Because what often passes for equity/diversity/inclusion in these contexts is the farthest thing from what would be truly equitable or inclusive. True diversity is not fostered by EDI goals, these are purely about enforcing conformity. And dangerous conformity at that - many people ITT have pointed out that "anti-racist" has pretty much become code for anti-Asian.
As a hiring manager, DEI efforts have made hiring a lot more challening.
For my team we pretty much can only hire experienced, senior candidates with specialized skillsets. We do hire and train up juniors from time to time when our team gets big enough and has the time to mentor effectively. Anyway, women and minority candidates do apply (and get hired) for our positions but at much lower percentages.
To meet DEI goals though, our internal recruiters shove completely inexperienced/unqualified candidates into our pipeline and then put internal pressure on us to hire their candidate (one time there was a complaint from HR to a few exceutives claiming we were sabotaging their DEI efforts...the executives had to explain to the HR team how difficult and specialized the job that we do is and how important it is for us to have a pipeline of the best candidates...) even though they can't succeed in the role at that experience level.
They've even gone so far as to modify resumes of people we interview to inflate the experience level and immediately get caught out by the candidate who tells us that isn't the resume they submitted...and these are our _internal_ recruiters fucking with us like this. They even pushed through a candidate once who didn't speak any of the same languages as anyone else on our team. We only found out at the in-person interview stage...
Damn, that's where diversity initiatives become too much for me. Hiring people for the sake of diversity only perpetuates negative stereotypes about women in tech.
I don't want anyone I hire to be set up to be in a situation where they will surely fail, but that does seem to be where this is going. DEI seems to care about short term efforts/results but not long term.
My team has huge demands put on it as a result of product development and most of the time we need to hire entirely self-sufficient people. That's simply not possible without a significant amount of in-field experience. Having inexperienced people shoveled into our pipeline is a complete counter-productive waste of time.
OTOH it also takes like two years of dedicated peformance coaching in my org to fire anyone so the DEI folks are getting exactly what they want in the end anyway.
So these individuals are like potential spies inside the organization? To whom would they report?
I've seen a considerable number of people hired who seemed to have no productivity but the idea that they might have a reporting function outside the usual "chain-of-command" (e.g., like communist party political officers in the military) never occurred to me.
mandated DEI hires without also working on providing training for candidates (or at least post-hiring training) .. wow, what a bold strategy.
> We do hire and train up juniors from time to time when our team gets big enough and has the time to mentor effectively.
If DEI is a real goal then ... training has to be a real priority, not just "when big enough" and "when have time".
So if the company doesn't want to spend resources on it then it'll get strictly worse results. (Ie. it'll either find itself unable to hire people, it'll be chronically understaffed, and/or it'll end up with a lot of internal conflicts about skills/competence.)
