IBM Diversity Efforts Targeted by Stephen Miller's Legal Group | Hacker News Reader

IBM Diversity Efforts Targeted by Stephen Miller's Legal Group

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64 pointstiahura49 comments

This case or one like it will end up before the SCOTUS sooner rather than later and they will almost certainly rule the same way as in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023).

Companies are acting in clear violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

42 USC §2000e–2 (a) It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer— (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

It's shameful behavior. We'll look back at all of this and cringe.

Yeah I saw a couple clips from this and management was straight up "you need 13% black, mid teens Hispanic ... we are getting rid of people who can't get with the program ... and to be 100% clear Asians are NOT an under represented minority"

I definitely feel bad for all the talented folks at IBM who earned a spot there but will be seen as forced diversity hires.

> to be 100% clear Asians are NOT an under represented minority

How insane is that? Imagine you are one of the lucky few to make it out of war-torn genocided Myanmar to work towards the American dream™, and then are told you're not "underrepresented" enough to get a job.

Or maybe South-East Asians have dark enough skin to get a diversity pass in the American wokesphere?

Saw the leaked IBM video and it is clearly deeply racist against white people. Glad someone is sueing them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrfVIbXKqtg

A transcribed quote from the above video:

"Let me go deeper into Red Hat, multiple leaders over the last year plus that were held accountable to the point that they're no longer here at Red Hat because they were not willing to live up to the standards." -- Paul Cormier, Chairman at Red Hat

Paul Cormier and Arvind Krishna should be fired.

Positive discrimination can see as racist, ok. (even if positive discrimination being here because of negative (generally unconscious) discrimination and because "diversity" is generally good for innovation and competitiveness).

But what here is " DEEPLY racist against white people" ?

Let's take a hypothetical situation.

A company decides it doesn't want to hire black people or Hispanic people. They decide they only want to hire whites and Asians. Any of their employees who do not meet the quotas and hire too many blacks lose bonuses or are outright fired.

Would you still ask what is deeply racist in that case?

If you have to completely ignore the historical and present status of racial discrimination in order to make your argument, it's not quite as effective as you might think it is.

Being a racist who discriminates against specific races is fine if some other people were also racist? Is that actually what you are arguing?

What would be a non 'racist against white people' way to reduce race-based discrimination against non-whites?

Not being racist to anybody would be a way to reduce racism against non-whites.

Oh, can you point to examples where racism has spontaneously disappeared?

Stop moving the goal posts.

You said that racism against non-whites can be removed by 'not being racist', these are your words.

"Positive discrimination"

Every big company does this. My company also has a target goal “for blacks”. It’s on PowerPoints. It must be on someone’s KPIs, and thus tied to their bonus payouts.

If we're not hiring based on merit then we're destroying the country's global competitiveness against China.

Hiring is not based on merit anyway. Plenty of talented and skillful workers who may lack in the social and communication skills department, don't have a maxed out and blinged up LinkedIn profile with a bazillion connections or have a resume that was automatically filtered into the rejection stream.

I agree with you otherwise, just wanted to point it out though.

Merriam Webster defines merit as "a praiseworthy quality".

Programming skills would qualify as merit but so would "social and communication skills". Hiring based on any of those skills would still be hiring on merit. Having an immutable characteristic like a specific gender or race is not a praiseworthy quality.

Being able to sell yourself during a job interview is not necessarily a good indicator of your ability to communicate effectively at work. Instead it selects for people are shameless self-promoters.

I never suggested that it was. I'm just saying it is a skill to being able to promote yourself. Hiring based on a skill (even if it is only semi-related to the job) is hiring based on merit.

Also, if you can sell yourself you are likely to be able to sell ideas which is a good skill for developers to have.

Depending on the work, it may be more valuable than coding ability even. You need people with the right ideas that can win arguments. Without that you can only build garbage.

So we need to address that one as well, so we can employ those who are brilliant technically but might not be so good at socializing. We urgently need something to counter the rise of China, so we are going to have to adapt as a society in order to compete globally.

In fact, hiring such people would be a step towards real diversity in the workplace, if we can find a way to fit them in somehow.

A diverse workforce, and thus diversity of perspectives, thoughts, and opinions, is a major competitive advantage against a monoculture that doesn’t value diverse thinking.

Why not hire specifically for "diversity of perspectives, thoughts, and opinions" then? Why bring race into it?

that is one proxy

Are you saying all blacks think the same way?

Most big companies want compliant followers who don't make themselves, their bosses, or the company look bad. The problem is the fads of business theater: open offices, DEI, butt-in-seat mentality, multiple layers of top-down militant managers, and multiple rounds of layoffs and uncertainty are the worst.

Would be a beautiful thing. But these initiatives don’t do that: instead, they select for a political and socioeconomic monoculture, with diversity in physical appearance only.

Do you agree the important negative (often unconscious, based on cognitive bias) discrimination against minorities is a problem for the country competitiveness ? (negatively discriminated despite "merit")

Do you agree that reducing racial gap and gender gap in USA would be better for the country and its competitiveness ?

I am not a fan of quota, especially taken in isolation... But the underlying issued are huge, for a moral (not everybody have the same moral) but also economic standpoint

Racism is a societal disease. But it doesn’t follow that racial quotas is the cure. That is the Politician’s Fallacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism

Yes on the first question, no on the second question.

Everybody thinks they merit a position but your resumes all look the same. If you’re being switched out for some rando your work doesn’t matter.

Also it would be in Russia and China's interest to promote these diversity agendas, in order to destabilize and weaken the West. I remember someone say these DEI agendas are a part of a "long march through the institutions" - something right out of China's playbook? If there's a real possibility of state actors promoting such agenads, then this is a serious national security issue.

Man that is dehumanizing. Really sick

First off, having Saddam Hussein as a group's representative isn't going to win any credibility points.

One failure of big companies is they let themselves be distracted with consulting fads and bikeshed on distractions rather than hire the most effective people globally. Letting unconscious bias pervade an organization is one thing, but being absurd as to "undo" the past by different discriminatory, quota-based standards lower for some groups but not others is counterproductive. Furthermore, anyone of integrity isn't going to work somewhere like that because they have too much self-respect to let anyone say they didn't meet the bar or were shown favoritism.

It’s like IBM heard they should do DEI, so they hired consultants/advocates for it and set targets and then fired people who couldn’t meet them. Then also said out loud things they shouldn’t have.

Now they are confused why they are attacked and ridiculed.

Poe's Law. That leaked video is so insane, I can't help but think it's satire.

I’ve sat through similar meetings not at IBM.

Literally “we can’t hire any more white men.”

In corporate-type environments, I've seen individuals working within the company be put on something like a secret discrimination list for not passing enough underrepresented candidates (even when there are not many options): you are forced to or there will be consequences.

Co-workers giddily talk about this after work at bars.

Unfortunately, this is the end point for most large companies.

It starts with "when hiring, we need to expand our candidate base to be more diverse" which is a laudable goal. Then it becomes "our employee distribution should reflect the underlying population" which also sounds reasonable on its face. When that doesn't actually happen, then quotas get set, which is a huge gray area. When quotas aren't met, then hiring managers get told "do not put white males up for consideration". I have personally experienced this on multiple occasions as a hiring manager.

Then you haven't been paying attention for years.

Thank God. I’m excited for the re-segregation era to end.

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