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.
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.
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-...
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
Definitely agree nobody will vote for anything that costs them anything.
But my kids are mixed race partial African heritage and I do think it behooves us as Americans to think about rectifying that terrible wrong on my wife's side of the family. There are dozens of examples of horribly wrong headed ways to do that (Brazil had some really creative and disastrous ideas), but we should at least acknowledge the lingering effects that still impacts people today that are descendants of slaves.
Maybe I'm just sensitive because it feels like Florida, where I currently live, is trying to wipe away that history. Why inhibit discussion about it?
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
My take on your statement is similar to "If the economics of your area is not good, they can just move." Most areas where the economy is falling a person is incapable of selling their home since no one wants to buy their house. This leads to a stale mate of having to stay in the area because they cannot afford to move and doing so would just compound their poverty. Children are often the ones that leave because they are most likely have a near zero dept are more time to build up their economic mobility.
Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
The solutions between the two are the same. Social acceptance and assistance to provide economic mobility. Irony, is that these environments reduce social engagement producing tribalism like states where trust is lost between these groups. This is our problem and we need to stop thinking independently because this just leads to selfish behavior that harms our society.
Creating a better environment for others is a Win-Win versus creating a better environment just for you is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose resolution.
[0] https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highli...
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
One thing that you definitely can't trace in the DNA is "that group of people tried to genocide my grandparents", but that seems like an important "ethnic group" distinction to you.
This is not to dispute your main point which I take to be that you stop fighting over "ethnic" distinctions by giving people a new unifying identity, but I still find myself thinking that something is lost in the process, even if it is a proven approach.
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
For an incredibly evolved version of this, check out a (brief summary of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India].
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
If you want to see some European racists, go to a soccer/football match between national teams. Or ask a Northern European what they REALLY think about the south. Or even a Northern Italian about Southern Italians. Or ask almost any of them about Eastern Europe or especially Roma.
In many cases immigrants bring their own racism to the US that white Americans are completely unaware of. One of the only direct "racism in the workplace" complaints I've been party to in the workplace was Indian on Indian. Former team lead was fired and replacement was an Indian guy, from one particular caste/region I don't recall. Anyway he immediately tried to due-diligence the caste/region of the only Indian on the team. The rest of us had no idea what was going on until our Indian colleague rapidly found another job and accused him on the way out the door.
I've even seen some crazy resentment in the workplace between patriotic CCP PRC enjoyers vs Taiwanese coworkers "you aren't Taiwanese, it's not a real country".
It's not to excuse any past or present faults in the US, but only to raise the relative performance to other countries&group / how achievable the utopian Star Trek vision is. Our technology and living conditions have evolved rapidly, but HumanOS remains the same. We move ever forward, but its slow.
One issue that often escapes our attention when we focus on group identities and historical grievances is just how much we collaborate across groups. When a white woman (Katalin Karikó, Hungarian) worked on mRNA, the end results of that research were used by all groups and social identities. We collaborate across much more than we like to acknowledge.
But, I fail to see how your lengthy diatribe about modern day racism, most of what I agree with, disputes my comment about reparations. Those are totally different things and that's what I'm pointing out.
I hope we can build some common identity as “world citizens” or whatever- but the trend seems to go towards _more_ balkanisation and more division along class/wealth/privilege.
You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression.
So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US).
I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
I guess that what went wrong with them. Rather than generate systems to treat _evereyone_ equally the systems attempted very hard to 1. categorize people into predefined groups 2. after people are grouped, then treat each group individually.
What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
The DEI systems that were implemented were just policy theater, that were ineffective and alienating.
In US corps outside US (I worked for a subsidiary in Finland) the DEI stuff they implemented was just insane and non-helpfull almost in every aspect. "You can no longer use git repositories with the term master.." - that was hilarious. It's obvious nobody was serious about DEI. Management just hired bunch of consultants who sold them checklists so managament could check the box in their own checklist. An opportunity to actually help minorities was lost sadly.
The only good thing that came from the rigmarole were unisex toilets which are just common sense.
I think you are correct, but it still misses the mark on framing. White people are indeed not punished, but they are being hindered by DEI mandates. At one point, it gets a little annoying, because we see no real benefit from it. If anything, demands seemed to escalate.
I will tell you my own personal 'fuck it' moment. Company meeting with chief diversity guy. Peak DEI moment. A suggestion is made after presentation that maybe 'we' should have 'black safe spaces', where only black people meet. It took everything in my power to remain silent at that time, because if I have ever heard of a racist policy, that was it and the company is lucky I did not pursue legal path. Someone else did cautiously raised it though and that concerned was dismissed with wordplay.
I am just one guy, but DEI breeds heavy, misunderstood and very much unseen resentment discussed in small local groups only, because you cannot even discuss it openly in company channels. If anything, people bond over 'fuck it' moment.
<< But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
shrug Does it mean we should exacerbate those issues by instituting restitution? Seems counterproductive.
When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.
When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.
When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.
You can't just dismiss the framing to dismiss the injustice it points to. Slavery wasn't meant to be a punishment either, doesn't mean we can omit the injustice it entails.
Skip explicit racial discrimination and help those who are most in need. It's that simple. Yes this group will have a specific racial makeup but it makes a world of difference to discriminate based on need rather than taking a racist approach.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I mention this only to support the point you make above, not to virtue signal. Anyway, it's nothing my family did, it's just historical circumstance. But to my family, the insane amount of politics and drama around DEI and BLM in America still seems foreign to us, even a few generations later.
I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
He was not the harmony flowers and rainbows he was white washed into.
Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
It passed through moral persuasion and nonviolent activism.
Your statement is factually incorrect. There are dozens of other examples.
This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
That's a 50% increase.
Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
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.
That sounds proportional?
I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently.
So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society.
But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ?
For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
If there’s continuing trauma, it isn’t caused by what happened 100 years ago, it’s because it is still being perpetuated somehow.
That might be what you are trying to say, but I had to read it a few times to see it.
Europe has not forgotten about that, other than in terms of formal politics.
Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
It does help somewhat that Germany has made really serious efforts to repudiate its own behavior, the culture that enabled it, and efforts to revive it. Much harder to say that about the equivalents for US slavery.
Are there injustices being perpetrated by the institutions today? Lets call them out.
Injustices perpetrated generations ago belong in history books. We cant forget about them but Im not going to be held responsible for them.
Every government wants to "forget". France maintained a viewpoint that Vichy was a "few bad apples" until the evidence of deporting Jews until their death was undeniable.
That's politics. Many Europeans are certainly still hurting from the trauma the wars caused. That includes later born generations.
Culturally, the two world wars have had a great impact, but that's another story.
My main point is that individually experienced trauma does transmit over generations, while great national narrative can change relatively quickly.
Germany paid massive amounts of reparations for the sins of the Nazis, and on top of that, Nazi leadership was executed.
It's simply ignorant to think a citation to post-war Germany is a winning argument for you.
Germany probably shouldn’t forget the genocide of millions of people from a variety of groups, just as the united states should not forget the systematic enslavement and repression of millions of people, who are also americans and their descendants are alive and numerous today. It doesn’t really make sense to me why people should forget that, and it cannot be forgotten by the people still living with the consequences of it today - but I’m not really willing to be baited into this type of discussion on a platform like this, so I’ll just say your fundamental premises in your post sound flawed if not extremely troubling in what you seem to be implying. It sounds completely unreasonable to say for instance, indigenous groups should forget they were pretty much wiped out by largely white colonizers. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just a matter of fact.
The thing about oppression is that it causes both long-lasting and recurring trauma. The people targeted will be hurt for a long time, and they will be the target of follow-up attacks because other bullies know they can get away with it.
In the specific case of Nazi Germany, exterminating the Jews was not an original idea of Hitler. Hitler's only original idea was taking shittons of methamphetamine. Martin Luther had done the legwork of radicalizing Germany into hating Jews; once Germany had become a functionally unified nation-state the Holocaust was a forgone conclusion. This is the core belief of Zionism[0]: that the only way to stop Jews from becoming victims is for those Jews to form their own nation-state that can commit its own atrocities.
BTW, this is the same logic the Japanese had in their head when they started invading and destroying the rest of East Asia, around the same time as Hitler. They wanted to be respected in the way that the Christian Bible would describe as "having the fear of God". The fact that this led to the horrific rape of China and Korea[1] would suggest that these victim narratives are morally self-defeating without some framework of reciprocal[2] tolerance and human rights to distinguish between justified self-defense and unjustified oppression.
But America at least sort of has that, so we can make that distinction. In fact, that's part of what makes American race relations so weirdly straightforward. In the "old world" you have complicated webs of peoples angry at each other for shit that happened anywhere from ten to ten thousand years ago. But in America, there's just one very deep wound that never seems to heal.
When does America "forget" slavery? Well, ideally, we don't 'forget', but we do 'forgive'. Practically, however, we can't. Every time a cop thinks it'd be a good idea to treat a criminal suspect like a demon in DOOM Eternal, and it hits social media, we get a huge reminder of "oh, there's still people in this country who think it's OK to do this to black people".
[0] I'm a Mormon[3], so I'm morally obligated to point out that we fell into this rhetorical trap, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre
[1] And yes, they still complain about it, too. It doesn't help that Japan's ruling LDP was run by a war crimes denialist for a decade and change.
[2] As in, "tolerate all except the intolerant." See also: the GNU General Public License.
[3] I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mormonism, is in fact, LDS/Mormonism, or as I've recently taken to calling it, LDS plus Mormonism. Mormonism is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning LDS system made useful by the LDS Doctrine & Covenants, the Old & New Testaments, and the Pearl of Great Price comprising a full testament as defined by Jesus.
2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA
50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do.
Especially historically under represented groups.
It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well.
But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time.
Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc.
If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever.
Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path.
But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it.
So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons.
One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try.
East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs.
If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces.
The same also applies to people of colour.
If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.
The Republicans in charge of two school districts near me have been trying to organize book burnings for the last two years.
Get back to me when it's the Democrats.
I keep hearing about Republican book bans, but I've only heard they don't want certain books to be available to children in schools, not that they should be banned in general. Compare this with liberals who got some Dr. Seuss and other books cancelled and removed from Amazon etc.
It's seems like both sides attempt to decrease accessibility to literature that they find objectional, but neither has achieved an actual ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
I guess if you think this is fine then that's what you think.
Donald Trump was re-elected. He has said that we should deport pro-palestinian protestors on college campuses and has sued multiple news outlets, both on tv and in paper, for their coverage during the election season. It's really hard to find any political figure who is more aggressively targeting speech he doesn't like than Trump.
But at the same time, both the progressives and the conservatives who are active on political social media (take your pick of platform) are very likely to actively attempt to silence the opposition and punish them for speaking.
It's less a political divide and more that most people are still tolerant of dissenting speech, so the people you know in person will tend to be tolerant. There's a loud minority that's vocal on the internet on both sides that advocates for silencing others.
Which side is often going to court (and losing) to dispute facts (like election integrity or sexual assault allegations)?
We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats.
2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.
I'm trying to put in flat terms, but fundamentally power matters. This is the base of democracy: give people the power to change things, there needs to be a fear that these people will exercise their power.
Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.
And also people are way more influenced by their everyday environments than nice speeches. Having a nation that values diversity helps more to also embrace these ideals, than living in a racist dictatorship and fighting at every corner to keep your minority voices in your heart.
> It's a slow, painful process
The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger. Women lost abortion rights over a few weeks (the leading to that was also long and slow, but when it finally happens it doesn't take much). Foreign people lost the right to return to their US home within days when the ban happened last time.
Power matters.
ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?
Things improve on their own over time too.
15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.
I've worked in Wall Street tech for 20 years, and while the demographics of my coworkers have changed, it largely had nothing to do with DEI or other recruitment efforts.
In the late 90s/early 00s it was FSU Russians&Ukrainians living in South Brooklyn & US born and/or raised Cantonese speaking Chinese from downtown. By late 00s, percent of Indians started to tick upwards. In 2010s, mainland Chinese students on visas ticked way up, and in 2020s one of the fastest growing groups was actually female mainland Chinese students. Campus recruiting may pat themselves on the back about finally growing the % of women, but this was largely downstream of enrollment & degree choices made by these women many years before.
In many ways it's gotten a lot better as all these different groups largely work wherever in the organization. 15-20 years ago there was a big problem with the Indian UI guy loading his team with Indians, the Chinese data guy loading his team with Chinese, and the Russian backend lead hiring all Russians. You could guess what team people were on by their face, and they'd often slip into their native languages at work. Not the best for collaboration.
Also agree that real change of hearts & minds is slow going over generations, and can't be legislated. That said we have made and continue to make a lot of progress. Anyone who has been alive more than 20 years should be able to recognize US culture in 2020s is so different than even 2008, 1999, 1990, or the 1980s..
I think some people mix 1) cultural change (acceptable words people use / ok jokes people make) with 2) legal changes (gay marriage rights / expanded legal protections from discrimination) and finally 3) outcome changes (higher % of group going to college / lower % of group being poor / etc). 1 moves faster than 2 which moves faster than 3. I think that's because each is downstream of the preceding change. You can't directly change outcomes in a short time span.
There are countless instances throughout history of lasting change being sparked by a single moment. Sure, that moment is frequently the culmination of some period of struggle, but you have to remember that the issues that came to a head and sparked those DEI initiatives a few years ago were exactly that—the product of literally centuries of struggle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a recent phase of that struggle.
So, I believe your emphasis is on the wrong side of the equation here. That is, it's not that there is an inherent deficiency in a trending moment or ascendant party giving rise to change. It's the explicit pushback against DEI that is responsible for its unwinding. And, this effort was not successful because the party that sponsored the pushback was ascendant. Instead, part of the party's ascension was due to it making an issue of the pushback. More specifically, the blowback was part of a divisive theme, along with illegal immigration and other issues.
Progress is not a one-way street and gains are not de facto insulated against erosion. Progress (and its security) is a product of the mores and culture of a time, and these can be influenced and manipulated. So, there is really not such a thing as "lasting change", and that's what we saw here. In some ways, the blowback has taken us not just back to our pre-DEI state, but to a pre-1960s mental footing.
Of course it was, and so is this latest effort from Meta. I'm sure if there was some anti-Brazilian group in power in Washington or something, you'd see Meta shutting down their offices in Rio.
AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
I've witnessed the DEI transformation from the inside - which amounted to a chief diversity officer being hired, a lot of incredibly sanctimonious online trainings got scheduled for us, and rainbow flags started popping up in the weirdest places.
A few coworkers I had, who checked a lot of the boxes got dragged into interviews and company events (which some found somewhat uncomfortable). Very little changed in practice, and if you didn't care to read the company newsletter (who does that anyway), then you didn't experience much of it.
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...
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
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.
In my experience, DEI programs do the opposite. I've seen manager leave headcount unfulfilled because the qualified candidates they found were non diverse and hiring them would put them below their diversity target. If 20% of the workforce is women and your bonus is contingent on reaching 30%, you could recruit at Grace Hopper and try to hire more women. But if that doesn't get you to your quota, you need to hire fewer men to push up the proportion of women.
Edit: another comment on hn says that Bloomberg's methodology was flawed, which seems more plausible to me.
Why is that? Virtue signaling? Discrimination on males?
If there wasn't a demand for specifically female engineers they would cost the same as male engineers regardless of the supply because an engineer should be fungible with gender. Unless you think that women have some innate characteristic that makes them better than men?
To fix this sort of problem a wholistic approach is required. Whatever the approach it should apply to all equally so that the market is fair. Offhand, my historic recollection is that STEM generally is traditionally less appealing to those of the female sex (by Science/Biology definition of the phrase), and that there might (rightly?) be a perception of poor work / life balance and career tracks that don't pair well with fulfilling time limited biological imperatives. My personal opinion is that enforced labor regulation that provides sufficient parental leave, work / life balance generally, and generally promotes healthier recognition of employees as humans would be better for society overall.
I also recognize that we're probably not going to get that until the US gets rid of the 'first past the post' madness and adopts a voting system with literally _any_ form of IRV. There just won't be bandwidth for such an issue otherwise. Of said systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method is my favorite, but I'd start with ANY IRV, they're (offhand) all less flawed than what we've got.
I’m so old fashioned thinking your immutable characteristics shouldn’t be considered for employment.
One thing that's common is for people to recommend their friends for jobs. Most of the time, their friends look just like them, because that's the kind of friends that people make. If you base your hiring process around this easy source of candidates, you end up not talking to a lot of people that would be qualified for the position. "DEI" can be as simple as "in addition to employee referrals, we're going to hand out brochures at a career fair".
https://journalistsresource.org/education/race-neutral-alter...
> 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...
There was one notable exception: an org based in Virginia with something like 10% or 15%. I figured it was due to black former military and defense workers who had to be on-site in Virginia to work on a specific GovCloud project, part of the JEDI contract effort. I knew of one black engineer who worked on that compared to about ~5 others I knew who worked on that.
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.
In the US, inferiority of blackness is so deeply ingrained and entrenched. it's like air, we (blacks, white and everything in between) have all breathed in and fully internalized that we don't even realize its there.
Reading things like The Color Purple, Black Like Me, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X in my childhood didn't remove that blind spot; if anything, the contrast tempted me to think that racism was pretty much a solved problem in the US, except for a few reactionaries. It wasn't until years of living something fundamentally different that I could start to notice how absurd and pervasive it was.
I wonder why US is not racist against Indians and Chinese.
> Perhaps the US system of racism is less effective against people who had first-class opportunities at education and mentorship
Are we supposed to believe that only certain societies (like India and China) have these kind of opportunities? Why doesn't Latin America, with 600-700M population, have this kind of opportunity then?
> lots of times I had Indian and Chinese coworkers and a white boss.
Anecdote - at the last FAANG I worked at, 6 out of 7 people in my management chain were Indian dudes, including the CEO. Also as a matter of statistics, Asians are over-represented in S&P500 leadership positions compared to their share of the US population.
I live in Latin America now, and the universities almost all suck. Latin America culturally has the idea that universities are for job training and are basically all equivalent. China and, generally speaking, India instead place very high value on education and on good universities, and China also has a massive research budget. Latin America, broadly speaking, has zilch. The result is that in lists like https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin... the top 100 universities include 11 in China, 4 in Singapore (which is largely Chinese), and 0 in Latin America. Most of India's IITs don't appear on that list for some reason, but they should — and the ones that do appear are the wrong ones.
Here in Buenos Aires, the University of Buenos Aires was badly damaged by Perón demanding loyalty oaths from the professors, driving those who valued their intellectual freedom out of the university and often out of Argentina entirely. A few years later, it was damaged further by an anti-Peronist military dictatorship attempting to purge it of Peronists https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noche_de_los_Bastones_Largos. The first computer in Latin America was lost in the shuffle. Decades of such intermittent political violence disproportionately affected the intellectual classes; the last dictatorship, backed by the US in its secret mass murders of political dissidents, notoriously blamed society's drug problems on "an excess of thinking" among students: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Bardi#Ministro Those intellectuals who could move abroad often did so, including Favaloro, who invented heart bypass surgery after refusing to swear loyalty to Perón, and Chaitin, the discoverer of the random number omega at the heart of computability and the graph-coloring formulation of the compiler register allocation problem.
Despite all that, the University of Buenos Aires is still one of the best five or so universities in Latin America. That may give you a clue as to how bad the situation is in places like Ecuador, Venezuela, and Honduras, or even the poorer provinces of Argentina.
You really can't imagine why American culture treats blacks differently from how it does Indians and Chinese? That says more about your imagination than it does America.
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...
Also, in the US Asians, overall, are not economically disadvantaged like most Blacks and Latinos. So I don't think you can really put them together in this particular context. Notice that the largest group of Professionals were Asian (lots of engineers/programmers from India/China as usual).
(Also at the Executive job level, Whites still very on top.)
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.
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.
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-...
I think I would still blame the management of NHTSA for setting that standard.
Are there no white people studying CS anymore or looking for jobs? Did they all stop applying?
Again, it’s only from personal experience. I never asked any of my coworkers a “hey, do you ever interview white people?”, so it could be a coincidence that I was never matched with any. But I don’t think that’s the most likely explanation…
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.
It’s all Indians and Chinese
It's like the southern Bay Area in general, the least black place I have ever lived. People call it diverse, but it's really just 4 ethnic groups that rarely intermingle. It's not diverse like LA or NYC are diverse.
I'm not doubting your companies' policies, but just throwing my data point in there too.
Ignorant investors check a box to put their money towards 'ethical' investments, leading companies to create DEI marketing departments to exploit the new investment pipeline.
Publicly traded companies operate under a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders (maximizing long-term shareholder value). For consumer-facing companies one could easily argue these initiatives are part of a broader marketing/corporate branding strategy that benefits shareholders. But, for large publicly-traded companies that don't rely on retail consumer sentiment, I presume DEI initiatives were primarily a strategy to attract investment from ESG funds and help quell potential regulatory action/political controversies
I'm ultimately not sure how reasonable my take is (I have no insider experience or knowledge) but would love to hear from someone with relevant first-hand knowledge and get their perspective
Obviously thats hard to do and still maintain a massive profit, so some did the next easiest thing to greenwashing: hiring some DEI consultants and PR people to take some photos of the three employees with blue hair and melanin.
ESG is still a thing, despite some finance bros making a fuss.
ESG ratings champion companies in industries killing millions: https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/how-tobacco-companies-are...
reminiscent of the comic of people being bombed in awe that 'They say the next [bombs] will be sent by a woman!'
But they can be more. Some companies I've worked for used their DEI programs to actively support local communities, organize volunteering efforts, collect donations. Even companies that HN might consider "Evil", I've seen have very strong and engaged DEI groups. It came down to two things: 1) they hired passionate people who took it upon themselves to organize internally and do more with the groups, and 2) they had leadership that (amazingly) gave the support needed for the group to make a positive impact.
But also, some companies I've worked for just had a 30 minute "movie lunch hour" and guest speaker and that was it. So it's obvious to me now when a DEI program is a PR dodge, and when it does real work.
I did around 1000 interviews for my current company and about 200 for the previous one. I found that in IT in Europe there are not many candidates to meet DEI targetsand still hire the qualified ones. Even expanding to other continents, we barely made it; the last team I hired was one Latino, one Filipino and one white, 2 out of 3 were male. I interviewed around 30 candidates for these positions and I selected the top 3. These 3 were just above the lower limit of expertise to be hired, so I basically had zero choice, the alternative was to pull triple shifts myself to cover for the missing people.
Let's say you are the director of a steel plant. DEI targets are totally irrelevant, I never heard about a woman working on the plant floor, but I have many cousins who did. Dying at 45 or 50 years old due to lung or throat cancer is not something many women want to, but all my cousins did. I don't believe in DEI in these circumstances. But if you want DEI in "a day in life of a Microsoft /Twitter employee having free food and pointless meetings all day" videos, that is not fair.
So, I don't know why you were not able to place the developers, but think about DEI even more. We have several black people in my department, one of the best PMs I worked with is an older black woman, a good professional will find a place almost anywhere. Morgan Freeman shows that being black does not prevent one from magnificent results, but asking for rewards for being black is not the way.
(IE; Italians are "White" but Turks are non-white. Romanians ironically get the short end of the stick no matter the situation).
Mostly it centers on LGBTQ+ and Women though.
Hailing from Eastern Europe, I could tell so many stories, some of which happened to me, and some to others, which was kinda affirming to see that it was not self centered bias.
How it went for me - I built a super challenging, super advanced feature (involving graphics acceleration, video encoding etc. in a company where this was not a core competency), then I got put in a team where we had to deliver a shipping prototype on a short timescale, build up a team around it, etc.
Still I was not promoted - what I got was a clueless Western manager, who I had to hand dictate Jira tickets and Asana reports to. A year later he left for a high-level position at an A-list company. Out of curiosity, I submitted my CV to a regular dev position at the same company, and all I got was an automated rejection letter.
I also had an Ukrainian coworker who built super impressive development tooling to a huge delight to everyone - he quit in frustration, and they had to build an entire team (with similar hiring logic), and unsurprising they couldn't match half his velocity with a team of 5.
It's not really in your face, you are not really treated like dirt - but you are managed away from actual prestige and opportunities, especially if the project succeeds, they tend to forget about you - except when the bug reports come rolling in.
It really shows up in the org charts too - we used to joke that there was an 'iron curtain' on C-level minus two, as nobody from EE managed to get promoted that far. I aLso felt that the fact that the majority of engineering was in EE was treated as some 'shamful dark secret' that if found out, would cast a bad light on the firm.
This is especially super ironic considering the standard diversity spiel (you are all privileged white men) is still going on, ironically from someone who makes 5x as much as we do, and sits in London.
Are you suffering from the same condition, too?
This is an old phenomenon that keeps reoccurring in many forms.
I understand that it is important to raise social awareness about some things. People should not be afraid to talk about real issues. Freedom of speech, the need to listen to people/citizens/customers &c.
That said, the cheerful, forced vapidity in that video is embarrassing. None of those parroted statements is worth a tinker's cuss historically. And none of it is worth a damn in the present time either unless the corporation is going to give billions in reparation to the tribes that were permanently evicted.
Is the Land Acknowledgement Theatre really a strategic attempt to avoid paying damages in many potential class-action law suits?
Is that corporate fear really what drives most of these obsequious recognition statements and policies?
It's just part of the social fabric now, though not without its detractors.
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.
How much did you get paid for doing all those consulting gigs on DEI topics?
Just to point out, even as you highlight the hollowness of the trend passing through, you were a part of the industry it created and a beneficiary of people's sudden interest in the symbolism of it even if it achieved little. Tons of people who could justify some kind of vague contribution/expertise were glad to make money off of the political need to pursue this, and be seen doing it.
It sounds like you were one of the more respectable contributors. Others were hangers-on, making money or careers off people's fear of being accused of not toeing the new party line, regardless of how hollow it was. VPs/deans/executive directors of diversity and inclusion at whatever institutions they could sell their services to.
Whether it was good or not at its core, some people had a vested interest in it continuing. It happens equally with every new trend that is hard to set real goals against. (or achievable ones, until it's found out to be empty).
It was in the middle of a hiring spree. Why not spend that time interviewing black engineers instead?
So I don’t positively discriminate but, the most recent role I was looking to fill, I didn’t speak to that many candidates because applicant quality was overall poor, but getting on half of those I did speak with were from minorities.
In the end we decided not to hire for the time being because we couldn’t find anyone at the standard we needed (possibly due to time of year - November/December often aren’t great), but I’m surprised that you weren’t even getting people to interview. That, on the face of it, is quite concerning.
I have never seen anything more cringe or ridiculous than this video.
Bill Gates has said publicly that he's a fan of Silicon Valley, the tv show that pokes hard fun at the startup culture. But it's Microsoft that's beyond parody...
Your skin colour of course.
Do you know what the success rate is for non-DEI candidates? I believe there is some bias in the hiring process including racism, sexism, ageism, etc. But I also think that companies are hiring less than 1% of applicants in general. From what I have seen, companies are very bad at identifying the best candidates. But if you are getting 100 resumes a month and you hire 2-4 people a year, it's a roll of the dice just selecting the 20 resumes out of 400 to invite for an interview.
All of that is to say: don't get too discouraged. A 1% success rate would be remarkable. If you can achieve a 0.5% success rate you can increase diversity by 400%.
Personally, I'm a fan of meritocracy. I wish the most qualified people were surviving the roll of the dice. But I think it would be ideal if the most qualified people included a lot of diversity. As it is, employers' best chance to hire qualified people is to rely on human networks to help somebody stand out in the sea of resumes. So the more people of diversity you can land, the better chance there is for future candidates. And the better qualified your diverse candidates are, the more voice they'll get in future hiring influence. So keep pushing highly qualified diverse candidates. And while you're at it, push highly qualified non-diverse candidates so you aren't just seen as a diversity advocate. People might take your diverse candidates more seriously if they are perceived less for their diversity and more for their excellence. If 80% of your recommendations are diverse and 50% seem to be very high-quality, the 10% that are very high-quality non-diverse will change the perception of the 40% very high-quality diverse candidates.
I work at pseudo government organization where we take seminars every few months about dei, gender issues, etc... and it has made 0 difference when it comes to hiring. Ultimately my org is trying to reach out more, get to dei events, but that's as far as the effort goes. Once a job application is posted, it's the same old process. Maybe that's fair, but it felt disingenuous, and unnecessary, especially since we weren't great at hiring anyways.
Years ago, tech companies would promote such moves to improve their image, play intot heir role as being "outsiders" or "disruptors" and to attract staff, who tended to skew towards socially progressive issues. There was genuine belief in the missions of those companies. Google once touted its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
But now we're talking about trillion dollar companies that move in lockstep with US policy.
I tend to believe that every US company eventually becomes a bank, a defense contractor or both.
The biggest heel turn politically is probably Mark Zuckerberg, who now makes frequent donations to Republican candidates (and some Democrats, for the record) but we also have Meta donating $1M to Trump's inauguration (by comparison, there was no contribution to Biden's inauguration). Efforts of fighting misinformation are out. DEO is out.
If you work for Meta, you're now really no different to Tiwtter. Your employer now actively pushes right-wing propaganda and the right-wing agenda. There is no real support for minorities. But the sad truth is, every other big tech company is on the same path.
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".
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.
Even in the US, commons-deeded land between multiple people is still a thing. Albeit one that lawyers hate to mess with because it's more work for them.
For purposes of this thread, exclusive control of an area, absent other claims, would certainly entitle indigenous American peoples to ownership of that land.
None of this is guaranteed by 'ownership'.
It isn't splitting hairs. It's outright propaganda invented to justify stealing native land. The idea being if natives had no sense of property, we didn't really steal anything from them because they had no property to begin with.
The other trope justifying theft of the land is of the "dumb indians" who sold the land for cheap. Like indians selling manhattan for a handful of beads.
The notion of a lack of land ownership is just fetishization.
Even animals mark their territory and aggressively defend it.
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.
Capitalism has very fine-grained ideas about property rights. Consider corporations, for just one example. There are multiple kinds of shares about who owns what rights to the corporation. Then there are all the contractual obligations that, in essence, transfer specific property rights. There are the web of rights that workers have over it. Then there are the rights the government has over it, via tax obligations and regulations. Layer on the concept of "stakeholders" that layer on more ownership rights.
Societies on the hunter/gatherer spectrum also value their hunting grounds, but in far less strict ways.
I'm pretty sure the indigenous peoples that lived by farming had well developed concepts of land ownership, but they were the minority when Europeans arrived.
As in… we are the custodians now.
I'm curious why it took hundreds of candidates to not be hired before it dawned on you that it was not sincere? Wouldn't the first dozen have been enough?
Unless your financial interests intersected with those of the companies you consulted for this "show"...?
But, I applaud your bravery in calling these guys out after they stopped giving you work.
Bravo.
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.
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."
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 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.
Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.
Another possibility: Women in poorer countries enrol in CS out of necessity. In wealthy countries, they have more economic freedom and there are more jobs available higher up on Maslow's Hierarchy, so they enrol in what they actually want (which is not CS).
On average.
Several of my friends in CS said their parents wouldn't have supported their college education if they were getting a humanities degree, with the possible exception of law. Even business was unlikely.
* counting South and West Asian too
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.
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".
We are in for some dark times.
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.
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.
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.