Is that why there are so many women of color software engineers in tech?
She also took back to back maternity leave throughout her time at the company, 3 times in a row, before leaving. Didn't even know it was possible to have kids that fast.
Conferences bend over backwards to have her speak. She has no clue what she is talking about but at least she gets to put it on her LinkedIn I guess.
"I thought after Obama was elected, that diversity was no longer a problem" "When we thought of diversity, we thought of it in terms of hiring more women" "We just don't get the applicants. There's nothing we can do."
The whole BLM thing really shook up their thinking and approach to diversity. Now, I think a bunch of them did really engage in "corporate puffery", but I did see a lot of cases where tangible changes were made to diversity programs.
...and then more recently they seem to be firing their entire DEI teams. :-(
Ask a "woman of color" how much of this perceived advantage they actually enjoy in real life, especially from their perspective. You will be shocked the gap between what you presume and what the reality is.
Obviously that isn't to say women of color have it easy (nobody has it easy these days), but it is beyond dispute that this sort of discrimination is rampant in certain industries (like higher education) and in certain cities.
And for people who say this is illegal (and perhaps it is), when a white man (not me), who was a victim of this policy (many accolades, highest performance reviews, seniority), was repeatedly passed over for promotion by women of color and other "marginalized" people, filed a complaint with the NYC EEOC office, he was met with derision.
As a hiring manager in a fortune 100 who saw firsthand the delta between white men and everyone else in terms of the amount of justification required for hiring, promoting, and firing... yes, I do know this for a fact.
Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.
As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.
If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.
That's just one example of what they do.
You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".
This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse".
And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.
Statically Asians in America outperform "White" people when it comes to education and salaries, which shows the fallacy in the whole white privilege thing. Therefore DEI policies pretend Asians don't exist.
The less charitable interpretation is that DEI programs aren't being pushed for by Asians and they're designed to help people who look like the people starting the programs.
If HR passes me a stack of resumes then that's who I interview; if all the people HR passes me are white, then I'm left to either assume that these were all the qualified candidates who applied (or at least, to operate under that assumption).
If the process gets bounced back because the stack that was passed to me was filtered by HR's unconscious (or conscious) biases, that forces them to give me more diverse candidates to choose from; the best candidate may still be the middle class white dude, but ensuring that the hiring manager is presented with a broad range of options and not just Chad, Biff, and Troy helps the whole pipeline.
I was hiring manager at a "woke" (media) company during and after peak DEI.
The only policy of DEI that really affected me was that we had to have a "diverse slate of candidates" meaning, we had to interview at least one woman and (non asian) minority. This was actually a problem hiring engineers because we wouldn't be able to extend offers unless we'd satisfy the "diverse slate" meaning we'd miss out on candidates we wanted to hire while waiting for more people to interview. We could get exceptions but it'd be a fight with HR.
Asians didn't count as diverse because, in tech, they are not underrepresented. Basically "diverse" hires were women, AA, hispanic, etc.
Our company quietly walked back the "diverse slate" stuff years ago. In fact I think it was only in effect for like a year at the most.
The DEI stuff rolling out was highly performative. It wasn't in place for really long and quietly walked back. Now, the loud walking back of policies that probably haven't been enforced in years is also performative. In both instances it's companies responding to the political moment.
I am not even white by the way. I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. I am confident and proud of my skills, which I put a lot of effort to develop over decades. The color of my skin is as meaningless as the color of my shirts.
That's exactly what was happening, and you can imagine the quality of work that resulted in. Now that the tide is turning, that hopefully won't be the case anymore.
This sounds like a terminally online Twitter user's idea of how people do hiring.
It's also funny to consider when 70%+ of H1Bs are Indian men. Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.
This kind of rhetoric is why we're seeing a pendulum swing in the other direction instead of a sane middle ground. But at least it's finally becoming trite to make these claims with a straight face.
Have never worked anywhere there was a shortage of Asian Male engineers.
Not as many Black engineers for sure — but I think that tends to be a society wide workforce problem. In an absolute sense there are less Black software engineers.
I think a lot of these imbalances come down to that. But people don’t want to acknowledge that the majority of software engineers are male, and largely white, Asian, or Indian. But they expect their individual company to somehow solve a society wide deficit.
You must put up for dismissal 15% of your reports, of those 10% will be dismissed. You may not select any female, ethnic minority, lgbtq or disabled employees.
The point the GP makes - why was the promo/hiring committee unable to find a breadth of candidates - is a troubling but real part of many of our daily lives.
Maybe there weren’t any. That’s usually the reason/excuse given. That should still be a cause for concern.
We would frequently miss out on opportunities to hire qualified candidates because we couldn't make an offer until satisfying the interview quota. By the time we did, the candidate accepted another offer.
I think it's probably a net positive for underrepresented people (it's kind of hard to argue harm to white people when they just get other offers elsewhere that are good enough to accept without waiting), but I'm really not sure if it's a net positive for the company (pre-ipo, still trying to grow a lot).
My fringe belief is that giving an edge to buddies of current employees ought to be illegal (at least at large companies) for many of the same reasons why nepotism is frowned upon.
Hiring referrals is great for both problems. The person is already vetted by someone your organization trusts. This is great because a referral is more likely to be someone that knows their stuff and thus pass the interview process. You also have someone vouching that this person is a good employee and not just a good interviewer. The candidate is more likely to accept when they have a contact on the inside that can vouch for the the company and team.
This all assumes that the company is going to do their own independent evaluation of the referred candidate.
The thing that was harder for me was working with the people hired to run the DEI recruiting programs. I never was able to establish a great working relationship with them even though I was able to do so with a good cross-section of the rest of the organization. Not really sure why tbh.
Ya, but... what is that impact? Why would a company want to pay another company to make it harder to do basic operations
Reading the accomplishments in 2024 for our DEI program, it was essentially just marketing. Which has some level of value for sure, but the most valuable thing that came out of it was the number of conferences the head of the department went to.
That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.
In my experience it has been about trying to encourage a more diverse pool to select from, and a more diverse pool of choosers, and that's it. After that, it's selecting the best person.
And, to be clear, even if 'diversity hires' did take place in the way you seem to imagine it, it wouldn't be racist to hire based on diversity as it's not done from a basis of racial superiority.
How about 'choose your descriptor here' based on an actual understanding of the words. Is it 'woke' now to ask people actually understand the words they're using.
Considering you don't understand what the word 'racist' means, do you understand what 'DEI policies' are?
Yes, when they were widely introduced in my large company circa 2016-17 it was explained to senior managers as part of HR's efforts to "align with industry best practices". During the meeting introducing it to VPs and dept heads, there were skeptical questions as a lot of groups were under shipping pressure and short-handed. There was also already a lot of "HR overhead" like various mandatory compliance training sessions that all employees had to attend every year (unrelated to their actual work). The company was also clearly already highly diverse at all levels from the CEO on down and had been for a long time.
The DEI training did end up becoming a yet another mandatory HR time sink and no one I know thought it was necessary or useful. The second year the program expanded to take even more time but the worst thing was they brought in outside trainers who started doing the "You're a racist and don't even know it" schtick along with weird tests and exercises. This became contentious and caused a lot of issues, especially because the context leaves people feeling like they can't openly disagree. There was a lot of negative push back but people felt like they couldn't use normal company channels so it was all in private conversations and small groups. Kind of the opposite of the intent of openness and communication.
For me, that was when DEI went from "probably unnecessary (at our company) but just another 'HR Time Tax" to "This is disruptive and causing problems." I'm not surprised that some companies are realizing that the way many of these DEI initiatives were implemented wasn't effective in helping diversity and that they were also causing problems. It was the wrong way to pursue the right goal. At our company, we got rid of the old DEI program in early 2020, so this broad correction pre-dates the US election 8 weeks ago.
For an extreme example, imagine a car company with zero women employees. I could imagine that their designs might look increasingly awesome to people who grew up playing with black, angular, high-powered cars (like me -- that's what I'd want!). And while there are plenty of women who'd like that, too, there are lots of women (and plenty of men!) who'd want something smaller, more brightly colored, and with better gas mileage. It they didn't have those varying opinions, or weren't even aware that people had other opinions, they'd be severely limiting their potential market and leaving huge amounts of money on the table.
(My wife's a big F1 fan and wants to own a McLaren some day. I know that many, many women love fast cars, too, and that many, many men do not. That was meant to be illustrative, not a perfect analogy.)
I am utterly convinced that getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable. Even if I didn't care about the societal ideals behind DEI programs, I'd still happily endorse them as a competitive edge.
I'd argue that a specialised company that focuses and hones in on catering to black, angular high-powered cars OR smaller, more brightly coloured cars will have a healthier long term outlook than a company that tries to appeal to every market.
In the example of a car company with zero women employees, if the market doesn't want "black, angular, high-powered cars", then they will lose market share to companies that produce cars that the market does want.
And if "getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable" is a true statement, then capitalism will prove it because the most diverse companies will naturally become better and more profitable than non-diverse companies.
Will "getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds" make their servers not fail with 500 errors? Or make them actually deliver features at a reasonable rate? Or will it prevent them not having a major bug every other release? Because that's what the customers complain about, and that's what company needs for major growth.
(I am suspect that hiring Rachel of rachelbythebay.com will help with this, but this will be because she is a great engineer, not because of her gender.)
What I'm skeptical of is that DEI programs in bigger companies were ever anything more pandering. There was an "enlightened self-interest", but it was that the regulatory and cultural environment made it difficult to attract talent without at least paying lip service to DEI. Now the winds have shifted, and — surprise! — their "enlightened self-interest" no longer includes pretending to care about it.
This isn't a critique of DEI programs specifically, by the way. I think any social initiative at a company fulfills basically the same function: environmental pledges, etc. The point is to make your company look better without actually changing anything.
That is not what is actually happening. The net impacts are essentially marketing, which has value in it's own right for sure, but I'd prefer real change as opposed to marketing impacts, and forced trainings everyone must take.
Right-wingers are ready to believe companies are lying about some things but not about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
