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> Veering off topic, but this letter is in a variable width font. Were there typewriters that could do that?

Yes, and in fact one of the most popular was from IBM itself [1], released in 1944.

> The letterhead and body text aren’t aligned, so if it did go through a press it took two passes.

It was pretty standard practice to have pre-printed letterhead, hence the cachet of something being issued on "company letterhead". Take a sheet of company letterhead, pop it in the ol' Executive, and type-type-type.

> The signature is also in ink, so that’s either a third pass for color, or an actual signature, and the letter doesn’t have the notation to indicate that it was signed by the secretary, so that leads me to think that it wasn’t widely distributed.

I'm not really sure what potential significance you see in this. It was likely typed by the secretary and signed by the CEO. It's the original copy. Any copies required for the personal reference of the supervisory personnel affected would be made in the standard 1950s ways - a few carbon copies for the top executives, mimeographs further downstream if necessary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Electric#Executive

Looks like it was written on an IBM Executive Model A:

https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/178vjlf/sample...

There were variable-width font typewriters starting in 1930:

https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/3ltlgn/have_va...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vari-Typer

Well of course IBM made typewriters! It looks like the 'IBM Executive' landed in 1944 with the ability to do proportional spacing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Electric#Executive

IBM made a lot of very fancy typewriters so while I don't know what they had in 1953, one would assume that the president of the company would have access to the fanciest model they offered

Trying the ol’ Sam Donaldson dilemma from Bush Jrs first reign.

> and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.

It goes further than just fudging the metrics: By relying on quotas you have to dig deeper into the minority pool of candidates, and are more likely to get someone less skilled than if you hadn't used quotas. This combined with the overall focus on DEI just ends up reinforcing racism/sexism when the quota-hires are more inept than the non-quota hires.

This is a simplistic view. E.g. how does this argument account for the data we have that someone with black sounding name will get less opportunity than someone with a white sounding name and an identical resume? In this case the lower chances to get ahead have nothing to do with economic circumstance.

I think it's probably some of both. Certainly a lot of inequality is economic in a way that is independent of race. However, I think that there's also a degree to which people in power are naturally going to favor people like them. I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of discrimination. If I'm interviewing, for example, it's going to naturally be easier for me to recognize indicators of merit associated with my own culture. Therefore, I think that DEI is an important part of making our society more of a meritocracy.

In terms of your second paragraph. I think that the problem is that those regulations are often put in place to protect people in a way that doesn't depend on company size. For example, in many cases workers usually don't need any less protection just because the company that they are working for is small.

So you said "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities"

This is a supposition: the cure "lowering barriers, regulatory overhead" may not cause the intended outcome "make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business".

Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.

And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.

So, how do we get to the outcome we all want: your talent drives your success?

One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.

In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.

> So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity

Very much agree with this. Economic inequality is the root of the problem. But it's also one that very few people are willing to actually address because that sounds like "socialism" (how un-American!). It's the biggest problem facing this country, but the kind of social changes that are needed to solve that problem are anathema to Americans. (Certainly Trump doesn't give F about poor people, and the Democrats mostly pay lip service to it.)

But here's why I'm in favor of DEI initiatives, generally speaking (though certainly not all of them or even most of them):

DEI doesn't directly address economic inequality the way it should, but it does get is part of the way. Certainly it's better than nothing, which is what those who are anti-DEI are mostly proposing.

We also have to take into consideration that certain groups of people, specifically African Americans and Native Americans, are _not_ on a level playing ground, even today, because they were deliberately suppressed for centuries. Just because the Civil Rights Act finally got signed 50 years ago means that all of a sudden they have equal opportunity.

If companies and universities, and society as a whole, makes no effort to level the playing field, it won't just level on its own, especially in today's society (which does not offer the wide-open opportunities that America 100 or 200 years offered to anyone landing on its shores with $5 in their pocket).

If you don't make an effort to recruit from low-income black neighborhoods for example, you're not likely to get many takers because of the amount of effort that it takes to climb out of such deep social holes--only the very best and most determined will. But if you can deliberately offer opportunity to more people who have been suppressed, more of them will be in a position to provide their children with an environment where they can have better opportunities, and over generations society changes for the better (and everyone benefits).

So that's why I'm generally in favor of DEI type initiatives. Not what companies did or do -- which was mostly greenwashing PR based on either public opinion (last administration) or government pressure (this administration). But genuine efforts to level the playing field in terms of economic opportunity, including a boost to those who were deliberately disadvantaged for so long.

You can argue that it's unfair to white poor people. I agree, it is somewhat unfair. Economic opportunity should have nothing to do with race, and we should be making every effort to raise the economic standard of poor whites too. But we also need to recognize that poor whites are starting at a different baseline, one of poverty, yes, but not slavery and targeted suppression. So while there might be economic similarities (poor whites, poor blacks) they're not necessarily on the same level.

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I don't think I've ever heard someone who opposes DEI say "we should fix our broken economy instead". But it's not wrong - the problems of racism and classism are uniquely intertwined and need to be fixed together.

The way DEI is usually framed by opponents is less "companies are using DEI to buy woke points so they don't fix the real economic issues" and more "companies deliberately hired unqualified black lesbians to tick a checkbox". These are very different critiques in terms of who they're aimed at. The latter makes it sound like we just need "more meritocracy" - i.e. to fix the problem by firing all black and poor people. The former makes it clear the problem is the people running the economy who are pitting different groups of people against one another to keep labor down.

> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit.

That sounds nice, but that’s not what our laws and institutions are doing, nor is it the direction they’re moving in.

> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals...

One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.

But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.

That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.

"If a school enroll someone with a 400 point lower sat over the higher person on the sole basis of their race, that is a major Injustice on the scale of individual humans, even if it moves some group statistic closer to equal."

So this is a hypothetical that is not worth discussing. Until specific cases can be brought to bear, why are you inventing situations that may never have existed?

I'd also like to opine on SAT scores for a second. First off, it's well known that SAT scores are not directly correlative in post-secondary educational success, nor work-success. Second they are not highly accurate measurements - there's an inherent fuzziness to them. So even if 2 students had a SAT within some Epsilon, the SAT scores might not really provide much differentiation there. Ergo, basing all of our policies on SAT scores - which are well known to be easily gamed, and also a product of a private institution - seems not a good idea.

Moving on, the problem with being against "myopic obsession with the group statistics" is you are ignoring some important evidence. What do you think of the "group statistics" that say that black people start less businesses, have less family wealth? Or black women have higher maternal mortality? These are pointing to important individual outcomes that are, to say the least, wrong.

So I don't think that paying attention to group statistics, like black maternal mortality (aka how many black moms die in child birth or due to child birth) is "myopic" and "to the detriment of individual equality." It's a very very real problem we, if we intend to call ourselves a moral society, need to solve. So having specific programs to help solve black maternal mortality in a hospital is not "countering racism with racism" imo. It's a focused program on solving a focused problem.

This logic extends out to most "DEI" things. For example is it good if the students at universities drift from representing America on average? I'd say it is not good. What about the ivy league pledges to make school free for anyone who's family income was under $X a year? Is that a myopic obsession with group statistics, namely poor people who can't afford elite colleges even if they were admitted? Seems like yes that could fit into your definition of why you oppose DEI. And IT IS a DEI program - it's increasing diversity (income/class diversity) and equality/equity (improving outcomes for individuals) and inclusions (including those who cannot afford elite colleges).

So when DEI programs that are focused on race, because much of our racial divide was artificially constructed by racist laws and policies of the past, it is suddenly bad, even though I rarely hear anti-DEI people go on about the low income scholarships for ivy leagues. Honestly it starts to sound that in fact many people may in fact have a problem not with the overall concept, but the beneficiaries of the programs.

So back to your comment, let's pick some specific circumstances that we know about and may you can propose how you'd meaningfully fix it, policy wise, within 5 years: - Black maternal mortality us 3x higher than white maternal mortality - Black people are ~ 14.4% of USA, but 12.5% in colleges. Is this a problem? - If we think talent is spread equally, then we should expect to see more % of black founders in YCombinator than the 2-4% there is. Maybe not exactly 14.4% but surely closer to 10% than 0%? Is this worthwhile of being solved? - While we are at it, only 11% of YCombinator founders are women. Is this a problem?

So what can be done about these noticeable gaps? What kinds of suboptimal outcomes are being picked when, for example, few YCombinator founders even know about the challenges and struggles of the average American? (who's a woman btw, women are 50.49% of the population, a majority) What kinds of products, opportunities, etc are being missed here? Maybe none?

What are your "race blind improvements" to economic mobility here? You have a 5 year timeline to make statistically meaningful changes to these metrics.

DEI is not a law. I get how this misunderstanding is possible given how wildly the term gets thrown about by conservatives, like it is a boogieman that is the source of everyone's problems.

Anyway, everyone is already ostensibly equal under the law, but, like you've recognized, we've still found our way into a system of racism (that goes beyond governmental discrimination). Logically, to recognize systemic racism, that folks are born into a disadvantage, then to say that these disadvantages must be ignored, is to exploit systemic racism. It does nothing to address the system. If anything, by making it an EO, it strengthens the system.

You call DEI countering racism with racism, but your only argument for this is getting mad at a hypothetical situation. To add, though, to recognize systemic racism and to then put so much weight on an SAT score, while standardized testing is known as being a component of systemic racism [0], is racist in and of itself.

0 - https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-begin...

DEI is just giving other people the chance to setup the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people in a white dominated society.

It isn't a law. It's just looking at history and going, "They'd probably be as successful if there was a pipeline for those folks to get there, since that pipeline doesn't exist we need to represent them to allow the pipeline to be built."

You also don't seem to fully know what DEI is. You assume it's specifically hiring less qualified people because of their skin color. That isn't what DEI is.

It isn't racism. It's just giving other people the same chance of success. Representation is important.

Anti-DEI is just white people, once again, being offended that someone else is getting equal treatment. Look at trans hate, same thing. Look at book bans, same thing. It's just white folks getting upset and being offended.

I think it's important not to make things too black and white. Certainly it's difficult to put in place or even define a perfectly fair world. However, that doesn't mean that we can't make things more fair.

I think this is a perfect example of gp's comment.

Yes, but this isn't what they'll say if you ask them.

Hiring based on the worst prejudice or nepotism is still merit based in this sense. Meritocracy is supposed to be about varieties of merit which you aren't ashamed to admit are relevant.

And zeal for carrying out the elected official’s agenda. Which is the whole point of political appointments.

> but in practice I always saw it looking for excuses as to why people who got ahead were privileged and why people who didn't were marginalized, regardless of the individual's actual circumstances.

I feel like it's easy to notice the examples where it stood out. A survey of all the actual results might (or might not!) change your opinion. That being said, it's easy to say stuff like "everyone should be treated equally!", it's slightly harder to actually mean it, and it's even harder to do something about it.

We're certainly not legislators debating a bill before us, we're on social media arguing, but it'd be nice if people complaining made some effort to think of a solution.

counter-example:

Most systems that work with standardized tests, while they can systematically fail to capture certain types of talent, are fairly objective - "if you're in the top 10% on this test, then we take you". The format and subject matter of the test is known in advance, people are free to prepare for it in whatever way they want.

Of course, being good at passing tests doesn't mean one will be good at other things, in much the same way that one can be good at Leetcode problems but not good at building and maintaining large scale software systems in a large corporate environment. Still, it remains a 'credible' example of 'how to do meritocracy right', with examples dating back to the Chinese civil service examinations during the Sui and Tang dynasty (from around 593 AD). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination

It's an argument to not trust a book by its cover.

Well I have no reason to think the IBM board had any reason to think Arvind wasn’t supremely well qualified and, if anything, Microsoft’s decision to go with Satya has proven an amazingly good choice.

> limited their educational opportunities, and also because it’s hard for a child to lever themselves into a higher socioeconomic group than their parents.

Is this not what universal state-funded schooling is for. (And please don't forget that state-level funding is anti-correlated with local funding, so the standard "but property taxes!" thing is a red herring.)

> Equity vs. equal opportunities; I’m sympathetic to the latter, but what do you do when the opportunities were unequal in the past, and that causes inequitable results in the present?

I am not aware of anti-dei people having problems with need-based (as opposed to demographics-based) scholarships and such.

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Are you being serious?

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A more pragmatic reason for this approach is many subgroups lack sufficient population sizes in relevant candidate pools to realistically attempt such a high-context focus with any sort of evaluation of efficacy.

If you’re a cog stamper, probably doesn’t matter, but if you think for a living and need to generate ideas ever, diverse perspectives are invaluable. It’s the exact same as biology: bio diverse environments always outperform homogeneous ones. You can adapt to way more situations. If everyone thinks the same, and has roughly the same life experiences, when you hit a situation one person can’t think their way out of, no one will be able to because you’re all roughly the same. “Outside the box thinking” is cliche for a reason: it’s a good thing everyone wants but is hard to capture. Diverse workforce is a more reliable way to capture it.

You know, and I know, and literally everybody in this thread knows, that race is a an imperfect proxy for other things. Why keep trotting this out like you're going to really get someone with it?

Everyone does their jobs differently due to innumerable variables, including life experience and cultural background.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? Your bad faith anti-DEI rants are basically half this thread.

You are obsessed with race. It's weird.

That diversity research at big organizations has been called into question: https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/diversity-was-supposed...

Target basically decided to stop "over-delivering" on DEI. e.g. stuff like $2 billion to black-owned businesses, increase black workforce by 20%, etc. Even with the rollbacks, they are probably doing on average more DEI for the sector, than a Costco, Amazon.

They definitely messed up the messaging, though, in that they positioned themselves to be somehow boycotted by both left and right.

Costco is 20x the business as Target for numerous reasons, I kind of doubt any of it has to do with DEI.

Personal experience is that Costco foot traffic has been visibly increased in recent weeks. Our Costco has a few colorful members of staff, which I personally find makes my visits there more pleasant.

dei programs in academia and corporations aren’t limited to breaking ties at the end of hiring. But I can consider the possibility in good faith.

I think giving someone who might normally not have the chance is a good tie breaker. I’m opposed to a policy that dictates that must be determined by skin color/gender/religion. If the individuals involved in the hiring felt that was the right tie breaker based on their knowledge of their community, I’m not opposed to that.

Can you expand on the logic in your comment?

That’s the motte. But the bailey is anti-white discrimination through the application of different standards to different races: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...

Critiquing the actions and policies of a political movement—especially when they have clear, documented consequences for marginalized groups—is not attacking the person, it's addressing the substance. There’s ample evidence that recent anti-DEI efforts are not grounded in merit-based reform but in resentment and exclusion. A few examples:

* Executive Order 11246, which prohibited discrimination by federal contractors, was eliminated.

* Civil Rights investigations in schools and colleges were dropped or deprioritized.

* Investigations into racial and gender discrimination in banking were quietly shelved.

These are a few structural, documented actions, not just rhetoric. Their impact falls disproportionately on people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, and immigrants. That’s not an ad hominem, it’s observable policy.

How so? The words and actions of the current administration and its supporters are pretty clear about the intent. One of the first acts of the president was to fire a black man and a white woman from the joint chiefs of staff and replace them with white men. The current secretary of defense claims that women shouldn't be in the military, and rolled back protections for LGBT servicepeople. Records of the black service men are erased from public web pages. I could go on and on and on, it is a nearly endless list.

Uh huh.

> U.S. State Department hire Darren Beattie wrote on X: "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-darren-beattie-state...

What you call “popping your head in someone’s cube”, I call “distraction from doing deep work”.

I’ve seen studies where it takes on average over 20 minutes to recover from an interruption.

My job is to be heavily collaborative with clients and coworkers in consulting. I’m more efficient with a screen share and a shared Lucid chart than I ever was on a whiteboard.

I want an organized meeting on my calendar to discuss things where everyone is prepared to discuss issues collaboratively instead of random interruptions.

No I’m not an anti-social introvert. I am the first person to talk to clients after sales, I have no problem hopping on a plane to talk to customers, business dinners, working with a leading implementation teams, etc - all remotely.

> Over time, however, fractures in the team, collaborations, efficiency start to show and people change their mind.

Also from what I saw, juniors struggled without always-available guidance while mid and seniors could get a lot done by avoiding interruptions. If the mix of employees changed in those couple of years, that alone could have been the entire difference.

Obviously there are pluses and minuses for both but the pluses outway the cons otherwise companies wouldn't have survived after years of it. No this is just popular because the elite noticed workers were feeling happier and more empowered and they feel threatened by that. So along come Trump with an escape hatch, and they make up bullshit about DEI and WFH not working even though it worked for years and stock market was way up. Nope this is all about the old boys network trying to keep the peasants in place and save a few bucks this quarter.

Also that somebody could change their mind after two years of experience.

I don't know if it's bad management per se. I think some people are very well suited for remote; some people aren't. Probably a rough extension of introversion/extroversion in the people mix.

If you take a bunch of very extroverted people and have them all work remotely they will not have a good time (in general).

Equally; if you take a bunch of very introverted people and have them in an office they'll really not like it, especially in open plan.

The other problem is fraud levels in hiring for fully remote is absolutely shocking. There are so many stories now of fake candidates etc, massive cheating in interviews with AI, etc. I've seen many stories like that even with really 'in depth' interview processes, so much so people are now going back to in person interviews en masse.

My rough take is that organisations need to really rethink this home/office thing from first principles. I suspect most engineering teams can work as well/better fully remote. I very much doubt all roles are like that. I think we'll see WFH being based on department or role rather than these global policies.

About a year ago I moved to a new, largish company and, for the first time in my career, got to see how a company can be bad at remote work.

It's by being bad at work, period, but in ways that can be partially mitigated by being in-person. Poor documentation of processes, lots of know-the-right-person involved in getting anything done or figured out, using Teams (its design is remarkably awful for organizing and communicating within and among... teams) rather than literally any other notable chat system, et c.

This stuff is also making in-person work less efficient but it's easier to work around the problems when in-person.

Better than resisting remote work, would be for them to suck less at managing a business. Even if they continued resisting remote work, they should do that!

At Google, they found that engineers L5 and above got more work done with RTO, and engineers at L4 and below got significantly less work done. WFH is great but it doesn't work for fresh engineers (who are often the most gung-ho about it as well).

I think it goes beyond bad management.

These are my disadvantages of working remotely. I say all of these things as an advocate for hybrid work arrangements and co-working spaces/satellite offices:

1) Some people work better in an office. Offices are literally designed for working anyhow.

2) Some people didn't, and/or still don't, have optimal conditions in their house to work remotely.

I've seen tons of people on camera (another thing some management likes to "encourage" by mandate) who are working out of bedrooms, closets, or other makeshift rooms in their house. This is just _asking_ for a constant barrage of distractions.

3) Some jobs aren't compatible with remote work. Examples:

- Tech sales (moreso for complex sales and expansions than new sales)

- Many people who work in the public sector (even before this administration's aggressive RTO campaign)

- Most folks doing hardware or embedded work

- Pretty much everyone that we interact with outside of our home on a daily basis, like front desk personnel, doctors, mechanics, retail and restaurant staff, etc.

This creates an unfair imbalance of "haves" and "have nots". It is also very easy for the "have nots" to typecast those who WFH as lazy, especially given some of the memes of people doing all sorts of other things during core hours.

4) Some people don't naturally communicate what they're doing over Slack. This is the one thing I'll blame on management is communication.

Weekly "15-minute" hour long standups and check-in meetings covered for people like this back when we worked in offices, but it can be easy for these checkpoints to slip in when everyone's remote.

Now, these meetings existing are, in and of themselves, signs that management can be improved. Between Slack/Teams/whatever, bug trackers, Git commit histories, Office 365/Google Workspace APIs and all of the other signs of life of people doing things, there are ways for the PHBs to check that people are doing things so that they can report the things being done to their PHBs so they can report to their PHBs all the way up to the board and investors.

It would be great if more companies invested more in their processes to make it possible to assess productivity without needing inefficient meetings. This would make it possible to be a high-performing company regardless of location.

But change is hard, and it's easier for senior leaders/execs to throw their hands up and say "this isn't working; back to the office, now", especially when those leaders are already traveling all of the time as it is.

(I know that the trope of CxOs who golf/eat steak dinners all of the time is common; my experience working with people at these levels does not completely reflect that.)

5) Work-life balance is so much easier to immolate when working remotely.

When your home is your office and your work apps are on your personal phone, it takes the mental fortitude of a thousand monks to not be "terminally online" at work.

"I'll just hop back on after I'm done with the kids/dinner/etc." is the new normal. It existed before WFH, but it feels so much worse now, as the technology needed to set this up is so much more pervasive (mostly MDM being mature for Apple devices and Android becoming much more secure at the cost of everything that made Android fun for us hackers).

This has the fun side-effect of making people who try very hard to keep work and life as separate as possible look like slackers even when they're not.

6) Establishing rapport and camaraderie is much harder to do remotely. This "just happens" when you're working next to the same people every day for months/years at a time.

This was most evident when I joined a new company after COVID to avoid an acquisition. Almost everyone was super tight with each other because they hung out all of the time. There were so many inside jokes/conversations/memories that I was basically left out of, and because traveling was impossible then, forming new ones didn't really happen.

I get that many on this board view this as a feature, not a bug, but friends at work is important to some (most?) people. It's the one thing I miss from the before times more than anything else. Well, that and traveling all of the time!

7) Last thing I'll say on this: onboarding, in my opinion, is much worse when done remotely.

I've switched companies four times since COVID. ALL of these onboarding experiences have had some combination of:

- Loads of training materials, like labs and new hire sessions, that are dry as toast over Zoom but can be extremely engaging in-person,

- Some kind of buddy system that falls apart because everyone is drowning in a sea of Zoom meetings and the last thing people want to do is have ANOTHER zoom meeting explaining things about your new job that are kind-of difficult to explain without shadowing, and

- An assumption that you are a self-starter who will learn how to do your job by self-organizing meetings with people and scouring whatever documentation/knowledge/recordings/etc you can find.

This might just be a 'me' thing, but I've found remote onboarding to be a poor substitute for onboarding at an office somewhere.

The company was publicly lying that it did because execs thought it would help us recruit younger people.

Unless you are willing to say there is an ongoing flu pandemic then I can't really agree with you.

> after covid is an illusion, there is no such thing as "after" for an ongoing pandemic....

The US death rate from Covid in Q4 2023 (so, pre-Trump II) is roughly the same as the US death rate from influenza. 14.9 or 16.8 deaths per 100,000 for Covid (first number is 12 months ending with Q4 2023, second number is the three month rolling window), 13.5 or 15.1 deaths per 100,000 for influenza.

"After covid" is a perfectly fine description of the current state of affairs.

Honestly I think nearly anyone would do the same. Going against the flow is the rare territory of the founder.

> different roles have different needs, depending on who you collaborate with, etc.

At one FAANG company where the CEO is pushing for RTO, it's mandatory regardless of whether all of the people you collaborate with are in other offices across the country, and your manager has no power to offer an exemption even when they fully agree that there's no reason for you to be at the office.

Apparently my role could be remote but the company took it away.

I don't think we need to give their good wills. They are just using the economic reality to fuck us, and I'm sure many of us are considering fucking back when the stars are right.

Profits don't have to spiral for something to become clear it's not working.

Maybe it's as simple as "this used to take us 3 weeks but now it's taking 5"... or "we're shipping features but they have a lot more holes than before".

Collaboration is pretty hard remotely when you have to schedule discussions and everything else is asynchronous. Certain tasks lend themselves greatly to WFH, but not all of them.

If that how advantageous you think running a company is, you should definitely start one!

> related, the implication is that "DEI" is getting fired,

No. the implication is that DEI policies are being watered down or removed

> The burden of proof in constructive dismissal cases lies with the employee.

The only practical way is if somehow an executive breaks ranks and exposes some list or email or private conversation where he they were planning this.

A harder way is some coordinating action from employees. All get together to figure out the patterns.

Which is exactly why they lead with the "closer to the customer" bullshit. The federal government is starting to do the exact same thing (with the exact same rationale) right now.

Trump and Musk are doing this to the people who enforce labor laws, so we can expect no more labor law enforcement this term

Doing things and then undoing things, I care not to waste time on predictions. Corruption is as corruption does.

Spend a little cash, have a dinner, get favor. Or something. They want to save downtown... because downtown made a bet.

It’s striking how corporate complicity in systematic oppression can be sanitized over time until egregious patterns only resurface as political talking points.

"That One Time It Powered a Genocide" is just an older example of how IBM is happy to put profit over principles. They have a long history that includes happily selling to authoritarian regimes¹, knowingly selling technology that doesn't work², commercializing biometric data without consent³, age discrimination, and more.

¹ http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.co... ² https://www.healthcaredive.com/news/stat-ibms-watson-gave-un... ³ https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/ibm-stirs-controversy-by...

Why do you think "DEI people" are running DEI programs?