by FloorEgg | 2025-10-28 19:20:48+00:00
Actually, I work for many people: My customers, my colleagues, my family. I just don't work for strangers on HN.

My mistake was answering judahmeek's question directly. They asked "What are your sources?" and I answered with the truth, that my impressions came from reading the regulations myself. Instead I should have just not replied at all, because I didn't have the time then to go re-do the research and find all the links. It's not like I save every link I visit when exploring my own curiosity. I am not trying to get some paper published here, just trying to understand whats going on and occasionally share what things seem like to me on HN. Also if they had said something like "This is shocking to me, can you point me where to look into this for myself" I would have probably waited and made a more constructive response.

I hope you appreciate that I just took time out of my day to do this for you, primarily because I found your response (in contrast to judahmeek's) reasonably respectful.

What I noticed when I looked into this last year was that regulatory implementations of the affirmative action executive order 11246 continuously increased and seemed to hit a couple inflection points. I think one was in 2000 and one was in 2021, but there may have been more. I didn't save all the sources that I read to give me the impression I got last year, but after spending about 30 min trying to find at least some of them, it wasn't hard to start to see the picture again.

Note that there is a lot of disparate facts here that paint a picture, and they will paint different pictures depending on the stance the reader starts with before engaging. When I explored this last time, I came at it with curious skepticism. The picture they painted for me, was that something that was well intentioned (affirmative action) came with an assumption: if organizations hire blindly based on merit, over time the distributions of their workforce will match the distributions of the pool of applicants applying to work there. To implement affirmative action these organizations need to include everyone in the pools of applicants, which may require disproportional outreach to invite minorities. Based on this assumption, recommendations were made into outreach programs and requirements were set to measure outcomes. Over time the outcomes didn't match expectations, so regulatory pressure was increased. As the regulatory pressure increased, it put more pressure on all levels within these organizations to take action beyond just outreach programs. So what was federally mandated across many industries specifically was race, gender, sexuality reporting and making plans to reach distributions representative of the broader population. Given this accountability set by federal regulations, and decades of efforts to try to solve the problem with outreach and merit based hiring not leading to the expected outcomes, efforts naturally expanded beyond outreach into all relevant decisions (hiring, promoting). That is how you get people being hired and promoted based on race, gender, sexuality instead of merit. (The exact opposite of the original intention).

For example in Title 41: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-41/subtitle-B/chapter-60/... See 60-2.16 placement goals

Federal contract compliance programs https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2014/12/09/2014-28...

FAR 52.222-23 https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.222-23 Construction firms must set goals for gender participation in workforce

SEC Release no 34-92590 https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/sro/nasdaq/2021/34-92590.pdf Publicly traded companies that don't have at least two minorities on their board risk being delisted from exchanges

What I remember from last year as most shocking were Department of Education regulations and NSF incentives, but I can't find those primary sources now. The NSF website seems gutted. What I recall was that NSF set criteria in grant awards to incentivize institutions to have a diverse workforce. I can find evidence of this from secondary sources, but not the primary source I remember seeing last year. Similarly what I remember, is that the DOE mandated DEI reporting and planning and tied it to federal funding/support. The effect was that leaders would put pressure on the organization beyond just job placement recruitment/outreach. The reporting and accountability focused on diversity and representation throughout the entire organization, and so the "plans" and more importantly implications would extend beyond just outreach and impact placement decisions from hiring, to special training / career acceleration programs and promotions.

I think it crossed a line for some people in the years following 2021 (EO 13985) when these regulations were expanded to include factors related to peoples sexual orientation and preferences. Once some manager who was just trying to get through their quarter and hire the candidate that will the do best job has to forgo what seems like the best candidate in favor of some other candidate because of how they chose to identify or who they like to have sex with, well... yeah it was getting ridiculous.

Let me be extremely clear that I don't condone discrimination. I think we should do our best to support everyone to thrive. We just have to be careful about confusing responsibility with privilege, and respect how hard it is to design incentive systems that actually produce the desired outcomes.

You can look at the evidence that I am presenting here and call it weak and argue against it. Or you can consider that I dug this up in 30 min on my lunch break as a favor to you, as someone with no motive other than curiosity and concern.