Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 898 posts

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

#371

Post by rsj_hn »

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'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.

This is exactly what DEI is, and I guarantee you that your own company, if it is of any substantial size, systematically hires under qualified candidates because of DEI. It would require a hermetically sealed reality-avoidance filter to not notice this. While there are some people who walk around with these filters on, the vast majority of people do not, and will readily tell you exactly what DIE is about once they feel safe enough to speak honestly with you. Listen to them.

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

#372

Post by tacitusarc »

John23832 wrote: post #90

(Black man here) Two things can be true at once. I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on. That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aim…

I see a different risk with DEI, and I’d sure love your perspective if you’re willing to give it. I think there’s a certain class of people (mostly young and white though the fact they are white is explainable as a statistical artifact) who feel empowered by DEI to push for changes that are meaningless and burdensome, but give them a feeling of power and virtuousness. This includes changing away from “master” as a branch name, to creating an extensive list of taboo words such as “whitelist”, “blacklist”, and “subordinate”, to chiding colleagues for saying “brown bag lunch”*.

DEI not only legitimizes, but actually encourages the above behavior. This seems problematic to me for two reasons: first, it creates a positive feedback loop for (at best) actions that make one feel self righteous without adding anything of real value, and second, it undermines the importance of critical thinking and analysis in engineering.

So, all that being said, the justification is these changes help make black people in tech feel more included, a goal I support. In your opinion, do these changes have the intended effect? Are they meaningful and useful?

* For those who don’t know, there used to be a racist practice by some fraternities, etc called a “brown bag test” where a brown bag was used to judge skin color for entry. This made brown bags racist, which in turn made brown bag lunches racist.

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

#373

Post by odiroot »

catiopatio wrote: post #119
John23832 wrote: post #90

(Black man here) Two things can be true at once. I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on. That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aim…

Are you joking? We were absolutely not “virulently” anti- anyone on early IRC. We didn’t even have real names or photos. Nobody had any idea who was behind the keyboard, and that was okay.

What I loved the most about IRC is no one cared about your age too! I was very passionate about tech since early primary school. But I couldn't really share this passion with anyone, being a little kid.

Once I got dialup (in middle-school) and could join IRC channels, I realised, no one would know, how young I was. It felt great.

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

#374

Post by bradlys »

m348e912 wrote: post #364
oytis wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO the right way to implement diversity is to get more underrepresented people into the funnel, not lowering the bar. But it requires resources that startups might not have/might be unwilling to allocate.

>>the right way to implement diversity is to get more underrepresented people into the funnel, not lowering the bar This is the best comment in the thread. If you have a diverse funnel you will have diverse employees and as long as you maintain standards, they will be well qualified for the job. This includes internships and job training programs.

Eh, the resume stack is fundamentally flawed. A lot of URT are never going to go into tech because they just don’t want to. It’s a large cultural issue.

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

#375

Post by anonymouskimmer »

willcipriano wrote: post #229
John23832 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some places are targeting percentages of certain races that exceed that races representation in the general population, let alone the population within a given field. It may be that the demand exceeds the supply.

As an under credentialed, relative to the general population very smart white guy, I doubt the demand for any group exceeds the supply. It just might involve searching outside of the range of the lamppost. Gasp, horror, it might involve internal training as opposed to expecting people to hit all the marks for a position on their prior labor and education. It might involve hiring a lot more entry level positions than advanced positions, regardless of the needs of the moment.

The best I've seen as a person who's not part of the DEI team is cultivating relationships with universities with large numbers of URM students. But that's really still just searching slightly outside of the range of the lamppost.

Are you straight up going to small towns and offering scholarship opportunities? Going to college fairs (no, not hiring fairs at colleges, but the fairs that high school students go to to find a college) and marketing what jobs are available at your company for majors of certain degrees? These are just off the top of my head; I'm sure there are a lot better, and tested ideas out there.

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

#376

Post by goatlover »

domain8543 wrote: post #289
moomoo11 wrote: post #176

I wish we would transcend to a point where we look up to people based on their achievements and separate their race from it. I’m Asian btw. I can relate to Lebron just as much as I can relate to Neil Armstrong or Satya or Matz or Woz or Marie Curie because they are all excellent at what they did/do. I want to be excellent like them. Because we all are humans.

Lebron's struggles as a black man in America are a huge part of his success story. Not just that he's excellent at what he does. Pretending that race doesn't exist does not actually work in practice. LeBron himself will tell you that.

Lebron plays in a league that's majority black in the footsteps of Michael Jordan, who was the most famous athlete on the planet and on the way to being a billionaire and owner. Lebron was anointed Jordan's heir while still in high school, and he got drafted straight into the NBA with the #1 overall pick. He's had numerous huge endorsements over his career.

Exactly how did he struggle as a basketball player? White Men Can't Jump was a 90s movie, and back in the 80s, Bird was a the great white hope as redneck from Indiana, because the top players were mostly black, and Bird was even called out as unathletic by Dennis Rodman and Isaiah Thomas after he won a playoff game over them in Detroit.

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

#377

Post by Dooflegna »

John23832 wrote: post #90

(Black man here) Two things can be true at once. I have built great things. I can stand on my own. My merits are great. I do not want to be the token employee that is trotted around for Diversity Points (tm). I do not like the diversity porn that a lot of these DEI groups get off on. That being said, I do recognize that I have benefited from these groups (at least at their most genuine). There are groups that are aim…

> 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.

It's amazing how blind people can be to experiences that don't match their own. And when you _tell_ them what has happened to you, point at the preponderance of evidence out there about it, they still don't believe you.

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

#378

Post by ModernMech »

seneca wrote: post #334
John23832 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> X always leads to the same bad outcome

X does not always lead to the same bad outcome here though. That is, DEI initiatives that increase diversity while not lowering the hire bar do exist. That some particular company decided to lower their hiring bar doesn't indicate that DEI initiatives always cause companies to lower their hiring bars.

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

#379

Post by hunter2_ »

slackfan wrote: post #240
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.…

>actively hiring under-qualified Oh it's absolutely been done. I have very strict color and gender-blind hiring standards, because I want to hire the actual best people for the job. My filtering of candidates has absolutely been overruled by (white) upper management, because they needed to make the department I was in more $diverse, for whatever that means. The punchline is that I'm not white. I've since moved on fro…

I think the idea is that even if blind hiring makes for the best possible employees on an individual basis in the short term, loosening that optimization in favor of diversity is a worthwhile pursuit because the company actually will thrive more when you look at long term collaboration (conversations and opinions that draw from a larger variety of life experiences can improve user advocacy, for example) and the possibility that amazing potential employees down the road might pass on applying to companies that aren't so diverse.

I see the irony in using protected characteristics for profit, but it's a win-win...

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

#380

Post by mwcampbell »

shadowgovt wrote: post #338
catiopatio wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Saying we should aim for better sounds nice, but I fear that bias and prejudice based on things that shouldn't matter is an incurable part of human nature, and anonymity, and using text for everything, would be our best defense. I say "would be" because I doubt that I can convince a large enough percentage of people, including my own cofounder, to use anonymized text chat for important things like interviews and work conversations. Especially the "text chat" part since, at least for now, talking is still much faster and smoother for most of us than accurate text input. But I can dream.
Post reply on HN