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0 pointsvoidr3y ago0 comments

> Sure I know that a lot of the DE&I stuff is frustrating for people.

It's also inherently unfair, that's why nobody likes it, I have seen it first hand that it just leads to a few token hires, with no real change. People who actually care realise that if you want to improve something you start at the beginning, not a the outcome, you would at minimum start at education, however I guess it's cheaper to have a few diversity hires here and there without changing anything that really matters.

> Can you actually prove that people are in any way capable of measuring merit, especially for leadership decisions

You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.

> which is pretty squishy to begin with

I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job, which diverts from the point, we make decisions without knowing the outcome all the time, if we would take your worldview then every decision where we don't know the outcome would be decided by a dice roll.

> Better this than promoting the CEO's nephew.

You are exchanging one favouritism for another, how is that an improvement? At least the CEO's nephew would have connections in high places and likely more pressure to perform.

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mikkergp3y ago

> You can, otherwise we would select leaders by rolling dices, however we don't tend to do that.

I would disagree. First of all, just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways, it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice. I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes. Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?

Second of all, I'm not talking about a recent grad and someone with 10 years of experience, but having been in leadership circles. It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"

> I guess your narrative is that it doesn't matter who we select as leader, they all have a chance of doing an equally bad job.

This seems like an overly broad interpretation. Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true. i.e. take your pool of 60 senior managers, there's one open director position. Find your best 15 senior managers. You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers? (assuming there aren't specific technical skillsets involved)

voidrOP3y ago

> just because we think we have ways, doesn't mean that they're good ways

Evolution does work. Assuming people are free to try everything out, usually the strategies that become the norm are the strategies that work better than the other ones. If you know better then the market, you could theoretically go in, make your own company execute your own strategy and start dominating the market, this has been done in history multiple times.

> it may be that our ways are the equivalent of rolling dice

Would you try this out if your own money or health was on the line?

> I mean hilariously there are all like endemic complaints about interview processes.

I have a lot of complaints against democracy, however that does not mean I desire fascism, it means I want a better democracy.

> Why is it that all of a sudden you turn against the criticism and act like our decision making is sacrosanct?

Assuming we want the people who can best perform, we should be looking at ways how to better identify the best performers instead of actively sabotaging the process by adding arbitrary discrimination into it that is proven to work against the goal.

> It's often "trust" and "reputation" and other sticky things like that that make the decision. I seem to hear all sorts of stories of people hiring leaders because "I had a good feeling about him"

Would you give keys to your house to someone you don't trust? Would you give the keys to your car to someone who has a reputation of crashing cars?

Democracy is based on trust as well, you don't know if your favourite politician is actually going to do what they say they are going to do or if it's actually a good idea, yet you are likely going to go with your feelings and cast your vote.

How do you think a CEO would fare if that CEO would not have the respect of their subordinates?

> Among relatively equal candidates I think this is true.

For highly skilled roles, I doubt that this happens often in real life, usually you will have candidates with different qualities and you have to figure out which are the ones you believe to be more valuable.

> You could probably roll the dice among this group, otherwise, maybe you're not that great at training senior managers?

I would probably try to see who would do the job for less, but sure, if that's the case you could also choose at random, however the higher the skill requirement, the less likely you will get into this situation.

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