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Comment by scottiebarnes | Hacker News Reader

The idea of activists/politicians having any say in who companies hire disgusts me

But does it disgust you when companies discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc?

Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?

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You're advocating for a cure far worse than the disease and the disease isn't nearly as bad as they make it seem.

You see, what's great about the private sector is that any company that engages in discrimination only harms itself and drives potential talent to their competitors. That's why I love working for private companies, no matter who you are or where you come from if you're making them a lot of money they'll treat you like royalty. I've never seen an environment more egalitarian than a private company.

Corporations are not 100% efficient. I have seen so much favoritism in my short career. It's to be expected. A middle manager doesn't care about the company's bottom line, they care about maintaining/upgrading their own position. That sometimes means working towards the bottom line, but usually means working people relationships.

Those people relationships are affected by race gender etc. You really have NEVER seen someone get on a great project because they're better connected, even if they are a worse engineer than someone who doesn't fit in as well?

In the US there are already laws against this. The company doesn't need DEI positions to enforce this.

The law punishes overt instances of discrimination.

I can hire all of x gender, x race, x religion, etc. for my 1000 employee work force. You won't legally be able to nail any kind of discrimination on me so long as I take care as to not leave evidence of it.

In this instance, did discrimination occur? Did the law do its job adequately?

If there is no evidence of discrimination - how do you even know that it occurred? Are you saying that we should have people who decide what is and isn't discrimination without evidence? (since those, in your example, are not there).

EEOC can consider any sort of de facto discrepancy in racial distribution in hiring to be actionable discrimination.

So you want to force outcomes according to whichever moral rubric is fashionable at the moment? How well has 'equity' worked for Asian Americans with regards to Ivy League admissions?

EEOC and the DoJ litigate even covert attempts at discriminatory employment - that's kinda their job. The bigger issue is they (and the rest of the Federal Litigation infra) are chronically underfunded due to partisan bickering from both parties.

As far as I can tell DEI is self-imposed. Those who already don't care about discriminatory facets are the ones with DEI groups. The companies without DEI groups have HR departments that handle this.

It's also illegal to steal from the company, yet companies still have internal security departments.

Sexual harassment is illegal, yet companies still do sexual harassment training and HR in theory can help protect employees from sexual harassment and take action on harassers (if only to protect the company).

What a ridiculous statement. It is of course the responsibility of people inside company to ensure that it doesn't perpetuate illegal discriminatory activities.

Even if by internal policing you think it's going to be completely removed (based on your statements here) you are overwhelmingly naive to corporate culture and are obviously responding in this way because you maintain a hard stance for such oversight regardless of actual need.

People in charge of compliance are commonplace when it comes to regulations. It's a huge part of HRs job for example. Some regulations even require a specific compliance officer, such as the GDPR. "There is a law" is a pretty weak argument for why a position shouldn't exist. If anything it's an argument for why one should.

Fair point, but workplace discrimination is already under the purview of the HR department. Before there was ever a DEI department HR covered the same stuff. In fact, in many orgs DEI is a subset of HR.

The real question is there any evidence of DEI departments effecting change beyond what was already supplied previously. Anecdotally I haven't seen it, nor have I seen any studies backing it up (please supply those if you know of them). The only thing I have seen come of it is additional training every year which can be basically summed up to "play nice with others".

> Should corporations be accountable to society in some way, or do we trust them to "do the right thing"?

This strawman. you jumping to big conclusion by asking aggressive question.

im minority person. dei things me saw at big tech massive grift. usually run by people without real skill..people who simply there for crusade if they personal social beliefs.

in one org person responsible for daily long email on trans issues. not single trans person on team or on org. so let maybe discuss ukraine..libya..palestine?

at another big tech company..small army of engineers to scan entire company code base and flag word like “whitelist”. Highly paid engineer and managers $300k+ comp to change “whitelist” to “allowlist”

Me minority. none of this nonsense helpful. it actually insult. most stuff corporate entitlement program to create fake job for people without useful skill. pandering to often white people with savior complex who seem to hate other white people.

Somethings are definitely stupid, but I don't really see what's bad about changing whitelist. White = good and black = bad is a weird concept that when using an American lens, is hard not to see implied racism.

Plus, allowlist and denylist is simply easier to understand.

I agree that if your entire job is coming up with this kind of stuff, that's a bit ridiculous. But I don't really see anything wrong with a few engineers spending a few hours a month to push company discourse in a more egalitarian direction.

Actually listened to an interesting lecture on the ancient far east. The White = good and black = bad had originated from the people of the Levant originally, and I mean a long time ago, like before 600BC long ago.

I don't deny that there's historical things to be said about light being good and darkness being bad. That definitely has nothing to do with racism. I have nothing against yin and yang etc

But modern America has a modern lens, not a 600BC lens. Why ignore that?

Corporations are optimizing to the playing field that society creates. As long as 1st world countries can import an endless stream of credentialed migrants, there's no incentive for corporations to hire and train the economically disadvantaged (aka, in many cases minorities).

If you want to hire minorities, open an office in their community, require them to work on site, and hire completely unskilled people with no experience so you can train them. This would require actual investment, not token 'DIE' positions, so corporations don't do it.

The actual practice of DEI typically is to discriminate based on age/gender/sexual orientation/race/disability/religion/etc.

Isn't that already illegal to discriminate based on most of those things?

It's illegal to do a lot of things. That doesn't mean they don't happen or aren't common.

It’s illegal not to file your taxes but companies still hire accountants to make sure they do it, and also use strategies above and beyond the minimum prescribed by the law that benefit the company.

Seems to make sense that DEI departments could fill a similar role - make sure the company is in compliance with the law and then look for ways to go above and beyond it that benefit the company’s position in the market for talent.

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