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When a viz-minority hire sucks, it's clearly DEI's fault, we shout from the rooftops.
When a non-minority hire sucks, crickets.
None of you folks are ever 'afraid of talking about it', because any time this subject comes up, we see a full broadsides of tenuous, frequently mask-off racist nonsense.
Meanwhile, the champions leading the fight against the DEI boogieman have a truly amazing knack for both being, and appointing some of the most ignorant, least qualified individuals to ever hold positions of power... And are now speed-running their way through breaking everything.
Before DEI, minorities were hired because they're actually competent. Now they're there because of who they are and not what they can do.
Things need to get worse before they get better.
The founder of TripleByte observed how companies lied about their hiring from the outside: https://x.com/jesslivingston/status/1884652626467303560
You see, it doesn't add up, because usually when a company breaks the law so blatantly, it does so in crafty, shady ways intended to make more money, not in an attempt to create diversity that does nothing for the bottom line while also threatening the very existence of the firm.
But let's say that the top management in your org have made a public commitment to "increase representation of underrepresented groups". The managers in that org are then required, by company policy, to have their own goals be "aligned" with it, so they write something similar. What do you think then happens when it comes to interviews and hiring decisions?
You can have better parental leave and part-time work policies. Or you can open an office in a region with different racial demographics. Or you can send recruiters to events like Grace Hopper. The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.
So what they are going to do is the only thing that they actually have the power to do, which is to favor candidates that, if hired, will check off the right boxes as far as "team diversity" goes on their upcoming mid-year review.
2. In the private sector, white men are not disadvantaged. Give me a fucking break man.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/01/12/fifth-circuit-vac...
That's an absurd lie. People convicted of sex crimes shouldn't have jobs with children. Foreign nationals shouldn't have top security or intelligence jobs. People with a record of substance abuse shouldn't operate heavy machinery. And so on an so forth... I'm boring myself with how obvious this all is.
And maybe, just maybe, extremely powerful jobs that have an outsized influence on our society shouldn't only be offered to straight white men. It's clearly not as obvious of an argument as my previous examples, but it's not absurd either.
Harvard denied access to Jews for “personality flaws” in the early 1900s, and similarly denied Asians for “personality” reasons up until a couple years ago when the Supreme Court finally declared that illegal.
Racism is still racism, even if you claim to be “correcting” some imagined harm through your racism
The reality is there are more non-white, qualified people than you could possibly hire. The world is overflowing with them.
So if your board is 100% white men, that's really fucking weird. How did that happen?
The elephant in the room here is that white men are SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to be hired due to the color of their skin. Look at Trump's current admin - full of white men who aren't qualified, who are alcoholics, who are patently stupid, and on and on. But if you look at research, too, just having a white name is enough to increase your chance of being hired by 50%.
It's a good thing this is something that is not happening, then.
What's happening is you are assuming that black individuals or homosexuals finding success must have been handed something. Which is, obviously, prejudiced. The lede you're burying is that those people were hired because they're qualified.
If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups (unless you are so racist as to believe they can’t compete on merit)
Where are these mandatory affirmative action policies anywhere?
DEI mostly revolves around programs for outreach, employee resource groups, statements of diversity considerations for research, that kind of thing. The idea that DEI means you have quotas for how many black people you have to hire is just GOP nonsense.
> If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups
I mean, not necessarily. Historically, and currently, you're going to end up with a disproportionate amount of white people. Because that's just how the US works - white people are incredibly advantaged so naturally they're going to get more, and better, jobs, in relation to their level of qualification.
Naturally over the past ~80 years it's gotten better. We don't explicitly say "we don't hire black engineers" anymore, so that's great. But you'd be a fool to think this systemic racism just vanishes overnight.
It will takes hundreds, yes hundreds, of years before it is completely eradicated. We live in the shadow of the systems and institutions of our grandparents. Who, might I add, are still alive and still making decisions.
Are you saying that (straight) (white) (men) have not had (nor continue to enjoy) unfair advantages in our society? And is that not an injustice?
Saying "racism is bad" is correct but only the first step. Step two is recognizing the accumulated results of long-standing historical (and continuing, frankly) discrimination against minority groups and working to right that injustice.
But would like to hear your perspective.
It sounds like you actually haven't applied to jobs in the last 10 years or have been applying to some seriously messed up places.