Do Not Trust Employee Resource Groups

I share the author's concern about company-sponsored groups, but I'm not impressed when the article starts out by citing the "robust literature" that employees can only be productive for under 3 hours a day.

Robust literature? A deals website in the UK did a survey of its customers during the pandemic and announced that people work on average 2 hours 53 minutes per day[0].

I can imagine no more robust source of hard data on human potential than a blog post about a self-reported survey from the marketing team of a deals and coupons website during a pandemic. But hey, I'm sure they got great SEO on the article and have great coupons and discounts on stuff.

Don't cheapen your points by pulling in a bunch of nonsense "statistics" to try to back them up.

[0]The firm that did the survey doesn't even seem to have any live links to their "report". The best contemporary discussion I can find of it is https://www.strategy.rest/?p=3169

I think this is an overly cynical take on a promise that either was never made or made cynically without an expectation that sophisticated employees would take it seriously.

If you draw the 2x2 of Good for Employers & Good for Employees, ERGs can be helpful in pushing incremental changes that are both Good for Employers & Employees and reducing stuff that is Bad of Employers and Employees. It probably can't nor ever really promised to work on issues that are Good for Employees & Bad for Employers and that's rightfully where unions play a role and of course executives are already hired to work on the segment of Good for Employers but Bad for Employees.

As long as you approach ERGs with this understanding and also the additional understanding that, at most companies, when dealing with marginalized groups, there are plenty of Good/Good and Bad/Bad issues that deserve work on. ERG groups are pretty forceful in pushing employees away from Good/Bad issues, even if they are more important issues to work on because the purpose of ERGs is a channeling force to focus on the Good/Good problems.

One thing I've found interesting about ESGs is a very notable absence of one particular (legally protected) group: 40+ year olds.

Ageism is well established as a reality in tech and virtually all of the companies that I've worked at have a very visible lack of anyone over 40+. At the same time this is a protected group that all of us (if we're fortunate) should eventually belong to.

Same goes for discussions around diversity in hiring. I have never heard a hiring manager even hint that we need more diversity in the age of our team members.

As someone in this group I don't feel particularly discriminated against on a day to day basis, but I do feel there is an implied rule that you pretend to be younger if possible. Wear t-shirts, mention your kids if you must but don't mention that they will soon be old enough to work along side you, don't bring up things like divorce (that only happens to old people) and try not to bring up your decades of experience in industry too much.

The older I get (and I quite enjoy aging) the more I come to realize that being old is an anathema to the culture of tech (and late Capitalism) which constantly wants to promote neoteny so it can perpetually sell a wider audience new toys. That of course and people's very real fear of death, which aging is an annoying reminder of.