As others have noted, using diversity as an indicator seems like confirmation bias. If you look for something hard enough you will see it (like faces in a cloud) and correlation is not causation.

Now, I don't care much for diversity/dei stuff, i believe in reasonable (not puritanical) meritocracy but when someone picks on dei it shows you how they think.

Obviously the author is not claiming diversity is the cause of decline at these companies. He is claiming it as an indicator of a court of bersailles culture shift where people pay lip service to DEI but he chose analyst calls which are not by tech workers or producers in FB. This is a call by managers/execs and traders. DEI lip service has been a thing in corporate america long before 2020, I remember having to endure bs DEI townhalls in companies that have nothing to do with tech and that were and still are very profitable as long ago as 2014-15.

The fact is, a public call or company wide townhall is set up to pay lip service to bullshit. You can't take that as a reflection of internal culture. They probably stopped talking about it on analyst calls because they had more pressing items like loss of share value and their plans to reassure shareholders.

If a FB tech worker claimed they get promoted based on attendance of a diversity seminar I would change my mind but the author picked on diversity similar to how republicans say "woke" as a dogwhistle to what they really mean.

It's not that I care about bullshit diversity lipservice bu random corporations but when you use that to make your point about the overall decline of a company now you are not paying lip service, your anti-diversity propaganda will have actual effects in excluding people.

Another HN post was saying things like "you shouldn't have committ hooks for a diversity committee meeting" I keep seeing this as a dogwhistle, the new "maga".

Show me evidence that diversity lipservice, as bullshit as it maybe, is being used in place of actual performance of employees that aren't in HR or managers at the middle-manager and higher level and I will take back what I said. Until then, this is a nicely concealed racial dogwhistle.

I remember clearly my highschool teacher telling the class how corporate america is "is still great, mostly white" and no one batter an eye lol. I know where this sentiment comes from no matter how well it is concealed these days.

The court of versailles vs wild west analogy lacks a lot of nuance. HR will usually be to the versailles extreme and SWEs to the wild west in any company.

What I have noticed on the other hand is execs are influenced by marketing, legal, investors, anyone but their core product people and that's when you see a decline. Google for example became a "buy another company instead of build it in house" type of a company which is why they were caught off guard.

Microsoft got past all that after shedding steve ballmer. They're not the 90s Microsoft but they are very innovative and even when they take over a company they show wisdom in not destroying the culture/people right away.

It's a shame, the article started out nice but I think the author let their bias leak/influence their conclusion.