One of the reasons I quit my last job (senior manager in an investment bank) is because of the pressure I was under to hire female technologists to make their diversity stats look better.
The pipeline was 90% male, reflecting the choices that women make in school and university.
We attempt to “correct” this imbalance at the hiring stage, and to do so at this late stage, we simply have to throw meritocracy in the bin.
Horribly damaging in so many ways. Diversity quotas are patronising to female technologists. Quotas only serve to increase their sense of imposter syndrome, when women find out the bar was deliberately lowered for them.
It is also damaging in the long term because it actually -creates- prejudice against women.
Just awful all round.
The DEI phenomenon is self-serving and divisive. Yet it has become a cottage industry right in the heart of our institutions. It needs to be robustly challenged and rejected.
Fully agree. There is further discussion to be had as to why the pipeline is so male-dominated. Societal labeling of programming as male, inherita of being so male dominated for so long, and stereotypes around women interacting with people and men with things are likely factors.
But it needs to be fixed at start of the funnel rather than the end.
Typically when you are on a hiring freeze, you don’t need recruiters. Likewise when you are trying to be more efficient as a company, things that aren’t either bringing in new revenue, keeping revenue or creating new revenue sources aren’t critical to weathering economic turbulence.
It can be argued that if those programs are effective, they should be able to stand on their own or be absorbed into other roles for 6 months to several years.
How is this news? I’m all for diversity and inclusion, but entire departments dedicated to things that people can do without them? Of course they get cut when pockets get lighter.
I would fully expect that I’d be let go before a SWE. An SWE can do SysEng work when they’re forced to do it. They don’t do it as well, probably, but they can get by for a while. I can’t do their job for a day. Of course, if we’re down to the point that the only systems engineer in the company is getting laid off for budgetary reasons, the company is probably going under soon.
I have never seen a good candidate get turned away for being a minority. I have however seen bad candidates get extra chances for being a minority, and good candidates who are not a minority be reconsidered due to not being a minority. I personally opted out of interview processes for the last 2 years with how rascist and absurd hiring became.
Meanwhile, opposition to DEI within the company is a fast track to losing favor internally. It is incredibly hard to push back against without being the asshole. It's self reassuring nonsense that protects itself with its own undeserved smugness.
I understand your frustration, but I think it misses the point behind attempts at DEI hiring. It's that if you don't push people to look outside their network, they will never even bring in the minorities to interview at all. I tend to agree -- if you have the stellar AA candidate in front of you, they tend to be treated pretty fairly. But what's far more likely, is that I send a referral for a colleague I know from another experience, who is likely white -- and we never even look at the other guys resume.
