DEI is to prevent the kind of favouritism/nepotism that prevails in a lot of society (e.g. "the old boys club"). A suitable example would be the recent hires by the U.S. administration - people are being given high ranking jobs just because they're loyal/friendly to a certain person and nothing at all to do with their competency to do the particular job.
The purpose of DEI is to allow the most qualified person to get the job despite the overt racism and sexism in society.
Whatever DEI was supposed to accomplish in theory, in practice it was token hiring to make the PR (yes, not even the HR) department happy. And it very fast developed is own "old boys club" hiring one another and spreading through companies.
I don't know why you're being down-voted, I've seen diversity hires placed in charge of projects and destroy them. When you weren't promoted for merit you stop believing merit matters, and quickly build diverse teams with no experience incapable of building things in a timely manor.
Sure but the practical result of considering diversity is you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project. Projects fail or run over budget all the time with the best engineer, so hiring fifth best engineer for a project to achieve a particular diversity requirement feels irresponsible at best.
> you end up not hiring the best engineer for a project
I don't think this has actually been proven as of yet, since "best" is a very loaded word, especially you're required to measure on more than one axis. (But feel free to point me to any source that disagrees with me.)
I think you're misunderstanding; this is a logical exercise. The best is a hypothetical ranking, and to add a independent variable which means we must detract from hiring the best person. To disagree would be to say someone is better strictly because of the color of their skin.
It's like if you were tasked with buying the most powerful engine produced for a locomotive. How you define powerful is arbitrary and is an optimization problem on its own, but if you then say "and the engine block must come from the factory painted red" you are, by definition, no longer optimizing for the fastest engine, you're optimizing for the fastest red engine. Being red is independent from being the best engine.
If your logical exercise includes "interacting with other people" as a criterion, it would disqualify a lot of the people that you consider to be "the fastest engine", that's why I mentioned "multiple axis".
I do not approve of DEI methods as they usually get implemented in capitalist tech companies, but the underlying idea, encourage more groups with lower representation to participate in tech is sound, and it is what I'm advocating for in this exchange.
Western tech world is biased in favour of middle-class white men due to the fact that it's made out of mostly middle-class white men. You might not agree that's a problem, but most of the world does.
