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.
There is a conflation in the idea behind this comment that drives me crazy. This version of equity based on race is using race as a proxy for outcomes in life that are actually based on a wide variety of factors. Equality based on race is treating peoples race as equal.
The idea that we care about equity is important, but using race as a proxy means we need to care especially about the proxy and making sure the proxy is representative of the outcomes and how the inputs are effecting the outputs. And, if we're being honest, it's kind of an arbitrary proxy beyond the correlation.
We are already seeing huge problems here with men vs women using gender as a proxy for outcomes, where we've basically flip-flopped graduation rates, but since it's a lagging indicator, we've really gotten ourselves into a pickle where we are creating an equity problem while trying to solve an equity problem, because we're so focused on outputs throughout every stage of the life process that we're missing a massive shift in the inputs (like who we're graduating).
Equality is important. Equity is important. They are different things, that should have different attention. Equality uses identity directly. Equity uses identity as a proxy for outcomes. We need to be very careful when we focus too much on one over the other.
Why use various proxies at all? Most of the group differences seem to largely share poverty as a primary root factor, and this impacts plenty of sub-groups within the supposedly advantaged groups as well. So why are we not simply addressing that directly?
A refrain I've been seeing a lot lately is that the outcome of a system is its purpose. Perhaps that reasoning should be equally applied to an analysis of the implementation choices made by various social programs and the solutions espoused by various political movements.
Why? I presume that people don’t look for second and third order effects. They see disproportionate numbers of people of color struggling, they blame the first order grouping as the cause.
Statistics is complicated. People reject even straightforward theories with obvious scientific bases. It makes sense.
As I understand it, “equity” in this content generally refers to equality of outcomes between groups. I don’t see why that is desirable, important, or even possible.
Would you explain why you believe that equity is important?
It means equal outcomes for arbitrary groups. We should expect fairly similar outcomes for groups based on arbitrary differences. If we don’t, it should concern us.
Non-arbitrary issues should obviously affect outcomes, but the prevalence of melanin should affect skin cancer rates, not incomes.
> This version of equity based on race is using race as a proxy for outcomes in life
Because racism is ongoing and negatively impacts people of color, it makes sense to focus where harm is being done.
There is a leftist school of thought that agrees with you (focus on class instead of race). But I personally don’t believe that a focus purely on outcomes would be applied equitably while racism still exists.
> we're so focused on outputs throughout every stage of the life process that were missing a massive shift in the inputs
It is a fallacy to think we can’t focus on multiple things at once. Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others.
>Because racism is ongoing and negatively impacts people of color, it makes sense to focus where harm is being done.
My point is that there are plenty of -isms going around and focusing on race alone completely ignores the fact that our lives are impacted in different ways. When we take a flat reductionist view, as if Sasha and Malia Obama face the same challenges as some randomly chosen person of the same race, we have the potential create a significant class divides within communities, as the folks of a certain race with a privileged background fill the rolls that ought to be set aside for folks who are still dealing with the significant economic after-effects of a discriminatory past.
>It is a fallacy to think we can’t focus on multiple things at once. Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others.
The point and the problem is that there is no coordination, so if everyone is trying to make a positive impact, it is very likely that we will overshoot. This is always the case when you have an uncoordinated approach to dealing with a lagging indicator.
> My point is that there are plenty of -isms going around and focusing on race alone completely ignores the fact that our lives are impacted in different ways.
No it doesn’t. We have other means of support for people whose lives are impacted by e.g. poverty.
> When we have a flat reductionist as our view, as if Sasha and Malia Obama face the same challenges as some randomly chosen person of the same race, we have the potential create a significant class divides within communities.
There are already significant class divides in the community. Our system specifically encourages that sort of thing. The idea that a few high performers get the same benefits (ones that aren’t already means tested) as the poorest is irrelevant in the scheme of things.
> The point and the problem is that there is no coordination
A interesting point. I suspect it’s not true, but either way this is the first I’ve heard anyone arguing for better coordination. I don’t see that present in any of the current efforts.
>There are already significant class divides in the community. Our system specifically encourages that sort of thing. The idea that a few high performers get the same benefits (ones that aren’t already means tested) as the poorest is irrelevant in the scheme of things.
I think this is where we might disagree most. I see racism as a form of stupidity, that is, a general induction error given perception bias, where you generalize the examples of a small sample size to a group and draw a wrong conclusion... based on race. Here, due to the history of discrimination, we have significant class difference that lead to more racism, which is class differences but projected as a race difference. I'd note here, we don't have the same kind of deliberate class as a place like the UK does, but we do have class and it's class beyond just an economic class.
I'll obviously admit that that's certainly not an explanation for all current racism, but I think a significant amount of our concern may be here. In this case, I worry that using race as a proxy for existing class differences in racially different communities will be incorrectly addressed in DEI programs based on race. You can already see the awkwardness of this in Asian and Indian communities, as they are racial minorities, yet they are often seen as overrepresented in outcomes. A traditional "racism is just racism" view really doesn't explain this mismatch, but a race-as-a-proxy-for-class easily does.
> Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others
In theory, perhaps, but in practice nothing is being done to help boys. In fact, DEI programs in universities continue to favor young women even as they approach 60% of students.
We're all familiar with Girls Who Code, Women in STEM, and similar organizations. Where are equivalent organizations for young men?
Would it even be possible to start such an organization without being ostracized as a bigot?
Here's a story I was listening to today about a program at an all-boys school trying to address the growing prevalence of loneliness, depression, and bad behavior in school.
Where are the equivalent for young men? Literally all of the other hackathons ever. Girls who Code arose because of toxic men chasing girls and women out of those spaces. Women worked tirelessly for decades to make these spaces happen. Men just want to whine about it because to actually address the issue is too “woke”. I’m sorry you created your prison, but don’t look to us to bail you out while you’re punching us down for not helping.
It reminds me of the white supremacists raging about Black Miss America pageants for existing. But they were ignorant of the fact that the official Miss America pageant had a rule that said “no negroes” up until 1972-73.
That's an admission that DEI in schools supports women, from some of its biggest advocates. Where are the programs to support boys in school?
Edit: Of course, the mere existence of the Society for Women Engineers, AAUW, and other groups focused on women in education, without comparable groups for men, is another example of the phenomenon.
They're a remnant of a time when they were necessary, now favoring the group that has not only caught up, but taken the lead.
Oh look, a society dedicated to men in nursing. This is completely reasonable. The idea to go from "women are most of college graduates" to "society of women engineers should not exist" is insane.
It's a serious topic in education, yes it's a thing people care about.
I studied with and was friends with women in my computer engineering major, SWE helped connect them with industry engineers who could speak about what it was like being a women in engineering.
To people downvoting the above comment - could you explain your reasons? You may feel all arguments have already been said on this issue but the situation is different today. And especially young people, whether white or colored, feel they have more bleak future in front of them than the previous generations and basically refuse to reproduce globally. In this light, it's worth having this discussion again because it is not the same.
I didn't but I would have. It appears to be dragging the discussion towards political flamewar. It doesn't present any substantial observations or reasoning, just ideological talking points that we've all heard countless times by now.
If there had at least been some attempt to tie things back to the headline article in a nontrivial way then maybe I'd be more sympathetic.
I didn't downvote, but I gave a long, good faith response as to why I think it's sub-optimal reasoning at best. I think this divide is a huge problem for the left, and it's actually creating new problems while the left pats itself on the back thinking we're solving them.
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.
> Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that?
Yes, and in fact one of the most popular was from IBM itself [1], released in 1944.
> The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes.
It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.
> 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.
I'm not really sure what potential significance you see in this. It was likely typed by the secretary and signed by the CEO. It's the original copy. Any copies required for the personal reference of the supervisory personnel affected would be made in the standard 1950s ways - a few carbon copies for the top executives, mimeographs further downstream if necessary.
Of course it was typed by a secretary. At a computer company I worked at starting in the mid 1980s it was not unheard of for some execs to have their admins print out emails for them and type in the handwritten responses. This was an internal-only system. No external email.
As of 2010 it was not unheard of for old civil engineers to have their secretary print all email and maps, they would redline them, and the response would be typed or scanned as appropriate.
> It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.
This was indeed standard until colour laser printers became cheap (and physically printing letters became less common), well into the 2000s.
IBM made a lot of very fancy typewriters so while I don't know what they had in 1953, one would assume that the president of the company would have access to the fanciest model they offered
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.
> and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
It goes further than just fudging the metrics: By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas. This combined with the overall focus on DEI just ends up reinforcing racism/sexism when the quota-hires are more inept than the non-quota hires.
I don't think that necessarily follows. For example, if 20% of some minority are qualified and without quotas only 5% would be hired, then a quota requiring hiring 10% wouldn't result in unqualified candidates.
That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.
We can use an actual example. Joe Biden going into the 2020 election pledged that he would choose a black woman as his running mate. This pledge excluded half the population on gender grounds, and 87% of the population on racial grounds. When you are only looking at half of 13% of the population you're going to be turning away a lot of qualified people. And we saw the consequences of Joe Bidens 2020 election pledge in the 2024 election
I never said unqualified. I used relative terms like less skilled, for example the 5% in your example that wouldn't have been hired without quotas.
The non-quota'd hires in that example, that the additional 5% displaced, are now also more likely to be of higher average skill (since you need less of them and can drop the bottom of the candidates), making a bigger disparity between the quota'd group and the non-quota'd group. Which, as I said, just reinforces any racism/sexism such quotas attempted to offset.
I don't think that actually changes anything. Lets suppose that we can measure qualification on a 100 point scale.
Lets say that there are 5 people in a minority group with a qualification of 100 and 9 people in the non-minority group with a qualification of 100. If 1 person from the minority group gets hired and 13 people from the non-minority group get hired, then a 5 person minority group quota would result in an increase in the qualifications of the people hired.
Of course in reality is more complicated since companies don't always hire only the absolutely most qualified people in a given group and it's not easy to even define objectively who is the most qualified. However, that doesn't matter to the point that I'm making which is that even a quota (which again most proponents of DEI don't want) doesn't necessarily result in hiring less qualified candidates.
In your example, no quotas would result in all 14 hires being those with a qualification of 100. Congrats, got all 5 minorities without quotas!
Now for some thing more realistic: Instead of making those 14 candidates all perfect, distribute them a bit more randomly and only hire the top 10. Without quotas you'll end up with around 4 from the minority group and 6 from the majority group. But if for example your quotas are for 50/50, you have to exclude 1 person from the majority group who is more qualified than the 5th person from the minority group to reach it.
> By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas.
What? By pulling from a larger pool of candidates, you’re more likely to get someone more skilled.
Say you’re looking to hire 20 people. So you pick the 20 best, and you end up with the 17 best men and the 3 best women. Of course you claim to be gender-blind and it just happens that you got 17 men and only 3 women, these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault.
Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire the 11th - 17th rated men, and instead did hire the 4th - 10th rated women.
Now: maybe you think that’s not a fair system, and you’re probably right. But it would mean you’re hiring better candidates. You pass on some lower rated candidates that only made it through because they were guys, and instead got some higher rated candidates that you had passed on previously because they were women.
You're assuming the men and women being judged on a different scale is the only way you can get a disparity to begin with.
Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?
I don't think it necessarily has to be all one thing or the other. For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring. Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.
> For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring.
That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.
> Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.
How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.
And if you’ve ever been or been adjacent to oil workers or truck drivers - those daughters would be well served by listening, assuming they have any other options.
They are brutal occupations that chew up and spit out the typically more physically robust men who make up the majority of those occupations on the regular.
Unless the top 20 people only had 3 women, which is totally possible if there were 200 men and 30 women in the total applicants. In this case, you just discarded 7 more qualified men to get 7 less qualified women. Now in terms of average skill across your hires, it looks like men in general are more qualified than women and you're reinforcing the sexism, not fighting it.
That’s fair—I’m closer to the east coast, so around me it is mostly white dudes, but that might not be true elsewhere. But it is mostly men, at any rate.
The question was if you believe the hiring process is excluding the other groups. Another way of asking that is, are similarly qualified people from the other groups applying in sufficient number? Would they have been hired if they had?
This is a simplistic view. E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume? In this case the lower chances to get ahead have nothing to do with economic circumstance.
> E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume?
You're referring to a decades-old study that failed to replicate:
It still has to do with economic circumstance, but here, according to Sowell it's about the cost of employing empirical discrimination (judging each specific case through complete knowledge of the individual) instead of a proxy for empirical discrimination (like likelihoods based on a non-arbitrary characteristic such as income or neighborhood).
The solutions that follow from that conclusion are to find ways to make empiricism less costly, or to change the stereotype (such as people from a poor neighborhood are likely to be a bad risk for a loan).
Systemic racism tends to apply so much economic drag to the system that any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand. Apartheid in South Africa was systemic racism, and businesses were violating those laws long before they were abolished just out of profit-motive. It became obvious and common-sense for the system to be ended. Thomas Sowell, in that same work, points out that Type II discrimination (discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics like race, ethnicity, belief... etc.) always ends up being economically unfeasible.
You raise an interesting point but I think that's an overly broad claim. Groups with strong internal adhesion and sufficiently high trust can remain xenophobic indefinitely.
It's also wrong on some level to refer to these things as arbitrary characteristics. They might be seemingly unrelated, but in a broader social context they are often far from arbitrary. Particularly when it comes to belief systems they can have direct and tangible impacts.
I think it's probably some of both. Certainly a lot of inequality is economic in a way that is independent of race. However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture. Therefore, I think that DEI is an important part of making our society more of a meritocracy.
In terms of your second paragraph. I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
> However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture.
For this to be a major factor you'd need some explanation for the over-representation of Asian Americans in many lucrative fields in the US. Shouldn't they otherwise be seeing a significant negative impact from this?
> I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
The issue is that the rules are often created without respect to how they impact smaller entities, or are purposely designed to impair them at the behest of larger ones.
A lot of regulatory overhead is reporting requirements. Reports from small entities are typically going into a database never to be read by anyone ever. But you still have to spend time filing them, and then they'll stick you for filing fees even though you're just uploading 2kB of text to a website, and the filing fees are the same whether you're a sole proprietorship or Walmart.
The rules are often completely nuts, e.g. you can be ineligible to collect unemployment if you were self-employed but you're still legally required to pay for the unemployment insurance coverage. Some states have paid leave policies that assume every employer is a bureaucracy large enough to absorb the cost of hiring a temporary employee while concurrently paying the one on leave.
There are also tons of rules that are simple enough to comply with if you know about them, but with no reason to expect them to exist and a book of regulations which is thousands of pages long and full of rules that don't apply to you, the first time you find out can be when you get a fine or somebody files a lawsuit. In many cases these will be some kind of reporting or registration requirement that exists for no good reason, but exists nevertheless, e.g. did you remember to register a DMCA agent, or list your physical mailing address when you sent that email? These things aren't actually protecting anybody, they're just a trap for the unwary.
So you said "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities"
This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business".
Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.
And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
So, how do we get to the outcome we all want: your talent drives your success?
One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
Access to capital is hardly the reason why it's hard to start a business. I know two first-generation immigrants who started a landscaping business with a used pickup truck and a few tools. They reinvested their earnings in the business and now run multiple crews servicing properties all over the area. So it's not a unicorn tech startup but they seem to be doing pretty well. Anyone willing to work hard can accomplish something like this, no talent required.
I don't think it is necessarily that simple. A pickup truck, a few tools, and enough time or savings to spend starting a business is a lot more than many people have. Then there's survivor bias; while it may have worked out for them, how many people did it not work out for. Finally, there's the issue that not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Someone has to actually work at the various businesses that exist and are being created.
> If you try hard enough you can always find plausible excuses for failure.
That is true but it does not imply that success is possible for all people in all cases.
I can always blame some external factor for my loss in a competition but it is not necessarily within the realm of (realistic) possibility for me to win every possible matchup.
> Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.
Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without having to pay a ton for commercial real estate (i.e. capital)? Nope, zoning violation. But surely if you rent a commercial shop for your restaurant then you can then live there instead of having to maintain two separate pieces of property and a car to commute between them? Nope, sorry, the commercial unit isn't zoned for residential. Also, you'll have to outbid Starbucks and McDonalds for the site because there is only a small area of land zoned for commercial use and it's already full with nowhere empty zoned to add more.
Now that you've put yourself in debt for real estate you're not allowed to live at and opened a business with ~4% net margins, your customers expect to pay with credit cards and the law allows that racket to take ~3% of your total revenue.
To make this work at all you're going to have to do enough volume that you'll end up hiring people. Congrats, you now get to do Business Taxes. This isn't the thing where you file a 1040 which is just copying some numbers from a sheet you got from your employer, it's the thing where you have to calculate those numbers for other people and also keep track of every dollar you spend on every chair, kilowatt hour and jar of tomato sauce so the government can take half your earnings instead of the three quarters or more you lose if you're bad at math or forget to deduct something big. But don't be bad at math the other way either or then you go to jail.
Now that you're almost making enough money to be able to eat at your own restaurant, the power to your stove goes out and shuts down your whole operation. You track it down to a defective splice put in by the licensed electrician who wired the place before you bought it. You're not allowed to fix this because you're not licensed as an electrician. You're also not able to get licensed because it's both prohibitively expensive for someone who only does occasional electrical work and requires you to do a multi-year apprenticeship even if you could pass every test to get the license. So you either have to wait a week for someone with a license to have time for you even though the actual fix is only going to take five minutes, or pay through the nose for emergency service, or break the law and do it yourself.
I could go on. The reason "access to capital" is such a problem is that the regulations make everything so expensive, and most of the regulations are a result of regulators being captured by the incumbents.
> And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
Racial discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases. That doesn't necessitate casting aspersions in cases where there isn't any evidence of that, just because the economic disparity tends to create an outcome disparity even when the entity isn't doing anything racist.
> One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?
> In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
"My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
> When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases.
To be fair oftentimes that documentation is due to the regulations you're speaking against here. I'm not necessarily taking a side. It just seemed relevant to point out.
> "My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
No, if it were true, standing on its own, it would be an accurate statement of fact. It is only be the ad hominem fallacy if it forms part of an argument with this logical structure:
While many regulations exist due to regulatory capture, many also exist for good reasons. Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.
I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
> Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.
What health and safety reason requires a 3% processing fee for credit card payments? Why is it unsafe for the proprietor to live in a room in the same structure as a restaurant in some areas, but not in other places that have different zoning?
The only thing that comes close to a health and safety issue is requiring a licensed electrician, and that's still a racket because they make it infeasible for you to get the license yourself even if you're willing to learn the material.
> I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
In the absence of these rules, you start a restaurant out of your home and do the work yourself and the capital you need to start out is predominantly the things you already need in order to have food and shelter. These regulations add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional capital costs for the purpose of constraining supply so landlords and contractors and banks can extract more money.
The electrical example is particularly interesting because it's generally legal to DIY things on a house that you simultaneously own and live in. Many (not sure if all) US states even have laws preventing insurance from forbidding such (although they can generally deny coverage after the fact if the incident can be shown to stem from your DIY work).
There also exist mixed zoning areas where you can run a business that hosts customers on site out of your house.
Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation. In terms of incentives, there's probably less inclination to cut corners and be reckless with a structure that your entire family lives in.
I think I'm going to blame zoning on this one long before I take issue with electrician apprenticeships.
> Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?
Because conservatives won't let us. Literally the most famous slogan associated with leftists is wanting regular people to "own the means of production." Most leftists would be THRILLED by programs to help anyone get access to capital.
The single largest capital requirement for most new small businesses is real estate, and is real estate because mixed use zoning is prohibited in the vast majority of areas in the US, requiring the proprietor to separately pay for somewhere to put the business and somewhere to live. Zoning is a local regulation and there are very many localities completely controlled by Democrats, so why does this continue to be the case?
> So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity
Very much agree with this. Economic inequality is the root of the problem. But it's also one that very few people are willing to actually address because that sounds like "socialism" (how un-American!). It's the biggest problem facing this country, but the kind of social changes that are needed to solve that problem are anathema to Americans. (Certainly Trump doesn't give F about poor people, and the Democrats mostly pay lip service to it.)
But here's why I'm in favor of DEI initiatives, generally speaking (though certainly not all of them or even most of them):
DEI doesn't directly address economic inequality the way it should, but it does get is part of the way. Certainly it's better than nothing, which is what those who are anti-DEI are mostly proposing.
We also have to take into consideration that certain groups of people, specifically African Americans and Native Americans, are _not_ on a level playing ground, even today, because they were deliberately suppressed for centuries. Just because the Civil Rights Act finally got signed 50 years ago means that all of a sudden they have equal opportunity.
If companies and universities, and society as a whole, makes no effort to level the playing field, it won't just level on its own, especially in today's society (which does not offer the wide-open opportunities that America 100 or 200 years offered to anyone landing on its shores with $5 in their pocket).
If you don't make an effort to recruit from low-income black neighborhoods for example, you're not likely to get many takers because of the amount of effort that it takes to climb out of such deep social holes--only the very best and most determined will. But if you can deliberately offer opportunity to more people who have been suppressed, more of them will be in a position to provide their children with an environment where they can have better opportunities, and over generations society changes for the better (and everyone benefits).
So that's why I'm generally in favor of DEI type initiatives. Not what companies did or do -- which was mostly greenwashing PR based on either public opinion (last administration) or government pressure (this administration). But genuine efforts to level the playing field in terms of economic opportunity, including a boost to those who were deliberately disadvantaged for so long.
You can argue that it's unfair to white poor people. I agree, it is somewhat unfair. Economic opportunity should have nothing to do with race, and we should be making every effort to raise the economic standard of poor whites too. But we also need to recognize that poor whites are starting at a different baseline, one of poverty, yes, but not slavery and targeted suppression. So while there might be economic similarities (poor whites, poor blacks) they're not necessarily on the same level.
I don't think I've ever heard someone who opposes DEI say "we should fix our broken economy instead". But it's not wrong - the problems of racism and classism are uniquely intertwined and need to be fixed together.
The way DEI is usually framed by opponents is less "companies are using DEI to buy woke points so they don't fix the real economic issues" and more "companies deliberately hired unqualified black lesbians to tick a checkbox". These are very different critiques in terms of who they're aimed at. The latter makes it sound like we just need "more meritocracy" - i.e. to fix the problem by firing all black and poor people. The former makes it clear the problem is the people running the economy who are pitting different groups of people against one another to keep labor down.
It's rather ironic since we know that women, poc, and more often face a lot of professional resistance, and therefore have to be better than average to succeed.
Which means when you come across a black or female professional who has risen, it means they actually are much more likely to be MORE talented than the average white man.
In other words, this notion of "diversity hires" is not logical. It barely makes sense.
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?
I think it's important not to make things too black and white. Certainly it's difficult to put in place or even define a perfectly fair world. However, that doesn't mean that we can't make things more fair.
GPs comment is a perfect example of GPs comment. The burden of proof is on the person trying to make a point. They gave no arguments or evidence in their favor. I lay out a point that shows they have no ground to stand on.
It is unfortunately impossible to prove the negative. I did give examples of what I would like to see in a discussion. There's unfortunately no realistic way for me to "provide evidence" that I only rarely see it.
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.
> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals...
One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.
But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.
That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.
Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, or that employers couldn't do better with writing job postings. But I've found that a lot of corporate training content is total BS, often based on a single low-quality study that was never reproduced. When the results seem "truthy", people tend to believe without being sufficiently critical.
That sounds like a sexist stereotype to me. Men and women are the same in all the ways that matter, except for the small percentage of areas where we forget that and admit they act differently because it gives us an excuse to treat women better? Please.
What people usually argue is that men and women are the same in many ways but are often conditioned by society to act differently. That conditioning is what people are generally critical of and attempt to change via things like DEI.
> 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.
That sounds nice, but that’s not what our laws and institutions are doing, nor is it the direction they’re moving in.
"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."
So this is a hypothetical that is not worth discussing. Until specific cases can be brought to bear, why are you inventing situations that may never have existed?
I'd also like to opine on SAT scores for a second. First off, it's well known that SAT scores are not directly correlative in post-secondary educational success, nor work-success. Second they are not highly accurate measurements - there's an inherent fuzziness to them. So even if 2 students had a SAT within some Epsilon, the SAT scores might not really provide much differentiation there. Ergo, basing all of our policies on SAT scores - which are well known to be easily gamed, and also a product of a private institution - seems not a good idea.
Moving on, the problem with being against "myopic obsession with the group statistics" is you are ignoring some important evidence. What do you think of the "group statistics" that say that black people start less businesses, have less family wealth? Or black women have higher maternal mortality? These are pointing to important individual outcomes that are, to say the least, wrong.
So I don't think that paying attention to group statistics, like black maternal mortality (aka how many black moms die in child birth or due to child birth) is "myopic" and "to the detriment of individual equality." It's a very very real problem we, if we intend to call ourselves a moral society, need to solve. So having specific programs to help solve black maternal mortality in a hospital is not "countering racism with racism" imo. It's a focused program on solving a focused problem.
This logic extends out to most "DEI" things. For example is it good if the students at universities drift from representing America on average? I'd say it is not good. What about the ivy league pledges to make school free for anyone who's family income was under $X a year? Is that a myopic obsession with group statistics, namely poor people who can't afford elite colleges even if they were admitted? Seems like yes that could fit into your definition of why you oppose DEI. And IT IS a DEI program - it's increasing diversity (income/class diversity) and equality/equity (improving outcomes for individuals) and inclusions (including those who cannot afford elite colleges).
So when DEI programs that are focused on race, because much of our racial divide was artificially constructed by racist laws and policies of the past, it is suddenly bad, even though I rarely hear anti-DEI people go on about the low income scholarships for ivy leagues. Honestly it starts to sound that in fact many people may in fact have a problem not with the overall concept, but the beneficiaries of the programs.
So back to your comment, let's pick some specific circumstances that we know about and may you can propose how you'd meaningfully fix it, policy wise, within 5 years:
- Black maternal mortality us 3x higher than white maternal mortality
- Black people are ~ 14.4% of USA, but 12.5% in colleges. Is this a problem?
- If we think talent is spread equally, then we should expect to see more % of black founders in YCombinator than the 2-4% there is. Maybe not exactly 14.4% but surely closer to 10% than 0%? Is this worthwhile of being solved?
- While we are at it, only 11% of YCombinator founders are women. Is this a problem?
So what can be done about these noticeable gaps? What kinds of suboptimal outcomes are being picked when, for example, few YCombinator founders even know about the challenges and struggles of the average American? (who's a woman btw, women are 50.49% of the population, a majority) What kinds of products, opportunities, etc are being missed here? Maybe none?
What are your "race blind improvements" to economic mobility here? You have a 5 year timeline to make statistically meaningful changes to these metrics.
DEI is not a law. I get how this misunderstanding is possible given how wildly the term gets thrown about by conservatives, like it is a boogieman that is the source of everyone's problems.
Anyway, everyone is already ostensibly equal under the law, but, like you've recognized, we've still found our way into a system of racism (that goes beyond governmental discrimination). Logically, to recognize systemic racism, that folks are born into a disadvantage, then to say that these disadvantages must be ignored, is to exploit systemic racism. It does nothing to address the system. If anything, by making it an EO, it strengthens the system.
You call DEI countering racism with racism, but your only argument for this is getting mad at a hypothetical situation. To add, though, to recognize systemic racism and to then put so much weight on an SAT score, while standardized testing is known as being a component of systemic racism [0], is racist in and of itself.
With respect to education, I'm not attached to SAT scores. Pick any non racial metric of merit, and I'm OK with it. Income is fine, not a protected clause. Random is fine too. Just don't promote or penalize people based on race.
With respect to jobs, if you agree the most qualified person should get it, we are similarly aligned.
If you agree with all that, we are good, not matter what it is called.
The problem as I see it is that hiring the most qualified person for the job often requires DEI. That's because one of the primary goals of DEI programs is to attempt to ensure that people in different groups have the opportunity to demonstrate that they are qualified. That could take the form of trying to account for differences in how groups communicate their qualifications (e.g. certain neurodivergent people are likely to struggle processes that put excessive weight on ability to make small talk), trying to account for differences in access to opportunities to demonstrate qualifications (e.g. by sending recruiters to historically black colleges), trying to account for alternative was that people might be qualified (e.g. by trying to recognize how someone with technical experience form the military might be qualified even without a degree), or trying to avoid recruitment practices that are likely to favor people in the same group as the interviewer (e.g. being careful of basing hiring on "culture fit").
I'm not sure this is terribly relevant given where the conversation has gone, but in your example, college admissions, race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates.
I suspect that's how it ended up being used in a lot of places (aside from deliberate outreaches to encourage applications, etc).
Beyond that though, I'm not sure not getting into harvard is exactly a "grave injustice". You don't have a right or entitlement to go to harvard regardless of what your academic score is. And I don't think there's a reasonable argument that there should be such a right.
Then that's wrong, Harvard should not do it, and it would be good to try to create/enforce regulations that prevent them from doing it. However, that doesn't mean that all DEI efforts are bad.
I have argued elsewhere that Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone. However, the civil Rights act does prevent discrimination based on race if they do.
The supreme Court case on the admissions topic showed extremely clearly that race was not just a tiebreaker.
Imo, the far more egregious use is public universities.
Similarly, if I run an organization, I can choose to serve 10 or 10,000. I just can't hang out a sign saying "no blacks/whites allowed".
What about Brown v. Board of Education?
Do you think that Southern schools had an obligation to accept black students or did they not have to accept anyone at all?
Do you think in 1900-1945 when Harvard Yale and Columbia were putting a quota on the number of Jewish students to limit their enrollment that was fine, as Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone, Jewish or otherwise?
DEI is just giving other people the chance to setup the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people in a white dominated society.
It isn't a law. It's just looking at history and going, "They'd probably be as successful if there was a pipeline for those folks to get there, since that pipeline doesn't exist we need to represent them to allow the pipeline to be built."
You also don't seem to fully know what DEI is. You assume it's specifically hiring less qualified people because of their skin color. That isn't what DEI is.
It isn't racism. It's just giving other people the same chance of success. Representation is important.
Anti-DEI is just white people, once again, being offended that someone else is getting equal treatment. Look at trans hate, same thing. Look at book bans, same thing. It's just white folks getting upset and being offended.
> the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people
There is no opportunity pipeline for white people.
There is an opportunity pipeline for a small number of well connected, wealthy people who can get their kids into elite prep schools starting from kindergarten.
It's not open to working class white people.
Edit: that doesn't mean no working class white person can succeed. Just that the prep school, elite university, big corporation (or startup founder) "pipeline" - which certainly does exist - is for wealthy people.
That's where the idea of intersectionality comes in. A person who is white and poor might be worse off than someone who is black and rich; however, someone who is black and poor would likely be worse off than both of them.
That's also why DEI advocates generally don't advocate focusing exclusively on race. Instead they generally advocate that DEI focus on many factors such as race, wealth, disability, sexuality, gender, military service, etc.
I think that's a step in the right direction. I'd just take it one step further, consider all the factors of each person's life, and thus treat people as individuals and not as representatives of a few select groups. Intersectionality excludes too many factors as it focuses on just a few.
Quite a few "white people" got a start at accumulating property this way that was denied to "black people". Is it directly tied to going to college? No. Does it help? Probably.
My wife’s family is from a nearly all white coastal oregon county whose median household income is about the same as the national average household income for black people. Between two individuals with that same income level, the historical reasons why they ended up in that position are irrelevant. Neither person experienced those historical circumstances themselves. And regardless of path dependency, the result of that they’re on the same rung of the economic ladder today. There is no legitimate basis to help one of those people over the other.
And if you’re looking at path dependency, Asians should be the biggest beneficiaries of DEI. My dad was born in a third world village. He’d literally have been far better off going to school in the segregated south than taking a boat to school during monsoon season. I don’t think that should count in how you treat me—I grew up comfortably middle class—but it’s downright bizarre to say I’m somehow more privileged than people whose families have long been in America.
What if demanding leveling for everyone is a distraction so that it never gets leveled for anyone? Similar to now is not the time, thoughts and prayers, etc.
It also never seems to be a problem that businesses don't need everything leveled for all businesses. The PPP loans were all taken up by people with lawyers that could quickly jump on all the money, and didn't actually help many of the businesses that needed it.
Perhaps it is for some people, but I'm serious. I'd like to see the economic playing field leveled. I was pissed when I saw the Democrats use racism and sexism to sideline Bernie Sanders and real economic change. Remember "Bernie Bros"? Biden's "black firewall"?
You say you want to see the economic playing field leveled, does spending time and energy trying to tear down the existing DEI systems get you closer to that goal or farther away?
Closer. There are a lot of people who are happy to see classism continue if they can use their race or sex to get an advantage in that system. I don't believe economic equality has a chance until the Democrats abandon DEI.
Edit: Yes, I made a bold assertion, based on the view from the working class and the many intelligent white people I know who were held back by not being wealthy or well-connected. For those outside the elite pipeline, it's an advantage not to be white.
If there's a pipeline I don't know about, I'd like to hear it. Point it out so more people can join the pipeline to success!
I come from a working class background, if that’s what you can call two parents who have spent most of their life on welfare of various kinds. I along with many of my white friends are now high six figure earners.
I have no high school completion, no university education, no qualifications. So obviously it’s not as closed as you are pretending it is.
I guess we don't agree what DEI is. I'm against different criteria for people based on race. This is most apparent in school admissions and affirmative action.
I think it is a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to have dual standards based on race.
Also, I don't appreciate you blatant racism putting all white people into a single stereotype, not do I think it is accurate
This seems to be mostly a discussion in good faith, so I'm going to engage. There is definitely some ambiguity around the definition, and that's because DEI isn't law. Particularly in the context of this discussion, different companies implement different policies. So when asking if it's essentially affirmative action, the answer is "it depends".
But to shift gears, I've seen good arguments on both sides here. It seems like (in this discussion), there is a fair amount of agreement that the root of the problem has to do with disadvantaged folks lacking the same opportunities due to historical factors. So that's a good starting point.
The crux of the issue seems to be whether the appropriate course of action is to level the playing field for individuals who are starting from a disadvantage. This can be described as "equal outcome" rather than "equal opportunity". There are pros and cons to both options, but to put a fine point on it, I'm just not aware of any actions that can be taken to effect "equal outcome" that don't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
I think you are describing the situation well. I would put myself in the bucket of equal opportunity. I prefer addressing the causes, and think poverty is a better proxy for the core issue than skin color, and doesn't have the collateral damage.
A black and a white children of dirt poor single mothers are both going to have major headwinds in life.
A black and white children of married techies and doctors are both going to start with a good hand.
Addressing the problem at the college admission stage is just juicing the numbers in a way that says our University is care more about your skin color than what you can do.
It would be far better to look at what we can do to keep kids in school, stabilize their home lives, and make them into competitive college applicants.
This is the route to address equal outcome that doesn't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. It's slower to show results, but I think it's the only thing they'll actually get there in the end.
If all we care about is the numbers, we could just give honorary diplomas to kids that can't even read and make the numbers work.
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.
Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].
In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?
Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?
I would 100% support blind screening and application where possible. Also educating recruiters and diversifying pipelines. My job had the latter, and I supported it.
What I don't approve of was my annual bonus depending hitting on targets for % minority hires. That shouldn't be on my mind when I'm interviewing candidates.
Blind hiring does not actually work, it's essentially Recruitment Theatre as a way of making you feel like the interview process is more fair when it's actually more discriminatory.
There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.
So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.
People keep saying this. It's such a nice and simple statement. "All men are created equal!". It's the details of real life where you tend to run into issues.
Are we allowed to measure what percentage of various races get to go to harvard? If we find an oddity can we correct it? How do you fix both the existing racial biases and the previous history of racial biases affecting people's positions?
Saying "racism is dead let's not worry about it" seems like a really convenient position to take. You don't have to actually do any work.
I addressed this above, I explicitly said it exists, but getting better. You help people break out of poverty and ensure they have actual merit. You don't establish separate requirements and treatment based on race.
So, like, those programs exist. People are trying to help others break out of poverty. But we happen to live in a nation where a specific group of people were denied advantages most/everyone else got, for a very long time, explicitly based on skin color.
Is trying to boost certain candidates based on skin color the best way to do it? Obviously not, in a perfect world we would have a more complex and accurate system. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'm betting 90% of the people who yell about "DEI" on the TV are not "concerned that this is an imperfect way of solving the problem".
This comes up a lot in these types of threads. It's fine to acknowledge someone might have identified an actual problem. It's theoretically possible for Trump to tell the truth, if only by accident, at least once. But there is a huge difference between agreeing that something might need to be fixed, and handing power to people who want to tear it all down.
There's, dunno what to call it, maybe naivety, in places like this, where you see, a certain attitude that's like "well <current solution> isn't perfect so lets get rid of it and then maybe someone will do it better next time".
There's a bunch of issues there, but the biggest one is that usually it took years and years and hundreds if not thousands of people's efforts to get the current solution in place and if you just tear it down, it'll take the same amount of effort if not more to get something else done.
Obviously some solutions do more harm than good and so the correct answer is to remove them. I'm unconvinced, say, harvard considering race as a factor when choosing people to admit is actually doing harm to anyone, much less so much harm that we need to have a culture war over it.
I think definition is definitely an issue in the debate. What you’re describing I knew as affirmative action. I’ve only understood DEI as being willing to hire from diverse backgrounds, implemented by posting job positions in diverse areas like HBCUs. I’ve not personally seen any examples of different criteria for different people. Is this actually documented as something companies with DEI initiatives were doing post affirmative action?
You can find a lot of this in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. At its most extreme an Asian Student and Black student with the exact same MCAT test score would have a 21% acceptance rate for the former and 80% acceptance rate for the latter. The lawsuit revealed the admissions office would use intangibles to discriminate, like giving Asian students low "Personality scores"
My bonus at a fortune 50 bay area firm was based (partially) on % minority hires. These were called "DEI Targets"
I've been told face to face by several tech recruiters that they are not looking to hire my race and gender, but I should tell my minority wife should apply.
Google "diversity quotas" or "hiring targets". If you are explicitly demanding a disproportionate number of minority candidates, you are disadvantaging other candidates.
That's the thing, DEI advocates generally don't advocate for diversity quotas or hiring targets and such practices are not common. For example, when I went through the DEI portion of interviewing training we were explicitly told that we were not allowed to hire people of a certain group in order to try to improve diversity.
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.
Yes, but this isn't what they'll say if you ask them.
Hiring based on the worst prejudice or nepotism is still merit based in this sense. Meritocracy is supposed to be about varieties of merit which you aren't ashamed to admit are relevant.
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.
> 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.
I feel like it's easy to notice the examples where it stood out. A survey of all the actual results might (or might not!) change your opinion. That being said, it's easy to say stuff like "everyone should be treated equally!", it's slightly harder to actually mean it, and it's even harder to do something about it.
We're certainly not legislators debating a bill before us, we're on social media arguing, but it'd be nice if people complaining made some effort to think of a solution.
Not everyone should be treated equally, because not everyone behaves the same. Everyone should get the same opportunity to excel or fail, but you shouldn't treat excellence the same as failure or mediocrity.
Talking about how to encourage more excellence... now that's an interesting conversation.
That's fair, I did mean "equal opportunity". But yes, it is an interesting conversation. It's also a hard conversation because people really don't like hearing that they were born on third base and might have to forgo some benefits that other people are being allocated.
...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?"
Most systems that work with standardized tests, while they can systematically fail to capture certain types of talent, are fairly objective - "if you're in the top 10% on this test, then we take you". The format and subject matter of the test is known in advance, people are free to prepare for it in whatever way they want.
Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', with examples dating back to the Chinese civil service examinations during the Sui and Tang dynasty (from around 593 AD).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
> Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', [...]
It's important not to forget Goodhart's law in this context: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Unless the tested skill is wholly and directly applicable to the position you're testing for, the results will still be unfairly skewed towards those with more resources - they can afford more time to study for this specific test, and more importantly they have the resources to buy specialized learning material as well as tutoring.
Of course that's not to say that merit doesn't factor into the results at all, but it does mean that even examples of 'how to do meritocracy right' show that merit is never the only thing that matters.
This is presented as an argument against objective metrics, but a) the alternative is subjective metrics, which is even worse, b) "disparate impact" is just another metric subject to Goodhart's law, and c) resources aren't the only thing that determines test scores.
If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library. The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it. Whereas, how is a low-income white kid supposed to overcome a race quota where every slot for their race was already filled by nepotism?
> This is presented as an argument against objective metrics
No, it's not. It's presented as an argument that measuring objective metrics doesn't mean you're measuring merit.
> If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library.
The library most likely doesn't have the same specialized learning materials that rich kids can afford, so this doesn't mean the poor kid has equal opportunity.
> The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it.
You're presenting this like it's purely an issue of free time, which is obviously not the case. The poor kid possibly can't reach the library without their guardian, who may or may not have time to drive them there. The poor kid possibly doesn't have anyone to teach them using the learning material there, while the rich kid likely has either their guardians or even specialized tutors for this purpose.
Your comment is a wonderful example of how people arguing for meritocracy can ignore reality - the bare minimum is supposed to be enough for the disadvantaged, even though there's a massive difference in effectiveness.
> No, it's not. It's presented as an argument that measuring objective metrics doesn't mean you're measuring merit.
The goal is to measure merit. Objective metrics are the nearest thing we have to achieving that goal. If there is a better metric, you use that instead. But if the best metric we have isn't perfect, that's no argument for doing something even worse.
> The library most likely doesn't have the same specialized learning materials that rich kids can afford, so this doesn't mean the poor kid has equal opportunity.
And yet this is still more of an opportunity than being locked out by race quotas.
> The poor kid possibly can't reach the library without their guardian, who may or may not have time to drive them there.
Libraries are generally in higher density areas with mass transit, and in the worst case you can walk there. Moreover, primary schools generally have libraries and then the kid is already there for school.
> The poor kid possibly doesn't have anyone to teach them using the learning material there, while the rich kid likely has either their guardians or even specialized tutors for this purpose.
Which is why it takes longer. But the point is that determination has an effect. It's something you can choose rather than something you can't control. Whereas telling people that it's not a level playing field so therefore they shouldn't even try is how you perpetuate the problem forever, if not actively make it worse.
> The goal is to measure merit. Objective metrics are the nearest thing we have to achieving that goal. If there is a better metric, you use that instead. But if the best metric we have isn't perfect, that's no argument for doing something even worse.
You may notice that I didn't argue against objective metrics at all? All I've said is that objective metrics don't mean you're directly measuring merit. It's important to keep this in mind, for example by ensuring equal access to specialized training materials.
> And yet this is still more of an opportunity than being locked out by race quotas.
DEI doesn't necessarily mean race quotas - it's telling that you think it does.
> Libraries are generally in higher density areas with mass transit, and in the worst case you can walk there. Moreover, primary schools generally have libraries and then the kid is already there for school.
But the kids don't necessarily live in higher density areas! So not only do the kids get worse material and less help, they also have a much harder time accessing those worse materials. And again, a library usually doesn't have the same specialized materials that rich kids can afford. I've been trying to show that this should be kept in mind and remedied, but you're arguing against me by arguing against things I haven't said. This is usually what happens.
> Which is why it takes longer. But the point is that determination has an effect.
But kids don't have infinite time! So the rich kids still have unfair advantages, so the tests aren't directly measuring merit. And again, you're arguing that the bare minimum should be enough for the disadvantaged. You seem to effectively be arguing that meritocracy is either impossible, or should not be the goal.
> You may notice that I didn't argue against objective metrics at all? All I've said is that objective metrics don't mean you're directly measuring merit. It's important to keep this in mind, for example by ensuring equal access to specialized training materials.
But then who are you arguing against? Is there someone strongly opposed to providing equal access to training materials, e.g. by making them available in school libraries?
> DEI doesn't necessarily mean race quotas - it's telling that you think it does.
That's how it's most commonly implemented in practice whether de jure or de facto and that's its opponents' primary objection to it.
> But the kids don't necessarily live in higher density areas!
In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
> You seem to effectively be arguing that meritocracy is either impossible, or should not be the goal.
Actual perfect meritocracy is impossible because actual perfect anything is impossible. But meritocracy is the goal and what you want is to get closer to it. Which providing better study materials in school libraries can do, but that isn't what anybody is complaining about when they're complaining about DEI.
> In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
The poor kids also live rural.
Remind me again, where there are lower costs, but also lower income, less opportunity, harder to get anywhere, less education? And also, who did most of rural vote for?
In most situations, rural = poverty = trap. Our society is nowhere near prepared in addressing the rurality and poverty trap.
But really, this whole dei being a proxy for this gender or that race issue is looking around the real problem. In the end, its all about access to 2 resources: money and time. The bourgeoisie have it, the proletariat do not. As long as there is a massive gulf between the 2, we'll argue this in different names and forms (civil rights, affirmative action, political correctness, DEI)
> But then who are you arguing against? Is there someone strongly opposed to providing equal access to training materials, e.g. by making them available in school libraries?
The materials aren't available. Why do you think that is?
> In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
Ah, and that means we can ignore poor kids who don't fall into this pattern, as well as poor kids who live too far away from libraries?
> Actual perfect meritocracy is impossible because actual perfect anything is impossible. But meritocracy is the goal and what you want is to get closer to it. Which providing better study materials in school libraries can do, but that isn't what anybody is complaining about when they're complaining about DEI.
You're ignoring that this is only part of the equation, as the tutoring etc. is also missing. There must be special programs for the disadvantaged to level the playing field here, but that's what anti-DEI advocates also complain about!
Actual meritocracy isn't the goal when you argue that the disadvantaged should be fine with far worse resources and opportunities, as you've done in this thread. You've repeatedly argued that it's fine if they have far higher time investments and far worse materials, as long as they theoretically could achieve similar things as the rich. That's simply not meritocracy.
> The materials aren't available. Why do you think that is?
To begin with, they often are. A lot of school libraries actually have test prep materials available. They don't all have them because libraries are locally administered and each locality gets to make its own choices, but if that's the case in your locality then you can direct your complaints to the town council rather than the federal government.
> Ah, and that means we can ignore poor kids who don't fall into this pattern, as well as poor kids who live too far away from libraries?
This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?
> You're ignoring that this is only part of the equation, as the tutoring etc. is also missing. There must be special programs for the disadvantaged to level the playing field here, but that's what anti-DEI advocates also complain about!
Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns. Again, the goal is to get as close to measuring merit as feasible; "closer than now" is possible but perfection isn't.
> To begin with, they often are. A lot of school libraries actually have test prep materials available.
They have some materials available, but often older or less specialized ones. That's my whole point: rich people have access to better materials. This is simply a fact.
> This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?
How about introducing DEI programs that help these disadvantaged people access the same materials? Again, you're basically saying that they have to suck it up and accept their position. That's not meritocracy.
> Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns.
There's obviously an incredibly large gap between "spend $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US" and "poor kids should either have no access at all, or have to walk large distances to public libraries, only have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available". The latter simply isn't meritocracy, yet you keep arguing that it is, and keep arguing against DEI programs.
> That's my whole point: rich people have access to better materials. This is simply a fact.
"Rich people have more money" isn't an interesting fact, it's just the definition of rich people.
> How about introducing DEI programs that help these disadvantaged people access the same materials?
The term "DEI" has been applied to disparate impact rules and other policies that amount to race quotas and correspondingly garner strong opposition. If you want to advance good policies, you should stop using the same term to apply to them as is used to apply to bad policies with strong opposition.
> There's obviously an incredibly large gap between "spend $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
There is equally obviously a point at which the threshold of diminishing returns is met, and high-quality individualized private tutoring is plausibly beyond that threshold because it is very expensive. It's also still not clear how you expect to feasibly provide a high density of libraries in an area with a low density of people.
> "Rich people have more money" isn't an interesting fact, it's just the definition of rich people.
That's not what I said. This is bordering on bad faith, please don't do that.
> The term "DEI" has been applied to disparate impact rules and other policies that amount to race quotas and correspondingly garner strong opposition. If you want to advance good policies, you should stop using the same term to apply to them as is used to apply to bad policies with strong opposition.
First, what term would you have me use instead? Second, I don't believe it matters what term I choose, because it will get demonized just like DEI did.
> There is equally obviously a point at which the threshold of diminishing returns is met, and high-quality individualized private tutoring is plausibly beyond that threshold because it is very expensive.
There is still a large gap between "high-quality individualized private tutoring" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
But that's besides the point, which was: objective metrics don't mean you're measuring merit. You've shown wonderfully how those advocating for "meritocracy" often don't care about actual merit. Thank you for the discussion, but I don't think it makes sense to continue, as you seem to simply not care about the issues with your position.
Personally I appreciate your merit. Starting the race 100 meters ahead of the other runners probably doesn't get you a very accurate measure of who is the fastest.
The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.
If you then want to buy books for people who can't afford them, that's an entirely different proposal than giving the job to someone who isn't as qualified.
> The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.
Well, an athletic competition would make more sense because that actually determines whose the best. We don't test heart surgeons to see who the best is, we test to see if they can do the job.
That's what people tend to... conveniently overlook... in these conversations. No one is hiring "the best" or only accepting "the best" into their college or whatever else. They pick a good one from the pool of candidates they have available.
Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.
> Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.
When you have a competitive major university that gets thousands of applicants and you base admission strictly on test scores, you'll end up accepting only 1% black applicants because their test scores are lower for various reasons. If you wanted to accept 14% black applicants as reflects their proportion of the US population, you would have to be turning down other applicants with significantly higher test scores. It's not just about accepting someone who got a 1520 instead of a 1530, the difference is hundreds of points.
> For the 2015-2016 academic year, the average GPA of all students applying to medical schools was 3.55 and the average MCAT score was 28.3 according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
> The middle set of bars in the top chart above show that for applicants to US medical schools between 2013-2016 with average GPAs (3.40 to 3.59) and average MCAT scores (27 to 29), black applicants were almost 4 times more likely to be accepted to US medical schools than Asians in that applicant pool (81.2% vs. 20.6%), and 2.8 times more likely than white applicants (81.2% vs. 29.0%).
That link shows that (presumably in order to meet diversity targets) black applicants with a GPA of 3.2-3.39 had nearly the same acceptance rate as Asian applicants with a 3.6-3.79 GPA. 0.4 points is an entire standard deviation for GPA.
> That's not what I said. This is bordering on bad faith, please don't do that.
The premise of a meritocracy isn't that everyone is the same, it's that everyone is subject to the same standard. The alternatives are things like racism or nepotism where someone gets the position even if they're not expected to do a better job, because of their race or because their father owns the company.
But merit isn't a fixed property. If you spend your time studying physics, you'll make yourself qualified to do certain types of engineering when spending that time playing football wouldn't.
Money, then, can be used to improve merit. You can e.g. pay for tuition at a better school that someone else couldn't afford. If that school actually imparts higher quality skills than a less expensive school (or no school), a meritocratic hiring practice will favor the graduates of that school, because they're actually better at doing the job.
You can then argue that this isn't fair because rich people can afford better schools etc., but a) that will always be the case because the ability to use money to improve yourself will always exist, and b) if you would like to lessen its effect, the correct solution is not to abandon meritocracy in hiring decisions, it's to increase opportunities for the poor to achieve school admissions consistent with their innate ability etc.
> First, what term would you have me use instead? Second, I don't believe it matters what term I choose, because it will get demonized just like DEI did.
The demonization comes from rooting the concern in race rather than economic opportunity, because the people obsessed with race are interested in dividing the poor and pitting them against each other in tribal warfare, and then any term you use for that will be demonized because it will become infected with tribal signaling associations.
> There is still a large gap between "high-quality individualized private tutoring" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
And then we're back to, what is even the dispute? You can't close the entire gap because part of the gap is a result of things that are infeasibly expensive at scale and no one disputes that. There are cost effective and reasonable policies that could close some of the gap, but many of those have already been implemented or could be adopted with minimal opposition if they were simply proposed in the places not already doing them, because they're cost effective and reasonable. It's literally only a matter of going to your town council meeting and convincing them that it's a good idea.
People don't strongly oppose libraries that stock study books. They oppose race quotas.
> People don't strongly oppose libraries that stock study books. They oppose race quotas.
People absolutely do oppose libraries. They also oppose programs that pay for tutors for poor kids, programs that allocate more money to schools in poorer neighborhoods and basically anything else you can think of.
But I do admit it must make your life incredibly simple to just pretend racism doesn't exist and everyone ends up in the exact position they deserve.
> People absolutely do oppose libraries. They also oppose programs that pay for tutors for poor kids, programs that allocate more money to schools in poorer neighborhoods and basically anything else you can think of.
Opposition to spending in general is distinct from opposition to a specific policy because the policy has a deleterious effect, and is much easier to overcome if you would e.g. source the money from a constituency that supports the policy, or offer to cut something else to make room in the budget.
> But I do admit it must make your life incredibly simple to just pretend racism doesn't exist and everyone ends up in the exact position they deserve.
That would need some inclusion laws that enforce preferred hires from lower financial backgrounds instead of better prepared candidates with more resources.
Poor have less chances?
Enforce hiring of the poor.
Non-white habe less chances?
Enforce hiring of non-whites.
Non-male have less chances?
Enforce hiring of non-males.
Disabled have less chances?
Enforce hiring of disabled.
If you have less chances because of a attribute you aren’t responsible for, enforce hiring of people with such an attribute to normalize the attribute in the workspace is DEI.
The premise of that proposal is that the test scores are inaccurate as a result of the economic disparity, because people with less income have less resources to prepare for the test. That would apply in the case of an economic disparity because having more resources allows you to artificially receive a higher score. It's not about accepting someone with less merit out of charity but rather about adjusting for a measurement error.
But the economic disparity is the reason for the racial disparity, because otherwise we expect people of different races are equally intelligent, right? So the economic disparity is the real one and accounting for that inherently accounts for the racial disparity as well, and you don't need both.
Which is the reason doing the latter is controversial.
> But the economic disparity is the reason for the racial disparity, because otherwise we expect people of different races are equally intelligent, right? So the economic disparity is the real one and accounting for that inherently accounts for the racial disparity as well, and you don't need both.
That's only true if you assume prejudices like racism and sexism don't exist anymore, but they do. Even today, these are the lived experiences of many people in society. As examples, there are black people who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, even when they are more qualified and put in more work. There are women who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, and so on.
These are real implicit biases, and they don't go away by just ignoring them.
Yes but what prejudices we accept and which we do not is arbitrary. You have no choice over your height. Taller people can have more promotions and more dating opportunities, but we don't have affirmative action for short people, and we don't treat women who say they don't date short guys like we treat women who say they won't date black guys. There's always going to be discrimination, what form of discrimination is acceptable or unacceptable is still arbitrary.
First, let's not talk about dating and work in the same argument - they are fundamentally different in many important ways, and it's not conductive to the conversation.
Second, at least call a spade a spade - according to you, when people say meritocracy they actually mean "meritocracy with handicaps for non-whites and non-males". Let's not call that "meritocracy", okay?
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.
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.
Well I have no reason to think the IBM board had any reason to think Arvind wasn’t supremely well qualified and, if anything, Microsoft’s decision to go with Satya has proven an amazingly good choice.
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.
They’re not wrong. The tension is that on average, dark-skinned folk have lower merit — because of racism in the past that limited their educational opportunities, and also because it’s hard for a child to lever themselves into a higher socioeconomic group than their parents.
Among a number of other reasons. Equity vs. equal opportunities; I’m sympathetic to the latter, but what do you do when the opportunities were unequal in the past, and that causes inequitable results in the present?
One might, for instance, attempt to make up for it with targeted education. It’s a pity that the US educational system is such a disaster.
> limited their educational opportunities, and also because it’s hard for a child to lever themselves into a higher socioeconomic group than their parents.
Is this not what universal state-funded schooling is for. (And please don't forget that state-level funding is anti-correlated with local funding, so the standard "but property taxes!" thing is a red herring.)
> Equity vs. equal opportunities; I’m sympathetic to the latter, but what do you do when the opportunities were unequal in the past, and that causes inequitable results in the present?
I am not aware of anti-dei people having problems with need-based (as opposed to demographics-based) scholarships and such.
> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.
There's a lot of anti-DEI folks who are furious at what they believe DEI is.
First generation college students, veterans, disabled people, including white ones, benefit from DEI programs. Our Vice President benefitted from Yale's Yellow Ribbon program as a veteran! He's a DEI admit!
> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.
Little Rock Nine is 68 years ago. Several of those screaming women are still alive. It's really not that long ago.
But it's very telling that you keep phrasing it as 'punishment'. The problem when you truly fuck over people for many generations, is that it takes generations to make up for it. Not to punish, but to actually give the children and children's children of the victims a fair chance. Especially in such a hard and competitive society as the American one, where your familys wealth is so indicative of how well you will do.
The problem with your argument is that's not actually what advocates of DEI actually believe.
Economic inequality is part of DEI so there's no reason why people without "daddy big bucks" backing them would be left out.
In fact, most advocates of DEI want UNIVERSAL social welfare programs. The only reason that the advocate for more targeted programs is because otherwise conservatives start screaming about socialism.
The reason you are likely to get downvoted is because you are substituting personal attacks and rhetoric ("coddling", "hysteria", etc.) for actually engaging with the issues.
The reason you are likely to get downvoted is because you are substituting personal attacks and rhetoric ("coddling", "hysteria", etc.) for actually engaging with the issues.
I was thinking of writing something similar in my sibling comment, but I did not find a good phrasing. But when I read OP's comment again after writing my comment, I got this sinking feeling of 'there is just no point. This person is already strawmanning everyone else, and has pre-victimized themselves'. But maybe civil discourse is possible and useful?
I think they are: the sociological definition of a minority is a member of a class which is socially disadvantaged (sociologists talk about women as minorities for this reason) and a sociological "-ism" (racism, sexism) is policy or decisions which disadvantage the socially disadvantaged.
Presuming that position, it's understandable that they further believe that not favoring the disadvantaged is continuing the status quo, which is a disadvantage to the already-disadvantaged, hence the sociological "-ism".
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.
Ethnicity is just one aspect of diversity. In my opinion (in line with gp’s point), it is generally advantageous to increase the diversity of culture and life experiences within a population. As both of these are very difficult to precisely identify or categorize, ethnicity tends to provide a decent, though imperfect, approximation.
Anything affecting appearance can shape one’s life experience drastically as others respond to you based upon their perceptions. And ethnicity affects appearance. As does culture and class.
If this is hard to believe, it wouldn’t be hard to play with one’s appearance (or even one’s speech/behavior) to gather an understanding of how it might shapes one’s life.
> So you make assumptions about peoples' "culture" and "life experiences" based on their ethnicity?
When dealing with people, to understand the meaning behind their actions and words, one needs to have some understanding of their perspective (including their intent). Their perspective is informed by their culture and life experience, amongst other things (but life experience is broad, so mentioning anything else is just redundant). Life experience is informed by their ethnicity and the environment in which they exhibit that ethnicity. I don't say "hey this guy looks to be [...], therefore he definitely is/experienced [...]", but if they are clearly not of the ethnic majority, then I know they have experienced things that the ethnic majority has generally not experienced. That's a helpful start to understanding their perspective and relating to them. I also can ask questions to understand them better, and express insight or interest in them if my "guess" is right and if I have some background knowledge (of history/culture) to avoid misteps, at which point they are nearly always much more receptive and expressive, seeing that I am curious and open rather than uncurious and closed.
If one could somehow be "blind" to ethnicity, then it would only be a disadvantage to effective communication and relations, for both sides. (As evidence, one need only observe the general state of discourse online.) No one is that blind though, at least subconsciously.
> The differences that you posit exist--are these differences necessarily "advantageous" or can the differences be disadvantageous as well?
I'm a little uncertain as to what you mean here. Advantageous to the population or to the individual?
In either case, both exist, depending on the goals.
Individual advantages and disadvantages are probably obvious, especially the disadvantages given the amount of discussion they receive and the human propensity to identify personal threats rather than potential gains.
For populations on the otherhand, for basic long-term survival in a competitive landscape, diversity is an unequivocal advantage.
But, populations may have particular goals rather than pure real survival. For instance, they may prioritize maintaining their particular culture or ethos, beliefs and perspectives, and as such they view diversity as a threat because beliefs/perspectives are too easily transformed by the introduction of new beliefs/perspectives. Or simply because they are false goals, hiding the real goal of maintenance of power or maintenance of a subpopulation (usually a power-holding subpopulation experiencing decline). We are now experiencing the effects of that goal, as have many other cultures in the past. Always to ill-effect for the population as a whole in the long-run. And especially detrimental to individuals who are not part of the favored subpopulation.
Does it make a difference if half a day in a month you're in pain ? Does it impact your human skills if you'll get shot by a cop if you're drunk in the middle of the night ? Will it make a difference if you go to golf with your boss or go to the same book club as your scrum master ?
You can argue whether any difference is worth it or not, but truth is we all have our opinions, we're probably right on some and wrong on other, and nobody knows exactly what actually matters. So we try to cover our bases.
Because I view DEI and ethnic identity as a personal threat to my mixed kids. Followed closely by the fact that i’m from a third world country, and I know that promoting ethnic identity invariably corrodes and destroys a society. It wrecks every facet of society and governance. Every issue becomes overtaken by ethnic scorekeeping and jockeying. Democracy itself disappears, replaced with ethnic machine politics.
Maybe the emphasis on racial identity in society will prove harmful in the long run. But it's plain to see that the anti-DEI push from the Trump administration is little more than a return to white, male supremacy. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/park-service...
If I had to choose between the two, white supremacy is not what I would pick. And if it sticks around, it's going to be much more of a threat to the life and liberty of your mixed kids.
The anti-DEI push is not about “white supremacy,” but rather what some disparagingly call “multiracial whiteness.” It’s basically a return to the 1990s, when we retained a distinctly Anglo-flavored dominant American culture, but anyone could assimilate into that culture.
> It’s basically a return to the 1990s, when we retained a distinctly Anglo-flavored dominant American culture, but anyone could assimilate into that culture.
But that's.. not what the 1990s actually were like? I mean, this isn't that long ago, I was there, I lived through it. Returning to the 1990s is not a great goal, maybe we should try moving forwards?
Holy baloney, that is some top grade insane rambling. (Seriously, "Hitler-centric"? Are we just throwing darts at the scary word board now?) The administration pays lip service to getting rid of DEI, but then tries to erase genuine American heroes like Harriet Tubman while hiring completely unqualified candidates like Pete Hegseth, glorifying genocidal maniacs like Andrew Jackson, and restoring racist Confederate monuments that should have been melted down in the 60's.
If you don't see the white supremacy inherent in these actions, you are like a fish in water.
What is your thought process for that? Do you think ethnic conflicts do not exist in developing countries? Do you think nonwhite immigrants to the US would not talk about politics? Do you think nonwhite immigrants to the US are unbothered by a rise in ethnical tensions?
In which “third world” country have you experienced this?
How does ethnic identity threaten a mixed person?
Being mixed myself, I'd love to know why you think ethnic identity is a threat to me and others like me.
In my experience, it has been a tremendous advantage, despite the fact that I have lost friends and opportunities simply because I am not "white enough". And that isn't a guess or misread, I've been told that explicitly. It hurts, especially as a child, but knowing this happens allows me to understand the importance of exposing everyone to as much diversity as possible. Why? Because each and every time someone has mistreated me or judged me negatively based on ethnicity, it was quite apparent that they have lived a very cloistered life and oftentimes carry some sort of grudge or sense of victimhood despite their advantages. And they quite often look up to someone (e.g. their father or other adult role model) who exhibit the exact same prejudices, insecurities and victimhood.
I've also been threatened and harassed by the out-group because they thought I was of the in-group. Not a fun experience in the least. But again, it became quite clear why they behaved that way: a lack of diverse real-world experience (particularly a lack of positive experiences) combined with misguided lessons from equally misguided role-models.
>> In which “third world” country have you experienced this?
> Bangladesh. My uncle fought a war to gain independence from Pakistan and establish a homeland for our ethnic group.
I appreciate that, as a family history you carry. I'm curious, how do you feel about it in the context of your arguments made here? Do you think ethnic groups should fight for survival and a safe harbor (homeland)? (Rereading your prior answer, it sounds like a definitive "no")
Do you think there is value in maintaining a living culture outside of the homeland?
Do you recognize any potential loss to individuals when their family's culture or ethnicity is erased?
>> How does ethnic identity threaten a mixed person?
> Because ethnic identity is maladaptive in individualist American society.
How so? Would you consider all group identities maladaptive?
> I'm curious, how do you feel about it in the context of your arguments made here? Do you think ethnic groups should fight for survival and a safe harbor (homeland)? (Rereading your prior answer, it sounds like a definitive "no")
If an ethnic group can realistically achieve self determination, that is the best course. Bangladesh's independence came at a terrible human cost, especially to the Hindus that were purged from the country during and after independence. But the result is a country that, for all its myriad other problems, doesn't suffer from significant sectarian or ethnic conflict.
If that's not realistic--and in the U.S. it isn't--then the best course is aggressive assimilation. In China, for example, 90% of the population is considered "Han Chinese," even though in reality that designation papers over a tremendous amount of underlying diversity.
I’m quite curious why this, me sharing my own highly-applicable experience, is being downvoted. I’ll take the additional downvotes simply to be given an answer.
If it’s due to a lack of clarity, I’ll gladly elucidate here. (I can’t directly edit the comment at this point)
Edit: Haha thanks for the extra downvotes HN. So predictable.
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
A more pragmatic reason for this approach is many subgroups lack sufficient population sizes in relevant candidate pools to realistically attempt such a high-context focus with any sort of evaluation of efficacy.
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?
You know, and I know, and literally everybody in this thread knows, that race is a an imperfect proxy for other things. Why keep trotting this out like you're going to really get someone with it?
If you’re a cog stamper, probably doesn’t matter, but if you think for a living and need to generate ideas ever, diverse perspectives are invaluable. It’s the exact same as biology: bio diverse environments always outperform homogeneous ones. You can adapt to way more situations. If everyone thinks the same, and has roughly the same life experiences, when you hit a situation one person can’t think their way out of, no one will be able to because you’re all roughly the same. “Outside the box thinking” is cliche for a reason: it’s a good thing everyone wants but is hard to capture. Diverse workforce is a more reliable way to capture it.
I’m trying to establish what people think “diversity” means. The foundational premise of the civil rights movement is that race is a superficial characteristic and people are the same. Accepting that as true, the concept of “diversity” makes sense only as a confirmation about the absence of irrational racial discrimination.
But OP suggested that diversity itself was a good thing, which makes no sense because racial differences aren’t meaningful. All else being equal, it’s not possible for a “racially diverse” team to function differently than a racially homogenous one.
> All else being equal, it’s not possible for a “racially diverse” team to function differently than a racially homogenous one.
And if all horses are perfectly spherical, they'd be awfully hard to ride.
The plain fact is that people are discriminated, for and against, based solely on their appearance. It happens today and it sure happened 100 years ago.
> The plain fact is that people are discriminated, for and against, based solely on their appearance. It happens today and it sure happened 100 years ago.
What does that have to do with how someone does their job?
This thread is about diversity in the workplace. OP said: “Personally I fully agree that building a diverse workforce is more profitable…” I’m asking how that’s possible when race is a superficial and meaningless.
I'd agree with that if you meant "you" as in the US public. It is difficult to respond to a DEI comment without acknowledging that racialist logic is a pretty major factor of DEI policy and it is unfortunate that race discrimination remains a political colossus despite some sterling efforts to weaken it. The fight against racism will always be an ongoing one.
Isn’t it a bit odd to dismiss discussions that focus on race, when DEI by definition centers on factors like race, gender, and ethnicity?
If the goal is to address inequality across these lines, shouldn’t that require a strong focus, some might say an obsession, with those very attributes?
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.
Ah, McKinsey. That their pro-remote study was bogus will probably come as a shock to the four people left on planet earth who aren't familiar with "where there's fraud there's McKinsey"
Target basically decided to stop "over-delivering" on DEI. e.g. stuff like $2 billion to black-owned businesses, increase black workforce by 20%, etc. Even with the rollbacks, they are probably doing on average more DEI for the sector, than a Costco, Amazon.
They definitely messed up the messaging, though, in that they positioned themselves to be somehow boycotted by both left and right.
Costco is 20x the business as Target for numerous reasons, I kind of doubt any of it has to do with DEI.
Personal experience is that Costco foot traffic has been visibly increased in recent weeks. Our Costco has a few colorful members of staff, which I personally find makes my visits there more pleasant.
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'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?
dei programs in academia and corporations aren’t limited to breaking ties at the end of hiring. But I can consider the possibility in good faith.
I think giving someone who might normally not have the chance is a good tie breaker. I’m opposed to a policy that dictates that must be determined by skin color/gender/religion. If the individuals involved in the hiring felt that was the right tie breaker based on their knowledge of their community, I’m not opposed to that.
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.
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).
> Acceptance rates for students with slightly higher and slightly lower than average GPAs and test scores are displayed in the other columns. In other words, the table above displays acceptance rates by race/ethnicity for students applying to US medical schools with average academic credentials, and just slightly above and slightly below average academic credentials.
So, uh, what? The argument is that it's now awful and horrible that average black students are accepted more frequently than average white students? Who cares.
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.
Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement—especially when they have clear, documented consequences for marginalized groups—is not attacking the person, it's addressing the substance. There’s ample evidence that recent anti-DEI efforts are not grounded in merit-based reform but in resentment and exclusion. A few examples:
* Executive Order 11246, which prohibited discrimination by federal contractors, was eliminated.
* Civil Rights investigations in schools and colleges were dropped or deprioritized.
* Investigations into racial and gender discrimination in banking were quietly shelved.
These are a few structural, documented actions, not just rhetoric. Their impact falls disproportionately on people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and immigrants. That’s not an ad hominem, it’s observable policy.
Yes I agree almost completely with what you wrote. However, I disagree with your premise that GP was "critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement":
> Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement
Here is their entire comment:
> 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.
Reading that yet again, it seems to me to be clearly making an argument that we shouldn't listen to any of the points/arguments/information they present because they don't have pure motives.
From the wikipedia page on Ad Hominem:
> this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.
If you believe that GP was critiquing actions and policies, can you kindly point out which actions and policies?
How about this: the GP was clearly communicating a all-but-obvious conclusion based on the the demonstrated, highly publicized, and widely available evidence to anyone who has paid a modicum of attention. For Trump and his team: the motives are the substance!
At this point I do not think it is reasonable for an informed participant in this conversation to demand every attack on the motives of the current administration given the overt words, policy and behavioral choices supporting such a conclusion. The GP wasn't speculating or prepping for debate club, they were summarizing a (seemingly) obvious conclusion. That you agree with me tells me you know at least some of this.
This isn't a debate class where we score points on technical merit. Do you disagree with the point being made, or were you just having fun demanding the GP show their homework? But perhaps in fairness, I've moved the goalposts. Yet once again I would say: it seems a distraction from the obvious larger, more important, easily demonstrated point.
> U.S. State Department hire Darren Beattie wrote on X: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."
Yes, to be clear I'm not suggesting they have pure motives, nor am I suggesting they don't deserve the criticism. You are reading into my statement things that aren't there.
What I'm saying is that's irrelevant to the claim they are making. It is an ad hominem, which is a formal logical fallacy and has been for a very long time (going back well over 2,000 years)[1]. It didn't used to be controversial to say that ad hominem was a fallacy.
Are you disagreeing with me that the above is ad hominem? Or that ad hominem is a fallacy?
Wouldn't it be much better to just refute the claim instead of attack the person's motives? I.e. I think it's pretty damn easy to demonstrate that non white men have been great leaders who have gotten things to work. Refuting that claim is the non-fallacious approach and may actually convince someone honest (likely some third-party who is reading it later, you'll probably never convince the original speaker).
The claim we are arguing is "anti-DEI stuff is predicated on the idea that civil rights are bad and that white (straight dude) rule is good.". You said this claim is an ad hominem fallacy. I quoted someone in the administration who is literally saying "competent white must be in charge," an exact example of what the claim is stating.
> Wouldn't it be much better to just refute the claim instead of attack the person's motives?
No, at some point, and we have absolutely passed it in the US, you can be overwhelmed by the lies and bad faith arguments if you try to respond to them individually, and it's necessary to try to derail the source.
it’s okay to attack a person’s motives when those motives are just racist as fuck. The arguments put forth by the ‘anti-DEI’ crowd are what is known logically as ‘bullshit.’
How so? The words and actions of the current administration and its supporters are pretty clear about the intent. One of the first acts of the president was to fire a black man and a white woman from the joint chiefs of staff and replace them with white men. The current secretary of defense claims that women shouldn't be in the military, and rolled back protections for LGBT servicepeople. Records of the black service men are erased from public web pages. I could go on and on and on, it is a nearly endless list.
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.
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.
> Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.
Also from what I saw, juniors struggled without always-available guidance while mid and seniors could get a lot done by avoiding interruptions. If the mix of employees changed in those couple of years, that alone could have been the entire difference.
Obviously there are pluses and minuses for both but the pluses outway the cons otherwise companies wouldn't have survived after years of it. No this is just popular because the elite noticed workers were feeling happier and more empowered and they feel threatened by that. So along come Trump with an escape hatch, and they make up bullshit about DEI and WFH not working even though it worked for years and stock market was way up. Nope this is all about the old boys network trying to keep the peasants in place and save a few bucks this quarter.
What you call “popping your head in someone’s cube”, I call “distraction from doing deep work”.
I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption.
My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard.
I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions.
No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.
Point taken about the distraction. For me it's the this to do on the working from home days. Office days are all about talking through plans, questions, problem solving or investigation etc. sure you can say that this does not require an office but it works well for me.
1 person's deep work might mean an entire department is stuck twiddling their thumbs because they're blocked and can't reach the person absorbed in "deep work".
wfh can be great for individual productivity, but it can also seriously hamper team productivity.
That seems to indicate a catastrophically low bus factor--people get sick, take vacations, sleep, quit, etc. If you’re blocked on an IC doing anything other than finishing their task you've got a bigger problem than them going out of pocket for a day, fix the real problem.
(If they're a manager/decisionmaker of some sort then they better learn how to multitask online, which is like a 30 year old skill requirement at this point)
I have been in some type of team lead/architect position for almost 10 years now. 4+ years at product companies and 5+ in consulting companies. At any given time, I might have needed a decision to be made by my CxO, the client or another team.
On the other hand I might be preparing for a meeting, in a meeting, on a plane, at a customer’s site etc. On the opposite end, there is always a list of things I need to get done. I put that item as “blocked” and move on to my next item. If it is a downstream dependency as a developer, I mock it out and keep going.
If you are dependent on one person to answer a question, what happens when they go on vacation or if they are otherwise unavailable? I make it a point to not be a single point of failure.
Also, I keep my calendar up to date, including time I need to do “deep work”, when I’m traveling for business, of course meetings automatically show up. Anyone is free to put a meeting on my calendar if they need to interact with me synchronously.
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.
I don't know if it's bad management per se. I think some people are very well suited for remote; some people aren't. Probably a rough extension of introversion/extroversion in the people mix.
If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general).
Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan.
The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse.
My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.
I think both problems are real, and your last paragraph really gets at why. People and jobs vary widely, and so does the quality of management. If you have a strong business and reasonably mature teams, you might not even realize problems with your management culture and practice are until something big changes; conversely, if you have strong managers you might have been able to soak up a lot of personnel and job issues before they got attention because some unappreciated middle managers put a lid on potential problems first.
In all cases, you really someone with time to look at the business as a whole to evaluate these things. For example, one of the things which has made RTO unproductive for many workers are open plan offices, which is a really easy problem to see and fix if workplace productivity is someone’s job but not if the RTO push is being driven by politics or the need to justify leases.
Agreed, but falling commercial real estate prices will allow some forward thinking companies to go back to private offices for developers, which arguably is the best solution (apart from commute/flexibility) for most, productivity wise.
Funny you mention fraud... I worked for a company for quite a while that was absolutely dedicated to WFH for engineering - but swore up and down that sales just couldn't work without "bullpen" office setups.
Come to find out at least one entire office was engaged in widespread misreporting and fabrication. Turns out fraud is pretty tempting when you can easily avoid any paper trail.
Re:introvert/extravert I suspect it's the reverse.
Extraverts, broadly, aren't afraid of picking up the phone and calling you to chat about the email they sent you three minutes ago while driving and also on mute in a zoom; introverts can use remote work to be unreachable in a way they can't if you can just walk over and impose yourself on them.
yeah I feel like blaming management is like blaming teachers when students got bad scores during remote-schooling. You can give them all the resources they need to succeed, but if they'd rather go to the dog park in the middle of the day, there's not much that can be done.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.
The metaphor breaks down a bit when you consider that teachers don't generally get to pick their students while organizations get to choose their employees. Failing to choose the right employees is a failure of management.
I don't mean completely in person, but I do expect a lot of companies will want to meet the person in real life at least once. Which adds huge logistics problems.
Btw I'm not saying 'cheating', that's one thing. I am meaning industrial scale fraud with remote candidates. Eg having one person interview then another (much worse) person gets the job. There are gangs that are going to almost unbelievable lengths to do this.
About a year ago I moved to a new, largish company and, for the first time in my career, got to see how a company can be bad at remote work.
It's by being bad at work, period, but in ways that can be partially mitigated by being in-person. Poor documentation of processes, lots of know-the-right-person involved in getting anything done or figured out, using Teams (its design is remarkably awful for organizing and communicating within and among... teams) rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.
This stuff is also making in-person work less efficient but it's easier to work around the problems when in-person.
Better than resisting remote work, would be for them to suck less at managing a business. Even if they continued resisting remote work, they should do that!
Teams' core problem is that the actual Teams-section is more like a bulletin board than a chat system, almost like it was targeting that weird impulse companies had for a few years to build "company facebooks" or whatever.
The real chat part is cordoned off in ad-hoc channels that individual users can sticky, but that aren't "structural" and can't really have order imposed on them, if that makes sense.
It's like if Slack only had the DM and group-message feature, and no channels.
My thing is that while better IM systems exist, none is what I would call "Good" or even "Acceptable". Being better than Teams is not really saying much :-)
I haven't used Slack in years, so I can't speak to it, but it sucked when I used it. Back when our team was all colocated in one building, I intentionally had my IM app turned off and disconnected. Interruptions in person suck, but with Slack et al interruptions were multiplied significantly. Kind of: "If you can't be bothered to get up and walk to my cube, it probably wasn't that important."
What I want from Teams and similar SW:
A way to, with a keystroke, mark all messages as "Read" (even when focus is not on the window).
A way to, with a keystroke, print out all unread messages on my console (or in a popup window, or whatever).
In other words, just give me a damn API I can program these things with. Teams' API lets me get messages, but will not let me see if a message is read or unread.
Any app that forces me to open up the window, click on a dozen channels to read all the latest messages, sucks. Period. I should be able to read it all with one click/keystroke, and have them marked as "Read" when I do it.
And being in an office doesn’t help if no one on your team is in the same office. If you work in a large company that has multiple offices, you are still going to have the sane problem because eventually the person you need is not going to be in your office.
Even the small companies I’ve worked at (100-700 people) had multiple offices where you had to coordinate time to meet with the people you needed.
I’ve also worked remotely for the second largest employer in the US. Amazon has internal “interest” channels for each service team (the team responsible for an AWS service). Anyone could ask a question and usually one of the developers of the service would help.
At Google, they found that engineers L5 and above got more work done with RTO, and engineers at L4 and below got significantly less work done. WFH is great but it doesn't work for fresh engineers (who are often the most gung-ho about it as well).
These are my disadvantages of working remotely. I say all of these things as an advocate for hybrid work arrangements and co-working spaces/satellite offices:
1) Some people work better in an office. Offices are literally designed for working anyhow.
2) Some people didn't, and/or still don't, have optimal conditions in their house to work remotely.
I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.
3) Some jobs aren't compatible with remote work. Examples:
- Tech sales (moreso for complex sales and expansions than new sales)
- Many people who work in the public sector (even before this administration's aggressive RTO campaign)
- Most folks doing hardware or embedded work
- Pretty much everyone that we interact with outside of our home on a daily basis, like front desk personnel, doctors, mechanics, retail and restaurant staff, etc.
This creates an unfair imbalance of "haves" and "have nots". It is also very easy for the "have nots" to typecast those who WFH as lazy, especially given some of the memes of people doing all sorts of other things during core hours.
4) Some people don't naturally communicate what they're doing over Slack. This is the one thing I'll blame on management is communication.
Weekly "15-minute" hour long standups and check-in meetings covered for people like this back when we worked in offices, but it can be easy for these checkpoints to slip in when everyone's remote.
Now, these meetings existing are, in and of themselves, signs that management can be improved. Between Slack/Teams/whatever, bug trackers, Git commit histories, Office 365/Google Workspace APIs and all of the other signs of life of people doing things, there are ways for the PHBs to check that people are doing things so that they can report the things being done to their PHBs so they can report to their PHBs all the way up to the board and investors.
It would be great if more companies invested more in their processes to make it possible to assess productivity without needing inefficient meetings. This would make it possible to be a high-performing company regardless of location.
But change is hard, and it's easier for senior leaders/execs to throw their hands up and say "this isn't working; back to the office, now", especially when those leaders are already traveling all of the time as it is.
(I know that the trope of CxOs who golf/eat steak dinners all of the time is common; my experience working with people at these levels does not completely reflect that.)
5) Work-life balance is so much easier to immolate when working remotely.
When your home is your office and your work apps are on your personal phone, it takes the mental fortitude of a thousand monks to not be "terminally online" at work.
"I'll just hop back on after I'm done with the kids/dinner/etc." is the new normal. It existed before WFH, but it feels so much worse now, as the technology needed to set this up is so much more pervasive (mostly MDM being mature for Apple devices and Android becoming much more secure at the cost of everything that made Android fun for us hackers).
This has the fun side-effect of making people who try very hard to keep work and life as separate as possible look like slackers even when they're not.
6) Establishing rapport and camaraderie is much harder to do remotely. This "just happens" when you're working next to the same people every day for months/years at a time.
This was most evident when I joined a new company after COVID to avoid an acquisition. Almost everyone was super tight with each other because they hung out all of the time. There were so many inside jokes/conversations/memories that I was basically left out of, and because traveling was impossible then, forming new ones didn't really happen.
I get that many on this board view this as a feature, not a bug, but friends at work is important to some (most?) people. It's the one thing I miss from the before times more than anything else. Well, that and traveling all of the time!
7) Last thing I'll say on this: onboarding, in my opinion, is much worse when done remotely.
I've switched companies four times since COVID. ALL of these onboarding experiences have had some combination of:
- Loads of training materials, like labs and new hire sessions, that are dry as toast over Zoom but can be extremely engaging in-person,
- Some kind of buddy system that falls apart because everyone is drowning in a sea of Zoom meetings and the last thing people want to do is have ANOTHER zoom meeting explaining things about your new job that are kind-of difficult to explain without shadowing, and
- An assumption that you are a self-starter who will learn how to do your job by self-organizing meetings with people and scouring whatever documentation/knowledge/recordings/etc you can find.
This might just be a 'me' thing, but I've found remote onboarding to be a poor substitute for onboarding at an office somewhere.
> I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.
At home, there have never been more than three other people in my house, when I’m “at work” with my door closed, they knew not to bother me. At work in an office there are constant distractions.
As far as “tech sales”. I’ve lead my share of complex cloud tech projects from discovery, customer acceptance to leading the delivery - all remotely. Yes sometimes I had to travel to the client’s site. But I haven’t needed to be in the office with the people on my team (who were sometimes in another country).
My coworkers are just that my coworkers. At work, “I’m taking a step back to look at things from the thousand foot few”, “taking things to the parking lot”, and “adding on to what Becky said”. I’m a completely different person at home. At the end of the day, my “friends” at work are not interested in keeping their jobs. I go to work to make money - not friends.
I’ve worked for two companies remotely since 2020 - Amazon and now a much smaller company. They both had excellent onboarding procedures. While AWS wasn’t “remote first”, my department (Professional Services) was as is my current company. Both had “onboarding buddies” and Amazon had a list of people you should set up 1x1’s with an instructions for the relevant internal systems you should use.
> after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic....
The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza.
"After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.
by that token; you can argue HIV is endemic and nothing should be done about it...
people will understand wearing condoms but apparently can't understand masking... hmm... neither are very difficult to do, I'd argue that wearing a condom is more tricky in some aspects.
the reason is simple: wearing a mask reminds people there is a risk and it doesn't "look good", despite its many advantages for many pathogens and pollutants; also acknowledging indoor air quality is crap is hard for businesses (and governments) to do since they would need to invest into better ventilation and filtration systems.
you are accounting for immediate deaths; you have to keep in mind that covid causes immune dysfunction, heart disease etc; 10% of people are still not recovered after 4 years...
long term effects are rare in the (proper, confirmed flu, not your cold you think is the flu) flu
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)
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.
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.
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?
Profits don't have to spiral for something to become clear it's not working.
Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before".
Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.
the bottom line profit is your primary guideline if you are succeeding. Profits have been great for most companies for quite a while now. WFH works in most cases. The current push to end it, is simply a fad amongst CEOs because it's popular, not because it is proven or has merit. If you are in a construction crew, obviously you can't work from home. If you work in an office and mostly on your own "stuff" you can work from home and work more productively without all the office distractions and negative energy.
A company's profits can remain high even while operating very inefficiently.
You seem to have strong opinions on WFH. Find a job that agrees and allows this. If your current employer requires RTO, well.. they're paying you to be in the office so show up and stop the conspiracy theories.
It's objectively vastly more expensive to operate an office building or buildings. No organization is going to decide to incur the significant expenses and liabilities associated with operating facilities with people in them if they don't need to. Very little logic supports your claims, especially regarding the "CEO" and "fad" points you are attempting to make.
There's a complication to starting a company. The execs answer to the board and investors. Since so many companies are unprofitable for so long, it is very difficult to start a company today without either being rich or being beholden.
I'm going to guess that most people who start companies are beholden. The investors need people to RTO for some important reasons - real estate values, economies built on supporting workers, and of course - some amount of lifestyle differentiation (a luxury of having fuck you money is being able to spend more time with friends and loved ones than the peasant class).
WFH is a one of the most disruptive cultural shifts ever - pushback was only expected.
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.
> different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all of the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.
out of a handful of the largest companies in the world, in a thread about the specific company IBM and its policies, why do you avoid naming the company and CEO?
Apparently my role could be remote but the company took it away.
I don't think we need to give their good wills. They are just using the economic reality to fuck us, and I'm sure many of us are considering fucking back when the stars are right.
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
> The burden of proof in constructive dismissal cases lies with the employee.
The only practical way is if somehow an executive breaks ranks and exposes some list or email or private conversation where he they were planning this.
A harder way is some coordinating action from employees. All get together to figure out the patterns.
It depends on the state, but you don’t have to prove intent, you have to prove that the conditions of your job changed enough that it is an unreasonable burden.
If they transfer you to a location that requires an additional hour of commuting, you just have to prove that the commute takes an extra hour.
No. The government authority in charge of employment decides whether that change is enough of a change of the original job that it constitutes constructive dismissal.
If so, you can quit your job and are eligible for unemployment and any other legal benefits of having been fired without cause, and a claim is put against the employers account in the unemployment system.
Oh for unemployment sure, but the claim here is that the person hired under a DEI initiative is now let go, but under a different scheme of “restructuring”. Now their job would be to find redress and either reverse that or win monetary damages. It’s not impossible but it’s an uphill battle unless someone find a written directive somewhere a red flag. Or all the terminated employees somewhere coordinate to prove a particular pattern.
I wasn’t commenting on that case. Constructive dismissal is irrelevant in that instance if you have been let go since you don’t have to prove that your job was changed if it no longer exists.
Also, it is perfectly legal to terminate someone in most of the US under a restructure.
My original response was just pointing out that proving constructive dismissal doesn’t have to do with the intent of the employer, merely the effect of those actions. In your original example the employer can’t pretend that asking someone to commute to Alaska three days a week is reasonable and therefore they weren’t fired without cause when they refuse to do that.
Juries are allowed to infer intent. They do not need an explicit statement admitting it.
To be honest, I find it very weird that you quoted that part and had the response you did as if you knew what you were talking about. By your logic, intent would essentially be impossible to prove in just about any circumstance. Obviously, that's not true. In reality, there's tons of caselaw about when intent can be inferred by a jury for any claim requiring intent.
> To be honest, I find it very weird that you quoted that part and had the response you did as if you knew what you were talking about.
Well honesty is always key, I find.
> Obviously, that's not true. In reality, there's tons of caselaw about when intent can be inferred by a jury for any claim requiring intent.
By one juror or two, and if the defense lawyers are dummies and fail to do their job. Corporations like IBM have lawyers on retainer and they are not that incompetent.
It will be hard to infer intent if the defense can present some evidence of “increased efficiency”, “working together” and “consolidating”. Without a smoking gun piece of evidence proving the contrary it would be an uphill battle, especially for one individual plaintiff.
>By one juror or two, and if the defense lawyers are dummies and fail to do their job. Corporations like IBM have lawyers on retainer and they are not that incompetent.
What do you mean by one juror or two? My point is regarding when juries are legally allowed to make an intent determination. It often does not require a specific expression of intent and instead can be inferred from activities that indicate things like reckless behavior and disregard for the potential that they do the unlawful thing.
>It will be hard to infer intent if the defense can present some evidence of “increased efficiency”, “working together” and “consolidating”. Without a smoking gun piece of evidence proving the contrary it would be an uphill battle, especially for one individual plaintiff.
No, that's just a defense which might not cut against the inference at all.
>Do you speak for all jurors?
No, you seem to be confused about the evidence a court allows a jury to rely on when it makes a state-of-mind determination in civil suits. My reading of your post was that you suggested it required an express claim regarding intent. That is not the case, legally. Maybe you didn't realize that and were just posting layman stuff, which is understandable. It's not just a reflection of legal reality.
I don't think that you appreciate the typical legal procedure is that before any fact-question is presented to the jury, parties move based upon the available evidence, whether or not there is sufficient facts presented to warrant a fact-decider's decision. This occurs prior to trial at the summary judgment stage and after evidence is presented at trial. So there is often a legal boundary as to what evidence a jury can consider when it comes to any fact question (i.e. did this party have intent? did this party do the thing? etc)
> What do you mean by one juror or two? My point is regarding when juries are legally allowed to make an intent determination. It often does not require a specific expression of intent and instead can be inferred from activities that indicate things like reckless behavior and disregard for the potential that they do the unlawful thing.
The point is the defense can show loads of documents about how working together increases efficiency, how they are streamlining units and they plaintiff has to prove they were targeted as an ex-DEI hire and even though there is just hunch. I don’t know about other countries but that’s how it works in US.
Worker protection here is very weak. There are protected categories but they’d have the burden of proof they were let go specifically because of their protected category.
> I don't think that you appreciate the typical legal procedure is that before any fact-question is presented to the jury, parties move based upon the available evidence, whether or not there is sufficient facts presented to warrant a fact-decider's decision
Exactly, moreover jurors would be instructed to make up their mind based on the presented evidence. One side will have papers and the other will have read-between-lines hunches. Sure jurors can still do whatever but unless they’re all activist jurors they will just go with whatever side is more convincing and the evidence they have been presented.
Which is exactly why they lead with the "closer to the customer" bullshit. The federal government is starting to do the exact same thing (with the exact same rationale) right now.
I really don't mind RTO. As a mostly-remote worker right now, I would actually prefer a few office days each week; being right next to colleagues and able to spitball news, ideas, and other work (and non-work) stuff is great for my knowledge, abilities, and morale. With that being said, It's also nice to be able to get uninterrupted heads-down time, or just work at my own pace at home some times.
I think 3 days in-office and 2 days WFH is the sweet spot, at least for me.
Don't fall for the commute hype. Get a life that doesn't living at work or require sitting in traffic to fulfill the whims of management control-freaks.
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...
> 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.
Just thinking out loud here, are they not worried about class action lawsuits. Maybe they think the courts and jury trial is on their side, but if the 2028 election doesn't go towards the current admin's side, then won't there be massive lawsuits? It's not like IBM is a stranger to that either way.
What's the risk calculus here? If I were an apathetic CEO who just cares about the bottom-line, I would wait for the government to at least publicly pressure the company before bending the knee. That way, the company is insulated from lawsuits to a degree, "coercion" could be the defense.
It's almost like they're eager to promote racism now lol.
At least as described by the OP, I have a hard time believing IBM is doing this. There are a whole bunch of markets -- far more than they listed in their flagship/hub site list -- where a vendor like IBM would have a several - a few dozen dedicated teams that just serve local clients. Now, in a lot of cases (but by no means all) the sales engineers can get badged at their customers and spend a few days a week onsite. While not unheard of, especially at the largest shops, its less common for the account managers to be badged and have unfettered access.
That said, I've never worked at IBM, and the sales segments they listed in the article (strategic, enterprise, etc.) are notoriously company-specific. But, I can't imagine the ones in the exception list cover all of teams with named accounts.
Deliberately placing your sales teams in different cities than their clients is almost always an incredibly dumb idea, WFH or not. In 15 years of sales engineering/sales engineering management, I remember exactly one account team we deliberately placed outside of their client geography, and that was because the client was so spread out, it made more sense to put the team close to a big airport than pick a single client site to place them near.
edit - I’m talking about dedicated/assigned teams, not inside sales or startups that have one or a handful of teams to cover everything.
> 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.
As a European who used to go "fuck yeah Intel!" "fuck yeah Boeing!" "fuck yeah IBM!" etc... it seems like US companies are going down the drain real fast.
I blame bad management, lack of innovation, poor quality control and of course, general greed...
In this case it is bad management hiding behind RTO/DEI excuses. WFH works for many and especially on "cloud" stuff I do not see the point of having people systematically RTO to... tweak a few config files (most of the time) or change some hardware (some of the time)
I have the example of a friend in IT who was made to drive 4 hours to change.... the default DNS on a Windows machine at a client's.... a phone call would have done it...
I attended a talk given by a local author who wrote a book about his father being the first black software engineer at IBM, who joined with several women around 1950, and the gist was that it was mostly to take some heat off of them for this collaboration.
in kindness to the previous poster, they are being as direct and truthful as one can be on a platform that has tilted hard to the right in the past 5 years and where discussion of the alluded-to-salute is flagged [0].
It’s striking how corporate complicity in systematic oppression can be sanitized over time until egregious patterns only resurface as political talking points.
Of all the RTO orders, part of this at least makes sense. If you're in sales, it's beneficial to be close to your clients.
But if you're working on cloud, hard to see how working at the office is any more productive than from home.
also, this is significant:
> The employee shuffling has been accompanied by rolling layoffs in the US, but hiring in India – there are at least 10x as many open IBM jobs in India as there are in any other IBM location, according to the corporation's career listings. And earlier this week, IBM said it "is setting up a new software lab in Lucknow," India.
Within the last half decade it appears like IBM overtly markets to whatever administration and party is in power, a few years ago they were marketing creepy vaccine passports [1].
"…Black outlined the key role of IBM's technology in the Holocaust genocide committed by the German Nazi regime, by facilitating the regime's generation and tabulation of punch cards for national census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity."
"That One Time It Powered a Genocide" is just an older example of how IBM is happy to put profit over principles. They have a long history that includes happily selling to authoritarian regimes¹, knowingly selling technology that doesn't work², commercializing biometric data without consent³, age discrimination, and more.
I don't have a dog in this fight and if there are recent examples of this kind of crap going on, by all means publicize them. My issue is with people who drag up shit from 100 years ago and they go "see how bad they are?"
Go back far enough and everyone's had a skeleton in their closet.
Red Hat is involved with a lawsuit alleging that they used illegal criteria to discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, and sex in hiring and layoffs. Until that is settled one way or the other, Red Hat is a potential liability to its parent company. The most likely path is status quo so if doesn't look like IBM is punishing nor rewarding Red Hat for the situation.
We're still buying tons of things from IBM. Storage, Linux, automation, data analytics...
Part of it is the old guard saying "Let's see what IBM has" when we're looking for solutions, but they do provide a pretty large group of established products. They're already in, as well.
They are one of the larger MSPs globally, they own RedHat and Hashicorp, SPSS is the backbone of the global logistics industry, and IBM Cloud does have decent traction in the financial services and logistics space.
Getting rid of DEI is par for the course with the trump administration.
How else would they handle the database and personnel backend of the current fascist's database requirements?
Jewish Holocaust victims' tattoos were IBM database primary IDs. and given ongoing federal/government contracting, thus is yet another opportunity to be at ground zero for another genocide.
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.
> 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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110409171021/http://www-03.ibm...
It has both the original typewritten scan and a searchable-text version right underneath.
That's a pretty solid letter given the 1953 date! Consider it predates MLK's and Rosa Park's most famous activism. Not bad.
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There is a conflation in the idea behind this comment that drives me crazy. This version of equity based on race is using race as a proxy for outcomes in life that are actually based on a wide variety of factors. Equality based on race is treating peoples race as equal.
The idea that we care about equity is important, but using race as a proxy means we need to care especially about the proxy and making sure the proxy is representative of the outcomes and how the inputs are effecting the outputs. And, if we're being honest, it's kind of an arbitrary proxy beyond the correlation.
We are already seeing huge problems here with men vs women using gender as a proxy for outcomes, where we've basically flip-flopped graduation rates, but since it's a lagging indicator, we've really gotten ourselves into a pickle where we are creating an equity problem while trying to solve an equity problem, because we're so focused on outputs throughout every stage of the life process that we're missing a massive shift in the inputs (like who we're graduating).
Equality is important. Equity is important. They are different things, that should have different attention. Equality uses identity directly. Equity uses identity as a proxy for outcomes. We need to be very careful when we focus too much on one over the other.
Why use various proxies at all? Most of the group differences seem to largely share poverty as a primary root factor, and this impacts plenty of sub-groups within the supposedly advantaged groups as well. So why are we not simply addressing that directly?
A refrain I've been seeing a lot lately is that the outcome of a system is its purpose. Perhaps that reasoning should be equally applied to an analysis of the implementation choices made by various social programs and the solutions espoused by various political movements.
Why? I presume that people don’t look for second and third order effects. They see disproportionate numbers of people of color struggling, they blame the first order grouping as the cause.
Statistics is complicated. People reject even straightforward theories with obvious scientific bases. It makes sense.
> Equity is important
As I understand it, “equity” in this content generally refers to equality of outcomes between groups. I don’t see why that is desirable, important, or even possible.
Would you explain why you believe that equity is important?
It means equal outcomes for arbitrary groups. We should expect fairly similar outcomes for groups based on arbitrary differences. If we don’t, it should concern us.
Non-arbitrary issues should obviously affect outcomes, but the prevalence of melanin should affect skin cancer rates, not incomes.
> I don’t see why that is desirable, important, or even possible.
Are you okay with being in one of the groups where the outcomes are worse?
I am not sure what you mean. Would you give me an example?
I’m not sure what groups you were referring to in your original post, so it would probably be better if you provided the example.
> This version of equity based on race is using race as a proxy for outcomes in life
Because racism is ongoing and negatively impacts people of color, it makes sense to focus where harm is being done.
There is a leftist school of thought that agrees with you (focus on class instead of race). But I personally don’t believe that a focus purely on outcomes would be applied equitably while racism still exists.
> we're so focused on outputs throughout every stage of the life process that were missing a massive shift in the inputs
It is a fallacy to think we can’t focus on multiple things at once. Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others.
>Because racism is ongoing and negatively impacts people of color, it makes sense to focus where harm is being done.
My point is that there are plenty of -isms going around and focusing on race alone completely ignores the fact that our lives are impacted in different ways. When we take a flat reductionist view, as if Sasha and Malia Obama face the same challenges as some randomly chosen person of the same race, we have the potential create a significant class divides within communities, as the folks of a certain race with a privileged background fill the rolls that ought to be set aside for folks who are still dealing with the significant economic after-effects of a discriminatory past.
>It is a fallacy to think we can’t focus on multiple things at once. Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others.
The point and the problem is that there is no coordination, so if everyone is trying to make a positive impact, it is very likely that we will overshoot. This is always the case when you have an uncoordinated approach to dealing with a lagging indicator.
> My point is that there are plenty of -isms going around and focusing on race alone completely ignores the fact that our lives are impacted in different ways.
No it doesn’t. We have other means of support for people whose lives are impacted by e.g. poverty.
> When we have a flat reductionist as our view, as if Sasha and Malia Obama face the same challenges as some randomly chosen person of the same race, we have the potential create a significant class divides within communities.
There are already significant class divides in the community. Our system specifically encourages that sort of thing. The idea that a few high performers get the same benefits (ones that aren’t already means tested) as the poorest is irrelevant in the scheme of things.
> The point and the problem is that there is no coordination
A interesting point. I suspect it’s not true, but either way this is the first I’ve heard anyone arguing for better coordination. I don’t see that present in any of the current efforts.
>There are already significant class divides in the community. Our system specifically encourages that sort of thing. The idea that a few high performers get the same benefits (ones that aren’t already means tested) as the poorest is irrelevant in the scheme of things.
I think this is where we might disagree most. I see racism as a form of stupidity, that is, a general induction error given perception bias, where you generalize the examples of a small sample size to a group and draw a wrong conclusion... based on race. Here, due to the history of discrimination, we have significant class difference that lead to more racism, which is class differences but projected as a race difference. I'd note here, we don't have the same kind of deliberate class as a place like the UK does, but we do have class and it's class beyond just an economic class.
I'll obviously admit that that's certainly not an explanation for all current racism, but I think a significant amount of our concern may be here. In this case, I worry that using race as a proxy for existing class differences in racially different communities will be incorrectly addressed in DEI programs based on race. You can already see the awkwardness of this in Asian and Indian communities, as they are racial minorities, yet they are often seen as overrepresented in outcomes. A traditional "racism is just racism" view really doesn't explain this mismatch, but a race-as-a-proxy-for-class easily does.
> Nothing keeps us for helping boys in some sectors and women in others
In theory, perhaps, but in practice nothing is being done to help boys. In fact, DEI programs in universities continue to favor young women even as they approach 60% of students.
We're all familiar with Girls Who Code, Women in STEM, and similar organizations. Where are equivalent organizations for young men?
Would it even be possible to start such an organization without being ostracized as a bigot?
Here's a story I was listening to today about a program at an all-boys school trying to address the growing prevalence of loneliness, depression, and bad behavior in school.
https://www.haverford.org/the-big-room-blog/blog-post/~board...
Where are the equivalent for young men? Literally all of the other hackathons ever. Girls who Code arose because of toxic men chasing girls and women out of those spaces. Women worked tirelessly for decades to make these spaces happen. Men just want to whine about it because to actually address the issue is too “woke”. I’m sorry you created your prison, but don’t look to us to bail you out while you’re punching us down for not helping.
It reminds me of the white supremacists raging about Black Miss America pageants for existing. But they were ignorant of the fact that the official Miss America pageant had a rule that said “no negroes” up until 1972-73.
> ... toxic men chasing girls and women out ... Men just want to whine ... while you’re punching us down .... reminds me of the white supremacists
Thank you for providing an example of the hostility faced by anyone who even raises the issue, let alone tries to improve things.
You’re not improving things. You’re trying to take away things that make the world better.
If you stuck to programs that help boys - yes they exist - maybe you’d have a moral leg to stand on.
Discriminating against some people for the benefit of others does not make the world better. And that's all DEI is.
I have no problem with programs that benefit students. All students. (Likewise workers - all workers.)
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> In theory, perhaps, but in practice nothing is being done to help boys.
Untrue. There’s a ton of work being done on how to better support boys in school.
> In fact, DEI programs in universities continue to favor young women even as they approach 60% of students.
What are these DEI programs favoring university admission for young women?
Here's the opinion of the Society for Women Engineers:
> Cutting these [DEI] programs means fewer resources for students that need support. It’s devastating for women
https://swe.org/magazine/dei-faces-rising-waters/
That's an admission that DEI in schools supports women, from some of its biggest advocates. Where are the programs to support boys in school?
Edit: Of course, the mere existence of the Society for Women Engineers, AAUW, and other groups focused on women in education, without comparable groups for men, is another example of the phenomenon.
They're a remnant of a time when they were necessary, now favoring the group that has not only caught up, but taken the lead.
That's an admission that a group focused on women is concerned with the impacts of issues on women.
Is there a society for Men Engineers that is concerned with the impacts of issues on men?
For most of history that would be any society for engineers.
If you feel there are issues uniquely impacting male engineers though why not start one?
Women are not close to even 50% of engineering students or industry or academic engineers yet you go after society of women engineers?
Let's flip it - nursing, where men are a minority:
https://www.aamn.org/
Oh look, a society dedicated to men in nursing. This is completely reasonable. The idea to go from "women are most of college graduates" to "society of women engineers should not exist" is insane.
> without comparable groups for men
Did you even try?
https://www.naesp.org/resource/male-models/
It's a serious topic in education, yes it's a thing people care about.
I studied with and was friends with women in my computer engineering major, SWE helped connect them with industry engineers who could speak about what it was like being a women in engineering.
To people downvoting the above comment - could you explain your reasons? You may feel all arguments have already been said on this issue but the situation is different today. And especially young people, whether white or colored, feel they have more bleak future in front of them than the previous generations and basically refuse to reproduce globally. In this light, it's worth having this discussion again because it is not the same.
I didn't but I would have. It appears to be dragging the discussion towards political flamewar. It doesn't present any substantial observations or reasoning, just ideological talking points that we've all heard countless times by now.
If there had at least been some attempt to tie things back to the headline article in a nontrivial way then maybe I'd be more sympathetic.
I didn't downvote, but I gave a long, good faith response as to why I think it's sub-optimal reasoning at best. I think this divide is a huge problem for the left, and it's actually creating new problems while the left pats itself on the back thinking we're solving them.
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.
Does anybody have any other insights?
> Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that?
Yes, and in fact one of the most popular was from IBM itself [1], released in 1944.
> The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes.
It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.
> 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.
I'm not really sure what potential significance you see in this. It was likely typed by the secretary and signed by the CEO. It's the original copy. Any copies required for the personal reference of the supervisory personnel affected would be made in the standard 1950s ways - a few carbon copies for the top executives, mimeographs further downstream if necessary.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Electric#Executive
Of course it was typed by a secretary. At a computer company I worked at starting in the mid 1980s it was not unheard of for some execs to have their admins print out emails for them and type in the handwritten responses. This was an internal-only system. No external email.
I know many old lawyers who still can’t type. They have admin staff (and junior solicitors) to draft correspondence for them.
They also charge enough for their services, as senior partners of big firms for it to make no sense for them to do their own typing.
As of 2010 it was not unheard of for old civil engineers to have their secretary print all email and maps, they would redline them, and the response would be typed or scanned as appropriate.
Being a touch typist was seen as kind of blue collar until everyone could afford personal computers at home..
Never learned to touch type. I can type pretty quickly but never took a course. Same with shorthand.
> It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.
This was indeed standard until colour laser printers became cheap (and physically printing letters became less common), well into the 2000s.
At work, we still have several boxes of "company letterhead" in the basement, maybe 15,000 A4 sheets.
I should probably use it as scrap paper, there's no way it will ever be used for sending letters at the current rate.
Looks like it was written on an IBM Executive Model A:
https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/178vjlf/sample...
There were variable-width font typewriters starting in 1930:
https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/3ltlgn/have_va...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vari-Typer
That is a REALLY nice typewriter; wow.
Well of course IBM made typewriters! It looks like the 'IBM Executive' landed in 1944 with the ability to do proportional spacing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Electric#Executive
Wow, TIL.
IBM made a lot of very fancy typewriters so while I don't know what they had in 1953, one would assume that the president of the company would have access to the fanciest model they offered
Or his secretary would have :-)
Trying the ol’ Sam Donaldson dilemma from Bush Jrs first reign.
Thank you, I appreciate the find.
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.
> and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
It goes further than just fudging the metrics: By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas. This combined with the overall focus on DEI just ends up reinforcing racism/sexism when the quota-hires are more inept than the non-quota hires.
I don't think that necessarily follows. For example, if 20% of some minority are qualified and without quotas only 5% would be hired, then a quota requiring hiring 10% wouldn't result in unqualified candidates.
That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.
We can use an actual example. Joe Biden going into the 2020 election pledged that he would choose a black woman as his running mate. This pledge excluded half the population on gender grounds, and 87% of the population on racial grounds. When you are only looking at half of 13% of the population you're going to be turning away a lot of qualified people. And we saw the consequences of Joe Bidens 2020 election pledge in the 2024 election
I never said unqualified. I used relative terms like less skilled, for example the 5% in your example that wouldn't have been hired without quotas.
The non-quota'd hires in that example, that the additional 5% displaced, are now also more likely to be of higher average skill (since you need less of them and can drop the bottom of the candidates), making a bigger disparity between the quota'd group and the non-quota'd group. Which, as I said, just reinforces any racism/sexism such quotas attempted to offset.
I don't think that actually changes anything. Lets suppose that we can measure qualification on a 100 point scale.
Lets say that there are 5 people in a minority group with a qualification of 100 and 9 people in the non-minority group with a qualification of 100. If 1 person from the minority group gets hired and 13 people from the non-minority group get hired, then a 5 person minority group quota would result in an increase in the qualifications of the people hired.
Of course in reality is more complicated since companies don't always hire only the absolutely most qualified people in a given group and it's not easy to even define objectively who is the most qualified. However, that doesn't matter to the point that I'm making which is that even a quota (which again most proponents of DEI don't want) doesn't necessarily result in hiring less qualified candidates.
In your example, no quotas would result in all 14 hires being those with a qualification of 100. Congrats, got all 5 minorities without quotas!
Now for some thing more realistic: Instead of making those 14 candidates all perfect, distribute them a bit more randomly and only hire the top 10. Without quotas you'll end up with around 4 from the minority group and 6 from the majority group. But if for example your quotas are for 50/50, you have to exclude 1 person from the majority group who is more qualified than the 5th person from the minority group to reach it.
> By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas.
What? By pulling from a larger pool of candidates, you’re more likely to get someone more skilled.
Pulling from the 30% of applicants that matches the quota will always be a smaller pool than pulling from all 100% of applicants.
Say you’re looking to hire 20 people. So you pick the 20 best, and you end up with the 17 best men and the 3 best women. Of course you claim to be gender-blind and it just happens that you got 17 men and only 3 women, these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault.
Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire the 11th - 17th rated men, and instead did hire the 4th - 10th rated women.
Now: maybe you think that’s not a fair system, and you’re probably right. But it would mean you’re hiring better candidates. You pass on some lower rated candidates that only made it through because they were guys, and instead got some higher rated candidates that you had passed on previously because they were women.
You're assuming the men and women being judged on a different scale is the only way you can get a disparity to begin with.
Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?
I don't think it necessarily has to be all one thing or the other. For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring. Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.
> For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring.
That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.
> Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.
How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.
And if you’ve ever been or been adjacent to oil workers or truck drivers - those daughters would be well served by listening, assuming they have any other options.
They are brutal occupations that chew up and spit out the typically more physically robust men who make up the majority of those occupations on the regular.
Unless the top 20 people only had 3 women, which is totally possible if there were 200 men and 30 women in the total applicants. In this case, you just discarded 7 more qualified men to get 7 less qualified women. Now in terms of average skill across your hires, it looks like men in general are more qualified than women and you're reinforcing the sexism, not fighting it.
You're narrowing the pool by only hiring specific races or sexes. Not widening it.
Do you believe that hiring currently excludes those races and sexes? Because that's explicitly illegal, and has been for a long time
> Do you believe that hiring currently excludes those races and sexes?
Good lord yes. In software engineering almost everyone is a white male.
Absolutely and unequivocally false. Unless you are casting Asian and Indian as white.
That’s fair—I’m closer to the east coast, so around me it is mostly white dudes, but that might not be true elsewhere. But it is mostly men, at any rate.
The question was if you believe the hiring process is excluding the other groups. Another way of asking that is, are similarly qualified people from the other groups applying in sufficient number? Would they have been hired if they had?
This is a simplistic view. E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume? In this case the lower chances to get ahead have nothing to do with economic circumstance.
> E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume?
You're referring to a decades-old study that failed to replicate:
https://datacolada.org/51
(This is extremely common in social sciences.)
https://thefederalist.com/2018/12/07/thomas-sowell-explains-...
It still has to do with economic circumstance, but here, according to Sowell it's about the cost of employing empirical discrimination (judging each specific case through complete knowledge of the individual) instead of a proxy for empirical discrimination (like likelihoods based on a non-arbitrary characteristic such as income or neighborhood).
The solutions that follow from that conclusion are to find ways to make empiricism less costly, or to change the stereotype (such as people from a poor neighborhood are likely to be a bad risk for a loan).
Systemic racism tends to apply so much economic drag to the system that any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand. Apartheid in South Africa was systemic racism, and businesses were violating those laws long before they were abolished just out of profit-motive. It became obvious and common-sense for the system to be ended. Thomas Sowell, in that same work, points out that Type II discrimination (discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics like race, ethnicity, belief... etc.) always ends up being economically unfeasible.
> any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand
You raise an interesting point but I think that's an overly broad claim. Groups with strong internal adhesion and sufficiently high trust can remain xenophobic indefinitely.
It's also wrong on some level to refer to these things as arbitrary characteristics. They might be seemingly unrelated, but in a broader social context they are often far from arbitrary. Particularly when it comes to belief systems they can have direct and tangible impacts.
I think it's probably some of both. Certainly a lot of inequality is economic in a way that is independent of race. However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture. Therefore, I think that DEI is an important part of making our society more of a meritocracy.
In terms of your second paragraph. I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
> However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture.
For this to be a major factor you'd need some explanation for the over-representation of Asian Americans in many lucrative fields in the US. Shouldn't they otherwise be seeing a significant negative impact from this?
> I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
The issue is that the rules are often created without respect to how they impact smaller entities, or are purposely designed to impair them at the behest of larger ones.
A lot of regulatory overhead is reporting requirements. Reports from small entities are typically going into a database never to be read by anyone ever. But you still have to spend time filing them, and then they'll stick you for filing fees even though you're just uploading 2kB of text to a website, and the filing fees are the same whether you're a sole proprietorship or Walmart.
The rules are often completely nuts, e.g. you can be ineligible to collect unemployment if you were self-employed but you're still legally required to pay for the unemployment insurance coverage. Some states have paid leave policies that assume every employer is a bureaucracy large enough to absorb the cost of hiring a temporary employee while concurrently paying the one on leave.
There are also tons of rules that are simple enough to comply with if you know about them, but with no reason to expect them to exist and a book of regulations which is thousands of pages long and full of rules that don't apply to you, the first time you find out can be when you get a fine or somebody files a lawsuit. In many cases these will be some kind of reporting or registration requirement that exists for no good reason, but exists nevertheless, e.g. did you remember to register a DMCA agent, or list your physical mailing address when you sent that email? These things aren't actually protecting anybody, they're just a trap for the unwary.
So you said "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities"
This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business".
Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.
And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
So, how do we get to the outcome we all want: your talent drives your success?
One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
Access to capital is hardly the reason why it's hard to start a business. I know two first-generation immigrants who started a landscaping business with a used pickup truck and a few tools. They reinvested their earnings in the business and now run multiple crews servicing properties all over the area. So it's not a unicorn tech startup but they seem to be doing pretty well. Anyone willing to work hard can accomplish something like this, no talent required.
I don't think it is necessarily that simple. A pickup truck, a few tools, and enough time or savings to spend starting a business is a lot more than many people have. Then there's survivor bias; while it may have worked out for them, how many people did it not work out for. Finally, there's the issue that not everyone can be an entrepreneur. Someone has to actually work at the various businesses that exist and are being created.
Regardless of what you might "think", it really is necessarily that simple. If you try hard enough you can always find plausible excuses for failure.
> If you try hard enough you can always find plausible excuses for failure.
That is true but it does not imply that success is possible for all people in all cases.
I can always blame some external factor for my loss in a competition but it is not necessarily within the realm of (realistic) possibility for me to win every possible matchup.
> Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.
Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without having to pay a ton for commercial real estate (i.e. capital)? Nope, zoning violation. But surely if you rent a commercial shop for your restaurant then you can then live there instead of having to maintain two separate pieces of property and a car to commute between them? Nope, sorry, the commercial unit isn't zoned for residential. Also, you'll have to outbid Starbucks and McDonalds for the site because there is only a small area of land zoned for commercial use and it's already full with nowhere empty zoned to add more.
Now that you've put yourself in debt for real estate you're not allowed to live at and opened a business with ~4% net margins, your customers expect to pay with credit cards and the law allows that racket to take ~3% of your total revenue.
To make this work at all you're going to have to do enough volume that you'll end up hiring people. Congrats, you now get to do Business Taxes. This isn't the thing where you file a 1040 which is just copying some numbers from a sheet you got from your employer, it's the thing where you have to calculate those numbers for other people and also keep track of every dollar you spend on every chair, kilowatt hour and jar of tomato sauce so the government can take half your earnings instead of the three quarters or more you lose if you're bad at math or forget to deduct something big. But don't be bad at math the other way either or then you go to jail.
Now that you're almost making enough money to be able to eat at your own restaurant, the power to your stove goes out and shuts down your whole operation. You track it down to a defective splice put in by the licensed electrician who wired the place before you bought it. You're not allowed to fix this because you're not licensed as an electrician. You're also not able to get licensed because it's both prohibitively expensive for someone who only does occasional electrical work and requires you to do a multi-year apprenticeship even if you could pass every test to get the license. So you either have to wait a week for someone with a license to have time for you even though the actual fix is only going to take five minutes, or pay through the nose for emergency service, or break the law and do it yourself.
I could go on. The reason "access to capital" is such a problem is that the regulations make everything so expensive, and most of the regulations are a result of regulators being captured by the incumbents.
> And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
Racial discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases. That doesn't necessitate casting aspersions in cases where there isn't any evidence of that, just because the economic disparity tends to create an outcome disparity even when the entity isn't doing anything racist.
> One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?
> In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
"My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
> When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases.
To be fair oftentimes that documentation is due to the regulations you're speaking against here. I'm not necessarily taking a side. It just seemed relevant to point out.
> "My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
No, if it were true, standing on its own, it would be an accurate statement of fact. It is only be the ad hominem fallacy if it forms part of an argument with this logical structure:
1. My opponents argue X, but
2. My opponents are lying racists, therefore
3. X is false.
That is the structure of the argument. X is that DEI is a bad policy.
While many regulations exist due to regulatory capture, many also exist for good reasons. Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.
I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
> Notably, with the possible exception of the complicated taxes, the examples you give all have pretty obvious health and safety reasons why they exist.
What health and safety reason requires a 3% processing fee for credit card payments? Why is it unsafe for the proprietor to live in a room in the same structure as a restaurant in some areas, but not in other places that have different zoning?
The only thing that comes close to a health and safety issue is requiring a licensed electrician, and that's still a racket because they make it infeasible for you to get the license yourself even if you're willing to learn the material.
> I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
In the absence of these rules, you start a restaurant out of your home and do the work yourself and the capital you need to start out is predominantly the things you already need in order to have food and shelter. These regulations add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional capital costs for the purpose of constraining supply so landlords and contractors and banks can extract more money.
The electrical example is particularly interesting because it's generally legal to DIY things on a house that you simultaneously own and live in. Many (not sure if all) US states even have laws preventing insurance from forbidding such (although they can generally deny coverage after the fact if the incident can be shown to stem from your DIY work).
There also exist mixed zoning areas where you can run a business that hosts customers on site out of your house.
Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation. In terms of incentives, there's probably less inclination to cut corners and be reckless with a structure that your entire family lives in.
I think I'm going to blame zoning on this one long before I take issue with electrician apprenticeships.
> Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?
Because conservatives won't let us. Literally the most famous slogan associated with leftists is wanting regular people to "own the means of production." Most leftists would be THRILLED by programs to help anyone get access to capital.
The single largest capital requirement for most new small businesses is real estate, and is real estate because mixed use zoning is prohibited in the vast majority of areas in the US, requiring the proprietor to separately pay for somewhere to put the business and somewhere to live. Zoning is a local regulation and there are very many localities completely controlled by Democrats, so why does this continue to be the case?
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> So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity
Very much agree with this. Economic inequality is the root of the problem. But it's also one that very few people are willing to actually address because that sounds like "socialism" (how un-American!). It's the biggest problem facing this country, but the kind of social changes that are needed to solve that problem are anathema to Americans. (Certainly Trump doesn't give F about poor people, and the Democrats mostly pay lip service to it.)
But here's why I'm in favor of DEI initiatives, generally speaking (though certainly not all of them or even most of them):
DEI doesn't directly address economic inequality the way it should, but it does get is part of the way. Certainly it's better than nothing, which is what those who are anti-DEI are mostly proposing.
We also have to take into consideration that certain groups of people, specifically African Americans and Native Americans, are _not_ on a level playing ground, even today, because they were deliberately suppressed for centuries. Just because the Civil Rights Act finally got signed 50 years ago means that all of a sudden they have equal opportunity.
If companies and universities, and society as a whole, makes no effort to level the playing field, it won't just level on its own, especially in today's society (which does not offer the wide-open opportunities that America 100 or 200 years offered to anyone landing on its shores with $5 in their pocket).
If you don't make an effort to recruit from low-income black neighborhoods for example, you're not likely to get many takers because of the amount of effort that it takes to climb out of such deep social holes--only the very best and most determined will. But if you can deliberately offer opportunity to more people who have been suppressed, more of them will be in a position to provide their children with an environment where they can have better opportunities, and over generations society changes for the better (and everyone benefits).
So that's why I'm generally in favor of DEI type initiatives. Not what companies did or do -- which was mostly greenwashing PR based on either public opinion (last administration) or government pressure (this administration). But genuine efforts to level the playing field in terms of economic opportunity, including a boost to those who were deliberately disadvantaged for so long.
You can argue that it's unfair to white poor people. I agree, it is somewhat unfair. Economic opportunity should have nothing to do with race, and we should be making every effort to raise the economic standard of poor whites too. But we also need to recognize that poor whites are starting at a different baseline, one of poverty, yes, but not slavery and targeted suppression. So while there might be economic similarities (poor whites, poor blacks) they're not necessarily on the same level.
I don't think I've ever heard someone who opposes DEI say "we should fix our broken economy instead". But it's not wrong - the problems of racism and classism are uniquely intertwined and need to be fixed together.
The way DEI is usually framed by opponents is less "companies are using DEI to buy woke points so they don't fix the real economic issues" and more "companies deliberately hired unqualified black lesbians to tick a checkbox". These are very different critiques in terms of who they're aimed at. The latter makes it sound like we just need "more meritocracy" - i.e. to fix the problem by firing all black and poor people. The former makes it clear the problem is the people running the economy who are pitting different groups of people against one another to keep labor down.
It's rather ironic since we know that women, poc, and more often face a lot of professional resistance, and therefore have to be better than average to succeed.
Which means when you come across a black or female professional who has risen, it means they actually are much more likely to be MORE talented than the average white man.
In other words, this notion of "diversity hires" is not logical. It barely makes sense.
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?
I think it's important not to make things too black and white. Certainly it's difficult to put in place or even define a perfectly fair world. However, that doesn't mean that we can't make things more fair.
Of course, that's the reality of it - fairness is iterative and reactive. My questions are:
- Do you think DEI was the right path forward? Did it achieve its goals? If not was that because of counter currents or something else?
- If and when we have "perfect DEI" will we declare the world a fair place? If not, what comes next?
I think this is a perfect example of gp's comment.
GPs comment is a perfect example of GPs comment. The burden of proof is on the person trying to make a point. They gave no arguments or evidence in their favor. I lay out a point that shows they have no ground to stand on.
It is unfortunately impossible to prove the negative. I did give examples of what I would like to see in a discussion. There's unfortunately no realistic way for me to "provide evidence" that I only rarely see it.
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.
> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals...
One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.
But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.
That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.
Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, or that employers couldn't do better with writing job postings. But I've found that a lot of corporate training content is total BS, often based on a single low-quality study that was never reproduced. When the results seem "truthy", people tend to believe without being sufficiently critical.
That sounds like a sexist stereotype to me. Men and women are the same in all the ways that matter, except for the small percentage of areas where we forget that and admit they act differently because it gives us an excuse to treat women better? Please.
What people usually argue is that men and women are the same in many ways but are often conditioned by society to act differently. That conditioning is what people are generally critical of and attempt to change via things like DEI.
> but are often conditioned by society to act differently
Mind expanding on this a bit?
> 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.
That sounds nice, but that’s not what our laws and institutions are doing, nor is it the direction they’re moving in.
"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."
So this is a hypothetical that is not worth discussing. Until specific cases can be brought to bear, why are you inventing situations that may never have existed?
I'd also like to opine on SAT scores for a second. First off, it's well known that SAT scores are not directly correlative in post-secondary educational success, nor work-success. Second they are not highly accurate measurements - there's an inherent fuzziness to them. So even if 2 students had a SAT within some Epsilon, the SAT scores might not really provide much differentiation there. Ergo, basing all of our policies on SAT scores - which are well known to be easily gamed, and also a product of a private institution - seems not a good idea.
Moving on, the problem with being against "myopic obsession with the group statistics" is you are ignoring some important evidence. What do you think of the "group statistics" that say that black people start less businesses, have less family wealth? Or black women have higher maternal mortality? These are pointing to important individual outcomes that are, to say the least, wrong.
So I don't think that paying attention to group statistics, like black maternal mortality (aka how many black moms die in child birth or due to child birth) is "myopic" and "to the detriment of individual equality." It's a very very real problem we, if we intend to call ourselves a moral society, need to solve. So having specific programs to help solve black maternal mortality in a hospital is not "countering racism with racism" imo. It's a focused program on solving a focused problem.
This logic extends out to most "DEI" things. For example is it good if the students at universities drift from representing America on average? I'd say it is not good. What about the ivy league pledges to make school free for anyone who's family income was under $X a year? Is that a myopic obsession with group statistics, namely poor people who can't afford elite colleges even if they were admitted? Seems like yes that could fit into your definition of why you oppose DEI. And IT IS a DEI program - it's increasing diversity (income/class diversity) and equality/equity (improving outcomes for individuals) and inclusions (including those who cannot afford elite colleges).
So when DEI programs that are focused on race, because much of our racial divide was artificially constructed by racist laws and policies of the past, it is suddenly bad, even though I rarely hear anti-DEI people go on about the low income scholarships for ivy leagues. Honestly it starts to sound that in fact many people may in fact have a problem not with the overall concept, but the beneficiaries of the programs.
So back to your comment, let's pick some specific circumstances that we know about and may you can propose how you'd meaningfully fix it, policy wise, within 5 years: - Black maternal mortality us 3x higher than white maternal mortality - Black people are ~ 14.4% of USA, but 12.5% in colleges. Is this a problem? - If we think talent is spread equally, then we should expect to see more % of black founders in YCombinator than the 2-4% there is. Maybe not exactly 14.4% but surely closer to 10% than 0%? Is this worthwhile of being solved? - While we are at it, only 11% of YCombinator founders are women. Is this a problem?
So what can be done about these noticeable gaps? What kinds of suboptimal outcomes are being picked when, for example, few YCombinator founders even know about the challenges and struggles of the average American? (who's a woman btw, women are 50.49% of the population, a majority) What kinds of products, opportunities, etc are being missed here? Maybe none?
What are your "race blind improvements" to economic mobility here? You have a 5 year timeline to make statistically meaningful changes to these metrics.
DEI is not a law. I get how this misunderstanding is possible given how wildly the term gets thrown about by conservatives, like it is a boogieman that is the source of everyone's problems.
Anyway, everyone is already ostensibly equal under the law, but, like you've recognized, we've still found our way into a system of racism (that goes beyond governmental discrimination). Logically, to recognize systemic racism, that folks are born into a disadvantage, then to say that these disadvantages must be ignored, is to exploit systemic racism. It does nothing to address the system. If anything, by making it an EO, it strengthens the system.
You call DEI countering racism with racism, but your only argument for this is getting mad at a hypothetical situation. To add, though, to recognize systemic racism and to then put so much weight on an SAT score, while standardized testing is known as being a component of systemic racism [0], is racist in and of itself.
0 - https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-begin...
With respect to education, I'm not attached to SAT scores. Pick any non racial metric of merit, and I'm OK with it. Income is fine, not a protected clause. Random is fine too. Just don't promote or penalize people based on race.
With respect to jobs, if you agree the most qualified person should get it, we are similarly aligned.
If you agree with all that, we are good, not matter what it is called.
I just call it non discrimination.
The problem as I see it is that hiring the most qualified person for the job often requires DEI. That's because one of the primary goals of DEI programs is to attempt to ensure that people in different groups have the opportunity to demonstrate that they are qualified. That could take the form of trying to account for differences in how groups communicate their qualifications (e.g. certain neurodivergent people are likely to struggle processes that put excessive weight on ability to make small talk), trying to account for differences in access to opportunities to demonstrate qualifications (e.g. by sending recruiters to historically black colleges), trying to account for alternative was that people might be qualified (e.g. by trying to recognize how someone with technical experience form the military might be qualified even without a degree), or trying to avoid recruitment practices that are likely to favor people in the same group as the interviewer (e.g. being careful of basing hiring on "culture fit").
I'm not sure this is terribly relevant given where the conversation has gone, but in your example, college admissions, race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates.
I suspect that's how it ended up being used in a lot of places (aside from deliberate outreaches to encourage applications, etc).
Beyond that though, I'm not sure not getting into harvard is exactly a "grave injustice". You don't have a right or entitlement to go to harvard regardless of what your academic score is. And I don't think there's a reasonable argument that there should be such a right.
> race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates.
That’s demonstrably untrue. At Harvard, an Asian candidate at the top decile of academic index scores had roughly the same admissions rate as a black candidate in the 4th decile: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...
The candidates were basically competing in entirely different lanes based on race.
Then that's wrong, Harvard should not do it, and it would be good to try to create/enforce regulations that prevent them from doing it. However, that doesn't mean that all DEI efforts are bad.
There would be almost no black people at Harvard if they did not do it.
I have argued elsewhere that Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone. However, the civil Rights act does prevent discrimination based on race if they do.
The supreme Court case on the admissions topic showed extremely clearly that race was not just a tiebreaker.
Imo, the far more egregious use is public universities.
Similarly, if I run an organization, I can choose to serve 10 or 10,000. I just can't hang out a sign saying "no blacks/whites allowed".
What about Brown v. Board of Education? Do you think that Southern schools had an obligation to accept black students or did they not have to accept anyone at all? Do you think in 1900-1945 when Harvard Yale and Columbia were putting a quota on the number of Jewish students to limit their enrollment that was fine, as Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone, Jewish or otherwise?
I think you misunderstand what I wrote. Please reread it
DEI is just giving other people the chance to setup the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people in a white dominated society.
It isn't a law. It's just looking at history and going, "They'd probably be as successful if there was a pipeline for those folks to get there, since that pipeline doesn't exist we need to represent them to allow the pipeline to be built."
You also don't seem to fully know what DEI is. You assume it's specifically hiring less qualified people because of their skin color. That isn't what DEI is.
It isn't racism. It's just giving other people the same chance of success. Representation is important.
Anti-DEI is just white people, once again, being offended that someone else is getting equal treatment. Look at trans hate, same thing. Look at book bans, same thing. It's just white folks getting upset and being offended.
> the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people
There is no opportunity pipeline for white people.
There is an opportunity pipeline for a small number of well connected, wealthy people who can get their kids into elite prep schools starting from kindergarten.
It's not open to working class white people.
Edit: that doesn't mean no working class white person can succeed. Just that the prep school, elite university, big corporation (or startup founder) "pipeline" - which certainly does exist - is for wealthy people.
That's where the idea of intersectionality comes in. A person who is white and poor might be worse off than someone who is black and rich; however, someone who is black and poor would likely be worse off than both of them.
That's also why DEI advocates generally don't advocate focusing exclusively on race. Instead they generally advocate that DEI focus on many factors such as race, wealth, disability, sexuality, gender, military service, etc.
I think that's a step in the right direction. I'd just take it one step further, consider all the factors of each person's life, and thus treat people as individuals and not as representatives of a few select groups. Intersectionality excludes too many factors as it focuses on just a few.
"Small number" is doing a lot of work. Just as an example: https://heller.brandeis.edu/news/items/releases/2023/impact-...
Quite a few "white people" got a start at accumulating property this way that was denied to "black people". Is it directly tied to going to college? No. Does it help? Probably.
My wife’s family is from a nearly all white coastal oregon county whose median household income is about the same as the national average household income for black people. Between two individuals with that same income level, the historical reasons why they ended up in that position are irrelevant. Neither person experienced those historical circumstances themselves. And regardless of path dependency, the result of that they’re on the same rung of the economic ladder today. There is no legitimate basis to help one of those people over the other.
And if you’re looking at path dependency, Asians should be the biggest beneficiaries of DEI. My dad was born in a third world village. He’d literally have been far better off going to school in the segregated south than taking a boat to school during monsoon season. I don’t think that should count in how you treat me—I grew up comfortably middle class—but it’s downright bizarre to say I’m somehow more privileged than people whose families have long been in America.
As others have said, that is now an economic advantage. There are other economic advantages. Why not level the economic playing field for everyone?
What if demanding leveling for everyone is a distraction so that it never gets leveled for anyone? Similar to now is not the time, thoughts and prayers, etc.
It also never seems to be a problem that businesses don't need everything leveled for all businesses. The PPP loans were all taken up by people with lawyers that could quickly jump on all the money, and didn't actually help many of the businesses that needed it.
Perhaps it is for some people, but I'm serious. I'd like to see the economic playing field leveled. I was pissed when I saw the Democrats use racism and sexism to sideline Bernie Sanders and real economic change. Remember "Bernie Bros"? Biden's "black firewall"?
DEI is a defense of classism.
> DEI is a defense of classism.
That seems like a pretty far-fetched claim.
You say you want to see the economic playing field leveled, does spending time and energy trying to tear down the existing DEI systems get you closer to that goal or farther away?
Closer. There are a lot of people who are happy to see classism continue if they can use their race or sex to get an advantage in that system. I don't believe economic equality has a chance until the Democrats abandon DEI.
What would an opportunity pipeline for white people look like? How would we detect one if it were to exist?
Why ask me? It was chneu who claimed it existed.
Edit: Yes, I made a bold assertion, based on the view from the working class and the many intelligent white people I know who were held back by not being wealthy or well-connected. For those outside the elite pipeline, it's an advantage not to be white.
If there's a pipeline I don't know about, I'd like to hear it. Point it out so more people can join the pipeline to success!
You claimed it didn't exist[1]. Presumably you had some criteria, found no evidence and then made a conclusion. What was your criteria?
1. A substantially different claim than "We have no evidence for its existence" or "We don't know that it exists".
I come from a working class background, if that’s what you can call two parents who have spent most of their life on welfare of various kinds. I along with many of my white friends are now high six figure earners.
I have no high school completion, no university education, no qualifications. So obviously it’s not as closed as you are pretending it is.
I guess we don't agree what DEI is. I'm against different criteria for people based on race. This is most apparent in school admissions and affirmative action.
I think it is a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to have dual standards based on race.
Also, I don't appreciate you blatant racism putting all white people into a single stereotype, not do I think it is accurate
This seems to be mostly a discussion in good faith, so I'm going to engage. There is definitely some ambiguity around the definition, and that's because DEI isn't law. Particularly in the context of this discussion, different companies implement different policies. So when asking if it's essentially affirmative action, the answer is "it depends".
But to shift gears, I've seen good arguments on both sides here. It seems like (in this discussion), there is a fair amount of agreement that the root of the problem has to do with disadvantaged folks lacking the same opportunities due to historical factors. So that's a good starting point.
The crux of the issue seems to be whether the appropriate course of action is to level the playing field for individuals who are starting from a disadvantage. This can be described as "equal outcome" rather than "equal opportunity". There are pros and cons to both options, but to put a fine point on it, I'm just not aware of any actions that can be taken to effect "equal outcome" that don't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
I think you are describing the situation well. I would put myself in the bucket of equal opportunity. I prefer addressing the causes, and think poverty is a better proxy for the core issue than skin color, and doesn't have the collateral damage.
A black and a white children of dirt poor single mothers are both going to have major headwinds in life.
A black and white children of married techies and doctors are both going to start with a good hand.
Addressing the problem at the college admission stage is just juicing the numbers in a way that says our University is care more about your skin color than what you can do.
It would be far better to look at what we can do to keep kids in school, stabilize their home lives, and make them into competitive college applicants.
This is the route to address equal outcome that doesn't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. It's slower to show results, but I think it's the only thing they'll actually get there in the end.
If all we care about is the numbers, we could just give honorary diplomas to kids that can't even read and make the numbers work.
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.
Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].
In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?
Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/04/17/new-res...
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
I would 100% support blind screening and application where possible. Also educating recruiters and diversifying pipelines. My job had the latter, and I supported it.
What I don't approve of was my annual bonus depending hitting on targets for % minority hires. That shouldn't be on my mind when I'm interviewing candidates.
Blind hiring does not actually work, it's essentially Recruitment Theatre as a way of making you feel like the interview process is more fair when it's actually more discriminatory.
There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.
So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.
People keep saying this. It's such a nice and simple statement. "All men are created equal!". It's the details of real life where you tend to run into issues.
Are we allowed to measure what percentage of various races get to go to harvard? If we find an oddity can we correct it? How do you fix both the existing racial biases and the previous history of racial biases affecting people's positions?
Saying "racism is dead let's not worry about it" seems like a really convenient position to take. You don't have to actually do any work.
I addressed this above, I explicitly said it exists, but getting better. You help people break out of poverty and ensure they have actual merit. You don't establish separate requirements and treatment based on race.
So, like, those programs exist. People are trying to help others break out of poverty. But we happen to live in a nation where a specific group of people were denied advantages most/everyone else got, for a very long time, explicitly based on skin color.
Is trying to boost certain candidates based on skin color the best way to do it? Obviously not, in a perfect world we would have a more complex and accurate system. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'm betting 90% of the people who yell about "DEI" on the TV are not "concerned that this is an imperfect way of solving the problem".
This comes up a lot in these types of threads. It's fine to acknowledge someone might have identified an actual problem. It's theoretically possible for Trump to tell the truth, if only by accident, at least once. But there is a huge difference between agreeing that something might need to be fixed, and handing power to people who want to tear it all down.
There's, dunno what to call it, maybe naivety, in places like this, where you see, a certain attitude that's like "well <current solution> isn't perfect so lets get rid of it and then maybe someone will do it better next time".
There's a bunch of issues there, but the biggest one is that usually it took years and years and hundreds if not thousands of people's efforts to get the current solution in place and if you just tear it down, it'll take the same amount of effort if not more to get something else done.
Obviously some solutions do more harm than good and so the correct answer is to remove them. I'm unconvinced, say, harvard considering race as a factor when choosing people to admit is actually doing harm to anyone, much less so much harm that we need to have a culture war over it.
I think definition is definitely an issue in the debate. What you’re describing I knew as affirmative action. I’ve only understood DEI as being willing to hire from diverse backgrounds, implemented by posting job positions in diverse areas like HBCUs. I’ve not personally seen any examples of different criteria for different people. Is this actually documented as something companies with DEI initiatives were doing post affirmative action?
You can find a lot of this in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. At its most extreme an Asian Student and Black student with the exact same MCAT test score would have a 21% acceptance rate for the former and 80% acceptance rate for the latter. The lawsuit revealed the admissions office would use intangibles to discriminate, like giving Asian students low "Personality scores"
My bonus at a fortune 50 bay area firm was based (partially) on % minority hires. These were called "DEI Targets"
I've been told face to face by several tech recruiters that they are not looking to hire my race and gender, but I should tell my minority wife should apply.
Google "diversity quotas" or "hiring targets". If you are explicitly demanding a disproportionate number of minority candidates, you are disadvantaging other candidates.
That's the thing, DEI advocates generally don't advocate for diversity quotas or hiring targets and such practices are not common. For example, when I went through the DEI portion of interviewing training we were explicitly told that we were not allowed to hire people of a certain group in order to try to improve diversity.
The terms get lumped together by conservatives and then blamed for all evils. Defining it might help, but good luck with that.
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.
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.
Merit seems to be highly subjective given that the people in current US administration are all hired based on merit.
The merit they evaluate for is loyalty to the leader, not academic merit, or some other measure.
Yes, but this isn't what they'll say if you ask them.
Hiring based on the worst prejudice or nepotism is still merit based in this sense. Meritocracy is supposed to be about varieties of merit which you aren't ashamed to admit are relevant.
And zeal for carrying out the elected official’s agenda. Which is the whole point of political appointments.
That didn't work very well for the folks that tried that defense in the Nuremberg trials.
If the agenda is to commit crimes and destroy the constitution I would have expected people to be a bit more patriotic.
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.
> 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.
I feel like it's easy to notice the examples where it stood out. A survey of all the actual results might (or might not!) change your opinion. That being said, it's easy to say stuff like "everyone should be treated equally!", it's slightly harder to actually mean it, and it's even harder to do something about it.
We're certainly not legislators debating a bill before us, we're on social media arguing, but it'd be nice if people complaining made some effort to think of a solution.
Not everyone should be treated equally, because not everyone behaves the same. Everyone should get the same opportunity to excel or fail, but you shouldn't treat excellence the same as failure or mediocrity.
Talking about how to encourage more excellence... now that's an interesting conversation.
That's fair, I did mean "equal opportunity". But yes, it is an interesting conversation. It's also a hard conversation because people really don't like hearing that they were born on third base and might have to forgo some benefits that other people are being allocated.
...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?"
Your response was beautifully eloquent.
counter-example:
Most systems that work with standardized tests, while they can systematically fail to capture certain types of talent, are fairly objective - "if you're in the top 10% on this test, then we take you". The format and subject matter of the test is known in advance, people are free to prepare for it in whatever way they want.
Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', with examples dating back to the Chinese civil service examinations during the Sui and Tang dynasty (from around 593 AD). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
> Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', [...]
It's important not to forget Goodhart's law in this context: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Unless the tested skill is wholly and directly applicable to the position you're testing for, the results will still be unfairly skewed towards those with more resources - they can afford more time to study for this specific test, and more importantly they have the resources to buy specialized learning material as well as tutoring.
Of course that's not to say that merit doesn't factor into the results at all, but it does mean that even examples of 'how to do meritocracy right' show that merit is never the only thing that matters.
This is presented as an argument against objective metrics, but a) the alternative is subjective metrics, which is even worse, b) "disparate impact" is just another metric subject to Goodhart's law, and c) resources aren't the only thing that determines test scores.
If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library. The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it. Whereas, how is a low-income white kid supposed to overcome a race quota where every slot for their race was already filled by nepotism?
> This is presented as an argument against objective metrics
No, it's not. It's presented as an argument that measuring objective metrics doesn't mean you're measuring merit.
> If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library.
The library most likely doesn't have the same specialized learning materials that rich kids can afford, so this doesn't mean the poor kid has equal opportunity.
> The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it.
You're presenting this like it's purely an issue of free time, which is obviously not the case. The poor kid possibly can't reach the library without their guardian, who may or may not have time to drive them there. The poor kid possibly doesn't have anyone to teach them using the learning material there, while the rich kid likely has either their guardians or even specialized tutors for this purpose.
Your comment is a wonderful example of how people arguing for meritocracy can ignore reality - the bare minimum is supposed to be enough for the disadvantaged, even though there's a massive difference in effectiveness.
> No, it's not. It's presented as an argument that measuring objective metrics doesn't mean you're measuring merit.
The goal is to measure merit. Objective metrics are the nearest thing we have to achieving that goal. If there is a better metric, you use that instead. But if the best metric we have isn't perfect, that's no argument for doing something even worse.
> The library most likely doesn't have the same specialized learning materials that rich kids can afford, so this doesn't mean the poor kid has equal opportunity.
And yet this is still more of an opportunity than being locked out by race quotas.
> The poor kid possibly can't reach the library without their guardian, who may or may not have time to drive them there.
Libraries are generally in higher density areas with mass transit, and in the worst case you can walk there. Moreover, primary schools generally have libraries and then the kid is already there for school.
> The poor kid possibly doesn't have anyone to teach them using the learning material there, while the rich kid likely has either their guardians or even specialized tutors for this purpose.
Which is why it takes longer. But the point is that determination has an effect. It's something you can choose rather than something you can't control. Whereas telling people that it's not a level playing field so therefore they shouldn't even try is how you perpetuate the problem forever, if not actively make it worse.
> The goal is to measure merit. Objective metrics are the nearest thing we have to achieving that goal. If there is a better metric, you use that instead. But if the best metric we have isn't perfect, that's no argument for doing something even worse.
You may notice that I didn't argue against objective metrics at all? All I've said is that objective metrics don't mean you're directly measuring merit. It's important to keep this in mind, for example by ensuring equal access to specialized training materials.
> And yet this is still more of an opportunity than being locked out by race quotas.
DEI doesn't necessarily mean race quotas - it's telling that you think it does.
> Libraries are generally in higher density areas with mass transit, and in the worst case you can walk there. Moreover, primary schools generally have libraries and then the kid is already there for school.
But the kids don't necessarily live in higher density areas! So not only do the kids get worse material and less help, they also have a much harder time accessing those worse materials. And again, a library usually doesn't have the same specialized materials that rich kids can afford. I've been trying to show that this should be kept in mind and remedied, but you're arguing against me by arguing against things I haven't said. This is usually what happens.
> Which is why it takes longer. But the point is that determination has an effect.
But kids don't have infinite time! So the rich kids still have unfair advantages, so the tests aren't directly measuring merit. And again, you're arguing that the bare minimum should be enough for the disadvantaged. You seem to effectively be arguing that meritocracy is either impossible, or should not be the goal.
> You may notice that I didn't argue against objective metrics at all? All I've said is that objective metrics don't mean you're directly measuring merit. It's important to keep this in mind, for example by ensuring equal access to specialized training materials.
But then who are you arguing against? Is there someone strongly opposed to providing equal access to training materials, e.g. by making them available in school libraries?
> DEI doesn't necessarily mean race quotas - it's telling that you think it does.
That's how it's most commonly implemented in practice whether de jure or de facto and that's its opponents' primary objection to it.
> But the kids don't necessarily live in higher density areas!
In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
> You seem to effectively be arguing that meritocracy is either impossible, or should not be the goal.
Actual perfect meritocracy is impossible because actual perfect anything is impossible. But meritocracy is the goal and what you want is to get closer to it. Which providing better study materials in school libraries can do, but that isn't what anybody is complaining about when they're complaining about DEI.
> In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
The poor kids also live rural.
Remind me again, where there are lower costs, but also lower income, less opportunity, harder to get anywhere, less education? And also, who did most of rural vote for?
In most situations, rural = poverty = trap. Our society is nowhere near prepared in addressing the rurality and poverty trap.
But really, this whole dei being a proxy for this gender or that race issue is looking around the real problem. In the end, its all about access to 2 resources: money and time. The bourgeoisie have it, the proletariat do not. As long as there is a massive gulf between the 2, we'll argue this in different names and forms (civil rights, affirmative action, political correctness, DEI)
> But then who are you arguing against? Is there someone strongly opposed to providing equal access to training materials, e.g. by making them available in school libraries?
The materials aren't available. Why do you think that is?
> In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
Ah, and that means we can ignore poor kids who don't fall into this pattern, as well as poor kids who live too far away from libraries?
> Actual perfect meritocracy is impossible because actual perfect anything is impossible. But meritocracy is the goal and what you want is to get closer to it. Which providing better study materials in school libraries can do, but that isn't what anybody is complaining about when they're complaining about DEI.
You're ignoring that this is only part of the equation, as the tutoring etc. is also missing. There must be special programs for the disadvantaged to level the playing field here, but that's what anti-DEI advocates also complain about!
Actual meritocracy isn't the goal when you argue that the disadvantaged should be fine with far worse resources and opportunities, as you've done in this thread. You've repeatedly argued that it's fine if they have far higher time investments and far worse materials, as long as they theoretically could achieve similar things as the rich. That's simply not meritocracy.
> The materials aren't available. Why do you think that is?
To begin with, they often are. A lot of school libraries actually have test prep materials available. They don't all have them because libraries are locally administered and each locality gets to make its own choices, but if that's the case in your locality then you can direct your complaints to the town council rather than the federal government.
> Ah, and that means we can ignore poor kids who don't fall into this pattern, as well as poor kids who live too far away from libraries?
This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?
> You're ignoring that this is only part of the equation, as the tutoring etc. is also missing. There must be special programs for the disadvantaged to level the playing field here, but that's what anti-DEI advocates also complain about!
Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns. Again, the goal is to get as close to measuring merit as feasible; "closer than now" is possible but perfection isn't.
> To begin with, they often are. A lot of school libraries actually have test prep materials available.
They have some materials available, but often older or less specialized ones. That's my whole point: rich people have access to better materials. This is simply a fact.
> This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?
How about introducing DEI programs that help these disadvantaged people access the same materials? Again, you're basically saying that they have to suck it up and accept their position. That's not meritocracy.
> Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns.
There's obviously an incredibly large gap between "spend $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US" and "poor kids should either have no access at all, or have to walk large distances to public libraries, only have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available". The latter simply isn't meritocracy, yet you keep arguing that it is, and keep arguing against DEI programs.
> That's my whole point: rich people have access to better materials. This is simply a fact.
"Rich people have more money" isn't an interesting fact, it's just the definition of rich people.
> How about introducing DEI programs that help these disadvantaged people access the same materials?
The term "DEI" has been applied to disparate impact rules and other policies that amount to race quotas and correspondingly garner strong opposition. If you want to advance good policies, you should stop using the same term to apply to them as is used to apply to bad policies with strong opposition.
> There's obviously an incredibly large gap between "spend $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
There is equally obviously a point at which the threshold of diminishing returns is met, and high-quality individualized private tutoring is plausibly beyond that threshold because it is very expensive. It's also still not clear how you expect to feasibly provide a high density of libraries in an area with a low density of people.
> "Rich people have more money" isn't an interesting fact, it's just the definition of rich people.
That's not what I said. This is bordering on bad faith, please don't do that.
> The term "DEI" has been applied to disparate impact rules and other policies that amount to race quotas and correspondingly garner strong opposition. If you want to advance good policies, you should stop using the same term to apply to them as is used to apply to bad policies with strong opposition.
First, what term would you have me use instead? Second, I don't believe it matters what term I choose, because it will get demonized just like DEI did.
> There is equally obviously a point at which the threshold of diminishing returns is met, and high-quality individualized private tutoring is plausibly beyond that threshold because it is very expensive.
There is still a large gap between "high-quality individualized private tutoring" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
But that's besides the point, which was: objective metrics don't mean you're measuring merit. You've shown wonderfully how those advocating for "meritocracy" often don't care about actual merit. Thank you for the discussion, but I don't think it makes sense to continue, as you seem to simply not care about the issues with your position.
Personally I appreciate your merit. Starting the race 100 meters ahead of the other runners probably doesn't get you a very accurate measure of who is the fastest.
The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.
If you then want to buy books for people who can't afford them, that's an entirely different proposal than giving the job to someone who isn't as qualified.
> The issue is that it's not an athletic competition. If someone is better at heart surgery, it doesn't matter if it's because their parents could afford books and someone else's couldn't, that's still the person you want doing heart surgery.
Well, an athletic competition would make more sense because that actually determines whose the best. We don't test heart surgeons to see who the best is, we test to see if they can do the job.
That's what people tend to... conveniently overlook... in these conversations. No one is hiring "the best" or only accepting "the best" into their college or whatever else. They pick a good one from the pool of candidates they have available.
Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.
> Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.
When you have a competitive major university that gets thousands of applicants and you base admission strictly on test scores, you'll end up accepting only 1% black applicants because their test scores are lower for various reasons. If you wanted to accept 14% black applicants as reflects their proportion of the US population, you would have to be turning down other applicants with significantly higher test scores. It's not just about accepting someone who got a 1520 instead of a 1530, the difference is hundreds of points.
That seems rather unlikely, you have any data to back that up?
Someone else linked this article https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...
> For the 2015-2016 academic year, the average GPA of all students applying to medical schools was 3.55 and the average MCAT score was 28.3 according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
> The middle set of bars in the top chart above show that for applicants to US medical schools between 2013-2016 with average GPAs (3.40 to 3.59) and average MCAT scores (27 to 29), black applicants were almost 4 times more likely to be accepted to US medical schools than Asians in that applicant pool (81.2% vs. 20.6%), and 2.8 times more likely than white applicants (81.2% vs. 29.0%).
Seems like they're in the same applicant pool.
That link shows that (presumably in order to meet diversity targets) black applicants with a GPA of 3.2-3.39 had nearly the same acceptance rate as Asian applicants with a 3.6-3.79 GPA. 0.4 points is an entire standard deviation for GPA.
> That's not what I said. This is bordering on bad faith, please don't do that.
The premise of a meritocracy isn't that everyone is the same, it's that everyone is subject to the same standard. The alternatives are things like racism or nepotism where someone gets the position even if they're not expected to do a better job, because of their race or because their father owns the company.
But merit isn't a fixed property. If you spend your time studying physics, you'll make yourself qualified to do certain types of engineering when spending that time playing football wouldn't.
Money, then, can be used to improve merit. You can e.g. pay for tuition at a better school that someone else couldn't afford. If that school actually imparts higher quality skills than a less expensive school (or no school), a meritocratic hiring practice will favor the graduates of that school, because they're actually better at doing the job.
You can then argue that this isn't fair because rich people can afford better schools etc., but a) that will always be the case because the ability to use money to improve yourself will always exist, and b) if you would like to lessen its effect, the correct solution is not to abandon meritocracy in hiring decisions, it's to increase opportunities for the poor to achieve school admissions consistent with their innate ability etc.
> First, what term would you have me use instead? Second, I don't believe it matters what term I choose, because it will get demonized just like DEI did.
The demonization comes from rooting the concern in race rather than economic opportunity, because the people obsessed with race are interested in dividing the poor and pitting them against each other in tribal warfare, and then any term you use for that will be demonized because it will become infected with tribal signaling associations.
> There is still a large gap between "high-quality individualized private tutoring" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
And then we're back to, what is even the dispute? You can't close the entire gap because part of the gap is a result of things that are infeasibly expensive at scale and no one disputes that. There are cost effective and reasonable policies that could close some of the gap, but many of those have already been implemented or could be adopted with minimal opposition if they were simply proposed in the places not already doing them, because they're cost effective and reasonable. It's literally only a matter of going to your town council meeting and convincing them that it's a good idea.
People don't strongly oppose libraries that stock study books. They oppose race quotas.
> People don't strongly oppose libraries that stock study books. They oppose race quotas.
People absolutely do oppose libraries. They also oppose programs that pay for tutors for poor kids, programs that allocate more money to schools in poorer neighborhoods and basically anything else you can think of.
But I do admit it must make your life incredibly simple to just pretend racism doesn't exist and everyone ends up in the exact position they deserve.
> People absolutely do oppose libraries. They also oppose programs that pay for tutors for poor kids, programs that allocate more money to schools in poorer neighborhoods and basically anything else you can think of.
Opposition to spending in general is distinct from opposition to a specific policy because the policy has a deleterious effect, and is much easier to overcome if you would e.g. source the money from a constituency that supports the policy, or offer to cut something else to make room in the budget.
> But I do admit it must make your life incredibly simple to just pretend racism doesn't exist and everyone ends up in the exact position they deserve.
Straw man.
That would need some inclusion laws that enforce preferred hires from lower financial backgrounds instead of better prepared candidates with more resources.
So why is that not the proposal instead of DEI?
That’s still DEI.
Poor have less chances? Enforce hiring of the poor.
Non-white habe less chances? Enforce hiring of non-whites.
Non-male have less chances? Enforce hiring of non-males.
Disabled have less chances? Enforce hiring of disabled.
If you have less chances because of a attribute you aren’t responsible for, enforce hiring of people with such an attribute to normalize the attribute in the workspace is DEI.
The premise of that proposal is that the test scores are inaccurate as a result of the economic disparity, because people with less income have less resources to prepare for the test. That would apply in the case of an economic disparity because having more resources allows you to artificially receive a higher score. It's not about accepting someone with less merit out of charity but rather about adjusting for a measurement error.
But the economic disparity is the reason for the racial disparity, because otherwise we expect people of different races are equally intelligent, right? So the economic disparity is the real one and accounting for that inherently accounts for the racial disparity as well, and you don't need both.
Which is the reason doing the latter is controversial.
> But the economic disparity is the reason for the racial disparity, because otherwise we expect people of different races are equally intelligent, right? So the economic disparity is the real one and accounting for that inherently accounts for the racial disparity as well, and you don't need both.
That's only true if you assume prejudices like racism and sexism don't exist anymore, but they do. Even today, these are the lived experiences of many people in society. As examples, there are black people who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, even when they are more qualified and put in more work. There are women who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, and so on.
These are real implicit biases, and they don't go away by just ignoring them.
Yes but what prejudices we accept and which we do not is arbitrary. You have no choice over your height. Taller people can have more promotions and more dating opportunities, but we don't have affirmative action for short people, and we don't treat women who say they don't date short guys like we treat women who say they won't date black guys. There's always going to be discrimination, what form of discrimination is acceptable or unacceptable is still arbitrary.
First, let's not talk about dating and work in the same argument - they are fundamentally different in many important ways, and it's not conductive to the conversation.
Second, at least call a spade a spade - according to you, when people say meritocracy they actually mean "meritocracy with handicaps for non-whites and non-males". Let's not call that "meritocracy", okay?
Because it's incredibly complicated and proxying it via race is easier and humans like easy?
Using race as a proxy for other things is what racism is all about. We're trying to get rid of that rather than perpetuate it.
Scott Alexander has a good summary of what went wrong with the former mindset (fill the job with the qualified candidate becomes mimic the population at large or else): https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-origins-of-...
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.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention would’ve never guessed.
I've observed the people who are very anti-DEI will change their talking points when they are competing with Asians and Indians.
Suddenly they start espousing DEI principles and emphasize how it's important to find a more "well rounded" individual.
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.
Well I have no reason to think the IBM board had any reason to think Arvind wasn’t supremely well qualified and, if anything, Microsoft’s decision to go with Satya has proven an amazingly good choice.
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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.
Is this an argument to keep DEI in place?
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They’re not wrong. The tension is that on average, dark-skinned folk have lower merit — because of racism in the past that limited their educational opportunities, and also because it’s hard for a child to lever themselves into a higher socioeconomic group than their parents.
Among a number of other reasons. Equity vs. equal opportunities; I’m sympathetic to the latter, but what do you do when the opportunities were unequal in the past, and that causes inequitable results in the present?
One might, for instance, attempt to make up for it with targeted education. It’s a pity that the US educational system is such a disaster.
> limited their educational opportunities, and also because it’s hard for a child to lever themselves into a higher socioeconomic group than their parents.
Is this not what universal state-funded schooling is for. (And please don't forget that state-level funding is anti-correlated with local funding, so the standard "but property taxes!" thing is a red herring.)
> Equity vs. equal opportunities; I’m sympathetic to the latter, but what do you do when the opportunities were unequal in the past, and that causes inequitable results in the present?
I am not aware of anti-dei people having problems with need-based (as opposed to demographics-based) scholarships and such.
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> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.
There's a lot of anti-DEI folks who are furious at what they believe DEI is.
First generation college students, veterans, disabled people, including white ones, benefit from DEI programs. Our Vice President benefitted from Yale's Yellow Ribbon program as a veteran! He's a DEI admit!
> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.
None of this is true, which really problematizes your entire manifesto: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-racial-wealth-gap-fin...
Little Rock Nine is 68 years ago. Several of those screaming women are still alive. It's really not that long ago.
But it's very telling that you keep phrasing it as 'punishment'. The problem when you truly fuck over people for many generations, is that it takes generations to make up for it. Not to punish, but to actually give the children and children's children of the victims a fair chance. Especially in such a hard and competitive society as the American one, where your familys wealth is so indicative of how well you will do.
> The book “the coddling of the American mind” should be a must read for anyone who takes the societal problem of DEI hysteria seriously.
Hey, look at that, it's an If Books Could Kill alum!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-coddling-of-the-am...
The problem with your argument is that's not actually what advocates of DEI actually believe.
Economic inequality is part of DEI so there's no reason why people without "daddy big bucks" backing them would be left out.
In fact, most advocates of DEI want UNIVERSAL social welfare programs. The only reason that the advocate for more targeted programs is because otherwise conservatives start screaming about socialism.
The reason you are likely to get downvoted is because you are substituting personal attacks and rhetoric ("coddling", "hysteria", etc.) for actually engaging with the issues.
I agree strongly with this comment
I was thinking of writing something similar in my sibling comment, but I did not find a good phrasing. But when I read OP's comment again after writing my comment, I got this sinking feeling of 'there is just no point. This person is already strawmanning everyone else, and has pre-victimized themselves'. But maybe civil discourse is possible and useful?[flagged]
Are you being serious?
I think they are: the sociological definition of a minority is a member of a class which is socially disadvantaged (sociologists talk about women as minorities for this reason) and a sociological "-ism" (racism, sexism) is policy or decisions which disadvantage the socially disadvantaged.
Presuming that position, it's understandable that they further believe that not favoring the disadvantaged is continuing the status quo, which is a disadvantage to the already-disadvantaged, hence the sociological "-ism".
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.
Do you think people with different ethnicities do their jobs differently? Or is ethnicity purely superficial?
Ethnicity is just one aspect of diversity. In my opinion (in line with gp’s point), it is generally advantageous to increase the diversity of culture and life experiences within a population. As both of these are very difficult to precisely identify or categorize, ethnicity tends to provide a decent, though imperfect, approximation.
Anything affecting appearance can shape one’s life experience drastically as others respond to you based upon their perceptions. And ethnicity affects appearance. As does culture and class.
If this is hard to believe, it wouldn’t be hard to play with one’s appearance (or even one’s speech/behavior) to gather an understanding of how it might shapes one’s life.
So you make assumptions about peoples' "culture" and "life experiences" based on their ethnicity?
The differences that you posit exist--are these differences necessarily "advantageous" or can the differences be disadvantageous as well?
[This should be read in conjunction with my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43730717]
> So you make assumptions about peoples' "culture" and "life experiences" based on their ethnicity?
When dealing with people, to understand the meaning behind their actions and words, one needs to have some understanding of their perspective (including their intent). Their perspective is informed by their culture and life experience, amongst other things (but life experience is broad, so mentioning anything else is just redundant). Life experience is informed by their ethnicity and the environment in which they exhibit that ethnicity. I don't say "hey this guy looks to be [...], therefore he definitely is/experienced [...]", but if they are clearly not of the ethnic majority, then I know they have experienced things that the ethnic majority has generally not experienced. That's a helpful start to understanding their perspective and relating to them. I also can ask questions to understand them better, and express insight or interest in them if my "guess" is right and if I have some background knowledge (of history/culture) to avoid misteps, at which point they are nearly always much more receptive and expressive, seeing that I am curious and open rather than uncurious and closed.
If one could somehow be "blind" to ethnicity, then it would only be a disadvantage to effective communication and relations, for both sides. (As evidence, one need only observe the general state of discourse online.) No one is that blind though, at least subconsciously.
> The differences that you posit exist--are these differences necessarily "advantageous" or can the differences be disadvantageous as well?
I'm a little uncertain as to what you mean here. Advantageous to the population or to the individual?
In either case, both exist, depending on the goals.
Individual advantages and disadvantages are probably obvious, especially the disadvantages given the amount of discussion they receive and the human propensity to identify personal threats rather than potential gains.
For populations on the otherhand, for basic long-term survival in a competitive landscape, diversity is an unequivocal advantage.
But, populations may have particular goals rather than pure real survival. For instance, they may prioritize maintaining their particular culture or ethos, beliefs and perspectives, and as such they view diversity as a threat because beliefs/perspectives are too easily transformed by the introduction of new beliefs/perspectives. Or simply because they are false goals, hiding the real goal of maintenance of power or maintenance of a subpopulation (usually a power-holding subpopulation experiencing decline). We are now experiencing the effects of that goal, as have many other cultures in the past. Always to ill-effect for the population as a whole in the long-run. And especially detrimental to individuals who are not part of the favored subpopulation.
What _doesn't_ change how you do your job ?
Does it make a difference if half a day in a month you're in pain ? Does it impact your human skills if you'll get shot by a cop if you're drunk in the middle of the night ? Will it make a difference if you go to golf with your boss or go to the same book club as your scrum master ?
You can argue whether any difference is worth it or not, but truth is we all have our opinions, we're probably right on some and wrong on other, and nobody knows exactly what actually matters. So we try to cover our bases.
Why are you always all over these DEI threads?
Because I view DEI and ethnic identity as a personal threat to my mixed kids. Followed closely by the fact that i’m from a third world country, and I know that promoting ethnic identity invariably corrodes and destroys a society. It wrecks every facet of society and governance. Every issue becomes overtaken by ethnic scorekeeping and jockeying. Democracy itself disappears, replaced with ethnic machine politics.
Maybe the emphasis on racial identity in society will prove harmful in the long run. But it's plain to see that the anti-DEI push from the Trump administration is little more than a return to white, male supremacy. For example: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/park-service...
If I had to choose between the two, white supremacy is not what I would pick. And if it sticks around, it's going to be much more of a threat to the life and liberty of your mixed kids.
The anti-DEI push is not about “white supremacy,” but rather what some disparagingly call “multiracial whiteness.” It’s basically a return to the 1990s, when we retained a distinctly Anglo-flavored dominant American culture, but anyone could assimilate into that culture.
> It’s basically a return to the 1990s, when we retained a distinctly Anglo-flavored dominant American culture, but anyone could assimilate into that culture.
But that's.. not what the 1990s actually were like? I mean, this isn't that long ago, I was there, I lived through it. Returning to the 1990s is not a great goal, maybe we should try moving forwards?
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Holy baloney, that is some top grade insane rambling. (Seriously, "Hitler-centric"? Are we just throwing darts at the scary word board now?) The administration pays lip service to getting rid of DEI, but then tries to erase genuine American heroes like Harriet Tubman while hiring completely unqualified candidates like Pete Hegseth, glorifying genocidal maniacs like Andrew Jackson, and restoring racist Confederate monuments that should have been melted down in the 60's.
If you don't see the white supremacy inherent in these actions, you are like a fish in water.
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I
What is your thought process for that? Do you think ethnic conflicts do not exist in developing countries? Do you think nonwhite immigrants to the US would not talk about politics? Do you think nonwhite immigrants to the US are unbothered by a rise in ethnical tensions?
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Why do you find it hard to believe? Naturalized citizens like me were one of the groups that swung the hardest towards Trump in 2024: https://www.cato.org/blog/naturalized-immigrants-probably-vo....
Accordingly, it's also very easy to Google a picture of him.
In which “third world” country have you experienced this?
How does ethnic identity threaten a mixed person?
Being mixed myself, I'd love to know why you think ethnic identity is a threat to me and others like me.
In my experience, it has been a tremendous advantage, despite the fact that I have lost friends and opportunities simply because I am not "white enough". And that isn't a guess or misread, I've been told that explicitly. It hurts, especially as a child, but knowing this happens allows me to understand the importance of exposing everyone to as much diversity as possible. Why? Because each and every time someone has mistreated me or judged me negatively based on ethnicity, it was quite apparent that they have lived a very cloistered life and oftentimes carry some sort of grudge or sense of victimhood despite their advantages. And they quite often look up to someone (e.g. their father or other adult role model) who exhibit the exact same prejudices, insecurities and victimhood.
I've also been threatened and harassed by the out-group because they thought I was of the in-group. Not a fun experience in the least. But again, it became quite clear why they behaved that way: a lack of diverse real-world experience (particularly a lack of positive experiences) combined with misguided lessons from equally misguided role-models.
> In which “third world” country have you experienced this?
Bangladesh. My uncle fought a war to gain independence from Pakistan and establish a homeland for our ethnic group.
> How does ethnic identity threaten a mixed person?
Because ethnic identity is maladaptive in individualist American society.
>> In which “third world” country have you experienced this?
> Bangladesh. My uncle fought a war to gain independence from Pakistan and establish a homeland for our ethnic group.
I appreciate that, as a family history you carry. I'm curious, how do you feel about it in the context of your arguments made here? Do you think ethnic groups should fight for survival and a safe harbor (homeland)? (Rereading your prior answer, it sounds like a definitive "no")
Do you think there is value in maintaining a living culture outside of the homeland?
Do you recognize any potential loss to individuals when their family's culture or ethnicity is erased?
>> How does ethnic identity threaten a mixed person?
> Because ethnic identity is maladaptive in individualist American society.
How so? Would you consider all group identities maladaptive?
> I'm curious, how do you feel about it in the context of your arguments made here? Do you think ethnic groups should fight for survival and a safe harbor (homeland)? (Rereading your prior answer, it sounds like a definitive "no")
If an ethnic group can realistically achieve self determination, that is the best course. Bangladesh's independence came at a terrible human cost, especially to the Hindus that were purged from the country during and after independence. But the result is a country that, for all its myriad other problems, doesn't suffer from significant sectarian or ethnic conflict.
If that's not realistic--and in the U.S. it isn't--then the best course is aggressive assimilation. In China, for example, 90% of the population is considered "Han Chinese," even though in reality that designation papers over a tremendous amount of underlying diversity.
I’m quite curious why this, me sharing my own highly-applicable experience, is being downvoted. I’ll take the additional downvotes simply to be given an answer.
If it’s due to a lack of clarity, I’ll gladly elucidate here. (I can’t directly edit the comment at this point)
Edit: Haha thanks for the extra downvotes HN. So predictable.
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
A more pragmatic reason for this approach is many subgroups lack sufficient population sizes in relevant candidate pools to realistically attempt such a high-context focus with any sort of evaluation of efficacy.
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?
You know, and I know, and literally everybody in this thread knows, that race is a an imperfect proxy for other things. Why keep trotting this out like you're going to really get someone with it?
If you’re a cog stamper, probably doesn’t matter, but if you think for a living and need to generate ideas ever, diverse perspectives are invaluable. It’s the exact same as biology: bio diverse environments always outperform homogeneous ones. You can adapt to way more situations. If everyone thinks the same, and has roughly the same life experiences, when you hit a situation one person can’t think their way out of, no one will be able to because you’re all roughly the same. “Outside the box thinking” is cliche for a reason: it’s a good thing everyone wants but is hard to capture. Diverse workforce is a more reliable way to capture it.
Disagree. You can have a team of similar life experiences that considers other life experiences.
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Everyone does their jobs differently due to innumerable variables, including life experience and cultural background.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? Your bad faith anti-DEI rants are basically half this thread.
I’m trying to establish what people think “diversity” means. The foundational premise of the civil rights movement is that race is a superficial characteristic and people are the same. Accepting that as true, the concept of “diversity” makes sense only as a confirmation about the absence of irrational racial discrimination.
But OP suggested that diversity itself was a good thing, which makes no sense because racial differences aren’t meaningful. All else being equal, it’s not possible for a “racially diverse” team to function differently than a racially homogenous one.
> All else being equal, it’s not possible for a “racially diverse” team to function differently than a racially homogenous one.
And if all horses are perfectly spherical, they'd be awfully hard to ride.
The plain fact is that people are discriminated, for and against, based solely on their appearance. It happens today and it sure happened 100 years ago.
> The plain fact is that people are discriminated, for and against, based solely on their appearance. It happens today and it sure happened 100 years ago.
What does that have to do with how someone does their job?
The subject is preferential admission to harvard, what do you mean who does a job?
This thread is about diversity in the workplace. OP said: “Personally I fully agree that building a diverse workforce is more profitable…” I’m asking how that’s possible when race is a superficial and meaningless.
You are obsessed with race. It's weird.
I'd agree with that if you meant "you" as in the US public. It is difficult to respond to a DEI comment without acknowledging that racialist logic is a pretty major factor of DEI policy and it is unfortunate that race discrimination remains a political colossus despite some sterling efforts to weaken it. The fight against racism will always be an ongoing one.
Isn’t it a bit odd to dismiss discussions that focus on race, when DEI by definition centers on factors like race, gender, and ethnicity?
If the goal is to address inequality across these lines, shouldn’t that require a strong focus, some might say an obsession, with those very attributes?
I was just minding my business until someone called me a “person of color.”
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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.
That diversity research at big organizations has been called into question: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/diversity-was-supposed...
Ah, McKinsey. That their pro-remote study was bogus will probably come as a shock to the four people left on planet earth who aren't familiar with "where there's fraud there's McKinsey"
The current example is Target vs Costco.
(Because of a black pastor-led boycott of Target for dropping their DEI policy)
Target basically decided to stop "over-delivering" on DEI. e.g. stuff like $2 billion to black-owned businesses, increase black workforce by 20%, etc. Even with the rollbacks, they are probably doing on average more DEI for the sector, than a Costco, Amazon.
They definitely messed up the messaging, though, in that they positioned themselves to be somehow boycotted by both left and right.
Costco is 20x the business as Target for numerous reasons, I kind of doubt any of it has to do with DEI.
Personal experience is that Costco foot traffic has been visibly increased in recent weeks. Our Costco has a few colorful members of staff, which I personally find makes my visits there more pleasant.
> Our Costco has a few colorful members of staff, which I personally find makes my visits there more pleasant.
Is this a poor choice of words, or one of those "I've gone so far left, I'm now also racist" things?
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.
I think this is an online minority positions. There are a lot of well intentioned concerns which have nothing to do with “supremacy “
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.
Can you expand on the logic in your comment?
Why even have an interview or evaluate performance if everything is unknowable?
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.
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?
dei programs in academia and corporations aren’t limited to breaking ties at the end of hiring. But I can consider the possibility in good faith.
I think giving someone who might normally not have the chance is a good tie breaker. I’m opposed to a policy that dictates that must be determined by skin color/gender/religion. If the individuals involved in the hiring felt that was the right tie breaker based on their knowledge of their community, I’m not opposed to that.
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.
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).
That’s the motte. But the bailey is anti-white discrimination through the application of different standards to different races: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...
So the chart says:
> Acceptance rates for students with slightly higher and slightly lower than average GPAs and test scores are displayed in the other columns. In other words, the table above displays acceptance rates by race/ethnicity for students applying to US medical schools with average academic credentials, and just slightly above and slightly below average academic credentials.
So, uh, what? The argument is that it's now awful and horrible that average black students are accepted more frequently than average white students? Who cares.
> The argument is that it's now awful and horrible that average black students are accepted more frequently than average white students? Who cares.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 cares.
Presumably by your logic it would also care if black students weren't being accepted at an average rate? This is a silly conversation.
If they were being accepted at lower rates despite having the same index scores, then yes, that would be a huge civil rights act problem too!
“White” is not a race, but a vague signifier of pan-European identity that has shifted dramatically over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43720538
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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.
You're conflating two different sets of people.
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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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.
This is classic ad hominem fallacy. I don't think I've seen such a great example in a long time
Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement—especially when they have clear, documented consequences for marginalized groups—is not attacking the person, it's addressing the substance. There’s ample evidence that recent anti-DEI efforts are not grounded in merit-based reform but in resentment and exclusion. A few examples:
* Executive Order 11246, which prohibited discrimination by federal contractors, was eliminated.
* Civil Rights investigations in schools and colleges were dropped or deprioritized.
* Investigations into racial and gender discrimination in banking were quietly shelved.
These are a few structural, documented actions, not just rhetoric. Their impact falls disproportionately on people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and immigrants. That’s not an ad hominem, it’s observable policy.
Yes I agree almost completely with what you wrote. However, I disagree with your premise that GP was "critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement":
> Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement
Here is their entire comment:
> 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.
Reading that yet again, it seems to me to be clearly making an argument that we shouldn't listen to any of the points/arguments/information they present because they don't have pure motives.
From the wikipedia page on Ad Hominem:
> this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.
If you believe that GP was critiquing actions and policies, can you kindly point out which actions and policies?
How about this: the GP was clearly communicating a all-but-obvious conclusion based on the the demonstrated, highly publicized, and widely available evidence to anyone who has paid a modicum of attention. For Trump and his team: the motives are the substance!
At this point I do not think it is reasonable for an informed participant in this conversation to demand every attack on the motives of the current administration given the overt words, policy and behavioral choices supporting such a conclusion. The GP wasn't speculating or prepping for debate club, they were summarizing a (seemingly) obvious conclusion. That you agree with me tells me you know at least some of this.
This isn't a debate class where we score points on technical merit. Do you disagree with the point being made, or were you just having fun demanding the GP show their homework? But perhaps in fairness, I've moved the goalposts. Yet once again I would say: it seems a distraction from the obvious larger, more important, easily demonstrated point.
Uh huh.
> U.S. State Department hire Darren Beattie wrote on X: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-darren-beattie-state...
Yes, to be clear I'm not suggesting they have pure motives, nor am I suggesting they don't deserve the criticism. You are reading into my statement things that aren't there.
What I'm saying is that's irrelevant to the claim they are making. It is an ad hominem, which is a formal logical fallacy and has been for a very long time (going back well over 2,000 years)[1]. It didn't used to be controversial to say that ad hominem was a fallacy.
Are you disagreeing with me that the above is ad hominem? Or that ad hominem is a fallacy?
Wouldn't it be much better to just refute the claim instead of attack the person's motives? I.e. I think it's pretty damn easy to demonstrate that non white men have been great leaders who have gotten things to work. Refuting that claim is the non-fallacious approach and may actually convince someone honest (likely some third-party who is reading it later, you'll probably never convince the original speaker).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
The claim we are arguing is "anti-DEI stuff is predicated on the idea that civil rights are bad and that white (straight dude) rule is good.". You said this claim is an ad hominem fallacy. I quoted someone in the administration who is literally saying "competent white must be in charge," an exact example of what the claim is stating.
> Wouldn't it be much better to just refute the claim instead of attack the person's motives?
No, at some point, and we have absolutely passed it in the US, you can be overwhelmed by the lies and bad faith arguments if you try to respond to them individually, and it's necessary to try to derail the source.
it’s okay to attack a person’s motives when those motives are just racist as fuck. The arguments put forth by the ‘anti-DEI’ crowd are what is known logically as ‘bullshit.’
How so? The words and actions of the current administration and its supporters are pretty clear about the intent. One of the first acts of the president was to fire a black man and a white woman from the joint chiefs of staff and replace them with white men. The current secretary of defense claims that women shouldn't be in the military, and rolled back protections for LGBT servicepeople. Records of the black service men are erased from public web pages. I could go on and on and on, it is a nearly endless list.
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.
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.
Why is it not possible both are/were true?
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.
> Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.
Also from what I saw, juniors struggled without always-available guidance while mid and seniors could get a lot done by avoiding interruptions. If the mix of employees changed in those couple of years, that alone could have been the entire difference.
Obviously there are pluses and minuses for both but the pluses outway the cons otherwise companies wouldn't have survived after years of it. No this is just popular because the elite noticed workers were feeling happier and more empowered and they feel threatened by that. So along come Trump with an escape hatch, and they make up bullshit about DEI and WFH not working even though it worked for years and stock market was way up. Nope this is all about the old boys network trying to keep the peasants in place and save a few bucks this quarter.
What you call “popping your head in someone’s cube”, I call “distraction from doing deep work”.
I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption.
My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard.
I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions.
No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.
Point taken about the distraction. For me it's the this to do on the working from home days. Office days are all about talking through plans, questions, problem solving or investigation etc. sure you can say that this does not require an office but it works well for me.
1 person's deep work might mean an entire department is stuck twiddling their thumbs because they're blocked and can't reach the person absorbed in "deep work".
wfh can be great for individual productivity, but it can also seriously hamper team productivity.
That seems to indicate a catastrophically low bus factor--people get sick, take vacations, sleep, quit, etc. If you’re blocked on an IC doing anything other than finishing their task you've got a bigger problem than them going out of pocket for a day, fix the real problem.
(If they're a manager/decisionmaker of some sort then they better learn how to multitask online, which is like a 30 year old skill requirement at this point)
I have been in some type of team lead/architect position for almost 10 years now. 4+ years at product companies and 5+ in consulting companies. At any given time, I might have needed a decision to be made by my CxO, the client or another team.
On the other hand I might be preparing for a meeting, in a meeting, on a plane, at a customer’s site etc. On the opposite end, there is always a list of things I need to get done. I put that item as “blocked” and move on to my next item. If it is a downstream dependency as a developer, I mock it out and keep going.
If you are dependent on one person to answer a question, what happens when they go on vacation or if they are otherwise unavailable? I make it a point to not be a single point of failure.
Also, I keep my calendar up to date, including time I need to do “deep work”, when I’m traveling for business, of course meetings automatically show up. Anyone is free to put a meeting on my calendar if they need to interact with me synchronously.
Company people will say anything to align with corporatespeak.
It's likely that both can be true: he meant what he said in 2022 but _had_ to mean what he said in 2024.
Also that somebody could change their mind after two years of experience.
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.
This often just feels like bad management.
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.
I don't know if it's bad management per se. I think some people are very well suited for remote; some people aren't. Probably a rough extension of introversion/extroversion in the people mix.
If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general).
Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan.
The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse.
My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.
I think both problems are real, and your last paragraph really gets at why. People and jobs vary widely, and so does the quality of management. If you have a strong business and reasonably mature teams, you might not even realize problems with your management culture and practice are until something big changes; conversely, if you have strong managers you might have been able to soak up a lot of personnel and job issues before they got attention because some unappreciated middle managers put a lid on potential problems first.
In all cases, you really someone with time to look at the business as a whole to evaluate these things. For example, one of the things which has made RTO unproductive for many workers are open plan offices, which is a really easy problem to see and fix if workplace productivity is someone’s job but not if the RTO push is being driven by politics or the need to justify leases.
Agreed, but falling commercial real estate prices will allow some forward thinking companies to go back to private offices for developers, which arguably is the best solution (apart from commute/flexibility) for most, productivity wise.
Funny you mention fraud... I worked for a company for quite a while that was absolutely dedicated to WFH for engineering - but swore up and down that sales just couldn't work without "bullpen" office setups.
Come to find out at least one entire office was engaged in widespread misreporting and fabrication. Turns out fraud is pretty tempting when you can easily avoid any paper trail.
Re:introvert/extravert I suspect it's the reverse.
Extraverts, broadly, aren't afraid of picking up the phone and calling you to chat about the email they sent you three minutes ago while driving and also on mute in a zoom; introverts can use remote work to be unreachable in a way they can't if you can just walk over and impose yourself on them.
yeah I feel like blaming management is like blaming teachers when students got bad scores during remote-schooling. You can give them all the resources they need to succeed, but if they'd rather go to the dog park in the middle of the day, there's not much that can be done.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.
The metaphor breaks down a bit when you consider that teachers don't generally get to pick their students while organizations get to choose their employees. Failing to choose the right employees is a failure of management.
Unfortunately many of the employees _most interested_ in remote work are such because they want to do things other than work.
Not all. I work with some remotes who are awesome. But the 24 year olds who want to work remotely from Thailand aren't getting their shit done.
Seeing posts on here and Blind advocating for interviews to go back on-site due to cheating next to "RTO bad" posts is wild af.
It's wilder still that the handful of times I've dealt with this have all been before RTO!
I don't mean completely in person, but I do expect a lot of companies will want to meet the person in real life at least once. Which adds huge logistics problems.
Btw I'm not saying 'cheating', that's one thing. I am meaning industrial scale fraud with remote candidates. Eg having one person interview then another (much worse) person gets the job. There are gangs that are going to almost unbelievable lengths to do this.
About a year ago I moved to a new, largish company and, for the first time in my career, got to see how a company can be bad at remote work.
It's by being bad at work, period, but in ways that can be partially mitigated by being in-person. Poor documentation of processes, lots of know-the-right-person involved in getting anything done or figured out, using Teams (its design is remarkably awful for organizing and communicating within and among... teams) rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.
This stuff is also making in-person work less efficient but it's easier to work around the problems when in-person.
Better than resisting remote work, would be for them to suck less at managing a business. Even if they continued resisting remote work, they should do that!
> rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.
What is better? I hate Teams, but Slack really wasn't much better.
Teams' core problem is that the actual Teams-section is more like a bulletin board than a chat system, almost like it was targeting that weird impulse companies had for a few years to build "company facebooks" or whatever.
The real chat part is cordoned off in ad-hoc channels that individual users can sticky, but that aren't "structural" and can't really have order imposed on them, if that makes sense.
It's like if Slack only had the DM and group-message feature, and no channels.
No arguments about the crappiness of Teams.
My thing is that while better IM systems exist, none is what I would call "Good" or even "Acceptable". Being better than Teams is not really saying much :-)
I haven't used Slack in years, so I can't speak to it, but it sucked when I used it. Back when our team was all colocated in one building, I intentionally had my IM app turned off and disconnected. Interruptions in person suck, but with Slack et al interruptions were multiplied significantly. Kind of: "If you can't be bothered to get up and walk to my cube, it probably wasn't that important."
What I want from Teams and similar SW:
A way to, with a keystroke, mark all messages as "Read" (even when focus is not on the window).
A way to, with a keystroke, print out all unread messages on my console (or in a popup window, or whatever).
In other words, just give me a damn API I can program these things with. Teams' API lets me get messages, but will not let me see if a message is read or unread.
Any app that forces me to open up the window, click on a dozen channels to read all the latest messages, sucks. Period. I should be able to read it all with one click/keystroke, and have them marked as "Read" when I do it.
Wait, what? We're moving to Teams soon...
This looks like channels do exist, is it new (there's no date on the page) or do they not work as you'd expect? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-new-chat-and-...
And being in an office doesn’t help if no one on your team is in the same office. If you work in a large company that has multiple offices, you are still going to have the sane problem because eventually the person you need is not going to be in your office.
Even the small companies I’ve worked at (100-700 people) had multiple offices where you had to coordinate time to meet with the people you needed.
I’ve also worked remotely for the second largest employer in the US. Amazon has internal “interest” channels for each service team (the team responsible for an AWS service). Anyone could ask a question and usually one of the developers of the service would help.
At Google, they found that engineers L5 and above got more work done with RTO, and engineers at L4 and below got significantly less work done. WFH is great but it doesn't work for fresh engineers (who are often the most gung-ho about it as well).
Did you mean L5 and above got more work done with WFH? Since the next sentence implies that it was the fresh engineers who were most impacted by WFH.
I think it goes beyond bad management.
These are my disadvantages of working remotely. I say all of these things as an advocate for hybrid work arrangements and co-working spaces/satellite offices:
1) Some people work better in an office. Offices are literally designed for working anyhow.
2) Some people didn't, and/or still don't, have optimal conditions in their house to work remotely.
I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.
3) Some jobs aren't compatible with remote work. Examples:
- Tech sales (moreso for complex sales and expansions than new sales)
- Many people who work in the public sector (even before this administration's aggressive RTO campaign)
- Most folks doing hardware or embedded work
- Pretty much everyone that we interact with outside of our home on a daily basis, like front desk personnel, doctors, mechanics, retail and restaurant staff, etc.
This creates an unfair imbalance of "haves" and "have nots". It is also very easy for the "have nots" to typecast those who WFH as lazy, especially given some of the memes of people doing all sorts of other things during core hours.
4) Some people don't naturally communicate what they're doing over Slack. This is the one thing I'll blame on management is communication.
Weekly "15-minute" hour long standups and check-in meetings covered for people like this back when we worked in offices, but it can be easy for these checkpoints to slip in when everyone's remote.
Now, these meetings existing are, in and of themselves, signs that management can be improved. Between Slack/Teams/whatever, bug trackers, Git commit histories, Office 365/Google Workspace APIs and all of the other signs of life of people doing things, there are ways for the PHBs to check that people are doing things so that they can report the things being done to their PHBs so they can report to their PHBs all the way up to the board and investors.
It would be great if more companies invested more in their processes to make it possible to assess productivity without needing inefficient meetings. This would make it possible to be a high-performing company regardless of location.
But change is hard, and it's easier for senior leaders/execs to throw their hands up and say "this isn't working; back to the office, now", especially when those leaders are already traveling all of the time as it is.
(I know that the trope of CxOs who golf/eat steak dinners all of the time is common; my experience working with people at these levels does not completely reflect that.)
5) Work-life balance is so much easier to immolate when working remotely.
When your home is your office and your work apps are on your personal phone, it takes the mental fortitude of a thousand monks to not be "terminally online" at work.
"I'll just hop back on after I'm done with the kids/dinner/etc." is the new normal. It existed before WFH, but it feels so much worse now, as the technology needed to set this up is so much more pervasive (mostly MDM being mature for Apple devices and Android becoming much more secure at the cost of everything that made Android fun for us hackers).
This has the fun side-effect of making people who try very hard to keep work and life as separate as possible look like slackers even when they're not.
6) Establishing rapport and camaraderie is much harder to do remotely. This "just happens" when you're working next to the same people every day for months/years at a time.
This was most evident when I joined a new company after COVID to avoid an acquisition. Almost everyone was super tight with each other because they hung out all of the time. There were so many inside jokes/conversations/memories that I was basically left out of, and because traveling was impossible then, forming new ones didn't really happen.
I get that many on this board view this as a feature, not a bug, but friends at work is important to some (most?) people. It's the one thing I miss from the before times more than anything else. Well, that and traveling all of the time!
7) Last thing I'll say on this: onboarding, in my opinion, is much worse when done remotely.
I've switched companies four times since COVID. ALL of these onboarding experiences have had some combination of:
- Loads of training materials, like labs and new hire sessions, that are dry as toast over Zoom but can be extremely engaging in-person,
- Some kind of buddy system that falls apart because everyone is drowning in a sea of Zoom meetings and the last thing people want to do is have ANOTHER zoom meeting explaining things about your new job that are kind-of difficult to explain without shadowing, and
- An assumption that you are a self-starter who will learn how to do your job by self-organizing meetings with people and scouring whatever documentation/knowledge/recordings/etc you can find.
This might just be a 'me' thing, but I've found remote onboarding to be a poor substitute for onboarding at an office somewhere.
> I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.
At home, there have never been more than three other people in my house, when I’m “at work” with my door closed, they knew not to bother me. At work in an office there are constant distractions.
As far as “tech sales”. I’ve lead my share of complex cloud tech projects from discovery, customer acceptance to leading the delivery - all remotely. Yes sometimes I had to travel to the client’s site. But I haven’t needed to be in the office with the people on my team (who were sometimes in another country).
My coworkers are just that my coworkers. At work, “I’m taking a step back to look at things from the thousand foot few”, “taking things to the parking lot”, and “adding on to what Becky said”. I’m a completely different person at home. At the end of the day, my “friends” at work are not interested in keeping their jobs. I go to work to make money - not friends.
I’ve worked for two companies remotely since 2020 - Amazon and now a much smaller company. They both had excellent onboarding procedures. While AWS wasn’t “remote first”, my department (Professional Services) was as is my current company. Both had “onboarding buddies” and Amazon had a list of people you should set up 1x1’s with an instructions for the relevant internal systems you should use.
> Internally, it was very clear that it did not work
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.
The company was publicly lying that it did because execs thought it would help us recruit younger people.
If they were willing to lie to juice their metrics during COVID, why would any outsider believe them now?
after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic....
and the company you work for seems rather incompetent
Unless you are willing to say there is an ongoing flu pandemic then I can't really agree with you.
Except one doesn't get the flu every 6 months like most people seem to get covid ; at most one gets the REAL flu every 10 years.
SOURCE: several studies and my own conclusion observing friends...
> after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic....
The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza.
"After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.
I don’t understand how that conclusion follows from that comparison. We also wouldn’t describe the current day as “after the flu”. Both are endemic.
The phrase you picked to describe them is "endemic", rather than "ongoing pandemics". There's a reason for that.
by that token; you can argue HIV is endemic and nothing should be done about it... people will understand wearing condoms but apparently can't understand masking... hmm... neither are very difficult to do, I'd argue that wearing a condom is more tricky in some aspects.
the reason is simple: wearing a mask reminds people there is a risk and it doesn't "look good", despite its many advantages for many pathogens and pollutants; also acknowledging indoor air quality is crap is hard for businesses (and governments) to do since they would need to invest into better ventilation and filtration systems.
you are accounting for immediate deaths; you have to keep in mind that covid causes immune dysfunction, heart disease etc; 10% of people are still not recovered after 4 years...
long term effects are rare in the (proper, confirmed flu, not your cold you think is the flu) flu
> Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
Funny joke. I needed a laugh.
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.
I think it is largely just rationalizing what is fashionable. WFH was fashionable for a while. Now WFO + AI replacement is cool.
its almost as if they are not totally rational actors and instead operating on vibes...
Honestly I think nearly anyone would do the same. Going against the flow is the rare territory of the founder.
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)
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.
Of course they are. It makes no sense for sales roles to be in an office for “collaboration”.
> Same companies were telling is how well it worked
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?
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.
Foolish.
Non conspiracy explanation:
It seemed to work at first, but over time it became clear it didn't.
> 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?
Profits don't have to spiral for something to become clear it's not working.
Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before".
Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.
the bottom line profit is your primary guideline if you are succeeding. Profits have been great for most companies for quite a while now. WFH works in most cases. The current push to end it, is simply a fad amongst CEOs because it's popular, not because it is proven or has merit. If you are in a construction crew, obviously you can't work from home. If you work in an office and mostly on your own "stuff" you can work from home and work more productively without all the office distractions and negative energy.
A company's profits can remain high even while operating very inefficiently.
You seem to have strong opinions on WFH. Find a job that agrees and allows this. If your current employer requires RTO, well.. they're paying you to be in the office so show up and stop the conspiracy theories.
It's objectively vastly more expensive to operate an office building or buildings. No organization is going to decide to incur the significant expenses and liabilities associated with operating facilities with people in them if they don't need to. Very little logic supports your claims, especially regarding the "CEO" and "fad" points you are attempting to make.
If that how advantageous you think running a company is, you should definitely start one!
There's a complication to starting a company. The execs answer to the board and investors. Since so many companies are unprofitable for so long, it is very difficult to start a company today without either being rich or being beholden.
I'm going to guess that most people who start companies are beholden. The investors need people to RTO for some important reasons - real estate values, economies built on supporting workers, and of course - some amount of lifestyle differentiation (a luxury of having fuck you money is being able to spend more time with friends and loved ones than the peasant class).
WFH is a one of the most disruptive cultural shifts ever - pushback was only expected.
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.
> different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all of the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.
out of a handful of the largest companies in the world, in a thread about the specific company IBM and its policies, why do you avoid naming the company and CEO?
Apparently my role could be remote but the company took it away.
I don't think we need to give their good wills. They are just using the economic reality to fuck us, and I'm sure many of us are considering fucking back when the stars are right.
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].
1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickle-lamoreaux_dei-diversit...
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.
No, it's misleading:
> 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.
> related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired,
No. the implication is that DEI policies are being watered down or removed
I accept your interpretation and disagree.
Respectfully, I disagree. I immediately thought they were firing all DEI related people just like the entire federal government.
Also:
Purge: remove (a group of people considered undesirable) from an organization or place in an abrupt or violent way.
IBM will use any excuse to justify firing people over 50 years old. So "DEI purge" is just an excuse, nothing more.
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.
Yeah they kind of got burned by the "dinobabies" comment from a while back.
Their previous excuse was "AI is so awesome, we've automated away the jobs"
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.
Despite the quotes IBM has not announced "we're getting rid of DEI hires".
Reading the article will give you a fuller understanding of the announcement.
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.
The laws are still there, but who enforces the laws at this point?
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
No, that would be constructive dismissal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
> The burden of proof in constructive dismissal cases lies with the employee.
The only practical way is if somehow an executive breaks ranks and exposes some list or email or private conversation where he they were planning this.
A harder way is some coordinating action from employees. All get together to figure out the patterns.
It depends on the state, but you don’t have to prove intent, you have to prove that the conditions of your job changed enough that it is an unreasonable burden.
If they transfer you to a location that requires an additional hour of commuting, you just have to prove that the commute takes an extra hour.
> If they transfer you to a location that requires an additional hour of commuting, you just have to prove that the commute takes an extra hour.
Oh that’s easy to prove. But then what? Does your employment contract prohibit commutes.
No. The government authority in charge of employment decides whether that change is enough of a change of the original job that it constitutes constructive dismissal.
If so, you can quit your job and are eligible for unemployment and any other legal benefits of having been fired without cause, and a claim is put against the employers account in the unemployment system.
Oh for unemployment sure, but the claim here is that the person hired under a DEI initiative is now let go, but under a different scheme of “restructuring”. Now their job would be to find redress and either reverse that or win monetary damages. It’s not impossible but it’s an uphill battle unless someone find a written directive somewhere a red flag. Or all the terminated employees somewhere coordinate to prove a particular pattern.
I wasn’t commenting on that case. Constructive dismissal is irrelevant in that instance if you have been let go since you don’t have to prove that your job was changed if it no longer exists.
Also, it is perfectly legal to terminate someone in most of the US under a restructure.
My original response was just pointing out that proving constructive dismissal doesn’t have to do with the intent of the employer, merely the effect of those actions. In your original example the employer can’t pretend that asking someone to commute to Alaska three days a week is reasonable and therefore they weren’t fired without cause when they refuse to do that.
Juries are allowed to infer intent. They do not need an explicit statement admitting it.
To be honest, I find it very weird that you quoted that part and had the response you did as if you knew what you were talking about. By your logic, intent would essentially be impossible to prove in just about any circumstance. Obviously, that's not true. In reality, there's tons of caselaw about when intent can be inferred by a jury for any claim requiring intent.
> To be honest, I find it very weird that you quoted that part and had the response you did as if you knew what you were talking about.
Well honesty is always key, I find.
> Obviously, that's not true. In reality, there's tons of caselaw about when intent can be inferred by a jury for any claim requiring intent.
By one juror or two, and if the defense lawyers are dummies and fail to do their job. Corporations like IBM have lawyers on retainer and they are not that incompetent.
It will be hard to infer intent if the defense can present some evidence of “increased efficiency”, “working together” and “consolidating”. Without a smoking gun piece of evidence proving the contrary it would be an uphill battle, especially for one individual plaintiff.
>By one juror or two, and if the defense lawyers are dummies and fail to do their job. Corporations like IBM have lawyers on retainer and they are not that incompetent.
What do you mean by one juror or two? My point is regarding when juries are legally allowed to make an intent determination. It often does not require a specific expression of intent and instead can be inferred from activities that indicate things like reckless behavior and disregard for the potential that they do the unlawful thing.
>It will be hard to infer intent if the defense can present some evidence of “increased efficiency”, “working together” and “consolidating”. Without a smoking gun piece of evidence proving the contrary it would be an uphill battle, especially for one individual plaintiff.
No, that's just a defense which might not cut against the inference at all.
>Do you speak for all jurors?
No, you seem to be confused about the evidence a court allows a jury to rely on when it makes a state-of-mind determination in civil suits. My reading of your post was that you suggested it required an express claim regarding intent. That is not the case, legally. Maybe you didn't realize that and were just posting layman stuff, which is understandable. It's not just a reflection of legal reality.
I don't think that you appreciate the typical legal procedure is that before any fact-question is presented to the jury, parties move based upon the available evidence, whether or not there is sufficient facts presented to warrant a fact-decider's decision. This occurs prior to trial at the summary judgment stage and after evidence is presented at trial. So there is often a legal boundary as to what evidence a jury can consider when it comes to any fact question (i.e. did this party have intent? did this party do the thing? etc)
> What do you mean by one juror or two? My point is regarding when juries are legally allowed to make an intent determination. It often does not require a specific expression of intent and instead can be inferred from activities that indicate things like reckless behavior and disregard for the potential that they do the unlawful thing.
The point is the defense can show loads of documents about how working together increases efficiency, how they are streamlining units and they plaintiff has to prove they were targeted as an ex-DEI hire and even though there is just hunch. I don’t know about other countries but that’s how it works in US.
Worker protection here is very weak. There are protected categories but they’d have the burden of proof they were let go specifically because of their protected category.
> I don't think that you appreciate the typical legal procedure is that before any fact-question is presented to the jury, parties move based upon the available evidence, whether or not there is sufficient facts presented to warrant a fact-decider's decision
Exactly, moreover jurors would be instructed to make up their mind based on the presented evidence. One side will have papers and the other will have read-between-lines hunches. Sure jurors can still do whatever but unless they’re all activist jurors they will just go with whatever side is more convincing and the evidence they have been presented.
Which is exactly why they lead with the "closer to the customer" bullshit. The federal government is starting to do the exact same thing (with the exact same rationale) right now.
Trump and Musk are doing this to the people who enforce labor laws, so we can expect no more labor law enforcement this term
I really don't mind RTO. As a mostly-remote worker right now, I would actually prefer a few office days each week; being right next to colleagues and able to spitball news, ideas, and other work (and non-work) stuff is great for my knowledge, abilities, and morale. With that being said, It's also nice to be able to get uninterrupted heads-down time, or just work at my own pace at home some times.
I think 3 days in-office and 2 days WFH is the sweet spot, at least for me.
Don't fall for the commute hype. Get a life that doesn't living at work or require sitting in traffic to fulfill the whims of management control-freaks.
> able to spitball news, ideas, and other work (and non-work) stuff
... you can do this from home too
IBM is long past innovation, and is in the license audit and share buyback business.
Age bias lawsuit: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/fired-ibm-workers-wrap-up-age-...
IBM audit: https://itaa.com/insights/ibm-audits-lessons-learnt-cimino-i...
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...
> 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.
This statement is not true
Just thinking out loud here, are they not worried about class action lawsuits. Maybe they think the courts and jury trial is on their side, but if the 2028 election doesn't go towards the current admin's side, then won't there be massive lawsuits? It's not like IBM is a stranger to that either way.
What's the risk calculus here? If I were an apathetic CEO who just cares about the bottom-line, I would wait for the government to at least publicly pressure the company before bending the knee. That way, the company is insulated from lawsuits to a degree, "coercion" could be the defense.
It's almost like they're eager to promote racism now lol.
At least as described by the OP, I have a hard time believing IBM is doing this. There are a whole bunch of markets -- far more than they listed in their flagship/hub site list -- where a vendor like IBM would have a several - a few dozen dedicated teams that just serve local clients. Now, in a lot of cases (but by no means all) the sales engineers can get badged at their customers and spend a few days a week onsite. While not unheard of, especially at the largest shops, its less common for the account managers to be badged and have unfettered access.
That said, I've never worked at IBM, and the sales segments they listed in the article (strategic, enterprise, etc.) are notoriously company-specific. But, I can't imagine the ones in the exception list cover all of teams with named accounts.
Deliberately placing your sales teams in different cities than their clients is almost always an incredibly dumb idea, WFH or not. In 15 years of sales engineering/sales engineering management, I remember exactly one account team we deliberately placed outside of their client geography, and that was because the client was so spread out, it made more sense to put the team close to a big airport than pick a single client site to place them near.
edit - I’m talking about dedicated/assigned teams, not inside sales or startups that have one or a handful of teams to cover everything.
> 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.
As a European who used to go "fuck yeah Intel!" "fuck yeah Boeing!" "fuck yeah IBM!" etc... it seems like US companies are going down the drain real fast. I blame bad management, lack of innovation, poor quality control and of course, general greed...
In this case it is bad management hiding behind RTO/DEI excuses. WFH works for many and especially on "cloud" stuff I do not see the point of having people systematically RTO to... tweak a few config files (most of the time) or change some hardware (some of the time)
I have the example of a friend in IT who was made to drive 4 hours to change.... the default DNS on a Windows machine at a client's.... a phone call would have done it...
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IBM of course has a long and uh, colorful history when it comes to complying with government programs violently opposed to diversity.
Must’ve invoked a lot of nostalgia for them seeing Musk’s inauguration speech.
let's be more direct and truthful - ibm directly aided the third reich in their despicable actions. full stop.
I attended a talk given by a local author who wrote a book about his father being the first black software engineer at IBM, who joined with several women around 1950, and the gist was that it was mostly to take some heat off of them for this collaboration.
in kindness to the previous poster, they are being as direct and truthful as one can be on a platform that has tilted hard to the right in the past 5 years and where discussion of the alluded-to-salute is flagged [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42774621
It’s striking how corporate complicity in systematic oppression can be sanitized over time until egregious patterns only resurface as political talking points.
I guess all of sales will be moving to Delaware since all of IBM's customer's are incorporated there.
Sounds like IBM is going to have a bad year. I should probably dump that stock.
They're pretty cozy with Uncle Sam, take that for what you will...
Except the US government has been canceling contracts left and right.
Doing things and then undoing things, I care not to waste time on predictions. Corruption is as corruption does.
Spend a little cash, have a dinner, get favor. Or something. They want to save downtown... because downtown made a bet.
There are a lot more competing options to run the "census" systems this time around though.
Living up to their memory as not being averse to supporting Nazis before WW2 finally broke out.
Of all the RTO orders, part of this at least makes sense. If you're in sales, it's beneficial to be close to your clients.
But if you're working on cloud, hard to see how working at the office is any more productive than from home.
also, this is significant:
> The employee shuffling has been accompanied by rolling layoffs in the US, but hiring in India – there are at least 10x as many open IBM jobs in India as there are in any other IBM location, according to the corporation's career listings. And earlier this week, IBM said it "is setting up a new software lab in Lucknow," India.
Within the last half decade it appears like IBM overtly markets to whatever administration and party is in power, a few years ago they were marketing creepy vaccine passports [1].
[1] https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/vaccine-passport
Has IBM ever let moral or ethical standards get in the way of profit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
"…Black outlined the key role of IBM's technology in the Holocaust genocide committed by the German Nazi regime, by facilitating the regime's generation and tabulation of punch cards for national census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity."
If you have to go back 80 years to find something to complain about, I'd say it's not worth complaining about.
"That One Time It Powered a Genocide" is just an older example of how IBM is happy to put profit over principles. They have a long history that includes happily selling to authoritarian regimes¹, knowingly selling technology that doesn't work², commercializing biometric data without consent³, age discrimination, and more.
¹ http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co... ² https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/stat-ibms-watson-gave-un... ³ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/ibm-stirs-controversy-by...
Thank you.
I don't have a dog in this fight and if there are recent examples of this kind of crap going on, by all means publicize them. My issue is with people who drag up shit from 100 years ago and they go "see how bad they are?"
Go back far enough and everyone's had a skeleton in their closet.
For most people, that skeleton isn't aiding the holocaust though.
Behavior won't change until incentives that cause the behavior change.
Awful. I hope Red Hat is escaping the tightening gauntlet on this misdeed.
I also wonder about how they are going to manage Hashicorp, a fully remote remote company.
Red Hat is involved with a lawsuit alleging that they used illegal criteria to discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, and sex in hiring and layoffs. Until that is settled one way or the other, Red Hat is a potential liability to its parent company. The most likely path is status quo so if doesn't look like IBM is punishing nor rewarding Red Hat for the situation.
What does IBM do?
Surprising that IBM still generates _new_ sales and has a dedicated sales workforce.
Must be hard to generate new sales for their deadass mainframe tech.
We're still buying tons of things from IBM. Storage, Linux, automation, data analytics...
Part of it is the old guard saying "Let's see what IBM has" when we're looking for solutions, but they do provide a pretty large group of established products. They're already in, as well.
IBM makes money selling mainframes like Microsoft makes money selling boxed copies of Windows. They're mostly making money doing other stuff.
They are one of the larger MSPs globally, they own RedHat and Hashicorp, SPSS is the backbone of the global logistics industry, and IBM Cloud does have decent traction in the financial services and logistics space.
Since they seem to just go with the wind of what people want, I'm sure they are itching on building some AI to detect and classify woke
Getting rid of DEI is par for the course with the trump administration.
How else would they handle the database and personnel backend of the current fascist's database requirements?
Jewish Holocaust victims' tattoos were IBM database primary IDs. and given ongoing federal/government contracting, thus is yet another opportunity to be at ground zero for another genocide.
So this is IBM siding with the Nazis for a second time around now it seems?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Posted without further comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
“Cloud”
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>"DEI Purge"
What in the actual fuck is that supposed to mean? Firing black people to make the president happy?
As if there were any meaningful amount of "DEI" to "purge" from the tech industry in the first place.
Absolutely disgusting.
It typically just means gutting DEI programs, not firing people hired because of them.
>It typically just means gutting DEI programs, not firing people hired because of them.
And who do you think is running those programs?
Why do you think "DEI people" are running DEI programs?