Comment by LightHugger
3 days ago
> Some people have criticized that their company culture of libertarianism sometimes takes precedence over other important values including equity and inclusion.
To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some misguided quotas.
I don't want to get into this on this discussion because...well. video games. But consider the following: The organization and customers benefits from meritocratic hiring of the best candidates. But individual hiring managers have biases either for specific people (nepotism) or against groups of people (bigotry). Those individuals would be acting against the best interests of the company and customers whether they act consciously or not. A responsible company would adapt hiring processes to remove that kind of bias otherwise everyone suffers. The company suffers due to lower efficiency and blind spots in their points of view. Customers suffer due to worse output by the company. Some individual candidates suffer by being denied opportunities based on attributes they have no control over (gender, race, physical appearance) instead of the merits of their education, experience, and talents.
There's no single way to do this but people have lumped them all together and called them "quotas" (they're not, at least not in responsible processes). It really does a disservice to the fact that it's encouraging meritocratic hiring. Because for most of the 20th century (and even still today) employment was and is stratified by race and gender, not ability.
Meritocratic hiring of the best candidates is equality of opportunity, not equity/equality of outcome. Equity requires discrimination and dehumanization of individual people to achieve because racial distributions vary at an earlier stage than the hiring process. I agree that a responsible company tries to remove bias and doesn't discriminate on the basis of immutable characteristics, however...
It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.
If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.
It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.
You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.
The flat structure deadlocks projects and adds downward pressure to not take on ambitious ones (Half-Life 3?) as it requires massive-scale politicking.
Sounds like you're operating off of old knowledge from the Half-Life Alyx developer's commentary. They specifically changed their internal processes because of those issues.
It's crazy that, according to people like you, we've always been doing merit-based hiring and still the computer workforce is disproportionately white and male. Nothing fishy there at all.
Tbf if your graduating class is 89% male, and your declared tech majors are 80% male, the issue isn't necessarily on the workforce. It's clear we need to start much earlier in exposing tech to potential other audiences.
But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
There are factors that affect the education pipeline as well. Representation can make it appear as if some groups aren't welcome. Read about the Scully effect to see how simple representation (in fiction no less!) changed the number of women who grew up watching the X-Files who chose a field of science. Harassment during education has caused candidates to change majors. I've seen this one happen IRL to a friend. She ended up pursuing her software dev career independently of a college degree because the environment was so toxic.
The problem isn't just hiring, but helping hiring will help with the other two by addressing those cultural problems.
do you find it fishy 88% of the nursing workforce is female?
Yes, I do.
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"People like you" So prejudiced, maybe get that looked at.
It's a complicated topic, but no we have not always been doing merit based hiring. However, merit based hiring does result in imbalanced race and gender distributions due to long term societal issues and demographic distributions at earlier stages.
Basically, there is a skewed class distribution at the source. You have to fix it at the source via equality of opportunity and making our society more equal. I'm not a conservative, i'm very far left and strongly believe in making society more equal in general. However. Trying to fix it at the destination is called racial discrimination and is dehumanizing and evil and anyone who does it should suffer prosecution.
You don't get to dehumanize and discriminate against individual people for the greater good, i will personally go out of my way to see you receive consequences if you try this and you're doing it somewhere i can see. There's a lot of us with this opinion, hopefully your stance starts getting chilled from fear of blowback.
I see nothing wrong with prejudice against those working and arguing policies that, inadvertently or purposefully, keep minorities out of tech.
I have a question for you. Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?
I look forward to you and your army of white men marching on me saying they're tired of racial discrimination in the workplace. I'll send you guys right over to HR, and tell them that you're tired of me hiring so many black people. I'm sure it'll go well.
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