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This is about layoffs in tech and what they underscore about modern economy.
https://blog.interviewing.io/how-much-have-2022-layoffs-affected-engineers-vs-other-departments-we-dug-into-the-data-to-find-out/
This passage feels obvious. Of course companies will let go those employees first who contribute little to the bottom line. Of course companies will hold onto their critical resources--engineers and salespeople in this case--until the very worst moment.
But underneath this is a statement about how many bullshit jobs are there in our economy. Jobs that are merely simple busywork. Jobs that exist solely as a way to redistribute the fruits of capitalism from those who have found a way to way to produce for society and those who didn't. It's basically a giant social contract about providing for a rather large part of society that would not otherwise be able to sustain itself.
If anything, this speaks of how deep our humanism runs. Instead of sawing off the sickly branch, we embrace it with care, doing so in a way that doesn't over-infringe on the patient's dignity (Consider how powerful a mark of status it is to provide for the weak and poor--now this status-marker has been democratized).
Thus we learn something practical: don't take anything HR says or does too seriously. They play an unpopular, minor role in the fabric of a company, relegated to the equivalent of keeping the litter box clean: ensuring legal compliance, tackling on/off-boarding paperwork, and organizing company celebrations. That, and be wary of HR departments that seem to outgrow their function. A fat, active HR department is a sign that a company isn't allocating its funds efficiently. Or that it usurps power from more important departments, eg. the power to design and run the hiring process (they should only take care of the mechanical parts; the candidate qualification process should be in the hands of subject-matter experts). Either way, it's a bad sign.
Our company keeps hiring DEI folks, and it worries me -- they seem a net negative, beyond just their salary.
My post was partially inspired by having to sit through 2 hours of DEI training organized by HR.
Maybe it's me spending too much time here and getting used to good faith, high quality arguments, but those two hours felt like being schooled by teenagers who were giving it half their effort. It was painful. For example, we had a module about how diversity is a smart business choice because it gets more diverse ideas injected into the company, after which we had to get into groups of 3-4 and discuss how each of us would work toward increasing diversity in our specific roles.
My first thoughts were:
leading the question -> there's no room for discussion, even questions, but you're made to feel "as if" you have any choice or input. You're given a goal (diversity) and ordered to come up, in front of your peers (social pressure), with ways to achieve that goal.
motte and bailey -> basically arguing for an unfair, politically-motivated redistribution of wealth ("bad diversity") and hiding it behind a good, meaningful idea of diversity.
At the end, I couldn't tell what's worse. The icky ways someone was trying to pressure people into doing/thinking what they wanted us to think OR the form it took, which was so poor, it would get you a C at most if you did that for a school project.
The snarky, but reasonably accurate, way to answer is, "in the context of getting fresh ideas in, I'd suggest that we hire smart people with non-college backgrounds; we could probably do that using aptitude testing on an open pool of candidates". For me, this has the virtue of being something that I actually believe is true in addition to it baiting someone to say that they actually don't give a shit about ideas and that "diversity" doesn't mean anything like the dictionary definition.
Edit - Of course, the latter part is a ridiculous fantasy of a gotcha moment. In real life, the answer is that aptitude testing is racist and doesn't actually measure intelligence anyway.
But, one might answer, how well do they predict one's ability to come up with unconventional ideas ? Because that's what would matter here.
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