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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

11 of then ~20 Black employees by early 2019* had complained to HR about racism. That's over half! And that's only the people with the fortitude or optimism to talk to HR (HR is notoriously useless at many companies). That's a complete disaster. 15 of that 20 quit! Why wasn't that treated as an emergency?

*At the end the article says at the end of 2019 there's 31 Black employees of 1000. At the beginning of the article about the beginning of 2019 it's about 20 of 600 before 15 Black employees quit.

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It was treated as a disaster - they labeled the leavers as “political” and announced they instituted policies to prevent future “political” employees.

> Why wasn't that treated as an emergency?

Companies can be incredibly callous about retention issues, especially if fixing them involves noticing which managers are responsible for behaving badly towards their staff.

> retention issues

Well we allow those companies to continue to dismiss their interactions with most of the people in the company as "retention issues," so I think I can spot an actual cause here. Roll in typical treatment of customers as barriers to profit and we have a theme starting.

"Callous" would mean it's about you, but think about it from the viewpoint of the company. If the aggrieved employee leaves, the problem is solved.

Hiring and onboarding costs money. Having people quit costs money in replacing them. Allowing managers to drive them out and incur the cost of replacement is basically allowing them to light money on fire for their entertainment.

Not from the POV of the company, but from the individual actors within it, is the problem solved. Principal-agent dilemma, innit.

Only if the issue is with that individual employee. In this case, that obviously isn’t the case. Ignoring a systemic problem in your company solves nothing.

Don't know if that's true. The big goal is to avoid federal lawsuits and other scandals. If the can can be kicked down the road for a few more years, fine! Uber only blew up because Susan Fowler was better connected than most, and you'd like to know how much the scandal affected the company. Uber is fine, Kalanick is fine, a few HR drones lost their jobs, business as usual.

Highly paid people are a pain to hire for and replace.

If all of a sudden your turnover spikes that's a lot of sudden unexpected cost, which is very bad.

Diversity in team pays off, you are missing if you don’t have a diverse team. It’s not a charity anymore it’s more of a science in getting quality output from your team.

Especially when the solution to these issues is also a retention issue as you likely have to fire other people for their behavior.

Or if the real problem is at the top.

The cynical view is that you can either kick out your racists or those who complains about racists. And given how "diverse" tech is I wouldn't be surprised if the company would have a bigger problem if the racists left instead of the black people.

Tech is incredibly diverse.. The racial representation in tech is roughly proportional to the racial representation in Computer Science. i.e. it's not racism that is keeping black Americans out of tech, and suggesting otherwise with zero evidence beyond the observed racial disparity is extremely irresponsible.

It’s not. It isn’t. And why do you think the racial diversity in Comp Sci doesn’t match that of America? Or even that of the general college population?

You can only claim tech isn't diverse if you ignore the massive overrepresentation of asians. Going off of Google's diversity report (because it's easy to find), non hispanic whites make up 43% of Google but 61% of America. For blacks it's 5% of Google and 12% of America. By those metric we should be pushing Google to hire more white and black employees.

The same reasons that are always ignored or considered sinful by progressives. Some people are more interested than others, just the same way that nursing and numerous other non-diverse fields that you mysteriously aren't concerned about have people driven to them in numbers that don't match the population.

It is. A huge number of visible minorities are in tech.

>And why do you think the racial diversity in Comp Sci doesn’t match that of America?

That's a different subject, and nothing to do with whether tech is racist.

if you look at smaller companies, not Google, tech is incredibly not-diverse. especially when it comes to gender

No, the cynical view is that the people in charge are racist.

This needs a name, but when you have a very small minority in a much larger group (women who are software engineers, black people in a white company or guys who work as childcare workers) you can see insane levels of hated against members of that group, even if most of the larger group goes out of their way to be friendly with the minority, because even a very small percent of the larger group that hates the minority can still be numerically larger than the entire group. Not to mention that one bad manager can cause trouble for numerous employees.

According to the article 15 black people left in total between late '18 early '19. It seems that the compliance team makes up the major part of the departures (up to 8 quit, depends how you read it). From the article this could be attributed to coinbase opening an office in portland and employees declined to move.

The headline also mentions that black people were fired, but never follows up on it.

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