Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium.

There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.

Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.

> My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow.

I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.

> the first time having two black senators is now

This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...

> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.

That's a 50% increase.

> According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.

Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?

>FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%

That sounds proportional?

I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?

> I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade.

I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick.

I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started.

Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.

> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%

That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.

>And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.

This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.

silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do

The Republicans in charge of two school districts near me have been trying to organize book burnings for the last two years.

Get back to me when it's the Democrats.

> And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.

Donald Trump was re-elected. He has said that we should deport pro-palestinian protestors on college campuses and has sued multiple news outlets, both on tv and in paper, for their coverage during the election season. It's really hard to find any political figure who is more aggressively targeting speech he doesn't like than Trump.

Shouting people down and canceling them is never a way to persuade people your cause is just.

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This is pretty spot-on. Whether they’re aware of it or not, most white liberals are motivated not by a desire to lift nonwhites up but rather by a desire to push “white trash” down.

> Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.

Yes. Probably multiple lifetimes. This is why I say that real change takes generations.

You cannot have a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs. You can either strip the people who hold reprehensible beliefs of the vote, or you can work diligently over generations to change the culture. But as long as you have a democracy, you will never be able to create change that sticks by simply wielding the power temporarily granted to you.

Wield that power too forcefully, and you'll get pushback, and unsavory politicians will ride that pushback to power. When that happens, as you observe, a lot of what was previously accomplished is undone.

I believe that democracy is the greatest good progressivism has ever accomplished. I'm not willing to sacrifice democracy in order to speed up the rate of change, even if it means that people suffer in the short term. And because I believe in democracy, I cannot support the heavy-handed use of power to try to force people to change. Not for their sakes, but because it simply doesn't work. As long as those people have the vote, they will resent you for your use of power and be able to strip it from you. That's the lesson of 2024.

That's not to say we can't do anything while in power, but it must be done with an eye towards the next century, not just the next election cycle.

> The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger.

The trap is accidentally triggering a reactionary movement by moving too hard too fast. Reactionaries aren't called that by accident—they react. It is within the power of progressives to avoid triggering them by staying within (whilst steadily changing) the national Overton window.

The issue here is that power not exercised is power lost, and power fundamentally comes down to either perceived or actual consequences.

All people have some degree of racist tendencies - regardless of gender, sex, color, etc. And criminal tendencies. And other tendencies.

And what actual consequences will be applied that impact one group or another tend to go in cycles/pendulum back and forth (and hence impact what percent of the population is going to do x, and how many will see real consequences for those actions).

That is because when one group overdoes it (or is perceived to), enough people get tired of that group/outraged, and then things shift. And these patterns tend to be on coarse criteria like gender/sex/color/race/language, etc. because the most brazen users of any sort of shitty force/violence/shaming/whatever are exactly the type of people who are the shittiest. And every group of people have a percent that is shitty.

For instance, for many years now shame has been a major consequence, along with legal action.

So eventually, we end up with a group/leader essentially immune to shame and legal action, who is now going to use do all sorts of shameless and illegal things. Really, a large group of people like that. And who don’t mind violence (or the threat of it) as a potential consequence.

Eventually, being a shameless crook will fall out of fashion (or will have finally hurt/pissed off enough people), and another counter group will rise to take it’s place.

Often, when it gets particularly ugly/strong in one direction or another, there is also a corresponding backlash against the particularly strong users of the prior ‘fashion’ of power.

Sometimes beheadings, or ostracizing, or legal harassment, or whatever.

Weinstein getting what he got (as deserved as it was), was one swing. We’ll see who gets this next counter reaction.

Why do you think the dems and tech companies are going out of their way to be as friendly to the incoming admin as they are? They know the score, and are trying to avoid getting whacked.

Or, to quote an old western - ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it’.

It can be marketing and somewhat effective. I'm not trying to say that it didn't accomplish anything (though others are), I'm suggesting that it wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to accomplish something real for equity. And since the motivation was external pressure, a change in external pressure immediately triggers a pivot.

There’s no reason to believe it’s primarily due to the DEI programs until it gets worse again with them gone. That’s a basic ABA flow for testing causation.

Things improve on their own over time too.

I wanted a wider view of the trend, and it looks to me like after the covid dip the US is still not back at the 2000s level of participation.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300026

In tech it might be a different story, but all I've seen where the stats decrease until 2020, and haven't seen much data covering the recent years. Was there any significant increase above what the other fields have seen ?

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I don't want to make too many assumptions here because it's a bit of a minefield, but... perhaps there's an entirely selfish and rational explanation for DEI hiring programs in a tight labor market? If you feel like you've hired all of the labor you can at a given market price (e.g., you're cheap and don't want to pay people more) it might make sense to try and reach out to parts of the labor force that you feel have been underutilized (or historically underrepresented, but we're looking at this from the perspective of a ruthless business), and DEI programs could be a way of achieving this.

I don't think that's an entirely accurate narrative, but I do think it's probably at least part of this (e.g., that all of the best white people were already hired, while many POC people of equal caliber were not or not making as much). The job market was soaring in 2021 and looking for ways to hire new people without having to pay them more would likely be highly attractive. Now that the job market is not so competitive, there's not as much need to do so if you're just trying to find workers.

this is an incredibly misleading statistic skewed by the fact that almost all retiring corporate workers are white so lots of white jobs were “lost”

We are already in the backlash.

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If only 25% of people hired for roles requiring professional degrees were white, that's still a remarkable number, given 2/3rds of people receiving professional degrees in 2021 where white, without even considering the total population of professional degree holders

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72

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Yes this is a wildly misrepresented statistic that has nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with demographic shifts in the U.S. population (specifically, that the "non Hispanic white" segment of the U.S. population is shrinking).

As a black software engineer, in my entire career working for US companies, I have yet to work with another black software engineer.

But this discussion is about it being a problem with hiring?

There was not a single black student in my graduating class of Software Engineering from college.

So is the problem truly with hiring, or is it earlier on. It could also be both. But if none are graduating with a SE degree...

I've worked directly (that is, either on the same team or with an immediately neighboring team) with two black engineers.

My company historically has had leveling issues and, sadly, they were definitely not meeting expectations for their level, or maybe even for the one below their level.

One was nudged out to another team. One currently on my direct team is being nudged out. One or two people want him to be fired (very curmudgeonly engineers who had worked with him), but me and the manager would rather find him new work within the company suited to his background in data science rather than software engineering. He's been dragging his feet; it's getting more and more difficult.

The company has a strong and vocal DEIB/social justice culture within certain parts of the company (though I suspect much less so among executives). It sometimes comes into play pretty directly in hiring. I've been in panels where someone calls out that the candidate is part of a disadvantaged population who've historically been under-leveled, though I haven't been in a panel where that made a difference in hiring or leveling.

The standard line is that the company doesn't compromise its hiring standards for diversity. I clearly have my doubts about whether that ends up happening in practice.

Northrop Grumman had a lot of folks from Crenshaw/Hawthorne/Carson when I was there, due to a partnership program with the local Cal State (Long Beach). All of the security staff was from that area too. Good folks, would 100% work with them again.

On the other hand, I've seen exactly 1 guy at the FANG I work at. What's the difference? I think it's companies like Northrop realizing that folks from under-represented communities have great value and prioritize that instead of whatever the current HackerRank-based interview process selects for

I'm software, but towards the hardware side of things, for decades, in silicon valley and elsewhere. I've worked with (as in, in the whole org) exactly zero software/firmware, and only one black hardware engineer (born and raised in Nigeria). I've interviewed a couple hundred people at this point, with only one being black.

Where I've been, trying to get some DEI policy to influence who's hired would be impossible, since the panel has to agree, and there's no way they would agree to someone not qualified. Even with pressure like "we really need to hire someone before end of month or we'll lose the req", the response has always been "find better people then".

Idk wtf companies you're working at but in my short career in a small city in the middle of the country where most people are white by a good percentage Ive worked wkth a ton of black developers.

While I can think of at least five people I have worked with who were SDEs and black (two from Africa, three from I-don't-know-where-but-I-presume-American-born).

Depends what the applicant pool looked like, but 94% seems almost certain to be an overcorrection.

I dont think the people of color that got their foot in the door in tech would agree with you.

The particular issues around medicine and cars were more due to regulatory and liability issues than bad management culture or intentional discrimination. Pharmaceutical companies often didn't include women as subjects in clinical trials over fears that if one got pregnant and then had a baby with serious birth defects because of the drug that would be ethically problematic and potentially lead to huge monetary damages in a civil trial. The FDA has since changed their rules to require broader participation in clinical trials.

https://www.fda.gov/consumers/diverse-women-clinical-trials/...

Likewise with cars, the NHTSA originally had a single standard crash test dummy designed to mimic an average sized man. So manufacturers optimized around that. Now they are using a more diverse set of dummies.

https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/improving-safety-for-women-...

https://www.nhtsa.gov/nhtsas-crash-test-dummies

I also work for a big US tech company. If it’s not standard practice, I’m happy to hear it.

My understanding is there’s a lot of outreach at HBCUs, so you may try that. Also H-1Bs.

The joke that white men are all named “Chad” is tired. You’ll notice I didn’t say everyone I interviewed was name DeShawn or whatever. Let’s move past that.

None of this matters if the children grow up in a single-parent household. Keeping a two parent household has an outsized influence on the children's development and needs to be a cultural shift in our society.

    > Where is the problem?

Does this matter to you? This depends on the type of society you want to live in and be a part of. My take? None of us live in a vacuum in isolation; we live in a country of 300+ million people. My neighbor's are Iranian, Syrian, Turkish/German, French/Moroccan, Indian, East Asian and all lovely people.

The problem DEI programs should solve is a systemic one where hiring practices might otherwise pass on qualified minority candidates or may not even be presented to them in the first place. The implementation of many programs is questionable, but the objective and why have some form of policy that focuses on broader inclusivity in the hiring process should not be: I want a better America for everyone and not just some subset of Americans.

None of the companies I worked for considered Asian tech workers "diverse". One actually carved out a separate category for Asian males: ND. Negative Diversity.

I'm not doubting your companies' policies, but just throwing my data point in there too.

I'm surprised I don't come across this perspective more often. ESG funds reached 15% of the total global securities market in assets under management (although much of this was merely a reclassification of existing investments). It seems very reasonable to conclude that ESG funds/scorings became the primary market incentive driving the corporate DEI initiatives we've seen rolled out this past decade.

Publicly traded companies operate under a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders (maximizing long-term shareholder value). For consumer-facing companies one could easily argue these initiatives are part of a broader marketing/corporate branding strategy that benefits shareholders. But, for large publicly-traded companies that don't rely on retail consumer sentiment, I presume DEI initiatives were primarily a strategy to attract investment from ESG funds and help quell potential regulatory action/political controversies

I'm ultimately not sure how reasonable my take is (I have no insider experience or knowledge) but would love to hear from someone with relevant first-hand knowledge and get their perspective

Companies also want to be in the middle of the pack when it comes to sociocultural norms. There is safety in numbers. When everyone was adopting DEI initiatives, it was the safest for you to do it too. Now that everyone is abandoning DEI initiatives, it's also the safest to abandon it. There is no upside in being the fastest when it comes to bucking society's norms.

That resentment drove people to vote for powers that forced FB and other bigtech to reduce the discriminations that were creating those resentments

I’d say it did make things better.

So you are born in the middle class, then it is a class issue? Will Smiths son Jaden had it way better than you. The axis for where to look is just bizarre.

To really help, make sure the schools in poor areas are top notch, even better than upper class schools, and you will automatically fix the imbalance, without having to use equipment for darkness, dna samples to check the heritage and other clearly bizarre future paths.

casinos 'changed the conversation from a zero sum game'?

Land acknowledgements are easy. They're not a policy objective. Most DEI stuff, it's the result of being in a room where you're trying to get some real change accomplished and you just give up with the decisionmakers and say "OK, whatever, do nothing about this problem, but could you at least admit that the boarding schools were bad?" And they agree because it gets them out of the conversation. And no, it's not going to solve everything, it might not even solve anything, but it's nice to at least have some agreement on things that we definitely shouldn't do again, even if we have no idea how to fix the damage.

> I am stating these as a neutral facts on purpose. Regardless of how we got here, the hand is ours to play.

Yeah.

English as a first language is a huge advantage (you have most of the internet at your disposal, with tons of educational resources), but illiteracy is a huge problem.

> hard to recruit good teachers

Good teachers are rare. I wonder if you could find some people to teach who are not teachers in the usual sense. People having a different job, or university students, who would just come and teach kids one lesson a week. It's not perfect, but it could be the most popular lesson, just because it is unusual.

But the important part would be to grow your own teachers; help the best kids become the teachers of the next generation. Maybe you could encourage kids to do this from the start; for example, take the best kids at each grade, and tell them to teach some younger kids one lesson a week.

I wish I could help, but I'm on the opposite side of the planet.

Not sure where you see assumptions. There are many possible problems, and I don't know OP's situation, which is why I was asking what is the main problem there. Sometimes it's teachers. Sometimes it's textbooks. Sometimes it's not having a roof above your head. Sometimes the kids are starving and can't focus on the lessons. Sometimes it's different language.

> would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?

One possible reason is that some of them could be born there. Again, this differs between communities. Some of them respect their smartest members. Some kick them out.

Yes they would. It’s a beautiful part of the country. And I know great teachers that live there.

Abbott districts in New Jersey are an obvious counterpoint to this. They are funded at levels equal to if not greater than the wealthiest districts in the state, despite being in some of the poorest parts of the state. I spite of this, over the four decades that Abbott districts have been in place, educational attainment gaps between them and the rest of the state have actually widened.

You make this to be a financial problem, but I think actually it is a cultural problem. Maybe lack of row models or not valuing education sufficiently. Having too much money can be a hinderance to educational motivation too.

It sounds like you're confusing affirmative action with DEI. A broader perspective benefits everyone. Different lived experiences contribute to a broader perspective. It's not about checking boxes or filling quotas and it's not specific to any particular group.

These DEI programs were not primarily about outreach. Outreach existed way before DEI (e.g. interns, new grads, Grace Hopper conference, etc) and will continue to exist. DEI introduced improper - discriminatory - systems with quotas and heavy prioritization of specific groups of people.

Name and shame

Not many people supported those "fundamental values" to begin with. The only people that wanted DEI policies were extremely loud liberals (that temporarily gained power by steamrolling the apathetic majority)

Now we are just seeing a return to reality.

Surely nothing can go wrong with authoritarians backed by trillionaires with social media in their hands, rapidly talking over power. I doubt Orwell could have predicted how the 2020s are turning out.

Which as it turns out, is also easier for employees to reason about and navigate.

Complex social games with rituals, vocabulary, etc are not, and act as class signaling mechanisms.

> If you were a woman of color in tech you’ve been basically guaranteed a job, no matter how good or bad you actually are.

Is that why there are so many women of color software engineers in tech?

This perfectly fits my old big tech EM who was totally incompetent and made life miserable for everyone on her team to the point where all but 2 people left (team of 12)

She also took back to back maternity leave throughout her time at the company, 3 times in a row, before leaving. Didn't even know it was possible to have kids that fast.

Conferences bend over backwards to have her speak. She has no clue what she is talking about but at least she gets to put it on her LinkedIn I guess.

I think there is a difference between diversity initiatives before 2020 and the DEI initiatives since 2020. As far as I can see, the latter is indeed is corporate puffery, where employees maybe join a half-hour seminar to talk about DEI every year, and perhaps there are new DEI groups for employees to discuss this. But the diversity hire initiative before 2020 was much more substantive that resulted in real meaningful changes to company demographics.

are you a woman of color? if you are not, you absolutely do not know for a fact.

Ask a "woman of color" how much of this perceived advantage they actually enjoy in real life, especially from their perspective. You will be shocked the gap between what you presume and what the reality is.

Mentioning that a poc is successful only because of their colour is harsh. Maybe they bring value and have qualities that other candidates did not have. DEI only widens the pipeline, no private company lowers their standards.

> Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

This is already super weird. If someone is making decisions on who to interview based on the gender/culture of the name they see on the resume and not the qualifications and work history, having them "consider" some additional token candidates is not going to do much. On the flip side, an interviewer that's already trying to be impartial in this situation is going to have to admit candidates he normally would not have based on their qualifications to interview someone "diverse".

And then there's the definition of "white". In practice, a lot of these efforts consider asian immigrants "white" for some reason. Meanwhile a privileged black person from an Ivy League school is not "white" even though they're going to be "white" in every socioeconomic way that matters.

> Do you actually have experience with those programs?

I was hiring manager at a "woke" (media) company during and after peak DEI.

The only policy of DEI that really affected me was that we had to have a "diverse slate of candidates" meaning, we had to interview at least one woman and (non asian) minority. This was actually a problem hiring engineers because we wouldn't be able to extend offers unless we'd satisfy the "diverse slate" meaning we'd miss out on candidates we wanted to hire while waiting for more people to interview. We could get exceptions but it'd be a fight with HR.

Asians didn't count as diverse because, in tech, they are not underrepresented. Basically "diverse" hires were women, AA, hispanic, etc.

Our company quietly walked back the "diverse slate" stuff years ago. In fact I think it was only in effect for like a year at the most.

The DEI stuff rolling out was highly performative. It wasn't in place for really long and quietly walked back. Now, the loud walking back of policies that probably haven't been enforced in years is also performative. In both instances it's companies responding to the political moment.

If that's what DEI did, I think that getting rid of it is positive. It seems to just add performative and inefficient bureaucracy to an already typically slow and laborious task which is hiring people.

I am not even white by the way. I would feel extremely insulted if I found out I was hired to fill some diversity checkbox instead of being hired for being damn good at what I do. I am confident and proud of my skills, which I put a lot of effort to develop over decades. The color of my skin is as meaningless as the color of my shirts.

> consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

This sounds like a terminally online Twitter user's idea of how people do hiring.

It's also funny to consider when 70%+ of H1Bs are Indian men. Tech companies just have subconscious bias for hiring both brown men and white men, but not black or yellow ones to complete the Blumenbach crayon set.

This kind of rhetoric is why we're seeing a pendulum swing in the other direction instead of a sane middle ground. But at least it's finally becoming trite to make these claims with a straight face.

The memo sent from on high (multiple years):

You must put up for dismissal 15% of your reports, of those 10% will be dismissed. You may not select any female, ethnic minority, lgbtq or disabled employees.

There are example of DEI not being racist but the one you provided is extremely racist.

My company did (still does? Not sure) have a policy similar to that, even for IC roles.

We would frequently miss out on opportunities to hire qualified candidates because we couldn't make an offer until satisfying the interview quota. By the time we did, the candidate accepted another offer.

I think it's probably a net positive for underrepresented people (it's kind of hard to argue harm to white people when they just get other offers elsewhere that are good enough to accept without waiting), but I'm really not sure if it's a net positive for the company (pre-ipo, still trying to grow a lot).

What most companies do is interview primarily referred candidates, which is arguably the opposite of DEI. It favors people in the social networks of the population already employed by the hiring company. And most people have social networks that look very similar to themselves in terms of race, gender, and economic class. Is that fair? It doesn’t seem fair.

My fringe belief is that giving an edge to buddies of current employees ought to be illegal (at least at large companies) for many of the same reasons why nepotism is frowned upon.

> the actual implementations don't actually do anything useful.

That blanket statement can't possibly be true for all cases, across all businesses.

If a role is specifically set to be filled by diversity hires, I really don't understand how that's not racist (or choose your descriptor here) towards whoever has been excluded for that role.

What is a DEI specific role? Isn't that against EoE rules?

My general experience was that this was much more a thing on the ground in ~2015-2020 and the internet / political rage machine is (as usual) a few years behind.

I'm skeptical too. I've worked at a series of smaller companies with strong DEI programs, and the "enlightened self-interest" part was that it gave us better products. Turns out I have a pretty good idea of how to build products and features that appeal to people with the same regional, race, gender, and other backgrounds as me. Working with people who are in different from me in some substantial way showed me how much of that is arbitrary.

For an extreme example, imagine a car company with zero women employees. I could imagine that their designs might look increasingly awesome to people who grew up playing with black, angular, high-powered cars (like me -- that's what I'd want!). And while there are plenty of women who'd like that, too, there are lots of women (and plenty of men!) who'd want something smaller, more brightly colored, and with better gas mileage. It they didn't have those varying opinions, or weren't even aware that people had other opinions, they'd be severely limiting their potential market and leaving huge amounts of money on the table.

(My wife's a big F1 fan and wants to own a McLaren some day. I know that many, many women love fast cars, too, and that many, many men do not. That was meant to be illustrative, not a perfect analogy.)

I am utterly convinced that getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable. Even if I didn't care about the societal ideals behind DEI programs, I'd still happily endorse them as a competitive edge.

Deep insight? It was completely obvious that it was performative. Why would huge companies like suddently care about black people or women if it was not to seek popular approval and get closer to power?

It's not deep insight. I am for real DEI.

That is not what is actually happening. The net impacts are essentially marketing, which has value in it's own right for sure, but I'd prefer real change as opposed to marketing impacts, and forced trainings everyone must take.

Did it note the particular ethnic group that's overrepresented in US Tech?

Unlikely

It doesn't help when the Seattle school superintendent told parents that if they didn't like their school policies, they could leave.

NJ is even more extreme, the poor districts get more funding and it's been that way for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

This is true many places. But I think the "property tax explains everything" talking point is going to persist a long time, because it's very convenient.

This is the same as California.

EDIT: I was wrong, and explain it as a comment below.

I don’t think that’s true. It looks like the US has pretty similar spending to European countries at least as a percentage of GDP: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...

Depends which state.

Want to hear my hot take?

It's not funding (though that is A problem).

It's not attracting qualified, talented teachers (though that is A problem).

The main problem is parents and society. Individualism means parents know better than the schools, and teach their kids that attitude as well. This cuts across class, ethnicity, and any other demographic marker you can think of.

Am I right? I don't know, but I think I am.

That's just false. Nearly every state relies disproportionately on local property taxes to fund schools. Federal dollars tend to be supplemental and come in the form of food subsidies or Title grants. They absolutely do not "more than have the gap made up" unless you're in a state with an equity funding pool (like Washington).

US ranks very high in the world in gov spending on education at 6% of GDP. Higher than Canada, France, Germany, UK, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...

The EU as a whole for example is around 4.7% https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

I'm assuming you are not familiar with this study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/lkatz/files/chk_aer_mto_04...

It shows that if a poor family moves from a poorer school district to a richer school district, and they have children under 13, then those children are significantly more successful than children whose families remain in the poorer school district. However, after 13 there seems to be a slight negative effect.

There are other studies showing similar effedcts.

Summary: It's not genetics.

> it won't be long until someone smart realizes there's whole groups of qualified candidates who aren't getting the same offers as others and hires them

There's an argument to be made that this is exactly what pipeline-level DEI programs are!

That's an efficient market theory, and it's extremely optimistic about how real people work.

If you anonymize applications you don't hire the 'right' ratio.

Anonymization is probably an under tried idea. Various orchestras switched to blind auditions and significantly increased the number of women they hired.

people can cheat in anon interviews?

I guess it depends a lot on the reason why they're under represented. Lack of skinny people in UFC makes sense. I'm not so sure companies and schools are just passive in a cultural preference environment. And by not so sure I mean I am pretty confident there is tons of discrimination, I've seen it.

I’m 35 now, at no point in my career have I ever been in an environment that would have tolerated that, school- college or workplace.

And I haven’t been trying exceptionally hard to avoid it.

If such jibes had happened those people would not have a job, point blank.

Given the average seniority for a full stack engineer is 10 years, I should have encountered at least one, or worked with someone who had been in such an environment.

I think chud behaviour is an excuse, because it’s not tolerated for at least my lifetime.

Your suggestion that bad behavior by all-male teams would be improved by the addition of women rests on a couple of assumptions that are not true: that women are inherently better behaved than men, and that women naturally see each other as being on the same team.

I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.

On the other hand, I have often, often worked on teams that were (except for me) all men, but by and large they were men who had mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that they loved, and who therefore had no trouble relating to me with respect and affection. While it is true that some men treat women specifically badly, and that some men treat people generally badly, it is not true that men in general treat women badly. Quite the opposite.

It does take a moment, as a woman, to find your feet socially in an all male space. But does it not always take a moment to find your feet in any new space? I have generally found that what makes it go smoothly is the fact that we are all hackers. If anything, it is all the walking on eggshells about sexism that makes social integration awkward at first. People are trying to figure out how they are "supposed" to behave around me, worried that I will be aggressive socially and legally. When we focus on the work we do together and the love we have in common for the field, we become friends naturally and get along well.

I myself think all the hand-wringing over demographics has been a waste of time at best and counterproductive at worst. I think it makes more sense to focus on developing virtue, civility, and good leadership among the people who find themselves here.

> Do you think such an event would've occurred without pushback on a team with more than 1 woman?

Sure. One of the women I dated detailed a story about how a man at a conference she attended suggested it'd be more fun if she was roofies. To her face, in front of her co-workers (many of them women). She was in a majority female industry (healthcare).

Why do we just assume that men stop doing cringe stuff just because women are around?

I hear stories like this, but now after 25 years in the industry, no place I've worked at would have ever tolerated this, nor have I seen or heard this happen from colleagues. Granted I've worked mostly in California, but still seems so foreign to me.

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Extreme examples like this provide a nice attention-grabbing narrative, but they're not responsible for driving the central 99.5% of the workforce distribution

I'm not sure that's entirely what's to blame when the countries with the least gender discrimination (Scandinavia) tend to be about 20% female in tech. I think that when people are free to choose their fields based purely on personal inclination, without major financial incentive, tech lands at about 20% female and early childhood education ends up being the opposite.

Now of course, a lot of software in the US is below 20% female and we easily end up with spirals where departments end up lower than that and develop a toxic environment that pushes each new woman out. I personally ended up majoring in math instead of cs because of that process at my college.

> the US education system because of how underfunded the system is as a whole.

The US spends more per student than any other country, by a lot. Money is very clearly not the problem.

BTW, if you condition PISA scores on racial groups, any racial group (black, white, asian, whatever) scores higher in the USA than in any other country, except Hong Kong.

> Sexism and racism are both very real and objectively quantified

Outcome differences are real and quantified. Your preferred explanations for the differences are not. Racism and sexism are not the most parsimonious explanations for the majority of outcome variance. We know this because there are shallower nodes in the causal graph you can condition on and race/sex disappears as an outcome predictor.

The problem is that when you quantify sexism in tech objectively, the results aren't what most people expect.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484

Entirely accurate, in ex-communist eastern europe some sort of math/engineering job was about the only way to live somewhat decent, so anyone remotely ambitious would go into that.

And in Iran, it's even higher (1). It is not what you would expect from either country based on the stereotypes people have in their minds.

(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyguttman/2015/12/09/set-to-ta...

interesting. not going to comment too much on this, but this idea would seemingly be belied by the well-known STEM gender-equality paradox.

of course it’s not. you don’t solve racism with more racism in the opposite direction. alas…DEI.

> It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition

It does not require it. My second point refers to the fact that people often talk about evaluating candidates/choices as if there’s a single, objectively measurable metric by which we can rank them. I argue that’s not how people really make decisions, but even if they did, who’s to say that the top three choices of suppliers are not all owned by minorities or women? You can both fulfill a mission to engage with more diverse suppliers and not lower your standards.

I’ve personally never been a fan of stringent DEI requirements, especially those that came from companies that were clearly in it just for the optics, and I do think it can result in lower quality. It’s the way that some people almost take lower quality as a given if diversity is involved that doesn’t sit well with me.

I can tell you, even a massive corporation that makes medical devices definitely does NOT choose their suppliers just by quality, a LOT of the suppliers we used were thanks to "people who know people", such as the painter that sucked but was buds with the plant manager so we kept dumping money into his company to fix their deficiencies.

The biggest lie that they told you was that the world actually works on merit: it does not.

That’s not necessarily true. In fact, by not having DEI programs, companies could, because of leaders’ own biases, reject better suppliers based on owners or employees being minorities.

There's no reason to believe pure meritocracy is somehow the default state and plenty of evidence to the contrary. Humans are naturally biased in how we make choices and "this person looks and sounds like me" is probably one of the most common and deep rooted subconscious (or sometimes conscious) preferences. This isn't just a workplace hiring problem either. Humans are objectively bad at making purely objective decisions, even when they think they're doing so.

This isn't to say DEI programs as implemented today are the best solution to this problem, or even an effective one. I personally think more broad anti-bias training and programs could be a good alternative since race and gender are hardly the only biases that lead to bad decision making (e.g. hiring someone just because they went to the same school as you is also bad). But it seems silly to pretend bias doesn't exist or that it doesn't take active effort to counter, although I understand the appeal of doing so especially for uncomfortable topics like race.

> It does require lowering standards and quality, by definition

This assumption works if and only if you assume that the highest quality products are always (and categorically) produced by the folks that DEI initiatives do not target.

To say that it lowers standards _by definition_ is identical to saying that the system that disproportionately advances straight white guys is _by definition_ optimal and creates the best products — the simpler way of rewriting that sentiment is to simply say “straight white guys make the best stuff _by definition_”

As an aside it reminds me of something I saw a while ago — “There are two genders: men and ‘Political’, two races: white and ‘Political’, and two sexual orientations: straight and ‘Political’

It is funny to see people argue this with a straight face.

I’ll quote the parent comment again:

> To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse.

Filtering based on identity can hurt his business by making his products worse. The line between cause and effect that he’s drawing seems pretty clear to me. What other interpretation would you have for that?

And for the sake of completeness let’s ask a 3rd party.

ChatGPT prompt:

“”” Given the following sentence:

To filter things based on the owner's identity… may disadvantage my business by making my own products (build from their components) worse.

To what is the reader attributing a potential lower quality in his products? “””

Response:

“””

The reader is attributing the potential lower quality of their products to the filtering based on the owner’s identity. This implies that restricting components based on who owns them could limit access to necessary or high-quality components, thereby negatively impacting the quality of the products they build. “””

That actually shows that helping poor people would help black the most. So why not do it?

Thank you for the lecture.

Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, Twitter, Netflix all did this. As far as I know, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google still do this. For hiring and promotion both.

Nvidia has the polar opposite problem on their hands, they're one of the most Asian-overrepresented companies in America. 56% of employees are of Asian descent, in a country where Asians make up 6% of the population. Second largest market cap in the world. And yet, not a peep about it from the social justice folk, funny how that works.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1369578/nvidia-share-of-...

Apple went hard on it, especially culturally, and it led to the type of censorship and control you see on the iPhone. Like apps being required to match Apple’s moderation rules, or the gun emoji being removed, or whatever. You can’t be an Apple employee that isn’t aligned to their way. You’ll be fired.

It was.

This.

What makes it worse:

- Each "bad" term gets replaced by multiple alternative terms, often non-obvious, so good luck figuring out what people mean now. For example, MitM (Man in the Middle) was a well established technical term. Everybody knew what was meant, the term had no acutal gender association in the meaning, but now you instead read "machine-in-the-middle, meddler-in-the-middle, manipulator-in-the-middle, person-in-the-middle (PITM), or adversary-in-the-middle (AITM)".

- The "it's more descriptive" excuse was used as a very thin veil of justification even though the actual reason for the change was clear. So not only do you get to deal with the extra hundreds of hours of overhead, but you also have people lie to your face about why you're being forced to do that.

- It never ends. First it was "master/slave", then "master" in any context, and once that battle was "won", proponents of such policies started finding new "offensive" words.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack#Notes

Fair point, I don't think it should have been changed in the first place. But it's been changed whether we like it or not. If it was "main" in the first place I think that's still a better name than "master."

Good point about the number of dev hours dedicated to this.

Having been in the TV industry as well, it would be virtually impossible to "root out" the word "master" by any woke movement. The word is deeply entrenched there. It's everywhere. I was a little surprised when it showed up as a branch name, however.

Note that there is another instance where this is used much more explicitly with "master-slave" replication. Most people don't even pause to think about that.

Why not `g` then? Or `o`?

I think you may have reliably heard he is a fascist, which is objectively true, and confused that with unserious people saying this will be the last election.

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Ha! I was going to say, I haven't managed to spend less than $100 for weekly grocery since before COVID at Costco, wonder what his secret is.

it's a joke, because literally every time I go to Costco it's $150 bill because it's so fun to do "treasure hunts" with my wife lol

They make up for it with the $1.50 hotdog and drink combo.

I thought their model was cheap/bulk products

> I don't see them as different to any other company, really.

The pool of qualified people, for a cashier, is basically everyone.

The pool of qualified people for, say, working at a tech company, is not as diverse [1], and don't match the general population.

[1] https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/people/talent-flows...

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It certainly is not there for the customer, as their core business of exclusionary membership is a quintessential example of systemic racism and classism via disproportionate impact.

That's interesting. Every company I worked at that instituted DEI policies claimed that achieving a workforce representative of the customer base helped the customer.

There were teeth, in that your own performance review (as a leader) would be affected by it. Depending on your level, your own promotion would require certain stats for your teams for it to be approved. So people made all sorts of decisions - including hiring people they shouldn’t have hired - in order to push those numbers to where they were forced to. The same happened behind closed doors on promotions.

The threshold is when ideals meet actionable outcomes.

And it's not a utopian system.