If your company has a head of diversity, your company is bloated and this person isn't going to fix diversity. I view these strictly as PR positions because I have yet to see anything useful come out of them.
I've yet to see anything come out of the PR-driven "diversity" push anyway. Call me back when those above the age of 55 can get jobs in Silicon Valley.
Upvoted because these are great reads. Generally being younger is an advantage, but in how many trades does having more experience make you less desirable?
I would be happy even if someone had anecdotes of success stories where these people fundamentally altered the culture of the companies to make them diverse. I have yet to see one success story that isn't some PR piece about the percentage of female engineers going from 15 to 18% (a.k.a they hired two).
Is this because you don't believe that employees have a problem with monocultures? Or because the initiatives they undertake don't address the problem?
Company culture is set by the leadership, if leadership is in the way any effort by the diversity guy is futile. I have never encountered a single one that wasn't a figurehead and several that were a nuisance.
They definitely don't fix the problem. As the sibling comment points out, diversity is a result of tons of factors - office locations, industry sector, compensation packages, pto, work life balance culture; and, most importantly, the diversity of the candidate supply itself (you're delusional if you expect a large deviation from graduation ratios).
It's sort of similar to hiring a "head of profit". Profit, like diversity, is the outcome of the entire company's operations.
I'm sure a lot of the departures are just those leaving the sinking Twitter ship, but this person leaving so soon doesn't bode well for either party.
Diversity-as-an-initiative once a company has grown to a large size is seemingly a futile exercise as evidenced by these diversity reports, year after year.
If companies are actually serious about diversity, they need to make it part of the company's culture from the beginning, before all the typical tech hiring inertia takes place.
In an ideal world you would be correct and I hope nobody would disagree with your ideal desire (well, I know some do).
The reality, however, is still far from there. The point of diversity programs is not to accentuate the differences (although it can have that as a second order side effect), but simply to increase the rate at which these barriers break down. There are plenty of studies that show that people who are around others who are "different" (whatever the dimension: body shape/color, religion, political views, etc) in general stop being bothered by the differences. So it's in everybody's interest to try to get more of that. And in the long term it's good for business, even if it may or may not be in the short term -- but why should't corporations invest in the long term?
It's not in everybody's best interests to change some people's minds and "steer society" in a different direction by breaking down barriers. The blowback from trying to make people stop being bothered by differences is real and there are countless examples of it around the world and throughout history.
"Live and let live" is more than just a banal platitude, it's a rule that's useful in keeping society functioning. Throwing radically different folks together and telling them to accept each-other is a fool's errand.
> Throwing radically different folks together and telling them to accept each-other is a fool's errand.
Fortunately the facts are against you. Whether it's Boston bussing (I lived through it) or the unremarkableness of women in business, military or government, or removing restrictions on marriage, acceptance demonstrably comes via contact.
There's still a long way to go but things have improved a lot. Just for me: I was born in a country with statutory restrictions on people of different "races". When I came to the US for the first time my parents drove north from Washington DC because had we looked for a hotel in VA my parents would have had to stay in different ones. That's inconceivable now.
And frankly we all have better things (from wifi to medicines to books plays and movies) because more people than before have the opportunity to participate. Shoving some of them down hurts everyone.
"Live and let live" is a rule that works except when a minority is kept from pursuing opportunity. The job of the EEOC is to point out when businesses systematically prevent a particular group (sometimes white men!) from an equal opportunity to succeed.
"Live and let live" is not a universal maxim. It was the primary argument in opposition of federal government enforcement against segregation.
It's not a 'Goldilocks thing'. It's very easy to measure the degree to which a large company's hires is loosely reflective of demographics in the general population. The reason to that is that many companies want to get big orders from federal and state government, which organizations have imposed such requirements upon their suppliers as a systematic solution to rectifying the discriminatory policies of the past.
I can see you're an intelligent person and have some knowledge of this issue, which leads me to think you already understand the basis of diversity policies very well and are simply choosing to mischaracterize it.
The problem is that individual companies are held responsible for the general population instead of the qualified population. It isn't the company's job to make sure that the general population is educated.
It is enough that well known/top companies have demographics that are similar to the undergrad CS demographics of Berkeley/Stanford/MIT/etc., whether or not those demographics are reflective of the general population
In the public eye, your statement is correct. In terms of EEOC investigation and litigation, on the other hand, the qualified applicant pool is the criteria.
Well discrimination is illegal, and the the Department of Labor will sue you if your numbers are bad like Google's. https://www.fastcompany.com/3066914/innovation-agents/google... Google spent a quarter-Billion dollars trying to improve diversity for apparently no gains. It's an important thing to get right, and after a company grows to a certain point it takes a lot of effort to change.
That's true, it goes a lot further for government contractors. They are even required to implement affirmative action plans if their numbers are too far off. But you can still be sued or criminally charged for specific acts of discrimination even if you're not a government contractor.
Because then your employees can make it into the all-important business stock photos, and be PowerPoint stars forever.~
If companies cared about real diversity rather than the illusion of diversity, they would blind their own interview process to any factors not directly related to job duties.
A truly diverse company can potentially produce a wider variety of creative options, as a lesser overlap in skills and experiences produces greater coverage of a problem space with the same number of people investigating it. It isn't just about age, sex, color, or religion. It's about the cities lived in, the neighbors barely tolerated, the pets kept, the hobbies enjoyed, the music listened to, the crazy acquaintance stories, the routes taken on the daily commute, and quite a lot of other things selected against when seeking out "culture fit".
Otherwise, "head of diversity" sounds like a nice, cushy sinecure, with a gratuitously large budget to waste. Diversity is the responsibility of the entire personnel/HR department, and can't be meaningfully delegated to one figurehead.
If companies cared about real diversity rather than the illusion of diversity, they would blind their own interview process to any factors not directly related to job duties.
That would be good for cases when you need someone who can jump in immediately, and you have their job requirements nailed down ahead of time. But sometimes you need to gauge a person's potential for growth into a position. And as FT_intern pointed out, often you want to know how the person will do with a particular team. That's really hard to do in a blind test.
Essentially saying that the biases of individual teams trump the diversity goals of the entire company?
Blind testing is not so difficult that it isn't worth doing. Last week, the spouse and I did a blind taste test of nine different beers. We got someone else to pour them into numbered cups and rated the contents of the cups without pre-existing biases. You just have to interview in such a way that no one can see the candidates' labels.
Would it really be that awful to use a telepresence robot with text-to-speech in an interview? That would allow the candidate to see and hear everybody else, but no one would know anything about them other than what they typed in a chat box.
It's both more effective and a remediation of past discrimination. Bear in mind this is only an obligation insofar as companies wit to contract with governmental entities.
Have you tried reading comments all the way to the end before replying? I wrote two sentences in the post above, and the second one addressed that very objection.
You'll miss out on less talent. Your teams will be better at problem-solving if they have diverse backgrounds and outlooks (not just genetic "heritage" but that can be a half-decent proxy). You're not going to contribute to racism, sexism etc in society at large which might be driving groups apart culturally or denying certain opportunities to certain groups of people. And the DoL won't sue you :)
This is assuming that the diverse candidates who actually have talent aren't being hired. That's the argument you need to be making
> Your teams will be better at problem-solving if they have diverse backgrounds and outlooks
If you want teams that are better at problem-solving, why don't you directly judge applicants based on their problem-solving abilities in a team environment instead of using diversity as a proxy for problem solving ability (which has not been proven at all)?
The other, more probable interpretation is that it is a pipeline problem. Try comparing their demographics with Bay Area, top school and CS demographics.
Pinterest has a Head of Diversity [1]. Her name is Candice and she's great. I can see how people are sensitive to diversity issues as humanity has a long history of various forms of discrimination. Let's try to be data driven here though and see if we can take some lessons from other fields that have had success with issues of diversity. For example, it sure seems like medicine has really moved the needle on the percent of doctors that are women over the last 10-30 years. I'm sure there are some lessons in there that we could use to help our diversity in software and engineering as well.
>Pinterest has a Head of Diversity [1]. Her name is Candice and she's great.
I think the question is: What does the role actually do? The cynic in me says it exists to signal that your company cares about diversity. Okay, but after the hiring decision is made, based on whatever criteria make the company properly diverse, what happens? Does this person act as a recruiter for underrepresented people?
Pinterest's policy is to hire people on what they can do, not who they are. Hire the best person for the position not a specific gender or other trait. My understanding is that Candice's role is to help ensure that we're avoiding biases in the our hiring process, trying to ensure that that we have a diverse pool of candidates to begin with and work on longer term programs that help to generate well qualified diverse candidates. I wouldn't believe anyone who says they know how to make the tech industry population similar to the overall US population distribution but I think it is still good to have people thinking about it and working on it.
How do we really know race and gender are discriminating factors? Do we look at anything else or are we just making zero effort to do more than just confirm our biases?
We might as well take into account their financial background too, for example whether their parents grew up poor. It's about as relevant as someone's race, gender, and sexual orientation when it comes to hiring decisions.
Unless it's actually all about scoring useless PR points, or, more sinisterly, cowing to the demands of progressive extremists that threaten violence and negative media exposure. If that's what it's about then we can safely assume race, gender, and sexual orientation are irrelevant when it comes to hiring practices, and instead we can just hire random people that seem remotely qualified (which is what we have already been doing before this madness began).
Probably reaching out to minority college programs, graduates, and professional organizations. If your black, woman engineer, for example, you aren't necessarily reaching out to your old boys network for prospective jobs.
I'm assume you assume they sit in their chair all day and spin around in circles.
Our engineering culture is actually pretty great - diversity is something we strive for and have made great improvements at, but definitely not at the expense of hiring talented people.
I've sat in interviews for most positions (at where I work, anyway). The only one that requires actually knowing who the person is (gender wise, race wise, etc) is sales. Even in that case, it's only because of preexisting prejudice.
These companies will figure out sooner or later that anonymous interviewing is the only solution. Those who benefit from the status quo will protest, "rightly so". Those who don't won't be around to complain, and so a kind of survivorship bias persists.
I think you give up way more with anonymous hiring than you would ever get in return. How do you gauge verbal and non-verbal communication skills? Do they mesh well with the team. Once you drop the in-person interaction you lose more than just the ability to discriminate.
I don't have any issue with this process beyond the use of 'majority'...Maybe I'm just skeptical, but I don't see how the majority of any interview could be non-interactive... Now maybe you think it can be anonymous and interactive but that's rarely true in the way you would want it to be. If it's chat we might over-focus on whether their writing is English as a second language, same for voice. Anything less than that is non-interactive, anything more than that is not anonymous in any way.
I fail to see what any of that has to do with knowing who the person is. You might be right, though. As I mentioned, those benefiting from these things will obviously protest it.
Again, it's possible to have an anonymous candidate you can talk to. Voice obfuscation, prohibited questions (to ensure anonymity, etc.) There's nothing inherent in needing to know who the person is. If you disagree I'd love to hear some scenarios.
Sure it's more difficult to do so, which I agree with. However, the only people who will claim that as a reason NOT to do this will be people who are benefiting from how the system is already, or have something else to lose. The dollar amount to implement this is trivial.
If you've ever been to any of those anonymous chat rooms, that's an example. You could then conduct a full interview that way, and have an independent third party source check all of the credentials. Boom. You're done. This whole thing can be implemented with a standard application form (to initially remove identifiers such as name and school) and a Slack channel.
I believe we've had this conversation once or twice before. Please don't start a classic flamewar like this without anything new to say, as the guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
Often the best people for the job (the holistic purpose of the company or problem at hand) requires diverse input. For example, you can hire a bunch of designers who individually kick ass, but if they're all from similar backgrounds, their output is likely to fail to account for the preferences of large segments of users from other backgrounds.
A designer's job is to design for people with different backgrounds (or else we'd still be using the terminal for everything). We should not distill people's value down to their background, regardless of whether it helps fill a diversity requirement.
Every person in the history of the world has a million unspoken, unidentified assumptions based on where and how they were born and raised. Our (early) experiences shape us profoundly, and it's impossible to overturn that even if you try.
Nobody is "neutral". It's simply impossible. Therefore, diversity.
I think this supports the statement you are responding too. The million factors impart a diversity of perspective regardless of whether there is diversity of racial heritage. Does focusing on diversity of racial heritage optimize diversity of perspective?
So apps developed in China or Japan or Nigeria will be at a disadvantage because they lack design diversity? Or will thru do just fine if they all went to different schools of design?
what are you trying to say here? that all designers are good at designing for people with different backgrounds? therefor we don't need to keep diversity in mind when hiring them?
I'm saying that valuing somebody for their background instead of their skills is a subtle but very real form of bigotry while also betraying the reality that you can understand/empathize with people from different backgrounds without being part of that background.
The problem is, "diversity" too often means only superficial diversity (skin color, sex) instead of actual diversity (experience, culture, language, thinking patterns, ...).
This seems to be an argument more for interacting with your target market than for diversity. Or are you thinking more like: "Team we just got a new client from Mexico, obviously we are going to assign Alberto to work on their stuff."
At the end of the day, I just want to work with the best people for the job.
Evidence has shown that without a commitment to diversity, some of the best people can be overlooked or passed over during the interview process, and some evidence shows that diverse teams in fact outperform non-diverse teams.
I do know for a fact they shadow-banned or throttled Scott Adams, who is far from a conservative but likes to practice free speech and is very open about what he finds problematic on his side of the aisle. Most of his tweets never appear on my timeline.
Twitter shadow banned the following October 3, 2016 Tweets.
When Twitter shadow bans Trump’s tweets, the public can no longer see any of the tweets, and only users who replied or re-tweeted the tweet’s can see said censored tweet — or if one knows the URL/web address of the tweet, one can see said censored tweet.
Here are the URL/web address for each one (take note that hardly anyone has re-tweeted or liked any of them):
Thanks for taking the time to itemize these. I notice they're clustered around a shortish period, and wonder if this is not simply the result of some technical glitch than any organized effort. I don't have any connection with or programming experience of working with twitter's API, but I don't find it so odd that from a high volume of tweets sent from a variety of mobile devices, a few should run into problems. as I mentioned, I hit minor problems 2-3 times a day and I'm a pretty casual Twitter user.
Your source* asserts that these actions were intentional but doesn't actually offer any evidence for this claim. I'm afraid I'm disinclined to believe a site which relies so heavily on handwaving and CAPITAL LETTERS to persuade readers. Searching for other sources only turned up articles from fringe outlets like Breitbart, and absent any sort of rigorous/technical analysis I'm not inclined to take the matter very seriously.
I did find one article+ about the phenomenon of 'deleted tweets' which went into more depth but which was written some time earlier rather than being a comment on this alleged incident. While it was in the Washington Post, a paper you probably love to hate, it wasn't especially focused on election matters and so it might be a good lead for you to perform more rigorous analysis or to contact someone with experience in this area who could substantiate or explain away your claims. I'll certainly be interested to read about it if you uncover more concrete evidence.
It seems to be that the next logical step would be to write a bot which uses the methodology described in the image several layers above to check if POTUS is shadow banned. Thoughts?
Practical and worthwhile, but don't forget your control group so that you have a baseline against which to make meaningful comparisons. I'm not a data scientist though, so you might get better ideas by starting an Ask HN thread focused on the general problem of 'am I shadowbanned on Twitter?'
Probably because both the head of diversity and HR rep know how toxic twitter is and have given up on any kind of reform. Any person thats a minority and basically not a white guy has to run the gamut when it comes to twitter. The comments here are a testament to that.
Calling a company with a head of diversity bloated for instance is telling of your politics.
No offense but MLK did not agree with you, would not agree with you, and taking some words that are easy to white-wash out of the context of his true political philosophy is insulting.
The spirit of MLK's teachings is that we should look beyond color, not remedy discrimination of the past by tilting the scales in favor of colored people.
> The spirit of MLK's teachings is that we should look beyond color, not remedy discrimination of the past by tilting the scales in favor of colored people.
Actually, tilting the scales in favor of previously-discriminated-against groups (including, but not limited to, "colored people") until such time as the resulting disadvantage from that discrimination was remedied is exactly and concretely what King advocated, for example, when calling, in Why We Can't Wait, for a "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged" parallel to the "GI Bill" (then known as the "GI Bill of Rights") for veterans.
The right wing has taken to presenting, on the basis of a single line in the "I have a dream" speech, an utter fabrication about King's philosophy that conflicts with what King himself wrote and said on the specific issues for which they deployy the fabrication as an argument.
Curious: after the responding comment proved you unequivocally wrong (as did my link, if you cared to read it), was there any sort of catharsis? Or will you go on continuing to abuse and misrepresent King's words to work against movements trying to encourage the same kind of justice he wanted? Genuinely curious.
The grandparent poster suggested that your comment indicates a degree of political bias. You tried to pivot to a definitional argument about whether something was offensive or not.
If your mode of argument depends on putting words in other people's mouths, you're not a very effective debater.
>Calling a company with a head of diversity bloated for instance is telling of your politics.
Calling a company with a head of diversity-- and that loses tons of money-- bloated, is sensible business acumen. Unless you blame earnings woes on diversity issues.
Many of these comments seem to indicate that lots of people are threatened by diversity, that maybe their privilege is ending and they might start getting treated as equals.
And to those commenters who think current hiring practices are fair:
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
"We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market."
Almost everyone agrees with the idea of hiring based on merit instead of prejudice. But I very often see diversity advocates attacking the idea of merit-based hiring. For example, making fun of people that use the word "meritocracy" has become a popular meme. Personally I'm not sure how to account for this discrepancy.
Perhaps because 'meritocracy' is sometimes advanced as an excuse for ignoring other factors, without the proponent investing the effort to actually use double-blind method for selecting among applicants to avoid the possibility of bias among hiring managers.
Expecting employers to "fix" diversity imbalances is like rolling up to Anthony Bourdain in a garbage truck and telling him to do his best with dinner.
The problems with social inequality go waaay back. They go back to single-parent homes. They go back to childhood environments of violence and drug use. They go back to inequalities in access to food, water, shelter, K12 education, the internet, name it.
We Americans live in an outrageously unfair society that we are largely complicit in by not doing anything to change it beyond writing comments on the internet and wanting it to just happen already.
So if you leave it up to the employer to have a "diverse" workforce, diversity is already dead.
