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

Living in Atlanta with an open mind and friends with different political opinions (though pretty clustered around "moderate" to left), this subject has come up a lot. I'm a strong believer in both moral and business benefits for diversity, but what surprises me is the universal dislike of these efforts.

I believe the major problem is the role of optics in corporate environments. In a corporate environment people have to justify their existence, and visible efforts are prioritized. Unfortunately these visible efforts are not only superficial (they make the people running the initiatives look good, the company itself can posture, but not much changes internally), but also single out and "other" people. These initiatives can be doing good work behind the scenes too, but how do you judge someone doing a good job in this area? Metrics about hiring? Metrics about promotions?

Maybe it would be better if these initiatives answer to and be judged by the people they should be helping, and not to some success metrics thrown out during a board meeting or company optics. Instead of focusing on diverse hires, focus on supporting the diverse staff you already have. If it's a good place to work, the hires will come out of that.

I believe these efforts are ultimately a good thing, even if they're getting it wrong, but as a white male I hesitated to even write that, because I know how vastly different the experience of a minority in America is from my own, and from what I've heard it's a mixed bag. I always remember reading an interview with one of the little rock nine who said she felt forced to go to an integrated school and was still angry about it as an adult. It absolutely sucks to be in that position - something that's ultimately good for society but devastating for an individual. So while I think the general thrust of DEI is a good thing, it has to be tempered by the individual experience and always support people as individuals and not perpetuate lumping everyone in the "minority" bucket.

I said his struggles as a black man. As in being raised in poverty in the midwest (not a lot of opportunity for people of his background) and having no real shot at success in America other than selling his body.

For context, Intel introduced quotas back in the mid 2010s:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...

> Now, of course, the talk is of inclusion, not confrontation. And I was surprised to hear Intel—old-fashioned Intel—mentioned as one of the companies successfully innovating around gender. It had been releasing diversity numbers since 2000, though not with as much fanfare as some of its peers, and without much improvement. But in the past couple of years, Intel decided to try a few other approaches, including hiring quotas.

> Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a public company’s board members must be female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. “We never use the word quota at Intel,” says Danielle Brown, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or underrepresented minorities.

> Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.

TL;DR: Intel docked your pay unless you met a quota for women and URM hires.

Because the focus on ID Pol came after Occupy Wall Street started threatening the people in charge, by changing the focus from class to race, sex, and sexual orientation they manage to keep the middle and lower classes fighting each other instead of pushing against the fact that during COVID was saw some of the largest redistribution of wealth imaginable in this country.

DEI gets a lot of unfair hate because it's a fraught topic. It's a job, and like any job, some people do it badly.

People here complain about hiring and "agile" and which language smarter people program in and whether unit tests are a good use of time, but it doesn't rise to the level of vitriol that is applied to missteps and bad ideas in DEI. To me that shows that DEI is important but hard. Maybe the problem is DEI doesn't pay enough to attract people who can do it well.