Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons? Just about every time the subject came up there were people saying it was just lip service and theater -- put a DEI statement on your company's public-facing webpage and pretend they actually did anything.

Maybe. I had two different hiring managers in two different companies explicitly tell me and others to hire women or PoC. Yes it was illegal. No one cares.

If you rephrase "ending DEI" to "reducing the risk of getting sued when laying off x% of staff", does it make any more sense?

Nobody knows how to actually hire competent staff because it's a constantly changing bar: if you give people leetcode, they start cramming leetcode; if you review their GitHub profile, they start spending disproportionate amounts of time on projects; if you give them take-homes, they spend 5x the recommended time; if you give them real-world problems in a timed interview, that's probably harder to game, but some candidates will send a completely different person along. On top of that, some people just interview really well but aren't good 9 to 5. At a big enough company, you've always got a list of people who you incorrectly hired and want to get rid of.

DEI is a minor barrier to doing that for some cohorts. It's not that you hired incompetent people in XYZ groups to bump up your diversity numbers, it's that you hired incompetent people in every group and now you're unable to get rid of some of the ones in XYZ.

Also, let's not forget that some people are just genuinely sexist and/or racist and/or whateverist, either consciously or unconsciously. What happens when those people aren't held back by HR as strongly?

I don't think it's as big of a factor as the parent comment, but I witness a lot of extremely weird DEI related hiring things in 2020-2022.

C-level executives would flag certain job openings as only eligible for women or minorities. I clearly remember a meeting where our CTO declared that he had rejected an extremely qualified male candidate because "we have enough of those".

When some people complained they started hiding the details, but it was still obvious. There would be hiring rounds where the only candidates coming from HR were dozens of women for a specific role. After interviewing all of them and giving several second chances we couldn't find anyone qualified in that batch of candidates, so there was a very tense meeting where we were heavily pressured to just pick one.

You could tell a lot of the candidates involved in this process were catching on and/or being pandered to and they really didn't like it either.

Only anecdotally I can tell you when I was at a medium sized (~200 employee) fintech business in Australia, I was told by my engineering manager to hire any woman or PoC that applied. but in my 2 year tenure I think only 1 of either applied, both were hired immediately.

I've had like 10x more pressure lately to hire cheap contractors from India than I ever did to hire a woman or black guy at any point in my 10 years of hiring in this field.

>Do you really think that companies were hiring that many unqualified people for DEI reasons?

Depending on what industry you are in, absolutely. I can offer one anecdote that I can personally attest actually occurred. (though I was not the protagonist).

There was an opening for a new, salaried, full-time faculty member after the unfortunate death of the previous position holder. During the hiring discussion at a staff meeting at this (private) NYC college the Dean stated, "we aren't hiring or promoting any more straight white men". They said this openly, and without shame, in front of a room full of people including a well-credentialed adjunct (who happened to be a straight, white man) who had worked there for several years, without an annual contract or any of the accompanying benefits. And, in fact, they ended up hiring a completely unqualified black, LGBTQ woman for that position. The woman was so unqualified and out of her depth that she stopped showing up entirely just a month into the semester. The passed-over adjunct tried to file an EEOC complaint but was told (rightly or wrongly) that since he wasn't part of a protected class he didn't qualify. For the next several years, of the ~10 people that were hired or promoted at this NYC college, none were straight white men.