Comment by rebeccaskinner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rebeccaskinner | Hacker News Reader

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> Why? As a non-white immigrant, I’m deeply suspicious of the notion that a team with me on it is in any way different than a team without me on it based on my skin color or ethnicity.

Perhaps, but a team that would not have hired you because of your skin color or ethnicity would also be a worse team since they would not be willing or able to hire the best candidates.

> As soon as you make it acceptable to say that people are different based on group membership, they will start to notice those differences and categorize them as good and bad. DEI is based on the premise that people will recognize all of those differences as good but that’s completely delusional.

I don't think this is the right angle to look at it. Everyone has a unique combination of experiences that they bring, and what groups someone belongs to are one part of the set of experiences that make up how they experience the world. DEI programs aren't inventing this, it's just a part of the human condition that we're shaped by the unique combination of our experiences.

Focusing on specific unique aspects of individual people's backgrounds isn't the only shape DEI can take though. Done well, I think they instead look at the shape of systems and processes in place and try broadly to consider how to remove artificial barriers so that people have an equal chance to contribute.

> You are socializing people to identify other people with their group membership and they’re going to take those observations in directions you don’t expect.

I think this does happen a lot. Tokenism and only being seen as a particular part of your identity are problems. I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team. It sucks to be told that I'm wrong to suggest take-home exercises in interviews are a good option because women have caregiver duties and can't make time for them when I, a woman, prefer them because I feel like they offer a better opportunity for me to think deeply about a problem.

I don't think this is a reason to ignore DEI programs though, it's simply a failure case to be aware of.

I agree with the “eliminate artificial barriers” version of DEI. I’m a huge beneficiary of the push in the 1990s to “not see race.” But I don’t think that’s the dominant version of DEI today. I think the notion that “diverse teams are better” actually erects barriers, because it socializes people to think that the races are different.

I think the situation is different for sex diversity because men and women are different in ways that require accommodation.

It seems to me like we’re probably not too far apart in our opinions- and perhaps each of us bringing a separate set of experiences is letting us come to a better and more nuanced view.

I still do personally think that at a high level diverse teams and companies do tend to be better than non-diverse ones, especially when you have many axes of diversity. I imagine that some of that is direct benefit when someone is able to pull on their experiences to directly benefit a project, and some of it is simply that teams who hire the best people without artificial barriers will both be better and tend to be more diverse.

That’s observational rather than prescriptive though. When it comes to individual teams and individual hiring decisions I’d never advocate for anything other than hiring the best available candidate. Similarly, while you can say that across the population having diversity is good, you shouldn’t assume any specific part of an individual’s background or experience should manifest in any particular way.

All that said, I do think understanding the general ways that different aspects of a persons background impacts their work experience is a necessary part of building an effective workforce. How can you remove artificial barriers without taking time to understand what those barriers are?

Although I’ve had my own negative experiences at times, my experience overall is that most DEI initiatives I’ve been involved with have not been unaware of the risks and nuance, and people involved are usually trying to do the right things. I don’t think modern DEI approaches are overall worse- just more controversial because of broader social, cultural, and political tensions.

> I can't speak to the experience of being a non-white immigrant, but I've had other forms of this experience. It sucks to be in a job interview where you have a great skill set that matches the role and a lot of relevant experience, but it's clear that the only thing the recruiter cares about is that you could add gender diversity to a team.

But this is the dominant strain of DEI thinking today, and why it's seeing such a backlash.

The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.

A moment's thought reveals why this is impractical to impossible, especially in the short to medium term. But this is how everything is evaluated through a DEI lens. Every discussion devolves just to counting how many people of each kind of group are represented in whichever topic is under discussion.

All the stuff about eliminating barriers is just the motte for this Bailey.

> The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.

I’ve simply never seen this happen, although I’ve seen a lot of accusations of it. In a very large organization you might look at how your organizations demographics compare to industry demographics in different ways, but that’s always been at most an individual data point that elicits further investigation.

I’ve lost count of the number of articles that simply cite disproportionate demographic distributions as proof of discrimination.

you've contradicted yourself, that's all the parent was saying, that comparing your demographics with national demographics is used to identify the degree to which your organization needs to institute race quotas

> that's all the parent was saying

Nuh uh. jimbokun intensified it by a huge amount with those "every" terms and saying "must" and "exactly", describing a mandate that is very stupid and ignorant of statistics in a way that rebeccaskinner's description is not very stupid and ignorant of statistics. Also,

> race quotas

The post you're replying to says "further investigation", not "race quotas".

> The over riding DEI principle is that every profession, every organization, every role, must somehow have exactly the demographic breakdown of the society as a whole.

No it's not. That's a dumb strawman. "The over riding DEI principle" is not some guy that doesn't understand statistical variance, and doesn't accept any reason at all for fields to differ.

But we should have a starting position of being extremely skeptical of any big group that has a significantly different breakdown, especially if it's different in the specific ways that fit common discrimination.

You start out disputing my claim…and end by reinforcing it.

You don't see the difference between "x must be y always everywhere even in tiny groups" and "start skeptical if x isn't y in big groups"?

I don't know how much simpler I can make this. Those statements are not the same.

they're the same from the perspective that race is a factor which merits equalizing

It might need equalizing.

It depends on why the balance is the way it is.

It's good to check sometimes.

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