Agree, but how do you know that you won't be the one sacrificed in the name of diversity? How does one fairly choose which member of the more prevalent gets sacrificed if there is limited headcount? How do you prove that diversity generates more value than stronger individual members regardless of identity?

I think that's something everybody can agree with. However, I sometimes think that HR, Code of Conduct policies, etc do more harm than good in ensuring that happens.

What about when that is reached, or is nearly reached? What's the medium term end goal? Long term end goal? I think here is where people disagree even more than the means to get there.

>Whether this is true or not, or how much it's true, is not that relevant. It certainly can't hurt.

It can lead to distrust, skepticism, disrespect, worse communication. All sorts of negative things.

If we include ideology in the general diversity conversation, and class, rather than primarily gender and race, I'd respect the intention much more.

Do you have any evidence of this? Any world-leading product that assembled its team specifically for "diversity" rather than talent will do.

> On a personal level, wouldn't you like to work with a more diverse group of people as well?

It doesn't matter what I would like. I will not discriminate based on sex, colour, or religion out of principle and I will fight people who do.

What you're missing is that many employers don't have the perspective whereby gender, skin color or political views are irrelevant. Biases against gender, race and religion are part of the reason that many professions have been dominated by certain races, genders and religions (although laws have attempted to counteract this effect.)

The point of diversity in the workplace is to force an implicitly prejudiced employment market to be less prejudiced than it otherwise might be, just as the point of labor laws and the minimum wage are to force companies to care more about their employees' welfare than they otherwise would.

Some people think incorrectly on all topics in wild ways. This article does not(edit) provide evidence that '"diversity" is the only goal' for some people. I am sure you can find people like that, but this article is not good evidence for it or that they that they are a significant force in the work place.

From the start, there are absolutely people out there who argue diversity is bad and that ultimately we should live in some kind of ethnostate. Then there's a whole gradient of people from that end to people who think the government should force integration in pretty much any semi-public setting. There are definitely people out there arguing diversity is bad. I don't agree with these people, but I at least acknowledge these people do exist.

In this spectrum, there are other people who don't have a problem with diversity but only wish for such things to happen more or less organically. Of course there's a view that if the people making hiring decisions are always a particular kind of world view they're going to usually select people they can self-identify with leading to a self-selection bias that restricts the rate of integration in an organization. Enforcing such integration or not, or the level of such forced integration, is absolutely a diverse range of policy viewpoints largely anchored on base political ideologies.

Your own opinion that "hiring someone specifically for this seems a bit silly" is a view you have based on your ideology. Others don't find it silly, which is their view based on their ideology.

And here is the problem - diversity has become a goal rather than a natural consequence of everyone having equal chances.

It's not the lack of diversity that those companies should focus on - much more important is an elimination of any kind of discrimination based on gender/race/religion etc.

People (manager/HR/VPs of Diversity/etc) do not understand the implication.

Here's an intellectual exercise:

Would a team of two people - one being a foaming at the mouth antifa and another being card carrying garb wearing KKK dude be very diverse? Certainly. Would this team be productive? Unlikely.

But what does it mean to have an LGBT viewpoint? Why should it be assumed that because someone is LGBT they think about issues that would be pertinent to most jobs or product offerings in a manner that is different than a straight person? Explicitly classifying LGBT as a separate group with different thought processes that could impact how a job is performed is inherently discriminatory, even if it is done for positive reasons.

It's not clear to me that it is either good or bad for business. Why is this stated as a matter of fact. And please spare me links to studies funded by special interest groups.

> You want people from different backgrounds and different ways of thinking.

Define "different backgrounds". Why is only reduced to the color of someone's skin or sex? Why not people who grow up as Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, etc? Or those who grew up as a single child? Or played team sports? Don't all these things play a role in shaping who someone is?

Some people just like to worth with really intelligent, hard working people and don't care anything else about the person. And some people want to work with people like themselves. I probably fall into the former, but who am I to dictate what model creates the most success for a business (assuming that's the goal)

If you are hiring the first 5 employees of a company you started, I think DEI will be the last thing on your mind. So why does DEI suddenly become so important 50+ employees later?

About this.... There's something I've noticed is that when one group has rights by default, and another doesnt, fighting for equality or equity feels like to the innate group that rights are taken away.

Its the perception of zero-sum game versus a positive-sum game. For the in-group, having others brought up to your status feels like its reducing yours... But it doesn't.

Whereas rights can be assessed for everyone. The more rights we all have is a positive sum. A rising tide raises all boats.

Expressing anti-diversity sentiments does create a hostile environment. I don't understand why this is so hard for people to grasp.

Diversity, as everything else, has a sweet spot. Too little and too much are equally bad. Of course nobody knows where the sweet spot is, but merely increasing diversity is not a guarantee for improvement. I mean, you can hire someone who hates your gut and doesn't speak your language. This will definitely increase the diversity, but you probably not going to like it.

> will also explain that trying to increase diversity in the workplace is terrible. It’s almost like there’s something else going on there.

I think most of those folks just despise hypocrisy. "Being anti-racist by being racist" makes me cringe.

If you're making a diversity hire to get alternative viewpoints, you're doing it for your own benefit and being honest, I don't think anybody will have problem with that. It's the virtue signaling that makes it despicable.

There's also argument to be made that if you're allowing diversity hires, you might have to allow "cohesion" hires. Justifying one but not the other seems disingenuous.

From the point of view of a business, it is by no means clear to me that having a diverse workforce, at least along the traditional lines of demarcation - even assuming that this leads to a 'diversity of viewpoints' - makes the business more successful.

Hollywood, for example, spends the big money on films targeted at the notional 15-30 year old male, and medium budgets on patronising 'chick flicks' for women. It turns a very nice profit doing so, and has done for a long old time. A fortiori triple-A games, most of which I find frankly disturbing nowadays in their contempt for their audience.

Before the 1970s-80s, when equal ops and stuff really became a thing at all, I didn't notice anyone failing to make boatloads of money either, despite reproducing the much stronger racist/sexist biases of society at that time.

Until somebody shows me evidence that increasing diversity on staff and at senior levels/C-level has a causative relationship with increased profits, I conclude that capitalist enterprises are an ineffective vehicle for this sort of social change, and that people would be better served forming political parties, standing in elections, protesting, doing political stunts, strikes, whatever tickles your political fancy, than grumbling about what percentage of whom Google should have managed to hire thus far. It wasn't diversity on the board of Ma Bell that got rid of Jim Crow.

He's telling this to a $650B company. And then just to cover for himself, he says:

> I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more.

And then:

> My concrete suggestions are to: De-moralize diversity

But my favorite is:

> Stop alienating conservatives.

This seems to be an article of faith among the diversophiles, and it seems to me to require a lot more supporting evidence than is typically proffered.

First, the notion that a diversity of anatomical characteristics leads to a diversity of thought seems specious. College campuses are wonderfully diverse in ethnicity and gender and sexuality, but strikingly uniform in belief systems. Whereas the American Founding Fathers were all straight white male aristocrats, and yet had vast and meaningful ideological differences. If diversity of thought is what you seek, why optimize for the dubious proxy of race and sex? Why not just seek out candidates with vastly different belief systems to your own? Hire conservatives and progressives and liberals and socialists and libertarians.

Second, the notion that diversity of belief systems leads to success in engineering endeavours also strikes me as needing far more support than its proponents provide. Nazi Germany had a brutally enforced ideological homogeneity, and yet produced a rocketry program that was decades ahead of anyone else. Japan has a very rigid corporate culture, and yet has a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence. And the most successful companies in Silicon Valley have a very clear and well defined corporate identity, vision, and mission to the point where jokes are made about the odd ways their employees all think alike. It would seem that ideological unity and cohesion is actually more correlated with engineering success than diversity of thought.

Again, this is all from the perspective of an outsider. I don't live in Silicon Valley (or even the United States) and I don't identify with the vast majority of its residents or companies. My critiques are made from the perspective of a disinterested observer at 10,000 ft.

It's a company though, I don't see how diversity is important. The goal is to make money and they should hire the best people that apply, unrelated to the color of their skin.

I work for a company which is very diverse and I like it, I just don't see how it matters as a company goal (assuming that having "only white men" works for them currently).

The arguments for diversity usually say that organizations improve when people from different backgrounds are part of them. This is the argument for increasing diversity along gender, orientation, and ethnic lines. If different points of view help then we should be trying for ideological diversity directly.