A few years ago I worked for a company obsessed with DEI

If somebody is not a white man, you probably don't have to pay them more than if they were a white man. If somebody is older, then you probably DO have to pay them more than if they were younger, because older candidates likely have more experience and have correspondingly higher salary expectations. So there's that. Now suppose you have an older candidate who is not demanding high seniority pay. In that case they should be on equal footing with the younger candidates, right? Well, no. There's the double standard of "if you're so old, why aren't you above our pay grade? Shouldn't you be a manager or something?" That I don't know how to fix. Then there is the more overtly discriminatory "I'd rather hire the young candidate because old people are slow." Maybe what it really comes down to is "I don't want to work with my dad."

I know this topic has been beaten to death, but the shallow symbolic form Diversity takes in practice (college recruiting photos) confirms it's merely political. Here are a few forms of "real diversity" I have run into that you will never see initiatives for at big tech, and it would not necessarily be taboo to publicly discriminate against them: - Number of siblings - Asian ethnic minorities (Miao, etc) - Discriminated indian castes - Parents vs childless - University degrees - American 19th century religions (JW, Mormon, 7th day adventists, etc) - Military experience - experience in manual labor jobs - Sunni and Shia Muslims - Russian ethnic distinctions (russkiye vs rossiyane) Obviously we can't create programs for every possible form of identity. But you can look at 2 asian men and say there isn't any diversity, when actually their life experiences couldn't be more different. Similar…