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Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

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Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#471

Post by salemh »

gigatree wrote: post #343
firefoxd wrote: post #184

I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1]. What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert? In addition to my job, I spent nights developing pr…

Has anyone asked why so many companies seem to care so much about the appearance of DEI? And all at the same time? I know there’s cultural shifts towards that sort of thing, probably to fill the void left by religion, but does that explain why the world’s largest private equity firms push them so hard? Seems like something everyone just accepts without question, even though it’s completely out of character for people…

[dead]

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#472

Post by whimsicalism »

specialp wrote: post #385
gorgoiler wrote: post #124

Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none. When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoin…

The start of the funnel is also the most racist and class discriminatory. Almost every school in the USA takes pupils from districts where the property owners pay the taxes for the schools. Rich areas get much more resources and support. Poor students get put into less funded schools and suffer from not having mentorship or peers to look up to. I live on Long Island and we have a majority white population. Despite th…

as someone who grew up attending a majority black school district, this is not really true.... underfunded majority minority districts typically more than have the gap made up by federal funds and the causal evidence on returns on education funding suggests extremely limited impact if any

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#474

Post by thefourthchime »

dijit wrote: post #435
65 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My controversial opinion is that I think "main" is more descriptive and intuitive than "master."

my controversial opinion is that it never mattered, all that really mattered was that there was a universal word- changing it to anything would cause at least a few hundred hours of development work and a few hundred additional hours of changing documents and tutorials and stuff. For what? Main isn’t better if the issue is racism, because “main” has some really negative connotations in Korea (“main” families having s…

Good point about the number of dev hours dedicated to this.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#475

Post by wyager »

pavl- wrote: post #198
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black…

One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in…

Extreme examples like this provide a nice attention-grabbing narrative, but they're not responsible for driving the central 99.5% of the workforce distribution

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#476

Post by cjohnson318 »

firefoxd wrote: post #184

I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1]. What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert? In addition to my job, I spent nights developing pr…

To underscore your point, I've met 5 black engineers in 13 years as a software developer. To put this in perspective, my high school was 50% black, and my college was 30% black. Somehow I got where I am, but almost none of my classmates were able to do the same. I don't know what the solution is.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#477

Post by thunder-blue-3 »

I'm not going to review the above, as I've had to much of DEI corp talk over the past decade. Given that, it’s likely no surprise that I’m glad to see it phased out. Throughout my experience, I witnessed underqualified engineers navigating FAANG companies due to DEI initiatives, accumulating significant wealth despite contributing little to released projects. I believe its departure is overdue.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#478

Post by dmurray »

JohnMakin wrote: post #3

I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performativ…

> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place

That seems unnecessarily judgemental about the true effect of the program. Maybe it was really effective and made Meta more productive and also helped many people from historically underrepresented backgrounds people get good jobs, but they're falsely claiming it's ineffective because that's what they expect the current political leadership wants to hear?

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#479

Post by wyager »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #200
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just common sense, or should be. Unfortunately common sense is as uncommon as people tend to joke about. So you get a lot of focus on business hiring practices, even though it's literally impossible to hire candidates that don't exist. Sometimes this gets taken to absolutely farcical levels. I recall reading a blog from an Irish writer about how activists were trying to demand that companies there hire black…

The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's just very difficult to affect these in the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole. Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered folks, come from how parents push their values onto their kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved int…

> the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole.

The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.

BTW, if you condition PISA scores on racial groups, any racial group (black, white, asian, whatever) scores higher in the USA than in any other country, except Hong Kong.

Re: Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

#480

Post by xvector »

purplethinking wrote: post #263
jandrese wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only seems bizarre if you didn't consider DEI programs to be largely symbolic corporate puffery in the first place. For all of the hate they received from some political spheres they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start, especially in larger companies.

DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc.…

This perfectly fits my old big tech EM who was totally incompetent and made life miserable for everyone on her team to the point where all but 2 people left (team of 12)

She also took back to back maternity leave throughout her time at the company, 3 times in a row, before leaving. Didn't even know it was possible to have kids that fast.

Conferences bend over backwards to have her speak. She has no clue what she is talking about but at least she gets to put it on her LinkedIn I guess.

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