91–100 of 504 posts
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Merit seems to be highly subjective given that the people in current US administration are all hired based on merit.
The merit they evaluate for is loyalty to the leader, not academic merit, or some other measure.
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There's a whole section of the article titled "DEI'ing inside" where they explain some tactics that fit the bill. Of course nobody said the phrase "DEI purge", that's the author summarizing it for a headline. I'm not really taking a stand on whether it's accurate or click/rage-bait, just saying this is standard writing style to summarize things into themes and it appears they have the content to back it up in the art…
No, it's misleading: > IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge Because the rest of the items in the headline are labor related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired, whatever that means. People in this comment section who did not read TFA are commenting on "DEI" firings, even though there's nothing in TFA about that. It's a little worse than clickbait IMO.
No. the implication is that DEI policies are being watered down or removed
The general reasoning given by a lot of these companies is that WFH did not work. Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up. I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.
I work for a company that made a big deal about how well it worked. The CEO and chief people officer both made a lot of public statements about it, during and just after covid. They did this claiming they had the numbers to back it up and said numbers but they basically made them up. It was PR and they were using it to aid recruiting into what was and is a company that young people avoided. What numbers they did have…
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Merit seems to be highly subjective given that the people in current US administration are all hired based on merit.
...damn, that's a legitimately sick burn that's also a prime example of why "Meritocracies" are a bad thing on their face. "Whose merit? What is merit? Why is X merit but not Y? How come person A's merit is worth less than person B's?" Your response was beautifully eloquent.
Most systems that work with standardized tests, while they can systematically fail to capture certain types of talent, are fairly objective - "if you're in the top 10% on this test, then we take you". The format and subject matter of the test is known in advance, people are free to prepare for it in whatever way they want.
Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', with examples dating back to the Chinese civil service examinations during the Sui and Tang dynasty (from around 593 AD). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
The general reasoning given by a lot of these companies is that WFH did not work. Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up. I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.
Having worked at a fully remote company before (and during) COVID, I'm surprised so many companies have stuck with it for so long. IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc. Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it'…
I've personally worked at 4 different companies since early 2020. Not everyone does WFH well. Many pretend they do, but don't. Even those that do it well, do better when they meet regularly in person (have some hybrid model). Some teams/departments/functions are better at it than others, but companies as a whole I think perform better when the people have personal connections and relationships across the org. In a remote WFH situation, over time, through natural attrition, new people are onboarded and never actually meet anyone in the company and this becomes a large portion of employees that are very loosely connected in terms of their interpersonal relationships/network and this weakens the organization. I can see how that is fine in a individual contributor role of SWE, but for most roles, in most departments, it doesn't play out well (or takes a very special/rare personality trait to actually do it well).
I am curious if anyone can find the text for "IBM's Policy Letter #4" written by IBM's chairman in 1953, which is referenced in this article. I did some searching but all the links I found to the full text were broken. I ask because I think it shows what a Rorschach test the arguments over DEI have become. I at least found one quote from the Policy Letter #4 which stated "It is the policy of this organization to hire…
> I am curious if anyone can find the text for "IBM's Policy Letter #4" written by IBM's chairman in 1953, which is referenced in this article. https://web.archive.org/web/20110409171021/http://www-03.ibm... It has both the original typewritten scan and a searchable-text version right underneath.
Does anybody have any other insights?
I am curious if anyone can find the text for "IBM's Policy Letter #4" written by IBM's chairman in 1953, which is referenced in this article. I did some searching but all the links I found to the full text were broken. I ask because I think it shows what a Rorschach test the arguments over DEI have become. I at least found one quote from the Policy Letter #4 which stated "It is the policy of this organization to hire…
However, what I usually see is people either ignoring the issues people are facing, ignoring the arguments put forth by advocates of DEI, or substituting slogans for arguments.
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They’re not wrong. The tension is that on average, dark-skinned folk have lower merit — because of racism in the past that limited their educational opportunities, and also because it’s hard for a child to lever themselves into a higher socioeconomic group than their parents. Among a number of other reasons. Equity vs. equal opportunities; I’m sympathetic to the latter, but what do you do when the opportunities were…
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Hey, look at that, it's an If Books Could Kill alum!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-am...
The general reasoning given by a lot of these companies is that WFH did not work. Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up. I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.
First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc.
Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road.
And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.