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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

#91

Post by ptudan »

elektrontamer wrote: post #49
scottiebarnes wrote: post #24

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"?

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 t…

Corporations are not 100% efficient. I have seen so much favoritism in my short career. It's to be expected. A middle manager doesn't care about the company's bottom line, they care about maintaining/upgrading their own position. That sometimes means working towards the bottom line, but usually means working people relationships.

Those people relationships are affected by race gender etc. You really have NEVER seen someone get on a great project because they're better connected, even if they are a worse engineer than someone who doesn't fit in as well?

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

#92

Post by poszlem »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #88
poszlem wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe those statistics enough to get rid of the laws that prevent discrimination? If the stats are true, then surely companies, who are known to value monetary gains above all else, would take care of the problem of lack of diversity based solely on their market performance.

Textbook strawman argument, congrats

How is that a strawman? What am I strawmanning? I am asking if you believe those research papers enough to actually put on the line something you believe in. I am not creating a strawman, but giving you a conclusion based on what the OP posted.

If diversity actually increases profits (and not is merely correlated with it) then that should be a no-brainer.

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

#93

Post by brodouevencode »

scottiebarnes wrote: post #40
brodouevencode wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The law punishes overt instances of discrimination. I can hire all of x gender, x race, x religion, etc. for my 1000 employee work force. You won't legally be able to nail any kind of discrimination on me so long as I take care as to not leave evidence of it. In this instance, did discrimination occur? Did the law do its job adequately?

As far as I can tell DEI is self-imposed. Those who already don't care about discriminatory facets are the ones with DEI groups. The companies without DEI groups have HR departments that handle this.

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

#94

Post by linksnapzz »

poszlem wrote: post #62
scottiebarnes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law punishes overt instances of discrimination. I can hire all of x gender, x race, x religion, etc. for my 1000 employee work force. You won't legally be able to nail any kind of discrimination on me so long as I take care as to not leave evidence of it. In this instance, did discrimination occur? Did the law do its job adequately?

If there is no evidence of discrimination - how do you even know that it occurred? Are you saying that we should have people who decide what is and isn't discrimination without evidence? (since those, in your example, are not there).

EEOC can consider any sort of de facto discrepancy in racial distribution in hiring to be actionable discrimination.

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

#95

Post by elektrontamer »

unsui wrote: post #79
elektrontamer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

[flagged]

Complete and utterly false my good sir. Not only did you bring up an anecdote as an argument but you also accused me of being indifferent to the plight of others. I've personally known people who were discriminated on the basis of religion, my friend wears a headscarf, and I've been both sad for the discrimination she faced and happy when she inevitably, as a talented developer, got a much better position in the private sector. I went out of my way to encourage her to be more confident and showcase her achievements to our employer.

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

#96

Post by SuoDuanDao »

tristor wrote: post #46
adamsmith143 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 th…

An EDI advocate I talked to was of the opinion that lowering the bar was the best and only way to include more minorities in tech. When I asked her whether she felt the same about men in nursing, she said that nursing is a critical function and standards can't be lowered.

I'm pretty sure the casual racism and misogyny she displayed are par for the course among genuine believers in the EDI space, most just being better at dancing around it than she was. The idea that 'whatever those people are doing' isn't harmed by lowering the bar is probably a less obvious component of how the ideology perpetuates itself.

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

#97

Post by bart_spoon »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #27

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…

Once again, it is necessary to point out the difference between correlation and causation. Is it possible that simply bringing in people of different ethnicities into your company leadership somehow leads to more profitability? Yes.

But it seems far more likely the reverse is true. In a world where corporations want to demonstrate they are diverse and inclusive, and systemic forces are limiting the number of minorities who make it up the career ladders into leadership positions, minority leadership becomes a scarce commodity. The more profitable and successful a company, the more attractive the company and the more money they have to offer the limited number of minority executives for compensation, increasing the likelihood said executives join their teams.

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

#98

Post by turtlesdown11 »

poszlem wrote: post #92
turtlesdown11 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbook strawman argument, congrats

How is that a strawman? What am I strawmanning? I am asking if you believe those research papers enough to actually put on the line something you believe in. I am not creating a strawman, but giving you a conclusion based on what the OP posted. If diversity actually increases profits (and not is merely correlated with it) then that should be a no-brainer.

> Person 1 asserts proposition X. Person 2 argues against a superficially similar proposition Y, falsely, as if an argument against Y were an argument against X.

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

#99

Post by Volundr »

lordfrito wrote: post #68
Volundr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone is fireable. People who make it through large layoffs like to tell themselves it's because of the value they produce, but in my experience having been close to the decision making process on some of these it has a lot more to do with luck of the draw than anyone would care to admit.

> but in my experience having been close to the decision making process on some of these it has a lot more to do with luck of the draw than anyone would care to admit. I'm sure this happens, but it's not been my experience working for healthy companies. Been through a few attrition rounds myself. The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they h…

I caveated my statement because my experience in this is obviously limited, I doubt anyone has a wide view of the industry but...

> The process has always been, every single time: identify low performers, find reasons to fight for them to stay (do they have gifts the company isn't properly utilizing, etc.)

Strongly doubt this is done effectively in anything but smaller organizations. Imagine an organization the size of Google, doing this analysis effectively would involve consulting thousands if not 10s of thousands of managers, some of whom will be on the chopping block themselves. Organizations pretty much never want to telegraph these kinds of moves in advance, and looping that many people in 100% guarantees the entire process will be leaky as hell. Sure these organizations will play games with performance reviews to try to make some attempt at coming up with a more meaningful filter than a dice roll, but the accuracy is at best, questionable, and as we've seen in the recent layoffs a good performance review is a pretty weak form of protection.

Your second sentence even provides a perfect scenario around exactly the kind of randomness that comes into play

> essentially pruning unhealthy/unproductive branches from the tree trunk to keep the rest of the tree healthy.

High performer but working on a product the company has decided to de-prioritize? Bye.

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

#100

Post by za3faran »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #27

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…

Statistics 101: correlation does not imply causation.
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