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> Over 50 years ago the US Military recognized that segregation and entrenched racial biases lead to inefficiencies and lack of readiness.[1] In an economy where hiring pipelines for skilled technical people are stretched incredibly thin, we need to be taking a hard look at why we're only getting people that look a certain way through our hiring process.

That doesn't follow, at all. For one, you're comparing apples and oranges. The "norm in Silicon Valley" is not to practice explicit racial segregation like the US Army did in 1940. Additionally, D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.

An anecdote: a non-white friend of mine recently quit her job, because she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person who checked a lot of DEI boxes. That person proceeded to drive her crazy with their incompetence until she burned out and quit.

[omegaworks]

The norm in Silicon Valley is treat D&I with an inordinate level of skepticism, if not reject it outright as "anti-meritocratic." What we have here is not explicit racial segregation, but a system operating via capital and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant segment of the American economy. This creates huge bind spots and carries the risk of building systems that reinforce oppression.

>D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.

Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.

>she was pressured into hiring an incompetent person

That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization. The requirements for any role you hire for should be clear, expectations should be set and when they are not met there should be consequences. If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.

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>> D&I may very well be operating at the wrong end of the pipe.

> Then that should be the argument at hand. Not rejecting the idea outright.

That doesn't follow. If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work and will cause pointless problems in the meantime.

> That there is no system in place for addressing concrete performance issues in any employee is the failing of the organization.... If this is not the case at the organization she worked at, she was bound to burn out, irrespective of the DEI objectives.

There was a system in place, but if you couldn't read between the lines: the bar was far higher for firing a "diverse" employee with performance issues, which followed from the DEI ethos in place.

[omegaworks]

>If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work and will cause pointless problems in the meantime.

So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work, we should throw it away. Sounds like a newbie dev throwing a tantrum over having to build on a system with legacy code.

>the bar was far higher for firing a diverse employee with performance issues, which followed from the DEI objectives.

That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI objectives." Was that bar for performance standards explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here, hyperbole?

[zozbot234]

> So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work

Parent comment didn't say anything like that. Please assume good faith in discussions. They said that D&I efforts are more likely to work if focused on other parts of the education/industry pipeline, which seems at least plausible.

[omegaworks]

Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected outright" and uselessly categorized the pain of driving institutional change as "pointless problems."

There is a point to trying to change a system that only sees white people at the end of the hiring pipeline. We can debate where it needs to change, but the change is necessary.

[zozbot234]

> Parent comment literally said "D&I should be rejected outright"

Nope, they didn't. A direct quote: "If D&I is operating at the wrong end of the pipe, it should be rejected outright because it won't work". Note the "If". If you disagree that D&I wouldn't work under these conditions, or that stuff that doesn't work should be rejected as pointless, you're still welcome to make that argument. But please be careful not to misquote other users' comments.

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> That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI objectives." Was that bar for performance standards explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here, hyperbole?

The person simply couldn't do the job and was profoundly incompetent, and the response was to that was to repeatedly be told to spend more time training them. My friend had previously successfully terminated a white employee who was under-performing but turned out to be more competent than this one.

[pedrosorio]

> What we have here is not explicit racial segregation, but a system operating via capital and clout that has elevated a small group of mostly white men into positions of extreme power and influence over the most vibrant segment of the American economy

Microsoft - Satya Nadella

Google - Sundar Pichai

Twitter - Parag Agrawal

None of these men is white or even born in the USA, and somehow they managed to arrive at positions of extreme power and influence through this system of "capital and clout".

[omegaworks]

All Brahmin, members at the top of a caste system established by British colonizers[1]. A system causing its own set of problems in Silicon Valley[2].

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734

2. https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/caste-silicon-valley-th...

[pedrosorio]

So, what's the mechanism here? The white Americans in power are fans of the caste system established by the British colonizers and decided to make an exception to their white supremacy to allow some Brahmins to control some of the most important US tech companies?

[omegaworks]

I'm simply pointing out that your three examples don't negate the fact that we have a system here that taken whole rewards and uplifts whiteness. White colonialism literally crafted the system that elevated those three non-white people. Do you think that that influence is not relevant just because those three people are not white?

[pedrosorio]

Working in tech, I don't see a system that rewards and uplifts whiteness. Asians (both East and from the subcontinent) are greatly overrepresented relative to their fraction of the US population in SWE jobs. Their skin color was never a factor. Most of the ones I've worked with/interviewed, were hired due to merit, not the color of their skin.

That richer and more well educated Indians are over-represented in tech jobs and as CEOs of major tech companies relative to those with fewer resources and less well educated is not surprising.

I am not sure what's the relevance of the skin color of those who allegedly imposed the system that led to this particular group being at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy in India today. How did that result in "uplifting whiteness"?