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Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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