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Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

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Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#41
DEI departments and projects have a fervor to them that is near religious: the core tenets are faith based and impossible to challenge scientifically. Challenge any DEI tenet and your are immediately met with threats of excommunication. Get in line or you're out.

The thing is DEI efforts oftentimes mask comical understanding of history and blindingly gross racism.

Personal anecdote: How do you deal with people who proudly wear "Antiracist" t-shirts, but will quickly tell you Asians are opportunity hoarders who must hate their kids because they focus too much on academics. Or how do you explain indentured servitude, wars and famine have been commonplace all through history.

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc? Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?

In the US there are already laws against this. The company doesn't need DEI positions to enforce this.

It's also illegal to steal from the company, yet companies still have internal security departments.

Sexual harassment is illegal, yet companies still do sexual harassment training and HR in theory can help protect employees from sexual harassment and take action on harassers (if only to protect the company).

What a ridiculous statement. It is of course the responsibility of people inside company to ensure that it doesn't perpetuate illegal discriminatory activities.

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#43

"Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go." I understand what this meant in the context of the article, but without context, this seems like a potentially dangerous statement.

I think even in context its a bit dangerous. Who counts as diverse, and who gets cut in that consideration? Imagine there are three employees, and one of them has to go due to budget cuts. One is a straight African American male, one is a white homosexual male, and one is a white straight female. All of these might be considered diverse because they are all minorities in the tech industry in some way. However, taking…

I think you're just looking at it wrong. None of those people is diverse because no individuals are diverse; a person is only themself. A group of people can be varyingly diverse, and observations about the before/after diversity of a group of employees is a different thing from making decisions based on someone's individual group membership.

I think this upside-down view of diversity being located in individuals is really common though, which is one of the problems with tech DEI initiatives. But you get much more use out of it the other way around.

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illegal at the federal level, no?

Yes, but I appreciate it when people are so deep in their field that they innocently spout off ideas like this. It's also a little sloppy for Bloomberg to let that get by since it almost encourages something that's possibly illegal.

I think we just found where the root of the disconnect between a certain "victimized" demographic and how D&I works stems from:

As the reply above said, D&I isn't about "Don't fire minorities", it's about "If you fire 10% of your workforce, but they end up being 30% of the minorities in your workforce, question why there's a disconnect"

The idea being is the 10% actually where 10% of cuts need to happen, or is the 10% including some business unit that didn't have the right people hitting up the after work pub crawl with the founder, so no one one felt personally connected enough to have them stick.

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And I feel like the kneejerk is to assume "oh well you're just assuming founders are discriminatory"... it really doesn't have to be a discriminatory thing, it's simple human nature.

It's hard to trust someone who thinks that they won't subconsciously lean away from firing people that they've spent more time with and happen to like. They should accept that camaraderie outside of the bounds of business can subtly affect affect business sense even if you are a fair person before you can consciously override that tendency.

Similarly even though they're not sexist, they're not a T-1000 and are subject to things like same-gender preferences that have been replicated time and time again: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0186...

A large part of D&I is supposed to get people to embrace uncomfortable hidden biases without jumping to the least charitable cause: You don't have to be racist to get along better with people who are from your culture when that often means sharing interests, understanding each other better, etc. You don't have to be evil for that to end up affecting your decision making subconsciously.

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#45

My favorite part of the diversity sham is the race selector on the Bumble dating app. Asian has 5/6 options with all cardinal directions included. Yet White has one option. Certainly just like the South Asian is different than the North Asian you get the picture. Also the Greek European is different than the Norwegian. You get the picture. Also the chess.com emoticon selector. If you don't pay you have to be OK with…

This seems off topic?

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't listen to the full podcast, but as someone who has spent much of my work time in the past few years trying to hire -- it seems surprising to hear its not a pipeline problem. I advertised and solicited from as many diverse venues as I could find and still found hardly any qualified applicants. In fairness it wasn't easy to find White or Asian qualified applicants too, but still found disproportionately more.…

>I advertised and solicited from as many diverse venues as I could find and still found hardly any qualified applicants. So if you were e.g. recruiting for SWE roles at an HBCU presumably there are hundreds of CS students there. Are you saying none were qualified? If so isn't that a problem with education/preparation?

> Are you saying none were qualified? If so isn't that a problem with education/preparation?

Yes, in other words... a pipeline problem.

When you have bars set in fields where outcomes are tangible (STEM), you cannot improve the situation by lowering the bar, you must improve the situation by improving the populace so more can get over the bar. This is a lot harder to do, and not possible to do in a way that juices the numbers, so very few people and institutions bother to do it.

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#47

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our... > Gender diversity is correlated with both profitability and value creation. In our 2017 data set, we found a positive correlation between gender diversity on executive teams and both our measures of financial performance: top-quartile companies on executive-level gender diversity worldwide had a 21 percent likelihood of outperforming their fourth-quarti…

I simply do not trust these kind of statistics. Almost without exception the only people doing this kind of research are activists with an agenda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

Not saying its true, not saying its not.

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#48

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me. The average person might thing of them as professional useless people. But as someone who lives in a somewhat corrupt country, I fear it's far more sinister. Here, after every government change, public worker positions and state universities tend to get filled with by the winner with their incompetent cronies. But the private sector i…

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc? Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?

[deleted]

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#49

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me. The average person might thing of them as professional useless people. But as someone who lives in a somewhat corrupt country, I fear it's far more sinister. Here, after every government change, public worker positions and state universities tend to get filled with by the winner with their incompetent cronies. But the private sector i…

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc? Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?

You're advocating for a cure far worse than the disease and the disease isn't nearly as bad as they make it seem.

You see, what's great about the private sector is that any company that engages in discrimination only harms itself and drives potential talent to their competitors. That's why I love working for private companies, no matter who you are or where you come from if you're making them a lot of money they'll treat you like royalty. I've never seen an environment more egalitarian than a private company.

Re: Big Tech Layoffs Are Hitting Diversity and Inclusion Jobs Hard

#50
post #37

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me. The average person might thing of them as professional useless people. But as someone who lives in a somewhat corrupt country, I fear it's far more sinister. Here, after every government change, public worker positions and state universities tend to get filled with by the winner with their incompetent cronies. But the private sector i…

I don't understand why anybody would be against having political commissars at their place of work. Did we not learn from Soviet Russia that those work great?

I recently read an interesting book called "Ivan's War" that is an in depth look at WW2 from the Soviet side that extensively draws on 1st hand sources. One of the things I found so interesting was that much of the Soviet framework was built upon ensuring you couldn't trust anyone, putting spies amongst military units to rat on their comrades, splitting apart units that had served together for a while, etc.

The whole point wasn't to control thought, or stamp out disloyalty it was merely to make each person feel like they were alone and isolated.

I have to wonder how much of some of these culture war issues have been brought into corporations in order to prevent the workers from organizing.

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