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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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Meta ends its DEI program (internal memo, Ars Technica verification). The company is disbanding its DEI team. It will no longer use "diverse slate hiring" (intentional seeking-out of candidates of particular underrepresented minorities). It is "sunsetting our supplier diversity efforts", which probably means that they will no longer privilege minority/women-owned suppliers.

It is ending the perception that it has representation goals. Yes that's convoluted, but how else does one interpret this statement:

"We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it."

The stated reason for the shift in policy:

The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms longstanding principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics.

That is, they expect to no longer be sued based on "disparate impacts", but possibly sued based on preferential treatments. This... makes sense for a company to do. McDonalds is doing it; Walmart did it more than a month ago.

I expect more companies to follow suit (quietly or loudly). My question is: are there any corporate for-profit true-believers who will stick with the DEI initiatives? Ben and Jerry's, maybe?

That certain companies are drifting away from DEI doesn't imply that that the relative prevalence of DEI policies is largely a function of government disposition, nor even that those programs were uneconomical or counter-productive. In many ways it seems likely that extensive DEI stuff was a zero-interest rate phenomenon. When capital was scrambling about for productive uses, putting some of it into DEI to try to improve hiring/retention/productivity may have been perfectly rational, even if it has ceased to be now interest rates are higher.

I admire how you structured this post in such a way as to make refuting it require about a thousand times the effort you put in to it. Is any of that actually your perspective though? Do you believe the relative prevalence of DEI policies is not largely a function of government disposition? Do you believe those programs were economical and productive?

Your critique of @HaroldWilson is a touch indelicate, but fair.

Let me try to steelman.

Under ZIRP, a lot of companies, especially those with Silicon Valley style startup funding, raised more money than they could reasonably deploy. There are a lot of reasons for this but, suffice it to say, it was quite common up until 2020 for a startup founder to have far more money than he or she knew what to do with.

The one thing you can't do is not spend the money. So, companies would do all sorts of odd stuff. Usually, you just overhire sales and marketing as even if the ROI isn't great, you're still probably driving revenue. Others would launch new product lines willy-nilly. Others would turn into acquisition firms without saying so.

It stands to reason that DEI may have been an actually earnest attempt to capture talent that had been "overlooked" somehow. You can say "well, the very fact that they think the talent was overlooked is evidence that these people have horrible biases blah blah blah" - but that's thinking too deeply. They had too much cash, they had to do something with it, and this was the very noisy-random something they came up with.

Why not take less cash but give away a smaller amount of your start up?

Most likely Keynesian beauty contest reasons - if you behave in an unusual way, especially in one that means you get less money out of the gate, that implies you believe you have less opportunity to make money than other prospects, which means investors will get less money if they invest in you, which compounds on itself to make you unattractive to any investor and so you end up with no money at all.

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