Twitter’s head of diversity is leaving and its chief HR officer has already left
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's sort of similar to hiring a "head of profit". Profit, like diversity, is the outcome of the entire company's operations.
Hello?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454634
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9497721
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412284
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086689
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As for whether or not it's easier or harder than being young, who knows. Isn't being younger an advantage in getting almost any job?
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.
We used to teach kids to be colorblind but now we're teaching them to see nothing but color. It's a sad state of affairs.
I don't think either method worked.
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?
"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.
"Live and let live" is not a universal maxim. It was the primary argument in opposition of federal government enforcement against segregation.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
Managing that policy isn't normally a separate position.
The other, more probable interpretation is that it is a pipeline problem. Try comparing their demographics with Bay Area, top school and CS demographics.
Edit: These numbers vary wildly for other companies in the same location, so I'm not sure a comparison with them proves anything. https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San-Fran...
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1522O6
But you don't want too few asian people because you'll get sued for that:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-tech-discriminati...
It's kind of a Goldilocks thing. And you need a c-suite executive to make sure you're playing the game just right.
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.
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
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/pinterest-hires-its-first-...
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).
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?
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.
Check out this article published yesterday from a relatively new manager to hear what it's like on the inside: https://medium.com/@kathleencodes/the-surprising-things-ive-...
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.
You don't see how meeting a person would remove some of their anonymity?
Or when you say anonymous do you just mean we can't know who the person is by name? But we can meet them, talk to them, etc...
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.
With that you can measure the effects of whatever attribute tag you want depending on the interview type.
Ex:
1. Anonymous Interview
2. Feedback Given
3. 'Culture' Interview
4. Feedback Given
5. Attributes Recorded & Decision Made
Calling a company with a head of diversity bloated for instance is telling of your politics.
So is it offensive to subscribe to MLK's general idea of judging people not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character?
[1] http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/04/martin_luther...
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.
If your mode of argument depends on putting words in other people's mouths, you're not a very effective debater.
Not sure if I understand your issue with my response which tried to get at the root of his statement.
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.
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."
Because the position of "VP of diversity and inclusion" sounds ridiculous?
>These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.
This surprises precisely no one. What does it have to do with the article?
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.