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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

#631

Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals." Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics: For our employ…

While WalMart - unsurprisingly - ended its DEI efforts.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-dei-programs-mcdonalds-wal...

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

#632

I am a Black male and worked as a developer for mostly small unknown companies from 1996-2020. I then pivoted to cloud+app dev strategic consulting when a job at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap. I now work for a third party consulting company as a staff software architect. For the last 5 years, I have had customer facing jobs where I am either on video calls or flying out to customer sites working with s…

[deleted]

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

#633

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…

Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. These programs were never a victory for the principles or the people, they were marketing. So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is valuable has c…

I remember watching some event around CHAD time, where white social justice warriors on stage where making lots of social justice outrage statements, on behalf of Native Americans, in front on this native America elder. Only to have him take the microphone after them, and he was having none of it, he went up to the mic and completely denigrated them. Then it dawned on me, that these white people where literally ruining his cause by trying to take it over. And there's long history of white people doing this, where they subvert and neuter a movement and insert themselves as leaders, but only temper the cause. The end result is a kind of moderation, where no effective change happens because of it. I guess I read a similar sentiment once, where Anarchists where claiming that it was them that changed course of human history, repeatedly, by throwing the wrench in the wheels of society, to cause the change. From that point of view, it would get annoying if there was someone taking the wrench out before the fall.

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

#634
post #365
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people say DEI programs were purely performative and just for political points. But these policies did change the corporate landscape and affect hiring decisions. Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color This data came from workforce demographic reports submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by 88 S&P 100 companies Hispanic individua…

In my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with a black software engineer. Not a auxiliary role like PM, DevOps, IT but a straight SDE role. I have worked with literally hundreds of software engineers in my life.

I've worked directly (that is, either on the same team or with an immediately neighboring team) with two black engineers.

My company historically has had leveling issues and, sadly, they were definitely not meeting expectations for their level, or maybe even for the one below their level.

One was nudged out to another team. One currently on my direct team is being nudged out. One or two people want him to be fired (very curmudgeonly engineers who had worked with him), but me and the manager would rather find him new work within the company suited to his background in data science rather than software engineering. He's been dragging his feet; it's getting more and more difficult.

The company has a strong and vocal DEIB/social justice culture within certain parts of the company (though I suspect much less so among executives). It sometimes comes into play pretty directly in hiring. I've been in panels where someone calls out that the candidate is part of a disadvantaged population who've historically been under-leveled, though I haven't been in a panel where that made a difference in hiring or leveling.

The standard line is that the company doesn't compromise its hiring standards for diversity. I clearly have my doubts about whether that ends up happening in practice.

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

#636
post #154

From the memo: > We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it. I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your executive bonus will t…

As a mid-level manager in a prominent tech company, my VP (not current) explicitly asked me if there were any women or minorities for whom we could accelerate promotion. Not that were ready, but may be ready soon and we'll take the benefit of the doubt. I know that lots of women, minorities, and LGBTQ employees benefitted from that, but white male employees learned there wasn't budget for them.

Execs given a goal will do what it takes to meet the goal.

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

#637
post #311

I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society. To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time…

> lack of educational resources Could you please explain this part? I am not sure how you meant it. Is the main problem that the resources are not in the language of your tribe? Or is that a lack of educational resources regardless of language (e.g. simply not enough textbooks to give to each child)? What kind of educational resources do you wish you had?

Great questions. The kids mostly speak English as first language, and the schools are in English. With the exception of one huge twist, the schools have many educational difficulties you'll find in rural America generally—it's hard to get money for materials and curriculum, hard to recruit good teachers, hard to get students connected to people with practical advice/guidance, hard to get connected to opportunities, hard to reach escape velocity, and so on.

So, what's the twist? Tribal schools tend to be administrated by the federal government which makes problems extremely slow and hard to address. With some asterisks, the local elementary school was basically provisioned as a consequence of a federal treaty with the US Senate, and is/was mostly administered by a the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which rolls up into a federal department that until 2020ish, had never been run by a native person. All of these things make it very tricky to work with.

In spite of that, believe it or not, this is a massive improvement: until relatively recently, the school was a mandatory boarding trade school meant to teach kids to be (basically) English-only maids. This lead to a substantial percentage of the population being either illiterate or semi-literate, with no meaningful work experience, and with very very few opportunities that were not menial work. That inertia is extremely challenging to overcome, and the most natural place to try is the education system, which generally is simply not up to it.

I am stating these as a neutral facts on purpose. Regardless of how we got here, the hand is ours to play. Some of us got out and whether we succeed in the next generation depends on whether we can mobilize the community to productively take advantage of the resources we do have. This is why it's painful to me to hear about, e.g., land acknowledgements. If you have seen this pain firsthand I just do not see how that can be the #1 policy objective.

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

#638
post #231

Why does the skin color or gender matter if in the end they pick candidates that all went to the same top schools or have previously worked at the same top companies? Diversity in training, education and work history vastly outweighs diversity in superficial physical features.

i dont know where you work but my company actively diversified sourcing to other kinda of schools

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

#639
post #230

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…

This is saying those businesses all used DEI for show, and suggests their efforts were half-hearted, if I read correctly. Their metrics I assume are zero / flat, around 'success' for DEI, derivatively. To me this suggests the next best focus area for increased fairness of societal fiscal (opportunity) performance is regulation, perhaps driven by social change and social pressure. I have next to no influence. Still I…

That's what I've seen in the metrics. DEI hiring has been an enormous failure. A lot of the concern in non-exclusively-left-leaning online spaces (including this one) about DEI hiring was and is way overblown given how drastically unsuccessful they are in practice. The default like is that "it's bad, but getting better" by showing difference year to year in sectors where the numbers look good, or even just reporting on noise.

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

#640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Apple. In our org of 1000 people there were/are zero black leaders/senior managers It’s all Indians and Chinese

But we'll call that "diversity" because they're not white. It's like the southern Bay Area in general, the least black place I have ever lived. People call it diverse, but it's really just 4 ethnic groups that rarely intermingle. It's not diverse like LA or NYC are diverse.

None of the companies I worked for considered Asian tech workers "diverse". One actually carved out a separate category for Asian males: ND. Negative Diversity.

I'm not doubting your companies' policies, but just throwing my data point in there too.

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