DEI measures from companies I have been with have been unironically fighting the woes of systemic racism with a new form of systemic racism. IMO it leads to resentment even from minority employees and is poison to morale in a meritocratic performance based organizations.

Yep. The worries over "Am I just a diversity hire?" are a real concern. :(

I really wish that applicants were required to give less information, not more. I don't want to know your name, or how old you are, or where you're from. I just want to know what your credentials are.

Personally, I feel like criminal records, outside of specific work like working with weapons, children/elderly, or law enforcement, should not be asked on applications. If they served their time, let them live their lives.

It's incredibly frustrating that there's all of these extraneous attributes we're supposed to hem and haw over, like we're choosing the best fruit in the market. It's human beings, and they should be treated in as fair and neutral manner as feasibly possible. Best man wins.

I've found that the only controllable practices are to force our hr to send anonimized resumes to my interview team and to zealously challenge bias through panel review questions to interviewers. Our reviews can't detail things like "not a culture fit" or "is unqualified." there has to be a specific quantifiable reason for decline or hire. We've never had anyone openly discriminate because I don't sincerely believe people do (intentionally) , but I'm willing to put faith into the concept of unconscious bias and take action to challenge it with methods that do not hypocritcally embrace discrimation of protected class/features/etc. However, I strongly believe dei equity creates more racism rather than remove it.

All opinions here subjective, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like it's best for both candidate and company.

Man, that sounds like an incredible system! The company that I am working for currently is, frankly, desperate to keep people on staff and struggling to hire competent people to fill the roles we have open. I really can't see them going for anything of that caliber of hiring process any time soon, but I will absolutely keep that in mind.

And, yep, even though it's only your and my own opinion, it certainly seems like some form of mandated quota, initiative, etc. does seem to cause some level of damage, whether it be as bad, or worse, than the thing it's trying to defeat. It's not so much an outer thing, but an inner thing that gnaws at your confidence and ability.

I find the idea of offering some kind of special leverage to be demeaning in a way I can't quite express. To my ears, it comes off as, "We know that you can't win without our help, so we'll throw you a bone. Be grateful to us now." I get that's not the intention, but man, it's hard to even see how the outcome is all that different. I just want to see myself, and others succeed purely based on merit. On doing a good job. And if that means that a manager, "See's a lot of white faces in the office" then it ought not be seen as a problem, but instead - shocker - the companies workforce. To not see those workers as some metric. The idea of being counted out like grapes for some fruit salad...it's just crushing.

equity is a word that has replaced equality or equal opportunity because it in used to mean "equivalent outcome". It doesn't matter what your process is, if it doesn't produce the "desired" diverse outcome, it is not equitable.

the dei crowd would not accept your formulation because it doesn't guarantee equitable outcomes.

pointing it out because when we don't use words the same way, we're not really communicating.

I agree that unintended consequences (a subset of which are the Cobra effect) are bad. Can you explain further what type of unintended consequences you are thinking of in the AA context? The main one that springs to mind is that some people will assume that employees were hired/promoted based on race/gender/etc. Are there other unintended consequences in this context?

I don't know what's actually happening, but my interpretation of the cobra effect reference is that people are inventing new identities/affinities in order to be able to benefit from the systems which reward them.

No, it's about trying to make a policy to reach some goal but this policy cause an opposite effect

i.e trying to diversify to discourage racism so you end up prefering minorities who are less fit for a job than just to be "diversified"

What identities/affinities were invented in order to be able to benefit from the systems which reward them?

Again, I said I don't know what's actually happening. I'm just providing my interpretation of what I thought the grandparent comment was trying to say.

Not the OP, but one example is that it may benefit the well-connected minorities rather than those with less opportunities.

If the goal is to raise opportunity for a historically disenfranchised group, this may not meet the end goal. For example, imagine a hiring goal is to increase the number of minority X. This may give additional leverage to someone of that group who already comes from a well-connected family and already has the opportunity to obtain the necessary credentials. It does nothing to give the opportunity to those in a less privileged group obtain those credentials in the first place. It doesn't mean it's wholly bad policy, but it can lead to the pattern of pointing to those successful outcomes as evidence that we're in a post-racial era. And so even less focus is paid to those who actually need more opportunity.

Basically, hiring someone because they're from minority/vulnerable race/gender/etc.. to diversify instead of hiring the one that has the best skillset for the job

If we put the idea of Cobra effect aside, these companies are also trying to bargain because vulnerables and minorities would prefer to work for them than for other companies that don't express their preference of minorities, so eventually many of them will accept less pay to feel more welcomed, which is - in my opinion - pure emotional exploitation, they claim they have ethical reasons but actual many of them has only unethical reasons

Ehh I would attribute this to general ignorance of the country's history caused directly by the states are very loudly outlawing the teaching of it now and the states more quietly censoring it in the mere 2 generations since the civil rights act, 5 generations since slavery was outlawed.