Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts
theverge.com
theverge.com
Python Software Foundation telling the NSF they had too many strings attached to their money is another interesting spotlight on the current situation.
It would be stupid not to kowtow to the current admin given how much business Microsoft does with the US government. The pendulum will swing back, guarantee it.
Unless they find a way to cut the line making it a unconstrained projectile.
The efficacy of current DEI efforts is debatable, but the need should be obvious.
No, it just assumes it was more of a meritocracy than actively hiring based on irrelevant guiding principles like counter-balancing historical wrongs.
A blind process would both be neutral to the ideology that caused the wrongs (racism and such bias) and based on far more meritocracy.
no one really liked those sorts of questions, always had to game it or make BS up. but on a personal level definitely furthers my desire to mot want to come out at work as a trans person
> What impact did your actions have in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive Microsoft?
What does this even mean? How do I show I did this? If I don’t interpret the meaning of this question correctly, do I fail the test and end up some HR watchlist? If I don’t succeed at whatever this is going for, will I not promote?
As an engineer, you needed to have an answer to that question or else you could not be promoted (at least in some parts of the org chart).
It was a box that your skip levels needed to see checked in order to approve promotions. My lead told me as much in exactly those words.
We wanted leader to be empathetic and respectful.
Hypothetically: Substitute Microsoft for a company with “zero downtime” as one of their company values.
Now imagine you were asked “What impact did your actions have in contributing to zero downtime at Hostingsoft?”
That wouldn’t be a controversial question.
Why are we putting questions that could very easily elicit a political reaction into corporate yearly performance reviews?
There are also optional and non-optional hiring trainings that address these kinds of topics which you can do. I was a hiring manager for a while so I also spent some time doing some of these optional things to improve my chances of building a diverse team. This mostly included helping with sourcing candidates and a few times meant speaking up when I could see that identity biases were being used in evaluations.
But often just simple things are all you need. For example, when picking a group dinner destination making sure various culinary requirements are accounted for (either cultural or dietary) or finding team building activities that are inclusive.
I never once had an issue finding some of this to put on these perf reviews. Most of this is just under the category of being a good human who respects and values others.
I prefer my yearly company expectations to be quantifiable with clear metrics.
And instead this is the kind of squishy question that eludes any kind of reasonable metric. And worse, its vagueness could lead to misunderstanding. And even worse, misunderstanding the question in any dimension seems like it could have actual repercussions.
Some commenters have said it’s as simple as being inclusive of dietary restrictions. Ok cool easy enough. Is that actually in a rubric?
What if I have a manager that thinks it means I should run in the annual LGBTQ+ 5K? Ok I’m willing to do that, I like to run and support those causes. But is that expectation written anywhere?
In short, I don’t think these kind of questions are ever as simple as “just don’t be a douchebag.”
lol, yes, annual tech perf reviews. Known for clear and quantifiable metrics that are in no way based on squishy realities.
This just seems to be especially hand-wavy, with an additional whiff of ideological litmus testing thrown on, which could go sideways in more problematic ways than “this year I reduced the frontend bundle size by 25%”
It's weird that you're making up scenarios that would obviously never happen like the 5k thing.
If you can give me some more examples I’m happy to hear them.
So far, commentators have listed:
(1) dietary considerations for team meals. (2) participation in company ERGs (this has never been compulsory at any company I’ve worked at). (3) making up a series of words they hope will appease managers
None of this seems like it should be part of a yearly performance package?
Personally, if I had celiacs and found out people were using ordering me a gluten-free pizza as a critical input to their yearly performance reviews, I’d probably be a little weirded out. But then maybe I’d be one of the more popular folks in the office come lunch-and-learn day, so pros and cons I guess.
in many of the F500 orgs I've worked at -- yes it is. unambiguously so.
diversity / inclusion / team building activities were explicitly called out as part of yearly goals and performance review metrics.
things like go to a women-in-tech event and just listen, or a black history month discussion, read a book about homelessness and minority communities, etc. I went on a postmodern literature spree and ended up reading a bunch of african and middle eastern authors and that qualified for the perf review.
the "LBGTQ 5k" is a laughably bad strawman and would never be required for a bunch of reasons.
The point was: Do they have actual documented examples of what they want from me when they put this on my performance review:
> What impact did your actions have in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive Microsoft?
I am glad your companies have given you documented examples of what they have wanted in this arena. I'm sure that helped make it easier for you to meet their expectations and avoid any potentially awkward confusion.
> “We are not doing a traditional report this year as we’ve evolved beyond that to formats that are more dynamic and accessible — stories, videos, and insights that show inclusion in action,”
Oh, you wanted hard numbers? What about a TikTok video instead?
Just be honest about this stuff. It’s insulting to the intelligences of all involved to pretend that you just coincidentally happen to be making these shifts.
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
> (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
> (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Without DEI, it's just white men that will be hired and generally, it'll be friends of friends with no regard to their competency. DEI is an attempt to level the playing field as otherwise, racist/sexist employers will continue to be racist and sexist.
Whats changing is how this is communicated externally, and I can see why this would have to change based on the political climate.
It could have been nice if DEI at least made some sense and wasn't just code for black/women but I think people who run these programs might not be the smartest and have the understanding of discrimination of an infantile. Maybe in the future we can have something that actually promotes equality properly and not what Karen from HR thinks it means.
He is also.... the president of the United States?
[1] Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. You [2] voted for it, now you [2] get to keep it.
[2] you as in "We, the People".
While I don't think "corporations should be in charge", I also don't think a President should be dictating corporate culture or policy short of going through the proper channels of using Congress to write legislation that keeps corporations in check and doesn't allow their power and influence to grow too large.
But... uh... yeah that isn't happening either. Instead, those in power are helping each other out, at the expense of common citizens of the U.S. (and likely at the expense of people outside the U.S. too.)
If you dont, you could suddenly find that the thing you sell has a ridiculous tariff imposed on it. Then that might mean you sell a lot less. He has done much more for much less in the past.
I mean, yes, Microsoft is international, and the president could probably find an angle to put a tariff on some part of their business. Not most of it, though.
At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.
Those baseball cards also come with some rights. The people running the company have a fiduciary responsibility to them. They cannot, for example, use the company as a piggybank.
Nobody outside of the founders has enough of a controlling stake for that to be practically possible.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/29/microsofts-github-has-become...
DEI is to prevent the kind of favouritism/nepotism that prevails in a lot of society (e.g. "the old boys club"). A suitable example would be the recent hires by the U.S. administration - people are being given high ranking jobs just because they're loyal/friendly to a certain person and nothing at all to do with their competency to do the particular job.
The purpose of DEI is to allow the most qualified person to get the job despite the overt racism and sexism in society.
Humans gonna human.
I don't think this has actually been proven as of yet, since "best" is a very loaded word, especially you're required to measure on more than one axis. (But feel free to point me to any source that disagrees with me.)
It's like if you were tasked with buying the most powerful engine produced for a locomotive. How you define powerful is arbitrary and is an optimization problem on its own, but if you then say "and the engine block must come from the factory painted red" you are, by definition, no longer optimizing for the fastest engine, you're optimizing for the fastest red engine. Being red is independent from being the best engine.
I do not approve of DEI methods as they usually get implemented in capitalist tech companies, but the underlying idea, encourage more groups with lower representation to participate in tech is sound, and it is what I'm advocating for in this exchange.
Western tech world is biased in favour of middle-class white men due to the fact that it's made out of mostly middle-class white men. You might not agree that's a problem, but most of the world does.
These giants know that people are lazy, they aren't likely doing the effort to see all the product holding. And that people will forget the outrage when the next thing comes up. It also helps that a lot of the dumb reactions have been things like people buying their product only to angerly shoot it with a gun or run it over with a truck.
When time passes, so does the outrage. And what they've actually bought is a bit of unearned goodwill and forgotten badwill.
I think that's the point, using "pressure from the administration" as an excuse to nix culture war entanglements they got themselves into over the previous ~10 years. I think the "modern titans of industry" have wanted to dip out of this stuff for some time and felt stuck. Now they can do so while having plausible deniability (it was da govamint made us do it!)
Walking it back is just the same behaviour manifesting in a different way. Investors don’t value DEI in the same way they did before so it becomes an expense with no value to shareholders, so it gets cut.
It’s very cynical but nothing about this should be particularly shocking.
You can fail to recognize a problem, and you can also overreact to it.
I have yet to hear a good justification for why people who are not interested in programming should be encouraged to become interested purely in the name of equality, yet my institution is still spending huge amounts of public money on trying to achieve exactly that.
Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline. From kindergarten, drive kids to want to participate in a dynamic economy instead of pursuing selling themselves short and perhaps getting involved in the underground economy, dead-end jobs, etc. Go give it a go in all areas of the nation that are under-served. That is the way to do it. If you do it any time later, like at hiring time, then you risk hiring on things other than merit.
You read cyberpunk novels and thought "yeah, I would love my country to be governed by megacorps from cradle to grave".
It's not necessary that corps own the education, but they they have schools within a school to deliver the education that they are expecting from new graduates.
Public education is also something you are responsible for as a citizen. If it is shit, it is so because you let it be. Assume your responsibilities instead of hoping for "enlightened" corporate lords to do it for you, peasant.
Previous company "did that", but what it amounted to was young HR women filtering all candidates before engineering saw them or their resumes, and you had to pick from their not-so-great candidates they got based on gender or race. Also interviewers could not see what other interviewers said - so we got bypassed as well behind the scenes
In those terms it is equally perplexing for them to have bowed down to a geriatric dementia-addled has-been, to a deeply corrupt DEI hire, to a dynastical potato-brained fool, to a whoring sumb*tch, ... in other words to the leader of the 'free world' known as the President of the United States of America. Just because you don't like the current one does not mean he has less authority than any of the previous ones - especially compared to the previous 'democratic' iteration who had to be told where to walk, what to say to whom at what moment and had to be kept on a leash so he did not bumble off into the shrubbery during memorials.
If pushing diversity makes their goal easier then they'll do it, and if pushing diversity makes it more difficult then they'll back off of those initiatives.
The only thing they actually care about is what's best for their bottom line.