A majority of Americans across nearly all demographic groups said DEI initiatives have made no impact on their personal careers, according to a newly released Harris Poll/Axios Vibes survey.
Why it matters: Republican lawmakers and activists have vilified DEI, a term for diversity, equity and inclusion policies used by employers. Companies have responded by rolling back programs.
- Yet Americans — and businesses — have a generally positive to at least indifferent view on the subject.
- On balance, most demographic groups were more likely to say DEI benefited their career than hindered it.
Being in enterprise IT I’m intimately familiar with this mindset.
I’ve always felt bad for IT. They hire enough and give you just enough resources to limp along, but never enough to actually do your job well. And I feel like every few years they have to run a skeleton crew so small that something major happens to remind them why they pay you at all.
At my last job, we had to get CFO approval to buy a bag of zip ties, and the PO was denied. It was like $3.
But yeah, we had offices in India with an IT team there, and one of the C-suite assholes loved to tell us how he could replace us with 10 Indians for what they paid us.
At one point, a coworker stopped giving a fuck and said, “You’re full of shit. If you could do that, you already would have.”
At my last job, I had three meetings to discuss why we needed SSDs instead of rotational hard disks for a build server. The cost of the employees attending the meetings several orders of magnitude exceeded the cost of the purchase.
The cost of the CFO taking the time to look at that approval was more than the zip ties.
Yup, it was ridiculous.