Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

If what the article says is true, it seems they rolled back about a decade and a half of diversity in tech initiatives. It also speaks to how little power those organizations have.

Since I can remember there have been nonstop “women in tech” clubs to encourage women to advance their career even if it’s not easy. And it’s not easy if you have to take care of a child. The company might have a monthly zoom call and schedule a female senior manager to give a speech about her career. Wonderful.

And then RTO hits. And some of those same senior managers are requiring their teams to commute to an office and sit at a desk for vague, unspecified, or otherwise underjustified reasons.

The result is predictable. People resign. But some people are more likely to leave than others. Single men with no other obligations are less likely to mind leaving at 8:30 and getting back at 6:30. Women may not be able to.

It turns out, those zoom calls were largely useless. It’s not a mindset issue. It’s a labor issue. Women in tech initiatives were tolerated as long as they positioned themselves as mindset or career growth within the company, and didn’t encourage organizing or asking anything of the company. But a truly effective movement would have gave employers pause before mandating RTO.

Companies don’t care about any of that, they care about cheaper labor that comes from a larger hiring pool.

I'm not sure I buy into this super connected WFH and diversity argument.

Folks working to 8:30 are working to 8:30 from home or work, both are going to hit people of different backgrounds differently depending on their personal situation as much as anything else.

It’s not my argument, I am just repeating the results discussed in the article. Perhaps there are unrelated factors, but diversity did decrease after RTO.

Just as an example of how it plays out in practice, commute time is an externality the company just pushes onto employees. If you’re salaried, you aren’t paid for it despite it being required. This is time which could be used for other things. Of course this affects people more if they have responsibilities outside of their job.

My broader point is that these meetings effectively reframed collective problems, where many women (and men) had shared labor interests, into an individual “grindset” issue. Therefore an RTO mandate which should have been a major dispute was never really questioned.

Very simple: where do the kids go to school or daycare?

Unless you're significantly wealthier than your neighbors, most likely the public school for their grade level closest to your home, which you picked in large part for the quality of the schools.

And who is, in the end, the parent usually taking children to school and picking them up, and dashing over to pick them up if they get sick or injured?

The mothers.

For younger children, daycare arrangements were made based on where the primary caregiver (usually, mother) plans to work.

When that plan all of the sudden becomes "compulsory hybrid", you can't just split the kid's time between two daycares - in a lot of places, just getting that first slot was hard and expensive enough.

There's the simple fact that the daycare near your house might not open early enough or stay open late enough to accomodate your commute. Plus, I kind of want to do more with my little kid during the week than get him ready for daycare and get him ready for bed.

These aren't all the reasons that RTO pushes young (and young-ish) women out of the workforce, but are just the first examples that came to my mind.

If it were easier to fall back to part time but stay in tech for a few years, it wouldn't be as big a deal.

"And who is, in the end, the parent usually taking children to school and picking them up, and dashing over to pick them up if they get sick or injured?"

While this is true, this has done more to hurt women than the RTO policy. I grew up in New Jersey. When I was 5 years old I started Kindergarten. The first day of school my father walked with me, to show me where the school was. After that I was on my own. And all of the 5 year olds in my neighborhood were also on their own. We were expected to have enough maturity to get ourselves to school, and we did, everyday. We generally walked together, all the 5 and 6 and 7 and 8 year olds. School was exactly 1 kilometer from my house.

If you're looking for something that puts an undue burden on modern women, it's the modern practice that children cannot get to school on their own. They (the children) still somehow manage to get to school on their own in rural areas and in most countries: most of Europe, all of Latin America, Africa, nearly all of Asia.

We should be clear about where the real burdens are coming from. If we could get back to a situation where children could get to school on their own, the situation would be easier for women.

And obviously, if you expect workers to find a collective solution to their problems then you should also expect parents to find a collective solution to their problems.

If blue collar worker single parents manage to somehow make things work, it's not unreasonable to expect the same from white collar people with much less demanding and strict jobs time wise

[citation needed]

It is very likely that blue collar hiring, firing, promotion, flexibility dynamics are entirely different to tech.

Tech competition might be much stronger compared to whatever competition exists in a very local workshop.

Blue collar workers often also don’t have any parental leave at all and might even be required to work the day after giving birth. Is the argument that because they “make it work” that no group of people should ask for better working conditions?

I don’t think we should look to the worst examples of labor standards to decide what is fair. People with healthcare can “make it work” without healthcare. People who don’t have to work 996 could “make it work” if they had to work Saturdays. Even before OSHA, most factory workers weren’t losing their fingers in meat grinders.

Whataboutism arguments are useless

About as useless as the original comment.

WFH benefits are apparent on their own for a individual. How WFH affects diversity in a specific company maybe a useful exercise , it doesn't change the benefits much.

This is bunk anecdata.

DEI initiatives across all industries are considered luxury goods. They provide no measurable impact the bottom line. Ignoring that, I've yet to find someone who has thought hiring these DEI experts over more engineering or management to be the fiscally intelligent choice.

When money supply shrinks the fat gets cut. The DEI initiatives were excessive levels of fat and in a value-driven economy this stuff gets cut.

This doesnt mean that RTO wasn't used to get people to quit. It's just this anecdata is a thinly disguised political op-ed rather than what most major news has reported for the last 2 years. Correlation is not causation. The majority of the first cuts from 2021-2023 came from these initiatives (and HR in general) as paying someone 250,000 dollars to browbeat people at the company all-hands is neither productive nor fiscally responsible.

You don’t need to agree that DEI hiring is useful to see my point about sponsored women in tech clubs for existing employees. What is important is that for employees in the company who take care of children (many of them women), reframing their collective interests as individual problems essentially guarantees they won’t question leadership decisions. This is despite those decisions making their job more difficult, as evidenced by the fact that many women would rather quit than RTO.

Personally, I am more concerned with the cumulative drop in productivity that will control for all variables including this one. Again though, sponsored clubs for a particular gender are a luxury good. If these initiatives were self-organizing it wouldn't be a problem. However, the implication here is they are not.

On a numbers basis the rules still apply: there are N members of this club. Each are paid an average of X dollars per hour. If the meeting is only an hour a week thats still N x X x 48 annually. Add in a food budget, perhaps bringing in a guest or two once and while. This quickly gets unsustainable as N grows.

The issue I take with this reframing is that it is once again Men vs. Women in this completely fabricated war in tech (and only tech). RTO is a negative for everyone involved. The division here makes it sound like, once again, women suffer more than men for an isolated reason, not considering that men suffer in a different but comparable way. Or they are quitting at a dramatically higher rate over the baseline RTO quit-rate (and "women with children" quit-rate across industries). The actual reason boils down to simple MBA spreadsheet math.

Productivity be damned, RTO makes fiscal sense when you have a 15 year lease on a building you can't get out of. I don't agree with it, but I can see why you'd want warm bodies in seats when you pay 20,000 (or more) a month for your modern-tech cube farm.

Women with children in other industries that have never had these luxuries are clearly doing something that women in tech aren't. The question I have is - what is it? Is the actual solution an economic one whereby we could once again afford to live on a single salary so someone is staying home?

> Again though, sponsored clubs for a particular gender are a luxury good.

I think my point here is that a company-sponsored women in tech club is actually not that expensive and deliberately created to co-opt what would otherwise be a collective interest. It is certainly less expensive than giving concessions to women. That is the calculation. Imagine if women with children had organized and collectively refused RTO. Now you’re looking at either caving or finding replacements, depending on the feasibility of firing them.

> it is Men vs. Women in this completely fabricated war on tech

I agree, it isn’t men vs. women. It is various interest groups vs. management. One of those interest groups happens to be parents who take care of kids. Corporate friendly “glass ceiling” framing only came later to redirect attention away from management.

None of this is to say RTO wasn’t a burden for men either.

> Productivity be damned, RTO makes fiscal sense when you have a 15 year lease on a building you can't get out of. I don't agree with it, but I can see why you'd want warm bodies in seats when you pay 20,000 (or more) a month for your modern-tech cube farm.

Could you explain your thinking this further, please?

In your example the company is paying for accommodation whether it is used or not, it seems to be a sunk cost. The fiscal decision making should hinge purely on what gives the best ROI given that money has already been forsaken.

What you're describing seems to be more aligned to "it makes sense psychologically." A large and very visible commitment has, due to unforseeable reasons, been made partially unnecessary. Following through regardless saves face.

I'm FT WFH, my anecdote is that every time I'm on a call, it is the father who is taking care of the kids in the background.

If we're trying to equalize traditional gender roles, how about getting more fathers home to take care of kids?

Better yet, remove gender completely and let WFH stand on it's own, which it clearly does.

The "E" (environment) portion may sometimes be useful. Specifically, a more efficient or recycling focused approach, if common-sense in nature, may boost internal efficiency. Recycling (item X) means you don't need to buy a new one, means saved costs, means environment karma upvotes.

But it's not karma upvotes that causes company to do this, nor is it that our companies are governed by rabid hyperleft liberals. It's that one particular ibank, Blackrock, is governed by a rabid hyperleft liberal, thus anyone who wants his money, will also hit the "D" and "I" initiatives. And by "his money" I mean "all of our money" which is a massive collection of investments funds that blackrock manages and uses as a kudgel for these social initiatives. That's all to say, hiring XX people of YY skin color may result in ZZ concrete additional dollars of funding or stock price, which under certain circumstances may be a profitable transaction.

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