Were a lot of these programs a performative kabuki theatre that wasted time and money? Yes. Were companies ever going to fill their ranks with black, lesbian programmers? No.

On the other hand, now having worked my way up in the tech world, the idea that the C-suite decision makers are there through some sort of meritocracy is also equally laughable. These are exclusive circles, and your breeding (family, school, frat) already determines your access more than success ever will.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the ideal of giving more types of people a chance. But it was an issue of execution, not intent.

People tend to be tribal. People, when interviewing and select, will tend to hire people that look like them. A white guy from a white school from a white neighbourhood is far more likely to hire another white guy because that's what the've spent their whole lives surrounded by. This is justified a million ways, but what it boils down to is favouring someone who is a certain race.

And when tech is already full of white guys, it just means more white guys will be hired in tech... Cause maths.

All DEI was doing in the tech world was saying, "try interview at least one woman/ black person etc". Also maybe some training on how to avoid the pitfall in an interview of just hiring someone the same as you.

But look around you in the office. How many women are there? How many black people? How many... Black women?!?! Yea, I thought so.

If you are talking about "merit based" then that is "DEI". If you are talking about "people who look and act like me", then you are racist.

Anyway, excluding people leads to worse outcomes. Unfortunately, it makes life harder for people on the way.

Either you pass the threshold or you don't. No excuses.

A lot of people are strongly in favour of this, of course, including me. But are you sure that's all that it was doing?

Its also full of Asian guys, so its way more diverse than most sectors in USA.

Also why do you think this principle applies to the categories Women and Blacks, and not for instance people with diabetes, psychopaths and people who like Taylor swift?

Source: https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/diversity-inclusion/news/51-of...

I’ve found 5-10 more similar sources via a quick google search.

While the law did not compel a business to report dei metrics to my knowledge (besides boards of public companies via the SEC), the impact of mass virtual signaling had the practical effect of compelling businesses of embracing dei or face being labeled as racists or immoral, which is a form of coercion by itself. I’d argue it would have been be better if such actions were simply deemed as illegal rather than racists or immoral. So with that said, I would argue the previous state of affairs was significantly worse with dei measures in place.

Putting the power back to the law rather than to a group of loosely collected virtual signalers is a better world imo.

But a company like Google, which makes obscene profits every quarter, should be doing far more at all stages to fight the effects of that prejudice, because if whole categories of people are unprepared to work at Google because of societal failures, that’s huge numbers of potentially fantastic employees Google is missing out on.

> Says the pot to the kettle.

That was my point. When I said "it's like an accent" I didn't mean I myself don't have an accent. It's that I don't perceive it. People do not perceive their own accents as accents. They don't perceive their own biases as biases.

But accents are still accents regardless of whether we perceive them. Biases are still biases.

My point wasn't that I am pure, free of sin. It wasn't about me at all. It was that biases are bad but often invisible.

> They wanted to have a diverse workforce, and came up with an excuse for it post-hoc. The best defense I've seen of this is that diverse opinions are good for business.

Is it true? If so, who cares whether it was post hoc?

I don't know whether you've done any machine learning. Nowadays all the news is about LLMs, but back in the day there were other algorithms -- decisions trees, support vector machines, logistic regression models, simple Bayesian models, etc. You had a mess of data. You defined feature vectors. You vectorized your data and threw it at the algorithm. You got a classifier. Or a regression model or whatever. Then there were also meta algorithms that took these base algorithms and combined them to make something more robust and accurate -- a random forest or something. This meta algorithm worked only if these sub-deciders differed. You make one decision tree, duplicate it 1000 times, and wrap it in a random forest and you get nothing but wasted effort. To achieve the gain you needed your deciders to have different opinions.

This is the theory behind diversity in an organization: you have multiple viewpoints plus some mechanism to combine them into a final decision. It has nothing to do with race or gender or anything. It is a provable way to get better decisions.

Did someone also want to lift up people historically beaten down? Maybe? Thats also a good thing! It's awesome if you can get better decisions and also make a more just society, right?

> We have a word for this: racism.

What? This is just a shibboleth. Is racism a good thing or a bad thing? Is trying to counteract racism just as bad as raw racism? It produces a more fair outcome, but it's forbidden! We must preserve the injustice because to counteract it would also be unjust!

This is a ludicrous position. The point of using a DEI mechanism is that it is just that, a mechanism. You set it up and let it decide so that flawed human judgment doesn't decide. Is the mechanism racist? I don't know, does it have ideas and intentions?

Perhaps it will be clearer if I try to do some perspective taking for you.

Imagine there is a company with a South Asian CEO, CTO, etc. They only trust South Asians. Only South Asians are a good cultural fit. North Americans are lazy, unmotivated, dumb, incurious, entitled. They are poor team players. They won't put in extra hours, or if they do, it will achieve nothing. And then if you interact with them there's always this tension, awkwardness. You can't tell the same stupid American jokes. It's a joke! They have no sense of humor.

Now you are a North American with skills. You actually are very talented and insightful. You have lots of energy, lots of ideas. You would be a great employee. But this company will not hire you. (You disgust them a little.) Is this racism? I've just inverted identities, but I think you would agree that the company is racist and this is unfair. And it's clear that this racism harms both you and the company. But if the company's HR or whatever recognized the possibility that racism was tainting their hiring practices and implemented DEI targets as an impartial mechanism to work against this bias, that would be racist against South Asians! So to maintain their moral purity they should preserve their original racism and deny you the job. [slaps dust off hands and calls it a day]

Do you see the other perspective now? To summarize: racism is bad because it harms both parties. A mechanism that counteracts this helps both parties, and is just and good to boot. Saying that they are equivalent because they both consider race, to say that this makes them both equally racist, is to make "racism" a nullity, a thing of no consequence. If this is racism, it is good racism, because it rights an injustice. Or, alternatively, it is not racism. Racism is using race to commit an injustice, not to counteract it.

Don't know why West Point thinks that is required by the anti-DEI order, maybe someone is going through and looking at anything with race or gender in the name and shutting it down?

If so, that would be on West Point.

We all know that these programs don't result in better candidates, and that standards are lowered, not raised, when they are introduced.

Just be honest about it and make the case for why you think lowering standards is a worthwhile sacrifice to accomodate people from diverse backgrounds.

Even better, make the case for why considering any of this is a companies responsiblity in the first place.

They also do the inverse, insisting that obviously white Arabs and Persians can't be white because they don't live in successful countries. (On the other hand, Russians can be white despite not living in a successful country. Who knows. In this case, it looks like "white" actually means "Christian", except for Middle Eastern or Korean Christians.)

Kim Kardashian was supposed to be non-Caucasian, if you believe Twitter. Her name clearly identifies her as Armenian; you can't get much closer to the Caucasus than that. Although it is true that she's only half Armenian, with the remainder being Scottish and Dutch.

Governments are responsible for addressing social inequity, while companies simply hire whoever best meets their needs (within the constraints of antidiscrimination laws).

In America these responsibilities seem to have become blurred, resulting in an XY problem whereby people debate which hiring policies are best at addressing certain societal problems, without questioning whether it is even appropriate for companies to be taking on that responsibility in the first place.

Companies shouldn't be expected to solve every problem in society, and certainly not social issues.

As far as DEI, that's exactly how it works:

https://i.imgur.com/SFf8IL7.png

You see, I show evidence. Unlike you.

There used to be programs like that, and they mostly helped the children of Chinese and Vietnamese refugees from communism. Low childhood household income doesn't really have much effect - "low income" in a US context is quite rich in a world context.

That would make far more sense if this was only about money.

Ontario is the wealthiest, most populous and most diverse. Are you happy with education there?

/s, I hope. :/

Was it though?

Or was it just a result of society and culture outside the companies control.

The idea behind DEI is as if a car crashes into another car because of an issue with the road, that leads to one car being more damaged than the other, the solution is to make sure the less damaged car has the same amount of damage, rather than fixing the road.

I don’t think any of them were dumb, just focused on the things they saw members of their community do.

Are you seriously suggesting that black people are genetically less predispositioned to program? Explain the evolutionary advantage to that please because that sounds absolutely absurd.

So if there's some genetic bias at play, as long as the social issues are right there staring us in the face, you're going to need to advance the science of genetics to get the answer. Without that it just comes off "race science" and that kind of thing.

If you had a better metric that can be used to help people from marginalized cummunities, wherever they happen to be, you should be using those if the goal is to be more inclusive, more diverse and more equitable.

But the problem is that the very same psychological mechanisms that drive racism are the ones which drive these modern attempts at fixing racism.

I think there are two different but related angles at play:

1. Historical injustice. Racism against black communities in the USA has such a long and disgusting history that when new generations learn about that it's understandable that people want to wash that away and find ways to make amends and counterbalance things.

2. Since we live in a world where skin color is a visible marker that you literally wear on your skin, there is a sense that you're just being disadvantaged for being you and thus you need a more-than-normal counterbalance to set things straight.

We thus ended up in a situation where we destroyed the aspirations of a truly color-blind society. We need to keep reminding ourselves about the fact that color matters.

This is not helping defusing racism. This is feeding racism because despite the best intentions it operates in the worldview of racism.

Of all the words you Americans have purged from the language you kept the word race, a word that post WWII many European nations successfully defused.

I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.

It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.

I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.

Finally, from the article in this post:

> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.

It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.

These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.

Yes, it has. Look at the college admissions. The test score requirements for black students were way way lower than those for the Asian students in many universities and colleges. That's favoring people by their skin color.

Which is illegal since at least 1964.

Some companies are under legal pressure to avoid lawsuits because some programs are violating civil rights. I wouldn't call those instances craven.

As for your definition of DEI, I find it fairly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Regardless of how we want to define DEI in the hypothetical perfect world, the reality is a large portion of current DEI programs look absolutely nothing like what you described.

> DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it

I have been in the room where HR/hiring managers have explicitly stated that they want to hire [specific race/gender] for an open role. This has been at major companies. In states where this is explicitly illegal.

In the very high level abstract, the goal of DEI programs may not be to engage in explicitly illegal race/sex discrimination, but in practice, this is how it often turns out.

I will let others give their own anecdotes, as cases like this are widespread.

There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.

The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.

You're right, reverse racism does not exist, it's just racism.

> to work harder than white men to get where they are.

Asian Americans prove this is not true. I recall that statically the average wage for asians in America is higher than white people.

On the other hand, the tricky bit comes in when it's only in retrospect everyone agrees those were terrible perversions of DEI. When they're actually in place, anyone who criticizes them is considered a racist neo-Nazi.

Equity factors in historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences. This could mean that if we have a candidate who seems to be with lesser qualification then they potentially can be hired over a more qualified candidate.

This is with reasoning that due to past decades (and centuries) of historical situations a candidate was led through a path which landed them with a 'lesser' qualification. So, now if we continue to correct this historical situation then sometime in future the need for Equity would disappear, since that future generation is result of a equitable society - then no more excuses, if you have lesser qualification then it is your doing and not society's.

You forgot transphobist and whatever the -ist form of Nazi is. National Socialist, possibly. No point going with half-measures on the insults.

Not 100%, sure, but that's far different from 0%.

Which job fairs do your company reps attend? Is there a built-in bias causing you to miss out on good candidates?

Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?

> What you're suggesting is that companies favor candidates who have a different appearance or background than existing employees, which is the definition of bias and discrimination.

No. The suggestion is that companies should not favor candidates because they have the same appearance or background than existing employees.

If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?

The former discriminates on the basis of religion, and is prohibited in most cases.

Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.

Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.

Makes sense?

He is the best example of how someone exists in 2025 with such ignorant views, and those who voted for him share that.