I work at a different FAANG and it seems like more and more the only news that we get from corporate is related to DEI. Also a lot of hiring details are now hidden from ICs. It used to be that you would be apart of the interview panel as an interviewer and then you would get together with your team afterwards and everyone on the team would vote yes/no and that would pretty much be it. Now it’s made by a manager elsewhere and you have no idea why the decision was made.
I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.
We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all. Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us.
It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome. To quote Kamala Harris’ recent remarks “to make sure everyone ends up in the same place”, i.e. “equity”
Relatedly: I cannot defend the kind of "diversity" that would rather hire a rich brahmin than an inner-city American kid in need of a leg-up, just to fulfill some backwards skin-color quota. It's obscene, and insulting to all parties involved.
I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.
> I also worry that this nonsense will erode support for the kind of diversity I do defend, or worse, prompt some kind of revanchist backlash against visible minorities in general.
As a women in tech, I am feeling the backlash. I have seen a huge increase in the amount of skepticism of my abilities that I face from people who haven't worked with me before. And the worst part of it is that there's actually logic behind the bigotry, because it is extremely true that my company continues to hire incompetent people just because they are women.
Bigotry itself is very difficult to combat, but when you add in a solid logical grounding for the bigotry, it becomes dang near impossible to eradicate. I worry that companies are causing more harm than good with the change in hiring practices these past couple years. I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.
As a hiring manager I have substantial pressure to hire incompetent people to meet quotas. I confronted my recruiter in front of witnesses and was partially shunned.
I have been hiring for many years, and I truly pay no attention to gender or ethnicity. Now I am forced to.
It’s an insult to those who earned their position. It’s an insult to me as I am less and less likely to get a new job because I won’t fit quotas.
There is resentment all around.
I feel bad for the minorities who have worked hard to earn their positions, you are right that it undermines their work and trivializes their commitment to their work.
You should think about legal recourse here. If this isn't stomped out it can result in real racism pretty quickly. It has to, because people aren't treated fairly and it creates adversary between people of different skin color.
I was just interviewed at Microsoft last week and at the end of a very good interview the interviewer said welp we are looking to diversify our team more. Best of luck to you.
Define "real". It's definitely measurable in the lab, but the effect sizes aren't very impressive, and the link to real-world outcomes remains quite controversial.
Likely not. Saying "we will only hire women for this position" would be illegal, but saying it implicitly would not be. True quotas are unlawful, but there are many loopholes there.
>I continue to hear sexist comments from people who never would have said those sorts of things just five years ago.
As a man in tech, I've been a part of countless hush-hush conversations that would never be repeated within earshot of a woman or untrusted man. It's as grim as you say, and worse.
I'm really sorry that things have become like this.
What do you mean by "things have become like this"?
I obviously don’t know your age but the software industry (and other fields) has been extremely sexist since decades (at least the 80s).
The efforts to explicitly reign in the sexism in tech are quite recent (late 2000, early 2010, and even later in France where I live).
My point is that what you perceive as a recent reaction might be the same old sexist culture continuing to spread, ruin life’s and block careers (which is a definition of backlash: reactionary fight against feminist advances)
There seem to be a few classic stories that have been spun:
- that a gender imbalance in students or employees automatically implies sexism
- that being casual about sex is automatically sexist
- that not favoring a feminine, talkative, consensus-first working style is sexist
- that women deciding to leave tech means they are being "chased out"
I don't find any of these arguments particularly convincing. It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment.
What you may be referring to from the early 2010s is that a few activists of the Adria Richards type found that all they had to do was cry sexism, and a bunch of naive geeks stood ready to self flaggelate about how sexist all the other men were, but not them, no no no.
Which of course means that tech is not particularly sexist at all, certainly not compared to media or finance.
If there is one thing that is unabashedly sexist, it's western feminism, which has had 50 years to show its homework, and has revealed itself to not be interested in gender equality, but only in advancing female interests and positing women's rights, preferences and working styles as superior to those of men.
Strangely, despite this long track record, feminists still haven't realized that they are the status quo and they do everything they can to maintain a monopoly on gender discussions and issues. The use of words like "reactionary" is meant to emphasize this: that anyone who does not agree with them is trying to go backwards. But this is a lie, because despite their "gender studies" we understand men and women worse than ever before. Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is, but they are all sure that women have it worse. Funny that.
You made a lot of arguments in your post, and it's going to take a lot of work to unpack them all.
But I'll say right away - starting your post with "What evidence of sexism do you have?" is a bit laughable. There's a lot of evidence of sexism in our industry. But it seems that you are unwilling to consider any of it. If you truly believe that western feminism is the REAL sexism, do you think there is a chance to find any middle ground or agreement on this discussion?
I have something to say about almost everything you wrote, but I'll pick the thread on one spot that I think has the most potential:
> It seems like misogyny usually just means "something a woman hates" as opposed to actual overt discrimination and mistreatment
Well...yeah? If there is a concept, or behaviour that men happen to not mind, but women on average/generally/mostly do, and an environment that contains mostly men either actively promotes that concept/behaviour, or tacitly ignores it by looking the other way, that is going to create an environment that is hostile to women!
Now you might say, that's not inherently a problem. But what if this is an environment that doesn't inherently benefit from an imbalanced gender ratio. Then those behaviours, that hostility, is actually actively funnelling viable capable women out of the environment, and there is no meritocracy to ensure that it can occur.
> Many of these same activists now even refuse to define what a woman actually is,
I have a different experience and believe that tech fields are extremely egalitarian. This might not apply to the specific regions like SV where tech and status often intermingles, don't know much about the situation there. There is probably also a difference between countries.
There are some very opinionated engineers, but they are an exception and quite rare. They might bark a little from time to time but it doesn't have any real repercussions.
Sure, if you are one of the few women in tech, you might face some difficulties getting into established groups, but that isn't due to sexism for the most part. Far more often it is some misplaced courtesy or something else in my experience.
Compared to medicine for example, tech is pretty harmless. Medicine has a lot of women, but that doesn't mean much. Surgeons for example are know to have their elitist clubs and it often is exclusively men. I have yet to hear similar "locker room talk" or what you call it in any tech circle. Probably exists but it has to be quite rare.
To my knowledge the diagnosis for tech was pretty much that there are far more men here. But that isn't indicative of sexism. So I don't understand what you mean by "extremely sexist" at all.
Not questioning what you're saying, just adding that I think "prejudice" is a better word for this than bigotry? (to be clear: we're discussing here the results of identity-based hiring practices, as opposed to are there sex differences in programming ability)
Words never have entirely cleanly defined meanings, but broadly I think bigotry is often used to speak specifically of all-out irrational dogmatic beliefs. Prejudice is more often used where there is some partly rational judgement about a group of people, together with moral problems caused by applying that logic to a particular person. Of course, often our prejudices are very fallible: "rational" prejudices turn out to be wrong, and in that sense are functionally equivalent to bigotry. But holding a "rational" belief that all prejudice is irrational also does not make us infallible!
Some prejudice seems hard to criticize morally: for example, everybody makes prejudiced judgements say based partly on clothing, age, and sex if they find themselves in close proximity to a group of young men in a city at night. On the other hand, at work, one tries hard to not judge based on whatever preconceived group notions one has -- I think almost everybody thinks that's a good thing (which as you say can be harmed by identity-based hiring). I don't have a good abstract explanation of what makes the difference between "good" and "bad" prejudice, and I wish I did, so would love to hear of good writing about it if somebody can recommend some!
In the company I worked for recently, perhaps even a majority of the more capable programmers around me happened to be women. But wherever we do start hiring based on identity, it's hard to see how prejudice can be avoided, even if bigotry were entirely absent.
Of late I have been seeing people going viral for posting some incredible career trajectories. Usually involving someone in another career who made the switch to tech by doing a bootcamp, and within a year they were in FAANG. Now that I think about it, they were all people who fit into diversity quotas and were probably diversity hires
Brown Indian immigrant here. I am part of a multi racial family and have nephews and nieces who are white and mixed race. I have family who is white and black while I am brown.
This “DIE” stuff is repulsive. Other than the obvious hiring of incompetent people simply to fill a quota, it also creates frictions in relationships when some job post hires one family member simply because they are brown or black while excluding their sibling simply because they are white. I can’t explain how disgusting these policies feel to me.
Some of starting to rearrange the letters to be DIE. Companies are going to die as they become paralyzed trying to placate differing views and opinions... or parts of their workforce are going to protest or cause internal strife/trouble...
Putting identity over class is the main sin of the modern "woke" movement, in my opinion. Seeing how much that identitarian, exclusionary, and sectarian thinking is promoted by mainstream media, I cannot help but think it is intentional, as a distraction.
USA has a long documented history of being deeply racist inside class consciousness, which is why poor non-whites compromise on "help rich and poor PoC" instead of only "help poor but only white people"
wow .... when was a rich brahmin hired instead of an inner city American kid .... are you really sure ... that the Indians working in the US tech industry have gotten those positions thru affirmative action?
I keep seeing this being repeated everywhere. let me clarify Indians are NOT getting into US companies because of a colour quota.
I will tell you how they are getting in. There are two ways
1. Thru outsourcing/body shopping
2. A lot of Indians get in by doing Masters courses in the US. Most of them would have already worked for tech in India. For US companies they can hire experienced people at US fresher salaries.
I'm coming in very late to this conversation, but there may be some ambiguity here. Americans will often use the word "Brahmin" to generally refer to an upper class. For instance, the "Boston Brahmins" is a phrase used to refer to old money WASP families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Brahmin. So this might not have been in tended specifically as a reference to upper class Indians (it wasn't entirely clear to me from the post).
What's a rich Brahmin? Where this assumption coming from ? I think you are about to make highly biased and uninformed opinion on Hinduism based on some article you read , so go on...
> Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us.
Some state authorities and companies like Microsoft are racist. You have to call them that even if there are people behind these programs that just mean well. But you cannot compromise on that accusation. If you do, you will lose that discussion. Simple politics and management 101 and this is just a dirty political game.
Yes, Microsoft is a racist company. Exposé 1 is that they hire people by skin color. It cannot be more direct than that. Again, you cannot compromise on that accusation. It is rational and formally correct. Most people are too nice to defend against this management pressure Microsoft tries to put forward.
Not that there are many young people that would want to work at MS these days. But again, Microsoft employs racist hiring schemes and the people in support behind this are real racists and this is always how real racial discrimination starts. Microsoft as a company is a fascist authoritarian organisation that collaborates with the state against citizens.
You might think that is a bit too much, but you have to start with this if your opponent in a discussion opens with accusations of systemic issues that require racial quotas. Otherwise you will lose. Just repeat it and the situation should again normalize and Microsoft hopefully has to pay the price for their little racist adventure.
I don't think this will be effective. Kendi explicitly admits that his prescription is racist, it's not some secret. His supporters have just decided that equity is more important than equality and (probably) rightly see that the only path there is racism.
There is a silver lining. This DEI thing is now causing massive influx of sub-par employees in big tech. This is not because minority is sub-par but because hiring practices incentivize sacrificing quality over diversity to make your numbers and get your bonuses. Everyone winks at others and they say we don't sacrifice quality but it is not possible when you have limited window for headcount and your VP is sending you constant reminders for making your numbers and everyones bonuses are at stake. In my estimate, big tech already had 60% of employees just costing around and now this DEI will push them to almost 80% employees that are mediocre and unable to compete with the best. This is how startups like Google and Microsoft were born that toppled big techs of the day called Yahoo and IBM. A lot of talent will simply not even get opportunity to be interviewed at big tech. Guess what they are going to do?
Not have the same opportunities as the founders of Google and Microsoft due to the mediocre employees abusing their positions to engage in advocacy in the wider world that serves the purpose of keeping them employed.
Stuffing big firms with idiots is one way you get idiocracy, since those firms have influence far beyond what the idiots could get on their own.
That's not a new trend. It's a pretty common path to do a couple of years in big tech, and then use that credential as part of your pitch. "Ex-Google Engineer leaves to Airbnb for Cats"
Assuming you’re right and not unfairly discounting people who look or think different due to your prejudices, this just hurts mega-businesses profitability right? What’s the measurable material harm to you exactly? Can you prove it or do you just feel it? Still assuming you’re right, and not prejudiced, why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad? Won’t at least some of them thrive and blossom thereby paving the way for others who look, think, act, or worship like them? Is this not corporate welfare in a time when social welfare has been whittled so far down that there are generation long waiting lists for public housing vouchers? What exactly is so terrible about helping people grow into roles instead of following the semi recent practice of only hiring perfectly qualified candidates?
>Still assuming you’re right, and not prejudiced, why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad
this is simply not true. Hiring must be all about merit, not handouts for some noble social purpose.
Secondly, lowering bar for one race while keeping the same bar other races is blatant racism. It is conveniently called affirmative action, but in reality it is racism against more qualified candidates (like asians, jews, etc).
Third, just looking at skin color and handing out jobs does not accomplish intended goal (helping disadvantaged people), instead it only reinforces negative perceptions of minorities as unqualified and not deserving of high paying jobs.
Fourth, a lot of people who take advantage of DEI programs to get into high pay jobs/colleges - are not disadvantaged at all. I am talking about people from middle-class/high income families, kids from medium/high net worth families who also happened to be in a minority race. Also middle class/rich immigrants from Africa/Latin America, who never experienced many disadvantages that under represented minorities face in the US.
If you really really want to help underrepresented minorities get into tech - you should specifically target people from low income/poor neighborhoods, poor rating/high crime school districts - and to help them become qualified and deserving of jobs, not just handing out "Chief Diversity Officer" type token jobs that have no real impact, and are not really bona fide jobs. That also obviously includes white kids from poor neighborhoods, and becomes income targeted program, rather than racial profiling program.
>> What exactly is so terrible about helping people grow into roles instead of following the semi recent practice of only hiring perfectly qualified candidates?
Imagine your son was rejected for a job he perfectly was qualified for, and instead someone from another race was hired who was less qualified. Just because of race. Once you flip the situation to yourself and become on the other end of the "affirmative action" you will understand. You can't fix past discrimination with another discrimination.
I’ve actually heard from many friends that even though they are in a “favored” group, because of their skin color or gender, they hate it because they suffer from even worse impostor syndrome than the average developer.
They might genuinely be awesome and yet they sit there and doubt and ask “am I only doing well because of something not related to my work”
I would like to think of it as first, second order effects.
First order effect of DEI:
- Bar is lowered in the name of DEI, to bring more diverse employees
- Managers/CEOs/HRs get their bonuses for meeting DEI metrics
Second order effects:
- Hired minority employees find it hard to perform to the expected(or peer) level
- Because lot more minority candidates were hired than if it were without DEI, performance issues start to become bigger and more noticeable problem. More importantly performance issues cluster around minority candidates
Third order effect:
- Long-term workplace perception of all minority candidates is harmed, regardless of skill.
- We are back to square one, where in order to compensate for 2nd order effects all minorities are subjected to unfair discrimination based on race, regardless of skill
Right you are... I used be a Manager at Volvo (Sweden) and I really like their approach to boost the diversity on the workplace. Instead of targets/or lowering the standards they were moving obstacles (childcare, flex work) and focusing on marketing amongst the diversity groups.
This is something I have always wondered. What are the psychological/mental effects on an employee upon the discovery of the real reason they were hired?
op specifically said about hiring unqualified/less qualified people and "let them grow into jobs", which assumes rejecting more qualified candidate (who doesnt need to grow into a job but has has wrong skin color ) so Op denies merit explicitly and prefers racial nepotism.
No wonder DIE initiatives face pushback as they do not make any sense and are plain harmful to all parties involved
Big tech profitability does not get hurt by hiring mediocre people. They are post-talent businesses. They do not depend on tech talent to drive and keep profit margins but rather depend on established monopoly and maintaining barrier-to-entry to continue their profitability. They show their growth by simply showing more ads or hiking subscription prices or through more sales people - not by developing new ground breaking tech. Apple is likely exception here.
He, this seems to be quite accurate. I wonder how companies come up with that blindness. Internal politics?
I don't believe you have to be the best hacker to start a successful business at all, but some companies try to go out of their way to make working there unattractive.
> why is giving historically disadvantaged people a crutch to lean on so bad?
Policies like this don't really change the number of disadvantaged people who are hired. To do that, they'd have to reduce the number of elites who are hired, and that doesn't happen.
Instead, these policies help disadvantaged people of some races by shutting out disadvantaged people of other races.
You are assuming that people who need hand outs are all not white. That appears to me to be pretty racist in itself.
I know many poor white Americans that don't even have Internet.
I also grew up poor. My grandmom was Italian and treated poorly when she arrived in America. She got called the n word because her skin was dark and couldn't go to school because of it as well.
Well here I am 80 years later. White male that has worked very hard to get myself out of where I was only to be confronted with people talking about the color of skin and not Merritt.
We are all in this together.
I put a lot of work into my life to get where I am. I did a lot of things I didn't want to and sacrificed a lot. I had a really good hour long interview at Microsoft last week and was told at the end that they are looking to diversify their team more and best of luck to you.
I was wondering why the US is so obsessed with diversity alone the line of race and gender instead of social-economical status, education background, career background, and etc? If I'm developing a statistical model, wouldn't it make more sense if my diversity means having in my team people who have statistics background, people who study statistical physics, people who are great at maths, people who are great at building a team, people who are creative, people who communicate and market and sell well, people who are amazing engineers, and people who are experts in the domain for which I develop my model? Why would I be interested in my team member's sex orientation, their gender, or their race? Or on the other hand, why would give up Quoc Le for Gebru if I have only one opening for developing the next generation of NLP model? Just because Quoc is an "over-represented" Asian and Gebru is the vanguard of righteousness and checks all the boxes of diversity?
Or why not by my birth origin? Say, India? India is a huge country with diverse languages, cultures, histories, religions, and social structures. I guarantee you that I had such a unique background among the other 10,000 ones in India because I grew up in this particular family in this particular town of this particular state in this particular union territory.
It's because of the law. The civil rights legislation of the 1960s helped to destroy the evil of segregation. But the system that was once healthy and beneficial has now become a cancerous tumor that is metastasizing and infecting everything. https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-j...
> I was wondering why the US is so obsessed with diversity alone the line of race and gender instead of social-economical status, education background, career background, and etc?
because its way easier to do that than fix the real socio-economic/education problems and distracts people from the real root issues that you are eluding to: class
it's checkbox compliance all the way up to the top. it's only for show as if people wanted a rigorous solution the problem, the mechanisms in play and each possible solution would have been documented in autistic detail before anyone put it out. this is a kind of issue you would keep junior talent and HR far far away from at all costs. this is software after all, people who care about something specific, care a LOT. this topic is a real issue but it has been tainted by racial political framing. imo, start with women in tech first, then go from there.
It's weird that none of the answers here mention slavery and segregation. It's really not a long time ago, and not surprising at all that this trauma leaves permanent cultural marks. These people are peoples grandparents, and many of them are still alive: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/archivesphotos/results/item....
There is a guy out there who spent a few years investigating this. He traced back the term in the scientific literature. He calls it Race Marxism. His name is James Lindsey.
> I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.
1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse.
2. There is nothing wrong with your kids being in a majority demographic. It sounds like you're more worried about the world discriminating based off race and other traits.
I suspect you agree with all of this but it's a little scary how insidious these policies are. Even in your dissent you're seeing things from their perspective.
It is always useful and prudent to see things from the perspective of those attacking you. "Know your enemy.."
You can argue over definitions and terms as much as you want, but the uniform you wear is often defined by your opposition. In other words, it may not be completely relevant what you or OP think diverse is or isn't. It is very relevant what the power structures and people implementing these policies think it means, no?
If someone has a kid that potentially is going to be quota'ed out of jobs or education, why wouldn't they worry about it?
I don't mean they shouldn't worry. I mean they shouldn't use language that puts blame on their kid for not being "diverse" (which is also a non-sensical description of 1 person).
I'm sorry but you're just missing the point. You're taking the term literally, but it is very simple in practical terms how this actually plays out:
diverse is code word for non straight White male. Slightly more diverse would be straight White female.
Obviously OP is simply saying, as a White man, he worries his children through no fault of their own by virtue of birth would be excluded or limited by these cultural trends.
Blame on their kid? What sense does this make? He's blaming the system.
> A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse.
According to the plain old-fashioned definition, this is true. According to the modern political definition, “diverse” is approximately a synonym for “non-white”.
> 1. A single person cannot be diverse or not diverse.
Compare and contrast with people saying "neurodiverse" when they mean "neurodivergent". I think there is general agreement that a single person should be described as "neurodivergent" rather than "neurodiverse". Some people say the wrong word just because the two words are so similar and are happy to be corrected.
On the other hand, if we're talking about other kinds of diversity then I don't think there's a similar pair of terms. "The addition of this gender-divergent person increases the gender-diversity of the team"? I don't think so!
Well yeah, calling something divergent implies that there is a "normal". For ways of thinking and personalities people are fine with calling others not normal. For races and genders that is currently very not politically correct.
A single person can be diverse relative to a group, though. Like a black woman would add diversity to a group of white men, for instance. When we talk about diversity in recruiting, usually we mean diversity of the candidate relative to the makeup of the company.
Optically maybe, if that’s what you’re aiming for. Just assuming that the “group of white men” are “all the same” is not very deep. The truth is that they’re all individuals with individual stories strangers who judge them by their looks know nothing about. It used to be understood as a good thing to not judge people based on their gender or skin color, including the nowadays declared “evil” white men.
That's what the parent is saying. The aforementioned black woman may have more in common with the white men on the team than other white men. If you were striving for true diversity, it is quite possible that yet another white man with a different background would provide the greatest diversity, but if you are only optimizing for optical diversity then those considerations go out the window.
> Are you and the parent really arguing white men are even better than black women at diversity?
People with different backgrounds are "better" at diversity than people with the same background who look dissimilar, for sure. The wealthy black woman who went to school at Stanford alongside all the other white men on your team does not bring any meaningful difference in viewpoint. The tribesman from Kenya, on the other hand, comes with a very different outlook.
Of course, something akin to "Must be a US Citizen" is attached to most jobs because we don't actually care about diversity, just optics.
"diversity of the candidate" doesnt make any sense. Or are you looking at the candidates ancestory and deciding what their diversity is?
A single person isn't "diverse." I know some people are trying to change the meaning of "diverse"to mean "a minority."
May be if they are all posing for a stock photo then yes. But how does it add diversity in a workplace. Assuming all the white men are from different countries.
What if the black woman is privileged, and went to a prestigious college all expenses paid by parents...you know, like most of the white men you meet in tech?
Meanwhile, the person who is self made (real diversity in this situation) and successfully bootstrapped themselves gets passed over because thier skin color is too bright.
Qualified diverse people are rare (no relation to skin color "diversity"). That is why everyone is cracked out over skin color and gender because there is an actual population of people that the HR secretariat pool can EASILY identify by just taking a glance. Thier mission, of course, is to please thier white male executives.
It reminds me when my childhood friend's parents moved to LA so he could attend an inner-city high school so that his scores from a lower ranking school were more heavily weighted for college admissions. They were wealthy immigrants from the middle east.
> it seems like more and more the only news that we get from corporate.....
"Seems", "like" "more and more", "only"... I sometimes wonder if people are downplaying it so others may not be as offended in a social situation, or are those words really what they meant?
We are in late 2022, at this (late) stage of the cycle, Big tech has been throwing DEI, ESG at our face for 5+ years. Both Internally and Externally via PR and Consumer Trade Show / Conference. We have got to a point they are actually "dialling" back a bit already.
>It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome.
I do not have data to judge how many people are on the side wants "equality of opportunity". Which is a very sane thing to do. But I can assure you there will be plenty of evidence the media ( Mainstream or not, ) has been arguing for equality of outcome for a very VERY long time. This isn't, and shouldn't be news.
Reading the above comment being Top Voted on HN gives me hope, but on the other hand also felt sad the realisation came so late.
with a push for "racial equity" combined with an inept middle management and hr who in order to get equal outcome will push people down instead of lifting people up, the only thing i can see from this is a sharp rise in ethno nationalist idiocy across the board.
i dont want to be right about it but i am not going to be shocked if i start seeing such bubble up as a reaction to this kind of short sighted strategy.
I share your concern... Started as a manager in a successful scale-up and as usual our engineering staff is white & male (we are hiring from European Timezone). In order to secure the funding round, the higher management has introduced a diversity targets, which is driven aggressively by HR.
Funny enough lots of the European laws forbid asking if the candidate is a member of an "unrepresented" group, so I guess we'll be just eyeballing it??? This won't end good, but one must make a living.
How can you even report to your investors on this diversity? I was under the impression that registering things like sexual/gender/religious identity and "race" are not allowed under GDPR unless you have very good reasons (i would assume securing investment is not one of them).
Depends on the investors but allegedly it is widely spread. And if you want lucrative government contracts, you have to implement it. I think it is overwhelmingly driven by government. Didn't find enough racism so they needed to create it.
Are you actually unaware of the Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) programs?
Many institutional investors - the largest ones - have announced their funding is dependent on ESG scores. I'm fascinated that people on this site can be unaware of this.
Isn't that the thing though? Being your kids, they already have an advantage. You are their advantage, everything you bring with you, your behavioral habits that will give them a huge head start.
I did not come from a family of engineers. For most of their lives, my parents had to struggle to survive as immigrants, living in a fairly rough area, and making ends meet.
I was lucky enough to go to university for STEM. I saw the huge difference between myself and students who came from families that had even one parent experienced in any sort of engineering (let alone both parents). Not only did they always have someone to consult, but they knew what they were getting into, they were much better prepared, and for the most part, they were building the toolset from their early teens.
It dawned on me that similarly, people coming from very wealthy families are likely to be better prepared to create or at least sustain wealth, in a way that might be completely taken for granted, but is actually the result of years and years of mentoring and picking up on behavioral hints at home.
This is the meaning of inequality. It's literally the family you're born into. Your kids will make it either way way because you have already paved much of the path and can show them the way. For schools and jobs to insist on hiring people who are not born into this circle, is a good thing.
Another thing to mention is that I am far from being a touchy politically correct person. I don't really care about minutiae such as naming your git brach this way or that. But in inclusion I feel I've seen inequality from both sides of the coin. And I definitely support letting more people into the party.
Commies in USSR wanted to take away children from parents and nurture them in special institutions, but luckily didn't succeeded. Do you want the same for yours or is it better to be able to help your children and share your experience with them?
Well met stranger! I don't understand how your comment is related to anything I said. I never suggested you avoid helping your children. I stated that by being able to help them, you are giving them a significant advantage.
That's how natural selection works and it's natural for a reason, ie was proven to be evolutionary successful, diversity is the king, and when there's a king there's always going to be someone not that much successful. We as society should embrace competition and filtering out because that's healthy when resources isn't infinite, which is our case.
There are plenty of decent schools and also plenty of decent jobs. However, my anecdotal experience from applying a kid to college last year is that the most selective schools are taking diversity initiatives too far. I know a kid who was a Regeneron scholar who was rejected from many of the most selective schools.
> It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome.
Perfect equality of opportunity can only be achieved if everyone has 0 opportunity and the same outcome. Because if you can work hard to give your children a better life, that means that someone with parents who don't work hard will start worse off, with fewer opportunities. Optimizing solely for equality of opportunity inevitably leads to commie hellhole; instead, optimize for absolute opportunity (both average and minimum).
>We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all
Think of how impossibly naive and utopian this is though, and I don't mean to personally attack just to condemn the idea this is possible in any way whatsoever. Is it possible economically? How about resource wise, or geographically can we all possess equal territory? How about military power? How about physical attributes such as height or beauty? How about intelligence?
On which axes of consequences can we equalize things; how do we do it? Zero sum conflicts are everywhere that demands for equalization exist.
There is only competition over limited resources, power and prestige. There is cooperation amongst allies and friends, but only in so far as feelings are mutual and the efforts of both are in each others interest, which goes with out saying includes in you or your family/tribe/groups interests.
Is anyone trying to take money and power out of you or your children's hands a friend or ally, or are they competing with you for their own interests at your expense?
The propaganda you believed was intended to take advantage of your good nature. As long as someone brow-beats you with moralism over the downtrodden they can convince you of doing anything to dis-empower you, if you believe the nonsense that "privilege" or power are bad things, which those scheming you certainly don't as they pursue both.
It is bad to not have privilege or power. It is good to have them. It is this simple.
Unequal outcomes will produce unequal future opportunities. This fact undermines any of premise from that start. And compelled equalization will commence just the same.
So this is a distinction without much of a difference. Certainly rule of law and various good faith attempts to provide opportunity are understandable. But when the outcomes simply are not equal along various group identity lines or this or that interest group achieves less wealth and power than another, no one is going to give up that game and say "OK, fair play, we lost the outcome."
No, pursuit of human self interest does not ever stop. So there's no endgame to any of this.
You cannot make everyone equal. Freedom and equality collide at some point. People need to grow out of that assumption because acceptance of that fact can alleviate cases of injustice. You are not solving any problems with such a strategy, you only make everything worse.
Impossible and naive is fighting racism with racism. Making everything equal is a perfectly paved route to totalitarianism by now. Did you read at least one book in your life? Sorry for the accusation here, but if you think of yourself to be able to determine what is just or unjust for others, you need to put some more cards on the table. And it certainly isn't simple.
You are optimistic. Even countries that had problems with this exact same issue are currently repeating the error by the letter. Case in point Germany. We now have sex quotas, won't take long for racial quotas be established. Shitty and dumb country, didn't learn a lot. And like any totalitarian movement before there is no reasoning possible and will at some point probably derail.
You are removing words. OP was saying that they are worried that their kid would fail to reach the elite level, using standard coded words "decent" and "good".
Why are "decent" schools and "good" jobs so rare that we are competing for them against each other, instead of a standard anyone can reach with effort? Even schools! The very source of opportunity that we hope to equalize!
Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.
> Just about anyone can get into a school, or get a job.
Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes, it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and therefore no reason to worry.
> Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.
It only seems that way to you if you can't empathize with others. The OP makes a valid point. Any group that is caught in the crosshairs of discrimination will naturally be worried for their kids. It's not a "nice problem to have", as you put it, regardless of the group being targetted.
> Wouldn't that mean that based on the equality of outcomes, it doesn't matter what type of school OP's kids go to, and therefore no reason to worry.
Equality of outcomes? It's just a fact that some people excel at work/school (for various reasons) or that some people receive different pay (again, for various reasons). The point is that we shouldn't discriminate against things like sex, gender, and skin colour. That means I don't consider gender when I hire... but I also don't consider it when I fire, either.
Certain asians (Chinese and Indians descent), are over represented in elite universities, so yes, students of those origins face more competition, than say students who are Native American (who are very poorly represented at elite schools).
Except it doesn't seem to mean that (at least not anymore). Hence the exasperated comments you are reading on this very thread.
All people (including whites and heterosexual males) can be the targets of negative discrimination. No one wants to see themselves or their kids be intentionally disadvantaged based solely on the colour of their skin or their sexuality. Any attempt to create ANY exception to this rule is disingenuous and does nothing but further damage the very thing you claim to be trying to resolve.
Every not white parent I’ve met is concerned with their kid’s future- what job, what education, what marriage, etc.
I’ve met a lot of people from different backgrounds and one thing I notice is how much we have in common. I worked with people who make less than a few dollars a day in developing nations and it was interesting how the parent stories are almost the same. Pictures of kids and grandkids. Stories about successful kids. Plans for kids to have education and jobs. The scale varies but the concerns are very similar.
I'm not concerned about that. A workplace that cares about diversity will not discriminate based on schooling. If businesses are imposing fake diversity measures to embolden certain ethnic groups, my child is no doubt doomed either way, so I would be more troubled if all that time and money was wasted.
How I know their mind is simple, I am not-white, and my kid's aren't white.
And true, parents do want their kids to succeed in life. But I also worry about how the world will treat my kids, because historically black and brown kids don't get treated well.
So you know your mind. You don’t know the minds of all not-whites.
I’m pretty sure all parents worry about how the world will treat their kids.
There’s pros and cons to everything. If you’re in the US or Europe, you’re in a very privileged position compared to others in less privileged countries.
To imagine that someone who is not-white will know how all not-white parents think is silly. Even within a small demographic sliver, it seems weird to generalize my thoughts to all people who have my race or culture (eg, it’s lack of critical thinking to think “I’m Vietnamese and my kids are Vietnamese so I know the mind of all Vietnamese parents”)
There is a lot of racism toward black and brown kids and it’s the worst for poor black and brown kids. Hopefully, since you’re reading on HN you have a tech job and make some money. Historically, and presently, poor kids don’t get treated well.
Worrying about going to a good school and getting a good job is a nice worry to have.
Worrying that your kid will be the next Trayvon Martin is the reality that many-non white parents worry about. I understand you won't ever have to worry about your children like in that manner. That is one of the benefits of being white.
And white people can scream as loud as they want about how it's unfair they are being discriminated against, in reality they just don't get to enjoy all the advantages they had in prior years for being white.
>Worrying that kids may not be able to get into a decent school because they're not diverse enough seems like a a nice problem to have--parents of "diverse" children have much larger worries.
Do your typical ethnic minority immigrant parents worry about anything else _apart_ from their childrens' job prospects and education?
>I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.
That’s silly. You should stay focused on ensuring that your kids become well rounded, educated, and cultured people fit for the society of tomorrow and prepared for problems you can’t imagine.
I do worry that my kids won’t be diverse enough to be able to get into a decent school or get a good job like I was able to when they’re older.
We used to argue for equality, a level playing field, for all. Now we’ve had the rug swapped from underneath us.
It’s no longer about equality of opportunity, it’s about equality of outcome. To quote Kamala Harris’ recent remarks “to make sure everyone ends up in the same place”, i.e. “equity”