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?