Hacker News Reader

Comment by vondur | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure if you are white and laid off, you will have a pretty strong case for a lawsuit. I can't believe someone in legal wouldn't warn the leadership that putting out a press release stating this was a good idea.

View on HN

This is San Francisco. When I worked there (2015-2020), most of my co-workers openly endorsed hiring bias against demographics that aren't considered "diverse". I'd be highly skeptical that a jury would side with a plaintiff alleging anti-white discrimination, no matter how solid the proof. If a community widely thinks activity that is de jure illegal should be allowed then it becomes de facto permitted because even if a company engages in this behavior and gets sued they won't be held liable.

I worked in SF during the same time period, at a small startup. There would have extreme fury at the idea of hiring/firing based on anything but ability.

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?

By contrast, I was at two successful unicorns. They were both large (1,000 and 2-3,000 employees). We had the luxury of having significantly more applicants than headcount. I think the mentality is more that the product is already successful, and we have a responsibility to ensure that that oppressed people don't miss out on that success.

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.

> 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.

It’s beyond ugly and the irony will be that progressives who are so concerned with how history will judge them will be judged harshly by these positions.

That's why the key point for me isn't that it's illegal (though it is): it's immoral, even if it was legal.

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 think of this as the Left having lost its way (in its own sort-of marxist terms). It's overly obsessed with identity and forgets the much more important discriminant of class. A cynical analysis is that the upper classes are using this as a successful divide and conquer tactic...

It’s a communist tactic to sow division in society by raising tension along identity lines like race, etc. Of course schools usually cover this part of history as “McCarthyist nonsense.”

this assumes that you’re making a lesser hire and that a parallel skill level hire of a minority isn’t possible

That is jury nullification.

Legal probably approved the word "lens". And if this ends up in court they will say that "lens" means that we are aware of the impact layoffs have on our society, but does not change who we fire during a layoff, meaning even if we didn't do this through a lens the person suing would have still been let go.

If the layoff was done through the lens of racist consideration, and minority races were given preference, then the odds of a white or Asian person getting fired were higher.

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.

As an aside, the Latin words you wanted are a priori, but you're right that race is a protected category and putting out a statement saying "we made firing decisions based on a protected category" is a bad idea for that reason.

Then the laid off employees should organize as a class action so that "this specific person would have been let go" is no longer an acceptable defense and the question can be focused on whether using a "lens" to fire people based on race is illegal. If they argue that the lens means something else or that they didn't use the lens then Twilio has potentially just filed a materially false statement with the SEC.

> but does not change who we fire during a layoff

what does 'carried out through a lens' mean. Through means it was put through that lens?

a lens translates things to a different view. so they either justified it somehow, or it changed the outcome. not a hair I'd want to be splitting in court.

Yeah the comment means nothing if it did not impact their decision.

Exactly my point. White Male CEOs are afraid of an article in a major newspaper showing them being rich next to a picture of a poor minority that they just fired. So they put a PR spin on the firings.

Unfortunately, mostly not. Courts have so far been extremely unwilling to consider cases of that sort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com