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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

#181
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.

are you suggesting the company's staffing policy influences what users post? I don't agree the arrow points in that direction. or that there's an arrow between those topics at all

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

#182
post #88

DEI was a song and dance that companies put on for the media, politicians, investors, employees, and the public at large. Now anti-DEI is a song and dance for the exact same reason. If you have been in the business long enough, you will know that the company has NO ONE's interests at heart. Never had and never will. They will discriminate against any race they have to, whether majority or minority, if it leads to an…

This take is cynical to the point of wilfull ignorance. My spouse works in DEI and I guarantee you her and her coworkers are sincere and trying to instill better, less biased hiring practices and to make everyone feel welcome and part of the team. Not everyone is going to be the same but that's like anything else. Being 100% dismissive is as much of a mistake as being 100% unquestioningly accepting.

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

#183
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. Even if you desire, and want DEI programs to be meaningful, the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful. Reading the accomplishments in 2024 for our DEI program, it was essentially just marketing. Which has some level of value for sure, but the most valuable thing that came out of it was the number of conferences the head of the department went to.

> the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.

That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.

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

#184
I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1].

What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert?

In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way.

Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company.

However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview.

Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188

[2]: https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4?si=wtnQtBOE-fs4V7gR

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this about Twitter and Facebook but my experience is completely different. I believe the default experience is as you describe, but after I started following dozens of retrogaming groups, old games are all I see in both places. Even the ads became relevant and, believe it or not, interesting. I've clicked on a couple, which took me to small creators in the retrogaming and RPG areas.

The same is true with Reddit. The default feed is absolutely awful, but the bar required to curate something individually interesting and useful is too high for most new users, given the toxicity + banality of the default.

I finally quit my barren Twitter when the Musk takeover resulted in my feed being flooded with porn (including illegal content) and arabic carpet cleaning ads. I seriously doubt anyone's default Reddit front page has ever looked like that.

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

#186

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…

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

#187
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse".

And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.

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

#188
post #6

> We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone. The new(ly leaked) moderation guidelines might suggest otherwise...

Apparently they consider platforming hate speech to be beneficial because it could bolster sympathy for the groups being attacked. I wish I was joking. https://www.platformer.news/meta-new-trans-guidelines-hate-s... Alex Schultz, the company’s chief marketing officer and highest-ranking gay executive, suggested in an internal post that people seeing their queer friends and family members abused on Facebook and Instag…

A company would have to put me at gunpoint to make me say something similarly as insane. I'd sooner quit and give the entire place a massive middle finger.

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

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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

Agreed. Twitter is now awful, and I'm not even being biassed. I checked it out recently via xcancel.

The promotion of blue-ticks above everything has completely ruined it as the blue-tick has no correlation to quality - often the inverse.

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

#190
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/sexi…

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