I do believe that these efforts mean well, and come from a good place. Diversity of ideas is very important for building successful products for a diverse audience - there is no doubt about that. However, there are two things that leave me puzzled:

1) I feel that it has become a matter of one-upmanship between companies, with huge emphasis on proudly touting how many black or latinx people they hired last quarter ([1], [2] to name a few).

2) Related to 1), the emphasis on equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity. I think Goodhart's Law is at play here ('When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.'). "Diverse people hired" may be becoming a lousy metric that doesn't account for differences in talent pool size, enrolment in schools, number of people interviewed, etc. A very common phrase, especially used at one of my former employers, was this idea of "overcoming a homogenous workplace".

There are diversity teams at most big tech firms geared to drive up these metrics - just like any other team which is driven by ad revenue or MAU.

At my ex-employer, hiring managers were invited by a 'diversity lead' and told to 'account for diversity' when candidates are fairly even; in this case, the other candidate is placed at a disadvantage.

I am not trying to be inflammatory here; I just want to learn how these programs are bringing real benefit - or at least the underlying reasoning/legislation driving them.

[1] https://qz.com/work/1793500/etsy-doubled-its-hiring-of-black-and-latinx-employees-in-one-year/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/how-slack-got-ahead-in-diversity/558806/