This is the first piece I know I should not say but still say it anyway here. Hey, I’m anonymous[1] : )

The problem

When I was a frontline engineering manager, I lost two bright, hardworking junior AI/ML engineers within a few months of span. Knowing I am a great manager, the work we were doing was interesting and the pay was one of the best in the local market, I had lunch with the second departing engineer. “You and everybody are simply great, but I sometimes just don’t feel that I belong… Em, just between us, I want to go somewhere that’s more diverse.”

Mind you, the two departed engineers are Caucasian. After their departure, my team of 9 – 2 = 7 machine learning engineers were 100% Asian.

Don’t ask me why[2], a few months later after we refilled the two positions, my team of 7 + 2 = 9 machine learning engineers were still 100% Asian.

For my all-Asian team, which is technically 100% minority, we need more Caucasians which are technically population majority. This is what I mean by reverse diversity.

The origin

Before we examine the origin of the reverse diversity problem, let’s define a few terms:

  • American Elites. The powerful, the rich, the establishment who control policies, corporations and institutions.
  • American Majority. The majority of American population who are not or not yet elites.
  • Model minority. Asian Americans were characterized as a “model” minority amid the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

It all started with Outsourcing which as a term originated no later than 1981 and it took four decades in the making:

  1. American elites outsourced manufacturing to China.
    • Out of greed, not caring the detrimental effect to the American majority in the manufacturing sector.
    • Out of short sight, not realizing the long term strategic risk to America’s national security.
  2. American elites outsourced IT to India.
  3. American majority values more prominent and profitable jobs in finance and management over manufacturing, IT and STEM.
    • A vacuum of domestic IT and STEM talents formed.
  4. The vacuum of IT and STEM talents was filled by foreign talents, reverse colonization of United States happened.
    • Model minorities occupied low level domestic IT and STEM positions.
    • Model minorities occupied middle management positions in IT and STEM. Because upper-management American elites, especially those in traditional industries[3] such as banking, healthcare and manufacturing, developed a functional dependency on model minorities who are willing to lick their boots and to learn and do whatever boring, hard or inhumane things to get ahead.
    • With the people management power, model minorities hired more model minorities.
  5. All-model-minority teams emerge across IT and STEM industries.

The mechanism

With the advent of Big Tech’s unreasonably high salary, American majority’s attitude toward IT has swung to the opposite:

  • FAANG employees can make more money than doctors and bankers now. Tech bros such as Elon enjoy more power than politicians now.
  • It’s hard to get into computer science (CS) programs of American colleges now.
  • Recent CS graduates find its hard to find a job now.

But why all-minority teams still exist and keep emerging at present day when abundance of population majority job seekers are available? To answer this question, we have to look at the dynamics in the hiring and promotion process.

Cronyism and mono-culture are the two catalysts of the all-model-minority teams:

  • Overt, covert, intentional or subconscious cronyisms are human nature.
    • For some cultures the cronyism is national: Even if I despise you because of the region, school, caste or religious background you come from but I still help you because you’re my people.
  • Many places and ways cronyisms may exert themselves:
    • Interviews maybe rigged.
    • Contractors may deflect or by-pass the stringent interview process to get in, then convert to senior level with the years of experiences on their often fake resume.
    • Task assignment and promotion maybe biased.
  • The often-toxic mono-culture of all-model-minority teams expels population majority candidates or team members.
  • All factors above cause model minorities to self-select and congregate.

The secret agenda

Why I, one of the model minorities, am ranting about reverse diversity?

  • Since I got on the bus, you may shut the door now.
  • My American born and educated kids can’t find jobs in the high paying IT field.

No, these allegations are not true. I’m against the all-model-minority team on grounds of:

  1. My “everything in moderation” belief. 100% of a single minority culture in a team is the extreme of the extreme and is not good for any party. That’s it. I’m only objecting to those 100% all minority teams. In the melting pot that is America, can you honestly object to my objection?
  2. The parasitic and cancerous anti-cultures these teams breed. I once received a call 7:00pm from one of my newly joined report, addressing me as ‘Sir’, announcing his break-through at work. If all I care is impressing my boss with the team’s outputs and don’t hate too much of the modern day workplace caste or feudalism, I’d happily turn him into my vassal or even proactively harassing my peasants at 7:00pm myself. America wins by creativity, not by servitude or burning the mid-night oil. I stayed in the states just so that me and my kids don’t have to do 996. Witnessing the all-minority teams doing variants of it makes me petrified.

The resolution

The reverse diversity problem took four decades in the making, it’ll take at least a decade to eradicate. The domestic IT industry is taking notice. Go ask Capital One, what kind of experience made it to ban contractors from being converted to full-time employee?

This is how it likely to play out:

  1. American majority values IT and STEM education and jobs. Domestic IT and STEM talents become abundant.
    • Social unrest will arise when American majority can’t land a job in IT and STEM.
  2. American elites will listen and initiate course correction.
    • All-minority-teams will be the first target.
    • Previously occupied low level and middle management positions will be reversely diversified with American majorities who learned and practiced IT and STEM.
  3. American majority + minority, the abundance of domestic IT talents will reduce the profession toward the direction of construction.
    • More likely to specialize into the likes of design, civil engineering and construction roles in the building industry.

Reckoning with these realizations, I soon moved to a diverse team that mimics the US population composition and couldn’t be happier. Composition of the team that I left behind, after my position was refilled, concentrated further to a specific Asian region.

The recommendation

Leaders of all-minority teams, you’re warned, reverse diversify now!

Notes

[1] Dear reader, if you figured out my identity based purely on info from this site, please do let me know. So I can fix the privacy loophole.⤴
[2] Okay, I can’t help:

  • Out of the 132 resumes I collected, only handful are qualified American majority candidates. Why they’re not applying? Maybe because certain kind of street reputation my company got. For example, when locals discussed the thousands of jobs my company was about to add on citydata.com:

    Or AI’s effect to job security at my company at thelayoff.com:

    Or interview process at teamblind.com:
  • My boss who is a model minority as I am brought a resume to my desk: “Gary, my husband plays tennis with this guy. Graduated from the best boot-camp in my hometown and I think it doesn’t hurt for the team to interview him. But, it’s ultimately YOUR DECISION!“. What can I say and do? We “interviewed” and hired the guy. ⤴

[3] Big techs are not prone to the problem either: Intuit, Paypal, Linkedin, AWS, Meta… to name a few. ⤴

Reverse Diversity