There's an implication here that 7% of the tech workforce being Black is an obvious indication of disparate treatment. Taking programmers as an example, the claim is that the industry is actively discriminating against Black workers for a 1:2 ratio, while at the same time fetishizing Asian employees by having them over-represented 4:1. Whites are also underrepresented. Is anybody investigating that?
I'd be perfectly happy to support their cause if they provided evidence of discrimination to back their claims, but these accusations come off as sensationalist, statistically innumerate and lazy.
We occasionally get US HR people come over here, talking to a team of 4-10 people, point out there's no black people in it and use that as an example of the lack of diversity.
The problem is that black people are ~1% of local population, so a team without black people is much less surprising than in the US or London.
I think that the focus on "percentage of workforce" as a proxy for "amount of discrimination" is a bad idea. Frankly, I don't know how discrimination in the workplace ought to be measured. I know that every single woman I know that works in tech has experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. At a company where I worked, male employees started telling female employees that they shouldn't be wearing pants to work and should be instead be wearing dresses and skirts.
Certainly, these experiences are anecdotal, but I've seen enough anecdotes personally (in addition to reading articles about discrimination at Uber and Blizzard) to suggest that discrimination is a non-negligible problem. I'd definitely be in favor of accurately measuring discrimination since, at the moment, all I know is that it happens to _some_ people, but I have no clue how big that group is.
I doubt that tech companies have any motivation to actually try to measure this accurately. A lot of the "pro-diversity" actions that tech companies have taken seem to be aimed to placate (sometimes misguided) employees worried about diversity issues, rather than trying to actually solve any actual problems.
Which doesn't even include the word layoff, is from 2022, and doesn't seem to address the issue at all.
As I go through, this is consistent in the article. Make an argument, link to evidence, which doesn't include anything about your argument.
I'd really like to read a better put together article on the topic. I think it's a very reasonable discussion, but I'm dissuaded to try and sort out it when they cite details that have no evidence i can see.
Let's just keep it real... In a practical, engineering environment, the talk of race and status has no place. If you want to code for a living, write good code, and do your best to find somewhere that will pay you adequately for your skillset. Once you're there, improvise and collaborate with your coworkers and use the resources at your disposal to get tasks/tickets done to the best of your ability. Nobody on earth can rightfully ask for any more of you than that.
The more time you spend talking to your employer about your skin color, the less work is getting done, and in the long run that equates 1:1 to money. Do the work, take the money, and keep it simple.
I think people need better mentors. They don't need diversity pledges and social justice initiatives in the workplace, I think they just need people to guide them along their path to becoming the best X that they can be, without judgment. That way the relationship is collaborative and nurturing, rather than threatening and adversarial like with these diversity movements. Keeping it skill-based is better for everyone.
This assumes everyone is starting from the same place. And that tribalism isn't an inherent human trait, or is so mild it needs no conscious effort to counteract.
Some of us are born into privilege, and those who aren't do need some help to level the playing field. And that's likely at every stage of life, from forced integration of schools to extra grace for oppressed groups in the workplace.
I agree with most of this, however in practice, it doesn’t really go down this way.
These large corporations often turn diversity goals into pseudo-business number games. To put it bluntly, they’ll hire a certain number of brown folks and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
I’m all for extra grace. I really, truly am. I don’t talk about this much, but my grandfather was murdered by a burglar many years ago. My dad visited that man over a dozen times that I can remember when I was growing up, and there’s a lot of other details and lessons surrounding this, but my point is that I understand what I believe to be the true nature of grace.
Giving someone a job they don’t deserve because of their skin color is not grace, it’s tokenizing and patronizing, whilst simultaneously reinforcing the power structures that create the situation in the first place. No, a person should be given a job they don’t deserve because of the belief that they will be grateful to learn to do it well, and led to do so by a competent and compassionate mentor.
It’s this weird quantification that holds back people’s understanding when it comes to race and status in the workplace. It’s about people, and it can’t be captured or comprehended by any form of spreadsheet or business initiative.
If we want the situation for our neighbors to improve, we need to be good neighbors and help them, rather than saying “oh, well we should find sixteen more black neighbors to make our diversity quota.” If you’re one of those future neighbors, you suddenly realize that all you are is just some black person to fill a space, for numerical purposes.
"Despite loud commitments of solidarity and support for Black communities after the murder of George Floyd, the tech industry, by and large, seems content to quietly overlook the business case for retaining employees of color and prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging."
What is the business case for retaining employees of color other than having them as employees that benefit the company? This reads like companies should keep employees of color no matter what, essentially discriminating against everyone else and just virtue signalling.
The crazy people complaining about "cultural marxism" weren't totally wrong. A broken clock is right twice a day. There are people who sincerely think companies should hire employees of color more-or-less just for their being of color.
Which is pretty terrible for talented people of color who are making material contributions because it erodes their peers confidence that they're actually qualified.
It's hilarious that those loons have come full circle to the point that they say people should be judged by the color of their skin rather than the quality of their character.
It's those statements that make it obvious that none of this is about diversity and inclusion, but rather about selfishness and grabbing any advantage you can have.
> According to a McKinsey report, nurturing organizational diversity leads to higher profit margins. The most diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% in profitability.
>"DEIB leads to employee retention, which means there are actually savings on keeping employees in the company longer versus spending money on recruitment to fill those roles..."
These are two points contained within the article, in the paragraphs leading up to the conclusion.
So are employees of color being fired disproportionately therefore reducing diversity? There is no data in the article to support that. Maybe far more men than women were let go? So diversity is only increasing.
You are listing two business cases for retention: do you think tech companies are not aware of the same data? If there was a strong case for keeping employees of a specific demographic, do you think companies would ignore that and prefer to lose more money?
I can only hope this is true! DEI has been an increasing cause of active discrimination against majority-population groups, and gives powerful roles to the most jealous, historically uneducated, politics playing people in each company. It has made working on tech almost unbearable for many years. The sooner it’s over the better, and I hope we never go back to it.
Not to mention that the longer DEI lasts, it will discredit any future attempts to address any actual issues with the distribution of opportunity in our society.
Worked at a place with ERGs. I had never heard of them before. In our company wiki, they were listed as places where people of the protected group could "share career opportunities" and help each other out. Seemed mega illegal to me. I asked HR how is this not discriminatory, and they said anyone could join the group, not just people of the protected group. But nowhere was that written down or communicated. Pretty sure I was put on a "list" for that line of questioning.
ERGs in the companies I've been in has been a way to redirect the organising types into something that is probably cost-neutral after considering the PR wins rather than have them focus on union-type things they might otherwise get into that are just straight up cost to the company.
When you've got a hiring freeze and your stock is beat up, you don't need to recruit more talent (BIPOC or otherwise), and you don't need to tell the world how progressive you are. You need to prioritize projects and execute with strong teams. As an initiative, diversity distracts from that.
Coinbase isn't in the business of being a platform for progressive politics. It's a platform for exchanging crypto, and it's explicit about it. Other companies aer quietly following suit.
This is going to be kind of tangential and I apologize for that, but allow me to say that as a person of Japanese heritage I fucking hate the term "BIPOC" and any related terms thereof.
I'm a man, not a political object of convenience. If you must refer to my race for actually practical reasons, you can just refer to that than use a stupid term stemming from identity politics. If you need some generic way to refer, just refer to us as the minority because that's an objective fact.
"BIPOC" is insulting, both to the individuals and their heritage.
It's a kind of figurative "colonialism" if you think about it, and I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who talks that way (same with Latinx as someone else mentioned).
These terms get used the way "savage" might have been used a few 100 years ago by missionaries
Despite the "World's Dumbest Idea[1]," the legal construction of corporations exist to provide net positive social benefit. This is a collective and subjective judgement, but when, in aggregate, the public's perception is that corporations aren't living up to their end of the bargain, the social contract is broken and a raging public is the last thing anyone needs. It typically ends very poorly for the targets of said outrage.
A bit off-topic, but how do people actually feel about being diversity hires? Doesn't that feel... Demeaning?
I've once had a talk with a CEO (a very technical one) of an ML/CV company, who told me a story of how some American company wanted to hire her as a female manager.
She was super offended by this and declined. When asked why, she said that she wanted to be hired for her skills, rather than for her set of genitalia.
So my question is: don't diversity hires feel devaluated? Or maybe I just underestimate the level of day-to-day discrimination in the US and the alternative is worse?
P.S. I don't live in a western country so excuse me if any of this sounds insensitive.
This is just my opinion, there is a group of "professional diversity hires" - usually very well off but with some trendy ethnicity in their background that play it up and use their heritage to further their career. This diversity stuff basically pushes these people to the front of the line.
There are also of course (as a majority) legit people from whatever trendy background that just want to do their job, and see all the fawning over "diversity" either as something to ignore (like most of us do). And then there are a few that choose to engage with it and see it as actively offensive, which it is when you think about it.
So bottom line, my feeling is that the way "diverse" - trendily ethnic or genedered etc people feel about it is about the same as everyone feels about it
I don’t see this as any different to traditional office politics and the self serving “dark triad” personalities you come across. The key component of Machiavellianism is using whatever means you have. That could be in-group status OR out-group status, the result is the same.
The label of “professional diversity hire” is harmful to those in the majority group you identified who aren’t playing that game. So just call it for what it is rather than enabling discrimination with a dog whistle.
Diversity hire is a dog whistle. If you are a low performer in the in-group, you are label as a low performer. If you are a low performer in the out group, you are labelled as a diversity hire.
Even if you are not low performing, you’re still under constant pressure to prove you’re not a diversity hire.
People usually don’t have the designation of “diversity hire” officially bestowed on them by a company. They are just given to people who are in the out-group by people in the in-group. In your story, it sounds like a company explicitly was searching for a woman as a manager or the CEO got that impression. I don’t know American laws but where I am the exemptions for explicitly hiring a job based on a protected category are very limited and need to be intrinsically link - think things like requiring a woman for a female role in a movie or requiring a member of X cultural group for an outreach role focusing on that group.
Obviously this is very hard to police, and people do consider protected categories in hiring practices, sometimes in favour of an in-group and sometimes in favour of an out-group.
You might argue that the existence of diversity quotas, targets, policies or programs is the cause of the the different treatment, but it is not. Even if the company had a very explicit “best candidate wins - no special treatment” policy - you can’t escape in-group vs out-group politics. It is just that the dog whistle used will change. Even if a company has no diversity policy, the laws exist and so the whistle will change from “X is diversity hire” to “they can’t fire X because they’re afraid of lawsuits”.
Most people in out-groups will just end up adopting a persona that is acceptable enough to the in-group in order to survive. But this also does bad damage to a person’s identity. Ironically, one of the best ways to prove yourself as a member of the in-group is to blow the same dog whistles - as the female CEO did in your example.
I'm Japanese-American and have, thankfully, never experienced being a diversity hire. If I were presented with such a situation though, I would take that as an insult and refuse the offer or quit ASAP because I want to be judged for who I am rather than what I am.
Readit News
I'd be perfectly happy to support their cause if they provided evidence of discrimination to back their claims, but these accusations come off as sensationalist, statistically innumerate and lazy.
Some U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for reference: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
The problem is that black people are ~1% of local population, so a team without black people is much less surprising than in the US or London.
College educated San Franciscans are close to ~1% black as well.
Certainly, these experiences are anecdotal, but I've seen enough anecdotes personally (in addition to reading articles about discrimination at Uber and Blizzard) to suggest that discrimination is a non-negligible problem. I'd definitely be in favor of accurately measuring discrimination since, at the moment, all I know is that it happens to _some_ people, but I have no clue how big that group is.
I doubt that tech companies have any motivation to actually try to measure this accurately. A lot of the "pro-diversity" actions that tech companies have taken seem to be aimed to placate (sometimes misguided) employees worried about diversity issues, rather than trying to actually solve any actual problems.
What makes it so that Asians are underrepresented, and would the games be more interesting if these causes were addressed ?
Dead Comment
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"Recent research shows Black and Brown employees were disproportionately impacted in those layoffs." Links to
https://www.zippia.com/advice/diversity-in-high-tech-statist...
Which doesn't even include the word layoff, is from 2022, and doesn't seem to address the issue at all.
As I go through, this is consistent in the article. Make an argument, link to evidence, which doesn't include anything about your argument.
I'd really like to read a better put together article on the topic. I think it's a very reasonable discussion, but I'm dissuaded to try and sort out it when they cite details that have no evidence i can see.
The more time you spend talking to your employer about your skin color, the less work is getting done, and in the long run that equates 1:1 to money. Do the work, take the money, and keep it simple.
I think people need better mentors. They don't need diversity pledges and social justice initiatives in the workplace, I think they just need people to guide them along their path to becoming the best X that they can be, without judgment. That way the relationship is collaborative and nurturing, rather than threatening and adversarial like with these diversity movements. Keeping it skill-based is better for everyone.
Some of us are born into privilege, and those who aren't do need some help to level the playing field. And that's likely at every stage of life, from forced integration of schools to extra grace for oppressed groups in the workplace.
These large corporations often turn diversity goals into pseudo-business number games. To put it bluntly, they’ll hire a certain number of brown folks and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
I’m all for extra grace. I really, truly am. I don’t talk about this much, but my grandfather was murdered by a burglar many years ago. My dad visited that man over a dozen times that I can remember when I was growing up, and there’s a lot of other details and lessons surrounding this, but my point is that I understand what I believe to be the true nature of grace.
Giving someone a job they don’t deserve because of their skin color is not grace, it’s tokenizing and patronizing, whilst simultaneously reinforcing the power structures that create the situation in the first place. No, a person should be given a job they don’t deserve because of the belief that they will be grateful to learn to do it well, and led to do so by a competent and compassionate mentor.
It’s this weird quantification that holds back people’s understanding when it comes to race and status in the workplace. It’s about people, and it can’t be captured or comprehended by any form of spreadsheet or business initiative.
If we want the situation for our neighbors to improve, we need to be good neighbors and help them, rather than saying “oh, well we should find sixteen more black neighbors to make our diversity quota.” If you’re one of those future neighbors, you suddenly realize that all you are is just some black person to fill a space, for numerical purposes.
"Despite loud commitments of solidarity and support for Black communities after the murder of George Floyd, the tech industry, by and large, seems content to quietly overlook the business case for retaining employees of color and prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging."
What is the business case for retaining employees of color other than having them as employees that benefit the company? This reads like companies should keep employees of color no matter what, essentially discriminating against everyone else and just virtue signalling.
Which is pretty terrible for talented people of color who are making material contributions because it erodes their peers confidence that they're actually qualified.
MLK would be rolling in his grave.
>"DEIB leads to employee retention, which means there are actually savings on keeping employees in the company longer versus spending money on recruitment to fill those roles..."
These are two points contained within the article, in the paragraphs leading up to the conclusion.
Paradoxically, more profitable companies can afford hiring practices which hurt their bottom line. The causality could easily be the other way around.
Did the report imply causation from correlation?
You are listing two business cases for retention: do you think tech companies are not aware of the same data? If there was a strong case for keeping employees of a specific demographic, do you think companies would ignore that and prefer to lose more money?
Not to mention that the longer DEI lasts, it will discredit any future attempts to address any actual issues with the distribution of opportunity in our society.
Worked at a place with ERGs. I had never heard of them before. In our company wiki, they were listed as places where people of the protected group could "share career opportunities" and help each other out. Seemed mega illegal to me. I asked HR how is this not discriminatory, and they said anyone could join the group, not just people of the protected group. But nowhere was that written down or communicated. Pretty sure I was put on a "list" for that line of questioning.
Coinbase isn't in the business of being a platform for progressive politics. It's a platform for exchanging crypto, and it's explicit about it. Other companies aer quietly following suit.
This is going to be kind of tangential and I apologize for that, but allow me to say that as a person of Japanese heritage I fucking hate the term "BIPOC" and any related terms thereof.
I'm a man, not a political object of convenience. If you must refer to my race for actually practical reasons, you can just refer to that than use a stupid term stemming from identity politics. If you need some generic way to refer, just refer to us as the minority because that's an objective fact.
"BIPOC" is insulting, both to the individuals and their heritage.
These terms get used the way "savage" might have been used a few 100 years ago by missionaries
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-ori...
I've once had a talk with a CEO (a very technical one) of an ML/CV company, who told me a story of how some American company wanted to hire her as a female manager.
She was super offended by this and declined. When asked why, she said that she wanted to be hired for her skills, rather than for her set of genitalia.
So my question is: don't diversity hires feel devaluated? Or maybe I just underestimate the level of day-to-day discrimination in the US and the alternative is worse?
P.S. I don't live in a western country so excuse me if any of this sounds insensitive.
There are also of course (as a majority) legit people from whatever trendy background that just want to do their job, and see all the fawning over "diversity" either as something to ignore (like most of us do). And then there are a few that choose to engage with it and see it as actively offensive, which it is when you think about it.
So bottom line, my feeling is that the way "diverse" - trendily ethnic or genedered etc people feel about it is about the same as everyone feels about it
The label of “professional diversity hire” is harmful to those in the majority group you identified who aren’t playing that game. So just call it for what it is rather than enabling discrimination with a dog whistle.
Even if you are not low performing, you’re still under constant pressure to prove you’re not a diversity hire.
People usually don’t have the designation of “diversity hire” officially bestowed on them by a company. They are just given to people who are in the out-group by people in the in-group. In your story, it sounds like a company explicitly was searching for a woman as a manager or the CEO got that impression. I don’t know American laws but where I am the exemptions for explicitly hiring a job based on a protected category are very limited and need to be intrinsically link - think things like requiring a woman for a female role in a movie or requiring a member of X cultural group for an outreach role focusing on that group.
Obviously this is very hard to police, and people do consider protected categories in hiring practices, sometimes in favour of an in-group and sometimes in favour of an out-group.
You might argue that the existence of diversity quotas, targets, policies or programs is the cause of the the different treatment, but it is not. Even if the company had a very explicit “best candidate wins - no special treatment” policy - you can’t escape in-group vs out-group politics. It is just that the dog whistle used will change. Even if a company has no diversity policy, the laws exist and so the whistle will change from “X is diversity hire” to “they can’t fire X because they’re afraid of lawsuits”.
Most people in out-groups will just end up adopting a persona that is acceptable enough to the in-group in order to survive. But this also does bad damage to a person’s identity. Ironically, one of the best ways to prove yourself as a member of the in-group is to blow the same dog whistles - as the female CEO did in your example.