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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

#331

Post by trabant00 »

onion2k wrote: post #285

For example, I know I'm talented - I've got the projects, certs, and experience to back it up. I think a lot of people who are relatively new to tech (less than 20 years experience) fail to realise that DEI measures were invented to tackle literal racism and misogeny in tech hiring. Companies would routinely screen out resumes from people whose names weren't white enough or who were a bit too feminine. You could have…

> Companies would routinely screen out resumes from people whose names weren't white enough or who were a bit too feminine

Could you provide any details on this? I've been in tech for more than 20 years and never heard of anything like what you stated.

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

#332

Post by flippinburgers »

version_five wrote: post #97
NickC25 wrote: post #33

> but creating townhall meetings and parading your black/brown employees around like show ponies is nothing short of corporate virtue signaling. It doesn't just undermine the self-esteem of a PoC, it undermines the self-esteem of white folks, too. Hiring or promoting people due to their skin color is just wrong, no matter what skin color that is. As a white dude, seeing my PoC teammates in the past celebrated not for…

> PoC > White folks I just want to mention that one of the worst aspects of all this is trying to sort people according to (here apparently a binary) label. There is not really such thing as either of these categories - it's stereotyping of the worst kind, and takes us back many generations

Didn't you get the memo? We cannot "move forward" until we properly asses people based the the fantastically shallow marker that is skin color!

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

#333

Post by sequoia »

(a bit tangential to your point, but I think related:) "...that leads to what I call the Iron Law of Woke Capitalism: brands will gravitate towards low-cost, high-noise signals if these are accepted as a substitute for genuine reform."[0]

Companies engage in these practices (IMHO) from a mix of genuine desire to "be good" and do the right thing, as a marketing exercise, and as PR insurance against charges of racism. If you get "called out" on twitter for being a racist company (for whatever reason) you will probably fare much better if you can point to your diversity initiatives & goals, diversity officer etc.

That said I think most individuals are acting in a genuine well-meaning way.

It is disturbing to me that (as you point out) the initiatives we have to promote inclusion may end up stigmatizing the people that are intended to be "included."

0: https://helenlewis.substack.com/p/the-bluestocking-woke-capi...

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

#334

Post by seneca »

John23832 wrote: post #213
bradlys wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 solution is simple, hire better minority candidates. There are minority candidates who can thrive at all levels of tech. Nobody is telling your to hire subpar candidates. That's on your company's lazy implementation of their inclusion efforts, not on DEI.

This is the classic excuse. "Bad outcomes aren't the fault of X, you're just doing X wrong" even though X always leads to the same bad outcomes.

When an initiative fails, the solution is rarely to do more of it.

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

#335

Post by Vaslo »

We need to get started with recruiting PoC much earlier in their careers. I almost never get resumes from african americans beyond entry level. I get why this happens - I fell accidentally into my career - my parents were blue collar and knew nothing about careers in business and couldn't help me. I imagine this is the same for other groups. If people really knew what was out there, like if I knew what the path was in business for IT, Finance, etc I'd be further ahead in my career. Force your HR teams to get out to schools with minority groups and volunteer your time to visit these groups and talk about careers.

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

#336

Post by kenjackson »

seneca wrote: post #303
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.…

> 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. That's because it's often illegal, and most people find it immoral. It's the "quiet part", if you will. I've been in a hiring role for a decade, and I can tell you that it happens at every company I've been at that has a DEI program. Many o…

I’ve seen just the opposite. We always hire the best candidate. Sometimes the question will come up. : “why were there no POC brought in to interview?” They want to know about where we recruited from. But our hiring was never questioned.

That said I hired way over industry average in females. But under for POC. But I probably got slack for all the female hires. All of whom were the best we interviewed.

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

#337

Post by spoiler »

trogdor wrote: post #308
John23832 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, that's your experience. But I was sharing mine, and those of the other minorities I know very well.

How do you know the experience of other categories of people very well?

> EDIT: In the below thread are many people who personally identify as omnipresent IRC Gods, so my experience must have happened in an alternate universe. My bad.

There can only be one omnipresent IRC God, and you're talking to them. You can wipe your ass with your experience for all they care.

My lord, the lack of self awareness...

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

#338

Post by shadowgovt »

catiopatio wrote: post #139
shadowgovt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The old saying was "The beauty of the Internet is nobody knows if you're a dog." ... except they didn't mean dog, and we never said why it might matter what you are or what other people were assuming you were absent further information.

No, we literally meant dog. It was a joke. Why might it matter? Because the rest of the world was a lot more racist and sexist, but IRC wasn’t.

> but IRC wasn’t

No, sorry, I was there. That's the key thing people need to remember about the Old Internet.

Some of IRC was extremely racist and sexist. Almost all of the rest was "regular" racist and sexist. It was pretty closely related to 4chan culture (under-moderated by outside forces that had little power to force any particular standards upon the moderators). The magic of the medium was that since everything was text, nobody knew you were the butt of the joke and you could pretend you weren't.

But go mask-off and admit you were a woman or a minority, and oh boy. Good luck with that. Good thing it's easy to change your handle, right?

There's a reason anonymity as a virtue grew in that space: it protected people from those who hadn't left their IRL baggage behind by letting people pretend to be the "default" (which was almost always white men).

We made a mistake believing the online space wasn't the real world. It was. It was just the real world where you could pretend to be something else. That was good at the time; it let more people participate by donning masks. But we should aim for better.

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

#339

Post by wereallterrrist »

What a great time for a thread like this to pop-up and remind me why I basically want nothing to do with this fucking community. I gotta stop making this mistake.

Sorry to those that took the time to share their experiences and then were told "no, you're wrong, here's why". Nothing will change here, good luck.

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

#340

Post by kohanz »

This is a great topic and I support the OP for posting it.

However (and as a PoC myself), to me, "Tell HN" is generally reserved for alerting the community to statements of fact (e.g. "Tell HN: AWS us-east-1 is degraded").

This post is an opinion - albeit an informed opinion based on experience. You might ask: "What's the big deal?". To me, the problem is that posting "Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company" tries to make it sound like the post speaks for all POC.

The post is a good one and it's an important discussion, but I do wish it would be framed a bit differently. For example, simply "DEI initiatives undermine the self-esteem of some PoC within a company"

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