They may have been a dog and pony show but were definitely real and forced executives to change how they hire and promote in illegal, discriminatory ways.
There were teeth, in that your own performance review (as a leader) would be affected by it. Depending on your level, your own promotion would require certain stats for your teams for it to be approved. So people made all sorts of decisions - including hiring people they shouldn’t have hired - in order to push those numbers to where they were forced to. The same happened behind closed doors on promotions.
That was not the case in my experience. I am learning that we all have vastly different experiences on what the implementation was, making the discussion rather difficult because we are all talking from very different vantage points.
I think the only "dei" hire i saw was an administrative assistant that got fired ultimately.
Let's not pretend eng hasn't had a massive gap in available hires for a very long time.
