Microsoft laid off a DEI team, and its lead wrote an internal email blasting how DEI is 'no longer business critical'
Microsoft laid off a DEI team, and its lead wrote an internal email blasting how DEI is 'no longer business critical'
Microsoft laid off a diversity, equity, and inclusion team, citing "changing business needs," according to an internal email.
I will be interested to see if Microsoft gets worse or better when Nadella decides to retire. If there’s anything left of it by then.
It’s all about MSFT and has been for a while now. And, MSFT is doing great. Microsoft has always been about keeping business and consumers reliant on them. So, they’ll keep making themselves indispensable while squeezing out as much money as they can.
If they can drop DEI and keep the share price up, they will.
Squeezing tighter holds more sand!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
"True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020," a leader of the team wrote in an email sent to thousands of employees, which was viewed by Business Insider.
The team leader, whose identity BI has confirmed, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Many technology companies, including Microsoft, made commitments to improve diversity efforts after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the historic protests that followed.
Zoom laid off a DEI-focused team earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.
"Our D&I commitments remain unchanged," a Microsoft spokesperson, Jeff Jones, said in a statement.
Contact Ashley Stewart via the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email (astewart@businessinsider.com).
The original article contains 326 words, the summary contains 124 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
"Republicans have decided that fairness, along with recognizing and supporting different points of view is bad, so we are abandoning that mindset."
A dei team. Hey Microsoft. They probably all need to go. Collosal waste of money and resources.
Facts.
What the hell would a diversity, inclusion and equity team even do? Not just Microsoft...but any company. Sound like a serious waste of money from the beginning..
Hire people based on how smart they are or the skills they bring to the company ..not how Asian or black or female they are.
Diversity brings new perspectives and those new perspectives drive improvements to a company's culture and output. It's that simple.
Link to a single study I found easily, but there are many more. If you want your company to be successful, it behooves you to diversify your workforce as much as possible on every possible axis.
Exactly. Clearly you are responding to a troll, but here's the real reason: Microsoft will receive a ton of applications for every job. Many people will be qualified, so they have to choose based on other factors besides "how smart someone is" (as if an interview or resume could communicate that).
Basically they want to create the best team. Different people from different places have different ideas, no matter how "smart" they are. That means that a global company needs to get a bunch of diverse opinions from diverse people, otherwise you might just miss something important.
The best companies are not the "smartest" but the most flexible and able to respond to new information. Different opinions help you achieve that.
The only axis the corporate world cares about is (quite literally) skin deep.
You know why people moved to the west coast and grew Hollywood? It's because Thomas Edison was a flaming sack of shit who exploited and claimed every invention that anyone who ever worked for him made. So what did these very smart people do? They all went to Hollywood and completely blew away Edison's pathetic movie business. They did this BECAUSE of diversity and BECAUSE all of the old guard were no longer in the way.
If you want a successful company, you want diversity. If you don't go diverse, then you end up doing stupid things like make face recognition technologies that cannot recognize the faces of Asians (this happened) or will constantly misidentify black people for arrest (this also happened).
The problem was the statistically proven fact that left to their own devices will try and fill a role based on the idea of what they think the person who fills that role will look like in their head, and for most positions that looks like a white guy.
A few decades ago the fact that major companies were routinely and systematically passing over more qualified not white men in favor of under qualified white men who looked the part induced a public backlash big enough that many major corporations were forced to at least publicly pretend that they were implementing a watered down version of the plan to equitise these barriers that was fought for by a guy called Martin Luther King Jr.
This resulted in a cooperate data driven approach to level these barriers to ensure that the most qualified candidate for the position was hired instead of the candidate who mearly looked like the candidate who closest matched the image the hiring manager had in their head called Affirmative Action.
This data driven approach didn’t really work and the public kept complaining that the difference in who got hired based on who looked whitest was continuing, so companies began working on researching and educating their hiring managers on these subconscious bias through a broad range of programs classified as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in hiring and the workplace.
Then the right complained that dispite the fact that white men were still getting hired easier and had a lower bar to pass than everyone else that really they were the ones being reverse racismed based on vibes because they needed a way to explain that the reason it’s hard to get a job and work sucks wasn’t because of decades of continuous free market policy and the rile up the base and show that the Jews and Blacks were replacing all the good white people. Now here we are.
See I don't disagree with that logic, but there are lots of folks who will instantly discount a candidate because they're ignorant. We wouldn't need any diversity if we were honest with ourselves but the last few years especially since Trump praised the white nationalists in Charlottesville, where racists think it's okay to be racist.
It's not okay, dislike someone because their an asshole not because of a shade of color
Edit: also should not be sexist discriminate on age
Oh I totally agree with you. Race imo shouldn't even be a consideration for a job. We're all the same and my previous statement always gets met with resistance because I believe they assume I'm saying they the races or whatever you wanna label em as don't deserve the job or shouldn't ever be hired. We're all the same but some have better skillsets so they should be priority.
People hear what they want to hear and not what's actually being said.
This lady can sum it up a LOT more intelligently then I ever could. https://youtu.be/3WMuzhQXJoY
Agreed 💯
You get destroyed on this platform for making sense. Or maybe it's because they got hired because of their melanin. Or whether or not they have a crotch, so they defend this stupid junk