I love wildly beyond mild inappropriate jokes as they are a litmus test for a thinking person. The people that take things way too sensitive are a net drag and buzz kill for doing the grinding required. It goes both ways too. I love it when people are agressive with me. So, by freedom of association, cliques form and I have no problem with nepotism because the ultimate currency in life is trust.

You don't ask HR to go out and push some value if you already have it. You only ask when you want to change or want to pretend to change.

That said, some management people say it's important for a large company to write down the values that they actually practice. I can see several reasons why it's good, but I haven't ever seen anybody go and do it, so IDK.

Lived values need to be discussed sometimes…

HR run programs are costly and applied to either mandated trainings or things the org has issues with.

DEI isn't mandatory, so an org heavily invested in DEI training probably had serious issues in the first place (whether they end up on the other side at the end of the trainings being another question)

That's different from putting it as a core value though. Most companies have some kind of "make more money with less resources" stated value, and I don't think we see it as an issue ?

I just want to be clear that these are not the only two ways to do diversity. Even if you're just focused on hiring (which is a myopic way to view diversity, even at the most simplistic level you need to think about retention) hiring is complicated and I've seen people try a variety of things to get a wider pool of qualified candidates in the pipeline (offering remote work, better paternity/maternity leaves, outreach with local women in engineering groups, etc). This isn't at all my area of expertise and I've seen a lot of things outside of the dichotomy you described.

Also, idk why people view quotas as all of "diversity". I've literally never worked at a place that considered this but I see people mention them all the time on the internet.

The meritocratic delusion is that you would be in the "have" pile, rather than sitting in the back of the bus with the rest of the "have nots".

Of course, its statistically most likely that any individual would belong to the much larger latter group but stats like that only apply to other people, right?

Worse, its a zero step thinkers solution. Step zero is a merit based system, step one is for the people with motels on Boardwalk and Park Place to ensure they can never lose again by rigging the system to ignore merit in favor of capital.