> acknowledging that such DEI program was performative in the first place.
That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
> This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
It's not about making users or bloggers happy. They don't care whether those people are "pissed" because they're just going to keep coming to stare at ads anyway. It was about keeping regulators disempowered by proactively tossing an agitated public some crumbs, but they don't need to worry about that for a while now. They're obviously just trying to keep their staffing strategies open and unshackled so that they can pursue whatever business objectives they see coming up in the next few years, and aren't at a disadvantage against competitors like Musk/X who resisted these kinds of things all along.
You can be unbiased in hiring and still end up with an unrepresentative mix, because underprepresented minorities don't even apply, and outreach is a good way to get to improve that without lowering your standards. That's the theory, at least, but yes, in practice it's really hard and most of these efforts end up performative, and staffing DEI bureaucracies with minorities is a good way to make the dismal diversity statistics look less bad if you don't look too closely at the breakdown by roles and salary bands.
These DEI programs were not primarily about outreach. Outreach existed way before DEI (e.g. interns, new grads, Grace Hopper conference, etc) and will continue to exist. DEI introduced improper - discriminatory - systems with quotas and heavy prioritization of specific groups of people.
Not only that, the “diverse slate” requirement, which is mentioned in the Meta posting, is actively harmful to PoC jobseekers. When I was at a Microsoft, I
I knew of multiple cases where a candidate was already essentially decided on, but they had to continue what was essentially “sham” interviews of at least one woman and one PoC in order to check the diverse slate box. Complete waste of time on all sides.
I worked with a talented engineer who happened to be female and she was constantly behind because she had to attend each interview this small company did. Even she, a big supporter of these efforts, had to laugh about it.
The company i work for does not have any quota and neither does meta. There is no lowering of standards to hire somebody, just more effort to get wider application pool and outreach programs to schools.
Also DEI is not just based on colour or ethnicity. There are other groups like mothers, neuro divergent people etc.
I know of a famous tech company where majority of workers were white, not even Asian and Indian people, who usually tend to over represent in tech. Around the BLM times they put in policy that they had to interview people of color. What most managers did was just interview people of color only to reject them, often judge the candidates too harshly to ensure no laws were broken. They often interviewed the same candidate for multiple positions, it was pretty obvious what they were doing. Obviously if they were investigated, nothing provable would ever come out. But stuff like that is pretty prevalent in tech.
Microsoft did this.
I went through a DEI loop at Microsoft (found out later) and was ghosted by one manager, another manager asked a leetcode hard with 20 minutes to implement it, another asked a leetcode hard and DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE ANSWER until I walked them through it step by step (they had never seen the answer before).
Less you think I'm complaining about algorithmic interviews, I passed Google and Netflix technical rounds just fine.
Microsoft managers were the most disinterested group I've ever interviewed with, and it was only later that I found out I was picked to interview for multiple teams because of a DEI recruiter, and then found out that MS had initiatives forcing managers to interview people from underrepresented backgrounds.
Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock. The IQ difference between the people at Netflix and Google compared to MSFT was astounding.
I used to work at Microsoft and was on the other side, unfortunately I had the exact opposite experience. I interviewed and rejected a candidate (due to poor technical performance) then had the hiring manager contact me asking if I would reconsider as he needed to "increase DEI" footprint of his team. He wanted me to lower the bar for DEI reasons.
>Finally, almost everyone of the above mentioned interviewers was just not that bright. Seriously, sell your microsoft stock.
Well, if they were only interviewing you for performative box-checking reasons so they could hire the person they really wanted to hire then they would have a strong incentive to come across as somewhere you didn't want to work at. A disinterested interviewer is going to come across as not so bright. So this is hardly a fair assessment of the talent at Microsoft.
OTOH my professional interactions with Microsoft employees has always been positive. They've always been extremely capable and have gone the extra mile for me.
No, they were not smart engineers.
one literally interrupted me to say “you can’t solve this using recursion, you need a for loop”. I clarified if they meant for stack space reasons and they said “no, it just doesn’t work recursively”.
The system design round, they got confused with some basic queueing concepts. It was a shit show.
Okay but you can’t rely blame this on DEI or racism for sure. Plenty of people have had the same experience (myself included) with tons of companies and their hiring processes, it’s not like being given unfair conditions in interviews definitively amounts to racism or Microsoft being performatively woke. It happens to everyone. Even your anecdotal experience with the other companies being “better” is just that, random chance. I’ve had great interviews and bad ones, and 99% of the time all it comes down to is the mood of the interviewer and how much they like me personally.
> That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
Which is fine. But are they then suggesting that bias/etc was never a problem in the first place? Or, are they suggesting that DEI was not the solution, and if so, then why aren’t they suggesting a new solution?
There isn’t a satisfying answer here, to me anyway.
Aside: It appears the modern world is inflecting to OVERT (subversive) insular, erosion of fundamental values, with recent leveraging of power-structures to facilitate authoritarian thinking.
Not many people supported those "fundamental values" to begin with. The only people that wanted DEI policies were extremely loud liberals (that temporarily gained power by steamrolling the apathetic majority)
To be clear, the thing that’s keeping them from being disadvantaged against Musk/X is cozying up to the Trump and the government. That’s going to make a much bigger difference in stock performance than any personnel impact of these changes.
Surely nothing can go wrong with authoritarians backed by trillionaires with social media in their hands, rapidly talking over power. I doubt Orwell could have predicted how the 2020s are turning out.
Hardly. Social media algorithms optimising for engagement is surely one of the main reasons we're in this hyper-polarised environment. So yes, their marketing said DEI, but their algos pushed far-right propaganda onto my screen.
if we are in a dangerous political situation I wouldn’t know because trump alarmism has been turned up to 100 since 2015, so I have to discount what your saying to “mild political irritation”.
Yes it's called boiling the frog + shifting the Overton window. Threatening to invade allies, or having an unelected halftrillionaire direct the government of the US and openly push for regime change across Western Europe (to give two examples from just the past week), would be unthinkable in 2015. Now it's just "oh there's this guy again, anyway what's on" / "mild political irritation".
So yes, you're right that it's a bad strategy to keep the alarmism on 11 for a decade (because this normalisation is what eventually happens), but wrong to think that it's not actually a true problem.
That's exactly what they're doing and I don't think that's a secret.
> This kind of announcement seems extremely self defeating and unlikely to please anyone and piss off just about anyone that cares about this in any way shape or form, on either side.
It's not about making users or bloggers happy. They don't care whether those people are "pissed" because they're just going to keep coming to stare at ads anyway. It was about keeping regulators disempowered by proactively tossing an agitated public some crumbs, but they don't need to worry about that for a while now. They're obviously just trying to keep their staffing strategies open and unshackled so that they can pursue whatever business objectives they see coming up in the next few years, and aren't at a disadvantage against competitors like Musk/X who resisted these kinds of things all along.