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IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

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Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#391

Post by Cerium »

ghaff wrote: post #155
MyPasswordSucks wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that? Yes, and in fact one of the most popular was from IBM itself [1], released in 1944. > The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes. It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhea…

Of course it was typed by a secretary. At a computer company I worked at starting in the mid 1980s it was not unheard of for some execs to have their admins print out emails for them and type in the handwritten responses. This was an internal-only system. No external email.

As of 2010 it was not unheard of for old civil engineers to have their secretary print all email and maps, they would redline them, and the response would be typed or scanned as appropriate.

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#392

Post by wredcoll »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #364
wredcoll wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances. I feel like it's easy to notice the examples where it stood out. A survey of all the actual results might (or might not!) change your opinion. That being said, it's easy to say stuff like "everyone should be treated equal…

Not everyone should be treated equally, because not everyone behaves the same. Everyone should get the same opportunity to excel or fail, but you shouldn't treat excellence the same as failure or mediocrity. Talking about how to encourage more excellence... now that's an interesting conversation.

That's fair, I did mean "equal opportunity". But yes, it is an interesting conversation. It's also a hard conversation because people really don't like hearing that they were born on third base and might have to forgo some benefits that other people are being allocated.

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#393

Post by mcphage »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #170
harimau777 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue that I have is that I've almost never seen an anti-DEI advocate actually engage with the issues. Even if I ultimately disagreed with them, I could respect someone who was willing to look at the problems the US is having with inequality and present a reasoned argument for alternatives to DEI. However, what I usually see is people either ignoring the issues people are facing, ignoring the arguments put forth…

I don't like DEI and am willing to engage. The US has a huge disparity of outcomes along racial lines. This is a legacy of slavery as well as social and governmental discrimination following slavery. [Racial biases persist today, but are much better today than the past, and we should focus on elimination of those biases, not adding new ones.] These factors result in real disparity in capabilities and merit today. Thi…

> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit.

That sounds nice, but that’s not what our laws and institutions are doing, nor is it the direction they’re moving in.

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#394

Post by fzeroracer »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #337
__egb__ wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm against different criteria for people based on race. Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2]. In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination…

I would 100% support blind screening and application where possible. Also educating recruiters and diversifying pipelines. My job had the latter, and I supported it. What I don't approve of was my annual bonus depending hitting on targets for % minority hires. That shouldn't be on my mind when I'm interviewing candidates.

Blind hiring does not actually work, it's essentially Recruitment Theatre as a way of making you feel like the interview process is more fair when it's actually more discriminatory.

There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.

So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#395

Post by wredcoll »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #341
wredcoll wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm against different criteria for people based on race. People keep saying this. It's such a nice and simple statement. "All men are created equal!". It's the details of real life where you tend to run into issues. Are we allowed to measure what percentage of various races get to go to harvard? If we find an oddity can we correct it? How do you fix both the existing racial biases and the previous history of racial…

I addressed this above, I explicitly said it exists, but getting better. You help people break out of poverty and ensure they have actual merit. You don't establish separate requirements and treatment based on race.

So, like, those programs exist. People are trying to help others break out of poverty. But we happen to live in a nation where a specific group of people were denied advantages most/everyone else got, for a very long time, explicitly based on skin color.

Is trying to boost certain candidates based on skin color the best way to do it? Obviously not, in a perfect world we would have a more complex and accurate system. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'm betting 90% of the people who yell about "DEI" on the TV are not "concerned that this is an imperfect way of solving the problem".

This comes up a lot in these types of threads. It's fine to acknowledge someone might have identified an actual problem. It's theoretically possible for Trump to tell the truth, if only by accident, at least once. But there is a huge difference between agreeing that something might need to be fixed, and handing power to people who want to tear it all down.

There's, dunno what to call it, maybe naivety, in places like this, where you see, a certain attitude that's like "well isn't perfect so lets get rid of it and then maybe someone will do it better next time".

There's a bunch of issues there, but the biggest one is that usually it took years and years and hundreds if not thousands of people's efforts to get the current solution in place and if you just tear it down, it'll take the same amount of effort if not more to get something else done.

Obviously some solutions do more harm than good and so the correct answer is to remove them. I'm unconvinced, say, harvard considering race as a factor when choosing people to admit is actually doing harm to anyone, much less so much harm that we need to have a culture war over it.

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#396

Post by trogdor »

mcphage wrote: post #386
trogdor wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Equity is important As I understand it, “equity” in this content generally refers to equality of outcomes between groups. I don’t see why that is desirable, important, or even possible. Would you explain why you believe that equity is important?

> I don’t see why that is desirable, important, or even possible. Are you okay with being in one of the groups where the outcomes are worse?

I am not sure what you mean. Would you give me an example?

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#397

Post by wredcoll »

leereeves wrote: post #374
Larrikin wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if demanding leveling for everyone is a distraction so that it never gets leveled for anyone? Similar to now is not the time, thoughts and prayers, etc. It also never seems to be a problem that businesses don't need everything leveled for all businesses. The PPP loans were all taken up by people with lawyers that could quickly jump on all the money, and didn't actually help many of the businesses that needed it.

Perhaps it is for some people, but I'm serious. I'd like to see the economic playing field leveled. I was pissed when I saw the Democrats use racism and sexism to sideline Bernie Sanders and real economic change. Remember "Bernie Bros"? Biden's "black firewall"? DEI is a defense of classism.

> DEI is a defense of classism.

That seems like a pretty far-fetched claim.

You say you want to see the economic playing field leveled, does spending time and energy trying to tear down the existing DEI systems get you closer to that goal or farther away?

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#398

Post by scoofy »

trogdor wrote: post #371
scoofy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a conflation in the idea behind this comment that drives me crazy. This version of equity based on race is using race as a proxy for outcomes in life that are actually based on a wide variety of factors. Equality based on race is treating peoples race as equal. The idea that we care about equity is important , but using race as a proxy means we need to care especially about the proxy and making sure the prox…

> Equity is important As I understand it, “equity” in this content generally refers to equality of outcomes between groups. I don’t see why that is desirable, important, or even possible. Would you explain why you believe that equity is important?

It means equal outcomes for arbitrary groups. We should expect fairly similar outcomes for groups based on arbitrary differences. If we don’t, it should concern us.

Non-arbitrary issues should obviously affect outcomes, but the prevalence of melanin should affect skin cancer rates, not incomes.

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#399

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wredcoll wrote: post #389
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery. If you then want to buy books for people who can't afford them, that's an entirely different proposal than giving the job to someone who isn't as qualified.

> The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery. Well, an athletic competition would make more sense because that actually determines whose the best. We don't test heart surgeons to see who the best is, we test to see if they…

> Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.

When you have a competitive major university that gets thousands of applicants and you base admission strictly on test scores, you'll end up accepting only 1% black applicants because their test scores are lower for various reasons. If you wanted to accept 14% black applicants as reflects their proportion of the US population, you would have to be turning down other applicants with significantly higher test scores. It's not just about accepting someone who got a 1520 instead of a 1530, the difference is hundreds of points.

Re: IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge

#400

Post by leereeves »

wredcoll wrote: post #397
leereeves wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is for some people, but I'm serious. I'd like to see the economic playing field leveled. I was pissed when I saw the Democrats use racism and sexism to sideline Bernie Sanders and real economic change. Remember "Bernie Bros"? Biden's "black firewall"? DEI is a defense of classism.

> DEI is a defense of classism. That seems like a pretty far-fetched claim. You say you want to see the economic playing field leveled, does spending time and energy trying to tear down the existing DEI systems get you closer to that goal or farther away?

Closer. There are a lot of people who are happy to see classism continue if they can use their race or sex to get an advantage in that system. I don't believe economic equality has a chance until the Democrats abandon DEI.
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