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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Good. DEI is a hangover from 2020 that, aside from buying some cheap publicity points, didn't do anything for anyone (except the DEI activists themselves).

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.

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> 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.

That's one of the best theological arguments I've seen in some time.

Plus it was always illogical to tell the most successful corporations that DEI is essential to become one of the most successful corporations and that they aren't doing DEI right.

Maybe there's more to having values than competitive advantage. Just a thought.

What values? Those that say that a company should strive to achive certain ratio of black and white employees, no matter their real competencies?

For the neoliberal mind, values are just vibes.

to say that a company should be aware of brospeak in their job postings if they want to have women applying for jobs. to say that a company shouldn't just rely on internal referrals if they want to diversify teams.

your suggestion that diverse hiring equals less competent hiring is offensive.

"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.

where are your facts to back this up then?

Facts to back what up, exactly?

GP said two statements: 1) the Earth revolves around the Sun and 2) Truth > Conformism

You are asking to facts about that?

I guess the idea is that average black worker is just as good as white worker, so why do you have 3 black workers and 50 white workers?

From what I have seen at work, gender or color of the skin has very little to do with how good worker someone is.

I agree with you that gender or color of the skin has nothing to do with how well can someone write code. Both gender nor skin color should not be any factor in hiring.

> so why do you have 3 black workers and 50 white workers?

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.

Any maybe the types of DEI initiatives promoted and implemented over the last few are worse for actually achieving DEI. Just a thought

The Amish have a very strong set of values, but don't expect the next Google to come from them.

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.

A strict ordering of candidates by merit quantified however you please followed by selection of top n candidates ought to on average look exactly like candidate pool however since we are garbage at ranking people it often looks like the existing powers that be in culture gender and color.

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.

That makes sense, you are just the right amount of racist when hiring

No what it means is that instead of hiring bob's friend another white dude and then james that guys best bud you pull some resumes and do some interviews in hopes of not missing out on qualified people.

Issues with nepotism aside, I bet hiring on candidate merit (blind) would require not flexing your racism. You're willing to discard candidates that don't meet the skin color you prefer, that's some heavy stuff.

There is no blind hiring or objective measurement of merit in most jobs just a biased subjective affair easily given to pre-judgment.

"DEI provides impetus..."

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.

DEI in America looks like happy little video trainings about the importance of diversity, a poster, and a person who talks to higher up folks about the importance of hiring qualified candidates of all stripes. It is mostly a soft push in reality in the direction of diversity.

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.

> Notably, the most important competitors of US businesses in East Asia don't even pretend to care about diversity, and they thrive.

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?

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