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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:
The stated reason for the shift in policy:
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.
DEI as a plan doesn't make any sense under this theory though. You are a startup. Your first 10 guys are all still there. You know them. They aren't DEI in the slightest. You went to the same school as this potential DEI hire, you thought she/he was a dunce not worthy of being part of your SR design team that is now literally your company.
The only reason you are going for DEI is because your funders want it. Why they want it is a black box to you, but it is because either the government or their funders are demanding it. This will always be the case because DEI is the most inorganic type of movement. People will often refer to it as race communism, and usually such ridiculous descriptions of large movements are not well founded, but that one is. The demands of DEI ask a team to violate both ingroup preferences and competency preferences. Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you. Such a system will almost never be ground up or organic.
Look, I'm no DEI fan at all. My previous comment literally said I was going through the exercise of steelman-ing.
When you say things like "Your job under DEI is to hire and promote incompetent people who hate you" you're demonstrating that you don't want to think through the other side's position, you just want to yell at it - which is exactly one of the core criticisms of DEI.
This is what's at the heart of the Motte - this community demands more than "boo outgroup." This is why there's literally the boo outgroup reporting button.
I tried to come up with a rational market explanation for DEI. It could very well be wrong. Your counter, however, was "no, actually DEI is just stupid and evil."
No one thinks there aren't some DEI true believers. The problem with your hypothetical is not that. It is that thinking people at a dynamic startup (statistically started by a small group of white & asian men with technical backgrounds) are all of the sudden going to go through an organic switch from thinking about bringing in people they know can do the job to thinking about hiring in a different way. And they then, again, organically start hiring based on the criteria that the university scolds who discriminated against them before would like them to?
No, that is a terribly unlikely mechanism. Because they had too munch money to spend they hired DEI candidates? Thats not how engineers work. They loathe on-boarding even competent people. They would rather buy 1000 servers to sit in an empty closet.
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