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

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

#181

Post by syzarian »

ejstronge wrote: post #113
azangru wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 obtai…

I really like your phrasing:

problems that are not our fault but are now our responsibility

That’s a very nice, concise way of summarizing the essence of the issue.

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

#182

Post by HideousKojima »

chuckhendo wrote: post #35
spangry wrote: post #21

> 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.…

This take is radically wrong, and you're just reinforcing OP's insecurities. How do you know that OP has a job at the expense of a white person? How do you know that OP isn't in fact the best candidate for the job? You're making a whole lot of assumptions here that are bordering on outright racism

While it's not certain that the OP was hired over a white person, it is mathematically certain that DEI policies cause whites to be discriminated against in aggregate.

1. There are fewer qualified black and Hispanic candidates per capita (i.e. without a college degree, without the right experience, etc.) than white and Asian candidates. The cause of this is irrelevant to the argument, it is factually true.

2. There are a finite amount of positions at any given company paying any given amount.

3. If companies hire a larger percentage (beyond a certain margin of error) of black and Hispanic candidates than actually exist in the hiring pool then they must commit racial discrimination against whites and Asians in order to accomplish this. You can try to redefine racism and discrimination as "prejudice plus power" or whatever you want to justify the fact that you mistreat people on the basis of their skin color, but factually that is what is being done.

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

#183

Post by cycrutchfield »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #132

Hiring preferences for PoC is discriminating against all not PoC. It is in practice exactly what these initiatives claim to be fighting, bigotry.

Who is talking about hiring preferences? Why are you mischaracterizing diversity programs?

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

#184

Post by jimbokun »

HideousKojima wrote: post #115
monero-xmr wrote: post #25

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 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.

> and they still try to use as money proxies for race

But that's completely legitimate. If black people (for example) are systemically poorer than white people as a group, it makes sense to give them more help.

It's favoring a wealthy black person over a poor white person, that's arguably problematic.

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

#185

Post by LegitShady »

tjpnz wrote: post #14

Tangential to the current discussion but why do I always sense a reluctance to include matters relating to social class in these programs? When I bring it up during D&I discussions I'll usually get blank stares, and in one instance there were crude comments made about needing to beef up building security first.

your employer doesn't want you talking about social class because they're the ones who have to pay you enough to get out of one class into another. It's much easier if they talk about your DIE 'identity' instead of paying you more.

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

#187

Post by bradlys »

backzerman wrote: post #129

I'm seeing a lot of claims here that DEI initiatives are about actively hiring under-qualified under-represented candidates to change the demographics of the company. I've sat through a lot of DEI sessions at work (as have many of my friends), and I've yet to hear of anyone actually _hiring_ under-qualified candidates for the sake of a quota. The DEI sessions I've sat through have focused heavily on the I--inclusion.…

We’ve hired people at my jobs (big tech to startups in SV) that were underqualified because of diversity measures. If we had ran them through the typical interview gauntlet with the same rubric, they wouldn’t pass. We often changed the interview format or the rubric when presented with someone who was URT pool.

I’ve talked to enough managers who complain about lackluster employees and how they’re not fireable because the person is URT. It’s a thing - even if we all like to think it isn’t. Your best effort is to manage them out.

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

#188

Post by scythe »

xienze wrote: post #43
_fat_santa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> actually hire some folks from diverse backgrounds Because you’re trying to hire from a small pool of candidates (minority software developer or whatever) that EVERY OTHER tech company is trying to get in a desperate attempt to not look bad (because not having a sufficient number of minorities on staff is a sin). It’s simply a question of numbers. There’s only so many minorities, and only a fraction of them are suff…

When this topic comes up I always remember a friend's comments about Google shuttering their Atlanta office: they say they want to hire Black employees, but not "where they actually, you know, live". It's not that hard to find employees of color; they just tend to live in different places. It's also not necessarily easy to move somewhere nobody looks like you — which I also experienced as a white guy in China.

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

#189

Post by ejstronge »

azangru wrote: post #166
ejstronge wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obtai…

> So what does one do if you wish to have a level floor? Let me offer you a different metaphor about levels :-) In Greek mythology, there was a character named Procrustes. He had an iron bed of a certain size, to which he strapped his captives, and if they happened to be taller than the bed was long, he cut off their legs to fit the bed; whereas if they were shorter, he stretched them to fit the bed tearing their sin…

I appreciate your analogy and I will politely remind you that in American history, members of certain classes did indeed have limbs cut off or their body parts stretched for arbitrary reasons.

In fact, this practice only really ended in the 1960s; controversially, one might even say that this practice continues to today.

So what do we do when confronted with an anecdote from antiquity versus system inequities from our modern era?

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

#190

Post by dbrueck »

asimpletune wrote: post #120

Honest 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…

A big part of the problem is that it's not really a problem for companies to solve. Or, put another way, it's nearly impossible for most companies to address the problem in a non-ham-fisted way; arguably they end up doing more harm than good.

Opinions vary wildly on how much of a problem still needs to be solved, but to the extent that it's still there, it's a societal problem. The most effective ways to address it are going to be in the education of each new generation, both formally (in schools), but also informally (in family discussions, in media, etc.).

Ultimately, anything that boils down to judging people based on something like the color of their skin has great potential for being harmful and counterproductive.

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