IBM Sues Microsoft's New Chief Diversity Officer To Protect Diversity Trade Secrets (geekwire.com)

theodp writes: GeekWire reports that IBM has filed suit against longtime exec Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, alleging that her new position as Microsoft's chief diversity officer violates a year-long non-compete agreement, allowing Microsoft to use IBM's internal secrets to boost its own diversity efforts. A hearing is set for Feb. 22, but in the meantime, a U.S. District Judge has temporarily barred McIntyre from working at Microsoft. "IBM has gone to great lengths to safeguard as secret the confidential information that McIntyre possesses," Big Blue explained in a court filing, citing its repeated success (in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017) in getting the U.S. government to quash FOIA requests for IBM's EEO-1 Reports on the grounds that the mandatory race/ethnicity and gender filings represent "confidential proprietary trade secret information." IBM's argument may raise some eyebrows, considering that other tech giants -- including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook -- voluntarily disclosed their EEO-1s years ago after coming under pressure from Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus. In 2010, IBM stopped disclosing U.S. headcount data in its annual report as it accelerated overseas hiring.

Comments

Re:Douchebag manoeuvre

[ckatko]

Diversity jobs aren't about diversity. It's about profit. Maximizing public good will. It's PR. It's plausible deniability for a corporation to drop hundreds of grand to get you to give them the benefit of the doubt when a scandal comes out.

If diversity is "obvious" and we need "50-50" party and all that shit, and Salon et al minimum-wage journalists know what's best for us, then why do you need someone making over half-a-million a year just to tell you that? Is "not hiring black people = bad" something so profound you need a dedicated "scientist" to reveal that gem?

And if you ARE discriminating, congratulations, it's already illegal to discriminate based on age, sex, religion, or sexual orientation. So if your lawyers aren't stopping that, they should all be fired.

I mean, has anyone ever actually asked themselves what this person would DO on the job? Compute Maxwell equations? Run Monte Carlo simulations? Nah. You know exactly what it is. Talking out of your ass with feel good initiatives. Making people run through sexual harassment seminars, and inviting other feel good speakers that all help in the plausible "we take #OutrageFlavorOfTheWeek seriously."

Even the wikipedia says exactly what I'm saying:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

>A cultural diversity practitioner has expertise in managing and leading programs designed to foster productive relationships among people of different cultures.

Meanwhile, notice a complete lack of any formulas, philosophies or anything you'd see from a real degree or position. Even business wikis list things like basic accounting formulas, and organizational management rules, and other "laws".

We might as well have a senior level job for "Chief Pizza Officer" for addressing serious concerns about whether people are eating enough quality food while they work. I'd love to see the college that gives *that* degree. I'd even get one--in spite of the inevitable intense rigor required to survive the class load.

Re: Douchebag manoeuvre

[mapkinase]

Exactly. I hate it when people "helping" minorities trying to represent as a good business model.

It's a good business model because if you do not follow it either government will crack down on you or liberal media will scare off all your advertisement or customers.

Re:wait what?

[tlhIngan]

Actually, based on some of my experiences with Quality Managers, the purpose of the Diversity Officer is to find a way to cover up the ways in which you discriminate against certain groups. I have recently discovered that the purpose of a Quality Manager is NOT to ensure the quality of your production. Rather their purpose is to put into place systems and procedures designed to disguise the fact that you don't give a crap about quality. I saw a situation where the Quality Manger did not CARE that the products going out the door were terrible as long as all of the boxes on the proper forms were checked and the right people had signed them. The fact that following those procedures failed to catch the quality defects was irrelevant. It was the Sales and Marketing guys who insisted that people change what they were doing in order to make sure that the stuff going out the door would perform as the customer expected. The Quality Manager fought them on those changes because they would make it harder to pass the Quality Standards audits.

A lot of quality systems aren't about producing "high quality" product. Because believe it or not, that doesn't matter.

What matters most is consistency. Lot of people will chose a consistently crap product over one where one item might work great, but the next 3 are marginal, and 1 fail completely. Or even one where 90 out of 100 are up to spec but 10 are complete fails spec wise.

Easier to design around the flaws of a consistently bad item than have to implement part screening to filter out the bad ones from a bunch of good ones, or having to loosen your specifications so the bad ones also work fine

And that's really what quality systems measure - how consistent is your product. Not that your product has an excellent set of specifications that will pass everything you throw at it.

Re:Douchebag manoeuvre

[liquid_schwartz]

...Likewise, diversity is not supposed to be about competitive advantage, but about the betterment of society and the fair treatment of all people.

Careful, the last diversity officer that said that had to step down. Diversity has been nakedly about promoting favored classes for some time. If you even suggest that a white male might be more than an evil oppressor you will be punished.

Citation:

https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/...