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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

#671

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

#672

Post by UncleMeat »

diogocp wrote: post #507
lolinder wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.

> And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.

Donald Trump was re-elected. He has said that we should deport pro-palestinian protestors on college campuses and has sued multiple news outlets, both on tv and in paper, for their coverage during the election season. It's really hard to find any political figure who is more aggressively targeting speech he doesn't like than Trump.

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

#673

Post by UncleMeat »

anon373839 wrote: post #508
seadan83 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread belief? According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstaking…

> My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed…

MLK's ideals were not colorblindness. He explicitly supported race-specific reparations and policies that focused on repairing specific racial oppression and suffering.

MLK had one famous line in a speech that has been leveraged by reactionaries to use him as a weapon against advocates of racial liberation. But that is not an honest use of his beliefs.

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

#674

Post by superultra »

swatcoder wrote: post #10
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's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret. > This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side. It's not about making users or bloggers happy. They don't care whether those people are "pis…

> That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.

Which is fine. But are they then suggesting that bias/etc was never a problem in the first place? Or, are they suggesting that DEI was not the solution, and if so, then why aren’t they suggesting a new solution?

There isn’t a satisfying answer here, to me anyway.

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

#676

Post by zmgsabst »

lolinder wrote: post #371
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…

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…

There hasn’t been a decade in the past 130 years of their existence that Progressives haven’t advocated for systemic racism.

We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats.

2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.

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

#677

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

#678

Post by bloqs »

groby_b wrote: post #499
bko wrote: 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…

I recommend reading the WaPo article that goes along with it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/28/minoritie... Bloomberg's choosing to misrepresent the data here - this is not about jobs added, it's about changes in the employment composition. Simple example: Company X has 950 white and 50 POC employes. 10% leave over the year (95 white, 5 POC). They hire 200 more at an even split (50% white, 50% POC).…

[flagged]

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

#679

Post by riwsky »

The whole zero-sum, straw man depiction of DEI initiatives is intellectually lazy, even if we ignore the ideology. When I've put effort into it, it's looked like:

  * blinding candidate names from take-home or resumé reviews
  * writing structured interview rubrics
  * defining concrete soft skills and behaviors we're looking for, instead of "culture fit"
In a world without, say, sexism, the above practices would still lead to better hiring decisions. It just happens to be the case that in our world, making your hiring process better tends to make it less sexist; everything that rises must converge.

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

#680

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

titanomachy wrote: post #596
az226 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At big tech company I used to work for ($3T) they did this in 2017, and my manager did not give a single offer to a man in years even when everyone said hire, and the next 14 of 14 offers were to women, several minorities, despite many having barely any “hire” votes.

Must be Microsoft, I don’t think Apple and Nvidia went hard on this

Nvidia has the polar opposite problem on their hands, they're one of the most Asian-overrepresented companies in America. 56% of employees are of Asian descent, in a country where Asians make up 6% of the population. Second largest market cap in the world. And yet, not a peep about it from the social justice folk, funny how that works.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1369578/nvidia-share-of-...

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