Google defends scrapping AI pledges and DEI goals in all-staff meeting
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The DEI stuff though is gone and isn’t coming back. The concept was well intentioned but, quite ironically, these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior and it was becoming increasingly hard to paint them as anything else.
DAI is going to be one of the first things the next administration brings back, mark my words. Saying it's discriminatory is like saying affirmative action is discriminatory
i’m personally in favor of some limited AA in unis, but if even black people are majority against AA when polled… it’s definitely not coming back. might be that this changes once minority groups realize how much of an impact it was actually having, i think a large segment of people convinced themselves that a lot more of these admissions were by pure merit than is supported by the data.
Guess what!
This and more... You're telling the wrong person to do good in the world xD
Anyway, upvoted because you are of course right
If you cannot restrict yourself to that, you are as bad as those that discriminate without further reflection.
Personally I do take that step back. I would consider myself a violent person if I did not. I look around and I see my peers choosing not to work towards dismantling the systems that privelege themselves and I consider their inaction a form of violence against people who are already struggling. I am not American so I can't speak for the culture there but in my society there is a general acceptance of using collective power to limit the violence of individuals, and even more so when there is such an evident power disparity.
No, it would not be morally superior and it is commendable if you do take a step back. But to remove discrimination you have to leave others to make their choice too.
> I consider their inaction a form of violence against people who are already struggling.
To help people in need, you do not have to put them in groups first. This grouping is already discrimination. I would say literally, but the term is a bit overused. But the good thing is that you never need discrimination to alleviate injustices.
Any argument for social security policies and everything that remotely fits under that umbrella does not need discrimination. In fact it would work much better without it or using discrimination as a justification. It even undermines the argument for it.
I don't "put" them in groups. I recognise that we are all put into groups by the systemic nature of society. I also recognise the active grouping of others who feel that they are disadvantaged and try to listen to various advocacy groups who again and again ask for me to "use my privilege" to help. The idea of choosing not to do that but rather to respond with "your sense of Otherness is constructed, just let it go and don't worry about this group or that group" would feel both cruel and absurd.
> Any argument for social security policies and everything that remotely fits under that umbrella does not need discrimination.
Again you're the one framing this as discrimination. Something I would advocate for in my workplace is bias training, where people can learn to spot unconscious biases in themselves and can learn about the effects of systemic inequality on the individual and societal levels. I think it would be difficult to argue that such actions are "discriminatory."
I understand that the conversation is about specific DEI legislation and I have to admit that I am not American and am not familiar with the minutia of what was enacted there. But I am specifically responding to the idea that any action taken to combat implicit discrimination will lead to explicit discrimination.
There's the example of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra which I always think back on. They opened up to allow women to join but after some years no woman had managed to get a position on merit. Eventually a blind audition was introduced and the split quickly became reflective of broader societal demographics. To my mind it feels like many people here are jumping to say that blind auditions are discriminatory because they im some way disadvantaged the white men who "looked like" professional musicians. In some way that is true but it feels like such a warped reading of reality to me that I struggle to advocate for my own views in the face of it.
One simple thing we do at my company is to scrub things like names from applications, so that John Smith doesn't get preference to Aphiwe Mvala because of the ease/familiarity of the name. Would I advocate for mandating that practice in public jobs? Most certainly, I don't see why not, especially if I see the outright discrimination scandals such as [0] that can result from overly homogeneous institutions. Is the argument really that John is discriminated against with this policy?
0: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/O-9-2022-00002...
I can only hope the dems are smart enough to drop DEI for good, I don't think Trump is healthy for the US.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/656636/democrats-favor-party-mo...
The good news on the left side though that I don't think the next candidate could be worse than Kamala Harris.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here, but even if so: This phrasing is too close to just spreading a pro-Trump lie outright.
Better to say that companies are avoiding these policies because a wannabe dictator has thrown a hissy fit about them while CCing everyone on the email.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Kershaw#%22Working_Towards...
Wouldn’t interpreting the EO as setting limits on the private sector be government overreach?
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/maryland-ag-dei-presi...
It seems like this part is the relevant part:
> [The executive order] also instructs the U.S. attorney general to create a plan that would deter the private sector from continuing DEI programs.
So while it is not technically illegal yet, seems like they are getting ahead of that issue before it may arise based on pretty strong signaling that it will
I think the programs basically did nothing. They were ineffective. Yet, that made a lot of people really angry.
> these programs turned into a hub of biased discriminatory behavior
Similarly, individual companies may have fumbled DEI initiatives, but years on, I think it will have had a (small) positive impact.
Do you see it differently?
Tiger Woods is probably the only professional golfer that the average person knows by name.
I'd also argue that Venus and Serena Williams were a prerequisite to Coco Gauff. That's the point of representation: to make it easier for the meritocracy to work by creating a path for talent that might otherwise not consider a field (or sport, in this case). In many cases with minorities, what we see are extraordinary individuals who are able to shatter these biases and be pathmakers for others to follow. Jeremy Lin has also talked a lot about his experiences with racism all along his journey to the NBA (racism and prejudice is just a form of exclusion).
But it's ironic, right? Professional sports is a meritocracy that for decades excluded other non-white races from participating. The only reason we can call it a merit based system today is because there were strong efforts by individuals and organizations throughout the 20th century to make it inclusive, you know, the "I" in "DEI". You cannot have a functional meritocracy if individuals are being excluded from participating.
There's this assumption that certain races or genders are just better at coding or engineering or finance or math and that these fields are already merit based. Isn't it more likely that these fields still suffer greatly from the same type of prejudiced exclusion that professional sports suffered from and that "non-conforming" talent is being excluded at the candidate prospecting phase?
I’m sorry, you don’t get to argue that modern sports aren’t a true meritocracy because of policies that existed 80 years ago. You’re also putting too much into the selection process, implying that there’s active efforts to exclude, for example, blacks from hockey. I’d argue it’s more a result of cultural preferences - basketball and football see much higher participation and enthusiasm.
It might behoove you to take a quick recap of the history of racism (exclusion) in sports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Robinson#Negro_leagues_...
Modern sports at the coaching level is a more recent shift to meritocracy through a concerted effort to include minority candidates in the hiring process. It is only a meritocracy today because of extraordinary individuals like Jackie Robinson breaking the barriers and decades of integration.
> ...there’s active efforts to exclude, for example, blacks from hockey.
Tiger Woods would not be Tiger Woods had his father not had access to Navy golf courses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Woods#Early_life_and_ama...
Is there a specific reason why Carribean islands produce so many great baseball players and not so many hockey players? Think about that.
Jeremy Lin's story is also an interesting one because he talks a lot about how many schools, coaches, and scouts were prejudiced against Asian basketball players. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Lin#College_career
Isn’t this the opposite of DEI then? There’s “momentum” in sports - kids want to play what their heroes play, Dominicans have Dominican baseball heroes and play baseball. There’s nothing DEI about that.
The process is self-selecting because it is not merit based; it is based on access and economic factors. It's not that black Americans or Hispanic Americans have no talent for hockey, it's that they have no access so the sport is "self-selecting" wealthier, white athletes who have access and the economics to start and sustain the sport from a young age. To make this a meritocracy, it requires inclusion (I'm not advocating for this, but simply as a thought experiment). Imagine if every community had plenty of free ice rinks on the same order as basketball courts. Do you think the racial composition of the sport of hockey would remain the same?
Tiger Woods would not be Tiger Woods if his dad didn't have access to Navy golf courses.
If you think the reason we don't see many Dominican hockey players is because they have no talent for the sport and not because of access, then well, I don't think this conversation is of any use; you already have it in your mind that because professional hockey is predominantly white, only white players have the merit or talent for the sport.
If you don't have access, it is not a meritocracy. That is the intent of DEI: to improve access and enable meritocracy.
The practice of DEI at any individual org is a different story.
I think you’re running into resistance because of this stance.
You’re talking about an optimized meritocracy or a meritocracy at one level of abstraction in which raw talent is able to be manifested due to optimal (or at least good enough) access. This sort of definition might fly in certain academic circles, but it doesn’t fly outside of those circles.
For most folks, “meritocracy”, by which people are selected based on ability, refers to actualized talent rather than theoretical talent. In your case of Dominican ice hockey players, I think most people think that their absence from the NHL does not compromise whatever meritocracy the NHL is (it has other issues), rather it’s merely that most/all Dominican ice hockey talent hasn’t been actualized to a point that it can be professionally competitive.
Bringing this back to DEI, improving access doesn’t really “enable meritocracy”, rather it just makes a meritocracy utilize its available resources more efficiently.
Also, a side note about the failings of DEI discussions outside of academic circles…
Individuals (e.g., NHL team owners) have a great deal of agency in ensuring that the players on their team are more or less chosen by meritocratic standards. These same individuals have much less agency in actualizing ice hockey talent in every place in the world (massive undertaking). As such, they may bristle when their system is accused of being non-meritocratic or non-inclusive because of societal issues that they don’t really have any or much agency to change.
Don’t get me wrong… discussions of underutilized talent are absolutely fascinating. The US in particular is absolutely flooded with underutilized talent, and there have been times in my life when I’ve been able to move the needle in certain organizations about how they tapped into that underutilized talent.
That said, labeling people or orgs as “racist” or “non-meritocratic” just doesn’t fly when the issue is structural rather than something that they actually have direct control of.
The concept of using discrimination against discrimination wasn't even new, but it was never successful. Quite analogous to violence for that matter.
All in all it was a vanity project and it destroyed trust in academia and the press that defended such initiatives, pushed for censorship and tried to dictate language rules. I would argue that the political costs were quite immense and the effects still persist today given the shift towards more right leaning parties throughout the western world.
> DEI created a lot of bad blood and even more prejudices than before.
You’d probably have to adjust for socioeconomic level etc. It’s no good if all the hires in the low paying jobs are one type of people.
I don’t think it’s impossible to tell even if “99%” is hyperbole.
At work? I doubt that. Only for a job available to anyone and chosen by everyone. I don't think there's any jobs even roughly like that.
People get jobs and then their social and professional network now has someone who works at $BIGCO. Now folks can see themselves there and apply for openings, which could accelerate this effect. Now you can see minorities hired on merit, showing up in clusters.
> I don’t think it’s impossible to tell even if “99%” is hyperbole.
I dunno - it just seems like "majority ethnicity implies merit, minority implies DEI" to me.
I gather you assume any person of color or female hire is a “DEI” hire and by that you mean someone who isn’t qualified. This assumption is quite stupid.
People who say they can tell the percentage of DEI hires on sight—up to two significant digits from a data set, like "99%"—imagine that the past was a meritocracy, because they never grew past these simple stories to encourage children to pursue science.
Einstein moved to the US well after he became a famous scientist. The University of Zurich, where he got his degree, has been open to women since the mid 19th century.
The Ivy League first started admitting women in 1870 (Cornell). The rest, however, were far later.
The US had a "Jewish quota" to limit the number of Jews allowed in universities, so "white" Jews experienced more discrimination than white Christians. However, racial segregation between white and black people was legal until 1954-1964, so white Jews generally experienced less discrimination compared to black people.
If Germany and the US wasn't so racist, science would have advanced further than it is today. Famous Jewish scientists (and science communicators) proved that white supremacy was wrong, not right.
Perhaps. And yet your initial statement would assume that you would want to discriminate against them.
This is more or less exactly what I believe DEI policies would lead to. There are enough people that believe Jews are advantaged but the opposite is mostly true. Still under the metrics DEI generally proposes they would need to be discriminated against.
This is why having the premise to treat everyone equally is the better solution than what DEI proposes. And criticism of DEI is not white supremacy.
idk what to tell you, the way it plays out in practice is preferential on the basis of race. maybe that’s okay, but that is absolutely what it means
have a good one, maybe spend a little less time on the news
We live in a society where no one calls a wholly unqualified moron like Hegseth a “DEI hire” but people referred to Karine Jean-Pierre as such.
1. in practice, does “DEI”/AA typically mean using race to influence hiring decisions? i think the answer is unequivocally yes, not taking a position on the merit of doing so.
2. Has “DEI” become some sort of boogeyman that is almost equivalent to communism of a past era? Yes, I agree with you - it has really accelerated in the past year and people are using it in ways that don’t even make any sense or blaming it for things that clearly are unrelated.
But I never made a claim of the 2nd form. Hegseth is obviously a nepo hire, most plum book positions in general are nepo hires.
So, yes, there is a correction and this correction is based on race because this is the correct variable to de-bias the evaluation. But does it mean "preferential"? The point is to correct the evaluation such that this evaluation is not preferential and is neutral with respect to the race.
We have little data from jobs for various reasons - but if we look at the data from universities, the “correction” is clearly far in excess of any bias by race against same score candidates, which is why URM admits typically have significantly lower scores. It is only a correction if you are saying that it is also correcting for a lot more upstream stuff that might be causing the divergence in scores. There might be merit to the claim but it does also mean that the end result is you are picking worse candidates “on paper” on the basis of their skin color.
You were saying "maybe that’s okay, but that is absolutely what it means". Now you are saying that DEI/AA is not preferential, some applications of it are.
> but if we look at the data from universities, the “correction” is clearly far in excess of any bias by race against same score candidates
You cannot easily compare such numbers, and in this case, "clearly far in excess" is just totally subjective. This is typically where biases and cognitive dissonance are the most easy to creep in.
> There might be merit to the claim but it does also mean that the end result is you are picking worse candidates “on paper” on the basis of their skin color.
But if you don't apply any correction, you are picking worse candidates "on paper" on the basis of their skin color.
That the fundamental flaw of people who are so vocal about the over-correction of DEI/AA: they care a lot about over-correcting but don't seem to care that much about under-correcting. Over-correcting is a big injustice, under-correcting is just something that may happen, hey, what can you do, right?
Let me give you a scenario. It's the 1940's, a company has a policy that privileges white applicants. Someone says, "let's remove this policy, and tell the company they have to treat all applicants easily." Someone else replies, "no, because if this company was told they had to treat everyone equally and not privilege white people they would discriminate against white people. I have many studies proving this!"
Does that pass the smell test? A company that's intentionally trying to privilege group X is suddenly going to discriminate against group X if they're told they have to treat everyone equally?
It is also worth mentioning that in real life, we apply such policies. If I remember correctly, black people are more prone to prostate cancer, and therefore there are policies that "discriminate": the process for cancer screening is different between black and white people. Does it mean it is racist? Does it mean it is unfair?
I think the difference is that I focus on equality of opportunity while you focus on equality of outcome. You are targeting "when looking at the process, I want to see everyone treated the same". Others may target "when looking at the opportunities, I want to see everyone with the same merit having the same probabilities of success". It reminds me of the famous cartoon of people wanting to watch a football game over a fence. The drawing illustrates that "treating everyone the same" without considering that not everyone starts from the same situation is stupid.
I doubt that studies in this field are less biased for that matter but they certainly lack hard substantial data.
You yourself are free to take a step back for someone you deem disadvantaged. If you demand this from others, you are just as plainly discriminating. I would argue that you overstep your bounds.
Let's approach the problem theoretically. Let's imagine a distant planet where, by construction of our thought experiment, there are 2 groups, A and B, and when evaluated for a job position, people of group A are scored as "their real score plus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1" and people of group B are scored as "their real score minus a random value sampled from a gaussian centered on 1".
In this world, without correction, just using the evaluated score, there is discrimination: for the same merit (or sometimes even when they merit it more), people of group B will usually not be chosen when competing with a person of group A.
In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.
Now, we can come back to our reality. You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think. Great. I'm saying that these biases exist or are bigger than what you think. Your position is not better than mine.
As for the "overstep your bounds", what you are basically saying is that "if you think there is something unfair, it does not count, I'm the only one allowed to decide what is fair or unfair". I'm pretty sure that it exists things that you find unfair and that you don't accept when you are the victim of the unfair situation. And I'm pretty sure that you can, for each case, find individuals that will argue that they don't find it unfair. In this case, be honest, will you really say "I think you are treating me unfairly, but if you think it's not the case, I cannot demand you to change anything or force anything to get retribution, because it will be overstepping my bounds"?
No, that is not true, you have changed the statement. The statement was "let's not apply discrimination". You just reframe your discrimination as something different, in this case a "correction".
> In this world, the corrected evaluation score is not biased anymore, even despite the fact that the correction is based on which group they belong to.
Wrong, you do not "correct" discrimination and instead argue to implement it.
> You are saying that these biases don't exist, or are smaller than what I think.
I did no such thing. You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that. You are free to take a step back and give your advantages up for others. That is very commendable and perhaps your deeds bring about the corrected world in your example.
> Your position is not better than mine.
I don't argue anything like that. I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.
Even with applying groups in your hypothetical example you apply discrimination, a group as an abstract representation of the individual. Your whole argument cannot stand on its own without discrimination and the reasoning is inherently circular.
> if you think there is something unfair, it does not count
Again, I am saying nothing like that. I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies. But I don't argue about fairness or what someone deserves and I cannot judge who is up for a bigger part of the pie in the contrast to someone other. And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".
Please don't be so aggressive. I did not take your statement, I was just saying that in the situation where there is a need of a correction, not applying the correction is also a justification for discrimination.
The question is "do we need a correction", and it is a very tricky question, and people who jump on "of course no" usually are just careless and don't realise that they put themselves as "the judge who decide what is fair and what is not", as much as the person who says "yes it needs a correction".
> You set yourself up to be the judge of which discrimination is justified. I said you are not equipped to do that.
My point is that if you judge that it does not need a correction, then you are doing exactly the same as me: you judge which discrimination is justified.
> I just said that you cannot be the judge to determine who deserves discrimination.
But that's exactly my point: if you just say "obviously there is no need for correction, obviously the default value is neutral", you are judging that the needed correction is 0. How is that not as bad as me if I judge that the needed correction is 1.
> I fully support relieves to the poor, financial support for education and several sensible policies.
But you are therefore discriminating: you give advantages to the poor that you don't give to the rich. How is that different?
> And I believe neither are you or some alleged "discrimination experts".
But I haven't said that I support any concrete DEI/AA. For all you know, I'm opposed to all the DEI/AA you have in mind, and just support the same policies as you about the poor and the sensible policies.
I think that in fact we are exactly the same. All I'm saying is that everyone, including you, end up applying "corrections" to reach fairness (decided by them or not, it does not matter). And that the choice "the correction should be 0" is as much a "choice of discriminating to a given level" than the choice "the correction should be 1".
“Enjoyed” is not the right word either. It’s better explained by stating the tech industry is dominated by certain demographics because that’s just how it is, and DEI initiatives give preferential treatment to those who are not in those demographics, in an attempt to increase diversity, and give equitable opportunities, and make people feel included.
Bigots have used that one forever, defining the current state of affairs as natural and any attempt to improve things as <insert loaded term of the time here>.
Yeah, you found a different synonym.
> “It’s better explained by stating the tech industry is dominated by certain demographics because that’s just how it is”
For the last 500 years white men have had preferential treatment when it came to hiring. Indeed a stronger word than “enjoyed” is merited. But you think using “enjoyed” is too strong a word to use to describe such a state of affairs?
Saving others a click: it's an n=1
I'm not asking for data points to do a study into individual companies applying their policies and compiling anecdotal results to do statistical or qualitative tests on all by myself in spare time when there's people being paid to do this properly. I was wondering if someone knew if the evidence has already been compiled and we know the overall effect, rather than stories which are surely plenty on both sides (assuming we agree that racism and other biases are not legitimate selection reasons, thus there being a reason to push against them). The question is: where is the balance? What policy creates the greatest median happiness in the population, all else being equal? This isn't trivial to determine, I can't do that by myself in an afternoon based on a few news reports of individual cases
The last corporate DEI initiative I was pulled into was so blatantly discriminatory that many of us were scrambling to remove ourselves from hiring roles as quickly as possible.
One of the few times I’ve been speechless in a meeting was when someone proudly told us they had just rejected a perfect candidate for the role because they were a man and not a minority, and we “had enough of those”. This was followed by a debate about whether Asians qualified as a minority in the context of a tech company.
I started working on my exit from that company as quickly as possible. These were ex-FAANG executives but they had been out of FAANG long enough that they likely came up with these ideas on their own, I think.
To be honest, I’ve been very hesitant to even talk about that situation in person because it’s such a minefield.
This is obviously a lie. Google’s more senior leaders had (and probably still have) quotas for hiring and promotions. If you didn’t hit quotas, not only did you face intense pressure to artificially skew things when HR reviewed numbers, but your performance (and compensation) would also be affected. Many people have privately talked about this, but most are afraid to speak up, due to the aggression of the progressive employees and the official DEI machine (from HR).
I wonder if Sundar will be brave enough to admit fault in how they handled the past, instead of just pretending nothing is changing. I am reminded of James Damore’s situation - he discussed something controversial in a polite way, with sources backing up his ideas, but was viciously attacked inside Google and also outside. News media regularly misrepresented what he said. His firing was unfair. That was just one example of how the company operated all this time. If that’s changing, they should own up to it.
James was a below average engineer who wanted the special treatment of his daddy’s generation.
Seems like his firing was completely justified. But is also a knock against Google for hiring him in the first place.
What's been amazing to me is how skin-deep the stated values across the tech industry were. Virtually every executive is behaving in ways they would fire their employees for just a few months ago. The executives have no moral compass as human beings. I believed this to be the case before, since the people I've interacted with who rose that high did so by being psychopaths, but what's amazing is how on display it is.
I don't mind the before or the after so much as the very, very transparent about-face.
;-)
For example, Larry and Sergei didn't seem like psychopaths. Neither did Omar Bose. Many other founders aren't.
Ditto for most processes with extreme selective pressures (e.g. most senator, PoTUS, many elite academics, elite law firm partner, etc.). People win by optimizing to the process. People with ethics, or who don't cheat, don't win. There are exceptions, but they're in the minority. For example, if you are an extreme genius or stumble on a major breakthrough, in science, and don't have it stolen by a psychopath.
You got downvoted, so I'll provide two references:
* Power by Pfeffer
* Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Very different takes, but same general conclusion. Both are respected academics at Stanford and NYU, respectively, with de Mesquita being far more respected, and an excellent read. Power is a bit less so
The whole "Don't be evil" brouhaha several years ago didn't clue people in? It was marketing fluff from the beginning but it should have been obvious even to the most oblivious that it was marketing fluff by the time it was removed.
That's a deep problem. Checks-and-balances are hard, and Google had none. Ergo, it went from good to evil.
The final two paragraphs of the article are telling:
The third-most-popular question employees asked was why the AI summaries were so bad.
“The AI summaries of questions on Ask are terrible. Can we go back to answering the questions people actually asked?” it read.
I thought summarization was a task AI was considered good at. If their own tech sucks at this, what makes us think it's safe to use in the context of war?
Makes sense
I found this article was a good explanation why this isn’t the case:
https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actu...
TLDR: it all comes back to the same principle: LLMs are predicting words based on their training. Which means they are not actually summarizing ideas from documents (or whatever other task we give them).
> what makes us think it's safe to use in the context of war?
Those in charge probably found that it performs on par but without paid time off or medical bills
Frankly, I hadn't put this together yet until thinking on your comment. This is hecking scary if the country I live in ends up in a war now
Summarization is universally disappointing when it tries to reduce a lot of different pieces of information (like answers to a lot of different questions) into a much smaller number of bullet points.
It’s simply not possible to compress a lot of disparate pieces of information into a much smaller set of sentences.
Actually relying on it to accurately summarize many points, it's completely useless. We have it enabled in our meetings and it's hilariously bad at summarizing even the simplest and shortest of meetings.
> Parker said that, as a federal contractor, the company has been reviewing all of its programs and initiatives in response to Donald Trump’s executive orders that direct federal agencies and contractors to dismantle DEI work.
And finally how should this be funded? Should people who immigrated or whose families immigrated to America after slavery was abolished be taxed also?
And yes, everyone would indirectly be taxed for slavery reparations.
For some reason, they think DEI means some unqualified woman or minority is taking the position over someone more qualified. That is not the case.
DEI was created because corporate leadership structures were "the good old boys club" where less qualified people were hired because they knew someone or were related to someone in the company over a more qualified candidate.
Still today, qualified job candidates do not get calls back because their name sounds foreign. [1, 2]
There are many reasons why qualified candidates cannot even get into the interview process.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-... [2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/02/23/516823230...
I.e. we can demonstrate that the scale is unfair, but we can't measure exactly how. The results of the bias are apparent, but the bias itself is unobservable. But when we put a thumb on it, that's highly observable, and we know the thumb doesn't know exactly whom to prefer over whom. You can't possibly expect humans to not revolt against that.
More practically speaking: Yes, the loud assholes focus on unqualified people theoretically being hired, but even if you dismiss them, there are still a bunch of people who won't be able to ignore the fact that, while DEI will cause the best candidate to sometimes be hired when they otherwise wouldn't, it intuitively causes the still-qualified-but-not-as-qualified candidate to be hired at least as often. Additionally, being denied by human bias (unconscious bias, charitably) is less angering than being denied by policy.
The people that are reimplementing Jim Crow apartheid in America under the guise of protecting us from diversity, equity, and inclusion are the same people who have been actively undermining the education system in America, from banning accepted science such as evolution to clever extortion schemes diverting collective funds from public education to private religious/ideological indoctrination. As part of the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion from American society, Trump has mandated that schools teach a false version of American history that forbids acknowledging that the USA has ever done racist things. They are currently working to completely eliminate the Department of Education.
Meanwhile, in between threatening to arrest congresspeople, commentators, and journalists for clear first-amendment-protected speech and retweeting literal white supremacist propaganda, Elon Musk is guiding his strike team of blackhats and/or neonazis to completely purge the government of patriotic workers and destroy its ability to do anything but wage offensive wars and enforce the radical puritanical mores of millenarian "Christian" sects. The American people (and indeed, citizens of the developed world) currently exist in a hyperreality that requires self-deprivation to clear the fog of algorithmic far-right radicalization employed by our media companies social and traditional. We suck at that. The history of countries in analogous situations is bleak: we are rapidly approaching moral oblivion. There is not a human in this world who will remain unscathed by the devastation we unleash.
Yet, they hopped on the layoff train this time around with a particularly nasty twist. [1]
Perhaps they were afraid they'd need to be sociopathic in at least one regard, lest they buck the wider ethos lately. Facebook for example, offered generous severance packages but threw DEI in the trash immediately. [2]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/business/dei-programs-ini...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-performance-based-...
[2] https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/laid-off-meta-employees-blast...
As DEI sees itself as better to determine who needs discrimination, so does Microsoft leadership. It is not much more complicated than that and fits the picture. A company with a long history of policies to not enable people to be more independent.
In their view, these employees don't truly deserve their positions.
How do they do it? Just treat it like a job and do whatever the bag full of money demands? Or do they double-think like in 1984 and convince themselves that they themselves also believe it?
The answer is the same, some people just say what they think will give them the most power and advantages. If denying gay rights gives them votes? "Of course they shouldn't have any!" Wait, no, gay rights give votes?? "Oh, yeah anyone who doesn't give them rights is the worst!"
Almost all leaders are like that in a large enough population, since if you say what people want to hear you tend to bubble upwards.
https://youtu.be/4AzLrn5JVIo?si=bYtAbriIbp0AVrxP
Obama was adamant that he did not support legislation to legalize gay marriage. When SCOTUS legalized it he was caught off guard but he and other Democrats were able to then fully embrace the issue. The nation’s view on the topic rapidly changed and now it is a nonissue for most Republicans.
Is say the swift boat thing and the flip flop accusations are what hurt him
Also many Republicans are still very anti gay marriage
Gay marriage is a virtual nonissue with Republican voters. They didn’t run on repealing it this past election cycle. They may care about it but not enough to run on the issue. DEI is the new fear mongering b.s. for the idiots.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/may/11/barack-oba...
According to the article he publicly held a variety of positions on the topic over the years. Apparently you can find a quote of his to fit whatever narrative one wants but they didn’t push for federal legislation on the isssue in 2009.
The book is descriptive - describing the ethical norms in large corporations, but it doesn't make a value judgement on whether those norms are good or bad.
A fascinating read of you're curious about the structural reasons for this sort of behavior. Really interesting to see how people act by different ethical codes inside vs outside of work.
It's not ideal, but also not likely to change. Understanding the structural reasons why it is the way it is has helped me to be less surprised / angry by things like this which I can't change.