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“Incredibly non-diverse”? No. They are in a better position than most

https://www.nytco.com/2023-new-york-times-diversity-and-incl...

The my don’t complain about tech being non-diverse, they report that it is non-diverse - which is true.



>> “Incredibly non-diverse”? No. They are in a better position than most

Absolutely not. This is typical trickery of stats. They have diversity at lower levels. But unlike SV almost no diversity at senior ranks. I think its past time that we consider janitorial and admin jobs as a win. If we have legions of educated minorities, why aren't they making it into executive roles at the NY Times?

Here is the exec staff: https://www.nytco.com/company/people/ "Filter by executive"

There are >64 million Hispanics living in the United States, yet not a single one on the NYT exec team.

They have 1 token asian,

1 token black person.

That is not "Better position than most." That seems like 3x worse than your average tech firm.


I opened the link and filtered by executive. Thirteen people there: - 5 white men - 4 white women - 1 black man - 2 black women - 1 asian woman

Pretending that a sample size of 12 should exactly reflect the diversity of the whole population of the country is just weird to me.


A citizen journalist I follow on YouTube pointed out that for having 5900 employees, they have fewer than 10 who are veterans. It explains why they get so much wrong when reporting on the military.


I'm sure that both of those people would feel very vindicated in their career knowing that the person advocating for further affirmative action calls them "tokens".


If you read some of the linked articles off of the one posted a few comments back, then you will see that the recent cuts have disproportionately affected minorities, minorities are making less, and that minorities are receiving lower evaluation scores. So it seems they do have a diversity problem.


perhaps diversity has a performance problem.


I want to see the actual studies that the guild has used to generate the numbers for their claims so I can see what possible mechanisms might be at play and what sort of level setting they've done for the data. Unfortunately, I didn't see any of the studies released.


It’s “true” only according to a custom definition of diversity common in newsrooms and universities - but not, apparently, the Times’s own diversity report - where some groups which become too included no longer count as diverse. I think this standard, whereby I’ve had a non-white yet non-diverse manager for 95% of my career, deserves an extraordinary amount of scrutiny.


60% white is much whiter than a tech company


Why is the color important here?


Because dei and the nyt focus on that being important.


[flagged]


"Feels like this deviation is always used as a distraction to divide and conquer the workers and voters on race and skin color and have them fight against each other to prevent them collectively allying against those from the top actually oppressing them and eroding their rights and wages."

It does seem that way, slightly. There seem to be some natural causes for misalignment that I would think are more influential. One main issue is that different people and groups of people have different experiences. If you've never been screwed over, you might not see the problems in the current system. If you have been screwed over and seen other screwed over, you might just think that's the way it goes.

What are the alternatives proposed to the unfair impacts? I want to see the objective rating criteria that can reduce or prevent people from getting screwed over. I do think tech unions can help with this a little, but I haven't seen any successful approaches to things like ratings. Even the places that set standards seem to have subjective criteria, or you work is subjectively applied.

I've been screwed over and passed over multiple times. I also have a disability, no less it's one that causes inconsistencies with policies and treatment to jump out to me. I still haven't seen any solutions that will work until the members agree on what are the problems and how do we fix them. Many of my coworkers think my company is great, but those also tend to be the people that consistently get high ratings and promotions. Meanwhile, I struggle to point out all the contributions I made, align them to the standard, and otherwise do my manager's job of rating me for them only to get an average rating. It also doesn't help that I have to tell them what the corporate policies say when they try to misuse them against me (holding time off against me, holding prior period performance against me for this period, not providing accommodations that were promised, etc). Nobody else seems to have this hard of a time so why would they risk anything to speak up for people like me? I've learned to live with the disappointment by giving up any dreams of advancement and just trying to keep the job I have while fending off as much BS as I can... and perhaps complaining about it on HN.


> Feels like [feelings about dei]

It's an issue of competence.

Having cleared the lowest bar, society is demonstrably less racist than a century ago. The next bar is much more difficult; we may be less equipped than we were for the last one.

We can measure some more nuanced outcomes of racism. Past that we are struggling to even qualify successes and failures. Instances & causes remain tied to systems & psychology that seem too complex for current skill sets to parse well. As a result, poor performance and less-poor performance are happening all at once.

At this level of the challenge, failure is one of the best learning tools at our disposal. Bad actors are quick to see that and are doing what they have always done - exploiting our poor valuation of failures to derail progress.


[flagged]


> The present day issues aren't caused by skin color or race, it's just haves vs have nots, elite vs plebs

Can you possibly think of a reason why black people might be highly over-represented in the "have nots" group in America?

Go out on a limb, what could it possibly be.


What about the other color of skins who are also part of the "have nots"? Are they not also affected? Why must the focus always be on the skin color instead of on the "not have" part? What's with this racism shit?

You're only proving my point that I made above, that people care more about punching up against a skin color they consider have an unfair advantage due to past history, but which won't improve their situation anyway, instead of focusing on the economic and political issues made by the ruling elite of today that impact those of all skin colors who are on the wrong side of the financial fence.

Our modern economic system is based on "time in the market beats timing the market", that's all. So of course those who come from a well off background of several generations will be even more well off today, while those who come from an impoverished background will have a hard time building any wealth and most likely stay impoverished, but that's nothing to do with skin color since money doesn't get transferred genetically though osmosis where one skin color somehow is born with more money in their account and the other not otherwise there would be no broke white people. If your parents were broke AF, most likely you'll also be broke AF no matter your skin color, unless you bust your ass in school to escape poverty.

But if you have an alternative answer please go ahead.


Of course people with other skin color are also affected by poverty, or whatever it means to be a have-not, why wouldn't they be?

I didn't say the focus must be on skin color. I'm saying to disregard why certain groups are represented in the haves/have-nots, you must ignore history.

I don't believe you're arguing in good faith if you think point out that racism exists/existed, and you call that "racism shit"


I called your argument "this racism shit" since you're trying to argue how some people today are poor because of events from 150 years ago and not do to their own actions or inactions. That would be like me blaming my lack of financial success in life on the Ottoman empire's occupation of my country.

How about personal responsibility? How can you blame people you've never met and who are long dead for why you're poor today.

Why is it that Iranians, Indians, Taiwanese, Chinese, and other Asians who emigrate to the US with little to no money can become very successful within 1-2 generations despite being poor foreign immigrants while a certain minority of the US citizens who enjoy rights and benefits immigrants do not seem to be stuck in poverty/crime and keep blaming history for it? Is it because some cultures value education highly while a US minority does not?

It's not your fault you are born into poverty but it's your responsibility to do your best to get out of it. Who is stopping that minority group from going to school/college or trades to escape poverty?


Interesting. I wonder what could be the cause that a certain minority culture doesn't value education highly?

Go out on a limb, what could it possibly be.


I dunno, you tell us why, since so far you haven't made any arguments, but kept baiting and beating it around the bush with loaded questions. Just say what you want to say.


> the reality is much simpler than you're making it be. The present day issues aren't caused by skin color or race

This strongly implies that racism is no longer a meaningfully impactful problem. That would not be true.

> Core issue is not social, it's economical masquerading as social...

If this were meaningfully true, police & justice stats for poor white populations would be indistinguishable from poor black and brown populations - across the country.

> ...to divide and conquer people

Planned and coordinated division is most visibly on display when a marginalized group is suddenly, widely demonized. False rhetoric and tightly crafted language indicate that fascism is a factor.


>This strongly implies that racism is no longer a meaningfully impactful problem. That would not be true.

That was the point I weas trying to prove from the start. The moment you point the fingers at the causes of our massive problem (ruling elite, economy policies, etc) and away from racism, people will immediately accuse you of discrediting racism as a problem. I never said racism it's not a problem, I said as a society we have much bigger problems that impacts everyone, not just this or that group.

Like I said above, the elite take 9 out of the 10 piece of the wealth pie, give half a piece to one class, half of piece to the other, and say "hey look, the other guy's class is why you only have half a piece, go fight him over it to claim back what's yours", and you keep focusing on that other half piece instead of the other 9 pieces.

If you can't afford a house anymore, and inflation ate away your savings, and your wage has stagnated, it's not because one skin color made a targeted attack on precisely other skin color. Like I said, it's haves vs have nots now, not one race vs another.

>Planned and coordinated division is most visibly on display when a marginalized group is suddenly, widely demonized.

Who is currently being demonized, where are they being demonized, and who is the one demonizing them?

>False rhetoric and tightly crafted language indicate that fascism is a factor.

Can you point that out where you see it? And please let it not be Twitter or other social media garbage.


And, funnily enough, this kind of divide-and-conquer exploitation also happens to create incredibly homogenous workplaces. The reason why these horrible workplaces have fewer black people or women is because the business practices - i.e. lots of crunch time, toxic workplace environment, shitty mismanagement, etc - filter out people who don't have the tolerance for that shit. It just so happens that young white men happen to be the least sensitive to bad business practices (because of all that stuff the woke left packaged into the word "privilege") so they're the last one standing.

Most corporate DEI is less "what can we do to retain power minority employees" and more "how can we turn minorities into more effective worker drones that we can then abuse". This is less because they actually want diversity and more because they want to be able to put the word "diversity" in a mission statement. It's left-wing[0] language being coopted to serve the purposes of cutthroat capitalism. "Diversity" happens to be a popular term with the people who are currently their most abusable worker drones. So they apply it liberally to make them think they're winning when they're losing.

This works the other way too - effective labor organization and opposition to corporate power needs (actual) DEI just as (again, actual) DEI needs organized labor. Collective solidarity cannot function if you leave out certain groups of people, otherwise you're not doing a revolution, you're doing a changing of the guard.

[0] Libertarian left specifically. Yes, there is an "anti-woke left", it's called the Chinese Communist Party.




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