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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   37736 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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For years I have heard on this forum and other places that Trump is an idiot who can't govern, doesn't know what to do to effect change, is to vain to do the right things, or won't simply because he doesn't really care. It's futile to vote for Trump. He doesnt know what he's doing. And I have been called unserious for believing in Donald Trump's excellence. Today I would like to start taking my victory lap:

https://x.com/awprokop/status/1881900975851708751?t=8OquEiW6cV89zAtXmm9kng&s=19

Trump is abolishing Affirmative Action in federal contracting. He is going to order the government to pressure private companies to end Affirmative Action. This directly benefits my career. This ends bad policy that is massively unpopular and is the kind of thing many people predicted Trump would never do. I voted this. I am thrilled!

I am doubling down on my prediction that Trump Era will be remembered as a Golden Age, will fundamentally reshape American history for the better, and will in fact be enjoyed even by thosr who have been most skeptical!

Who makes hiring decisions? HR. Who works in HR, almost exclusively (especially at major corporations)? Liberal white women.

This is like SCOTUS abolishing affirmative action in college admissions, literally meaningless so long as the same people are making admissions decisions.

This directly benefits my career.

If you work in tech, the number of black and Hispanic engineers is so low that the impact on your career will be very limited. Amusingly, the biggest beneficiaries of a full end to affirmative action in employment would be the kind of progressive white men who work in book publishing, media, advertising and humanities academia, but as I said, it’s not going to end, just happen unofficially.

And if I’m the management who already dislikes HR maybe I fire them and out source a portion of their work.

And then hire who? The industry's biases are endemic. Even if you have a pragmatic and fair HR leader, it's insanely difficult to find non-racist/sexist HR professionals.

Then, government is its own animal. You need to both know and understand how it works, and be comfortable with being part of the grift machine. They're checking boxes. Affirmative action made things easier for them: You have two hires, they've all lied about their qualifications, and you don't have to think about work ethic or intelligence. You just say "Darkest Wins" and move on.

Sorry for the blackpill, but an EO changes far less than you would suggest. Maybe 10% improvement. This needs to be enshrined in law, and even then it can't be 100% effective.

With no one. I just don’t think HR is a valuable cost center.

With no one.

And then you get sued, and the EEOC going after you, until you're forced out of business. Like Jim says, HR departments are a tentacle of the state inserted into every corporation, via threat of lawfare.

Fire them for what? Affirmative Action doesn't give private companies license to ignore Title VII. Any "affirmative Action Hires" you can find are likely going to be marginal cases where the resume was similar to a qualified non-minority candidate. The upshot is that any AA on the part of your HR department isn't going to be consequential to the point where it's worth laying off the majority of your HR department so you can pay them unemployment on top of the increased rates you're going to be paying an outside contractor to do the work. Not to mention the fact that this outside contractor isn't going to be as familiar with your company and it's policies as your existing staff. My firm outsources its billing to a third party firm and my boss has hour-long weekly Zoom meetings with them just to make sure they're doing what we need them to do. And this is a relatively small firm. In any event, let's not pretend you're going to give some company in India major say in hiring decisions.

Fire them because the vast majority of their actions actually reduce value. I think most of HR is bullshit and the very limited value add could easily be outsourced. This is just a signal that lawsuits will be easier to defend and therefore reduces the CYA of HR.

Who makes hiring decisions? HR. Who works in HR, almost exclusively (especially at major corporations)? Liberal white women.

If I had told you this LBJ EO existed, you would have guessed Trump wouldn't do anything. Your skepticism is rebuked! Trump and his people are in charge now, not the HR.

OK. We’ll see if he deports more than even (a pathetic) 25% of the illegal alien population, then we can talk about winning.

All he has to do is enforce penalties on employers and they’ll self deport

HR doesn't make hiring decisions, do they? At least at my (tech) company, they, at best, facilitate hiring. Hiring is determined by the engineers and managers.

They frequently pre-screen applicants before they ever go in front of an engineer or manager.

That's actually "recruiting", and they're usually either separate from HR (or outsourced entirely) or a separate thing within it. At least in tech recruiters are far more likely to be male than HR bureaucrats. And tempermentally they're not bureaucrats, they're salespeople.

Our recruiters (for an engineering focused org) are mostly women, and are incredibly bureaucratic about blocking resumes. Including in situations where managers have told someone "Hey, I think you'd be perfect, I'd like you to apply". Resume not only never makes it to the manager's desk (even if there are literally zero other candidates), but there is nothing the manager can do to lean on HR other than to re-post the position with changes.

I've seen it happen multiple times, including to people who should have set off all of HR's demographic desire bells. Our HR and their control is probably the biggest reason why I'm looking at other career prospects.

HR screens initial candidates who are then put in front of the relevant teams.

Even if HR does initial screens, they aren't throwing the resumes of qualified applicants in the circular file just because they're (probably) white. Most of it is throwing out the massive volume of garbage applications from people who have no hope of getting the job in any universe. Usually they don't even do a great job at this, especially if this work is outsourced to a recruiting company. My brother had a manager who was completely incompetent but only ended up getting fired after it was discovered that he was sharing personal information of female employees with people who didn't need to know about it. A friend of ours (who used to work with my brother) works for a company that was looking to hire a manager and the hiring team was complaining that all their staffing company was doing was sending them this loser's application over and over again.

Replying to @falling-star too

Well, I can say that's not the way it works in my company, which may not be quite the norm. In my company, individual teams drive the hiring process, including finding candidates. Recruitment does a call, but it's mostly to prep candidates in what comes next. If they narrowed out a candidate during an intense hiring period for reasons other then serious flags, there would be hell to pay. Managers have a difficult enough time getting candidates through the hiring pipeline as is.

If individual teams already have full discretion over hiring then presumably abolishing DEI will have minimal impact anyway (it will either continue to happen if individual managers put their fingers on the scale for ideological reasons, or it won’t if they don’t).

HR is involved and will push managers and hiring decisionmakers towards diversity candidates, but they're not, at least in tech, a literal screen. Orders like Trump's will remove some of HR's ability to push; they can no longer say DEI will be better for getting government contracts, for instance.

What I’ve seen is two-fold: (1) if we are hiring a larger class, then there are effectively AA slots and (2) people understand incentives and so if there is a URM they will push them through the interview process provided they are reasonably in the same church (if not pew) as the other candidate.

Clueless recruiters have often blocked people I've referred to my company so that they don't even get a phone screen. In most cases it's because the recruiters are incompetent and can't understand a resume, but there may be some DEI thumb on the scale here as well.

Yes, that's my assessment based on my company. It's a big company, but I know that at least one other big company totally differs from mine in how hiring is done (it's more central, less team-owned). I don't know which is closer to the norm for others companies.

Despite all of my company's flaws, I've always been proud of the fact that I really don't know any diversity hires. The team owned and data driven process to assess candidate skills have been very effective at keeping DEI's influence on hiring almost non-existent.

If it rids companies of hour long lectures on microaggressions, at least that's a step.

To be replaced with more equally boring training on how to identify phishing emails, ‘interacting with coworkers from different cultures’, communications skills and networking workshops.

Sure, but micro aggression bullshit is worse.

Jokes on you, we already have all that other stuff.

Of course, but it can always be increased in volume.

I'd still be okay with this, comparatively speaking.

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