A lot of things have "said purpose" and the "real purpose" because of which such absolutely kafkaesque things survive in organizations.
The said purpose of-course is to make sure that the candidate is "committed to diversity". We can argue all day on whether a statement is in any way good measure of it. It really isn't. I have helped people write such statements and we have always written it with cynicism and great contempt for the people who might actually read it.
But the "real reason" which such concept found a great foothold in modern American universities is that it kind of acts as top kill to get rid of potential people who might actually ask questions critical of various ideological positions that the university's internal bodies might have. You either want a radical zealot or at least someone who is willing to play along for his own career-maxing goals. What you don't want is someone who can call the emperor naked. Diversity statements are excellent way to achieve this as I have seen people write one line diversity statements such as 'I don't have one as I do not think diversity is important'. Such person IMO is more intellectually honest and would be a good addition to faculty position but will not be hired.
You are right that there is tons of resentment around the DEI BS that people have to go through. Tech companies have esoteric training problems with terms like "allyship" and "bystander effect" and all that which basically smells rotten to lot of engineers but they cynically complete those trainings any ways.
The pinned comment at the top of this thread requests that "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". Bravo to you for providing exactly that.
Too much of the discourse around this insists that these statements are useless and counterproductive. But as you've explained, they do pretty well in staffing the leadership of these orgs with people who believe in this philosophy by weeding out people who disagree or won't go along for career progression.
> The pinned comment at the top of this thread requests that "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive". Bravo to you for providing exactly that.
Consider the fine grained details of the logic involved in combining "more" with "exactly(!) that".
The above commenter framed the situation as the DEI folks being necessarily strategically dishonest and malicious, as opposed to being True Believers (more technically: Naive Realists), like most people are, though with different fantasy worlds, due to the consumption of different training material combined with the same flawed interpreter.
> The above commenter framed the situation as the DEI folks being necessarily strategically dishonest and malicious.
I think the question of whether DEI folks are dishonest is entirely irrelevant (but important). You have to put yourself in the shoes of some diversity officer and think of what you will do to feel important, save your job and get promotion.
You will obviously have to come up with idea like "diversity statements", "diversity OKR" for your engineering managers. Most engineering managers are busy building products, they might think it is stupid but still would play along since the cost of compliance is very low.
When someone stands up to this, diversity officials get the villains that further help them justify their role and existence. "Look this person is creating unsafe work environment, he needs to go". All this results into an organizations which loses its ability to question DEI initiatives even more.
It is not my claim that DEI folks are all vile, they get into a conference room and make these grand plans. It is just that the moment you create positions like "DEI officials" the incentives are aligned to set the ball rolling.
Hard disagree. The argument assumes bad intent on the part of the evil DEI and implies the only reason for the policy is too get rid of "troublemakers".
This is some peak choir preaching. If you polled people neutral, or those with the opposite opinion they would think it's nonsense.
But on this site you can just chant things like "all hail the gray ones, the ones that can't be silenced by the blues!" and be celebrated. In fact, I suspect there's a high chance of me getting banned for pointing this out.
I don’t think that is what the poster was saying. If it was, they wouldn’t have used ‘kafkaesque’.
From what I can tell, they are saying the purpose of the statements is to weed out people who will be openly honest about concerns or be willing to debate pros and cons of a controversial position held by leadership.
They could still privately disagree or not go along, they’d just have to be able to do so while keeping up appearances.
Which in my experience academically and with big-corp is very accurate. There are plenty of folks who will spout DEI party lines all day long while only hiring Asian women, or Indian men, or white women, or white men, etc. as long as no one makes a stink about it in a way they’ll get in trouble.
Notably, those folks have also finely honed their ability to nuke anyone from orbit that attempts to get them in trouble for what they are definitely doing.
From an organizational perspective, it’s actually a very valuable skill - because to make this work, they have to placate stakeholders while also getting some key metric
that the organization needs ‘done’ well enough to offset their other shenanigans.
And in any sufficiently large organization, it’s essentially impossible to do that by actually doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing to the level you’re supposed to be doing them.
Which is why large organizations (and frankly societies) tend to be kafkaesque - they have too many conflicting interests and power bases that all have potentially legitimate reasons for applicability, but are irreconcilable-in-fact/impractical when ‘the rubber meets the road’.
It's not that, the reality of fascism on uni campuses (in tech) is really bleak. Lots of people don't see the problems that don't bother them.
So it's not trying to off people for asking the wrong questions. They're trying to cut back on the assholes that say things like:
"Awktually, there is a scientific arguement that whites smarter than blacks"
"I see you're black, but how ghetto are you?"
etc. etc.
Some things may get blown out of proportion, but I think people that claim it's not so bad don't know how bad it is for someone that doesn't fit a specific mold.
> A lot of things have "said purpose" and the "real purpose" because of which such absolutely kafkaesque things survive in organizations.
I remember sitting in conference room once and between meetings we started discussing the MBA degree and how you often needed one to move up at big companies. I mused that I didn't understand why this was so important since an MBA program didn't teach you much that you couldn't learn on the job or by reading a few books.
A colleague of mine, who'd recently gotten his MBA, started laughing out loud. He said, "You're missing the whole point. Nobody cares about the course content or what you learn. The value of the MBA is that it's proof you can spend a lot of time and effort completing bullshit assignments on time without too much heel-dragging or back talk. It tells the world you'll keep your head down and not cause too much trouble for the organization".
> You are right that there is tons of resentment around the DEI BS that people have to go through. Tech companies have esoteric training problems with terms like "allyship" and "bystander effect" and all that which basically smells rotten to lot of engineers but they cynically complete those trainings any ways.
I think this is probably a feature not a bug. Companies are all about having programs whose sole purpose is to limit liability and to (for lack of a better term) quite cynically virtue signal. And if that causes the programs to be hated and later dismantled, all the better -- because it was never about actually achieving DEI but about appearing to support it. All of the corporate DEI training that I've been through were considered "cringeworthy" by literally everyone in the company. And this was in a very left-leaning company, but it was run by mostly a pile of middle aged white guys at the top.
The said purpose of-course is to make sure that the candidate is "committed to diversity". We can argue all day on whether a statement is in any way good measure of it. It really isn't. I have helped people write such statements and we have always written it with cynicism and great contempt for the people who might actually read it.
But the "real reason" which such concept found a great foothold in modern American universities is that it kind of acts as top kill to get rid of potential people who might actually ask questions critical of various ideological positions that the university's internal bodies might have. You either want a radical zealot or at least someone who is willing to play along for his own career-maxing goals. What you don't want is someone who can call the emperor naked. Diversity statements are excellent way to achieve this as I have seen people write one line diversity statements such as 'I don't have one as I do not think diversity is important'. Such person IMO is more intellectually honest and would be a good addition to faculty position but will not be hired.
You are right that there is tons of resentment around the DEI BS that people have to go through. Tech companies have esoteric training problems with terms like "allyship" and "bystander effect" and all that which basically smells rotten to lot of engineers but they cynically complete those trainings any ways.