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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#311

Post by badpun »

fzeroracer wrote: post #284
badpun wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a problem exactly? What problem is that causing to society? Mind you, there's plenty of women in tech (and often in business or managerial positions, directing those white and asian programmers), they just don't go through the CS degree. I personally don't blame them, my CS degree at least was really super boring and mostly just a way to get an easy and well paying job. And men care about both money and t…

> And men care about both money and technical things much more than women Stop this. These arguments are not only making massive assumptions but they are historically and factually wrong. In the history of computing and computer science women formed a large chunk of computer science graduates and programmers. This decline started in 1984 when the culture and advertising shifted to market computers and such as being f…

Both facts that, on average, women are less interested in things (and more interested in people) and also women, on average, are less interested in money, have a solid backing in research. They're not factually wrong.

The field of software business changed rapidly in the 80s. It shifted from a fairly boring and low-paying thing, into an unpleasant and high-pressure field where fortunes were made, even for regular employees (the stock options lottery). Salaries also went way up. It was only natural that men became much more interested in it at that point, and women's interest waned (they're far less inclined to kill themselves in a pointless job to get that $500k salary).

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#313

Post by Cyberdog »

sascha_sl wrote: post #273
purpleblue wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not those with a disadvantage. It's strictly based on skin color. That's the problem. You have no idea if they are disadvantaged or not. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-class Black families these days. Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.

Disadvantage is not solely based on wealth, though it does play a large part. If you presuppose that giving disadvantaged groups an extra chance is a positive (your argument sort of does already) and only use wealth as a factor, isn't it still a net positive to uplift the typically poorer group? Doesn't that rightfully uplift more people than it does "wrongly"?

I notice that you only use the word “group” above and not “people” or some older word acknowledging that that’s what these groups are made of.

Why judge people by the groups that were born into when we could be judging them as individuals instead?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#314

Post by skrbjc »

logicalmonster wrote: post #2

According to the Microsoft 2021 Annual Diversity And Inclusion report, 34.9% of employees identified as Asian in the US, far exceeding their overall representation in the US population. Why are Asians doing so well? Why can't we replicate this for other groups? And doesn't trying to hire more of other races imply that mathematically speaking, fewer Asians must be hired and promoted to achieve greater equality? Please…

Who's "WE" in your view? There was not top-down effort to get Asians to excel in the US, it was due to their own desires and efforts.

I think it also explicitly proves the point that companies in the US are not racist. If they cared so much to only promote whites, why do they promote Asians?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#315

Post by pc86 »

wyager wrote: post #147
systemvoltage wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed, perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I concept and move forward with complete blindness to race, culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals of operations of a company – i.e., just focus on…

Companies aren't doing DEI because they feel like it. They're doing it because if they don't, they will be punished by the state. The way this works is that there is a patronage relationship between the grievance HR class and certain political actors. If you fail to hire enough DEI HR people to suck revenue from your company, the state prosecutors hit you with all kinds of hiring discrimination lawsuits. It's sort of…

I can't even imagine what it must be like to live in this kind of contrived world.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#316

Post by epicureanideal »

noasaservice wrote: post #181
epicureanideal wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t appreciate the casual racism in your post.

What's "funny" about your comment is that there is no "white" race. "Whiteness" was created in a Virginia 1691 law to be "not negroe and not indian". Naturally, that also expanded to be not: Jews, Asians, sometimes not Italians, usually not Irish, and absolutely no indigenous people of any sort. Defining yourself by what peoples you exclude is the core kernel of racism. And that's what "white" means.

These poor tactics of rhetoric do not justify racism. I don’t believe this was an intellectually honest response.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#317

Post by tablespoon »

omegaworks wrote: post #257
tablespoon wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe. > Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright. That doesn't follow. If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work and will cause pointless problems in the meantime. > That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the fai…

>If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work and will cause pointless problems in the meantime. So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work, we should throw it away. Sounds like a newbie dev throwing a tantrum over having to build on a system with legacy code. >the bar was far higher for firing a diverse employee with performance issues, which followed f…

> That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI objectives." Was that bar for performance standards explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here, hyperbole?

The person simply couldn't do the job and was profoundly incompetent, and the response was to that was to repeatedly be told to spend more time training them. My friend had previously successfully terminated a white employee who was under-performing but turned out to be more competent than this one.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#318

Post by skrbjc »

seti0Cha wrote: post #236
winternett wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of statement is this? D&I is supposed to be comparatively balanced to the society is serves. Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success. D&I is not a terrible paradigm that needs to be dismantled just because some companies take it to far, it's no different than accounting or other functional considerations withi…

> Minorities are essential within companies to prevent bias in their marketing and product development that can be fatal to business success. Is there any reason to believe this is true and not just conjecture? This always struck me as kind of far fetched.

It's just one of those things that gets repeated so much that people just start to believe it.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#319

Post by faeriechangling »

comex wrote: post #132

> You might imagine this policy doesn’t bias the hiring process, since managers are still free to choose who to hire after interviewing the diverse candidates. But because of the number of applicants, most are rejected based on their resumes. Imagine diversity candidates are 1% of the applicants but 15% of those interviewed. This gives those candidates opportunities to do well in interviews that their peers with simi…

I'm so tired of this crap where we pretend discrimination isn't discrimination if we jump through a bunch of hoops. Yes asians being told they can't come to interviews because they're too asian is racism and it does impact their chances of seeking employment because how you do on any given interview is going to be to a degree random. You could get a coding test you've never seen before or one you practiced the night before.

The whole song and dance about applying racism at the interview selection stage isn't about not being racist, it's that there isn't court precedent that specifically makes that illegal, but there is for other more direct techniques like racial quotas.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#320

Post by systemvoltage »

pc86 wrote: post #315
wyager wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies aren't doing DEI because they feel like it. They're doing it because if they don't, they will be punished by the state. The way this works is that there is a patronage relationship between the grievance HR class and certain political actors. If you fail to hire enough DEI HR people to suck revenue from your company, the state prosecutors hit you with all kinds of hiring discrimination lawsuits. It's sort of…

I can't even imagine what it must be like to live in this kind of contrived world.

I kind of agree with OP. Lot of the D&I initiatives are CYA from lawsuits and we have built regulations so that D&I are instituted permanently by law.

I hope SCOTUS strikes all of this down.

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