On a tangent... but has anyone here had some success in correcting their unconscious biases?
Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
111–120 of 898 posts
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#112(Black man here) Two things can be true at once. I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on. That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aim…
Growing up on IRC, I have very much the same experience as you but quite opposite as I experienced hardly any racism, and nobody knew my identity either.
Nobody wanted to involve their personal lives or details until recently when identity and identifying became the thing.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Please take a moment and reflect on why these sorts of initiatives exist. These sorts of initiatives are trying to cure a racial or sexual bias with a different sort of racial or sexual bias. How does the question "why they exist" help those of us who think, in Kant's deontological terms, that racial or sexual biases are wrong?
Very respectfully, I do not read Kant - and I wish I had the opportunity to do so in the very poor high school I attended.
Please consider an old house you may buy if you live in New England or Europe. Sure, if you were building a new house everything should be plumb and level. But the house you’re able to buy in old cities is not brand new. So what does one do if you wish to have a level floor? We add shims to obtain some objective reasonable result, accepting that to get to a this result we must try to address systemic problems that are not our fault, but are now our responsibility.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#114I have heard first hand from trans hires that they KNOW their job is to 'be diverse', and there's no reason to grow technically or professionally - just coast and fail to get fired.
Everyone reasonable hates that shit.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#115It 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 wil…
>I think the UC university system has it right because they ban racial preferences for admitting students.
The UC system only did so because they were mandated to by law (specifically a voter initiative), and they still try to use as many proxies for race as possible in order to try and be racist in their admissions policies.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#116About 10 years ago I had an incompetent colleague, but she was a woman of native American ancestry, with a lot of visible tattoos and she was a lesbian. She was passed on from one department to another every couple of years to check a lot of diversity boxes and not to spend too much time the headcount and budget of any department. She was actually a cool person, in my opinion, but she had a fame way bigger than the real person. I looked for her in the internal directory, but she is not around anymore or she changed the name.
The big problem with diversity hires is that good people that are hired will be automatically tagged as bad people. It is hard to fight this image and prove it wrong, especially when it is widescale in some places and it not just based on race, but any diversity target. For example my country is almost exclusively white (with a couple of non-white celebrities as exceptions), there are legally no trans people so the pressure is to hire women, lots of them (70-80% is the desired target). That fires back visibly, the really good ones leave the company, the bad ones remain (to cash in on their gender) and this makes the image even worse.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#117I've always found these telling when companies bandy around with "DEI great!"... All the while the C-levels are 'white male sausagefest' except for the DEI position, which is invariably a black woman. I like seeing real diversity at all levels of a company, and not the fake diversity pushed by DEI initiatives.
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Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#118"...it would be beneficial if DEI initiatives were confidential and kept "hush hush" within a company." "...is nothing short of corporate virtue signaling." It might be most beneficial for individuals if it's kept-low key. It's best for the company to scream it to the world. Or at least that's what the leaders think right now. Personally, I think any medium to large company that talks about DEI and isn't addressing t…
I've seen quite a few people angrily push back on statements like 'pipeline problem' and I don't understand why. Obviously there's more to it than that, but it's also that (with hard numbers to back it up).
I think it’s because focusing on the pipeline problem focuses on the parts of hiring that a company doesn’t have control over. Those decisions often happen in high school and tech companies don’t have direct influence in these decisions.
Instead, companies are better off focusing on making the later parts of the pipeline less leaky. Minorities tend to leave tech at a higher rate than average due to factors the company has some control over.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#119(Black man here) Two things can be true at once. I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on. That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aim…
Are you joking? We were absolutely not “virulently” anti-anyone on early IRC.
We didn’t even have real names or photos. Nobody had any idea who was behind the keyboard, and that was okay.
Re: Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company
#120Honest question for the crowd. Obviously DEI or affirmative action-esque initiatives are not perfect. But is there something better that could be done?
Asking bc I went to a good school that had affirmative action. It was for years that I just assumed it was racist, even if it was helping poc. Then it dawned on me in my last year that it was also benefitting me. That if the govt hadn’t done something to intervene, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to know any poc until I was an adult.
(For those of you wondering, a lot of Americans are born in highly segregated communities, where there are few (or even zero) poc, like many suburbs, and it’s not by choice or fault of their own)
Anyways, without that experience and diversity in college, I would have been very deprived. So, I’m not saying OP doesn’t have a point. I just want to share my pov and ask what else can be done? In an almost selfish way, as a white guy born in the suburbs, I am extremely grateful that I had a chance, even if by intervention, to go to a diverse college. I take it for granted now, but I shudder to think what school would have been like without that.
So what’s the better alternative to diversity initiatives? Which is the least evil option?