Just genuinely curious. Non-DEI myself, just seen so many of those posts. Do you think people start to look inward and see that they didn’t have what it takes?
| +40 | SpaceX IPO - what are your thoughts | 9 | 5m |
| +28 | Should I use Claude or chatgpt? | 15 | 6h |
| +21 | Funny Things to Say to Interns | 7 | 9h |
| +17 | How did you meet your significant other/partner? | 13 | 22h |
| +17 | London's future as a financial centre | 18 | 1d |
| The Great Debate | 9 | 10h | |
| +7 | E ink/electronic notepads | 4 | 23h |
| +6 | Stay Sharp All Day With Best Modvigil 200 MG Tablet | 0 | 19h |
| +6 | Test post will be deleted automatically. | 11 | 1d |
| +5 | get a model before you model | 3 | 2d |
Career Resources
Get instant access to lessons taught by experienced private equity pros and bulge bracket investment bankers including financial statement modeling, DCF, M&A, LBO, Comps and Excel Modeling.
Obviously it's going to be that random black guy they saw in the street on their way to interview with PJT RSSG that gave them bad luck
Look inward? Never that...They'll find something or someone to pin it on to protect their fragile egos.
Biden, Kamala, Obama, AOC, liberals, the left, antifa, illegal immigrants, Canadians (51st state Americans), China, Ukraine
It's always someone else's fault. Didn't you get the memo?
In before the "look another diversity hire" response. Mediocre peeps going to stay mediocre.
You're implying that the DEI programs have no real impact on who's ultimately hired, which is false. If the DEI programs are genuinely eliminated, many of the people complaining about them will in fact be hired rather than DEI candidates.
That's like implying that all underrepresented employees in the office have less skill than their counterparts which is also false. Yes, some DEI candidates have unfairly taken some jobs from deserving candidates, but a lot of those White finance bros were just trash and weren't getting a job anyway or they weren't any better than the Black kid - they could both do the job just as well. I wish you kids who hate the Black or Latino kids in the office kept that same energy for the junior or the third in the office who is only there because of his dad. They took some of your jobs too.
Edit: Or how about all the jobs and promotions mediocre or horrible White workers took from more deserving Black or Latino people over centuries in all industries? I still see it happen all the time, especially in the public sector. Or all the jobs White men took from more deserving women? You know that good ol boy's club? There's a reason DEI initiatives started in the first place you know? It was a flawed attempt to combat racism, sexism, explicit, and implicit biases. It just went too far.
If DEI is genuinely eliminated and there is a true meritocracy (which there won't be and never was) then those same candidates still aren't getting jobs.
Unpopular opinion: A lot of kids screaming for meritocracy don't really want meritocracy, they just want the system to go back to working for them. Everyone loves the system when it works for them no matter how unfair it is to someone else.
Best summary I've seen
Most people would be more than happy to see legacy admits/nepo hires gone too, but unlike racial discrimination, there's no laws prohibiting against for people to attack in the courts.
Well, those with the necessary skillset would have made it regardless.... right?
"A lot of kids screaming for meritocracy don't really want meritocracy, they just want the system to go back to working for them."
Sometimes being correct can cause you to be unpopular I guess
The level of entitlement these diversity people have... They came to live in societies created by white people, only for their children to hate the very people who let them come into their countries and benefit from society that was created by white people. Precisely the reason why immigration needs to stop.
No they won't lol
This is so laughably naive. Of course DEI has a massive impact on who is hired. It just has no impact on the people complaining about it. There are two alternatives here. First, people keep using DEI metrics or whatever to hire diverse candidates. Second, they actively reject that and go back to hiring the son of the boss's golf buddy, just like what happened before.
The entire concept that DEI was somehow skewing this wonderful meritocracy we used to have is beyond stupid. Banks, for example, hired lots of relatively mediocre white men who knew someone in the department.
So I suppose to the extent that people complaining about DEI are rich, privileged white kids who don't have a lot to recommend them except their last name, getting rid of DEI is a big deal. For the people on WSO, who at least pretend to be highly qualified, they'll get absolutely zero benefit from it.
So "DEI has a massive impact on who is hired", but all the qualified people who are passed over just serenely shrug it off without complaint, and anyone who complains about it is part of a totally separate group who would never be hired under a meritocratic system? Now that is a laughable view.
Naw, the sound pretty lame
Nepo babies
Asians
This. Feeling like you belong and belonging are different. Know that there will always be a target. In some sense, society or politics as a whole has borderline personality disorder. I’ve seen a lot of progress for Asians in my 20 year career. The timing for more diversity in commercial real estate lagged behind finance in general. I was a “token minority” early in my career working for a large RE fund. Things can be fine when the target is on someone else, but eventually the target moves to the next rung.
Nepotism (which has always been a bigger hurdle than DEI)
Let me give you a more "senior" perspective. I don't really care for my own career, i am established and have track record, way past the DEI noise.
I have 3 juniors. They would all qualify for what you call DEI.
1 minority guy who got transferred from some other team. I couldn't get an unrestricted headcount back then. He is average, he can do the job for sure and is hard working with great attitude, but is clearly not the "next generation" that will carry the load.
1 girl hired through the "female empowerment" stuff. That process was so random and not competence based but we got told it's that or nothing, so i took the best out of 3 candidates, directly to graduate program, the luckiest person ever given how hundreds of people struggle to even get an internship. Given the process, I had incredibly low expectations, she is outperforming the low expectations which is great. Again this person would not have gotten here without massive help from these "programs". She is diligent and can do the job so far, but it's rather average as well in absolute terms, i am just touching wood that she is better than what i was dreading.
1 girl which just got dumped on me from some failing desk, they didn't want to fire her only because "it would look bad" so i had to "find her stuff to do". She is very bad and deserves to get the boot but here we are.
So this DEI stuff has real consequences on my team, i am 100% confident that the quality of people i have under me is massively below what i could get if i had unrestricted hiring constraints and just got "the best".
It paradoxically also makes me much more valuable short/medium term, because management knows these guys aren't anywhere close to being good enough to replace me. But long term it hinders my ability to "rely" on my underlings to step up myself.
I pretty much told management that i need an unrestricted medium seniority hire otherwise i will leave and let them deal with the kindergarten.
Are ALL dei people bad? Not at all. But most are just "average" that "can do the job", but can never graduate into being the next generation of decision makers because at some seniority level, people have to start generating cash, not just "go through the motion". And the proportion of people that are force fed through the DEI program that turn out briliant is rather low. This is embedded at every level, HR send tons of average female CVs, then complain if you didn't select enough of them.
I don't even care for myself and made enough money to retire anyway, but this stuff is harmful if your focus is the bottom line. I am 100% convinced of it.
So you've made one single DEI hire, who is actually doing a good job. She's "average" which means she's exactly what you'd expect from a new hire if you hired them based on competence alone.
The other two people you mention, you didn't actually hire, so you have no idea what they're story is or why they're at the firm.
When i say "average" it's clearly compared to her seniority level, not in general...
You seem rather average in your reasoning.
BuT bUt buT taking what Coconut1983 says seriously contradicts the argument he is trying to make. We can't take what Coconut is saying seriously
I think this reflects the experience many teams have made, which has an statistical relevance (limiting pool of candidates to a subsegment of the population, truncating the sample).
Ultimately, as a team leader you want the best talent, period. Irrespective of gender, background, etc, just the best people out there. Background (gender, race, faith, economic background) should not bear significance per se, only if it supports the performance (hustler, resourceful, etc.). This can help good performers from any background get the job, irrespective of other (less relevant) characteristics.
Avoiding elevating biased factors (e.g. DEI, or Nepos) helps focusing on getting the best performers out there.
Does DEI's include middle eastern/eastern european races? I will be recruiting for 2029 and 2030 summer, and wanted to ask how the environment is looking for a diversity/immigrant prospect.
Thought this was a joke until I read your profile.
No, generally they don't.
How can I look like a DEI, both in College apps, and IB recruiting?
English is my second language and I'm as white as a Spanish person.
Thanks 😊
Oh no. Losing out to better candidates on the merits or due to their straight up connections that are a fact of life. The horror.
I mean, you don't see a problem with lumping these two together?
Why is it okay to hire someone because of "connections" but it isn't okay to hire them for some other reason?
If you think hiring should be meritocratic, great. Obviously that isn't, wasn't, and won't be how hiring decisions are made, but at least objecting to DEI on those grounds has the fig leaf of legitimacy. But saying "hey, any idiot whose father plays golf with the MD deserves to be hired" kind of undermines that point. And given how white and male banking is, you're basically just arguing for the explicit blacklisting of all minorities.
Nobody is blacklisting anyone but you go ahead and keep up the catastrophic thinking & perpetual exaggeration because it's clearly going well. I didn't say nepos "deserve" to be hired, I said that their relationships are a fact of life and crying about it does nothing. Humans are tribal and have relational preference, so nepotism will always exist in some form. At least the act of nepotism serves a purpose with potential benefit beyond what the competence of the candidate can deliver - strengthening the relationship the firm has with either an existing employee (essentially a perk for working as hard as they do for the firm/getting to where they are) or with a potential client (I help your son/daughter out maybe you do the same for mine later/do work with us, either a perk for me as the senior or for the firm as a whole getting business). DEI accomplishes neither of these and exists purely to make leftoids like you feel good about seeing brown people in a room because you can't stand the overwhelming white & asian success that dominates this field. So not only does it have no opportunity to provide benefit that wouldn't have otherwise existed, it's effectively a negative free roll because there's only a higher chance that you hire someone who's less competent + provides none of those benefits. If they were as good as any other top candidate they don't need the DEI to get the job. If they wouldn't have gotten the job without DEI, then they're clearly not good enough as a candidate to compete on the merits. Also, hiring someone with preference based on race is, shockingly, is racist whereas nepotism is a fact of life that exists cross culturally and everyone has to deal with equally. Also there was this thing called the civil rights era that happened a while back where a bunch of people got together to reaffirm the belief that racial discrimination shouldn't be permitted in hiring and implemented legislation to enforce it - sound familiar?
Why are you so eager to add other meaningless differentiators to an already difficult process, explicitly to disadvantage racial groups that on average overwhelming outperform the ones you otherwise want to give preference to across the metrics that actually matter? Would you ever argue that banks in China need to hire more Indians or in that ones in Africa need to hire more white Europeans? No, of course not, because the only places that need to be racially diverse in your view are the western countries and racially diverse has to mean lowering standards otherwise the "proportional" representation you crave will just never happen. Why if DEI is removed would the number of URMs decline? Because it's a skill issue goofy. If the amazing URMs are so bothered by not having an express lane into a job then just be better.
Just say you hate whites and asians and be done with it you sad little shill
Some other external factor whose nonsensical relationship to them not getting a job is about on par with DEI
I'm just glad I don't have to keep pretending I'm going to give these black & hispanic doofuses a chance because I need to meet a quota. Couldn't be more happy if my analyst class had been all asians & white guys or all indians, so long as shit's getting done.
In my opinion, the only way to have true meritocracy from a racial perspective is to take ethnicity out of it (applications, etc.). If I, a family member, or friend had to have triple bypass surgery, do you really think I would give a flying fuck what the surgeon looked like?!?! Be competent and have a good attitude/personality, and you could be neon-striped and polka dotted for all I care.
Why leftists feel the need to act like removing a barrier to the most competent candidates getting a job is a bad thing will always mystify me
In an ideal world, the most competent people get the jobs they deserve. In the real world, it comes down to who the gatekeepers and decision-makers like. As I mentioned before race, gender, and explicit and implicit biases are factored into those decisions every day. In many cases, halo effects and office politics hold more weight than hard work and competency. As long as imperfect people make decisions then they will always hire and promote the people they want to hire and promote unless they're reluctantly forced to hire and promote the people they don't want to hire and promote. Sometimes the people they want to hire and promote are the hardest working people who deserve it, and they look past race and gender.
However, too many times they don't. They hire their friends even though their friends suck. They hire their friend's kids even though their friend's kid is a lazy waste of space who doesn't even want the job, but his dad is forcing him to do something with his life. Sometimes they're incapable of seeing how bad the people they like are at their job because of whatever biases they hold. And sometimes they know the people they like suck but they hire or promote them anyway to take care of them or because they don't want to tell their friends they suck and ruin the friendship. Human beings aren't objective as much as they like to believe they are.
Meritocracy also matters more in some cases than others. You want the best surgeon, pilot, soldier, etc. because lives are on the line when you don't have it. But no one is going to die when an idiot is promoted to midlevel management or hired for some sales role selling crap to people that they don't need or to put some Powerpoint slides together and fill out some spreadsheets. It may affect the bottom line down the road, but it can be overlooked and it often is. Oftentimes there is some poor soul who is smart enough but dumb enough to pick up the slack for the dead weight and work for two people but get paid for one so it doesn't even affect the bottom line too much. That guy would probably never get the raise or promotion he deserves because he's too good and cheap in his current role, and he doesn't know how to play the game. Or like I mentioned, the public sector where the government funds everything and no one has to compete in a free market, and it's impossible to be fired.
A lot of you kids haven't seen the real world yet but you're going to learn fast that hard work and meritocracy is bullshit. Wait till some of you hardworking White kids get passed up for a promotion by a White guy that doesn't do shit, takes all the credit, and jerks off the boss every chance he gets. It won't be DEI's fault or the Black kid's fault.
This is a direct excerpt from Steve Schwarzman's autobiography "What It Takes" PG. 28 so you can see meritocracy in action.
"I arrived for my first interview on Wall Street an hour early, because I didn’t want to be late. I sat in a Chock Full o’Nuts coffee shop nursing a cup of coffee, the one cup I could afford, checking my watch every couple of minutes. When 9:00 a.m. arrived, I went into the headquarters of Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette at 140 Broadway, up to the thirty-sixth floor. I took a seat in reception and watched as sophisticated young women with black headbands and fancy shoes and young men in ties and shirtsleeves, only slightly older than me, ran around the office alert and purposeful. The energy of the place was electric.
After half an hour, an assistant ushered me in to see Bill Donaldson, the D in DLJ. It was surprising to see a man so young sitting in a rocking chair, but this was fashionable post-JFK. Our meeting had been arranged by Larry Noble, Bill’s Yale classmate, who was now working in the Yale admissions office. I had met Larry when I had seen him with his young family at a Yale fifteenth reunion and felt compelled to buy a copy of Babar the Elephant for his son. I had no idea who Larry was, but my random act of generosity led to a friendship and now this interview.
“Tell me,” said Bill, “why do you want to work at DLJ?”
“Frankly, I don’t know much about what DLJ does,” I said. “But it seems you’ve got all these amazing young people working here. So I want to do whatever they’re doing.”
Bill smiled and said, “That’s as good a reason as any.”
After we talked a bit, he said, “Why don’t you go around and see some of my partners?” I did, but when I got back to Bill’s office at the end of the day, I told him they seemed uninterested in me. “Listen,” he said laughing, “I’ll give you a call in two or three days.” He came through with an offer of a job. The starting salary was $10,000 a year.
“That is absolutely terrific,” I said. “But there’s only one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“I need $10,500.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “What do you mean?”
“I need $10,500 because I heard there’s another person graduating from Yale who’s making $10,000, and I want to be the highest-paid person in my class.”
“I don’t care,” said Bill. “I shouldn’t be paying you anything at all. It’s $10,000!”
“Then I won’t take the job.”
“You won’t take the job?”
“No. I need $10,500. It’s not a big deal to you, but it’s a really big deal to me.”
Donaldson started laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not kidding.”
“Let me think about it.” Two days later he called back. “Okay. $10,500.” And with that I entered the securities business.
Do you think a Black kid can walk into Blackstone and pull this off? Do you think a Black kid could pull this off anytime in American history? In contrast, watch The Pursuit of Happyness and see what a Black dude had to go through to get a job as a stockbroker in the 80s.
You'll often hear boomers laugh about shit like this while they're telling stories like this about their meritocracy (Watch the first minute):
"Hehehe I didn't know shit, but I still got a job."
Now look at the White kid staring at his phone the whole time at 3:49 in contrast to all the DEI hires in the video. I wonder who his dad is...
Yeah, things have changed a little but not really if you're looking in the right places.
Similar story from an alum I connected with a long time ago - first interview at Saloman Brothers, they asked him if he would rather be in equities or bonds. Dude said he didn't know what they were but would like to try equities because he had heard there was a lot of money in equities. Dude eventually became head of equity private placements at BofA...
Sed ut nostrum hic non doloribus voluptate. Accusantium quae odio eos illum quia aut. Nihil veniam harum dolorum culpa veritatis quo quos eum. Asperiores iure eveniet molestiae sit.
Assumenda eveniet voluptate non et. Autem fugiat ea sint incidunt laudantium. Error ipsum dolor voluptas qui. Provident repudiandae qui voluptatem optio ea odit perspiciatis. Sit aut deserunt vel qui voluptates eum quod. Minus iure vero fuga. Suscipit incidunt quam necessitatibus impedit temporibus quo autem.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...
Tempora ut porro consequatur ut in nesciunt veritatis. Enim placeat iste dolores ut dolorem. Mollitia itaque tempora animi tempora.
Veritatis id expedita qui est. Temporibus qui velit dolor ipsam excepturi quia. Sint odit assumenda qui veniam quae et. Natus enim quas eos non nostrum dignissimos.