Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

Well, I feel like the "traditional way of life" argument is okay for why they should get special treatment. But why should anyone get special treatment if they are going to just, essentially, treat it as way to siphon tax revenue from the larger society?

> The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership"

I doubt they had deeds to land. But they did fight inter-tribal wars over which territory belonged to which tribe.

Humans have a very well developed notion of "mine" and "not mine". Saying indigenous peoples did not have this is an extraordinary claim, and would need strong evidence.

From my understanding that analysis is complete junk. From the Daily Wire of all people:

> But it’s not possible from the data to say that those additional “people of color” took the 320,000 newly created positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs.

> A telltale sign that Bloomberg’s “percentage of the net increase” methodology is flawed, VerBruggen explained, is that, if the departures of whites had been just a little higher, the net change in whites would have been negative instead of the actual small growth of 20,000. Bloomberg’s methodology would then assert that whites took a negative percentage of the new 320,000 jobs, a mathematic impossibility.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bomb...

> Of 323,092 new jobs added in 2021 by S&P 100 companies, 302,570 (94%) went to people of color

Given this July 2024 population estimate by race from census.gov[1], leaving only 6% of new jobs to the majority seems tailor-made to trigger a large-scale backlash:

  75.3% White alone
  13.7% Black alone
  1.3% American Indian and Alaska Native alone
  6.4% Asian alone
  0.3% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone
  3.1% Two or More Races
  19.5% Hispanic or Latino
  58.4% White alone, not Hispanic or Latino

Looking at that article, it looks like for "Professional" degrees, it was about 25% white and 40% Asian. The "White 6%" figure came from a decrease in white workers in low-skilled roles and a massive increase in Hispanic people in those same roles.

Given that many DEI programs specifically focus on "high skill" roles (like software engineers), it's unlikely that DEI accounted for this disparity while massive numbers of black and hispanic people being hired for low-skilled jobs had a larger impact.

That data cannot support the conclusion drawn. You don't know what the turnover rate was.

So it was racist?

So this is an example of what not to do.

1. Violate the law more blatantly than anyone else. 94% of new jobs went to POC? So what, 50% of the population shared 6% of the jobs? This sounds like apartheid era South Africa.

2. Create a backlash where the largest population and richest segment is so angry, it uses all its resources to absolutely destroy this.

Nice going.

In no way it is at all believable that 94% of all fortune 500 hiring during 2021 went to minorities. This is statistical mumbo-jumbo. Do you even work at a company like this? This statistic has to be misrepresentative of the conclusion you are suggesting because it is easily debunked by standing at the entrance to any midtown manhattan building during the morning rush hour.

An alternate take: there are good DEI programs and poor ones. The poor ones fail because the planners dont really know what they are trying to do, but leadership thinks they ought to have one, and so they metric-ize it. And since (again, no clarity of thought) hard numbers in areas like hiring sail perilously close to large legal rocks, they whiff on the metrics and end up measuring something like "engagement". And, concomitantly, deliver a lot of low value chatter that provides ample ammunition to opponents of any kind of DEI programs, even the good ones.

A good DEI program should, IMHO, be indistinguishable from good management culture embedded at every level in an org.

- It should not be controversial to assert, and product management to insist, say, that products designed for humanity should be usable by humanity: men and women, for example - but we still have medicine and cars tested on male models, and software that is unusable if you have low vision or cant operate a mouse and keyboard simultaneously. That doesn't automatically mean one must hire 50:50 men:women, say (see legal rocks, above), but it certainly starts to smell like a missed opportunity if you don't have a single person on your staff or in your network of consultants who can explain what it feels like to wear a seatbelt when you are 1.5m and 50kg not 2m and 85kg. If you want better products, this seems like a no brainer, but it doesnt seem to happen.

- It must absolutely be a mandate for all managers to avoid cliques. All men? All women? All Indians? All Purdue grads? Close watching needed, especially when those groups hire and promote. Doesn't need a mandate, needs better managers of managers.

Tldr is that no amount of DEI will fix bad management culture.

That's a bizarre take. Something doesn't have to be useful forever to be of use. And mechanical printing presses were probably one of the most significant inventions ever, even if they're obsolete now.

You can be unbiased in hiring and still end up with an unrepresentative mix, because underprepresented minorities don't even apply, and outreach is a good way to get to improve that without lowering your standards. That's the theory, at least, but yes, in practice it's really hard and most of these efforts end up performative, and staffing DEI bureaucracies with minorities is a good way to make the dismal diversity statistics look less bad if you don't look too closely at the breakdown by roles and salary bands.

Aside: It appears the modern world is inflecting to OVERT (subversive) insular, erosion of fundamental values, with recent leveraging of power-structures to facilitate authoritarian thinking.

To be clear, the thing that’s keeping them from being disadvantaged against Musk/X is cozying up to the Trump and the government. That’s going to make a much bigger difference in stock performance than any personnel impact of these changes.

I started a new account on Twitter just to see what it's like. It's completely unusable. The place is filled with shit content that a I don't want to see and bots. Not sure what competitive advantage you are talking about.

DEI has not been only for show, I know for a fact that being "diverse" has been a huge benefit in job search for the past 15 years. If you're a "woman of color" in tech you've been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are. I've been on several teams where the higher ups demanded we hire women because we were not diverse enough. Various grants and investments require a certain ratio etc. There's no point in denying this, this is what DEI has been pushing for, and this is what happened.

Do you actually have experience with those programs?

Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.

As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.

That's just one example of what they do.

You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".

Agreed. Even if you desire, and want DEI programs to be meaningful, the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.

Reading the accomplishments in 2024 for our DEI program, it was essentially just marketing. Which has some level of value for sure, but the most valuable thing that came out of it was the number of conferences the head of the department went to.

I’ve interviewed candidates for DEI specific roles. Not sure how that aligns with your narrative.

Symbols can have a lot of political power.

> they were largely just PR initiatives right from the start

Yes, when they were widely introduced in my large company circa 2016-17 it was explained to senior managers as part of HR's efforts to "align with industry best practices". During the meeting introducing it to VPs and dept heads, there were skeptical questions as a lot of groups were under shipping pressure and short-handed. There was also already a lot of "HR overhead" like various mandatory compliance training sessions that all employees had to attend every year (unrelated to their actual work). The company was also clearly already highly diverse at all levels from the CEO on down and had been for a long time.

The DEI training did end up becoming a yet another mandatory HR time sink and no one I know thought it was necessary or useful. The second year the program expanded to take even more time but the worst thing was they brought in outside trainers who started doing the "You're a racist and don't even know it" schtick along with weird tests and exercises. This became contentious and caused a lot of issues, especially because the context leaves people feeling like they can't openly disagree. There was a lot of negative push back but people felt like they couldn't use normal company channels so it was all in private conversations and small groups. Kind of the opposite of the intent of openness and communication.

For me, that was when DEI went from "probably unnecessary (at our company) but just another 'HR Time Tax" to "This is disruptive and causing problems." I'm not surprised that some companies are realizing that the way many of these DEI initiatives were implemented wasn't effective in helping diversity and that they were also causing problems. It was the wrong way to pursue the right goal. At our company, we got rid of the old DEI program in early 2020, so this broad correction pre-dates the US election 8 weeks ago.

I'm curious, what gives you that kind of deep insight?

Right. For the large companies, and the majority of the workforce, they mean nothing. Then the small to mid size businesses with some whackadoo who goes "we're not hiring X anymore, underrepresented groups only!" get a ton of press and create political capital.

Trump previously threatened to imprison Zuckerberg for life on trumped up charges (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-mark-zuckerberg-c...). He said in an interview that's probably why Meta changed their policies (https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lf66oltlvs2l).

ESG is just a jobs program for stock brokers.

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> the pendulum is headed back toward centre.

That's not how a pendulum works. It's leading to a white terror, then it will swing back to a smaller red terror, then a smaller white terror, etc... Eventually some event will tap the pendulum again.

The diversity scam was a way to pretend that Affirmative Action wasn't racist, and Affirmative Action was a way not to settle accounts with the descendants of slaves. All of this is about not dealing with slavery, and the children of slaves are not the slightest bit materially better off than before it started. The vast majority of the benefits of these programs went to white women, immigrants, and sexual minorities.

We literally don't even keep statistics about the descendants of slaves, because they're too embarrassing. The only reason race was introduced into the census was to keep track of them, and now we're counting Armenians for some reason.

Not dealing with slavery turned us all into race scientists.

That being said, the white victimization story is a dumb one. White people are overrepresented. If some institution stopped hiring or admitting for diversity reasons, they wouldn't be hiring and admitting more white people, they'd just hire and admit fewer people. Anti-woke is a civil rights struggle on behalf of dumb people: the lowest ranked white people with absolutely no historical excuse. If one really believed in nature over nurture, or the degeneracy of culture, that's exactly where you would go looking for it.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/long-shadows-the-black-wh...

> Our headline finding is that three-generation poverty is over 16 times higher among Black adults than white adults (21.3 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively). In other words, one in five Black Americans are experiencing poverty for the third generation in a row, compared to just one in a hundred white Americans.

I don't see them as different to any other company, really. I could imagine diversity in their staff of buyers would be useful, for example, to ensure they're stocking products that represent the different desires of different groups.

perhaps it goes without saying but they don’t only employ front line store staff.

The diversity isn't for you the customer, it's for the employees and the kind of corporate environment Costco wants to build.

Edit to add: A better corporate environment, of course, does tend to lead to a better customer experience, but the "visibility of diversity" should not be the goal but rather "genuinely fostering an inclusive environment where people are respected and feel willing to put in their best work," and I think that shows at Costco.

> Except for shareholder value

Well, it depends. Zuckerberg has controlling interest in Meta even though he owns a minority of it (<15%) because of its dual share structure. Meta will do what he wants it do.

Google has a similar structure.

Isn't that more about the value of the shares they personally received as part of their compensation package?

If meta cared about shareholder value they wouldnt be spending 10 bil a year on VR. Decisions at meta are made with marks interests in mind

Not even really true anymore. It’s all about “stakeholder capitalism“ now, which boils down to management being able to prioritize whichever stakeholder it wants to in any given situation.

Shareholder primacy may not be perfect, but it at least constrains management instead of giving them completely free rein.

I believe the comment is implying that having DEI programs at all was a song-and-dance put on by the C-suite; not that your spouse is insincere in their work.

Put differently: the C-suite set up these programs (and hired very sincere people to work in them) but never really actually cared about the outcomes.

I think both things are true: there are people who sincerely want to change things, but the organization and incentive structure for large public orgs means the corps will only do things that don't lower their profits.

It's funny how they suddenly realized and reversed every "wrong" policy decision made over many years just days before a new administration takes over. And these new policies are exactly aligned with what the administration wants.

One of the smartest people I know almost quit software her first year out of school, because her all-male team spent an afternoon teasing her about how they were going to start a strip poker game and they think she'd be "a natural", or some nonsense like that. Do you think such dynamics introduce barriers to female participation in tech? Do you think focusing solely at the "bottom of the funnel" could still result in a lack of diversity if the "top of the funnel" isn't pleasant for certain demographics to work? Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman? Do you think what you consider to be "common sense" is shaped very much by your personal experience, and that you'd have no "common sense" intuition for how frequently things like this happen because it doesn't personally impact you?

Except fields often aren’t open to people in different demographics. Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified.

The problem I've heard from friends in education is that it's just very difficult to affect these in the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole. Most of these issues, at least when we talk about cisgendered folks, come from how parents push their values onto their kids. I have plenty of friends whose parents discouraged daughters from exploring technically or mechanically involved interests because of ideas they had about masculinity and femininity.

My parents softly discouraged my sister from playing with Legos as a kid because "girls like pretty things."

(~2018) In India, women represent 45% of total computer science enrollment in universities, almost three times the rate in the United States, where it is 18%.

Hint: None of this is news to people advocating for DEI programs. They believe that part of what screws up the top of the funnel is there being so few examples to follow later on down the funnel.

There is no person on the planet who's advocating for DEI at senior level positions in advanced fields and no changes elsewhere in the system... obviously.

Some also say that real Communism has never been tried.

Where is the threshold of being "real enough" in case of utopian systems?

Perhaps in your experience, I would be for them if they "forced executives to change how they hire".

From my perspective, that has not happened. My problem is their lack of teeth to do what they say they do.

Is there anything that couldn't be justified with this style of thinking? Would this person support legalizing murder since more murders might raise awareness of how bad murder is?

The same way Kristallnacht increased support for Jews I suppose. That's how it went down right?

And a marketer too! My god.

Kind of an insane stance to take considering we've seen exactly what happens when queer people's friends and family members get pummeled with anti-gay and anti-trans hate campaigns... which is that half of them end up falling for it and turning on their friend/family members.

Bullies important part of playground ecosystem, says bully lol

A company would have to put me at gunpoint to make me say something similarly as insane. I'd sooner quit and give the entire place a massive middle finger.

An important thing to note is that this is an exception to the rule: you aren't allowed to call someone mentally ill, unless it's based on gender or sexual orientation.

https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/h...

> Do not post: [...]

> - Insults, including those about: [...]

> Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness. [...] We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation

Additionally they've unbanned the use of some slurs, such as calling other people "retarded". Not a nice feeling having grown up with that word directed at me almost every day.

This is practically a guideline to people who want to deploy hate speech against other minorities on the platform: just make a topic "controversial" enough.

> common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird,’

Are they still mad over the couch thing?

[dead]

The Intercept leaked more detailed internal guidelines:

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...

Ha. Of course.