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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#381

Post by guhidalg »

tomp wrote: post #365
rrradical wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates. Two people growing up in different places (not different cities…

This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people use this perverted logic. But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism. Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty. So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.

Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are less likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#382

Post by Dig1t »

I work at a different FAANG and it seems like more and more the only news that we get from corporate is related to DEI. Also a lot of hiring details are now hidden from ICs. It used to be that you would be apart of the interview panel as an interviewer and then you would get together with your team afterwards and everyone on the team would vote yes/no and that would pretty much be it. Now it’s made by a manager elsewhere and you have no idea why the decision was made.

I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.

We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all. Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us.

It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome. To quote Kamala Harris’ recent remarks “to make sure everyone ends up in the same place”, i.e. “equity”

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#383

Post by topaz0 »

yucky wrote: post #260
mikkergp wrote: post #18

Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diver…

>They mention an increase of from 3% to 5% of membership of senior black leaders. So now instead of those 3% being seen as having earned their position, all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage. So now it's not only unfair to the people excluded based on skin color but it's unfair to those who benefitted strictly because of the perception they now have to deal with as having not really earned thei…

> all 5% will be seen as having been given an unfair advantage.

Only by the kinds of people who tend to assume the worst about Black people.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#384

Post by max51 »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #292

This is how literally everything in corporate America works. You start with a good idea. It gets turned into a metric. Targets for this metric are assigned at various levels in the management hierarchy. Bonuses are made dependent upon meeting the target for the metric. Eventually everyone forgets the initial objective and just focuses on managing the metric. I work in consulting, client satisfaction is obviously very…

You missed the part where after a few years of cheating the metric, getting "above average" satisfaction (4 out of 5) from a client is considered a failure and a manager 3 levels above you will personally come asking what went wrong with this client.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#385

Post by faeriechangling »

rrradical wrote: post #287
Manuel_D wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So minority candidates are given an advantage in getting their foot in the door, but still have to prove themselves qualified for the job by doing well in interviews. Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Imagine I tell my recruiters to exclusively interview white Catholics, and I respond "well, those white Catholics still had to pass the skill-based interview. Had we…

> Discrimination in selecting who to interview is absolutely a form of discrimination. Exactly. That's what the parent comment is saying. But they are thinking about the entire funnel, not just the end of it. By the time a slate of candidates reaches a company's hiring process, there has already been an immense selection bias against minority candidates. Two people growing up in different places (not different cities…

>The article points to a rising black employee population has some kind of evidence of injustice

I agree, it is incoherent for people to say that certain racial groups being over-represented doesn't mean the system isn't fair, but blacks suddenly being hired is evidence the system isn't fair.

>So a good thing to do is apply some pressure on the funnel

With racism... and honestly this entire process is annoyingly indirect... just apply a racial quota and don't BS me.

> Now obviously the best thing would be to fix all the other environmental factors that led to an all-white candidate slate.

People sure are obsessed with this narrative that affirmative action is all about preventing too many whites from getting jobs. This isn't the 60s, most of the people who are getting the bump are asian not white and it's not even close. This narrative doesn't work because it's nearly impossible to explain how asians ended up in the span of around a century ended up way behind whites and getting discriminated against to shooting past them in income.

> Unless we think that skin-color is a predictor of performance (ugh, I hope no one actually does)

If you claim that people can get worse healthcare, worse schools, worse safety, worse opportunities, and know less connected people and still think they perform equally at a job? Well you actually are still predicting performance, you're predicting that certain groups are stoic supermen. Whereas other groups are a bunch of losers who couldn't even be better at their job despite growing up with every advantage in the world. So not only have you not gotten away from predicting performance based on skin colour, now you're also predicting privilege based on skin colour, so you've doubled your race based assumptions.

Personally I'm just so done with the racist theories and the mental gymnastics people play around this data. If people want to reserve jobs for people of different identity groups, fine, lets do it for the sake of racial harmony so we can all sing songs together holding hands interracially in a circle.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#386

Post by BlargMcLarg »

guhidalg wrote: post #381
tomp wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice way to excuse your racism. A lot of people use this perverted logic. But at the end of the day, it's still evil racism. Different "worlds" (neighbourhoods, schools, health care) doesn't happen because of skin color, it happens because of wealth/poverty. So if you apply a racist filter on top of the (implicit) wealth filter, you're just being racist against poor Asian & white people.

Ya you are, but you know white people and Asians are less likely to be poor compared to Hispanics and African Americans so reality is fighting against your argument.

Reality isn't fighting against their argument as long as a single white or Asian poor person exists. It still means an approach is punching a part of the population further down.

These things aren't mutually exclusive, stop trying to project them as such.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#387

Post by dijit »

peter422 wrote: post #360
dijit wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is overly hostile and I don't really want to engage with it because of that. To answer the question as coldly as I can: 1) Women are graduating from nearly all University programmes more than men.[0] 2) The role of Doctor is not as highly paid or prestigious as it used to be, at least in Europe.[1] [0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin... [1]: https://www.paragona.com/healthcare-jobse…

Quoted post unavailable.

Actually it seems that the evidence is against you.

In the most unequal societies (Russia[0], India[1]) the tech industry is much closer to gender parity than in the west.

Sweden has gone further than any other nation on earth to be equitable across gendered lines yet remains extremely unequal in the actual working model. (In my former employer 14% of applicants were women, yet they constitute 20% of employed staff due to excessive D&I initiatives).

I should be self interested, we’re talking about competition for work. It would be death to roll over. Jobs are absolutely zero sum-

However my argument is backed by statistics, so I think you need to face the reality in front of you.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39579321

[1]: https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-employment-tr...

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#388

Post by invalidOrTaken »

peter422 wrote: post #272
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 obviously care about being doctors and lawyers more than women, too, of course for the same reasons. 60 years ago >90% of lawyers and doctors were Men and because the desire to be a doctor or a lawyer is mostly dictated by a person's gender those statistics haven't changed at all!

The Last Psychiatrist: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w...

>I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#389

Post by topaz0 »

origin_path wrote: post #301
weakfish wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a very large leap in logic, if I follow… are you saying the parent is communist for using the term reactionary?

They are. kardianos is observing that the situation is very similar, that history is rhyming if not repeating. Woke racism/sexism (DEI) is frequently referred to as neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism because when examined it turns out to be closely related to Marxist thought, with race/gender/sexual attributes substituted for class. Beyond this somewhat trivial difference there are many clear similarities: 1. The insist…

Have you read Marx then? I'd love to hear about the core dialectics of the "race theory of value" in your words if so.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#390

Post by coryrc »

ealexhudson wrote: post #350
Manuel_D wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You addressed the wrong argument. The intent is to give groups that are disadvantaged in the hiring process a chance. The intent is equity. Your example distorts that by shifting the balance in favor of an already advantaged group. Then anonymize the resumes so that recruiters can't tell which candidates are men or women, or which is white, Asian, Black, etc. You don't eliminate discrimination by setting caps on ho…

Blinding an interviewer by changing pitch/modulating the voice does little to erase the actual disadvantage. Few are arguing "people that sound like women are discriminated against", they're saying that the systems are set up in such a way that there is a bias against women that encompasses the evaluation of their experience, their work profiles, the topics they're interested in, the projects they've completed previo…

> That's a systemic disadvantage women suffer.

That's, perhaps, a systemic disadvantage mothers suffer. Tilting the tables advantages childless women most of all (and would be illegal discrimination against men, were the law to be enforced). Similar to how Ivies' affirmative action helps the children of African despots more than disadvantaged Americans.

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