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Comment by brodouevencode | Hacker News Reader

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".

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