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Comment by boeingUH60 | Hacker News Reader

You can always count on DEI folk to fight with themselves over petty nonsense. Guess that’s what happens when your work isn’t productive so you have find things to make it look like you’re working.

What the hell is even a DEI exec? If you want diversity, that’s something your existing HR head can handle…any DEI executive is a plain grifter. It’s the same sector that produces authors like Ibram Kendi earning hundreds of thousands from their BS books or that BLM foundation founder who spent donations on real estate because, of course, running an organization is not her skill set, it’s grifting.

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Why have people with a job description that's explicitly about information security, when that should be everyone's responsibility, right? The reality is that some concern just won't ever be considered at all unless you put someone explicitly in charge and supply them with enough formal rank that they can't be ignored, as they inevitably would be without.

Doubt so. Many employees dont know even how to write VBA macros even though they use Excel for decade (I have bosses superb at Excel and PPT use but just not at VBA macros level). IT is harder than you think most employees arent that smart to be able to self learn IT stuff because it has real brain burner technical stuff. DEI lacks any technical competencies. Mostly just aggregates of opinions bundled as "scientific research" in social studies faculties around worldwide unis. You should use other examples. Information security is clearly not good example to illustrate your point.

> If you want diversity, that’s something your existing HR head can handle

If your existing HR head has been handling it for years, and you still haven't made any significant progress, appointing a person in charge of DEI is something that the CEO does to be able to say "hey, we're doing something about it".

Where "significant progress" is defined as...

DEI goals are so vague as to be non-existent which make it possible to continue to use DEI as a moniker on the path towards ideological obedience.

Obedience towards what ideology?

Clearly the one pushing for the adoption of DEI. Call it "The Ideology Which Shall Not Be Named" if you please although that hardly makes for a good acronym - too many consonants.

If you are really interested in where this all comes from I'd suggest perusing James Lindsay's New Discourses which is centred around this subject. DEI finds its origin in Critical Social Justice which in its turn is an offshoot from "Theory" [1], short for "critical [2] postmodern theory". New Discourses is full of references which makes it possible to trace back anything found there to its source - which is more or less all that Lindsay does, he starts at some academic utterance related to this subject and traces the references back to their roots.

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-theory/

[2] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical/

The guy who refers to the Pride flag as "the flag of a hostile enemy?" No thanks.

James Lindsay's shtick is doing enough research on academic leftism (for lack of a better term) to identify some of its primary sources, and then harvesting jargon from it to confuse and intimidate people who (like him) haven't taken the time to follow any of the underlying scholarship. It's a grift.

In particular, DEI (we're almost always referring to what I'd call "institutional DEI", a particular organizational orthodoxy about proactive inclusion and avoidance of bigotry") is not, in fact, an offshoot of Critical Theory, or Critical Postmodern Theory, or Critical Social Justice, or Critical Race Theory, and the point where you're pretending you can distinguish these things in a tweet (some of them are actually at odds with each other!), you've already given away the game.

Lindsay shows a trail running from a bunch of German and French philosophers in the 1800's through their followers and hangers-on all the way to the present. You don't show anything in support of your claims other than a few ad-hominems. Given the matter-of-fact way in which you make your claims I assume you can disprove the trail dug up by Lindsay and enlighten us about the real background of the "DEI movement". If your proof holds up better than Lindsay's - and others, he not being the only one who came to these conclusions - your claim will win out but until such a time I'll keep on looking into the followers of the Frankfurt school to find out where this all came from and what the most likely goals are.

When an argument is about a particular person, it's not a fallacious ad hominem to impeach that person. If that's not obvious to you, there's not much point in continuing to discuss.

This is more or less exhibit A in why it often is so difficult to have objective discussions around contented subjects: The argument is not about the person, the argument is hardly ever about the person. It is about the message the person brings, in this case Lindsay's message on the origins of "critical social justice" or "DEI".

Stop looking at the messenger and start concentrating on the message. In this case my question was centred around the absence of anything to support your statements around the origins of "DEI" while Lindsay's statements check out due to the lengthy trail all the way back to the 1800's. Do you have anything to support your statements, anything free from circular references where A says B as supported by C where C says B because A says so? Where does DEI come from according to you?

I think a large perceived benefit of a DEI officer is to increase the number of officers and thus improve the desired demographic ratios among officers.

I think DEI is critically important for organizations as missing out of ideas because someone is discriminated against is a disadvantage for the organization. But I think this is really hard and threatens people in their positions who don’t want to be fired and don’t want to lose hiring authority. So lots of superficial things are done (like hiring DEI officers and lots of training).

I think it’s much harder to change culture and think that people need to internalize and adapt rather than having ineffective and distracting policies (eg, every position must interview one minority or every department must have a minority leader, etc ).

> You can always count on DEI folk to fight with themselves over petty nonsense.

As an outsider to DEI groups, I've never noticed that kind of infighting. But maybe they just kept it behind closed doors.

I previously worked at a very large popular progressive startup.

Of hundreds of slack channels one of the few that was private was the "Diversity, equity, and *inclusion*" channel.

The fact that it's behind closed doors is all you need to know.

> The fact that it's behind closed doors is all you need to know.

I'm one of the least likely persons to defend DEI initiatives.

But I could imagine legit reasons for certain DEI channels to be private. E.g., if they're used to discuss potential HR responses to employee complaints.

Is a DEI channel the appropriate place to discuss HR complaints? Wouldn’t HR have a place for that so any surfaced in a DEI channel would be directed to HR.

There’s a lot more to DEI than potential complaints and limiting inclusion just to protect that small percentage seems counterproductive.

> Is a DEI channel the appropriate place to discuss HR complaints? Wouldn’t HR have a place for that so any surfaced in a DEI channel would be directed to HR.

It's certainly plausible.

FWIW, I wasn't sure that the aforementioned DEI channel had a good reason for being private. I was just responding to the "that's all I need to know" assertion.

This reminds me of the people who heard that companies like Facebook have a Trust and Safety engineering team, and said something along the lines of:

> They’re engineering Trust and manufacturing a facade of safety. The fact that these teams exist is all you need to know.

When, in fact, Trust and Safety is an extremely common department for larger organizations to have, and it deals with ensuring the platform is safe and trustworthy.

In your case, I wouldn’t at all be surprised that the channel was for DEI volunteers to coordinate events or something along those lines.

I suspect it's a bit like the security field. Some are useful and bring value. Some are hired so when something goes wrong there's a person to blame and a head to axe.

> You can always count on DEI folk to fight with themselves over petty nonsense.

I'd look at the spaces vs tabs or text editor conflicts as a sign that this behavior is not limited to DEI folk.

Nobody is getting suspended or fired over a spaces vs tab or vi vs emacs discussion.

But they should. I really don’t feel safe around tabbers and the fear that someone could just lint my code at any time has me literally shaking.

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