Nobody fucked up DEI more than the big tech companies and FAANG. The amount of nonsense showboating and trying to make it look like they really cared when all they wanted to do was lip service has cost them dear. I don’t know about other companies, but at my company the amount of brain drain and smart people leaving has really come to hurt the company. At some point the company made up nonsense rules like X # of people in your reporting chain should be either women, or POC. The company took a goal to hire POC leaders as a metric (i.e, X # of directors and VPs had to be POC, namely Black). While the goals were admirable, the problem was that there was no talent to meet that demand. The result was in pandemic years, if you were a woman or black person you would be promoted without batting an eyelid. I saw this happen all around me where so many of my own colleagues (Indians, Asians, Whites) were overlooked because they wanted to promote women and black people. I was like, fine, it’s great you want to promote them, but at least promote the people who *deserved* it. But nope, this was all about filing in the numbers and showboating they did something. The end result? The smart folks who gave their all for the company simply just left for other pastures. The people who got promoted because they were in that special group never brought that innovation and change that company needed. So here we are in 2025, when the company has lost immense group of talent because of these efforts, and the people who stayed on are just not good enough. I would not have returned if I did not come back at the higher level and higher pay scale.
So yeah, I am kind of glad the company is winding down DEI efforts. Even when re-joined the company back, my director was forced to hire POC woman for a senior role in his leadership team; she came with great background but misfit for the role. She left within a year leaving such a big mess that it’s still taking a toll on the team she managed. She was a great academic, just a complete misfit for this team – and she left the team as angry as others were. So when that leadership position opened, I expressed interest, only for my director to tell me very up front he had to hire a woman for it, period. Which he did, and now we have another woman (white this time) who is much better than old one but also struggling a lot. Eventually because my own manager quit, I ended up being in the leadership team but the whole experience has been quite dumb. Its no secret to any of us that our director (and now manager) has always hated this DEI shit (and he is a Trumpkin), but this whole thing has corroded so much of working experience in big companies its not funny.
So yeah I am kind of glad the company is winding down some of these efforts. These were just lip service efforts and they really did not care about anyone or anything in general. They got the flak and called out for it. If they were really serious about this, they could’ve done so much more and so much different, but they took the least common and least resistive path so they could just off. Now its bombed on them and its left blacks, women and POC in an even worse space than they were before.
