Comment by kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

I can respect this opinion and as I get older I realize how little I actually care about work. I am not really passionate about tech, security, etc, I just know a lot about it. I basically never talk about it with anyone, I have absolutely no interest in meetups, and I don't care about the news (past the minimum needed to keep up to date for my job)

The only thing I care about is money, and making more money. I don't care about your company mission, I don't care about D&I initiatives, I don't care about culture, just money. I will do an excellent job, better than anyone else, if you pay me well. Even though I don't have any passion for the work, I still do an amazing job because I know it will directly lead to more money.

I don't think its a big deal to want to skate by as long as you actually get work done. Just find an SE job in a company that doesn't harp about its culture.

IME the more they talk about D&I, the more annoying the company will be about brainwashing everyone to drink the corporate koolaid.

Stay far away from any SaaS companies as they usually want devs to do support or be on call for their shitass app. I don't know what skills you have but most lower-level programming is much easier in terms of not dealing with BS. Anything involving JS nonsense (frontend or backend) will involve a lot of product and people.

Some related advice: some management actually LIKEs folks that are primarily money motivated. It makes the picture much simpler for them compared to others who are motivated by vaguer things like “interesting problems”, “career progression” etc

At one job during goal setting with my manager I put it like “I wanna be making $x by next year. Let me know what I need to do to get there, and if that’s too much, how close can we come, and what’s needed for THAT”

Later on he’d tell others how impressed he was by that and how the clarity made life for him easy

I'm one who mostly cares about money. It's funny that you say "career progression" as something separate from being motivated by money. I care a lot about career progression because it means more money.

If I could continue getting a 10-15% raise every year, I wouldn't care if I never got promoted. Call me "Junior Engineer" for my entire career idc.

Yeah, I say even better – more responsibility/stress for those pay bumps is often a raw deal

Yea I just finished with a "training" about D&I. I just don't get it. Those people who didn't care still won't care but they will be pissed too. It won't have an effect on those who cared.

At this point I think it is a necessity for most companies to do this shit though. I've heard stories about investors pulling their support because the company wasn't "diverse" enough. They are trying to force a solution for this Catch 22 and it isn't helping: you don't get more women into IT until IT becomes friendly for them. IT won't become friendly until there are more women in IT. (substitute women for whatever PC term you want to use)

> IME the more they talk about D&I, the more annoying the company will be about brainwashing everyone to drink the corporate koolaid.

Expect this to only ramp up given how diverse and queer Gen Z is. What passes for diversity among the Gen X / Boomer bosses isn’t good enough, and they have enough options that D&I has quickly become a competitive advantage. Every client I have is going in hard on DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) as a result — you just can’t hire the best young talent otherwise.

This is the downside of Citizens United for corporations — by creating an outsized role for corporations in a democracy, corporations are implicitly expected to reflect the ideals of their employees rather than shareholders. This limits their agility and has strained relationships with employees who are now working to organize / unionize to achieve their goals. If this isn’t a role employers want to play, they are free to lobby for a law to protect them from themselves; otherwise the battle lines (and collateral damage) over any labor vs capital dispute will be drawn wholly within the company.

This is a real shame. I wish we could do something to stop this insanity. Their dogmatic approach to D&I is really scary honestly.

On top of that, you are marked if you are a "cis white male". It doesn't matter if you are an immigrant. It doesn't matter if you are jewish (less than 0.003% of the global population, so one of most minority minorities), doesn't matter if you have a rich ethnic background with white skin. Why can't people just get rid of the racists and sexists without going crazy?

Because that’s not what it’s about; it’s about having a diverse leadership that more closely resembles the makeup of our nation and communities. Cis white men make up only about 30% of our population but account for probably 80% (and that’s being generous) of positions above middle management. It’s the cultural homogeneity that’s the business problem, and that doesn’t get solved without the right optics. Most of these jobs are not so hard that a person who is appropriately trained / supported couldn’t do them.

Again, gen Z is the most diverse generation in history. If you want to hire talent over the next decade, your company’s leadership needs to resemble your prospective employees because they take it as a hiring signal.

The problem isn’t cis white men; it’s the sense of entitlement that cis white men often walk around with. I have plenty of coworkers who are white men and great allies because they recognize that others are not entitled to the same things based on pretty arbitrary criteria. But the entitlement (“you’re gonna take the job I’ve been working towards for years and give it to a new ‘diversity’ hire!?”) is the problem, especially in the upper ranks.

But as it's been said many times, corporations aren't democracies. (And regardless of moral value, they never will be.) The expectation that your leadership should look like you is fraught and misunderstands the whole idea of a corporation. We don't hire according to population makeup, we hire according to an arbitrary set of metrics that roughly correlate with drive to create value.

The expectation is societal by their participation in the political process; because the voice of the population carries far less weight than that of a large corporation, there will be strong internal pressure for the company to take a political stance on an issue.

The corporations opened this Pandora’s box; if they want the workplace to be apolitical again they need to work with Congress to muzzle themselves and stay out of politics altogether.

(Also those “arbitrary metrics” now largely include diversity metrics because they do actually increase profitability in the long run.)

Jewish people are significantly overrepresented in positions of power relative to their population size. Should companies treat this is a cultural homogeneity problem and try to make it so that Jewish people are represented more closely in line to their actual numbers?

Or how about Asian-Americans in tech? Asian-Americans are only a tiny fraction of Americans but make up a substantial part of the tech industry. Is that a cultural homogeneity problem that companies should try to solve by working to increase the representation of people who are not Asian-American?

Uh, yes actually. To both. That said, this situation almost never happens beyond an individual contributor level — where diversity is already less of a problem because diverse candidates hit a glass ceiling and move no further.

>Uh, yes actually. To both.

What a disgusting opinion you have. Of course the two cultures that strongly value education and success are... successful.

The contention is whether you can accurately ascertain the experiences of any of the cohorts that you cite.

Each cohort literally represents millions of people (billions if including the world). This makes the cohorts meaningless.

And it's in the category of generalizations that we've been fighting. It's part of the problem, not the solution.

Oh okay so if we are going by populations, all companies should strictly be 6.7% black and no more, right?

> But the entitlement (“you’re gonna take the job I’ve been working towards for years and give it to a new ‘diversity’ hire!?”) is the problem, especially in the upper ranks.

Thank you for pointing out this exact mindset. As a cis white man myself, if I was up against someone else for the same position and we were equally matched in all ways except the other individual was in the minority when compared against the overall make-up of the position's peers, then I would fully expect the company to pick the other individual over me. Diversity is valuable because different life experiences which provide a different perspective are valuable. Additionally, a company is far more likely to attract top talent from diverse pools if you have diversity in your company. (I just realized you said this in your original post! "If you want to hire talent over the next decade, your company’s leadership needs to resemble your prospective employees because they take it as a hiring signal.")

> except the other individual was in the minority when compared against the overall make-up of the position's peers

Problem: that's everyone. No one brings your unique viewpoint of life. Just because two people look the same doesn't mean a lick about their life experiences or who they are on the inside. Everyone at your company, wherever you are, is fundamentally a completely different person from you. If you want real variety, the way to do that is by interviewing people, not by looking at them.

This is reductionist to the point of being insulting. The problem is that when you interview people, the way you look has an impact on how the interviewer perceives and is able to communicate with you (implicit bias).

The flip side is that when you have a little difficulty finding common ground with a person, it challenges you to find a way to relate. Which means listening to their experiences. Which generally makes for better products. But what it means is that the interviewer often judges the wrong criteria, and most interviews are about how well you are able to communicate to your interviewer (and not the other way around).

When people talk about “intersectionality” this is what they mean. You can be privileged in one way but disadvantaged in another. Some intersectionalities are visible, and some are not. The more dissimilarity in your experiences, the more problems you will have communicating. Working through those problems and learning from one another is an invaluable part of the process — if you can make it through the interview in the first place.

> The problem is that when you interview people, the way you look has an impact on how the interviewer perceives and is able to communicate with you (implicit bias).

I have to disagree with your core point. If that were the real problem, blind orchestra auditions would be held up as the gold standard for hiring practices. As it is, people want it torn down. [1]

Though I agree with the aspect of working harder to empathize being good for business. Again, that’s what the interview is for. If you want diversity, add a behavioral segment to your interview loop and use it as an opportunity to actually understand the person.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-audition...

Would you say that the experience of the average cis gender white man is as unique as that of the average cis gender black woman?

Or that the average cis gender white man would have the experiences required to have the perspective of the average cis gender black woman?

No one has the experiences required to have the perspective of another person; that would require having lived two lives. Everyone has exactly one perspective, and because no one lives the exact same life, that perspective is unique.

There’s some kind of belief going around that there are some kinds of people who understand some things in a way no one else can understand. This is tantamount to the “God works in mysterious ways” argument - because we can’t come up with a real dimension to make a claim about, we say there is something magically unique about being poor, or being asexual, or any number of things. Sorry to say, but I don’t believe in magic. There are a few dimensions poor people are more optimized along, for example, maybe grit and resiliency, and there are rough correlations along the racial boundaries as well. But until you actually talk to a person, you’ll have no idea who they are.

I'm extrapolating here, but effectively you're arguing that diversity initiatives don't provide any value because everyone lives a unique life?

That’s not something I agree with at all. What was said was

> in the minority when compared against the overall make-up of the position's peers

What I am saying is that a company is using skin color or sexual orientation as the basis for knowing this is doing it wrong. Yes, I believe being different from your peers makes you a better hire. But that’s what you gain from the interview, not what is gained from the observation of someone’s appearance (diversity scorecard).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com