[ReticentVole]

The ultimate aim of these diversity projects is to lower labor costs - either by psychologically manipulating people into accepting lower wages, by focusing on conflict and alignment along racial lines instead of class lines, or simply to expand the available pool of workers.

[voz_]

Very hot take. I couldn't disagree more. The ultimate aim of these diversity projects is to help members of disenfranchised communities find meaningful employment at good companies. This both strengthens the product and makes the company more attractive - implemented correctly, it can be come a powerful flywheel of benefits. Implemented incorrectly, and it can sink morale without actually empowering, supporting, or helping anyone.

[jfengel]

Absolutely. It may be positive without being purely altruistic. Companies benefit from diversity directly in a number of ways.

* It reduces the number of those moments where you do something stupid and insensitive because a bunch of identical-looking people all nodded and said "Sure, I don't see any problems with that".

* It not only increases the talent pool, but gives that new talent a reason to think that they'll actually be accepted because there are already some faces like theirs.

* You get new perspectives on user needs and potential markets.

As, you say, it's easy to do it wrong. But the self-fulfilling prophecy where people hire those who look like themselves -- and then conclude that people who look like that must be the most successful -- is always going to make certain mistakes over and over. Always with the same shrug and "Well, what are you gonna do?"

[ReticentVole]

African Americans and Hispanics are hired at lower rates into the IT sector because they have poorer outcomes in school, particularly for mathematics.

How does racially-biased hiring address that other than just placing unproductive workers into roles they are not qualified for, with flow-on negative impacts to the rest of the company and society?

Why is it that migrants from poor countries like Ghana, Nigeria outperform African Americans, when those migrants have no connections or local advantages?

It would seem to me that there are fundamental cultural problems in some ethnic groups in the US (eg. father absence, 'acting white' meme) that if addressed would actually yield improvements. Deciding not to hire White or Asian workers at Google does not - instead it diminishes the achievement or any Black or Hispanic worker who was hired based on their actual capability instead of just their skin color.

[voz_]

Please provided sources for all your claims, then we can talk :)

[buzzkillington]

How does increasing the pool of labor not decrease the price of labor?

This is economics 101.

[sjtindell]

Nobody argues that. The OP said “the ultimate goal is...” and many people would argue against decreasing labor costs as the ultimate goal. More like a side effect.

[TehCorwiz]

If diversity caused lower wages then we'd see a proactive push among corporations to create inclusive cultures to invite that situation. But we don't, because it doesn't.

[banads]

>we'd see a proactive push among corporations to create inclusive cultures to invite that situation. But we don't

Wait, are you saying there has not been a push among corporations to increase diversity?

>In 2003, MIT professor Thomas Kochan noted that companies were spending an estimated $8 billion a year on diversity efforts. But since Trump’s election, and with the emergence of movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, the industry has exploded. A 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63% of the diversity professionals had been appointed or promoted to their roles during the past three years. In March 2018, the job site Indeed reported that postings for diversity and inclusion professionals had risen 35% in the previous two years.

https://time.com/5696943/diversity-business/

[throwgeorge]

watch the hands not the mouth - take a gander at the demographics of microsoft/facebook/google and you'll see how much they actually support diversity initiatives

[omershapira]

A labor pool doesn't increase because a company magically discovered under-served minorities.

People who ignore how large their competition was to begin with tend to develop terminal exceptionalism.

[buzzkillington]

How dare any worker demand a living wage. Look at minorities. They are poor and you need to be just as poor to not be a nazi.

This isn't even a strawman in this case, since the company in question is literally cutting pay to its workers for the sake of minorities.

The capitalists are very good at starting a race war to keep workers from uniting.

[voz_]

1) Unemployment for software engineers is negative, there's way more room to hire skilled people before salaries become the reason people switch amongst top companies.

2) The poster I replied to stated that lower labor costs were the primary goal - and I refuted that. You seem to think I am stating something I am not.

[amznthrwaway]

No. The goal of white supremacists is to keep minority participation in high reward activities such as engineering low.

This is because mediocre white men are afraid that more talented minorities may gain access to the labor pool and they might start having to work harder for a living.

ReticentVote is fairly openly asserting that he wants less competition, because he is a mediocrity whose wages will suffer if forced to compete against minorities.

It saddens me that the very first comment here was from a white supremacist, but that is unsurprising given that Daniel Gackle works really fucking hard to ensure that HN is a "safe space" for white supremacists.

Congratulations dang, you've done it again. More bigoted white supremacists spreading their shit on your platform. The klansmen in your family would be proud of you.

[obiye27]

It seems like the main effect has been to surface all the racists who come out in opposition. Programs like these are highly efficient at that.

[api]

I've had a similar thought about really extreme "social justice warrior" stuff: I've seen it as a kind of unintentional troll that has worked to surface all the racism latent in the culture.

Yes, I do think a good number if "pomo" types and really extreme SJWs are nuts. No, there is nothing these people could say or do that would cause me to embrace Hitlerism, neo-monarchism, race nationalism, or any of the rest of this ludicrous nonsense. One thing being nuts does not make it reasonable to embrace other things that are nuts.

I see the fact that some non-trivial number of people have embraced these kinds of ideologies "in reaction" against SJW ideology as evidence that they were always latent racists and fascists to begin with. Either that or they're lazy thinkers who are easily provoked/trolled into taking irrational reactive positions. Either way the people who have jumped on these bandwagons have failed some kind of test: either a test for the decency of their beliefs or an IQ test.