"When Coinbase announced it would be opening an office in Portland, Ore., several Black employees in the compliance department who worked remotely were told to move there or reapply for new jobs, four former employees said."
"All of the Black workers in the compliance division ended up among the group of 15 who left."
Without concrete evidence of discrimination in the article, my mind jumps to this being the pivotal cause of the stats, one team getting asked to relocate and that team being disproportionate in its demographics.
I know from co-workers that the company once had a strong stance against remote work and made limited exceptions. I can see that being a source of a lot of discontent. Asking folks to move to a new city is a big ask too; I could see the company having handled that poorly.
On the upside CB shifted to remote-first which should be great for being able to have a more diverse workforce. And contrary to some of the comments here, I take that as strong evidence of the ability for our leadership team to acknowledge mistakes and course correct.
Let's not ignore that this exception is being positioned as being based on skin color (racist motives), not job role, tenure, exceeding expectations, caregiving responsibilities, or any other plausible reason for an exception. That's a laughable, yet dangerous take. Incredibly inflammatory and accusatory.
Either Coinbase is an incredibly racist and black-unfriendly company, or some people would like you to believe that, and these accusations can all be unravelled to crying wolf, accusing others of downright illegal acts, without even filing a formal complaint to help others not suffer the same fate.
And at a certain point the motive for these decisions doesn't even matter. If an overwhelming majority of Black employees feel they are being discriminated against at work, that is a huge failing for a company whether there is active discrimination happening or not.
There's a data mismatch between the CB blog post and the article. CB cites that only 2-3 formal complaints were filed iirc.
11 employee complaints matches pretty closely with the PDX group.
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FWIW I'm not dismissing the complaints. I've worked and studied in places where I've felt like an outsider; I've seen people make inappropriate comments about race+stereotypes in past work environments; I've also seen people make fishing claims of racial discrimination.
I wasn't on those teams in 2019, so the truth is I simply don't know.
From what I see today and the lack of concrete evidence in the article, I do have some doubts about the overall impression the article tries to give. I have the sense that certain information might have been omitted that might paint a clearer picture. I could totally be wrong as well.
>The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company.
"[R]oughly three-quarters" implies there were likely either 19 or 21 employees Black employees at the company since 20 would be exactly three-quarters. I was just using 75% and 20 employees because that is the best estimate we got. The article also stated clearly that 8 Black employees were part of the PDX group.
The Coinbase rebuttal was worded very specifically.
>only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase.
The New York Times wasn't being as narrow with their counting and they said:
>11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment
There is obvious middle ground between these two quotes. 11 people complained to their manager or HR at some point including potentially after they left the company however only 3 filed official complaints while working there. Keep in mind that simply complaining about something to a coworker isn't the same thing as "filing" a complaint.
If this middle ground scenario transpired as I described, doesn't the NYT's recounting sound much closer to the truth than CB's? Also ask yourself who has a bigger incentive to stretch the truth here. Is it the newspaper that could instead report on literally anything else or the company that is being accused of discrimination?
This is a tall assumption. People are more complicated than that, and so are their identities. What if you are a pro-life, strongly Catholic black person? I can definitely see the pro-diversity campaigners balking at the "pro-life" component of your identity.
Really? "Most other tech firms" do this?
Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
N = 15 while p ≈ 20. It has been a while since I have taken a stats class, but that sample seems plenty large enough to me.
>Learning the true context is most important. This could be done by corroborating allegations for example.
Corroborating is exactly what journalists do. From the article:
>five people with knowledge of the situation said.
>But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations
>according to a recording of the session shared with The New York Times
>In a company email he sent later, which was also shared with The Times
>wrote in a Slack message that was viewed by The Times.
>three people briefed on the situation said
>according to a recording of the event
>according to a copy of the message seen by The Times
>according to a copy reviewed by The Times.
>two people with knowledge of the situation said
The NYT talked to dozens of people, watched/listened to multiple recordings, and viewed numerous emails and Slack messages. This story is corroborated.
> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.
These have no corroboration, even though they allegedly happened in front of multiple coworkers.
Isn't there like 400 million guns in private hands in the US? If so, the assumption that pretty much anyone you meet in the street might have concealed gun on them is not absurd per se.
But speaking about it aloud seems strange, yes.
"passed over for promotions"
This is the oldest workplace complaint ever and happens in racially homogeneous countries all the time. Favoritism in the workplace is probably as old as the pyramids.
Yes that's what was asked; which ones?
> especially when n=15(if this was a statistical study on insulin response to artificial sweeteners, people would be saying the sample size is too small to draw conclusions)
And those people would be wrong. It's incorrect to dismiss a study based on sample size without a discussion of significance and effect size in the context of the data.
Moreover I reject the premise that you should be assessing this story quantitatively rather than qualitatively. But if you insist: what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
> what are your priors on whether or not a given company engaged in discrimination, and how do these change if you're told 75% of employees of a particular demographic stated there was discrimination?
I completely agree that it's a very bad look. It is probably even more likely than not that given those facts, it is due to racism. I guess the question comes down to, philosophically, how one answers the following question: In the quest to eradicate racism and racists, is it better to be over-zealous and destroy a few non-racists to make sure you get all the actual racists(the chemo approach) - or is it better to be slightly more circumspect and let a few racists slip through the cracks so that far fewer non-racists are punished (the US judicial system ideal)?
