[scblock]

You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been. Using it as a pejorative in the way you are is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist. It doesn't reflect the purpose of the concept at all. In fact your description of "favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job" is exactly what the concept hopes to prevent, not enable.

DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it, it is more about considering diversity and recognizing personal and institutional bias, and working to ensure that bias does not negatively affect people, whether that be in hiring, consideration for roles or promotions, and so on.

All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven, and if you actually look you can see it's already doing damage. There seem to be a lot of assumptions that women or people of color in high positions are "DEI hires" when they likely had to work harder than white men to get where they are. I mean firing a 4-star admiral because she's a woman and then claiming she was a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are. Automatically assuming a black or trans pilot is a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are.

[deelowe]

I am a former hiring manager at Google and we were specifically told by hr that we could hire 2 people on one headcount if one of those people met specific dei criteria and there was a list of races and genders that met the criteria. One of my peer managers grew his org twice as fast as me by only hiring females with engineering degrees. He got promoted shortly after. Within 2 years his entire team was disbanded for being completely ineffective. Google ended up getting sued over this practice and they lost. This is not the only example I have. The worst of all was Eric Schmidt literally saying to us that diversity was "strategically important" as it helped to "increase the talent pool" and "keep salaries competitive." This was never about doing the right thing for employees.

I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.

It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.

[nosefurhairdo]

IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses.

I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.

Finally, from the article in this post:

> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.

It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.

These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.

[drusenko]

As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.

The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.

Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.

Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?

[nosefurhairdo]

The idea that people aren't comfortable on a team that doesn't have other people matching their immutable sex/race characteristics, and that we should encourage this fragility is insane to me.

If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?

I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.

[Lanolderen]

There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.

Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.

[bufferoverflow]

> You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.

Yes, it has. Look at the college admissions. The test score requirements for black students were way way lower than those for the Asian students in many universities and colleges. That's favoring people by their skin color.

Which is illegal since at least 1964.

[UncleMeat]

College admissions have (until very recently) operated under a different jurisprudence than businesses.

[icameron]

Where can I look at these college test score requirements? I have never heard of such a thing besides minimum SAT score to be considered. Is that adjusted based solely on race at some university? Where?

[brigandish]

Probably in the NBER report[1] on the data that came out of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case[2]. It's an interesting read, as is the other one on legacy applicants.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29964

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

[piker]

At the graduate level there are a number of resources which can illustrate the difference between admissions standards for people from “underrepresented minority” (URM) groups and non-URMs. They manifest as materially lower LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs for URMs. There are Supreme Court cases analyzing details, and prior to the most recent doctrine, the preferencing policies were totally open because SCOTUS blessed it in the case of law school admissions.

[sepositus]

> All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven

Some companies are under legal pressure to avoid lawsuits because some programs are violating civil rights. I wouldn't call those instances craven.

As for your definition of DEI, I find it fairly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Regardless of how we want to define DEI in the hypothetical perfect world, the reality is a large portion of current DEI programs look absolutely nothing like what you described.

[stale2002]

> It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.

> DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it

I have been in the room where HR/hiring managers have explicitly stated that they want to hire [specific race/gender] for an open role. This has been at major companies. In states where this is explicitly illegal.

In the very high level abstract, the goal of DEI programs may not be to engage in explicitly illegal race/sex discrimination, but in practice, this is how it often turns out.

I will let others give their own anecdotes, as cases like this are widespread.

[Digory]

“Recognizing personal and institutional bias” sounds nice, until someone has to decide which biases or differences to overcome, and at what cost.

There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.

The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.

[ChocolateGod]

> DEI is not "reverse racism"

You're right, reverse racism does not exist, it's just racism.

> to work harder than white men to get where they are.

Asian Americans prove this is not true. I recall that statically the average wage for asians in America is higher than white people.

[scarmig]

On the one hand, you have DEI policies like Harvard's college admissions or the air traffic controller hiring scandal. And of course DEI advocates always claim that these are obvious perversions of True DEI, which is only about expanding opportunities and never about discriminating against disfavored groups of people.

On the other hand, the tricky bit comes in when it's only in retrospect everyone agrees those were terrible perversions of DEI. When they're actually in place, anyone who criticizes them is considered a racist neo-Nazi.

[protocolture]

Has there been a big effort to call the FAA whistleblowers nazis?

I learned about it, went "oh that sucks", but never felt like they were being racist. They have a great evidentiary basis. Its not like some red hat guy screeching about losing his job without being able to show cause.

[achow]

I'm all for DEI, however you too seem to misunderstand one critical aspect, the 'E' in DEI. The 'E' (Equity) aspect is very nuanced and if not understood and communicated well would lead to deadlocked discussions

Equity factors in historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences. This could mean that if we have a candidate who seems to be with lesser qualification then they potentially can be hired over a more qualified candidate.

This is with reasoning that due to past decades (and centuries) of historical situations a candidate was led through a path which landed them with a 'lesser' qualification. So, now if we continue to correct this historical situation then sometime in future the need for Equity would disappear, since that future generation is result of a equitable society - then no more excuses, if you have lesser qualification then it is your doing and not society's.

[roenxi]

> ...is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist...

You forgot transphobist and whatever the -ist form of Nazi is. National Socialist, possibly. No point going with half-measures on the insults.