> I'm more American in attitude than most Americans I know.
I am not sure what's this "American attitude" you mention here nor which scale you are using to say that you are somewhat higher on that scale vs "most" American.
Been here for about 8 years, live in a bunch of places in the world. For me the most striking thing about the US as always been the sheer diversity of thoughts and perspectives.
That and also the fact that somehow most American think they have the magical ability to know what is american and what is not.
> I consider myself a nationalist.
And a lot of american are not.
> First and foremost, I strongly believe that elected representatives should represent the best interests of their citizens and ONLY their citizens.
To a degree and with some limitation. Should we allow american companies to do morally/ecologically dubious things overseas just because we get some tax revenue ?
> The best interest of potential future citizens is not something they should even give a thought to.
So... the interest of children of american's shouldn't matter ?
> That's the question that should be asked when admitting an immigrant: "Is this person a net benefit to the citizens of this country I was elected to represent?"
The issue is of course in defining what is a "net" benefit. For some, the cultural exchange, the moral obligation to asylum seekers or relative to people already here does count like a net benefit.
It is also important to note that this view of immigration as something that should be provably beneficial is pretty recent. The wave of european (italian, irish etc...) did migrate in mass to the US without any obvious/forseeable benefit... But all in all it turned out well.
> First, it absolutely must cost more to bring in an immigrant to do a job than to hire an American. Under no situation should it be allowed to depress wages. If a citizen costs X, it should cost like 1.5x or some value like that to import the talent you need if you genuinely can't find the talent you need domestically.
Agree.
> Second, the visa should belong the the person being brought to the US. A company can sponsor them and maybe get exclusive access for some short period of time like the first year or so, but after that, the person should not have their visa tied to the employer that sponsored them. If they get a good perf review after their first year on the job, they absolutely should get an extension to stay another N years like 3 to 5, but at this point they are totally free to work for any other company with zero risk of losing their visa status if they choose not to continue working for the employer that sponsored them. If that employer wants to keep them, they'll have to pay the premium to keep them and treat them well. No immigrant should ever feel like an indentured servant.
Agree
> Third, scrutiny should be applied to all companies involved in using the H1-B program as a visa mill and to co-ethnic nepotism.
You absolutely need to make sure that companies aren't "selling" the visas. For example, someone in country X should not be able to pay or perform a favor for a company in the US to get a visa. A genuine need needs to be demonstrated and we need to make sure there is no quid pro quo.
Co-ethnic nepotism is another big one. Executives and managers should not be able to sponsor H1-Bs from their country of origin or from their religious group. If the CEO of a company is from country X and manager of the team is from country Y, then the H1-B visa cannot be filled by someone from either country X or Y. There are 195 countries in the world. Removing the United States, country X and country Y, still leaves 192 other countries from which to find talent.
The h1-b should be merit based. However people tend to know other people from the same general background, so it might be hard to distinguish between nepotism and that.
I do agree with the general sentiment, any system will be abused by bad actors, we need checks to make sure those don't happen.
> Lastly, we need to focus on assimilation. I have citizenship from three countries myself and I choose to live in the US because I value US culture (or at least what it was 10 to 15 years ago).
> If I wanted to live and work in the other countries in which I could legally work, I'd move to those countries. I don't want that. I want to live and work in the US because I value US culture. If you disproportionately bring in immigrants from particular countries, you turn the US into those other countries for better and for worse. This happens both at the national level and at the local level. I don't want it at either.
> In fact, when you disproportionately bring in people from country X into a specific locality, you make it harder for those folks to assimilate. This allows the formation of ethnic/cultural enclaves. This should not happen. You should have a mix of folks from multiple countries in a place so they actually co-mingle and assimilate to become Americans. Not hyphenated Americans, but bonafide Americans that adopt America as the home and the country in which they pride themselves.
> Completely disregarding assimilation is going to kill the Golden Goose that Elon Musk values. He can build SpaceX here in American but not in country X or country Y. However, if we culturally turn the US into country X or country Y or just kill the current culture we have now with an indiscriminate immigration policy, then he won't be able to keep building SpaceX in the US in the way he has in the past. He may be able to fix the regulatory hurdles to getting to Mars with DOGE, but he won't be able to fix the culture of the country if we don't prevent the negative aspects of the change in culture. America today is already a much lower trust culture than when I moved here 29 years ago and the continued loss of trust threatens being able to get anything done together as Americans. Coethnic nepotism within a firm, for example, absolutely hurts the ability for that firm to fulfill on its mission as different enclaves within the firm fight with one another for a bigger piece of the pie instead of working together to grow the size of the pie.
Well you did warn us that you were a nationalist. So we can't be too surprise. I strongly suspect that alot people disagree what most of whhat you are saying here.
But more importantly we do not need to solve/agree on those cultural problem to address the issue with H1-B
> Basically, I want to Make American a High Trust Culture Again. This has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. It's culture and it requires assimilation and a common identity.
America was never a "high trust culture".
> Our motto is e pluribus unum, not e pluribus pluribus.
It's interesting that you seem to read the exact opposite of what "e pluribus unum". It's a celebration of differences... The belief that unity doesn't require uniformity or common identity. That hyphenated Americans can live together without having to drop the hyphen.
In fact, that's another thing that very "american" and different from European. The concept that out of the many can emerge the one and that both can coexist...
I strongly suspect that you are mixing culture and values...
I'm not surprised by your interpretation of a lot of my comment. Coastal/Urban America hasn't had anything resembling a common culture for a lot longer than 8 years now. I'd say that it's been a wholly different place pre- and post- 9/11.
Your view of America is limited by your experience of it in the past 8 years. I assure you, it was very very different even just 20 years ago. America pre-social media was a very very different place. We now have at least one (Gen Z), if not two full generations (younger Millenials) of Americans that have grown up with all of their experiences mediated in some form or another in a relatively international post social media landscape.
> And a lot of american are not.
Believe it or not, this is a pretty recent phenomena. It's only been since the late 90s as best. Hyphenated Americans is about 36 years old. It started with African-American" in about 1989 and didn't spread to others until at least another decade. Go check Google's ngram viewer for "African-American" and see for yourself.
A lot of this language coincided with Occupy Wall Street because the powers that be had a vested interest in diverting attention away from a discussion of class in America.
I'm a nationalist because I remember back when America largely had a singular identity and it was highly socially unusual to split up into all these sub identities. It still isn't the case for much of small town America and what coastal elites consider flyover country.
> But all in all it turned out well.
Only because of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that allowed a single cohesive identity to form over like 40 years. The history of America is actually pretty messy.
> America was never a "high trust culture".
Absolutely not true. It was much much higher trust when I first moved here in 1986 (which is 39 years ago, not 29 years ago. I did my math wrong in my comment and just now realized it).
> It's interesting that you seem to read the exact opposite of what "e pluribus unum". It's a celebration of differences...
This is not at all what it was three decades ago and further back until the origin of the country's founding. It was a celebration of finding commonality despite differences. What you're describing is a complete retcon of what it historically has meant since it was first used on the great seal in 1776.
Go watch American classic movies and TV shows from the founding of Hollywood until about 1990. Much of it was highly representative of American culture I experienced in the earlier years when I first moved here. Much much much higher trust than today.
> Absolutely not true. It was much much higher trust when I first moved here in 1986
I don't believe it, especially given that you're saying this is due to immigration. What do you mean specifically when you say this? Do you mean there was less violent crime? Because that isn't true. Do you mean that there's more ethnic conflict now? That also isn't really true.
America has been characterized largely by the racial conflicts it's had since the 19th century, with there being ethnic violence between whites, Chinese, Irish, blacks, Italians, and others. Though not to the same extent as the 19th century, riots were still happening, e.g. the 1992 LA riots.
For the most part, my observations is that we now just put up with rampant property crime and very little of it gets reported. This isn't surprising because getting cops to respond to property crime reports when you call 911 now takes so long that it isn't even worth it.
I've personally experienced more property crime and other issues in the past 5 to 10 years than my entire family experienced in the 29 to 34 years prior.
About a month and a half a go, I had some kids damage my car in the supermarket parking lot. Called 911. Waiting on hold for like 20 minutes because it wasn't an emergency. Cops didn't show for an hour. Called back, changed the address of the incident to my home. Cops ended up showing up 13 hours after the incident between 1 and 2 am. Growing up, I don't recall ever waiting more than 30 minutes for anything when 911 was called. I wouldn't have even called 911 for this issue if I had a choice. Supermarket wouldn't provide surveillance footage without a police report filed.
The statistics simply aren't telling the whole story. People have largely given up on reporting things because they've become so commonplace and folks don't expect anything to be done. Crime clearance rates for all crimes are down all over the country as we lose faith that anything will be done.
I wish I had the study I read one time handy, but it was comparing crime stats between the US and Japan over time and it basically showed that you can get to a point where crime has gotten so bad that it's no longer reported because folks no longer expect any resolution from reporting crime. This closely matches my personal experience with property crime that has impacted me and others I know.
Even the arsonist who tried to set my home on fire two years ago while on a meth bender is getting out in 5 years from now. The charges were two separate cases. One was 5 counts of arson 1 and the other was 1 count of arson 1 and violating a restraining order IIRC. Pled everything down to 6 counts of arson 2. 7 years total, with two years already served. In the end, one entire house burned down. One was severely damage and the other had minor damage because the fires were put out promptly.
We wouldn't bother to lock our doors growing up. Today, I probably record someone checking to see if my car is unlocked (crime of opportunity) about once every one to two months.
I really appreciate the tenor of the discussion you've had with your primary interlocutor(s) above. It's been substantive and civil, and I wish every sociopolitical disagreement online could be approached in the same manner. Because of the respect I've gained for you throughout this thread I'm going to do what I seldom do online, and express something about my political point of view.
I agree with your diagnosis of the problems with American society, particularly the 'high trust' vs 'low trust' line of thought. I'd add the nuance that in the past trust was not (largely) extended across racial lines, but there was progress made, up until it began falling apart altogether.
Coming from a left-liberal point of view, I think the root cause has been economic, rather than cultural, because (developing along the same timeline as your tenure in the United States) we've arrived at an extractive rather generative form of capitalism. I think that explains the H1b abuses we both deplore, the social balkanization, and also the very similar cultural, economic, and governance breakdowns simultaneously appearing in other countries across the "western/liberal" world.
I'm not saying that to spark further argument, just as prelude to: I hope you're right. If the way to re-forming a high-trust society and curing what we agree ails us is as simple as the American right posits then I will happily eat crow over the next four or eight or whatever years. That is, of course, the opposite of what I expect to happen with (as I see them) the extractive capitalists fully in charge, but I am prepared to be proved wrong.
I will ask you, as I've recently been asking all of my right-wing friends, to judge what happens in the near future against the expectations that you have now. If things go badly, and those solutions fail, will you be willing to try "my side's" ideas - think TR +FDR reduce corporate power, : wealth transfers and massive infrastructure investments - next? I believe that's what created the mid-twentieth century cultural foundations which we'd both like to reconstruct.
> I'd add the nuance that in the past trust was not (largely) extended across racial lines, but there was progress made, up until it began falling apart altogether.
Yeah, I'm not going to deny this at all, but I must say that in the 1990s and 2000s at least among the older Millennials and younger GenX, there was a very real sense of judging people mostly by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. What has happened in the last 15 years in race and gender relationships is a massive step backwards. Even I can't help having prejudiced thoughts today as a response to these changes that me 20 years ago would have been repulsed by. I say this as a third culture kid, who is mixed race whose "plurality" leans European, but who who identifies with Europe, Latin American and a tiny smidge of Indigenous South America.
It's actually been sad to see some of the comments here where folks have expressed that "America doesn't have a culture". I know it's largely attenuated from when I was younger, but it's still palpable to me. It's sad to see that it's now so weak that many express that they don't even think it exists.
> Coming from a left-liberal point of view, I think the root cause has been economic, rather than cultural, because (developing along the same timeline as your tenure in the United States) we've arrived at an extractive rather generative form of capitalism.
Couldn't agree more. I was left leaning most of my life. I remember back when Zappa testified in Congress about overzealous right leaning conservative school marms. Today, it largely feels the same but the longhouse school marms are left leaning. I'm always conflicted about self describing myself as conservative these days because while policy-wise that's where I'm out, it's mostly out of the complete failures of the left-leaning policies of those in control of every major American institution. In 20-30 years, I would not surprise if I end up back expressing support for the equivalent of left leaning policies in 2050 or so in the event the right successfully takes back these institutions. Ultimately, I just want to be left alone and want to see everyone else left alone as well.
I'm also in complete agreement that its the blind pursuit of economic policy that serves those in power that's been most contributory to the destruction of American culture. If I read correctly a full 1 in 5 working adults in America are immigrants. That's wildly high and it's insane to me than anyone can argue that hasn't depressed wages, increased pressure on housing costs (which increases the cost of living across the board).
That said, this all falls under the research of George Borjas, who has done an amazing job documenting the impact of immigration workers on the American workers. But it isn't the whole story. He has a colleague at Harvard, whose work is equally important in this discussion and that is the work of Robert Putnam, who has done the largest and most comprehensive studies documenting the decline of civic engagement in America. His work is summarized in his book "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community", but his larger body of work merits attention.
The disintegration of homogenous communities and replacement with heterogenous communities has creation circumstances where groups are fighting with one another.
One of the seminal lessons I've learn in my life personally is that politics rises when things balkanize. Instead of a single culture rowing together in the same direction to grow the size of the pie, they instead fight against one another to grow the size of their piece of the pie. I've seen this happen in America broadly in the time I've lived here, but I've also seen it up close and personally while working at one of Silicon Valley's best known unicorns.
I feel like I joined the company relatively late at around employee ~2000 and engineer ~200, but by the time I left about 10 years later, I was among the 25 most tenured employees at the company and had seen probably 10000 engineers pass through the company and who knows how many total employees. My guess is 50k or more.
The last 4 years or so were painful. The company went from one where everyone had shared economic incentives (stock options) and a shared mission, to one with fiefdoms everywhere and everyone just trying to further their career and the career of their manager or skip level. By the time I left, my guess is that I could count those folks that I worked with that still truly believed in the mission of the company on two hands. Which is nothing in a company of 25k+ active employees.
I sincerely believe we can get back to a unified culture, but it's going to require something drastic like the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 to stop the bleeding and then one to two generations to pass to allow for those here to figure out how to form one new common American identity. That's not to say we shouldn't allow anyone in, but it should only be allowing those in that truly benefit all Americans and not just the American oligarchy.
> That is, of course, the opposite of what I expect to happen with (as I see them) the extractive capitalists fully in charge, but I am prepared to be proved wrong.
I too am skeptical, but I'd put the emphasis more specifically on globalists and the deep state. Between all that's happened with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Thomas Massive, Jeffrey Epstein, P Diddy, Twitter Files, revelations from Mike Benz, Hunter Biden laptop, etc. etc. etc., I have very little confidence that corruption from those in economic and political control will actually be held to account.
> I will ask you, as I've recently been asking all of my right-wing friends, to judge what happens in the near future against the expectations that you have now. If things go badly, and those solutions fail, will you be willing to try "my side's" ideas - think TR +FDR reduce corporate power, : wealth transfers and massive infrastructure investments - next?
Yes and no. I'm absolutely willing to condemn what you're describing as "my side's ideas", but I have no confidence in the ideas you're talking about as well. I've seen them fail both in this country and the country I'm from.
The ideas I want to see tried out are neither Republican or Democrat ideas. I want to take a wrecking ball to power structures in America. Everything deep state related needs to go.
The analogy I use as a sailor (which should also be familiar to anyone who has kitesurfed), is the idea of "depowering" the sails. Right now, we have instutitions with way too much power and all that power is a massive magnet for the most corruptible people. Orwell said "Absolute power corrupts absolutely", but their is more to it than that. Absolute power also absolutely attracts the absolutely corrupted. I'd love to see far more decentralization and power back at the state and local level. I'd love to see every major institution under the Executive branch either dismantled or spread across medium-sized cities all across the country.
Back before we had the Department of Education, we relied on 50 department of educations in each of 50 states trying things out. Some had good ideas, but some had bad ideas, but those with bad ideas had the option of copyingt those experiencing success with their policies.
I've seen this exact same situation at the big company I left. For the first 5-6 years anyone with an idea had to first implement that idea, prove it out and then scale it up. Eventually, everything became command and controls and now every idea could no longer be experimented with and scaled up. Instead they had to be implemented by or get the blessing of the annointed ones with power and if considered acceptable could only be implemented company-wide or not at all. With that approach, I saw so many "ideas" that were ram-rodded through as multi-year efforts, many of which failed, but failed only after their original "sponsor" was promoted and had moved on, leaving a wake of destruction for others to clean up.
The closest equivalent to this is what's happened with Milei in Argentina. I'm still skeptical of him as an individual, but what he's achieved has been nothing short of remarkable.
If I could have one wish for America, it would be that the bulk of my taxes went to my local jurisdiction first, then state and only pennies were left over for federal only for those things that can only be handled at the federal level like national defense (but only acted upon with the blessing of 50 states).
One of the biggest failures I think with our Constitution are that representation wasn't designed to scale. When the first Congress was established the US had 3.9 million people. Today, it's 346 million. In 1789, with the first Congress, we had 26 senators and approximately 65 representatives by the end. The ratio in 1789 was 43k people to each member of Congress. Today it is 643k.
This is a failure to scale because each citizen has a far smaller voice and it's much cheaper for those in power to corrupt 538 members of Congress today. Had we scaled proportionately (43k to 1), Congress would have just over 8000 members. IMHO, that would be far healthier because it would be far more expensive for special interests to buy their way into getting a majority of votes of 8000+ members of Congress.
Anyways, that's enough for now. I could go on forever on this. Again, I appreciate your comment.
TBF, I'm not against wealth transfers and infrastructure investments. I just think they should be handled as close to the local level as possible.
Wealth transfers for example worked better when Churches and other local community institutions were involved. They'd collect directly from their parishioners and provide support directly to those that need help. This is a system that is highly accountable to the people providing help and keeps those receiving help accountable for "helping themselves" and not just mooching.
Same with infrastructures. With infrastructure, there are times, that some big may have value, but very rarely does it require the scale of the state or the federal government. The biggest of infrastructure projects are rarely larger than an economic region (e.g. SF Bay Area. Seattle Metro area. etc.).
The interstate highway system is like the only infrastructure project that benefits from Federal involvement.
Right now, doing through the Federal government provides far too little accountability for results and spending money wisely.
Beyond elements of nuance and emphasis I don't disagree with anything you've said. For instance, I completely agree with the philosophy of localism and federalism and "de-powering the sails" that you lay out. (And yes, the House of Representatives should be scaled!) At the present moment I just... Prioritize de-powering corporations over government, because if we do it the other way around there will be nothing restraining the further concentration of power in, and the further corruption of government / society at, their hands.
Where I think we part company is in our assessments of the current American "left" and "right" parties. I see more energy towards de-centralization (both corporate and governmental) in some younger politicians within the Democratic party, and a firm intent to increase corporate power within the GOP.
But, it gives me hope to see so much substantive agreement with someone who's chosen to vote the other way, and I genuinely hope that I've misjudged the incoming administration. If it all works out as you believe it will, then I'll be happy to have been wrong. Thanks again.
The way I see it, the overly powerful government and corporate institutions are two sides of the same coin. There's been so much revolving door activity and corporate capture of government, that depowering either in either order yields a weakening of the other.
One person that I can't recommend enough is Mike Benz, if you've never checked out his videos. He's an absolute fountain of knowledge, it's just that there is such a vast spiderweb of "<foo> industrial complexes" out there (finance, military, media, tech, censorship, etc.) that it's impossible to convey in short media clips.
Once, you've seen enough of the links between government and corporations pointed out by him and others that are watchdogging, you start seeing it everywhere. You literally can't turn on a single MSM news show today and not see "expert" after "expert" that if you dig in are just cutouts for the vast web of "<foo> industrial complexes" out there and how there are so many innocuously named institutions, think tanks and NGOs that are quietly guiding so much of what is happening from behind the scenes and manufacturing narratives.
What I see in the new administration has less to do with policies and more to do with folks that are increasingly hard to manipulate and blackmail. Thiscertainly doesn't apply to Trump's first administration, which was a disaster, but it was a disaster because he really didn't expect to win, and completely underestimated the swamp. As a result, he hastily put together a first administration of folks that had ulterior motives or was compromised.
At this point, Trump is probably the most vetted president in modern times. They have literally done everything possible to try and take him down. Yes, he's had his fair share of indiscretions and he absolutely is a flawed human, but none of his legitimate indiscretions were enough to take him out that there have now been many unhinged efforts to manufacture scandal to take him out because he represents such a threat to the deep state.
One reason Trump has largely been able to avoid this stuff is because he learned first hand how the coercion and blackmail machine functioned very early in his career with his exposure to Roy Cohn and the Blue Suite scandal at the Plaza Hotel. His behavior certainly hasn't been beyond reproach (far from it), but at this point, it's safe to say that he's not nearly as compromised as the Clinton's, the Bush's and the Biden's have proven to be.
While I'm not keen on many of his cabinet picks, there are quite a few folks in there that have already had their dirty laundry aired, and while it wasn't always pretty, it also wasn't career ending. What you're left with are folks that have seen how the coercion and blackmail and scandal operating machine works and are on a mission to destroy it. This time around, more of the cabinet picks appear to be far less compromised than previous administrations including Trump's first administration.
Basically, my take is that this is the first administration in my lifetime that has some leeway to break from from the orbit of blackmail and coercion that has shaped policy since Kennedy was assassinated.
This is how collusion happens between the government (regulators, prosecutors, politicians, etc) and the corporate (media personalities, super wealthy, powerful attorneys, think tanks, etc). Revolving door, conflicts of interest, etc--these can't be solved in the modern form of government.
I'm not sure there is a modern form of government that can solve the problem we have. If a non-trivial quantity of your leaders (elected or appointed) are being coerced and blackmailed, there's not really a solution. Maybe in the past, a monarch could have their blackmailer and associates put to death, but there's not really a solution for a nation under blackmail. You certainly won't be able to have a form of government with a functional justice system with concepts like innocent until proven guilty and due process. I can't think of a way for a leader to remain beholden to the will of the people, if there is no mechanism to swiftly deal with blackmail, when the price is to go against the will of the people. Such a mechanism would be incompatible with the modern tenets of justice.
"Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion, Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." — John Adams, October 11, 1798.
I don't remember the interview, but there was an interview in the second have of 2024 with Peter Thiel where he basically alludes to the fact that we're largely operating with institutions today that are basically a club where admittance is granted on the basis of being compromised. Basically, this reeks of the adage attributed to Lenin "Trust is good. Control is better".
As greed and avarice and numerous vices become more common, the pool of blackmailable people to sponsor to a position of power only grows. There was a reason, institutions like the FBI and CIA used to strongly prefer hiring Mormons, who did not drink and were very unlikely to partake in adultery or other frowned up sexual proclivities.
For the most part, I would not be surprised if getting the financial support to run for office in many parts of the country are largely predicated on the whether or not the financial backers underwriting your campaign feel confident they can control you. It's probably not enough to trust a politician for many financiers of politicians. They need to know they can control before they write a check.
This is why we have so few politicians of any integrity like Thomas Massie. Even he has a massive target on his back, with lots of money pouring in to support his opponents. I can imagine that someone like Thomas Massie could only ever win in a state that is still largely constituted of the types of people of which John Adams wrote. A politician with any integrity would be very unlikely to ever win in states like California, New York or Illinois.
The fact that the only people arrested in the Epstein scandal have been Epstein and Maxwell, pretty much speaks volumes about how out how our government is being run. There is little to no accountability (for government officials or executives in corporations) apart from a token person going to jail now and again. We have a system of government and institutions actively protecting criminals.
I worked at FAANG andhave burned out, and i know alot of friends who also have... with varying degree of severity.
I would say pretty frequent. I am not sure if the incidence of burn-out is higher for software engineer vs other profession. Anecdotally, both academia and entrepreneurship seems to also have a very high incidence of burn out.
My guess is that the mix of a highly competitive field, mixed with poorly defined evaluation metrics mixed with skewed(winner-take-most/all) reward system does create a lot performance anxiety and psychological pressure.
I have never worked at a smaller company, but i am not sure it's any better for the majority of people. You just get paid less for your troubles.
I don't think the size of the company truly matters. I think it's a proxy for one's position in the importance hierarchy within the companies. The higher one is, the higher one can command/shape its experience to include things like autonomic, interesting work, respect etc... etc... And those factor influence more the burn out situation
This is sadly a reality that is difficult to talk about.
I would even go further and say that we have a tendency to benefit the "least" minority of the minority.
Hiring a black or Hispanic or women from MIT is from my perspectives not really what this work should be about. Those outliers already have enough opportunity, but tend to be the one benefiting from most efforts. I would love to see deeper investment like 3 or 4 year before college in more at risk communities.
I agree wholeheartedly. I'm a Latin Stanford graduate, from a wealthy two parent household. I'm sure there were some people who escaped genuine poverty among my classmates, but for the most part anyone at Stanford is privileged regardless of background.
I find that companies only care about improving their annual diversity report pie chart, and have adopted a cynical attitude along the lines of "the diverse talent pool is limited so we need to make sure we get more of them than our competitors". Nobody is actually trying to get more underprivileged people into tech as a whole.
A company instituting a DEI initiative where employees take one day a week mentoring students at a less affluent high school would do way more good than a percentage quota. The former actually makes the world have more software developers of underrepresented backgrounds. The latter just increase the share of "diverse" devs at that particular company, doesn't actually shift the needle in the industry as a whole.
> By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether.
I don't think the parent comment is negating the need to hiring bars. IMO two important points :
1 - DEI and hiring bars are not opposed to one another. Actually well designed DEI program are meant to make sure the hiring bar are free of un neccesasary blockers.
2 - I think that mostly what the parent comment was trying to say, "hiring bars" is a nebulous term thrown around. Every team "saying/thinking" they have ha hiring bar doesn't mean that there actually have one. Just rejecting 99% percent of the candidate doesn't imply a good hiring bar... since you might selecting the bottom 1%...
> Its whole premise is alleviating racism in the workplace
No, as a non american living in the US i find american obsession with race fascinating.
DEI is about every characteristic on which human can differ and how those difference play a role in the work place. Race is of course a factor , but so are neuro divergence, language, culture, gender and sexuality. Hell even things like "Don't schedule a meeting before 9 AM" is a form of inclusion for the non morning people.
> yet its practical effect is giving certain races a favorable edge in the hiring process, independent of merit.
Then that's a badly designed program. However the other side of the equation, if there some aspect of the workplace ( such as say every important meeting are at 8 AM) are needlessly preventing certain people of expressing their talent... we should also look into it.
> Most recently when he hired an engineer from one of these "favorable races" even when half of the interview panel recommended a no-hire.
Yeah sounds like a problem. Maybe look into the statistics to see if usually those type of candidate would have been rejected.
> However the other side of the equation, if there some aspect of the workplace ( such as say every important meeting are at 8 AM) are needlessly preventing certain people of expressing their talent... we should also look into it.
This is a disingeuous point of comparison, because this is a behavior that can easily be corrected. Just set an alarm clock like everyone else. On the other hand, I cannot correct the fact that I am from a non-minority background. How is it in any way fair for me to be disadvantaged in the hiring process for something I cannot control?
> Maybe look into the statistics to see if usually those type of candidate would have been rejected.
This sounds like a question asked in bad faith. Rather than analyzing hiring outcomes by background, does it not make a lot more sense to analyze hiring decisions based on interview performance, totally independent of race/language/gender/etc.
If this data is then correlated against race, and hiring decisions are provably equitable across races, then great! But anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case.
> This is a disingeuous point of comparison, because this is a behavior that can easily be corrected.
As someone commented bellow, that's incorrect. Modern sleep science seems to indicate that people have different circadian rhythm, which correlate with different energy and alertness level at different time of the days. Sure it's easy to set an alarm at 8 AM, but it's not easy to be at 100 % for some people at that time. I think there is even a movement to make school start later to combat those effects.
> How is it in any way fair for me to be disadvantaged in the hiring process for something I cannot control?
I can't pretend to understand your experience on DIE but at the risk of repeating myself... this is not what DIE is about... you don't get browny point because your are a minority or get point taken away because you not a minority. It's about providing the best condition for EVERYONE to express their best potential and then select the best one.
> This sounds like a question asked in bad faith. Rather than analyzing hiring outcomes by background, does it not make a lot more sense to analyze hiring decisions based on interview performance, totally independent of race/language/gender/etc.
I do not follow your reasoning here. You mentioned that you witnessed "ONE" case where a candidate was accepted despite having "HALF" of the reviewers no hire decision.
Where i work, those case go to deliberation and usually we would have the candidate come back for a second round of interview, or even depending on the seniority level send him to specialist reviewer. Generally, those case are a result of miss-calibration of the interview loop : like for example having an experience network/kernel specialist ending up in a generalist loop designed for entry level.
I do not know how things work in your company : You are making the case that one experience is an example of DEI gone bad... My point is that if you want to make that point, a statistical analysis of similar case is the only way to know for sure. Just saying that someone with so so performance on half reviewer got in is simply not enough...
to strengthen your argument, you can acknowledge that no system we had was doing what you wish
there are magical criteria like culture fit which is inherently discretionary and biased which should be penalized too
DEI as you have experienced isnt a solution for that either
one reality is that companies dont always need most the cognitively/physically qualified person. they need to tap into markets and revenue, companies that have already reached the peak of their primary market gain perspective by having people of backgrounds more in align with markets they aspire to be in. Many large companies are in that position and should be ignoring employee reindeer games about pedigree and performance.
although one most complaint alteration of DEI is just recruiting from different sources that might have more minorities, like different schools, or even creating the pipeline in those schools, where the goal is more talent that happens to perform as well as existing talent, there is a parallel effort where none of that matters if the organization’s expansion into markets simply relies more on familiarity with that market. Do both, I say
but other organizations that are just metoo-ing DEI should absolutely be called out
all organizations that implemented it for arbitrary reasons should be called out
> there are magical criteria like culture fit which is inherently discretionary and biased which should be penalized too
OK, I have been rejected once -- during the interview no less, not via an email after -- because I said I am not into Game of Thrones. Apparently everyone on the team's pass time was chatting about it. They openly told me I don't fit in because I don't like GoT, even though the interview before that was an exhaustive technical one and I passed with 93% score.
Whom should I contact so they get penalized?
You realize these are private companies and they are not accountable to how they achieve their results as long as the means are not illegal, right?
And you do realize suing them over this will take a huge amount of time and money? Money that most working people don't have?
> one reality is that companies dont always need most the cognitively/physically qualified person.
Whose reality is that? I haven't seen it ever. Business makes money by hiring N people with capability X, and not N*5 people with capability X/5. Otherwise business will go broke paying salaries to incapable people. Common sense.
I get that you are saying that you might need people who understand certain markets better and that's practically their only skill but... on a more general premise the statement "you don't always need the most qualified person" is just confusing.
> on a more general premise the statement "you don't always need the most qualified person" is just confusing.
obviously its paradoxical because the person with the only skill that differs from the rest of the entire corporation would be the most qualified person. I tried to qualify that with other ways. I'm glad that we used language to convey a shared understanding, which is the purpose of language.
Regarding how to hold corporations accountable for hiring bias, I never broached that at all. "Culture fit" likely has a limited halflife, where legislatures or labor agencies will just discourage the word and that kind of discretion. labor agencies use their own budget from taxpayers or the state's other revenue sources to bring action to corporations, you should check them out, they might have found the Game of Thrones criteria to be window dressing for a sanctionable form of employment discrimination, that other people have already complained about. So that suggests your reality is either hyperbole or ignorance, easily remediable with accurate guidance.
> anecdotal evidence suggests this is not the case.
Ah, and we all know the plural of anecdote is "data". /s Oh wait...
The fact that you said this, suggests to me that you were the odd-person out on a hiring committee, and because the person got hired anyways, you feel like that means all hiring decisions are made on the basis of race. When in reality, you just didn't like the one candidate, and everyone else was fine.
I don't know for sure that this happened, but I've met people who made these cases, and they pretty consistently overvalue their own opinions.
> No, as a non american living in the US i find american obsession with race fascinating.
Especially super weird is the hiring practises of (non-US) businesses OUTSIDE the US who've blindly copied this US DEI stuff without thinking if it even applies.
Several major Australian universities (and some gov departments) practically don't hire white males any more. As several friends already working at these places have complained about in private.
Sometimes forwarding the "new and updated policy" mass emails from HR about it, just to show how insane things have become.
Specially at the same time when we are seeing gender-ratios going the other way. For some reason we are not working hard to aim it squarely to match general population...
> Having actually worked at big tech companies with DEI initiatives, there have been many instances when we have had to lower the hiring bar to meet diversity requirements.
Since we are throwing random samples of 1 on the internet, having been involved into some of those initiative at a large big tech company : Not lowering the bar was pretty much always top of mind, and we always made sure to be fair to ALL candidate.
Most of the initiative where around reaching a larger pool of candidate (for example reaching out to more school than we use too) and also addressing what looked to us like information deficiencies : Someone in an IVY league school for example just by osmosis will absorb a lot of the what/why/how companies look for in an employee and therefore can better show the required characteristics.
Every generation of engineer always feels like the engineer after them are somewhat the consequence of lowering the bar... We used to think this when we started recruiting outside of ivy league, then we started lowering the importance of formal education at all ettc... etc...
You would be amazed at the difference good interview preps makes to someone who was never exposed to it.
> What it really fosters in a company is resentment, both due to hiring bar changes and also as the actual DEI job function is mostly useless but gets paid quite a bit
From experience, those type of feeling are usually a consequence of lack of information and exposure of what actually goes on in the meetings. You mentioned you worked at the companies with those initiative, but i am not sure how many time you have actually been involved in the design of those programs.
Tech jobs in large tech companies is very competitive job. Everything is always framed as a competitive advantage and can sometime wrap one's perceptions. Companies spend a bunch of moneys on all kind of weird stuff.
And finally let me be clear, i am a software engineer myself. I do believe that pretty much anything HR does that's not purely the day to day of employee is a grift. Hell the bigger the companies, the more grift around : from management "training" that somewhat requires fancy restaurant. Team building exercise that somewhat require a bunch of very introverted engineer to go to a concert non of them are interested in etc... etc...
DEI is not different, yes grifter gonna grift and some people are just in it for themselve.
So can DEI be better/ more efficient : yes, is there a lot of virtue signaling and fakeness around yes, are we somewhat lowering the bar because we like having diverse people around NO, and for having witness the difference that those program can be in the lives of young and new people in the industry... i think they worth keeping around even if a better more pragmatic form.
I think this will add context to the discussion. Below are the recently leaked internal Red Hat guidelines.
RED HAT ALLYSHIP COMMANDMENTS
1. Openly acknowledges PRIVILEGE and SYSTEMIC racism exist in trauma
2. Never questions the REALITY of our BLACK friends and colleagues
3. Rejects the idea that race is political
4. Accepts that WHITE people are responsible for dismantling racism
5. Only WHITE people are racist
6. Knows the BLACK community owes us nothing in this work
7. Requires acknowledgment and repair of inevitable MISTAKES
8. Is never rooted in WHITE SAVIORISM
9. Sees the black community as a group of individuals and not a MONOLITH
10. Does NOT seek recognition or praise for a job well done
West African here too. This is too simplistic, and a problem can have multiple guilty parties. There is enough blame to go around.
> we, not they, commit these boys and girls to these activities, of our own volition.
We can judge people's choices without taking in consideration the context and the options that they have. The alternative to not sending those young people to work is them starving, or not going to school.
> if child labor is bad, we don’t need mars and the rest of the world to tell us so. we should be civilized enough to get ourselves out of the ongoing era of barbarism and brutishness that has plagued the continent. fuck!
Child labor is the best solution within a see of worst solutions to a complex problem. Having talked and knowing people in similar conditions, every parent naturally wants they kids to have an easy and better life. That's not being civilized it's just being human. Saddly those parent can not afford the luxury of giving that to their parent.
> it’s a fucked up society that looks to hold an external party responsible for ills within itself.
The economical situation in African countries is complex and multivariate. And yes the governments are usually corrupt and ineffective. But the failed policies of international bodies such as the IMF or world banks, the complicity of european banks in money laundering. The meddling of international companies that are happy to support which ever dictatorship du-jour suit their needs best are definitely not helping.
> it’s not the business of mars (m&m makers) to ensure that no children are exploited during the production of the cocoa beans
They made it their business by participating in it.
> americans shouldn’t eat their chocolate with some trepidation that they might be eating the body and blood of a 5-yo.
No... It's a personal choice. If some people can become vegan out of compassion of animals, we should be able to avoid chocolate out of compassion our fellow human beings even if they happen to not be from the same country.
so maybe a little more context will help here. i've been in the situation described as child labor here—been involved in hard labor since i was about 6-yo, mainly working on the farm, carrying heavy load of produce and firewood on my head for long walk home. all these along with other kids—so i'm mainly speaking from experience.
it's a complex problem, of course, but nothing to do with all the entities you have invoked. bear in mind that these abused kids don't live in cities, nor do they belong to middle class families: they're village dwellers, not poor by the standards of the village but by the standards of world bank. their families and communities need their labor because that's all they have known. people in these communities barely speak english. their whole lives all they've known is tilling the land and dutifully committing the next generations to the same task. if you don't want munira working the farm, you don't accost mars. rather you systematically educate and civilize her community so that they become self-aware of the benefits of education and the perils of denying their children this opportunity.
without any systematic effort to transform the elders of the community, you can't stop child labor. mars may decide to stop buying from munira's community. but that will never take munira and other kids her age away from the farm: it's their fate, according to the beliefs of their elders.
