As far as company material, at least public facing, you’re entirely correct. It’s almost exclusively corporate speak rather than anything useful. That’s not unique to DEI, though, and convincing corporations to make their public HR content more exact when they’re not quoting the law is unfortunately pissing up a rope.

DEI is not a singular method. It’s a larger framework in short concerned with certain outcomes. A number of different methods may be part of DEI at a particular place. I think you are driving at a salient point in that the grammar used with it can give that impression. It’s easier to speak about in a way that isn’t repetitive by using shorthands, and there’s definitely danger there that uncurious people not willing to have good faith discussions like we are will make assumptions.

Conquering that is going to be difficult because it’s a larger linguistic issue common to many unproductive politicized topics. I hate that a lot of discussion time is taken up by essentially semantic arguments rather than substantive ones. I’m not sure how to solve for that because language almost always creates more generic categorizations to lump similar but distinct ideas to save time. To your point, by its nature that introduces vagueness.

For me, the lesson needs to be to seek depth where something seems disagreeable but has vagueness, especially ideological labeling. I wish that was a realistic ask for all people. It has made me change my opinions a lot over the years as I’ve learned more—not necessarily dramatically, but it has tempered them with nuance.

That’s certainly a fair point. Though, there is a difference between complaining about what something actually is versus what some supporters may desire. Not sure I see much distinction made from the grumbling crowd when they cry DEI hire.

My opinion on that matter isn’t a simple yes or no. If we could realistically make significant progress undoing generations of institutional racism purely looking at socioeconomic background, I’d be much closer to no. Socioeconomic background is not really a checkbox that many companies are willing to suss out, however, since it requires a lot of effort and has many dimensions.

The hope with using it as part of decisions is that, since in aggregate a race or gender may have statistically worse representation, you’ve got increased likelihood of a hit than going in blind. But if a company is achieving the same results going on their metric of socioeconomic background, that’s sufficient to me.

I’m sorry if recognizing the complexity of the situation leads to bad perceptions, but I’m not going to pretend the world is simple to appease those who are not interested in nuance. My interest is in achieving outcomes and frankly we don’t have the knowledge on which methods are most realistic and effective. I can’t make a hard decision about something without that.

I’d really like for there to be a mostly agreeable method of evaluating socioeconomic background that companies would be willing to implement and have real A/B testing. That’s total fantasy considering how the world works, though that is why I don’t take a hard stance that there’s one way to work at it.

There really is no mentionable amount of DEI hiring quotas, at least the market I am familiar with (US). It’s practically illegal due to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. Though it was rare even before that. Not sure if that is the case in other places.

I think that’s sort of an impossible task though, for any sufficiently large idea. You can’t control all people. I definitely agree there should be concerted effort to educate people on what something is truly about. However, that is already happening, but you can’t teach people who won’t hear or only listen to outlets who oppose it ideologically. Basically every company with a DEI department gives training of some sort to their employees, yet many of them will ignore what they are told if it doesn’t fit their preconceptions. I have seen it at my own company (people arguing we shouldn’t do something we already don’t do).

For the point about universities, this is a fairly significant area of discussion in the field of education. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the ideas or statistics. But deciding what is “better” is a very difficult question. An elite school in the US is objectively more likely to produce better outcomes in the aggregate, but a lot of that (in my opinion) comes down to confounding variables: only accepting already high performers, having more opportunities, having access to already successful people, not having to work their way though school, etc.

If we could truly remove many of those, especially around wealth, access, and opportunities by making school affordable/tuition free and distributing access and opportunity amongst all schools (e.g., internships), I think we could much more accurately measure the quality of schools here. But we simply can’t right now.

Those are all inseparable parts of a whole for DEI. Frankly, they are the most significant parts. Much of the time, companies have zero DEI policy at the hiring step. It’s part of why the griping about it is confusing to me. Most of the companies I am familiar with are already where you seem to want them. But I guess they have to pretend to throw it out and call it something different to appease the complainers.

I never said it was a silver bullet. I explained why doing away with an effort like it and achieving a fantasy of background agnostic hiring will not solve the problem in a generation, since you were not sure why generations of institutional racism would go away with one generation of blind hiring practice.

There is also a very large difference between no college education and just not going to an exclusive institution, which is explicitly what my example was about. The people who go to state schools also get a quality college education believe it or not.

One can be critical and consider if the candidate has some attractive points because they are truly more capable or they just had better opportunities. More questioning beyond that may reveal that they truly are great or just had it easier. The problem is a lot of traditional hiring stops at taking things at face value.

Part of the problem with the hypothetical is not everyone in one of these positions is truly hired. I mean if we completely got rid of inherited wealth so nobody could pass on their company to their kids, that’d certainly accelerate the timeline.

Background-agnostic will also still miss the knock-on effects. If someone goes to a high quality college with a name because their rich parents can afford it that leads to an attractive internship that lands them a career job, on paper they got their current job because they had good qualifications.

Or, if the company has a history of only white men in positions of power and goes background-agnostic with zero outreach to marginalized communities, you’re not going to get a lot of applicants from there. They may not even know the company exists, while every kid of those powerful white men sure do, and they know which skills are most necessary to look good in a job interview.

DEI is not just handing out roles to unqualified people because they’re not white men. It’s about access, outreach, thinking differently, being welcoming. It’s complex. It’s certainly easy to rabble rouse over because dumb people don’t want to take the time to understand complicated things. I don’t believe we should abandon nuance because some people refuse to attempt to understand it. They’ll just do that with the next thing until everything is dumb and simple.

The problem is the size of the gulf. If we were talking about, for instance, there only being 5% more white male executives compared to their share of the population, then compete blindness would more or less erase the problem given time.

When the gulf is large, the time period to erase that even with completely background-agnostic selection in any direction is many generations. It doesn’t sound fair to say, “OK, the racist stuff was wrong. We stopped (we didn’t totally). Your great-great-great grandchildren will see parity! Stop complaining.” You’re basically saying nobody alive will ever see something approaching equity.

Part of DEI is reassessing the metrics used to evaluate candidates. People often unconsciously will be more forgiving of shortcomings in people they identify with. So they can certainly write candidate evaluations that make one candidate seem clearly better than the other. But jobs are rarely so simple that you can list out and check boxes on every possible pro or con, and it’s easy to miss the pros if you aren’t looking for them.

Also, I will say having been on the hiring side for many positions, there are definitely plenty of cases where a couple candidates are roughly equal. That literally happened in the last position we filled. Maybe we’re outliers.

I’m not familiar with the example you’re referencing. Was it stated this person was only hired for their pronouns or just due to a diversity initiative?

There are people who reveal themselves to be unqualified and incompetent through all types of hiring practices all the time. That does not invalidate the methodology entirely because none is perfect. If it was doing so consistently in a way that can be documented, that’d be different. But if that were the case, for profit companies would drop it on their own without external pressure.

The problem is it doesn’t matter what you call it. Affirmative action, DEI, whatever. The people who complain about DEI will complain about that new term. I’m not sure there’s a neutral way to describe that if two candidates are about equal, you’ll pick the one from a disadvantaged/underrepresented background. Even if you said you’re looking for unique perspectives, if it’s not a white man who ends up making the mistake, some people will complain that unique perspectives are anti white and racist and hurting the country.

I’m not sure if there needs to be fewer subjects, but I feel like there should be much more focus on why what students are learning matters. Passing a standardized test is not a goal kids care about. This invariably has to be at the expense of rote information since there is only so much time, though I think that is a worthwhile trade.

Nobody cares about the exact year that Mehmet II conquered Constantinople. But the impact of that on world history is both interesting and significant. I only had one history teacher before college who told students he didn’t care about exact years; if you could give the general period that was sufficient.

I find it interesting that seemingly every person who complains about “health freedom” only wants to use that freedom to do the opposite of what experts recommend. I’m sure it’s not just about being contrarian…

I don’t go to McDonald’s very often, but the location near me has remarkably good service. I never use the drive thru, so maybe that’s it. The one time I thought my order got messed up I had actually ordered the wrong thing, and they offered to replace it for free when I came back in to order the correct thing.

I think the problem Obama ran into that still exists is to close Gitmo, the remaining prisoners have to go somewhere, and nobody will take some of them. DoD announced very recently a large portion are going to Oman, so this is still in process it seems.

The obvious lesson to learn is it’s a bad idea to extrajudicially detain and torture enemy combatants that don’t fight for a particular government. Or in my opinion don’t do that even if they do belong to a government willing to take them back.

You are correct in my opinion. I don’t like how many people assume it’s a green arrow or that you must go if able, but I wouldn’t give it up.

How would a VPN have helped a dude who used the same handle for a porn forum and other sites he personally identified himself on?

At-will has little to do with curbing union power. You are thinking of right to work laws.

At-will is, as you mentioned, the default that absent a contract either party can unilaterally terminate the employment relationship except for a reason explicitly prohibited by law, like due to being part of a protected class.

Right to work laws harm unions because they allow individuals in a workplace under union contract to opt out of paying union dues while still benefitting from the agreement, draining the union of resources so it cannot be effective in the future.

Seriously. You aren’t really managing your employees if they have to organize resource shortages for you. At my job, I tell my colleagues to just take time off and, like me, list a few close co-workers as people to contact in case of emergencies in their OOO reply. Nothing is life-or-death, so people can deal with waiting. It’s not like anyone is taking off months straight.

This can unfortunately be due to poor work culture a lot, where anyone admitting fault is saddled with all the blame and consequences. A great way to start correcting that is to lead by example from the top, though. Executives can’t be surprised if this culture develops if they’re always sidestepping accountability.

The vast majority of Muslims are members of the Sunni branch, like 90%. Its differentiating factor is not being more radical, but mostly about the succession of Muhammad, especially compared to the Shia branch.

Developing standards, best practices, conventions, etc. One of the most valuable people on my team wrote some incredible quality automations a few years ago, and the only coding he does at this point is updates to them when necessary. By volume, he’s easily bottom 5% this year, but we’d be much worse off without his expertise/advise and the fact he advocates for the team.

This is classic shit management metrics. It would take some time for the rot to set in after using a cudgel approach to a team, and by the time it did, the assholes responsible would have fucked off elsewhere with their huge bonuses.

Both FFTA games are great!