Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion... Discrimination.
What is it with Donald's administration that they so eagerly embrace DoubleThink?
(edit: also to clarify I think what the Trump admin is doing - bribing to take a different political stance - and allowing monopolies - is bad)
and emit a photon and antineutrino?
(nerd alert...). https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/...
I don’t know or care who they invest with or if they own hotels
That was my point, but I guess subtlety doesn’t work well on the internet.
Your stories don't cancel out, they add up: most DEI programs I've seen have discriminated against Asians at least as much as whites if not more.
I spent 25 years in the industry and a dozen as a manager and I can tell you that straight up racism against black and latino people has been coddled and tolerated for a long time.
The solution isn't to say: we won't hire white people, but it is to say, we have to create teams that are heterogeneous (and doing what that takes).
Your personal anecdotes are not what makes up racism, writ large. And the fact that this has to be explained is, you know, the thing.
Probably the the most diverse place I worked at had no such quotas.
My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
There are mountains of research and witnesses. What does your statement mean?
Also, maybe you weren't aware of how they made their hiring choice? People don't usually openly say they are doing it for racist reasons.
> My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
I don't think DEI is implemented by quotas usually, nor is racism.
For example, I had a recruiter I relied on heavily. I realized that they only sent me white guys to interview (with one exception).
I have no idea why, but I know the recruiter found people through their own networks, and I bet those networks - usually formed from people we've gone to school with, worked with, socialized with, family, etc. - was white people, and that's who is added to the network. It's self-perpetuating - white people know white people. IIRC, AirBnB's founder knew someone at YC via their MIT fraternity - what do you think they probably looked like (I'm not criticizing AirBnB founders at all - they did amazing; for all I know they are big proponents of DEI)? (There are so many white people - ~60% of the population or ~200 million in the US - that you can spend your entire life without knowing anyone else.) And look around the office of your IT organization; if someone was black, what is the chance that they'd know someone who would help them get a job there?
One method of DEI in hiring is to require that a person from a minority is interviewed for every position (in IT, that includes women). By me requiring that, my recruiter was required to develop networks that included many minorities, and I hope those people - now in the network - got opportunities for other jobs too.
But if you have never seen racism against Latinos or blacks during hiring it is your eyesight that needs checking, my friend.
Maybe you didn't know what you were seeing? People don't often openly say, 'I'm not hiring them because they are black'. They don't necessarily think it; they think, 'I'm not as comfortable with this person' and 'I don't know how they'll fit into our team', without even realizing why.
DEI trains people to be aware of those feeling and thoughts and double-check them. Most people don't want to make decisions in that way and appreciate the training.
Exactly this. It's all about awareness.
IMO companies that enforce quotas are not really trying to fix the problem but just forcing the numbers to look good. Because quotas are not solving the mindset that causes this. It's a quick fix. Trainings and workshops are hard work but they actually improve people's self-awareness over time.
Things like removing names from CVs are fairly effective at fighting bias.
However, it is best for society to do this. Because it is best for society if all groups are starting from the same point; and that means we need to give a leg up to the groups that are currently being pushed down by the system.
The available talent pool is usually defined by the personal/professional networks of the people doing the hiring, and since the hirers are almost all white, so is the talent pool.
The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
> you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
The racist competition for survival is the hallmark of the propaganda of racists. It's just a fair competition - do you want minorities excluded from competing for the job? Do you want a handout?
When baseball in the US ended the color line, and allowed black and latino and other athletes to compete for the same jobs as white athletes, were they 'negatively impacting' some white athletes? I guess that's literally true, but do you really think they should have continued to receive 'affirmative action for white people', which is what hiring was and in many ways still is?
Education works, I guess?
Maybe kids and others who disagree with you aren't indoctrinated, but form their own opinions, and the great majority have seen the research (in college) and the very obvious reality, and concluded there is discrimination. I don't know how you can say otherwise in the face of reality.
'Decades' ago there was even more open racism. It didn't take much education to say that white-only hotels and restaurants, and lynchings indicated there was racism.
Many people today, since 2016, openly embrace racism. What do you say to them?
It is not "as racist" because we didn't just magically arrive into this moment.
The spirit of DEI initiatives is to balance out the racist-by-default policies and institutions. Which is why racists are losing their minds.
Often said. Rarely backed up by such data. Efforts to measure bias in tech has consistently shown preferences favoring women:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112, the chart with the important data: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.1418878112/asset/fc20a...
Study on sending resumes to SV tech companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484, HN discussion on the paperhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
Yet all the DEI programs I've seen firsthand have privileged women over men.
Anyone who thinks "you have to hire a certain amount/percentage of minorities" doesn't mean, by definition, that you will need to negatively impact _individual_ members of a majority hasn't spent any real time thinking about how it works. But the point is that it's worth it for society as a whole.
Who decided/determined this? You state it as if positive discrimination is a proven social good, yet I don't think it's so clear. There's still a ton of debate around it, and different western countries have difference stances on it. To me it still seems like an experiment with unclear/unknown long term value to society.
The "correct" answer isn't biasing evaluation pipelines, it's ensuring you have proportional representation in the pool of applicants.
One of the biggest things about the DEI discourse that puts me off is the dishonesty of it. Many, perhaps most, DEI advocates attempt to argue that policies like withholding executive bonuses if their org isnt X% women and Y% URM isn't discrimination. Heck, I've encountered one former co-worker argue that allocating a segment of headcout exclusive to women wasn't discrimination, because it's "extra" headcount. If I have 100 headcount and I prohibit men from 20 of them that's discrimination, but if I have 80 headcount and I add 20 "extra" heads exclusively available to women that's not discrimination, according to this former co-worker's logic.
It's one thing to advance a controversial policy and stand by it earnestly. It's another to advance a controversial policy while lying about it to people's faces. DEI is unfortunately often carried out via the latter fashion. And realistically, that's the only way it can be carried out under our present set of laws, because discrimination on the basis of race and gender are illegal nation-wide in the USA.
So, it's not speculation. What it does, taking away from one group to give to favored groups, is exactly what intersectionality/woke/etc called for.
That's right out of the playbook of how to promote racism and descrimination - tell people that the 'Blacks', etc. are taking their jobs. It literally goes back to the days of slavery, when they would turn poor whites against black slaves. God forbid the poor and oppressed got together; then they might vote out the wealthy and powerful.
DEI is not redistribution. It's eliminating bias that favors the powerful groups, mostly white guys, that have benefitted - many unwittingly - from that bias for all of US history. If you want your job on merit, if you want a fair chance rather than a handout, you should favor DEI. If you think there's no bias, you are living in a fantasy - it's gone on for centuries, the documentation and research are overwhelming, and it's boomed since 2016.
Once it is in place, they always take from specific groups that they label as advantaged, privileged, or oppressors. They give to other groups they favor. I'll let you guess who the bad guys always are. Even if minorities become dominant, they still talk like white males are the advantaged people and still work against them. So, it's just hateful and systematically racist against specific groups.
How about some examples of what I ran into. Please note these are not arguing race is the cause but a specific culture that comes with DEI. This is not how I think about black organizations or anything like that. These are all DEI, liberal run, etc.
At one employer, they did a hiring event that caused the entire workforce to be mostly black within a week or so. Then, management and corporate people were that way. They put out big, "diversity" signs in front showing non-whites being promoted. They were evil and into cronyism like the whites before them but looked different so society is better?
When I lost my job, it was hard to find new ones. Our area was more equally white and black than most places. The companies now were mostly black: workers, managers, and who hired. At some, the white people acted more black than white. So, add any of those jobs. Some would laugh at or mock white people.
My friend gets in a hospital that's also DEI. The mostly-black staff were always rude. One knocked her on the ground to move her as she worked. People there said whites and women never last. That it was pointless to try to correct it.
My step-dad was at a warehouse at the time. Of nearly 100 people, only a few were white. They were treated more strictly and petty. For instance, he said they got in trouble for not having the new shirts but only the black people knew about them. They didnt bother telling the white people.
Many tech companies I looked at overtly said they wanted diversity (not whites). They showed pictures of their staff that had few to no white people. Some like Babbel played up transgender a lot. Local and remote companies had special, support groups for non-whites, women, and LGBT people (eg Plaid). Groups like Best Buy offered in-house mini-MBA's for advancement... unless you're white.
Many of the organizations doing training, networking, mentoring, and grants were focusing on needy minorities. The minority members often got more at the EBT office. The media would always talk about their plight, too, like many of us didnt have empty fridges and no insurance.
So, however you would quantify all that multiplied by however many whites or men were financially or medically impacted by it. I'm glad it's starting to reverse under the Trump administration. At least one politician thinks whites, males, and straight people are human beings, too.
Anything that teaches you to hate and fear is a red flag - a sign to run the other way. They are doing it for a reason, they are appealing to the worst and most emotional parts of people for a reason. (And no, DEI doesn't teach that; it's just the propagandists that portray it that way).
This runs directly contrary to my experience with DEI. I demoed setups for anonymized zoom interviews, and blinded resume review. HR didn't want any of it. Instead, we made exec's bonuses contingent on keeping the percentage of male employees in their org below a cap - exceed the cap, lose your bonus. The cap was lower than men's representation in the field.
If DEI was about promoting merit, it would be focused on making interviews more objective, and anonymizing as much of the hiring process as we can. In practice, it's the opposite: directly tying incentives to the demographics of the candidates and penalizing those who don't adhere to the desired ethnic and gender ratio.
Intersectionality is a descriptive term to understand how a person's advantages (say from being white) and disadvantages (say from being gay) interact and how all the different combinations have unique struggles and challenges. It doesn't do or call for anything.
In practice, they always treat whites, males, and straight people as the problem. The DEI policies they pushed certainly "call for" Something.
You don't need a whiteness tax or other nonsense, when you have equitable systems (like heating assistance programs) the benefits naturally flow to disadvantaged groups because they'll be the ones disproportionately qualifying for aid.
If a law is passed requiring drug use to be prosecuted and making it illegal not to, you have criminalized decriminalization.
Just because words or concepts are opposed in isolation doesn't mean they can't appear in a sentence or thought together. That's not how grammar works, and it's not what 1984 is about.
Racism is not necessarily overt, but you certainly you are well aware that overt racism is widely trendy now, and people engage in it publicly. Look at the well-accepted virulant hatred toward immigrants, often based on transparent stereotypes (i.e., not individual merit at all). Many argue, even on HN, that white/Asian men are inherently superior at math/coding/etc., which is why they dominate SV. Do you think those people hire based on merit?
Racism can be unconscious. In hiring 101, you learn that people instinctively hire people like them. Even beyond that, people hire who they are comfortable with. It's not a secret that humans are uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, and that many white people are particulary uncomfortable around black people. People hire those who they are comfortable with, often without realizing why.
Racism can be systemic. If you grew up in a mostly segregated community, and went to school with those people, who will be in your personal/professional network to hire, or to call up with your investment or business idea, etc.? You didn't choose it; that's the system you grew up in. And unless you consciously change it (for example, via DEI), you will perpetuate it and the next generation will also be segregated.
People often don't intend to be racist; they just don't realize how it comes to pass. Most appreciate training in how to do better (who wouldn't?). Also consider that the small improvements from generation to generation are not nearly fast enough - the minority people of today, right now, deserve fair opportunities. It's absurd to tell them - your grandchildren will have a better chance.
The nature of dog whistles is that some people use the term in earnest, without the subtext. But in my experience most people enthusiastic about DEI ultimately do condone discrimination in one way or another.
Also, DEI is about giving people with special needs the things they require to function. And providing managers insights into the things they might struggle with. We do information packs about LGBT, different religions etc just so managers understand and can accommodate. We have resource networks for managers (and really, all employees) that have questions about such things. We organise awareness events about LGBT and minority topics so employees can learn from each other and create a better understanding. And it works. It's not just about hiring but also creating better awareness for existing employees.
We do look at numbers to guage how we're doing but nobody is being penalised. If we have very few minorities compared to the local demographics it just means our trainings are not getting heard properly and we need to improve them.
I would go as far as to say that a company that has strict quotas doesn't really care about DEI. They just want a quick fix. This is not how these things work. You're working with people, not numbers.
What bothers me the most is that the Trump administration is even trying to force foreign companies like my employer to abandon DEI programs. It's none of their business what we do in the EU. We like what we do and we're not going to change. They cherrypick a few bad examples and pretend everyone works like that.
There are incompetent people on both sides of the issue. the difference is that one side has correctly identified a problem with how institutions choose people. The other side is screaming bloody murder that there's no problem at all and that we have to stop talking about the obviously inadvertent and innocuous inequities in our society and institutions.
Not every inequity is the result of discrimination or bias. Should we strive to have a 50/50 gender split in murder convictions? A quota restricting murder convictions to 50% men would be an equitable policy but an explicitly unequal one as it'd require either men being let off or women being falsely convicted.
If DEI was carried through policies like anonymizing resumes and interviews, I'd believe the claims about how DEI is about reducing discrimination. Instead, all the DEI program I've actually seen firsthand have either directly discriminated on th basis of protected class, or incentivize people to discriminate (e.g. bonuses tied to quotas).
Carr has shown himself to be nakedly partisan, and at risk of doing serious damage to the industry. Anyone who believes otherwise should be referred to his consistent rhetoric that news agencies that show unfavorable coverage to the Trump administration will be investigated and brought to heel.
https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/brendan-carr-ta...
So we're mostly down to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter.
Verizon previously tried to merge with Charter back in 2017, but that didn't work out.[1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-is-exploring-combinatio...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&channel=ent...
Then you've got things like Canada's Bell buying a controlling interest in Ziply, which acquired Frontier Northwest 4-5 years ago.
op00to•5h ago
stackskipton•5h ago
Ending DEI is unlikely to impact their bottom line but mergers do so out with DEI programs they go.
rdtsc•5h ago
The speed with which they all dropped DEI programs was shocking. Especially after years of saying how it's critical, it makes them more vibrant, stronger, etc. I guess they never believed any of that.
It seems Stripe CEO is the only one left wondering what the heck happened: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/05/16/john-collison... ( https://archive.ph/5PFgq )
> “I am baffled by all the companies doing an about-face on their social initiatives right now. Did you not actually mean it in the first place? Either don’t do it, or do it and stay doing it, but don’t do this ‘DEI is cancelled now’,” he says. “It’s very odd to me.”
tdeck•5h ago
acdha•4h ago
9283409232•4h ago
mizzack•1h ago