The issue with your arguments in response is the issue with the entire way DEI is structured in industry. It's not that diversity is unimportant, diversity of /thoughts/ and /beliefs/ is critical to building products that appeal to the widest audience/target market. It's that the way programs are implemented focus on the wrong things, and worse are based on this type of wishy-washy thinking.
Your argument amounts to a completely unsubstantiated what-if "[What] if there's a brilliant swe that feels uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their branches..."
Here's a counter-argument: Productive driven people don't get distracted by irrelevant and petty things like what the repository branch is named in the private repo that no customer ever sees. This is the type of petty nonsense that bureaucracy loves though, and bureaucracy kills innovation, creativity, and productivity. The entire issue with DEI isn't that opponents think diversity is bad, or that we're against hiring people from diverse backgrounds, it's that the way DEI is implemented is a cancerous bureaucracy that kills companies and teams.
It's just another form of the massive spread of administration/non-productive management across large organizations within the West. There's now close to (or in excess of) 1:1 administrators to faculty in most universities in the US, and the majority of the administrative hires are in DEI. These bureaucracies work to advance the bureaucracy, not to advance the mission of the organization they purport to represent. The massive waste of money on administration in hospitals, insurance companies, universities, and large corporations does not make these organizations improve patient outcomes, improve education of students, reduce medical costs to society, or improve products in the market that people rely on in their day to day lives. It's just a huge pile of burning money supporting the existence of roles that effectively detract from the overall productivity and quality of organizations.
This isn't just DEI, by the way, it's all forms of unnecessary bureaucracy. It's one of the reasons why we need stronger anti-trust, because this is an inherent cancer to large organizations. The only solution for which is to have smaller organizations in the first place, so they can be razor focused on their actual core mission and not burning mountains of cash on administrative boondoggles.
Indeed, I didn't cite any sources but I'm fairly sure there's literature studying this phenomenon. I agree that DEI when used as a political tool is a distraction for a company.
Your argument amounts to a completely unsubstantiated what-if "[What] if there's a brilliant swe that feels uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their branches..."
Here's a counter-argument: Productive driven people don't get distracted by irrelevant and petty things like what the repository branch is named in the private repo that no customer ever sees. This is the type of petty nonsense that bureaucracy loves though, and bureaucracy kills innovation, creativity, and productivity. The entire issue with DEI isn't that opponents think diversity is bad, or that we're against hiring people from diverse backgrounds, it's that the way DEI is implemented is a cancerous bureaucracy that kills companies and teams.
It's just another form of the massive spread of administration/non-productive management across large organizations within the West. There's now close to (or in excess of) 1:1 administrators to faculty in most universities in the US, and the majority of the administrative hires are in DEI. These bureaucracies work to advance the bureaucracy, not to advance the mission of the organization they purport to represent. The massive waste of money on administration in hospitals, insurance companies, universities, and large corporations does not make these organizations improve patient outcomes, improve education of students, reduce medical costs to society, or improve products in the market that people rely on in their day to day lives. It's just a huge pile of burning money supporting the existence of roles that effectively detract from the overall productivity and quality of organizations.
This isn't just DEI, by the way, it's all forms of unnecessary bureaucracy. It's one of the reasons why we need stronger anti-trust, because this is an inherent cancer to large organizations. The only solution for which is to have smaller organizations in the first place, so they can be razor focused on their actual core mission and not burning mountains of cash on administrative boondoggles.