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

> There's also the fact that most (read: all) of the computing pioneers are white.

Would you count Katherine Johnson as a tech role model?[1]

But I agree with you. The old IRC culture gave the illusion of equity since by default your face isn't seen. But the rose-colored glasses overlook that once a person's age, race, or sex became known they'd be treated differently. And it often was not pleasant because as we've seen the pseudonymity tends to make people, who already generally suck at being kind to strangers, even more awful.[2](warning: language)

That's the reason we should have DEI. If the implementations of it are flawed, that should be a motivation to make the programs better. Think of it as fixing bugs in the human codebase.

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

[2] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

It's very different.

Being roasted for being a moron was something where it was/is allowed to stand up for yourself. I know that when people thought I was male, I was allowed to give as good as I got as long as I knew how to take an L once in a while and had a thick skin. Arguing and insulting back is accepted and a lot of the arguments can be conclusively settled in some way. Even if you pedantically argue for something incorrect long after you should, you can usually make amends by accepting you acted like a dumbass and letting people clown on you for it.

The shit I got for being female was different because it was a bunch of projection that I had no way of addressing. There are a lot of people who are just plain not okay with the opposite sex and could not handle being turned down. The most vile crap was spewed in private and then it turned into 'he said/she said' or 'I/we can't control what members say or do outside of the channel/forum/newsgroup'. Ambient sexist atmospheres could not be diffused by giving the guff back as places that are 90/10 male to female do not respond well to the women clowning on the men: You can't answer 'get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich' with 'get back to the factory and make me money' because the men fall in line to support each other. You can't answer it by bringing it up seriously because then you're a buzz kill, etc. It's not two equals arguing; it's one side being told to shut the fuck up.

If there's no actual problem to be solved here, isn't this just the same sort of virtue-signalling OP is accusing the entirety of DEI of? Which is ironic, because my understanding of the matter is that diversity has been studied and found to correlate with increased profitability. Even if you zoned out through DEI training, inclusion should be a no brainer— you'll retain employees who feel like they are part of your organization. Equity is probably a little harder (and the part people get hung up on), but frankly, I haven't seen any numbers to convince me that we're approaching anything near equity so again I ask: what is the problem to be solved here?

Is it really such an important goal for the IT industry in the U.S. that instead of having the 3% or 4% of our employees be black (by that I mean historically disadvantaged African Americans, descendants of enslaved people, a qualification which would _further_ reduce that percentage), that we bring that number down to 1-2%, or even lower? I'm sorry, but this is such an absurd problem to want to solve, and it just reeks of insecurity to supposed "high performers" bring it up.

I don't want to dismiss this issue entirely because I know it's a sensitive topic for a lot of people, but it's pretty frustrating to see the constant anti-DEI posts in tech spaces when nearly every team I've been on in my 10+ year career has been almost exclusively white and male. Why are we clamoring to return to the days of total unmitigated unconscious bias and homogeneity?

> However, when I have to join a cheesy townhall once a month to discuss diversity hires, it makes me feel like I have no right to feel proud of any accomplishments I've made within the company.

Why in the world would you feel this way, after admitting that you have the chops? What does these "diversity hires" being simply _hired_ have to do with your actual material accomplishments within your company? It strikes me that perhaps the real problem here is that our most insecure colleagues are being threatened by unqualified employees stealing their jobs, in which case I would suggest that the real solution here is therapy, not returning to some idealized version of the past.

I can only speak for myself, but my self esteem is not undermined by the fact that DEI could mean that there will be two black men on my team instead of just me, or that my small organization of a few hundred could have maybe four black men instead of three. If anything, my self esteem is undermined by the fact that those numbers are so low to begin with.

- Another Black Man

Man, IRC was so toxic in many regards. Two stories:

On EFnet, there were aggressive racists in positions of authority. References to burning crosses, etc. Many of the earliest bash.org quotes originated there, including the idea that "the bash.org 'worst' quotes list is just "the best racist jokes list." The place was in generally incredibly abusive, and frequent channel and nick takeovers. The expectation of anonymity was a feature that enabled this behavior.

On Freenode, things were better. Pseudonymity let you hide from others but less so admins. But still there was a period of time where everyone was getting PM's about an IRC network where black people were banned (also, the thing was offensively named). It got so bad they had to institute a system to prevent DMs from unregistered accounts. You may also recall that one of Ubuntu's earliest contributions was a Code of Conduct, and that this was relevant because the #debian-* help channels were borderline abusive.

So yea, you didn't have to identify yourself, just humiliate and dissociate.

Would you be okay with white and Asian people similarly applying in-group advantage towards their own races to the detriment of ours? The software interview process is capricious, but this doesn't justify racial discrimination. If we're so nonchalant about racism favoring us, we're hypocrites for criticizing racism favoring other groups over us.

I am deeply troubled by racial discrimination favoring Latin people, despite benefitting from it in a narrow and immediate sense, because it makes people justified in carrying out their own discrimination potentially to my detriment.