Due to current admin policies, failing to do this would limit Microsoft's ability to drink from the federal trough. Whatever value they put in diversity is less than they put in large contracts.
At the risk of sounding like an LLM, you're absolutely right!
It would be stupid not to kowtow to the current admin given how much business Microsoft does with the US government. The pendulum will swing back, guarantee it.
And it is interesting to see how different organizations are reacting to this administration depending upon what percentage of their bottom line is directly tied to government or military contracting.
Python Software Foundation telling the NSF they had too many strings attached to their money is another interesting spotlight on the current situation.
Total US Fed. Gov. contracts for 2024 was (according to gao.gov) $755B. That's a lot of drinking, never mind any anticipated AI spending boost next year.
That assumes the status quo ante was a meritocracy. It wasn't, hence the need for actions that promote merit based hiring and workplace inclusion for historically oppressed groups.
The efficacy of current DEI efforts is debatable, but the need should be obvious.
yeah they dropped their “what actions did you take to further diversify and inclusion” question in biannual reviews last month
no one really liked those sorts of questions, always had to game it or make BS up. but on a personal level definitely furthers my desire to mot want to come out at work as a trans person
Aside from the alleged "culture war" aspect, looking at the 2024 report you can see that the category "Asian" is at 36%. Roughly 5% of the US population can tick the "Asian" box on the census. There are a lot of people on both sides of the US political aisle asking why this is the case. Making it harder to tease that data out might limit blowback from low-effort attempts to smear the company.
While there’s a lot of this era that’s deeply unfortunate, this kind of question on my yearly review would be incredibly vexing to me:
> What impact did your actions have in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive Microsoft?
What does this even mean? How do I show I did this? If I don’t interpret the meaning of this question correctly, do I fail the test and end up some HR watchlist? If I don’t succeed at whatever this is going for, will I not promote?
This isn't that hard. There are various employee groups around identities (Women in Tech, Asian Pacific, Black, LGBTQ, etc). Membership is not exclusive to those groups but also open to allies. As an example, I used to participate in the Women in Tech one at both Mozilla and at LinkedIn. Often I just listened, but I also helped organize a few events with them, contributed ideas for those events, and when they started a structured mentoring program I was one of the mentors.
There are also optional and non-optional hiring trainings that address these kinds of topics which you can do. I was a hiring manager for a while so I also spent some time doing some of these optional things to improve my chances of building a diverse team. This mostly included helping with sourcing candidates and a few times meant speaking up when I could see that identity biases were being used in evaluations.
But often just simple things are all you need. For example, when picking a group dinner destination making sure various culinary requirements are accounted for (either cultural or dietary) or finding team building activities that are inclusive.
I never once had an issue finding some of this to put on these perf reviews. Most of this is just under the category of being a good human who respects and values others.
It's a very basic question. You can meet that by simply treating everyone with integrity and respect. This results in an inclusive workplace. It's not a trick question.
I feel like there’s already HR processes in place for someone who is creating a hostile workplace?
I prefer my yearly company expectations to be quantifiable with clear metrics.
And instead this is the kind of squishy question that eludes any kind of reasonable metric. And worse, its vagueness could lead to misunderstanding. And even worse, misunderstanding the question in any dimension seems like it could have actual repercussions.
Some commenters have said it’s as simple as being inclusive of dietary restrictions. Ok cool easy enough. Is that actually in a rubric?
What if I have a manager that thinks it means I should run in the annual LGBTQ+ 5K? Ok I’m willing to do that, I like to run and support those causes. But is that expectation written anywhere?
In short, I don’t think these kind of questions are ever as simple as “just don’t be a douchebag.”
When I was at LinkedIn we definitely cared about this. It probably wouldn't be enough to knock you down a peg during your review if you had none during a particular half/quarter, but if you never did anything in this bucket it would be a red flag during promotion consideration.
Imagine you are a salesperson for the hardware division of such a company. Imagine you did your work well through the entire year. How would you answer your question?
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It would be stupid not to kowtow to the current admin given how much business Microsoft does with the US government. The pendulum will swing back, guarantee it.
Unless they find a way to cut the line making it a unconstrained projectile.
Python Software Foundation telling the NSF they had too many strings attached to their money is another interesting spotlight on the current situation.
The efficacy of current DEI efforts is debatable, but the need should be obvious.
No, it just assumes it was more of a meritocracy than actively hiring based on irrelevant guiding principles like counter-balancing historical wrongs.
A blind process would both be neutral to the ideology that caused the wrongs (racism and such bias) and based on far more meritocracy.
no one really liked those sorts of questions, always had to game it or make BS up. but on a personal level definitely furthers my desire to mot want to come out at work as a trans person
> What impact did your actions have in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive Microsoft?
What does this even mean? How do I show I did this? If I don’t interpret the meaning of this question correctly, do I fail the test and end up some HR watchlist? If I don’t succeed at whatever this is going for, will I not promote?
There are also optional and non-optional hiring trainings that address these kinds of topics which you can do. I was a hiring manager for a while so I also spent some time doing some of these optional things to improve my chances of building a diverse team. This mostly included helping with sourcing candidates and a few times meant speaking up when I could see that identity biases were being used in evaluations.
But often just simple things are all you need. For example, when picking a group dinner destination making sure various culinary requirements are accounted for (either cultural or dietary) or finding team building activities that are inclusive.
I never once had an issue finding some of this to put on these perf reviews. Most of this is just under the category of being a good human who respects and values others.
Deleted Comment
I prefer my yearly company expectations to be quantifiable with clear metrics.
And instead this is the kind of squishy question that eludes any kind of reasonable metric. And worse, its vagueness could lead to misunderstanding. And even worse, misunderstanding the question in any dimension seems like it could have actual repercussions.
Some commenters have said it’s as simple as being inclusive of dietary restrictions. Ok cool easy enough. Is that actually in a rubric?
What if I have a manager that thinks it means I should run in the annual LGBTQ+ 5K? Ok I’m willing to do that, I like to run and support those causes. But is that expectation written anywhere?
In short, I don’t think these kind of questions are ever as simple as “just don’t be a douchebag.”
As an engineer, you needed to have an answer to that question or else you could not be promoted (at least in some parts of the org chart).
It was a box that your skip levels needed to see checked in order to approve promotions. My lead told me as much in exactly those words.
We wanted leader to be empathetic and respectful.
Hypothetically: Substitute Microsoft for a company with “zero downtime” as one of their company values.
Now imagine you were asked “What impact did your actions have in contributing to zero downtime at Hostingsoft?”
That wouldn’t be a controversial question.
Why are we putting questions that could very easily elicit a political reaction into corporate yearly performance reviews?