Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping.
If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are.
That then makes it harder for the minorities you claim to be "helping" to stay in the room anywhere else because of bad will generated by some company that wanted the headlines to include their diversity push.
Edit: In summation, do not conflate your layoffs with your "diversity".
I mean, this isn't a question. They're saying it outright. When picking who to layoff, race was a factor. If you don't like it, take it up with people making those decisions.
This is a common tactic from progressive in that they flat out deny the reality that everyone else see. They just say "it doesn't happen" when the CEO in a letter that was filed stated they specifically did this.
Second, the statement clearly says that it is a part of the calculus. Nobody is fired because they are white or black or whatever. The statement is just that it is taken into consideration (which is something that I have issue with).
Please (and I mean this in the most considerate way because you're on the internet just randomly labeling people) touch grass.
Imagine if the response to the Civil rights movement was "its okay stop complaining, race is just part of the calculus we use to determine who gets to go on the front of the bus, no one is forced to sit in the back because of race, it's just part of the calculus". No one would fall for that lame excuse to cover discrimination.
We're not falling for it
Secondly, busing does not compare to at will employment? The analogy also ignores the power dynamic behind racism (and all -isms), but that's a longer discussion than I'm willing to have here.
Lastly, I'm not sure who the "we" was there... but whoever the in-group that you're associate with is, I would suggest they look more at the socioeconomic conditions that we are all living through that lead us to these conversations filled with baseless accusations and labeling rather than making minorities the targets of your fears of replacement.
Whoosah.
I don't have any insight into what they are actually doing.
It is you parachuting in to be offended that is the disingenuous thing here.
Replace all the groups with "white men", and if it seems racist then, well, it's also racist when it's any other group except "white men".
Without looking anything up tell me what you know about it.
But since neither I nor any of the employees there were ever a slave, I have no idea why a histy so old has to be taken in consideration.
The answer also shows a lack of knowledge about anything other than the headline "slavery".
Mind, I'm also not particularly comfortable with racist hiring practices, no matter who's being targeted. Just pointing out that widespread de jure inequality based on race, plus various extremely-racist practices that were carried out and weren't illegal (as distinct from the law calling for racial discrimination explicitly, which was also still a thing then) were major factors in the US until not that long ago, including, crucially, housing and financial discrimination that left black people behind in the post-WWII economic boom—the short version is that they were flat-out banned from many of the best up-and-coming neighborhoods, and if they could find a good neighborhood that'd let them buy a house, they'd have, all else being equal, a much harder time securing a loan than a white person. This had measurable and pronounced effects on poverty rates and general financial well-being for them and their families, decades later.
And even the US Civil War wasn't that long ago. There were still a handful of former slaves alive in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was going on, IIRC. The US Civil War was the early and mid 1860s, about 100 years earlier—there were no combatants left alive by the 1960s ("fun fact": a few married-later-in-life widows of soldiers were still alive and receiving Civil War pensions, though!) but there were surely at least a few born-into-slavery-in-1865 slaves still alive 95-100 years later. The war freed them from slavery but they spent basically their whole lives under regimes of legally endorsed racial discrimination, with the tide only turning as the last of them died.
I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I mean just look at Ahmaud Arbery, whose 3 white male murderers were initially not arrested or charged with a clearly obvious murder. In 2020!
Thanks! Was trying to keep it concise and tight enough to be both informative and interesting to someone who's not American, while still hitting the "highlights", especially the relative recency of outright racist laws and of how recently private and public racial discrimination was legal (if not always required by law) and normal.
> I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
... which is why I didn't even try to cover these instances of what I guess could be grouped together as something like "civil strife", which actions were or are explicitly outside the law, not simply not-illegal, but have been or are often tolerated or overlooked, but you're absolutely right to bring them up.
In the case of the Civil Rights Movement it wasn't only (though, to be clear, it was mostly) black people being killed by racists, often with no consequences for the perpetrators—several white participants in civil rights marches and rallies were also targeted and murdered. Often Quakers or (IIRC?) Catholics, participating in part due to their religious convictions—the whole "social justice" angle held greater sway in US Catholicism then than it does now, I gather, which was also evident in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. These killings weren't legal, of course, and I expect they'd have been quite unpopular if you'd polled the whole US population, but such actions had enough support locally, including among public officials, that many of the killers escaped justice anyway, so long as the killings were in the name of preserving white supremacy, even if that meant killing some white people, too.
A read over a Wikipedia timeline of 1960s US history is pretty wild—the entire decade was batshit crazy, not to put too fine a point on it.
Who are you to quiz random people on the internet on historical context, and what does that have to do with the legality of hiring or firing based on race?
It seems to me like you're trying to justify institutionalized systematic racism on the basis of 'historical context'.
Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
race plays a role in college admissions, and now in this layoff, and maybe hiring at the same company. so clearly it has relevance today in its current context.
>it would be very difficult to understand the point of the policies.
which policies? making hiring and firing decisions based on race is illegal in the USA.
>Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
You didn't make any arguments at all, you just started quizzing them on their knowledge.
Again, it just seems like you're trying to legitimize systemic institutional racism on the basis of 'historical context' of a 'social construct'.
But I bet you’ll say that I don’t make sense and that I don’t understand anything, and that history this and context that. So be it. Proves my point, in a way. Dragonslayers turning into the dragons they’ve slain and all that.
Taking offense to unfair firing practices also doesn't mean one doesn't take offense to unfair hiring practices. But the topic at hand is layoff, not hiring.
The argument seems to be "a little discrimination is okay". So, I guess the question would be, what is an acceptable coefficient for the race variable, for it to be okay?
"Part of the calculus" implies there is a specific point at which racial discrimination stepwise goes from bad to not-bad, and I'm curious what that weighting value is.
Obviously if I institute a total no-blacks policy, that's a problem. But what if I only mark down black people, say, 20%? Are EEOC investigators going to rubber-stamp my racist employment decisions then?
Take it up with your lawyers. I can't believe they admitted it in an official filing. It's like they're begging to be sued.
> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
This makes it sound like affirmative action is illegal. But it is currently allowed and many companies brag about doing it.
What Twilio is doing is basically the same. It's like affirmative action for layoffs.
I agree that GP was wrong to say that discrimination is mandated, which it is not.
I can't say wether anything like that was the case, nor would I counter the experience of responders here saying that they as minorities find actions like Twillio's harmful. Nor do I comment on whether the messaging was done well. Only that the situation can have nuance.
But the most harmful is for minorities who were laid off. That signals that they were really subpar, even more than the average laid off person.
It seems like this policy has two negative impacts on minorities and only one on white people. Some would say that's a disparate effect on minorities, and the policy is therefore racist. /s
edit: these are just the perception problems. There's also the fact that it is possibly illegal and unethical.
The belief that individuals were affected due to their race, etc will almost certainly be pervasive because the upper management claimed that it's what happened. And that will be despite the fact that upper management is almost certainly not competent enough to decide on the competence of the people they are laying off (they never are).
When funding is tough, pure capitalism takes over woke values and it is up to whether your monetary value to the company>your monetary cost to the company.
But is it actually true? Did they fire white people at a higher rate?
If an "anti-racist lens" means anything other than "processes to help avoid the effect of subconscious racial bias" I'd agree it's a problem.
You are assuming the decision makers have subconscious racist biases. And you are assuming those biases favor white people, men, etc.
In the world I live in there is a good chance that each of these is false. The fact that they made this statement indicates as much.
Also, there has never been a linkage drawn between scores on subconscious bias tests and real world actions. Are racists probably "subconsciously biased"? Sure. But the reverse has never been shown.
http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/20...
Anonymizing seems like an appropriate way to handle layoffs as well. It may be hard to do because some managers know the people involved. But they could force all decisions to be justified and externally reviewed by others who don't know the demographics.
No one would have had a problem if they described a rigorous process of anonymizing the layoff decisions. It swings the pendulum too far to go full on anti-racist. Others point out it's also illegal.
1: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/case-study/unintended-effec...
If they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random, there's a chance that someone later would say "Twilio employees are 35% female, 33% Asian, 9% Latino, and 6% Black, but the laid-off employees were 11% Latino! Racism!" and turn a mob against them. Once the media/Twitter/mob believe that Twilio HR and Twilio executives are racist, those execs might try to defend themselves by saying: "We weighted based on performance reviews, added a bit of statistical noise, and then did a random selection. We believe those performance reviews to be objective and free of racial bias. We didn't even realize that Latinos were slightly over-represented in the layoffs until you mentioned it, but it looks to be merely statistical chance. We actually fired slightly more white people and more men than the statistics would suggest, we're not bigots."
...Do you think that would work?
It's far easier to defend against the accusation of being overly woke than it is to defend against the accusation of being racist, so while you'd rather be neither, it's better to overtly and publicly fail in the safer direction.
This is a false dichotomy. They could have done layoffs based on the company's needs and the performance of the employees. That isn't random.
Your big picture point amounts to a heckler's veto. The more you cater to the heckler, the more powerful the heckler becomes.
No, it kind of cemented that perception.
This means when you keep good engineers but lay off HR, marketing, sales, and admin employees, the layoffs look really bad in terms of affected protected groups.
For the company, this is a curse in good times, and a blessing in bad times.
It's not a chance, it's a guarantee. Every layoff gets lawsuits claiming discrimination and has so for decades. Which is why virtually every company does this analysis as a normal part of executing a layoff... and has done so for decades.
Would this be legal even?
> outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
Yes, that's the same act that makes it illegal to discriminate against racial minorities, women, religions, etc.
Discrimination based on race is illegal, pure and simple. Hiding it under nice names like "affirmative action" does not change this fact.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/education/2021/07/22/as-supreme-co...
Racist discrimination is an ugly thing, even when you call it pretty names like "affirmative action".
If Affirmative Action was universally legal, than nothing would prevent racist/sexist discrimination as long as you have a nice-sounding excuse for it, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be rendered vacant.
Women outnumber men 1.3:1 in college admissions, so Affirmative Action would let me openly discriminate in favor of men in hiring and promotion, as they are evidently a disadvantaged population compared to women.
You can look this up for yourself, but here's one source[0]. Men are admitted at a higher rate, with worse grades and test scores, by selective universities that want to make sure they have a "balanced" class of undergraduates.
[0] https://www.ivywise.com/ivywise-knowledgebase/resources/arti...
Check out the section Discrimination v. Affirmative Action [1] and a sample of significant discrimination case outcomes.[3]
[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/cm-607-affirmative-action
[2] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/practical-significan...
[3] https://www.eeoc.gov/initiatives/e-race/significant-eeoc-rac...
If you have employees A and B, both earning $100k/year, and your declining financials require you to save $100k/year, you must fire A or B. If you decide to fire A because s/he is white, even if it was just one factor, then you just fired a worker for their race, and violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
If you manage to implement a policy that benefits a protected class (such as a particular race or sex) without depriving a different protected class, it would not be illegal. This is not the case we are discussing here, of racial considerations affecting hiring or termination decisions.
Regarding the links you posted: It's no secret that the current administration is in favor of racist discrimination. They support Harvard's racist discrimination against Asians:
https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-12-08/bid...
The law remains the law, and racist discrimination remains just as objectionable, even if the current administration supports it. I personally hope that any employee who was subject to racist discrimination will seek justice in court.
You don’t actually have to avoid depriving a protected class of anything by relative omission. Otherwise affirmative action and diversity programs would be illegal, and until the courts change their mind they’re currently allowed. If you allow your reasoning to be unconstrained there is no way to provide any benefit whatsoever in any form to particular races because that would be necessarily be depriving that benefit to the compliment.
Change the framing from "a victim was robbed of $1,000" to "a poor person gained $1,000" and the clear crime of armed robbery becomes a positive event!
Fortunately, playing these types of games with language doesn't change the facts, or else there would be no justice; you can always "change the framing" to make any crime sound positive, by emphasizing its positive impacts and ignoring the adverse impacts.
As a matter of law, the SCOTUS unfortunately let their political views override a clear reading of the law in one case (Grutter v. Bollinger), and allowed a very limited form of affirmative action in a very specific context.
Discrimination based on race or sex in hiring and firing is still very much illegal. It's not hard to see why it's both immoral and destructive if we allow it in our society.
So I don’t disagree with your overall point but I also don’t think anyone is going to win a lawsuit over this without a huge case that makes it to scotus because the practice of diversity hires is common and currently tolerated. And “we looked at all our employees and chose who to retain” is isomorphic to regular affirmative action.
According to this pessimistic viewpoint, there was no point in the civil rights movement of the 1960s that led the to revolutionary Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Black people would look around, and realize that discrimination against them is "common and currently tolerated", especially in the South, and just throw their hands in despair and live with it.
Fortunately, they didn't. And if even a single Twilio employee was fired for his race, I hope he doesn't, either. Not just for his sake, but for our sake as a society.
I don't want to live in a society where people are judged and treated according to the color of their skin.
The thing you think affirmative action means “hiring less qualified employees because of their race” is illegal. You can’t base your hiring decision on someone’s protected characteristics but you are totally free to base other things on that.
Here are some anti-* takes that are totally legal.
* Someone you’re interviewing is Latino that has only worked on small projects or small features and when asked about it they expressed that they always asked to be given bigger projects but was always turned down. You get the feeling that this was likely due to his race and so you don’t hold it against him.
* You’re interviewing a trans woman who recently quit her job while not having anything lined up. She describes the last few months as suddenly having her workload increase, her code reviews getting more critical, and her pto being denied that never had before. By your estimation it seems like she was quiet fired because of her gender alignment and so you don’t consider it a red flag.
* You have the unfortunate task of needing to drastically cut payroll expenses and finance says it will be around 20% of the workforce. You talk to your senior staff and managers to recommend low performing candidates and collect metrics like cards worked and performance reviews. You’re reviewing a woman selected for termination and notice that she seems to be closing more cards than some of her male teammates which is odd, and when you dig into the PRs they’re fine, she’s seemingly not taking on easier work, and from the comments her teammates seem to love her. So you ask the manager’s manager and find out that she’s very much a girls girl and usually passes on the “boyish” team building activities that always get voted on like doing a work fantasy league and fishing. You think it’s pretty clear what’s going on and pick someone else from that team.
What would cause someone to get this feeling? Does a candidate just have to indicate that he wanted bigger projects but didn't get them? Seems like the exact same thing that would happen to someone who was not ready for bigger projects.
Would you do the same thing for a dev with a strong southern accent who worked at a company with mostly left leaning employees?
Abso-fucking-lutely. In fact I've actually done something similar, when you work in the somewhat affluent urban blue specs on the political map you will find genuinely talented engineers, usually self-taught too, who grew up in a small town/village and just don't have the usual pedigree of a CS degree from a random college and tech internships. I felt so bad for this one guy we hired, dude was and still is a fucking wizard at networking -- he literally runs his own ISP now as a side hustle but in the interview he didn't even have to say it, it was clear from how defensive he was saying stuff like "I know you would be taking a chance on me", "I would be fine with a probationary period" that he was getting rejected other places. So we had to interview him differently to set him up to show off what he was good at because random whiteboard algo problems wasn't it.
So it's not exactly textbook discrimination, but it is recognizing the systematic disadvantages this guy had as a result of who he is.
That's already illegal. Even if you can somehow prove in court that "white worker X" would still be fired had he been black (already a dicey and likely impossible feat), just the fact that the employer already admitted that this worker was under more risk for getting fired due to his race, a-priory creates a cause of action against the employer.
If I say "I give preference to hiring men over women", and a woman is rejected and then sues, trying to show that I would not have hired her even if she was a man is arguing from a losing position.
The policy itself is racist and illegal.
what does 'carried out through a lens' mean. Through means it was put through that lens?
Again, this was a small company. Every person mattered. Every talented hire advanced the company, and every talented departure put us at risk.
Even now at the big company I work for, the small team sizes mean each dev either contributes or drains. We even have an informal budget of how much we expect contributors go drain/gain (junior devs can drain for a while, senior devs make up for it, etc).
The sort of “anti-racist” methodology suggests a mindset I don’t quite get.
Every company I know of has an extemee backlog. Product isn’t getting shipped because there aren’t enough devs.
Are people seriously saying it’s ok their company doesn’t ship as much product if it benefits historically oppressed devs?
The irony is that most "oppressed" people hired at the companies we very well off. I'm Latin myself (a fact I don't advertise in my workplace precisely because of this discrimination) and I had a very privileged upbringing. Same with another Trinidadian engineer I spoke with. So in the end, it was a bunch of privileged white people patting themselves on the back for hiring privileged Latin and Black people.
While whites and Asians born into poverty, who struggled all their lives against overwhelming odds, were deprived of these opportunities due to the color of the skin they were born in.
This is ugly, ugly stuff.
Discrimination against blacks in the South was legal. Plenty of people defended racism on these grounds back then: "it's legal, the courts have approved it, and therefore it must be right."
These are not the people progressives are celebrating today. In fact, they'll cancel you for being at all similar to these people. Yet they are just like them.
I agree the implication seems very much like an intended 'affirmative'/'positive' action role-selection policy though. (I think such things are stupid - whether hiring/firing/anything - and bad for everybody, but I am white, so I try to keep that a 'lightly held' opinion.)
In the UK the law is similar to your description, but large companies also have to publish stats, and the implication seems pretty much like quotas are good/the law, it's hard to imagine anyone/entity being found guilty of (as-written) illegal discrimination on the 'positive' side that tilts you more towards balance, IMO. (IANAL.)
Making it analogous to antimatter only works if you say something like 'a white person is antiracist to a black person'.
Yeah, but the minorities who kept their jobs even it out to 1 point for whites and 1 point for minorities.
Cause that's who this shit works, as a zero-sum game.
It literally was because of their race.
> But the most harmful is for minorities who were laid off
srs?
Many of the recent tech layoffs included entire departments not entirely related to the operation of the business, the core product. For example: recruiting departments. When entire diversity departments were terminated, many considered the move racist. Perhaps Twilio found themselves in this scenario?
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really were trying to fight inequity in the system. Instead of saying something like "Historically layoffs in tech have disproportionately affected minorities, pregnant women, and older employees. Here's a link to a study showing that data. With these layoffs we ensured that no group was affected unfairly", they just throw out the term anti-racist, and let the audience draw their own conclusions.
Because at the end of the day, making sure their layoffs don't unfairly target X or Y disadvantaged group--or really any group--is just doing the right thing. Why brag about the fact that your HR policies are not systemically flawed? It's as if you came home to your partner and proudly stated that on your drive back home you did NOT run over any elders or toddlers with your car. You're expected to do that. If anything taking credit makes people wonder.
In this case, it comes across as virtue signaling by Twilio's leadership. The same desire to curry favor when laying off people that makes CEOs tell their employees how hard the decision was for him or her. Trying to pat yourself in the back while announcing layoffs seems wildly tone-deaf to me. And at the expense of the groups they're allegedly trying to protect.
[1] - https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-prefere...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/world/americas/mexico-wom...
Their primary language is English, so any difficulty pronouncing LatinX in Spanish doesn't matter as much to them. They're not necessarily looking to solve the gendered nature of Spanish overall, and may not even speak it fluently. Also, similar early English terms for gender-equality/non-binary identities were equally difficult to pronounce (the title Mx., neo-pronouns like xie/zer).
I'm curious how the data would look split by gender/country of origin/LGBTQ+ or not.
But, there are millions of native people from those places who don't view themselves as Latino, and, if anything, see the Latins as invaders/colonizers/oppressors. For example, if you're a K’iche’ speaker from Guatemala, you may not even speak Spanish, and you probably don't self identify as "Latino".
Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico… all have fascinating cultures and histories on their own. All erased and stereotyped by a bland externally imposed term like Latinx that is not even pronounceable in Spanish. It feels like the colonialism that some are supposedly trying to fight against.
It's pretty clear what antiracist means:
> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
- Ibram X. Kendi, "How to Be an Antiracist"
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/06/ibram-x-kendi-def...
I find that equally obnoxious. If I wanted to hear about "God", I'll go to a local church/fellowship/insert whichever place of worship for any religion...not from a soul-less business.
By unfairly you mean fairly.
Making "improving company diversity" a terminal goal is a problem in and of itself.
A bold move, especially since the court looks even less favorably on affirmative action than it did 40 years ago.
How do they know who is what race though? If I am 50% latino / 50% asian what does that mean? Do you get to pick? Or do they test my skin color? Do they have forms to fill out what race you are? Do they do genetic testing? Depressing racism is back.
I read this just as "we were careful not to have our layoff unfairly impact minorities", not "we unfairly fired non-minorities".
Unfortunately, reading the comments here, it sounds like most people assumed the latter, which I found quite sad.
It reminds me a bit of the “asbestos free” xkcd comic. Like, I’m sure there are some companies still who would try to first fire the black folk or the Indian folk or whatever. But… is there really a big tech firm where that’s a possibility? I kinda doubt it.
I suspect this is just Twilio trying to get social justice credit for standard HR practices.
People have lost their damn minds. This is actual institutionalized racism.
I wouldn't work for these people in a million years, but I really do wonder how I'd fit into their shallow models (I'm mixed race b/w).
But seriously since we're talking about skin color, all kidding aside, (and you're probably already aware of this) skin cancer rates vary dramatically by race:
https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/uscs/about/data-briefs/no9-melano...
> Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.
Sounds like they are taking steps to make sure whoever was chosen for layoffs were not chosen for racist reasons.
But so many comments are making the leap to they are targeting white people for layoffs and claiming this layoff is racist against white people.
For example this comment:
> People have lost their damn minds. This is actual institutionalized racism.
and this:
> I consider myself very ‘liberal’ per American standards (pro abortion, pro lgbt rights, pro racial diversity and acceptance), and this to me screams of woke culture gone wild. Looks like anything can be weaponised.
You can find more.
This school of thought purports to agree that harmful impact supersedes good intent.
They just refuse to recognize the individual as the ultimate minority.
It's like saying "I'm not racist" before doing something unrelated.
It should be; but I think it's naive or disingenuous to imply that hiring/layoff decisions are usually fair and unbiased, especially in multiple departments in a large organization.
Imagine a company writes, "We avoided laying off Latino men for racist or bigoted reasons." But not Latino women? But not African Americans? What is the message behind limiting this assurance of non-discrimination to a particular group?
I agree that people interpreting this as Twilio announcing that it explicitly discriminated against non-oppressed groups are reading way too deep into it. But it was a pretty dumb thing to put in a layoff note.
I read the statement the same as the GP comment.
Doing so is illegal and makes little sense to put it in a public announcement. Might as well state that they don't intend to murder anyone.
FWIW I would be interested to know what the CEO actually meant by that. My assumption is it's more lip service than anything else.
What do you think "layoffs were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" means?
Like, what concrete actions do you think they took to justify that statement?
Do you think it's purely window-dressing? That they did absolutely nothing different, and just included the statement?
I don't know if it's an authoritative source, but here's one of the top Google results for "what is anti-racisim":
"Anti-racism is also a system – a system in which we create policies, practices, and procedures to promote racial equity."
and
"Anti-racist policy creates systems that center the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color"
and
"We refer to ‘racism’ as an interpersonal display of prejudice toward Black, Indigenous, and People of Color."
Given the above understanding of the term "anti-racist", if I were a betting man, I'd bet that the racial makeup of the laid off employees is not an even sampling of the racial makeup of the company.
What do you think?
(Link to anti-racist information: https://www.nlc.org/article/2020/07/21/what-does-it-mean-to-...)
I would bet that your average "blind" layoff is not an even sampling of the racial makeup of the company. If they did anything at all here it was probably taking some sort of active role in preventing that outcome.
(Meta/off-topic: Someone flagged your comment, so I vouched for it. Viewpoint moderation is dumb and inhibits good conversation.)
that would have been illegal either way. Really there are two options here: Either they did something questionable and want to deflect (like being racist against white people. I'm not saying this is the case but it is a possibility), or they want to get a pat on the back for not breaking the law.
It's one of those sentences that immediately puts your mind to why it was placed in there: "[..] so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out without clubbing any seals."
Why would one say that? Why does one explicitly mention this? To what gain?
Either you want brownie-points for something that should be a given, or you want to get ahead of something.
Given this pattern of messaging, how else can someone conclude that white people are not the primary targets of a layoff of a San Francisco based company? Especially when the statement contains, "layoffs were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens".
If you look at all the layoffs we had this year, the vast majority are by companies that are VC funded and unprofitable. It would be a scary time to work for a VC backed company, because you're one missed funding round away from getting kicked to the curb, and VC's seem to be clutching the funds in this economy.
The ballpark method I've been using has been to ask for the ARR and divide that number by the employee count. I don't know that this is a real business indicator, but it seems to me that the closer that number is to a workable salary, the better.
Maybe all tech startups are all using VC funds, but they're not all created equal in terms of management quality. There are a handful of startups that boast never holding a formal layoff.
Isn't that always the case?
Over 200%: from 2,800 staff to 8,510 ...
This means this 11% reduction leaves them at... 292% growth since 2020, while its not amazing news, this is a small reduction given the growth they've had.
These layoffs were inevitable IMO, everyone doubled their team (or more!) and then asked where the money was going to come from.
It's *CKing crazy. Reminds me of government
So if you're flush with cash just wildly overhire and then let go those you couldn't find a place for. And that won't even necessarily be all the "bad hires" because most people can do some job well, you just need to transfer them to it. (Otherwise you have to admit that there are people not fit for working at all, and they must starve in the street or something.)
Companies that do this are waving a big red parachute in your face.
VC-backed companies that aren't profitable are risky places to work for anyways. At least in these layoffs, the whole company doesn't go bust.
But if you work at a VC-backed company, and you don't feel essential, then maybe keep your resume updated.
A common pattern for all of these is the inability to generate profit, but this is business-as-usual for a startup. Even in normal times it's okay for startups to lose money.
Startups typically perform layoffs because they are running out of runway and need to extend the life of the company. Their entire reason for existing is the liquidity event that is either acquisition or IPO, and it is essential for investors that they survive long enough to see such an event.
For publicly traded companies, which we've seen a lot of layoffs in recently (which in the last 30 days includes: Twilio, Rent the Runway, Uber, Shopify, Snap, Wayfair, New Relic). The common theme for almost all of this is negative net earnings and B2C. This is what makes Twilio interesting, they're the first B2B IPO with major layoffs.
One thing that I keep hearing at my IPO'd startup is that "we won't have layoffs since we have a long runway", but runway matters way less for IPO'd companies. The key aim for IPO'd companies is to please your investors, and if you're shares keep taking a hit because interest rates go up and your net earnings remains steeply negative, then layoffs are coming.
If this continues it will start to impact profitable companies, but not before doing much more damage to the non-profitable ones. This feels like a slow motion re-enactment of the dot com burst.
That's verbatim from the actual PDF, in case anyone was curious (https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001447669/5c6aa73...) Page 6, under the heading "How did we decide which roles would be impacted".
I wonder what race they deliberately targeted for these layoffs, with language like that. Oh well, I guess we'll never know.
All CEOs are bastards.
> All CEOs are bastards.
Imagine turning a perfectly valid criticism into some weird anti-capitalist thing?
1. We shouldn't have CEOs, in which case most businesses today wouldn't exist. Using Apple as an example, it never would have released the products it did - not to say Steve or Tim are soldering iPhone components, that's clearly not what I mean. But you can't honestly believe that Jobs didn't play some role in directing Apple early on and instilling a certain culture (for better or worse). Maybe you think that employee-owned co-ops would produce things of higher value for lower cost, but that hasn't really been the cast so far in human history. Employee-owned companies exist and none of them are producing world-class products, and most of them still have CEOs.
2. You think we should have CEOs, maybe because they're a necessary evil or something, but you still want to bitch about it online, in which case ... :shrug:?
What's the third option?
There's over 30 million businesses in the US [0], and 200,000 CEOs.
Is it really impossible to imagine another structure that doesn't involve a CEO or chief?
I don't personally think it'll change anything (nor do I have any hatred for CEOs), we'll just hate whoever made the decision. It's just easier when it's one human-with-out-of-fashion-attributes who makes a lot of money.
[0] https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/news/2019/04/11/number-of... [1] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm
I was just responding to this. Sounds like you agree we'd have "most" of the 30M businesses left.
It's quite difficult to imagine one that works for most large companies, at the very least. Name a couple if it's so easy.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should just copy what we do in civil governments over to corporations. The United States' government at all levels is pretty anemic in being democratic, imo, and not a model to be envied. But there are other models for groups of people to collectively work together where they share decision making power and share in the fruits of their labor. There's stuff like worker-owner cooperatives, sociocracy, and open source software, for example. These different models for building things exist despite being within a capitalist society. I believe that under a different economic model, or even just powerful policy changes, people could be empowered in other ways to work together to create things for society.
And looking at your other post, it's true, I don't think Apple could exist as it does today in any society besides a capitalist society. That's not so bad, though, is it?
[1] Twilio cutting 11% – Letter from CEO [pdf]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837250
I am NOT fine with hiring that enforces equality of outcome (where some people, who would otherwise be considered unqualified, are granted an opportunity because of their race).
Race should account for ZERO percent of a hiring decision.
A great many eggs have been and will continue to be broken in service of equality of outcome, and we will all be worse off for it.
Acknowledging it has, and does, and that it is more often than not to the detriment of minority groups is what any informed person should recognize.
Imagine being a white guy, just laid off... it's not better, it's not fair, it seems like pure racism (even if you'd get fired anyways), and in a normal country, would be a basis for a discrimination lawsuit.
It's also probably not true in the first place. Which is the point of my post.
You sue for being let go due to racism, show the document, where they say exactly that, and they have to prove that they didn't take race in consideration after saying (in their own document) that they did.
My guess is the sex/race/etc metrics of the layoff "looked OK" by coincidence, and someone wrongly thought it was a good idea to call out
Then the CEO revisits, and changes the decisions or overrules an underling on a few cases about who to lay off to make things less embarrassing.
I don't know that that's what happened here, but is that really so unthinkable for a woke tech company in 2022 to do? For a company clearly concerned with how it's publicly perceived on this front?
Just wanted to add some additional context from the PDF you linked.
The civil rights act of 1964 should make racially-based decisions in workforce hiring/firing illegal, but here we are, nearly 60 years later.
That's how it is in NY state.
The parent post is just plain wrong. Race and color are protected classes, for every race and every color, not just for specific ones.
Really? I still don't see any state law text.
> The parent post is just plain wrong. Race and color are protected classes, for every race and every color, not just for specific ones.
Didn't comment on that. Just that New York City was being used as proof of New York state.
In practice it probably just means some EA looked over the layoffs and made sure the optics wouldn't be horrible. I see this as more of a blow-hard CYA statement that they made sure there is no potential for a class action lawsuit. Putting it in the press release as a bullet point is pretty silly to me though.
I have no problem with people being woke as long as we're both working towards a provable shared reality with data rather than rhetoric.
Humans lie. Sufficient amounts of data analyzed by a suficient number of people do not.
Assuming it was possible to look at the data I call for above, would you be opposed to the public dissemination and analysis of it?
(The reality of the whole thing is so obvious that they paid some contractor to say they’re antiracist without actually changing anything they did.)
Again, that would be racist. 'Anti-racist' is more likely that they made sure the white (or Indian, or whatever) manager didn't just fire all his non-white (or non-Indian, or whatever) reports, without good reason.
Getting hurt over people trying to be racially equitable ignores the fact that the default is racial inequity. 11% of the staff had to be fired, why not make sure it is done more fairly/randomly than racially? Because the latter is the default (or at least sadly common) whether you like it or not.
Equality of opportunity (equality) is good. Equality of outcome (equity) is only possible if you deliberately handicap the most competent and most productive people of the group, because humans are differently abled.
I am not mad that the NBA hires a massively disproportionately large number of African Americans, for instance, because small differences in average height (African Americans are taller, on average, than Caucasian Americans) result in much larger discrepancies at the extremes. If you're playing a game where you need extreme height, you'd expect an overrepresentation of African Americans relative to whites.
If you're playing a game that benefits players with a different extreme stat that Asian Americans score better in, on average, than Caucasian Americans, you'd expect the highest levels of that game to have an overrepresentation of Asian Americans relative to Caucasian Americans there too.
And the result is good. Watching a bunch of pudgy, (comparatively) short Caucasian Americans playing basketball interests me a lot less than a bunch of 6'6"+ African Americans who are objectively superior at the sport playing.
I'd rather listen to music made by the world's best band than by the world's most racially equitable band.
I'd rather get surgery at the world's best hospital than the world's most racially equitable hospital.
This is why we have social hierarchies stratified by competence, rather than by racial equity.
We should never be denying anyone the opportunity to try their best at something just because of their skin color, but we shouldn't expect perfect equality of outcome on that front either.
Note this also applies to gender. I'm a fat, heavy person, if I'm in a burning building, I want my firefighter to be able to carry 300 pounds. I'd make an educated guess that there are a lot more men than women who can carry 300 pounds.
I read a study a while ago that said women are 77% less likely to die in a car accident. By that same logic (and personal anecdote), I much prefer female drivers to male drivers when I am a passenger.
That's not to say there aren't women who can carry me, or that there aren't men who drive responsibly, but equity in either of these fields would probably lead to more deaths, because different types of people, on average, are better at different things, and an economy which encourages everyone to do what they are best at brings out the best in all of us.
An economy in which the most competent are artificially handicapped and the least competent are artificially boosted is worse for everyone.
Not true. White American men are an inch taller than blacks. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/americas-...>
We either have equality codified as Civil Rights law and respect that or we don't have it all and we are free to associate with people we want to in every respect. But you need to pick one.
Whether you fire star-bellied sneetches or non-star-bellied sneetches, you can just blame the algorithm. "Yes, the star-bellied sneetches were disproportionately affected and while that is tragic, we did carry it through a lens, so you know, we're good, right?"
What if, the meaning of “anti-racist” layoffs, is to fire all races equally?
Until the discovery phase
Every single layoff story stupefies me. Confuses. Flabbergasts.
What are these companies doing with so many people? What are they doing? Like, what are their day-to-day tasks?
My employer has more people but we build nuclear reactors and spacecraft. Our revenue per employee is nearly double Twilio's and is low for a "tech" firm due to the extremely high capital costs and labor-intensive nature of our work.
Nearly 8,000 people (surely, 8,000 with contractors) to build an SMS and VOIP marketing spam, sorry, ahem, communications, platform?
Are they all in marketing or customer support?
It is incomprehensible.
For reference, in the past I worked for an immensely profitable eCommerce business and I don't think our entire engineering department ever reached more than 40 people at its absolute largest.
I know all those employees aren't engineers, and I've been around long enough to know that what we see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg. But if we assume even 25% of them are engineers directly working on the product, that is still nearly 2,000 people. That must be a huge iceberg.
So what on Earth are all those people doing? I am not being sarcastic or obtuse, I am genuinely curious because the only organization that I have ever worked for that was that size or larger was the US government. Is it administrative/managerial bloat? Are there a bunch of different pivot projects going on? What does Twilio have going on that needs nearly 8,000 employees?
I don't know but I will say that I had the time of my life at the Signal 2018 conference where they rented out Bill Graham Arena and booked OK GO to play ... open bar and an arena full of indoor food trucks ...
... and earlier that day Tony Hawk was doing a halfpipe demo ... related to Twilio somehow ... ?
Hard to say where their business is going but it has all worked out very well for me.
There is overhead per customer in each of their segments for compliance, revenue retention, contract growth, and support.
From a technical standpoint, engineers are required for each of these aspects as well.
Then there is overhead for employees, in terms of managers, human resources, and it.
However, if this is what the CEO did, then he did not use an anti-racist lens -- merely a "not-racist" lens.
Kendi is explicit in his book, "How to be an Anti-Racist", that there is no neutrality. You simply cannot say "the layoff is not racist". You can either have the layoff be racist, or antiracist, there is no middle ground.
DiAngelo agrees in her assessment. She says that people should not ask, "Did racism occur", but rather, "How did racism occur?" When looking at the roster of layoffs, one must come to the conclusion that racism occurred, no matter how unbiased the results appear.
How does Kendi say anti racism rectifies past prejudice? Present prejudice. How to rectify present prejudice? With future prejudice.
If the CEO actually used an anti-racist lens in the layoff decisions, then by definition, he used prejudice based on race.
Given that it's basically all downside to declare yourself white or asian, I'm expecting almost everyone to start electing black or hispanic in the coming months.
For those who cry it's unfair – there's presently no justice or transparency in how these "anti racist" aka affirmative action policies are being implemented. It's a black box, private committee selecting person A or person B , based on some criteria: likely a self-selected category or worse a stereotypical naming pattern. (and if you don't believe me, look into university admissions processes).
She pretended to be a Native American for more than 30 years. Trump called her Pocahontas and she challenged trump with a dna test. This test is kind of bogus but it proved that she is like 1/1024 Native American.
How can that fly.
It goes to show these policies are clumsy and absurd. They will only make matters so much worse.
Is it reasonable to ask someone to make an election that will result in them not getting or getting fired prematurely ? We're talking about food on the table here.
To be clear, she contributed as a Cherokee Indian on a cookbook called Pow Wow Chow, and sumbitted at least one completely plagiarized recipe… as an adult.
https://elizabethwarrenwiki.org/pow-wow-chow-cookbook/
As to why Cherokee matters, the Cherokee have a well maintained registry. You do not claim to be Cherokee if you are not. She doesn’t care and never had anything in her youth to bring her up Cherokee. She’s a liar through and through.
A liar and a pretty bad one too.
Remind me again, why would a white person (especially man) not put them on the back of the queue when deciding where to apply for a job?
Despite not living in the states (and in a country where this sh*t is illegal), I think I will make it my policy to never work for a (parent) company that has a diversity policy from now on.
They may not realize it, but they will quietly lose business over time to folks who are not fans of the style of this layoff.
edit: Where does one check hiring metrics for company before accepting contract?
Sure! So, you've got your business goal(s), and within those goals you have sub-goals that achieve the main goals. One of your primary goals requires additional headcount, which then necessitates that one of your sub-goals is... wait for it... a hiring goal.
Apple is at the extreme, but the logic applies. There are massive budgets, so what do you do? You hire.
Startups do this, too. Give an engineering team $20m (or $200m....) and they will hire a lot of people. They aren't just going to sit on the money...
Even in the world of StableCo annual budgets, by the time the budget is approved, I guarantee it reflects a number of goals that have been recently axed. Or, in times of growth, there’s other goals that have come up and claimed some resources that technically were earmarked for something else. Budgets and goals are fluid.
Also hiring goals are useful for measuring activities. They have an HR/talent acquisition team and that team needs goals. How would you frame those goals if not hiring? And , unfortunately, printer purchases is a real business goal if your the guy responsible for purchasing printers.
Any hiring or new initiative looks "careless" if it didn't work out, but it could have just been a calculated risk that didn't pay off, especially given how chaotic the last few years have been.
LinkedIn company pages have those stats for Premium members.
Twilio is showing -- what do you know -- 13% headcount growth over the last 6 months and a median tenure of 1.3 years.
People just building their resume for things like "managed a department of 200 people" ?
Otherwise over hiring sounds like a pain in the ass to deal with.
Kind of the opposite of the beginning of the pandemic, when companies with in-person employees were laying off staff and moving to work-from-home and online companies like Zoom, Shopify, Teledoc, Twilio began booming. But now many of those brand new customers are returning to their old ways.
These internet companies "over hired" in the sense that they got a massive unexpected influx new demand they needed to scale out for, and no clue how long this would last. Will it fade out next month or be a decade long pandemic?
Many companies also expected higher customer retention after covid than they're actually keeping. If you look at trendlines for online shopping, work from home, etc related industries covid caused an instant jump in their growth equivalent to about 5 years on the trend line. Rather than staying "in the future", demand is declining back towards a trend line that otherwise ignores covid.
And when you're growing fast there's a real impetus to fill seats FAST and there's not much discipline around making sure you're hiring well. So you end up having to collect more people than you need because not all of them are well suited to their roles and you've got a lot of new projects that everyone isn't fully spun up on so there's always a surprising proportion of people who are being spun up or wound down on random projects all the time without directly committing any code. Companies that grow like this tend to end up with a lot of dead weight and bad business processes that spontaneously appear to shift that dead weight around to where they don't drag things down.
Perhaps this is too difficult to tweak the timing on, particularly at public companies. But at the very least, I'm sure some of the Twilio execs were glad to hear about Patreon's layoff yesterday.
Once they start you may have a bit of PR adjusting things but I daresay this announcement was planned weeks in advance. I could see a company deciding to lay off a bit less to make their percentage look a tiny bit better but other than that, probably not.
Now some companies may have "perpetual layoff plans" where every manager has to identify X people he'd lay off if needed, even if they never use it, then I could see someone taking advantage of it.
It’ll, ideally, become a class action lawsuit, which should keep this story in the news for a long time, providing cover for other companies to do layoffs
Even more happy with that decision now.
https://www.couponbirds.com/research-center/data/unemploymen...
B. I appreciate they made their idiocy public. I will make sure to 100 percent shut down any possibility of my company using their services. We’re still using Expensify which does upset me, cut from the same cloth as Twillio but they were more sneaky about it, will cut them asap.
Also if shareholders lose confidence they can oust the leadership.
it’s no skin off the company’s back, so it is the correct strategy. when CEOs (the world over) say they overhired AND that it was a mistake, it’s a pitiful political lie. also a mandatory strategy. you can’t say, “employees are cogs. we planned this shit. this was plan A.”. you wouldn’t be able to hire again when you find your stride.
Fixed that for you.. And oh boy would I not want to be one of this companies lawyers in the coming months and no doubt years! Yikes
https://www.mailersend.com/blog/introducing-transactional-sm...
I'm very happy with their support and email product.
I don't even know what that is, but sounds like a money pit.
What does this actually mean, in the context of "when we fired people, we considered their race"?
There is more than enough racism and other bigotry in North America to make the assumption that the layoffs across all departments would be fair and equitable a suspect assumption.
I guess this is probably true. In every group I've worked for, it was obvious who the high and low performing people were. In the two companies I was at, with layoffs, there weren't really any surprises. Not surprisingly, this has remained a strong motivator for my work effort: if you're complacent or incompetent, you're the first to go.
A cop stopped him at gunpoint and had him lie face-down on the ground and frisked him. Eventually, finding nothing, he let him go. “Mistaken identity.”
This is the kind of shit black people have to live with. None of my white bosses have ever had interaction with law enforcement - other than the time a cop helped one find his keys to his BMW after he’d accidentally tossed them in the bushes.
Our country is getting better. Most people don’t want to be racist. But this stuff still happens in the modern era. Acknowledging the problem and taking reasonable steps to try and improve it is not racist.
Now, as the GP pointed out, this particular incidence probably did more harm than good/looks like a PR stunt.
But here's the thing, not all racism is overt. There's more subtle ways it plays out too - patterns of behavior and the like.
When I was in my early 20s I worked at a bar owned by a black man, and I'm a white man. His role was basically manager, and I was basically assistant manager - and in the small bar world that meant we both were jacks of all trades. We did janitorial work and bookeeping and serving and really all the jobs of a bar. Depending on what each of us was doing that day, we could be dressed down and dirty, or dressed up and looking like a million bucks. Some days i would look basically homeless and he would look like a well of guy, and some days it would be the opposite. Some days we'd both look the same in that respect.
Over time I noticed a pattern - independent of what task we were doing or how we were dressed, I would be approached by people wanting to do business first. Distributors, musical acts, promoters, maintenance workers, and even cops would approach me for manager intereactions more often than they would approach the owner. No matter what the outward appearances were, I was the first person approached 2/3-3/4 of the time.
Any one of those instances could easily be rationalized away - Oh the well dressed guy was approached as manager, or they didn't want to bother the manager to begin with so they approached the worker first, or they approached who they saw first, or ..., or...
But after a couple years of this, there really was only one pattern that was consistent: they approached the white guy first more often than anything else. Most of the people who came in to do business never said or did anything overtly racist. I suspect most of them wouldn't consider themselves racist and they likely have black friends and think the concept of racism is irrational. Yet the fact remains - in a 50-50 situation, the white guy was selected as likely to be the boss a lot more than 50% of the time.
Yes this wasn't real science and theres a multi-variable statistical analysis that would be needed and all that jazz, but it was enough for me to become aware of the pattern - as i said any one of those situations can be rationalized away, but the fact that each situation needed a different rationalization and the racial bias explanation was much more consistent throughout was enough for me to believe that maybe there's more to racism than wearing a hood.
Relating this back to the cop story above - sure you can rationalize this one incident however you want. But over time, pay attention - you'll find disproportionately more stories about such cases of 'mistaken identity' being applied to minorities than white folks in the US. This is what people are talking about with institutional racism or societal racism, the fact that it's assumed that a person is a criminal or a boss or whatever based on thier race (not the race of the assumer, that in and of itself is a racist notion - "oh the black cop assumed the black person was a criminal disproves racism because all black people are a single group and represent a single viewpoint").
Try it on yourself - walk into a high end or middle class establishment where most of the people are a different race than you and pay attention to your comfort level. Compare it to your comfort level in a similar establishment where most of the people are the same race. When you meet a person, pay attention to how surprised you are that they have some role, or some power level and if that matches what you expected first looking at them. Racial bias comes in part from how our society is set up wrt race - you probably aren't racist, but I bet you have racial biases anyway. I do - most people do, a lot of it is taught long before any experiences. The best we can do is acknowledge to ourselves the times we made stupid assumptions that had no merit, and update our priors - this can be upsetting sometimes, I know I would love to say I got where I am on my own, but my observed reality is: there's a lot of racism in the world, and I'm in the "easy mode" group.
I'm "glad" you were able to claim your "white privilege". Coming from a low class background, I was not afforded such and have had to struggle to get where I am. However, according to your own definition, you are now guilty of the racism you decry. You assume because you took advantage of "white privilege" every white person had the same. Not all white people are well connected or come from money. The percentage might be higher but that means zero to those of us that did not have an easy go like you.
But hey, do whatever you need to do to assuage your guilt. I have no such burden and I resent people like you for trying to lay one at my feet. It seems like most of your response is based on projection.
Under that assumption I (again, the whole "you thought about your reaction" thing was a bad assumption on my part, sorry) related my own past thinking and how it changed. There was no moral superiority there, just my story about how my thinking changed and what I have observed. You seem to be reading a lot more into it than I wrote.
It is fully possible this was random chance. It’s an anecdote, not statistics. But if you want to look at statistics, there are plenty of studies. From the first hit on Google for police stops: a black person in North Carolina is 95% more likely to get pulled over than a white person, over twice as likely to be searched, but less likely to be in possession of contraband or get a ticket.[1]
1: https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/06/racial_disparities_traffi...
There are other news reports of similar incidents with black men. If race is not a factor, we would expect to see many more white than black men wrongly treated in this way, as they are a larger share of the population. I’m not aware of similar reports for white men, but would be interested to see them.
Re traffic stops: The idea that you can’t see the race of a driver while driving behind them is ludicrous. Next time you’re on the highway look in the rear view mirror of the car in front of you. You can see the person’s face.
If they’re actually stopping and searching people on some heuristic that just happens to be correlated with race, they should stop - it’s a bad heuristic. They’re searching black drivers at double the rate of whites, but finding contraband at a lower rate.
Clearly something they’re doing is broken, and it manifests as an undo burden on black drivers.
When you are hitting cars with a radar gun — that’s how most speeding tickets happen — you in fact cannot see the race of the driver.
You must be very good friends with your bosses to know this. People I work with have no idea what interactions I've had with the police.
Stopped for cause? Yeah, maybe not.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838754.