Yeah, but we throw a really nice gay pride parade to show we're good people. Loads of BLM support on walls. Many of my colleagues updated their instagram filters.
I interviewed at a company based out of SF last week. The HR person had this long comment about diversity and how that is important at their company and asked what I've done in my career to support diversity. I told him a story about how a company I was at had decided to outsource some of the QA work to India and when the first employee in India came to the US to onboard I was very welcoming and did everything I could to help him feel welcome and part of the team including hanging out after work.
This HR guy said "Is that really diversity though?"
I guess he was looking for a more symbolic or virtue signaling example and with another minority group other than Indians. Something like "I was the first person at my company to put a BLM sticker on my cube."
"By relocating our manufacturing facility to China and laying off the corresponding employees domestically we have been able to vastly improve workforce diversity numbers".
East Asians aren’t white enough to be invited to the tee time and they’re not diverse enough to get special quotas so they keep doing what they have always done which is study harder and perform better.
I don't think it's symbolic or virtue signalling. In the SF area, "diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female". (You'll often see people say things like "we'd like 40% of our candidate pool to be diverse", which only really make sense under that definition.) The idea of building a welcoming environment for people from all walks of life is usually referred to as "inclusion".
No, it's not symbolic, just the opposite, it's Orwellian newspeak/totalitarianism.
By your very own words: ""diverse" is just an HR term of art that means "black, Hispanic, or female"", i.e. a completely subjective, odd, and contextual local moralism.
The problem is that these folks believe that any 'questioning' of their methods or approach are in fact 'questioning' of the underlying positive impetus of their motivation (i.e. we all agree 'not being racist' is good, but that doesn't mean we have to buy into any specific moralisms about diversity).
But anyone who asks that kind of question in an interview is either a clown or a pill-swallowing victim, and it's definitely a massive 'Red Flag' in that you're entering into a dystopian social nightmare where you'll need special help 'interpreting' thew Newspeak.
People from outside the West are already having enough trouble keeping up with the basic PC stuff, this is getting ridiculous.
It's a sign of social decay, and that SF has 'peaked' in terms of it's relative importance. Thanks to COVID, the rise of China, Trumpian foreign policy which has engendered a lot of mistrust, the 'decentralization' has begun in earnest.
I work with developers in E. Europe and 20 years ago they would have jumped at the chance to move to the US, now they have a strong preference for staying home - the only motivation is money, but since there's massive Purchase Power differential, even their low salaries offer them fairly high standard of living - and their economies are growing consistently 4-7%/year.
The story really is not about 'people leaving SF' - it's about 'The End of Short-lived SF Mecca'.
Note that SF proper was not a 'centre' of anything really until about 2010: Google, FB etc. are all 'Valley'companies, not until the rise of Twitter, Salesforce, Stripe did we see 'SF Values' come to start to infiltrate the definition of 'Silicon Valley'. The Bay will remain important, possibly even the 'most' important, but much like broad relative US decline (i.e. 40% of global GDP in 1960, 25% today), the relative influence will wane. The 2010's were 'peak SF'.
Edit: I should add - a regular from outside the Angloshpere upon hearing the question 'what have you done to support diversity' would basically be baffled and probably have no real idea what the interviewer was asking. I don't think many Americans in these situations realize how hyper-American (at very least Anglo/American or Western) these kinds of things are. Imagine asking that question of someone from Hong Kong, Delhi, or god forbid the true capital of 'complicated diversity', Lebanon.
The HR guy was probably looking for an answer that wasn’t “we hired this nonwhite person specifically because he was cheaper than someone in the United States.”
The thing is, as San Franciscans, we really support all the oppressed transgender teenagers in Mississippi. What's that? Build more housing, so they can actually afford to move here and escape the oppression they face in Mississippi? Uh, no, you see, we support them to the extent that it doesn't affect our property values...
I'm saying I also dislike the overly leftist culture in San Francisco, which is another reason why I'm leaving. There are many nice people here, but there are also too many people who I consider too far gone.
Stuff like:
– Non-ironically comparing Trump to Hitler. "At least Hitler listened to his generals!" Umm what? Seriously? And it's not even true: Hitler rarely did. Just... I can't even.
– We can't use the words "blacklist" and "whitelist" now even though they have nothing to do with race. I kid you not, I even heard people talking about "black hole" being "problematic". How patronizing can you be to black people, to think they give a shit? To think this shit is actually helping?
– Non-ironically talking about abolishing the police. If you disagree, you're white privileged and subconsciously racist. No? I just want some statistics first. Evidence it might be a good idea? Pros and cons of the police first? Just not viral videos and emotions?
– Non-ironically talking about socialism, white patriarchy this, equal outcomes that. Partitioning based on race.
– Can't mention Joe Rogan without someone wanting to deplatform, talking about how harmful it is to trans people to even mention the name.
You know what sucks the most? I rarely feel able even to discuss these topics in a calm, sensible way with people. Definitely never at work. Many people are just too emotional here. The culture sucks. So I just keep silent most of the time. You have to figure out if it's safe to say moderate things to someone, like you're in the French resistance or something. And I have relatively liberal views on most topics! I'm hardly an unreasonable right wing gun loving Christian, or whatever caricature of "the other" is in their heads. Yet I don't feel welcome here.
Yeah, go ahead and downvote because I have different politics to you, even though I was just answering the question (at least I interpreted it as a question asking me to elaborate).
