Due to current admin policies, failing to do this would limit Microsoft's ability to drink from the federal trough. Whatever value they put in diversity is less than they put in large contracts.
At the risk of sounding like an LLM, you're absolutely right!
It would be stupid not to kowtow to the current admin given how much business Microsoft does with the US government. The pendulum will swing back, guarantee it.
And it is interesting to see how different organizations are reacting to this administration depending upon what percentage of their bottom line is directly tied to government or military contracting.
Python Software Foundation telling the NSF they had too many strings attached to their money is another interesting spotlight on the current situation.
Total US Fed. Gov. contracts for 2024 was (according to gao.gov) $755B. That's a lot of drinking, never mind any anticipated AI spending boost next year.
That assumes the status quo ante was a meritocracy. It wasn't, hence the need for actions that promote merit based hiring and workplace inclusion for historically oppressed groups.
The efficacy of current DEI efforts is debatable, but the need should be obvious.
Sounds like we kind of agree but you wouldn't include blind hiring under the label of DEI. Also, I wouldn't agree that historically hiring was more meritocratic before DEI programs.
yeah they dropped their “what actions did you take to further diversify and inclusion” question in biannual reviews last month
no one really liked those sorts of questions, always had to game it or make BS up. but on a personal level definitely furthers my desire to mot want to come out at work as a trans person
Aside from the alleged "culture war" aspect, looking at the 2024 report you can see that the category "Asian" is at 36%. Roughly 5% of the US population can tick the "Asian" box on the census. There are a lot of people on both sides of the US political aisle asking why this is the case. Making it harder to tease that data out might limit blowback from low-effort attempts to smear the company.
While there’s a lot of this era that’s deeply unfortunate, this kind of question on my yearly review would be incredibly vexing to me:
> What impact did your actions have in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive Microsoft?
What does this even mean? How do I show I did this? If I don’t interpret the meaning of this question correctly, do I fail the test and end up some HR watchlist? If I don’t succeed at whatever this is going for, will I not promote?
This isn't that hard. There are various employee groups around identities (Women in Tech, Asian Pacific, Black, LGBTQ, etc). Membership is not exclusive to those groups but also open to allies. As an example, I used to participate in the Women in Tech one at both Mozilla and at LinkedIn. Often I just listened, but I also helped organize a few events with them, contributed ideas for those events, and when they started a structured mentoring program I was one of the mentors.
There are also optional and non-optional hiring trainings that address these kinds of topics which you can do. I was a hiring manager for a while so I also spent some time doing some of these optional things to improve my chances of building a diverse team. This mostly included helping with sourcing candidates and a few times meant speaking up when I could see that identity biases were being used in evaluations.
But often just simple things are all you need. For example, when picking a group dinner destination making sure various culinary requirements are accounted for (either cultural or dietary) or finding team building activities that are inclusive.
I never once had an issue finding some of this to put on these perf reviews. Most of this is just under the category of being a good human who respects and values others.
It's a very basic question. You can meet that by simply treating everyone with integrity and respect. This results in an inclusive workplace. It's not a trick question.
I feel like there’s already HR processes in place for someone who is creating a hostile workplace?
I prefer my yearly company expectations to be quantifiable with clear metrics.
And instead this is the kind of squishy question that eludes any kind of reasonable metric. And worse, its vagueness could lead to misunderstanding. And even worse, misunderstanding the question in any dimension seems like it could have actual repercussions.
Some commenters have said it’s as simple as being inclusive of dietary restrictions. Ok cool easy enough. Is that actually in a rubric?
What if I have a manager that thinks it means I should run in the annual LGBTQ+ 5K? Ok I’m willing to do that, I like to run and support those causes. But is that expectation written anywhere?
In short, I don’t think these kind of questions are ever as simple as “just don’t be a douchebag.”
in many of the F500 orgs I've worked at -- yes it is. unambiguously so.
diversity / inclusion / team building activities were explicitly called out as part of yearly goals and performance review metrics.
things like go to a women-in-tech event and just listen, or a black history month discussion, read a book about homelessness and minority communities, etc. I went on a postmodern literature spree and ended up reading a bunch of african and middle eastern authors and that qualified for the perf review.
the "LBGTQ 5k" is a laughably bad strawman and would never be required for a bunch of reasons.
You guys must really hate running (and love missing the point). It wasn't even intended to be a "bad straw man" -- I literally would be fine running a 5K. If it was a documented example of a way I could meet their expectations for creating an inclusive environment, I would totally run a 5K themed around one of the company-approved causes. Might even lead up a whole group of us from the company to run in it together.
The point was: Do they have actual documented examples of what they want from me when they put this on my performance review:
> What impact did your actions have in contributing to a more diverse and inclusive Microsoft?
I am glad your companies have given you documented examples of what they have wanted in this arena. I'm sure that helped make it easier for you to meet their expectations and avoid any potentially awkward confusion.
It’s weird to have vague, non-business expectations built into a yearly performance review.
If you can give me some more examples I’m happy to hear them.
So far, commentators have listed:
(1) dietary considerations for team meals.
(2) participation in company ERGs (this has never been compulsory at any company I’ve worked at).
(3) making up a series of words they hope will appease managers
None of this seems like it should be part of a yearly performance package?
Personally, if I had celiacs and found out people were using ordering me a gluten-free pizza as a critical input to their yearly performance reviews, I’d probably be a little weirded out. But then maybe I’d be one of the more popular folks in the office come lunch-and-learn day, so pros and cons I guess.
True it’s all kind of hand wavy at the end of the day for a lot of this performance review stuff.
This just seems to be especially hand-wavy, with an additional whiff of ideological litmus testing thrown on, which could go sideways in more problematic ways than “this year I reduced the frontend bundle size by 25%”
When I was at LinkedIn we definitely cared about this. It probably wouldn't be enough to knock you down a peg during your review if you had none during a particular half/quarter, but if you never did anything in this bucket it would be a red flag during promotion consideration.
Imagine you are a salesperson for the hardware division of such a company. Imagine you did your work well through the entire year. How would you answer your question?
No matter how you might view the topic I hope we can all agree that this is vacuous nonsense:
> “We are not doing a traditional report this year as we’ve evolved beyond that to formats that are more dynamic and accessible — stories, videos, and insights that show inclusion in action,”
Oh, you wanted hard numbers? What about a TikTok video instead?
Just be honest about this stuff. It’s insulting to the intelligences of all involved to pretend that you just coincidentally happen to be making these shifts.
The corporate slant on forcing staff back into the office is approached the same way. No numbers/data, all "vibes" -> "we want to bring the sense of connection and collaboration" blah blah .. vacuous indeed, totally omitting any shred of concrete substantiation.
DEI is a blatant violation of title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and any company that engages in it or any form of racial discrimination by any other sickening PR sanitized name like "affirmative action" should be aggressively prosecuted.
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -
> (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or
> (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
This makes no sense to me. Surely DEI reinforces those 2 clauses?
Without DEI, it's just white men that will be hired and generally, it'll be friends of friends with no regard to their competency. DEI is an attempt to level the playing field as otherwise, racist/sexist employers will continue to be racist and sexist.
Hot take: i'm not sure this is actually bad for actual diversity and inclusion. From my experience (not at msft), companies continue to have many internal goals related to equal pay, gender balance, etc.
Whats changing is how this is communicated externally, and I can see why this would have to change based on the political climate.
Can't see anything lost here. I'm in the awkward camp of neither being in the privileged group but I also don't check off any DEI boxes so I never benefited from it. I'm sure a lot of other people can relate.
It could have been nice if DEI at least made some sense and wasn't just code for black/women but I think people who run these programs might not be the smartest and have the understanding of discrimination of an infantile. Maybe in the future we can have something that actually promotes equality properly and not what Karen from HR thinks it means.
I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to a glorified reality show egomaniac. Allying to price-fix is one thing, but surely they can ally to resist culture war nonsense from making its way into their employee handbooks?
MS (or any large company for that matter) didn’t participate in BLM discussions and get speakers to describe themselves and list their pronouns because they thought it was virtuous or right, they were just following the cultural zeitgeist in a way that they thought would make them more money.
Walking it back is just the same behaviour manifesting in a different way. Investors don’t value DEI in the same way they did before so it becomes an expense with no value to shareholders, so it gets cut.
It’s very cynical but nothing about this should be particularly shocking.
There has certainly been an overreaction, and it continues to be the case even after efforts have been walked back.
I have yet to hear a good justification for why people who are not interested in programming should be encouraged to become interested purely in the name of equality, yet my institution is still spending huge amounts of public money on trying to achieve exactly that.
>surely they can ally to resist culture war nonsense from making its way into their employee handbooks?
I think that's the point, using "pressure from the administration" as an excuse to nix culture war entanglements they got themselves into over the previous ~10 years. I think the "modern titans of industry" have wanted to dip out of this stuff for some time and felt stuck. Now they can do so while having plausible deniability (it was da govamint made us do it!)
The only reason implemented these measures in the first place was because of pressure from the other side of the political spectrum. It's hardly surprising that pressure from the opposite direction will make them walk it back.
DEI is to prevent the kind of favouritism/nepotism that prevails in a lot of society (e.g. "the old boys club"). A suitable example would be the recent hires by the U.S. administration - people are being given high ranking jobs just because they're loyal/friendly to a certain person and nothing at all to do with their competency to do the particular job.
The purpose of DEI is to allow the most qualified person to get the job despite the overt racism and sexism in society.
Whatever DEI was supposed to accomplish in theory, in practice it was token hiring to make the PR (yes, not even the HR) department happy. And it very fast developed is own "old boys club" hiring one another and spreading through companies.
I don't know why you're being down-voted, I've seen diversity hires placed in charge of projects and destroy them. When you weren't promoted for merit you stop believing merit matters, and quickly build diverse teams with no experience incapable of building things in a timely manor.
Sure but the practical result of considering diversity is you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project. Projects fail or run over budget all the time with the best engineer, so hiring fifth best engineer for a project to achieve a particular diversity requirement feels irresponsible at best.
> you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project
I don't think this has actually been proven as of yet, since "best" is a very loaded word, especially you're required to measure on more than one axis. (But feel free to point me to any source that disagrees with me.)
I think you're misunderstanding; this is a logical exercise. The best is a hypothetical ranking, and to add a independent variable which means we must detract from hiring the best person. To disagree would be to say someone is better strictly because of the color of their skin.
It's like if you were tasked with buying the most powerful engine produced for a locomotive. How you define powerful is arbitrary and is an optimization problem on its own, but if you then say "and the engine block must come from the factory painted red" you are, by definition, no longer optimizing for the fastest engine, you're optimizing for the fastest red engine. Being red is independent from being the best engine.
If your logical exercise includes "interacting with other people" as a criterion, it would disqualify a lot of the people that you consider to be "the fastest engine", that's why I mentioned "multiple axis".
I do not approve of DEI methods as they usually get implemented in capitalist tech companies, but the underlying idea, encourage more groups with lower representation to participate in tech is sound, and it is what I'm advocating for in this exchange.
Western tech world is biased in favour of middle-class white men due to the fact that it's made out of mostly middle-class white men. You might not agree that's a problem, but most of the world does.
IMO, it's something more cynical. It's not bowing to pressure or whatever. Rather, the guys running marketing have realized a trick to getting attention is making some innocuous political statement that ultimately causes social media to freak out. For example, having a trans person advertise their beer.
These giants know that people are lazy, they aren't likely doing the effort to see all the product holding. And that people will forget the outrage when the next thing comes up. It also helps that a lot of the dumb reactions have been things like people buying their product only to angerly shoot it with a gun or run it over with a truck.
When time passes, so does the outrage. And what they've actually bought is a bit of unearned goodwill and forgotten badwill.
For three more years, and at significant risk of being basically neutered in a year (the polls aren't exactly going _great_ for him). Like, it's unclear how much accommodation one should be making to his delicate feelings.
I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to the president of the United States.
While I don't think "corporations should be in charge", I also don't think a President should be dictating corporate culture or policy short of going through the proper channels of using Congress to write legislation that keeps corporations in check and doesn't allow their power and influence to grow too large.
But... uh... yeah that isn't happening either. Instead, those in power are helping each other out, at the expense of common citizens of the U.S. (and likely at the expense of people outside the U.S. too.)
> I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to the president of the United States.
If you dont, you could suddenly find that the thing you sell has a ridiculous tariff imposed on it. Then that might mean you sell a lot less. He has done much more for much less in the past.
If you make that thing in the US, good luck having the US government slap a tariff on it.
I mean, yes, Microsoft is international, and the president could probably find an angle to put a tariff on some part of their business. Not most of it, though.
There's a hell of a lot of power vested in the executive branch especially in the DOJ to really mess with companies and the real protection against it's misuse was the agreement that the President didn't directly instruct and control who the DOJ actually indicted. It used to be a notable event when a president even appeared to hint that he was encouraging investigations (not even indictments) into specific companies now we've got a president explicitly demanding the DOJ indict specific people and find any reason to do so, see Comey and Letitia James's recent indictments.
And, of course, since businesses are fundamentally in competition, that puts them in an interesting position: even if it's a net negative for the entire industry to capitulate to the bullying tactics of the executive branch, you can get a leg up on your competition by having one fewer giant complicated court case to worry about (even if the case is guaranteed to lose, it still costs money to defend it).
Yes, there's a lot of pressure to stay on his good side, even if the charges are bogus and eventually beaten or just ends in a pay-off like many cases the process is still damaging/costly and there's large incentives to pre-comply. Look at Apple's little gift plaque for an example of that, not really a bribe unless more laws are broken but a nice little ego stroke none the less.
So "democracy" [1], that term which is bandied about so much by those who seem to consistently fail at it.
[1] Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. You [2] voted for it, now you [2] get to keep it.
The OP was actually not questioning that at all. It was lamenting that they are bending the knee to someone unworthy of it, in furtherance of a culture war spearheaded by said someone. In particular, a glorified reality show egomaniac who treats their current job as a glorified reality show.
It certainly isn't useless information that the person is currently president, but that alone doesn't say much, because no presidents have ever acted this way before. The difference here is that this president is also a power-tripping glorified reality show egomaniac. Thus, the operant term is the latter, not the former.
The part which is relevant is that he’s willing to break the law in unprecedented ways and has the full support of the Republican Party in doing so. Americans used to pride ourselves on the government not controlling businesses.
Really? So like IBM getting big and then fading to Microsoft and then Apple and Google was a government plan? The government decided that American car manufacturers should lose to Japan but then pivoted back for … reasons?
This is not like “every other country”, it’s like corrupt authoritarian countries and you shouldn’t help cover for it by making excuses for corruption.
Sure, and again, that someone is also a 34-time convicted criminal and rapist. He wouldn't be doing these things if he wasn't predisposed to criminality and abusing people over which he has disproportionate power, or if he wasn't a malignant narcissist and glorified reality tv show egomaniac, with a track record of amoral transactional relationships aimed at improving his position at the expense of others.
So, your points and others' are all 'pretty relevant': we now have the means (provided by the article), the motive (provided by others), and the opportunity (provided by you). Thank you for your useful and equal contribution to the trifecta.
That's proved to be an idea only held up by the fig leaf of norms like the independence of the DOJ and the idea of the other two branches actually acting as a check on the others. Instead after the 70 year project we now have a compliant Supreme Court rubber stamping practically every action and flirting with ratifying the unitary executive as law. That plus a compliant Congress either ideologically aligned or cowed by the idea of his power over the voters means we very much have a President able to exert huge amounts of influence over companies.
For minor things with immediate payoffs like a pardon that seems correct. If you're ask is longer term though I'd be hesitant, he shows the same inclination to go with whatever the last person in a room wanted for longer term stuff, see his aggressive oscillations on Ukraine.
These companies had no problem resisting "the president". Heck, if Bernie Sanders or AOC were elected president, do you think they would bend the knee the way they do?
Trump is the president AND he is part of their in-group. They submit willingly.
Not really. This is one of the things Google got right; organize your company so founders have a controlling interest and it doesn't matter fundamentally what the investors think, they can't steer the company.
At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.
> At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.
Those baseball cards also come with some rights. The people running the company have a fiduciary responsibility to them. They cannot, for example, use the company as a piggybank.
It's a mistake to think corporations above a certain size care about anything other than getting more money for themselves and sharedholers.
If pushing diversity makes their goal easier then they'll do it, and if pushing diversity makes it more difficult then they'll back off of those initiatives.
The only thing they actually care about is what's best for their bottom line.
Nobody in the tech industry cares about DEI (most people I've met are downright hostile to the idea). All those companies in 2020 who hired DEI consultants and made big announcements about DEI and changed master to main were just buying cheap good will
Didn't Microsoft spend years basing the bonuses and performance reviews of middle management based heavily on the gender and race of who they managed to hire or promote?
The cynical take is that main was about shutting up Github employees protests against ICE contracts [1]. And it seemed to work: no more protests and another diversity consultant enriched.
Whatever they do, companies should not be doing quotas other than bringing in the people who will propel the mission.
Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline. From kindergarten, drive kids to want to participate in a dynamic economy instead of pursuing selling themselves short and perhaps getting involved in the underground economy, dead-end jobs, etc. Go give it a go in all areas of the nation that are under-served. That is the way to do it. If you do it any time later, like at hiring time, then you risk hiring on things other than merit.
So instead rely on public education which fails many students in delivering a quality education, or, having given up, just pass them to let them figure life out once they graduate.
It's not necessary that corps own the education, but they they have schools within a school to deliver the education that they are expecting from new graduates.
Public education is what made those great companies you fawn about.
Public education is also something you are responsible for as a citizen. If it is shit, it is so because you let it be. Assume your responsibilities instead of hoping for "enlightened" corporate lords to do it for you, peasant.
> Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline.
Previous company "did that", but what it amounted to was young HR women filtering all candidates before engineering saw them or their resumes, and you had to pick from their not-so-great candidates they got based on gender or race. Also interviewers could not see what other interviewers said - so we got bypassed as well behind the scenes
And I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to glorified twitter rants and non-technical HR busybodies who pushed DEI internally?
Yeah, because you know best. You never made any hiring mistake and you never have any bias whatsoever when you hire people. Who dared double-guess you, after you put all the effort of spending a few hours with each candidate?
You’re not responding to the post you’re replying to. I would’ve been happy to use tools to blind interview candidates. But that wasn’t what was asked - instead I was asked to racially discriminate against applicants.
The diversity efforts were companies bowing to government "egomaniacs" as you put it. If anything a more pure merit-based hiring is more in line with what companies and employees want
> I'm continually blown away that the modern titans of industry readily bow down to a glorified reality show egomaniac.
In those terms it is equally perplexing for them to have bowed down to a geriatric dementia-addled has-been, to a deeply corrupt DEI hire, to a dynastical potato-brained fool, to a whoring sumb*tch, ... in other words to the leader of the 'free world' known as the President of the United States of America. Just because you don't like the current one does not mean he has less authority than any of the previous ones - especially compared to the previous 'democratic' iteration who had to be told where to walk, what to say to whom at what moment and had to be kept on a leash so he did not bumble off into the shrubbery during memorials.
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