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Who cares about diversity?

fakenous.substack.com

21–30 of 536 posts

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#21

I just saw this post reach about #4 on the frontpage, get flagged, marked DEAD, then come back but no longer on the frontpage, all in about 2 minutes.

Yeah, I flagged it (which killed it) in anticipation of the shit storm I expect to see in the comments an hour or 2 from now.

No post body was provided.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#22
post #6

Going on a tangent I am tired of diversity theater at most companies. You know how I know you don't really care? I look at your C level (excluding Chief Diversity Officer) and you board.

This is an extremely shallow and dismissive take, IMO. As someone who has recruited engineers, I can tell you there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. At the C-level, it only gets worse. It takes years to even get to the C-suite, which means that white men inherently have a head start, and that it's one of the last places you'd expect to see the effects of diversity initiatives. That isn't…

> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself.

So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#23
post #6

Going on a tangent I am tired of diversity theater at most companies. You know how I know you don't really care? I look at your C level (excluding Chief Diversity Officer) and you board.

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They can hire the way they want to hire but should stop the diversity training theater and fill good posting on twitter if they have 0 diversity on the C team they directly hired.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#25
post #20
post #2

It could be that the people do care about the values listed, but don't know an effective way to guarantee them, and that existing diversity statements are a stopgap measure until something better is figured out. But no, let's jump directly to "Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy." Or..…

The original article went into an in-depth analysis that you label as “jump directly to…”

[deleted]

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#26
post #8

Quoted post unavailable.

Alternate perspective: it will be flagged down because HN's community has continually proven incapable of having discussions like this without it turning into a shouting match. It's already happening.

> because HN's community has continually proven incapable of having discussions like this without it turning into a shouting match

Maybe, but that itself (just like downvote brigading) is a technique used to suppress discussion. Become so "outraged" when others simply state their opinion to make normal discussion impossible.

That is an area in which I don't think HN moderation does a good job. They blame people who merely state a controversial opinion for "initiating a flamewar" instead of standing firm against the angry mob and putting emphasis on the importance of keeping a high standard for discussion. Simply being outraged is quite diagonal to curiosity, the core value of HN.

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#27
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extremely shallow and dismissive take, IMO. As someone who has recruited engineers, I can tell you there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. At the C-level, it only gets worse. It takes years to even get to the C-suite, which means that white men inherently have a head start, and that it's one of the last places you'd expect to see the effects of diversity initiatives. That isn't…

> there's a serious diversity problem with the candidate pool itself. So there's too many white men. How is this impacting performance? Or do you just want to check some boxes and be able to say "we've got X% of engineers who aren't white men, look at how diverse we are!"

It's not possible to measure a counterfactual where teams at a given company just suddenly become diverse. But, it is pretty well known that there are some advantages to diversity in the workplace. Take, for instance, this reasonably well source article which lists 10 advantages: https://www.talentlyft.com/en/blog/article/244/top-10-benefi...

Oh, and it's not just white men. East Asians and those from the Indian subcontinent are also well represented in tech (perhaps over represented -- I'm not sure).

Re: Who cares about diversity?

#29
post #6

Going on a tangent I am tired of diversity theater at most companies. You know how I know you don't really care? I look at your C level (excluding Chief Diversity Officer) and you board.

Years and breadth/depth of experience is far from everything, but it's also far from nothing. I'd sort of expect the CxOs at most major companies to be ~25-40 years into their career. I'd therefore expect them to look a lot like the white collar workforce new entrants looked in 1982-1997.

Are you for real largest SV companies can't find a single "diverse" board member or C level but spend 100s of millions evangelizing how they care about diversity and on employee diversity training?
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