There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
How well would the tech industry do if they fired all the autistic people for "not being team players"? How many dev teams are there without at least one furry, trans person, or socially awkward geek?
The irony is that DEI promotes merit by forcing companies to justify hiring beyond basic “cultural fit” vibes.
I’ve been in the business and seen a ton of hires on vibes. DEI actually asked people to expand the talent search, not hire anyone unqualified (which is what the anti-DEI folks are desperate to have us believe it did).
I predict some major EEO lawsuits will eventually bring the pendulum back in the other direction because my sense is that the return to vibes hiring (and RIF-ing) is resulting in very actionable discrimination cases.
The enthusiasm for disparaging DEI combined with a lack of articulation of how they plan to quantify 'qualifications' in a non-biased manner. My sense is that they don't plan to do this at all, they don't have a plan, and they are going to blunder into patterns of discriminatory practices that DEI frameworks were protecting them against.
If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.
Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on, prefilter insufficiency "diverse" candidates from the pool presented to teams, or implement internal quotas to meet external funding or contract requirements.
Not to mention the actual external requirements for "diversity" from public tender process, government backed funding bodies, and politically protected mega wealthy.
If hiring practices were purely operating on merit and free from discrimination, we wouldn't have studies repeatedly showing that people with the 'wrong' names, and otherwise identical resumes, weren't called back as frequently.
> Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on
HR departments have screwed around with delays in the interview process long before anyone ever imagined the concept of expanding the candidate pool, doing blind resume screening, and standardizing the interview process. I don't think having fairer hiring processes created this problem.
> If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.
Yes, there would, because un-diverse candidates (not white, young males from a handful of schools) would never get their foot in the door. Companies only interview a small fraction of their candidates.
> It’s not like we have a term like “individual contributor” or anything in the industry.
Perhaps I'm missing something here.
To me "individual contributor" means anyone who is NOT: A (technical) "Lead", "Chief", "Architect", or (possibly) "Staff" anything, and has no management or team-leader responsibilities.
Alas, I’ve learned that while everyone wants to hire them to fix their hideously fucked systems, they really don’t enjoy being told that their systems are, in fact, hideously fucked. They’d much prefer you quietly put out fires while biting your tongue about how they aren’t actually fixing any root causes.
I'm not saying there can't be very clear counter examples, I guess the overall sense though is that "being a team player' is generally considered an attractive quality in any employee. If A is a team player and B isn't, and they're otherwise equivalent, you're probably going to take/keep A.
It's not like (most) hiring managers put "not a team player" in the pro column.
The problem is that people are being cut for not being perceived as a team player, because they don't exactly fit the narrow perspective avoided by the dominant social culture. That doesn't mean they aren't team players.
For example: someone not always looking into your eyes while talking can be perceived as "rude". Same for wearing noise-canceling headphones in a talk-heavy environment. Oh, you don't drink alcohol during the "optional" Friday-afternoon company mixer? That's just weird. Want to have a day off for Eid rather than Christmas? Wellll, you did ask for it six months in advance and we did approve it already, buuuuut Dave planned a last-minute meeting which conflicts with the mandatory team meeting, so we moved the mandatory team meeting onto your day off... We'll just pay the hours you spent doing first-line support during Christmas in cash, okay?
heres an article that discusses how inflated diversity could possibly be a cause of social tension. the article's abstract concludes with a shrug ('too many factors!') but it does provide links to research papers arguing both for and against this case.
on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings, therefore social behaviours could be assumed to a higher degree. reference behavioural encodings drastically diverge across cultures (as embodied by religious value sets, or at a different meta level, the idea of low trust vs. high trust societies). based on this drastic divergence, predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity.
so i see that jacking up societal entropy leads to lowered societal cohesion. but thats just my stance and id love to hear yours.
> on the surface it seems pretty clear to me. behaviour is encoded in genetics. if one were surrounded by the same group for a few thousand years, they would share a common base of encodings...
Which homogenous country with thousands of years of existence did you have in mind when writing this??
none, because i said group, not country. the history of my own ethnic subpopulation can be traced back around a millenia or two, perhaps that biased my writing?
I couldn't disagree more. "predictions made about one's neighbour scale downwards in accuracy relative to increased cultural diversity"? I feel like this is just a fancy way of saying that you're uncomfortable with people being different from you. The social tension you're describing is in your own head. Even the article you're citing doesn't even agree with what you're saying.
your post is an ad hominem without substance to back the personal accusations within. i said there were arguments both in favor of and against diversity. the article i posted showed arguments both in favor of and against diversity. obviously some contradictions will present when looking at both sides.
diverse, millenia old, genetically encoded behavioural structures exist in our shared reality. id love to discuss this idea and the exact types of behaviours that can be encoded, down to the generational timespans required for encoding. that way we can talk about my idea in objective good faith.
'its all in your head' isnt objective good faith. applying the golden rule, you clearly accept bad faith ... man you couldnt tolerate a dissenting idea even momentarily before bringing out social ostracization and logical fallacies! sounds pretty similar to the behaviour of a racist, were you projecting?
that was said facetiously. im not trying to accuse you of anything, rather to show how it feels to be accused. to conclude i think its pretty easy to predict what my neighbours are eating for dinner at home and pretty hard in the city so youre gonna have to try a bit harder to convince me that the evidence of my eyes and ears is wrong.
Human populations dont share enough genes when they do share culture for this argument to make sense, people identifying as X culture but with Y genetics don't magically act like Y - saying "genetically encoded behavioral structures" is usually just code for "black people are dumber than white people" so you should understand why people are assuming bad faith.
thank you for clarifying why bad faith was assumed, that makes sense ... im pretty sure different levels of intelligence do present across racial/cultural borders, but assigning that to any one factor (ie. black=dumb) is unscientific
If a qualification for the role is "appreciation for certain less represented cultures/ideas/..." then sure. Otherwise, for a backend c++ engineer the benefits are significantly less obvious, to the point it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill.
The goal should be to hire the best team for the use case, regardless of gender/race/culture/background.
Appreciation isn't always enough, lived experience provides a lot of value as well.
See all the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names/Addresses/Birthdays/Phone Numbers/Time Zones/etc, for example. Do you want a backend engineer who designs a 64-character ascii text field for legal name and have everyone nod in agreement, or would you rather have one who knows that it isn't going to work for their cousin "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso"?
> it's really hard to make a case for why DEI concerns should trump traditional evaluation metrics for skill
It doesn't. The goal of DEI has always been to attract a diversity of perspectives, all else being equal. Nobody ever proposed choosing a woefully unqualified diverse candidate over an obviously-qualified Generic White Guy. The only people who would oppose that would be the unqualified Generic White Guy who just happens to be the nephew of the CEO's golf buddy.
I don't know why someone with a cousin named Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso is that much of a better hire than someone named Jón Bergþóruson, 王小明, Sukarno (with no surname), גִּדְעוֹן בֶּן־גּוּרְיוֹן , or Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Wilhelm Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg. None of whom would classically qualify as diversity hires.
Hiring someone in the off chance that their ethnicity gives them some unique critical unknown unknown that will pop up half a decade down the line resides in the same mental space as a programmer writing `if (5 == i)` in case a future programmer accidentally deletes an =. It's just speculative defensiveness whose efficacy is simply not well established by actual research. And, in my view, just works to confound actual signals that, evidently, gitlab and other employers feel get unfairly overshadowed when emphasizing explicitly pro-diversity hiring policies.
McKinsey has studied this extensively had has repeatedly found that diversity is financially beneficial to companies. They've had at least 4 reports on the subject.
It's obvious why this is the case if you sit down and think about it. Echo chambers of like-minded individuals can't understand customers as well as a workforce of people who represent the diversity of those customers.
This isn't just diversity of race or gender, it's also diversity of thought and background.
Also critical and under-emphasized: the E and I in DEI, equity and inclusion. Power distance and lack of inclusion can railroad companies into giving the people with the most power the most influence on decisions, rather than giving the best ideas a chance to breathe.
In business a classic example might be "men designing women's clothing." How are you going to understand your customers if none of your employees and leadership resemble those customers? Perhaps you can figure it out and make some decent products but your competitor who has more diversity in their workforce is likely to outperform you, which is exactly what McKinsey's studies have demonstrated.
I will also point out that the only reason anyone started questioning this obviously true business concept and changing opinions into being against DEI is because the Republican Party's strategists figured out that they could appropriate and leverage the term "DEI" and attach it to the latent reactionary racism that much of the US still holds dear.
You can get away with saying "I don't like DEI" in public but if you say "I don't like black people" or "I don't think women should get hired for important roles" [1] that is obviously not acceptable, even though a large percentage of Americans feel that way. Right wing media twisted a largely innocent term into a useful dogwhistle.
Citing those studies should be peak confirmation bias.
So McKinsey made a study with a low risk feel good conclusion with outcomes that are completely subjective based on data that can be completely massaged and we are supposed to go all in with DEI and discrimination?
The idea that DEI is a discrimination program is a false implantation by right wing media.
Discrimination is the polar opposite of what DEI programs intend to implement. Unfortunately, we’ve been fighting the tail end of the civil war for the past century and the establishment sees equality as discrimination against their privilege.
Those McKinsey/HBR studies are trash. They privilege the hypothesis, overlook the obvious ecological fallacy at play and add in a bit of a sampling bias for good measure. The fact that East Asian Economies are all booming and exporting globally with ~0 diversity and unique cultures ought to refute this notion. I'm sure there is some no true scotsman line you can play here about how the true meaning of DEI, and I would agree that the stated goals of DEI are all laudable. But in practice these initiatives often amounted to unprincipled discrimination and venal power grabs, which is why they are so widely despised.
The teams in the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, the inventors of the transistor, the guys who designed the Hoover dam, who wrote Doom, etc. etc. etc. etc. were not very diverse.
You might not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
It seems like you’re using the achievements of white men as some kind of odd way to put down the achievements of people who aren’t men. They’re “peak performance” but everyone else isn’t, is that what you’re implying?
Ever heard of Ada Lovelace?
Grace Hopper, inventor of the compiler?
Katherine Johnson, who performed the calculations for John Glenn's Friendship 7 orbital flight, also did some calculations for the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions.
Margaret Hamilton, who created the term “software engineer” among other accomplishments as a computer programmer for the Apollo project.
Adele Goldberg, part of the team who developed Smalltalk.
You brought up Doom, so I’ll bring up the creative director of Uncharted series Amy Hennig, Kim Swift the game designer for Portal, Shannon Loftis at Microsoft, Ellen Beeman game designer for the Wing Commander series…
I think the industry's greatest strength is actually outsourcing bulk of the work to culturally homogeneous, cheaper labor countries of Eastern Europe and South [East] Asia.
Most DEI programs at big companies ended up setting goals based on things like race and sex. Zealots in HR departments then started implementing programs to change hiring and promotion and compensation to implement progressive identity politics at work, under the DEI label. These things happened in secret, because the companies didn’t like to highlight how being the wrong race or sex means your career is worse off.
That’s totally illegal and discriminatory but companies were not facing consequences for it under the Biden administration. The constant injection of DEI politics all over society - at work, in movies, in ads, etc - led to a backlash and personally I think it is one of the things that led to someone like Trump being re-elected. And this administration is very against DEI ideology. That’s one reason corporations quickly abandoned it - they didn’t want to face legal scrutiny now.
Another is that DEI culture produced no positive results, as expected. Companies already had incentives to hire the best employees they can. If you change that with other incentives thrown in, it’ll make things worse. And ten years after DEI began to appear everywhere, it was obvious it produced no benefit at best, and led to worse teams at worst.
Another reason is simply that a lot of the activists pushing this type of ideology grew out of the activist age group. And I think many of them likely don’t hold those beliefs as strongly anymore. But either way, younger people are different. Especially young males who are more conservative.
All of that and other things has led to DEI being removed or at least de emphasized.
> There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.
Okay, I'll bite. Why is it a strength, and why is it the greatest strength?
All people are equal, so it shouldn't matter if you have an all Asian team, an all black team, or any mix of all races.
Groups formed of people with similar life experiences have a greater tendency to fall into group-think that misses out on both giant errors and giant opportunities compared to more varied groups.
And all people aren't the same, you want a mix of minds and skills for most types of work. I'd totally hire someone that couldn't really do that much directly but was fun to be around and connected introverts that have some (potential) synergies in their ideas and generally made the group more productive over all.
Especially in business, the actual (not the managerial) judgment is the collective judgment on the whole groups output and actions by the market. Forging a high performing group out of different people is not the same as maximizing the median metric on some individual test of skill. Like quality, it's a bit undefinable, tho unmistakable when you experience it.
industry's greatest strength? where did that idea come from? hiring a bunch of didnt earn its based on race or sex? would you want your brain surgeon to be dei or do you want someone who is really good at the job?
Big Tech CEOs having a front-row seat at Trump's 47 inauguration should give you a decent hint: they bribed the right people, so now they get to enjoy the kickbacks. There's no risk of being regulated to death right now, so there's no need to pretend having the same values the Democrats pretend to have.
Corporate DEI was never real. There's no "push against" it, simply because there was never a genuine push for it. Large companies don't have moral values - if they did their CEOs wouldn't be billionaires.
I keep seeing this term “earned” ITT; what does this mean to you? Did you earn something which you were denied when a less-experienced other person got a job? We all have two brain cells and understand there’s a tradeoff being made here, and it sucks being on the other side of that, but i struggle to see what privilege you believe you have or should have.
Yes, MONEY. Companies and their management couldn't care less about DEI, they care about pleasing whoever in in power in order to get benefits and make as much money as they can. You could literally have Hitler in power now and you would see what companies would do for their survival.
Government put their national interest ahead of NGO organisations should not come as a surprise to anyone.
This reads like a failing part on the organisers to manage such risk, and decided to kick up a stink about it instead of implementing a fallback strategy.
It's Friday and the conference is Tuesday. Half their people, it sounds like, at least, are on the ground in Zambia already.
You'd take a conference a year in the making and shift it online over a weekend from your hotel room in a developing country? No you would not. I don't blame them for not doing that.
Precisely, the industry needs to empower the engineers to shift left and integrate security as a part of the SDLC. this is the only way to provide continuous assurance in the age of AI.
No need for this kind of attitude here. If you can extract more value out of a customer using more data points, wouldn't you? Or will you simply leave money on the table for someone else to take.
I agree, if you can take advantage of a situation in some way, it's your duty as an American to do it. Why should the race always be to the swift, or the jumble to the quick-witted? Should they be allowed to win merely because of the gifts God gave them? Well I say, cheating is the gift man gives himself.
Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
Whether they should or shouldn't, you have to expect that your company has root on your work device or at least some sort of corporate admin profile that gives them access to everything on the device and all attached peripherals. This has been pretty standard at IT / tech companies for as long as I've been in the workforce. I personally wouldn't do anything personal on a work computer, from sending personal E-mails all the way up to storing nudes on it. Why do that when a separate personal computer is cheap and solves the problem entirely?
EDIT: I remember, an example of this actually came up a while ago on HN. An Apple employee had to return a device unwiped, due to legal discovery, but the device had intimate pictures on it[1]. Oops! Don't do that, people.
Ask your IT department what they're tracking and they'll tell you. And yet I assume you still continue to go to work or do not actively seek out non-surveiling companies. By "everybody," maybe iI should clarify that it’s "majority" instead.
That's fine but realize you are not representative of the average tech worker or indeed any white collar worker such as those we are talking about in this post.
You're right, maybe they should put cameras in there too. But there's a reason we don't yet every worker still explicitly or implicitly knows not to use their work computer for personal tasks, as people can and do get fired for doing so.
This is a ridiculous statement. Everyone I know at my company uses work laptops for personal stuff. It's not in the land of freedom though, so great leaders like yourself can't fire people at will.
TBH at this point I don't believe you are a real person.
I stopped doing any personal stuff on a work laptop long time ago, like 10+ years ago. There is absolutely nothing on my work laptop which is not work related. Working from home though helps, I always have my laptop next to me. Same with the phone, under no circumstances I will do anything work related on my personal phone (and yes I do have a company provided phone with MDM and etc).
Consider, do they ever go on explicit websites on that computer? No? Because they know that's surveiled while a personal computer for the same purpose is not. As I said, people do know the difference and might do light personal things like googling something unrelated to work but wouldn't do e.g. banking on a work computer. If they do, well, it'll be their fault if they ever get fired for doing so.
The fact that you don't believe people who don't share your same opinion on mixing work and personal stuff are somehow not "real" is part of the problem.
The semi-official policy of my employer in Denmark is you can watch porn on a work computer, so long as you're paying for it. (This reduces the risk of malware etc.)
I say semi-official because someone asked the question at a Q&A training thing with IT, and that was the IT manager's response.
> Limited private use of these tools is often permitted, generating a level of expectation by employees for privacy: employers should not routinely read employee' emails or check what they are looking at on the internet.
Most companies just don't have a reason to look through the computer they're letting you use to do your job. Don't give them a reason.
Maximizing shareholder value by observing you doing job in the pursuit of replacing you with a very small shell script is a great reason that they've just discovered.
Get your own laptop, pay for your own cellphone, use your own internet service, etc. If you create anything of value on their property or with their property or during times they're paying you in any capacity, expect them to use it for profit.
Exactly, no one is stopping one from using their personal devices for any personal purpose, and the fact that somehow people are defending wanting to do personal things on a work laptop is utterly baffling to me. Like another commenter said, I always grew up with the notion, legal and social, that a company laptop is absolutely not your property and companies can and will look through it. Use your own devices for your own tasks.
But the legal notion from where you grew up might not apply worldwide right? People aren't saying you are wrong, they are just saying things are different in other places.
Where I grew up you do have legal right and social expectation not to be under surveillance at work. You even have an expectation of privacy in public spaces - I know this is not the case in other countries, but I accept/know that and it would be senseless to imply this is expected everywhere.
> I mean I have my own laptop and phone, why would I use a work device for that stuff?
Because you're traveling for work, and carrying two separate laptops eats into your limited baggage size/weight. Things are marginally better now that everything uses the same standard charger, but not much.
I make it a point to use the office bathrooms only to excrete food I ate from the work cafeteria. Personal food I ate at home I excrete in my personal bathroom.
It might surprise you, but culturally, not all companies are this way. I know some are, but some are very different.
100% of the people at my company use their computer for personal tasks, and this is permissible under our policies. Our company is fully BYOD and owns zero computers, and zero cell phones.
That sounds like a truly dystopian take to me, but suppose you're right and nobody should ever use their work computer for anything personal.
Per TFA, this thing is literally taking screenshots of what is on the employee's screen. At work my screen sometimes had things such as: performance data on other employees, my own PII from HR systems, PII from customers, password managers, etc. It's also logging keystrokes. How many times do you type passwords a day.
Collecting that kind of information on purpose is truly wild. Imagine the security safeguards you would need just to prevent it from leaking. Wait what, they're explicitly collecting it to train LLMs with it? God help us all.
Your screenshots go to your managers, not just anyone in the company. At Meta there are very strict safeguards for preventing employees e.g. stalking their exes, so I'd assume the same security is used for even PII filled images.
Im pretty surprised you're getting so much flak for this. This is the least controversial opinion I've seen on HN. I've been working for ~30 years, and every job I've had, if you actually looked at the IT policies, they were all very clear that work devices were for work, personal devices were for personal stuff. It wouldn't even occur to me to cross the streams. Carrying a second phone for personal stuff is a trivial burden.
I'm also very surprised, so much so that one of my comments got flagged for it. Seems like it's a few dissenters while others have mentioned concurring with this fact as I also have always been under the impression that work hardware is for work only. And then some people are talking about how it's authoritarian or anti human, like, it's not that deep.
> every job I've had, if you actually looked at the IT policies, they were all very clear that work devices were for work, personal devices were for personal stuff
There's quite a difference between that and zero privacy, and there's also quite a difference between "IT policy says" or "the law permits" and "this is how things ought to be".
That said, between necessary endpoint security and the potential to get caught up in corporate legal disputes I feel like maintaining a strict separation is advisable. But that doesn't mean I support unnecessarily invasive surveillance or think it's a good thing.
You already do and your consent is part of your employment. Check your employee handbook, search for things like "data privacy" and understand how https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf applies in the modern world, especially around AI. TL;DR companies can do whatever they want with your work / observe you and you have no real meaningful recourse.
/facepalm If we're going to debate norms and ethics, sending one liners into cyberspace won't get far. There are better ways. Invest in your conversational skills and listening skills, please. Otherwise you are a moth and HN is a streetlamp.
> Tbh that's to be expected, the work machine is the company's property and there shouldn't be any expectation of privacy.
> I work at a tech firm in India
First I wondered how can you have such a low expectation on privacy, then you answered my question. What you need in India is more unionization and fight against corruption. It is becoming worse here in Europe but in India you do not have the protections that we have. Without that you will have no rights.
You will have to fights to get rights at your job. In the same way that Europeans are going to have to fight to keep them.
I am a European in Europe and I expect the same. Why would I assume otherwise? The company laptop is full of spyware, starting from the OS. I have no reason to consider it "mine", and no desire to do so. If I want to do anything private (including things that my company would not like) I can do so from my private devices.
Europe is a big place, but in my area of Europe it is very illegal to monitor employees this way. If you were to be fired for something that illegal surveillance turned up, I would consider it a good thing - with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.
> with the settlement money you could take a couple years of vacation.
In many EU countries even if privacy protection is strong on paper, the settlement will be so low compared to US that you won't afford to take any vacation.
I've never worked a software development job where I didn't have a company-provided machine that I installed Linux on. I installed the OS, I have root on the machine, I wiped it and returned it empty when I was leaving the job.
Lucky you, I guess. In all the companies I worked for I have had a company-provided Windows laptop where the OS was managed by IT. The degree of freedom (e.g. what software could I install, what websites were blocksd) varied.
No to disagree with you here because I wholly support this position. But I can see the problem from both angles. The problem, it seems to me, is that, and Im not sure which came first, employees started being reckless at work, probably because employers stopped caring about the treatment of their workers, which ramped up the viscous cycle to where we are now.
I can see an argument for companies not trusting there employee's because most employees harbor borderline corrupt thinking in their work place and have terrible work ethics, of course all of this is brought on by corporate culture so its there fault in the first place, but im not exactly sure what started where.
If "most" employees are corrupt and have terrible ethics, why is the company hiring them in the first place? I don't think I've ever worked anywhere I thought that a majority of my coworkers fit this description. This sounds pretty much identical to what the parent commentee said: it's a hiring problem. Either the company is bad at hiring people who don't have these traits or they're actively selecting for it.
> A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
I know you’re in India, but in the US, could this not be considered intellectual property theft on “right of publicity”? Your persona and working style is one of your core values you bring to market; building a simulacrum of that is not something I expect to be part of the “your output is the company’s IP” in an existing contract.
I will give a company the right to try to reproduce my output. But my very likeness and modus operandi? No.
Here's how a refusal to them doing whatever they think would maximize shareholder value with any of your output or data they collect from your company computer would actually go down: the company would do something you didn't like, you'd try to complain about it, HR would listen and document everything. In the best-possible case, they'd let you personally opt out. More likely, since you're likely very easy to replace in their minds, they'd refer you to their data privacy clauses in their acceptable usage policy section of the employee handbook, maybe reference the notice sent out to everyone about how they're doing this, then fire you for performance reasons a few months later. You'd be given an NDA and a very average severance, then you could choose to try to hire a lawyer (who would take at least a third of any pre-tax settlement amount) and fight them, in which case they'd settle for more or less the same as the severance package (and keep in mind both that and any court settlement are both taxable income, so you're not getting a windfall in any case), or you'd just sign the NDA and take the severance with no admission of wrongdoing on their part and no legal recourse.
Large companies employ entire orgs of lawyers who specialize in these matters, and it is literally their job to protect the company, not the employees, from lawsuits like this. Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course. Welcome to America, land of the free for corporations which are legally people, just ones with infinite lives who cannot be arrested / imprisoned but can make legal decisions but cannot be subpoenaed. See eg https://www.theverge.com/policy/886348/meta-glasses-ice-doxx... for how the C-suite thinks about this type of thing.
> Is it fully legal and in the clear? Probably not. Will they still 100% get away with it and leave employees with no realistic options or upside attempting to fight it? Of course.
I am aware of "how the C-Suite thinks about this type of thing", but this is also a good example to surface here of what to redline in future employment contracts. Yes, that will likely shut you out of a lot of places, but the opposite is beyond learned helplessness: it is capitulation to a future that will not end well for the tech worker.
Strong disagree (especially under US law). Consider what this means for union organizing in the context of this 2022 NLRB memo.
> Under settled Board law, numerous practices employers may engage in using new
surveillance and management technologies are already unlawful. In cases involving
employer observation of open protected concerted activity and public union activity like
picketing or handbilling, the Board has recognized that “pictorial recordkeeping tends to
create fear among employees of future reprisals.”10 The Board accordingly balances an
employer’s justification for surveillance “against the tendency of that conduct to interfere with employees’ right to engage in concerted activity.”11 In that context, “the Board has long held that absent proper justification, the photographing of employees engaged in protected concerted activities violates the Act because it has a tendency to intimidate.”12
Wait so the engineers doing novel work are ousted; you fire the engineer that had the skill set to produce the work in the first place? Surely this is creating a Stasi-like neighbour snitching environment with chilling effect where the better you do the faster you become a target for replacement by engineer's incentivized to win points by replacing you. Even being very charitable where the scenario is the code was so poor that the code the employee is working on is so entrenched in domain knowledge they've become a huge bus factor, an LLM is going to make that kind of code worse. I'm struggling to imagine the subset of people this replaces that is not a long term detriment to everyone working there. Those people became "key personnel" for a reason no?
Just speculating, but the intention wasn't reducing key personnel risk. It was so that your employer could fire them and replace them with an agent running off of their associated skills.md.
At the risk of sounding like an LLM, a laptop is not just "something you get at work", it's literally your work tool. If you were hired at Shit Producers Inc as a defecator, you'd damn bet they would surveil the bathroom stalls there.
Well, no, there should be an expectation of privacy; an employer shouldn't just be able to have a palantír for their employees.
>I work at a tech firm in India, and we are encouraged to create skills.md based on the traits of our colleagues, with the intention of reducing key personnel risk. A handful of engineers were let go as the result of a re-alignment, and their AI counterparts are actively maintaining their code.
Okay, now this sounds like satire. But I suppose that's the way the world is going.
The proposed industry solution is to use agents to review PRs, as not to slow down the velocity of delivery...
My current workplace is going through a major "realignment" exercise to replace as many testers with agents as humanely possible, which proved to be a challenge when the existing process is not well documented.
The fact that anyone in leadership would ever think this is even remotely possible - given my experience in the general state of requirements / contracts / integrations / support - makes me bleed from my earholes just a little bit.
It's starting to just feel a little like an excuse to call everyone on deck for "a few weeks trying 9-9-6". But even then the lack of traction isn't between the eyeballs and the deployment. You'll still be spinning wheels in that slippery stuff between what a customer is thinking and what the iron they bought is doing.
So you essentially trust the output of the model from beginning to end? Curious to know what type of application you're building where you can safely do that.
Edit: to clarify, I know these models have gotten significantly better. The output is pretty incredible sometimes, but trusting it end to end like that just seems super risky still.
I did an experiment today, where I had a new Claude agent review the work of a former Claude agent - both Opus 4.6 - on a large refactor on a 16k LOC project. I had it address all issues it found, then I cleared context, and repeated. Rinse and repeat. It took 4 iterations before it approached nitpicking. The fact that each agent found new, legitimate problems that the last one had missed was concerning to me. Why can’t it find all of them at once?
It is more like a wiggly search engine. You give it a (wiggly) query and a (wiggly) corpus, and it returns a (wiggly) output.
If you are looking for a wiggly sort of thing 'MAKE Y WITH NO BUGS' or 'THE BUGS IN Y', it can be kinda useful. But thinking of it as a person because it vaguely communicates like a person will get you into problems because it's not.
You can try to paper over it with some agent harness or whatever, but you are really making a slightly more complex wiggly query that handles some of the deficiency space of the more basic wiggly query: "MAKE Y WITH NO ISSUES -> FIND ISSUES -> FIX ISSUE Z IN Y -> ...".
OK well what is an issue? _You_ are a person (presumably) and can judge whether something is a bug or a nitpick or _something you care about_ or not. Ultimately, this is the grounding that the LLM lacks and you do not. You have an idea about what you care about. What you care about has to be part of the wiggly query, or the wiggly search engine will not return the wiggly output you are looking for.
You cannot phrase a wiggly query referencing unavailable information (well, you can, but it's pointless). The following query is not possible to phrase in a way an LLM can satisfy (and this is the exact answer to your question):
- "Make what I want."
What you want is too complicated, and too hard, and too unknown. Getting what you are looking for reduces to: query for an approximation of what I want, repeating until I decide it no longer surfaces what I want. This depends on an accurate conception of what you want, so only you can do it.
If you remove yourself from the critical path, the output will not be what you want. Expressing what you want precisely enough to ground a wiggly search would just be something like code, and obviates the need for wiggly searching in the first place.
What an incredibly diverse and inclusive UI design. I often find that Indian mythologies tend to be overshadowed, but with the advent of AI generated art and media there's been a resurgence of Indian-centric stories.
The internet being flooded with AI slop masquerading as devotional artwork has been among the most depressing things about GenAI. It has no meaning or intention or devotion behind it, it’s just engagement farming. Nothing of value is added by having Devi with extra fingers on each hand and completely blurred messes for all the affects in her hands. Or pictures of Rama shooting a bansuri out of his bow. It’s just tripe. We could have told the stories with an overlay of open source artwork from Raja Ravi Varma or Gita Press or old Tanjore paintings or Chola bronzes or whatever if we couldn’t afford to hire an artist who knows what items Vishnu is supposed to be holding in each hand.
It’s not a problem just for us Hindus either. I see so much terrible Jesus/angel “artwork” everywhere. It makes me start to wonder if maybe the Wahabbis were onto something with their complete taboo around depictions of God or the prophets.
>Nothing of value is added by having Devi with extra fingers on each hand and completely blurred messes for all the affects in her hands
South Asian religions are in an especially bad position because so many works related to them have never been digitized (and quite frankly, in some cases what's available on the internet is of extremely low quality) [1]. I'd be pretty concerned if someone were to rely on entirely on these models since the probability of hallucinations (or at the very least, erasure of regional/ideological diversity) probably skyrockets because the information was never actually there in the training data to begin with.
Some references have been digitized but “Hinduism” is a broad collection of religious traditions with many different stories and folk practices and depictions of various deities and tales. Many of the depictions are considered “valid” only in the specific context of a particular temple or for a specific community and it becomes completely nonsensical once you start randomly jumbling up elements of all the Gods from across all of India over all of time.
I've been using GitHub for over 2 decades now so its not that I don't still love them. I just worry that GitHub will become just another arm of Microsoft's AI strategy. It FEELS like the platform is being reshaped around monetizing AI rather than serving developers but that's just my opinion.
Does anyone know what caused this?