I don't believe this is due to any sort of racism, but rather due to the education system in general. Trying to solve the diversity issue at the hiring end, when the number of qualified candidates is so small, is not the right way to solve the problem. The only way you will hit higher-than-normal diversity numbers is to reduce hiring standards, which is wrong.
The real way to solve it is at the bottom of the funnel, at the elementary, middle and high school levels. By getting more children of all races involved and interested in tech is the only way we truly increase diversity.
And that is on us, those of us that have experience in tech. My goal is to try to volunteer to teach young children in economically disadvantaged areas about technology. Of course, I have no idea how to start doing this, and would love suggestions or pointers.
You might consider reading the excellent paper, "Are Emily And Greg More Employable Than Lakisha And Jamal? A Field Experiment On Labor Market Discrimination": http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
My take is that if tech really, truly has no race or gender discrimination problems, that would be remarkably different than a lot of other US industries. One quick way to check is to ask your friends in those groups whether that's case. The ones I've talked to mostly disagree with you.
> The real way to solve it is at the bottom of the funnel [...]
I am strongly opposed to the notion that there is one real way to solve this problem. That you believe you have a plausible solution that might help is great. Definitely do it. But that's no reason to discourage people from trying other solutions.
I gave my opinion. This is what a discussion consists of. Nowhere did I discourage people from trying other solutions.
Now, I'm biased toward capability. I think progress is made almost entirely by people who possess both talent and will to power. But that's innate, and evenly distributed across racial and gender lines. So differences in outcomes are, broadly, due to privilege (specifically, resources). If someone has access to education and support, they'll do better than someone who does not, all other things being equal. Racist and sexist results are because of our failure as a society, not racial or gender inadequacy.
But anyway, about role models. For an ambitious child, the limits of "success" are the limits of what they see. That's what they see in their parents and their parents' friends, their neighborhood, etc. Their role models. If the most successful people you see growing up are doctors and lawyers and engineers, you imagine your own success as being a doctor or lawyer or engineer. If the most successful people you see are drug dealers and slumlords... well.
There are very few black engineers in this country. They're underrepresented. Because of this, smart and ambitious young black kids don't get "engineer" as a role model. They may have never met an adult who makes software or hardware for a living. So they have no frame of reference, no concept that this is "success". It's a big problem.
I've once saw of glimpse of this first hand and it was really depressing. Knew a waiter at a restaurant my family frequented. One day he was making chit-chat with us and talking about his son (who would have been rather young, 4-8) and that his dream for his son was to be a restaurant manager or a supervisor at a lawn care business or something like that. That was how high that family was dreaming, I guess that was as high as they could see being reasonable (unless they kid was a genius/pro-athlete).
From hearing stories of women in the industry seeing that one person that looks like them that shows the 'you can be this too' seems like it's often a huge help or an important moment.
Definitely. I'm probably in tech because my dad was. He started programming in the late 60s. How did he get the job? His dad was an executive at an insurance company; they'd just gotten a computer and didn't really know what to do with it. Not that my dad had any experience, but he was a quick study.
I'm sure that wasn't an option open to black people at the time. Their city still had segregated pools.
Women didn't have power because they were oppressed by men for centuries. Black people don't have "as good an education" because they've been systematically abandoned by the most powerful parts of society for centuries.
You could spend 100 million on a program just in my city alone to try to give disadvantaged kids tech lessons. You know what would happen?
Nothing, because you haven't addressed the fact that they have to sell dope, hustle or work multiple jobs just to put food on their family's table; that they're watching their baby sibling while mom and dad go out to score junk; that their friends need them to join the local gang to protect their neighborhood; that they don't have access to transportation to get to the classes; that the rest of the city needs money and will steal from the education fund as it always does, because why try to teach the kids when they're not going to learn anyway; and of course, because their parents gave up on their future a long time ago and give zero shit about trying to help them make something of themselves.
WOW. Haven't time to unpack all that is wrong with your response but mainly: Black people in the US can be found across all strata of society, including top/good schools. The implication that they must all be poor and in inadequate schools is ludicrous.
Part of why the diversity issue is so aggravating is because the # of qualified candidates may be relatively small, but it still significantly exceeds the # of Black candidates hired.
Likewise, stating that the only way to improve diversity is by lowering of standards is wrong. It communicates your obviously flawed perspective that Black candidates in tech are inferior.
I agree there is a diversity problem, and my proposed solution is to increase investment in education in disadvantaged areas. And somehow I'm vilified as a closet, biased racist. It's hilarious.
It's responses like this that make any discussion on increasing diversity completely impossible and futile.
I'd like to see how minority owned or run small to mid size enterprises even large have fared in hiring minorities (their own, as well as outside their own) in the "tech" field. If they can who higher rates, then it may indicate that non minority owned and run are to some extent racist, or at least not actively seeking minorities.
It's absolutely necessary to kill the myth of tech hiring as a perfect meritocracy. It is not, it's far from it. It's a dirty and incredibly flawed process that barely even works, let alone represents any pretense of egalitarian perfection.
The way I see it, the biggest beneficiaries of "affirmative action" aren't the people getting jobs because of diversity policies. It's younger, impressionable kids who get to benefit from role models in their likeness.
"Forced diversity" may be the best hack possible to foster persistent diversity down the line, and fix vicious cycles.
What they should look to do is recruit people who got to programming or designing through paths other than MIT or Stanford. Hire the guy that was a painter and then started building website UIs when he saw how those skills transferred. Hire the guy that graduated from the small state school and spent all of his free time web programming. That - at least to me - is the kind of diversity that comes at problems from various angles.
The VP idea with names was stupid, but if I walked away from a job every time one guy had a stupid idea i'd be locked in a closet somewhere howling at the world's stupidity.
My 2 cents. I got to get back in my closet.
That doesn't mean they'll give different answers to a question on how to traverse a linked list. But they'll give different answers on how to build a content moderation feature, how to prevent abuse, how to protect freedom of expression on the platform.
The way people look at you, talk to you (or ignore you), talk about you, extend invites, etc..that ALL changes with your race.
The differences between their experiences is smaller than the differences between that black individual (sidenote: I was recently told by a black guy that African American is worse than black when used as an identifier) and someone of the same race who grew up in a significantly different socioeconomic class. If we want to increase diversity, the best would be to do so by class first, gender second, and race third.
However, none of this would help the white person build a content moderation feature or prevent abuse or protect freedom of expression better than the black person.
May I ask specifically how a person's belief that their name was the cause of failing to get a job leads them to create a better content moderation feature?
I don't think it's the tech department's job to define those.
You are implying that those negative experiences are a product of racism and not of simple statistics.
Maybe, only maybe, people _dont have_ as many problems with white guys wandering down a dark street wearing a hoodie as they have with black guys wandering down a dark street wearing a hoodie, so they dont call the cops on the former and call the cops on the latter.
Youre implicitely ruling out the mere _possibility_ that there maybe, only maybe, _might_ be a problem with blacks, that isnt a problem with whites, asians, indians or hispanics.
Come on. At under 5% basically ANYTHING ELSE is diversity.
Also, he does touch on this in the article. He says that Twitter relies heavily on a few schools for hiring so even if they get 'diverse' candidates from those schools they've still had a very similar experience compared to people from geographically diverse schools. That alone would add one form of diversity. He said he's seen this resulting in group think, and I can believe that.
But really? You want people to define diversity in this situation? That seems like a 'no true scotsman' setup to me.
Having a different skin color makes a HUGE impact on the way you experience life, especially in America. Holding all other things equal, that alone will give you a different outlook on life, and likely different ideas too.
If a diversity quota decides about you gettnig a job or not getting a job, then it is indistinguishable from a race quota, i.e. racism.
I assume he (or she, don't remember the name) is looking for any kind of diversity, although their experience (and the chart posted) clearly talk about ethnic diversity, which may be what they have the most direct experience with.
It's just ethocentrism or more specifically in his case Afro-centrism. Racism as a condemnation shouldn't be bandied about this lightly. The US media already devalued it and made it a joke by their excessive and irresponsible use of the term.
"Twitter as a platform has empowered underserved and underrepresented people. It has fomented social movements and..."
Sounds like twitter is killing it for people of all ethnic groups. It's as if a bunch of White/Asian dudes can actually design algorithms that work for everyone. So, um, why do we need a non-Asian engineer?
It's also worth questioning how a black person would think differently from the (apparently highly effective) white/Asian workforce. I've seen very few meaningful examples of this and I've never experienced it (I'm usually the only person of my race). My current job is mostly Punjabi's, no techies of my ethnic group, and my unique perspective is "lets all be Bayesian cause Frequentism is ass backwards" and "stop the multiple fucking comparisons!"
A naughty question: suppose I'm wrong, and black people actually do think differently. Given that whites/Asians seem to be doing such a great job, why do we think that "different" is actually better or even useful? In statistics terms, given two different functions f and g which are estimators for some truth t, it's unlikely that |f(x)-t(x)| = |g(x)-t(x)|. One of them is probably better.
If we're going to blame the employers, can someone show me that there's a disproportionately large number of unemployed minority engineers that are seeking work but not getting it?
Makes sense, but I'd say it should be a disproportionately large per-capita fraction of minority engineers with similar degrees, experience, geographic location, etc, relative to white engineers with the same characteristics.
For example, if minority engineers with Stanford degrees with 7-10 years experience and living in zip codes [A, B, C, ...] are 10% unemployed and their white classmates have a 5% unemployment rate, that could be evidence of deliberate discrimination. It's important to compare like to like, otherwise you can wind up with all sorts of weird conclusions.
The arguments for diversity usually say that organizations improve when people from different backgrounds are part of them. This is the argument for increasing diversity along gender, orientation, and ethnic lines. If different points of view help then we should be trying for ideological diversity directly.
The fact that Twitter enables diversity doesn't mean that they have or understand diversity. It may be that they simply haven't accidentally stepped on it.
If they don't know why what they're doing is working then they can't successfully improve it further, or avoid squashing it unintentionally and irreparably.
Honestly your comment reads very racist to me. "why do we need a non-Asian engineer?", "suppose I'm wrong, and black people actually do think differently. [if twitter is doing good] why do we think that "different" is actually better or even useful?"
So Twitter is doing great, and you've basically reduced it to either 'race/perspective never matters' or 'non white/asians are inferior'. I'm sure you'll say it's the former.
Wow.
(Now that I've re-read your comment, I'm happy with my down vote).
But yes, if different races do behave differently, it's valid question to ask whether you actually want that different behavior. As a silly hypothetical to illustrate the point, humans and leopards behave differently. Turns out one of them is a lot worse for the office environment than the other.
If you want to argue that A != B, you are explicitly allowing for the possibility that A < B. So some argument is necessary why that isn't the case.
But again - I think A == B, which I guess makes me racist.
Different experiences yield different points of view yield different ideas
Lets be concrete here, rather than appealing to vague platitudes.
I idiotically misread the chart posted in the post. I originally thought the chart under ( https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*F9MLGQLTU2HZD4In6o... ) wasn't normalized to anything; but upon rereading i found that the top row is the comparison row and represents the percentages of working force age us citizens in the tech industry, which Twitter with its 1% falls far below.
I'm sorry for my mistake.
My original post below for context for the replies made to it, but which is otherwise useless.
------------------------------
It's alway a little confusing when people bring up diversity reports that aren't normalized to an appropiate comparison metric. (Possibly local demographics, or any number of more in-depth metrics. I also earlier suggested applicant demographics, but justizin pointed out those are not feasible.)
Also see: https://xkcd.com/1138/
To bring it into contrast with the article, he says:
"<5% make up engineering and product management combined."
According to this census report: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....
Race - Black or African American 48,870 6.1%
The twitter numbers are thus a little below average, but not necessarily unexpected given where Twitter's headquarter is located.
Edit:
According to this, Twitter has roughly 30% asians: https://blog.twitter.com/2014/building-a-twitter-we-can-be-p...
Which seems to fit the census as well:
Race - Asian 267,915 33.3%
Another Edit:
To clarify, i am not saying that there is no problem. I'm merely saying that in order to solve a problem, one must both set appropiate goals, as well as correctly identify the root cause. Both of these can only be done usefully by applying statics correctly.
That analysis assumes that the hiring base is predominately drawn from local people. Speaking anecdotally, I know many people who graduated from college and headed to the Bay Area to look for a job. I myself moved to Mountain View for a job, then later moved away.
A more complete analysis along the lines you took would look at where people in engineering and product management were, say, 1 or 5 years previous. That are would likely better characterize the relevant population statistics.
As an obviously contrived example, suppose people in engineering and product management are only in the Bay Area for 4 years, burn out, and leave, and suppose the companies offer free relocation from anywhere in the US. Then it doesn't make sense to look at the local demographics.
As a more real-world case, consider a place like Los Alamos National Labs, which has a large number of people from around the world working there, with a relatively high turnover rate partially due to interns, post-docs, and visiting professors. Los Alamos county was carved out for the lab, so the demographics of the county reflect the lab, but most of the people working at the lab are not from Los Alamos.
I do not have access to these sorts of numbers, merely pointing out how it's not easy to interpret the numbers you gave, or the certainty of your conclusion that it's a "not unexpected" result. I suspect the uncertainty is actually very high, and a shot-in-the-dark/back-of-the-envelope estimate isn't likely to be useful.
So maybe the bar is right, in that it selects the most high-performing asset to execute the requisite keystrokes in a cost-effective manner. But maybe the world we should strive for is not one where people spend their lives in anxiety honing their resumes, getting into the right schools, the right clubs, getting the right internships, and having the right connections through daddy. God forbid there are any complications in your life along the way, or if you were born in a place which set you up for failure from the get-go.
I think one great thing about tech is that you can learn it, if you're intelligent and you get shit done. Maybe all you need is somebody to give you a shot to set you off on a trajectory toward the moon.
Capital should be blind to all these qualitative descriptors like race, biological gender, age etc. Successful capitalists are always looking to maximize the return on their investment and they don't subscribe to these inconsequential notions, all what they care for is making money for them. If you're a Martian and are capable of doubling their profits every two years or so, they would be all over you and discard any prejudices toward you.
Money $$$ talks after all esp with the capitalists.
Granted, that isn't by the author, but it shows a company trying to dodge the diversity issue.
That's a problem. Hiring corps not only need to screen more applicants in order to find more applicants above their quality bar, but they also need to engage the community to get more kids interested in their fields and encouraged through school.
It's the long view, the generation long kind. Public corp cost accounting idiotry will not support investment like that, so it's up to the private corps.
This sums up my issue with this piece: at best, not all his wishes are necessarily shared by other people of color; at worst, some of the things he wants could actually be construed as racist("Just because I'm black doesn't mean I'm interested in Jesse Jackson" my friend often says.)
If you (try to) eliminate race from hiring, you don't lower the bar. You raise it, because suddenly there's a group of so-so engineers who now can't get a job just because they're white.
If that feels uncomfortable, replace "white" with "MIT student". Or any other in-group.
If you almost exclusively hire from a single group, at some point just being part of that group makes it easier for you to get a job.
As far as I can tell, nobody is asking for hiring quotas based on profile. What people are asking for is an equal chance.
For pretty much any group that's not white/asian male, tech has an issue. The percentage of the minority group in the general demographic is higher than the percentage of people in that group graduating. The percentage of graduates is higher than the percentage of people hired. The percentage of people hired is higher than the percentage of people promoted.
All this diversity thing is asking for is that we take a look why the percentages are decreasing.
E.g. for black people: They're 12% of the general work force. 4.5% of CS bachelors are black. 2% of SV tech employees are black. 1% of Fortune-500 CEOs are black.
There's constant attrition going on, while the number of the main demographic increases as you go up the ladder. (This general relationships hold for other minorities as well, but I don't have numbers handy right now)
That's what diversity asks for - stop the steady attrition of anybody who's not in the majority group.
Anyway. Are you sure it's a good idea to compare numbers like recent grad percentages and Fortune-500 CEOs? These two in particular strike me as separated by several decades in which society has changed. Perhaps not the most useful comment on current society.
1. Assuming hiring a more diverse workforce would lower the bar.
The statement precludes that a more diverse workforce would implicitly lower the bar. This makes no sense. Increased diversity means increasing the many ways one can look at a problem, which improves problem solving and improves creativity. If the very first thing this guy thinks about is that hiring more women or black people would lower the bar, that's fucked up.
2. Assuming non-diverse workforce would not lower the bar.
If you hire shitty people, you lower the bar. There's plenty of white male tech workers who could lower the bar; keeping your workforce from being more diverse does not guarantee you won't hire a bar-lowering white male.
So at the very least it's inaccurate and misleading, and at the worst it is classist, racist, and sexist.
> Some people criticize that that statement is racist, but they aren't thinking about the context.
People who haven't had the advantages of white males have a harder time getting the same job, so an attempt is made to 'level the playing field' for someone who probably has exactly the same job competency but not the same socioeconomic advantages. That's the actual context.
> When people ask companies to do something about diversity, they're normally asking to carve out more quota for certain minority group, just like how universities carve out certain portion of their student quota for people who donate large amount of money to get in.
It is illegal in the United States for any employer, university, or other entity to have a quota for a certain race. Furthermore you're also assuming that donations preclude acceptance, which it doesn't inherently. The fact that the kid's parents could afford to pay for the best education up to that point gets them farther than the money alone.
The implicit assumption in that statement is that the current hiring process is not discriminatory, therefore the only way to hire more people of <group X> would be to lower hiring standards. Many people believe the hiring process is discriminatory - and, indeed, there are studies which support that claim.
Leaving aside the issue of discrimination, though, what's curious is that it's widely accepted that hiring in tech is broken. Companies complain that it's extremely difficult to identify talent. Larger companies are willing to risk turning away many qualified candidates if it reduces their risk of a poor hire. It turns out that it's very difficult to reliably identify who is above "the bar" and who is not. There are startups out there trying to solve this problem right now. It's a problem that effects everyone in the industry, too, not just individuals from <group X>.
So, if we lack a reliable way to determine if someone's above "the bar," how on Earth can we say that the reason we don't have more employees in <group X> is because there aren't enough applicants from <group X> who are above the bar? We can't.
Unintentional sampling bias, I guess.
I can't see what one has to do with the other.
It is the legacy of the famous Griggs vs Duke Power case.
Requiring IQ tests to filter employees was found to have "disparate impact" with respect to different identifiable groups.
Silicon Valley does a lot of different IQ test proxies in order to filter their prospective employees in a hopefully-not-racist way: programming tests, seeking college degrees, etc.
But if they use an IQ test, suddenly there's a slippery slope: Why is the cutoff 130? The error range on IQ tests is non-zero, so what if a black candidate with 129 comes in? How do you defend that disparate impact in court? You can't.
As an aside, I ran the names Miles Davis, Ray Charles, Morgan Freeman, Ben Carson, and Charlie Rangel against one the tools the author mentioned [1] and also got no correct answers.
George Washington GreaterEuropean, British
John Smith GreaterEuropean, British
Barack Obama GreaterAfrican, Africans
Mike Brown GreaterEuropean, British
Tamir Rice GreaterEuropean, Jewish
Eric Garner GreaterEuropean, British
John Crawford GreaterEuropean, British
Akai Gurley GreaterEuropean, British
Ezell Ford GreaterEuropean, British
Cynical Oogaboogoo Asian, IndianSubContinentMost Black Americans are descended from slaves. And their slave owners forced their family name on them. Slave owners were white. So these names will register as white names.
Completely destroys any accuracy concerning Black people.
All that lobbying for people who did not meet the technical criteria, that getting upset at the idea of someone not noticing his differentiating blackness.
He might have a point in the part about how many minorities are using the service, but I don't see how the tech department should be concerned at all with that. Community relations, marketing, sure. Not tech.
Also, I'd like to point that this fellow engineer comes across as bit pushy with his agenda (It's very obvious that has one). He's treating Twitter as a political organization where he's using his position as a conduit to further his goals as an activist advocating for change which is in my opinion very troubling and unhealthy for any business.
Also, it is worrisome that he didn't perform his duties as a diversity officer[?] efficiently as it seems to me that he was only concerned about his own people, African Americans. (What about other francophone Africans? Foreigners? People of other ethnicities and regions like MENA ..etc?) He didn't seem impartial to me at all and all what he cared about was lobbying for his own group only and this is not really commendable. You don't join a company and start lobbying for certain outside groups like that and expect a smooth sailing. If you're turning the company into a political battle field, you should be ready to face the consequences of your actions.
This brings to another equally important point which is the apparent feud or problem with the VP of Engineering regarding recruitment decisions. This activist engineer was very ambitious and at the same time shortsighted in his plans to make political gains in the organization and not expect opponents to show resistance or experience friction throughout the process. He clearly wanted to influence the decision making process if not tow and subordinate the whole department to his department which in my opinion is very naive thing of him to do and clearly revealed his motives that what he's after is more power in the organization and not reaching a more egalitarian system or environment.
It was all a power play for from the get go and he wasn't very good at it because you don't expect to encroach on someone's turf and not face a backlash or pushback. Even the most level-headed and good tempered person would turn territorial in these situations of adversity and things get ugly that could lead to tensions and strenuous relations between department within the organization.
Finally, his quitting and cop out sealed it for me as to my assessment of his account because no activist worth his salt would bail out and leave the cause he's fighting for like this. Change doesn't happen overnight and you gotta invest heavily and believe truly in your cause to start seeing progress. So, maybe he's more suited to work inside a political organization that's aligned well with his worldview and affiliation where they favor more chip on the shoulder type but he's certainly not a good material or asset and to have on your pro team or in your business.
At companies I've worked at I've seen the leadership cheerleading race & gender diversity, but not interfering with engineering management's hiring practices. I assume that the leadership is just playing the Public Relations game, because being seen as a proponent for diversity is good press, but not letting it actually change anything. If I'm being even more cynical, then leadership is just clueless, and is also clueless that they shouldn't be averaging engineering with marketing in order to say that we have a good gender ratio.
I'm surprised that you're surprised.
Why is it needless to say that?
Tisk. Tisk. It's been well documented that these tools are used to weed out ethnicities.