I’m a senior engineer and i had to work with a few diversity hires and man, that’s bad for everyone.

I get unqualified colleagues, they get a work they can’t perform optimally, other people in the org soon come to realise person x is a diversity hires and ultimately stereotypes just get reinforced (eroding trust in people from the same minority who are actually competent).

That is just reality slapping clueless top managers in the face.

If a certain minority is, say, 2% of the country population you can’t expect it to be 25-30% of your company population (numbers here are made up, i’m not thinking of any specific minority).

Unless you go over your way to discriminate and hire for skin color or sexuality or whatever else.

And also “reverse discrimination” is just discrimination.

9 points in 30 minutes and not on the front page, yeah, this is getting [flagged] for sure.

(2022)

If companies want to more diverse workforces, they need to invest more in education and children early on.

I help with interviews, and I want to work with motivated and talented individuals. I don’t care about their race or gender. Being in the software sector, an overwhelming amount of applicants are men. There’s a higher distribution of men where I work. I truly believe that this isn’t because there’s an effort to suppress women but that there simply aren’t enough women with software skills to hire.

If you want better diversity in the workplace, you need to invest in supporting minority groups early on. Firm’s investments here may not directly benefit them as these individuals may chose to work for different firms in the future. However, if firms truly believe in this cause being worthwhile the effect of their investment will be worthwhile.

I've been explicitly asked to do this by management at a long-former employer who cited "improving" visible metrics. I just ignored it, but one member of the interview team quit in protest. In retrospect, I should've done the same, as such a policy was an omen of things to come. In the rank-and-file, one should note such signifiers, since you lack complete information or access to the corp strategy discussions occurring in the c-suite conference room. By the time things have gotten to the point where you're doing mandatory diversity training or, like in my case, attending a meeting and given an order like this, your employer has already long been colonized by activist cultural rot.

On the topic generally, I think it's one of those everyone-loses situations. Even if you're politically aligned with the extremity pushing for this, this is bad strategy, a bad move that just ultimately enhances the authority of your opponents. I suppose I understand why activist types reach for it, it's an action taken that has visible effectuation in the real world. There's a libidinal appeal to it, as it empowers the activist, while disempowering anyone on the consequential end. But, there's a disconnect between source and effect here. If we're going to outsource morality, we should consider the motivations of any external source of it. Minimally, the moral arbiter should be tied to the consequences of their prescription. A company is composed of thinking beings, already filtered for ability of some kind, and all of whom at least have some embedding in the structure that will change, so we should be skeptical of the need to ever defer to an external other for ethical conclusions.

Here's some political praxis, something that could apply regardless of alignment: any political alliance will be composed of a range of entities, to include the action-over-consequences types. You want those people to take orders from the theorists, not the other way around. On the left, the Frankfurt School knew this, and their praxis was one of mobilizing an activist base of lumpenproletariat. Those foot soldiers would wave signs with simplified versions of messaging devised by an intellectual elite. Their job was to simply add directional social pressure, while thinkers like Marcuse and Adorno considered nuance and higher structure. This arrangement worked well for them, but later generations lost sight of the framework, and it ended up inverted. What you get then is an acephalic monster, a political id, one only capable of destruction, even self-destruction, not the deep thought necessary for creation of a new order. The waved sign or bumper sticker is not a moral system and certainly not a corporate strategy. It's an intensity, an exclamation; when you read one, infer the exclamation point, which is always there.