The solution is simple, hire better minority candidates.
There are minority candidates who can thrive at all levels of tech. Nobody is telling your to hire subpar candidates. That's on your company's lazy implementation of their inclusion efforts, not on DEI.
Some places are targeting percentages of certain races that exceed that races representation in the general population, let alone the population within a given field. It may be that the demand exceeds the supply.
As an under credentialed, relative to the general population very smart white guy, I doubt the demand for any group exceeds the supply. It just might involve searching outside of the range of the lamppost. Gasp, horror, it might involve internal training as opposed to expecting people to hit all the marks for a position on their prior labor and education. It might involve hiring a lot more entry level positions than advanced positions, regardless of the needs of the moment.
The best I've seen as a person who's not part of the DEI team is cultivating relationships with universities with large numbers of URM students. But that's really still just searching slightly outside of the range of the lamppost.
Are you straight up going to small towns and offering scholarship opportunities? Going to college fairs (no, not hiring fairs at colleges, but the fairs that high school students go to to find a college) and marketing what jobs are available at your company for majors of certain degrees? These are just off the top of my head; I'm sure there are a lot better, and tested ideas out there.
Let's say green people are 10% of the population to make the numbers easy and not call out anyone in particular. You have company A and they are killing it on their diversity goals, 20 percent of its employees are green people. Now you have company B, same size and industry as company A, they want to hire green people but their "share" of greens is already working at company A, perhaps they can pull greens from other industries but ultimately someone is going to be left holding the "you don't hire enough green people" bag.
> but ultimately someone is going to be left holding the "you don't hire enough green people" bag.
This would be a good argument if we ever get to that point. But we aren't even close, and plenty of smaller companies and startups don't have diversity goals at all. There's plenty of room for some big names to go 100% green without being a tithe of a tithe of the full working population. Or even a tithe of a tithe of the working population of greens.
Even Walmart is less than 1% of the total employed population in the US. Much more so for smaller companies such as Alphabet or Meta.
X does not always lead to the same bad outcome here though. That is, DEI initiatives that increase diversity while not lowering the hire bar do exist. That some particular company decided to lower their hiring bar doesn't indicate that DEI initiatives always cause companies to lower their hiring bars.
My impression is that the mechanism is that racial/gender/etc diversity proxies for some amount of viewpoint diversity, and it's the viewpoint diversity which is improving outcomes. Assuming I'm correct on that point, my strong suspicion is that a lot of DEI programs in the US are not resulting in much more diverse hiring than their peer groups while simultaneously limiting viewpoint diversity pretty considerably (or if they're not limiting the viewpoint diversity of the people they hire, they're limiting the willingness of those people to express diverse views--probably a combination of the two).
I'm also vaguely of the impression that at least some research is finding DEI initiatives to be neutral or perhaps even counter-productive, but I'm having a hard time finding those papers--if this is jogging anyone's memory, I would appreciate links.
Just… stop. DEI works when well executed. Accept that.
If you want to police DEI initiatives to ensure they’re properly implemented, go for it, but the constant aversion to a so thoroughly researched concept is bordering on flat earther level conspiracy.
Considering all of science is having a replication crisis, you are going full flat earther, then.
I really cannot overemphasize how detrimental to your argument what you just wrote is to any thinking human being. Blindly claiming all research, from literally every institution in the world, is both inaccurate and rigged somehow on a widely studied topic, is an insane claim only made when you've given up on the entire concept of rationality.
You really would rather throw all of science under the bus before you let black people get an even footing in society, wouldn't you? Incredible.
STEM fields don’t have a replication crisis in the same way that humanities do.
The issue in STEM fields is that essential elements to replicate (like the code) are not being published, yet the underlying science is solid enough for production technology people rely on every day to be built on it.
In the humanities the replication crisis is that a significant amount of published “research” is essentially made up whole cloth.
One of these things is not like the other.
Also, nice edit calling me racist with zero basis. This behavior, by the way, is why this /entire/ thread exists on HN. DEI zealots will libel, slander, and insult anyone who doesn’t follow their ideology. Criticizing it, even with clear evidence, or pointing out lack of evidence supporting it is treated the same as taking the most extreme position in opposition.
You’re ridiculous and you should be ashamed of yourself. Take a breath and reconsider your life choices.
Your response to me is utterly uncalled for, and you continue to double down after I pointed this out. There is no point in having a discussion with you, as you are determined to straw man me, libel me, and otherwise behave in a manner which is inappropriate for HN and civil discourse generally.
You know nothing about me, and your claims about me are not only wrong, they’re laughably so. I hope I never have to work with you or otherwise interact with you off the Internet, you have made it clear by your behavior here that you’re truly a horrid person.
What's "uncalled for" about what I said? Is this an outrage copypasta you got from somewhere? You could paste what you wrote in reply to nearly any comment on this platform and it'd be about as valid.
And I didn't say I knew anything about you? I said things that are true for any thinking, breathing human.
Honestly, what a weird reaction. You clearly feel attacked, which I guess makes sense if you genuinely are the worst possible parts of what I wrote about (choosing to be a racist asshole rather than a person of reason), but you're opting into those designations for some reason.
The things people will do to justify hatred are wild, thank you for reminding me of that.
A collection of openly hostile remarks you've made in this thread:
> shut the fuck up and take in the knowledge.
> You get called racist for saying racist things; if you don’t like it, stop doing it
> I really cannot overemphasize how detrimental to your argument what you just wrote is to any thinking human being.
> Blindly claiming all research, from literally every institution in the world, is both inaccurate and rigged somehow on a widely studied topic, is an insane claim only made when you've given up on the entire concept of rationality.
(note that the parent never made this claim, you're falsely imputing it on him)
> You really would rather throw all of science under the bus before you let black people get an even footing in society, wouldn't you? Incredible.
I suspect these comments likely violate even a very narrow reading of the site guidelines. Your account is relatively new, so maybe you aren't aware but you might want to take a look before mods intervene (guidelines are linked at the bottom of the page).
(same person, different account, HN is trying to throttle me)
None of those lines are in any way openly hostile, unless you fall into the worst category of what I wrote, which is the racist who is trying to find any excuse to remove black people from the conversation.
You're welcome to litigate your comments with the moderators, I'm just giving you a friendly heads-up that I don't think the mods will agree with you (and the fact that you've been throttled suggests you've probably been warned by the mods before). I'm also not sure they'll take kindly to creating throwaway accounts for the purpose of circumventing the rate limit, but I'll let them speak for themselves.
Criticizing DEI programs (as the parent was clearly doing) isn't "spouting bigotry". You can certainly challenge bigotry on this site without violating the site guidelines (and "challenging bigotry" is hardly unpopular here).
> Criticizing the concept of DEI is spouting bigotry, and it's anti-fact.
Not at all. For example, I believe that selecting for viewpoint diversity directly is a better way to achieve viewpoint diversity than via DEI. Moreover, I firmly reject that race or gender confer any special abilities (and frankly this gets me into more hot water with DEI advocates than anyone else). These two positions aren't in conflict in any way. This example constitutes incontrovertible proof that "criticizing the concept of DEI is spouting bigotry" is incorrect.
> And no, you cannot support the concept of DEI and remain on this site without resorting to the tricks I've had to.
This is factually incorrect as well. I debate with lots of people who argue vocally for DEI (even strongly implying personal attacks) who have been on this site for a long time (and have lots of karma!). They just stay within the guidelines or at least they don't flout them as egregiously as you seem to be doing.
Continuously asserting that they are “thoroughly researched” does not make them so. Comparing “criticizing DEI” with “advocating flat earth” is pretty absurd, not least of all because DEI programs are incredibly diverse (of course, you are unhelpfully referring only to the “good ones”).
Criticizing DEI is fine. Acting as if it isn't effective when properly implemented is on the same level as "advocating flat earth" theories, as they both fly in the face of a whole lot of data.
And you're right, claiming something does not make it so. What makes it so is all of the data supporting it, which is readily available to anyone who actually cares about this topic (up to you if that's you).
> Acting as if it isn't effective when properly implemented is on the same level as "advocating flat earth" theories
Who is arguing that DEI is ineffective when properly implemented (what does "properly implemented" even mean, concretely?).
> they both fly in the face of a whole lot of data
You keep referencing this data... Where are the metanalyses that show concretely that DEI programs are effective? To be clear, I'm aware of and believe that increased diversity makes organizations more robust, but again that's attributed to viewpoint diversity and it's not at all clear to me that modern DEI programs deliver on that viewpoint diversity. It's not even clear to me that there is widespread consensus that "viewpoint diversity" or "organizational robustness" is a goal of these programs--one definitely gets the impression that the primary goal is diversity of identities with little mind paid to the impact on viewpoint diversity or organizational robustness.
Here's HBR (https://hbr.org/2019/07/does-diversity-training-work-the-way...) talking about whether or not diversity training programs are effective; note that the implication here is that the goal is ideological agreement--they're not even looking for viewpoint diversity:
> What did we find? Let’s start with the good news. The bias-focused trainings had a positive effect on the attitudes of one important group: employees who we believe were the least supportive of women prior to training. We found that after completing training, these employees were more likely to acknowledge discrimination against women, express support for policies designed to help women, and acknowledge their own racial and gender biases, compared to similar employees in the control group. For employees who were already supportive of women, we found no evidence that the training produced a backlash.
There are minority candidates who can thrive at all levels of tech. Nobody is telling your to hire subpar candidates. That's on your company's lazy implementation of their inclusion efforts, not on DEI.