Before DEI is completely dead, let me get several things off my mind. I've never voiced these before and I want to get them out SOMEWHERE before it's all buried and forgotten:
1. I worked for Silicon Valley for over 25 years and the final five years were a DEI House of Mirrors.
2. I was paid very well, but as a white male, I was passed over multiple times due to "diversity" for positions I had sought where I was clearly qualified and the person chosen was less qualified. This is not speculation. I knew the people doing the hiring and was told this off the record in each case. This bothered me, but I also reminded myself that the job I had was still a great gig and 95% of the American workforce would have gladly traded place with me.
Also, the positions I was seeking weren't going to make me a huge amount more money than I was already making. They offered more recognition and I was also largely looking to make a move because I was bored doing what I had been doing. Better to appreciate the job I had, I figured; especially since it was not clear to me I'd get that job again if I had not been hired before absurd DEI guidelines were in place.
3. In the situations above, and many other clear DEI hires, the person who eventually was selected typically did not stay in that position for very long. In some cases, it simply became obvious they weren't suited for the job and either left on their own or were quietly replaced. In other rare cases, the person was a "DEI Poster Child" who was obviously on a promotion fast track and needed to park in one job they weren't qualified for and was quickly promoted again.
4. One of the DEI Poster Children was a person who I had worked with as a customer before she was hired as a peer of mine. I respected her for several reasons. However, as soon as she became a peer, I soon started receiving calls from her coworkers asking if I could do X or Y for them. My response was "sure, but I have to ask why isn't<insert DEI hire here> doing it?" Answer: she simply wasn't interested in doing it and was otherwise occupied with other DEI activities within the company.
5. Regarding pronouns: I was completely oblivious about this idiotic phenomenon until I noticed a co-worker had added "He/Him" to his signature on Zoom meetings about five years ago. I knew this guy to be a bit quirky and funny and assumed it was some kind of existential joke along the lines of "I think therefore I am". It was shortly after that when a non-binary character was introduced in the TV show "Billions" who was referred to as "they/them" that I put 2+2 together. Of course, the whole pronoun thing took off after that.
6. I never signed on to the pronoun thing (more about that in a moment) but never openly objected to it, because it was clearly a political issue and even long before explicit DEI issues were front and center, it was clear to me and others at the company that unless you were a committed leftist, discussing politics, even casually, was a career killer. There was simply no upside to touching these topics, so silence was the only prudent option.
7. The logic of the pronouns issue is preposterous:
- There was no reason -- other than virtue signaling or seeking political solidarity -- for me to declare my pronouns. Like ALL of my co-workers, there was no doubt how to address me without using my name
- I have never in my entire career met somebody whose pronouns needed to be told to me.
- Every single person who did declare their pronouns declared pronouns I already knew to use. Women were "she/her"; Men were "he/him"
- Pronoun declarations were ALWAYS third person pronouns. If a trans person was on a Zoom meeting with me or in a room (which never happened; not once) I would have referred to that person direclty in the second person "you/yours" and as far as I know, that would not have violated anybody's rights or sensibilities. If you ever needed to use a persons DECLARED pronouns it would most likely happen while that person was not present. Sure, if I said "I agree with Alice when she said ...." while Alice was in the room and Alice's pronouns were "they", I might have been corrected. But again....never happened. Not once. I never met an "Alice/they/them".
- Even though I and roughly 50% of the workforce declined to participate in the pronoun declaration fad and remained silent about it, it was clear over time who was in on the game and who wasn't. NOT declaring your pronouns was in itself a political declaration that you simply could not avoid. It showed up on every online meeting. Subtle as it was, it explicitly divided participants in a business gathering for no good reason.
- We were all adults. If ever a person needed to be addressed in a manner not within traditional norms -- which never happened -- every one of us would have respected that person's wishes.
8. Up to now, everything I've cited has been to a certain degree subtle and for the most part unspoken: not explicit DEI. But that also changed and did so dramatically. Every corporation has mandatory employee training and orientation on issues around hostile workplace, sexual harassment and respecting co-workers. I have always found most of this a condescending waste of valuable work time because, again, adults can simply act like adults. But I also knew the real purpose of this was to indemnify employers from lawsuits.
So, OK, it was subtle, but let's get it over with ...... until....... the "DEI Consultants" showed up. The hostile workplace 20 minute training videos were replaced with hired professionals where we attended long, detailed courses (with final exams) where we were shown expensive but creepy depictions of supposed workplace interactions (the videography was first rate; the acting was cringe-inducing) that might have occurred with less than 1/1,000,000 of the audience. We were given dictionaries of words and phrases to avoid. There was a detailed "color code" that employees could use to declare their level of being offended during conversations. E-mails were inspected electronically by "inclusiveness filters". It was plainly ideological indoctrination that had nothing to do with business.
9. Finally, anybody who has also worked in technology, knows there are terms to define software and hardware to convey how components interact. Sometimes (rarely) some of the terminology can seem uncomfortable in certain settings, such as "master/slave" to describe a component issuing information and another component receiving it. That is an example that did slowly phase itself out of use, but technology does stick around longer than the social norms change. And even less explicit terms that define authority between issuing commands and acting on those commands gets defined as --- here it comes -- "non inclusive".
Why does this matter? For one, a 21st century developer designing a system will out of common sense, seek to avoid obvious terms like "master/slave", but to replace it with ...what? With the advent of DEI, this became problematic in a very real sense. And as some employees signed on full-scale to the DEI dogma, it got out of control. Old software had to be re-written. Technical meetings would be disrupted over "inclusive language" discussions. Technology is complex, changing this stuff is even more complex, very risky and very, very expensive. DEI affected the quality of products in a negative way.
10. My experience in this was purely commercial and technical. But some of our products were used by institutions where life and death matters. So it was disturbing. Even more disturbing to me is how this phenomenon even more intensely infected academia. "Decolonize Math" and "Inclusivity Reviews" of scientific papers have gone from being what should be a joke to real barriers to knowledge. And it also -- of course -- leads to rewarding intellectual quacks and frauds like Harvard's Claudine Gay.
Sorry for the TL/DR. Now that I'm semi-retired from Silicon Valley, I can finally vent about this. Before, I was reluctant to do so, even on an anonymous forum. End of rant. DEI cannot die soon enough for me.
