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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Its often less of a training thing and more of a hiring thing.

There are two competing ways to view jobs:

  1. A job is a thing that needs to be done. It is not something people normally want to do, so you need to pay someone to do it.
  2. A job is a societal role and measure of social standing. The best people have the best jobs, the pay is part of the package for being such a great person.

The problem as I see it is that both views are correct, but only so long as most employers view jobs in the first way "as a thing that needs to be done".

DEI is specifically trying to push a set of social standings that it wants, by make that part of the company hiring practices. That is a luxury belief for companies to indulge in. At the end of the day labor is one of the most expensive factor inputs for most companies, and being dumb about a huge portion of your costs isn't a way to run a successful company.

The type of complaints I hear from DEI people are along the lines of "you say you want to hire more female or [specifc race] programmers, but the gender/race mix of our employees is unchanged". To which the companies have somewhat hilariously responded by saying "well it was our DEI department's job to get us more female and [specific race] programmers, and they failed so we are going to fire them to show that we take this job seriously". Because the companies still view jobs as a thing that needs to be done, and DEI departments are failing to get the thing done.