Merit First, Diversity Second
A good thing taken too far becomes a bad thing.
Diversity and inclusion (DEI) are good: if the team building a product is not diverse, considering that the user base is diverse, the team won’t have a sense for what users want. For example, an all-male team may not be able to understand challenges women face. In fact, one male-dominated team launched a social network that didn’t offer the ability to block people, because men aren’t stalked as much as women. A better product would have been launched had the team been more diverse.
Some principles of DEI are valid, like unconscious bias. In the first year of my job, I believed that software engineers from a certain geography can’t be as skilled as others, that the former can be skilled to an extent, but not as much as the latter. Within a few years, as I worked with highly skilled engineers from that geography, I realised that my original point of view was completely wrong. So I changed my beliefs to match reality, and told myself that from now on, I should not assume less of a person based on their background, such as gender, language, country or any other factor. I should assume the best of everyone, and make conclusions about people based on their work, not their identity. And that’s what I’ve been doing for most of my career. So the moral of the story is that we can have unconscious biases, and we should be aware of this possibility.
We should also use inclusive language when possible, like “person-hours” instead of “man-hours”. As another example, job postings should avoid using language that’s overly competitive, since that will tend to make women feel unwelcome, since women generally index higher on cooperation.
So, the spirit of diversity and inclusion is good.
But good things taken too far become bad. I've seen one company require at least X% of engineers being hired to be female. This is bad because you’ll hire less qualified engineers, girls who didn’t meet the bar in the first place. And if someone did meet the bar, she’d have been hired even without a quota. So, don’t have diversity quotas.
Some people, under the guise of DEI, try to do social engineering. For example, if despite your team’s best efforts at diversity, if everyone undergoes unconscious bias training and uses inclusive language and so on, if despite all these efforts, the team has too few female software engineers, that’s not a problem. Similarly, if too few nurses are male, that’s not a problem. Let people do what they want. I wouldn’t go and tell girls to be software engineers or guys to be nurses. But some radicals believe that a certain percentage of software engineers must be female. That’s how they want society to be, their vision of an ideal society. And they’ve co-opted DEI into a tool to reshape society to suit their ideology. This is as dangerous as the communists saying people should not own property, or that everyone should be paid similarly. So, DEI is not bad, but some DEI advocates are dangerous. Roles focused on DEI tend to disproportionally attract zealots. If you come across a DEI Champion or a Head of Diversity, run, don’t walk.
DEI extremists have made it taboo to question their ideology. This is how you enforce any ideology in society: you forbid questioning it. Everyone must think what you want them to think.
As an example, I’ve interviewed hundreds, maybe a thousand, engineers, and observed that female engineers are often enough less skilled than male. When I expressed that, an American pounced on me and attacked me for being biased. This critic confused two different things: a generalisation is not wrong, but applying it to an individual and assuming she’s less qualified is wrong. When I interview a female engineer, I don’t begin by assuming that she’s less qualified and expect her to work extra hard to prove herself. Statistics don’t apply to each and every individual. As an example, if someone said, “Indians are on average poorer than Americans”, attacking him for being racist would be dumb, since it’s a fact. But if an Indian buyer were to enquire about buying a private jet and he’s told, “You’re Indian, so you can’t afford this” that would be wrong. Generalisations are not wrong; applying them to an individual is. A generalisation is just an observation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to have this kind of reasoned conversation with my critic, since he regressed to repeating slogans he’d been told rather than using his brain. Maybe this issue was emotional enough for him that emotion overpowered reason.
After many years of out of control DEI, people are waking up to the fact that they’ve been taken for a ride by DEI hardliners. That’s why nowadays there's a backlash against DEI.