Part 3: Our Collective Order-Keeping Fictions
Part 3: Our Collective Order-Keeping Fictions
more stories and lessons from my first grown-up job
Advisory About Comments
I need all my time, energy, and attention during the week to focus on my new job. Comments for paid subs will be open until I go to bed on Sunday, November 3. This will be the usual pattern—whatever I publish during the week will be comments-closed until after work on Friday, when they will be opened for paid subs until the evening before I go back to work.
I apologize for the annoyance, but this is really helping me function better in my new job, which has to be my priority. Thanks for understanding.
Stephen King’s book, On Writing, encourages would-be novelists to write about what they know from their own jobs and work experiences. “People loooooooove to read about work. God knows why.” (Emphasis mine, based on how he narrated it in the audiobook version.)
I suppose he got that right. I estimate I have five posts worth of material, possibly a little more, about Fortune 500 life, and I’ll keep writing them as long as y’all continue to enjoy reading them. 😊
In part one (which is not behind the paywall), I explored five conclusions: one, my hypothesis on the real reason why huge US companies employ foreigners; two, that most managers are entirely useless; three, that stupidity is terrifyingly rampant; four, that bureaucracy exists to employ and thus collect taxes from cogs, and five, the revelatory role of remote work.
In part two, I went into some specific details of “stupidity is terrifyingly rampant,” from part one. In particular, how terribly insecure your data really is, regardless of what the company’s privacy policies promise, and why; explored a bit more of the consequences of offshoring customer service, and shared how egregiously overblown the managerial class plans for AI are, and what it means for you.
Here in part three, we’ll discuss DEI bullshit.
DEI Bullshit Is A Time-Sucking Parasite
The ESG (environmental, social, and governance) movement in corporate America purports to be about social responsibility and the promotion of same. To some extent, I suspect it actually is about those things. To whatever extent it prevents pollution and makes corporations prioritize investing in their local communities, I am grateful for its benefits.
But hiding in plain sight within the social — the S in ESG — is a time-sucking parasite that creates workplace situations too stupid to pass as farce. I mean that literally: some of the things that actually happened, at my first grown-up job, were so dumb that if I read them in a satirical novel I would close the book in disgust that the author had no subtlety. They’re that stupid.
And yet these things happen all the time.
Welcome to the world of DEI in the Fortune 500 workplace.
DEI’s Intended Role within ESG
Within ESG, the role of DEI programs is meant to be fivefold: one, talent attraction and retention; two, innovation and problem-solving; three, corporate reputation and consumer trust; four, investor expectations and financial peformance; and five, legal and regulatory compliance.
Points three, four, and five are all boring and redundant, and they flow from one and two anyway, so I will focus on points one and two.
First, I will be fair and point out the positives of these things. Why?
American culture can be very extreme. We pendulum-swing.
We are the people who went from slavery to race-based affirmative action in medical school admissions in 150 years, a historical blink. We go back and forth from one extreme to its opposite.
We elect Jimmy Carter, then Ronald Reagan. We elect Barack Obama, then Donald Trump. We go from 1984, a 49 state legitimate landslide by any definition—to an election that isn’t razor-thin, basically any situation where a definitive result is clear on Election Night constitutes a “landslide”.
This dynamic is part of our national character. It is also counterproductive, childish, and profoundly destructive.
Understanding the legitimate and serious problems that these efforts were an attempt to solve is useful in seeing how they became problems on their own, which allows us to understand what’s bathwater and what’s baby—and thus to avoid the kind of pendulum-swinging that Americans are so prone to.
Talent Attraction and Retention
DEI programs are meant to help companies attract and retain diverse candidates.
I absolutely affirm that everyone should be considered and judged as an individual. I hate, loathe, and despise group identity metrics. And I resent it—on a level deep enough that it’s come up in therapy more than a few times—each and every time I am regarded as an avatar for women, deaf people, white people, people with PTSD, disabled people, or any other group that I did not work very hard to join by my own conscious choice and willful desire.
But even I have to admit that there is a place for considering these things at times, and I’ll give you some examples.
Particularly as the world gets more globally connected and data becomes more and more crucial to decision-making, contexts and understanding of contexts are more important than they used to be.
How well can you expect an agent to solve a complex logistical problem—say, one involving both a refund from a package delivery company and an insurance claim for a seller who didn’t package something well—if that agent is from a part of the world where ordering things online isn’t the norm, as it is here? If the norms of customer service and understanding that everyone lives within the jurisdiction of the US Postal Service aren’t second nature to an agent, how well would you expect them to understand it?
If you need the dataset—which includes customer comments—for a ride-sharing app analyzed, who would you prefer? A worker who has never been on the same continent as someone who used a ride-sharing app, or someone who understands the ins and outs of ride-sharing apps because it’s his or her normal transportation method?
Similarly, an advertising agency is, in my opinion, justified to favor hiring by demographic markers that will help them serve their particular clients.
These considerations don’t have to amount to quotas, and they shouldn’t. Ever. But there are some areas where certain metrics are going to point in the right direction. Women make 85% of household buying decisions, and that number is a lot closer to 100% when the decisions relate to products used by children. An all-female team working on a product that is meant for children is much more likely to bring relevant life experience and the contexts for the same kind of decision-making that customers will make around buying. Similarly, men make almost as large a majority of the decisions about products used outdoors by homeowners (lawnmowers and the like).
Demographic and identity markers aren’t perfect predictors of things like this. I know this very well, as I am a woman who fits into very few of the stereotypes of my sex. But multiple things can be true at once, and it is also true that in many respects these demographic and identity markers get closer to being perfect predictors than anything else. And it’s both unrealistic and inefficient for people who hire (in situations where diversity in demographics can potentially help, which is not every situation) to not consider these things at all.
Innovation and Problem-Solving
This flows from the first idea. The idea is that diverse teams bring varied viewpoints, which can improve problem-solving and lead to innovative ideas. Research has consistently shown that diverse organizations outperform homogeneous ones in terms of financial returns and innovation. Here’s one report on such. It’s important to understand that diversity in and of itself isn’t the reason for this, which is a point that you will rarely hear made. Rather, it most often comes down to clarity. Diverse teams require higher levels of clarity, which in turn facilitates problem-solving.
Coming from a company where I was the only American on my team, I often had to go through painstaking, even excruciating efforts to be clear. I had to make things clear to people who shared none of my context and almost none of my experiences. That was annoying, but it was also very, very helpful.
Likewise, the kind of clarity that is required in a group of people with very different life experiences can be extremely helpful in solving problems.
One of the most common experiences in learning to code is getting confused, and then having to explain the problem to someone else in seeking help—only to find the process of getting clear enough on the problem to explain it to someone else causes the student to find the answer. This also happens all the time in math tutoring. I ask clarifying questions to get clear on what the student doesn’t understand, and the process of answering those clarifying questions causes the student to understand.
This is just one reason why diversity on a team that solves complex problems can be legitimately helpful.
Having given the devil his due, here’s why DEI bullshit has become a time-sucking parasite. I have dozens of stories, and perhaps over time I’ll share all of them. For today, we’ll focus on cartoon gay characters, the glass ceiling that prevents genderfluid people from achieving career success, and the crucial importance of visibility for gray asexuals on the neurodivergent spectrum.
I wish I were kidding.