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

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

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 504 posts

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

#431

Post by harimau777 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #267
dfxm12 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEI is not a law. I get how this misunderstanding is possible given how wildly the term gets thrown about by conservatives, like it is a boogieman that is the source of everyone's problems. Anyway, everyone is already ostensibly equal under the law, but, like you've recognized, we've still found our way into a system of racism (that goes beyond governmental discrimination). Logically, to recognize systemic racism, th…

With respect to education, I'm not attached to SAT scores. Pick any non racial metric of merit, and I'm OK with it. Income is fine, not a protected clause. Random is fine too. Just don't promote or penalize people based on race. With respect to jobs, if you agree the most qualified person should get it, we are similarly aligned. If you agree with all that, we are good, not matter what it is called. I just call it non…

The problem as I see it is that hiring the most qualified person for the job often requires DEI. That's because one of the primary goals of DEI programs is to attempt to ensure that people in different groups have the opportunity to demonstrate that they are qualified. That could take the form of trying to account for differences in how groups communicate their qualifications (e.g. certain neurodivergent people are likely to struggle processes that put excessive weight on ability to make small talk), trying to account for differences in access to opportunities to demonstrate qualifications (e.g. by sending recruiters to historically black colleges), trying to account for alternative was that people might be qualified (e.g. by trying to recognize how someone with technical experience form the military might be qualified even without a degree), or trying to avoid recruitment practices that are likely to favor people in the same group as the interviewer (e.g. being careful of basing hiring on "culture fit").

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

#432

Post by harimau777 »

rayiner wrote: post #408
wredcoll wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is terribly relevant given where the conversation has gone, but in your example, college admissions, race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates. I suspect that's how it ended up being used in a lot of places (aside from deliberate outreaches to encourage applications, etc). Beyond that though, I'm not sure not getting into harvard is exactly a "grave injustice".…

> race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates. That’s demonstrably untrue. At Harvard, an Asian candidate at the top decile of academic index scores had roughly the same admissions rate as a black candidate in the 4th decile: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti... The candidates were basically competing in entirely different lanes based on race.

Then that's wrong, Harvard should not do it, and it would be good to try to create/enforce regulations that prevent them from doing it. However, that doesn't mean that all DEI efforts are bad.

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

#433

Post by harimau777 »

leereeves wrote: post #258
chneu wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DEI is just giving other people the chance to setup the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people in a white dominated society. It isn't a law. It's just looking at history and going, "They'd probably be as successful if there was a pipeline for those folks to get there, since that pipeline doesn't exist we need to represent them to allow the pipeline to be built." You also don't seem to fully know wh…

> the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people There is no opportunity pipeline for white people. There is an opportunity pipeline for a small number of well connected, wealthy people who can get their kids into elite prep schools starting from kindergarten. It's not open to working class white people. Edit: that doesn't mean no working class white person can succeed. Just that the prep school, elite…

That's where the idea of intersectionality comes in. A person who is white and poor might be worse off than someone who is black and rich; however, someone who is black and poor would likely be worse off than both of them.

That's also why DEI advocates generally don't advocate focusing exclusively on race. Instead they generally advocate that DEI focus on many factors such as race, wealth, disability, sexuality, gender, military service, etc.

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

#434

Post by AnthonyMouse »

harimau777 wrote: post #409
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…

I think it's probably some of both. Certainly a lot of inequality is economic in a way that is independent of race. However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with…

> However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture.

For this to be a major factor you'd need some explanation for the over-representation of Asian Americans in many lucrative fields in the US. Shouldn't they otherwise be seeing a significant negative impact from this?

> I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.

The issue is that the rules are often created without respect to how they impact smaller entities, or are purposely designed to impair them at the behest of larger ones.

A lot of regulatory overhead is reporting requirements. Reports from small entities are typically going into a database never to be read by anyone ever. But you still have to spend time filing them, and then they'll stick you for filing fees even though you're just uploading 2kB of text to a website, and the filing fees are the same whether you're a sole proprietorship or Walmart.

The rules are often completely nuts, e.g. you can be ineligible to collect unemployment if you were self-employed but you're still legally required to pay for the unemployment insurance coverage. Some states have paid leave policies that assume every employer is a bureaucracy large enough to absorb the cost of hiring a temporary employee while concurrently paying the one on leave.

There are also tons of rules that are simple enough to comply with if you know about them, but with no reason to expect them to exist and a book of regulations which is thousands of pages long and full of rules that don't apply to you, the first time you find out can be when you get a fine or somebody files a lawsuit. In many cases these will be some kind of reporting or registration requirement that exists for no good reason, but exists nevertheless, e.g. did you remember to register a DMCA agent, or list your physical mailing address when you sent that email? These things aren't actually protecting anybody, they're just a trap for the unwary.

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

#435

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wredcoll wrote: post #419
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

That seems rather unlikely, you have any data to back that up? Someone else linked this article https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic... > For the 2015-2016 academic year, the average GPA of all students applying to medical schools was 3.55 and the average MCAT score was 28.3 according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). > The middle set of bars in the top chart ab…

That link shows that (presumably in order to meet diversity targets) black applicants with a GPA of 3.2-3.39 had nearly the same acceptance rate as Asian applicants with a 3.6-3.79 GPA. 0.4 points is an entire standard deviation for GPA.

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

#436

Post by AnthonyMouse »

harimau777 wrote: post #415
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people. Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without ha…

While many regulations exist due to regulatory capture, many also exist for good reasons. Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist. I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major bar…

> Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.

What health and safety reason requires a 3% processing fee for credit card payments? Why is it unsafe for the proprietor to live in a room in the same structure as a restaurant in some areas, but not in other places that have different zoning?

The only thing that comes close to a health and safety issue is requiring a licensed electrician, and that's still a racket because they make it infeasible for you to get the license yourself even if you're willing to learn the material.

> I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.

In the absence of these rules, you start a restaurant out of your home and do the work yourself and the capital you need to start out is predominantly the things you already need in order to have food and shelter. These regulations add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional capital costs for the purpose of constraining supply so landlords and contractors and banks can extract more money.

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

#437

Post by Izkata »

harimau777 wrote: post #426
Izkata wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In your example, no quotas would result in all 14 hires being those with a qualification of 100. Congrats, got all 5 minorities without quotas!

Now for some thing more realistic: Instead of making those 14 candidates all perfect, distribute them a bit more randomly and only hire the top 10. Without quotas you'll end up with around 4 from the minority group and 6 from the majority group. But if for example your quotas are for 50/50, you have to exclude 1 person from the majority group who is more qualified than the 5th person from the minority group to reach it.

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

#438

Post by AnthonyMouse »

harimau777 wrote: post #425
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring.

That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.

> 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.

How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.

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

#439

Post by AnthonyMouse »

harimau777 wrote: post #417
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people. Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without ha…

> Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business? Because conservatives won't let us. Literally the most famous slogan associated with leftists is wanting regular people to "own the means of production." Most leftists would be THRILLED by programs to help anyone get access to capital.

The single largest capital requirement for most new small businesses is real estate, and is real estate because mixed use zoning is prohibited in the vast majority of areas in the US, requiring the proprietor to separately pay for somewhere to put the business and somewhere to live. Zoning is a local regulation and there are very many localities completely controlled by Democrats, so why does this continue to be the case?

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

#440

Post by jocaal »

harimau777 wrote: post #429
milesrout wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

> but are often conditioned by society to act differently

Mind expanding on this a bit?

Post reply on HN