Microsoft just fired its DEI team.

What’s amazing is this quote from one of their team leads:

True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020.

Basically, this was all just performative.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/report-microsoft-shuts-down-dei-team-ex-lead-claims-similar-programs-at-risk

Report: Microsoft shuts down DEI team, ex-lead claims similar programs at risk

Diversity and inclusion initiatives could be facing the axe with large-scale conservative policy potentially on the horizon.

@atomicpoet

What gets me is that DEI is a vital, even critical, part of any company which purports to be invested in making software which is suited to a wide variety of users. When you have a homogeneous set of software writers, you're not going to get a wide variety of inputs -- and your output is going to be likewise constrained. (And that's putting aside the implicit biases found in, say, LLMs.)

What Microsoft are saying now is thus the racist and sexist equivalent to every abled manager dismissing the concerns of a disabled employee -- "It works for me, so it must be a you problem."