This has nothing to do with eliminating hiring discrimination or whatever; it's part of a political patronage network. You hire our most dedicated people, we don't bring the hammer down.

The irony is that DEI as a worldview promotes and condones racial discrimination in many forms -- that is, treating people differently because of the color of their skin, not the content of their character, their skills, or their physical ability (for physically demanding jobs).

Martin Luther King Jr. said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Based on statements like this, I believe he would be publicly against DEI if he were still alive (and he'd probably have been de-platformed by now).

After sitting in a room where we were told we needed to increase our “minority representation in upper management” (and I’m a mostly white manager). There were already 20% apparently, they wanted 40%.

I asked my boss, “so what does that mean to me? To me it seems like you don’t want me”

Boss: “oh no, you’re fine”

Me: “I don’t know, pretty obvious you want a higher representation of people not like me”

I quit after that. I was manager of one of the most productive research teams, created the most IP for the company, had the top projects, and yeah — lost me to this bs. I was joined by several other top people. Now they have a “diverse”, but less passionate, less competent team. Good luck with this stuff.

Boss: "You need to build a more diverse team."

Me: "What are you talking about? I'm 1 of only 2 white people on the entire 12 person team."

Boss: "Indians and Asians don't count as diverse."

Me: "Really? I did not know that. I do have 2 Hispanics on the team though."

Boss: "You're not hearing me. You don't have any black people and only have 2 women."

It became clear that "diversity" was not the goal, but rather something much more specific, likely because the metric the company was tracking specified it that way.

Indeed, it's not about "diversity" in the classic sense.

First, yes I'd say that is ridiculous. There are shorter NBA players, the fact we target "bigs" shows a lazy coach who's incapable of assessing the best way to form a team.

Second, size does play a factor [one of many] in basketball; In coding, neither the amount of melanin, hair color, eye color, nor gender play a role. We can argue a diversity of ideas or backgrounds are good. That's why we hired people with degrees in different fields; we hired people with different work experience. You don't want to say "we need less white people" or "we need less green eyed people". Sorry, but in your example it's equivalent to saying "I want more blonds in basketball" -- there is no relation.

> The fact that you didn’t get that would make me question if I wanted you on the team

I did not want to work with bigots of any kind.

The fact that you speak so confidently about a topic you clearly know almost nothing about I think speaks to why maybe your old team seemed OK to let you go.

> You don't want to say "we need less white people" or "we need less green eyed people". Sorry, but in your example it's equivalent to saying "I want more blonds in basketball" -- there is no relation.

You clearly missed the point of the analogy. The point was that you can look for one attribute, while still having a need for another. You seem to have conflated this with an unrelated point. Maybe not surprising.

But now lets talk about your latter point. You seem to miss one of the main points of DEI. Let's use another basketball example :-)

Jeremy Lin. He went largely unrecruited in HS, despite winning the California state championship over powerhouse Mater Dei, winning Nor Cal player of the year and was 1st team all state. And basically had no D1 offers. Why? Largely because he was Asian.

So, he goes to Harvard and has a good career there. He went undrafted despite great measurables -- including being one of the fastest people in the combine -- think Kyrie quickness and John Wall speed. He was in many ways a generational athlete. He eventually signed as a free agent after summer league to languish on the bench.

It wasn't until one night, at the end of his contract, when he was likely done with his NBA career did he play and he played with a "if I'm ever gonna do it, I gotta do it now attitude". And he went on one of the most impressive runs in NBA history -- Linsanity. Go look it up.

Now I tell this story because his whole life he was discriminated against because he was Asian. He never asked to be played over people that were better than him. Simply to give him a chance. He would never show up in a referral from John Wall or Kobe Bryant. He doesn't run in those circles. His last name doesn't evoke images of a ridiculous skilled guard. But he was.

DEI is about saying, "you've done a sufficiently good job of demonizing everything that comes from POC -- so that you immediately discount the way they walk, talk, where they go to HS, go to college, etc... But set aside these biases and try to let some in the front door to at least give them a chance at the interview. Try not to assume because they went to Howard they are less than." Lin went to Harvard because no other D1s would give him a spot. He was a Duke level player at a low-level non-scholarship school.

And the thing is that sports/basketball are among the most meritocratic activities on this planet. Yet racial bias reared its heard. You don't think this happens everyday in investment banking? Or for consulting? All the places where its so much harder to objectively measure the quality of work done.

If you're a GM in basketball and you're not saying, "we need to look at more Asian player. We need to look around the globe for talent" then you're not doing your job. And coincidentally its now arguable that the four best basketball players in the NBA are all international: Giannis, Luka, Jokic, and Embid. Peoople had to open their eyes and see that it wasn't just an inner city game.

Teams are trying to sell seats. Businesses are trying to target various markets, but more importantly raise capital and get cheap labor.

You could argue the same thing in my case, and that’s fine. I won’t play the race game. For reference, me and others were offered an exorbitant amount to stay. But to your point, give those opportunities to others, who by definition didn’t earn their place.

When you view everything through a racist lens, that's all you'll see -- it'll consume you.

I was proposing an alternative way to read the racism in the NBA (rather than overcoming racism, it was used as a ploy to increase revenues - oh hey, they opened the Chinese markets in 2010 https://lawaspect.com/nba-expansion-china/). In fact, in your prior post you were discussing all these forms of racism Lin faced without clear evidence (i.e. an email, paper trail, etc). That's what DEI is, people utilizing their race to shame others in attempt to gain wealth, power, etc. Ultimately, it's about claiming something is deserved due to your race; which in fact is no different than the opposite. From your prior post:

> DEI is about saying, "you've done a sufficiently good job of demonizing everything that comes from POC -- so that you immediately discount the way they walk, talk, where they go to HS, go to college, etc... But set aside these biases and try to let some in the front door to at least give them a chance at the interview. Try not to assume because they went to Howard they are less than."

Almost everyone agrees you should set aside the bias, but why give someone an interview based on their race? Why not equally pick at random from people at that point?

Regardless, what we were talking about were diversity quotas in management. Typically, that means promotions from within. Everyone had interviews, everyone has been working. DEI in the example I gave was a way to extract more power / wealth for a given group in the name of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion -- at the exclusion of others.

> And you thought your old boss was a bigot??

When you promote [or don't] based on race, what are you?

> the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

You love to dismiss anything with the appearance of racism, except when it negatively might impact white males. Than racism and bigotry is suddenly a huge problem.

And like Lin, people aren’t saying to promote based on race. But rather don’t neglect people based on race which is exactly what people like you do. I’d love to see the candidate pool randomly drawn from the general population. I bet you’d find problems with it.

Instead, companies are better off focusing on making the later parts of the pipeline less leaky. Minorities tend to leave tech at a higher rate than average due to factors the company has some control over.

They should have outreach programs in high schools, partner with schools to offer intro to coding, or even help sponsor some students for after school coding classes. Sure, these won't necessarily convert these individuals into employees. But it would be part of being a good corporate citizen even if those students end up going to other companies. So there are things they can do. They aren't completely powerless.

Here's the thing: by the time students reach high school, a lot of weeding out has already happened. I recall such a program where where they had something like 7% black students. All but one were children of wealthy Nigerian immigrants. The rest of the class was actually more Asian and White than the district.

Well, some people think when a company says "pipeline problem" it's a PR-vetted way to announce they ain't going to do shit.

Whether you think that's true probably depends on how cynical you are.

To take one obvious example: there's massive under-performance of black men (vs. any other group) at every stage of the educational ladder up to the tertiary level. There simply aren't enough qualified candidates for engineering jobs for firms to be representative of the relative populations at a national level.

36% of white men have at least a bachelors degree; only 19% of black men do. Black college graduates choose STEM majors at only two-thirds the rate of white graduates, and one-third the rate of Asians.

I came to this conclusion by watching what the California government has done in the SF Bay Area over last decade or so.

They keep narrowing commuter corridors, which disproportionately impacts low income workers. They only allow high density housing to be built far from transit corridors and walkable downtowns. They explicitly keep housing scarce via zoning restrictions, then have special ghetto projects for low income families.

Public education has gone from top ten to bottom five in the country, but rich areas have excellent public schools because they let parents pay to add back educational programs that have been defunded in the poor public schools.

Oakland has a special privatized police force for its downtown commercial district area so that the businesses there don’t have to “subsidize” police coverage for the other (mostly black) parts of the city.

Also, the GP did say they can do scholarships and such, there's that. Also (shudder) consider hiring from state schools and don't filter on where you got your degree, but the quality of education, which yes is much harder to judge. Also, fucking train your own hires, don't expect them to be brill out of the gate.

There is a lot they can do that really is actually quite colorblind on the surface that will lift all boats, but will actually disproportionately lift PoC since they skew worse on the metrics, as you stated.

[0] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...

[1] https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...

I worked at a BigCo that did all the usual DEI garbage and their only initiative that actually had results was the one where they spent a bunch of money sponsoring "women in stem" stuff at the high-school and college level.

Weird how there’s programs for the majority (women) when the minority (men) succeed — but no help for the minority (men) in any form. And this isn’t some new issue… men have been the minority in education longer than I’ve been alive.

The women hired as a result were far more socially diverse than people from the other hiring pipelines and I think that is of greater value than the fact that they were women.

This is a big non-FAANG tech company FWIW

At least in the case of an intern we had, she went to some other company. Which in fairness, was the better choice. In the conversation we were having, the manager even told her to go to any other company if she has the option because they will pay more. One of the best managers I've seen and he wasn't even my manager. Of course he left for another company shortly after.

In a work conversation, a coworker mentioned recruiting more women to work for us. I basically said we're never going to win against FAANG companies competing for the limited pool of women software engineers, and he didn't have a response to that.

Some companies may not be diverse because they don't want to hire from under represented categories, but because candidates from those categories have better offers.