[ColdTakes]

That title image looks like it is from the set of a sitcom starring Mark Zuckerberg.

DEI initiatives have always been a dog and pony show, not a thing executives have ever truly cared about and they are now in a political environment where they can show what they believe in. People will learn the hard way these companies have never cared about you.

[bubblethink]

The weirdest one I saw was when Uber Eats would highlight black owned businesses and ask you to order from them. Uber isn't going to lower its cut for these black businesses or donate to some charity for black people if you order. It just wants you to funnel money to them through a black business. Bizarre.

[undersuit]

https://merchants.ubereats.com/us/en/black-owned-restaurants...

Not bizarre, capitalism. Uber Eats should expand their offerings else someone else will take that market segment.

[blackeyeblitzar]

They may have been a dog and pony show but were definitely real and forced executives to change how they hire and promote in illegal, discriminatory ways.

[AndyNemmity]

Perhaps in your experience, I would be for them if they "forced executives to change how they hire".

From my perspective, that has not happened. My problem is their lack of teeth to do what they say they do.

[blackeyeblitzar]

There were teeth, in that your own performance review (as a leader) would be affected by it. Depending on your level, your own promotion would require certain stats for your teams for it to be approved. So people made all sorts of decisions - including hiring people they shouldn’t have hired - in order to push those numbers to where they were forced to. The same happened behind closed doors on promotions.

[AndyNemmity]

That was not the case in my experience. I am learning that we all have vastly different experiences on what the implementation was, making the discussion rather difficult because we are all talking from very different vantage points.

[ColdTakes]

It would help the conversation if you expound on your experiences on implementation.

[l0t0b0r0s]

That would require the person having an actual argument instead of being a contrarian shill.

[devvvvvvv]

What exactly else did DEI initiatives do besides try to get people hired for their race instead of their competence?

[laughinghan]

In theory they try to get people hired for their competence rather than their network. A widely-cited anecdotal example of this reportedly working well is the Rooney Rule: https://www.espn.com/nfl/playoffs06/news/story?id=2750645

This thread also has a lot of anecdotal examples of failure modes of 'diverse slate' rules, though, such as people who have already decided who to hire still interviewing women candidates just to appease the rule, thus wasting everyone's time.

[smrtinsert]

I think the only "dei" hire i saw was an administrative assistant that got fired ultimately. Let's not pretend eng hasn't had a massive gap in available hires for a very long time.

[AndyNemmity]

Well said. What we need is real DEI initiatives. But private dictatorships don't care about this stuff. Only what marketing value they can gain from it.