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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

#151

Post by ceejayoz »

jandrese wrote: post #29
ceejayoz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone unfamiliar: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee... > “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the revised company guidelines read.

> common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’ Are they still mad over the couch thing?

"That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry."

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

#152

Post by wussboy »

loeg wrote: post #56

Good to hear. Racism / sexism has no place in hiring practices and was always illegal.

I feel like people who say this haven't read the research about our unconscious biases. My personal "hit me on the head" moment was reading about the Cincinnati Orchestra who started auditioning candidates behind a curtain and suddenly found their ratio of male:female went from 3:1 to 1:1. No one at that organization was consciously discriminating. Everyone thought as you did that they were acting without racism/sexism. And yet (at least) sexism was obvious once they removed it from the hiring equation.

And this leaves people in a quandary. How do you control for sexism when you can't just hide your candidate behind a curtain? The solution society has tried is to mandate ratios. Why they tried this makes sense. It's obvious downfalls make sense. I'm not aware of any other suggestion that is viable.

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

#153

Post by jollyllama »

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…

> unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.

Disagree, right wingers will be satisfied by this performative posturing even though there's no real change to existing policy.

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

#154

Post by timmg »

From the memo:

> We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.

I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your executive bonus will take into consideration how close you got to X." In a world like that, many (most/all) executives will do whatever they can to get to those goals -- even if it goes against other official (or even legal) policies.

And that certainly would explain a lot of the behavior I saw working at a large company during DEI peak. (Not to say that is any kind of proof of anything untoward).

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

#155

Post by npteljes »

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.

I agree that it's a bad goal, in terms of how it being a goal corrupts the value itself. Like in Goodhart's law, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". But managing a larger entity cannot realistically be done via values, I think. Different people have different interpretations of the same values, and not sharing the values 100% in the first place, so, the values will need to be formulated into more tangible things, like goals, limits, directives, laws, ect. Will not be ever perfect, but I doubt that we have better tools to achieve it.

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

#156

Post by spike021 »

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.

perhaps it goes without saying but they don’t only employ front line store staff.

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

#157

Post by npteljes »

gorgoiler wrote: post #124

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 entrypoin…

I think these efforts need to be done at every level at the same time, and I agree that the "lower" or "earlier" levels need to be prioritized. Similar to how prevention is usually preferred to reaction.

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

#158

Post by pesus »

jandrese wrote: post #29
ceejayoz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone unfamiliar: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/meta-new-hate-spee... > “We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’” the revised company guidelines read.

> common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’ Are they still mad over the couch thing?

They are always incredibly upset about extremely mild "insults". There's a 50/50 chance you get downvoted for pointing out their weirdness.
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