If you're having a team going into every bit of government data, you might want to vet them. Beyond eugenicists and racists, if they're getting anywhere close to SCIFs, make sure they fill out that SF-86 accurately. And maybe even if they're not, have them go through regular clearance procedures.
Yes, it takes time. But right now, DOGE seems like a huge security risk for the USG what with it setting up backdoors everywhere, and with unvetted staff working for it.
That these concerns are being dismissed as partisan shows how far through the looking glass we truly are. Either _the party of law and order_ doesn't understand how risky this activity is, doesn't care or both -- any of which are _extremely_ troubling. We should also all be sure to keep this in mind next time they're crying crocodile tears about TikTok or DeepSeek.
I just emailed my representative (Mike Lawler) and I suggest everyone who's concerned about this activity and capable of offering compelling insights into why this activity (active data breach) is so concerning do the same. Perhaps they're somehow blissfully unaware of the security implications of these folks accessing data (it's only read-only access, though, so don't worry! /s), copying it to ... wherever?, running it through ChatGPT or tinkering in production on critical Cobol systems is and we can enlighten them.
> Either _the party of law and order_ doesn't understand how risky this activity is, doesn't care or both
If they hadn't already obviously ceded that title before 2025, they certainly did when over a thousand duly convicted violent partisan offenders were pardoned.
These weren't just random people, they were accomplices of the person who pardoned them.
We're in an autocratic United States now, where no crime, no matter how violent, committed by members of the regime will be prosecuted.
The majority of governors are all in on this new Republicanism. They can pardon any crime that Trump can't. Blue state governors can be leaned on extremely hard and most will have to give in if their Federal dollars are on the line. This isn't 2006 anymore.
> Blue state governors can be leaned on extremely hard and most will have to give in if their Federal dollars are on the line.
This is especially true if the courts roll over and reverse the Impoundment Act, which is exactly what the Project 2025 author and OMB nominee is pushing for. The president would be able to bankrupt any State, any entity that relies on federal funding, regardless of the wishes of Congress.
And arguably they could just do it: ignore any court judgment, and watch Congress do nothing. We know he won't ever be impeached and removed, so it's sort of a foregone conclusion that impoundment power can be seized at any time.
It doesn’t matter if you write or call your representative. He knows that if he goes against President Musk, Musk will throw his unlimited funds at someone so he gets primaried and even before that Musk will use his bully pulpit - Twitter - to berate him.
He is in a D+3 district that usually votes Democratic. That would usually moderate him. But see above about he would have to first survive a primary.
And why the senate didn't convict trump in the second impeachment about the insurrection he fomented. There is reporting of Mitt Romney that several republican senators indicated they didn't vote to convict because they were afraid what his minions would do to them and their families. They also mentioned they didn't have the funds to pay for private security the way that Romney had been doing for some time.
There's a word for achieving political ends via violence or the threat of violence. We should've been using that word heavily then, and we should be using it heavily now.
The Musk+Trump duopoly seems insurmountable. Trump has an a cult like hold on the Republican Party and Musk has enough money + Twitter to control the narrative/scare politicians in line to convince enough independents to keep them in power.
Our only hope is that the Cheeseburgers and high cholesterol gets the best of Trump.
What you're not mentioning the personal and intellectual flaws of these idols and their followers, and the tens, if not hundreds of millions of people in the US, and billions all over the world. How the chances "seem" right now is rather moot and very likely to be wrong one way or another; historians can say that later on. It is what it is now. It's not like you're suggesting to invest energy into A rather than B, so instead of idly musing about chances of success, try to focus on what increases them.
This isn't Musk+Trump, it's Musk+Thiel+Yarvin+Heritage+Vance, with Trump as a hood ornament. His job is simply to sign whatever they put in front of him and play golf.
Cholesterol getting the best of Trump isn't going to derail this, since Vance is more than happy to continue the amassing of unchecked executive power.
The difference is that it is never about policy with MAGA voters. It’s about Trump.
You see how quickly MAGA voters went from “America first. No foreign entanglements” to “let’s send troops to the Middle East to clear out Gaza” as soon as Trump said we should do so?
Anytime that Trump hasn’t been on the ballot since 2018, Trump voters stayed home.
Presidents have always been about personality and not policy. Biden and Bush I being the exception in my lifetime - or at least since Reagan.
> The difference is that it is never about policy with MAGA voters. It’s about Trump.
This is why there's an effort to centralize power in the executive at a blistering pace, so the opposition can be permanently defeated even without Trump.
Watch for three things: ignoring the courts, snuffing out the influence of non-party sources of authority (the press, academic institutions), and centralization of police power. I don't think they're going to wait past April before they do all three.
When Trump dies, do you think they will they stay home forever? Because he will die eventually (and is already past male US life expectancy), and I’m curious if the cult disbands at that point (if facts and policy don’t matter to them). If so, we’re really just defending against harm caused during his remaining life expectancy (unknown) and term (<4 years).
The other wannabe Trumps don’t have the draw/sway with MAGA folks that Trump does. DeSantis tries and tries but he’s perceived as just a weirdo for the most part. Vance likewise. There’s something uniquely compelling about Trump to the MAGA crowd.
Look at all of the other Republican candidates in the last primary. None of them would have ever gotten the cult like following if they had made it through the primaries.
I’m not saying another Republican will never win. But they will be your bland mostly inoffensive Republicans like Haley (2024), McCain, Romney, Bush I and II and Dole.
You might disagree with them on policy around the edges. But they won’t bring the destruction of Trump.
Desantis tries his best to be Trump and he flamed out marvelously on the stage. Even in Florida (where I live), he is losing his grip on the legislature.
I really hope that both sides comes out of this and re-focuses on the people. I strongly doubt it, but we could do with some healthy debate on what the purpose of government is and focusing on providing those services and improving the day to day existence of all of us.
I worry if it goes back to business as usual, it's just ripe for the next generation of con artists to show up and we'll go through this all over again.
My take is that we actually need more efficiency in government, and from a technology standpoint, they might have some good ideas.
I have a very pro-technology worldview. I'm independent leaning left but I thought that Democrats have been extreme, wasteful and untrustworthy in their own ways.
It's very unfortunate that this stuff like efficiency and technology integration is now associated so closely with neo-Nazis. Maybe I just didn't want to believe it. But when Musk did those Hitler salutes, I had to accept a new reality.
I don't think cutting programs or screwing up code is our main worry. The Secretary of Defense is literally an alcoholic neo-Nazi Crusader who talks about almost nothing besides getting rid of affirmative action and how evil Muslims are.
I am scared that they will actually try to deport millions of people, there could be massive detainment camps that become concentration camps. You only need a lack of food and one or two really serious neo-Nazis for that to become a death camp.
I am also afraid that they might trigger WWIII, fully fueled by racial hatred and dehumanization of Chinese people.
I am almost scared to write posts like this because who knows if they will start hunting down people from the internet.
Government services should be efficient, but that should never happen at the cost of being independent from the people in office, transparent, auditable, secure, and accountable.
This meme that government is just hugely more inefficient than business is not correct in my experience.
I've worked for both. I have seen massive waste in business, millions spent for no gain, staff employed to build a manager's empire, not to do anything that was actually needed and other terrible outcomes. Obviously that also happens in government too, although the bigger problem there was a whole bunch of lazy staff who were hard to fire.
But... A business can largely choose its market and optimise for that. A government cannot - it has to work for pretty much everyone. Business can choose to skirt the law or even break it. Government departments must comply with all law to the best of their ability.
Not saying there are no ways to improve government efficiency. But the people who think you just need a business approach (unless you just want to break it all) are deluded.
The big difference is that taxpayers are on the hook for government inefficiency and for most services there is no competition, the classic example being the DMV. Having one hour queues frequently is rare in private businesses.
Whereas with businesses they could go out of business if they overspend on inefficient processes and there can be competition on both quality and price.
One of the root causes is that it's very difficult to fire government employees for bad performance so that's why government services suck and cost a lot in almost every level of the government and in pretty much every country with some exceptions, like say the NTSB in the US.
It's not even that low performers should all be fired, but the fact that knowing you it's hard to get fired leads to many people underperforming given natural psychology. The other problem being lack of incentives tied to performance.
Maybe it's not that new then.. after all, I guess the Nazis did a lot of great work on rockets.. but very unfortunate. That association clouds people's views of technology in general. Technology itself is not biased or ignorant or evil. It's a lever. It should be able to help everyone.
Undoubtedly the IBM's of today are primed and ready to get the train rolling again. It is hard to be pro-technology realizing that the ownership of all that tech is ultimately the brainworm billionaire class. Who we already know are fascists.. as per daily news.
DOGE is just a dipshit rebrand of the US Digital Service, which was created under the Obama administration, and did bring real improvements and efficiency to the Federal Government. They're behind the IRS free to file program that I heard was just killed off. They also did login.gov. There is a huge number of lower profile improvements across the government that they're responsible for.
DOGE is a farce and I hate that I have to type the name of a joke from 2009 because Elon is a child and Trump is a crook.
DOGE (as in the sh**coin) is price manipulation. Elon may own a third of all DOGE in existence. So he pumped it when he appeared on SNL, pumped it on Twitter, and now pumps it via his reach as a newly minted oligarch.
> It's very unfortunate that this stuff like efficiency and technology integration is now associated so closely with neo-Nazis.
I don't think “efficiency and technology integration” is. I think DOGE is because its being done by neo-Nazis and in support of a blatantly fascist administration and doing things that look a lot more like ideological censorship and corrupt self-dealing than efficiency and technical integration, including specifically targeting things in government that actually did efficiency and technical integration.
Blue team is hesitant to use its power in a lot of ways, and due to insisting on consensus most of the time they are handicapped. Red team actually seems to know what power is and how to use it--unfortunately for us, they lack discrimination and strategic planning in its application.
Blue team also required a bunch of thought-killing exercises and public signalling of things that are clearly inefficient and intellectually bankrupt and dishonest--this drove away a lot of smart people that actually wanted to get shit done, and made it easy for red team to point over and say "see, they're lying/delusional/woke?" as covering fire when red team pushed for their own odious agendas.
Blue team also not only failed to address issues but deliberately lied about them: the immigration crisis was pilloried when Trump wanted to build a wall, but once Biden took power a few weeks later suddenly _then_ the immigration crisis was a real policy concern. When people were complaining about the cost of food and goods, that was silly--but now that Trump's in power, suddenly we are told to care again. The attempted manufacturing of consent by the media on the left (and to be clear, red team does the same thing) is now too obvious not to be used against them.
Given all of this:
* Things aren't as bad as they're being made out to be, though they are serious.
* There is an entire industry relying on your fear and anxiety to exist, so practice good information hygiene.
* Maybe look beyond the obvious labels (woke, Nazi, marxist, fascist) to understand what's actually going on--don't be intellectually lazy.
* Revisit the things you think you know and why they're Good or not--and consider what others would think of them (for example, we can't both talk about how it's only a matter of years that "white" will be a minority in the US and that that's a good thing _and also_ claim that reactionary concerns about replacement are wholly unfounded).
I would like to believe that those are just intellectually lazy labels. Are you sure it's not 100% accurate to say that Musk and Hegseth are neo-Nazis? Or that we are headed straight for new American Holocaust against Hispanics and a race-fueled third world war? I want that to be hysterical paranoia or "intellectually lazy labels". But look at the historical parallels.
He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
"He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies."
Confessing to fucking goats isn't quite the power move you make it out to be, but if you want to take one for the team, and claim that what you're doing is merely performance art intended to troll, while "things aren't as bad as they're being made out to be" and "concerns about replacement" are actually well founded, then be my guest. The fact that a racist doesn't mind being called a racist doesn't make them not a racist.
I don't think you're reading me in the way that I intended, and I think you're being very uncharitable.
I did not claim that their concerns about replacement were well-founded, merely that they were understandable. Again, go back and read what I actually wrote: we cannot both acknowledge that there is a decline in the proportion of whites in America, that there are policies being pursued that help with this (again, no moral judgement, simply a statement of fact), and also that the people who are scared about losing majority status are completely without basis in their concerns.
If you cannot understand the tiny pier of truth that these people use as a foundation for the massive pile of other nonsense they've stacked (or had stacked) upon it, you will never be able to get them to change.
I'm not asking you to agree with them. I'm not asking you to say that the whole of their beliefs makes any sense at all.
I'm asking you to understand that they aren't pulling this completely out of thin air, and that if you want to have more success than you've had it may be worth it to acknowledge their concerns and try to show how your preferred policies would serve them better and how their current preferred bozos are manipulating them.
You and people like you might assert that they're idiots, misinformed, evil, or whatever else--but their vote counts as much as yours, sometimes moreso, and so you ignore or misunderstand them at your peril.
> What is the relative population of Latinos in the US as a percent, compared with Jews in Germany at the time? What is the geographic distribution of those folks compared to Jews at the time? What is the representation of Latinos in Congress?
The thing that user is concerned about seems to be trying to decide if we're looking at another Holocaust. It seems reasonable to check to see if the preconditions are similar.
> But why do it in the form of a riddle?
It's not a riddle, it's an invitation to set a baseline to discuss from that's not just "the world is scary and we're looking at another Holocaust".
If somebody says the world is scary and they want reassurance, we can't just go "no the world isn't scary it's gonna be fine"--we have to explain _why_ the world isn't scary, and to do that we need shared understanding.
It's not helpful if, for example, they mean Nazi in the general sloppy sense ("thugs and bigots that seek power") and I use Nazis in a very particular sense (a group desirous of annexing Sudetenland and Alsace–Lorraine, seeking to restore German and Austrian economic power, scapegoating particular minorities and progressive values for cultural corruption, a reliance on a patchwork of occult and mystical foundations for rallying, etc.).
So, I didn't ask "riddles": I asked a bunch of questions to see where they were coming from before making an argument one way or the other. I wish more folks did this in the years leading up to the current situation, but here we are.
> It seems reasonable to check to see if the preconditions are similar.
I know. And I ask how that is relevant, how any answer to those particular question would makes them similar or dissimilar. It's not. I know this for a fact, but you didn't even make the attempt to claim otherwise.
It's not about absolute or relative numbers. And it's not about knowing the future.
If I say "don't fall asleep with a cigarette", do I mean "don't burn yourself", "don't kill yourself", "don't burn down your house", "don't burn down the block", "don't burn down the city", or "don't burn down the continent"?
If you can't see how the implementation of a Holocaust in the US might be impacted by the distribution and population density of Latinos I can't help you.
Some of the estimates I've seen for 1930s Germany were that Jews were less than 1% of the population; by contrast, Latinos are far beyond that--something like 40% in Texas and California.
A big part of the Holocaust was the targeted persecution and removal and ultimate execution of Jews, right? This was greatly aided by the fact that there were so few of them, and the Nazis were able to pin a bunch of ills of the time upon them. It's a lot easier to other a group when there are only a few representatives around.
My assertion--if you agree with the numbers earlier, which to me seem to be about the right near order of magnitude--is that we're not going to see that here in the US with Latinos (or Blacks, or most other groups) in the same way, and so fears of a Holocaust against those groups are likely unfounded.
Now, this isn't to say that there aren't a dozen other problems that could pop up, or that perhaps it might take a form wholly different than history--but the assertion was "we have lots of parallels to the Holocaust's preconditions" and I think that is (mercifully) one of the few things we don't have to worry about.
"the exact same thing in the same way" is a goal post of your own making, and I reject it. People stripped of their rights and disappeared, not based on individual actions, but their being only considered as object-like members of their groups. That's more than enough to have on one's plate not to wonder about the "likely" desert.
Hasn't started yet. Give it a few months or a year for the Taiwan situation to start to really boil and for them to have had their fill of rounding up Hispanics.
I don’t doubt there’s a racist element there, but people are blind as to just how deep United Front cells are stuck in the US. From running illegal weed grows, pushing power and doing transnational repression, it’s a way bigger threat that people don’t realise
I wish that made no sense. But instead we get dark synergy…
Cruelty is the point.
Chaos is the point.
Stupidity is the point.
Lies are the point.
Racism/anti-“different” (including different ideas) is the point.
Impunity is the point.
Destruction is the point.
What they have in common are in-our-face demonstrations of centralizing power, designed to encourage their base vicariously while stealing their lunch.
And discourage, silence, excommunicate, dis-home and dis-connect any competent detractors in any branch of government or appropriately hard news.
They know the value of cutting the cost of everything, with no concept of the loss of value sans anything.
Consistently hiring personally-loyal non-competent people with sketchy, crime-adjacent backgrounds, with histories of highly flexible loony tune views, isn’t an accident.
It isn’t at all difficult to recognize. It shouldn’t be hard to understand either. It is a very effective way to centralize power by replacing institutions with pawns.
Nor is the chaos being inflicted on those same institutions by targeted and random decrees. That many are vague and unbalancing is intentional. The aim isn’t to improve them, right-size them, or accomplish any national mission, etc. That would be a disaster if that was his goal. It is to kill any resistance to Trump in a way the constitution really has no effective response for.
As his power centralizes he will use his increased power to go after the next level of “threats” to his unmitigated power.
Where this stops, isn’t predictable. But given the chance, he won’t stop.
Regardless of your politics, it is an interesting historical moment, and worth seeing clearly. Trump is largely competently centralizing power to a degree we have not seen since Washington was given the greenfield mandate in which to oversee the raising up of our Constitutional institutions. An ironic difference from now.
If you want to understand the challenges and means of accruing power (with non-partisan, non-current-event nuance, and as it applies in any form of government), I recommend:
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics [0]
It says “Dictator’s” but the book covers every type of government and the principles and resulting plays apply to all.
"Sources? Or are you just knowingly spreaing false and defamatory claims because you feel emotional or want to signal your political affiliation?" -You, nullc aka Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>, before being flagged for hysterically and partisanly carrying Musk's water, and then ninja-editing your comment so as not to appear to be hypocritical for feeling emotional or signaling your political affiliation.
>"not a girl", "dead, killed by the woke mind virus" -Elon Musk
>[Musk's own estranged daughter] Wilson, 20, in an exclusive interview with NBC News, responded to comments Musk made Monday about her and her transgender identity. On social media and in an interview posted online, Musk said she was “not a girl” and was figuratively “dead,” and he alleged that he had been “tricked” into authorizing trans-related medical treatment for her when she was 16.
>“I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,” she said. “It was cruel.”
>“I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form,” she said in the court filing.
>“I lost my son, essentially,” Musk said. He used Wilson’s birth name, also known as a deadname for transgender people, and said she was “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”
>And in a post on X, Musk said Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and that, at age 4, she fit certain gay stereotypes, such as loving musicals and using the exclamation “fabulous!” to describe certain clothing. Wilson told NBC News that the anecdotes aren’t true, though she said she did act stereotypically feminine in other ways as a child.
>“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she wrote. “And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”
>“I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype,” she continued. “I think that says alot about how he views queer people and children in general.”
Independent of whether these goals are appropriate or not, these actions (and those of so many other companies) are just so predictably craven.
These executive orders (and what "DEIA" exactly means or constitutes, legally speaking) have not been litigated or clarified yet. Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?
At least Costco seems to have a logical reason for what they do and stood by it.
It surprises me that these programs were ever legal.
It is strictly illegal in Australia to consider factors like gender or race when hiring. Even capturing these details from applicants is problematic in most cases.
The compensation payable if caught can be enormous, in the order of a years salary per applicant. It’s not even necessary to prove that a specific applicant was discriminated against, simply having a process which is likely to discriminate is sufficient.
It's not "strictly illegal" in Australia. Our anti-discrimination bodies across the country frequently grant exemptions to employers allowing sex-based or race-based discrimination in favour of certain groups (e.g. women, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people), in order to "improve access to specific jobs, programs or services".
The truth is it comes down to the exact details of the policy whether it's legal. There's tonnes of things you can do to increase diversity in legal ways. For example, Google recruits at college campuses, they must have selection criteria for which campuses they visit, no matter what that policy is it's de facto a diversity strategy.
As for whether it's fair. It seems pretty dependent on your view of the world. If your base case is that without any regulations you'll just get the best person for the job, then these programs all look like an aberration. But if your base case is that hiring isn't fair - people hire their family, their friends, people from their alma mater, people from their church etc. Then putting in a programme to mitigate the biases that do exist seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Other countries often have a clearer separation of responsibilities between government and business.
Governments are responsible for addressing social inequity, while companies simply hire whoever best meets their needs (within the constraints of antidiscrimination laws).
In America these responsibilities seem to have become blurred, resulting in an XY problem whereby people debate which hiring policies are best at addressing certain societal problems, without questioning whether it is even appropriate for companies to be taking on that responsibility in the first place.
I recall we have a specific carve out for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders, and I recall seeing specific hiring drives especially around the public service (I also am aware that elements of the federal government had a program specifically targeting autistic people too, which is also a protected characteristic)
Theres also 2 forms these DEI programs took.
1. (The FAA Thing) where they specifically manipulated their hiring system to ensure a greater percentage of african americans.
2. (What a lot of the tech companies did) Write tons of new HR documentation, and add checks and balances to ensure that the implicit bias of the hiring manager didn't result in a biased outcome.
Theres really nothing wrong with 2 in an Australian context other than the extra overhead. The overhead was carried for a while as it allowed companies to signal alignment with political stances. They are shelving these programs to signal differently.
Honestly I cant completely hate the idea of 2 either. I despise the idea of more HR people drawing paychecks, but I recall an incident 20 years ago where our team couldn't hire a woman because the all female HR team unilaterally decided she wasn't technical enough, and bounced her out of the running without telling the hiring manager. (The applicant was conventionally attractive and younger than the HR team)
It is, and always was, illegal to hire or not hire someone based on their race (or other protected class). You cannot legally just use quotas. At the same time, the EEOC will find a way to sue you if you are a large company with a lower proportion of minority employees than population. So companies had to get creative.
Trump EEOC will not do that. It's questionable if the EEOC even has the power to do that anymore after recent supreme court decisions that weaken regulators in general.
DEI programs favoring a specific race is the exception to the norm. DEI is supposed to be about stopping discrimination and bias. A common recommendation of DEI programs is to replace names with numbers so people looking at the resumes racial biases can't influence decisions.
Imagine that someone decides recruiting needs a budget cut and shrinks the travel budget a bit. Managers shift to local career fairs instead. No one notices the complete lack of bay area HBCUs and a couple years down the road the pipeline is filled with people from Stanford with internships and internal recommendations competing against people from HBCUs that don't have either of them. One of these populations will look vastly more qualified on paper.
If that's what you consider to be useful evidence in a topic as complex as this one, heaven help whoever is paying you to make smart decisions for them.
You have been misinformed of how DEI works. Its goal is basically equal access to resources, addressing systemic inequities, and fostering an inclusive culture where everyone feels valued.
You cannot address systemic inequalities at the hiring level without some preferential treatment. The idea was that if you had two candidates who were equally strong, you pick the one from an underrepresented/disadvantaged background because they've had to work harder to get to the same place. At a surface level that is a disadvantage at the hiring level to the other one because the other gets a bonus tie-breaker.
The idea is that instead of just interviewing the people right next to you, who look exactly like you and have your exact background, you make the effort to interview a diverse set of candidates. Then you try to get rid of bias in the hiring process, and make the workplace somewhere that doesn’t make folks who are slightly different miserable. That’s it.
How does a company make an "effort" to interview a diverse set of candidates? There's an applicant queue not under their control, and a filtering phase at every step of the interview process.
What you're suggesting is that companies favor candidates who have a different appearance or background than existing employees, which is the definition of bias and discrimination. This is based on ignorant beliefs that people who look the same, have the same gender, ethnicity or background, will inevitably think the same way.
These programs are judging people by superficial traits, while claiming they somehow make the hiring process fair. It's ludicrous.
> There's an applicant queue not under their control
Not 100%, sure, but that's far different from 0%.
Which job fairs do your company reps attend? Is there a built-in bias causing you to miss out on good candidates?
Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?
> What you're suggesting is that companies favor candidates who have a different appearance or background than existing employees, which is the definition of bias and discrimination.
No. The suggestion is that companies should not favor candidates because they have the same appearance or background than existing employees.
If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?
The former discriminates on the basis of religion, and is prohibited in most cases.
Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.
Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.
Are job fairs still a thing? IME most recruitment happens online these days, with the vast majority of candidates coming in via LinkedIn and other job boards.
> Can employees recommend a friend as a potential recruit? What effect does that have on promoting favoritism over a better candidate?
Why is that a bad thing? Personal recommendations from someone you trust is a valid factor in making a hiring decision. This doesn't necessarily mean hiring someone who is inexperienced and not a good fit for the role over a better candidate just because they were recommended, but all else being equal, a recommendation is a strong signal to consider.
Although, truthfully, why is favoritism wrong? If a company prefers hiring someone based on a recommendation, they might have issues with their performance, but maybe that person makes the team happier and more productive. Ultimately, it's their decision to make and live with.
> If the core team is all from Local Church, and their friend network is all from Local Church, then should they favor that network to hire someone else from Local Church, or should other candidates be judged with equal weight?
I think we can agree that candidates should be judged equally based primarily on their ability to fulfill the role requirements. My problem with DEI initiatives is that they emphasize superficial traits like religion, race, gender, ethnicity, etc., which are things we've fought hard to _not_ pay attention to in a professional setting. The effect of this is that it simply reverses the direction of the discrimination, but it doesn't get rid of it.
> Bearing the latter in mind is DEI.
> Requiring new candidates to not be fro Local Church is also discrimination on the basis of religion, and is equally prohibited. It is not DEI.
You can define what DEI is supposed to mean all you want, but the reality is that companies use it as an excuse for discrimination[1]. This is not surprising, as it's a slippery slope from "suppressing our biases" to "reversing our biases".
I said "primarily" above because there is inevitably a human component in deciding whether a person or team would want to work with someone, which can be interpreted as a bias. This is often referred to with vague terms such as "culture fit", or the rebranded "cultural contribution", "values fit", etc.[2]
The thing is that humans are innately tribal. We tend to favor like-minded individuals familiar to our own background and life experience. Even if you educate people to not be biased against/for a specific set of traits, we will still be biased against some others. Humans in general favor attractive, charismatic, confident and outgoing people. Should we fight to remove those biases as well?
In broader terms, what is exactly the end goal of DEI programs? That companies are 100% heterogeneous across all possible criteria that can identify a person? This is insane and unrealistic. It completely ignores not only our inherent biases, but the fact that some of our traits influence our career decisions and make us better suited for specific roles. For example, nurses are overwhelmingly female, while mechanics and electricians are overwhelmingly male[3]. Is this the result of discrimination in these industries, or simply a side-effect of what makes us different? Would these industries be any better if we forced them to discriminate against the majority of their work force?
The local college here in town just had a job fair so, yes.
My point was to give a couple of examples of how the applicant queue is not completely out of a company's control. Surely you can think of other ones.
> The thing is that humans are innately tribal.
The thing about humans is we get to decide what our tribe is, and tribe membership both changes and is multi-component.
We can decide to change our religion, which changes our "tribe", while also supporting the local football team (another "tribe") and be in the alumni club of a college (a third "tribe") while also celebrating Independence Day (a fourth "tribe") at a work (tribe #5) event.
Making your point rather meaningless, since we can change ourselves.
> what is exactly the end goal of DEI programs?
I don't care to have this discussion. I'm a programmer. I came to point out that your objection to DEI was invalid, at a level that even a programmer could point out.
Never called you a Nazi. Just said that the guy who gave the Nazi salute, twice, while standing behind the Seal of the President of the United States, is a Nazi.
Well, if they prefer a black candidate to a white one, the white one can complain of being discriminated against and accuse them of promoting DEI, which under the new administration can have all sorts of bad consequences for them. So they'd better play it safe and hire the white candidate...
DEI is not about picking lesser candidates to fill quotas, it's about ensuring the human recruiters don't get in the way of the best talent joining your company.
A big part of the unpopularity of DEI programs is the dishonesty.
We all know that these programs don't result in better candidates, and that standards are lowered, not raised, when they are introduced.
Just be honest about it and make the case for why you think lowering standards is a worthwhile sacrifice to accomodate people from diverse backgrounds.
Even better, make the case for why considering any of this is a companies responsiblity in the first place.
How deep in the talent pool does Google usually go? It seems to me many HBCUs end up somewhere in the middle of the rankings. I don’t think Google went out of its way to interview at my middling state school. Should HBCUs get a boost?
I'm not sure "craven" is the right word, but it's definitely something.
> These executive orders (and what "DEIA" exactly means or constitutes, legally speaking) have not been litigated or clarified yet.
All of these DEI efforts were and are blatantly illegal. They were just never litigated for long enough that everyone was comfortable with doing them openly. The point of the executive orders isn't necessarily the orders themselves, but a clear signal the new administration will litigate these efforts that have always been illegal.
So many of these companies are backing away from the efforts and hoping that show of goodwill will ameliorate their potential upcoming legal risk. If they play ball, the new administration might accept the peace offering and not go full legal scorched earth.
> Is Google going to avoid interviewing anyone from a HBCU now?
No, because that would obviously be racist.
DEI would be favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job.
The just thing would be students from HBCUs having a level playing field along with everyone else.
It's no different than hiring managers selectively preferring graduates from Stanford or based on their surname's ethnicity, but it's hard to prove those things happen.
DEI is nominally about adjusting the situation so that the end result is equal. For example, paying women equally even if they don't negotiate as aggressively as men.
The nominal case doesn't always match the reality, but the reality is that no one has a level playing field to begin with.
The whole thing is about trying to eliminate sources of bias that we can. For example, blind screening of resumes where names and similar personal info aren’t given is a way to avoid racial bias while focusing on what matters. People have pre-determined opinions about many things, even if it’s subconscious. That’s an example of DEI policies trying to level the playing field to avoid unfair discrimination.
In theory if DEI was about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind, it wouldn't be controversial.
But companies went in hard with things such as quotas, and there's even cases in the courts at the moment where Red Hat/IBM supposedly awarded bonuses based on hiring managers fulfilling diversity quotas.
Of course its controversial either way. Let's assume for our purposes that DEI is purely about being race, sex, gender, sexuality, age blind (which we can absolutely argue about separately). It would absolutely be controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics and therefore has a large constituency of people it favoured. If I'm a rich white kid from a good family who went to a top school who gets into an Internship at Goldman because my Dad is golfing buddies with a Partner there then of course I would be opposed to DEI. And guess what? Rich white kids from good families and top schools have quite a lot of political capital.
And that's only those who directly materially lose out. Implicit in DEI is a suggestion that the American system is not a meritocracy, and if you accept that claim you are attacking the identity of a lot of powerful people who genuinely believe they got to where they are through unique skills and effort and not because they had any sort of advantage.
> controversial because it's replacing a system that previously wasn't blind to those characteristics
Was it though?
Or was it just a result of society and culture outside the companies control.
The idea behind DEI is as if a car crashes into another car because of an issue with the road, that leads to one car being more damaged than the other, the solution is to make sure the less damaged car has the same amount of damage, rather than fixing the road.
That's a great example of a DEI-inspired policy that should be, at least in most cases, pretty non-controversial, and very beneficial to the company itself.
Have you tried deploying it? If you do, you'll find blind screening is extremely controversial. DEI types loathe it and will fight against it.
The reason is that de facto unofficial discrimination against white men is widespread and blind screening eliminates it, so the resulting hires are more male and western than before. Mostly this result is kept hidden within the organizations in question, but there are a bunch of reported cases where this happened publicly.
Even the famous orchestra study that kicked off the fad for these screenings supports this if you read the data tables carefully. The paper made it sound like blind screenings are better for women and racial minorities, but their data properly interpreted didn't say that.
You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been. Using it as a pejorative in the way you are is how the right wants to use it, but it is also racist, sexist, and ablist. It doesn't reflect the purpose of the concept at all. In fact your description of "favoring one candidate over another specifically due to immutable personal characteristics, not their qualifications for the job" is exactly what the concept hopes to prevent, not enable.
DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it, it is more about considering diversity and recognizing personal and institutional bias, and working to ensure that bias does not negatively affect people, whether that be in hiring, consideration for roles or promotions, and so on.
All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven, and if you actually look you can see it's already doing damage. There seem to be a lot of assumptions that women or people of color in high positions are "DEI hires" when they likely had to work harder than white men to get where they are. I mean firing a 4-star admiral because she's a woman and then claiming she was a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are. Automatically assuming a black or trans pilot is a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are.
I am a former hiring manager at Google and we were specifically told by hr that we could hire 2 people on one headcount if one of those people met specific dei criteria and there was a list of races and genders that met the criteria. One of my peer managers grew his org twice as fast as me by only hiring females with engineering degrees. He got promoted shortly after. Within 2 years his entire team was disbanded for being completely ineffective. Google ended up getting sued over this practice and they lost. This is not the only example I have. The worst of all was Eric Schmidt literally saying to us that diversity was "strategically important" as it helped to "increase the talent pool" and "keep salaries competitive." This was never about doing the right thing for employees.
I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.
It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.
IBM executives are on record stating that hiring too many white or Asian men will cause hiring managers to lose bonuses.
I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.
Finally, from the article in this post:
> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.
It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.
These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.
As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.
The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.
Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.
Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?
The idea that people aren't comfortable on a team that doesn't have other people matching their immutable sex/race characteristics, and that we should encourage this fragility is insane to me.
If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?
I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.
There will always be friction between people, not even just based on physical attributes.. If a company/team doesn't have a subgroup/clique I can get along with the only thing the company can offer me is more standalone tasks/pay. They could try shuffling me from team to team hoping I click with someone assuming they are big enough to have multiple doing what I applied for but it seems hard to motivate the hire to notify you of the issue instead of finding a new job on the side and quitting.
Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.
> You misunderstand what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is. It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.
Yes, it has. Look at the college admissions. The test score requirements for black students were way way lower than those for the Asian students in many universities and colleges. That's favoring people by their skin color.
Where can I look at these college test score requirements? I have never heard of such a thing besides minimum SAT score to be considered. Is that adjusted based solely on race at some university? Where?
At the graduate level there are a number of resources which can illustrate the difference between admissions standards for people from “underrepresented minority” (URM) groups and non-URMs. They manifest as materially lower LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs for URMs. There are Supreme Court cases analyzing details, and prior to the most recent doctrine, the preferencing policies were totally open because SCOTUS blessed it in the case of law school admissions.
Probably in the NBER report[1] on the data that came out of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case[2]. It's an interesting read, as is the other one on legacy applicants.
> All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven
Some companies are under legal pressure to avoid lawsuits because some programs are violating civil rights. I wouldn't call those instances craven.
As for your definition of DEI, I find it fairly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Regardless of how we want to define DEI in the hypothetical perfect world, the reality is a large portion of current DEI programs look absolutely nothing like what you described.
“Recognizing personal and institutional bias” sounds nice, until someone has to decide which biases or differences to overcome, and at what cost.
There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.
The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.
On the one hand, you have DEI policies like Harvard's college admissions or the air traffic controller hiring scandal. And of course DEI advocates always claim that these are obvious perversions of True DEI, which is only about expanding opportunities and never about discriminating against disfavored groups of people.
On the other hand, the tricky bit comes in when it's only in retrospect everyone agrees those were terrible perversions of DEI. When they're actually in place, anyone who criticizes them is considered a racist neo-Nazi.
Has there been a big effort to call the FAA whistleblowers nazis?
I learned about it, went "oh that sucks", but never felt like they were being racist. They have a great evidentiary basis. Its not like some red hat guy screeching about losing his job without being able to show cause.
I'm all for DEI, however you too seem to misunderstand one critical aspect, the 'E' in DEI. The 'E' (Equity) aspect is very nuanced and if not understood and communicated well would lead to deadlocked discussions
Equity factors in historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences. This could mean that if we have a candidate who seems to be with lesser qualification then they potentially can be hired over a more qualified candidate.
This is with reasoning that due to past decades (and centuries) of historical situations a candidate was led through a path which landed them with a 'lesser' qualification. So, now if we continue to correct this historical situation then sometime in future the need for Equity would disappear, since that future generation is result of a equitable society - then no more excuses, if you have lesser qualification then it is your doing and not society's.
> It's not about favoring anyone despite qualifications and never has been.
> DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it
I have been in the room where HR/hiring managers have explicitly stated that they want to hire [specific race/gender] for an open role. This has been at major companies. In states where this is explicitly illegal.
In the very high level abstract, the goal of DEI programs may not be to engage in explicitly illegal race/sex discrimination, but in practice, this is how it often turns out.
I will let others give their own anecdotes, as cases like this are widespread.
I mean, considering West Point Academy is closing clubs like the National Society of Black Engineers or the Japanese Forum Club due to the anti-DEI order [1] I think that should tell you everything you need to know about what this change signals.
>the Japanese Forum Club, which described itself as a place for promoting “understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture and language”;
Don't know why West Point thinks that is required by the anti-DEI order, maybe someone is going through and looking at anything with race or gender in the name and shutting it down?
If they are accessing TS/SCI information and places like SCIFs have they filled out their SF-86? Are any of them dual nationals and do they have any ties or vulnerabilities to hostile foreign states?
Basic questions given the enormous access they are being given, far beyond frankly any handful of people have generally had in US government history.
Also, they have apparently plugged in their own private server at OPM. Has this already been compromised by Chinese/ Russian agents? Has the NSA had a look?
Would contractors need to do any of this? Is DOGE using federal funds?
I'm not exactly clear on the situation but if they are just doing this for free and don't have access to confidential information, I could see that potentially being the key loophole here.
While everyone is focusing on the so-called 'DEI' part, please note that per this article they are also targeting "environmentally friendly technologies". This is incredibly broad and could de-fund a broad array of fundamental research that has, as potential long-term impacts, reducing carbon emissions, PFAS remediation, desalination, etc. etc. Given that proposals were written years ago, researchers did not know that in the new regime certain words would become verboten and may have framed the eventual impact of their work in entirely reasonable ways that are now considered ideologically unacceptable.
If they do choose to issue stop work orders on already funded grants that will certainly cause chaos across engineering and science in this country. And frankly, it will cede leadership on many topics to China (which is already dominating fields like materials science).
This is disingenuous: there is no "DEI" component of NSF proposals. There is a Broader Impacts section which is mandated by law - the America Competes Act of 2010, which congress passed. https://www.congress.gov/111/plaws/publ358/PLAW-111publ358.p... It states that:
GOALS.—The Foundation shall apply a Broader Impacts
Review Criterion to achieve the following goals:
(1) Increased economic competitiveness of the United
States.
(2) Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce.
(3) Increased participation of women and underrepresented
minorities in STEM.
(4) Increased partnerships between academia and industry.
(5) Improved pre-K–12 STEM education and teacher
development.
(6) Improved undergraduate STEM education.
(7) Increased public scientific literacy.
(8) Increased national security.
That's it. I've won many NSF proposals and have never talked about DEI. Instead we talk about outreach work we do with local schools, our involving undergraduate students in research who would not otherwise be able to volunteer their time, and of course the economic impacts of working on these topics.
An executive order cannot override the law authorizing the National Science Foundation and its activities. We are, for now, a country of laws.
A recent Major Research Instrumentation proposal that I submitted to NSF had this required section in the Broader Impacts section [1], where I've pasted the text from the instructions:
Institutional Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion - Using no more than one paragraph, describe indicators of institutional commitment to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) within the awardee/subawardee institution(s).
Who knows? The executive orders read like they were written by children and don't clearly define what they mean by "DEIA". But NSF's authorization is from Congress. Unless congress passes a law rescinding this as a part of what counts as broader impacts, or the Supreme Court rules that increasing participation of underrepresented groups is unconstitutional (by precedent it is certainly not!), then NSF cannot simply change the definition of broader impacts.
NSF is an independent agency, and the degree of control over it which a President can legitimately exercise is disputed, but presidents from both parties have treated the independent agencies as being subject to executive orders.
They're created by Congress but administratively part of the executive branch, as described in the first two paragraphs of the linked wiki article, and they're independent so they can be insulated from politics and regulate effectively.
I believe that Independent Agencies were created by the Progressives of the early 20th century. They were subsequently found to be constitutional, through somewhat dubious reasoning, and it seems like they’re now too big to fail.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. Exactly what I was referring to, they are extra-Constitutional at best. And now the executive is rightfully taking them back under control
I think a better approach would be to rewrite the Constitution, taking into account what has been learned over the centuries. The executive branch should become more like a bureaucracy and less like a monarchy. In particular, department heads should have a degree of independence from the President, and it should only be possible to remove them before the normal term expires by impeachment or if the President and the Senate agree.
Agree in theory that we should try to rewrite our foundational laws rather than twist or ignore them.
Disagree with your specific proposals though. I want more accountability, not less. Your proposals also rely on Congress stepping up, which it hasn't done in some time
The way I see it, the dysfunctionality of the Congress and the rule by executive orders have made the President closer to an elected king than the chief executive of a republic. The US is now closer to a monarchy than the actual monarchies in Europe.
It's one thing to have a presidential republic, because you want an independent executive branch. (Unlike in parliamentary republics, where it's subordinate to the legislative branch.) But vesting so much power in a single individual is against everything a republic stands for. It's better to have an executive branch consisting of many independent departments than everyone serving at the will of the President.
> The way I see it, the dysfunctionality of the Congress and the rule by executive orders have made the President closer to an elected king than the chief executive of a republic. The US is now closer to a monarchy than the actual monarchies in Europe.
This is not new, and not caused by “Congressional dysfunction”, it is inherent in the design of the American system. To quote an editorial in the long-defunct Knoxville Journal, published all the way back in 1896 (February 9): "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king"
The British historian David Cannadine argues [0] that the American Founding Fathers created an elective monarchy, instead of a republic, in part because from the other side of the Atlantic they didn’t understand that the King was already more of a figurehead than a genuine power, and that the Prime Minister and Parliament were the ones who called the shots. So they gave the President, not the very limited powers that King George III actually had in practice, nor the less limited but still quite constrained powers of the Prime Minister, but a rather large chunk of the much more expansive powers they mistakenly thought the King still had-and their “checks and balances”, despite being conceptually neater than those in the UK, in some ways turned out to be weaker. In 1776 and 1787 (writing of the US Constitution), the modern office of Prime Minister was still a relatively new development-it is generally considered to have begun with Sir Robert Walpole’s appointment as First Lord of the Treasury in 1729-prior to that, the First Lord of the Treasury was closer to a finance/economics minister than a national leader.
"independent agencies" isn't meant to be at the same level of the "Big Three", but rather agencies that are deliberately created by the Legislative branch (typically) to be as independent as the constitution allows. We don't need the president, congress, and the supreme court to vote/judge on every single decision that happens in this country. We create bodies to do that for us.
I will take the SCOTUS opinion on these laws being Constitutional over an comment on hackernews. We'll see what happens, I'm sure that Trumpy will try and get it to SCOTUS and test such institutions.
The fact that you can pay to have your replies higher (plus the suppression of posts with links) on X are part of this. The other reality is that for me and my community / friends who used to be active on Twitter.. they're just not participating anymore.
It's become like Facebook became a decade or so ago. Total ghost-town with only some eccentric folks still posting. In the case of X, everything I see seems to be connected with some kind of ecosystem around Elon, Trump and right-wing influencers. Time to move on.
It is very close to the “if the poor can’t have fun, then your city is boring” idea (ok, I might have made it up, but apologies if I stole it from someone and forgot). Applies to social media as well.
What exactly does 'truly successful' mean here? If Nobel prize is the standard that's ridiculous. As someone who is a fairly successful (by conventional metrics) tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences, this was really dumb advice but not atypical from previous generations (along with: "make sure you have a wife at home to take care of everything" which, btw, was the more common advice to get, since almost every male academic had a wife and kids)
It is quite possible to get grants, do valuable work, advance your field (and get awards, if that's your jam) and still live a pretty normal life. In my case my spouse is also a successful (by conventional metrics) academic, and we have kids. It's not without challenges, but it's quite plenty of positives. And neither of us are charismatic geniuses. We have talents, sure, but the more important thing is that we are organized.
The unequal impact highlighted here is very real. As the man in a dual-career academic couple, I have actively worked (along with my wife of course) to counter it. Simple examples include strongly encouraging and supporting a spouse, including crucially owning/ being the primary point person on childcare - especially needed when they are in the midst of grant applications or important conference presentations, even in early childhood years.
are you a professor at a tier-1 university (you say "tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences")? Is it in an expensive city? what's your h-index? How much time do you spend writing papers and going to conferences, versus doing research. Is it lab work or theory? how much money do you bring in? Do you work weekends? Do you ever have to go to a conference and it means your spouse has to do extra work around the house?
You run a lab on $1M/year (grant money?). When I was a PI over a decade ago, that's enough to employ at best 2-4 research scientists.
What I actually meant was salary- because if you live in an expensive city, it's almost impossible to buy a house on an academic salary. Certainly you could buy in the worst part of town, far from your institution, with higher crime rates and lower quality of houses...
$1M / year is on the upper end in the engineering school I'm at (average faculty brings in less than half that). I mostly have Ph.D. students (as do most people in my field) that cost ~$100K/ year incl. overhead, or postdocs that cost ~$150K/ year incl. overhead. Things are very different in medical schools where staff scientists are more common and also you have to fund your own salary.
Total household income is > $450K/year, which along with lots of saving early in our career, allows us to live in a home close to work and in a nice neighborhood.
Everyone's experience will be different, and we are certainly lucky, but I am in a pretty similar situation to a dozen other recently-tenured faculty I know in my career/life stage at my university. We work hard, but the differences in hours etc. relative to my friends working at various Bay Area companies seem modest. YMMV.
Your experience is atypical in my field (medical biology/ML/drug discovery)/region(SF Bay Area). Think UCSF/UC Berkeley. My professor at UCSF was soooo happy he could hire starting professors at $70K a year (20 years ago; now it's about $120K).
A typical PI would have $10M/year in grants, have no grad students (or 1-2), only postdocs (who are already publishing), live fairly far away (45+minute commute). Once they reach full tenure it's about $250K/year salary (with summer free, but usually 1 day a week consulting with pharma instead), plus a heavy teaching load. And every single one of them is working nights and weekends to just barely keep up.
I looked at that, and concluded there was no way for me to be happy, and moved to industry, where I get paid more, work less, and have a far better work/life balance. I even have more time to do independent research and publish than I ever did as an academic. So I'm always interested in what attributes people who managed to pull off the "two body problem" in the physical sciences are doing.
It's true that there are major differences in academia across different fields. NIH funding is typically so much more $$ than NSF[1] -- and I wonder if this has an effect on how these fields are structured and thus who enters them. In particular, could the soft money[2] salary encourage people who are willing to take that bet?
But also UCSF/UCB's biomed stuff is kind of a different machine as far as I can tell -- it's not as focused on training (hence, fewer students and more postdocs/post-PhD researchers) and more akin to a traditional industrial research lab. But then: who are they teaching exactly at UCSF (where's the "heavy teaching load" coming from) if there are so few PhD students -- med school students?
For those reading along:
[1] Think medical/biomed/bioeng/pharma/etc. (NIH) vs physics/astronomy/computing/social science/etc. (NSF)
[2] "Soft money" means your (PI) salary is paid from the grants you get; don't get enough grants to cover your salary and you're out, typically, if you can't get a friend to sponsor you under their grants.
$10M/ year seems unusually high, even for med schools - are you sure those are annualized costs? Perhaps it's because I'm familiar with the more basic science (non clinical trial) parts of NIH, but a typical R01 is $250K-$500K/ year in direct costs so that would imply having to hold ~15 of them (with overheard) to reach $10M/year.
It seems like $10M in total value of active grants in a given year (~5 R01s) might be more typical (though the standard for tenure I've heard of in med schools is maybe ~2-3 R01s, so 5 would make you top tier and highly sought after).
For clarity, when I'm referring to $1M/year in annual funding, that's coming from ~6-7 active grants whose total value might be in the $5M range total.
R01s are too small to be worth applying for, typically. Or rather, most PIs have an R01 that pays for themselves and maybe some travel and publication feeds. Most of these people end up making center grants or finding other mechanisms (like non-NIH funding, such as CZI).
There's no way I personally would have been able to manage 5-6 active R01s a year; but then, when I did grant review, I noticed that other folks did a lot of copy/pasting and exagerating about their publications significance, which is not something I was willing to do.
I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while, and this just seems like a way for them to do it and get a tax write-off since it's a 'donation'. PARC has already been doing a lot of government contract work, and I've seen teams from PARC and SRI compete for certain programs, so there's definitely synergy there. But I think PARC was historically more commercially oriented than SRI, so there will be some cultural differences internally.
Over time Xerox has gone quite far from where it was when PARC was founded and I think internal support for it had weakened a lot.
The bigger problem both orgs have historically had is on compensation and retaining talent. A lot of people tend to leave or get poached by major companies and their R&D units - lots of former PARC folks at X, and lots of former SRI folks across various robotics companies.
Xerox went through the process of making PARC a wholly-owned subsidiary in 2002 (which is around the time the parc.com domain was created to replace the parc.xerox.com subdomain). This was presumably as part of trying to sell of PARC, in part or as a whole.
Xerox's revenue has been slowly declining over that time (~$15B from 2002-2009, ~$20B 2010-2013, ~$10B 2014-2019, ~$7B 2020-2023). There's likely a few business-related reasons they are doing this donation now.
> I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while
I wonder why some corporations don't see the value of R&D, or even "incidental" R&D, when you develop something revolutionary while you work on something profitable.
As an academic editor for a society journal this is ridiculous. Most of this process is automated and takes a grand total of 15 mins of time. Also, Nature charging $10k for open access while PLOS charges more like $2k should tell you what’s going on here
Most publishers do not have this process automated, I assure you. Even so, the theory that an automated process requires no maintenance does not hold water.
For a high-prestige journal, you get 50 submissions per 1 published article.
Let's reject 80% of them right off the bat from the editorial desk.
We now have twenty articles left to properly peer review. I had originally said 15, so let's make it 15.
In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.
$200. Let's say the total cost of an employee is $50 / hour (salary + insurance + taxes). Surely it's plausible that it takes a total of 4 hours, spread across multiple months, to maintain multiple (start at 30 and then drop) threads of communication that eventually get a review to completion.
And I did not include in that calculation anything that even remotely includes any other administrative costs, or, heaven forbid, "how much the CEO makes"
>> In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.
All that is either handled automatically -sending emails to people who submitted articles on online submission systems- or performed by unpaid editors -soliciting reviews, desk rejection or communicating with authors to request clarifications or respond to questions, chasing reviewers, and so on, and so forth.
But, hey, if the editors in your journal get paid for all this drudgery, then please let me know where to apply.
> Most publishers do not have this process automated
This kind of points to rent-seeking or cartel behavior, doesn't it? If this was a competitive market a publisher could get an upper hand by automating and offering their services at a lower rate.
The costs are minimal to handle rejected submissions. Most of the work is done by reviewers.
And no it doesn’t cost that much.. that’s the rate with a fat 50% margin, corresponding to the massive profits Elsevier rakes in. It’s just a tax on the system
Yes, it takes time. But right now, DOGE seems like a huge security risk for the USG what with it setting up backdoors everywhere, and with unvetted staff working for it.
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