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Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

Yup. That it’s related to the elections is also predictable, due to stress.

Made worse in big corp due to affirmative action + lack of enough qualified candidates meeting diversity criteria.

Which is inevitable when you have coarse criteria applied to such a large industry this way so quickly, as it takes decades for anyone to be qualified for the senior roles, and many years for junior/mid level, even if there were no pipeline issues, which there are.

And unqualified folks in leadership, and mid level == stupid mistakes.

And, with the DOL rules, the company can’t even pay people differently, so no bueno even giving the high performers keeping things afloat better bonuses - unless they happen to meet the diversity criteria and it makes the stats look good.

Which it’s already hard enough to do properly when there is only one dimension, and impossible when there are 2-3.

so the bigger the company, the faster it has to cut its own throat.

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Blaming an outage on DEI... Man that's a new one for me.

Could you let us know where you work? I want to make sure I never apply there.

Bwahaha, just wait until you see the shrapnel flying over the next year.

You don’t think the steady erosion in system reliability and ever increasing outages is unrelated to these pressures do you?

I’ve seen the sausage being made at the middle manager level in big corp for a long time. It’s never any one person/hiring decision, but the pattern and it’s impact has been obvious (and getting unavoidable) for a long time.

That no one seems to want to talk about the actual issues, but doing character assassination and black listing (like this comment) is part and parcel of the problem.

> You don’t think the steady erosion in system reliability and ever increasing outages is unrelated to these pressures do you?

Outages have steadily decreased at major companies. I don't know what you're looking at.

Remember AWS taking out a good chunk of the internet many times a year because their east coast data center kept going down? Remember the fail whale meme-ing because Twitter was so unstable?

Industry site reliability has only gotten better over the years.

Bwaha, so now everything is actually getting better and more reliable in big corp land!

I’m sure AT&T, Google, Facebook/Whatsapp/Meta, BofA, Apple, MS, and many others who have had prominent massive outages and embarrassing product launch failures this year will be happy to hear this.

Notably, Amazon is one of the few companies that has managed to avoid a lot of the DEI noise somehow. Perhaps due to their reputation for having such a brutal work culture already?

I can’t wait to hear what you’re going to say next.

Big Corp Software quality improving AND running faster on existing hardware?

Your spitball is flying in a completely different universe than my spitball. Imo anytime you have layoffs that cut so deep, you cut through informal capability, knowledge and relationships that take a long time to form. If anything DEI helps create internal resilience because the personal networks end up a little different, giving you wider and more angles of coverage.

HN talks about people in open source holding up major functionality with little to no recognition. That happens within corporations too. Indiscriminate layoffs may directly fire those people, or signal to them that it's better to move elsewhere leaving gaps that only get discovered over time.

Of course, and not breaking anything with layoffs is already hard when your sole criteria as a manager is ‘are they effective’. Which it’s never been that simple, especially in big corp, but it’s waaay more difficult now.

And so what happens when you’re required by the gov’t and leadership to also comply with coarse grained population statistics AND you can’t find qualified people that meet those statistics enough? On top of having to make layoffs?

My ex was a reasonably qualified software engineer, and even 4 years ago was getting no-interview offers because she was a woman - as explicitly stated by the recruiters.

It’s only gotten worse since then for hiring managers. She was offended because they literally didn’t seem to care if she was qualified or not.

I can provide links to signed and in force legal agreements between the DOL and Google for instance which formalize the need for this, and can point towards public records of evidence submitted to court of emails (internal) between recruiters which state the same too, btw.

Actual job qualifications (as in skills) did not enter the conversation at all. Just course grained DEI attributes.

So then they end up disproportionately cutting from the non-protected tranches (the groups that DO have to be qualified to stay) first because your stats still have to look good. I’m not saying DEI folks overall have no one qualified or hard working in them - rather, that there are little to no structural incentives for them to be. In many cases, they’re also unfireable/unlayoffable.

And eventually, the non-protected folks leave, burn out, or give up because f-this. Why do so much extra work when you literally can’t even get paid more for it, or be recognized because it will piss everyone else off?

And even if you’re superhuman on that front - everyone burns out eventually. Which is also why you tend to see what you see in Open Source.

It’s never any one decision, but stochastic movement in this direction has been relentless and inevitable.

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