[gizmo686]

> they are probably in a better position to do DEI at scale.

Slight tangent, but most large tech companies DEI programs were never really great at doing DEI at scale. They were mostly funnelling the existing pool of diverse candidates into them. The result is that companies without an active DEI program end up less diverse through no fault of their own.

[leetcrew]

what is the mechanism for that "funneling" though? intentional programs to make diverse candidates feel more welcome? more money? if big tech is actively working to attract diverse candidates and other companies aren't keeping up, it doesn't sound like it's through no fault of their own that they can't retain those people.

[gizmo686]

Corporate DEI can be split into 3 broad buckets:

1) Recruitment

2) Retention

3) Sponsorship

Retention improvements are generally a net positive for industry wide diversity. If someone leaves your company for harrasment reasons, they are more likely to leave the industry all together.

Sponsorship is generally net positive as well.

The funnelling I am talking about is entirely in the "recruitment" bucket. If you hire a woman software developer, they were already looking for a job. They already made a significant personal investment in getting the job. The industry is still enough if an employees market that they were probably going to get a job. You did nothing to bring that women into the industry. All you did is increase the chances that they end up working for you in particular. On the margins, this is still probably a net positive for industry wide diversity, but that is a much smaller effect then the chair shuffling effect.

Of these three buckets, the most effective way of increasing your diversity numbers is in recruitment (unless you have horrid retention). In the current environment, there is no way for a large company to get anywhere near 50/50 without a significant investment in the recruitment bucket.

[jimbokun]

More money.

Smaller companies can't compete with FAANG salaries. So when FAANG prioritizes hiring women, and there are still many fewer women than men in tech overall, smaller and poorer companies can't compete with the offers women are getting from FAANG.

[pas]

... sure, on the other hand way less competition, and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training.

[johnnyanmac]

>hire promising juniors and do on the job training.

I chuckled. I yearn for these days, but this isn't the experience I had (late millenial/early Gen Z). No one trains, you get maybe a week to adjust, expected to go full steam ahead, and leave or are laid off 2-3 years later.

[simonsarris]

We train juniors for years (we accept interns as young as junior year of high school) and its been pretty great. I really don't understand why more companies don't do it.

[Jensson]

> and smaller companies can also simply go ahead hire promising juniors and do on the job training.

Not before FAANG hired the promising juniors first, FAANG are very willing to give on the job training. Or at least were a couple of years ago.

[pas]

That seems to imply that they singlehandedly (or fivehandedly) exhausted the promising pool and kept it dry since! But that's not the case, right? So whatever they did - while definitely important at the margin does not completely change the bulk of the market.

We can look at their employment numbers, they did not hire millions of people, yet there are millions of capable juniors globally eager to jump head-first into software development.

Bootcamps closed because hiring slowed down. (Because ZIRP ended, everyone doubted that the Fed can do a soft landing, and on top of that the certified bubble of AI-mania meant that companies increased spending on buzzword driven development, and ... on top of all this increasing cloud costs and slowing growth meant that no one felt the need to hire juniors.)

Oh, and of course due to the amazing tech demos where this or that LLM created a site/game in React in a few minutes, or even issued a PR, the meme of end of coding led to a pretty significant belief about the end of juniors.

[jimbokun]

"way less competition"?

[pas]

excuse my phrasing, I meant fewer applicants for the position, so less competition for job-seekers

[ilickpoolalgae]

This may be true. As I noted, I've only worked at very "desirable" companies so my views are potentially skewed. That being said, I can't imagine that DEI has gotten significantly worse across the industry while vastly improving at the top end but I have no data to back that up.