Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

> If I were a white man with the same experience, I might not even be here?

I can understand how DEI initiatives might undermine your self-esteem and I'm sorry you are made to feel this way, but take solace in the fact that you have a job. Imagine how the white guy who was excluded from employment because of his skin color feels. That's who the real victim is here - the person who was racially discriminated against.

> In my opinion, it would be beneficial if DEI initiatives were confidential and kept "hush hush" within a company.

Personally, I prefer companies to be loud and proud about their DEI initiatives so that I know which companies engage in racial discrimination, rather than it all happening behind closed doors.

>They should be putting their money where their mouth is and sponsoring scholarships/internships/apprenticeships.

I worked at a BigCo that did all the usual DEI garbage and their only initiative that actually had results was the one where they spent a bunch of money sponsoring "women in stem" stuff at the high-school and college level.

It boils down to a core philosophical difference - do you want to emphasize equal access to opportunity, or do you want to emphasize equal outcomes? Some would argue it isn't an either-or thing, and we can do both at once, but I argue mandated equality of outcomes is insidious and causes social strife.

If you are a minority and get hired, and the company has an explicit policy of hiring N% of minorities, then you will always wonder (as will all other employees) whether you were hired because of your minority status or because of your actual skills. This is very bad for morale and self worth.

I don't think the minorities themselves were consulted. Perhaps it is being instituted by a minority, but they do not represent the preferences of people they purport to help with these policies.

I think the UC university system has it right because they ban racial preferences for admitting students. While overall the percentage of certain racial minorities is lower there, those that do get in feel accomplished and deserving. This is a better outcome for society and personal self worth.

I have a close friend who expresses similar sentiments sometimes, as someone who is sometimes the target of DEI initiatives.

I've seen DEI hiring initiatives abused to paradoxical ends. Once department administration got into an attempt to basically hire someone using funds set aside for DEI, essentially with the plan to terminate them later, just to collect the support monies that came along with the position. The situation was complex but none of this had to do with hires' actual competence, it had to do with the available pool and this zealotry in unit aims at the time (basically the minority applicants were all working in areas different from the types of projects administration thought people should be working on).

In any event, it created this disturbing situation where an attempt to increase DEI by the higher powers that be was actually having the opposite effect on a hire arguably, by creating this opportunity for unit management to use them for support funds with no actual intent to support them in their career or keep them around long term.

Whenever my company has had conversations about DEI initiatives, I always come back to the same argument: "talk is cheap, we can talk all day long about how we are diverse. How about we shut up, put our money where our mouth is, and actually hire some folks from diverse backgrounds".

DEI is something that is easy to talk about but actually kinda hard to implement. Part of the problem is the makeup of the industry in general. In tech for example it would be physically impossible for companies to be 50/50 male/female because the broader industry doesn't break down that way, same goes for any race, religion, background, etc. Companies love to scream from the rooftops about DEI because yelling about it is significantly easier than actually doing it.