zlacker

> nowadays you need to be (or rather show) “diversity and inclusion” as a business if you want to appear as a “better” company (useful for soliciting VC investment when you don’t have a profitable business), regardless of whether diversity & inclusion has ever been a problem at the company.

Could you expand on this? My naive impression is that VCs do their best to make hard-nosed expected-value-in-USD estimates, perhaps specifically estimating the likelihood the company will be worth >$100M/$1B or whatever; and that acting like that is probably in their job description because they're investing other people's money who expect a return.

How does the phenomenon you describe fit in? Is there some group of VCs that believe that championing "diversity and inclusion" is likely to lead to 10x growth? Does the company making the pitch make that claim—or, as one reading of your words suggests, claim that not having achieved 10x growth in the past is due to the lack of such championing? Or do VCs face social pressure (from, I dunno, other VCs, journalists who write about them, whoever else they talk with) to make it look like they're funding virtuous causes (er, companies)? Seems like the last is most plausible.

>>waterh+(OP)
Companies in general try to seem like they care about more than money. "Grey Goo Ltd. We care." Diversity rhetoric is an easy, pre-constructed set of Things to Say (TM) that you can use to project empathy - notably, without doing anything significant to back it up. Google is still 70% men.

But bear in mind San Francisco is incredibly liberal, SF programmers even more so. Companies based there will make overtures toward diversity & inclusion rhetoric to keep their workforce happy.

>>random+r1
I wonder what that 70% looks like relative to other software engineering firms?

>>shadow+25
According to this chart[1], less women than Amazon, Facebook and Apple, more than Microsoft. When you normalise for tech workers only, it climbs to 77% men, which is about average for the industry.

[1] https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/4467.jpeg

>>waterh+(OP)
This is from my experience looking at a few companies and their online presence.

Companies with a strong business model don't seem to do this whole bullshit virtue signaling, whether it's about diversity/inclusion or "values" unless there is an actual problem with one of those things.

The VC-funded ones that usually have no long-term, profitable business model are the ones to brag the most about "diversity and inclusion" or similar things. It's as if they were saying "we'll run out of money in 3 years, we pay shit, but hey at least we're diverse and inclusive and (pretend to) have values; wanna work for us?".

One company went as far as banning words and idioms like "blacklist" and "elephant in the room". I mean come on, were these words even being a problem or are you just looking for a problem so you can push your virtue signaling to the next level and obviously write the obligatory blog post?

Whether that actually translates to more VC funding or not is unclear, but the majority of VC-backed companies seems to be doing this charade nowadays.