Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

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> Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager

Staff recruitment and retention roles.

> Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality

Easily mockable since it has "strategic" in it twice, but ultimately this role should either get money into FF or get FF into more platforms. Focus on mixed reality / AR seems questionable in retrospect.

> Global Event Maker

Did Mozilla have many events? I don't really remember hearing of any.

> Senior University Recruiter

Fairly obvious: recruit graduates from universities.

> Senior Product Designer + Growth

This actually sounds pretty core; someone has to define the product, and I don't think you really want that left to the forums.

> Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Brand Designer

That may be one or two many designers, resulting in unnecessary UI churn.

> Senior Executive Assistant

Everywhere has one of these. PA to the boss. They tend to be surprisingly critical since they know what's going on even if they don't have formal responsibility.

> > Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager

> Staff recruitment and retention roles.

More like the exact opposite: annoy your staff with superficial stuff.

You don’t think those are important?

Most people don't care about D&I. Neither for or against, just an annoyance.

If you think diversity and inclusion is "an annoyance", then you clearly aren't "neither for or against"

Sibling comment:

> When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.

Can you give more of a reason why "most" people don't care about it? Why would inclusion be an annoyance?

Because "diversity offenses" typically happens against minorities, which definitionally aren't most people. It's also a questionable use of funds in that the places that would hire one are probably less likely to need it. But treating everyone well and handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient; a diversity and inclusion staff has become the requisite "Workers of the world, unite!" sign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...

Add to this that most people don't like being preached at not to be racist etc. when most already aren't.

Okay so I am a bit more confused now. You are comparing being told about diversity and inclusion in the workplace to communism?

> handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient

I am almost certain most of these "diversity and inclusion staff" you speak of are part of HR, so yes, it is still normal.

I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?

> I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?

To me, that's not life, that's being micro-managed or treated like a child. I'd never want to work somewhere that treats employees like that.

Do you throw your hands in the air every time your lead reminds you of a due date you already knew? Do you skip "meetings that could have been emails"? I have yet to find a place that doesn't tell me something I already know or hold on my hand on some minor things. I just go about it, being upset over it isn't worth my time.

No, but were it a regular problem, I'd absolutely bring up that it's likely an annoyance and a productivity hit for most people and a good manager would try to help fix the issue.

No, I'm trying to draw an analogy. Companies over the past few years have been expected to vocally articulate a commitment to a certain set of social values. This typically involves hiring diversity staff, mandatory training, letters of solidarity, etc. The mission of the corporation is still to make money, just as is the mission of a greengrocer.

> isn't that life in general

Sure, it still happens, but if it happens repeatedly in the workplace, I might try to reduce it. I also sincerely doubt that a terrible racist person will stop being one because his company implements mandatory diversity training.

This sorts of stuff is very often experienced by staff as lame box-ticking exercises they have to suffer through annually or quarterly, put together by people who spend most of the time keeping their chair from floating to the ceiling, and were only hired to make things look better if anything bad happens ("well look, we did something, look at all these records of training videos and ridiculous quizzes we made everyone take!")

That may not have been the case at Mozilla but it absolutely is at a lot of bigcos and in government.

How are you so sure this version of it so rampant everywhere? I am genuinely curious why so many people state this is such a common occurrence yet I have yet to see it myself personally.

You may not have worked at or know many people who work at sufficiently boring workplaces. It's the default at those, and that's... most workplaces, among the ones big enough to have this kind of thing.

"Training" from HR means "watch dumb videos in a browser for two hours, then take a quiz you could have passed with a 100% score without watching the videos". If you're really unlucky it's some in-person variant that's the live equivalent of that. If this is not what you mean you're doing when you tell someone you've got "training" this week, you'll need to specify, because that's what all your fellow-suffering workers will assume it is. Many of them probably experience it at least annually, on a schedule, no matter how many times they've done essentially the same crap, and some more often.

I've been fortunate to be with small companies almost my entire career so I've experienced this first-hand exactly once, but my friend circle's not at small companies and not in tech. That's what they talk about when they talk about (complain about, commiserate over) "training". It's super common.

> Most people don't care about D&I.

Maybe, but:

> Neither for or against, just an annoyance.

Viewing it as an annoyance is both “against” and very much not an example of not caring.

I'm not saying this is your actual motivation, but it kind of comes across as a clumsy attempt of someone hostile to the idea to try to get people in favor to back off by conjuring an image of the maligned neutral that they think those in favor will be more sympathetic to than actual opponents, but failing to be able to even imagine what neutrality would look like when presenting the argument.

When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.

Important as topics some people need to keep in the back of their minds while doing their jobs? Important as full time roles that are inherently out-of-hierarchy so that they conveniently need paycheck-induced status or else nobody will listen to them? Those are very different kinds of "important".

Needing D&I simply means the company and its employees did not self-regulate. And not needing one doesn't mean you don't care or it's not important, just that you don't need one. You're probably not brushing your teeth right now and it's not because you don't think oral hygiene is important.

If you're one of the people who don't need to be educated then D&I is an annoyance. If you're one of the ones who do then D&I is an annoyance. And unfortunately many times it's more than just an annoyance, it makes matters worse by polarizing or radicalizing people further.

You don't necessarily need a function like this to fix a behavior. You don't need a Basic Human Decency Lead to achieve this in your company. You instill it with education starting at a young age, and then you filter for this at every step of the way, including via interviews, promotions, etc.

But if it's one of those companies they probably couldn't care less about D&I, whatever they have works just fine for them. They want to look like they care so they proudly announce such functions and measures. All the while the people responsible for being in that situation in the first place still hang around, working just a bit harder to do the same things they always did and make it look legit this time. That's usually the role of D&I, shielding the company from responsibility while not actually changing much, if anything.

If you look at the Mozilla events page, in the past few years they've held a huge amount of dev events/user groups/outreach outside of Europe and North America. I would expect that someone there was working to make sure they were connecting and recruiting devs globally.

And I can see why, when you had Facebook pushing their walled garden with WhatsApp and Internet.org in various spots in Africa and India. Mozilla was all about an open global internet.

Or in many cases, it's annoying your staff with anti-white racism under the guise of being pro-diversity.

I am confused, how is pro-diversity immediately categorized as anti-white? Are you just assuming every pro-diversity initiative is anti-white?

I don’t want to jump into this particular garbage fire, but the answer to your second question (and implicitly your first) is in the post you’re responding to.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Staff recruitment and retention roles.

The irony being that they themselves were made redundant.

How will they possibly keep all the other staff now??

It’s pretty weird how the browser took off (and IMO was at its best) before most (all?) of these roles were involved, isn’t it?

> Did Mozilla have many events? I don't really remember hearing of any.

The main one was the Mozilla Festival, but I believe it also organized various smaller sibling events, hackathons, etc.

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