There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
Does anyone know what caused this?
There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
Does anyone know what caused this?
I think you need to make a case for DEI being “one of the industry’s greatest strengths”. It’s not obvious to me.
How well would the tech industry do if they fired all the autistic people for "not being team players"? How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person, or socially awkward geek?
> How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person
Very weird to include social awkward geek in there. But my guess would be like 99% of dev teams do not have a trans or furry.
I'd say more like 90%
You are imagining that the opposite of DEI is discrimination, whereas most see the opposite of DEI as merit.
The irony is that DEI promotes merit by forcing companies to justify hiring beyond basic “cultural fit” vibes.
I’ve been in the business and seen a ton of hires on vibes. DEI actually asked people to expand the talent search, not hire anyone unqualified (which is what the anti-DEI folks are desperate to have us believe it did).
I predict some major EEO lawsuits will eventually bring the pendulum back in the other direction because my sense is that the return to vibes hiring (and RIF-ing) is resulting in very actionable discrimination cases.
If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.
Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on, prefilter insufficiency "diverse" candidates from the pool presented to teams, or implement internal quotas to meet external funding or contract requirements.
Not to mention the actual external requirements for "diversity" from public tender process, government backed funding bodies, and politically protected mega wealthy.
The enthusiasm for disparaging DEI combined with a lack of articulation of how they plan to quantify 'qualifications' in a non-biased manner. My sense is that they don't plan to do this at all, they don't have a plan, and they are going to blunder into patterns of discriminatory practices that DEI frameworks were protecting them against.
Who is “they?” All employers?
With respect, it seems like the hiring managers you were complaining about above weren’t the only ones operating mostly on vibes.
If you're not a team player I'd expect you to be on the chopping block regardless of underlying race, mental, culture, ...
It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry.
I’ve worked with several excellent “just leave me alone” sysadmin types.
> It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry.
Perhaps I'm missing something here.
To me "individual contributor" means anyone who is NOT: A (technical) "Lead", "Chief", "Architect", or (possibly) "Staff" anything, and has no management or team-leader responsibilities.
Yeah, it doesn't mean a 1-person-team, it means your job doesn't include supervising someone else.
I'm not saying there can't be very clear counter examples, I guess the overall sense though is that "being a team player' is generally considered an attractive quality in any employee. If A is a team player and B isn't, and they're otherwise equivalent, you're probably going to take/keep A.
It's not like (most) hiring managers put "not a team player" in the pro column.
Alas, I’ve learned that while everyone wants to hire them to fix their hideously fucked systems, they really don’t enjoy being told that their systems are, in fact, hideously fucked. They’d much prefer you quietly put out fires while biting your tongue about how they aren’t actually fixing any root causes.
The problem is that people are being cut for not being perceived as a team player, because they don't exactly fit the narrow perspective avoided by the dominant social culture. That doesn't mean they aren't team players.
For example: someone not always looking into your eyes while talking can be perceived as "rude". Same for wearing noise-canceling headphones in a talk-heavy environment. Oh, you don't drink alcohol during the "optional" Friday-afternoon company mixer? That's just weird. Want to have a day off for Eid rather than Christmas? Wellll, you did ask for it six months in advance and we did approve it already, buuuuut Dave planned a last-minute meeting which conflicts with the mandatory team meeting, so we moved the mandatory team meeting onto your day off... We'll just pay the hours you spent doing first-line support during Christmas in cash, okay?
Socially awkward geek isn't dei
Including them is.
Not if they are straight and white, which is a disproportionate amount of socially awkward geeks
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It’s easy to make an objective case for how ‘D’ is a strength, however E and I are imo more values which intend to attract diversity.
there do exist objective arguments for the pursuit of diversity. there do also exist objective arguments otherwise.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12641
heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this case.
on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings, therefore social behaviours could be assumed to a higher degree. reference behavioural encodings drastically diverge across cultures (as embodied by religious value sets, or at a different meta level, the idea of low trust vs. high trust societies). based on this drastic divergence, predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity.
so i see that jacking up societal entropy leads to lowered societal cohesion. but thats just my stance and id love to hear yours.
I couldn't disagree more. "predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity"? I feel like this is just a fancy way of saying that you're uncomfortable with people being different from you. The social tension you're describing is in your own head. Even the article you're citing doesn't even agree with what you're saying.
your post is an ad hominem without substance to back the personal accusations within. i said there were arguments both in favor of and against diversity. the article i posted showed arguments both in favor of and against diversity. obviously some contradictions will present when looking at both sides.
diverse, millenia old, genetically encoded behavioural structures exist in our shared reality. id love to discuss this idea and the exact types of behaviours that can be encoded, down to the generational timespans required for encoding. that way we can talk about my idea in objective good faith.
'its all in your head' isnt objective good faith. applying the golden rule, you clearly accept bad faith ... man you couldnt tolerate a dissenting idea even momentarily before bringing out social ostracization and logical fallacies! sounds pretty similar to the behaviour of a racist, were you projecting?
that was said facetiously. im not trying to accuse you of anything, rather to show how it feels to be accused. to conclude i think its pretty easy to predict what my neighbours are eating for dinner at home and pretty hard in the city so youre gonna have to try a bit harder to convince me that the evidence of my eyes and ears is wrong.
Human populations dont share enough genes when they do share culture for this argument to make sense, people identifying as X culture but with Y genetics don't magically act like Y - saying "genetically encoded behavioral structures" is usually just code for "black people are dumber than white people" so you should understand why people are assuming bad faith.
thank you for clarifying why bad faith was assumed, that makes sense ... im pretty sure different levels of intelligence do present across racial/cultural borders, but assigning that to any one factor (ie. black=dumb) is unscientific
If your product is used bya cross-section of society, then having a cross-section of society build it should lead to a better product no?
If a qualification for the role is "appreciation for certain less represented cultures/ideas/..." then sure. Otherwise, for a backend c++ engineer the benefits are significantly less obvious, to the point it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill.
The goal should be to hire the best team for the use case, regardless of gender/race/culture/background.
> why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill
It was never trumping skill. This is just a willful rewrite of history perpetuated for some political goal.
The goal was always to ensure that skill had adequate opportunity to be displayed without bias.
Appreciation isn't always enough, lived experience provides a lot of value as well.
See all the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names/Addresses/Birthdays/Phone Numbers/Time Zones/etc, for example. Do you want a backend engineer who designs a 64-character ascii text field for legal name and have everyone nod in agreement, or would you rather have one who knows that it isn't going to work for their cousin "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso"?
> it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill
It doesn't. The goal of DEI has always been to attract a diversity of perspectives, all else being equal. Nobody ever proposed choosing a woefully unqualified diverse candidate over an obviously-qualified Generic White Guy. The only people who would oppose that would be the unqualified Generic White Guy who just happens to be the nephew of the CEO's golf buddy.
I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.
Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.
A million monkeys will never equal a single Einstein.
Just like people are judged by a jury of their peers, planes should be designed by your peers.
We should just get a representative sample of the population and give them equal say in the design of the plane, engines, etc.
McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
Landing page:
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...
It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals can't understand customers as well as a workforce of people who represent the diversity of those customers.
This isn't just diversity of race or gender, it's also diversity of thought and background.
Also critical and under-emphasized: the E and I in DEI, equity and inclusion. Power distance and lack of inclusion can railroad companies into giving the people with the most power the most influence on decisions, rather than giving the best ideas a chance to breathe.
In business a classic example might be "men designing women's clothing." How are you going to understand your customers if none of your employees and leadership resemble those customers? Perhaps you can figure it out and make some decent products but your competitor who has more diversity in their workforce is likely to outperform you, which is exactly what McKinsey's studies have demonstrated.
I will also point out that the only reason anyone started questioning this obviously true business concept and changing opinions into being against DEI is because the Republican Party's strategists figured out that they could appropriate and leverage the term "DEI" and attach it to the latent reactionary racism that much of the US still holds dear.
You can get away with saying "I don't like DEI" in public but if you say "I don't like black people" or "I don't think women should get hired for important roles" [1] that is obviously not acceptable, even though a large percentage of Americans feel that way. Right wing media twisted a largely innocent term into a useful dogwhistle.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1532673X251369844
Not to agree or disagree, but the McKinsey has been heavily criticised as bogus. For example https://econjwatch.org/File+download/1296/GreenHandMar2024.p....
Those McKinsey/HBR studies are trash. They privilege the hypothesis, overlook the obvious ecological fallacy at play and add in a bit of a sampling bias for good measure. The fact that East Asian Economies are all booming and exporting globally with ~0 diversity and unique cultures ought to refute this notion. I'm sure there is some no true scotsman line you can play here about how the true meaning of DEI, and I would agree that the stated goals of DEI are all laudable. But in practice these initiatives often amounted to unprincipled discrimination and venal power grabs, which is why they are so widely despised.
The teams in the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, the inventors of the transistor, the guys who designed the Hoover dam, who wrote Doom, etc. etc. etc. etc. were not very diverse.
You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
They were "not very diverse" teams but actually did have minorities in them, and those ones truly deserved their positions.
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United States domestic "politics" and just about everything adjacent to a certain well known public figure..
I think the industry's greatest strength is actually outsourcing bulk of the work to culturally homogeneous, cheaper labor countries of Eastern Europe and South [East] Asia.
> There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
Okay, I'll bite. Why is it a strength, and why is it the greatest strength?
All people are equal, so it shouldn't matter if you have an all Asian team, an all black team, or any mix of all races.
> so it shouldn't matter if you have an all Asian team
When there is a team like that, there is invariably sniping about how "X only hire their countrymen".
Groups formed of people with similar life experiences have a greater tendency to fall into group-think that misses out on both giant errors and giant opportunities compared to more varied groups.
And all people aren't the same, you want a mix of minds and skills for most types of work. I'd totally hire someone that couldn't really do that much directly but was fun to be around and connected introverts that have some (potential) synergies in their ideas and generally made the group more productive over all.
Especially in business, the actual (not the managerial) judgment is the collective judgment on the whole groups output and actions by the market. Forging a high performing group out of different people is not the same as maximizing the median metric on some individual test of skill. Like quality, it's a bit undefinable, tho unmistakable when you experience it.
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Big Tech CEOs having a front-row seat at Trump's 47 inauguration should give you a decent hint: they bribed the right people, so now they get to enjoy the kickbacks. There's no risk of being regulated to death right now, so there's no need to pretend having the same values the Democrats pretend to have.
Corporate DEI was never real. There's no "push against" it, simply because there was never a genuine push for it. Large companies don't have moral values - if they did their CEOs wouldn't be billionaires.
industry's greatest strength? where did that idea come from? hiring a bunch of didnt earn its based on race or sex? would you want your brain surgeon to be dei or do you want someone who is really good at the job?
What if they’re diverse and good?
It’s not like all surgeons and astronauts were white males for a long time out of inherent superiority.
Most DEI programs at big companies ended up setting goals based on things like race and sex. Zealots in HR departments then started implementing programs to change hiring and promotion and compensation to implement progressive identity politics at work, under the DEI label. These things happened in secret, because the companies didn’t like to highlight how being the wrong race or sex means your career is worse off.
That’s totally illegal and discriminatory but companies were not facing consequences for it under the Biden administration. The constant injection of DEI politics all over society - at work, in movies, in ads, etc - led to a backlash and personally I think it is one of the things that led to someone like Trump being re-elected. And this administration is very against DEI ideology. That’s one reason corporations quickly abandoned it - they didn’t want to face legal scrutiny now.
Another is that DEI culture produced no positive results, as expected. Companies already had incentives to hire the best employees they can. If you change that with other incentives thrown in, it’ll make things worse. And ten years after DEI began to appear everywhere, it was obvious it produced no benefit at best, and led to worse teams at worst.
Another reason is simply that a lot of the activists pushing this type of ideology grew out of the activist age group. And I think many of them likely don’t hold those beliefs as strongly anymore. But either way, younger people are different. Especially young males who are more conservative.
All of that and other things has led to DEI being removed or at least de emphasized.
outcomes
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>when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression
Tell this to the people enjoying unearned privilege under DEI policies.
I keep seeing this term “earned” ITT; what does this mean to you? Did you earn something which you were denied when a less-experienced other person got a job? We all have two brain cells and understand there’s a tradeoff being made here, and it sucks being on the other side of that, but i struggle to see what privilege you believe you have or should have.
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Tell yourself what you want.
But you don't have to dislike yourself to recognize systemic unfairness that you benefit from and want to help change it.
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Yes, MONEY. Companies and their management couldn't care less about DEI, they care about pleasing whoever in in power in order to get benefits and make as much money as they can. You could literally have Hitler in power now and you would see what companies would do for their survival.