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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

What's really revealing is the herd mentality the whole tech industry seems to have: in 2020, everyone had to have a (specialized) DEI team, now they are (apparently) no longer needed, although not much has really changed. Same with hiring like there was no tomorrow a few years ago, and now layoffs. Same with encouraging remote working during the pandemic, and now trying to push through return to office mandates, no matter if it makes sense (for the individual, for the team or for the company) or not. Wonder what's next?

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Wasn't DEI being forced into corporate America by the government and by large funds like BlackRock and such?

It depends, yes ESG was pushing these agendas, but I’m not sure how much influence blackrock and vanguard have in the tech sector.

Although it seems many in the tech sector agreed with ESG and implemented it anyway.

Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively own almost 20% of MSFT shares so they probably had a very large influence.

https://www.techopedia.com/largest-microsoft-shareholders

No one can speak on behalf of all corporate America, but I didn't see that to be the case at all in tech.

Maybe to an extent, but I'm pretty sure they willingly adopted the garb of this ideology because it aligned with a vocal portion of their workforce, so the ideology could be used as a substitute for financial compensation. Basically a free way to make workers happier without having to pay them more.

Correct.

What has changed is the supply of developers/tech-people and their price tag.

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.

DEI is a nice thing to wave at the face of prospective new hires when you're competing for talent to show how much you care about them at the workplace, but if you're not struggling to hire talent, maybe you can only focus on the "you have a chance to pay rent" aspect of your workplace.

The same goes for tech-fads like blockchain, VR, and AI.

It was politically favourable to have a progressive-leaning appearance during the current US administration. They're expecting for Trump and the alt-right to win this election, and they're adapting to the new landscape. Luckily for them it will be easier to align to their actual values this time around /s.

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...

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