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What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

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Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#61

Post by crackercrews »

bedobi wrote: post #19

I hate articles like these and their appeals to "meritocracy". Before my current team, my whole career, every single team I worked in was pretty much exclusively young, white, nerdy men. Maybe each person on those teams was objectively the "best" candidate for their respective hiring round! (though I doubt it) But they make horrible teams. If your team looks like that, your team is horrible too, no matter how much yo…

> Guess which has zero tolerance for any toxic behavior?

I find the current push toward so-called equity to be more toxic than anything I experienced on male-dominated teams. People fear saying things because they don't want to be called out. Someone uses a phrase like "off the reservation" or "grandfathered" or "whitelisted" and then we have to have a meeting about how someone might have been offended. Was anyone offended? No. But we'll have a meeting to discuss a hypothetically-offended person. This leads to some behavior change but also some silent backlash.

I get that certain types of toxic behavior might be limited on diverse teams. But it's simply not the case that by adding women and minorities we will eliminate toxic behavior. From what I've seen, we simply swap one type of toxicity for another.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#62

Post by colordrops »

bigbacaloa wrote: post #40
mikkergp wrote: post #18

Posts like this seem reactionary and equally anti-intellectual. Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people. But it seems like if you really want to dig into this you need to take broader approach. Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions, which is pretty squishy to begin with? It seems to me like throwing some extra diver…

It's clear as day that some culturally contingent notion of race isn't a good way of measuring merit.

Absolutely - there aren't clearly defined lines between cultural notions of race, and the scientific community doesn't even recognize race as anything but a social construct [1]. So in the end it's either how someone self-identifies, or the arbitrary superficial judgement of race by the hiring team, which is patently ridiculous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)

"Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society."

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#63

Post by inglor_cz »

systemvoltage wrote: post #54
Decker87 wrote: post #23

At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong color/gender.

I think we're going to see a rise of new companies formed, perhaps not from Silicon Valley, that will reject the whole D&I concept and move forward with complete blindness to race, culture, or gender. They will excel, outperform and form a new age of englightenment. I don't think this will happen because I want it to, it will happen because incentives and fundamentals of operations of a company – i.e., just focus on…

It is also possible that those companies will be suffocated by the fact that banks won't extend credit to them (ESG) or angry Twitter will pressure potential customers not to do business with them.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#64

Post by chrischattin »

franczesko wrote: post #38
Decker87 wrote: post #23

At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong color/gender.

This. Saying "no" to people based on their physical appearance is a discrimination.

It's also illegal.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#65

Post by pelasaco »

I experienced this in two different roles:

- One applying to one role at github/microsoft: After ton of meetings, I would have to talk with their diversity manager, it was a 60 minutes meeting, which i just didn't feel well to go through after some googling.

- As hiring manager (in another FAANG) company, I couldn't hire the best candidates, until all other 20 more diverse were interviewed. Everyone, regardless of qualified or not, had to be interviewed, before we could hire someone less diverse (aka not "white", not European, not "Man"). The position was for senior developer, and I had to go through a tedious set of interview with people straight of coding boot camp.. We ended up hiring one (guy), which wasn't in our top 5. All top 5 were able to get a new job, since our process took almost 6 month, from starting the process up to onboarding him. It was frustrating and actually the main reason why I left the team, to become architect. The process was called "agile/fair hiring", how ironic..

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#66

Post by crackercrews »

bergenty wrote: post #48
Decker87 wrote: post #23

At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong color/gender.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Hiring the best people invariably leads to hiring a very diverse team

If this is true, then I guess affirmative action isn't needed, right?

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#67

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #32

It's telling that this person posted a job listing, interviewed dozens of candidates, realized they couldn't proceed because they hadn't interviewed any minority candidate, tried for months and were still unsuccessful at finding a single one , and the take away wasn't that they should fix their broken recruiting pipeline but that the corporate policy was what was wrong.

[deleted]

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#69

Post by truetotest »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #56

The increase from 3.7% to 5.6% black executives as a sign of lowering standards, when black people are 14% of the population in the country... Can we first establish what percentage of managers people genuinely think got their job based on merit as a baseline? An equal explanation might be that because Microsoft forced people to actually interview black people at all, more qualified black candidates were hired.

No post body was provided.

Re: What “diversity and inclusion” means at Microsoft

#70

Post by inglor_cz »

bergenty wrote: post #48
Decker87 wrote: post #23

At this moment in time I think companies can gain a major hiring advantage by simply hiring the best regardless of race/gender. So many large companies are shooting themselves in the foot distorting incentives and saying "no" to people who are the wrong color/gender.

Quoted post unavailable.

"Hiring the best people invariably leads to hiring a very diverse team."

Only the diversity may go along the lines that the contemporary DEI philosophy does not like or even accept.

E.g. a Ukrainian refugee, a kid of poor Korean shopkeepers, an ex-Muslim atheist who does not even want to pretend that he is still Muslim.

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