I am curious if anyone can find the text for "IBM's Policy Letter #4" written by IBM's chairman in 1953, which is referenced in this article. I did some searching but all the links I found to the full text were broken.
I ask because I think it shows what a Rorschach test the arguments over DEI have become. I at least found one quote from the Policy Letter #4 which stated "It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, color or creed." Of course, in 1953 that was a pretty bold stance given the widespread official segregation policies in the Southern US at the time. Now, though, it feel like how you view that statement depends on which "tribe" you align with in the DEI debate: Anti-DEI folks say "Exactly, we want to hire people based on merit regardless of race, color or creed, and DEI has basically turned into a policy of racial quotas" while pro-DEI folks say "The policy back then was to fight official and systemic racism, which we still need to combat today."
So I'd just like to find the full original policy document so I can make up my own mind.
Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that? Was this so widely distributed that it was typeset on a printing press? The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes. The signature is also in ink, so that’s either a third pass for color, or an actual signature, and the letter doesn’t have the notation to indicate that it was signed by the secretary, so that leads me to think that it wasn’t widely distributed.
The issue that I have is that I've almost never seen an anti-DEI advocate actually engage with the issues. Even if I ultimately disagreed with them, I could respect someone who was willing to look at the problems the US is having with inequality and present a reasoned argument for alternatives to DEI.
However, what I usually see is people either ignoring the issues people are facing, ignoring the arguments put forth by advocates of DEI, or substituting slogans for arguments.
The anti-DEI argument is that modern racial disparities are predominantly caused by economic circumstances, e.g. black people are more likely to be poor and then less likely to have to startup capital to start their own business or be able to afford to attend a high status university. The same applies to white people who don't have affluent parents. "White people who grew up poor" are under-represented at the top of society.
So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity, not race. To fix it you need to e.g. make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities. That allows both poor black people and poor white people to get ahead without discriminating against anyone, but still reduces the racial disparity because black people are disproportionately poor.
It's basically Goodhart's law. Because of the existing correlation between race and poverty, continuing racial disparities are a strong proxy for insufficient upward mobility, but you want to solve the actual problem and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
I don't like DEI and am willing to engage. The US has a huge disparity of outcomes along racial lines. This is a legacy of slavery as well as social and governmental discrimination following slavery. [Racial biases persist today, but are much better today than the past, and we should focus on elimination of those biases, not adding new ones.]
These factors result in real disparity in capabilities and merit today. This is precisely why racism was and is so detrimental.
I oppose DEI because I think it is racist, even if good intended. I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit. I don't think that group statistic should be a higher priority than equality for individuals.
In my mind, DEI is a myopic obsession with the group statistics, to the detriment of individual equality.
If a school enroll someone with a 400 point lower sat over the higher person on the sole basis of their race, that is a major Injustice on the scale of individual humans, even if it moves some group statistic closer to equal.
I think countering racism with racism is a very dangerous game, likely to blow up in everyone's face.
Instead, equality under law should Ensure equal treatment moving forward. Past wrongs should be addressed by race blind improvements to economic mobility.
All social injustice stems from the first law of economics: there isn't enough to go around. DEI will come and go, but so long as we lack the wealth to meet everyones needs (and wants), there will always be inequity. The real question is, does anyone have an idea of what a fair world looks like in the mean time? Why do people disagree on what that fair world looks like? Is it a fools errand to try and make the world fair when there's no clear goal to move towards? How do folks who support DEI think of it in the above context?
1. If there is an issue it starts much earlier. Trying to solve a problem that happens at school or earlier by giving discriminatory preference to people in university entrance or job applications makes no sense.
2. Inequality of outcome simply doesn't matter anyway.
3. Nobody actually cares about inequality--they care about specific visual types of inequality. Nobody cares about the diversity statistics of poor white people from an underprivileged background, for example.
4. As for substituting slogans for arguments, the DEI argument is just slogans. That is all it is.
The problems the US has with inequality can be laid squarely at the foot of the dollar being the world's reserve currency.
It works like this:
The world uses dollars in international trade.
Who produces the world's dollars? Washington and Wall St. Congress mandates spending, which is funded by the Fed printing money and purchasing bonds. The Fed also controls the money supply via interest rates and fractional reserve banking.
This is a very complicated system, but the end result is the same. Washington and Wall St produce dollars that the world very much wants.
World needs dollars from Washington and Wall St, but Washington and Wall St. need something in return. This ends up being cheap manufactured goods.
The result: dollars and manufacturing jobs get exported abroad, and cheap goods get imported. Washington, Wall St, and their hangers-on (their investments in tech, hollywood, etc) become rich.
The average American gets a bunch of junk in their front yard. They don't work at Bath Iron Works like their grandfather, they get everything they "need" simply by working at 7/11 or as a mortgage broker.
The stuff about taxing the rich, deregulation, DEI, nationalism, etc have been a distraction from this fundamental shift in American society. Always follow the money.
Fortunately, the current administration understands this better any previous one.
I'd just say that I find it very frustrating that the argument for "one side" is how insane "the other side" is, because then that pretends that reasonable solutions (and not what I would call "compromises") don't exist, because you're only looking at the extremes.
Yes, I think it's nuts to replace "DEI hires" with DUI hires and pretend that is "merit based", and I think the US has become a pretty full-blown kakistocracy (my new favorite word) right now.
But while I agree with the purported goals of DEI, I often saw it go "off the rails" in practice, and lead to a cottage industry of pseudoscience-based "DEI consultants". I'll show my hand: when it comes to DEI, I absolutely get behind the "I" part of it - everyone should feel welcome and included at work. When it comes to the "D" part, while I support outreach to cast as wide a net as possible when it comes to things like hiring, too often I saw this devolve into soft quotas and semi-performative hand wringing when some job distribution didn't exactly match the wider population distribution. The "E" part I think was frankly insane and just "equality of outcome" over "equality of opportunity" with window dressing - and yes, I've heard how backers framed the equity part, but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.
...damn, that's a legitimately sick burn that's also a prime example of why "Meritocracies" are a bad thing on their face. "Whose merit? What is merit? Why is X merit but not Y? How come person A's merit is worth less than person B's?"
The problem with DEI is that it did, in fact, turn into a policy of racial quotas, only the quota-ness was denied even though the threat of legal action was omnipresent.
Just because you don't like people or tribe supporting a policy or their motives supporting such policies doesn't make a policy good or bad or valid or invalid. During COVID times, some statements or policies that turned out to be true were overly supported by some b wacky and or political undesirable people. Reacting to this, many decisions or policies stayed in place or were undertaken.
I have observed this too, but I don't think it either affirms or refutes either position. Generally speaking, people are ultimately self-interested, and will make whichever argument advances their interests. Being objective about something where you have a conflict-of-interest is very difficult.
I’ve seen people who say that, but what’s much more common in my experience is people who note that thinking seriously about Asians and Indians in tech isn’t very compatible with “DEI” as commonly construed. To me it seems clear that IBM promoting a dark-skinned immigrant to CEO proves their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; I know this position is controversial but for the life of me I can’t understand why.
The anit-DEI stuff is predicated on an idea that there is a clear known 'best fit' for a position and it shouldn't take into account X, whatever X is. The problem is always this, nobody actually knows what a best fit really is. Nature shows us that one trait leads to longer term survival, diversity. When you think you know the traits that pick most suitable and exclude other traits then you are getting rid of the chance to find something you didn't know about. Diversity is a key ingredient in long term health and survival. The challenge though is that diversity naturally creates a certain amount of dissonance simply because you are now getting what you didn't expect. This is a feature, not a bug, so building for it is critical. A hiring policy that seeks out diversity and injects it in, in the long term, will lead to a stronger, healthier company.
The American conception of diversity that looks for race and gender ends up grouping 60% of the world together as "Asian". These are regions of the world with vast cultural differences (the obvious because South VS East Asia) and even within countries someone from Beijing is vastly different from someone from Xinjiang. It's extremely western-biased to look at what's going on in DEI efforts and think that it in any way represents actual diversity. It mostly means white women and educated black men get jobs while spewing the exact same thoughts as the HR department.
I agree with what you’re explicitly stating, but I can’t tell if you acknowledge and accept the implications.
As it stands, your statement boils down to “DEI is not diverse enough.”
If one also accepts gp’s point, then it seems DEI should continue, but be applied more carefully and thoughtfully. This would likely mean an increase in resources dedicated to DEI.
I agree and would welcome this (without requiring it legally). But I doubt most others would agree.
To be fair to DEI, the D could easily stand for “anti-homogeneity”. To that extent, Beijing, Xinjiang, Lahore, Jakarta, or Manila makes no difference. All that matters is you’re not being excluded just because you look or sound different.
"AAPI" is truly the epitome of a DEI term that is racist in exactly the way the ideology pretends not to be.
Really, you're going to group indigenous New Zealanders with Han Chinese as "one" racial group? Just to pick two very different groups at random. There are many absurd pairings that fit under "AAPI" and it's a parody of itself.
It's erasing these cultures to group them all under one constructed postmodern umbrella
The "anit-DEI stuff" is the same as the DEI stuff from before this administration: performative. Originally DEI was because the people demanded it of companies, now the anti-DEI version is because the administration will make your life hell if you don't fall in line.
Personally I fully agree that building a diverse workforce is more profitable in the long run than ignoring diversity (unless your company will die in the short term because of political pressure).
Do you think people who have different skin colors do their jobs differently? Can you articulate how you think your white workers do their jobs differently than say your hispanic workers?
To play the devil's advocate, how do we know this carries over to business? If this was the case, it should have a track record at this point, since DEI has been a topic for a long time. Looking at comparable companies where one did do DEI and the other didn't, did one or the other have a statistically significant edge over the other? I have no idea, but I'm far from convinced purely from a reasoning stand point.
NPR had a story on this topic years ago and the researchers they talked with said diversity appears to have a negative impact on startups but a positive impact on established businesses. The logic was startups are smaller and need to move fast and be focused so DEI type efforts distract from the main business at that time. Once established diversity help the business by having people that can see business opportunities and challenges that a more homogenous workforce would not otherwise notice.
You've never witnessed a hiring decision that was based on an almost entirely arbitrary tie-breaker?
All I want out of DEI/Affirmative Action, apart from maybe some proactive efforts to improve diversity in the initial funnel, is for that arbitrary tie-breaker to skew towards the option that's underrepresented in the field. Does that seem unreasonable or particularly unfair to you?
I love taking ideas to extremes, but in this case I don't advocate for that. What I mean is, diversity should be sought out and thought of as a positive, but that doesn't mean you throw out what factors you believe are relevant. I am advocating for incorporating diversity, searching for surprise, into hiring, not making it the only factor. Seeking out surprise is the fastest way to learn what you don't know so that you can use that knowledge for the future.
The biggest predication of anti-DEI stuff is white supremacy. Despite what they say, based on their actions, the best fit (or put another way, "merit") is clearly not a concern for the current US administration.
Furthermore, if these anti-DEI folks, whatever DEI means, think that people are hiring primarily based on some attribute rather than capability then it's fair to assume that if someone in any position is a straight, white, male they are there, not because they are qualified, but because they are straight, white, male. And from what I've seen, that's actually always been more of a problem than sourcing candidates from various populations.
You are conflating two different ideas of diversity. An ecosystem of businesses is, for instance, more diverse if it contains some companies with racially and sexually diverse workforces and some companies without these properties. This is strategic diversity.
No, the anti-DEI stuff is based on the principle that race is a superficial characteristic that doesn’t change how someone would do the job. So, ipso facto, diversity itself can’t improve the performance of a workforce.
but DEI isn't just about race, nor is the idea behind it that a superficial characteristic makes someone more qualified for a job. DEI addresses the systemic barriers that have historically disadvantaged certain populations (like race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc). DEI aims to give them the same opportunities as their counterparts.
for example, DEI is meant to provide opportunities to impoverished white individuals as well, if they have not been able to afford higher education or have been passed on for various jobs because they didn't have the same internships or experiences that their wealthier counterparts had (which may have hindered their professional development).
I think these companies have found what they believe to be best fit. The question is, "fit for what?". The answer to that is maximum short term profits.
If you can't show benefits in the span of 1 quarter, it might as well not be an option.
Those that criticize DEI have no problem with Nepotism. Ivanka and Jared had white house positions, that paid them salaries and entitled them to secret service on trips to Israel and Saudi Arabia. That tells you all you need to know. I would not hire either of them as doormen in a new building development, but they ran the house on 1600 Pennsylvania. DEI really is poor nomenclature. I think all of us favor someone that came from hardship (low income areas, refugees, veterans, disabled person that wants to find fulfillment by working), and giving them an opportunity. There are many places (and states) where these people would NOT be hired, even if they were qualified.
The overall problem is nepotism, or even more generally, a lack of upward mobility. If you're poor it's a long road to the top. Most of the slots are filled by nepotism or otherwise having rich parents and only a minority are filled through merit.
The ideal solution here is to improve upward mobility, but neither party really does that, because to do that you have to fight entrenched incumbents. To lower poverty you need to lower the cost of living and therefore housing and healthcare costs, but the existing property owners and healthcare companies will fight you. To create opportunities you need to reduce regulatory capture so that small businesses can better compete with larger ones, but the existing incumbents will fight you. So these problems persist because neither party solves them.
Then, because more black people are poor and the bipartisan consensus is that if you're poor you're screwed, there are proportionally fewer black people at the top. Now consider what happens if you propose DEI as a solution to this. All of the nepotism still happens, but now the merit slots get converted into satisfying the race quota. Now if you're poor and white you're completely locked out, because the "white people" slots are all filled by nepotism and the remaining slots are used to satisfy the race quota.
The result is that poor white people are completely screwed by DEI, they understand this, and because the proponents of DEI are Democrats they then vote for Republicans. Then the Republicans oppose DEI because they're actually representing their constituents who at least want their chance at the limited number of merit slots instead of being completely locked out.
If the Republican elites then engage in nepotism and fail to improve upward mobility, that isn't good, but it's only a distinction between the parties if the Democrats would have done better in that regard, which they haven't, and they're plausibly even worse in terms of increasing regulatory burdens that prevent people with limited means from starting a small business.
No, the anti-DEI stuff is predicated on the idea that civil rights are bad and that white (straight dude) rule is good. There's not really any point in sugar-coating it or pretending the idea has any kind of intellectual or legal legitimacy. It is entirely driven by animus and resentment. The folks driving it aren't even hiding it.
The general reasoning given by a lot of these companies is that WFH did not work.
Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up.
I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.
> Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up.
I took a new job in 2022, at that time everyone was still working from home. My boss, who was a VP at that time, said isn't this amazing? We save on fuel, time, spend more time at home etc. Productivity has been amazing and all.
Two years later in early 2024 when they started pushing RTO, same guy repeats the standard bullshit about - we need those sidebar conversations, we need to meet face to face and all. Not a single word of how it wastes fuel, or time etc.
I realized he was powerless against the corporate policies, but just his hypocrisy was enough for me to find another (100% remote) job.
At the time, WFH was new for most organizations - and yes it feels pretty great. Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.
Certain tasks can be best done in solitude at home. Others... require collaboration. Collaboration that's scheduled in meetings or the dreaded video call are not the same as spontaneous collaboration or just popping your head into someone's office/cube and asking a quick question.
There's trade offs to both... and if a company has decided WFH isn't ideal for them, then you can leave and find a job that believes WFH is ideal.
I work for a company that made a big deal about how well it worked. The CEO and chief people officer both made a lot of public statements about it, during and just after covid. They did this claiming they had the numbers to back it up and said numbers but they basically made them up. It was PR and they were using it to aid recruiting into what was and is a company that young people avoided. What numbers they did have were mostly inertia and a side effect of lockdowns (people had little else to do); new projects and new teams floundered very visibly.
Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it.
I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff.
Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
For b2b sales, as this IBM initiative seems to be focused on, I think there are a few things going on. This is all my opinion, based on first hand observation during the height of COVID WFH in enterprise sales, for a vendor that did very well during the lockdown period but which "returned to customer" as quickly as possible.
First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc.
Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road.
And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.
I am not in sales and don’t travel nearly as much as our sales team. But I have been in a customer facing cloud consulting role for 5 years. I am the first technical person that the client encounters after the sales team. I’ve done my fair amount of business travel.
The argument is not that face to face to build relationships with customers is not important. It’s that it’s dumb to have “field by design” roles be forced to be in an office when they aren’t on customers sites.
Besides that, it is disruptive in the office because you are spending a lot of time with the customer on conference calls and how it often works is that the people doing the work are not in the office or even in the same country.
Your client facing staff is US based. But US employees are too expensive to do the grunt work (unless you’re using one of the exploitive WITCH companies).
AWS exempted their “field by design” roles from being in the office during the first few RTO mandates. But they eventually forced them to be in an office this year (after I left).
GCP has in office requirements for their Professional Services staff now too - full time direct hire employees for both AWS and GCP.
Having worked at a fully remote company before (and during) COVID, I'm surprised so many companies have stuck with it for so long.
IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc.
Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it's gone as well as it has, but it's also not surprising it's gone badly for a lot of companies.
IME, I'm a CFO so see every department this is not specific to software industry, it went well but it also ultimately highlighted how inefficient most company's office workers are. So once those people adjust to WFH, get caught up on a backlog of projects, etc. (the "being very good at WFH" phase) they eventually become unnecessary and headcount reduction becomes more obvious next step even though WFH "worked". But, there's also the part about why did the backlog of projects not continue to grow? What are we working towards now? etc. The response to this is making people RTO, because we feel that we broke something by going completely remote. The company isn't as connected, they're just coasting now pushing things forward, etc. These are the kinds of reasons that employee's and executive's see the RTO issue so differently.
I've personally worked at 4 different companies since early 2020. Not everyone does WFH well. Many pretend they do, but don't. Even those that do it well, do better when they meet regularly in person (have some hybrid model). Some teams/departments/functions are better at it than others, but companies as a whole I think perform better when the people have personal connections and relationships across the org. In a remote WFH situation, over time, through natural attrition, new people are onboarded and never actually meet anyone in the company and this becomes a large portion of employees that are very loosely connected in terms of their interpersonal relationships/network and this weakens the organization. I can see how that is fine in a individual contributor role of SWE, but for most roles, in most departments, it doesn't play out well (or takes a very special/rare personality trait to actually do it well).
Easier to force people back versus fix bad management, because bad management is everywhere.
(there is $120B+ in remote enterprise market cap as of this comment, anyone saying it doesn't work is not accurately representing the situation; it might not work for them because they are unwilling to make it work, but the evidence is clear it can work, does work, and did work during the pandemic)
In truth, tech workers hold all the cards and could easily push for permanent WFH if only they organized. Instead, they let management walk back their promises with barely a peep.
It is exactly it. It's a means to lay off a bunch of workers without having to go through the legal red tape of layoffs designed to protect workers, including the WARN act.
They're bending the knee. The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office. Trump, Musk, and Ramiswamy were all ultra-gung ho about ensuring that as many people with federal jobs were as miserable as possible.
> The CEO class loves their own freedom to move about at will but hates the idea that workers have the right to just NOT be in the office.
I don’t know that that is a reasonable take. More appropriate would be to acknowledge that different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
are profits spiralling downward? are these businesses, overall, making less profit? because of remote workers?
or is it closer to the truth to say that no amount of profit - or asserting authority over workers - is ever enough and since companies are in a position of power to squeeze blood from a stone, they will?
I'm super skeptical of this article, particularly the inclusion of the phrase "DEI purge", which I cannot find attributed to a single quote in the article. There's a memo from CHRO Nickle LaMoreaux that is quoted from, but not linked to, and the memo itself seems like a pretty anodyne statement that doesn't allude to any "DEI purge" or even DEI related firings, even if it is hypocritical[1].
There's a whole section of the article titled "DEI'ing inside" where they explain some tactics that fit the bill. Of course nobody said the phrase "DEI purge", that's the author summarizing it for a headline. I'm not really taking a stand on whether it's accurate or click/rage-bait, just saying this is standard writing style to summarize things into themes and it appears they have the content to back it up in the article, it shouldn't need to be a direct quote.
> IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge
Because the rest of the items in the headline are labor related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired, whatever that means. People in this comment section who did not read TFA are commenting on "DEI" firings, even though there's nothing in TFA about that. It's a little worse than clickbait IMO.
You know, even if you hired a protected class because of DEI fashion, that doesn't mean you can fire them just because the fashion has changed. The laws protecting them are still there, and I would think announcing "we're getting rid of DEI hires" would be giving a labor lawyer a discrimination case on a plate.
I think it's more they're gutting the DEI programs rather than the hires - many large companies have some variant of "reach out and hold campus events at HBCUs" or "sponsor a booth at a Girls who Code conference" which are suddenly mortal sins in the eyes of the people doling out Federal procurement contracts.
This is sort of like saying "IBM can't create a program designed to specifically prefer H-1Bs". They can't. They have had to pay tens of thousands of dollars in associated fees due to those illegal acts. They've also had to promise not do it again. Which they have. They paid those fines, again when caught doing the thing they can't do because it's illegal.
It most likely means the team in charge of implementing DEI policies was canned. Some places have tens of people whose job it is to solely work on DEI policies.
But the case won't get heard because the entire NLRB is frozen up. The dept of justice also won't hear these cases. So it doesn't even matter how blatant the violation is if there is no enforcement.
They would just say you’re reassigned to the Alaska office. You’re expected to work there 3 days a week starting October or something. See, they didn’t fire them! They just resigned under their own accord. /s
> On Tuesday, Big Blue shared new rules on where it expects its US sales staff to work: At least three days a week at a client, a flagship office, or a sales hub.
> And the mainframe giant last week told all US Cloud employees, sales or otherwise, to return to the office at least three days per week at designated "strategic" locations.
Yep. It's a de facto layoff.
Smart of them to add the DEI statement - as we can see here, everyone is arguing over that while ignoring what is essentially a mass layoff.
My company did the same thing - come to the office 3x per week.
We came in to the office to find monitors that were old pre-covid.
No office supplies (tissues, mouse pads, batteries, keyboards)
Expired food and beverages from pre-covid
No desks for my teammembers
The work environment was also much worse than before.
Now you get to overhear the executives bragging about their new cars, the golfing trips they are taking while trying to focus on your work.
You have folks taking calls from there desk without even using a headset.
My team productivity has gone down the drain. The business pre-covid was 90% US engineers and during covid we offshored most of everything to india. Now how am I supposed to get my team to have calls with india at early morning and evenings when we are forced to spend an hour just driving to the office.
Note that a lot of”IBM’s” cloud employees are actually at Red Hat, which I’m guessing though I don’t actually know, are not affected by this assuming it’s true.
Large corporations aren't demonstrably harmed by DEI initiatives, yet all hiring processes should be merit-based. Encouraging more women in engineering is a reasonable goal, but lowering qualification standards would be problematic. Throughout my career, I've never observed standards being lowered for diversity candidates—though I've witnessed DEI being wrongly blamed when underperformers are terminated.
What I have consistently seen is hiring standards fluctuating based on company performance: loosening when profits are high, tightening when they're not. The most pervasive bias in hiring isn't DEI-related but rather social network preference, where managers favor friends, neighbors, or people similar to themselves regardless of qualifications. This mirrors the "backdoor" admissions seen at elite universities and extends to government appointments, where connections often appear to outweigh merit...
Readit News
I ask because I think it shows what a Rorschach test the arguments over DEI have become. I at least found one quote from the Policy Letter #4 which stated "It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, color or creed." Of course, in 1953 that was a pretty bold stance given the widespread official segregation policies in the Southern US at the time. Now, though, it feel like how you view that statement depends on which "tribe" you align with in the DEI debate: Anti-DEI folks say "Exactly, we want to hire people based on merit regardless of race, color or creed, and DEI has basically turned into a policy of racial quotas" while pro-DEI folks say "The policy back then was to fight official and systemic racism, which we still need to combat today."
So I'd just like to find the full original policy document so I can make up my own mind.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110409171021/http://www-03.ibm...
It has both the original typewritten scan and a searchable-text version right underneath.
Does anybody have any other insights?
However, what I usually see is people either ignoring the issues people are facing, ignoring the arguments put forth by advocates of DEI, or substituting slogans for arguments.
So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity, not race. To fix it you need to e.g. make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities. That allows both poor black people and poor white people to get ahead without discriminating against anyone, but still reduces the racial disparity because black people are disproportionately poor.
It's basically Goodhart's law. Because of the existing correlation between race and poverty, continuing racial disparities are a strong proxy for insufficient upward mobility, but you want to solve the actual problem and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
These factors result in real disparity in capabilities and merit today. This is precisely why racism was and is so detrimental.
I oppose DEI because I think it is racist, even if good intended. I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit. I don't think that group statistic should be a higher priority than equality for individuals.
In my mind, DEI is a myopic obsession with the group statistics, to the detriment of individual equality.
If a school enroll someone with a 400 point lower sat over the higher person on the sole basis of their race, that is a major Injustice on the scale of individual humans, even if it moves some group statistic closer to equal.
I think countering racism with racism is a very dangerous game, likely to blow up in everyone's face.
Instead, equality under law should Ensure equal treatment moving forward. Past wrongs should be addressed by race blind improvements to economic mobility.
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2. Inequality of outcome simply doesn't matter anyway.
3. Nobody actually cares about inequality--they care about specific visual types of inequality. Nobody cares about the diversity statistics of poor white people from an underprivileged background, for example.
4. As for substituting slogans for arguments, the DEI argument is just slogans. That is all it is.
It works like this:
The world uses dollars in international trade.
Who produces the world's dollars? Washington and Wall St. Congress mandates spending, which is funded by the Fed printing money and purchasing bonds. The Fed also controls the money supply via interest rates and fractional reserve banking.
This is a very complicated system, but the end result is the same. Washington and Wall St produce dollars that the world very much wants.
World needs dollars from Washington and Wall St, but Washington and Wall St. need something in return. This ends up being cheap manufactured goods.
The result: dollars and manufacturing jobs get exported abroad, and cheap goods get imported. Washington, Wall St, and their hangers-on (their investments in tech, hollywood, etc) become rich.
The average American gets a bunch of junk in their front yard. They don't work at Bath Iron Works like their grandfather, they get everything they "need" simply by working at 7/11 or as a mortgage broker.
This is easily demonstrated by a wealth of data and theory. You can check out [WTF Happened](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/) in 1971, see the [Elephant Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve), and see the [Triffin Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma).
The stuff about taxing the rich, deregulation, DEI, nationalism, etc have been a distraction from this fundamental shift in American society. Always follow the money.
Fortunately, the current administration understands this better any previous one.
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Yes, I think it's nuts to replace "DEI hires" with DUI hires and pretend that is "merit based", and I think the US has become a pretty full-blown kakistocracy (my new favorite word) right now.
But while I agree with the purported goals of DEI, I often saw it go "off the rails" in practice, and lead to a cottage industry of pseudoscience-based "DEI consultants". I'll show my hand: when it comes to DEI, I absolutely get behind the "I" part of it - everyone should feel welcome and included at work. When it comes to the "D" part, while I support outreach to cast as wide a net as possible when it comes to things like hiring, too often I saw this devolve into soft quotas and semi-performative hand wringing when some job distribution didn't exactly match the wider population distribution. The "E" part I think was frankly insane and just "equality of outcome" over "equality of opportunity" with window dressing - and yes, I've heard how backers framed the equity part, but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.
Your response was beautifully eloquent.
The problem with DEI is that it did, in fact, turn into a policy of racial quotas, only the quota-ness was denied even though the threat of legal action was omnipresent.
Suddenly they start espousing DEI principles and emphasize how it's important to find a more "well rounded" individual.
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As it stands, your statement boils down to “DEI is not diverse enough.”
If one also accepts gp’s point, then it seems DEI should continue, but be applied more carefully and thoughtfully. This would likely mean an increase in resources dedicated to DEI.
I agree and would welcome this (without requiring it legally). But I doubt most others would agree.
Really, you're going to group indigenous New Zealanders with Han Chinese as "one" racial group? Just to pick two very different groups at random. There are many absurd pairings that fit under "AAPI" and it's a parody of itself.
It's erasing these cultures to group them all under one constructed postmodern umbrella
Personally I fully agree that building a diverse workforce is more profitable in the long run than ignoring diversity (unless your company will die in the short term because of political pressure).
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(Because of a black pastor-led boycott of Target for dropping their DEI policy)
You use your best judgment and consider many factors. You make mistakes and get better with experience.
What we don’t want to have happen is a conflict between two opposing goals. That’s very different than disagreement about how to meet a common goal.
All I want out of DEI/Affirmative Action, apart from maybe some proactive efforts to improve diversity in the initial funnel, is for that arbitrary tie-breaker to skew towards the option that's underrepresented in the field. Does that seem unreasonable or particularly unfair to you?
for example, DEI is meant to provide opportunities to impoverished white individuals as well, if they have not been able to afford higher education or have been passed on for various jobs because they didn't have the same internships or experiences that their wealthier counterparts had (which may have hindered their professional development).
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If you can't show benefits in the span of 1 quarter, it might as well not be an option.
The overall problem is nepotism, or even more generally, a lack of upward mobility. If you're poor it's a long road to the top. Most of the slots are filled by nepotism or otherwise having rich parents and only a minority are filled through merit.
The ideal solution here is to improve upward mobility, but neither party really does that, because to do that you have to fight entrenched incumbents. To lower poverty you need to lower the cost of living and therefore housing and healthcare costs, but the existing property owners and healthcare companies will fight you. To create opportunities you need to reduce regulatory capture so that small businesses can better compete with larger ones, but the existing incumbents will fight you. So these problems persist because neither party solves them.
Then, because more black people are poor and the bipartisan consensus is that if you're poor you're screwed, there are proportionally fewer black people at the top. Now consider what happens if you propose DEI as a solution to this. All of the nepotism still happens, but now the merit slots get converted into satisfying the race quota. Now if you're poor and white you're completely locked out, because the "white people" slots are all filled by nepotism and the remaining slots are used to satisfy the race quota.
The result is that poor white people are completely screwed by DEI, they understand this, and because the proponents of DEI are Democrats they then vote for Republicans. Then the Republicans oppose DEI because they're actually representing their constituents who at least want their chance at the limited number of merit slots instead of being completely locked out.
If the Republican elites then engage in nepotism and fail to improve upward mobility, that isn't good, but it's only a distinction between the parties if the Democrats would have done better in that regard, which they haven't, and they're plausibly even worse in terms of increasing regulatory burdens that prevent people with limited means from starting a small business.
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Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up.
I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.
I took a new job in 2022, at that time everyone was still working from home. My boss, who was a VP at that time, said isn't this amazing? We save on fuel, time, spend more time at home etc. Productivity has been amazing and all.
Two years later in early 2024 when they started pushing RTO, same guy repeats the standard bullshit about - we need those sidebar conversations, we need to meet face to face and all. Not a single word of how it wastes fuel, or time etc.
I realized he was powerless against the corporate policies, but just his hypocrisy was enough for me to find another (100% remote) job.
At the time, WFH was new for most organizations - and yes it feels pretty great. Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.
Certain tasks can be best done in solitude at home. Others... require collaboration. Collaboration that's scheduled in meetings or the dreaded video call are not the same as spontaneous collaboration or just popping your head into someone's office/cube and asking a quick question.
There's trade offs to both... and if a company has decided WFH isn't ideal for them, then you can leave and find a job that believes WFH is ideal.
Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it.
I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff.
Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
If it was clear, they shouldn't have trouble showing the data. Otherwise it's a case of "The data shows X, but my gut clearly shows Y"
I can certainly believe it didn't work for some companies/roles. But the burden is on the company to demonstrate it.
and the company you work for seems rather incompetent
Funny joke. I needed a laugh.
First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc.
Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road.
And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.
The argument is not that face to face to build relationships with customers is not important. It’s that it’s dumb to have “field by design” roles be forced to be in an office when they aren’t on customers sites.
Besides that, it is disruptive in the office because you are spending a lot of time with the customer on conference calls and how it often works is that the people doing the work are not in the office or even in the same country.
Your client facing staff is US based. But US employees are too expensive to do the grunt work (unless you’re using one of the exploitive WITCH companies).
AWS exempted their “field by design” roles from being in the office during the first few RTO mandates. But they eventually forced them to be in an office this year (after I left).
GCP has in office requirements for their Professional Services staff now too - full time direct hire employees for both AWS and GCP.
IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc.
Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it's gone as well as it has, but it's also not surprising it's gone badly for a lot of companies.
I've personally worked at 4 different companies since early 2020. Not everyone does WFH well. Many pretend they do, but don't. Even those that do it well, do better when they meet regularly in person (have some hybrid model). Some teams/departments/functions are better at it than others, but companies as a whole I think perform better when the people have personal connections and relationships across the org. In a remote WFH situation, over time, through natural attrition, new people are onboarded and never actually meet anyone in the company and this becomes a large portion of employees that are very loosely connected in terms of their interpersonal relationships/network and this weakens the organization. I can see how that is fine in a individual contributor role of SWE, but for most roles, in most departments, it doesn't play out well (or takes a very special/rare personality trait to actually do it well).
(there is $120B+ in remote enterprise market cap as of this comment, anyone saying it doesn't work is not accurately representing the situation; it might not work for them because they are unwilling to make it work, but the evidence is clear it can work, does work, and did work during the pandemic)
Do you mean “same” or “some”?
Either way do you not believe that different companies can have different outcomes or that one company’s outcomes can change over time?
Foolish.
I don’t know that that is a reasonable take. More appropriate would be to acknowledge that different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
It seemed to work at first, but over time it became clear it didn't.
are profits spiralling downward? are these businesses, overall, making less profit? because of remote workers?
or is it closer to the truth to say that no amount of profit - or asserting authority over workers - is ever enough and since companies are in a position of power to squeeze blood from a stone, they will?
1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickle-lamoreaux_dei-diversit...
> IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge
Because the rest of the items in the headline are labor related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired, whatever that means. People in this comment section who did not read TFA are commenting on "DEI" firings, even though there's nothing in TFA about that. It's a little worse than clickbait IMO.
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Everyone I know there knows this was coming after Nov 2024. IBM just wants to hide the number and age of the people being fired.
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Reading the article will give you a fuller understanding of the announcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
> And the mainframe giant last week told all US Cloud employees, sales or otherwise, to return to the office at least three days per week at designated "strategic" locations.
Yep. It's a de facto layoff.
Smart of them to add the DEI statement - as we can see here, everyone is arguing over that while ignoring what is essentially a mass layoff.
We came in to the office to find monitors that were old pre-covid. No office supplies (tissues, mouse pads, batteries, keyboards) Expired food and beverages from pre-covid No desks for my teammembers
The work environment was also much worse than before. Now you get to overhear the executives bragging about their new cars, the golfing trips they are taking while trying to focus on your work. You have folks taking calls from there desk without even using a headset.
My team productivity has gone down the drain. The business pre-covid was 90% US engineers and during covid we offshored most of everything to india. Now how am I supposed to get my team to have calls with india at early morning and evenings when we are forced to spend an hour just driving to the office.
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What I have consistently seen is hiring standards fluctuating based on company performance: loosening when profits are high, tightening when they're not. The most pervasive bias in hiring isn't DEI-related but rather social network preference, where managers favor friends, neighbors, or people similar to themselves regardless of qualifications. This mirrors the "backdoor" admissions seen at elite universities and extends to government appointments, where connections often appear to outweigh merit...