- as is frequently noted here, programming positions do not always require CS degrees.

- companies that produce software typically are composed of lots of roles. Microsoft has 100k engineers, but even more of their staff is not engineers. (That is: less than half the jobs at Microsoft are "engineers," and some of their engineers do not have CS degrees.) Many/most of those other roles translate quite well into tech. Just to take a few functional examples, the Finance function under the CFO, the HR function under the top people officer, the sales function, and the marketing function are not typically run by CS grads or staffed with programmers. Companies do not have to hit their DEI targets solely in their Engineering functions.

But back to your assertions, you seem to agree with me.

> So of those 12, you'd expect perhaps 1 to be black, and perhaps 2 to be women - optimistically.

Yes, if this is your slate for a programming role (again, assuming you are not somehow running a pipeline that somehow misses the enormous Latino population), you are probably doing okay. (Microsoft et. al. are able to aim for better than okay, but that's a business decision.)

Edit: I want to expand a little on the Latino/Hispanic component as well, as it's common in debates on this site to exclude them. But add them back in using the numbers on your first link. So we could expect 1 Black applicant, 1 Latino applicant, and 2 women (optimistically!). That's a third of your set of 12, using your data sources, for a programming role. This is optimistic, but nobody managing a F100 is asking their leadership to do easy things.

But it does sound like you generally agree that if you get sets of 12 applicants and they are all consistently white men in each set that there is a process defect? Similarly, if you are hiring for another role, your definition of a "diverse" set of applicants would be different.

> Qualified minority candidates rarely come through applications - instead, they're recruited

This is the activity that management is trying to encourage. Given industry history, it is not surprising that companies have to put in extra effort to try to change the perception of who is welcome. Microsoft is not new to this, having spent tons of money rehabilitating the image of Windows as an insecure, unreliable OS. Fixing a business process takes work, this is not surprising.