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Comment by frugalmail | Hacker News Reader

DEI hurt many companies. If anything it eliminated diversity of thought for those superficial categories of difference, and caused strong leaders to mutate their contributions from clear direction and achievement into playground cow towing to participation award saboteurs dragging the entire team down.

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While I believe what you're saying could be true in some cases, I work at a tech giant and there's no "diversity of thought" anyways because anything remotely controversial is not allowed to be discussed at work.

This is a company which went hard on and is now currently backtracking from DEI but this policy of "don't discuss anything controversial at work" has strengthened the entire time making diversity of thought a moot point.

FWIW that stance is (probably) in direct response to the realization that the "bring your whole self to work" movement was a bad idea anyway.

Sure, but diversity of thought doesn't matter if everyone is required to keep their divisive thoughts at home.

DEI has always been in companies before the term even arose to the larger public discourse. I have to go through such trainings every year at every company I've been at. There has never been true "diversity of thought" at most institutions and I doubt you would really want it, especially if you were on the receiving end of it every day and it was just blatant bigotry towards you. As far as achievements, I can't recall a single instance of someone being brought down because of a participation award. Unless you think being 1st, 2nd, or third gets robbed of all meaning because everyone got an award.

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