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Comment by dlss | Hacker News Reader

It's quite surprising to me that Apple seems to be doing so much better at diversity hiring. I think Google, Facebook, and Twitter are quite serious with respect to diverse hiring / I find it hard to believe Apple's methods wouldn't be found out and copied by any of them if they worked so much better.

Has anyone looked into the possibility that rather than Apple being uniquely good at diversity hiring, Apple is just uniquely good at gerrymandering their diversity report?

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In Apple's 2014 EEO-1 they distinguish between professionals and technicians. Professionals are 1.7% black and technicians are 11.3% black. I assume both of these are lumped into a single "tech workforce" number.

https://www.apple.com/diversity/pdf/2014-EEO-1-Consolidated-...

Wow, thank you sir. Note that 1.7% is roughly the same percentage that Google, Facebook, and Twitter have according to OP. I hope OP sees this and reevaluates his position now that Apple's diversity numbers no longer appear to be 4x higher than the rest.

Did we read the same post? The whole point is that they are not actually serious. There is a lot of lip service, but then diverse candidates in practice are stonewalled at every step: by location, by academic background, during evaluation etc.

If they were serious, they could look beyond their institutionally-placed (and fairly arbitrary, let's say it) obstacles, like Apple did for his friend; but they won't, which means they are not serious.

Right, that's the thesis of the article. The basis for concluding that Google, Facebook, etc were not "actually serious" was their numbers being lower than Apple's numbers.

I was asking if perhaps OP's data analysis was flawed because (for example) Apple might be counting Genius Bar employees as "tech" for the purposes of the diversity report... ie maybe Apple has the same difficulty hiring diverse candidates as Google for similar positions, OP's friend's experience notwithstanding.

on top of that, apple is much more of a device company than the others. this means that they will have a lot more people on the technical staff that aren't developers and those other positions may have a larger candidate pool of blacks.

Yeah. Going further, another part of "being serious" is training and a demonstration of commitment to the employees after they're hired.

Something like "Yes, this individual did not have a great education in youth because their local school district sucked. Nevertheless, this individual has potential. So we're committed to keeping this person on board and providing the necessary training. We will go to great lengths to make this person a useful and vital part of this company."

Amen to that. It's a whole pipeline thing that begins before they even interview, and extends at least as far as their first few promotions.

And you do it not just because you want to tick off some numbers, but you do it because a diverse workforce is going to create a more valuable and relevant company.

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