Same companies were telling is how well it worked and they had the numbers to back it up.
I think they are looking for scapegoats for some cost cutting. Officially force people back and hopefully some will quit. In practice, many will continue to operate as before.
Internally, it was very clear that it did not work. The numbers were massaged to back up the executive leaders, but everyone was pretty clear what was going on, and even the exec leaders, in leader-only meetings, did eventually admit that it was "more nuanced" initially to "does not work" internally. The company has since moved away sharply from remote employees. It's still not full-on RTO, but it's edging toward it.
I'm not saying this is everyone, but I think people should really take the 2020-2023 rise in remote and the narrative around it with a grain of salt. Most of the companies that championed it have reverted, and they aren't doing that because bosses are control freaks.
They go remote, but don't change a lot of other things or attempt to mitigate the downsides (there are downsides, everything is a trade off) and then claim its a failure when they need a stealth layoff.
Also IBM has a long history of "Resource Actions" so this type of thing is not all unexpected from them.
If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general).
Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan.
The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse.
My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting that some students excelled at remote schooling. But most are reading at a level 3 grades behind.
Not all. I work with some remotes who are awesome. But the 24 year olds who want to work remotely from Thailand aren't getting their shit done.
In all cases, you really someone with time to look at the business as a whole to evaluate these things. For example, one of the things which has made RTO unproductive for many workers are open plan offices, which is a really easy problem to see and fix if workplace productivity is someone’s job but not if the RTO push is being driven by politics or the need to justify leases.
Come to find out at least one entire office was engaged in widespread misreporting and fabrication. Turns out fraud is pretty tempting when you can easily avoid any paper trail.
It's wilder still that the handful of times I've dealt with this have all been before RTO!
Btw I'm not saying 'cheating', that's one thing. I am meaning industrial scale fraud with remote candidates. Eg having one person interview then another (much worse) person gets the job. There are gangs that are going to almost unbelievable lengths to do this.
Extraverts, broadly, aren't afraid of picking up the phone and calling you to chat about the email they sent you three minutes ago while driving and also on mute in a zoom; introverts can use remote work to be unreachable in a way they can't if you can just walk over and impose yourself on them.
It's by being bad at work, period, but in ways that can be partially mitigated by being in-person. Poor documentation of processes, lots of know-the-right-person involved in getting anything done or figured out, using Teams (its design is remarkably awful for organizing and communicating within and among... teams) rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.
This stuff is also making in-person work less efficient but it's easier to work around the problems when in-person.
Better than resisting remote work, would be for them to suck less at managing a business. Even if they continued resisting remote work, they should do that!
What is better? I hate Teams, but Slack really wasn't much better.
The real chat part is cordoned off in ad-hoc channels that individual users can sticky, but that aren't "structural" and can't really have order imposed on them, if that makes sense.
It's like if Slack only had the DM and group-message feature, and no channels.
My thing is that while better IM systems exist, none is what I would call "Good" or even "Acceptable". Being better than Teams is not really saying much :-)
I haven't used Slack in years, so I can't speak to it, but it sucked when I used it. Back when our team was all colocated in one building, I intentionally had my IM app turned off and disconnected. Interruptions in person suck, but with Slack et al interruptions were multiplied significantly. Kind of: "If you can't be bothered to get up and walk to my cube, it probably wasn't that important."
What I want from Teams and similar SW:
A way to, with a keystroke, mark all messages as "Read" (even when focus is not on the window).
A way to, with a keystroke, print out all unread messages on my console (or in a popup window, or whatever).
In other words, just give me a damn API I can program these things with. Teams' API lets me get messages, but will not let me see if a message is read or unread.
Any app that forces me to open up the window, click on a dozen channels to read all the latest messages, sucks. Period. I should be able to read it all with one click/keystroke, and have them marked as "Read" when I do it.
This looks like channels do exist, is it new (there's no date on the page) or do they not work as you'd expect? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/the-new-chat-and-...
Even the small companies I’ve worked at (100-700 people) had multiple offices where you had to coordinate time to meet with the people you needed.
I’ve also worked remotely for the second largest employer in the US. Amazon has internal “interest” channels for each service team (the team responsible for an AWS service). Anyone could ask a question and usually one of the developers of the service would help.
These are my disadvantages of working remotely. I say all of these things as an advocate for hybrid work arrangements and co-working spaces/satellite offices:
1) Some people work better in an office. Offices are literally designed for working anyhow.
2) Some people didn't, and/or still don't, have optimal conditions in their house to work remotely.
I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.
3) Some jobs aren't compatible with remote work. Examples:
- Tech sales (moreso for complex sales and expansions than new sales)
- Many people who work in the public sector (even before this administration's aggressive RTO campaign)
- Most folks doing hardware or embedded work
- Pretty much everyone that we interact with outside of our home on a daily basis, like front desk personnel, doctors, mechanics, retail and restaurant staff, etc.
This creates an unfair imbalance of "haves" and "have nots". It is also very easy for the "have nots" to typecast those who WFH as lazy, especially given some of the memes of people doing all sorts of other things during core hours.
4) Some people don't naturally communicate what they're doing over Slack. This is the one thing I'll blame on management is communication.
Weekly "15-minute" hour long standups and check-in meetings covered for people like this back when we worked in offices, but it can be easy for these checkpoints to slip in when everyone's remote.
Now, these meetings existing are, in and of themselves, signs that management can be improved. Between Slack/Teams/whatever, bug trackers, Git commit histories, Office 365/Google Workspace APIs and all of the other signs of life of people doing things, there are ways for the PHBs to check that people are doing things so that they can report the things being done to their PHBs so they can report to their PHBs all the way up to the board and investors.
It would be great if more companies invested more in their processes to make it possible to assess productivity without needing inefficient meetings. This would make it possible to be a high-performing company regardless of location.
But change is hard, and it's easier for senior leaders/execs to throw their hands up and say "this isn't working; back to the office, now", especially when those leaders are already traveling all of the time as it is.
(I know that the trope of CxOs who golf/eat steak dinners all of the time is common; my experience working with people at these levels does not completely reflect that.)
5) Work-life balance is so much easier to immolate when working remotely.
When your home is your office and your work apps are on your personal phone, it takes the mental fortitude of a thousand monks to not be "terminally online" at work.
"I'll just hop back on after I'm done with the kids/dinner/etc." is the new normal. It existed before WFH, but it feels so much worse now, as the technology needed to set this up is so much more pervasive (mostly MDM being mature for Apple devices and Android becoming much more secure at the cost of everything that made Android fun for us hackers).
This has the fun side-effect of making people who try very hard to keep work and life as separate as possible look like slackers even when they're not.
6) Establishing rapport and camaraderie is much harder to do remotely. This "just happens" when you're working next to the same people every day for months/years at a time.
This was most evident when I joined a new company after COVID to avoid an acquisition. Almost everyone was super tight with each other because they hung out all of the time. There were so many inside jokes/conversations/memories that I was basically left out of, and because traveling was impossible then, forming new ones didn't really happen.
I get that many on this board view this as a feature, not a bug, but friends at work is important to some (most?) people. It's the one thing I miss from the before times more than anything else. Well, that and traveling all of the time!
7) Last thing I'll say on this: onboarding, in my opinion, is much worse when done remotely.
I've switched companies four times since COVID. ALL of these onboarding experiences have had some combination of:
- Loads of training materials, like labs and new hire sessions, that are dry as toast over Zoom but can be extremely engaging in-person,
- Some kind of buddy system that falls apart because everyone is drowning in a sea of Zoom meetings and the last thing people want to do is have ANOTHER zoom meeting explaining things about your new job that are kind-of difficult to explain without shadowing, and
- An assumption that you are a self-starter who will learn how to do your job by self-organizing meetings with people and scouring whatever documentation/knowledge/recordings/etc you can find.
This might just be a 'me' thing, but I've found remote onboarding to be a poor substitute for onboarding at an office somewhere.
At home, there have never been more than three other people in my house, when I’m “at work” with my door closed, they knew not to bother me. At work in an office there are constant distractions.
As far as “tech sales”. I’ve lead my share of complex cloud tech projects from discovery, customer acceptance to leading the delivery - all remotely. Yes sometimes I had to travel to the client’s site. But I haven’t needed to be in the office with the people on my team (who were sometimes in another country).
My coworkers are just that my coworkers. At work, “I’m taking a step back to look at things from the thousand foot few”, “taking things to the parking lot”, and “adding on to what Becky said”. I’m a completely different person at home. At the end of the day, my “friends” at work are not interested in keeping their jobs. I go to work to make money - not friends.
I’ve worked for two companies remotely since 2020 - Amazon and now a much smaller company. They both had excellent onboarding procedures. While AWS wasn’t “remote first”, my department (Professional Services) was as is my current company. Both had “onboarding buddies” and Amazon had a list of people you should set up 1x1’s with an instructions for the relevant internal systems you should use.
> As far as “tech sales”. I’ve lead my share of complex cloud tech projects from discovery, customer acceptance to leading the delivery - all remotely. Yes sometimes I had to travel to the client’s site. But I haven’t needed to be in the office with the people on my team (who were sometimes in another country).
I was a cloud/DevOps consultant/SA as well before I moved into tech presales. It's a different world, even though it doesn't seem like it would be on paper.
Delivery can be (and usually is, these days) done remotely, but I've found that finding new opportunities to expand or sell into new parts of business is easier when done face to face. The human part of the job is difficult to replicate over Zoom, in my experience.
That said, when I was a consultant/SA, I much preferred pairing with clients in person than over Zoom. I enjoyed the travel and found sharing a keyboard to be more engaging than talking at a screen for hours on end. I realize that this was probably a "me" thing and that others are totally fine with remote pairing.
> My coworkers are just that my coworkers. At work, “I’m taking a step back to look at things from the thousand foot few”, “taking things to the parking lot”, and “adding on to what Becky said”. I’m a completely different person at home. At the end of the day, my “friends” at work are not interested in keeping their jobs. I go to work to make money - not friends.
This is where we differ. I'm at my best when I'm working with others in-person towards a common goal. While I'm also motivated by money and am not pining to make lifelong friends in the workplace, I miss going to the bar at the end of a long week and decompressing with others who "get it." My wife has this, and I'm always jealous about it. For me, doing this over Zoom pales in comparison.
However, all of this is why I prefer hybrid arrangements that are mostly remote with budget for monthly team get-togethers. I don't think being on-site every day is effective, but I've found being perma-remote to be really isolating.
> ’ve worked for two companies remotely since 2020 - Amazon and now a much smaller company. They both had excellent onboarding procedures. While AWS wasn’t “remote first”, my department (Professional Services) was as is my current company. Both had “onboarding buddies” and Amazon had a list of people you should set up 1x1’s with an instructions for the relevant internal systems you should use.
These are excellent systems _if you are a self-starter and know what you're doing_. They fall apart if you are junior that develops best in a dedicated environment, or if you prefer a more "social" way of onboarding.
I’m saying that it is silly to have those roles be in the corporate office of your employer.
AWS ProServe has a 3 month training program for their early career hires and career transitioners. It was all remote.
Even for their more senior roles, they had “AWSome Builder” where you had a two month “project” simulating a real world engagement where you had a mentor and five people from the department acting like stakeholders - CTOs, CFOs, directors etc. This was also remote where you had to do presentations.
and the company you work for seems rather incompetent
The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza.
"After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.
the reason is simple: wearing a mask reminds people there is a risk and it doesn't "look good", despite its many advantages for many pathogens and pollutants; also acknowledging indoor air quality is crap is hard for businesses (and governments) to do since they would need to invest into better ventilation and filtration systems.
long term effects are rare in the (proper, confirmed flu, not your cold you think is the flu) flu
SOURCE: several studies and my own conclusion observing friends...
If it was clear, they shouldn't have trouble showing the data. Otherwise it's a case of "The data shows X, but my gut clearly shows Y"
I can certainly believe it didn't work for some companies/roles. But the burden is on the company to demonstrate it.
Funny joke. I needed a laugh.
I don’t know that that is a reasonable take. More appropriate would be to acknowledge that different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.
I don't think we need to give their good wills. They are just using the economic reality to fuck us, and I'm sure many of us are considering fucking back when the stars are right.
At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all of the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.
It seemed to work at first, but over time it became clear it didn't.
are profits spiralling downward? are these businesses, overall, making less profit? because of remote workers?
or is it closer to the truth to say that no amount of profit - or asserting authority over workers - is ever enough and since companies are in a position of power to squeeze blood from a stone, they will?
I'm going to guess that most people who start companies are beholden. The investors need people to RTO for some important reasons - real estate values, economies built on supporting workers, and of course - some amount of lifestyle differentiation (a luxury of having fuck you money is being able to spend more time with friends and loved ones than the peasant class).
WFH is a one of the most disruptive cultural shifts ever - pushback was only expected.
Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before".
Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.
You seem to have strong opinions on WFH. Find a job that agrees and allows this. If your current employer requires RTO, well.. they're paying you to be in the office so show up and stop the conspiracy theories.
It's objectively vastly more expensive to operate an office building or buildings. No organization is going to decide to incur the significant expenses and liabilities associated with operating facilities with people in them if they don't need to. Very little logic supports your claims, especially regarding the "CEO" and "fad" points you are attempting to make.
IME, remote work works best when everybody in the company buys into it and there's an effort to make it run smoothly. Conversations in chat, always online meetings, etc.
Considering most companies were forced into remote work by a pandemic with no planning or anything, it's surprising it's gone as well as it has, but it's also not surprising it's gone badly for a lot of companies.
(there is $120B+ in remote enterprise market cap as of this comment, anyone saying it doesn't work is not accurately representing the situation; it might not work for them because they are unwilling to make it work, but the evidence is clear it can work, does work, and did work during the pandemic)
I've personally worked at 4 different companies since early 2020. Not everyone does WFH well. Many pretend they do, but don't. Even those that do it well, do better when they meet regularly in person (have some hybrid model). Some teams/departments/functions are better at it than others, but companies as a whole I think perform better when the people have personal connections and relationships across the org. In a remote WFH situation, over time, through natural attrition, new people are onboarded and never actually meet anyone in the company and this becomes a large portion of employees that are very loosely connected in terms of their interpersonal relationships/network and this weakens the organization. I can see how that is fine in a individual contributor role of SWE, but for most roles, in most departments, it doesn't play out well (or takes a very special/rare personality trait to actually do it well).
First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc.
Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road.
And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.
The argument is not that face to face to build relationships with customers is not important. It’s that it’s dumb to have “field by design” roles be forced to be in an office when they aren’t on customers sites.
Besides that, it is disruptive in the office because you are spending a lot of time with the customer on conference calls and how it often works is that the people doing the work are not in the office or even in the same country.
Your client facing staff is US based. But US employees are too expensive to do the grunt work (unless you’re using one of the exploitive WITCH companies).
AWS exempted their “field by design” roles from being in the office during the first few RTO mandates. But they eventually forced them to be in an office this year (after I left).
GCP has in office requirements for their Professional Services staff now too - full time direct hire employees for both AWS and GCP.
I took a new job in 2022, at that time everyone was still working from home. My boss, who was a VP at that time, said isn't this amazing? We save on fuel, time, spend more time at home etc. Productivity has been amazing and all.
Two years later in early 2024 when they started pushing RTO, same guy repeats the standard bullshit about - we need those sidebar conversations, we need to meet face to face and all. Not a single word of how it wastes fuel, or time etc.
I realized he was powerless against the corporate policies, but just his hypocrisy was enough for me to find another (100% remote) job.
At the time, WFH was new for most organizations - and yes it feels pretty great. Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.
Certain tasks can be best done in solitude at home. Others... require collaboration. Collaboration that's scheduled in meetings or the dreaded video call are not the same as spontaneous collaboration or just popping your head into someone's office/cube and asking a quick question.
There's trade offs to both... and if a company has decided WFH isn't ideal for them, then you can leave and find a job that believes WFH is ideal.
I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption.
My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard.
I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions.
No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.
wfh can be great for individual productivity, but it can also seriously hamper team productivity.
On the other hand I might be preparing for a meeting, in a meeting, on a plane, at a customer’s site etc. On the opposite end, there is always a list of things I need to get done. I put that item as “blocked” and move on to my next item. If it is a downstream dependency as a developer, I mock it out and keep going.
If you are dependent on one person to answer a question, what happens when they go on vacation or if they are otherwise unavailable? I make it a point to not be a single point of failure.
Also, I keep my calendar up to date, including time I need to do “deep work”, when I’m traveling for business, of course meetings automatically show up. Anyone is free to put a meeting on my calendar if they need to interact with me synchronously.
(If they're a manager/decisionmaker of some sort then they better learn how to multitask online, which is like a 30 year old skill requirement at this point)
Also from what I saw, juniors struggled without always-available guidance while mid and seniors could get a lot done by avoiding interruptions. If the mix of employees changed in those couple of years, that alone could have been the entire difference.
Foolish.
Do you mean “same” or “some”?
Either way do you not believe that different companies can have different outcomes or that one company’s outcomes can change over time?
Must’ve invoked a lot of nostalgia for them seeing Musk’s inauguration speech.
Everyone I know there knows this was coming after Nov 2024. IBM just wants to hide the number and age of the people being fired.
The only practical way is if somehow an executive breaks ranks and exposes some list or email or private conversation where he they were planning this.
A harder way is some coordinating action from employees. All get together to figure out the patterns.
If they transfer you to a location that requires an additional hour of commuting, you just have to prove that the commute takes an extra hour.
Oh that’s easy to prove. But then what? Does your employment contract prohibit commutes.
If so, you can quit your job and are eligible for unemployment and any other legal benefits of having been fired without cause, and a claim is put against the employers account in the unemployment system.
Also, it is perfectly legal to terminate someone in most of the US under a restructure.
My original response was just pointing out that proving constructive dismissal doesn’t have to do with the intent of the employer, merely the effect of those actions. In your original example the employer can’t pretend that asking someone to commute to Alaska three days a week is reasonable and therefore they weren’t fired without cause when they refuse to do that.
To be honest, I find it very weird that you quoted that part and had the response you did as if you knew what you were talking about. By your logic, intent would essentially be impossible to prove in just about any circumstance. Obviously, that's not true. In reality, there's tons of caselaw about when intent can be inferred by a jury for any claim requiring intent.
Well honesty is always key, I find.
> Obviously, that's not true. In reality, there's tons of caselaw about when intent can be inferred by a jury for any claim requiring intent.
By one juror or two, and if the defense lawyers are dummies and fail to do their job. Corporations like IBM have lawyers on retainer and they are not that incompetent.
It will be hard to infer intent if the defense can present some evidence of “increased efficiency”, “working together” and “consolidating”. Without a smoking gun piece of evidence proving the contrary it would be an uphill battle, especially for one individual plaintiff.
What do you mean by one juror or two? My point is regarding when juries are legally allowed to make an intent determination. It often does not require a specific expression of intent and instead can be inferred from activities that indicate things like reckless behavior and disregard for the potential that they do the unlawful thing.
>It will be hard to infer intent if the defense can present some evidence of “increased efficiency”, “working together” and “consolidating”. Without a smoking gun piece of evidence proving the contrary it would be an uphill battle, especially for one individual plaintiff.
No, that's just a defense which might not cut against the inference at all.
>Do you speak for all jurors?
No, you seem to be confused about the evidence a court allows a jury to rely on when it makes a state-of-mind determination in civil suits. My reading of your post was that you suggested it required an express claim regarding intent. That is not the case, legally. Maybe you didn't realize that and were just posting layman stuff, which is understandable. It's not just a reflection of legal reality.
I don't think that you appreciate the typical legal procedure is that before any fact-question is presented to the jury, parties move based upon the available evidence, whether or not there is sufficient facts presented to warrant a fact-decider's decision. This occurs prior to trial at the summary judgment stage and after evidence is presented at trial. So there is often a legal boundary as to what evidence a jury can consider when it comes to any fact question (i.e. did this party have intent? did this party do the thing? etc)
The point is the defense can show loads of documents about how working together increases efficiency, how they are streamlining units and they plaintiff has to prove they were targeted as an ex-DEI hire and even though there is just hunch. I don’t know about other countries but that’s how it works in US.
Worker protection here is very weak. There are protected categories but they’d have the burden of proof they were let go specifically because of their protected category.
> I don't think that you appreciate the typical legal procedure is that before any fact-question is presented to the jury, parties move based upon the available evidence, whether or not there is sufficient facts presented to warrant a fact-decider's decision
Exactly, moreover jurors would be instructed to make up their mind based on the presented evidence. One side will have papers and the other will have read-between-lines hunches. Sure jurors can still do whatever but unless they’re all activist jurors they will just go with whatever side is more convincing and the evidence they have been presented.
They can and a jury can still think that was not the actual reason someone was fired.
>Worker protection here is very weak. There are protected categories but they’d have the burden of proof they were let go specifically because of their protected category.
You're just making things up.
>Exactly, moreover jurors would be instructed to make up their mind based on the presented evidence. One side will have papers and the other will have read-between-lines hunches. Sure jurors can still do whatever but unless they’re all activist jurors they will just go with whatever side is more convincing and the evidence they have been presented.
You're mistaking plausibility with convincingness.
Sounds like you can't provide any response to that. Hopefully you've heard about "at will" before and how that works in US. So far it sounds like you're making stuff up or are talking about some other country or region.
> You're mistaking plausibility with convincingness.
That's exactly what you're confusing. Some juries can be convinced but doesn't mean that it's a winnable strategy. How many people are laid off across the US and how feasible is for them to bring up lawsuits and how many would be won with the current laws?
The only exception to this perhaps are the ADA laws, where one can show that the workplace has not accommodated a worker properly. (The ramp is not there / the elevator doesn't have the buttons at the correct height etc). But here we're talking about DEI initiatives not ADA.
> They can and a jury can still think that was not the actual reason someone was fired.
Here you're again mistaking plausibility with convincingness. Just because it's plausible something could have happened, say a person was "managed out" because they were DEI hire, without some evidence convincing the majority of the jury won't work, based on a hunch. That's just not how it works. We can discuss some fantasy world where all the citizens are righteous activists and fight back against the system or the how it usually works out in the real world.
A company's right to terminate you is not the same thing as their plausible defense in a wrongful termination lawsuit. That you're bringing up other countries is even more confusing. Nothing I said is related to other countries as I do not live in other countries, I have not been employed in other countries, and I do not practice law in other countries.
>The only exception to this perhaps are the ADA laws, where one can show that the workplace has not accommodated a worker properly. (The ramp is not there / the elevator doesn't have the buttons at the correct height etc). But here we're talking about DEI initiatives not ADA.
I'm not talking about DEI. I never mentioned DEI. Are you confused?
>That's exactly what you're confusing. Some juries can be convinced but doesn't mean that it's a winnable strategy. How many people are laid off across the US and how feasible is for them to bring up lawsuits and how many would be won with the current laws?
What does any of that have to do with my point? I didn't say it was common. I didn't say it was an automatic win whenever anyone is fired. These are all strawman arguments. I was just rebutting the very simple point that was made about direct evidence for a state of mind, which is something that IS true about the US legal system, and certainly exists beyond the concept of employment law.
You have completely twisted this around to being about DEI, and trying to rebut the idea that these lawsuits are constantly won at a loss to these companies. None of that was said by me nor was it even suggested by me.
Reading the article will give you a fuller understanding of the announcement.
"…Black outlined the key role of IBM's technology in the Holocaust genocide committed by the German Nazi regime, by facilitating the regime's generation and tabulation of punch cards for national census data, military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity."
¹ http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co... ² https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/stat-ibms-watson-gave-un... ³ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/ibm-stirs-controversy-by...
I don't have a dog in this fight and if there are recent examples of this kind of crap going on, by all means publicize them. My issue is with people who drag up shit from 100 years ago and they go "see how bad they are?"
Go back far enough and everyone's had a skeleton in their closet.
I ask because I think it shows what a Rorschach test the arguments over DEI have become. I at least found one quote from the Policy Letter #4 which stated "It is the policy of this organization to hire people who have the personality, talent and background necessary to fill a given job, regardless of race, color or creed." Of course, in 1953 that was a pretty bold stance given the widespread official segregation policies in the Southern US at the time. Now, though, it feel like how you view that statement depends on which "tribe" you align with in the DEI debate: Anti-DEI folks say "Exactly, we want to hire people based on merit regardless of race, color or creed, and DEI has basically turned into a policy of racial quotas" while pro-DEI folks say "The policy back then was to fight official and systemic racism, which we still need to combat today."
So I'd just like to find the full original policy document so I can make up my own mind.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110409171021/http://www-03.ibm...
It has both the original typewritten scan and a searchable-text version right underneath.
Does anybody have any other insights?
https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/178vjlf/sample...
There were variable-width font typewriters starting in 1930:
https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/3ltlgn/have_va...
Yes, and in fact one of the most popular was from IBM itself [1], released in 1944.
> The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes.
It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.
> The signature is also in ink, so that’s either a third pass for color, or an actual signature, and the letter doesn’t have the notation to indicate that it was signed by the secretary, so that leads me to think that it wasn’t widely distributed.
I'm not really sure what potential significance you see in this. It was likely typed by the secretary and signed by the CEO. It's the original copy. Any copies required for the personal reference of the supervisory personnel affected would be made in the standard 1950s ways - a few carbon copies for the top executives, mimeographs further downstream if necessary.
They also charge enough for their services, as senior partners of big firms for it to make no sense for them to do their own typing.
This was indeed standard until colour laser printers became cheap (and physically printing letters became less common), well into the 2000s.
I should probably use it as scrap paper, there's no way it will ever be used for sending letters at the current rate.
If the agenda is to commit crimes and destroy the constitution I would have expected people to be a bit more patriotic.
Hiring based on the worst prejudice or nepotism is still merit based in this sense. Meritocracy is supposed to be about varieties of merit which you aren't ashamed to admit are relevant.
Your response was beautifully eloquent.
Most systems that work with standardized tests, while they can systematically fail to capture certain types of talent, are fairly objective - "if you're in the top 10% on this test, then we take you". The format and subject matter of the test is known in advance, people are free to prepare for it in whatever way they want.
Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', with examples dating back to the Chinese civil service examinations during the Sui and Tang dynasty (from around 593 AD). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination
It's important not to forget Goodhart's law in this context: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Unless the tested skill is wholly and directly applicable to the position you're testing for, the results will still be unfairly skewed towards those with more resources - they can afford more time to study for this specific test, and more importantly they have the resources to buy specialized learning material as well as tutoring.
Of course that's not to say that merit doesn't factor into the results at all, but it does mean that even examples of 'how to do meritocracy right' show that merit is never the only thing that matters.
If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library. The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it. Whereas, how is a low-income white kid supposed to overcome a race quota where every slot for their race was already filled by nepotism?
No, it's not. It's presented as an argument that measuring objective metrics doesn't mean you're measuring merit.
> If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library.
The library most likely doesn't have the same specialized learning materials that rich kids can afford, so this doesn't mean the poor kid has equal opportunity.
> The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it.
You're presenting this like it's purely an issue of free time, which is obviously not the case. The poor kid possibly can't reach the library without their guardian, who may or may not have time to drive them there. The poor kid possibly doesn't have anyone to teach them using the learning material there, while the rich kid likely has either their guardians or even specialized tutors for this purpose.
Your comment is a wonderful example of how people arguing for meritocracy can ignore reality - the bare minimum is supposed to be enough for the disadvantaged, even though there's a massive difference in effectiveness.
The goal is to measure merit. Objective metrics are the nearest thing we have to achieving that goal. If there is a better metric, you use that instead. But if the best metric we have isn't perfect, that's no argument for doing something even worse.
> The library most likely doesn't have the same specialized learning materials that rich kids can afford, so this doesn't mean the poor kid has equal opportunity.
And yet this is still more of an opportunity than being locked out by race quotas.
> The poor kid possibly can't reach the library without their guardian, who may or may not have time to drive them there.
Libraries are generally in higher density areas with mass transit, and in the worst case you can walk there. Moreover, primary schools generally have libraries and then the kid is already there for school.
> The poor kid possibly doesn't have anyone to teach them using the learning material there, while the rich kid likely has either their guardians or even specialized tutors for this purpose.
Which is why it takes longer. But the point is that determination has an effect. It's something you can choose rather than something you can't control. Whereas telling people that it's not a level playing field so therefore they shouldn't even try is how you perpetuate the problem forever, if not actively make it worse.
You may notice that I didn't argue against objective metrics at all? All I've said is that objective metrics don't mean you're directly measuring merit. It's important to keep this in mind, for example by ensuring equal access to specialized training materials.
> And yet this is still more of an opportunity than being locked out by race quotas.
DEI doesn't necessarily mean race quotas - it's telling that you think it does.
> Libraries are generally in higher density areas with mass transit, and in the worst case you can walk there. Moreover, primary schools generally have libraries and then the kid is already there for school.
But the kids don't necessarily live in higher density areas! So not only do the kids get worse material and less help, they also have a much harder time accessing those worse materials. And again, a library usually doesn't have the same specialized materials that rich kids can afford. I've been trying to show that this should be kept in mind and remedied, but you're arguing against me by arguing against things I haven't said. This is usually what happens.
> Which is why it takes longer. But the point is that determination has an effect.
But kids don't have infinite time! So the rich kids still have unfair advantages, so the tests aren't directly measuring merit. And again, you're arguing that the bare minimum should be enough for the disadvantaged. You seem to effectively be arguing that meritocracy is either impossible, or should not be the goal.
But then who are you arguing against? Is there someone strongly opposed to providing equal access to training materials, e.g. by making them available in school libraries?
> DEI doesn't necessarily mean race quotas - it's telling that you think it does.
That's how it's most commonly implemented in practice whether de jure or de facto and that's its opponents' primary objection to it.
> But the kids don't necessarily live in higher density areas!
In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
> You seem to effectively be arguing that meritocracy is either impossible, or should not be the goal.
Actual perfect meritocracy is impossible because actual perfect anything is impossible. But meritocracy is the goal and what you want is to get closer to it. Which providing better study materials in school libraries can do, but that isn't what anybody is complaining about when they're complaining about DEI.
The materials aren't available. Why do you think that is?
> In general the poor kids live in higher density areas and the affluent kids live in the suburbs.
Ah, and that means we can ignore poor kids who don't fall into this pattern, as well as poor kids who live too far away from libraries?
> Actual perfect meritocracy is impossible because actual perfect anything is impossible. But meritocracy is the goal and what you want is to get closer to it. Which providing better study materials in school libraries can do, but that isn't what anybody is complaining about when they're complaining about DEI.
You're ignoring that this is only part of the equation, as the tutoring etc. is also missing. There must be special programs for the disadvantaged to level the playing field here, but that's what anti-DEI advocates also complain about!
Actual meritocracy isn't the goal when you argue that the disadvantaged should be fine with far worse resources and opportunities, as you've done in this thread. You've repeatedly argued that it's fine if they have far higher time investments and far worse materials, as long as they theoretically could achieve similar things as the rich. That's simply not meritocracy.
To begin with, they often are. A lot of school libraries actually have test prep materials available. They don't all have them because libraries are locally administered and each locality gets to make its own choices, but if that's the case in your locality then you can direct your complaints to the town council rather than the federal government.
> Ah, and that means we can ignore poor kids who don't fall into this pattern, as well as poor kids who live too far away from libraries?
This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?
> You're ignoring that this is only part of the equation, as the tutoring etc. is also missing. There must be special programs for the disadvantaged to level the playing field here, but that's what anti-DEI advocates also complain about!
Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns. Again, the goal is to get as close to measuring merit as feasible; "closer than now" is possible but perfection isn't.
They have some materials available, but often older or less specialized ones. That's my whole point: rich people have access to better materials. This is simply a fact.
> This is the thing where perfect is impossible. If you live in an urban area, having a library within walking distance is feasible because there are enough people there to justify it. If you live in a rural area, it isn't. What do you propose to do about it?
How about introducing DEI programs that help these disadvantaged people access the same materials? Again, you're basically saying that they have to suck it up and accept their position. That's not meritocracy.
> Rich people will pay for things that aren't scalable. If your parents make $20M/year, they can spend $1M/year on their kid. If you spent $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US, the cost would be $74 Trillion, which exceeds the US GDP. And there is a threshold past which additional spending has diminishing returns.
There's obviously an incredibly large gap between "spend $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US" and "poor kids should either have no access at all, or have to walk large distances to public libraries, only have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available". The latter simply isn't meritocracy, yet you keep arguing that it is, and keep arguing against DEI programs.
"Rich people have more money" isn't an interesting fact, it's just the definition of rich people.
> How about introducing DEI programs that help these disadvantaged people access the same materials?
The term "DEI" has been applied to disparate impact rules and other policies that amount to race quotas and correspondingly garner strong opposition. If you want to advance good policies, you should stop using the same term to apply to them as is used to apply to bad policies with strong opposition.
> There's obviously an incredibly large gap between "spend $1M/year on each of the 74M kids in the US" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
There is equally obviously a point at which the threshold of diminishing returns is met, and high-quality individualized private tutoring is plausibly beyond that threshold because it is very expensive. It's also still not clear how you expect to feasibly provide a high density of libraries in an area with a low density of people.
That's not what I said. This is bordering on bad faith, please don't do that.
> The term "DEI" has been applied to disparate impact rules and other policies that amount to race quotas and correspondingly garner strong opposition. If you want to advance good policies, you should stop using the same term to apply to them as is used to apply to bad policies with strong opposition.
First, what term would you have me use instead? Second, I don't believe it matters what term I choose, because it will get demonized just like DEI did.
> There is equally obviously a point at which the threshold of diminishing returns is met, and high-quality individualized private tutoring is plausibly beyond that threshold because it is very expensive.
There is still a large gap between "high-quality individualized private tutoring" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
But that's besides the point, which was: objective metrics don't mean you're measuring merit. You've shown wonderfully how those advocating for "meritocracy" often don't care about actual merit. Thank you for the discussion, but I don't think it makes sense to continue, as you seem to simply not care about the issues with your position.
The premise of a meritocracy isn't that everyone is the same, it's that everyone is subject to the same standard. The alternatives are things like racism or nepotism where someone gets the position even if they're not expected to do a better job, because of their race or because their father owns the company.
But merit isn't a fixed property. If you spend your time studying physics, you'll make yourself qualified to do certain types of engineering when spending that time playing football wouldn't.
Money, then, can be used to improve merit. You can e.g. pay for tuition at a better school that someone else couldn't afford. If that school actually imparts higher quality skills than a less expensive school (or no school), a meritocratic hiring practice will favor the graduates of that school, because they're actually better at doing the job.
You can then argue that this isn't fair because rich people can afford better schools etc., but a) that will always be the case because the ability to use money to improve yourself will always exist, and b) if you would like to lessen its effect, the correct solution is not to abandon meritocracy in hiring decisions, it's to increase opportunities for the poor to achieve school admissions consistent with their innate ability etc.
> First, what term would you have me use instead? Second, I don't believe it matters what term I choose, because it will get demonized just like DEI did.
The demonization comes from rooting the concern in race rather than economic opportunity, because the people obsessed with race are interested in dividing the poor and pitting them against each other in tribal warfare, and then any term you use for that will be demonized because it will become infected with tribal signaling associations.
> There is still a large gap between "high-quality individualized private tutoring" and "poor kids should walk large distances to public libraries, have access to worse materials and have no tutoring available".
And then we're back to, what is even the dispute? You can't close the entire gap because part of the gap is a result of things that are infeasibly expensive at scale and no one disputes that. There are cost effective and reasonable policies that could close some of the gap, but many of those have already been implemented or could be adopted with minimal opposition if they were simply proposed in the places not already doing them, because they're cost effective and reasonable. It's literally only a matter of going to your town council meeting and convincing them that it's a good idea.
People don't strongly oppose libraries that stock study books. They oppose race quotas.
People absolutely do oppose libraries. They also oppose programs that pay for tutors for poor kids, programs that allocate more money to schools in poorer neighborhoods and basically anything else you can think of.
But I do admit it must make your life incredibly simple to just pretend racism doesn't exist and everyone ends up in the exact position they deserve.
Opposition to spending in general is distinct from opposition to a specific policy because the policy has a deleterious effect, and is much easier to overcome if you would e.g. source the money from a constituency that supports the policy, or offer to cut something else to make room in the budget.
> But I do admit it must make your life incredibly simple to just pretend racism doesn't exist and everyone ends up in the exact position they deserve.
Straw man.
If you then want to buy books for people who can't afford them, that's an entirely different proposal than giving the job to someone who isn't as qualified.
Well, an athletic competition would make more sense because that actually determines whose the best. We don't test heart surgeons to see who the best is, we test to see if they can do the job.
That's what people tend to... conveniently overlook... in these conversations. No one is hiring "the best" or only accepting "the best" into their college or whatever else. They pick a good one from the pool of candidates they have available.
Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.
When you have a competitive major university that gets thousands of applicants and you base admission strictly on test scores, you'll end up accepting only 1% black applicants because their test scores are lower for various reasons. If you wanted to accept 14% black applicants as reflects their proportion of the US population, you would have to be turning down other applicants with significantly higher test scores. It's not just about accepting someone who got a 1520 instead of a 1530, the difference is hundreds of points.
Someone else linked this article https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...
> For the 2015-2016 academic year, the average GPA of all students applying to medical schools was 3.55 and the average MCAT score was 28.3 according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
> The middle set of bars in the top chart above show that for applicants to US medical schools between 2013-2016 with average GPAs (3.40 to 3.59) and average MCAT scores (27 to 29), black applicants were almost 4 times more likely to be accepted to US medical schools than Asians in that applicant pool (81.2% vs. 20.6%), and 2.8 times more likely than white applicants (81.2% vs. 29.0%).
Seems like they're in the same applicant pool.
Someone else getting picked instead of you sucks regardless of the reason and there's always going to be an imperfect system doing the picking.
That is exactly the goal of this process. Otherwise why does someone with a 4.0 GPA have any better chance than someone with a 3.2 GPA? If all you cared about was "qualified" then there would be some minimum threshold and candidates above that threshold would be chosen at random.
> there's always going to be an imperfect system doing the picking.
"Perfection is impossible" doesn't mean that every imperfect alternative is equally bad.
The poor kids also live rural.
Remind me again, where there are lower costs, but also lower income, less opportunity, harder to get anywhere, less education? And also, who did most of rural vote for?
In most situations, rural = poverty = trap. Our society is nowhere near prepared in addressing the rurality and poverty trap.
But really, this whole dei being a proxy for this gender or that race issue is looking around the real problem. In the end, its all about access to 2 resources: money and time. The bourgeoisie have it, the proletariat do not. As long as there is a massive gulf between the 2, we'll argue this in different names and forms (civil rights, affirmative action, political correctness, DEI)
Poor have less chances? Enforce hiring of the poor.
Non-white habe less chances? Enforce hiring of non-whites.
Non-male have less chances? Enforce hiring of non-males.
Disabled have less chances? Enforce hiring of disabled.
If you have less chances because of a attribute you aren’t responsible for, enforce hiring of people with such an attribute to normalize the attribute in the workspace is DEI.
But the economic disparity is the reason for the racial disparity, because otherwise we expect people of different races are equally intelligent, right? So the economic disparity is the real one and accounting for that inherently accounts for the racial disparity as well, and you don't need both.
Which is the reason doing the latter is controversial.
That's only true if you assume prejudices like racism and sexism don't exist anymore, but they do. Even today, these are the lived experiences of many people in society. As examples, there are black people who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, even when they are more qualified and put in more work. There are women who don't get jobs because they are just assumed to be worse candidates, and so on.
These are real implicit biases, and they don't go away by just ignoring them.
Second, at least call a spade a spade - according to you, when people say meritocracy they actually mean "meritocracy with handicaps for non-whites and non-males". Let's not call that "meritocracy", okay?
These are test scores. They're graded by people -- if not machines -- that don't know the race of the person taking the test. Anyone of any race can get a better score in one way: By getting more of the answers right.
Yes, I think it's nuts to replace "DEI hires" with DUI hires and pretend that is "merit based", and I think the US has become a pretty full-blown kakistocracy (my new favorite word) right now.
But while I agree with the purported goals of DEI, I often saw it go "off the rails" in practice, and lead to a cottage industry of pseudoscience-based "DEI consultants". I'll show my hand: when it comes to DEI, I absolutely get behind the "I" part of it - everyone should feel welcome and included at work. When it comes to the "D" part, while I support outreach to cast as wide a net as possible when it comes to things like hiring, too often I saw this devolve into soft quotas and semi-performative hand wringing when some job distribution didn't exactly match the wider population distribution. The "E" part I think was frankly insane and just "equality of outcome" over "equality of opportunity" with window dressing - and yes, I've heard how backers framed the equity part, but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.
I feel like it's easy to notice the examples where it stood out. A survey of all the actual results might (or might not!) change your opinion. That being said, it's easy to say stuff like "everyone should be treated equally!", it's slightly harder to actually mean it, and it's even harder to do something about it.
We're certainly not legislators debating a bill before us, we're on social media arguing, but it'd be nice if people complaining made some effort to think of a solution.
Talking about how to encourage more excellence... now that's an interesting conversation.
Suddenly they start espousing DEI principles and emphasize how it's important to find a more "well rounded" individual.
However, what I usually see is people either ignoring the issues people are facing, ignoring the arguments put forth by advocates of DEI, or substituting slogans for arguments.
It works like this:
The world uses dollars in international trade.
Who produces the world's dollars? Washington and Wall St. Congress mandates spending, which is funded by the Fed printing money and purchasing bonds. The Fed also controls the money supply via interest rates and fractional reserve banking.
This is a very complicated system, but the end result is the same. Washington and Wall St produce dollars that the world very much wants.
World needs dollars from Washington and Wall St, but Washington and Wall St. need something in return. This ends up being cheap manufactured goods.
The result: dollars and manufacturing jobs get exported abroad, and cheap goods get imported. Washington, Wall St, and their hangers-on (their investments in tech, hollywood, etc) become rich.
The average American gets a bunch of junk in their front yard. They don't work at Bath Iron Works like their grandfather, they get everything they "need" simply by working at 7/11 or as a mortgage broker.
This is easily demonstrated by a wealth of data and theory. You can check out [WTF Happened](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/) in 1971, see the [Elephant Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve), and see the [Triffin Dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma).
The stuff about taxing the rich, deregulation, DEI, nationalism, etc have been a distraction from this fundamental shift in American society. Always follow the money.
Fortunately, the current administration understands this better any previous one.
These factors result in real disparity in capabilities and merit today. This is precisely why racism was and is so detrimental.
I oppose DEI because I think it is racist, even if good intended. I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit. I don't think that group statistic should be a higher priority than equality for individuals.
In my mind, DEI is a myopic obsession with the group statistics, to the detriment of individual equality.
If a school enroll someone with a 400 point lower sat over the higher person on the sole basis of their race, that is a major Injustice on the scale of individual humans, even if it moves some group statistic closer to equal.
I think countering racism with racism is a very dangerous game, likely to blow up in everyone's face.
Instead, equality under law should Ensure equal treatment moving forward. Past wrongs should be addressed by race blind improvements to economic mobility.
Anyway, everyone is already ostensibly equal under the law, but, like you've recognized, we've still found our way into a system of racism (that goes beyond governmental discrimination). Logically, to recognize systemic racism, that folks are born into a disadvantage, then to say that these disadvantages must be ignored, is to exploit systemic racism. It does nothing to address the system. If anything, by making it an EO, it strengthens the system.
You call DEI countering racism with racism, but your only argument for this is getting mad at a hypothetical situation. To add, though, to recognize systemic racism and to then put so much weight on an SAT score, while standardized testing is known as being a component of systemic racism [0], is racist in and of itself.
0 - https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-begin...
With respect to jobs, if you agree the most qualified person should get it, we are similarly aligned.
If you agree with all that, we are good, not matter what it is called.
I just call it non discrimination.
I suspect that's how it ended up being used in a lot of places (aside from deliberate outreaches to encourage applications, etc).
Beyond that though, I'm not sure not getting into harvard is exactly a "grave injustice". You don't have a right or entitlement to go to harvard regardless of what your academic score is. And I don't think there's a reasonable argument that there should be such a right.
The supreme Court case on the admissions topic showed extremely clearly that race was not just a tiebreaker.
Imo, the far more egregious use is public universities.
Similarly, if I run an organization, I can choose to serve 10 or 10,000. I just can't hang out a sign saying "no blacks/whites allowed".
That’s demonstrably untrue. At Harvard, an Asian candidate at the top decile of academic index scores had roughly the same admissions rate as a black candidate in the 4th decile: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...
The candidates were basically competing in entirely different lanes based on race.
It isn't a law. It's just looking at history and going, "They'd probably be as successful if there was a pipeline for those folks to get there, since that pipeline doesn't exist we need to represent them to allow the pipeline to be built."
You also don't seem to fully know what DEI is. You assume it's specifically hiring less qualified people because of their skin color. That isn't what DEI is.
It isn't racism. It's just giving other people the same chance of success. Representation is important.
Anti-DEI is just white people, once again, being offended that someone else is getting equal treatment. Look at trans hate, same thing. Look at book bans, same thing. It's just white folks getting upset and being offended.
There is no opportunity pipeline for white people.
There is an opportunity pipeline for a small number of well connected, wealthy people who can get their kids into elite prep schools starting from kindergarten.
It's not open to working class white people.
Edit: that doesn't mean no working class white person can succeed. Just that the prep school, elite university, big corporation (or startup founder) "pipeline" - which certainly does exist - is for wealthy people.
Edit: Yes, I made a bold assertion, based on the view from the working class and the many intelligent white people I know who were held back by not being wealthy or well-connected. For those outside the elite pipeline, it's an advantage not to be white.
If there's a pipeline I don't know about, I'd like to hear it. Point it out so more people can join the pipeline to success!
1. A substantially different claim than "We have no evidence for its existence" or "We don't know that it exists".
Quite a few "white people" got a start at accumulating property this way that was denied to "black people". Is it directly tied to going to college? No. Does it help? Probably.
It also never seems to be a problem that businesses don't need everything leveled for all businesses. The PPP loans were all taken up by people with lawyers that could quickly jump on all the money, and didn't actually help many of the businesses that needed it.
DEI is a defense of classism.
That seems like a pretty far-fetched claim.
You say you want to see the economic playing field leveled, does spending time and energy trying to tear down the existing DEI systems get you closer to that goal or farther away?
And if you’re looking at path dependency, Asians should be the biggest beneficiaries of DEI. My dad was born in a third world village. He’d literally have been far better off going to school in the segregated south than taking a boat to school during monsoon season. I don’t think that should count in how you treat me—I grew up comfortably middle class—but it’s downright bizarre to say I’m somehow more privileged than people whose families have long been in America.
I have no high school completion, no university education, no qualifications. So obviously it’s not as closed as you are pretending it is.
That's also why DEI advocates generally don't advocate focusing exclusively on race. Instead they generally advocate that DEI focus on many factors such as race, wealth, disability, sexuality, gender, military service, etc.
I think it is a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to have dual standards based on race.
Also, I don't appreciate you blatant racism putting all white people into a single stereotype, not do I think it is accurate
Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].
In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?
Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/04/17/new-res...
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
What I don't approve of was my annual bonus depending hitting on targets for % minority hires. That shouldn't be on my mind when I'm interviewing candidates.
There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.
So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.
You can find reports of hr employees and lawsuits involving major companies and universities to the contrary, where there were quotas and discrimination, implicit or explicit.
I've been told face to face by several tech recruiters that they are not looking to hire my race and gender, but I should tell my minority wife should apply.
People keep saying this. It's such a nice and simple statement. "All men are created equal!". It's the details of real life where you tend to run into issues.
Are we allowed to measure what percentage of various races get to go to harvard? If we find an oddity can we correct it? How do you fix both the existing racial biases and the previous history of racial biases affecting people's positions?
Saying "racism is dead let's not worry about it" seems like a really convenient position to take. You don't have to actually do any work.
Is trying to boost certain candidates based on skin color the best way to do it? Obviously not, in a perfect world we would have a more complex and accurate system. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'm betting 90% of the people who yell about "DEI" on the TV are not "concerned that this is an imperfect way of solving the problem".
This comes up a lot in these types of threads. It's fine to acknowledge someone might have identified an actual problem. It's theoretically possible for Trump to tell the truth, if only by accident, at least once. But there is a huge difference between agreeing that something might need to be fixed, and handing power to people who want to tear it all down.
There's, dunno what to call it, maybe naivety, in places like this, where you see, a certain attitude that's like "well <current solution> isn't perfect so lets get rid of it and then maybe someone will do it better next time".
There's a bunch of issues there, but the biggest one is that usually it took years and years and hundreds if not thousands of people's efforts to get the current solution in place and if you just tear it down, it'll take the same amount of effort if not more to get something else done.
Obviously some solutions do more harm than good and so the correct answer is to remove them. I'm unconvinced, say, harvard considering race as a factor when choosing people to admit is actually doing harm to anyone, much less so much harm that we need to have a culture war over it.
But to shift gears, I've seen good arguments on both sides here. It seems like (in this discussion), there is a fair amount of agreement that the root of the problem has to do with disadvantaged folks lacking the same opportunities due to historical factors. So that's a good starting point.
The crux of the issue seems to be whether the appropriate course of action is to level the playing field for individuals who are starting from a disadvantage. This can be described as "equal outcome" rather than "equal opportunity". There are pros and cons to both options, but to put a fine point on it, I'm just not aware of any actions that can be taken to effect "equal outcome" that don't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
A black and a white children of dirt poor single mothers are both going to have major headwinds in life.
A black and white children of married techies and doctors are both going to start with a good hand.
Addressing the problem at the college admission stage is just juicing the numbers in a way that says our University is care more about your skin color than what you can do.
It would be far better to look at what we can do to keep kids in school, stabilize their home lives, and make them into competitive college applicants.
This is the route to address equal outcome that doesn't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. It's slower to show results, but I think it's the only thing they'll actually get there in the end.
If all we care about is the numbers, we could just give honorary diplomas to kids that can't even read and make the numbers work.
So this is a hypothetical that is not worth discussing. Until specific cases can be brought to bear, why are you inventing situations that may never have existed?
I'd also like to opine on SAT scores for a second. First off, it's well known that SAT scores are not directly correlative in post-secondary educational success, nor work-success. Second they are not highly accurate measurements - there's an inherent fuzziness to them. So even if 2 students had a SAT within some Epsilon, the SAT scores might not really provide much differentiation there. Ergo, basing all of our policies on SAT scores - which are well known to be easily gamed, and also a product of a private institution - seems not a good idea.
Moving on, the problem with being against "myopic obsession with the group statistics" is you are ignoring some important evidence. What do you think of the "group statistics" that say that black people start less businesses, have less family wealth? Or black women have higher maternal mortality? These are pointing to important individual outcomes that are, to say the least, wrong.
So I don't think that paying attention to group statistics, like black maternal mortality (aka how many black moms die in child birth or due to child birth) is "myopic" and "to the detriment of individual equality." It's a very very real problem we, if we intend to call ourselves a moral society, need to solve. So having specific programs to help solve black maternal mortality in a hospital is not "countering racism with racism" imo. It's a focused program on solving a focused problem.
This logic extends out to most "DEI" things. For example is it good if the students at universities drift from representing America on average? I'd say it is not good. What about the ivy league pledges to make school free for anyone who's family income was under $X a year? Is that a myopic obsession with group statistics, namely poor people who can't afford elite colleges even if they were admitted? Seems like yes that could fit into your definition of why you oppose DEI. And IT IS a DEI program - it's increasing diversity (income/class diversity) and equality/equity (improving outcomes for individuals) and inclusions (including those who cannot afford elite colleges).
So when DEI programs that are focused on race, because much of our racial divide was artificially constructed by racist laws and policies of the past, it is suddenly bad, even though I rarely hear anti-DEI people go on about the low income scholarships for ivy leagues. Honestly it starts to sound that in fact many people may in fact have a problem not with the overall concept, but the beneficiaries of the programs.
So back to your comment, let's pick some specific circumstances that we know about and may you can propose how you'd meaningfully fix it, policy wise, within 5 years: - Black maternal mortality us 3x higher than white maternal mortality - Black people are ~ 14.4% of USA, but 12.5% in colleges. Is this a problem? - If we think talent is spread equally, then we should expect to see more % of black founders in YCombinator than the 2-4% there is. Maybe not exactly 14.4% but surely closer to 10% than 0%? Is this worthwhile of being solved? - While we are at it, only 11% of YCombinator founders are women. Is this a problem?
So what can be done about these noticeable gaps? What kinds of suboptimal outcomes are being picked when, for example, few YCombinator founders even know about the challenges and struggles of the average American? (who's a woman btw, women are 50.49% of the population, a majority) What kinds of products, opportunities, etc are being missed here? Maybe none?
What are your "race blind improvements" to economic mobility here? You have a 5 year timeline to make statistically meaningful changes to these metrics.
One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.
But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.
That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.
That sounds nice, but that’s not what our laws and institutions are doing, nor is it the direction they’re moving in.
So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity, not race. To fix it you need to e.g. make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities. That allows both poor black people and poor white people to get ahead without discriminating against anyone, but still reduces the racial disparity because black people are disproportionately poor.
It's basically Goodhart's law. Because of the existing correlation between race and poverty, continuing racial disparities are a strong proxy for insufficient upward mobility, but you want to solve the actual problem and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
It still has to do with economic circumstance, but here, according to Sowell it's about the cost of employing empirical discrimination (judging each specific case through complete knowledge of the individual) instead of a proxy for empirical discrimination (like likelihoods based on a non-arbitrary characteristic such as income or neighborhood).
The solutions that follow from that conclusion are to find ways to make empiricism less costly, or to change the stereotype (such as people from a poor neighborhood are likely to be a bad risk for a loan).
Systemic racism tends to apply so much economic drag to the system that any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand. Apartheid in South Africa was systemic racism, and businesses were violating those laws long before they were abolished just out of profit-motive. It became obvious and common-sense for the system to be ended. Thomas Sowell, in that same work, points out that Type II discrimination (discrimination based on arbitrary characteristics like race, ethnicity, belief... etc.) always ends up being economically unfeasible.
You raise an interesting point but I think that's an overly broad claim. Groups with strong internal adhesion and sufficiently high trust can remain xenophobic indefinitely.
It's also wrong on some level to refer to these things as arbitrary characteristics. They might be seemingly unrelated, but in a broader social context they are often far from arbitrary. Particularly when it comes to belief systems they can have direct and tangible impacts.
You're referring to a decades-old study that failed to replicate:
(This is extremely common in social sciences.)
The way DEI is usually framed by opponents is less "companies are using DEI to buy woke points so they don't fix the real economic issues" and more "companies deliberately hired unqualified black lesbians to tick a checkbox". These are very different critiques in terms of who they're aimed at. The latter makes it sound like we just need "more meritocracy" - i.e. to fix the problem by firing all black and poor people. The former makes it clear the problem is the people running the economy who are pitting different groups of people against one another to keep labor down.
Which means when you come across a black or female professional who has risen, it means they actually are much more likely to be MORE talented than the average white man.
In other words, this notion of "diversity hires" is not logical. It barely makes sense.
This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business".
Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.
And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
So, how do we get to the outcome we all want: your talent drives your success?
One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without having to pay a ton for commercial real estate (i.e. capital)? Nope, zoning violation. But surely if you rent a commercial shop for your restaurant then you can then live there instead of having to maintain two separate pieces of property and a car to commute between them? Nope, sorry, the commercial unit isn't zoned for residential. Also, you'll have to outbid Starbucks and McDonalds for the site because there is only a small area of land zoned for commercial use and it's already full with nowhere empty zoned to add more.
Now that you've put yourself in debt for real estate you're not allowed to live at and opened a business with ~4% net margins, your customers expect to pay with credit cards and the law allows that racket to take ~3% of your total revenue.
To make this work at all you're going to have to do enough volume that you'll end up hiring people. Congrats, you now get to do Business Taxes. This isn't the thing where you file a 1040 which is just copying some numbers from a sheet you got from your employer, it's the thing where you have to calculate those numbers for other people and also keep track of every dollar you spend on every chair, kilowatt hour and jar of tomato sauce so the government can take half your earnings instead of the three quarters or more you lose if you're bad at math or forget to deduct something big. But don't be bad at math the other way either or then you go to jail.
Now that you're almost making enough money to be able to eat at your own restaurant, the power to your stove goes out and shuts down your whole operation. You track it down to a defective splice put in by the licensed electrician who wired the place before you bought it. You're not allowed to fix this because you're not licensed as an electrician. You're also not able to get licensed because it's both prohibitively expensive for someone who only does occasional electrical work and requires you to do a multi-year apprenticeship even if you could pass every test to get the license. So you either have to wait a week for someone with a license to have time for you even though the actual fix is only going to take five minutes, or pay through the nose for emergency service, or break the law and do it yourself.
I could go on. The reason "access to capital" is such a problem is that the regulations make everything so expensive, and most of the regulations are a result of regulators being captured by the incumbents.
> And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.
Racial discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases. That doesn't necessitate casting aspersions in cases where there isn't any evidence of that, just because the economic disparity tends to create an outcome disparity even when the entity isn't doing anything racist.
> One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.
Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?
> In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.
"My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
No, if it were true, standing on its own, it would be an accurate statement of fact. It is only be the ad hominem fallacy if it forms part of an argument with this logical structure:
1. My opponents argue X, but
2. My opponents are lying racists, therefore
3. X is false.
I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
What health and safety reason requires a 3% processing fee for credit card payments? Why is it unsafe for the proprietor to live in a room in the same structure as a restaurant in some areas, but not in other places that have different zoning?
The only thing that comes close to a health and safety issue is requiring a licensed electrician, and that's still a racket because they make it infeasible for you to get the license yourself even if you're willing to learn the material.
> I agree that we should be careful to avoid overregulation in general and regulatory capture in particular. However, even without that access to capital is likely to be a major barrier to entry to many people starting a business.
In the absence of these rules, you start a restaurant out of your home and do the work yourself and the capital you need to start out is predominantly the things you already need in order to have food and shelter. These regulations add hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional capital costs for the purpose of constraining supply so landlords and contractors and banks can extract more money.
There also exist mixed zoning areas where you can run a business that hosts customers on site out of your house.
Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation. In terms of incentives, there's probably less inclination to cut corners and be reckless with a structure that your entire family lives in.
I think I'm going to blame zoning on this one long before I take issue with electrician apprenticeships.
This is the ex post facto rationalization of the rules, not the actual reason. The actual reason is that businesses are more likely to have contracted it out regardless so are less likely to oppose, and are the more lucrative customers for the license holders lobbying for the rules, whereas homeowners object more and have a larger voting block.
Notice that the rules are based on use and not occupancy. A residential multi-unit condo will have more occupants than a small business that only serves five customers at once.
Meanwhile nobody actually wants an electrical fire. The primary thing leading to shoddy workmanship is artificial supply constraints on professional work, which creates financial pressure for amateurs to covertly perform work they're not qualified to do because there aren't enough professionals and puts the professionals under time pressure because there is too much work for them to complete with that number of workers.
There are likely ways we can give more latitude, but home kitchens often cannot be cleaned to the same standard as commercial kitchens just due to how they have been built.
Unfortunately in terms of "overreaching" regulations, this is the worst example: food borne illneses are very real killers, and a major risk.
Also regarding a licensed electrician, while the regulatory requirements for one may seem high - I'm not 100% sure if they are or not - electrical fires are one of the major ways structures catch fire and kill people.
Really in terms of overbearing regulations, these two actually protect lives every single day. Remember the "Ghost Ship" fire? Caused by electrical fire. Norovirus on cruise ships? Cause hospitalization and evacuation.
I'm all for minimizing regulations, but many many of them are literally written in blood, and the notion that we can wholesale relax them with no ill consequence is just not true.
> home kitchens often cannot be cleaned to the same standard as commercial kitchens just due to how they have been built.
This has nothing to do with zoning rules. You're not allowed to operate a restaurant on that piece of land regardless of what kind of kitchen you have. Requiring specific materials or equipment is not the same thing as "doing this is banned here but allowed somewhere you can't afford".
> Also regarding a licensed electrician, while the regulatory requirements for one may seem high - I'm not 100% sure if they are or not - electrical fires are one of the major ways structures catch fire and kill people.
Your assumption is that the rules improve safety when it's quite the opposite. A license should be something you get by passing a licensing exam, and taking the licensing exam should be free. Anyone who knows the material gets the license, immediately, at no cost.
Instead we have apprenticeship requirements whose purpose is to constrain the supply of people who hold the license. That increases the cost of hiring a professional, which causes more work to be done by amateurs even if it's illegal, or to ignore problems because they can't afford to pay someone to fix them. Which is how you get electrical fires.
Don't confuse actual safety rules with regulatory capture protectionism that compromises safety to pad the coffers of the incumbents.
Because conservatives won't let us. Literally the most famous slogan associated with leftists is wanting regular people to "own the means of production." Most leftists would be THRILLED by programs to help anyone get access to capital.
Additionally somewhere like SF isn't a monolith, and despite voting heavily for federal democrats, the local elections aren't so clear cut.
Also we need to consider how and if development is truly good for existing residents. Many of them do not think so. The appropriate response here is to develop a sense of curiosity: why is that? What do people believe, and why?
I would say this: modern development doesn't always make the kinds of mixed used neighborhoods that people truly want and love. The cost of development often results in street level vacant commercial space, and that is not good for neighborhoods. Yes a complete revamp of zoning could change this - but would it? How do you build a compelling future that brings people along?
It just isn't trivial sadly.
There are in actual fact many cities where Democrats control every branch of local government.
> The idea that zoning reform is a no-brainer and easy is also clearly not true: it's been a major teeth pull in SF and California, and many different people are pushing back.
That's the point. Democrats, despite having majority control in such areas, don't actually do it.
> Also we need to consider how and if development is truly good for existing residents. Many of them do not think so. The appropriate response here is to develop a sense of curiosity: why is that? What do people believe, and why?
If you're an incumbent property owner then you want the value of your existing property to go up. If you want to move into an area you don't already live or build something there, you want property to be affordable. Since only the first group gets a vote in local elections, there is a perverse incentive to maintain artificial scarcity.
> How do you build a compelling future that brings people along?
It's a structural failure that comes from doing zoning at the local level. Alice owns a house in San Francisco and intends sell it and buy one in LA. Bob owns a house in LA and intends to sell it and buy one in San Francisco. Therefore Alice currently wants housing to be expensive in San Francisco and cheap in LA and Bob wants the opposite. But Alice only gets a vote in San Francisco and Bob only gets a vote in LA, so they each vote for housing to be expensive there and then it ends up expensive everywhere. As soon as Bob buys the house in San Francisco and consequently a vote there, he wants that house to cost more rather than less.
If you prohibit scarcity-inducing zoning practices at the state or federal level then Alice and Bob no longer have a strong preference since the rule now affects them both when they sell and when they buy instead of only one of those, but all of the people who don't already own property can now vote in an election for someone that has jurisdiction.
To be fair oftentimes that documentation is due to the regulations you're speaking against here. I'm not necessarily taking a side. It just seemed relevant to point out.
That is true but it does not imply that success is possible for all people in all cases.
I can always blame some external factor for my loss in a competition but it is not necessarily within the realm of (realistic) possibility for me to win every possible matchup.
It goes further than just fudging the metrics: By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas. This combined with the overall focus on DEI just ends up reinforcing racism/sexism when the quota-hires are more inept than the non-quota hires.
What? By pulling from a larger pool of candidates, you’re more likely to get someone more skilled.
Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire the 11th - 17th rated men, and instead did hire the 4th - 10th rated women.
Now: maybe you think that’s not a fair system, and you’re probably right. But it would mean you’re hiring better candidates. You pass on some lower rated candidates that only made it through because they were guys, and instead got some higher rated candidates that you had passed on previously because they were women.
Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?
That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.
> Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.
How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.
They are brutal occupations that chew up and spit out the typically more physically robust men who make up the majority of those occupations on the regular.
Do you believe that hiring currently excludes those races and sexes? Because that's explicitly illegal, and has been for a long time
Good lord yes. In software engineering almost everyone is a white male.
Earlier you stated that you don't see them represented in the workforce but that doesn't necessarily imply exclusion by the party doing the hiring. Given what the labor market for dev is like I feel that attributing observations to blatant discrimination should require extensive direct evidence.
That being said, I haven't heard virtually any advocates of DEI calling for quotas and they don't seem to be common at all.
The non-quota'd hires in that example, that the additional 5% displaced, are now also more likely to be of higher average skill (since you need less of them and can drop the bottom of the candidates), making a bigger disparity between the quota'd group and the non-quota'd group. Which, as I said, just reinforces any racism/sexism such quotas attempted to offset.
Lets say that there are 5 people in a minority group with a qualification of 100 and 9 people in the non-minority group with a qualification of 100. If 1 person from the minority group gets hired and 13 people from the non-minority group get hired, then a 5 person minority group quota would result in an increase in the qualifications of the people hired.
Of course in reality is more complicated since companies don't always hire only the absolutely most qualified people in a given group and it's not easy to even define objectively who is the most qualified. However, that doesn't matter to the point that I'm making which is that even a quota (which again most proponents of DEI don't want) doesn't necessarily result in hiring less qualified candidates.
Now for some thing more realistic: Instead of making those 14 candidates all perfect, distribute them a bit more randomly and only hire the top 10. Without quotas you'll end up with around 4 from the minority group and 6 from the majority group. But if for example your quotas are for 50/50, you have to exclude 1 person from the majority group who is more qualified than the 5th person from the minority group to reach it.
Very much agree with this. Economic inequality is the root of the problem. But it's also one that very few people are willing to actually address because that sounds like "socialism" (how un-American!). It's the biggest problem facing this country, but the kind of social changes that are needed to solve that problem are anathema to Americans. (Certainly Trump doesn't give F about poor people, and the Democrats mostly pay lip service to it.)
But here's why I'm in favor of DEI initiatives, generally speaking (though certainly not all of them or even most of them):
DEI doesn't directly address economic inequality the way it should, but it does get is part of the way. Certainly it's better than nothing, which is what those who are anti-DEI are mostly proposing.
We also have to take into consideration that certain groups of people, specifically African Americans and Native Americans, are _not_ on a level playing ground, even today, because they were deliberately suppressed for centuries. Just because the Civil Rights Act finally got signed 50 years ago means that all of a sudden they have equal opportunity.
If companies and universities, and society as a whole, makes no effort to level the playing field, it won't just level on its own, especially in today's society (which does not offer the wide-open opportunities that America 100 or 200 years offered to anyone landing on its shores with $5 in their pocket).
If you don't make an effort to recruit from low-income black neighborhoods for example, you're not likely to get many takers because of the amount of effort that it takes to climb out of such deep social holes--only the very best and most determined will. But if you can deliberately offer opportunity to more people who have been suppressed, more of them will be in a position to provide their children with an environment where they can have better opportunities, and over generations society changes for the better (and everyone benefits).
So that's why I'm generally in favor of DEI type initiatives. Not what companies did or do -- which was mostly greenwashing PR based on either public opinion (last administration) or government pressure (this administration). But genuine efforts to level the playing field in terms of economic opportunity, including a boost to those who were deliberately disadvantaged for so long.
You can argue that it's unfair to white poor people. I agree, it is somewhat unfair. Economic opportunity should have nothing to do with race, and we should be making every effort to raise the economic standard of poor whites too. But we also need to recognize that poor whites are starting at a different baseline, one of poverty, yes, but not slavery and targeted suppression. So while there might be economic similarities (poor whites, poor blacks) they're not necessarily on the same level.
In terms of your second paragraph. I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
For this to be a major factor you'd need some explanation for the over-representation of Asian Americans in many lucrative fields in the US. Shouldn't they otherwise be seeing a significant negative impact from this?
> I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.
The issue is that the rules are often created without respect to how they impact smaller entities, or are purposely designed to impair them at the behest of larger ones.
A lot of regulatory overhead is reporting requirements. Reports from small entities are typically going into a database never to be read by anyone ever. But you still have to spend time filing them, and then they'll stick you for filing fees even though you're just uploading 2kB of text to a website, and the filing fees are the same whether you're a sole proprietorship or Walmart.
The rules are often completely nuts, e.g. you can be ineligible to collect unemployment if you were self-employed but you're still legally required to pay for the unemployment insurance coverage. Some states have paid leave policies that assume every employer is a bureaucracy large enough to absorb the cost of hiring a temporary employee while concurrently paying the one on leave.
There are also tons of rules that are simple enough to comply with if you know about them, but with no reason to expect them to exist and a book of regulations which is thousands of pages long and full of rules that don't apply to you, the first time you find out can be when you get a fine or somebody files a lawsuit. In many cases these will be some kind of reporting or registration requirement that exists for no good reason, but exists nevertheless, e.g. did you remember to register a DMCA agent, or list your physical mailing address when you sent that email? These things aren't actually protecting anybody, they're just a trap for the unwary.
- Do you think DEI was the right path forward? Did it achieve its goals? If not was that because of counter currents or something else?
- If and when we have "perfect DEI" will we declare the world a fair place? If not, what comes next?
2. Inequality of outcome simply doesn't matter anyway.
3. Nobody actually cares about inequality--they care about specific visual types of inequality. Nobody cares about the diversity statistics of poor white people from an underprivileged background, for example.
4. As for substituting slogans for arguments, the DEI argument is just slogans. That is all it is.
The problem with DEI is that it did, in fact, turn into a policy of racial quotas, only the quota-ness was denied even though the threat of legal action was omnipresent.
What in the actual fuck is that supposed to mean? Firing black people to make the president happy?
As if there were any meaningful amount of "DEI" to "purge" from the tech industry in the first place.
Absolutely disgusting.
And who do you think is running those programs?
> And the mainframe giant last week told all US Cloud employees, sales or otherwise, to return to the office at least three days per week at designated "strategic" locations.
Yep. It's a de facto layoff.
Smart of them to add the DEI statement - as we can see here, everyone is arguing over that while ignoring what is essentially a mass layoff.
We came in to the office to find monitors that were old pre-covid. No office supplies (tissues, mouse pads, batteries, keyboards) Expired food and beverages from pre-covid No desks for my teammembers
The work environment was also much worse than before. Now you get to overhear the executives bragging about their new cars, the golfing trips they are taking while trying to focus on your work. You have folks taking calls from there desk without even using a headset.
My team productivity has gone down the drain. The business pre-covid was 90% US engineers and during covid we offshored most of everything to india. Now how am I supposed to get my team to have calls with india at early morning and evenings when we are forced to spend an hour just driving to the office.
Must be hard to generate new sales for their deadass mainframe tech.
Part of it is the old guard saying "Let's see what IBM has" when we're looking for solutions, but they do provide a pretty large group of established products. They're already in, as well.
1: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nickle-lamoreaux_dei-diversit...
> IBM orders US sales to locate near customers, RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge
Because the rest of the items in the headline are labor related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired, whatever that means. People in this comment section who did not read TFA are commenting on "DEI" firings, even though there's nothing in TFA about that. It's a little worse than clickbait IMO.
No. the implication is that DEI policies are being watered down or removed
Also:
Purge: remove (a group of people considered undesirable) from an organization or place in an abrupt or violent way.
In this case it is bad management hiding behind RTO/DEI excuses. WFH works for many and especially on "cloud" stuff I do not see the point of having people systematically RTO to... tweak a few config files (most of the time) or change some hardware (some of the time)
I have the example of a friend in IT who was made to drive 4 hours to change.... the default DNS on a Windows machine at a client's.... a phone call would have done it...
This statement is not true
That said, I've never worked at IBM, and the sales segments they listed in the article (strategic, enterprise, etc.) are notoriously company-specific. But, I can't imagine the ones in the exception list cover all of teams with named accounts.
Deliberately placing your sales teams in different cities than their clients is almost always an incredibly dumb idea, WFH or not. In 15 years of sales engineering/sales engineering management, I remember exactly one account team we deliberately placed outside of their client geography, and that was because the client was so spread out, it made more sense to put the team close to a big airport than pick a single client site to place them near.
edit - I’m talking about dedicated/assigned teams, not inside sales or startups that have one or a handful of teams to cover everything.
How else would they handle the database and personnel backend of the current fascist's database requirements?
Jewish Holocaust victims' tattoos were IBM database primary IDs. and given ongoing federal/government contracting, thus is yet another opportunity to be at ground zero for another genocide.
But if you're working on cloud, hard to see how working at the office is any more productive than from home.
also, this is significant:
> The employee shuffling has been accompanied by rolling layoffs in the US, but hiring in India – there are at least 10x as many open IBM jobs in India as there are in any other IBM location, according to the corporation's career listings. And earlier this week, IBM said it "is setting up a new software lab in Lucknow," India.
(Because of a black pastor-led boycott of Target for dropping their DEI policy)
Is this a poor choice of words, or one of those "I've gone so far left, I'm now also racist" things?
They definitely messed up the messaging, though, in that they positioned themselves to be somehow boycotted by both left and right.
Costco is 20x the business as Target for numerous reasons, I kind of doubt any of it has to do with DEI.
If you can't show benefits in the span of 1 quarter, it might as well not be an option.
You use your best judgment and consider many factors. You make mistakes and get better with experience.
What we don’t want to have happen is a conflict between two opposing goals. That’s very different than disagreement about how to meet a common goal.
All I want out of DEI/Affirmative Action, apart from maybe some proactive efforts to improve diversity in the initial funnel, is for that arbitrary tie-breaker to skew towards the option that's underrepresented in the field. Does that seem unreasonable or particularly unfair to you?
I think giving someone who might normally not have the chance is a good tie breaker. I’m opposed to a policy that dictates that must be determined by skin color/gender/religion. If the individuals involved in the hiring felt that was the right tie breaker based on their knowledge of their community, I’m not opposed to that.
> U.S. State Department hire Darren Beattie wrote on X: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-darren-beattie-state...
What I'm saying is that's irrelevant to the claim they are making. It is an ad hominem, which is a formal logical fallacy and has been for a very long time (going back well over 2,000 years)[1]. It didn't used to be controversial to say that ad hominem was a fallacy.
Are you disagreeing with me that the above is ad hominem? Or that ad hominem is a fallacy?
Wouldn't it be much better to just refute the claim instead of attack the person's motives? I.e. I think it's pretty damn easy to demonstrate that non white men have been great leaders who have gotten things to work. Refuting that claim is the non-fallacious approach and may actually convince someone honest (likely some third-party who is reading it later, you'll probably never convince the original speaker).
No, at some point, and we have absolutely passed it in the US, you can be overwhelmed by the lies and bad faith arguments if you try to respond to them individually, and it's necessary to try to derail the source.
* Executive Order 11246, which prohibited discrimination by federal contractors, was eliminated.
* Civil Rights investigations in schools and colleges were dropped or deprioritized.
* Investigations into racial and gender discrimination in banking were quietly shelved.
These are a few structural, documented actions, not just rhetoric. Their impact falls disproportionately on people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and immigrants. That’s not an ad hominem, it’s observable policy.
> Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement
Here is their entire comment:
> No, the anti-DEI stuff is predicated on the idea that civil rights are bad and that white (straight dude) rule is good. There's not really any point in sugar-coating it or pretending the idea has any kind of intellectual or legal legitimacy. It is entirely driven by animus and resentment. The folks driving it aren't even hiding it.
Reading that yet again, it seems to me to be clearly making an argument that we shouldn't listen to any of the points/arguments/information they present because they don't have pure motives.
From the wikipedia page on Ad Hominem:
> this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself.
If you believe that GP was critiquing actions and policies, can you kindly point out which actions and policies?
At this point I do not think it is reasonable for an informed participant in this conversation to demand every attack on the motives of the current administration given the overt words, policy and behavioral choices supporting such a conclusion. The GP wasn't speculating or prepping for debate club, they were summarizing a (seemingly) obvious conclusion. That you agree with me tells me you know at least some of this.
This isn't a debate class where we score points on technical merit. Do you disagree with the point being made, or were you just having fun demanding the GP show their homework? But perhaps in fairness, I've moved the goalposts. Yet once again I would say: it seems a distraction from the obvious larger, more important, easily demonstrated point.
The overall problem is nepotism, or even more generally, a lack of upward mobility. If you're poor it's a long road to the top. Most of the slots are filled by nepotism or otherwise having rich parents and only a minority are filled through merit.
The ideal solution here is to improve upward mobility, but neither party really does that, because to do that you have to fight entrenched incumbents. To lower poverty you need to lower the cost of living and therefore housing and healthcare costs, but the existing property owners and healthcare companies will fight you. To create opportunities you need to reduce regulatory capture so that small businesses can better compete with larger ones, but the existing incumbents will fight you. So these problems persist because neither party solves them.
Then, because more black people are poor and the bipartisan consensus is that if you're poor you're screwed, there are proportionally fewer black people at the top. Now consider what happens if you propose DEI as a solution to this. All of the nepotism still happens, but now the merit slots get converted into satisfying the race quota. Now if you're poor and white you're completely locked out, because the "white people" slots are all filled by nepotism and the remaining slots are used to satisfy the race quota.
The result is that poor white people are completely screwed by DEI, they understand this, and because the proponents of DEI are Democrats they then vote for Republicans. Then the Republicans oppose DEI because they're actually representing their constituents who at least want their chance at the limited number of merit slots instead of being completely locked out.
If the Republican elites then engage in nepotism and fail to improve upward mobility, that isn't good, but it's only a distinction between the parties if the Democrats would have done better in that regard, which they haven't, and they're plausibly even worse in terms of increasing regulatory burdens that prevent people with limited means from starting a small business.
for example, DEI is meant to provide opportunities to impoverished white individuals as well, if they have not been able to afford higher education or have been passed on for various jobs because they didn't have the same internships or experiences that their wealthier counterparts had (which may have hindered their professional development).
> Acceptance rates for students with slightly higher and slightly lower than average GPAs and test scores are displayed in the other columns. In other words, the table above displays acceptance rates by race/ethnicity for students applying to US medical schools with average academic credentials, and just slightly above and slightly below average academic credentials.
So, uh, what? The argument is that it's now awful and horrible that average black students are accepted more frequently than average white students? Who cares.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 cares.
Really, you're going to group indigenous New Zealanders with Han Chinese as "one" racial group? Just to pick two very different groups at random. There are many absurd pairings that fit under "AAPI" and it's a parody of itself.
It's erasing these cultures to group them all under one constructed postmodern umbrella
As it stands, your statement boils down to “DEI is not diverse enough.”
If one also accepts gp’s point, then it seems DEI should continue, but be applied more carefully and thoughtfully. This would likely mean an increase in resources dedicated to DEI.
I agree and would welcome this (without requiring it legally). But I doubt most others would agree.
Personally I fully agree that building a diverse workforce is more profitable in the long run than ignoring diversity (unless your company will die in the short term because of political pressure).
What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? Your bad faith anti-DEI rants are basically half this thread.
But OP suggested that diversity itself was a good thing, which makes no sense because racial differences aren’t meaningful. All else being equal, it’s not possible for a “racially diverse” team to function differently than a racially homogenous one.
And if all horses are perfectly spherical, they'd be awfully hard to ride.
The plain fact is that people are discriminated, for and against, based solely on their appearance. It happens today and it sure happened 100 years ago.
What does that have to do with how someone does their job?
If the goal is to address inequality across these lines, shouldn’t that require a strong focus, some might say an obsession, with those very attributes?
Age bias lawsuit: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/fired-ibm-workers-wrap-up-age-...
IBM audit: https://itaa.com/insights/ibm-audits-lessons-learnt-cimino-i...
What I have consistently seen is hiring standards fluctuating based on company performance: loosening when profits are high, tightening when they're not. The most pervasive bias in hiring isn't DEI-related but rather social network preference, where managers favor friends, neighbors, or people similar to themselves regardless of qualifications. This mirrors the "backdoor" admissions seen at elite universities and extends to government appointments, where connections often appear to outweigh merit...
I think 3 days in-office and 2 days WFH is the sweet spot, at least for me.
... you can do this from home too
What's the risk calculus here? If I were an apathetic CEO who just cares about the bottom-line, I would wait for the government to at least publicly pressure the company before bending the knee. That way, the company is insulated from lawsuits to a degree, "coercion" could be the defense.
It's almost like they're eager to promote racism now lol.
josefritzishere•9mo ago
bravetraveler•9mo ago
mindslight•9mo ago
jerlam•9mo ago
bravetraveler•9mo ago
Spend a little cash, have a dinner, get favor. Or something. They want to save downtown... because downtown made a bet.