How has Diversity and Inclusion programs impacted your company?

Why should we hire anyone based off the color of their skin/gender, versus for their level of competency?

If a company start optimizing on diversity metrics instead of on ability, then they’ll be crushed by market forces from companies who optimize on ability.

Further, isn’t it a bit patronizing hiring people because they fit in a URM group, instead of hard work to sufficiently pass an interview/test/etc?

In the EU country I come frome, at least two forms of affirmative action are part of employment law.

1) At least 2.5% of the workforce (rounded down) in workplaces not physically demanding must be disabled, or the company pays some taxes. This has resulted in creating job positions that would otherwise be outsourced, in one company I worked in.

Not a bad thing I guess, but the percentage should really be adjusted downwards in 2021.

2) Veterans (a very large group) should be given preference when equally qualified. This does not affect the ordinary software engineers much, but does have implications in management. It is also impossible to fire a veteran. This was one of the factors that created extremely negative perceptions about veterans in the educated sectors of the society.

As for the US forms of affirmative action, I haven't seen that yet in companies I worked in. But we don't have such a skewed gender representation in STEM as the US has, and in 2021 the minorities who work have equal or greater income than the national average.

The way I think of this topic is that diversity should be a metric, not a goal. If the overwhelming majority of the people I'm interviewing, hiring, and working with look like me, then I have to ask, are these really the most qualified people? I mean, there's one of two possibilities -- either in fact there's something about people who are very similar to me that makes them the most qualified OR there's a lot of talent being overlooked and missed and my company is missing out here. Which one is more likely?

That re-framing is the easy part, of course. Actually making changes is hard. On one side we all know that if you make something a metric you run the danger of making it a goal, but on the other side the biases that lead to a lack of diversity are so deep and ingrained they can be very difficult to counter.

But hopefully this re-framing is at least helpful in explaining why a lack of diversity is an issue that matters.

Even if underrepresented minorities are hired, those hired will be the upperclass representatives of those minorities, and a lot has been written on these divisions. It turns out races are not some unified organs. And neither are genders for that matter. There is no solution whereby the owning class can continue exacerbating inequality in a morally righteous manner.

I haven't been in any companies where diversity & inclusion has been a noticeable problem. However I've been at many companies that will try to find problems even where there are none to the point where the whole thing becomes an obvious virtue-signalling exercise rather than addressing any D&I issues.

I've recently seen some great hires at LinkedIn. We've also lost some great candidates because we were too slow (due to covid era freeze). Overall I'm excited that were bringing in talent that looks like the users we're serving.

Maybe not the data point you're looking for (outside US):

There are none, so none.

In fact, a lot of the implicit biases in the process remain the same as the last 50 years, like how it's regularly advised your CV should include date of birth and portrait.