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

theregister.com

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

#421

Post by wredcoll »

rayiner wrote: post #335
wredcoll wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the chart says: > Acceptance rates for students with slightly higher and slightly lower than average GPAs and test scores are displayed in the other columns. In other words, the table above displays acceptance rates by race/ethnicity for students applying to US medical schools with average academic credentials, and just slightly above and slightly below average academic credentials. So, uh, what? The argument is t…

> The argument is that it's now awful and horrible that average black students are accepted more frequently than average white students? Who cares. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 cares.

Presumably by your logic it would also care if black students weren't being accepted at an average rate? This is a silly conversation.

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

#422

Post by Izkata »

mcphage wrote: post #406
Izkata wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pulling from the 30% of applicants that matches the quota will always be a smaller pool than pulling from all 100% of applicants.

Say you’re looking to hire 20 people. So you pick the 20 best, and you end up with the 17 best men and the 3 best women. Of course you claim to be gender-blind and it just happens that you got 17 men and only 3 women, these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault. Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire t…

Unless the top 20 people only had 3 women, which is totally possible if there were 200 men and 30 women in the total applicants. In this case, you just discarded 7 more qualified men to get 7 less qualified women. Now in terms of average skill across your hires, it looks like men in general are more qualified than women and you're reinforcing the sexism, not fighting it.

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

#423

Post by harimau777 »

grumple wrote: post #324
abracadaniel wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think definition is definitely an issue in the debate. What you’re describing I knew as affirmative action. I’ve only understood DEI as being willing to hire from diverse backgrounds, implemented by posting job positions in diverse areas like HBCUs. I’ve not personally seen any examples of different criteria for different people. Is this actually documented as something companies with DEI initiatives were doing pos…

Google "diversity quotas" or "hiring targets". If you are explicitly demanding a disproportionate number of minority candidates, you are disadvantaging other candidates.

That's the thing, DEI advocates generally don't advocate for diversity quotas or hiring targets and such practices are not common. For example, when I went through the DEI portion of interviewing training we were explicitly told that we were not allowed to hire people of a certain group in order to try to improve diversity.

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

#424

Post by nradov »

ryanobjc wrote: post #297
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-DEI argument is that modern racial disparities are predominantly caused by economic circumstances, e.g. black people are more likely to be poor and then less likely to have to startup capital to start their own business or be able to afford to attend a high status university. The same applies to white people who don't have affluent parents. "White people who grew up poor" are under-represented at the top of…

So you said "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities" This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business". Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm no…

Access to capital is hardly the reason why it's hard to start a business. I know two first-generation immigrants who started a landscaping business with a used pickup truck and a few tools. They reinvested their earnings in the business and now run multiple crews servicing properties all over the area. So it's not a unicorn tech startup but they seem to be doing pretty well. Anyone willing to work hard can accomplish something like this, no talent required.

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

#425

Post by harimau777 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #410
mcphage wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you’re looking to hire 20 people. So you pick the 20 best, and you end up with the 17 best men and the 3 best women. Of course you claim to be gender-blind and it just happens that you got 17 men and only 3 women, these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault. Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire t…

You're assuming the men and women being judged on a different scale is the only way you can get a disparity to begin with. Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?

I don't think it necessarily has to be all one thing or the other. For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring. Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.

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

#426

Post by harimau777 »

Izkata wrote: post #416
harimau777 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that necessarily follows. For example, if 20% of some minority are qualified and without quotas only 5% would be hired, then a quota requiring hiring 10% wouldn't result in unqualified candidates. That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.

I never said unqualified. I used relative terms like less skilled, for example the 5% in your example that wouldn't have been hired without quotas. The non-quota'd hires in that example, that the additional 5% displaced, are now also more likely to be of higher average skill (since you need less of them and can drop the bottom of the candidates), making a bigger disparity between the quota'd group and the non-quota'd…

I don't think that actually changes anything. Lets suppose that we can measure qualification on a 100 point scale.

Lets say that there are 5 people in a minority group with a qualification of 100 and 9 people in the non-minority group with a qualification of 100. If 1 person from the minority group gets hired and 13 people from the non-minority group get hired, then a 5 person minority group quota would result in an increase in the qualifications of the people hired.

Of course in reality is more complicated since companies don't always hire only the absolutely most qualified people in a given group and it's not easy to even define objectively who is the most qualified. However, that doesn't matter to the point that I'm making which is that even a quota (which again most proponents of DEI don't want) doesn't necessarily result in hiring less qualified candidates.

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

#427

Post by nradov »

derf_ wrote: post #333
s1artibartfast wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech br…

Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, or that employers couldn't do better with writing job postings. But I've found that a lot of corporate training content is total BS, often based on a single low-quality study that was never reproduced. When the results seem "truthy", people tend to believe without being sufficiently critical.

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

#428

Post by harimau777 »

nradov wrote: post #424
ryanobjc wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you said "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities" This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business". Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm no…

Access to capital is hardly the reason why it's hard to start a business. I know two first-generation immigrants who started a landscaping business with a used pickup truck and a few tools. They reinvested their earnings in the business and now run multiple crews servicing properties all over the area. So it's not a unicorn tech startup but they seem to be doing pretty well. Anyone willing to work hard can accomplish…

I don't think it is necessarily that simple. A pickup truck, a few tools, and enough time or savings to spend starting a business is a lot more than many people have. Then there's survivor bias; while it may have worked out for them, how many people did it not work out for. Finally, there's the issue that not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Someone has to actually work at the various businesses that exist and are being created.

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

#429

Post by harimau777 »

milesrout wrote: post #346
derf_ wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals... One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech br…

[flagged]

What people usually argue is that men and women are the same in many ways but are often conditioned by society to act differently. That conditioning is what people are generally critical of and attempt to change via things like DEI.

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

#430

Post by nradov »

harimau777 wrote: post #428
nradov wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access to capital is hardly the reason why it's hard to start a business. I know two first-generation immigrants who started a landscaping business with a used pickup truck and a few tools. They reinvested their earnings in the business and now run multiple crews servicing properties all over the area. So it's not a unicorn tech startup but they seem to be doing pretty well. Anyone willing to work hard can accomplish…

I don't think it is necessarily that simple. A pickup truck, a few tools, and enough time or savings to spend starting a business is a lot more than many people have. Then there's survivor bias; while it may have worked out for them, how many people did it not work out for. Finally, there's the issue that not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Someone has to actually work at the various businesses that exist and are be…

Regardless of what you might "think", it really is necessarily that simple. If you try hard enough you can always find plausible excuses for failure.
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