Curious if anyone has any personal experiences where you’d say a DEI program at your work was successful? I’d define successful as: a) Did something that improved their target metrics without messing up the business b) did anything at all to provably or even plausibly help the business directly or indirectly c) something else you feel should count as successful #tech #diversity #dei
Are you questioning the merit or DEI or the way the DEI is executed?
Both?
Had a coworker who was out in the workplace and very proud of their identity, and there was a manager who was very homophobic that they worked with. That manager would commonly make disparaging comments towards them. They went to the local DEI lead for advice on what to do, and the DEI lead got HR involved and walked all parties through how to handle things. That manager no longer works here, and I would very much call that a success story. They were toxic.
We send parties to the Grace Hopper conference to solicit new job applicants. It's brought in more women applications than we'd otherwise of had. That's a win for our company at least.
Smart company sending reps to Grace Hopper conference. They can do without a DEI specialist wasting money that can go to a producer.
Our DEI pretty much consists of ethnic food/snack and music events. No complaints here.
Came here to say that Chai samosa anyone? That's my DEI
We have some programs to hire military veterans. It's good because a lot of them have good experience working at NSA etc., but don't have degrees because they were trained by the military. Not the traditional identity-based DEI, but a good way to find high-quality, non-traditional candidates nevertheless.
At my previous company we had a program to train grads with civil/chemical/mechanical engineering, natural sciences, and health sciences degrees to do SWE work. Pay was on the low end (starting 97-99k, ending 120-122k) for 2.5 years, then they were converted to SWE or research engineer. Many of them left for better job opportunities during the program but the ones who stayed did very well. They greatly improved performance of many teams due to their background knowledge in a non-CS field. Engineering majors were better at solving unseen engineering problems. Natural sciences majors were better at simulation and computation and were overall faster learners. Health sciences majors better at tasks involving neural networks.
Author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World had something to say about this. Everyone has unique information. Being around people very different from you combined with joint ability to receive and give information = often faster, novel solutions. My ‘disagreement’ with DEI is that it constantly reinforces otherness at the same time it strives to bring people together. Right? The ideal is we accept and want the diversity we have without ‘othering’ it. It behooves us to humbly accept that each day we all must work to be humble, trust in others’ wholeness and capability, and extinguish judgment. I fully support DEI and understand that new approaches have awkward phases and implementations, as well as disingenuous ones. Assuming best intentions helps. But When work roles are proportionally and adequately filled by all the variations of people and circumstance I do believe the result would amaze us. Why be afraid?
DEI programs are kind of like DevOps, when they work well, other employees may take it for granted and may even question if DevOps or DEI are worth the time & money. Some people may even say that we don’t need these programs because the work is easy or obvious. The catch is that often the reason why we have the comfort to take it for granted is because people in these roles are working behind the scenes to prevent issues before they become problems.
Color me pleasantly surprised that this thread isn’t the dumpster fire I expected. Hats off Blinders! 🙇
I worked for race mongering companies that made derogatory comments and discriminated on hiring and promotions, and it helped me because it made me angry and I kept switching into higher comp. I went from being harassed by a sexist black woman manager when I made 90k to now a TC of 330k. Just keep working on your skills and the race mongers can't keep up
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Have a female developer on a team who had no prior software engineering background and does extremely well compared to male peers.
Translation: Dropbox is a sausage fest
I should add that the inverse is also true. Had hired DEI who where no where near their level of performance and was let go in last layoffs.