I'm skeptical too. I've worked at a series of smaller companies with strong DEI programs, and the "enlightened self-interest" part was that it gave us better products. Turns out I have a pretty good idea of how to build products and features that appeal to people with the same regional, race, gender, and other backgrounds as me. Working with people who are in different from me in some substantial way showed me how much of that is arbitrary.
For an extreme example, imagine a car company with zero women employees. I could imagine that their designs might look increasingly awesome to people who grew up playing with black, angular, high-powered cars (like me -- that's what I'd want!). And while there are plenty of women who'd like that, too, there are lots of women (and plenty of men!) who'd want something smaller, more brightly colored, and with better gas mileage. It they didn't have those varying opinions, or weren't even aware that people had other opinions, they'd be severely limiting their potential market and leaving huge amounts of money on the table.
(My wife's a big F1 fan and wants to own a McLaren some day. I know that many, many women love fast cars, too, and that many, many men do not. That was meant to be illustrative, not a perfect analogy.)
I am utterly convinced that getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable. Even if I didn't care about the societal ideals behind DEI programs, I'd still happily endorse them as a competitive edge.
Alternatively, trying to appeal to everyone or really the lowest common denominator just ends up creating bland products that nobody likes. Which is quite apparent right in the AAA video game industry.
I'd argue that a specialised company that focuses and hones in on catering to black, angular high-powered cars OR smaller, more brightly coloured cars will have a healthier long term outlook than a company that tries to appeal to every market.
OK, that fascinates me and it's a great example of things that would never occur to me. Run-flat tires aren't a big deal because I'm not bothered by the idea of changing my own tire by the side of the road. Ponytail indentations in the headrests? I have short hair that doesn't need it, but alright, I can see why that'd be great for people who do.
And a key takeaway is that those things don't make the car worse for me. I know there are tradeoffs with run-flat tires but that doesn't make it less good, and while I can change tires, it'd be nice not to have to. And the ponytail indent makes it nicer for some people without affecting me whatsoever. Those make a more appealing product for buyers with different needs from mine, in ways I couldn't have anticipated.
So your accepting of something you don't need but could be useful to others is totally opposite of the design not having a hood. Just because these females don't need it, they made it so nobody could use it.
Did I say that everyone should have that? No. I like working on my own cars. My personal gearhead top achievement was when my alternator seized up, and I had a new one installed and working 45 minutes later (including a quick run to the parts store).
That said, I've done nothing under the hood of our family minivan other than changing air filters. It wouldn't break my heart if I had to let the shop do that for me when I was there getting the oil changed every 2 (!!!) years. I can totally see why a lot of people, probably most people, would consider that a great tradeoff.
By the way, "these females" is not the preferred nomenclature. "Women", please.
so a small group of women made a unilateral decision that prevents others. again, it is just an example of one group making decisions without realizing (or caring) how it affects others.
the point is that every single decision can be construed as denying something to someone else when it was only made as a convenience for someone else. it's very strained here as not having a hood is just odd. Even if you only take the car in every 2 years, that cost of that service is going to be much higher because of the labor involved on removing the front just to access the engine rather than just popping the hood. We already have plenty of examples of cars where this has been the case
That's ridiculous. You and I don't have to buy that car. But if it existed and were brought to market, people who do like it have the option. It gives them choices they wouldn't otherwise have without restricting our options.
Tying this back to my earlier point, working on a product with people who weren't exactly like me made a better product for everyone. It didn't make it a worse product for older white guys like myself, while making it more useful for everyone else who isn't my twin. That's pretty cool, and customers rewarded us for it.
Without the input of diverse opinions, I wouldn't have thought of the simple changes we could make to expand its reach, again, without making it worse for me and people like me. The end result was universally better. That's a good thing for our users and our investors. Literally everyone involved was better off for it.
The fact that you think that removing the hood doesn't make it a worse product is baffling. If it has a hood and you choose to never open it, that does not make it a worse product. If you have no hood but have to incur extravagant service fees because of not having a hood definitely makes it a worse product.
> If it has a hood and you choose to never open it, that does not make it a worse product.
This is only true if having a hood has no negative ramifications, the argument from Volvo was that removing it made forward visibility better. For some people trading a hood they never use, against better forward visibility, could be well worth it. Especially for short people, where forward visibility can be more of a problem than for the rest of us.
To be more specific, Volvo designed a car specifically for women and chose to staff that team entirely with women. This is quite different than asking a team of women to design a car for everyone, and I feel that’s important context when considering the design decisions they made.
Wow, the lack of a hood is baffling, was that actually a conscious design decision or an urban legend?
Because in the case of the former I find it unbelievable that no one on the team, or even at Volvo that dropped by to see how the project is coming along (I assume they weren't shipped off to some isolated island to complete their work in complete secrecy) didn't say something. The first question at least 80% of people I know would have when looking over a car to buy for the first time is, "Can you pop the hood?" Not to mention getting at the engine to adjust or replace consumables like belts, fluids, plugs or even minor repairs.
I'm far more willing to believe this is just a small detail that simplified the production process for a one off prototype than that anyone thought this was actually a good idea.
If the i8 suffers from a similar problem (I'm not familiar with the design of that car) that's equally baffling to me on BMW's part.
A car telling someone not willing to maintain it itself that it's time to take it to a service center is fine and all and probably would avoid a lot of headaches for people that aren't mechanically inclined. But a design that encourages tacking on labor charges or being unable to give your car a quick look over yourself seems awful.
Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
In the example of a car company with zero women employees, if the market doesn't want "black, angular, high-powered cars", then they will lose market share to companies that produce cars that the market does want.
And if "getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable" is a true statement, then capitalism will prove it because the most diverse companies will naturally become better and more profitable than non-diverse companies.
> Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
The companies we're talking about have DEI programs specifically because they believe they'll improve their profitability in one way or another. Meta is scaling their program back, not ending it, so they still believe it's good for the company in some way.
Now, I may be skeptical of the purity of their goals, in this case suspecting that they're more concerned about looking to be the "right level" of diverse than actually achieving it. Regardless, no one's making them do it. They're doing it for those free market reasons.
Worth noting the same basic incentives apply to certain corporations performatively dropping their policies as a declaration of fealty to an administration they hope will refrain from interfering too much with their ability to make profits as a result. Whether that is considered to be a "free market reason" is another question entirely.
> The companies we're talking about have DEI programs specifically because they believe they'll improve their profitability in one way or another
Definitely not. I've been exposed to the rationale for these. Profit and effectiveness have nothing to do with it. CEOs put them in place because otherwise left wing employees or board members will try and destroy them, and Democrat-run regulators will support them in that goal even if it means breaking the rules. There have been many examples of such things in action - look at the organized cartel-like boycotts of X after Musk upset left wing marketing execs.
CEOs don't want that to happen to them. That's why this is happening now, the moment Trump won a major victory. The fact that the left has lost power comprehensively makes it safer to stand up for what Zuckerberg believed in all along.
Companies deciding not to spend money with X because consumers objected to ads there more than they bought products from ads there is "organized cartel like boycotts" and Zuck deciding to ditch decade old programmes because the new President hates them and him and his platform (and owns a rival platform too!) is freeing him to do what he believed all along!? I've heard it all now.
Bet Bezos has spent years dreaming of making that Melania documentary he's finally become free to spend $40m on too...
> Doesn't free market capitalism automatically fix this though?
Free market capitalism:
(1) does not exist,
(2) structurally cannot stably exist (because economic power and political power are fundamentally the same thing),
(3) is a utopian propaganda concept created in response to and to deflect critiques of the way that the capitalism that can and does actually exist works.
I keep hearing this example, but it's hard for me to imagine how this works with companies that are not designing consumer-facing products.
Will "getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds" make their servers not fail with 500 errors? Or make them actually deliver features at a reasonable rate? Or will it prevent them not having a major bug every other release? Because that's what the customers complain about, and that's what company needs for major growth.
(I am suspect that hiring Rachel of rachelbythebay.com will help with this, but this will be because she is a great engineer, not because of her gender.)
Yeah, what people miss when they talk about hiring "the best person for the job" is that a company is not composed of well-defined roles and fungible people who do the job description and nothing else. Ideally, you're building a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if someone isn't the most proficient person on the planet for a given role, they might be better for your team as a whole.
What I'm skeptical of is that DEI programs in bigger companies were ever anything more pandering. There was an "enlightened self-interest", but it was that the regulatory and cultural environment made it difficult to attract talent without at least paying lip service to DEI. Now the winds have shifted, and — surprise! — their "enlightened self-interest" no longer includes pretending to care about it.
This isn't a critique of DEI programs specifically, by the way. I think any social initiative at a company fulfills basically the same function: environmental pledges, etc. The point is to make your company look better without actually changing anything.
Alright, I can see that. DEI programs that actually change and improve the company are extremely valuable, in my opinion. Ones that check a box to say "look at how nice we are!" aren't so much.
I agree! But the problem is that many people are more invested in discrimination than they are in improving their team. At least according to their revealed preferences, a lot of people who claim to support meritocracy/yada yada would rather be on a worse-performing team with more white people/men/etc than a better-performing diverse one.
Dan Luu has a good article on this: [1]
> A problem is that it's hard to separate out the effect of discrimination from confounding variables because it's hard to get good data on employee performance v. compensation over time. Luckily, there's one set of fields where that data is available: sports.
> ...
> In baseball, Gwartney and Haworth (1974) found that teams that discriminated less against non-white players in the decade following de-segregation performed better. Studies of later decades using “classical” productivity metrics mostly found that salaries equalize. However, Swartz (2014), using newer and more accurate metrics for productivity, found that Latino players are significantly underpaid for their productivity level. Compensation isn't the only way to discriminate -- Jibou (1988) found that black players had higher exit rates from baseball after controlling for age and performance. This should sound familiar to anyone who's wondered about exit rates in tech fields.
> ...
> In tech, some people are concerned that increasing diversity will "lower the bar", but in sports, which has a more competitive hiring market than tech, we saw the opposite, increasing diversity raised the level instead of lowering it because it means hiring people on their qualifications instead of on what they look like. I don't disagree with people who say that it would be absurd for tech companies to leave money on the table by not hiring qualified minorities. But this is exactly what we saw in the sports we looked at, where that's even more absurd due to the relative ease of quantifying performance. And yet, for decades, teams left huge amounts of money on the table by favoring white players (and, in the case of hockey, non-French Canadian players) who were, quite simply, less qualified than their peers. The world is an absurd place.
I’m not usually one to complain about downvotes but it’s pretty funny to downvote this post specifically.
Like, what’s the actual counterargument here? “No, I think companies should hire the most qualified individual in the world for the job on paper even if it harms the team as a whole. Risking the bottom line is what meritocracy is all about!”
For an extreme example, imagine a car company with zero women employees. I could imagine that their designs might look increasingly awesome to people who grew up playing with black, angular, high-powered cars (like me -- that's what I'd want!). And while there are plenty of women who'd like that, too, there are lots of women (and plenty of men!) who'd want something smaller, more brightly colored, and with better gas mileage. It they didn't have those varying opinions, or weren't even aware that people had other opinions, they'd be severely limiting their potential market and leaving huge amounts of money on the table.
(My wife's a big F1 fan and wants to own a McLaren some day. I know that many, many women love fast cars, too, and that many, many men do not. That was meant to be illustrative, not a perfect analogy.)
I am utterly convinced that getting input from lots of people with various backgrounds makes a company much better and more profitable. Even if I didn't care about the societal ideals behind DEI programs, I'd still happily endorse them as a competitive edge.