Engineering from college.
|
| So is the problem truly with hiring, or is it earlier on.
| It could also be both. But if none are graduating with a SE
| degree...
| typon wrote:
| Just replying to the above comment that seems to suggest
| that all these DEI jobs are being taken over by "black or
| Hispanic" people.
| pixxel wrote:
| Are you presenting this as a positive?
| jlhawn wrote:
| > ... who owned the land ...
|
| they didn't use the word "owned", only "occupied". The
| indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our
| modern concept of land "ownership" and would think of it more
| like land alienation. As a Georgist, I'm personally very
| annoyed by these sort of empty indigenous land
| acknowledgements. I'm more excited about stuff like this
| Squamish Nation housing development in Vancouver, BC [1] where
| they actually get rights to use the land how they want even if
| it doesn't fit local expectations of "indigenous ways of
| knowing and being".
|
| [1] https://senakw.com/
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything
| like our modern concept of land "ownership"
|
| I doubt they had deeds to land. But they did fight inter-
| tribal wars over which territory belonged to which tribe.
|
| Humans have a very well developed notion of "mine" and "not
| mine". Saying indigenous peoples did not have this is an
| extraordinary claim, and would need strong evidence.
| santoshalper wrote:
| Also, OUR idea of ownership, at least legally, is based on
| the idea of usage and access. You may own a piece of land,
| but not the mineral rights. You can't prevent an aircraft
| from flying over your property etc. Ownership is a bundle
| of rights and exclusions. The idea of ownership meaning
| "who is allowed to hunt on this land" would fit right into
| our legal framework of ownership.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm also pretty sure that any tribe that built a village
| and farmed had a very strong notion of _my_ house and
| _my_ garden.
|
| Even animals mark their territory and aggressively defend
| it.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| You'd be surprised then. Indigenous property rights
| aren't homogenous. Many lacked the kind of exclusive
| ownership that we have in Western systems. (Some) Inuit
| recognized communal band lands for example, where a
| particular individual within that band might have rights
| to a particular resource location while they used it, but
| their usage was governed by complex systems of traditions
| and they couldn't necessarily exclude others from
| separate resources in the same physical location.
|
| Pueblo groups had extremely strong ideas about property
| lines, but those properties were often analogous to
| modern corporations where individual families could own
| "shares" in the property, and exchange those for other
| shares in other properties to reallocate ownership. Areas
| within a property could also be "rented" to others, or
| the entire property reclaimed by the government.
|
| The best way I can summarize it is that native Americans
| tended to have much more fine-grained ideas about what
| property rights entail than our Western systems.
| Capabilities based security vs role based security, to
| really force the analogy into computing.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Is that really different than traditional Western
| societies? Medieval European societies had complex
| systems governing shared rights and ownership of common
| grazing lands and forests, for example. Those rights
| changed over time (such as through the Inclosure Acts)
| but it's not a concept alien to western societies.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks for this bit of sanity. Arguing that Native
| Americans didn't have a concept of land ownership, while
| still having the concept "I'm going to murder you and your
| compatriots so that I can occupy the land where you live.",
| seems a bit like splitting hairs.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| Brett Devereaux talks about this in relation to the Mongols
| and other nomads. Yes they didn't "own" land but if you
| trespassed on their grazing pastures they would absolutely
| use violence against you:
| https://acoup.blog/2020/12/04/collections-that-dothraki-
| hord...
|
| The notion of a lack of land ownership is just
| fetishization.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Well, I feel like the "traditional way of life" argument is
| okay for why they should get special treatment. But why
| should anyone get special treatment if they are going to
| just, essentially, treat it as way to siphon tax revenue from
| the larger society?
| pshc wrote:
| Shouldn't building dense housing in an area with a terrible
| housing shortage increase the tax base if anything?
| phdavis1027 wrote:
| Because that society committed what are at least atrocities
| and probably more fairly described as genocide against
| those societies for like 400 years. A small casino empire
| seems like the least we could do lol
| colechristensen wrote:
| I'm perfectly fine with modern corrective actions taken in
| response to past treaty violations. They were treated with
| as separate nations in the past and now there are
| mechanisms for limited forms of self rule on tribal land.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Here in Australia they use the carefully crafted phrase: "the
| previous custodians of this land".
|
| As in... _we are the custodians now_.
| stevage wrote:
| What? No. The phrase is "the traditional owners" or
| sometimes "traditional custodians". Never previous.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| funny because i feel that your comment plays into the exact
| same tropes about "indigenous ways of knowing" you critique
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I've noticed most academic places I've worked perpetually use
| photos of the same 1-2 black people that ever worked there in
| marketing materials. Including people that left or were pushed
| out years ago due to racism and unfair treatment. We have
| constant trainings and workshops on diversity and inclusion
| (taught exclusively by perpetually angry and abrasive middle
| aged white people), but everyone ignores me when I point out
| how specific aspects of the hiring process and work culture
| systematically exclude people from diverse backgrounds. In
| truth, at our supposedly "woke" and "DEI hire" academic
| institution, a black candidate still needs to be much much
| better than a white candidate to have any chance... and once
| they are here they will not feel welcome or included.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yes, effecting actual change is hard, pulling employees into
| a meeting room for 45mins to show them some buzzword filled
| slides is much easier.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Crowning yourself as an expert in a politically contentious
| field is very lucrative if you can make it stick.
| gigatree wrote:
| Has anyone asked why so many companies seem to care so much
| about the appearance of DEI? And all at the same time? I know
| there's cultural shifts towards that sort of thing, probably to
| fill the void left by religion, but does that explain why the
| world's largest private equity firms push them so hard? Seems
| like something everyone just accepts without question, even
| though it's completely out of character for people and entities
| who only exist to increase their own bottom line (not that
| there's anything inherently wrong with that, it's just so out
| of character to the point you'd think it would raise
| suspicion).
| jeffbee wrote:
| Companies care about attracting all segments of society
| because if they can expand their applicant pool they will pay
| less for labor. If I am the only person smart enough to
| recruit qualified graduates from HBCUs then I get to be more
| selective in hiring and I also get to offer less wages but
| still fill the position.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Yes, this is asked a lot, and I've always assumed it was
| legal pressure. If a company doesn't have enough of X
| demographic, they can be sued for discrimination, while at
| the same time it has been illegal to hire based on race. This
| time the legal pressure in the opposite direction is more
| obvious.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's marketing, they judge that they will gain more by the
| good will earned than it costs to hire those "DEI experts".
| Now that the reaction is in full swing across many
| territories they start to cut back (see tfa).
|
| It's all very exhausting.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Green washing, security theatre, lip service, etc...
|
| This is an old phenomenon that keeps reoccurring in many forms.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Jeez, the most I ever got was called aside by the VP of
| Engineering on my last day to give him my opinion of their
| Diversity program ("since you're leaving, I figured you could
| be brutally honest with me"). Loved him for that, BTW :-)
|
| But seriously, congratulations!
|
| The negative effect of "fake diversity" is that it leaves
| everyone else wondering if the minority employees actually know
| what they're doing or if they were hired to make the company
| look good.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI
| was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win
| political points with the groups that were politically
| ascendant. These programs were never a victory for the
| principles or the people, they were marketing.
|
| So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another
| political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is
| valuable has changed, so there go the marketing programs that
| were designed for the old power structure.
|
| Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as
| long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually
| changing hearts and minds. Progressives have forgotten in the
| last 10-15 years that the progress which we've won took
| generations not because our predecessors were weak and slow but
| because it _inherently_ takes generations to effect lasting
| change. It 's a slow, painful process, and if you think you
| accomplished it in a decade you're almost certainly wrong.
| seadan83 wrote:
| I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting
| change, where is your impression coming from that the gains
| are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread
| belief?
|
| According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program
| increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems
| abysmal.
|
| My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that
| _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take
| for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_,
| the first time having two black senators is now, school
| integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even
| one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization
| that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that
| we were even starting at a "good" place.
|
| I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I
| don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there
| is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last
| decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not
| like we're in that good of a place, never really were.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-
| ending-...
| ruined wrote:
| the last known direct child of an american born into
| slavery died only a few years ago
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slaver
| y...
| pixxel wrote:
| > I don't know if it needs to be that slow.
|
| It needs to be much slower. Nil, ideally. Eventually
| negative.
| sanktanglia wrote:
| Ahh to be so pathetic as to go on hacker news to hope to
| remove the small amount of progress black people have
| made
| lolinder wrote:
| > I disagree that there is a wide held belief that
| everything was done in the last decade.
|
| I think I may have miscommunicated there--I'm not saying
| that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of
| the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in
| this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes
| generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the
| national government for a few years and push a bunch of
| bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going
| through the motions of equity and then expect anything you
| did to stick.
|
| I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real
| progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're
| still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years
| ago, but we're nowhere near where we started.
|
| Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations
| because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them
| to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the
| culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy
| itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social
| change to your preferred specs.
| thewanderer1983 wrote:
| >so there go the marketing programs that were designed for
| the old power structure.
|
| AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
| iforgot22 wrote:
| Is this because truly doing race-based hiring has been illegal
| for a long time? I've noticed they'll target certain
| demographics for interviews and other opportunities, but
| identity can't be a factor in the interview itself. It's a fine
| line.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > But hiring, that was too much to ask.
|
| Weird I've heard of lots of BLM-motivated hiring of POC at
| FAANG, with lots of "flexibility" in terms of qualification.
| harrall wrote:
| Personally I feel if you want to make an impact, you need to
| provide resources early on when people are growing up and in
| school.
|
| There's nothing like gaining inspiration because someone you
| know growing up is doing it. e.g. It's much easier to go
| camping for your first time when someone in your life is "the
| camping person" and can guide you through it. And the earlier
| you do it, the higher chance that you end up pursuing it.
|
| In a lot of impoverished communities, they don't have as many
| as those kinds of people. Especially not compared to a well-
| connected family in a wealthy suburb.
|
| I don't know how you would provide those resources and maybe
| these big companies already are, but the availability of
| professionals that young people surround themselves with should
| not be overlooked.
| andrepd wrote:
| Overlooked point but this is very very important. It's hard
| to understate the importance of good examples and role models
| while growing up. We are animals which learn essentially by
| imitation while growing up. We internalise what we see both
| consciously and subconsciously. It has a _massive_ impact.
| And in places where good role models are scarce this self-
| perpetuates.
|
| Not discounting the material/economic conditions, obviously.
| scelerat wrote:
| It's why day care, head start, school lunch and the like are
| super important.
|
| Even before we get to corporate demographics or college
| graduation, admittance, and application rates, there are
| millions of children growing up in poverty in the US.
| Relatively inexpensive social welfare investments can
| mitigate many of the worst effects, even for those who don't
| decide to become software engineers.
| 1over137 wrote:
| > Like what makes one an expert?
|
| Your skin colour of course.
| stevage wrote:
| In Australia, that kind of "acknowledgement of country" is
| extremely common at the start of all kinds of speeches in
| different contexts. Slightly shorter, and fixed structure, but
| very similar content.
|
| It's just part of the social fabric now, though not without its
| detractors.
| tantalor wrote:
| > Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject
| to public debate and is currently being challenged
|
| These challenges are always in bad faith. It starts off by
| assuming this practice is exclusionary of white males. We know
| that's not true, because that would (obviously) be illegal (Title
| VII) and these companies are not dumb.
|
| > there are other ways...
|
| Like what? Why won't those "other ways" be immediately challenged
| by the same bad faith actors?
| alangibson wrote:
| That they decided to fold before even being challenged really
| shows you how deeply held their DEI beliefs were.
| gusfoo wrote:
| > Read the memo from Meta in full:
|
| That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite
| sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now
| being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from
| diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very
| silly thing to do.
|
| I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable,
| stable products when I buy things. Not the skin colour of who
| owns the business. To filter things based on the owner's identity
| (in the American sense of the word) may disadvantage my business
| by making my own products (build from their components) worse. It
| would not be a sensible thing to do.
| j7ake wrote:
| Why does the skin color or gender matter if in the end they pick
| candidates that all went to the same top schools or have
| previously worked at the same top companies?
|
| Diversity in training, education and work history vastly
| outweighs diversity in superficial physical features.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| Top schools like ivy league in America exclusively discriminate
| against Asians and there was a lawsuit but its not being
| enforced.
|
| This is a different issue that precedes DEI.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| DEI is bullshit and everyone knows it.
| moskie wrote:
| This deluge of terrible things from Zuck over the past few days
| is so clearly 100% in deference to Trump. The fact that Zuck
| name-checked Twitter when explaining the change to Community
| Notes was also such an obvious tell. If he viewed Twitter as a
| competitor, he would have framed this shift in policy as
| something better than what Twitter does. But instead, "we're
| doing what they're doing" is a message that he is essentially
| collaborating with Musk on shared goals.
|
| Gee, what goals might those be.
|
| I had deleted Facebook years ago, but this has convinced to also
| delete my Instagram. Sincerely hoping an Instagram alternative
| starts to take shape, like what Bluesky is to Twitter.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I am a Black male and worked as a developer for mostly small
| unknown companies from 1996-2020.
|
| I then pivoted to cloud+app dev strategic consulting when a job
| at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap. I now work for a
| third party consulting company as a staff software architect.
|
| For the last 5 years, I have had customer facing jobs where I am
| either on video calls or flying out to customer sites working
| with sales.
|
| When I first encountered the DE&I programs at Amazon, I couldn't
| help but groan. The entire "allies" thing felt like bullshit.
|
| The only thing that concerns me is that I hope companies still do
| outreach to colleges outside of the major universities and start
| partnering with them to widen the funnel and partnering with
| smaller colleges to help students learn what is necessary to be
| competitive and to pass interviews
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Every time you try to right a wrong like this (DEI), it just
| makes things worse for everyone involved. Just find the best
| person for the job, no matter their skin color, sex, age, etc.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| Does this mean we can go back to using "master" as our git repo's
| default branch?
| renegade-otter wrote:
| "master" was not a thing even before. While I get the farce of
| renaming it for "social justice" reasons, it's still a stupid
| name.
|
| It's "trunk", as in "trunk and branches".
| snovymgodym wrote:
| It could not matter less. It's a piece of technical jargon.
| You learn what it means and move on.
|
| Depending on VCS and branching style, "master, "main",
| "mainline", or "trunk" might make more sense.
|
| "Master" always made sense to me.
| 65 wrote:
| My controversial opinion is that I think "main" is more
| descriptive and intuitive than "master."
| dijit wrote:
| my controversial opinion is that it never mattered, all that
| really mattered was that there was a universal word- changing
| it to _anything_ would cause at least a few hundred hours of
| development work and a few hundred additional hours of
| changing documents and tutorials and stuff.
|
| For what? Main isn't better if the issue is racism, because
| "main" has some really negative connotations in Korea ("main"
| families having servant families).
|
| And, for crying out loud. the tools name is literally a mild
| british swear word.
| int_19h wrote:
| I hope not; "main" is shorter and more to the point, regardless
| of any DEI stuff.
| tdiff wrote:
| Is not it a confession that DEI ideas were always political and
| Meta never truly believed in it?
| intalentive wrote:
| Astute observers have been predicting a woke / DEI rollback ever
| since Claudine Gay got canned. Big tech companies are enmeshed
| with the state, so it helps to keep the wider political /
| geopolitical context in view.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| They're bluffing
| thefaux wrote:
| The really troubling news buried in this to me was the
| appointment of Dana White to the meta board of directors. Like
| seriously what purpose does he serve but to appease the new
| administration?
| tyleo wrote:
| Out with the DEI people appointed to appease the old
| administration in with Dana White to appease the new one I
| guess.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| I was thinking about this as well, and it makes sense if Meta
| is planning a big sports push. Using a Quest 3, the sports
| "coverage" I've seen has been compelling (virtual NBA courtside
| seats are pretty nifty), especially MMA. Zuck's an MMA
| enthusiast so it fits.
|
| It would be silly to pretend politics plays no role in this,
| but it's not like they're putting Don Jr. on the board.
| CSSer wrote:
| He's Mark Zuckerberg's friend. They became close because
| Zuckerberg picked up MMA as a hobby. Zuckerberg has a majority
| stake in the company that can't be contested. He decided to
| throw his buddy a bone. That's it. Zuckerberg is tired of how
| much effort being "woke" takes. This is pretty easy to
| understand if you imagine being white and super-rich, and the
| closest exposure you have to any "real" adversity in life is
| your other super rich, multi-cultural friends and loved ones.
|
| Wealth inequality is at its highest _ever_ in the United
| States. He observed that the people he was supporting still
| hated him because he 's disgustingly rich, so he's getting
| diminishing returns for his effort to "be cool". Meanwhile
| everyone else is having so much fun. When he complained to his
| other rich friends about this, they convinced him that they
| don't really have any biases, he doesn't owe anyone anything,
| and people are just jealous. So the metaphorical gloves come
| off. The next four years, and maybe even many more years beyond
| that because of the persisting judicial climate, are going to
| be filled with people coming unmasked in this regard.
| barrenko wrote:
| These are the last days of Rome.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| I disagree. DEI has nothing to do with an ancient empire.
| int_19h wrote:
| Not in an obvious way, but "meninist" far right is obsessed
| with the whole "Rome was great until them libruls ruined it"
| trope.
|
| Ironically, Rome was actually unusually diverse for its
| times, and not just by virtue of having conquered so many
| different peoples: https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-
| the-queens-latin-o...
| janalsncm wrote:
| Charitably, I think they mean we are starting to see explicit
| alignment between government and the ultra wealthy, which
| definitely is a threat to democracy. You can either do what
| is good for the majority or what is good for the 0.0001%.
| MattyMc wrote:
| > The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made
| decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI.
|
| Does anyone know what decisions he's referring to?
| paxys wrote:
| Ending affirmative action, I assume
| mips_avatar wrote:
| My experience with DEI at Microsoft was that the true believers
| really had their hearts in the right place. Almost all of the
| negative consequences I saw, came from people who saw DEI as a
| way to get ahead. I think the biggest problem with DEI
| initiatives is how much they seem to only benefit cynical people.
| Eumenes wrote:
| > Sunsetting supplier diversity efforts
|
| Why the hell would a company pick vendors based on the sexuality
| or skin color of the owner or whatever?
| popcalc wrote:
| The US Government is required to do this.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Its wrong!
| badgersnake wrote:
| Further evidence Zuck is a fucking moron who got lucky.
| coliveira wrote:
| They're all business savants that got lucky, either by birth or
| by association, and completely stupid otherwise. The rest of
| society means nothing for them.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| I feel like I'm witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall. I
| actually didn't expect woke to collapse so quickly. I thought it
| would take another 10-20 years. Maybe it will to be mostly gone,
| but these are some good steps.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It will be seriously real when the NYT abandons it. Washington
| Post has started to and writers are fleeing to lesser
| publications. Need to continue to marginalize the wokes and
| push them to irrelevant spaces where they can do their thing
| and no one listens.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| I guess the trans people committing suicide because Facebook
| allows people to harass them more will be very happy with these
| "good steps".
| chimen wrote:
| Spare us with your trans people suicides over Facebook
| comments. How about your trans people beating up women in
| boxing and sports in general? We've had enough of this
| nonsense all these years. Ya'll managed to destroy complete
| industries and future generations for good years to come.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| The most famous example of that was, as far as I can tell,
| entirely fabricated. Algeria is famously known for being
| friendly to trans people.
|
| Also you're really equating street violence, murders, and
| suicide to losing a boxing match?
| chimen wrote:
| I knew you'd say it's "entirely fabricated".
|
| You're no different when it comes to violence so spare
| me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bylf--lPpk
|
| Regarding suicides, I usually equate them with mental
| disorders which may sound bad but it isn't. I see them as
| individuals who require medical attention and supervision
| not superpowers to change laws or destroy children's
| bodies
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| It's a step on the right direction. I'm optimistic but let's
| see.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| DEI, in my experience, was always getting hires from special
| programs (like black women coding bootcamps) and having them
| pushed as junior in your team, no choice about that. If you were
| their line manager, the responsibility of them succeeding was
| ultimately your. I'll let you imagine how much it helped the
| cause.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Musk buying Twitter had a profound effect on the discourse. I
| don't think this happens without him buying it. I don't think
| Trump wins without it. People can speak freely and it's just
| obvious some of these sacred cows were unpopular and only in
| place due to pressure. Overton window has shifted big time.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| Except you can't say anyone is cisgender, so not that freely.
| antics wrote:
| I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and
| I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am
| really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about
| my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my
| identity has in society.
|
| To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual
| change requires _commitment_ and _focus_ over an _extremely long
| period of time_. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause
| among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it _instead of_
| the others. You can 't do everything. The problems that afflict
| my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of
| educational resources, and secular trends have have made our
| traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land
| acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from
| racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not
| even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
|
| We all want to help, but to have an impact you _must_ have
| courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could
| care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work
| on. Do not be a tourist. I don 't expect everyone to get involved
| in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about
| whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions
| to make yourself feel better.
|
| When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest
| contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable
| or popular--if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to
| evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to
| make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the
| things you care about, and then follow through with them.
|
| To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together
| instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many
| minority communities in America is substantial economic
| development. In my own communities, I have seen economic
| development that has given people the ability to own their own
| destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to
| one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want
| to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with
| those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less
| competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
| algebra-pretext wrote:
| > "Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas,
| nor for what is in men's minds. The people fight and accept the
| sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material
| advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from
| progress, and for the better future of their children. National
| liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction
| of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of
| any significance unless they can be translated into a real
| improvement of living conditions." - Amilcar Cabral
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| >to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast
| majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit
| deeply to the ones you decide to work on.
|
| I strongly agree, but sadly I think what you're saying here is
| probably almost incomprehensible to a broad swathe of middle-
| class white Americans, to whom being seen to be outwardly
| supportive of every DEI-ish cause has essentially become
| something like personal hygiene -- a thing you do perfunctorily
| and without thinking. It's just "what you do", "what a
| civilised person does", etc.
|
| I'd be interested to hear more about what you have seen work
| and not work for economic development in these communities.
| getnormality wrote:
| Thank you for this wonderful message. As a fellow American, I
| can see you have our common interests at heart, as well as
| those of your tribe. That is a model for all of us.
| cbeach wrote:
| > At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be
| achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in
| knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives,
| and experiences.
|
| At last, a corporation acknowledges it's _cognitive_ diversity
| that matters.
|
| Most other forms of diversity are superficial, inherent human
| characterstics that are already equal under law, and make no
| difference to people's ability to use technology.
|
| I'm so relieved to see "DEI" die. With two young boys who are
| white, heterosexual and normal in every way, I found it
| disturbing to know they'd be discriminated against in the
| workplace.
|
| I knew this discrimination existed because I've been a hiring
| manager and had HR explicitly tell me I needed to focus on hiring
| female technologist.
|
| Luckily I left that job and am now at a smaller company that
| doesn't discriminate on gender)
|
| However, most large corporates I've worked at have pushed the DEI
| agenda (with the 'E' standing for "equity" as opposed to the more
| ethical "equality").
|
| There may have been historic discrimination against women and
| other minorities, but I have NEVER witnessed any such
| discrimination in the present day.
|
| We must avoid replacing one form of immoral discrimination with
| another form of immoral discrimination.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| Are you serious that you've never witnessed any discrimination
| against women or minorities?
| cbeach wrote:
| I have witnessed:
|
| * co-workers being extremely wary of offending them in any
| way
|
| * superiors telling me to hire them
|
| * corporate literature that focuses on promoting their
| interests
|
| * corporate networks that grant them additional networking
| and social opportunities
|
| I have worked at a hedge fund, market data company, American
| and Australian investment banks and a travel startup.
|
| I have NEVER witnessed racism or sexism in the workplace. If
| I ever did, I would find it shocking and very weird.
| eapressoandcats wrote:
| Maybe try talking to this guy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188
|
| If you're not witnessing it then that's only because you're
| not noticing it, unless you think a large chunk of the
| population is just a bunch of liars.
|
| Also you need to explain why there is a huge racial
| imbalance in elite jobs.
|
| Also you need to explain literal blinded studies
| demonstrating racism in callbacks based on resumes.
|
| None of it excuses reverse discrimination but denying it is
| happening is just not based in reality.
| cbeach wrote:
| > you need to explain why there is a huge racial
| imbalance in elite jobs.
|
| Well, that's easily explained by demographic history.
|
| Here in the UK, we only had mass immigration from the
| Middle East and Africa within the last couple of
| generations, and many of the people who came were
| emmigrating from countries with low rates of literacy.
|
| We wouldn't expect white-collar roles to match the
| demographic makeup of the population in tight lock-step.
| We cannot ignore the differences in economic and
| educational background, and the time it takes to attain
| elite high responsibility jobs in terms of career tenure.
|
| Luckily, children of ethnic minority immigrants are
| performing well in the UK school system, so hopefully
| over a generation or two we should naturally see the
| trend improve. But while our population is expanding at
| approx 900K per year, with many from low-income countries
| with poor education systems, we will continue to see
| demographic imbalances in elite roles.
|
| > you need to explain literal blinded studies
| demonstrating racism in callbacks based on resumes.
|
| I don't discount that racism exists. I simply pointed out
| that the only racism and sexism I've experienced in the
| workplace has been _against_ white people, as opposed to
| _perpetrated by_ white people.
|
| DEI, by lowering the bar for certain genders and races,
| is actually promoting prejudice against those groups. It
| sends the message that these people need a leg up.
| bollocksie wrote:
| > Also you need to explain why there is a huge racial
| imbalance in elite jobs.
|
| For the same reason there is a huge racial imbalance in
| crime rates.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > two young boys who are white, heterosexual and normal in
| every way, I found it disturbing to know they'd be
| discriminated against in the workplace.
|
| At least they will always feel welcome in their own country. I
| had that feeling about 10 years ago and I miss it.
| cbeach wrote:
| I don't think that's true. I've lost count of the number of
| times I've heard "pale, male and stale" as a racist, sexist,
| ageist slur in the UK - against its own native population.
| energy123 wrote:
| Internet Research Agency bots on social media
| smashah wrote:
| Hopefully we can also rid the tech industry of the most long
| running and pernicious and hidden DEI/WOKE program in history;
| Affirmative Action for Zionists.
| frob wrote:
| I remember meeting Maxine Williams on my first day at Facebook.
| She gave a strong introductory address that left me with a deep
| appreciation of the value of diversity not just as a moral good,
| but as a good business decision. Seeing her work denigrated and
| thrown under the bus to appease the bigotry of Trump, Elon, and
| their odious ilk is a gut blow.
|
| We are in for some dark times.
| random_i wrote:
| I previously assembled & managed a team of engineers at
| Microsoft.
|
| Out of 10 employees on my team, I had:
|
| - male and female (80/20 split)
|
| - black, white, asian, latino
|
| - engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s
|
| - east coast, west coast
|
| - ivy league, college and high-school graduates
|
| That level of diversity was very rare at Microsoft, and even
| rarer at other tech companies.
|
| It took a *lot* of work; with less effort I would have had a more
| uniform distribution (male, white/asian, younger, west coast)
| curtisblaine wrote:
| How did you get there? Did you have to make a conscious choice,
| for minority candidates, to prefer them to majority candidates?
| arghnoname wrote:
| From a business perspective, did it work? Was the team more,
| less, or equally effective than one where you didn't expend the
| time and expense of hiring a more homogenous group? Was
| turnover better or worse?
|
| I know you can't absolutely know the counter-factual, but I've
| always wondered this. Incidentally, when I was a young man and
| CS major, I changed majors and went into a different field
| because I wanted to be around more women, but I've never known
| if being outside that kind of monoculture actually is better
| for the business or not.
| encoderer wrote:
| As an elder millennial I have to cheer.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg is a documented sociopath so this isn't
| surprising but it absolutely sucks to see society slide
| backwards...
| coliveira wrote:
| This is a society that openly supports and roots for
| billionaires. Most of them are getting what they deserve as
| subjects of the modern oligarchy.
| parasense wrote:
| From the linked Article:
|
| > Why it matters: The move is a strong signal to Meta employees
| that the company's push to make inroads with the incoming Trump
| administration isn't just posturing, but an ethos shift that will
| impact its business practices.
|
| I would say the shift in policy is to avoid law suites, as the
| Federal Courts have held DEI programs are sometimes
| discriminatory... especially the equity parts. Diversity and
| Inclusion are important parts of existing civil rights laws, so
| those aspects of DEI programs are not very important except to
| actually ensure ethical hiring practices are in fact practiced
| (E.G. not being racist or sexist when hiring). But practicing
| equity, or sometimes called other things... like affirmative
| action, etc... are illegal (they are sometimes blatantly sexist
| or racist). I've been on technical teams blessed by the DEI
| hiring program, and it was alright... We got more ladies, and we
| hired people (who earned less) in other time zones around the
| world. It got weird, for a lot of weird reasons I won't go into,
| but the main point is the team stopped vibing like before, and
| that's fine to some extent but this was a disconcordant vibe, not
| a minor offbeat member of the band, but a bunch of folks playing
| their own tune...
| steele wrote:
| Zuck ditched the hoodies for the a hood with eye holes.
| abeppu wrote:
| So setting aside the details of DEI-specific issues, I find it
| really ironic that the right really wants to claim that
| government shouldn't be telling people how to run their
| businesses through regulation, but businesses trying to improve
| relationships with the incoming administration are changing how
| they do business to match Trump's preferences. I.e. three-letter
| agencies regulating their areas is governmental dangerous
| overreach but Trump expressing a view and having companies
| restructure themselves to meet his whims to curry favor isn't a
| concern.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Why would any California based company take a chance on being
| sued by the California attorney general's office in such a way?
| Meta is the perfect target to pick for fighting the overreach of
| a Trumpian department of Justice and GQP congress set on
| reversing years of social progress
| coliveira wrote:
| Whatever they were doing at DEI was certainly not working. I
| worked at a major FAANG and rarely saw any black person, and when
| it happened it was from another country. So I can only conclude
| that it was really only a farcical display for outsiders.
| justinl33 wrote:
| It's giving _Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard_
| masto wrote:
| I'm fortunate enough to have worked for Google during a period of
| time when Big Tech started to gain at least a modicum of self-
| awareness of its toxic culture and history of excesses and
| indiscretions. I arrived on the scene slightly late to witness
| the worst of it, but the stories were actively circulating, and
| the structure was very much still present. SRE teams had bars
| next to their desks, and office parties ended with ambulances.
| One of the first things I had to deal with as a new manager was a
| sexual harassment concern (which I was terribly unprepared to
| handle and it showed). And if you looked around the office, you
| saw a lot of people who looked a hell of a lot like me.
|
| But as I said, there was some awareness creeping in. Along with
| that, the folks in charge had the courage and empowerment to do
| something about it. And when I say the folks in charge, I don't
| mean the CEO. This was a company that was still running on a sort
| of quasi-anarchy of conscientious under-management: my first
| impression in 2013 was that there was no clear power structure,
| but everyone was trying to do the right thing and it somehow
| worked out. And most importantly, people could speak up if
| something didn't seem right.
|
| There are many examples, but to pick one, I remember my first
| trip to Dublin and being invited to join their local SRE
| managers' meeting. I watched someone bring up the topic of
| alcohol being omnipresently displayed around the office and how
| it was, at a bare minimum, not a good look. There followed a
| thoughtful and reasoned discussion that concluded with the
| decision to put it away. Not a ban on fun, but a firm policy
| that, among others to follow, helped SRE culture mature into
| something more appropriate for a workplace, while maintaining the
| essential feeling of camaraderie and mutual support.
|
| There were also top-down initiatives with varying degrees of
| success. When an executive puts something into OKRs, there's a
| good chance that by the time it reaches 13 levels down the org
| chart, it has turned into your manager demanding that you cut the
| ends off of 4.5% more roasts by the end of Q3 so they can show
| leadership on their promo packet. Nevertheless, there were a lot
| of good ideas, and a lot of good things were implemented. Through
| my job, I had access to training on topics like privilege and
| implicit bias that I believe have had a lasting positive impact
| on me as a person and as a leader. I also had access to people
| who thought about and fought about these things on a far deeper
| level than I will ever be able to, and I am grateful if even a
| sliver of their courage rubbed off on me.
|
| It wasn't just a song and dance. At least down near the bottom,
| we cared, and we tried very hard to make things better. We failed
| a lot of the time as well, in the sense that those top-down
| targets that were set were rarely achieved, which I suspect is at
| least part of the reason for dropping them. They've tried nothing
| and they're out of ideas.
|
| What we're seeing now is just more of the slide in the wrong
| direction that, unfortunately, started a while ago. Google in the
| mid-2010s was a place where people spoke up, to a fault. Yes,
| they complained about the candy dispensers running low or not
| having a puppy room, but they also told a senior vice president
| that he had been saying "you guys" a lot and do you know what
| happened? He thanked them, apologized, and corrected himself.
| Google in the 2020s is a place where you keep your mouth shut,
| sit down, and do what you're told. I don't know what it's like
| inside Meta, but I'm not surprised at this turn, because they're
| basically all following the same playbook, handed to them by
| Elon.
|
| I'm embarrassed that I've hesitated to speak my mind because I am
| looking for a job and what if someone reads this on my profile
| and decides I'm not a team player? Well, I'll say it clearly: I
| am on team try to be a good person and do the right thing and I
| am very much a team player. I believe that encouraging hate, and
| dropping DEI goals is wrong. And if that makes me not a good fit
| for your organization, I think we're on the same page.
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