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Comment by 56friends | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how to interpret this conclusion:

"Despite loud commitments of solidarity and support for Black communities after the murder of George Floyd, the tech industry, by and large, seems content to quietly overlook the business case for retaining employees of color and prioritizing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging."

What is the business case for retaining employees of color other than having them as employees that benefit the company? This reads like companies should keep employees of color no matter what, essentially discriminating against everyone else and just virtue signalling.

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The crazy people complaining about "cultural marxism" weren't totally wrong. A broken clock is right twice a day. There are people who sincerely think companies should hire employees of color more-or-less just for their being of color.

Which is pretty terrible for talented people of color who are making material contributions because it erodes their peers confidence that they're actually qualified.

It's hilarious that those loons have come full circle to the point that they say people should be judged by the color of their skin rather than the quality of their character.

MLK would be rolling in his grave.

MLK probably wouldn't be rolling in his grave but rather be supporting what's happening today, sadly:

https://edwest.substack.com/p/would-martin-luther-king-be-an...

“This post is for paid subscribers”. Truly inspiring!

Oh right. Here are some key paragraphs

> But would King have opposed Kendism? Although conservatives like to quote his brilliant speech on the content of a man’s character, he was also quite explicitly in favour of quotas and discrimination measures if they favoured his group. As King said: ‘if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in a particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas, as the case almost always happens to be.’

> King may have believed in all sorts of preferential treatment, not just on account of race but also income and class, but then he was quite explicitly a socialist. Racial equality was part of a more general belief in social equality between rich and poor (that these two goals inevitably and always clash is one of many problems making this dream not entirely realisable).

> As Matthew Yglesias has written: ‘Today’s conservatives often like to quote Martin Luther King Jr. as an apostle of “colorblind” policy as an aspirational goal. But King was a socialist who argued for a radical redistribution of material resources.’

Thanks for copying this over! I am guilty of quoting that famous speech too. Probably should stop doing that and read MLK’s works in more detail.

"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth" - African proverb

I'm glad I don't believe in that proverb or I'd be much more guarded against out groups.

Seems like a perfectly good proverb to me. It's saying don't create out groups that have no sympathy for you by excluding them from society. Not that you should increase your distrust of out groups!

It's those statements that make it obvious that none of this is about diversity and inclusion, but rather about selfishness and grabbing any advantage you can have.

> According to a McKinsey report, nurturing organizational diversity leads to higher profit margins. The most diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% in profitability.

>"DEIB leads to employee retention, which means there are actually savings on keeping employees in the company longer versus spending money on recruitment to fill those roles..."

These are two points contained within the article, in the paragraphs leading up to the conclusion.

So are employees of color being fired disproportionately therefore reducing diversity? There is no data in the article to support that. Maybe far more men than women were let go? So diversity is only increasing.

You are listing two business cases for retention: do you think tech companies are not aware of the same data? If there was a strong case for keeping employees of a specific demographic, do you think companies would ignore that and prefer to lose more money?

It sounds like you're skeptical about the business case, I was just pointing out that article did provide you with one.

I don't know the answers to your questions. Though I agree the article doesn't back up the claim that layoffs are reducing diversity, except possibly indirectly by references to Twitter, where there are claims layoffs disproportionately affected women.

>The most diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% in profitability.

Paradoxically, more profitable companies can afford hiring practices which hurt their bottom line. The causality could easily be the other way around.

> The causality could easily be the other way around.

Of course it could, though I've come to find this critique pretty weak when two people discuss a study that neither of them has read. You can say it about any topline conclusion about things that are correlated.

The driving factor could be something else - profitable companies could be more attractive to a diverse workforce.

Probably we oughta read the study. I was just pointing out that parent was looking for a business case for diversity in and of itself and seemed to have missed the one the article attempted to provide.

> The most diverse companies outperform their less diverse peers by 36% in profitability.

Did the report imply causation from correlation?

Maybe we should read it and find out, I haven't, was just quoting the article.

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