> It excludes the many, many more people just don't care about diversity and want the best people in a role regardless of ethnicity or sex or anything else.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.
We've yet to establish such a system, so I'm not holding out much hope (and anyone who has been through a handful of tech interview loops ought to realise this)
We can?
I'm pretty sure companies have spent billions trying to achieve this and failed. The best they can do is maybe sort of sometime hire people that are good enough
This is also sounds like mystical thinking or some kind of idealism. What safeguard prevents the interference and subversion by the class(es) that already control hiring and cause the problem that society desires to solve?
A meritocracy would of course, benefit everyone, but in creating systems that decide merit, we demonstrably have always created biases that preserve the control of someone involved in creating those systems.
Yes, we bias towards people we think will do work that benefits the organisation's end users or customers. That's what we want as end users or customers.
Diversity is good when it is either applied in a neutral and identify-agnostic way, or if we as a society all agree on which groups deserve getting benefits and which ones don't.
The first one is sadly horrible disliked and tend to lose support as soon the "wrong" demographic get benefits. If you have a diversity program to benefit minority X, and then later X become majority, then the program get canceled rather than applied for any new minority. The programs always get designed with a specific target in mind.
Similar for the second, if a group get popular support, diversity programs will help those while ignore any similar but disliked group. The program is not there to fix diversity, it is to help the intended group. When the political environment becomes polarized, it becomes very clear which groups get support from which side.
It has been very clear by diversity programs, and those who oppose diversity programs, that no one want a difference in perspectives, or for that matter catching their own blind spots.
Any system that tries to not hire for competence has a known, conscious blind spot. That's much worse than a system that arrives for the best but has accidental blind spots.
It's funny how the quest for "unique strengths" entirely ignores people with pale skin who grew up in trailer parks in Appalachia or farms in the midwest, despite the fact that they are dramatically underrepresented in our industry and in elite universities.
The DEI policies favor people with dark skin (as long as they're not Asian) and 1250 SATs from wealthy suburbs over pale skin 1450 SATs from rural backwaters. It's discrimination, it's "diversity" only on the surface. Incredibly shallow, condescending, and dehumanizing. It's so shallow that in most of the places it's implemented, it doesn't differentiate between descendants of slaves and recent West African immigrants, some of whom are wealthy descendants of the elites who captured and sold slaves in ports like Lagos.
And before you call me a bigot:
My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
I agree with you, and I am a minority, but as someone from the midwest, sometimes people here fail to succeed because they are lazy, like any other person. Midwesterners are modest, and this is great, but the stereotype that we are somehow more hardworking is lost on me.
Also, certainly someone can have principled opposition to DEI without being called a Nazi. But frankly, having a wife or kids "of color" doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Lots of plantation owners in the 19th century also had biracial kids while somehow maintaining their raging bigotry. We humans are quite skilled at compartmentalizing.
i'm one of those poor whites you're talking about (from another region; ethnic and economic bases covered though). you believe falsehoods.
> And before you call me a bigot: My kids are "bi-racial", so if you think i'm a nazi, ask yourself why I hate my wife and kids.
i would never ask you that. but i wonder if you should ask yourself how your views could potentially negatively impact your relationships with your family.
And thank you for the condescending, pious, moral superiority in the "your views" comment. It perfectly encapsulates the quasi-religious nature of the DEI adherents.
You often don’t know who the “best” person is for a role until they’re in it. Diversity is good because it allows for different perspectives and catching your own blind spots. Because we don’t understand different backgrounds as well as our own, we can fail to understand the unique strengths someone brings to the table simply by being different.