Independent of whether these goals are appropriate or not, these actions (and those of so many other companies) are just so predictably craven.
These executive orders (and what "DEIA" exactly means or constitutes, legally speaking) have not been litigated or clarified yet. Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?
At least Costco seems to have a logical reason for what they do and stood by it.
It surprises me that these programs were ever legal.
It is strictly illegal in Australia to consider factors like gender or race when hiring. Even capturing these details from applicants is problematic in most cases.
The compensation payable if caught can be enormous, in the order of a years salary per applicant. It’s not even necessary to prove that a specific applicant was discriminated against, simply having a process which is likely to discriminate is sufficient.
The truth is it comes down to the exact details of the policy whether it's legal. There's tonnes of things you can do to increase diversity in legal ways. For example, Google recruits at college campuses, they must have selection criteria for which campuses they visit, no matter what that policy is it's de facto a diversity strategy.
As for whether it's fair. It seems pretty dependent on your view of the world. If your base case is that without any regulations you'll just get the best person for the job, then these programs all look like an aberration. But if your base case is that hiring isn't fair - people hire their family, their friends, people from their alma mater, people from their church etc. Then putting in a programme to mitigate the biases that do exist seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Other countries often have a clearer separation of responsibilities between government and business.
Governments are responsible for addressing social inequity, while companies simply hire whoever best meets their needs (within the constraints of antidiscrimination laws).
In America these responsibilities seem to have become blurred, resulting in an XY problem whereby people debate which hiring policies are best at addressing certain societal problems, without questioning whether it is even appropriate for companies to be taking on that responsibility in the first place.
It's not "strictly illegal" in Australia. Our anti-discrimination bodies across the country frequently grant exemptions to employers allowing sex-based or race-based discrimination in favour of certain groups (e.g. women, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people), in order to "improve access to specific jobs, programs or services".
I recall we have a specific carve out for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders, and I recall seeing specific hiring drives especially around the public service (I also am aware that elements of the federal government had a program specifically targeting autistic people too, which is also a protected characteristic)
Theres also 2 forms these DEI programs took.
1. (The FAA Thing) where they specifically manipulated their hiring system to ensure a greater percentage of african americans.
2. (What a lot of the tech companies did) Write tons of new HR documentation, and add checks and balances to ensure that the implicit bias of the hiring manager didn't result in a biased outcome.
Theres really nothing wrong with 2 in an Australian context other than the extra overhead. The overhead was carried for a while as it allowed companies to signal alignment with political stances. They are shelving these programs to signal differently.
Honestly I cant completely hate the idea of 2 either. I despise the idea of more HR people drawing paychecks, but I recall an incident 20 years ago where our team couldn't hire a woman because the all female HR team unilaterally decided she wasn't technical enough, and bounced her out of the running without telling the hiring manager. (The applicant was conventionally attractive and younger than the HR team)
It is, and always was, illegal to hire or not hire someone based on their race (or other protected class). You cannot legally just use quotas. At the same time, the EEOC will find a way to sue you if you are a large company with a lower proportion of minority employees than population. So companies had to get creative.
Trump EEOC will not do that. It's questionable if the EEOC even has the power to do that anymore after recent supreme court decisions that weaken regulators in general.
DEI programs favoring a specific race is the exception to the norm. DEI is supposed to be about stopping discrimination and bias. A common recommendation of DEI programs is to replace names with numbers so people looking at the resumes racial biases can't influence decisions.
> Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?
No, because that would obviously be racist.
DEI would be favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job.
The just thing would be students from HBCUs having a level playing field along with everyone else.
It's no different than hiring managers selectively preferring graduates from Stanford or based on their surname's ethnicity, but it's hard to prove those things happen.
DEI is nominally about adjusting the situation so that the end result is equal. For example, paying women equally even if they don't negotiate as aggressively as men.
The nominal case doesn't always match the reality, but the reality is that no one has a level playing field to begin with.
The whole thing is about trying to eliminate sources of bias that we can. For example, blind screening of resumes where names and similar personal info aren’t given is a way to avoid racial bias while focusing on what matters. People have pre-determined opinions about many things, even if it’s subconscious. That’s an example of DEI policies trying to level the playing field to avoid unfair discrimination.
In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial.
But companies went in hard with things such as quotas, and there's even cases in the courts at the moment where Red Hat/IBM supposedly awarded bonuses based on hiring managers fulfilling diversity quotas.
Of course its controversial either way. Let's assume for our purposes that DEI is purely about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind (which we can absolutely argue about separately). It would absolutely be controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics and therefore has a large constituency of people it favoured. If I'm a rich white kid from a good family who went to a top school who gets into an Internship at Goldman because my Dad is golfing buddies with a Partner there then of course I would be opposed to DEI. And guess what? Rich white kids from good families and top schools have quite a lot of political capital.
And that's only those who directly materially lose out. Implicit in DEI is a suggestion that the American system is not a meritocracy, and if you accept that claim you are attacking the identity of a lot of powerful people who genuinely believe they got to where they are through unique skills and effort and not because they had any sort of advantage.
> controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics
Was it though?
Or was it just a result of society and culture outside the companies control.
The idea behind DEI is as if a car crashes into another car because of an issue with the road, that leads to one car being more damaged than the other, the solution is to make sure the less damaged car has the same amount of damage, rather than fixing the road.
That's a great example of a DEI-inspired policy that should be, at least in most cases, pretty non-controversial, and very beneficial to the company itself.
Have you tried deploying it? If you do, you'll find blind screening is extremely controversial. DEI types loathe it and will fight against it.
The reason is that de facto unofficial discrimination against white men is widespread and blind screening eliminates it, so the resulting hires are more male and western than before. Mostly this result is kept hidden within the organizations in question, but there are a bunch of reported cases where this happened publicly.
Even the famous orchestra study that kicked off the fad for these screenings supports this if you read the data tables carefully. The paper made it sound like blind screenings are better for women and racial minorities, but their data properly interpreted didn't say that.
You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been. Using it as a pejorative in the way you are is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist. It doesn't reflect the purpose of the concept at all. In fact your description of "favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job" is exactly what the concept hopes to prevent, not enable.
DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it, it is more about considering diversity and recognizing personal and institutional bias, and working to ensure that bias does not negatively affect people, whether that be in hiring, consideration for roles or promotions, and so on.
All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven, and if you actually look you can see it's already doing damage. There seem to be a lot of assumptions that women or people of color in high positions are "DEI hires" when they likely had to work harder than white men to get where they are. I mean firing a 4-star admiral because she's a woman and then claiming she was a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are. Automatically assuming a black or trans pilot is a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are.
I am a former hiring manager at Google and we were specifically told by hr that we could hire 2 people on one headcount if one of those people met specific dei criteria and there was a list of races and genders that met the criteria. One of my peer managers grew his org twice as fast as me by only hiring females with engineering degrees. He got promoted shortly after. Within 2 years his entire team was disbanded for being completely ineffective. Google ended up getting sued over this practice and they lost. This is not the only example I have. The worst of all was Eric Schmidt literally saying to us that diversity was "strategically important" as it helped to "increase the talent pool" and "keep salaries competitive." This was never about doing the right thing for employees.
I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.
It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.
IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses.
I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.
Finally, from the article in this post:
> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.
It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.
These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.
As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.
The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.
Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.
Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?
The idea that people aren't comfortable on a team that doesn't have other people matching their immutable sex/race characteristics, and that we should encourage this fragility is insane to me.
If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?
I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.
There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.
Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.
> You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.
Yes, it has. Look at the college admissions. The test score requirements for black students were way way lower than those for the Asian students in many universities and colleges. That's favoring people by their skin color.
Where can I look at these college test score requirements? I have never heard of such a thing besides minimum SAT score to be considered. Is that adjusted based solely on race at some university? Where?
Probably in the NBER report[1] on the data that came out of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case[2]. It's an interesting read, as is the other one on legacy applicants.
At the graduate level there are a number of resources which can illustrate the difference between admissions standards for people from “underrepresented minority” (URM) groups and non-URMs. They manifest as materially lower LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs for URMs. There are Supreme Court cases analyzing details, and prior to the most recent doctrine, the preferencing policies were totally open because SCOTUS blessed it in the case of law school admissions.
> All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven
Some companies are under legal pressure to avoid lawsuits because some programs are violating civil rights. I wouldn't call those instances craven.
As for your definition of DEI, I find it fairly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Regardless of how we want to define DEI in the hypothetical perfect world, the reality is a large portion of current DEI programs look absolutely nothing like what you described.
> It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.
> DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it
I have been in the room where HR/hiring managers have explicitly stated that they want to hire [specific race/gender] for an open role. This has been at major companies. In states where this is explicitly illegal.
In the very high level abstract, the goal of DEI programs may not be to engage in explicitly illegal race/sex discrimination, but in practice, this is how it often turns out.
I will let others give their own anecdotes, as cases like this are widespread.
“Recognizing personal and institutional bias” sounds nice, until someone has to decide which biases or differences to overcome, and at what cost.
There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.
The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.
On the one hand, you have DEI policies like Harvard's college admissions or the air traffic controller hiring scandal. And of course DEI advocates always claim that these are obvious perversions of True DEI, which is only about expanding opportunities and never about discriminating against disfavored groups of people.
On the other hand, the tricky bit comes in when it's only in retrospect everyone agrees those were terrible perversions of DEI. When they're actually in place, anyone who criticizes them is considered a racist neo-Nazi.
Has there been a big effort to call the FAA whistleblowers nazis?
I learned about it, went "oh that sucks", but never felt like they were being racist. They have a great evidentiary basis. Its not like some red hat guy screeching about losing his job without being able to show cause.
I'm all for DEI, however you too seem to misunderstand one critical aspect, the 'E' in DEI. The 'E' (Equity) aspect is very nuanced and if not understood and communicated well would lead to deadlocked discussions
Equity factors in historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences. This could mean that if we have a candidate who seems to be with lesser qualification then they potentially can be hired over a more qualified candidate.
This is with reasoning that due to past decades (and centuries) of historical situations a candidate was led through a path which landed them with a 'lesser' qualification. So, now if we continue to correct this historical situation then sometime in future the need for Equity would disappear, since that future generation is result of a equitable society - then no more excuses, if you have lesser qualification then it is your doing and not society's.
I mean, considering West Point Academy is closing clubs like the National Society of Black Engineers or the Japanese Forum Club due to the anti-DEI order [1] I think that should tell you everything you need to know about what this change signals.
>the Japanese Forum Club, which described itself as a place for promoting “understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture and language”;
Don't know why West Point thinks that is required by the anti-DEI order, maybe someone is going through and looking at anything with race or gender in the name and shutting it down?
Imagine that someone decides recruiting needs a budget cut and shrinks the travel budget a bit. Managers shift to local career fairs instead. No one notices the complete lack of bay area HBCUs and a couple years down the road the pipeline is filled with people from Stanford with internships and internal recommendations competing against people from HBCUs that don't have either of them. One of these populations will look vastly more qualified on paper.
If that's what you consider to be useful evidence in a topic as complex as this one, heaven help whoever is paying you to make smart decisions for them.
You have been misinformed of how DEI works. Its goal is basically equal access to resources, addressing systemic inequities, and fostering an inclusive culture where everyone feels valued.
You cannot address systemic inequalities at the hiring level without some preferential treatment. The idea was that if you had two candidates who were equally strong, you pick the one from an underrepresented/disadvantaged background because they've had to work harder to get to the same place. At a surface level that is a disadvantage at the hiring level to the other one because the other gets a bonus tie-breaker.
The idea is that instead of just interviewing the people right next to you, who look exactly like you and have your exact background, you make the effort to interview a diverse set of candidates. Then you try to get rid of bias in the hiring process, and make the workplace somewhere that doesn’t make folks who are slightly different miserable. That’s it.
How does a company make an "effort" to interview a diverse set of candidates? There's an applicant queue not under their control, and a filtering phase at every step of the interview process.
What you're suggesting is that companies favor candidates who have a different appearance or background than existing employees, which is the definition of bias and discrimination. This is based on ignorant beliefs that people who look the same, have the same gender, ethnicity or background, will inevitably think the same way.
These programs are judging people by superficial traits, while claiming they somehow make the hiring process fair. It's ludicrous.
> There's an applicant queue not under their control
Not 100%, sure, but that's far different from 0%.
Which job fairs do your company reps attend? Is there a built-in bias causing you to miss out on good candidates?
Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?
> What you're suggesting is that companies favor candidates who have a different appearance or background than existing employees, which is the definition of bias and discrimination.
No. The suggestion is that companies should not favor candidates because they have the same appearance or background than existing employees.
If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?
The former discriminates on the basis of religion, and is prohibited in most cases.
Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.
Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.
Are job fairs still a thing? IME most recruitment happens online these days, with the vast majority of candidates coming in via LinkedIn and other job boards.
> Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?
Why is that a bad thing? Personal recommendations from someone you trust is a valid factor in making a hiring decision. This doesn't necessarily mean hiring someone who is inexperienced and not a good fit for the role over a better candidate just because they were recommended, but all else being equal, a recommendation is a strong signal to consider.
Although, truthfully, why is favoritism wrong? If a company prefers hiring someone based on a recommendation, they might have issues with their performance, but maybe that person makes the team happier and more productive. Ultimately, it's their decision to make and live with.
> If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?
I think we can agree that candidates should be judged equally based primarily on their ability to fulfill the role requirements. My problem with DEI initiatives is that they emphasize superficial traits like religion, race, gender, ethnicity, etc., which are things we've fought hard to _not_ pay attention to in a professional setting. The effect of this is that it simply reverses the direction of the discrimination, but it doesn't get rid of it.
> Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.
> Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.
You can define what DEI is supposed to mean all you want, but the reality is that companies use it as an excuse for discrimination[1]. This is not surprising, as it's a slippery slope from "suppressing our biases" to "reversing our biases".
I said "primarily" above because there is inevitably a human component in deciding whether a person or team would want to work with someone, which can be interpreted as a bias. This is often referred to with vague terms such as "culture fit", or the rebranded "cultural contribution", "values fit", etc.[2]
The thing is that humans are innately tribal. We tend to favor like-minded individuals familiar to our own background and life experience. Even if you educate people to not be biased against/for a specific set of traits, we will still be biased against some others. Humans in general favor attractive, charismatic, confident and outgoing people. Should we fight to remove those biases as well?
In broader terms, what is exactly the end goal of DEI programs? That companies are 100% heterogeneous across all possible criteria that can identify a person? This is insane and unrealistic. It completely ignores not only our inherent biases, but the fact that some of our traits influence our career decisions and make us better suited for specific roles. For example, nurses are overwhelmingly female, while mechanics and electricians are overwhelmingly male[3]. Is this the result of discrimination in these industries, or simply a side-effect of what makes us different? Would these industries be any better if we forced them to discriminate against the majority of their work force?
The local college here in town just had a job fair so, yes.
My point was to give a couple of examples of how the applicant queue is not completely out of a company's control. Surely you can think of other ones.
> The thing is that humans are innately tribal.
The thing about humans is we get to decide what our tribe is, and tribe membership both changes and is multi-component.
We can decide to change our religion, which changes our "tribe", while also supporting the local football team (another "tribe") and be in the alumni club of a college (a third "tribe") while also celebrating Independence Day (a fourth "tribe") at a work (tribe #5) event.
Making your point rather meaningless, since we can change ourselves.
> what is exactly the end goal of DEI programs?
I don't care to have this discussion. I'm a programmer. I came to point out that your objection to DEI was invalid, at a level that even a programmer could point out.
Never called you a Nazi. Just said that the guy who gave the Nazi salute, twice, while standing behind the Seal of the President of the United States, is a Nazi.
Well, if they prefer a black candidate to a white one, the white one can complain of being discriminated against and accuse them of promoting DEI, which under the new administration can have all sorts of bad consequences for them. So they'd better play it safe and hire the white candidate...
DEI is not about picking lesser candidates to fill quotas, it's about ensuring the human recruiters don't get in the way of the best talent joining your company.
A big part of the unpopularity of DEI programs is the dishonesty.
We all know that these programs don't result in better candidates, and that standards are lowered, not raised, when they are introduced.
Just be honest about it and make the case for why you think lowering standards is a worthwhile sacrifice to accomodate people from diverse backgrounds.
Even better, make the case for why considering any of this is a companies responsiblity in the first place.
How deep in the talent pool does Google usually go? It seems to me many HBCUs end up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. I don’t think Google went out of its way to interview at my middling state school. Should HBCUs get a boost?
I'm not sure "craven" is the right word, but it's definitely something.
> These executive orders (and what "DEIA" exactly means or constitutes, legally speaking) have not been litigated or clarified yet.
All of these DEI efforts were and are blatantly illegal. They were just never litigated for long enough that everyone was comfortable with doing them openly. The point of the executive orders isn't necessarily the orders themselves, but a clear signal the new administration will litigate these efforts that have always been illegal.
So many of these companies are backing away from the efforts and hoping that show of goodwill will ameliorate their potential upcoming legal risk. If they play ball, the new administration might accept the peace offering and not go full legal scorched earth.
These executive orders (and what "DEIA" exactly means or constitutes, legally speaking) have not been litigated or clarified yet. Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?
At least Costco seems to have a logical reason for what they do and stood by it.