“Our Culture”

Big Tech, you might want to work some overtime this weekend scrubbing your servers of all the monthly Diversity & Inclusion presentations.

You remember, the encrypted ones HR presented from only one laptop. The Powerpoints with the column headers describing the selected favored demographics, and the goal, sorry goals are illegal, targets toward hiring and promotion. With the names of each manager in rows, and their personal / team score achieving this goal target. The ones where you could add all the targets and then figure out how many white men had to go.

The presentation which scored the hiring and promotion system which had been adjusted to structurally favor the CEO’s favorite groups and disadvantage the others. Followed by the two-hour brainstorming meeting, a meeting where precise words, phrases and sentences were carefully thought-out (i.e. eliminating structural bias good, structural favoritism not so good), to have all the managers volunteer ways the system could further be biased towards some groups and against others.

The meeting where the managers looked around the table and realized they better get on board and how or will be next on the chopping block.

The meeting where someone would eventually say, perhaps we could make sure our recruiting pipeline is as broad as possible, carefully mentor and select the best interviewers and managers, reinforce the importance of being aware of and free from personal bias and track and reward long term success growing talent, set a consistent high integrity example in ourselves, work tireless to encourage talent growth and treat everyone with equal dignity and respect. Or, something like that. And then the room would go quiet and that person would get the ‘ol  I Wonder How Long They Will Last Look of meek pity.

There are deep moral questions here that are way beyond me. Does replacing a highly qualified, experienced, hard-working, high integrity white male immigrant to the USA from the UK with a highly qualified, hard-working, high integrity black woman whose great great great great great grandmother might have been a slave make everything OK?

Beats me.

Is the argument made by a Supreme Court Justice whose writings look like they have been cut and passed from Vox, that she herself would not be a Supreme Court Justice if not for quotas persuasive?

I’ll pass.

What I know you have accomplished is to destroy trust in the integrity of your leadership among a majority of employees and vastly reduced capacity in the entire industry and it’s beginning to show.

All this I’m sure was wonderful during a period of stock buybacks with zero interest bonds and record high stock prices. What’s coming next might require some introspection.

Mike.

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