Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/10/meta-dei-memo-employees-programsWhat 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.
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...
> 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...
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.
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.
This is true many places. But I think the "property tax explains everything" talking point is going to persist a long time, because it's very convenient.
EDIT: I was wrong, and explain it as a comment below.
Do any tech companies have programs to hire out of historically disadvantaged regions of the US?
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 or maybe even the main problem.
"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.
This is intentional because then DEI is intended to be a self-help religion for the corporate class designed to deflect the externalities that they produce, and not about actual material conditions. And that's at its best. At its worst, DEI is insulting and infantilizing to "marginalized communities."
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.
Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.
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.
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.
That sort of chud behavior is very much tolerated in many places: https://www.romerolaw.com/blog/2021/11/complaint-alleges-ram...
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…
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.
In my teens my mom tried to reenter the workforce and got an office job, and she absolutely hated working with other women because of this. She wanted to work with men because in her experience, women were so much worse.
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.
FWIW, I do think most men with wives and/or daughters are generally thoughtful coworkers, but I'm not sure that's a majority in most tech workplaces, especially the ones that skew young. Thinking back to my own experience, I think, I was blind to a lot of the things I'm speaking about (or perhaps even resistant to the idea of calling it out) until I had a long-term partner.
Sure. One of the women I dated detailed a story about how a man at a conference she attended suggested it'd be more fun if she was roofies. To her face, in front of her co-workers (many of them women). She was in a majority female industry (healthcare).
Why do we just assume that men stop doing cringe stuff just because women are around?
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".
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.
The channels to reach out to more diverse candidate are more often than not different to those recruiters use to find your "average white guy in a hoodie". That's decreasingly the case for women (and I use that term very intentionally; I'm not talking generally "non-male" here), but social media and professional networking is quite hostile and/or intimidating to other groups. While the business benefits of putting in this extra effort in are obvious (it's a no brainer to seek out overlooked top talent, let alone the benefits of culture and diverse experiences), those benefits aren't always aligned with the hiring team who are incentivized in most companies to hit numbers. The business goals need to be driven from above by DEI initiatives or - if not - hiring manager allies who'll put their foot down.
I'm still waiting for Mastercard to change their name to a less "offensive" name: [0] /s (They never did.)
It's "trunk", as in "trunk and branches".
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.
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.
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).
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.
That anecdote is widely shared but inaccurate: https://reason.com/2019/10/22/orchestra-study-blind-audition...
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.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...
and the claims about the orchestra also didn't replicate.
Actually DEI promoters hate blind hiring and usually try to kill it because when implemented it always raises the number of white men being hired - there is racism and sexism in society, it's just in the opposite direction to what DEI programmes claim, and it's not unconscious.
An interesting example of this kind of meltdown was the one attempt to organize a conference for Electron developers. They decided to select speakers using blind reviews of abstracts, because they believed the non-replicable pseudo-science you're repeating here. When the results were unveiled it turned out every speaker they had selected was a man (the expected outcome of blind auditions), so they cancelled the entire conference in fit of anger. The whole community lost, because the organizers had believed in these lies told by social studies academics.