Measuring What Matters: Diversity at Uber

Growing up, I had a small group (3 white males) of extremely close friends, they all grew up to be good people. Going into college, that group grew into 6 people, the 3 new additions were a mix of gender and ethnicity. You know what noticeably changed? Some of the people I spent most of my time with were now female or a different ethnicity. Everyone had a different background, everyone had different experiences. Everyone contributed differently. But everything wasn't suddenly remarkably better because there was diversity.

Diversity doesn't inherently make you better. Hire good people. You want credit for diversity? Work on making sure people who come from poor homes have access to learn difficult topics (STEM fields) without having to deal with the stress of paying for school, housing, food, having a part time job to makes ends meet, getting into massive debt, etc. and work on figuring out why these groups aren't likely to go into tech---why aren't they getting their degrees in tech fields? Until then, I'm going to argue the quotas for diversity that seem to be prevalent in tech are disturbing.

I didn't write this initially, but I know it say's they're donating $3 million a year towards select groups. While that's good, I still find forcing inorganic diversity (meaning the amount of people of an ethnicity in the field being way lower than the ratio you're trying to hire) to be a counter intuitive, random PR shot in the dark approach to trying to be better.

Over the years, I noticed more and more that diversity as a topic in high tech had morphed from something positive into a witch hunt against white men and against people who were generally friendly towards the idea of diversity yet did not practice sufficient rigor in enforcing a very specific idea of diversity at their events.

A great example is Nodevember kicking out Douglas Crockford because he made a couple relatively non-offensive jokes using secret accusations against him. Another great example is the ongoing attempts by social justice warriors to force the Drupal community to discriminate against a relatively harmless follower of the Gorean movement for his private life.

Still other examples include unsubstantiated accusations of sexual harassment at OSCON by an anonymous blog. I have been to OSCON and saw absolutely nothing like what was being complained about in that blog post. Yet another example is the continuing efforts to pressure the organizers of Lambda Conf to ban people who privately have non-politically correct views.

Instead of diversity being a "positive thing," it became "if you don't do diversity, if you don't invite 50% female speakers, if you don't have a code of conduct...you are racist."

I also noticed Meetup organizers and conference organizers coming under continuous direct public shaming pressure by screaming mobs online when they didn't have a precisely calibrated gender balance amongst speakers despite a numerical discrepancy in submitted talks. On top of that, I frequently see female engineers now actually complaining about being asked to talk about diversity at conferences too frequently because they are in a minority who are able to fill these gaps.

Finally, and most boring, diversity-related content has creeped into many Meetups, conferences and other events to the point where formerly content-filled events are now 30% diversity-related content by weight. Instead of interesting information about Python, we get 7 talks about how Python programmers can be more diverse and what it is like being a female Python programmer.

I find these changes disturbing. I find conduct codes to be sinister and a form of creeping control by the Left to attempt to extend safe spaces into industry and other places they don't belong.

We have a code of conduct in the United States, it is called the law. The constitution is the code of conduct we need to be concerned with now.

Proportion of whites at Uber: 49.8%

Ars Technica: "Uber's labor force—in particular its tech staff—is overwhelmingly male and largely white." ( https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/new-diversity-repor... )

So whites are under-represented at Uber, even a minority, yet we're told that's still too many. Will they be happy when there's only 40% of them? Or 10%?

Now, I'm aware that African Americans are only one under-represented minority in tech, but they're still an important one. Latest numbers show that educated, middle-class black Americans are choosing to move to southern cities (especially Atlanta) at high rates. Some of them are moving for job opportunities, to be closer to family, to afford a higher standard of living, to escape winter weather in the North, or just because they like the city and culture there.

I work at a place with large office in ATL, and we've had a positive experience hiring very talented people from many different backgrounds. The ATL office is far more diverse than west coast offices and every bit as good at their jobs.

I think it's time to acknowledge that trying to "import" diversity into SV is not a real strategy for making tech more diverse. It's not fair to expect minorities to exchange their preferred community for a predominantly white one (with a far higher cost of living) just to have a chance of cashing in some sweet startup equity.

I wonder how diversity numbers at tech companies doing all-remote (like Zapier) compare to SV-centric tech companies.