[hitekker]

YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte observed the similar racial and sex quotas from the inside: https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560

IBM's CEO infamously championed DEI-as-quota which led to wave of lawsuits that IBM was forced to settle.

The memory holing on this topic is concerning.

[davorak]

> YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte

I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines.

I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.

[hitekker]

The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.

I'll summarize: TripleByte guy describes how companies prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms. He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.

IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie that diversity and merit can be found at scale, even when the world market only has so many "diverse" and "meritorious" candidates available for a given position. This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

[davorak]

> The rest of the Spotify podcast covers Jessica's side, but I think you've missed the subtext.

Link's? Timestamps? I skimmed the much of the podcast now and I did not hear anything like this from Jessica.

> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals; quotas in layman's terms

Quota is specifically a fixed share of something. "prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals" is not a quota, but an approach like that could be motivated by a quota.

I think quota has specific legal ramifications too so when the term was used in the comment but not used in the link I thought it was important to point it out.

> prioritized diversity over merit in their hiring goals;

I have only fully watched the video you linked to as of yet, not the full podcast. The companies Harj talked about wanted diversity in that top TripleByte metric pool, something that Harj said they were not able to supply. To me it sounds like the companies are clearly saying what they want but Harj/TripleByte was not able to supply.

Harj's says the companies would not explicitly ask for lowering the metric cut off for diversity. My attempt to transcribe what he said "noone would actually want to explicitly say that".

> He was annoyed that many companies refused to acknowledge the trade-off and instead blamed TripleByte for (in my words) real-world, supply-side scarcity.

Most clients in my experience are annoyed when they want something, want to pay you for it, and you can not provide it. The details and complexities often do not factor in, they want a black box they stick money in and get a solution out so they can focus on their companies core competences.

> IMHO, the part that rankles from that interview into this thread is the dishonesty around that trade-off. The comforting lie ...

You seem to making a big claim, but it is not detailed in a way that I can respond to. I do not see TripleByte or Harj claiming they are doing science or demographic research about the world populations I do not think an large or sweeping claims can be built off what they are saying.

> This comes up in other fields, like Music. "Blind auditions are merit, therefore DEI" was once espoused, until the more dedicated DEI supporters realized that focusing on the fruit of work wasn't creating enough diversity https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

The article you link to here is a particular persons opinion and advocates for change that person wants, it does not document anything more general than that like your statement implied. It does not document a trend in the field of moving away from blind auditions, I don't follow the field closely so I would know if there is one, but this article does not document it.

[virx61]

“Memory hole” is a term that should be reserved for things everybody actually forgets. This is more of a thing lots of people probably remember, but they don’t bring it up all the time.

[SR2Z]

No, lots of people willingly stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the abuses that were happening. See Brigida v Buttigieg for a particularly egregious example around the hiring of ATC.

The FAA, on an official test that ATC candidates were required to take, would disqualify applicants if they didn't answer questions like "what was your worst subject in school" with answers like "math" or "science." This explicitly was to increase racial diversity, which is both patronizing in the extreme and really stupid.

When I bring this up in SF, people accuse me of making it up. It's not that people don't remember it, it's that political polarization has blinded us to our side doing batshit crazy things. Another similar example was "defund the police" which is a crazy slogan on its face, yet for a year Democrats felt compelled to sanewash it.

I am about as blue and pro-DEI as someone could reasonably be and I think that this stuff is small potatoes compared to a president who has been continuously trying to send the army in to crush Democratic-leaning cities. That being said, I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are suspicious of DEI because we do not have a good track record of auditing these programs.