How well would the tech industry do if they fired all the autistic people for "not being team players"? How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person, or socially awkward geek?
The irony is that DEI promotes merit by forcing companies to justify hiring beyond basic “cultural fit” vibes.
I’ve been in the business and seen a ton of hires on vibes. DEI actually asked people to expand the talent search, not hire anyone unqualified (which is what the anti-DEI folks are desperate to have us believe it did).
I predict some major EEO lawsuits will eventually bring the pendulum back in the other direction because my sense is that the return to vibes hiring (and RIF-ing) is resulting in very actionable discrimination cases.
The enthusiasm for disparaging DEI combined with a lack of articulation of how they plan to quantify 'qualifications' in a non-biased manner. My sense is that they don't plan to do this at all, they don't have a plan, and they are going to blunder into patterns of discriminatory practices that DEI frameworks were protecting them against.
If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.
Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on, prefilter insufficiency "diverse" candidates from the pool presented to teams, or implement internal quotas to meet external funding or contract requirements.
Not to mention the actual external requirements for "diversity" from public tender process, government backed funding bodies, and politically protected mega wealthy.
If hiring practices were purely operating on merit and free from discrimination, we wouldn't have studies repeatedly showing that people with the 'wrong' names, and otherwise identical resumes, weren't called back as frequently.
> Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on
HR departments have screwed around with delays in the interview process long before anyone ever imagined the concept of expanding the candidate pool, doing blind resume screening, and standardizing the interview process. I don't think having fairer hiring processes created this problem.
> If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.
Yes, there would, because un-diverse candidates (not white, young males from a handful of schools) would never get their foot in the door. Companies only interview a small fraction of their candidates.
> It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry.
Perhaps I'm missing something here.
To me "individual contributor" means anyone who is NOT: A (technical) "Lead", "Chief", "Architect", or (possibly) "Staff" anything, and has no management or team-leader responsibilities.
Alas, I’ve learned that while everyone wants to hire them to fix their hideously fucked systems, they really don’t enjoy being told that their systems are, in fact, hideously fucked. They’d much prefer you quietly put out fires while biting your tongue about how they aren’t actually fixing any root causes.
I'm not saying there can't be very clear counter examples, I guess the overall sense though is that "being a team player' is generally considered an attractive quality in any employee. If A is a team player and B isn't, and they're otherwise equivalent, you're probably going to take/keep A.
It's not like (most) hiring managers put "not a team player" in the pro column.
The problem is that people are being cut for not being perceived as a team player, because they don't exactly fit the narrow perspective avoided by the dominant social culture. That doesn't mean they aren't team players.
For example: someone not always looking into your eyes while talking can be perceived as "rude". Same for wearing noise-canceling headphones in a talk-heavy environment. Oh, you don't drink alcohol during the "optional" Friday-afternoon company mixer? That's just weird. Want to have a day off for Eid rather than Christmas? Wellll, you did ask for it six months in advance and we did approve it already, buuuuut Dave planned a last-minute meeting which conflicts with the mandatory team meeting, so we moved the mandatory team meeting onto your day off... We'll just pay the hours you spent doing first-line support during Christmas in cash, okay?
heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this case.
on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings, therefore social behaviours could be assumed to a higher degree. reference behavioural encodings drastically diverge across cultures (as embodied by religious value sets, or at a different meta level, the idea of low trust vs. high trust societies). based on this drastic divergence, predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity.
so i see that jacking up societal entropy leads to lowered societal cohesion. but thats just my stance and id love to hear yours.
> on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings...
Which homogenous country with thousands of years of existence did you have in mind when writing this??
none, because i said group, not country. the history of my own ethnic subpopulation can be traced back around a millenia or two, perhaps that biased my writing?
I couldn't disagree more. "predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity"? I feel like this is just a fancy way of saying that you're uncomfortable with people being different from you. The social tension you're describing is in your own head. Even the article you're citing doesn't even agree with what you're saying.
your post is an ad hominem without substance to back the personal accusations within. i said there were arguments both in favor of and against diversity. the article i posted showed arguments both in favor of and against diversity. obviously some contradictions will present when looking at both sides.
diverse, millenia old, genetically encoded behavioural structures exist in our shared reality. id love to discuss this idea and the exact types of behaviours that can be encoded, down to the generational timespans required for encoding. that way we can talk about my idea in objective good faith.
'its all in your head' isnt objective good faith. applying the golden rule, you clearly accept bad faith ... man you couldnt tolerate a dissenting idea even momentarily before bringing out social ostracization and logical fallacies! sounds pretty similar to the behaviour of a racist, were you projecting?
that was said facetiously. im not trying to accuse you of anything, rather to show how it feels to be accused. to conclude i think its pretty easy to predict what my neighbours are eating for dinner at home and pretty hard in the city so youre gonna have to try a bit harder to convince me that the evidence of my eyes and ears is wrong.
Human populations dont share enough genes when they do share culture for this argument to make sense, people identifying as X culture but with Y genetics don't magically act like Y - saying "genetically encoded behavioral structures" is usually just code for "black people are dumber than white people" so you should understand why people are assuming bad faith.
thank you for clarifying why bad faith was assumed, that makes sense ... im pretty sure different levels of intelligence do present across racial/cultural borders, but assigning that to any one factor (ie. black=dumb) is unscientific
If a qualification for the role is "appreciation for certain less represented cultures/ideas/..." then sure. Otherwise, for a backend c++ engineer the benefits are significantly less obvious, to the point it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill.
The goal should be to hire the best team for the use case, regardless of gender/race/culture/background.
Appreciation isn't always enough, lived experience provides a lot of value as well.
See all the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names/Addresses/Birthdays/Phone Numbers/Time Zones/etc, for example. Do you want a backend engineer who designs a 64-character ascii text field for legal name and have everyone nod in agreement, or would you rather have one who knows that it isn't going to work for their cousin "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso"?
> it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill
It doesn't. The goal of DEI has always been to attract a diversity of perspectives, all else being equal. Nobody ever proposed choosing a woefully unqualified diverse candidate over an obviously-qualified Generic White Guy. The only people who would oppose that would be the unqualified Generic White Guy who just happens to be the nephew of the CEO's golf buddy.
I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.
Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.
McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject.
It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals can't understand customers as well as a workforce of people who represent the diversity of those customers.
This isn't just diversity of race or gender, it's also diversity of thought and background.
Also critical and under-emphasized: the E and I in DEI, equity and inclusion. Power distance and lack of inclusion can railroad companies into giving the people with the most power the most influence on decisions, rather than giving the best ideas a chance to breathe.
In business a classic example might be "men designing women's clothing." How are you going to understand your customers if none of your employees and leadership resemble those customers? Perhaps you can figure it out and make some decent products but your competitor who has more diversity in their workforce is likely to outperform you, which is exactly what McKinsey's studies have demonstrated.
I will also point out that the only reason anyone started questioning this obviously true business concept and changing opinions into being against DEI is because the Republican Party's strategists figured out that they could appropriate and leverage the term "DEI" and attach it to the latent reactionary racism that much of the US still holds dear.
You can get away with saying "I don't like DEI" in public but if you say "I don't like black people" or "I don't think women should get hired for important roles" [1] that is obviously not acceptable, even though a large percentage of Americans feel that way. Right wing media twisted a largely innocent term into a useful dogwhistle.
Citing those studies should be peak confirmation bias.
So McKinsey made a study with a low risk feel good conclusion with outcomes that are completely subjective based on data that can be completely massaged and we are supposed to go all in with DEI and discrimination?
The idea that DEI is a discrimination program is a false implantation by right wing media.
Discrimination is the polar opposite of what DEI programs intend to implement. Unfortunately, we’ve been fighting the tail end of the civil war for the past century and the establishment sees equality as discrimination against their privilege.
Those McKinsey/HBR studies are trash. They privilege the hypothesis, overlook the obvious ecological fallacy at play and add in a bit of a sampling bias for good measure. The fact that East Asian Economies are all booming and exporting globally with ~0 diversity and unique cultures ought to refute this notion. I'm sure there is some no true scotsman line you can play here about how the true meaning of DEI, and I would agree that the stated goals of DEI are all laudable. But in practice these initiatives often amounted to unprincipled discrimination and venal power grabs, which is why they are so widely despised.
The teams in the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, the inventors of the transistor, the guys who designed the Hoover dam, who wrote Doom, etc. etc. etc. etc. were not very diverse.
You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
It seems like you’re using the achievements of white men as some kind of odd way to put down the achievements of people who aren’t men. They’re “peak performance” but everyone else isn’t, is that what you’re implying?
Ever heard of Ada Lovelace?
Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler?
Katherine Johnson, who performed the calculations for John Glenn's Friendship 7 orbital flight, also did some calculations for the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions.
Margaret Hamilton, who created the term “software engineer” among other accomplishments as a computer programmer for the Apollo project.
Adele Goldberg, part of the team who developed Smalltalk.
You brought up Doom, so I’ll bring up the creative director of Uncharted series Amy Hennig, Kim Swift the game designer for Portal, Shannon Loftis at Microsoft, Ellen Beeman game designer for the Wing Commander series…