Big Tech layoffs hit diversity and inclusion jobs hard | Hacker News Reader

Big Tech layoffs hit diversity and inclusion jobs hard

seattletimes.com

66 pointspg_123462 comments

Couldn't happen to a better group of people. I've never met a DEI "coordinator" who wasn't condescending and openly racist to the non-focus ethnicities.

Hell, it was only after a TON of hate crimes that people realized Asians may not just be a different flavor of White in the office.

They aren’t just racist to non focus ethnicities, they are racist to the focus ones too. Now I don’t know if it is intentional or unintentional but their policies negatively effect all groups:

I happen to be latino, and only after wasting my time with an entire loop at Microsoft with a bunch of clowns that had no interest in hiring me, did I realize that

1. my recruiter had been a “diversity and inclusion” recruiter

2. Microsoft has policies that require many eng. Managers to check the box of having interviewed a “diverse” candidate before extending an offer.

That’s why they do “hiring events” where everyone who conducts the interview is a hiring manager.

I cannot emphasize enough how disinterested the people who interviewed me where. All the coding questions i had about 20 minutes and they were Leetcode hards. One of them was so fucking incompetent that when I solved it, (most LC hards would take me considerably longer but this was in my wheelhouse) he was confused until I explained it step by step.

Tl;DR

Microsoft DEI policies wasted my time and also Microsoft seems to be staffed by a bunch of clueless clowns.

Hispanic here too. I got explained to when I said I didn’t think the Spanish language was sexist and that only 5% of US Latinos used “latinx.”

I always assumed that stuff was coming from english speaking white kids, rather than anyone that natively speaks a gendered language.

Latinx was originated by a Mexican-American (I am not Mexican-American but am Hispanic) but definitely spread by white liberals.

Just call people what they want to be called. This goes for Americans too even though "America" means the whole hemisphere. When Italians are talking about a watered down coffee, they aren't blaming it on Colombia.

Even then, it's still disingenuous. They only care about Asians when it supports their political agenda.

Lol , you think they would care about black people if the companies didn’t want to signal?

Got hired into a company. Shortly after was told how they hated having to hire a typical white engineer. But they were desperate for someone that can actually solve problems. They had a huge number of jr level diversity hires that just could solve the hard problems. People literally just spent all day looking for reasons to be offended about one thing or another. Barely anyone was actually trying to improve their craft.

Someone got called a valuable resource. Then had to listen to them rage for hours at being labeled a resource.

Of course in the spirit of diversity they mocked their mostly white customers endlessly.

Was a horrible horrible job.

I'm in a very similar situation. What is the incentive for all of these so-called diversity hires? Is there some sort of federal mandate or tax cut or business incentive?

> Instead, he said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go.

Yikes.

Yikes? That's what has definitely happened - these companies don't want EEOC complaints. The layoffs were audited to not be racially biased - which is a good thing.

Do you believe race, gender, ect should play a more important role than job performance in lay offs?

I believe they do for shareholder value in this place and time.

Do you think that is good for our society/economy?

In my experience pretty much anyone can be bad at a given job. Your race gender or ethnicity do not play a part in it.

Should people who are not bad at their job be fired because they are the wrong race gender or ethnicity? Should someone who is bad at their job not be fired because of their race gender or ethnicity?

In the extreme, someone who is bad at their job and screws up can cost lives. What happens if that person works as pilot or engineer at a nuclear facility, and their negligence causes a crash or meltdown?

Who is the blame? Everyone knew the employee was bad at their job and possible a hazard but the company choose to keep that employee even though it was a risk. I have a really hard time blaming the employee here.

> Do you think that is good for our society/economy?

Of course not.

No, but I also believe there is racial bias in evaluating job performance - because I've lived through it.

"Audited to not be racially biased" is of course a different thing than "should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who to let go".

Biased relative to what? The racial makeup of current employees, of local/national demographics, industry average demographics, or demographics of low-performing employees?

Say the fired employees are disproportionately (compared to company demographics) of race X. Responding to accusations of bias, HR defends this with "Employees of race X at our company happened to have more low-performers than average".

Let's close our eyes and imagine the fallout for different values of X.

Live by the sword die by the sword

Not surprised here.

Twitter layoffs are all the managers and executives at my firm can talk about. They suspected tech has a lot of bloat, but Twitter surviving such a huge layoff AND pumping new features have made some of our executives start rethinking a lot.

Every two weeks like clockwork since then, I'm being pulled in the restructuring meetings.

It looks like we are going to layoff 20% in a couple months, anyone who doesn't perform in a way that has trackable metrics with a direct relationship to revenue is probably #1 on the chopping block.

It's been demoralizing working on these lists for various executives.

There is a lot of bloat, but the people who should be blamed are the executives who let it happen.

I’ve witnessed it first hand over the last decade, working at a handful of companies. Each year it seems like the # of engineers who don’t serve any purpose increases, and the more layers of abstraction are created (Frameworks on top of frameworks on top of frameworks) that don’t solve any real business problem. It sucks for the people being laid off, but things have gone off the rails and predictably we are now in a correction.

I agree.

The sentiment I'm hearing is the executives feel like they've been scammed by the Tech Industry and DIE initiatives. They trusted the "experts", and it was all a big scam.

At my firm they are mad, seriously mad. In moments like that, they talk about firing half of my division. I keep having to walk them back to reality. It's tough really tough right now dealing with personalities.

The people who make these decisions no longer trust the reports,the economy, the experts, and industry guidelines. It's a shitshow at the top right now.

I think the situation is simple: the experts they listened to had an agenda, and the actual experts were repeatedly ignored.

It's even simpler, anyone who calls themselves a expert isn't one.

I don't think its simple. A lot of people (myself included) are simply busy with life, families, jobs, etc.

If you are extremely busy and you aren't an expert, how do you know which experts have an agenda or not ? Then sometimes even the the most highly rated experts have a sudden shift of ideology/agenda/something later.

I have personally witnessed several highly competent long standing developers suddenly change, and push social agendas into everything. The worst is when HR also starts pushing social agendas into everything.

I'm expecting the layoffs to continue intermittently for another year or too, it gives management a nice cover to get rid of a lot of people.

That's interesting. What industry are you in?

> the people who should be blamed are the executives who let it happen.

The executives got promotions and raises and bonuses for hiring aggressively when times were good.

Now they are going to get promotions and raises and bonuses for aggressively laying off when times are .. bad?

Except we know times are not as bad as the media is saying.

This is one reason I always opt out of "race/ethnic" HR questions that are voluntary. My "race" has nothing to do with my performance, and hopefully nothing to do with my keeping/losing my job. I'm not Caucasian, and I don't think that should have anything to do with my employment.

If you opt out to self identify, and are employed there, the company is actually legally required to make their own evaluation of your ethnicity based on your appearance for reporting purposes

Jobs with little to no demonstrable connection with value accretion or profitability being eliminated in a cost cutting effort?!

A lot of these programs can be summed up with simple rules and processes.

Ensure diversity in the hiring pipeline, treat everyone with respect, check your biases.

This is probably the best way to think about it. DEI departments seem like they would have the opposite effect: they become an adversarial entity within an organization. Integrating those goals into the organization as a whole seems like it would have a much greater impact.

Serious question, how do you "ensure diversity"? How do you even define diversity? I agree with the other things you said.

In practice, diversity usually means "not white".

You're basically right. My gripe is that, who decides who is "white"? Are Jews white? Are Irish? Are Ukrainians? Are Mexicans? Maybe they are now, but it wasn't necessarily the case twenty, thirty, or fifty years ago.

And so what if we are mixed-race? What if we are a quarter white? Do we really want to go down this rabbit hole of racial politics? This is exactly what the Nazis did...as did slave-owning Southerners. Maybe in the long run it's better if we just... keep race out of the question, and treat people like _individuals_.

Anyway, I hope that doesn't sound too argumentative or bombastic. I just horribly hate the idea of being tossed into a "racial category" by someone that doesn't know me, my family history, etc.

It's based on how they self identify

So...what if we all just "self identify" as gay, black, trans, handicapped, etc. to get maximum diversity points and take advantage of this flawed and fraudulent system? Have you given this any thought?

Yeah you can do that, it will just look very bad on you so people don't

Ensuring diversity is obviously a terrible goal. The only sane and ethical goal is ensuring equality. If everyone got exactly the same opportunity and the best based on skill got hired, job done.

Yeah its more or an art than a science, but get metrics based on how they self identify

What if I don't want to "self identify"? Can't I just do my job as an individual, instead of a half-South African woman employee? I don't like this, and I don't like that this is becoming the norm; it does way more harm in the long run than good in my view.

Where I currently work (academia), it's a litmus test. At least for faculty and management staff, if you don't submit an appropriately florid DEI statement, you won't get hired. This makes me a bit sad.

If you're putting people in the hiring pipeline that are only there to fit a simple rule or process, then that's not really treating people with respect? Someone should only be chased by a recruiter or given an interview if there's actually a desire to hire them for their abilities.

Fundamentally there's no way to engage in any diversity initiatives of any kind that don't require disrespecting people or outright discriminating against them. Which is why DIE needs to die.

I love that your completely reasonable statement of opinion has been grayed out by anonymous, petty censors in this forum.

It's fixed now, so apparently those who agree are in a slight majority.

Because they were a product of the near-zero interest rate hiring frenzy of late 2020 alongside with the decade long VC fuelled tech bubble of startups.

If there is anything that had to be offloaded to save money, it had to be them; unsurprisingly.

Excuse my ignorance but what is a diversity and inclusion job?

Are they a branch of HR departments? Do they actually interview and hire people, or just write DEI training material?

The DIE agenda aka "diversity, inclusion, and equity" has no place in the business world. It is a neo-Marxist, fradulent institution created by academics to generate their permanent employment and the strenghthening of HR's influence, to the detriment of those who actually create value in businesses and organizations.

>“Cutting DEI-oriented staff now, unless you’ve made really progress and can say ‘mission accomplished,’ is not a good look,” said Angie Kamath, dean at the NYU School of Professional Studies, who focuses on workforce development. “There are some real risks.”

It's impossible to say "mission accomplished" when it comes to something subjective like "diversity and inclusion", which themselves are murky, amorphous terms. That's the _point_, the "mission" will never be "accomplished", which is why this is a sham institution to (attempt to) guarantee permanent employment, so I celebrate this news.

I fail to see how trying to eliminate race as a barrier to employment for a capitalist firm is neo-marxist. Saying black people are systemically oppressed doesn't lead to the democratization of ownership of capital.

If anything, I see the sort of "identity politics" to be something that capitalists of all flavor want! You either see minorities as useful scapegoat to keep your oppressed workers angry, or as an untapped market to be exploited if they only had more income.

>I fail to see how trying to eliminate race as a barrier to employment for a capitalist firm is neo-marxist. Saying black people are systemically oppressed doesn't lead to the democratization of ownership of capital.

DIE doesn't try to eliminate race as a barrier to employment. That's the race-grifting component. We already have labor laws preventing discrimination in hiring.

I'm as opposed to this woke nonsense as anyone, but calling it "Marxist" is wholly misleading. Marx and his ideological companions saw social injustices, like slavery, through the lens of economic exploitation and class struggle. The DIE cult flips the script entirely; for them, economic inequality is a product of omnipresent "structural racism" and "white supremacy." Calling this delusion "Marxist" is just as incorrect as calling Donald Trump "fascist."

Regardless, there is a gigantic overlap between people who champion DEI and people who champion Marx and communist ideas.

Fair point and thanks for asking that question and giving me the opportunity to elaborate. I was saying "neo-Marxist" because the DIe agenda essentially takes Marxism and ctrl+f replaces "class" with "race/gender". Comparison:

Marx -> Use the power of the state to seize power and economic opportunity from the "bourgeoisie" and distribute them to the proletariat to fix the inequities of history by any means necessary.

DIE cult -> Use the power of the state to seize power and economic opportunity from the "privileged"[1] and distribute them to the "underprivileged"[2] to fix the inequities of history by any means necessary.

[1]: aka "white-looking" men who can't be easily sorted into a "BIPOC" affinity group of "oppressed" persons. The jury's still out as far as where Asian-Americans, who largely out-perform and out-earn whites, for example, or white South Africans belong on this imaginary spectrum. Because "diversity" is inherently subjective, one's privilege rating is dynamic and can change at any time.

[2]: aka maybe women or people "identifying" as a woman, people with maybe slightly darker skin (unless they "identify" (which shouldn't be an intransitive verb anymore) as such, immigrants, morbidly obese, trans-identifying, gay-identifying, mental-illness-identifying, two-spirit-identifying, indigenous-identifying (Elizabeth Warren tried this), plus whatever cool new identities will be discovered from now to eternity.

And let's not forget that diversity of political viewpoints or opinions _never_ counts. (Yes, even if you grew up in east Germany, son/daughter of Soviet citizens whose parents were killed by Stalin and you are accordingly wary of new, trendy ideologies - when applying to work at a DIE-adhering corporations, you may be shoehorned into the "privileged" group, based on skin color or a subjective measure of relative "diversity" compared to current employees.

Then, who is the "underprivileged"

In my view, people who are arbitrarily discriminated against by this woke nonsense.

It's Marxist because it explains inequality by claiming (with no direct evidence) that society is split into two sides, and there's a conspiracy by one group to oppress the other which justifies the use of unfair tactics to take the wealth of the oppressors and give it to the oppressed. If some members of that latter group stand up and say they aren't actually being systematically oppressed, it is explained as treachery or that they are unaware of their own oppression.

IOW if you replace class with race/gender then it's the same world view, teachings and moral code.

They are essentially marketing and recruitment jobs. They aren't recruiting and don't need goodwill marketing.

I really wish companies would be more flexible with whom they are hiring, even if that meant longer probationary periods for example.

However just like I don't want to be denied a role due to my ethnicity (which does happen, unfortunately) I also don't want to be given one due to it. Even if it improves numbers on paper, it makes people distrust you because "you are there due to your ethnicity, not your skills" and you also think about it yourself as well, clearly! I don't want to doubt myself because I may or may not have been hired due to someone trying to fill a quota instead of being a valuable addition to the company.

Just my 2c.

Now the diversity coordinators can start making sure there are enough ethnicities in layoffs.

Good.

Real Meritocracy or be shoved to the back of competitive stage is the harsh reality of the competitive world. If it isn’t happening to your company - you’re in a monopoly/oligopoly.

> Workers are more likely to leave companies where equity efforts aren’t a priority. Nearly 1 in 5 female leaders have left a job in the past two years because of a company’s lack of commitment to DEI, according to an October report from McKinsey and LeanIn.org

Lmao don't let the door hit you in the ass

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