TRHLIM
- Thread starter cajunrevenge
- Start date
Sorry that you’re going through that. I hope it’s as simple as explaining the work-related issues that led to the PIP and HR telling the employee to pound sand. But a lot of HR people and companies are ****ing idiots.
Yes, to keep planes safe we should hire captains that aren’t afraid to be viewed as sexist if they don’t let their female trainee do something that might be dangerous. Women would seem to have the advantage here, but maybe we can find some programs to keep men in these roles.
One thing to clarify here: if the pilot that crashed the plane is a poor pilot, I’m 100% in support of her career as a pilot ending. A defense of even the forms of DEI programs I don’t personally support is not implicitly an argument against performance management. A woman can be unqualified to be a pilot for reasons unrelated to being born a woman, just as any individual person can be unqualified for some job. My position does not require a belief that all people have the same aptitudes, just that some people are very suddenly prone to looking for an excuse to blame diversity for anything they can. Enormous wildfires in LA? Lesbian fire chief. Helicopter crash? Minorities in the FAA for about a week until they could definitively pin it on a woman pilot.
It’s frustrating because there are so many legitimate critiques of progressive governance and the Democratic Party in particular that could be used here. Overly regulatory systems hampering results, performative political messaging, unrealistic expenditures toward climate initiatives that are negated by foreign production anyway, dismissive attitude toward rural voters and reliance on ideological purity, etc.
But the push to stop being curious about why something might have happened the exact moment a non-white male is shown to be involved in any part of the process limits what you might be able to actually solve if you look at the actual qualifications of the individuals, if their lack of performance was attributable to their race or gender, if there were actually other, more qualified candidates that might have been overlooked and if there was any specific direction to hire that person as a result of a DEI initiative. It’s a fair criticism to say that funding for DEI hiring initiatives are harming certain institutions, but when you just see a female crashed a plane and declare DEI struck again, you miss the chance to also ask if other parts of the system are a bigger cause.
It’s frustrating because there are so many legitimate critiques of progressive governance and the Democratic Party in particular that could be used here. Overly regulatory systems hampering results, performative political messaging, unrealistic expenditures toward climate initiatives that are negated by foreign production anyway, dismissive attitude toward rural voters and reliance on ideological purity, etc.
But the push to stop being curious about why something might have happened the exact moment a non-white male is shown to be involved in any part of the process limits what you might be able to actually solve if you look at the actual qualifications of the individuals, if their lack of performance was attributable to their race or gender, if there were actually other, more qualified candidates that might have been overlooked and if there was any specific direction to hire that person as a result of a DEI initiative. It’s a fair criticism to say that funding for DEI hiring initiatives are harming certain institutions, but when you just see a female crashed a plane and declare DEI struck again, you miss the chance to also ask if other parts of the system are a bigger cause.
sturg33
I
DEI initiatives have caused this response.
This airline in particular bragged countless times about how they have girl power running the planes and they don't need no men around!
It's true that this particular female pilot might be exceptionally qualified and not at all fault for piloting an airplane that ended upside down.
But the airline itself has required that we question the process. By definition, they lowered the standard of their pilots by prioritizing DEI. Sorry, this is unquestionably true.
Tapate50
Well-known member
Problem employees show themselves early
I get that, but I would argue it’s not really just a “woke” thing for companies to cover their ass when firing an employee, even if there’s no particular risk that a court would rule against you given the signs of poor performance. A lot of corporations will do that with every employee. If this is CA, it might be more warranted to blame leftists a little, but it’s not necessarily bad for a company to have its managers submit their detailed reasoning before firing an employee, even if it happens to coincide with a diversity-related reason. Lots of dumb managers out there, man.
I’m shocked at how low you can count then. I usually have most people pegged at least above their amount of fingers and toes.
Riddle me this: a company decides to spend more of their money on recruiting so that they may spend more time identifying and attracting talent that increases diversity within their organization. Maybe they accomplish this by temporarily running labor shortages while they seek a qualified candidate that meets their organizational standard, or perhaps they tell their investors to expect greater operational expenses initially due to the increased efforts, or they simply take the government’s free money to hire applicants that meet their standards. This would be a DEI program, and while there are several points here I’m sure would be non-starters for your support of them, it would not in any way lower the quality of the employees hired, right? It could even be discriminatory, ineffective or openly taking advantage of government programs and still not lower the quality of the employees if they still hired employees that met the expectations of the role. So DEI programs absolutely do not *require* us to question the competence of the individual employees. You have made that choice entirely on your own.
sturg33
I
If you are considering anything beyond merit, you are by definition de-prioritizing merit
When Joe Biden announces the next SC Justice will be a black woman, he is announcing that he will not be considering 94% of potential talent pool.
When my company announces that our board will be 50% women by 2025... they are telling the world that they will not consider high qualified men in their pursuit.
There is not a reality in which this does not lower the standard, because they are not capable of comparing the applicants they will consider against ones they don't
This airline in particular bragged about their girl power and now have images of a plane that it upside down
There is a massive difference between standards and optimization though. Basically every single time a company makes a hire, they are disregarding merit in some way. If I go out to hire someone and I have a budget of say $70k for the role, I’m de-prioritizing merit in the sense that anybody who has qualifications that would earn them more than that amount in the market is out of my reach now. The same thing happens with a company’s tolerance for leaving a key position open. Unless you find the absolute perfect unicorn candidate, you are de-prioritizing some aspect of your ideal qualifications to take a chance on an employee that meets your standards so that you can fill the position. No hiring decision is or can ever realistically be completely and utterly merit-based. That does not mean standards have been eroded through the hire of employees that check certain boxes. It could theoretically mean an even more qualified applicant did not get a job, but that’s a much different issue than the standards of a position.
Again, that’s not a full-throated defense of DEI programs as effective business practices. I’d imagine the main reason you’ll see many companies back away from DEI programs is not because they were hamstrung by the government, but because the government was subsidizing a lot of that through tax breaks and grants. I don’t actually disagree with the notion that there was waste in government diversity initiatives, because I’ve seen first-hand how companies can fall ass-backward into getting those tax breaks, not by prioritizing it, but by noticing there’s a program that happens to cover their natural work force. Entire communities have been declared HUBZones and companies already operating perfectly fine within those communities are having their employees subsidized by happenstance so long as they jump through a couple hoops. So I’m not really a hardliner on all DEI programs being positive, either in the private or public sector. But absolutely none of those issues pertain to an individual’s attributes relative to the standards of their industry.
That’s a fair criticism, except you’re still assuming the standards have been lowered. In the case of not being able to afford better talent, you’re not lowering the standards by not hiring an engineer with a Master’s in Aeronautical Engineering for a role that makes basic CAD drawings for $50k a year, are you? You’re lowering the potential surplus value of that hire beyond the standard, but you’re still prioritizing financial considerations over merit if that overqualified applicant interviewed for your position for some reason and asked for $200k a year. If your argument is just that companies should not use diversity as a consideration in the same manner, that’s a valid argument. But unless you can point to specific ways in which the standards were lowered, rather than the candidate pool restricted, you’re not proving a degradation of standards.
sturg33
I
um, ok. I guess I don't see the point. I'm not "lowering my standards" because I bought a boat instead of yacht. I couldn't afford a yacht
Sure, for example, both the army and marines reduced their fitness requirements to allow for greater female recruitment. and I don't think we need to re-hash the LAFD.
I'll share a story. I once worked a very large financial institution. 50K employees. Woke woke woke. We had about 10K engineers, and nearly 75% of them were men when I got there in 2017. HR assured us how problematic this was. I was involved in the tech talent development part of the org, and was closely involved with experiments ran to try to drive diverse hiring (i.e. more women).
The first test they did was blind resume evaluation. No names. The hypothesis was that tech leaders - mostly men - were biased towards hiring men. I'm sure you know where this is heading... but after 3 weeks of the experiment, there nearly double the applications of men that passed the first quality criteria standards, and a significant reduction of women applicants that did. Being younger and naive at the time, I thought this revelation would have been eye opening to our leaders. "wow - we actually have a bias towards bringing less qualified engineering in the company. This is great news for us to improve our talent."
That didn't happen. They killed the program. They went back to the old ways.
The next initiative was to give bonuses for managers of teams that had less than 60% of one gender. Lo and behold... nearly 65% of hires that year went to women. But here's the crazy part, over 80% applicants to engineering roles were men.
This was a clear, extreme example of DEI and it lowering our standards to check off boxes. It was also a clear message to me, a white man, that I would face an uphill battle working my way up the ranks... as similar initiatives and bonuses were being offered for sr titles.
The under-studied consequence of that... is it made me start to look for my next company. I was considered a top performer there 3 of my 4 years, promoted 3 times. And I decided to leave the company because of these policies.
These wouldn’t be policies I support, but I think it’s important to note you still haven’t mentioned any positional standards being lowered even in this very woke company you have first-hand experience with, let alone an industry and set of standards you don’t know anything about. I’m not naive enough to ignore the possibility of that incentive structure leading to poor hiring decisions, but it doesn’t follow that DEI programs inherently lower standards. Those hiring managers still needed to review applications, interview people and make selections. They didn’t just find the first woman they came across on the street and hire them. There’s a good debate to have about the way this decreases overall organizational effectiveness, but those are more complex issues than “girls can’t fly planes safely.”
sturg33
I
Sure it does. Because it has the background context that, when we removed names from the equations, women applicants didn't pass our initial quality standards at the same rate than when we knew they were women
The company had that knowledge and decided to put in incentive structures to increase worse candidates
But did 0 women pass your initial quality standards or just fewer? Because if even one woman in a given job req met the hiring standards, the hiring manager could game his bonus without lowering the baseline standard of the role. Not exactly great for the men in the req or the company’s long-term potential, but that’s a much different set of considerations than whether or not planes are crashing because we let unqualified women fly them.