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Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

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Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#121

Post by ericmcer »

romellem wrote: post #112

Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals." Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics: For our employ…

Did Costco ever have a diversity issue? I don't think people are worried about getting more representation among grocery store cashiers.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#122

Post by throwpoaster »

jandrese wrote: post #9
JohnMakin wrote: post #3

I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performativ…

It only seems bizarre if you didn't consider DEI programs to be largely symbolic corporate puffery in the first place. For all of the hate they received from some political spheres they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start, especially in larger companies.

Symbols can have a lot of political power.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#123

Post by cableshaft »

TSUTiger wrote: post #87
mempko wrote: post #73

I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.

[flagged]

Disagree, I still have my account and check it periodically when I get linked to something on Twitter and the feed and trending are both pretty crap (maybe it would be different if I used it every day, but I never used it every day, even when I created the account ~10-ish years ago. But my feeds are way worse than they used to be).

And it keeps putting things I really don't want to see in my feed, that aren't by anyone I follow.

Facebook has also gotten worse with its feed as far as sometimes injecting things into it I don't want, but most of it is still decent or at least relevant to my interests, and usually product or harmless news related (I get a lot of Kickstarter and mobile game ads, or celebrity gossip for some reason, even though I couldn't care less about most celebrities' lives) instead of political outrage and misinformation like I tend to get on Twitter.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#124

Post by gorgoiler »

Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none.

When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#125

Post by mmooss »

deadbabe wrote: post #100

Diversity should never be a goal or initiative. It’s a value. You wake up every day and practice diverse hiring practices. The moment you put a tangible target to hit, is when you gamify diversity into something bad.

How do you make it happen? Relying on people to "wake up every day and practice diverse hiring practices" wasn't working.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#126

Post by dmazzoni »

jandrese wrote: post #9
JohnMakin wrote: post #3

I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performativ…

It only seems bizarre if you didn't consider DEI programs to be largely symbolic corporate puffery in the first place. For all of the hate they received from some political spheres they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start, especially in larger companies.

Do you actually have experience with those programs?

Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.

As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.

That's just one example of what they do.

You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#128

Post by afavour »

ericmcer wrote: post #121
romellem wrote: post #112

Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals." Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics: For our employ…

Did Costco ever have a diversity issue? I don't think people are worried about getting more representation among grocery store cashiers.

I don't see them as different to any other company, really. I could imagine diversity in their staff of buyers would be useful, for example, to ensure they're stocking products that represent the different desires of different groups.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#129

Post by derefr »

JohnMakin wrote: post #3

I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performativ…

There were already actual commitments to diversity in most places, yes.

DEI programs, on the other hand, were basically a symbolic "party badge" that many companies and organizations felt compelled to adopt to keep scary people — often their own employees! — from suing them for discrimination.

That's the "political landscape" they are referring to — a political climate that allowed for even frivolous discrimination lawsuits to succeed, against companies already striving to minimize discrimination.

These DEI programs weren't "performative" in the regular "performing caring" sense that companies often do; they were "performative" in the Red Scare "performing Very Visibly Not Being A Communist, even though you were never a Communist" sense.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#130

Post by portaouflop »

TSUTiger wrote: post #87
mempko wrote: post #73

I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.

[flagged]

No thanks I won’t waste my limited lifetime tweaking some algorithm to serve me better ragebait.

Haven’t used any of these platforms in the last 5 years and I haven’t missed it a single minute - you should try it sometime

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