Again, DEI does not mean "hire less qualified people from group X", it mean "don't bias your hiring of less or equally competent candidates in favor of men". It is not "sexist/racist in the other direction" - though I'm sure some people can make it such - however, let's be clear here, if it _were_ racist/sexist in the other direction, and you want it to be removed, you're saying "both paths are sexist/racist and I just prefer the old sexist/racist path that gave an advantage to people who are straight, cis, white, and/or men". It's really not the most compelling argument to say "I just wish we got to benefit from the biases we used to have".

The problem is lots of people are use to a default world in which being a man, or being white, etc means that if all other things are equal they will be selected. They see anything other than choose the "equally performing" white dude by default as reverse racism.

Couple this with the well documented history of women and minorities being judged more critically for the same work, and you get the "non-racist" world where worse performing candidates are hired because they're "equal" and a better culture fit.

You can see the same thing retroactively: a woman or minority figure who subsequently performs below the level expected is blamed on "DEI", yet no one questions the hiring of a sub-performing non-minority. Weird right? lackluster minority employees only ever get their jobs because of DEI, lackluster non-minorities are just a thing that happens some times.

You're right, it would be great to not consider gender, race, etc - and certainly when I've interviewed people it has never figured into the process, but companies need to have some kind of mechanism to compensate for all the employees that do (you can happily find countless examples on HN of people openly admitting they consider women inferior devs, they dismiss certain races and castes, lgbt candidates, or people with the wrong religion. DEI programs exist so that those bigots can't pollute the entire recruitment process. Those are the bigots who complain most, yet seem completely unaware that they are the entire reason DEI programs are necessary. The moment you say "I don't think group X can do the job as group Y", you've immediately said there needs to be an external mechanism to mitigate the advantage you are giving to group Y.

That's what DEI is: a hamfisted, but sadly necessary, unless you have a better idea, mechanism to stop people from biasing the recruitment process.

Seriously.

If you think DEI is bad, I want you to think about every "bad" coworker you've had and see if there's any bias in what you blame for them being hired. If you look at the news today, everytime anything goes wrong, and there is a minority involved anywhere, even if they were objectively not at fault, the bigot circle jerk does nothing but blame DEI.

Lots of people want to go back to the "good old days", because they were immensely privileged in those days, you could get and stay married easier - because women could not have bank accounts, and were functionally owned by their family or husband. Remember a women could not divorce her husband for beating her, nor for raping her, because by definition spousal rape was impossible. So yeah, I understand why lots of men want to go back in time, life was objectively easier for them. Those men just don't give a shit about it being harder for literally every one else, which is why I don't give a shit about their opinion.

If you think DEI is the reason you can't get a job, maybe the problem is just that you're broadcasting "I'm a bigot" and no one wants to work with someone who is saying "I have no respect for my coworkers unless they're the same race, gender, religion, etc as me and will not treat them as people". Or of course, maybe it's just dunning-kreuger: you're too low skill to understand you're lower skill than the people being selected over you.