Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

I have friends at a high level at a few of the FAANG companies. They mentioned that hiring, promotion, and compensation activities are heavily driven by quotas that are illegal and discriminatory, but that it’s all handled in high-level meetings verbally with no paper trail and no transparency. For example at Amazon they reserve executive shadow roles for just women, trans people, Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. If you’re a White or Indian or Chinese male, you face a much harder road up the ladder because your merit won’t earn you opportunities. But no one dares to speak up because of how institutionalized DEI programs are. This would have sounded absurd to me five years ago, but even as an outsider I can see that social justice politics are everywhere in tech - I see it when I open the Amazon app or Spotify or whatever else. And I regularly hear the phrase “diversity hire” when surrounded by tech friends (usually in the context of successfully making a diversity hire), so what the poster shared here feels very possible. I feel bad for deserving candidates who belong to those demographic groups - I am sure their experience is especially exhausting.

If I’m a descendant of enslaved people, then sharecroppers, then parents living in the shadow of industrial complexes, it is possible and unlikely that I’ll be competitive for a FAANG position. Likewise if I’m the descendants of people sent to re-education camps (North American boarding schools). What are some other ways to help those who have been pushed down over the years by Eurocolonialism?

The racist undertones in your statement is abhorrent. There are many people who hold various illustrious positions in FAANG companies and acquired them through hard work. Progressive statements like yours not only discredit hard working minorities but Europeans as well.

You would probably be surprised to learn about how many people are descendants of enslaved people or existed in boarding schools as Europeans. The Irish comes to mind amongst others.

I don’t think the “Irish as slaves” idea is historically accurate[1].

Even without the Wikipedia article, as an Irish person, it’s never come up in my education or in public discourse.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_slaves_myth

Slavery for Irish people looked like Indentured Servitude and may not have been as dehumanizing as chattel slavery but make absolutely no mistake it's still slavery.

Calling it a myth is an absolute joke.

Calling something that isn’t slavery slavery is simply incorrect, and the equivalence has been broadly dismissed by historians.

Without citations outside of the far-left dominated Wikipedia [1] your statements hold no merit.

Coming in to this conversation to downplay the hardships and cruelty imposed on various Europeans throughout the centuries is exactly the level of racism that your original posts presents.

1: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/wikipedia-bias-socialism-pa...

You can recognize that racism has and continues to impact people without being racist.

I'd define Success as a dot product of hard work and luck. The less white society likes you, the more luck you need. A bit of extra luck doesn't discount the hard work.

How about programs that are based on income, instead of skin color? That way you aren't giving the children of millionaires undue benefits if they happen to have more melanin, and you're not racially discriminating against people in generational poverty if they happen to have white skin.

I 100% agree with this. It would be much better and less racist than affirmative action :-)

I come from a a very very poor family ( both parents working minimum wage job) in a small city in canada that doesn’t have an university… and where no one speak english.

I now work at microsoft in Seattle and everyone I met at work have a similar story.

So I don’t think what you said is very accurate

ultimately the market will solve the problem as companies that hire/promote based on merit will out-compete those with other priorities

I hope so, but many of these companies are massive, can copy the features of smaller companies (see Microsoft Teams versus Slack), and also benefit from low competition due to network effects, bundling of products, etc. Their sheer size and access to capital distorts the competitiveness of our markets. So personally I don’t feel as hopeful unless we are willing to come up with new anti trust laws and enforce them.

agreed

and in the long term: if the West ends not being able to solve these problems we'll end up out-competed by the CCP (who definitely don't care about DEI)

Not if these policies become law or industrywide requirements, such as NASDAQ dropping you from being listed on their exchange if you don't have DEI policies that meet NASDAQ's requirements.

the world consists of more than the United States

I very much doubt the Chinese would deliberately cripple their industry in a similar way

If you think the Chinese system is anything to aspire to then maybe you should move there for a while and try your luck and see how far you advance? Based on strictly merit I'm sure.

Isn’t it illegal to discriminate based on protected traits? I just looked up the policy you are referring to - NASDAQ now requires female board members and other types of minorities, which seems completely illegal and unethical: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/08/19/sec-adopts-nasdaq...

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