Google Has 'Shattered' Its Pipeline to Black Talent | Hacker News Reader

Google Has 'Shattered' Its Pipeline to Black Talent

vice.com

41 pointselsewhen39 comments

> Last December, Dr. Timnit Gebru, a world-renowned AI ethicist and one of the highest profile and highest ranking Black women at Google, announced the company had fired her for speaking out about racism and censorship of anti-racist research

No, she menaced to resign and they accepted, she was not fired for speaking out about racism, which coincidentally was her primary role at the organization. There's a vast difference.

She was fired for this:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-a...

Wasn’t fired. Wasn’t even forced out.

Says she’d quit as a threat, and they accepted.

She wasn't "forced out"?

I’m leaving you if you don’t put a ring on my finger.

Ok, bye then.

She was "resignated"

In normal situations, they would've discussed her conditions with her, and told her that they couldn't accommodate it. When people resign, they normally give two weeks+ notice. She was on vacation, and wasn't even aware that they'd "accepted" her resignation, effective immediately.

A rose by any other name...

The newsmedia loves to trash tech because they want to distract from their -- much worse -- diversity problem.

How much diversity does Vice have? You can see at: https://company.vice.com/diversity-and-inclusion/

Look at management: 70% white, 5% black. For a company based in New York that isnt hiring PhDs, tell me how this happens? How is it Vice cant hire more than 5% black managers (or 8% overall) when half their staff are fresh-out-of-college trust fund kids living in parents-paid Park Slope brownstones?

Did you register a new account just to issue whataboutisms?

How is that "much worse"? Those numbers sound about the same as Google to me.

To a large extent, SV tech firms and media companies are hiring from the same pool of upper-middle-class social climbers who went to elite universities.

This does seem worse. Google is at the mercy of hiring from the pipeline of universities CS programs and graduate programs.

Vice is hiring journalism, english, art history, classics majors and all random degress where there is absolutely no constraint.

It is much, much easier to find a black entry level employee who has ANY undergrad degree (journalism) than it is to find a black entry level employee from Stanford CS (tech).

I strongly dispute that a Stanford CS degree is needed to be a junior dev who wires together protobufs, but that's Google's business not mine.

At any rate, you were quoting stats for management roles, so undergraduate majors are irrelevant.

I live in a predominantly black neighborhood and no one follows this. Mostly feelings are negative toward Google because they are perceived to be contributing to gentrification. Also to some degree ordinary black people feel little connection to the hardcore STEM folks that Google focuses on hiring.

Part of the problem is the US immigration system. Instead of hiring the best talent possible at the highest wages possible, they hire the cheapest overseas talent -- by means of flooding the system with applications. This is bad for immigrants who are truly are top talent, and who deserves to be paid more. This is also bad for local workers, especially minorities w/o connections, because Big Tech would rather higher an overseas worker at a low wage as an indentured servant while they work their way out of the H1B system over a decade.

The only ones who benefit are BigTech.

Do you have numbers to back that up? Last time I've seen such discussion it turned out that FAANG H1B application numbers are quite low and most of the quota is consumed by "service" companies.

ordinary white people feel little connection to hardcore STEM folks too!

Double upvoting this.

Sheesh ...

unless all the black folks in your neighborhood work in tech, why would they follow this?

This comments seems so strange to me. I don't see the connection here, or why the population in general would follow this.

Tech people, sure. Silicon Valley, sure. But...I mean. Connection here?

This is just one problem of playing the identity politics game, you won't win. Now any firing of a Back person will be seen as a hostile move, regardless of whether or not it was warranted. You have the Twitter mob decide for you that those firings were wrong regardless of evidence.

How about go back to hiring people for their merit, instead of filling up "diversity slots"?

Timnit Gebru was famous before her firing, partially for papers on addressing bias in machine learning algorithms -- which makes it a juicy story.

You can sleep soundly knowing that most black people, lacking her fame, well have bad experiences at the FANGs and no one will give f*ck.

Every diversity thread on HN goes like this one

One of the things that goes unasked in these debates is how the hiring of minorities is affected by foreign hires, permanent residents or recent immigrants. I saw a stat that said that Google sought ~10K H1Bs. Given that these people are almost all in technical roles and that they don’t tend to come from the parts of the world where black people are prevalent it kinda acts as a cap on what percentage of technical employees can be black. A significant percentage of those that are American are first generation immigrants or green card holders — probably with similar demographics to the H1B employees. If we assume that this describes 1/2 - 2/3 of employees, and everyone else is completely representative of the American average, you’d be looking at between 4.5 - 6 % of employees as black.

H1Bs are also easier to exploit.

Side comment: it’s scary how some group came with the idea that we had to capitalize Black as a racial/ethnical epithet and now every major news media does it for fear of not being sensitive enough. Not considering whether there’s any sense behind that practice.

> All of these companies, she said, “must increasingly walk the walk and not view their relationships with Black employees and organizations as transactional.”

I can't think of any relationship more transactional than an employment relationship with a corporation.

"...and a limit on what they can say." This doesn't seem to be an issue limited to people of color.

"speaking out about racism and censorship of anti-racist research." What did she accuse them of doing?

She resigned because Google would not disclose the identity of a researcher who essentially denied her paper. Well she threatened to resign, which in multi-billion-dollar-companies language is basically walking out of the door.

What was the paper about? The reason I ask is ML using datasets thats don't include PoC at all can make for some really bad models.

I question if Google even cares. Their pipeline to talent as a whole is pretty epic and wide. They may have lost opportunities to hire great black employees, but those same gaps will be replaced with equal talent. Google only seems to care about diversity if it interferes with profit.

Is Black a monoculture identically outraged by Dr. Gebru’s self-immolation resignation being accepted by Google?

Fewer black/POC in tech, you get the AI/facial recognition problems we have today.

Tech created by white folk, who bring in their own biases, will lead to problematic tech. It's a difficult pill to swallow, but it exists.

They should create a union.

They just did. It's mentioned in the article.

Doesn’t take a genius to recognize that fewer Black engineers at Google means more biased ML models -> more bad/embarrassing publicity for Google -> more unwelcome attention from a Democrat-controlled WH and Congress.

Is this the intent for the company’s long term vision and branding strategies?

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