Comment by imcrs

I am an ethnic minority, not visibly though and not from any DEI bucket. But that doesn't matter. Some DEI proponents perhaps meant well, but the way the went about was simply the wrong one. Criticism wasn't welcomed at all, even treating everybody the same regardless of sex or race was looked down upon. Words like racism were redefined and you had to adhere to certain dogmata.

The classic approach to treat everyone equally is still better, even if there is some prejudice left. And that doesn't preclude any program that helps those in need. And here the same thing is true: Race and sex are irrelevant.

Some proponents of DEI had their own problems with prejudice to solve in my experience. So perhaps the onus should be that everyone works on their own personal prejudices for now.

Some things will be unfair, but introducing more unfairness doesn't solve any problems. And here DEI simply failed in its approach. A bad job market doesn't mean we can discriminate those that might have been more lucky regardless of reasons. The task would be to fix the job market.

To propose two groups of minorities against some diffuse ethnic majority is simply childish, comes with multiple problems and it doesn't provide tangible benefits to anyone in the long run. I would argue it even entrenches prejudices and pits people against each other.

My experience of DEI was as ideological cover to offshore jobs to India.

While the executive team performed sweeping layoffs to push up the stock price and increase their own compensation, they paid lip service to DEI as if engaged in a karmic balancing act and that was their cheat code.

And the company culture degraded as a result. Far more inter-group fighting, more politicking, more backstabbing, less cooperation.

I’m not there anymore, but I hear they are trying to revert things back, slowly. Basically every project since then has been a failure and they’ve been coasting on their original success.

Good people don’t need three letter acronyms to treat others fairly, and if someone is selling you new holier-than-thou rules, it’s worth asking what moral cost they no longer feel they need to pay.

Sure. And those with power will protect their groups first - or lose that power.

Which has been playing out for years now.

And DEI took the ‘we don’t go racist/sexist/etc’ off the table, as the various groups were being blatantly racist, sexist, etc.

So now it is being used against those groups.

DEI explicitly took ‘we don’t do that’ off the table, by proactively discriminating based on those factors.

And at first, when the pie is growing, that doesn’t threaten entrenched groups as much, so it mostly can happen.

In a zero (or negative) sum game world (layoffs, hiring freezes), what do you think is going to happen?

People with power will use the same tools to protect themselves or even acquire more power, and those without power will be ground under the same gears.

I’ve seen it happen in every major society - from India to Chile to Europe to the US.

In the US it’s getting particularly out of control (in both directions) for a number of factors - and very high publicity - but it’s way more blatant almost everywhere else in fact.

Again, it depends. Maybe they have more pride in their job or despise their company less, who knows.

And I don't mean productivity per hour. Lol. No, I mean absolute.

An employee working like a dog will get less work done than one just working normally, probably. Because most of the work is negative, so it doesn't add to the work done pile, it chips away at it.

Eventually, I would think, you reach a point where an employee is less productive than no employee at all. Seems impossible to be working 100 hours a week and be getting less than nothing done, but if you're actively making the product worse or creating debt, that's how I would classify that.

And you think you're more likely to get those four hours in an open office environment with distractions aplenty, as opposed to my effectively noise-proofed home office where I can actually focus?

First, nobody cares what you want. Second, do you pay for those 4 hours adequately, guess what if you don't? Even if you do, are you OK with 2 hours today and 6 hrs tomorrow? How about a year of 1 hour days and then a 24 hour period that fixes all the problems for last 2 years?

The nature of modern offices pretty much prevents deep work.

You're not going to get deep work when you pack people like sardines into neat rows of desks, where pretty much at any time someone within one row away is going to be in a meeting - conducted of course over teleconferencing software. Or some people will talk (honestly, being in the office mostly translated to chit-chat for me).

Deep work with an open office? Dont make me laugh. Please for the love of god bring back cubicles.

The steel man is that in the office you get cross team pollination organically. Team lunches, talking about an idea with another team on how to do something better as in that moment the idea came up. This happens more often in person than remote.

Does it need 5 days a week in the office? Absolutely not. 1-2 is plenty.

To be fair, you're either paying for hours or for output, because I assure you you are not paying staff accurately for their output. You can of course sack someone who outputs notoriously little, but if you get output exceeding your average "8 hours of output", you shouldn't care if someone made it in 1 hour or 16, or at least you wouldn't be able to tell.

I'm using "output" as quoted in context, it's such a nebulous measure unless you're specifically buying a product.

Do you pay your programmers hourly or on salary?

How do you measure whether some output corresponds to 8 hours of work, and not 4 or 16 hours?

8 hours of output? I get it but poor phrasing.

To be clear I'm having a lot of fun being snarky here.

Like everything it's a mix.

In seriousness, I do find the labor perspective sorely and quite conspicuously lacking in these discussions, both discussions about remote work and about DEI backlash.

Instagram ragequits remote working.

Atlassian is a dumpster fire, they run shit engineering since about 3 years.

Give me the secret sauce to being productive with remote employees. Maybe some have found it, but apparently paying above the employee ask, offering to double the salary in case of success, sending them to conferences and spending a lot of human time with them gives me the “evil employer” category on most forums.

Yeah, I know “Treat them even better!” is, again, the word of the union guy, but in most cases, the employer has to eat a shit sandwich.