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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

#661

Post by aprilthird2021 »

Avicebron wrote: post #594
antics wrote: 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…

> "The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete" So in my rural, predominantly white "Non DEI target" part of the country, this is the problem too except when these people apply to hundreds of jobs in software engineering they get crickets.

Well, in the non-DEI world, we'll soon find out if the reason this happens was solely because of policies or if low educational attainment seeps into one's college, ones preparedness for a job, one's ability to get a job, etc.

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

#662

Post by mmustapic »

zombiwoof wrote: post #601

I’m at white middle aged male and in 10 years have had no call backs from meta hiring. This week I got contacted by a meta recruiter

Maybe you got better at your profession. Maybe they are discriminating non whites now. Or a position just opened that’s great for someone like you.

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

#663

Post by bastardoperator »

antics wrote: 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…

I don't have to be invested in a cause to know that diversity in problem solving can be a key component to success hence global technology companies, or that promoting the ideas of equity and inclusion are things most humans can benefit from. DEI is not about change or solving a particular problem, it's about awareness of perspective and seeking to understand others.

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

#664

Post by lbrito »

yoavm wrote: post #358
Animats wrote: post #104

So far, Zuckerberg (Meta), Pichai (Google), Bezos (Amazon),Cook (Apple), and Sarandos (Netflix) have all personally made the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring. That's all of the FAANG CEOs. Nadella and Altman phoned it in. The Wall Street Journal has a long list.[1] It works for Putin. [1] https://archive.is/ozPQi

As an outsider looking at the US, this looks so dangerous. It feels like the whole democratic system is bending to the power of money. Just a few weeks ago, an American friend was making the comparison between the number of billion $ companies in the EU vs the US. I was trying to tell them that it isn't necessarily a bad thing to have less of that - I rather have 1,000 million $ companies than a billion $ one. The co…

>I rather have 1,000 million $ companies than a billion $ one

Except in the real world the bn $ company will dump and outright buy the puny million dollar companies. It will do everything in its power, which is a lot, legally and illegally, to destroy the competition. That's just the way capitalism works.

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

#665

Post by Manuel_D »

dmurray wrote: post #478
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 wan…

The DEI policies were effective, particularly the Diverse Slate Approach. But it's legally risky to continue with it under the current administration since it was a race and gender conscious policy. People can argue as to whether it was "discrimination" but it absolutely was conscious of candidate's protected class.

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

#666

Post by bnycum »

65 wrote: post #335
OnionBlender wrote: post #248

Does this mean we can go back to using "master" as our git repo's default branch?

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

I’ve been working with a large European company and it surprises me that they insist on using “master”. They even make other master named branches on the repos as well.

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

#669

Post by [deleted] »

fourside wrote: post #492
gusfoo wrote: post #227

> Read the memo from Meta in full: That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very silly thing to do. I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable, stable products when I buy things. Not the skin co…

> may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse One of the biggest wins for the anti-DEI crowd was convincing people that embracing DEI implicitly meant getting something of lesser quality or value. Here, you assume that focusing on businesses owned by people of color necessitates lowering your standards of your suppliers below acceptable levels.

[deleted]

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

#670

Post by Manuel_D »

kenferry wrote: post #324
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…

Mm. It’s certainly good to work at the other end of the funnel (thank you!) but it also won’t help address pattern matching that people do in hiring. It’s an incredibly natural thing for people to hire people like themselves, or people they meet their image of what a top notch software dev looks like. It requires active effort to counteract this. One can definitely argue about the efficacy of DEI approaches, but I di…

If the goal is to prevent people from being biased, why not anonymize candidate packets? Zoom interviews can also be anonymized easily. If it's the case that equally strong, or stronger, candidates are being passed over anonymization should solve this.

Rather than working to anonymize candidates, every DEI policy I've witnessed sought to incentivize increasing the representation of specific demographics. Bonuses for hitting specific thresholds of X% one gender, Y% one race. Or even outright reserving headcount on the basis of race and gender. This is likely because the target levels of representation are considerably higher than the representation of the workforce. At Dropbox the target was 33% women in software developer roles. Hard to do when ~20% of software developers are women.

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