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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.

This can be true, but it also ignores how a modern well run corporation (and admittedly not all of them are) works. There are many different factions, each with their own motivations, and it's not a straightforward matter to simply arbitrarily impose one's preferences on others.

Imposing more "training" requirements can't be done arbitrarily. The head of customer support has a spreadsheet which tracks the time taken to onboard a new agent, there's a cell which multiplies this by the number of agents they need to hire to deal with churn, and there's another cell which multiplies by agent wages. The net result is $cost. The head of customer support gets paid more if he makes this go down. He understands the value of diversity, but also maybe HR could tone it down and push some of the training into month 7 (average tenure of agent: 6 months) a bit and save the company $M?

Similarly, the head of backend engineering has a spreadsheet tracking time his devs spend on interviews. He also has a spreadsheet showing that he's hired 5 engineers/15 candidates from scraping github for cool repos and 0 engineers/75 candidates from HR's new diversity in eng program full of black people with an amazon certification (most of whom failed at technical screening). He totally supports diversity, so vitally important to have diverse perspectives on latency and uptime, but maybe HR could target this program better?

If HR can push back with "but lawsuits can cost $M", HR wins more of these arguments.

At a well run company, everyone is forced to produce such spreadsheets and justify them to their bosses. As the anti-empirical thread in modern wokeness (measuring stuff is raaacist) hints at, quantitative measurement more or less nukes most woke arguments.