Meta kills diversity programs, claiming DEI has become “too charged”

Meta claims it will find other ways to hire employees from different backgrounds.

See full article...

 

[wallinbl]

No argument there, but that's not a race thing. That's a class thing. It's the rich keeping their boot on the necks of the poor and the middle class. Doesn't matter what race they are. Imagine if all schools got the same funding per student instead of it being based on property taxes? The rich would go ballistic. Never gonna happen.

You're wrong that it's not also a race thing.

 

[DaVuVuZeLa]

Nope.

Meritocracy is a nice idea in theory, but it depends on who gets to define merit. And for a group of people who "traditionally" had job experience and education (because they kept other people from getting educated or good paying jobs), there's a certain motivation to make sure only certain people get to maintain that merit. Hence people of certain groups not getting the same high-paying jobs, or getting them but being paid less and with fewer chances for advancement. Or those people just not getting hired at all, and then whining about the lack of qualified candidates.

Meritocracy in practice is a Jim Crow literacy test. Meritocracy in practice is saying "I'd vote for a woman for president, just not <insert name of prospective female candidate here>." Meritocracy in practice is having a bunch of equally qualified candidates, and then deciding to hire for "culture fit" (i.e. drinking buddy).

Meritocracy is people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon tell us that they hire H1B's because the rest of us are watching too many reruns of Friends.

 

[Citizenkain]

If DEI is run the way so many people say it is, why would being a "DEI hire" be derogatory? Maybe people have noticed certain patterns for companies with DEI hiring policies.

Because they didn't get a job or thing they wanted and they feel they deserved it more then someone else. So they blame others, and since they are already racist, its an easy fit.

 

[Psyborgue]

I now wish I had the ability to leave the country.

Way ahead of you. Married to an EU citizen and we're already packing. If you're strapped for cash you could head to the developing world. Less comfortable but still probably safer than the US. Eventually people won't be allowed to leave.

Every dictatorship does this. Otherwise all the competent people disappear. You might have to request asylum eventually if we do the truly stupid and start a war with Europe/wherever. Now right now I realize that sounds impossible but Trump has no bottom and that means no bottom. All this sounds alarmist but in a few years people here might very well wish they had gotten out while it was possible.

 

[lolnova]

This needs to be a significant portion of the next D platform. It needs to have teeth and follow-through. Especially since we're going to see what it's like to live in a country controlled by the rich.

Bro, I've got news...

 

[Urist]

Direct fascist appeasement.

Because we all know Hitler stopped after Austria and Czechoslovakia...

 

[Tofystedeth]

Race tells you nothing about a person's economic or class background and thus nothing about whether they've been at a disadvantage or an advantage growing up. If you grew up poor you were at a disadvantage to someone who grew up rich. Makes zero difference what race you were. If you grew up in a 2 parent household you were at an advantage compared to someone who was raised by a single parent, again race is irrelevant. DEI focuses the attention on things that are entirely irrelevant.

I grew up middle class so I was at an advantage compared to someone who grew up poor. I was raised by a single parent so I was at a disadvantage compared to someone raised in a 2 parent household.

Unfortunately in this country due to our several hundred year history very explicit racism, it does usually mean they're more likely to be poor, or to have come from a poor family. And generational trauma is real.

And since as you keep ignoring, we didn't solve racism in the 70s, there still a ton of racial (and gender based and SOGI based etc) discrimination.

Studies have shown that a resume with the name John on it is less likely to get hired than an identical one that says Jamal. Or Janice.

 

[pnellesen]

The irony is that a shocking amount of the "we must have guns to protect us from tyranny" people chose to ally themselves with the rising tyrants.

Well, considering the VAST majority of the "we must have guns to protect us from tyranny" people are supposedly straight, supposedly christian, white males, and that the rising tyrants are more or less the same (just with more money) it's not really that shocking.

 

[Sjoerd Verweij]

Because 99% of jobs, your “viewpoint” has no bearing on the task you are assigned to complete.

I’ve never sat in an interview for hiring a purchasing agent and thought a persons group identity should play a role is writing PO’s to McMaster Carr.

Software companies like Meta tend to (or aspire to) hire white male, spectrum-adjacent people that are often abrasive if not almost impossible to work with. That's not to say that you shouldn't hire people like that; but a monoculture of them results in absolutely hilarious idiocy.

A long time ago, I was hired by a small company that had 5ish programmers, headed by The Architect, an abrasive, autistic dingle who was so technically competent (well, compared to the other devs in residence before I joined) that everyone all but bowed before him as he would pick a victim every morning to eat a sandwich at their desk while talking about what he read on /. last night.

This company had one product, a niche VB.NET desktop app, and when I joined, they were just weeks away from rolling out a very important update. This update would finally fix a very important problem: when selecting an item in a tree on the left side of the app, focus would be set to a dynamically loaded UserControl in the main area -- but the focus would not propagate to the first control within it!

The Architect had looked into this for months, and had concluded that this was a Bug in Windows Forms. His solution was to modify the setup program to disable all GAC protections, use the included-in-our-setup-app ILDASM to decompile the Microsoft-distributed Windows Forms DLL, grep/sed/awk (also included) to out patch out one branch in the IL, recompile the thing, and put it back in the GAC.

I shit you not, this was the actual solution that they were about to roll out. When I saw this and full-blast WTF-Scooby Doo'd, the development manager quietly took me aside to explain how genius this all was.

Clickety-click, open UserControl_GotFocus, Controls(0).SetFocus(), check in, walk over to QA... yeah, it's fixed. Probably because of the Architect's fix though.. It took me a full week to convince everyone that a single line of code did the same thing. That's how idiotic the culture had gotten. (To his credit, in the end, it was the Architect, after evaluating things for a week, that acknowledged that yes, I had fixed it.)

All of that just to say: monoculture is idiotic and does stupid things. It should be actively fought against. I've worked with several female developers, who have almost universally been bullied into being extremely timid... and are also almost always right when they do speak up. I have worked with deaf developers, autistic developers and blind developers that would NEVER pass a regular interview, and they have been far above average.

One more example: when you do the white US guy only hire thing, you end up looking like an absolute moron once you have to localize your app. Or you think localization is a "project" that can be done once and doesn't need to involve the core devs. UTF-8 is great, right?

 

[DarthSlack]

Aaaaaand there it is.

You got an actual point?

 

[Citizenkain]

Race tells you nothing about a person's economic or class background and thus nothing about whether they've been at a disadvantage or an advantage growing up. If you grew up poor you were at a disadvantage to someone who grew up rich. Makes zero difference what race you were. If you grew up in a 2 parent household you were at an advantage compared to someone who was raised by a single parent, again race is irrelevant. DEI focuses the attention on things that are entirely irrelevant.

I grew up middle class so I was at an advantage compared to someone who grew up poor. I was raised by a single parent so I was at a disadvantage compared to someone raised in a 2 parent household.

So you are fine with company saying they won't hire people from a single parent household because obviously those people have at least one parent who is unsuitable.

 

[Psyborgue]

Nope, it just bothers me when people liken things to nazism. It robs the power of that word and is disrespectful to so many people.

There are so many similarities I won't even bother to start. You either see it or you don't. And if you don't, I hope you enjoy the bed you've made.

 

[Coriolanus]

Then your company is run by morons and you should quit. Every DEI program I've run into is run the right way, it's a combination of scrubbing out indicators on the applications and training people to recognize their own biases. And it works.
on.

Using the word quota is red flag that contrary to his claim, he has never actually see any corporate DEI policies, because any corporate counsel would swat it down in a second.

 

[Meathim]

If you consider yourself to be a decent human being, please stop using Meta products. Because their owner isn’t.

The problem is that all of us has to do so at the same time. I follow bands and other creatives who exclusively market on Facebook/Instagram because there is where the audience is. Add to this the fact that Whatsapp is the de facto messaging method where I live. I could quit, but then I'd have to plan literally all my social hobbies/engagements through someone else who uses Whatsapp. From 2018 to some time in 2019 I actually didn't own a smartphone or had Internet at home at all, so I did do all that planning through a friend, and it was hell and didn't actually work.

 

[Citizenkain]

Nope, it just bothers me when people liken things to nazism. It robs the power of that word and is disrespectful to so many people.

Wouldn't want people who keep talking about how their country is poisoned by immigrants to be compared to nazis, how rude.

 

[passivesmoking]

It's sad to see so many negative comments. Folks, I don't know how so many can possibly believe this move is bad. It isn't.

That's easy for somebody who didn't spend 4 years unemployed with a computer science degree because nobody wanted to hire a disabled person. As somebody who did, I can assure you I have a somewhat different perspective.

Honestly, that's the sort of nonsense that can only spill from the gob of somebody who's got absolutely no clue what it feels like to be the target of discrimination.

It's a move toward meritocracy.

And there it is. The above statement makes it very clear what you think of people who aren't perfect like you are.

It's the opposite of racist.

You forgot ageist, ableist, sexist, homophobic...

and it most definitely isn't fascist, Nazi, or so the other comments I've read.

No, instead of putting down minorities systematically, they're putting minorities down thoughtlessly. Clearly that's so much better for the minorities.

Do you guys even know a conservative? As in real life? Or am I commenting to bots?

Oh the irony... most people who describe themselves as "conservative" these days have no clue what any political label means, least of all conservativism. Conservatism was once about being fiscally responsible. Show me anybody in America's right wing who is fiscally responsible.

 

[Sjoerd Verweij]

Facebook was created to rate and objectify women on campus. Unsurprisingly, it was all downhill from there.

Bluesky and Mastodon seems to be the only options at this point.

I'll re-iterate what Aurich said elsewhere: make sure you are on at least one of those platforms, and make sure you are subscribed to Ars on it.

THAT is the only change we as a community can effect. If most of the subscribers and/or casual visitors to Ars go to BlueSky and subscribe there, these numbers can be taken to the board as proof that they should be just there and no longer associate with Nazi bars. As long as those numbers are off by an order of magnitude, what do you think will happen?

Be the change, my friends.

 

[DarthSlack]

Using quotas would be illegal so no sane company is going to that.

But in 2020-2021 94% of people hired by S&P100 companies where non-whites. When such change happens in just a year or two something it's difficult to believe race wasn't a factor.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/

And if you actually read the article you point to, it's not about DEI, it's about deliberately hiring to make up for past discrimination. It's also worth noting that most of these jobs are low-level jobs, the management remains overwhelmingly white.

Not to mention that they're looking at 300,000 jobs. That's not a lot in the US economy which at that point had around 160M jobs. So Bloomberg looked at 0.2% of jobs.

It's also during the height of the pandemic and, as Bloomberg notes, the people laid off were predominantly people of color. So if its difficult to believe that race wasn't a factor in hiring, you also have to accept that race was a factor in firing. And this pattern may be people returning to jobs they previously had.

So maybe that study isn't as representative as it's being portrayed.

 

[DarthSlack]

Easy fix for that. Run all the resumes through a computer program that strips out all personally identifying information and just assigns them an applicant number. Do a phone interview with software that disguises the voice so you can't tell what race or gender they are. Now make your hiring decision based on the interview. Applicant number 3 and applicant number 5 are the most qualified. You don't get to find out what race they are or what gender they are, or even their name until their first day of work. Problem solved.

If they say anything during the interview that gives away their background they're automatically disqualified.

You do realize that your suggestion is trying to address the same problems that a DEI program does, right?

 

[s73v3r]

It's sad to see so many negative comments.

People tend to comment negatively about racist things.

 

[DarthSlack]

I'm just not at all surprised, bud

So you don't have any point at all. Gotcha.

 

[Citizenkain]

You do realize that your suggestion is trying to address the same problems that a DEI program does, right?

No, you see a program levels the field and lets people get hired based on merits, while if a person does it...ok wait. So if a program does it, then we can tweak things to give us what we want, while also hiring the company that is run by someone with the same last name as the CEO.

 

[Sjoerd Verweij]

Easy fix for that. Run all the resumes through a computer program that strips out all personally identifying information and just assigns them an applicant number. Do a phone interview with software that disguises the voice so you can't tell what race or gender they are.

That is a fantastic idea, and I'll take it one step further: when you do the Zoom/Teams interviews, run it through an AI filter that turns whoever the person is to a generic androgynous avatar with a generic androgynous voice. Shit, I think I've finally found a positive application for the current AI models!

 

[s73v3r]

Exactly this. Corporate monoculture is a death sentence for a modern company and frankly the monocultures of the past produced mediocrity at best.

I really wish that was the case, or that it worked faster. But unfortunately, it seems that once a company gets big enough, it can coast on inertia for quite some time.

 

[DarthSlack]

Sure, but my solution does it by explicitly NOT discriminating. DEI tries to fix discrimination by making discrimination mandatory.

Wrong. 110% USDA Grade A Choice Wrong.

DEI tries to fix discrimination by pointing out where discrimination already occurs and fixes it. In other words, DEI works by explicitly not discriminating. That you don't understand that means you don't know enough to contribute intelligently to the conversation. You've assumed you know what DEI is and never bothered to learn what it actually is.

 

[Coriolanus]

Easy fix for that. Run all the resumes through a computer program that strips out all personally identifying information and just assigns them an applicant number. Do a phone interview with software that disguises the voice so you can't tell what race or gender they are. Now make your hiring decision based on the interview. Applicant number 3 and applicant number 5 are the most qualified. You don't get to find out what race they are or what gender they are, or even their name until their first day of work. Problem solved.

If they say anything during the interview that gives away their background they're automatically disqualified.

Uh, so your system will automatically disqualify people who speak with an accent or some other dialect (like African American English) that the voice modulator can't disguise?

 

[Sjoerd Verweij]

There is one thing that should be free in this world, other than love and that is truth.

Lies are not free.

Which is "gay people are mentally ill"? Love or truth? Please don't be super-gross and say both.

 

[s73v3r]

Then focusing on hiring based on skills should do the job, no?

Not when you only look at the same 4 schools.

But you knew that, and you knew what these DEI programs were meant to do: look for talent in places the company normally didn't look, and reach out to people who normally wouldn't have applied. You knew what was being discussed, and yet you decided to fire off a bad faith zinger anyway, because you like the idea of only straight white men being the ones working in tech.

 

[s73v3r]

Because 99% of jobs, your “viewpoint” has no bearing on the task you are assigned to complete.

Then why does it matter that they're hiring someone besides default straight white guy #47?

 

[s73v3r]

I am 100% sure you don't. The garbage removal company for you home.

I don't have a choice in that. I do have a choice with whether to give my money to a racist asshole running a website.

 

[s73v3r]

Focuses on things other than skills, obviously.

So you just proved that you have no idea what you're talking about with DEI. Again.