Microsoft laid off a DEI team, DEI is 'no longer business critical'
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Microsoft's statement was the opposite, "Our D&I commitments remain unchanged [...]".
Interesting they call it D&I now. I guess the E was always a bit awkward considering the CEO earns $40 million.
First of all, Nadella has created a trillion dollars of value over his leadership. His pay packet of $40m is nothing.
Second, the E was never about equality of pay, or fairness. It’s equity. It was about quotas in hiring and equality of outcome, meaning active discrimination against certain groups. Which does cross a very dangerous line.
Or you? You do realise you are saying, if you haven’t done it, you are less than an untrained chimp yourself, just by the logic of your statement?
Because I didnt take over Microsoft, a 40 year old company, with monopolies firmly entrenched in 2014.
Nokia, another company which was very strong a decade ago, is de facto gone.
Achieving "equity" means they need/want to treat people unequally.
You might tell me here why in fact it does not actually apply here because reasons, if so fine I'm not an expert on DEI matters. But that would not be so relevant to my point, which is common understanding and concepts people have around that word potentially having difficulty coexisting with highly stratified company like MS.
Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
Nadella may not be carrying rocks but he's the one figuring out which rocks and where they should go.
Was this a collective decision by thousands of Microsoft employees, to go in this direction?
Is it thousands of google employees fault they missed it?
By your logic it is absolutely google employees fault, not executives… really??
The bullshit culture is actually thinking executives don’t do anything. Yet even a tiny bit of critical thinking would show you it has massive impact.
> By your logic it is absolutely google employees fault, not executives… really??
My logic is that placing an outsized importance on executives is just a way to justify inequality, when in truth they risk nothing. Even if their bets fail, it is the peons who pay the price.
Anyone who is physically healthy can carry a stone, but few places in the world built the pyramids.
Analogically, anyone with two hands can type something on a keyboard, the hard part is getting a useful software product out of this typing.
Even outside the commercial sphere, leaders of such complicated projects are famous, such as Linus Torvalds.
There is survivorship bias embedded in your reply. Pyramids are extremely durable, so we can still see them and judge them. Cultures that didn't build them could well spend their money and effort on some other status symbols, which were more transient. Like huge events (balls etc.) held for the royalty.
Ancient people were superstitious to the highest degree, and knew that victory always goes to whoever is favoured by the Gods. So, seeing these immense structures, Egypt's enemies knew that any raid on Egypt would be futile, as Egyptian gods would surely help their faithful followers who made them such magnificent gift.
Unless he was going to pay out of his pocket if he bankrupted Microsoft, that argument doesn't pass the sniff test.
Also, he has created a trillion dollars of valuation. That's not the same thing as value, just ask the Japanese property market in the 1990s. Current stock price can also entirely disconnected from reality and mid to long term future, just ask GE and Boeing.
If the AI/LLM hype dies down, a big chunk of that valuation will disappear, without anything meaningfully changing.
Azure, office 365, cloud, these were all massive to Microsoft and had created loads of value and revenue.
That isn’t a bubble.
Also AI might be hype, but it might not. Microsoft managed to get in at the right time with the right company, and is doing better than google, apple, amazon and many others.
To give no credit to Nadella is ridiculous there are so many other companies waiting to take Microsoft’s place. I find this resentful envy here on HN extremely sad and also very dishonest.
I'm giving him plenty of credit, he's the first competent CEO of Microsoft in a decade. Does that mean he deserves $40million/year while his company is laying off people to save on employee salaries? No, simple as that.
CEOs aren't some great superhumans that everything happens because of. They have a very important positions, and many CEOs have ruined or bankrupted companies through sheer incompetence, while many others have created amazing value (both societal and economic). They are not deities, they deserve prison and for their money to be seized when they commit crimes, and they don't deserve to be paid thousands of times more than the median employees that actually do the work and execute on the CEO's vision.
> I find this resentful envy here on HN extremely sad and also very dishonest.
It's disdain for sociopathy more than anything else. I personally can tell you that if I were a CEO, I would not be able to sleep at night if my company's revenue, profits and valuation are booming and I fire tens of thousands of people for no other reason than because I can and it will keep costs (that the company can easily afford) down.
> I personally can tell you that if I were a CEO, I would not be able to sleep at night if my company's revenue, profits and valuation are booming and I fire tens of thousands of people for no other reason than because I can and it will keep costs (that the company can easily afford) down.
No shareholders in their right mind would hire such a CEO, so your chances are pretty slim.
Are you seriously trying to say that Steve Ballmer was incompetent?!
IMO if Ballmer had stayed on until present day, Microsoft would have become something like Oracle. Technically growing revenue, but very little substance or relevance, no new customers or new business from them, only jacking up prices.
Also, he left in 2014, a decade ago, so it was ambiguous if I'm covering him or not.
Hence I really think the pay gap is ethically questionable.
that is my point. „Getting laid off“ means millions for him anyway.
You mean that he happened to be CEO during a period when market value increased due to a number of factors beyond his control or influence.
An interesting test is whether you can state this opinion openly and still remain an employee of $big_corp.
as always. e.g. the "C: drive" or the Virtual Memory instead of swap, etc.
I've worked with a lot of Ex-MSFT, and almost all do it!
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/wh...
I don't like being gas-lit by my employer. I prefer the honesty that they only care about money. That way we all know where we stand.
There are certainly some cartoonish outcomes (like my company no longer calls team meetings "All Hands"... in case, you know, someone doesn't have hands).
But there's nothing insane about a company thinking about what role it can play towards helping people up. I would be happy if my company donated computing equipment and resources to disadvantaged communities around the country. Having grown up in Appalachia with little computing resources nearby, my envy when I learned people my age had access to Sparc Stations and giant tech bookstores...
A corporation is not a person, they don't have people beliefs. Corporations only care about money and putting on a show of having people-like beliefs was only ever about saving money.
That may be true but that does not negate the fact that 'DEI' has been and still is a divisive 'praxis' (to use a word out of the underlying ideology's playbook) which intentionally divides people into an ever widening fractal of identity groups and increases distrust and envy between those groups by pushing a victim/victimiser narrative. Where the motto on the Great Seal of the United States reads E pluribus unum (out of many, one) [1] DEI aims to achieve the opposite: out of one, many.
DEI orders 'we, the people' into a hierarchy with the 'oppressed' on top and the 'oppressors' below them. This is an ever ongoing process since identity categories are themselves subject to the same 'intersectional' narrative, e.g. 'black lives matter' is one-upped by 'black trans lives matter' etc.
However the criteria is often reduced to race and sexual orientation. A truly effective approach would take to much resources.
It matters at all levels. It means "how things look from the outside to a person not familiar with what is happening inside."
At one point, DEI was a high concern for the entire nation, and companies were compelled to do something about it. Some actually made a positive change. Many created a position or team and not much was done. Regardless of what actually happened, the optics were aligned with the priority, and that mattered too.
This happens everywhere. The security theater after 9/11 is optics. The graph that you present to your VP showing an increase in code coverage is optics. There might be valuable work also happening, but the optics are important. Without them, people would not see that you are trying to do something.
Although it seems many in the tech sector agreed with ESG and implemented it anyway.
Additionally with the advancement of AI, humans aren’t that unique in tech any longer.
Corporations can basically afford to treat their employees as they like and not as those employees would like.
I doubt they ever expected for these programs to work, like Shell never expected for their wind farms to bring any actual profit[1]. It was mostly a marketing expense. Can we call it... Progressive-washing?
[1]https://www.power-technology.com/news/shell-jobcuts-offshore...
The very theory that skin-deep diversity helps businesses grow is based on extremely flimsy observations. It is likely non-reproducible. Notably, the most important competitors of US businesses in East Asia don't even pretend to care about diversity, and they thrive.
If an opponent completely ignores something that you worship and isn't stricken by the gods for his insolence, chances are that your gods are false, or, at best, very weak.
your suggestion that diverse hiring equals less competent hiring is offensive.
Well, so was suggestion that the Earth revolves around the Sun, once.
What really interests me is if it is true, not if it is offensive. Truth > Conformism, at least if you don't want to end up with an ossified society.
GP said two statements: 1) the Earth revolves around the Sun and 2) Truth > Conformism
You are asking to facts about that?
From what I have seen at work, gender or color of the skin has very little to do with how good worker someone is.
Because race has correlation with low-income communities that prevent people from going to colleges. The pool of competent black employees will just be smaller. I’d argue that’s a state problem, not for a company to solve.
It’s like a DEI recruiter wanted to have 50-50 men and women in software development at a company I worked for. I asked if there’re 50-50 of men and women in the total jobseeker pool. The answer was no(fewer women), but the person was determined to play a zero-sum game with other companies. It’s insane.
And I don't think that Microsoft or anyone else held DEI values deeply anyway. Corporations being the ultimate turncoats, they just did what was demanded of them in the heat of the moment.
If, in 2040, there comes a strong wave of people identifying as pineapples, expect all the CEOs to wear pineapple suits for one summer or so. Except Musk, he will don a potato suit on purpose and move the HQ to Martian Sands.
That's one of the best theological arguments I've seen in some time.
DEI provides impetus to select or at least give additional attention to candidates that otherwise might be overlooked.
To put it simpler if you have to hire 100 people out of 1000 and 10% of your qualified candidate pool is black you likely have 10 qualified black people. DEI means you won't hire 99 white dudes and instead will try to select from the entire population.
The statistical existence of the 10 qualitied black folks means that a diverse selection will on average trade someone from >100 ranking for someone <100 (better) ranking improving fitness.
For smaller sizes a fair selection is more likely to diverge from population and your team of 5 doesn't have to look like a burger king commercial with one of each kind of kid but its on average apt to say fairness improves fitness and I say that as a white dude.
DEI also provides an impetus to hire token minorities, even if underqualified, because the DEI team demands results and will label your explanation that you didn't really get your hands on a good black programmer as systemic racism. Or perhaps even your own personal racism.
From where I live (Czechia), we still remember old Communist Czechoslovakia. Late stage Communism was all about impressive statistics - on paper. Ticking the important boxes in the form was very important. Of course, the economy collapsed, because the real problems couldn't be papered over by impressive statistics forever.
DEI in American context looks similar to that, only America is more free and the corporations are more willing to shed the concept once it proved useless.
Whereas Czechia is very humongous racially and indeed culturally America is only 58% non-hispanic whites. 42% NEARLY half of your qualified candidates are for all jobs are actually non-white. Diversity is far from useless.
Their workforce pools are wildly different, and the only diversity they could realistically try to achieve would be to hire more women; the fact that they don't is part of the institutional sexism that is one of the main reasons driving those countries on a downward spiral of crumbling birth rates and maybe one day to extinction. Is that the best example to follow?
Indeed. Such displays aren't meant to change what people believe, only to make people feel good by affirming what they already believe. In places where the majority don't feel that way, the display is omitted. It's cynical pandering, not earnest activism.
People were asking what kind of monster would do such a thing and it was pulled from the hosting site, but it turned out the modder just enabled the Mideast localization for American versions of the game, to make the streets of NYC more decked out with US flags than they were in the US localization.
So, who’s the monster? The modder for distributing a patch which flipped an internal switch in the game, or the people who put the switch there in the first place?
It would be interesting to know how big the team was and if similar teams existed or still exist in other countries. In Germany, "DEI" is usually part of HR. There has to be a person responsible for it by law. However, these people typically have other responsibilities too.