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Comment by likeabatterycar | Hacker News Reader

> Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?

No, because that would obviously be racist.

DEI would be favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job.

The just thing would be students from HBCUs having a level playing field along with everyone else.

It's no different than hiring managers selectively preferring graduates from Stanford or based on their surname's ethnicity, but it's hard to prove those things happen.

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DEI is nominally about adjusting the situation so that the end result is equal. For example, paying women equally even if they don't negotiate as aggressively as men.

The nominal case doesn't always match the reality, but the reality is that no one has a level playing field to begin with.

The whole thing is about trying to eliminate sources of bias that we can. For example, blind screening of resumes where names and similar personal info aren’t given is a way to avoid racial bias while focusing on what matters. People have pre-determined opinions about many things, even if it’s subconscious. That’s an example of DEI policies trying to level the playing field to avoid unfair discrimination.

That's a great example of a DEI-inspired policy that should be, at least in most cases, pretty non-controversial, and very beneficial to the company itself.

I think there are also some other types of policies (whether formal or informal) that were much more controversial. For example: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/lawsuit-claims-google-...

Have you tried deploying it? If you do, you'll find blind screening is extremely controversial. DEI types loathe it and will fight against it.

The reason is that de facto unofficial discrimination against white men is widespread and blind screening eliminates it, so the resulting hires are more male and western than before. Mostly this result is kept hidden within the organizations in question, but there are a bunch of reported cases where this happened publicly.

Even the famous orchestra study that kicked off the fad for these screenings supports this if you read the data tables carefully. The paper made it sound like blind screenings are better for women and racial minorities, but their data properly interpreted didn't say that.

So why did companies adopt quotas?

In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial.

But companies went in hard with things such as quotas, and there's even cases in the courts at the moment where Red Hat/IBM supposedly awarded bonuses based on hiring managers fulfilling diversity quotas.

>In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial.

I think it would, there is a substantial contingent that wouldn't even like that.

Of course its controversial either way. Let's assume for our purposes that DEI is purely about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind (which we can absolutely argue about separately). It would absolutely be controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics and therefore has a large constituency of people it favoured. If I'm a rich white kid from a good family who went to a top school who gets into an Internship at Goldman because my Dad is golfing buddies with a Partner there then of course I would be opposed to DEI. And guess what? Rich white kids from good families and top schools have quite a lot of political capital.

And that's only those who directly materially lose out. Implicit in DEI is a suggestion that the American system is not a meritocracy, and if you accept that claim you are attacking the identity of a lot of powerful people who genuinely believe they got to where they are through unique skills and effort and not because they had any sort of advantage.

> controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics

Was it though?

Or was it just a result of society and culture outside the companies control.

The idea behind DEI is as if a car crashes into another car because of an issue with the road, that leads to one car being more damaged than the other, the solution is to make sure the less damaged car has the same amount of damage, rather than fixing the road.

It seems silly to say this is the idea behind DEI rather than what folks may feel is the consequence (I neither don’t care if it is or isn’t”).

You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been. Using it as a pejorative in the way you are is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist. It doesn't reflect the purpose of the concept at all. In fact your description of "favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job" is exactly what the concept hopes to prevent, not enable.

DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it, it is more about considering diversity and recognizing personal and institutional bias, and working to ensure that bias does not negatively affect people, whether that be in hiring, consideration for roles or promotions, and so on.

All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven, and if you actually look you can see it's already doing damage. There seem to be a lot of assumptions that women or people of color in high positions are "DEI hires" when they likely had to work harder than white men to get where they are. I mean firing a 4-star admiral because she's a woman and then claiming she was a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are. Automatically assuming a black or trans pilot is a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are.

> ...is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist...

You forgot transphobist and whatever the -ist form of Nazi is. National Socialist, possibly. No point going with half-measures on the insults.

> You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.

Yes, it has. Look at the college admissions. The test score requirements for black students were way way lower than those for the Asian students in many universities and colleges. That's favoring people by their skin color.

Which is illegal since at least 1964.

Where can I look at these college test score requirements? I have never heard of such a thing besides minimum SAT score to be considered. Is that adjusted based solely on race at some university? Where?

Probably in the NBER report[1] on the data that came out of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case[2]. It's an interesting read, as is the other one on legacy applicants.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29964

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...

At the graduate level there are a number of resources which can illustrate the difference between admissions standards for people from “underrepresented minority” (URM) groups and non-URMs. They manifest as materially lower LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs for URMs. There are Supreme Court cases analyzing details, and prior to the most recent doctrine, the preferencing policies were totally open because SCOTUS blessed it in the case of law school admissions.

College admissions have (until very recently) operated under a different jurisprudence than businesses.

> All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven

Some companies are under legal pressure to avoid lawsuits because some programs are violating civil rights. I wouldn't call those instances craven.

As for your definition of DEI, I find it fairly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Regardless of how we want to define DEI in the hypothetical perfect world, the reality is a large portion of current DEI programs look absolutely nothing like what you described.

I'm all for DEI, however you too seem to misunderstand one critical aspect, the 'E' in DEI. The 'E' (Equity) aspect is very nuanced and if not understood and communicated well would lead to deadlocked discussions

Equity factors in historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences. This could mean that if we have a candidate who seems to be with lesser qualification then they potentially can be hired over a more qualified candidate.

This is with reasoning that due to past decades (and centuries) of historical situations a candidate was led through a path which landed them with a 'lesser' qualification. So, now if we continue to correct this historical situation then sometime in future the need for Equity would disappear, since that future generation is result of a equitable society - then no more excuses, if you have lesser qualification then it is your doing and not society's.

On the one hand, you have DEI policies like Harvard's college admissions or the air traffic controller hiring scandal. And of course DEI advocates always claim that these are obvious perversions of True DEI, which is only about expanding opportunities and never about discriminating against disfavored groups of people.

On the other hand, the tricky bit comes in when it's only in retrospect everyone agrees those were terrible perversions of DEI. When they're actually in place, anyone who criticizes them is considered a racist neo-Nazi.

Has there been a big effort to call the FAA whistleblowers nazis?

I learned about it, went "oh that sucks", but never felt like they were being racist. They have a great evidentiary basis. Its not like some red hat guy screeching about losing his job without being able to show cause.

“Recognizing personal and institutional bias” sounds nice, until someone has to decide which biases or differences to overcome, and at what cost.

There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.

The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.

I am a former hiring manager at Google and we were specifically told by hr that we could hire 2 people on one headcount if one of those people met specific dei criteria and there was a list of races and genders that met the criteria. One of my peer managers grew his org twice as fast as me by only hiring females with engineering degrees. He got promoted shortly after. Within 2 years his entire team was disbanded for being completely ineffective. Google ended up getting sued over this practice and they lost. This is not the only example I have. The worst of all was Eric Schmidt literally saying to us that diversity was "strategically important" as it helped to "increase the talent pool" and "keep salaries competitive." This was never about doing the right thing for employees.

I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.

It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.

> It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.

> DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it

I have been in the room where HR/hiring managers have explicitly stated that they want to hire [specific race/gender] for an open role. This has been at major companies. In states where this is explicitly illegal.

In the very high level abstract, the goal of DEI programs may not be to engage in explicitly illegal race/sex discrimination, but in practice, this is how it often turns out.

I will let others give their own anecdotes, as cases like this are widespread.

IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses.

I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.

Finally, from the article in this post:

> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.

It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.

These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.

As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.

The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.

Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.

Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?

There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.

Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.

The idea that people aren't comfortable on a team that doesn't have other people matching their immutable sex/race characteristics, and that we should encourage this fragility is insane to me.

If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?

I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.

> DEI is not "reverse racism"

You're right, reverse racism does not exist, it's just racism.

> to work harder than white men to get where they are.

Asian Americans prove this is not true. I recall that statically the average wage for asians in America is higher than white people.

How do you feel about recruiting efforts at all-women's colleges? What if those were stopped?

I mean, considering West Point Academy is closing clubs like the National Society of Black Engineers or the Japanese Forum Club due to the anti-DEI order [1] I think that should tell you everything you need to know about what this change signals.

[1] https://time.com/7212911/west-point-disbands-cadet-clubs-aff...

>the Japanese Forum Club, which described itself as a place for promoting “understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture and language”;

Don't know why West Point thinks that is required by the anti-DEI order, maybe someone is going through and looking at anything with race or gender in the name and shutting it down?

If so, that would be on West Point.

> No, because that would obviously be racist.

And doing obviously racist things is unheard of, particularly in tech. /s

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