Comment by benjiro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjiro | Hacker News Reader

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> If you assume Adams is lying, that’s your call. But if the question is what he believes happened, the obvious evidence is his own account.

You can believe something with all your heart and that believe can be a lie. People are not machines.

The idea that a manager will go "hey, we are DEI hiring Asians" in the 80s in the bank sector... No offense but that is mixing modern 2020's politics and trying to transplant it to the 80's.

Fact is, you only have one source of this "truth", and have historical data that disproves this idea of DEI hires in the 80s (unless your white and male, then yes, there was a LOT of DEI hires and promotions that bypassed women and/or people of color).

And this is still happening today. But nobody wants to talk about that too much because that is considered the traditional family and god given right to the white male ;)

I am betting your a white male, that lissen to a lot of conservative podcast/twitter etc. You can prove me wrong but we both know the truth ;)

> The idea that a manager will go ‘hey, we are DEI hiring Asians’ in the 80s

No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking. The terminology has changed; the existence of compliance-driven hiring and promotion pressures has not.

> You only have one source of this ‘truth’.

When the question is what someone believes happened to them, their own account is inevitably the primary source. You can argue he was mistaken or self-serving, but dismissing the account outright because it doesn’t fit your expectations isn’t evidence.

> I am betting you’re a white male

And that assumption rather neatly illustrates why, for a long time, it was socially risky for white men to even claim discrimination without having their motives or identity used to invalidate the argument.

> No one used the term DEI in the 1980s. The language then was affirmative action or EEO, and it was very much present in corporate America, including regulated industries like banking.

This is true.

What is false is a blanket "We're not hiring or promoting white men" as a result during that time period.

That was an era when lip service was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.

No one has claimed a blanket anything.

> That was an era when lip srvice was given to affirmative action and literal token hires were made as window dressing .. but the fundementals scarcely changed and extremely rarely at board room and actual upper management levels for jobs that included keys to levers of power.

This is a pipeline fact. But that doesn't mean individuals didn't try to redress the balance themselves. Just as some schoolteachers will give kids of colour higher marks to make up for the bad things that they were told happened to all of them.

> No one has claimed a blanket anything.

Scroll up:

> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.

@sanity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46607980 3 hours ago

While he may have been told that (or more likely "remembered" things that way), it simply wasn't something that was commonplace in the 1980s.

Where exactly was he working that had a "no white men at the top" policy in the 1980s?

Death Row Records was founded in 1991, Bad Boy Records was founded 1993(?) and in that industry sub domain it should have been intuitively obvious to the meanest intellect that no white men would reach the top well before they (if any) joined as lowly office clerks.

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