DEI Hiring being halted at Google?

It was BS at Google It really had gone too far

I feel diversity is good, research shows it helps in decision making. But apart from that, when you over-engineer it, and make the primary focus of an org, you're bound to lose. Google was on that path. Internal protests, wokeism and all of it.

TLDR; Inclusion benefits EVERYONE.

@SleepyInput , this is not directed at you or any one person , it is just a general rant, thanks for the opportunity to voice it.

As a product manager , I support DEI wholeheartedly. DEI is helpful and useful social concept if applied properly. But like everything good , it was misused , politicized, and abused. Movement was hijacked by people with ulterior, selfish motives. Now people hate it.

Think about people with disability, they face discrimination for no fault of theirs, opportunities are extremely scarce for them and there is bias against them. They get barely any social support from institutions. They must rely on NGOs that again have their own agenda. While over the years things have improved, we are still far from the goal.

My job is to solve problems and over the years I started to strongly believe that Inclusion benefits ALL. You can have a permanent , temporary, or situational disability and accommodations made for PWD serve everyone equally.

Have you heard of Curb cut Effect ? In early days, the curb (footpaths) did not have a curb cuts (small cuts with ramps) that you see now a days. It made it difficult for people using wheelchair to climb and get down from footpaths safely. In 1945 a disabled veteran and lawyer from US started the movement and won. Curb cuts were introduced. The effect is for everyone to see. those small ramps created for wheelchairs are used by people with kid strollers , skateboards, people pushing heavy delivery carts, bicycle riders, elderly using walking sticks , even people with heavy luggage with wheels. People looking at it today have no idea it was a disability accessibility feature.

Think about one handed mode on your phone - it helps people with permeant disability (Born with only one arm/ lost one in accident) , temporary disability (fractured arm in cast), or situational disability(holding kids/groceries)

Subtitles / Closed captions were introduced so that people with hearing disability could easily watch tv and understand. Today in gym I can keep my headphones on while running on treadmill and watch tv and still understand the news. yesterday the bar was too noisy to hear the tv , but captions helped me read the news.

Now to answer the question about including them in workforce. Please try this role play , imagine you are a deaf person and try using these latest AI voice-based assistants. I have tried and it is very difficult to use them as voice query gets a response only in voice. A deaf person can’t hear it , must go via - text to text route to use it. There is no voice to text option. You must jump many hoops to get it do its job.

Is this the experience the creators wanted to design ? Obviously not. Why it happened ? Maybe they did not consider the inclusion during ideation , design stages. And it could simply be, cause there are no disabled member to remind them of this on their teams.

If you still do not support inclusion , understand this. There are over a billion people in the world as per WHO with some sort of disability. Do you feel it is ok to ignore billion voices ? Today you or your loved ones may not be a PWD but have you seen the future ? It is one accident , one mistake away, and not even your mistake it could be someone else's fault entirely. What if your kids are born with some sort of disability , Will that make you support inclusion ? World is unfair , our goal should be to leave it as a better place than we found it.

@FelineFinancier any words?

When will Amazon implement this executive order. Too much DEI here