Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

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Many companies officially endorse systematic racism under the banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). They isn’t just trying to exclude white males to hire more of the opposite traits. Many will have support groups for non-whites and non-males for their specific issues, special training that can lead to promotions which whites can’t have, and put out posters or videos displaying non-whites to show how much they care [if you’re not white].

I ran into this quite a few times when looking for AI companies. They often put it prominently in the About Us pages or their annual report. Some organizations were also giving grants or mentoring only to minority members.

That DEI makes hiring decisions partly based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. means it shouldn’t surprise you at all that someone mentions it as a hiring factor. If they hired X non-whites, then up to X whites may have been rejected depending on the makeup of the candidate pool. That’s just how systematic racism works. It should be abolished.

I'm close with a principal engineering manager at a large tech company. At his level, bonuses are in part determined by hiring minorities (discriminating against whites, East Asians, men), and resumés are sorted by the same category to ensure some minimum of minorities are given an opportunity before a less racially desirable candidate even has a chance of being looked at.

IBM Red Hat is being sued for this, having stated workforce diversity goals of 30% female and 30% people of color. Executives have openly stated that bonuses are on the line if you hire too many white men.

For the last decade or so we haven't been able to state these things without being accused of racism or sexism. Ironically, my primary concern is that these sorts of policies make the problems of racism and sexism worse. Equality requires that we judge people on their merits.

At my FAANG company, our leadership is super unbalanced in favor of white/asian men.

We have some empty words about diversity but no goals or metrics, so nothing effective will actually change.

As a (white, male) manager, I have huge power over who gets to interview. My network is, sadly, largely white/asian and male. So if I don’t even think about it, I will perpetuate the imbalance.

I haven’t seen bonuses tied to diversity. I have seen a promo doc where a manager was praised for increasing diversity, with a greater percentage of women now in his department. I then discovered he had hired 1 woman and 26 men, raising his percentage of women from 0. I’m not kidding.

You could lead by example and replace your own role with a "diverse" candidate?

Yes. I’m now close to retirement and am grooming my successor to replace me next year.

For now, I’m focusing my mentorship energy on promising women and minorities, and helping them network.

Sometimes the companies can't help it either. When you try to get business from government contracts or even large enterprises, they ask you your diversity in hiring in your org. You're excluded from applying if you're not diverse enough. So it's a chain.

I have seen this as well. We have "DEI" officers, whatever that means, whose job seems to be solely to email us about things like whatever native land our company's buildings exists on.

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