Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

It was a gesture for preening on the social networks, and now that the winds have changed, they will be trying to buy attention and approval on social networks through something else.

It is also a good indication that DEI doesn't really make money. If DEI was improving the bottom line measurably, as its proponents promise, capitalists would be loath to scrap it entirely. Possibly they would change the name of the program or try to cover it up somehow, but they would keep it, and the people involved, around.

View on HN

This is what interested me for a long time. The media industry in particular demonstrates very well that DEI content is not only unprofitable; it is net negative to the companies that produce it. The state of the movie industry is such that we have movies that have positive journalist reviews and negative user reviews, yet nobody is watching these movies, and each movie production costs them hundreds of millions. This should have a giant impact on a company that produces such content, yet the company keeps going on producing something that is net negative to it. Obviously, this looks like a push from investors. But why aren't investors interested in seeing more profits?

That is a really interesting question.

I understand why CEOs, boards etc. engage in virtue signaling: once you are rich enough, status becomes more important than extra money, and this is a cheap way how to buy status and get invited to the right parties, where you may even be allowed to recite your own land acknowledgment from a podium.

But investors mostly don't care about status, and quite a lot of investors likely come from countries where DEI was never popular to begin with (Saudi Arabia etc.) I would expect them to push against it.

Perhaps the investors felt that DEI programs would produce benefits in the long run? For all the accusations of Wall Street short-termism, the stock market was very patient with Amazon during its reinvest-all-profit years and the Saudis were very patient with Masayoshi Son's Vision Fund adventures.

> It is also a good indication that DEI doesn't really make money

Can't argue with that, but wanted to point out that this (ostensibly at least) wasn't the point. The point of these types of schemes was always purported to be for some kind of social justice.

You never encountered the idea that having diverse workforce makes the corporation better at doing business?

I saw it quite often.

>If DEI was improving the bottom line measurably, as its proponents promise, capitalists would be loath to scrap it entirely.

This may be true, but if you are going to construct such a sentence you might want to address the fact that the title of this thread is stating that one of the biggest capitalist companies in the world is trying to do just that. The elephant in the room and all that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com