I've been several years in the tech industry, observing the behavior of HR and different hiring managers.
DEI unfortunately fails in regions or countries where societies in large part do not believe in the benefits of multiculturalism, diversity or inclusion; they might sign on it only on paper just to get the support of management in developed countries such as the US and Canada but has no teeth or impact on hiring decisions or addressing hiring biases that certain countries or regions have specially if they have a severe systematic racism problem.
You end in up in the situation where the region's director hires managers who themselves come from a background or society where racism is normalized against minorities; which creates a Policy-Practice gap.
As many Devs have stated on social media, it doesn't matter how many years of experience you have, how many certifications you earned, or how many Leetcode challenges you solved. If they don't like you, they won't hire you, period. Surprisingly, you never hear that someone was rejected due to cultural fit because they can't use it since they are very careful on not being accused of racism. However, they will find 100s of excuses or make them up if they don't like you for reasons that are out of your control (e.g. your skin color, race, nationality, background, religion,etc...).
I had a situation where literally the hiring manager was wrong and tried to convince me that I'm wrong on one of the topics. Guess what, did I hear back from him after that? The answer is no; because he was since the first minute ,focused on not hiring me but instead focused on proving to himself that I'm not a good fit.
DEI cannot address the hiring bias; it might be useful if you're already working in a company that has DEI policies by serious management. However, it doesn't matter if you can't even land a job in the so called DEI companies due to the gatekeepers themselves not believing or practicing the DEI policies.
One of the biases I often spotted in different organizations is the confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is where a person is judged based on a stereotype that is spread by rumors, politicians or misinformation. Particularly, I found that people from the Middle East and Africa are often stereotyped for not doing anything properly; but when I took a deep look at those claims and removed my own biases, I found that the stereotype is false and is based on political rhetoric usually spread by politicians trying to gain votes by appealing to the grumpy locals who feel insecure.
I found no evidence that being from a developing country or poor country has impact on how good or bad a developer is. It all boils down to experience and each person is different.
As an experiment, I wanted to see if I can also feel the same way if I lied to myself to believe that someone is less intelligent than I'm; I started focusing on everything they do, and found out that it is indeed easy to find faults, including silly ones and feel that the person is inexperienced or not capable. However, on the large scale of things, this is confirmation bias; we all want to believe something because challenging an internal belief is not so easy.
Long story short, DEI fails the moment you move out of regions that are by default diverse such as the US and Canada for example.
Until now, there is no solution for minorities who happened to be unlucky enough to find themselves living in a society with severe systematic racism issues.
Large corporations with DEI policies, need to push the envelope and really try to take over the hiring process in other regions to help address those issues. Otherwise, they will end up in a situation with an anti-pattern. One region is highly successful due to diversity while another region is less performing due to policy-gap practice.
Large corporations in America function as DEI but the same corporation in Europe and other regions function as local startups.
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