Every DEI program I've been involved in has had target quotas which put pressure on hiring managers to reach those quotas, but still "hire on merit". And then they hire a viz minority engineer who thinks translating a js file to python means renaming the file extension.
I'm glad you took the time to point that out, because, as we all know, in the history of the universe, they have never made a non-viz minority hire who also happens to be completely incapable of doing the job.
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When a viz-minority hire sucks, it's clearly DEI's fault, we shout from the rooftops.
Guess what happened to quality around the time all the DEI stuff started shooting up in popularity around a decade ago? Everyone sees it. Everyone experiences it. No one wanted to talk about it, until things reached a breaking point.
You're going to have to make a much better argument of connecting the dots if you're going to blame the enshittification of everything on... Black people and women.
None of you folks are ever 'afraid of talking about it', because any time this subject comes up, we see a full broadsides of tenuous, frequently mask-off racist nonsense.
Meanwhile, the champions leading the fight against the DEI boogieman have a truly amazing knack for both being, and appointing some of the most ignorant, least qualified individuals to ever hold positions of power... And are now speed-running their way through breaking everything.
I was a hiring manager and saw this happen firsthand. So much pressure to hire people with the right skin color or gender, even if they outright failed an interview. Some of the ones who were fast-tracked later struggled and then got fired. One of them even stole the company laptop.
You are either lying about hard-number racial/gender quotas or you were working for companies that were flagrantly breaking the law. Did you whistle blow?
You see, it doesn't add up, because usually when a company breaks the law so blatantly, it does so in crafty, shady ways intended to make more money, not in an attempt to create diversity that does nothing for the bottom line while also threatening the very existence of the firm.
When this kind of thing happens - and it absolutely does - it's never put in writing. The company training is always going to say what the law requires it to say.
But let's say that the top management in your org have made a public commitment to "increase representation of underrepresented groups". The managers in that org are then required, by company policy, to have their own goals be "aligned" with it, so they write something similar. What do you think then happens when it comes to interviews and hiring decisions?
Hiring on merit can increase representation of underrepresented groups. There are also shitloads of decisions one can make that increase representation of underrepresented groups without violating Title 7.
You can have better parental leave and part-time work policies. Or you can open an office in a region with different racial demographics. Or you can send recruiters to events like Grace Hopper. The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.
The manager at the bottom who has no-one to pass that bucket to does not have the power to institute "better parental leave and part-time work policies", or "open an office in a region with different racial demographics". Yet they are still held accountable for those commitments.
So what they are going to do is the only thing that they actually have the power to do, which is to favor candidates that, if hired, will check off the right boxes as far as "team diversity" goes on their upcoming mid-year review.
You'd think those who disagreed would do more than flag and move on. My original flagged post:
>Hiring on merit can increase representation of underrepresented groups.
I got whiplash reading this. We were told for years by leftists that meritocracy was inherently White supremacist and racist.
>The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.
I have seen this in a very small number of places and never with the idea that actual merit is racist but instead that systems that promote a shallow understanding of individual meritocracy can perpetuate inequality.
But this has nothing to do with the fact that the alternative to "meritocracy" in the corporate world is not a sort of affirmative anti-racism but is instead the old-boys club system. Moving from that system to one focused on individual merit will produce greater representation for underrepresented groups.
O'Keefe is a remarkable person to cite here, given his history.
There are cases of corporations violating Title 7. Duh. They violate it by discriminating against black people or women too. But if you want to claim that when people working at corporations hear about goals to increase representation that they just decide to violate Title 7 at scale, you've got some splaining to do.
>I have seen this in a very small number of places...
GitHub is not a small place.
>O'Keefe is a remarkable person to cite here, given his history.
Remarkable because he hasn't been debunked, and IBM's attempts to have the lawsuit thrown out of court have failed. IBM has also tried to scrub the video from YouTube it seems, the Twitter link is the only one I could find.
>But if you want to claim that when people working at corporations hear about goals to increase representation that they just decide to violate Title 7 at scale, you've got some splaining to do.
The various lawsuits, some that have gone to the Supreme Court, have shown this type of discrimination against Whites, Asians, and males has been occurring at scale.
Ah yes, I'm going to whistle blow and ruin my career over something "illegal" that every university has been doing for the past 50 years. Im perplexed that you find this surprising at all. This stuff happened openly in all hands with pie charts of the existing gender and racial makeup, and the target makeup with struggle session-like questions of why our engineering department doesn't have 50% woman. None of this is inconsistent if the decision makers at the company think that any deviation in demographics is a sign of institutional racism.
University admittance and workplace hiring are different issues under the law. It sounds like you are purposefully conflating the issue to avoid acknowledging the logical flaws in your original claims.
The gaslighting here post-Trump is insane. I’m not going to pretend that “no white or Asian males” wasn’t standard policy during the DEI hysteria. Pretending DEI was “just all about merit!” is so absurdly revisionist. Pleaseeee
Remember with the SEC tried (and failed after Trump’s win) to mandate every board have at least 2 “diverse” (no white dudes) members? Not a lot of merit there!
> The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period!
That's an absurd lie. People convicted of sex crimes shouldn't have jobs with children. Foreign nationals shouldn't have top security or intelligence jobs. People with a record of substance abuse shouldn't operate heavy machinery. And so on an so forth... I'm boring myself with how obvious this all is.
And maybe, just maybe, extremely powerful jobs that have an outsized influence on our society shouldn't only be offered to straight white men. It's clearly not as obvious of an argument as my previous examples, but it's not absurd either.
It’s not that jobs only go to white men. It’s that you don’t deny a job to a white man (or any other identity group) because they are a white man.
Harvard denied access to Jews for “personality flaws” in the early 1900s, and similarly denied Asians for “personality” reasons up until a couple years ago when the Supreme Court finally declared that illegal.
Racism is still racism, even if you claim to be “correcting” some imagined harm through your racism
Why are you assuming that non-white people cannot have the necessary qualifications? If I didn't know any better, I'd conclude that reasoning is... racist.
The reality is there are more non-white, qualified people than you could possibly hire. The world is overflowing with them.
So if your board is 100% white men, that's really fucking weird. How did that happen?
The elephant in the room here is that white men are SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to be hired due to the color of their skin. Look at Trump's current admin - full of white men who aren't qualified, who are alcoholics, who are patently stupid, and on and on. But if you look at research, too, just having a white name is enough to increase your chance of being hired by 50%.
What’s weird is obsessing over the minute racial details of every person like it’s the antebellum south. The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period! Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!
> Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!
It's a good thing this is something that is not happening, then.
What's happening is you are assuming that black individuals or homosexuals finding success must have been handed something. Which is, obviously, prejudiced. The lede you're burying is that those people were hired because they're qualified.
If you live in a society that mandates DEI, it’s assumed that anyone getting a job via affirmative action is not the most qualified.
If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups (unless you are so racist as to believe they can’t compete on merit)
The way in which "society mandates DEI" in the US is via Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act, which expressly prohibits hiring decisions being made based on race or gender (or sexuality, through Bostock).
Where are these mandatory affirmative action policies anywhere?
DEI mostly revolves around programs for outreach, employee resource groups, statements of diversity considerations for research, that kind of thing. The idea that DEI means you have quotas for how many black people you have to hire is just GOP nonsense.
> If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups
I mean, not necessarily. Historically, and currently, you're going to end up with a disproportionate amount of white people. Because that's just how the US works - white people are incredibly advantaged so naturally they're going to get more, and better, jobs, in relation to their level of qualification.
Naturally over the past ~80 years it's gotten better. We don't explicitly say "we don't hire black engineers" anymore, so that's great. But you'd be a fool to think this systemic racism just vanishes overnight.
It will takes hundreds, yes hundreds, of years before it is completely eradicated. We live in the shadow of the systems and institutions of our grandparents. Who, might I add, are still alive and still making decisions.
Remember those startup pivots we used to make fun of on HN? When a pivot happens, it often means the initial idea ran its course, the startup is about to shut down because it's running out of money. However, the team seems to work reasonably well together, at least they get along and seem to have a decent balance of engineers and business people. A new idea comes along, some investors could be interested. But the condition for the investment is to reset the cap table and wipe out the previous investors. From the new investor's point of view, it makes sense: for all practical purposes, this is a brand new startup. From the founders' point of view, they don't really have a choice.
If you don't mind a follow up: how is it legal that some corporate restructuring applies differently do different investors, e.g. founders Vs angel? Like if I own 90% and you own 10% can I just go "I've decided that you own 0% now"?
That's because the republicans have long been the party of entitlement receivers. This is changing as under 25s are strongly shifting republican while boomers are moving democrat.
There are tons of alternatives, you just need to accept that its missing 1 or 2 features you like, because if the app supported the 1 or 2 features for everyone, it turns into jira/office
its so funny when you try to create an analogy to prove how something is absurd and the common understanding is that your analogy is how the world works
The last argument is basically the key point, you think google is going to let browsers die? Their entire business model depends on its survival; they just get less control over its destiny now, which is probably fine tbh.
The tariffs cover parts as well as whole vehicles. The thing announced here is that they'll have a rebate program if the car is 85% manufactured in the US, and the rebate will be in effect for 2 years. So you still pay the tariff on parts, but you get some or all the money back if you meet that threshold. The idea being that it gives the company two years to move their parts manufacturing or sources. But the threshold is so high that only Tesla gets to enjoy the rebate, not any other company.
But even Tesla only maxes out at 75 - how are they eligible? Also wouldn’t surprise me if this carve out is special purpose to give Tesla and only Tesla this rebate.
> Right but presumably 85% of the parts aren't imported?
85% of parts != 85% of cost
The rules for calculating what percentage of a vehicle is domestic or foreign made are obscure. It's not clear what rules they're going to be using for this tariff exemption yet.
It could be possible that the 15% foreign content of a car could make up 30% of the cost of goods sold, for example. If the parts come from China they could have a 125% or higher tariff applied, pushing the share of BOM cost even higher.
The article is really bad. Even the original source is just an off-hand comment from Lutnick, not the final regulation.
The idea is that automakers will get special exemptions from the tariffs for what they do import.
Handing out tariff exemptions was one of the red flags people were raising during this process. It becomes a lever the administration can pull to grant favor to specific companies. Everyone else suffers.
