It’s not clear to me if Google is changing its politics or is just hiding it more cleverly. But either way, this type of political activism never had a place in business or government. Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination. The fact that one half of America openly supported discrimination in the workplace - things like hiring or promotion goals/quotas based on race or gender - still shocks me. I hope we return to a more moderate balance.
ryandrake · 43m ago
FTA> Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
It doesn't appear to be voluntarily "changing politics" but instead a mandate from the feds to change ideology or not work with them.
meatbundragon · 38m ago
For those who are reading the parent comment, no, that's not what equity means.
Equity means just and fair allocation of resources and opportunities, not equality of outcomes.
perching_aix · 33m ago
> Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination
Could you explain how you got to that definition? Being a non-native speaker, words do not have inherent meaning to me, and no matter how I look it up, this is not the definition I get. Instead, I get an explanation along the lines of "equality of opportunity additionally weighted against circumstances".
I understand that at a lot(?) of workplaces, sex and ethnic quotas did/do exist, and that there are folks who were hired over people who were better fit for the various positions (although my source for both of these is just accumulated and often blatantly biased internet gossip). But I don't see how these relate to the E in DEI necessarily, not any more than I see over-zealousness and malicious compliance towards an idea simply manifesting in this.
kevingadd · 40m ago
The fundamental question is whether you think the population distribution of a company with thousands (or tens of thousands) of employees should look similar to the population distribution of the countries it's based in.
If the distribution doesn't look similar, why not? Is there a good excuse for being predominantly male, or predominantly white, or predominantly asian, or predominantly indian? What does that good excuse look like? I see people complain about these things all the time.
There's an assumption here that discrimination in the workplace only exists because of DEI which is a weird leap to make IMO. You could argue that DEI made the situation worse and that gets us somewhere but it's not clear to me whether that's your position.
x3n0ph3n3 · 31m ago
The discrimination is likely occurring much earlier in the employment pipeline (this was obvious in 2008). Why is it Google's job to solve that problem?
perching_aix · 28m ago
> Why is it Google's job to solve that problem?
This gave me a funny thought, can you imagine the absolute shitstorm if the government mandated ethnic and gender quotas for every workplace? Now that'd have been some real popcorn time, if I get my eyes roll over from all the overreach and oppression talk here now, that'd be a thread I would not dare to open for sure.
showdeaduser · 35m ago
Well the "D", Diversity, is also a rebrand of discrimination.
neko_ranger · 52m ago
The new South Park episode offers further insights into this very topic
michaelt · 57m ago
I hope critics will be equally critical of the companies that weren't donating to any DEI-related orgs in the first place.
perching_aix · 12m ago
Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to blame organizations "now-demonstrated to have been performative", as DEI's critics have been (performatively?) accusing them for so long? Or would that count as performative too?
Getting lost in the narratives at this point.
djohnston · 55m ago
Most people aren’t critical of either and don’t care about DEI initiatives.
trhway · 52m ago
The companies which followed their principles even when it was against the prevailing ideology du jour? (Being originally from USSR I hate ideologies and those 180 turns people do on a dime the moment the ideology changes)
csours · 38m ago
Writing as a person who wants the future to be a better place, the number one pass time of progressives is complaining about other progressives. The number two pass time is complaining about conservatives.
Anyway, my complaint is that a lot of DEI flavored stuff is very very lazy.
A fundamental issue is that once a person has been raised, you don't get to raise them again. You can't parent a grown person - even if they need more parenting. Social punishment only works inside a socially cohesive group. The shame and anxiety you create with social punishment may be exploited by someone else.
Anyway, I'm sure some DEI groups are coming to terms with why anti-woke trolling is so effective, and I hope they find a good way to tell that story.
nerdsniper · 14m ago
*pastime
cbeach · 55m ago
The pendulum is swinging back towards the centre.
I'm sure no matter where we stand on the political spectrum, we would support equality of opportunity for all.
Those that supported "equity" (i.e. leftwing political interventions against equality of opportunity) got too embedded in business for my liking.
It's time to return to meritocracy, colour-blind hiring and treating all employees as equally valuable.
Let's shut down these employee networks based on immutable characteristics. They artificially divide up the workforce and treat success in the workplace like a zero-sum game.
grafmax · 41m ago
I’m not sure how this is the center. We have devolved into something else. This is an expression of the tight control this authoritarian government holds on business. What we’re stumbling toward is possibly white nationalism. It’s not just the crackdowns on free speech, which are now commonplace, but mass deportation and concentration camps. I get that DEI is a conservative talking point but what’s taking shape before our eyes is far more sinister than just a rollback of Democrat identity politics.
ghushn3 · 43m ago
> Let's shut down these employee networks based on immutable characteristics.
Each of these networks is open to everyone. You can be straight and a member of the LGBTQ+ network just fine. You can be white and join the Black network too.
The networks exist because people have (and are) the targets of persecution. It's nice to find other people who will understand what that feels like and make connections and advocate for less systematic persecution.
happytoexplain · 44m ago
I agree with everything you said to some degree, except, unfortunately, the first sentence. The pendulum is obviously swinging to the right, generally, which, to be 100% transparent, I believe is worse than when the pendulum is on the left. I wish we could keep it centered, but I guess that's not how it works.
ofalkaed · 40m ago
Pendulums don't swing towards center, they end up resting on center when they run out energy. This analogy mostly fails because center is not correct, it is generally just less wrong than the extremes but sometimes the extremes are right.
perching_aix · 10m ago
The center of political pendulums is a maintenance of the status quo.
TheCycoONE · 9m ago
This comment got me thinking how relative the centre is to your experience, ideology, and perhaps the particular policies being referenced.
From my vantage point the US has never in my lifetime been remotely left of centre, they are moving from right to slightly further right.
DEI hiring is of course an easy target. It's a weak policy to tackle a complicated problem with obvious flaws and no track record of success. I think a truly left wing society would have quickly replaced it with more direct policies to hit generational poverty - EU style public education comes to mind.
getlawgdon · 48m ago
So you think fairness in opportunity is just declaring that we should be fair. I guess that should do away with the racists. Got it.
cronelius · 39m ago
racism is bad business. the market deals with it in the following ways:
- the competent people who are being discriminated against leave and go to places where they aren’t discriminated
- people in protected classes sue for discrimination
- companies that don’t discriminate get a reputation as such and attract the best
- companies that keep discriminating keep losing talent and getting hit with lawsuits
what else could you possibly need to show that racism is bad business? that racists get what’s coming to them in the long term?
nxrabl · 26m ago
As the saying goes, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. There are any number of ways a firm can do things that, in isolation, are bad for business, and still do very well overall if they’re protected by other factors (such as, case in point, the money printing machine that is Google ads). I think what the GP is saying is that sitting back and leaving things to the market to work out is essentially resigning the issue not to be resolved in our lifetimes.
typewithrhythm · 18m ago
What if teams of white men actually perform better than diverse ones?
I think this is what the left tends to believe, so that they can see any non white hire as a political win.
typewithrhythm · 30m ago
The best argument against DEI is that its proponents actively oppose merit.
Merit based hiring and rewards are fair, and actually build trust.
The ends of the pipeline (the private companies) should never have tried to evaluate the opportunitys someone had received.
dijit · 47m ago
I hope we do get a bit more sense in things.
I’m worried that the pendulum will swing far past center and back to biases though.
I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Lich · 41m ago
> I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
Examples?
> We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? But in the meantime, while we wait for the racists and sexists to become enlightened, should we not have initiatives, laws, education, to protect those who have historically been underrepresented and/or discriminated against?
happytoexplain · 36m ago
>should we not...
We should, though you've phrased it very generically. Obviously there is a line, and actively disadvantaging those who are systemically/historically advantaged is chaos - I'm even comfortable calling it immoral. "Treating the symptom", or "brute-forcing" it, is a catastrophe in culture-sized problems.
Ideally, via cultural development, one day we can look at statistics and see that no race or gender gets more/better jobs than another. Legally demanding that it simply be the case is insane.
happytoexplain · 40m ago
It's a tragedy how many people feel unrepresented by their nearest political party. Everybody is necessarily rounded to "right" or "left", but they both have such obvious, horrible issues (this is not a "both sides" argument, because I believe the issues of the right are much worse than the issues of the left).
exasperaited · 28m ago
It has nothing to do with a swinging pendulum and everything to do with training corporate America to obey in advance: strategically-chosen wedge issues that can be used to train major businesses, non-profits, universities and law firms to first ask what the executive might not like, before acting.
Smeevy · 33m ago
>return to meritocracy, colour-blind hiring
Yeah, let's "return" to that. Let's "go back" to the good old pre-racism days that we all remember that totally happened.
Please enlighten me as to when this period occurred in American history. Forget America, give me an example in any ethnically diverse society.
exasperaited · 17m ago
This is absolutely correct; it's as true in the UK as in the USA. Nobody can identify even the slightest window of time in which there really was a non-sexist, colour-blind, non-homophobic, chill meritocratic consensus that did not need rebalancing.
People often point at the 1980s but culture was extremely aware back then of the need to re-balance, but it did so in a kind of crass way at every level of the media. Token hiring was rampant, and used as a way to wash society's hands of the problem by laundering seemingly diverse figures into the unmodified culture, as long as they didn't question it too much.
I would echo your point. Anyone here: when was it better, genuinely, for everyone, than it is now? When was it less complicated?
ryandrake · 38m ago
Visualizing it as a "pendulum" is probably not accurate. That assumes that there is some natural force like gravity or entropy seeking some neutral "center". What's happening here is a human force (the federal government) is acting deliberately by telling companies to adopt ideology or not be federal contractors. It's not some natural force swinging things left and right.
kanbara · 42m ago
let me guess what privileges you have.
you do not support equality of opportunity if you do not account for systemic discrimination and disadvantage, support it, and enable people to be seen and heard. we are nowhere near this being true, and the moment that the scales shifted an iota away from white cishet men they all lost their collective minds.
also, recall or understand that DEI drives better products and features, especially in tech. skin colour, ability, age, gender, orientation all matter for developing things that society which includes those people use. that is also a form of merit. there is no objective function that can rank candidates meritoriously.
and fwiw, every employee is treated equally under DEI, just that a majority of the population arent treated like the only thing that matters.
tell me without telling me that you do not want to utilise empathy to understand fellow humans. it’s pretty sad, really, but not unexpected here.
typewithrhythm · 14m ago
Do you have any examples of dei actually making a better product?
Do you consider the countless examples where a small startup grows and becomes more diverse while the product becomes shit as counterexamples?
happytoexplain · 31m ago
>let me guess what privileges you have.
Let's not. This snideness should be indefensible, in an ideal world.
krapp · 37m ago
>It's time to return to meritocracy, colour-blind hiring and treating all employees as equally valuable.
We can't return to a state we've never been in.
Meritocracy has never existed - wealth, status, privilege and connections have always mattered. Colorblind hiring has never existed - race has always been a factor, and all employees have never been equally valuable to all others.
So let's be honest about where we're going - back to the status quo under which there was nothing in place, even in theory, to counteract the systemic effects of racial bias in hiring.
It doesn't appear to be voluntarily "changing politics" but instead a mandate from the feds to change ideology or not work with them.
Equity means just and fair allocation of resources and opportunities, not equality of outcomes.
Could you explain how you got to that definition? Being a non-native speaker, words do not have inherent meaning to me, and no matter how I look it up, this is not the definition I get. Instead, I get an explanation along the lines of "equality of opportunity additionally weighted against circumstances".
I understand that at a lot(?) of workplaces, sex and ethnic quotas did/do exist, and that there are folks who were hired over people who were better fit for the various positions (although my source for both of these is just accumulated and often blatantly biased internet gossip). But I don't see how these relate to the E in DEI necessarily, not any more than I see over-zealousness and malicious compliance towards an idea simply manifesting in this.
If the distribution doesn't look similar, why not? Is there a good excuse for being predominantly male, or predominantly white, or predominantly asian, or predominantly indian? What does that good excuse look like? I see people complain about these things all the time.
There's an assumption here that discrimination in the workplace only exists because of DEI which is a weird leap to make IMO. You could argue that DEI made the situation worse and that gets us somewhere but it's not clear to me whether that's your position.
This gave me a funny thought, can you imagine the absolute shitstorm if the government mandated ethnic and gender quotas for every workplace? Now that'd have been some real popcorn time, if I get my eyes roll over from all the overreach and oppression talk here now, that'd be a thread I would not dare to open for sure.
Getting lost in the narratives at this point.
Anyway, my complaint is that a lot of DEI flavored stuff is very very lazy.
A fundamental issue is that once a person has been raised, you don't get to raise them again. You can't parent a grown person - even if they need more parenting. Social punishment only works inside a socially cohesive group. The shame and anxiety you create with social punishment may be exploited by someone else.
Anyway, I'm sure some DEI groups are coming to terms with why anti-woke trolling is so effective, and I hope they find a good way to tell that story.
I'm sure no matter where we stand on the political spectrum, we would support equality of opportunity for all.
Those that supported "equity" (i.e. leftwing political interventions against equality of opportunity) got too embedded in business for my liking.
It's time to return to meritocracy, colour-blind hiring and treating all employees as equally valuable.
Let's shut down these employee networks based on immutable characteristics. They artificially divide up the workforce and treat success in the workplace like a zero-sum game.
Each of these networks is open to everyone. You can be straight and a member of the LGBTQ+ network just fine. You can be white and join the Black network too.
The networks exist because people have (and are) the targets of persecution. It's nice to find other people who will understand what that feels like and make connections and advocate for less systematic persecution.
From my vantage point the US has never in my lifetime been remotely left of centre, they are moving from right to slightly further right.
DEI hiring is of course an easy target. It's a weak policy to tackle a complicated problem with obvious flaws and no track record of success. I think a truly left wing society would have quickly replaced it with more direct policies to hit generational poverty - EU style public education comes to mind.
what else could you possibly need to show that racism is bad business? that racists get what’s coming to them in the long term?
I think this is what the left tends to believe, so that they can see any non white hire as a political win.
Merit based hiring and rewards are fair, and actually build trust.
The ends of the pipeline (the private companies) should never have tried to evaluate the opportunitys someone had received.
I’m worried that the pendulum will swing far past center and back to biases though.
I’m a bit of a leftie, but it has been really painful for the last 10 years watching my side be the one that is actively racist and proposing systematic racism & sexism with a bare face.
We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Examples?
> We should be mindful that inside each of us is a significant amount of value, and under the right circumstances that can be unlocked to be great- despite any political or physiological differences.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? But in the meantime, while we wait for the racists and sexists to become enlightened, should we not have initiatives, laws, education, to protect those who have historically been underrepresented and/or discriminated against?
We should, though you've phrased it very generically. Obviously there is a line, and actively disadvantaging those who are systemically/historically advantaged is chaos - I'm even comfortable calling it immoral. "Treating the symptom", or "brute-forcing" it, is a catastrophe in culture-sized problems.
Ideally, via cultural development, one day we can look at statistics and see that no race or gender gets more/better jobs than another. Legally demanding that it simply be the case is insane.
Yeah, let's "return" to that. Let's "go back" to the good old pre-racism days that we all remember that totally happened.
Please enlighten me as to when this period occurred in American history. Forget America, give me an example in any ethnically diverse society.
People often point at the 1980s but culture was extremely aware back then of the need to re-balance, but it did so in a kind of crass way at every level of the media. Token hiring was rampant, and used as a way to wash society's hands of the problem by laundering seemingly diverse figures into the unmodified culture, as long as they didn't question it too much.
I would echo your point. Anyone here: when was it better, genuinely, for everyone, than it is now? When was it less complicated?
you do not support equality of opportunity if you do not account for systemic discrimination and disadvantage, support it, and enable people to be seen and heard. we are nowhere near this being true, and the moment that the scales shifted an iota away from white cishet men they all lost their collective minds.
also, recall or understand that DEI drives better products and features, especially in tech. skin colour, ability, age, gender, orientation all matter for developing things that society which includes those people use. that is also a form of merit. there is no objective function that can rank candidates meritoriously.
and fwiw, every employee is treated equally under DEI, just that a majority of the population arent treated like the only thing that matters.
tell me without telling me that you do not want to utilise empathy to understand fellow humans. it’s pretty sad, really, but not unexpected here.
Do you consider the countless examples where a small startup grows and becomes more diverse while the product becomes shit as counterexamples?
Let's not. This snideness should be indefensible, in an ideal world.
We can't return to a state we've never been in.
Meritocracy has never existed - wealth, status, privilege and connections have always mattered. Colorblind hiring has never existed - race has always been a factor, and all employees have never been equally valuable to all others.
So let's be honest about where we're going - back to the status quo under which there was nothing in place, even in theory, to counteract the systemic effects of racial bias in hiring.