If you're from a group that is represented, in a company, at a smaller proportion than your group's proportion of the population from which a company hires from, how are you to assume anything but that you only got the job due to diversity quotas, if those quotas are in place? Wouldn't it make you feel worse about your own merits?
Will they hire back James Damore? Of course not, the early dissenters remain disgraced even if the people in power adopt their views a couple of years later.<p>I'm sure all Google leadership is best friends with Trump now.
One cool thing about the DeepSeek team that struck me was that they have slightly unconventional backgrounds. These days if you want to do deep learning research at a big name lab like DeepMind or OpenAI you probably need a PhD and to have published a paper or 5.<p>The DeepSeek folks are super smart of course but they have more diverse backgrounds. The CEO specifically said he values creativity not prior experience.<p><a href="https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-ceo-liang-wenfeng-leadership-style-opposite-silicon-valley/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2025/01/31/deepseek-ceo-liang-wenfeng-le...</a><p>As someone with a much more “traditional” background it makes me wonder what I’m not considering in my work and life.
Here's the thing about DEI initiatives, that many people seem to forget -- it was never about merit (or the lack thereof), it was about competing against racial bias and unfair laws.<p>The old boys' clubs kept out anyone that didn't look like them. We can debate all day if this was an implicit bias, nepotism, cronyism, or whatever. Take a look at the numbers from the past, take a look at the laws from Jim Crow. People of color and women weren't even allowed to work in some areas or companies. DEI grew out of Affirmative Action to add checks and balances to the practice of only hiring straight white men.<p>Of course, with human nature at play, DEI has become a way to add a checkmark for a member of historically excluded group. This checkmark may come at the expense of a more qualified member of a majority group -- or it may not. I can tell you as a member of several minority groups, we often have to work twice as hard to get to any position of authority, and even then, people assume we are just a DEI hire.<p>Now we have immigrant minority groups riding the coat tails of the Civil Rights movement, acting against their own best interest... At any rate, I no longer live in the US, and sitting back with my popcorn. This is gonna be interesting in the long run.
One way to look at this: Google had no other way to do this. As the other tech billionaires sworn allegiance, as Bezos had even fallen flat on his face for Trump to save the other business interests he has besides the WaPo, Google had to do something. Book burnings were not possible, so this was a nice gesture.<p>An alternative, better explanation could be obtained when ignoring all recent events. That would be the most convenient, and besides, we are not historians are we?
What is the point? Literally Google could have any subset of high achieving population and still meet any targets.<p>It could be a fully black, fully female, fully gay, fully Christian company and still the performance bar would not fall. They afford to select the cream of the crop out of any population set.
Feigned cowardice is a peculiar cover story.<p>Large companies anticipate a far more regimented future structure where the uppity intellectual sub management are replaced wholesale with prompt specifiers.<p>Intellectualism, skepticism, and other forms of anti authority that used to be tolerated by the managerial class as necessary evils to employing high intelligence is not viewed that way anymore even among the allegedly progressive elite of silicon valley<p>assuming Trump legitimately cares about his white blue collar constituency, these people support him not for rejection of racism, but for the path to to authoritarian oligarchy they think they can direct it towards.<p>There's no meritocracy anymore, dei or otherwise. It is the path to the end state of capitalism: slave labor pulling large blocks of rock under whip, leadership in pyramids.<p>I don't think people understand how horny these "leaders" are for this. And it's strange, because what approaches in the geopolitical future is war, economic or overt, hot or cold. We enter a world of receding resources and reduced global access to them.<p>It will be a struggle of civilizations, and authoritarianism loses to proper liberal democracies almost every time. The "elite" are drawing the wrong conclusions,bor outright ignoring, the end of globalization.