I am a former hiring manager at Google and we were specifically told by hr that we could hire 2 people on one headcount if one of those people met specific dei criteria and there was a list of races and genders that met the criteria. One of my peer managers grew his org twice as fast as me by only hiring females with engineering degrees. He got promoted shortly after. Within 2 years his entire team was disbanded for being completely ineffective. Google ended up getting sued over this practice and they lost. This is not the only example I have. The worst of all was Eric Schmidt literally saying to us that diversity was "strategically important" as it helped to "increase the talent pool" and "keep salaries competitive." This was never about doing the right thing for employees.

I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.

It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.