[RankingMember]

I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to a glorified reality show egomaniac. Allying to price-fix is one thing, but surely they can ally to resist culture war nonsense from making its way into their employee handbooks?

[cmcaleer]

MS (or any large company for that matter) didn’t participate in BLM discussions and get speakers to describe themselves and list their pronouns because they thought it was virtuous or right, they were just following the cultural zeitgeist in a way that they thought would make them more money.

Walking it back is just the same behaviour manifesting in a different way. Investors don’t value DEI in the same way they did before so it becomes an expense with no value to shareholders, so it gets cut.

It’s very cynical but nothing about this should be particularly shocking.

[ericmay]

Also, increasing efforts to support DEI and also decreasing those efforts can both be good things.

You can fail to recognize a problem, and you can also overreact to it.

[biofox]

There has certainly been an overreaction, and it continues to be the case even after efforts have been walked back.

I have yet to hear a good justification for why people who are not interested in programming should be encouraged to become interested purely in the name of equality, yet my institution is still spending huge amounts of public money on trying to achieve exactly that.

[mariusor]

Because "not being interested in programming" might not be the only cause for the lack of representation.

[sdsd]

>surely they can ally to resist culture war nonsense from making its way into their employee handbooks?

I think that's the point, using "pressure from the administration" as an excuse to nix culture war entanglements they got themselves into over the previous ~10 years. I think the "modern titans of industry" have wanted to dip out of this stuff for some time and felt stuck. Now they can do so while having plausible deniability (it was da govamint made us do it!)

[this_user]

The only reason implemented these measures in the first place was because of pressure from the other side of the political spectrum. It's hardly surprising that pressure from the opposite direction will make them walk it back.

[coldtea]

Especially since when implementing them gets them less capable stuff, hired to satisfy token quotas regardless of actual merit

[ndsipa_pomu]

I think you've got it back to front.

DEI is to prevent the kind of favouritism/nepotism that prevails in a lot of society (e.g. "the old boys club"). A suitable example would be the recent hires by the U.S. administration - people are being given high ranking jobs just because they're loyal/friendly to a certain person and nothing at all to do with their competency to do the particular job.

The purpose of DEI is to allow the most qualified person to get the job despite the overt racism and sexism in society.

[coldtea]

Whatever DEI was supposed to accomplish in theory, in practice it was token hiring to make the PR (yes, not even the HR) department happy. And it very fast developed is own "old boys club" hiring one another and spreading through companies.

Humans gonna human.

[guywithahat]

I don't know why you're being down-voted, I've seen diversity hires placed in charge of projects and destroy them. When you weren't promoted for merit you stop believing merit matters, and quickly build diverse teams with no experience incapable of building things in a timely manor.

[mariusor]

Because it's not impossible that there are non diversity hires that fuck projects up.

[guywithahat]

Sure but the practical result of considering diversity is you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project. Projects fail or run over budget all the time with the best engineer, so hiring fifth best engineer for a project to achieve a particular diversity requirement feels irresponsible at best.

[mariusor]

> you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project

I don't think this has actually been proven as of yet, since "best" is a very loaded word, especially you're required to measure on more than one axis. (But feel free to point me to any source that disagrees with me.)

[cogman10]

IMO, it's something more cynical. It's not bowing to pressure or whatever. Rather, the guys running marketing have realized a trick to getting attention is making some innocuous political statement that ultimately causes social media to freak out. For example, having a trans person advertise their beer.

These giants know that people are lazy, they aren't likely doing the effort to see all the product holding. And that people will forget the outrage when the next thing comes up. It also helps that a lot of the dumb reactions have been things like people buying their product only to angerly shoot it with a gun or run it over with a truck.

When time passes, so does the outrage. And what they've actually bought is a bit of unearned goodwill and forgotten badwill.

[alt227]

> a glorified reality show egomaniac

He is also.... the president of the United States?

[rsynnott]

For three more years, and at significant risk of being basically neutered in a year (the polls aren't exactly going _great_ for him). Like, it's unclear how much accommodation one should be making to his delicate feelings.

[neogodless]

I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to the president of the United States.

While I don't think "corporations should be in charge", I also don't think a President should be dictating corporate culture or policy short of going through the proper channels of using Congress to write legislation that keeps corporations in check and doesn't allow their power and influence to grow too large.

But... uh... yeah that isn't happening either. Instead, those in power are helping each other out, at the expense of common citizens of the U.S. (and likely at the expense of people outside the U.S. too.)

[terminalshort]

But the president absolutely can enforce civil rights laws which clearly ban racial discrimination in hiring and promotions.

[alt227]

> I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to the president of the United States.

If you dont, you could suddenly find that the thing you sell has a ridiculous tariff imposed on it. Then that might mean you sell a lot less. He has done much more for much less in the past.

[AnimalMuppet]

If you make that thing in the US, good luck having the US government slap a tariff on it.

I mean, yes, Microsoft is international, and the president could probably find an angle to put a tariff on some part of their business. Not most of it, though.

[westmeal]

So what?

[rtkwe]

There's a hell of a lot of power vested in the executive branch especially in the DOJ to really mess with companies and the real protection against it's misuse was the agreement that the President didn't directly instruct and control who the DOJ actually indicted. It used to be a notable event when a president even appeared to hint that he was encouraging investigations (not even indictments) into specific companies now we've got a president explicitly demanding the DOJ indict specific people and find any reason to do so, see Comey and Letitia James's recent indictments.

[shadowgovt]

And, of course, since businesses are fundamentally in competition, that puts them in an interesting position: even if it's a net negative for the entire industry to capitulate to the bullying tactics of the executive branch, you can get a leg up on your competition by having one fewer giant complicated court case to worry about (even if the case is guaranteed to lose, it still costs money to defend it).

[rtkwe]

Yes, there's a lot of pressure to stay on his good side, even if the charges are bogus and eventually beaten or just ends in a pay-off like many cases the process is still damaging/costly and there's large incentives to pre-comply. Look at Apple's little gift plaque for an example of that, not really a bribe unless more laws are broken but a nice little ego stroke none the less.

[hagbard_c]

So "democracy" [1], that term which is bandied about so much by those who seem to consistently fail at it.

[1] Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. You [2] voted for it, now you [2] get to keep it.

[2] you as in "We, the People".

[bitmasher9]

Everything is negotiable. Why would you resist joining the culture war, if your participation can be profitable.

[p0w3n3d]

If you are obliged by the investors too

[shadowgovt]

Not really. This is one of the things Google got right; organize your company so founders have a controlling interest and it doesn't matter fundamentally what the investors think, they can't steer the company.

At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.

[pfdietz]

> At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.

Those baseball cards also come with some rights. The people running the company have a fiduciary responsibility to them. They cannot, for example, use the company as a piggybank.

[shadowgovt]

But especially in the case of Google, those rights do not extend to setting the values, direction, or priorities of the company.

Nobody outside of the founders has enough of a controlling stake for that to be practically possible.

[p0w3n3d]

I'm speaking about ESG which became somehow mandatory for investors at some point of time. Not mandatory in legal, but cultural sense

[jlarocco]

It's a mistake to think corporations above a certain size care about anything other than getting more money for themselves and sharedholers.

If pushing diversity makes their goal easier then they'll do it, and if pushing diversity makes it more difficult then they'll back off of those initiatives.

The only thing they actually care about is what's best for their bottom line.

[shortrounddev2]

Nobody in the tech industry cares about DEI (most people I've met are downright hostile to the idea). All those companies in 2020 who hired DEI consultants and made big announcements about DEI and changed master to main were just buying cheap good will

[TheTaytay]

You could argue that they were pandering to certain powers then and are pandering now.

[blackguardx]

Who was president when Microsoft introduced D&I (Diversity and Inclusion) initiatives in 2019? AFAIK, they never called it DEI internally.

[shadowgovt]

I caution against extrapolating to the entire tech industry from an individual sample of experience.

[rockskon]

Didn't Microsoft spend years basing the bonuses and performance reviews of middle management based heavily on the gender and race of who they managed to hire or promote?

[veeti]

The cynical take is that main was about shutting up Github employees protests against ICE contracts [1]. And it seemed to work: no more protests and another diversity consultant enriched.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/29/microsofts-github-has-become...

[mc32]

Whatever they do, companies should not be doing quotas other than bringing in the people who will propel the mission.

Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline. From kindergarten, drive kids to want to participate in a dynamic economy instead of pursuing selling themselves short and perhaps getting involved in the underground economy, dead-end jobs, etc. Go give it a go in all areas of the nation that are under-served. That is the way to do it. If you do it any time later, like at hiring time, then you risk hiring on things other than merit.

[Arodex]

Oh, yeah, let companies be in charge of education from the kindergarten.

You read cyberpunk novels and thought "yeah, I would love my country to be governed by megacorps from cradle to grave".

[mc32]

So instead rely on public education which fails many students in delivering a quality education, or, having given up, just pass them to let them figure life out once they graduate.

It's not necessary that corps own the education, but they they have schools within a school to deliver the education that they are expecting from new graduates.

[Arodex]

Public education is what made those great companies you fawn about.

Public education is also something you are responsible for as a citizen. If it is shit, it is so because you let it be. Assume your responsibilities instead of hoping for "enlightened" corporate lords to do it for you, peasant.

[gedy]

> Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline.

Previous company "did that", but what it amounted to was young HR women filtering all candidates before engineering saw them or their resumes, and you had to pick from their not-so-great candidates they got based on gender or race. Also interviewers could not see what other interviewers said - so we got bypassed as well behind the scenes

[gedy]

And I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to glorified twitter rants and non-technical HR busybodies who pushed DEI internally?

[guywithahat]

The diversity efforts were companies bowing to government "egomaniacs" as you put it. If anything a more pure merit-based hiring is more in line with what companies and employees want

[hagbard_c]

> I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to a glorified reality show egomaniac.

In those terms it is equally perplexing for them to have bowed down to a geriatric dementia-addled has-been, to a deeply corrupt DEI hire, to a dynastical potato-brained fool, to a whoring sumb*tch, ... in other words to the leader of the 'free world' known as the President of the United States of America. Just because you don't like the current one does not mean he has less authority than any of the previous ones - especially compared to the previous 'democratic' iteration who had to be told where to walk, what to say to whom at what moment and had to be kept on a leash so he did not bumble off into the shrubbery during memorials.