I wrote about my experience working as a software developer and being black in the industry and I was lucky to have it published on BBC [1].
What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert?
In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way.
Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company.
However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview.
Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.
I am Wasq'u (a tribe in the PNW), I am connected to my tribe, and I am one of a handful of remaining speakers of the language. I am really tired of being caught in the maw of people fighting about my identity, what I am owed, and to some extent what place my identity has in society.
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
I'm a PoC, and stuff like this reads extremely bizarre to me. On the one hand, you're acknowledging rolling back DEI initiatives in part because of the "political landscape," and that you were already committed to diversity on your teams. That's all well and good, but then, why the initiative in the first place? It seems to me you're doing at least 1 thing here, and acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place. This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
Diversity in tech hiring never felt like the right end of the funnel. It’s why I went into teaching and I’m proud to say after what seems like a ridiculously short amount of time (“they grow up so fast” etc.) the girls from my classes are now entering the work force as SWE and ML interns. Not many, but more than none.
When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.
I am a Black male and worked as a developer for mostly small unknown companies from 1996-2020.
I then pivoted to cloud+app dev strategic consulting when a job at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap. I now work for a third party consulting company as a staff software architect.
For the last 5 years, I have had customer facing jobs where I am either on video calls or flying out to customer sites working with sales.
When I first encountered the DE&I programs at Amazon, I couldn’t help but groan. The entire “allies” thing felt like bullshit.
The only thing that concerns me is that I hope companies still do outreach to colleges outside of the major universities and start partnering with them to widen the funnel and partnering with smaller colleges to help students learn what is necessary to be competitive and to pass interviews
That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very silly thing to do.
I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable, stable products when I buy things. Not the skin colour of who owns the business. To filter things based on the owner's identity (in the American sense of the word) may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. It would not be a sensible thing to do.
Coming from another continent, it feels the discourse in the US is poisoned by the word RACE. Back home, no one uses it. The best proxy for inequality is poverty. Make poor people richer with basic support like free education and health care. Tax the richer. That should solve the problem. If you wonder about woman, create support for working mum with after school program and free baby care. Sorry to state the obvious.
> We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your executive bonus will take into consideration how close you got to X." In a world like that, many (most/all) executives will do whatever they can to get to those goals -- even if it goes against other official (or even legal) policies.
And that certainly would explain a lot of the behavior I saw working at a large company during DEI peak. (Not to say that is any kind of proof of anything untoward).
Contrast Meta's stance with Costco's, when [Costco responded][1] to a shareholder that proposed Costco prepare a report on "the risks of the Company maintaining its current DEI roles, policies and goals."
Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees,
members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:
For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and
respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company
the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract
and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our
success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.
That title image looks like it is from the set of a sitcom starring Mark Zuckerberg.
DEI initiatives have always been a dog and pony show, not a thing executives have ever truly cared about and they are now in a political environment where they can show what they believe in. People will learn the hard way these companies have never cared about you.
I think it's somewhat important to understand meta and its products are _not_ tech products. Outside of React and llama and the like, Meta is not building for or speaking to the tech community. If what they do or say sounds like populism, it's because it is. It can be ham fisted, because the majority of people are only barely paying attention, and the majority of people is who facebook wants to please.
Like politics, things feel dumb and ham-fisted, because they are. They're playing at winning wide swaths of billions of people, and the majority of people aren't paying attention, so hypocrisy doesn't register as well as just being vaguely aligned with what's popular.
I don't mean any of this in an derogatory "unwashed masses" sort of way, it's just how it is.
The really troubling news buried in this to me was the appointment of Dana White to the meta board of directors. Like seriously what purpose does he serve but to appease the new administration?
Almost all big companies are doing this now. It's never a good idea to hire someone based on skin color or gender rather than merit.
The predecessor to this was affirmative action in colleges (this is basically affirmative action in the work place).
New Jersey is seeing the direct result of this. Applicants couldn't pass a basic reading/writing/math test, so they were forced to get rid of these requirements. The direct result of this will be teachers that shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place and poor student results.
They call it 'redundant', but I would rather have someone teaching my kids that actually knows the material, rather than someone that went to any number of low-quality colleges where I have no idea if they know the material or not.
My experience with DEI at Microsoft was that the true believers really had their hearts in the right place. Almost all of the negative consequences I saw, came from people who saw DEI as a way to get ahead. I think the biggest problem with DEI initiatives is how much they seem to only benefit cynical people.
Why does the skin color or gender matter if in the end they pick candidates that all went to the same top schools or have previously worked at the same top companies?
Diversity in training, education and work history vastly outweighs diversity in superficial physical features.
DEI was a song and dance that companies put on for the media, politicians, investors, employees, and the public at large.
Now anti-DEI is a song and dance for the exact same reason.
If you have been in the business long enough, you will know that the company has NO ONE's interests at heart. Never had and never will. They will discriminate against any race they have to, whether majority or minority, if it leads to an extra dollar on their balance sheet.
As a current Meta engineer my perspective is this:
- DEI at meta has been non-existent for the past 6 months or more anyways. They care far less than any FAANG I've seen about DEI beyond the lip service and yearly training. This is just the announcement of something that's already been in place for a while
- Meta has very poor diversity. I go most days without seeing any black engineers. I see occasional latino engineers. Asians and Indians are extremely overrepresented. White people are a minority. Maybe 1/10 engineers are women.
- This comes against the backdrop of Meta failing something like 98% of market tests for H1B immigrants. Word is getting out that Meta is not the place to go if you're trying to immigrate to the US.
- There's the obvious pandering to the incoming administration (this is the third announcement this week, first Dana White on the board, then cancelling fact checking & moving some moderation people to Texas).
Summary: meta has serious diversity problems it needs to address. Existing DEI problem was not helping. Hopefully they do something to hire more women and minorities. They face H1B headwinds that may drive hiring outside the US or (much less likely) increase hiring of americans.
A few years ago I worked for a company obsessed with DEI. But, as a 40+, I knew their DEI programs where complete BS because they forgot the most important protected group: old people!
At this company we had plenty of groups for Muslims, blacks, Jews, Asians, etc, but I was one of the only people over 40.
People would laugh when I mentioned that we needed a DEI group for people over 40... but I wasn't entirely kidding. It's frankly bizarre that you can have 1000+ employees and only 2-3 are over 40!? I had worked in industries prior where the median age was > 40 and it did sincerely shock me that a publicly traded company would have almost 0 people in that age range.
The funny part is that while I will not ever be black, everyone of my younger coworkers (baring serious tragedy) will be in the 40+ protected group. So in theory, if anyone cares at all about DEI in a sincere way, they should care about people who are 40+ because they will be there.
So while we celebrated Ramadan with multiple company activities, there wasn't much respect for "I have to leave a bit early to pick up my teenage kid from my ex-wife's place".
> The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing
The legal landscape isn’t changing—it just was never what companies like Meta thought it was. The civil rights laws never embraced a distinction between racism against white people versus racism against non-white people. A lot of what corporate America did between 2020-2024 was simply illegal. All that’s changed is now corporate counsel are now dealing up from their thrall and realizing they’d been giving bad advice to their clients.
Every time you try to right a wrong like this (DEI), it just makes things worse for everyone involved. Just find the best person for the job, no matter their skin color, sex, age, etc.
DEI programs typically implemented in US companies are considered constitutionally illegal in other parts of the world, such as in France. Giving preferential treatment based on protected characteristics is not allowed in France, for ex. preferring a female hire over male, to meet female quotas.
In Texas, effective January 2024 DEI activities by state universities were prohibited. Universities are still trying to understand the implications fully [1]. I am generally in support of DEI on the university campuses but there were a few unwanted outcomes of blind DEI pursuit. The first major bad outcome is it adds administrative bloat. Our universities are already admin heavy. DEI departments just inflated that bloat sucking up more resources that could be used for instruction. The other poor outcome was that they added a lot more paperwork in every hiring decision. I know of a university in northeast that had to wait two months to get their job ad approved by the DEI folks. Finally, DEI departments also added mandatory annual DEI training for everyone on the campus. A lot of these training modules were downright patronizing in most cases.
Hopefully this means my company of 16 developers, all of whom are white and male, stops getting accused of being racist because ignorant people on the internet don't realise we are English and there are no black developers within 80 miles
> At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.
At last, a corporation acknowledges it's _cognitive_ diversity that matters.
Most other forms of diversity are superficial, inherent human characterstics that are already equal under law, and make no difference to people's ability to use technology.
I'm so relieved to see "DEI" die. With two young boys who are white, heterosexual and normal in every way, I found it disturbing to know they'd be discriminated against in the workplace.
I knew this discrimination existed because I've been a hiring manager and had HR explicitly tell me I needed to focus on hiring female technologist.
Luckily I left that job and am now at a smaller company that doesn't discriminate on gender)
However, most large corporates I've worked at have pushed the DEI agenda (with the 'E' standing for "equity" as opposed to the more ethical "equality").
There may have been historic discrimination against women and other minorities, but I have NEVER witnessed any such discrimination in the present day.
We must avoid replacing one form of immoral discrimination with another form of immoral discrimination.
I don't care whether who made the products I use is "diverse". I care about their quality, which has been sacrificed at the altar of DEI for far too long. Not surprising to see this happen once the population realised the truth. Finally a slow return to sanity.
Did you know positive discrimination is written into the Indian Constitution as an amendment(maybe there are more?).
Reservations in school and colleges is likely the only way kids get in, but from my own personal experience it's been a mixed bag. I have seen relatively more people fail and some succeed in schools and jobs who can via reservation(more of them failing in high school or college).
But perhaps that was not the point, the policy idea was to give them a chance. Public Policy and Skill at the job are not meant to align; It can create a shitty experience to work with someone who is not nearly as good as a they should be. But perhaps their future generations could do better.
The only way to really solve the problem of historic discrimination is to solve the root problem of child poverty and lack of good developmental experiences as a kid. Not all, but a lot of it is about just requires money flowing to school districts. Most rich people know this, and it's impossible for them to fix this without giving up a part of their most valuable asset: land/home
It is impossible to predict a kid who got all this, even though born in adverse circumstances, will care about DEI or support it at all(e.g. Clarence Thomas).
Thomas Sowell had good counter arguments against DEI. I recommend reading his book(s) including Social Justice Fallacies. The neurodiverse hiring stuff never even got me an interview. Even though I qualified for the programs and have the tech skills plus ASD, ADHD etc
Zuck has been a laggard in taking high risk policy decisions. Musk, despite some bad decisions, has at least shown the spine to buck the trend and do what he believes in.
DEI, in my experience, was always getting hires from special programs (like black women coding bootcamps) and having them pushed as junior in your team, no choice about that. If you were their line manager, the responsibility of them succeeding was ultimately your. I'll let you imagine how much it helped the cause.
Whatever they were doing at DEI was certainly not working. I worked at a major FAANG and rarely saw any black person, and when it happened it was from another country. So I can only conclude that it was really only a farcical display for outsiders.
DEI programs can be counter productive. The incorrect biases of the past can’t be fixed with opposite biases. Merit based equal representation should be the ideal state. For 10 positions if there are 50 applicants wearing blue and 50 applicants wearing red, knowing that the shirt colour doesn’t matter we should end up ~5 red and 5 blue new starters.
Now if there are only 2 blue applicants, then we should look into if there is something preventing the blues to get to a point where they can apply. That usually doesn’t fall under the hiring company’s control.
So far, Zuckerberg (Meta), Pichai (Google), Bezos (Amazon),Cook (Apple), and Sarandos (Netflix) have all personally made the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring. That's all of the FAANG CEOs. Nadella and Altman phoned it in.
Great, maybe we can instead focus on hiring based on merit instead of gender, etc.
It wouldn't be that hard to create a blind CV filtering process to avoid bias. And if the company is so racist they won't hire people with certain names, non white people probably wouldn't want to work there either.
Maybe we can even go back to not pretending everyone is equally good at everything. Men and women are different.
I'm not going to review the above, as I've had to much of DEI corp talk over the past decade. Given that, it’s likely no surprise that I’m glad to see it phased out. Throughout my experience, I witnessed underqualified engineers navigating FAANG companies due to DEI initiatives, accumulating significant wealth despite contributing little to released projects. I believe its departure is overdue.
I just hired two women into an all male team. It wasn't because of DEI, it was because the code bootcamp we recruited from had equal representation. I was delighted to increase diversity, because diverse teams do better work. But the fix was farther back in the pipeline.
I'm fortunate enough to have worked for Google during a period of time when Big Tech started to gain at least a modicum of self-awareness of its toxic culture and history of excesses and indiscretions. I arrived on the scene slightly late to witness the worst of it, but the stories were actively circulating, and the structure was very much still present. SRE teams had bars next to their desks, and office parties ended with ambulances. One of the first things I had to deal with as a new manager was a sexual harassment concern (which I was terribly unprepared to handle and it showed). And if you looked around the office, you saw a lot of people who looked a hell of a lot like me.
But as I said, there was some awareness creeping in. Along with that, the folks in charge had the courage and empowerment to do something about it. And when I say the folks in charge, I don't mean the CEO. This was a company that was still running on a sort of quasi-anarchy of conscientious under-management: my first impression in 2013 was that there was no clear power structure, but everyone was trying to do the right thing and it somehow worked out. And most importantly, people could speak up if something didn't seem right.
There are many examples, but to pick one, I remember my first trip to Dublin and being invited to join their local SRE managers' meeting. I watched someone bring up the topic of alcohol being omnipresently displayed around the office and how it was, at a bare minimum, not a good look. There followed a thoughtful and reasoned discussion that concluded with the decision to put it away. Not a ban on fun, but a firm policy that, among others to follow, helped SRE culture mature into something more appropriate for a workplace, while maintaining the essential feeling of camaraderie and mutual support.
There were also top-down initiatives with varying degrees of success. When an executive puts something into OKRs, there's a good chance that by the time it reaches 13 levels down the org chart, it has turned into your manager demanding that you cut the ends off of 4.5% more roasts by the end of Q3 so they can show leadership on their promo packet. Nevertheless, there were a lot of good ideas, and a lot of good things were implemented. Through my job, I had access to training on topics like privilege and implicit bias that I believe have had a lasting positive impact on me as a person and as a leader. I also had access to people who thought about and fought about these things on a far deeper level than I will ever be able to, and I am grateful if even a sliver of their courage rubbed off on me.
It wasn't just a song and dance. At least down near the bottom, we cared, and we tried very hard to make things better. We failed a lot of the time as well, in the sense that those top-down targets that were set were rarely achieved, which I suspect is at least part of the reason for dropping them. They've tried nothing and they're out of ideas.
What we're seeing now is just more of the slide in the wrong direction that, unfortunately, started a while ago. Google in the mid-2010s was a place where people spoke up, to a fault. Yes, they complained about the candy dispensers running low or not having a puppy room, but they also told a senior vice president that he had been saying "you guys" a lot and do you know what happened? He thanked them, apologized, and corrected himself. Google in the 2020s is a place where you keep your mouth shut, sit down, and do what you're told. I don't know what it's like inside Meta, but I'm not surprised at this turn, because they're basically all following the same playbook, handed to them by Elon.
I'm embarrassed that I've hesitated to speak my mind because I am looking for a job and what if someone reads this on my profile and decides I'm not a team player? Well, I'll say it clearly: I am on team try to be a good person and do the right thing and I am very much a team player. I believe that encouraging hate, and dropping DEI goals is wrong. And if that makes me not a good fit for your organization, I think we're on the same page.
So setting aside the details of DEI-specific issues, I find it really ironic that the right really wants to claim that government shouldn't be telling people how to run their businesses through regulation, but businesses trying to improve relationships with the incoming administration are changing how they do business to match Trump's preferences. I.e. three-letter agencies regulating their areas is governmental dangerous overreach but Trump expressing a view and having companies restructure themselves to meet his whims to curry favor isn't a concern.
I'm a Chinese Malaysian, and I look at the DEI debacles in the US with a mixture of amusement and sadness.
In Malaysia, we have something similar to DEI that stretches back to 1970. We call it the New Economic Policy (NEP), which aims to "restructure society" to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities across different ethnic groups. The explicit aim of the NEP is to increase the participation of Bumiputera (the "natives") in the economy, sometimes at the expense of the non-natives, the Chinese and Indians. The key target was to achieve 30% Bumiputera equity ownership of Malaysia's domestic corporations.
30% only? Bumiputeras constitute a much larger population percentage than that, even at that time. Furthermore, there was an expiry date attached to the policy: 20 years. So, for a Chinese person, enduring slight injustice for 20 years so that our friends can catch up with us—isn't that a good thing? Life is about give and take, right?
Except that even after 20 years—in fact, after more than 50 years—in the eyes of politicians and policymakers, the objective of the NEP hasn't yet been accomplished, and it looks like it will continue indefinitely. That's right: despite the fact that all major companies require Bumiputera participation (never mind that it's a gambling conglomerate, which is supposed to remain forbidden (Haram) to Muslim Bumiputeras), and despite the fact that Bumiputeras now monopolize public sector posts, public university quotas, and administrative/teaching positions, and pretty much dominate every aspect of government institutions (the police, army, judiciary, and all are basically Bumiputera-dominated), the NEP must still continue, because it hasn't yet accomplished its goal.
It will never accomplish its goal.
Meanwhile, the side effects of the NEP are palpable. It's common agreement that Malaysia is lagging behind, especially when compared to our neighbor, Singapore. In 1970, it was 1 SGD vs. 1 RM, and now... it's 1 SGD vs. 3.3 RM. See how much our currency has declined compared to our neighbor. It's no secret that Singapore gladly welcomes Malaysian Chinese "refugees" who escape to that little island to avoid discrimination and frequent hate speech.
Affirmative actions are a double-edged sword. They come at the expense of sacrificing market efficiency and some degree of fairness. And it's not at all clear that anyone can wield them well. I'm sure that the NEP's creators did have noble intentions and did try to minimize the side effects, but you can see where it's gotten them.
I'm most curious about the timing. Could this be related to the X narrative of LA fire response being compromised by DEI hiring? Zuck really sounds like he's mimicking X TPOT dialogues these days.
There are two things that are important to separate here:
1. In one hand, the rolling back of how DEI has/was implemented I think can be a good thing. I think lots of people, myself included, believe that it "went off the rails", but most importantly, I think it ended up being counterproductive to its end goals. Nearly everyone I know who wasn't part of the DEI cottage industry came to view many/most of these programs with cynicism, even if they weren't vocal about it.
2. Don't mistake the validity of number one for thinking that this is just pure and unadulterated pandering to the incoming administration. Meta would sacrifice small babies if they thought it would make them more money in the long run.
The reason I believe so strongly about number 2 is what happened with their content guidelines changes. I'm gay, and I'm actually fine with people calling me insane. But I also better be able to call lots of religious practices based around some invisible sky fairy insane too. The fact that the guidelines specifically called out "it's OK to call gay and transgender people mentally ill", and only those groups, is grossly despicable, and clearly shows Zuckerberg is just taint licking his new overlords.
And to people who still work at Meta, I also think that's fine - we all need a paycheck. But please don't try to convince yourself or anyone else that you're doing it for anything but the money. I'm so sick of these tech companies talking about their lofty goals (and honestly, have been for a while long before Trump) when it's so abundantly clear it's just about making money. And again, I think that's fine to only be about money - it's a business after all. Just don't pretend you're doing some sort of societal good.
I wonder how this page might look if people could only comment in support of policies that wouldn't lead to a direct personal financial benefit.
(Disclosure: In such a situation I would be unable to post this comment--as, in our just world, this comment's insightfulness would undoubtedly lead to me being the beneficiary of significant financial remuneration.)
Every change came with pros and crons, I believe that you can't employ people based on personal characteristics, genre, race, and etc. But if person fit the requirements of the open job, what important is the skill.
I know that world ins't fair, and some people (like me by example) have to put more efforts that others, but this is life, we have to conquer our space and be pride by our achievements.
Meta, maybe Zuck specifically, always seemed liked a pandering company trying to follow the social meta. VR gets popular, Meta goes all in. Twitter “dies”, Meta swoops in with Threads. Snapchat stories, FB stories. TikTok, FB shorts. Musk getting close to Trump, Zuck trying to get close. People say he’s a robot? Hey, he now has a chain, does jujitsu, and has a broccoli haircut. Puts Dana White on the board and does JRE. Now he’s removing fact checking and DEI as the left is losing power. It’s like Zuck just wants to be recognized as a cool kid in the group, but is clearly trying too hard. The last cool thing FB did was marketplace and then all the way back to timeline feature.
The whole zero-sum, straw man depiction of DEI initiatives is intellectually lazy, even if we ignore the ideology. When I've put effort into it, it's looked like:
* blinding candidate names from take-home or resumé reviews
* writing structured interview rubrics
* defining concrete soft skills and behaviors we're looking for, instead of "culture fit"
In a world without, say, sexism, the above practices would still lead to better hiring decisions. It just happens to be the case that in our world, making your hiring process better tends to make it less sexist; everything that rises must converge.
The problem isn't evil, but the lack of any leader standing up for good (using simplistic terms). The evil is always there, in our souls and in our society, as is the good; we just need to choose and use the latter to check the former. Who of any serious stature is standing up to Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump, etc.? The absence - the empty stage - is shocking.
It is one of Biden's great responsibilities, but he has long abandoned the country and the world in this essential sense and bears great responsibility for the outcome.
As a simple example, who is standing up for the LA fire chief? Is the mayor, the governor, national leaders? If they have, they are highly ineffectual - I haven't heard a thing - which is also failure on their part.
It's the responsibilities of many others. It's the responsibility of people here, in our own small community. If you are the leader, and now we all are, it's not your role to toy with the latest thought experiment; it is to make a just community. This isn't hacking the new thing, it is building critical human-rated systems on which lives, freedom, justice, and the future depend.
It shouldn't be hard for organizations to implement just policies: Agree to eliminate anything that favors one group. Agree it should be equal to everyone. And that means majority and minority, powerful and vulnerable: Eliminate anything that favors a group, including what favors the powerful majority group - which is mostly what is favored.
Acknowledging race in job seeking makes for intrinsically tokenized contingents of people. I’m not just a PHP guy… I’m a BLACK PHP guy, etc.
True equality imo is equivalent to a form of neutrality. Pay no mind to race at all and instead focus on hiring the best hackers available and let the educational markets figure out the rest.
Astute observers have been predicting a woke / DEI rollback ever since Claudine Gay got canned. Big tech companies are enmeshed with the state, so it helps to keep the wider political / geopolitical context in view.
For everyone like me who had to google that acronym:
DEI: Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability.
I'm sorry for asking the obvious, which I put on account of not running a business in an oligarchy, but what the heck is the angle, here?
What's to gain for Meta (and presumably others) when the new administration hasn't been inaugurated yet? They obviously can't say that they are compelled by law to do that, but they very much renege the eventually of saying "they forced us to do that" when the policy landscape will inevitably flip. This is pure signalling, with the effect of putting off about a half of the local population deemed progressive, and alienating most of the developed world. Whatever might be on the other side of that bargain must be disgustingly "generous".
If I was an evil despot about to be crowned, I don't know how I would feel about that: true this is a bunch of sycophants willing to kiss the ring, on the other hand "who do you think they are?". Anyhow, I probably be a terrible despot, too.
Let me get thsi right... Meta resolved issues with a performative DEI program with an even more performative act pandering to an incoming administration which is openly histile to POC... that's not better, it's worse.
I hope this extends to the media/movie industry. If there is one reason I would have voted for Trump that would have been to stop the flood of DEI in movies.
Couldn't watch a movie without a gay scene even if it had no sense in the movie. The exception became the norm.
This deluge of terrible things from Zuck over the past few days is so clearly 100% in deference to Trump. The fact that Zuck name-checked Twitter when explaining the change to Community Notes was also such an obvious tell. If he viewed Twitter as a competitor, he would have framed this shift in policy as something better than what Twitter does. But instead, "we're doing what they're doing" is a message that he is essentially collaborating with Musk on shared goals.
Gee, what goals might those be.
I had deleted Facebook years ago, but this has convinced to also delete my Instagram. Sincerely hoping an Instagram alternative starts to take shape, like what Bluesky is to Twitter.
For those living in countries that don't have majority white people (eg asian or african countries), do they have any DEI programs to hire more white people and all that?
It was all a trick in the first place, capitalism does what it feels is in its best interest, some days it's inclusion, some days it's world wars, every day it's self serving
I generally loathe DEI programs in the workplace, mostly because they are almost always just about appearances: "let's make sure we have at least 20% minority representation" or whatever.
Early in my career I worked at a company where we only wanted to hire the "best" people. However, after several years many of us began to notice a slow, downward trend in the quality of our products (games) were and how well they were selling.
One theory that we started floating around was that the "best" people we were interviewing for was actually more in line with "people who think like us". We were really good programmers, artists, and designers, so naturally people who thought and worked like us would be good, too, right? And they were. But that thinking also ignored the fact that people outside our bubble could be equally as good (or better), and bring new (and better) ideas that could expand the target audience.
Later, when I worked at a biotech, there was no [explicit] DEI program, but from the very top (CEO) all the way down, we consistently were hiring for "different than us". We actually wanted different experience and different ways of thinking. When we'd follow-up with each other after someone interviewed, we'd ask "what does this candidate bring that currently don't have?" And it made such a huge difference!
When creating drug studies, having a minority race (equally) represented on the team would result in meeting comments like "we also need enough genetic data from the latino population to ensure ...".
Having women on the team meant getting challenged with knowledge like "mothers have a more difficult time participating in medical studies, so what can we do to remove those barriers for them so we can get a broader test population that includes women?"
Having someone on the team with a relative who was anti-vax meant being always hyper aware of that audience and made us think about it.
Could a team of all white men (I use that demographic simply because it's what I belong to) also recognize those same issues and address them? It's possible, but it's likely not going to happen by default. That's not out of malice; I believe everyone wants to do the best they can. But when people are working hard and moving fast, they naturally just fall back to their defaults for quick decision making and those defaults are born of their own personal experiences.
Anyway, don't hire minorities and people different from you to tick some box (whether for legal reasons or not). Don't make the mistake of thinking "I'm awesome, so people like me are the awesome ones."
Awesomeness comes in all shapes and sizes. Hire people who challenge you and your experiences and challenge them and theirs in return! You, your team, the product, and the company will be immeasurably better off for it.
> Why it matters: The move is a strong signal to Meta employees that the company's push to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration isn't just posturing, but an ethos shift that will impact its business practices.
I would say the shift in policy is to avoid law suites, as the Federal Courts have held DEI programs are sometimes discriminatory... especially the equity parts. Diversity and Inclusion are important parts of existing civil rights laws, so those aspects of DEI programs are not very important except to actually ensure ethical hiring practices are in fact practiced (E.G. not being racist or sexist when hiring). But practicing equity, or sometimes called other things... like affirmative action, etc... are illegal (they are sometimes blatantly sexist or racist). I've been on technical teams blessed by the DEI hiring program, and it was alright... We got more ladies, and we hired people (who earned less) in other time zones around the world. It got weird, for a lot of weird reasons I won't go into, but the main point is the team stopped vibing like before, and that's fine to some extent but this was a disconcordant vibe, not a minor offbeat member of the band, but a bunch of folks playing their own tune...
Seems fine as it always appeared as virtue signaling to me. This is one less talking point that conservatives will use when literally anything happens.
20 years from now we will look at this DEI era, the way we look at the soixant-huitards and their obsession with „decriminalizing“ incest and pederasty: Bafflement how the disgustingness wasn’t obvious then.
„White Straight Man Are Evil“ isn‘t a force for good, its sexist, racist – and by the way classic cultural imperialism as US academic social science departments pushed this crap down the throats of every country in America‘s orbit (and sometimes even more if it helped with regime change).
Why would any California based company take a chance on being sued by the California attorney general's office in such a way? Meta is the perfect target to pick for fighting the overreach of a Trumpian department of Justice and GQP congress set on reversing years of social progress
I remember meeting Maxine Williams on my first day at Facebook. She gave a strong introductory address that left me with a deep appreciation of the value of diversity not just as a moral good, but as a good business decision. Seeing her work denigrated and thrown under the bus to appease the bigotry of Trump, Elon, and their odious ilk is a gut blow.
1) Twitter has imploded, and is on the road to Myspace level relevance
2) that implosion is due to a removal of moderation
I'll try to keep it politically neutral. But this and other Facebook announcements means inexorable collapse is on the medium term horizon, because they mirror what Twitter did
These actions could possibly be done with social network circa early to mid 2010s.
But since the rise of massive online campaigns of disinformation or propaganda, and then rocket fueled by AI...
It means not only will left-wing people run away in droves, but then toxicity explodes and successive waves of moderates and apolitical people get driven away.
It's interesting because people seem to have forgotten what the word moderation means.
It's keeping out the extremes. In particular, the extremes of emotions. Which then cloud any sort of productive discussion.
Without moderation, especially with the organized ai and misinformation and other social Network phenomena, The pure outrage cycle while individually effective for posts, very rapidly makes the overall ecosystem completely intolerable.
Because one thing at the political extremes I would argue more strongly on the right but definitely on the left, is intolerance.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming: making $$$
I don't expect BigTech to care about people -- it's clear that they never have. BUT what makes me sick is that they pretend to care, pretend that they are "solving the world's problems", "building communities", etc. They're no better, and perhaps just as destructive, as WalMart.
15-20 years ago I was very excited about and supportive of these companies. I've grown to despise them.
I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.
Musk buying Twitter had a profound effect on the discourse. I don’t think this happens without him buying it. I don’t think Trump wins without it. People can speak freely and it’s just obvious some of these sacred cows were unpopular and only in place due to pressure. Overton window has shifted big time.
> Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged
These challenges are always in bad faith. It starts off by assuming this practice is exclusionary of white males. We know that's not true, because that would (obviously) be illegal (Title VII) and these companies are not dumb.
> there are other ways...
Like what? Why won't those "other ways" be immediately challenged by the same bad faith actors?
Zuckerberg single-handedly pulling the control rods out of a platform with three billion users may go down as the most consequential, catastrophic decision in human events.
The only good billionaire is a former billionaire.
I got a UC Regents Scholarship to UCSD bc my parents are southeast Asian. My grades and SAT score were lower than my Jewish best friend's grades and scores. He did not get a scholarship. I promptly lost my scholarship after failing Physics 2A because I skipped the final to make out with a girl. I didn't think twice about what I squandered until I had to get a job and ask my parents for money to pay for the next quarter.
Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs
(axios.com)1177 points by bsilvereagle 10 January 2025 | 1744 comments
Comments
What immediately followed, every large company reached out to have me work as a consultant for their diversity program. I found it fascinating that they had a team of DEI experts in place already. Like what makes one an expert?
In addition to my job, I spent nights developing programs trying to help these companies. Some folks right here on HN shared their successful experiences and I presented it to several companies. I was met with resistance every step of the way.
Over the course of a year and hundreds of candidates I presented, I've managed to place just one developer in a company.
However, most these companies were happy to change their social media profile to a solid black image or black lives matters. They sent memos, they organized lunches, even sold merch and donated. But hiring, that was too much to ask. A lot of graduates told me they never even got to do a technical interview.
Those DEI programs like to produce a show. Something visible that gives the impression that important work is being done. Like Microsoft reading who owned the land where the campus was built [2] in the beginning of every program. It eerily reminds me of "the loyalty oath crusade" in Catch-22.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23669188
[2]: https://youtu.be/87JXB0t6de4?si=wtnQtBOE-fs4V7gR
To the pro-DEI crowd: I have some hard truths for you. Actual change requires commitment and focus over an extremely long period of time. That means you have to choose probably 1 cause among the many worthy causes, and then invest in it instead of the others. You can't do everything. The problems that afflict my community are running water, drug addiction, lack of educational resources, and secular trends have have made our traditional industries obsolete. I am not saying that land acknowledgements and sports teams changing their names from racial slurs are negative developments, but these things are not even in my list of top 100 things to get done.
We all want to help, but to have an impact you must have courage to say no to the vast majority of social issues you could care about, and then commit deeply to the ones you decide to work on. Do not be a tourist. I don't expect everyone to get involved in Indian affairs, but I do expect you to be honest with me about whether you really care. Don't play house or go through motions to make yourself feel better.
When you do commit to some issue, understand that the biggest contributions you can make are virtually always not be marketable or popular—if they are, you take that as a sign that you need to evaluate whether they really are impactful. Have the courage to make an assessment about what will actually have an impact on the things you care about, and then follow through with them.
To the anti-DEI crowd: focus on what you can build together instead of fighting on ideological lines. The way out for many minority communities in America is substantial economic development. In my own communities, I have seen economic development that has given people the ability to own their own destiny. It has changed the conversation from a zero sum game to one where shared interests makes compromise possible. If you want to succeed you need to understand that your fate is shared with those around you. In-fighting between us is going to make us less competitive on the world stage, which hurts all of us.
When we focus diversity efforts on high school kids then we get a turnaround at the funnel entrypoint in as little as only five years. Companies could be far more impactful here than any lone teacher could hope to be.
I then pivoted to cloud+app dev strategic consulting when a job at AWS (Professional Services) fell into my lap. I now work for a third party consulting company as a staff software architect.
For the last 5 years, I have had customer facing jobs where I am either on video calls or flying out to customer sites working with sales.
When I first encountered the DE&I programs at Amazon, I couldn’t help but groan. The entire “allies” thing felt like bullshit.
The only thing that concerns me is that I hope companies still do outreach to colleges outside of the major universities and start partnering with them to widen the funnel and partnering with smaller colleges to help students learn what is necessary to be competitive and to pass interviews
That did not seem at all controversial to me. It seems quite sensible, but it alludes to some silly practices that are now being retired. For example "This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses" is, in my opinion at least, a very very silly thing to do.
I am much, much, more interested in high quality, affordable, stable products when I buy things. Not the skin colour of who owns the business. To filter things based on the owner's identity (in the American sense of the word) may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse. It would not be a sensible thing to do.
> We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
I don't know how they treated those goals, but: you can imagine a large company. The CEO says "we need to reach X goal in Y. Your executive bonus will take into consideration how close you got to X." In a world like that, many (most/all) executives will do whatever they can to get to those goals -- even if it goes against other official (or even legal) policies.
And that certainly would explain a lot of the behavior I saw working at a large company during DEI peak. (Not to say that is any kind of proof of anything untoward).
DEI initiatives have always been a dog and pony show, not a thing executives have ever truly cared about and they are now in a political environment where they can show what they believe in. People will learn the hard way these companies have never cared about you.
Like politics, things feel dumb and ham-fisted, because they are. They're playing at winning wide swaths of billions of people, and the majority of people aren't paying attention, so hypocrisy doesn't register as well as just being vaguely aligned with what's popular.
I don't mean any of this in an derogatory "unwashed masses" sort of way, it's just how it is.
The predecessor to this was affirmative action in colleges (this is basically affirmative action in the work place).
New Jersey is seeing the direct result of this. Applicants couldn't pass a basic reading/writing/math test, so they were forced to get rid of these requirements. The direct result of this will be teachers that shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place and poor student results.
More information here:
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/video/nj-eliminates-redundan...
They call it 'redundant', but I would rather have someone teaching my kids that actually knows the material, rather than someone that went to any number of low-quality colleges where I have no idea if they know the material or not.
Diversity in training, education and work history vastly outweighs diversity in superficial physical features.
Now anti-DEI is a song and dance for the exact same reason.
If you have been in the business long enough, you will know that the company has NO ONE's interests at heart. Never had and never will. They will discriminate against any race they have to, whether majority or minority, if it leads to an extra dollar on their balance sheet.
- DEI at meta has been non-existent for the past 6 months or more anyways. They care far less than any FAANG I've seen about DEI beyond the lip service and yearly training. This is just the announcement of something that's already been in place for a while
- Meta has very poor diversity. I go most days without seeing any black engineers. I see occasional latino engineers. Asians and Indians are extremely overrepresented. White people are a minority. Maybe 1/10 engineers are women.
- This comes against the backdrop of Meta failing something like 98% of market tests for H1B immigrants. Word is getting out that Meta is not the place to go if you're trying to immigrate to the US.
- There's the obvious pandering to the incoming administration (this is the third announcement this week, first Dana White on the board, then cancelling fact checking & moving some moderation people to Texas).
Summary: meta has serious diversity problems it needs to address. Existing DEI problem was not helping. Hopefully they do something to hire more women and minorities. They face H1B headwinds that may drive hiring outside the US or (much less likely) increase hiring of americans.
At this company we had plenty of groups for Muslims, blacks, Jews, Asians, etc, but I was one of the only people over 40.
People would laugh when I mentioned that we needed a DEI group for people over 40... but I wasn't entirely kidding. It's frankly bizarre that you can have 1000+ employees and only 2-3 are over 40!? I had worked in industries prior where the median age was > 40 and it did sincerely shock me that a publicly traded company would have almost 0 people in that age range.
The funny part is that while I will not ever be black, everyone of my younger coworkers (baring serious tragedy) will be in the 40+ protected group. So in theory, if anyone cares at all about DEI in a sincere way, they should care about people who are 40+ because they will be there.
So while we celebrated Ramadan with multiple company activities, there wasn't much respect for "I have to leave a bit early to pick up my teenage kid from my ex-wife's place".
The legal landscape isn’t changing—it just was never what companies like Meta thought it was. The civil rights laws never embraced a distinction between racism against white people versus racism against non-white people. A lot of what corporate America did between 2020-2024 was simply illegal. All that’s changed is now corporate counsel are now dealing up from their thrall and realizing they’d been giving bad advice to their clients.
[1] https://compliance.utexas.edu/sb17
Hopefully this means my company of 16 developers, all of whom are white and male, stops getting accused of being racist because ignorant people on the internet don't realise we are English and there are no black developers within 80 miles
At last, a corporation acknowledges it's _cognitive_ diversity that matters.
Most other forms of diversity are superficial, inherent human characterstics that are already equal under law, and make no difference to people's ability to use technology.
I'm so relieved to see "DEI" die. With two young boys who are white, heterosexual and normal in every way, I found it disturbing to know they'd be discriminated against in the workplace.
I knew this discrimination existed because I've been a hiring manager and had HR explicitly tell me I needed to focus on hiring female technologist.
Luckily I left that job and am now at a smaller company that doesn't discriminate on gender)
However, most large corporates I've worked at have pushed the DEI agenda (with the 'E' standing for "equity" as opposed to the more ethical "equality").
There may have been historic discrimination against women and other minorities, but I have NEVER witnessed any such discrimination in the present day.
We must avoid replacing one form of immoral discrimination with another form of immoral discrimination.
Reservations in school and colleges is likely the only way kids get in, but from my own personal experience it's been a mixed bag. I have seen relatively more people fail and some succeed in schools and jobs who can via reservation(more of them failing in high school or college).
But perhaps that was not the point, the policy idea was to give them a chance. Public Policy and Skill at the job are not meant to align; It can create a shitty experience to work with someone who is not nearly as good as a they should be. But perhaps their future generations could do better.
(Not explained in the article)
It is impossible to predict a kid who got all this, even though born in adverse circumstances, will care about DEI or support it at all(e.g. Clarence Thomas).
Power always following money.
It’s a value. You wake up every day and practice diverse hiring practices.
The moment you put a tangible target to hit, is when you gamify diversity into something bad.
Does anyone know what decisions he's referring to?
Now if there are only 2 blue applicants, then we should look into if there is something preventing the blues to get to a point where they can apply. That usually doesn’t fall under the hiring company’s control.
The Wall Street Journal has a long list.[1]
It works for Putin.
[1] https://archive.is/ozPQi
It wouldn't be that hard to create a blind CV filtering process to avoid bias. And if the company is so racist they won't hire people with certain names, non white people probably wouldn't want to work there either.
Maybe we can even go back to not pretending everyone is equally good at everything. Men and women are different.
But as I said, there was some awareness creeping in. Along with that, the folks in charge had the courage and empowerment to do something about it. And when I say the folks in charge, I don't mean the CEO. This was a company that was still running on a sort of quasi-anarchy of conscientious under-management: my first impression in 2013 was that there was no clear power structure, but everyone was trying to do the right thing and it somehow worked out. And most importantly, people could speak up if something didn't seem right.
There are many examples, but to pick one, I remember my first trip to Dublin and being invited to join their local SRE managers' meeting. I watched someone bring up the topic of alcohol being omnipresently displayed around the office and how it was, at a bare minimum, not a good look. There followed a thoughtful and reasoned discussion that concluded with the decision to put it away. Not a ban on fun, but a firm policy that, among others to follow, helped SRE culture mature into something more appropriate for a workplace, while maintaining the essential feeling of camaraderie and mutual support.
There were also top-down initiatives with varying degrees of success. When an executive puts something into OKRs, there's a good chance that by the time it reaches 13 levels down the org chart, it has turned into your manager demanding that you cut the ends off of 4.5% more roasts by the end of Q3 so they can show leadership on their promo packet. Nevertheless, there were a lot of good ideas, and a lot of good things were implemented. Through my job, I had access to training on topics like privilege and implicit bias that I believe have had a lasting positive impact on me as a person and as a leader. I also had access to people who thought about and fought about these things on a far deeper level than I will ever be able to, and I am grateful if even a sliver of their courage rubbed off on me.
It wasn't just a song and dance. At least down near the bottom, we cared, and we tried very hard to make things better. We failed a lot of the time as well, in the sense that those top-down targets that were set were rarely achieved, which I suspect is at least part of the reason for dropping them. They've tried nothing and they're out of ideas.
What we're seeing now is just more of the slide in the wrong direction that, unfortunately, started a while ago. Google in the mid-2010s was a place where people spoke up, to a fault. Yes, they complained about the candy dispensers running low or not having a puppy room, but they also told a senior vice president that he had been saying "you guys" a lot and do you know what happened? He thanked them, apologized, and corrected himself. Google in the 2020s is a place where you keep your mouth shut, sit down, and do what you're told. I don't know what it's like inside Meta, but I'm not surprised at this turn, because they're basically all following the same playbook, handed to them by Elon.
I'm embarrassed that I've hesitated to speak my mind because I am looking for a job and what if someone reads this on my profile and decides I'm not a team player? Well, I'll say it clearly: I am on team try to be a good person and do the right thing and I am very much a team player. I believe that encouraging hate, and dropping DEI goals is wrong. And if that makes me not a good fit for your organization, I think we're on the same page.
In Malaysia, we have something similar to DEI that stretches back to 1970. We call it the New Economic Policy (NEP), which aims to "restructure society" to achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities across different ethnic groups. The explicit aim of the NEP is to increase the participation of Bumiputera (the "natives") in the economy, sometimes at the expense of the non-natives, the Chinese and Indians. The key target was to achieve 30% Bumiputera equity ownership of Malaysia's domestic corporations.
30% only? Bumiputeras constitute a much larger population percentage than that, even at that time. Furthermore, there was an expiry date attached to the policy: 20 years. So, for a Chinese person, enduring slight injustice for 20 years so that our friends can catch up with us—isn't that a good thing? Life is about give and take, right?
Except that even after 20 years—in fact, after more than 50 years—in the eyes of politicians and policymakers, the objective of the NEP hasn't yet been accomplished, and it looks like it will continue indefinitely. That's right: despite the fact that all major companies require Bumiputera participation (never mind that it's a gambling conglomerate, which is supposed to remain forbidden (Haram) to Muslim Bumiputeras), and despite the fact that Bumiputeras now monopolize public sector posts, public university quotas, and administrative/teaching positions, and pretty much dominate every aspect of government institutions (the police, army, judiciary, and all are basically Bumiputera-dominated), the NEP must still continue, because it hasn't yet accomplished its goal.
It will never accomplish its goal.
Meanwhile, the side effects of the NEP are palpable. It's common agreement that Malaysia is lagging behind, especially when compared to our neighbor, Singapore. In 1970, it was 1 SGD vs. 1 RM, and now... it's 1 SGD vs. 3.3 RM. See how much our currency has declined compared to our neighbor. It's no secret that Singapore gladly welcomes Malaysian Chinese "refugees" who escape to that little island to avoid discrimination and frequent hate speech.
Affirmative actions are a double-edged sword. They come at the expense of sacrificing market efficiency and some degree of fairness. And it's not at all clear that anyone can wield them well. I'm sure that the NEP's creators did have noble intentions and did try to minimize the side effects, but you can see where it's gotten them.
1. In one hand, the rolling back of how DEI has/was implemented I think can be a good thing. I think lots of people, myself included, believe that it "went off the rails", but most importantly, I think it ended up being counterproductive to its end goals. Nearly everyone I know who wasn't part of the DEI cottage industry came to view many/most of these programs with cynicism, even if they weren't vocal about it.
2. Don't mistake the validity of number one for thinking that this is just pure and unadulterated pandering to the incoming administration. Meta would sacrifice small babies if they thought it would make them more money in the long run.
The reason I believe so strongly about number 2 is what happened with their content guidelines changes. I'm gay, and I'm actually fine with people calling me insane. But I also better be able to call lots of religious practices based around some invisible sky fairy insane too. The fact that the guidelines specifically called out "it's OK to call gay and transgender people mentally ill", and only those groups, is grossly despicable, and clearly shows Zuckerberg is just taint licking his new overlords.
And to people who still work at Meta, I also think that's fine - we all need a paycheck. But please don't try to convince yourself or anyone else that you're doing it for anything but the money. I'm so sick of these tech companies talking about their lofty goals (and honestly, have been for a while long before Trump) when it's so abundantly clear it's just about making money. And again, I think that's fine to only be about money - it's a business after all. Just don't pretend you're doing some sort of societal good.
(Disclosure: In such a situation I would be unable to post this comment--as, in our just world, this comment's insightfulness would undoubtedly lead to me being the beneficiary of significant financial remuneration.)
I know that world ins't fair, and some people (like me by example) have to put more efforts that others, but this is life, we have to conquer our space and be pride by our achievements.
Out of 10 employees on my team, I had:
- male and female (80/20 split)
- black, white, asian, latino
- engineers in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s
- east coast, west coast
- ivy league, college and high-school graduates
That level of diversity was very rare at Microsoft, and even rarer at other tech companies.
It took a *lot* of work; with less effort I would have had a more uniform distribution (male, white/asian, younger, west coast)
5. It’s been pretend this whole time.
Previously:
1. It’s not happening.
2. It’s only happening a bit.
3. It’s good that it’s happening.
4. It’s the people complaining who are the problem.
https://www.axios.com/api/axios-web/get-story/by-id/636ca008...
DEI always seemed like an activity they did for show. This changes nothing honestly.
Why the hell would a company pick vendors based on the sexuality or skin color of the owner or whatever?
It is one of Biden's great responsibilities, but he has long abandoned the country and the world in this essential sense and bears great responsibility for the outcome.
As a simple example, who is standing up for the LA fire chief? Is the mayor, the governor, national leaders? If they have, they are highly ineffectual - I haven't heard a thing - which is also failure on their part.
It's the responsibilities of many others. It's the responsibility of people here, in our own small community. If you are the leader, and now we all are, it's not your role to toy with the latest thought experiment; it is to make a just community. This isn't hacking the new thing, it is building critical human-rated systems on which lives, freedom, justice, and the future depend.
It shouldn't be hard for organizations to implement just policies: Agree to eliminate anything that favors one group. Agree it should be equal to everyone. And that means majority and minority, powerful and vulnerable: Eliminate anything that favors a group, including what favors the powerful majority group - which is mostly what is favored.
Acknowledging race in job seeking makes for intrinsically tokenized contingents of people. I’m not just a PHP guy… I’m a BLACK PHP guy, etc.
True equality imo is equivalent to a form of neutrality. Pay no mind to race at all and instead focus on hiring the best hackers available and let the educational markets figure out the rest.
DEI: Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability.
Were they ever used and or how much?
What's to gain for Meta (and presumably others) when the new administration hasn't been inaugurated yet? They obviously can't say that they are compelled by law to do that, but they very much renege the eventually of saying "they forced us to do that" when the policy landscape will inevitably flip. This is pure signalling, with the effect of putting off about a half of the local population deemed progressive, and alienating most of the developed world. Whatever might be on the other side of that bargain must be disgustingly "generous".
If I was an evil despot about to be crowned, I don't know how I would feel about that: true this is a bunch of sycophants willing to kiss the ring, on the other hand "who do you think they are?". Anyhow, I probably be a terrible despot, too.
Couldn't watch a movie without a gay scene even if it had no sense in the movie. The exception became the norm.
They’ll say one set of virtuous sounding goals while completely undermining it in the same breath.
This is just them running with their tails between their legs before the new admin takes over.
Gee, what goals might those be.
I had deleted Facebook years ago, but this has convinced to also delete my Instagram. Sincerely hoping an Instagram alternative starts to take shape, like what Bluesky is to Twitter.
The new(ly leaked) moderation guidelines might suggest otherwise...
Early in my career I worked at a company where we only wanted to hire the "best" people. However, after several years many of us began to notice a slow, downward trend in the quality of our products (games) were and how well they were selling.
One theory that we started floating around was that the "best" people we were interviewing for was actually more in line with "people who think like us". We were really good programmers, artists, and designers, so naturally people who thought and worked like us would be good, too, right? And they were. But that thinking also ignored the fact that people outside our bubble could be equally as good (or better), and bring new (and better) ideas that could expand the target audience.
Later, when I worked at a biotech, there was no [explicit] DEI program, but from the very top (CEO) all the way down, we consistently were hiring for "different than us". We actually wanted different experience and different ways of thinking. When we'd follow-up with each other after someone interviewed, we'd ask "what does this candidate bring that currently don't have?" And it made such a huge difference!
When creating drug studies, having a minority race (equally) represented on the team would result in meeting comments like "we also need enough genetic data from the latino population to ensure ...".
Having women on the team meant getting challenged with knowledge like "mothers have a more difficult time participating in medical studies, so what can we do to remove those barriers for them so we can get a broader test population that includes women?"
Having someone on the team with a relative who was anti-vax meant being always hyper aware of that audience and made us think about it.
Could a team of all white men (I use that demographic simply because it's what I belong to) also recognize those same issues and address them? It's possible, but it's likely not going to happen by default. That's not out of malice; I believe everyone wants to do the best they can. But when people are working hard and moving fast, they naturally just fall back to their defaults for quick decision making and those defaults are born of their own personal experiences.
Anyway, don't hire minorities and people different from you to tick some box (whether for legal reasons or not). Don't make the mistake of thinking "I'm awesome, so people like me are the awesome ones."
Awesomeness comes in all shapes and sizes. Hire people who challenge you and your experiences and challenge them and theirs in return! You, your team, the product, and the company will be immeasurably better off for it.
> Why it matters: The move is a strong signal to Meta employees that the company's push to make inroads with the incoming Trump administration isn't just posturing, but an ethos shift that will impact its business practices.
I would say the shift in policy is to avoid law suites, as the Federal Courts have held DEI programs are sometimes discriminatory... especially the equity parts. Diversity and Inclusion are important parts of existing civil rights laws, so those aspects of DEI programs are not very important except to actually ensure ethical hiring practices are in fact practiced (E.G. not being racist or sexist when hiring). But practicing equity, or sometimes called other things... like affirmative action, etc... are illegal (they are sometimes blatantly sexist or racist). I've been on technical teams blessed by the DEI hiring program, and it was alright... We got more ladies, and we hired people (who earned less) in other time zones around the world. It got weird, for a lot of weird reasons I won't go into, but the main point is the team stopped vibing like before, and that's fine to some extent but this was a disconcordant vibe, not a minor offbeat member of the band, but a bunch of folks playing their own tune...
„White Straight Man Are Evil“ isn‘t a force for good, its sexist, racist – and by the way classic cultural imperialism as US academic social science departments pushed this crap down the throats of every country in America‘s orbit (and sometimes even more if it helped with regime change).
We are in for some dark times.
1) Twitter has imploded, and is on the road to Myspace level relevance
2) that implosion is due to a removal of moderation
I'll try to keep it politically neutral. But this and other Facebook announcements means inexorable collapse is on the medium term horizon, because they mirror what Twitter did
These actions could possibly be done with social network circa early to mid 2010s.
But since the rise of massive online campaigns of disinformation or propaganda, and then rocket fueled by AI...
It means not only will left-wing people run away in droves, but then toxicity explodes and successive waves of moderates and apolitical people get driven away.
It's interesting because people seem to have forgotten what the word moderation means.
It's keeping out the extremes. In particular, the extremes of emotions. Which then cloud any sort of productive discussion.
Without moderation, especially with the organized ai and misinformation and other social Network phenomena, The pure outrage cycle while individually effective for posts, very rapidly makes the overall ecosystem completely intolerable.
Because one thing at the political extremes I would argue more strongly on the right but definitely on the left, is intolerance.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming: making $$$
I don't expect BigTech to care about people -- it's clear that they never have. BUT what makes me sick is that they pretend to care, pretend that they are "solving the world's problems", "building communities", etc. They're no better, and perhaps just as destructive, as WalMart.
15-20 years ago I was very excited about and supportive of these companies. I've grown to despise them.
These challenges are always in bad faith. It starts off by assuming this practice is exclusionary of white males. We know that's not true, because that would (obviously) be illegal (Title VII) and these companies are not dumb.
> there are other ways...
Like what? Why won't those "other ways" be immediately challenged by the same bad faith actors?
The only good billionaire is a former billionaire.