There's an implication here that 7% of the tech workforce being Black is an obvious indication of disparate treatment. Taking programmers as an example, the claim is that the industry is actively discriminating against Black workers for a 1:2 ratio, while at the same time fetishizing Asian employees by having them over-represented 4:1. Whites are also underrepresented. Is anybody investigating that?
I'd be perfectly happy to support their cause if they provided evidence of discrimination to back their claims, but these accusations come off as sensationalist, statistically innumerate and lazy.
We occasionally get US HR people come over here, talking to a team of 4-10 people, point out there's no black people in it and use that as an example of the lack of diversity.
The problem is that black people are ~1% of local population, so a team without black people is much less surprising than in the US or London.
You don't need to filter for education or other factors to get 1% here, nor did we have a larger black population previously that was then economically displaced.
I think that the focus on "percentage of workforce" as a proxy for "amount of discrimination" is a bad idea. Frankly, I don't know how discrimination in the workplace ought to be measured. I know that every single woman I know that works in tech has experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. At a company where I worked, male employees started telling female employees that they shouldn't be wearing pants to work and should be instead be wearing dresses and skirts.
Certainly, these experiences are anecdotal, but I've seen enough anecdotes personally (in addition to reading articles about discrimination at Uber and Blizzard) to suggest that discrimination is a non-negligible problem. I'd definitely be in favor of accurately measuring discrimination since, at the moment, all I know is that it happens to _some_ people, but I have no clue how big that group is.
I doubt that tech companies have any motivation to actually try to measure this accurately. A lot of the "pro-diversity" actions that tech companies have taken seem to be aimed to placate (sometimes misguided) employees worried about diversity issues, rather than trying to actually solve any actual problems.
At large enough companies the aggregate ratios give a rough picture. One could also compare discrimination complaint rates to ratio of protected classes.
>What makes it so that Asians are underrepresented,
Their physique.
Fact of the matter is, black peoples' bodies are far more suited for strenuous physical activities than asians'. For the NBA specifically, the average height of blacks compared to that of asians is a significant factor; the taller you are the more advantageous you will be.
For a more in-depth example, over in Japan (note: I'm Japanese-American) athletes who have some foreign blood in them tend to perform better in sports compared to 100% Japanese athletes. Not to mention 100% foreigners who moved to Japan who will, in general, perform better than anyone with Japanese blood.
The reality is asians aren't as physically capable as other races, generally speaking.
>and would the games be more interesting if these causes were addressed ?
No. I think I speak for the majority when I say we watch sports matches to spectate top-of-the-class athletes doing their best, regardless who or what they are.
If there are obvious diversity quota players in the mix, that would /reduce/ the overall fun and interest because the sport stops being about the best athletes performing their best.
> The reality is asians aren't as physically capable as other races, generally speaking.
What about baseball then? MLB has only 3% asians[1]. However, asians have demonstrated excellence at a very similar sport (Cricket), so physique should not matter.
Disclaimer: I'm only intimately familiar with America's and Japan's baseball scenes.
That comes down to MLB play being on an entirely different plane of existence from Japanese (and I would presume other asian locales') professional league baseball.
Japan has two of their own professional leagues, and a handful of players manage to move over to the MLB in their careers. But only a handful make it, because the minimum skill and performance levels demanded by the MLB are several orders of magnitudes higher than Japan's leagues.
This isn't about racism nor discrimination, the reality is the vast majority of Japanese baseball players simply don't make the cut for MLB.
Players like Nomo, Ichiro, and Ohtani were among the cream of the crop in Japan's baseball leagues when they moved to the MLB. They make it all look mundane, but they quite literally busted several asses to get in the MLB.
Conversely, MLB players who move over to Japan's baseball leagues tend to wipe the floor with Japanese players because the performance floor is so much lower.
This is all to say physique, and also attitude, very definitely matter. That shit ain't easy; mad respects from me as a baseball fan. Baseball is as meritocracy as it gets.
P.S. Kudos to Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers for making the MLB one of the pioneers and forerunners in true equality for mankind.
> we watch sports matches to spectate top-of-the-class athletes doing their best, regardless who or what they are.
Then wouldn’t be more interesting if a variety of players with different top-of-the-class physical profiles moved the game through strategies optimized to their strengths and weaknesses ?
To take a concrete example, the addition of the 3 point rule expanded the category of players that could have a critical impact on the game. I personally wouldn’t see that rule addition as a dilution of the game or a pandering to physical diversity, it genuinely makes the games more interesting.
We could imagine other rules that bring in even wider physical profiles and change the game in interesting ways.
I watch sports to see athletes performing their best; I couldn't give a rat's rotten ass what they are.
As such, diversity quotas would not be appealing to my interests and demands in the first place. I /don't fucking care/ what they are, I care if they are good athletes.
If a sport presents me with diversity hires, I'm just going to go watch or do something else.
The other side of that is that there are sometimes opportunities to innovate within the existing rules that no one else is exploiting. For example, Boyd Epley revolutionized the whole game of gridiron football when he introduced a rigorous strength training program to the Nebraska Cornhuskers.
> black peoples' bodies are far more suited for strenuous physical activities than asians'
> […]
> The reality is asians aren't as physically capable as other races, generally speaking.
Do you apply similar logic to explain why black people are underrepresented in technical fields while Asian people are over-represented? Would you say that Asian peoples’ minds are “far more suited” for strenuous intellectual activities than black peoples’?
Given that he's "accusing" his own race of being less physically capable I can only assume that the same goes for other traits in other races. Have a look at who has been winning long distance running events for the last few decades and you'll quickly find out that people from a certain area - nay, a certain tribe [1] - in Kenya are grossly overrepresented. This is not because they're all using doping like e.g. athletes from the former DDR did, it is because they share a mixture of genes and culture which makes them exceed in this field. Going by the data it seems clear that people from certain areas in the world - mostly in Asia and Europe - share a mixture of genes and culture which makes them exceed in what you call "strenuous intellectual activities" [2].
You seem to be upset over his pointing out this fact. Why is it no problem to point out that these Kenyans are dominating long distance running - even NPR reports about this - but problematic [3] to point out that the Japanese, Swiss, Chinese, Americans and Dutch dominate when it comes to intellectual pursuits? I suspect this is because intellectual pursuits have a higher standing among the "educated" classes who tend to ruminate about these things than physical activities. In a way this itself is problematic just like the way many "educated" people look down upon physical labour is problematic - to use a term often bandied about by those same people. A healthy society needs both those who are more into physical activities as well as those who are more into intellectual pursuits to develop and thrive - this is true diversity.
I’m not particularly upset, and I don’t necessarily disagree with the rest of your comment.
My comment was more related to the fact that in my experience there are quite a number of people who have no qualms about suggesting that black people are over represented in sports like running and sprinting, professional basketball, and professional football because they are just naturally better athletes, but then will absolutely refuse to even entertain the possibility that some other races or ethnic groups might be naturally better in other fields like science and engineering. I find that sort of thinking rather inconsistent, so I was mostly just probing to see what the person I was replying to believed.
Of course this sort of discussion is going to be controversial since suggesting that a certain ethnic group is naturally better than other ethnic groups in some sense, even if only in certain areas, would seem to fit the traditional definition of racism.
I wouldn't say they are less intellectually capable. But the number of black people who grow up in an environment of computers, engineering, etc... is much much lower than the comparable number of white or asian young men who grow up in such environments.
This is also the reason why there are far few women software engineers than men. It is not about their capabilities, physical, intellectual or otherwise. It is about their environment where they grow up in - some people grow up with programming computers from very early age because their parents do something similar, most of these (by a wide margin) are white or asian boys.
But most early computer programmers were women. If it’s just the environment they grew up in, then why did programming computers shift over the 20th century from being a job dominated by women to a job dominated by men?
For the record, I also don’t think it’s about “differences in capabilities”. I think that amongst other things, as personal computing came of age different types of men became attracted to computing, and changed the culture around computing to one which excluded women (in most cases probably unintentionally). If that’s true, there might be parallels with the software industry today and race.
> But most early computer programmers were women. If it’s just the environment they grew up in, then why did programming computers shift over the 20th century from being a job dominated by women to a job dominated by men?
Early computer "programmers" were doing something more akin to data entry than churning out CRUD apps using the latest js framework. Comparing the programming jobs of the 70s or whatever to the jobs today therefore makes little sense.
Early "computers" were also women. Because the engineering work was done by men and the computational "menial work" was done by women. These same women were replaced by digital computers later on, and some of these women felt "at home" with the new medium since they had better familiarity with what is going on in there than men did.
But that was the 60s and 70s, and the women at the time were in their 20s and 30s.
Many of those women remained "computers" and did not go into "engineers", and there is a big difference between the two. A computer is great at solving equations and doing the menial work of data calculation, similar to what we use spreadsheets for today.
Engineers on the other hand is a more creative approach to problem solving, when presented with various problems (not just of math) that need some solutions, an engineer would try and find that solution by being creative.
About 20-30 years ago, there was a large population of engineers around the world who are the parents of today's engineers who are 20-30yo right now. Those engineers were white men, and women, and asian men and women. Not many of them were black families, so today's 20-30yo black men (and women) are not only a small portion of the world population, they are also heavily underrepresented in engineering. That is not to say they are incapable, as I mentioned above, it is more influenced by the "environment" where these people grew up in.
Also, early women programmers does not mean that today's women had the same upbringing and attraction to the same professions as the women in the 60s and 70s. Back then being a "computer" was similar to being a secretary, it involved a lot of menial work and precision. Today's secretaries might be required to be good with spreadsheets and document writing software, quite a leap away from programming.
The above are generalizations, since there are absolutely definitely amazing women software engineers today, as well as black men software engineers. It is just that they are barely a minority in the software engineering industry, there are just very few of them - which makes sense why the software engineering jobs don't have any significant representation of these people working there.
Assuming there are no underlying systemic discriminations or inhibitors at play, the results speak for themselves.
The brutal reality is that various peoples and individuals have varying aptitudes to various things depending upon their genetic makeup, upbringing, social factors, and more.
You literally can not round up a random group of people and expect them all to behave the same. That's not how this works.
> Assuming there are no underlying systemic discriminations or inhibitors at play, the results speak for themselves.
Systemic discrimination and inhibitors can't be set aside in a discussion about representation. The results you're referring to have those two baked in.
Japan finished 3rd in the medal count at the last summer Olympics. China and South Korea also did well. So the data doesn't seem to support your hypothesis.
You picked one ethnicity "Japanese" to represent all "Asians".
Regardless of the veracity of your claim, Japanese physiques don't represent all Asian physiques. And even Chinese historical records often mentioned who short the Japanese were.
I did say the Japan example is an "in-depth" example rather than a general one, so it would not necessarily apply to other asian locales.
I merely used Japan because I'm actually qualified to talk about them with some degree of specificity, and the rest of the comment is hopefully written in a more generalized manner.
Do you have some data to back any of this up? I feel that reducing the wast amount of people to a single variable based on skin color, doesn't add up. Even from my completely uneducated perspective I couldn't generalize people from different parts of Africa, let alone other places.
I'm not at all familiar with the finer points of table tennis, but I would presume any race predispositioned to more stamina would have an easier time in general.
I thought this would be obvious. Look at the representation of Asians in STEM programs versus athletic programs. There’s the stereotype that Asian parents are hyper-focused on their kids’ academics (tiger mom) and not on athletics but just because it’s a stereotype doesn’t mean it’s false.
Stereotypes don't form out of the ether. We don't have preconceptions about the Inuit being incredible basketball players because there's no reason why we would think that.
The main issue is the longevity of stereotypes vs how fast reality evolves.
Many inuits left their land and moved to cities. A second generation inuit living in Toronto has no reason to be better or worse than anyone else at basketball.
Because the implication here is that the reason that diversity metrics are what they are is because of innate genetic talent for working at tech company which is nonsense. Relating that to the NBA wouldn’t make sense whatsoever.
Why would exclusive spots for top tier talent in an industry not include a genetic component when exclusive spots for top tier talent in a sport clearly does?
Studies done with adopted children appear to show that slightly less than 50% of intelligence is heritable[1]. That means that a good deal of it isn't, but to say practically undetermined seems like an exaggeration?
I'm replying to myself because re-reading this comment is sounds a little callus. While I am implying that we can't say for sure what fair looks like given human variation, we also can't say that the current distribution is fair the way basketball appears to be.
Which doesn't even include the word layoff, is from 2022, and doesn't seem to address the issue at all.
As I go through, this is consistent in the article. Make an argument, link to evidence, which doesn't include anything about your argument.
I'd really like to read a better put together article on the topic. I think it's a very reasonable discussion, but I'm dissuaded to try and sort out it when they cite details that have no evidence i can see.
Let's just keep it real... In a practical, engineering environment, the talk of race and status has no place. If you want to code for a living, write good code, and do your best to find somewhere that will pay you adequately for your skillset. Once you're there, improvise and collaborate with your coworkers and use the resources at your disposal to get tasks/tickets done to the best of your ability. Nobody on earth can rightfully ask for any more of you than that.
The more time you spend talking to your employer about your skin color, the less work is getting done, and in the long run that equates 1:1 to money. Do the work, take the money, and keep it simple.
I think people need better mentors. They don't need diversity pledges and social justice initiatives in the workplace, I think they just need people to guide them along their path to becoming the best X that they can be, without judgment. That way the relationship is collaborative and nurturing, rather than threatening and adversarial like with these diversity movements. Keeping it skill-based is better for everyone.
This assumes everyone is starting from the same place. And that tribalism isn't an inherent human trait, or is so mild it needs no conscious effort to counteract.
Some of us are born into privilege, and those who aren't do need some help to level the playing field. And that's likely at every stage of life, from forced integration of schools to extra grace for oppressed groups in the workplace.
I agree with most of this, however in practice, it doesn’t really go down this way.
These large corporations often turn diversity goals into pseudo-business number games. To put it bluntly, they’ll hire a certain number of brown folks and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
I’m all for extra grace. I really, truly am. I don’t talk about this much, but my grandfather was murdered by a burglar many years ago. My dad visited that man over a dozen times that I can remember when I was growing up, and there’s a lot of other details and lessons surrounding this, but my point is that I understand what I believe to be the true nature of grace.
Giving someone a job they don’t deserve because of their skin color is not grace, it’s tokenizing and patronizing, whilst simultaneously reinforcing the power structures that create the situation in the first place. No, a person should be given a job they don’t deserve because of the belief that they will be grateful to learn to do it well, and led to do so by a competent and compassionate mentor.
It’s this weird quantification that holds back people’s understanding when it comes to race and status in the workplace. It’s about people, and it can’t be captured or comprehended by any form of spreadsheet or business initiative.
If we want the situation for our neighbors to improve, we need to be good neighbors and help them, rather than saying “oh, well we should find sixteen more black neighbors to make our diversity quota.” If you’re one of those future neighbors, you suddenly realize that all you are is just some black person to fill a space, for numerical purposes.
"Despite loud commitments of solidarity and support for Black communities after the murder of George Floyd, the tech industry, by and large, seems content to quietly overlook the business case for retaining employees of color and prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging."
What is the business case for retaining employees of color other than having them as employees that benefit the company? This reads like companies should keep employees of color no matter what, essentially discriminating against everyone else and just virtue signalling.
The crazy people complaining about "cultural marxism" weren't totally wrong. A broken clock is right twice a day. There are people who sincerely think companies should hire employees of color more-or-less just for their being of color.
Which is pretty terrible for talented people of color who are making material contributions because it erodes their peers confidence that they're actually qualified.
It's hilarious that those loons have come full circle to the point that they say people should be judged by the color of their skin rather than the quality of their character.
> But would King have opposed Kendism? Although conservatives like to quote his brilliant speech on the content of a man’s character, he was also quite explicitly in favour of quotas and discrimination measures if they favoured his group. As King said: ‘if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in a particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas, as the case almost always happens to be.’
> King may have believed in all sorts of preferential treatment, not just on account of race but also income and class, but then he was quite explicitly a socialist. Racial equality was part of a more general belief in social equality between rich and poor (that these two goals inevitably and always clash is one of many problems making this dream not entirely realisable).
> As Matthew Yglesias has written: ‘Today’s conservatives often like to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as an apostle of “colorblind” policy as an aspirational goal. But King was a socialist who argued for a radical redistribution of material resources.’
Seems like a perfectly good proverb to me. It's saying don't create out groups that have no sympathy for you by excluding them from society. Not that you should increase your distrust of out groups!
It's those statements that make it obvious that none of this is about diversity and inclusion, but rather about selfishness and grabbing any advantage you can have.
> According to a McKinsey report, nurturing organizational diversity leads to higher profit margins. The most diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% in profitability.
>"DEIB leads to employee retention, which means there are actually savings on keeping employees in the company longer versus spending money on recruitment to fill those roles..."
These are two points contained within the article, in the paragraphs leading up to the conclusion.
> The causality could easily be the other way around.
Of course it could, though I've come to find this critique pretty weak when two people discuss a study that neither of them has read. You can say it about any topline conclusion about things that are correlated.
The driving factor could be something else - profitable companies could be more attractive to a diverse workforce.
Probably we oughta read the study. I was just pointing out that parent was looking for a business case for diversity in and of itself and seemed to have missed the one the article attempted to provide.
So are employees of color being fired disproportionately therefore reducing diversity? There is no data in the article to support that. Maybe far more men than women were let go? So diversity is only increasing.
You are listing two business cases for retention: do you think tech companies are not aware of the same data? If there was a strong case for keeping employees of a specific demographic, do you think companies would ignore that and prefer to lose more money?
It sounds like you're skeptical about the business case, I was just pointing out that article did provide you with one.
I don't know the answers to your questions. Though I agree the article doesn't back up the claim that layoffs are reducing diversity, except possibly indirectly by references to Twitter, where there are claims layoffs disproportionately affected women.
I can only hope this is true! DEI has been an increasing cause of active discrimination against majority-population groups, and gives powerful roles to the most jealous, historically uneducated, politics playing people in each company. It has made working on tech almost unbearable for many years. The sooner it’s over the better, and I hope we never go back to it.
Not to mention that the longer DEI lasts, it will discredit any future attempts to address any actual issues with the distribution of opportunity in our society.
Tribalism seems to be a part of human nature. One that requires active effort to counteract. BIPOC are also born into more difficult circumstances, through no fault of their own. Rich societies can and should lend a hand. Not close their eyes and pretend systemic problems will work themselves out.
We should attempt to build a society with sufficient mobility and opportunity that regardless of any unfairness in starting conditions a relatively fair outcome would occur over time.
I recommend starting by reducing all the problems mentioned in the book "The Captured Economy", in particular residential zoning restrictions, occupational licensing (for all but the most safety relevant professions), and patent reform.
To that I would add, significantly simplify all laws, processes, and forms so that the average person (or preferably even a person 1 standard deviation below average) can start a business without consulting a lawyer.
Worked at a place with ERGs. I had never heard of them before. In our company wiki, they were listed as places where people of the protected group could "share career opportunities" and help each other out. Seemed mega illegal to me. I asked HR how is this not discriminatory, and they said anyone could join the group, not just people of the protected group. But nowhere was that written down or communicated. Pretty sure I was put on a "list" for that line of questioning.
ERGs in the companies I've been in has been a way to redirect the organising types into something that is probably cost-neutral after considering the PR wins rather than have them focus on union-type things they might otherwise get into that are just straight up cost to the company.
When you've got a hiring freeze and your stock is beat up, you don't need to recruit more talent (BIPOC or otherwise), and you don't need to tell the world how progressive you are. You need to prioritize projects and execute with strong teams. As an initiative, diversity distracts from that.
Coinbase isn't in the business of being a platform for progressive politics. It's a platform for exchanging crypto, and it's explicit about it. Other companies aer quietly following suit.
This is going to be kind of tangential and I apologize for that, but allow me to say that as a person of Japanese heritage I fucking hate the term "BIPOC" and any related terms thereof.
I'm a man, not a political object of convenience. If you must refer to my race for actually practical reasons, you can just refer to that than use a stupid term stemming from identity politics. If you need some generic way to refer, just refer to us as the minority because that's an objective fact.
"BIPOC" is insulting, both to the individuals and their heritage.
It's a kind of figurative "colonialism" if you think about it, and I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who talks that way (same with Latinx as someone else mentioned).
These terms get used the way "savage" might have been used a few 100 years ago by missionaries
Despite the "World's Dumbest Idea[1]," the legal construction of corporations exist to provide net positive social benefit. This is a collective and subjective judgement, but when, in aggregate, the public's perception is that corporations aren't living up to their end of the bargain, the social contract is broken and a raging public is the last thing anyone needs. It typically ends very poorly for the targets of said outrage.
A bit off-topic, but how do people actually feel about being diversity hires? Doesn't that feel... Demeaning?
I've once had a talk with a CEO (a very technical one) of an ML/CV company, who told me a story of how some American company wanted to hire her as a female manager.
She was super offended by this and declined. When asked why, she said that she wanted to be hired for her skills, rather than for her set of genitalia.
So my question is: don't diversity hires feel devaluated? Or maybe I just underestimate the level of day-to-day discrimination in the US and the alternative is worse?
P.S. I don't live in a western country so excuse me if any of this sounds insensitive.
This is just my opinion, there is a group of "professional diversity hires" - usually very well off but with some trendy ethnicity in their background that play it up and use their heritage to further their career. This diversity stuff basically pushes these people to the front of the line.
There are also of course (as a majority) legit people from whatever trendy background that just want to do their job, and see all the fawning over "diversity" either as something to ignore (like most of us do). And then there are a few that choose to engage with it and see it as actively offensive, which it is when you think about it.
So bottom line, my feeling is that the way "diverse" - trendily ethnic or genedered etc people feel about it is about the same as everyone feels about it
I don’t see this as any different to traditional office politics and the self serving “dark triad” personalities you come across. The key component of Machiavellianism is using whatever means you have. That could be in-group status OR out-group status, the result is the same.
The label of “professional diversity hire” is harmful to those in the majority group you identified who aren’t playing that game. So just call it for what it is rather than enabling discrimination with a dog whistle.
Diversity hire is a dog whistle. If you are a low performer in the in-group, you are label as a low performer. If you are a low performer in the out group, you are labelled as a diversity hire.
Even if you are not low performing, you’re still under constant pressure to prove you’re not a diversity hire.
People usually don’t have the designation of “diversity hire” officially bestowed on them by a company. They are just given to people who are in the out-group by people in the in-group. In your story, it sounds like a company explicitly was searching for a woman as a manager or the CEO got that impression. I don’t know American laws but where I am the exemptions for explicitly hiring a job based on a protected category are very limited and need to be intrinsically link - think things like requiring a woman for a female role in a movie or requiring a member of X cultural group for an outreach role focusing on that group.
Obviously this is very hard to police, and people do consider protected categories in hiring practices, sometimes in favour of an in-group and sometimes in favour of an out-group.
You might argue that the existence of diversity quotas, targets, policies or programs is the cause of the the different treatment, but it is not. Even if the company had a very explicit “best candidate wins - no special treatment” policy - you can’t escape in-group vs out-group politics. It is just that the dog whistle used will change. Even if a company has no diversity policy, the laws exist and so the whistle will change from “X is diversity hire” to “they can’t fire X because they’re afraid of lawsuits”.
Most people in out-groups will just end up adopting a persona that is acceptable enough to the in-group in order to survive. But this also does bad damage to a person’s identity. Ironically, one of the best ways to prove yourself as a member of the in-group is to blow the same dog whistles - as the female CEO did in your example.
I'm Japanese-American and have, thankfully, never experienced being a diversity hire. If I were presented with such a situation though, I would take that as an insult and refuse the offer or quit ASAP because I want to be judged for who I am rather than what I am.
I'd say more generally the product of not enough market competition. It's the equivalent of animals that evolve to signal fitness through useless plumage or ornamental antlers. The Canadian banks are a good case study in this regard (not just with respect to diversity). They have no competition and are completely undifferentiated so instead just focus on irrelevant fitness signalling that has no relation with the actual services they offer (which consist of exploiting monopoly power to a screw their customers). The same has been in effect true in tech, so we end up with initiatives like the one under discussion instead of focusing on a product or service
Wouldn't this be expected when companies are pruning the lowest performers? They got an extra boost to get in the door, but naturally, some won't take advantage of that and will be dropped when times get tough.
Probably because to have a real impact in this problem, you need to start in elementary school. Otherwise, you are just fighting for a limited amount of talent rather than growing how much of that talent is available.
True. It's absolutely a pipeline problem, and "tech" isn't even the solution as much as improving educations overall. I also thing home environment has something to do with it, and there's only so much public schools can do there.
There are only five companies in that list, and they’re all big enough that it should be possible for you to safely name-especially when you’re saying a good thing.
We’d all benefit from your inside view of positive support for people with potential at some of the largest, sometimes hated for their perceived indifference/profit-above-all, tech companies.
It would be expected if you come from the assumption that diversity hires are hired despite a low performance, and that they continue to be low performance thereafter. Which I'm not sure is something that's been proven.
DEI isn't measurable by counting the number of marginalized people in the room. It's totally possible and also extremely likely that demographics in any particular organization won't match proportions of the general population regardless of how the business operates.
>For all the industry’s talk of representation, the tech sector has always been one of the least diverse. Black workers accounted for just 7% of the workforce in 2021. With recent cutbacks, that number has undoubtedly diminished.
My (huge) company has a whole DEI department in Europe, and they have many programs that are extremely racist and probably illegal, such as giving a special referral bonus to the person that referred the most Black people.
But aren’t South Asians people of color? And overrepresented in tech companies.
I’m not sure that brown people are underrepresented in tech or that these layoffs hit them harder.
In fact, the article doesn’t share any data that the layoffs hit black people more than any other so if they are underrepresented in tech companies at only 7%, doesn’t that mean they would also be underrepresented in layoffs? So there are actually fewer impacted by these layoffs than non-black.
In the US, black is a race so I think I understand the usage. But not sure what brown means unless it’s some offensive term for Latino. I don’t really think that people who have brown skin share many socioeconomic characteristics as they are many different races and ethnicities and cultures.
No, it’s regularly used as shorthand for South Asians and/or Latinos. It certainly can have derogatory undertones though, just like “Mexican” isn’t inherently racist but often has negative connotations. This has been statistically investigated using word embeddings to claim that language models are racially biased, but in reality it just shows the way we use language—in a racially biased way.
I think the author took a shot by capitalizing it. Capitalizing Black to change it from a race to an ethnicity is one of the best things to come out of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter time. Making Brown a capitalized "other" though does not really make sense to me.
This article is so laughably transparent. None of those people care about diversity or inclusivity, they want more for themselves and found a trick to get it.
Surprisingly they don't seem to mind that in my UK team of 15 people we only have two British citizens (I am not one of them myself) and 11 people of color, while White British represent 75% of the population of the UK.
The irony is that DEIs prioritising one group over all others is inherently racist, IMO.
Also, it probably creates contempt among the discriminated groups, as the system is unjust towards them. Ie, there's no longer an equal equal opportunity at landing the job, since one side has an unfair advantage.
So, instead of bringing people together, these forced quotas just push people more apart.
I do understand that until 20 years ago black people probably had less chances to land these jobs due being disadvantaged by educational systems, but I think that's kinda behind us since universities also prioritised PoC admissions for a while now.
I'm lucky to not have been affected by this personally, and don't know many who have. So, maybe it's irrational to think they discriminate against other groups (because it's difficult to find people to fill diversity roles in the first place). I don't know. It's a very complicated world we created for ourselves.
I'm not sure how anecdotal this is, but I've probably interviewed at least 50+ candidates at companies I worked at before, and IIRC only one of them was black. It's not like my previous companies didn't want to hire people of colour, but there just weren't any around?
The only black dev I know personally is my ex, and he was the only black person on his old team (of devs I mean, there were other black people at his company; it was a big media company) and is the only black dev at the new company he's at.
So, these programmes seem to artificially increase the number of PoC in the industry by having a few large companies have diversity programmes, without actually affecting their market share (for a lack of better word) in the industry itself? Is this just the wrong way of thinking about it?
I recollect tech co's touting their diversity efforts at least since 2016 US elections. What do they have to show for 6 years of efforts? Any objective improvement so far? If not, better to end this performative theater and let's do something which will actually move the needle.
I learned early on that you need people from many aspects from life in a workplace, it is just a lot better with more diversity in it for me. It is always an loosing battle because people usually employ people they understand, and that is going to be the closest to their own mold as possible. The only place I professionally did not fit in was a place where I had no one that shared my story no one to relate to. I know I could have given a lot to that place, but fitting in as a minority is really hard work. If you actively work on widening the type of people you employ it's going to be easier to fit in.
I was fired from Panorama Education for being autistic after being told I didn’t belong there because I have trouble controlling my tone. The same people shouting off diversity initiatives and renaming “master” branches to “main” because they care about inclusivity ignore and marginalize those around them when it actually matters. It’s performative at best. Despite being very “out” as on the spectrum, despite presentations and knowledge sharing on neurodiversity and despite organizing and participating in a resource group they stood by nothing of what they preached. And yes, this is legit and yes I am suing them and yes my attorney is working completely on contingency. Panorama Education, a company dedicated to and attacked by the GOP for being “woke” is itself an ableist organization. Even the emperor wears no clothes.
Most of these companies don’t actually care at all about any sort of DEIB initiatives… even the supposedly “woke” ones. It’s all a sham.
Edit: This was a few months back. I lead an entire engineering organization now for a company who despite having no DEIB program is truely the most inclusive work culture I’ve ever seen.
This is controversial of course, but I followed Kris Nova pretty closely and after some time I saw her trying to funnel her audience into a slack instance (or something like slack, might have been discord).
When I reviewed the rules, which I tend to take seriously I noticed that it said "We promote neurodiversity" and in the next line it says "don't be an asshole".
I understand that some people can see a distinction here. The problem I have with those two rules is that if you are a person who is autistic, your behaviour is seen by neurotypicals as "being an asshole", especially on text based mediums where communication is much more limited in context and less rich meta-communication like body language or tone.
When I pointed this out, I was blocked.
I can only gather that people want to be seen as inclusive, so they use things that are easily seen. That which is _not_ easily seen is ignored, like autism- though people will say they support people with it, I think they're not actually interested in understanding that autism isn't just being a bit anti-social, it's a mental illness and it can be difficult to live with! Another minor example of people not caring what cannot be seen: I don't see many people making a stink about economic background, but that is a massive differentiator in mental diversity.
>When I reviewed the rules, which I tend to take seriously I noticed that it said "We promote neurodiversity" and in the next line it says "don't be an asshole".
The only commonly tolerated, perhaps even celebrated, form of neurodiversity is asymptomatic depression.
I think people are quite happy to accept ADHD on public social media, as sufferers of ADHD are more likely to engage with an online community sporadically while being unable to concentrate on other things.
Especially if they start getting a dopamine reward for engaging.
I should have said asymptomatic disorders in general. It's okay to say that you suffer from ADHD, people will support you. But co-workers and especially bosses tend not to appreciate the issues that come with it, such as procrastination, inability to meet deadlines, lack of focus etc.
> When I reviewed the rules, which I tend to take seriously I noticed that it said "We promote neurodiversity" and in the next line it says "don't be an asshole".
There is always a limit to what can or can't be allowed in spite of someone's neurodivergent status. The classic real-world case is Terry Davis, who would go on HN to insult just about everone and rant about the "CIA niggers" or whatnot. Many people were willing to give Terry some leeway, but ... to a limit.
Or to put it in another way: if you – due to your neurodivergent behaviour – are excluding other people from a community then there's clearly a bit of a conflict.
It's really sad that neither side actually gets this. Both (for the sake of simplifying, let's call it the left and the right) are filled with loud bigoted reprobates who don't realise they are the very things they hate, just with different labels attached.
An added layer of bewilderment is that the woke movement is becoming increasingly more bigoted, and seems to be using the fascist playbook more and more. Like, where's the self awareness?
I used to think that (due to tribalist human nature) mainstream American culture is structurally blind to the fact that virtue signaling by organizations is often superficial and sometimes gives cover for more discrimination than at places that don't try to sail the currents of the zeitgeist. Posts like this make me realize that sooner or later, organizations will figure out that it's usually better to just avoid carrying banners on social justice topics and focus instead on treating staff and customers fairly and with kindness. No idea on the ins and outs of your lawsuit but I hope that you encounter the justice that you appear to be seeking.
Yes, the executives who give long speeches about the oppressed are often also ones who push their teams to work 12 hour days and burn their people out. Somehow their kindness is only displayed in the abstract, never to actual people who work for them.
If they want to counter with a SLAPP or disparagement lawsuit they’ll only dig their grave deeper. I am not the least bit worried. The laws and the facts are on my side.
GP was giving generally accepted as sound advice. Regardless of how things ought to be, seeking and considering the advice of your counsel while in a lawsuit is a good idea.
The comments section of any article posted to HN that is related to race and diversity has become a predictable echo-chamber. Is there a way to filter these articles out? It’s honestly depressing.
> people who run the media made him a martyr specifically because he was a vile sort
If “vile sorts” have no rights, none of us do. Injustice anywhere, may disagree with what you say but defend your right to say it; this is a common refrain across millennia on justice.
> many posters are literally calling diversity hiring practices a cancer in this thread
Ho now, it's a single person. And no, I don't like that sort of language either; I downvoted that comment. But it's just one comment, not "many posters".
> Can anybody point out some empirical study that says “Diversity programs are literally the same thing as glioblastoma”
Do we need empirical studies to demonstrate that X is literally the same as excrement if someone says "X is shit"? This is a little bit silly...
It's just a generic insult. In Dutch, cancer (kanker) can serve roughly the same meaning as "shit". It's a bit less common in English, but I've seen it used before.
No need to dive into Dutch, "cancer" as a slang word to describe something that just sucks and is very annoying has been mainstream for quite many years in English. At least online and in the cities I've lived in, on both west and east coast of the US. And yes, there is a wiktionary entry for it as well[0].
Your dismissal of the user making the comparison to Dutch was straight up silly. It was based on nothing but you not being able to see the point they were trying to make at all. And their point would stand even if "cancer" was't an extremely commonplace slang term in English.
Fair enough; I guess I had some threads were collapsed when I ^F'd.
> I don't see how any of that is relevant here. Many countries have committed crimes and injustices, and in some cases continue to commit crimes and injustices. That doesn't say anything meaningful about China and Taiwan.
It's not a "fun fact", my point was that it's just a generic insult in multiple languages and that going on about literal definitions of cancer is a bit silly.
I don’t know anybody that regularly used “It’s a cancer” in english other than to express a severe dislike/disapproval/alarm about a thing.
Can you give an english example that you’ve personally heard where “cancer” just meant “a thing that mildly bothers me”? Like do your friends call when their shoestrings tied too tight “a cancer on society”?
Or in some other way give a personal example where you would use “cancer on society”, “cancer on the firm” etc. that is both personal to you and in english? You’re kind of defending a hypothetical and heavily referencing languages not at play here. If you feel strongly about it being a passe phrase, you must have an analogy in this language that makes sense to you personally?
Edit: For example, a pig can ejaculate for over 31 minutes. This is as relevant to this conversation as your references to China and Taiwan. Fun facts!
> I don’t know anybody that regularly used “It’s a cancer” in english other than to express a severe dislike/disapproval/alarm about a thing.
That seems about right; people are expressing a severe dislike about this.
I'm not entirely sure if I follow where we still disagree then? You asked for "empirical study that says Diversity programs are literally the same thing as glioblastoma" in your earlier comment, but clearly it's understood that "cancer" is this context does not refer to a disease, but is used more metaphorically.
Whether people should be using such language is a different matter altogether.
Can you give an english example that you’ve personally heard where “cancer” just meant “a thing that mildly bothers me”? Like do your friends call when their shoestrings tied too tight “a cancer on society”?
Which was two yes or no questions. Based on your response it’s a no to both.
Thanks for the response! Gotta love theoretical arguments about people that may not exist and didn’t post in this thread. What a good use of our time!
edit:
To make myself clear
> I'm not entirely sure if I follow where we still disagree then?
I disagree fundamentally that this is a fun moment to discuss linguistics. I was trying to figure out how exactly you felt you were contributing, especially now that you’ve walked back the importance of your fun facts about Dutch and the culture in Taiwan.
Is it always, by definition, a sort of funsy analogy when people say “a cancer on society”? People always both clearly feel strongly, but also clearly NEVER mean to point out what they feel is an existential threat?
I started out by pointing out that in English that cancer tends to mean something clearly bad with a special meaning. You invited yourself in to discuss otherwise. I guess replying to you meant inviting more of your posting, my bad.
Edit: also lol not a single example of anything I’ve asked for. Thank you for the unprompted trivia bit!
edit 2: Not all swiss cheese is the same! In fact there are many alpine and subalpine varieties made there in various forms! There are exactly zero casual examples of “cancer on society” from posters that have been asked about it though. Welcome to QI!
Literally none. The same number of my coworkers that post online about diversity hiring being equivalent to a particularly insidious fatal disease!
edit:
I’ll add that as someone that has been in the room when my family had to make the decision to move a loved one with cancer into hospice more than once, I’m sure what you’ve (the posters talking about race cancer or whatever other grievance) seen is definitely the same thing!
I clarified who I was referring to before you responded. Thanks for weighing in though!
Have you heard of any studies about diversity being akin to a fatal disease or… are you just here to say you don’t like my post?
edit: Can you point out what “my movement” is? I posted about how I thought some posts are silly.
edit 2:
I’ll respond to your response here!
“ I think the DEI movement is full of grifters and dummies who think saying intersectional a lot of times makes something right, is what I think. It's a jobs program for humanities majors where we pay them to tell us how awful we are”
Okay, so I’m part of “the DEI movement” (this isn’t something I’ve ever heard of but ok)
Since all posts are motivated by movements, can you describe your movement?
I guess I’ll just continue this conversation. I’m not sure why you seem to think deleting your posts makes this not a public conversation.
>I'm just a coder who posts occasionally. Small identity and definitely not attached to any movement.
You’re just an individual without any ideological affiliation or movement, but you have such an acute sense of who is in what movement that you’re comfortable accusing strangers of being paid shills for posting jokes online?
So like, would accusing me of being a paid shill violate that principal?
Out of curiosity, since you’re not in a movement or part of a group, who did you mean by “we” and “us” in the sentence “It's a jobs program for humanities majors where we pay them to tell us how awful we are”
I’m sure I’ll be downvoted to oblivion but I enjoy working on diverse teams rather than a bunch of people exactly like me. The comments about DEI here are largely negative about the premise but there are legitimate benefits to having teams mirror the populations they write software for. It’s a shame people don’t do a little critical thinking about why it matters and instead spout right wing talking points.
In practice though it’s all theater. When I asked if we could at least interview some people from under-represented groups for a new position I got a “we’ll look into it.” And they didn’t.
EDIT: I have no idea how this was seen as an attack comment.
First of all your question is terse and I think you need to expand a bit more so we can understand exactly what you want to know. For example are there any of the very few examples in this thread that you do not agree with? As always when this is discussed people get into the "holier than thou" argument some thing like: "they are not for diversity because they do not think my aspects are important enough". Feel free to use them as good examples of why diversity is needed.
I think you can find at least four arguments for diversity by reading the negative comments in this thread.
Why attack the person asking a question, instead of giving examples? It's not productive, and you just come off as pretentious and are pushing the discussion into an unproductive direction.
How would you have liked the question to have been phrased? This isn't rhetorical, btw. I'm genuinely curious now.
I found one about facial recognition not working for black people, and another that comes to mind in a similar vein is that the new Goole Pixels phones seem to do some camera razzle dazzle to make skin tones more accurate.
Another example that comes to mind is Overwatch's dev team is fairly diverse, which leads to really authentic hero designs in the game.
I think the last one is probably the best one out of the three I listed. The first two required more diverse models not developers IMO. But I'll keep them until people contribute more examples.
Did not know that about Overwatch, I've only played a little and the heros did seem to have been given some care. The bar is low for most games though.
I care about understanding other people, if you ask a question with no context, I have no clue of what aspect interest you, and we will never be able to have a conversation. If you read the comments in this thread, the examples I see are mostly about inter personal relations that is something that has always been a big cost at all my workplaces. That is completely different from your examples.
I think we both agree that diversity is good. I've made great friends through work, but not the majority of them.
My friendship group is largely diversified by having "graduated" the friendships from knowing them online to meeting them in person, or meeting people at festivals. So, maybe I appreciate workplace diversity less in that aspect.
If it's a common vector for one to diversify their environment, then it might be boon.
I do think the way it's currently done is a bit... Shallow, lazy? For lack of a better analogy, it reminds me of a fad diet. But that's not really a constructive criticism on the topic, since I don't know what we should do better either
> way it's currently done is a bit... Shallow, lazy?
Many in this thread have valid whataboutism points of the diversity argument, even if they are valid the danger is that they derail the argument. You should not undermine a movement if you support their goals in someway, you have to learn how to compromise or just learn from them and take up the fight for yourself.
I've been part of building up many organizations, the online ones are always easier. That said I do not spend time with any of those people except online. I do not have the capacity for that.
Improving diversity was an investment - a long-term bet. This is what most people who were criticizing it (including elsewhere in this thread) never seemed to understand. It was never just "Lower the bar to hire more black people").
In an economic slow-down, investment in big long term bets invariably gets decreased. This is one of them.
I'd be perfectly happy to support their cause if they provided evidence of discrimination to back their claims, but these accusations come off as sensationalist, statistically innumerate and lazy.
Some U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for reference: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm