There's also the big cable MSO that is the combined RCN, Wave, Grande (now being rebranded as Astound), also owned/run by some wall street finance types.
Then you've got things like Canada's Bell buying a controlling interest in Ziply, which acquired Frontier Northwest 4-5 years ago.
shakna · 9h ago
"DEI discimination".
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion... Discrimination.
What is it with Donald's administration that they so eagerly embrace DoubleThink?
winrid · 9h ago
I've literally been in meetings were managers said they couldn't hire someone because they weren't a minority.
(edit: also to clarify I think what the Trump admin is doing - bribing to take a different political stance - and allowing monopolies - is bad)
ok_dad · 9h ago
I’ve been in a meeting where my boss said he didn’t want to hire any more Indians because they aren’t fun to talk to at lunch, so I guess our two stories cancel out?
everdrive · 8h ago
Two wrongs do not make a right. Both practices are wrong.
ok_dad · 5h ago
I agree. No singular story like either of ours represents the hiring practices of any company except those we were part of.
That was my point, but I guess subtlety doesn’t work well on the internet.
tootie · 4h ago
Hard disagree. On the one hand, "we have to hire a minority" is extremely blunt interpretation of DEI. But the intent is to foster diversity and that does mean hiring underrepresented groups. Having a diverse team is net positive on a lot of fronts. There are studies showing it actually improves team performance, but more generally it improves society. It may be marginally "unfair" for a particular company to be the one picking up the slack for society, but given the systemic discrimination that exists against minorities in so many part of society, giving them any sort of accommodation in hiring can at least offset the injustice elsewhere. The net result is a better society. Why is that the responsibility of a private company? Because companies are people and people live in society.
jdonaldson · 8h ago
Are you saying that all we have to do is hire a few boring Indians to cancel out one DEI hire? This is huge news!
No, just some gamma radiation and maybe pions or something.
netik · 9h ago
Two racists make a right (winger) I guess.
9283409232 · 8h ago
I've been in meetings where we had minorities that killed the interviews but leadership gave us shifty reasons as to why they weren't hired. They landed on "bad cultural fit"
pfannkuchen · 8h ago
When you say minority are these like East Asians or Indians? I’ve never heard of anyone rejecting a high performing African American or Hispanic for cultural fit, I’d be curious to hear what part of the country this happened in if it was from the latter group.
9283409232 · 8h ago
This happened about a decade ago on the west coast when I still worked for big business. The candidates I'm thinking of were Hispanic.
nickpsecurity · 8h ago
I work for Indians. They often try to use other Indians for investing, repairs, and key positions. It's also mostly immigrants from one state. They dominate the hotel industry.
foogazi · 4h ago
I’ve worked with/for/hired by Indians & Chinese from startups, corporate to FAANG - smartest, kindest people I’ve ever worked with
I don’t know or care who they invest with or if they own hotels
Manuel_D · 6h ago
And one of my previous companies, Indian male applicants were categorized as "ND". Negative Diversity. Even less desirable than whites.
Your stories don't cancel out, they add up: most DEI programs I've seen have discriminated against Asians at least as much as whites if not more.
shakna · 8h ago
Cool. But DEI practices happened not because of anecdotes, but data on systemic bias - which endangers multiple generations of people. A responsible government will act on the data, rather than a gut feeling.
Manuel_D · 6h ago
> But DEI practices happened not because of anecdotes, but data on systemic bias
Often said. Rarely backed up by such data. Efforts to measure bias in tech has consistently shown preferences favoring women:
Yet all the DEI programs I've seen firsthand have privileged women over men.
shakna · 18m ago
Ok, but "tech" is not just Silicon Valley. And as a whole, there is absolutely bias [0]. In the US, mostly for older, white males, in Europe, mostly for younger white males.
But anti-DEI policy allowed a group in the process of losing status to name and point to a target. The function of removing DEI is to relieve them of the feeling that their status was under attack.
RHSeeger · 8h ago
I don't think anyone with a brain thinks that the DEI rules don't provide benefit to people of a minority at the expense of the people in the majority. But they also provide benefits to the minority as a whole against the system as a whole, to help raise them up from the lower starting point they been pushed into. And it's a balance between individual unfairness (negative impact to individuals of the majority) and systematic fairness (positive impact to the minorities as a whole). The end goal is that all groups start at the same point and the nobody needs to be given preference because of their group.
Anyone who thinks "you have to hire a certain amount/percentage of minorities" doesn't mean, by definition, that you will need to negatively impact _individual_ members of a majority hasn't spent any real time thinking about how it works. But the point is that it's worth it for society as a whole.
umvi · 8h ago
> But the point is that it's worth it for society as a whole.
Who decided/determined this? You state it as if positive discrimination is a proven social good, yet I don't think it's so clear. There's still a ton of debate around it, and different western countries have difference stances on it. To me it still seems like an experiment with unclear/unknown long term value to society.
BobaFloutist · 7h ago
If you believe human capabilities tend to follow a bell curve, and if you believe that minorities are statistically disadvantaged compared to their non-minority complement, that would seem to imply minorities are un(der)tapped as a market and as a labor pool. Which would suggest making a point to actively include them in your hiring and marketing funnel and at least slightly biasing those funnels in their favor would just be good business.
Enginerrrd · 7h ago
Your reasoning is totally sound up until the final clause.
The "correct" answer isn't biasing evaluation pipelines, it's ensuring you have proportional representation in the pool of applicants.
RHSeeger · 3h ago
> ensuring you have proportional representation in the pool of applicants
But you don't in most cases. And a lot of that is because minorities, in general, have a less access to opportunities. By lifting up minorities individually, the goal is to raise them up at a systematic level. And the end goal of _that_ is so that they can/do have proportional representation in the pool of applicants. At which point, the biased treatment to get them there will no longer be necessary.
Admittedly, it's debatable as to whether that approach will work; but I haven't seen any other viable options put forth.
Manuel_D · 6h ago
Then DEI proponents should be honest about the fact that DEI isn't about curbing discrimination, but deliberately engaging in positive discrimination.
One of the biggest things about the DEI discourse that puts me off is the dishonesty of it. Many, perhaps most, DEI advocates attempt to argue that policies like withholding executive bonuses if their org isnt X% women and Y% URM isn't discrimination. Heck, I've encountered one former co-worker argue that allocating a segment of headcout exclusive to women wasn't discrimination, because it's "extra" headcount. If I have 100 headcount and I prohibit men from 20 of them that's discrimination, but if I have 80 headcount and I add 20 "extra" heads exclusively available to women that's not discrimination, according to this former co-worker's logic.
It's one thing to advance a controversial policy and stand by it earnestly. It's another to advance a controversial policy while lying about it to people's faces. DEI is unfortunately often carried out via the latter fashion. And realistically, that's the only way it can be carried out under our present set of laws, because discrimination on the basis of race and gender are illegal nation-wide in the USA.
RHSeeger · 3h ago
> Then DEI proponents should be honest about the fact that DEI isn't about curbing discrimination, but deliberately engaging in positive discrimination.
That's fair. But it's unfair to state it like _all_ DEI proponents aren't honest about it. Clearly, I'm saying just that and I _am_ a proponent of it.
tehwebguy · 7h ago
I bet they were lying, or that you are!
winrid · 6h ago
I understand the concern, but I have no skin in the game to lie here. Actually it's fairly risky to say what I've said, but it frustrates me. Also, I do not think they would slip up and lie in such a way.
epistasis · 8h ago
That is illegal and they should have talked to HR about what DEI is, because it's certainly not that!
aorloff · 9h ago
Ok great, and what ?
I spent 25 years in the industry and a dozen as a manager and I can tell you that straight up racism against black and latino people has been coddled and tolerated for a long time.
The solution isn't to say: we won't hire white people, but it is to say, we have to create teams that are heterogeneous (and doing what that takes).
Your personal anecdotes are not what makes up racism, writ large. And the fact that this has to be explained is, you know, the thing.
winrid · 9h ago
You said that my personal anecdotes don't matter while bringing up your personal anecdotes. I've personally never seen racism against Latinos or blacks during hiring.
Probably the the most diverse place I worked at had no such quotas.
My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
mmooss · 8h ago
> I've personally never seen racism against Latinos or blacks during hiring.
There are mountains of research and witnesses. What does your statement mean?
Also, maybe you weren't aware of how they made their hiring choice? People don't usually openly say they are doing it for racist reasons.
> My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
I don't think DEI is implemented by quotas usually, nor is racism.
For example, I had a recruiter I relied on heavily. I realized that they only sent me white guys to interview (with one exception).
I have no idea why, but I know the recruiter found people through their own networks, and I bet those networks - usually formed from people we've gone to school with, worked with, socialized with, family, etc. - was white people, and that's who is added to the network. It's self-perpetuating - white people know white people. IIRC, AirBnB's founder knew someone at YC via their MIT fraternity - what do you think they probably looked like (I'm not criticizing AirBnB founders at all - they did amazing; for all I know they are big proponents of DEI)? (There are so many white people - ~60% of the population or ~200 million in the US - that you can spend your entire life without knowing anyone else.) And look around the office of your IT organization; if someone was black, what is the chance that they'd know someone who would help them get a job there?
One method of DEI in hiring is to require that a person from a minority is interviewed for every position (in IT, that includes women). By me requiring that, my recruiter was required to develop networks that included many minorities, and I hope those people - now in the network - got opportunities for other jobs too.
aorloff · 7h ago
Some places might not need quotas.
But if you have never seen racism against Latinos or blacks during hiring it is your eyesight that needs checking, my friend.
jazzyjackson · 8h ago
Problem is if the talent pool is not heterogenous, for a litany of historical reasons, a hiring manager becomes tasked with waiting around for a candidate that meets a race quota, which one might consider exactly as racist as maintaining a race status quo.
acdha · 8h ago
I haven’t seen DEI programs which set “race quotas”. It was things like making sure they did outreach to wider groups, had job requirements which matched the work, and made efforts to avoid nebulous “culture fit” judgements which tended to cut against people who weren’t like the existing employees (this often benefits even white guys if, for example, it avoids age discrimination or lower ratings for someone who goes home to their family after work instead of grabbing beers with the other 20-something single people).
RHSeeger · 8h ago
Honestly, it feels like you're not looking, then. Because most DEI programs push to have a balance of minorities in employees. And, if the available pool consists of mainly the majority, that means you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
However, it is best for society to do this. Because it is best for society if all groups are starting from the same point; and that means we need to give a leg up to the groups that are currently being pushed down by the system.
acdha · 6h ago
I have seen my personal experience and what I’ve heard from trusted friends, which has generally been expanding the pool for merit-based hiring. I’m sure there are places which set quotas but I haven’t seen that or reliable data about hiring quotas so I didn’t comment about what I haven’t seen.
mmooss · 7h ago
> if the available pool consists of mainly the majority
The available talent pool is usually defined by the personal/professional networks of the people doing the hiring, and since the hirers are almost all white, so is the talent pool.
The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
> you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
The racist competition for survival is the hallmark of the propaganda of racists. It's just a fair competition - do you want minorities excluded from competing for the job? Do you want a handout?
When baseball in the US ended the color line, and allowed black and latino and other athletes to compete for the same jobs as white athletes, were they 'negatively impacting' some white athletes? I guess that's literally true, but do you really think they should have continued to receive 'affirmative action for white people', which is what hiring was and in many ways still is?
dgfitz · 8h ago
It’s a step before that. Colleges have DEI quotas, which is the mindset that is ingrained before graduation. It just carries over, even if it isn’t actually relevant at an employer. We have very effectively “educated the shit out of our kids” for decades about this.
Education works, I guess?
mmooss · 7h ago
> We have very effectively “educated the shit out of our kids” for decades about this.
Maybe kids and others who disagree with you aren't indoctrinated, but form their own opinions, and the great majority have seen the research (in college) and the very obvious reality, and concluded there is discrimination. I don't know how you can say otherwise in the face of reality.
'Decades' ago there was even more open racism. It didn't take much education to say that white-only hotels and restaurants, and lynchings indicated there was racism.
Many people today, since 2016, openly embrace racism. What do you say to them?
dgfitz · 4h ago
Sincerely, I have no idea how to respond to any of that. I’m kind of at a loss… hasn’t the messaging been that it takes a generation or so to make an effective change in the mindset of a population? Aren’t we bearing the fruits of that?
mmooss · 35m ago
> hasn’t the messaging been that it takes a generation or so to make an effective change in the mindset of a population? Aren’t we bearing the fruits of that?
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean, it's not changing faster because it takes a generation? The US has been addressing racism for many generations; the civil rights era - which was not the start of the issue - peaked in the 1960s. The US had the Abolitionist movement in the 19th century and maybe before. The US Civil War was in the 19th century.
shakna · 8h ago
Thankfully "race quotas" are not the only DEI hiring practice.
Things like removing names from CVs are fairly effective at fighting bias.
winrid · 8h ago
I'm perfectly fine with that.
aorloff · 7h ago
This is the mental trap the right wing wants you to fall into.
It is not "as racist" because we didn't just magically arrive into this moment.
eweise · 8h ago
I've spent at least that much time in the industry and never witnessed such discrimination.
mmooss · 7h ago
The evidence is well-documented and overwhelming, as are the witnesses to it, news stories, etc.. Are you saying it's all false?
Maybe you didn't know what you were seeing? People don't often openly say, 'I'm not hiring them because they are black'. They don't necessarily think it; they think, 'I'm not as comfortable with this person' and 'I don't know how they'll fit into our team', without even realizing why.
DEI trains people to be aware of those feeling and thoughts and double-check them. Most people don't want to make decisions in that way and appreciate the training.
eweise · 2h ago
I didn't say its all false but I also noticed that you didn't post a single link to the overwhelming and well-documented evidence. Since most of the people I work with are Indian, I guess you're suggesting that Indians are racists against hispanics and blacks. I don't know why that would be but I guess from you said, its well documented.
wkat4242 · 6h ago
> DEI trains people to be aware of those feeling and thoughts and double-check them. Most people don't want to make decisions in that way and appreciate the training.
Exactly this. It's all about awareness.
IMO companies that enforce quotas are not really trying to fix the problem but just forcing the numbers to look good. Because quotas are not solving the mindset that causes this. It's a quick fix. Trainings and workshops are hard work but they actually improve people's self-awareness over time.
user3939382 · 9h ago
If you think policies are named for what they actually are you’re going to be shocked at how legislation is titled.
tshaddox · 8h ago
Shouldn't forced policy changes be based on what the policies actually are instead of what they're named? Otherwise it would be permissible to simply change the name of the policy.
morkalork · 8h ago
Right to Work always comes to mind
kylecazar · 8h ago
Patriot Act never far behind
ToucanLoucan · 8h ago
No Child Left Behind
trav4225 · 3h ago
Please be kind and rewind!
jvanderbot · 8h ago
Not to push back, just to add context: I'd wager about half of people would say that "DEI" is itself doublespeak. I don't agree with any of the strong opinions around this subject, but I can definitely say that we won't get far repeating the same old talking points.
nickpsecurity · 8h ago
It was made by people promoting intersectionality with redistributive "justice." It was often promoted and enforced by such people. Many consultants also have highly negative views of white people.
So, it's not speculation. What it does, taking away from one group to give to favored groups, is exactly what intersectionality/woke/etc called for.
mmooss · 8h ago
> taking away from one group to give to favored groups
That's right out of the playbook of how to promote racism and descrimination - tell people that the 'Blacks', etc. are taking their jobs. It literally goes back to the days of slavery, when they would turn poor whites against black slaves. God forbid the poor and oppressed got together; then they might vote out the wealthy and powerful.
DEI is not redistribution. It's eliminating bias that favors the powerful groups, mostly white guys, that have benefitted - many unwittingly - from that bias for all of US history. If you want your job on merit, if you want a fair chance rather than a handout, you should favor DEI. If you think there's no bias, you are living in a fantasy - it's gone on for centuries, the documentation and research are overwhelming, and it's boomed since 2016.
Manuel_D · 6h ago
> DEI is not redistribution. It's eliminating bias that favors the powerful groups, mostly white guys, that have benefitted - many unwittingly - from that bias for all of US history. If you want your job on merit, if you want a fair chance rather than a handout, you should favor DEI.
This runs directly contrary to my experience with DEI. I demoed setups for anonymized zoom interviews, and blinded resume review. HR didn't want any of it. Instead, we made exec's bonuses contingent on keeping the percentage of male employees in their org below a cap - exceed the cap, lose your bonus. The cap was lower than men's representation in the field.
If DEI was about promoting merit, it would be focused on making interviews more objective, and anonymizing as much of the hiring process as we can. In practice, it's the opposite: directly tying incentives to the demographics of the candidates and penalizing those who don't adhere to the desired ethnic and gender ratio.
nickpsecurity · 7h ago
No, it's out of the playback of the people who invented and promoted intersectionality, redistribution of wealth/power, and DEI. Then, pushed their ideology into universities, corporations, and governments by lying that it was merely promoting diversity or fighting discrimination.
Once it is in place, they always take from specific groups that they label as advantaged, privileged, or oppressors. They give to other groups they favor. I'll let you guess who the bad guys always are. Even if minorities become dominant, they still talk like white males are the advantaged people and still work against them. So, it's just hateful and systematically racist against specific groups.
ryandrake · 7h ago
What did "they" take from you? Be specific and quantify it.
nickpsecurity · 4h ago
It's a strange question to ask me about DEI policy since they specifically aim to hire or promote non-white and non-male people. So, jobs or promotions based on official policy. I cant quantify it since the non-whites and women who got hired or promoted didnt tell me their salaries.
How about some examples of what I ran into. Please note these are not arguing race is the cause but a specific culture that comes with DEI. This is not how I think about black organizations or anything like that. These are all DEI, liberal run, etc.
At one employer, they did a hiring event that caused the entire workforce to be mostly black within a week or so. Then, management and corporate people were that way. They put out big, "diversity" signs in front showing non-whites being promoted. They were evil and into cronyism like the whites before them but looked different so society is better?
When I lost my job, it was hard to find new ones. Our area was more equally white and black than most places. The companies now were mostly black: workers, managers, and who hired. At some, the white people acted more black than white. So, add any of those jobs. Some would laugh at or mock white people.
My friend gets in a hospital that's also DEI. The mostly-black staff were always rude. One knocked her on the ground to move her as she worked. People there said whites and women never last. That it was pointless to try to correct it.
My step-dad was at a warehouse at the time. Of nearly 100 people, only a few were white. They were treated more strictly and petty. For instance, he said they got in trouble for not having the new shirts but only the black people knew about them. They didnt bother telling the white people.
Many tech companies I looked at overtly said they wanted diversity (not whites). They showed pictures of their staff that had few to no white people. Some like Babbel played up transgender a lot. Local and remote companies had special, support groups for non-whites, women, and LGBT people (eg Plaid). Groups like Best Buy offered in-house mini-MBA's for advancement... unless you're white.
Many of the organizations doing training, networking, mentoring, and grants were focusing on needy minorities. The minority members often got more at the EBT office. The media would always talk about their plight, too, like many of us didnt have empty fridges and no insurance.
So, however you would quantify all that multiplied by however many whites or men were financially or medically impacted by it. I'm glad it's starting to reverse under the Trump administration. At least one politician thinks whites, males, and straight people are human beings, too.
mmooss · 7h ago
You're just saying this stuff, but it's not only badly misconceived, it's repeating that playbook. You can easily find - even in this discussion - why it's false.
Anything that teaches you to hate and fear is a red flag - a sign to run the other way. They are doing it for a reason, they are appealing to the worst and most emotional parts of people for a reason. (And no, DEI doesn't teach that; it's just the propagandists that portray it that way).
Spivak · 7h ago
My guy you clearly have no idea what intersectionality even means. Like this is firmly in the "not even wrong" territory where the word doesn't make sense in the sentence.
Intersectionality is a descriptive term to understand how a person's advantages (say from being white) and disadvantages (say from being gay) interact and how all the different combinations have unique struggles and challenges. It doesn't do or call for anything.
nickpsecurity · 7h ago
The People that promote it call for "redistributive justice" that takes away from groups they see as advantaged to give to groups they see as disadvantaged. Advantaged, privilege, and power are synonyms for them.
In practice, they always treat whites, males, and straight people as the problem. The DEI policies they pushed certainly "call for" Something.
Spivak · 6h ago
Ya know, reading this I start to understand the backlash against DEI programs when real life, presumably educated, people such as yourself seem to genuinely believe in such a cartoonish narrative. That's not even what redistributive justice means— welfare and public education are redistributive justice, progressive taxation is redistributive justice. It's a political and economic theory supported by the well known woke anti-white and anti-male institution The Catholic Church.
You don't need a whiteness tax or other nonsense, when you have equitable systems (like heating assistance programs) the benefits naturally flow to disadvantaged groups because they'll be the ones disproportionately qualifying for aid.
rwaksmunski · 9h ago
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tootie · 4h ago
Same reason the considered antifa to be public enemy #1.
kryogen1c · 8h ago
Is English not your first language? That isn't double think.
If a law is passed requiring drug use to be prosecuted and making it illegal not to, you have criminalized decriminalization.
Just because words or concepts are opposed in isolation doesn't mean they can't appear in a sentence or thought together. That's not how grammar works, and it's not what 1984 is about.
shakna · 2h ago
Uh... That's precisely what 1984 was referencing - rules and laws passed in Soviet Russia that twist the meaning of existent words.
Manuel_D · 6h ago
Because "DEI" is a dog whistle [1] for discrimination. Every DEI program I've witnessed ultimately worked through discriminatory means. Remember, offering a "bonus" for reaching X% of a certain demographic is no different than penalizing employees if they fail to reach the quota. Allocating "extra" headcount that's exclusive to "diverse" candidates is no different than banning non-diverse candidates from a segment of headcount.
The nature of dog whistles is that some people use the term in earnest, without the subtext. But in my experience most people enthusiastic about DEI ultimately do condone discrimination in one way or another.
Your experience is filtered through your own biases and preferences.
There are incompetent people on both sides of the issue. the difference is that one side has correctly identified a problem with how institutions choose people. The other side is screaming bloody murder that there's no problem at all and that we have to stop talking about the obviously inadvertent and innocuous inequities in our society and institutions.
Manuel_D · 5h ago
Are the policies I've laid out not explicitly discriminatory? You realize that outright denial of employment on the basis of gender was one of the policies I listed. If your strategy is to simply tell people to disbelieve their own lying eyes... good luck with that.
Not every inequity is the result of discrimination or bias. Should we strive to have a 50/50 gender split in murder convictions? A quota restricting murder convictions to 50% men would be an equitable policy but an explicitly unequal one as it'd require either men being let off or women being falsely convicted.
If DEI was carried through policies like anonymizing resumes and interviews, I'd believe the claims about how DEI is about reducing discrimination. Instead, all the DEI program I've actually seen firsthand have either directly discriminated on th basis of protected class, or incentivize people to discriminate (e.g. bonuses tied to quotas).
mpalmer · 3h ago
Yes I did in fact read your comment. Your kneejerk conclusion that I'm gaslighting you notwithstanding, you are presenting your personal observations as representative of some whole truth. I am challenging that.
I'm involved in hiring at my company, which is fairly diverse compared to my perception of the average. There are no quotas, only intentional processes that ensure everyone gets a fair shake.
Manuel_D · 3h ago
As I said in my first comment, the nature of dog whistles is that some people use it innocently, without invoking the deeper context.
> ...only intentional processes that ensure everyone gets a fair shake.
Care to elaborate? The overtly discriminatory policies I listed above were supposedly just ensuring everyone gets a fair take. The language of "ensure everyone gets a fair shake," is no different than how my previous employers described our policy to restrict a segment of headcount to one gender.
If you're interested in non-anecdotal evidence on tech hiring bias, here's a few studies tracking applicants submitted to companies and universities:
We don't do any of that. Our DEI program is just about training for hiring managers to recognise bias.
Also, DEI is about giving people with special needs the things they require to function. And providing managers insights into the things they might struggle with. We do information packs about LGBT, different religions etc just so managers understand and can accommodate. We have resource networks for managers (and really, all employees) that have questions about such things. We organise awareness events about LGBT and minority topics so employees can learn from each other and create a better understanding. And it works. It's not just about hiring but also creating better awareness for existing employees.
We do look at numbers to guage how we're doing but nobody is being penalised. If we have very few minorities compared to the local demographics it just means our trainings are not getting heard properly and we need to improve them.
I would go as far as to say that a company that has strict quotas doesn't really care about DEI. They just want a quick fix. This is not how these things work. You're working with people, not numbers.
What bothers me the most is that the Trump administration is even trying to force foreign companies like my employer to abandon DEI programs. It's none of their business what we do in the EU. We like what we do and we're not going to change. They cherrypick a few bad examples and pretend everyone works like that.
walledstance · 5h ago
Thank you for your perspective. Sometimes I think, in our data filled world, we overestimate numbers even when disparaging something. Refocusing on the people is an important reminder that numbers matter a little less than we think.
blacksmith_tb · 8h ago
So newly-enlarged (and emboldened) ISPs will happily screw over white folks and people of color without a hint of bias, now that's what I call progress marching forward.
robert_foss · 9h ago
American institutions are truly being gutted and weaponized.
thrance · 8h ago
This is how mafia works. Be loyal, do the boss's bidding and you shall be rewarded. Slip and be sent to an El Salvador black site.
tootie · 9h ago
Carr has been pretty clear the FCC will do whatever Trump wants despite their status as an independent agency. Mergers and spectrum and whatever will be handed out to politically compliant outlets.
SimianSci · 8h ago
We commonly use the word 'tool' to describe such people because it is the best descriptor.
Carr has shown himself to be nakedly partisan, and at risk of doing serious damage to the industry. Anyone who believes otherwise should be referred to his consistent rhetoric that news agencies that show unfavorable coverage to the Trump administration will be investigated and brought to heel.
Hilarious that companies like Verizon get pushed around by dopes like Carr and Trump.
stackskipton · 9h ago
Companies will only fight back on things that impact their short-term bottom line.
Ending DEI is unlikely to impact their bottom line but mergers do so out with DEI programs they go.
rdtsc · 9h ago
> Companies will only fight back on things that impact their short-term bottom line.
The speed with which they all dropped DEI programs was shocking. Especially after years of saying how it's critical, it makes them more vibrant, stronger, etc. I guess they never believed any of that.
> “I am baffled by all the companies doing an about-face on their social initiatives right now. Did you not actually mean it in the first place? Either don’t do it, or do it and stay doing it, but don’t do this ‘DEI is cancelled now’,” he says. “It’s very odd to me.”
tdeck · 9h ago
I think these companies found it harder to hire, and thus worked harder to look good to perspective employees. Now with the hiring market being reset in a way that favors employers, a lot of that is going away.
acdha · 8h ago
I think that’s right, extending hiring to include retention. Tech workers had an almost two decade run of extremely high negotiating power and many used that to have more influence on company policies than most workers are allowed. There’s a theory that what we’re seeing now is more resentment about upsetting the power dynamic than any actual cost these guys suffered, and that’s compatible with e.g. those leaked group chats.
mizzack · 5h ago
The end of ESG investing and, yes, preference falsification and preference cascade. They never believed in it, it was just socially unacceptable to admit it until the pendulum swung back in the other direction.
9283409232 · 8h ago
Credit to him I guess. Someone should keep a list of companies that are sticking to their guns.
So we're mostly down to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter.
Verizon previously tried to merge with Charter back in 2017, but that didn't work out.[1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizon-is-exploring-combinatio...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-e&channel=ent...
Then you've got things like Canada's Bell buying a controlling interest in Ziply, which acquired Frontier Northwest 4-5 years ago.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion... Discrimination.
What is it with Donald's administration that they so eagerly embrace DoubleThink?
(edit: also to clarify I think what the Trump admin is doing - bribing to take a different political stance - and allowing monopolies - is bad)
That was my point, but I guess subtlety doesn’t work well on the internet.
and emit a photon and antineutrino?
(nerd alert...). https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/...
I don’t know or care who they invest with or if they own hotels
Your stories don't cancel out, they add up: most DEI programs I've seen have discriminated against Asians at least as much as whites if not more.
Often said. Rarely backed up by such data. Efforts to measure bias in tech has consistently shown preferences favoring women:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112, the chart with the important data: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.1418878112/asset/fc20a...
Study on sending resumes to SV tech companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484, HN discussion on the paperhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
Yet all the DEI programs I've seen firsthand have privileged women over men.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212...
Anyone who thinks "you have to hire a certain amount/percentage of minorities" doesn't mean, by definition, that you will need to negatively impact _individual_ members of a majority hasn't spent any real time thinking about how it works. But the point is that it's worth it for society as a whole.
Who decided/determined this? You state it as if positive discrimination is a proven social good, yet I don't think it's so clear. There's still a ton of debate around it, and different western countries have difference stances on it. To me it still seems like an experiment with unclear/unknown long term value to society.
The "correct" answer isn't biasing evaluation pipelines, it's ensuring you have proportional representation in the pool of applicants.
But you don't in most cases. And a lot of that is because minorities, in general, have a less access to opportunities. By lifting up minorities individually, the goal is to raise them up at a systematic level. And the end goal of _that_ is so that they can/do have proportional representation in the pool of applicants. At which point, the biased treatment to get them there will no longer be necessary.
Admittedly, it's debatable as to whether that approach will work; but I haven't seen any other viable options put forth.
One of the biggest things about the DEI discourse that puts me off is the dishonesty of it. Many, perhaps most, DEI advocates attempt to argue that policies like withholding executive bonuses if their org isnt X% women and Y% URM isn't discrimination. Heck, I've encountered one former co-worker argue that allocating a segment of headcout exclusive to women wasn't discrimination, because it's "extra" headcount. If I have 100 headcount and I prohibit men from 20 of them that's discrimination, but if I have 80 headcount and I add 20 "extra" heads exclusively available to women that's not discrimination, according to this former co-worker's logic.
It's one thing to advance a controversial policy and stand by it earnestly. It's another to advance a controversial policy while lying about it to people's faces. DEI is unfortunately often carried out via the latter fashion. And realistically, that's the only way it can be carried out under our present set of laws, because discrimination on the basis of race and gender are illegal nation-wide in the USA.
That's fair. But it's unfair to state it like _all_ DEI proponents aren't honest about it. Clearly, I'm saying just that and I _am_ a proponent of it.
I spent 25 years in the industry and a dozen as a manager and I can tell you that straight up racism against black and latino people has been coddled and tolerated for a long time.
The solution isn't to say: we won't hire white people, but it is to say, we have to create teams that are heterogeneous (and doing what that takes).
Your personal anecdotes are not what makes up racism, writ large. And the fact that this has to be explained is, you know, the thing.
Probably the the most diverse place I worked at had no such quotas.
My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
There are mountains of research and witnesses. What does your statement mean?
Also, maybe you weren't aware of how they made their hiring choice? People don't usually openly say they are doing it for racist reasons.
> My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
I don't think DEI is implemented by quotas usually, nor is racism.
For example, I had a recruiter I relied on heavily. I realized that they only sent me white guys to interview (with one exception).
I have no idea why, but I know the recruiter found people through their own networks, and I bet those networks - usually formed from people we've gone to school with, worked with, socialized with, family, etc. - was white people, and that's who is added to the network. It's self-perpetuating - white people know white people. IIRC, AirBnB's founder knew someone at YC via their MIT fraternity - what do you think they probably looked like (I'm not criticizing AirBnB founders at all - they did amazing; for all I know they are big proponents of DEI)? (There are so many white people - ~60% of the population or ~200 million in the US - that you can spend your entire life without knowing anyone else.) And look around the office of your IT organization; if someone was black, what is the chance that they'd know someone who would help them get a job there?
One method of DEI in hiring is to require that a person from a minority is interviewed for every position (in IT, that includes women). By me requiring that, my recruiter was required to develop networks that included many minorities, and I hope those people - now in the network - got opportunities for other jobs too.
But if you have never seen racism against Latinos or blacks during hiring it is your eyesight that needs checking, my friend.
However, it is best for society to do this. Because it is best for society if all groups are starting from the same point; and that means we need to give a leg up to the groups that are currently being pushed down by the system.
The available talent pool is usually defined by the personal/professional networks of the people doing the hiring, and since the hirers are almost all white, so is the talent pool.
The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
> you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
The racist competition for survival is the hallmark of the propaganda of racists. It's just a fair competition - do you want minorities excluded from competing for the job? Do you want a handout?
When baseball in the US ended the color line, and allowed black and latino and other athletes to compete for the same jobs as white athletes, were they 'negatively impacting' some white athletes? I guess that's literally true, but do you really think they should have continued to receive 'affirmative action for white people', which is what hiring was and in many ways still is?
Education works, I guess?
Maybe kids and others who disagree with you aren't indoctrinated, but form their own opinions, and the great majority have seen the research (in college) and the very obvious reality, and concluded there is discrimination. I don't know how you can say otherwise in the face of reality.
'Decades' ago there was even more open racism. It didn't take much education to say that white-only hotels and restaurants, and lynchings indicated there was racism.
Many people today, since 2016, openly embrace racism. What do you say to them?
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean, it's not changing faster because it takes a generation? The US has been addressing racism for many generations; the civil rights era - which was not the start of the issue - peaked in the 1960s. The US had the Abolitionist movement in the 19th century and maybe before. The US Civil War was in the 19th century.
Things like removing names from CVs are fairly effective at fighting bias.
It is not "as racist" because we didn't just magically arrive into this moment.
Maybe you didn't know what you were seeing? People don't often openly say, 'I'm not hiring them because they are black'. They don't necessarily think it; they think, 'I'm not as comfortable with this person' and 'I don't know how they'll fit into our team', without even realizing why.
DEI trains people to be aware of those feeling and thoughts and double-check them. Most people don't want to make decisions in that way and appreciate the training.
Exactly this. It's all about awareness.
IMO companies that enforce quotas are not really trying to fix the problem but just forcing the numbers to look good. Because quotas are not solving the mindset that causes this. It's a quick fix. Trainings and workshops are hard work but they actually improve people's self-awareness over time.
So, it's not speculation. What it does, taking away from one group to give to favored groups, is exactly what intersectionality/woke/etc called for.
That's right out of the playbook of how to promote racism and descrimination - tell people that the 'Blacks', etc. are taking their jobs. It literally goes back to the days of slavery, when they would turn poor whites against black slaves. God forbid the poor and oppressed got together; then they might vote out the wealthy and powerful.
DEI is not redistribution. It's eliminating bias that favors the powerful groups, mostly white guys, that have benefitted - many unwittingly - from that bias for all of US history. If you want your job on merit, if you want a fair chance rather than a handout, you should favor DEI. If you think there's no bias, you are living in a fantasy - it's gone on for centuries, the documentation and research are overwhelming, and it's boomed since 2016.
This runs directly contrary to my experience with DEI. I demoed setups for anonymized zoom interviews, and blinded resume review. HR didn't want any of it. Instead, we made exec's bonuses contingent on keeping the percentage of male employees in their org below a cap - exceed the cap, lose your bonus. The cap was lower than men's representation in the field.
If DEI was about promoting merit, it would be focused on making interviews more objective, and anonymizing as much of the hiring process as we can. In practice, it's the opposite: directly tying incentives to the demographics of the candidates and penalizing those who don't adhere to the desired ethnic and gender ratio.
Once it is in place, they always take from specific groups that they label as advantaged, privileged, or oppressors. They give to other groups they favor. I'll let you guess who the bad guys always are. Even if minorities become dominant, they still talk like white males are the advantaged people and still work against them. So, it's just hateful and systematically racist against specific groups.
How about some examples of what I ran into. Please note these are not arguing race is the cause but a specific culture that comes with DEI. This is not how I think about black organizations or anything like that. These are all DEI, liberal run, etc.
At one employer, they did a hiring event that caused the entire workforce to be mostly black within a week or so. Then, management and corporate people were that way. They put out big, "diversity" signs in front showing non-whites being promoted. They were evil and into cronyism like the whites before them but looked different so society is better?
When I lost my job, it was hard to find new ones. Our area was more equally white and black than most places. The companies now were mostly black: workers, managers, and who hired. At some, the white people acted more black than white. So, add any of those jobs. Some would laugh at or mock white people.
My friend gets in a hospital that's also DEI. The mostly-black staff were always rude. One knocked her on the ground to move her as she worked. People there said whites and women never last. That it was pointless to try to correct it.
My step-dad was at a warehouse at the time. Of nearly 100 people, only a few were white. They were treated more strictly and petty. For instance, he said they got in trouble for not having the new shirts but only the black people knew about them. They didnt bother telling the white people.
Many tech companies I looked at overtly said they wanted diversity (not whites). They showed pictures of their staff that had few to no white people. Some like Babbel played up transgender a lot. Local and remote companies had special, support groups for non-whites, women, and LGBT people (eg Plaid). Groups like Best Buy offered in-house mini-MBA's for advancement... unless you're white.
Many of the organizations doing training, networking, mentoring, and grants were focusing on needy minorities. The minority members often got more at the EBT office. The media would always talk about their plight, too, like many of us didnt have empty fridges and no insurance.
So, however you would quantify all that multiplied by however many whites or men were financially or medically impacted by it. I'm glad it's starting to reverse under the Trump administration. At least one politician thinks whites, males, and straight people are human beings, too.
Anything that teaches you to hate and fear is a red flag - a sign to run the other way. They are doing it for a reason, they are appealing to the worst and most emotional parts of people for a reason. (And no, DEI doesn't teach that; it's just the propagandists that portray it that way).
Intersectionality is a descriptive term to understand how a person's advantages (say from being white) and disadvantages (say from being gay) interact and how all the different combinations have unique struggles and challenges. It doesn't do or call for anything.
In practice, they always treat whites, males, and straight people as the problem. The DEI policies they pushed certainly "call for" Something.
You don't need a whiteness tax or other nonsense, when you have equitable systems (like heating assistance programs) the benefits naturally flow to disadvantaged groups because they'll be the ones disproportionately qualifying for aid.
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If a law is passed requiring drug use to be prosecuted and making it illegal not to, you have criminalized decriminalization.
Just because words or concepts are opposed in isolation doesn't mean they can't appear in a sentence or thought together. That's not how grammar works, and it's not what 1984 is about.
The nature of dog whistles is that some people use the term in earnest, without the subtext. But in my experience most people enthusiastic about DEI ultimately do condone discrimination in one way or another.
1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_whistle_(politics)
There are incompetent people on both sides of the issue. the difference is that one side has correctly identified a problem with how institutions choose people. The other side is screaming bloody murder that there's no problem at all and that we have to stop talking about the obviously inadvertent and innocuous inequities in our society and institutions.
Not every inequity is the result of discrimination or bias. Should we strive to have a 50/50 gender split in murder convictions? A quota restricting murder convictions to 50% men would be an equitable policy but an explicitly unequal one as it'd require either men being let off or women being falsely convicted.
If DEI was carried through policies like anonymizing resumes and interviews, I'd believe the claims about how DEI is about reducing discrimination. Instead, all the DEI program I've actually seen firsthand have either directly discriminated on th basis of protected class, or incentivize people to discriminate (e.g. bonuses tied to quotas).
I'm involved in hiring at my company, which is fairly diverse compared to my perception of the average. There are no quotas, only intentional processes that ensure everyone gets a fair shake.
> ...only intentional processes that ensure everyone gets a fair shake.
Care to elaborate? The overtly discriminatory policies I listed above were supposedly just ensuring everyone gets a fair take. The language of "ensure everyone gets a fair shake," is no different than how my previous employers described our policy to restrict a segment of headcount to one gender.
If you're interested in non-anecdotal evidence on tech hiring bias, here's a few studies tracking applicants submitted to companies and universities:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112, the chart with the important data: https://www.pnas.org/cms/10.1073/pnas.1418878112/asset/fc20a...
Study on sending resumes to SV tech companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3672484, HN discussion on the paperhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25069644
Also, DEI is about giving people with special needs the things they require to function. And providing managers insights into the things they might struggle with. We do information packs about LGBT, different religions etc just so managers understand and can accommodate. We have resource networks for managers (and really, all employees) that have questions about such things. We organise awareness events about LGBT and minority topics so employees can learn from each other and create a better understanding. And it works. It's not just about hiring but also creating better awareness for existing employees.
We do look at numbers to guage how we're doing but nobody is being penalised. If we have very few minorities compared to the local demographics it just means our trainings are not getting heard properly and we need to improve them.
I would go as far as to say that a company that has strict quotas doesn't really care about DEI. They just want a quick fix. This is not how these things work. You're working with people, not numbers.
What bothers me the most is that the Trump administration is even trying to force foreign companies like my employer to abandon DEI programs. It's none of their business what we do in the EU. We like what we do and we're not going to change. They cherrypick a few bad examples and pretend everyone works like that.
Carr has shown himself to be nakedly partisan, and at risk of doing serious damage to the industry. Anyone who believes otherwise should be referred to his consistent rhetoric that news agencies that show unfavorable coverage to the Trump administration will be investigated and brought to heel.
https://pressfreedomtracker.us/all-incidents/brendan-carr-ta...
Ending DEI is unlikely to impact their bottom line but mergers do so out with DEI programs they go.
The speed with which they all dropped DEI programs was shocking. Especially after years of saying how it's critical, it makes them more vibrant, stronger, etc. I guess they never believed any of that.
It seems Stripe CEO is the only one left wondering what the heck happened: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2025/05/16/john-collison... ( https://archive.ph/5PFgq )
> “I am baffled by all the companies doing an about-face on their social initiatives right now. Did you not actually mean it in the first place? Either don’t do it, or do it and stay doing it, but don’t do this ‘DEI is cancelled now’,” he says. “It’s very odd to me.”