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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

#261

Post by threeseed »

glimshe wrote: post #132
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.

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.

I run a number of business X accounts which are post-only.

The very second the US election got underway all of our accounts started to heavily promote right-wing political content. Even though we specifically said when we signed up that we aren't interested in anything like that.

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

#263

Post by purplethinking »

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.

DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.

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

#264

Post by alickz »

wussboy wrote: post #152
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/sexi…

DEI seems to me to be the _opposite_ of blind auditions though, where instead of hiding immutable characteristics in the hiring process, they are factored in

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

#265

Post by thfuran »

niftaystory wrote: post #258
firefoxd wrote: post #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 pr…

[flagged]

That's a bizarre take. Something doesn't have to be useful forever to be of use. And mechanical printing presses were probably one of the most significant inventions ever, even if they're obsolete now.

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

#266

Post by llamaimperative »

morkalork wrote: post #259
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…

You're absolutely correct and I think it's what drives all the resentment about DEI programs. People aren't dumb, when they see some group only makes up 3% of the population of engineers and they see a program trying to balance senior positions, they're going to feel its unfair bs. What's really interesting is that almost every woman I've worked with professionaly isn't from North America, they're all from India, Ira…

Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on down the funnel.

There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes elsewhere in the system... obviously.

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

#267

Post by dijit »

pavl- wrote: post #198
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black…

One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in…

I’m 35 now, at no point in my career have I ever been in an environment that would have tolerated that, school- college or workplace.

And I haven’t been trying exceptionally hard to avoid it.

If such jibes had happened those people would not have a job, point blank.

Given the average seniority for a full stack engineer is 10 years, I should have encountered at least one, or worked with someone who had been in such an environment.

I think chud behaviour is an excuse, because it’s not tolerated for at least my lifetime.

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

#268

Post by thfuran »

linotype wrote: post #256
bko wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people say DEI programs were purely performative and just for political points. But these policies did change the corporate landscape and affect hiring decisions. Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color This data came from workforce demographic reports submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by 88 S&P 100 companies Hispanic individua…

So it was racist?

Depends what the applicant pool looked like, but 94% seems almost certain to be an overcorrection.
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