Mark Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg for Meta 'inclusivity' push: report

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/executive-leadership-and-management/mark-zuckerberg-blamed-sheryl-sandberg-for-meta-inclusivity-push-report/ar-AA1xolsJ

by impish9208 • 2 years ago

51 88 2 years ago

msn.com

ggm• 2 years ago

Returning to his value roots I see.

sandspar2• 2 years ago

Yes he's a chameleon and yes he's a turncoat and so on, but it's interesting that he's gone all in on this. There's some debate whether wokism is finished for good or if it's merely gone dormant. He seems to be betting that it's gone for good.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

School integration was woke. Women voting was woke. Interracial marriage was woke. Gay marriage was woke. Over the long run, progress only goes in the right direction. There's no debate, just noise. The year to year skirmishes aren't terribly important in the big picture.

sandspar2• 2 years ago

Do you really want to get into this?

nahnahno• 2 years ago

Moving away from color and race blind hiring to discriminatory hiring was not woke, by your definition.

krick• 2 years ago

That's exactly what confuses me. Yes, I would expect some easing on that, but it's so 180° that I find myself wondering, what exactly is that force that defines the direction. Like, who dictates the agenda. I mean, I would always assume that any 4chan-level explanations that have an actual person making the order of how this will go are not exactly true and things must be a little more complicated than that. But how something "a little more complicated" can lead to this? Why yesterday Zuckerberg felt that he must, and today he is totally convinced he must not? Surely he has a better grasp of that than me, but how the fuck does it work? Who decides that one day we are woke, and the next day we aren't?

After all, nobody assumed that wokism is dead the last time Trump was elected. If anything, it was harsher than ever. Why today major supporters of it suddenly say "fuck that"? Please don't tell me that it has anything with Zuckerberg becoming BJJ aficionado, because I won't buy that shit.

toasterlovin• 2 years ago

Intellectual fads—memeplexes, if you will—burn through populations. There’s a whole lifecycle to a memeplex taking up residence in a host, then eventually getting ejected. Once you’ve ejected a particular memeplex from your mind, it’ll probably never make it back in. You have antibodies. Repeat that for enough people and the tide can permanently turn on a memeplex. Or at least for several decades, until there is a whole new generation of hosts who don’t have immunity.

It’s seemed pretty clear to me that this would eventually happen for wokism (or whatever you want to call it). It’s simply not sustainable to tell the majority of your potential hosts that, because of their inborn, unchangeable attributes (being white and/or male), they are the problem. And people really do not like feeling physically unsafe, which they do in most coastal blue cities, and which almost all women do when there is a man in the bathroom with them.

So the difference between 2024 and 2016 is that the memeplex was just getting rolling in 2016, but today enough people have antibodies that, to any keen observer, it’s days are clearly numbered.

sweeter• 2 years ago

It would take a LOT of explaining about the context and political climate as to why this is the case. Im on mobile so I'll give a very reductive take, the political guard rails have been removed. Billionaire after billionaire, politician after politician has gone to Maralago to meet with Trump and kiss the ring, they've been making donations of millions to his inauguration fund. Trump specifically threatened Zuckerberg with prison, so he fell in line, and that is the "right" thing to do in his eyes because he stands to gain a lot by getting on his good side, he could even get tiktok. On the other hand, his other option is prison or endless harassment from the government. This is the same deal with Bill Gates and many others. It's all performative bs and these corporations have never had any convictions other than to make the most money possible and to accrue power by taking the path of least resistance.

whatnotests2• 2 years ago

Fingered again

forgingahead5• 2 years ago

An MSN repost of a Fox Business article, that lifted a specific sentence from a NYTimes article, where the source was "people familiar with the meeting".

This is likely as accurate as the game of broken telephone that kids play.

tasty_freeze• 2 years ago

More than once it has happened where some NYT article will discuss some private meeting at the White House and attribute it to someone like, "According to a credible source at that meeting, blah blah". Later it is confirmed that that well placed source was the President, or the secretary of state, etc. Credible news organizations don't just repeat whatever some random guy claims to have heard.

forgingahead5• 2 years ago

The NYTimes has a history of fabricating and outright lying to serve their own corporate or affiliated agendas. See for eg:

https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrica...

byearthithatius• 2 years ago

So it is two articles that both ultimately source from NYT? They are not commonly flat out incorrect, and when they are tend to correct the record. So I would say your statement is hyperbole and wrong. NYT sources are likely quite a bit more trustworthy than eight year olds whispering to each other for fun.

forgingahead5• 2 years ago

The NYTimes has a history of fabricating and outright lying to serve their own corporate or affiliated agendas. See for eg:

https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Misreporting-Fabrica...

johnneville2• 2 years ago

i imagine they are still close enough, and perhaps she still has enough stock, that she understands he's willing to compromise his own morals for the financial benefit of the company

on a personal level, it is demoralizing to read though

mikojan• 2 years ago

[flagged]

echelon• 2 years ago

Probably super easy to launch a Facebook or Instagram competitor app right now. All you have to be is the anti-Zuck and you get free marketing.

It's the perfect window of opportunity. Launch, get traction, get funding, scale. It's all teed up.

poisonborz• 2 years ago

Literally every social network launched in the last decade was outspokenly anti-Zuck, all of them failed or are struggling. People don't care.

Manuel_D17• 2 years ago

To be clear, Meta's "Diverse Slate Approach" was explicitly discriminatory with regards to protected class. It prohibited hiring managers from proceeding with an offer until at least one of the on-site interviews contained an "underrepresented group", meaning women and URM males. In practice this meant that white and Asian men had to wait a long time to get an offer even after they passed the interview rounds. But women and URM never had to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled because their presence caused it to be fulfilled.

To see how this is discrimination, consider a company that decides to wait 90 days before proceeding with any offer to a Catholic candidate, but no such delay if the candidate is not Catholic. Surely we see that this is discrimination. Even if we argue that the Catholic candidates are still getting their offer eventually it's still plainly discrimination. What if instead we rolled a dice and added 0 to 90 days of delay? Some Catholics have zero delay, just like non-Catholics. Is that still discrimination? Of course.

Now considering how the DSA works. Most candidates are not "diverse". If you look at the sequence of candidates with non-diverse (N) or diverse (D) candidates the sequence looks something like this:

NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND

So if we introduce the requirement that at least one interviewed candidate must be diverse, a non-diverse candidate may get lucky and the next candidate is diverse. Or maybe they'll be waiting a long time until a diverse candidate is interviewed and fulfills the DSA. But a diverse candidate never has to wait for th DSA to be fulfilled. Sounds like a familiar situation where an offer is randomly delayed on the basis of protected class, right?

It's true that the DSA never lowered standards for diverse candidates. But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.

Ozzie_osman• 2 years ago

NNNNNNNNNNNNDNNNNNNNNNNND

If the pattern resembles this for a group that represents over 50% of the broader population (women and some subset of males), I'd argue that it's highly possible there are other, possibly discriminatory, factors at play.

Manuel_D17• 2 years ago

So we should expect 50% men in elementary schools? How about lumberjacks? Should those be 50% women too?

A non discriminatory hiring process should reflect the demographics of the workers in the given field (other factors like geography matter too). Why would we expect, say, pediatricians (80% female) to have 50% men?

Achieving a 50/50 split between men and women in a field that's 80% one gender requires hiring one gender at 4x the rate of the other. This line of thinking is what leads companies to set up discriminatory hiring practices in pursuit of DEI goals.

The even government office of non discrimination compliance agrees: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs

The purpose of affirmative action is to ensure equal employment opportunities for applicants and employees. It is based on the premise that, absent discrimination, over time a contractor’s workforce generally will reflect the demographics of the qualified available workforce in the relevant job market.

murderfs• 2 years ago

Over 60% of the U.S. population don't have college degrees, but you obviously wouldn't expect Facebook's hiring to be proportional to that. The demographics of CS graduates is much closer to what you'd expect the hiring percentages to reflect (and they do)

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 2 years ago

Had to look up URM

https://diversity.ucsf.edu/programs-resources/urm-definition

Manuel_D17• 2 years ago

Thanks for the link. A bit of clarification: in this context Asian was not in the category of URM since Asians are overrepresented in tech roles at Meta. So URM meant Black, Latin, and American native.

t8sr• 2 years ago

What you're describing is not how it works. Chiefly, the hiring pipelines are not set up for a single role, but a whole family of them. They are filled ahead of need. (Or were, at a time when this would've been taking place.)

There are other inaccuracies, but suffice it to say, this comment section is full of comments by people who have never been hiring managers talking about how hiring works.

tantalor2• 2 years ago

The phrase "confidently incorrect" comes to mind

Manuel_D17• 2 years ago

I re-read the wiki page on the DSA multiple times. It does explicitly spell out that at least one "diverse" candidate must be on the slate for each role. Yes, candidates are considered for multiple roles as they go through the hiring pipeline, but that doesn't change the fact that it prohibits moving forward with a hire if the candidate pool for the role does not include a diverse candidate.

If this is wrong, but all means explain how the DSA actually works.

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

Nothing you just said contradicts the OP in any way, as those details don't change any aspect of the argument.

drweevil• 2 years ago

Wow. Who was the boss? This is contemptible stuff.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

He always has been (literally, due to the share structure of Meta and how much Zuckerberg owns), he is just trying to throw someone under the bus for the change in political winds.

tantalor2• 2 years ago

The buck stops somewhere else

PakG14• 2 years ago

People for some reason have an inability to separate the goals of DEI/EDI from the practice. It's possible that the goals are important and correct, but the implementation sucks. I am of this belief for many DEI programs I've seen. But I'm still pro-DEI. It just gets implemented often too simplistically and naively, enabling the creation of more controversy and also likely many poor outcomes in organizations. As for what percentage of DEI programs result in such poor outcomes, I dare not guess, I have too little data.

However, the comments that Zuckerberg is making makes me think he really thinks that the goals of DEI are themselves intrinsically bad. He seems to be leaning into the stereotypical type of thinking that causes the issues that DEI is trying to address in the first place.

I'm disappointed. I would have hoped that he'd be capable of diving into more nuance.

johnneville2• 2 years ago

furthermore, he is blaming the company's decision on his COO and not on himself as CEO. more than almost any other founder, he maintained control over his company and for better or worse it is clear that he alone bears the responsibility for what the company does as a result of that control. blaming one of his most trusted, respected, and successful deputies for what he now describes as a failure does not reflect well on him as a leader in my esteem.

PakG14• 2 years ago

I think he did her dirty. Don't think he is where he is today without her being by his side back then. She was and remains a fantastic operator.

Manuel_D17• 2 years ago

The goals of most DEI programs can't be achieved without discrimination on the basis of protected class. If software developers are 18% women how can a company achieve 40% women software developers without discrimination? And that was a DEI goal a previous employer used. In fact they had the same goal for electrical engineer too despite being 10% women.

Ambiguous goals like "make people feel welcome" doesn't require discrimination. But those are not the DEI goals people object to. 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at implemented DEI goals in the form of numeric thresholds, and used discrimination to achieve them. Only one carried out DEI in the innocuous manner.

PakG14• 2 years ago

I'd argue if you're looking to achieve DEI goals in the short-term rather than over decades, you're going to fail because the backlash and other consequences will destroy any progress you think you made. And I think that's what we're seeing. You can work towards DEI goals without achieving them in the short-term and still look to make good changes over the long run. But it requires a systems view of everything, including helping kids from various backgrounds to get access to the education they need and then helping them to be in an environment where they can actually successfully learn stuff. That's a multi-generational multi-decade problem, not a corporate fiscal year problem.

MyHypatia3• 2 years ago

You say that 3/4 of companies you are familiar with used discrimination to achieve numeric thresholds of 40% women software developers. I can't name a single medium or large tech company that is 40% women software developers. Can you?

xyst• 2 years ago

yet another story pushed down the pipeline to push a culture war and divide us.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 years ago

Text-only:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1xolsJ

jahlove• 2 years ago

Is this pure JSON for anyone else? (Which admittedly, is in-fact text-only).

1vuio0pswjnm72• 2 years ago

   curl https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1xolsJ \
   |sed 's/.*body":"//;s/","readTimeMin.*//' \
   |tr -d '\n\134\xa0\xc2\xe2\x80\x93' > 1.htm

   firefox ./1.htm

matrix87• 2 years ago

This level of political engagement seems kind of out of character for him

Is he just kissing ass, or is there genuine frustration on decaying business culture? It feels like both he and Musk are idealizing some kind of past version of SV where WLB was less of a concern

zug_zug• 2 years ago

I think there's a few possibilities:

Maybe he has some political ambitions.

Maybe he's trying to get cred with trump so that he can try to have influence over the tik-tok ban (a huge competitor).

Mark Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg for Meta 'inclusivity' push: report

Related Stories