Twilio CEO announces 11% in 'Anti-Racist' focused layoffs | Hacker News Reader

Twilio CEO announces 11% in 'Anti-Racist' focused layoffs

fortune.com

31 pointsxqcgrek245 comments

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7 recent articles with comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894062

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32868134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32855380

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32849920

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837250

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Twilio CEO announces 11% of employees will be laid off - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32894062 - Sept 2022 (16 comments)

Are Race-Based Firings Legal? Twilio's About to Find Out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32868134 - Sept 2022 (130 comments)

Twilio CEO: Layoffs were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32855380 - Sept 2022 (68 comments)

Twilio promises ‘anti-racist’ layoffs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32849920 - Sept 2022 (6 comments)

Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837802 - Sept 2022 (463 comments)

A message from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: 11% workforce cut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837345 - Sept 2022 (198 comments)

Twilio cutting 11% – Letter from CEO [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837250 - Sept 2022 (106 comments)

I find this anti racism, itself racist, it's like: oh you have a certain skin colour? Aww you must need our help and special treatment. What if you had to lay off either a Black person from a rich, well educated family, vs a white person from a poorer family who really needs the money?

Why not just judge people based on their individual self and content of their character, rather than their skin colour and your preconceived assumptions about them because of their colour(e.g thinking all black people are poor or uneducated, thinking all white people are privileged or have easier lives)?

> Why not just judge people based on their individual self and content of their character

Because it’s hard to do

You’re arguing for equality over equity. The reason our societies have moved towards encouraging equitable outcomes is because the equality approach like you suggest doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it ignores inherent systemic biases and racism built into many of our systems. The point is to try to help people who are otherwise marginalized because of their skin colour, disability, etc. This is basic stuff.

How do you ensure "equitable outcomes" without resorting to using racial discrimination in your policies?

I don't think skin colour is comparable to disabilities. I don't agree with grouping and separating people based on race so you can treat them differently. I agree some people need extra resources given to them, race should have no part to play in it. If someone's poor, they're poor and could need/want help, their skin colour has no role to play in that. I just think your opinion is fundamentally so wrong and misguided, I hope we both have good intentions and want what's best, but I think your path to get there is doing the opposite of what you want.

I agree that race should ultimately have no part of it, but that’s not the reality we live in. Systemic racism is real in America, and people are disadvantaged from birth by the color of their skin. I don’t know how to completely fix something so deeply engrained in American society, but taking steps ensure more equitable employment outcomes for people fundamentally disadvantaged by the color of their skin (no, not white) is at least something.

I also agree with your general point that in general, disadvantaged people (eg poor white people) should also get some kind of boost and not be left in the dust, there just needs to be some nuance and acknowledgment of the systemic racism that applies to others as well.

> Why not just judge people based on their individual self and content of their character, rather than their skin colour...

Indeed. Unfortunately there's a mountain of research showing we're pretty hopeless at doing that. And it's not just skin colour (or sex, or other obvious physical markers) - even knowing someone's name causes implicit bias when judging suitability for employment/romantic compatibility etc. But "anti-racist" shouldn't mean "favouritism towards historically marginalised races", rather "checks and balances to prevent further entrenchment of implicit biases".

Is the Twilio CEO going to step down and have someone else with less privilege take his place? It's always good to lead by example.

Anybody who doesnt lose a billion per year would do it

Source?

Given that he’s the co-founder, less likely.

Would have been interesting if George Hu had become the CEO, and what the company trajectory would have been instead since his departure.

(fyi — Firefox reader mode works)

> Companies that relied on a “last hired, first fired” approach to layoffs for example, lost nearly 19% of their share of white women in management and 14% of their share of Asian men, according to report which was published in the Harvard Business Review.

So this is a good point. Especially if a company made a ton of recent strides in advertising hiring in disadvantaged communities, cuts based on recency of employment would largely unwind a lot of that progress. And I expect randomizing it risks cutting employees the company actually wants to keep.

I hope twilio publishes their method e.g with HBR later on. It'll either be a good example to learn from and/or fodder for misguided lawsuits, but I hope we get to see their solution to the problem.

It does make me curious how random it will be. If they're unwilling to put their top performers in the tombola (and they probably are), there will be a firing bias anyway.

I'll guess: randomized among people who got below a certain review grade on their last one or two reviews.

The article is gated so I can’t see if they address this but when companies make such announcements isn’t differential laying off / firing due to race illegal?

Reader mode in Firefox works around it.

If it were race-based that would be illegal. It sounds like what Twilio has done is ensure that their firing criteria simply don't encode prior organizational sources of racism, not that they decided "we will fire the white men".

One cited example is "last hired, first fired" layoffs - if your company has recently improved the diversity of its candidates resulting in a more diverse hiring pool, firing the newest hires would unwind that.

A company that wants to be racist might even deliberately choose the arguably-innocent policy which results in firings disproportionate to the makeup of the company. So this just seems to me like Twilio doing the opposite - ensuring that the firing criteria aren't a proxy for race

> job cuts won’t hit workers from ‘marginalized communities’ more than others

This is the most corporate sentence I have heard today.

It’s still early, plenty of time for that one to be outdone.

You know anti-racism has turned performative when companies start to use it in their corporate speak.

Not Twilio.

I recently attended a manager meeting in my own company, where some of the managers were comfortable saying they would insist on a certain number of percentage of new-hire candidates who were of “x”.

Non-white male; but I’m quietly distressed at the implications.

I’ve been thinking over how to even process or deal with this.

Judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, or whatever other affinity group one can assign them to. Simple idea. People are individuals, not instances of stereotypes.

It's been said before but it obviously needs repeating. We're gonna hafta embrace the "subversive" label that preaching MLK's message will earn us.

It’s easy in theory but difficult in practice not to be biased; like, I get why quotas happen.

It’s also wrong and undercuts someone’s actual talent and achievements.

Pretty common I think.

Not only hiring. A coworker was blocked from organizing some technical community event because among the 5 speakers who applied to present only one was "x".

I get the sentiment behind such quotas but it's not always realistic. I think a fair way to look at it is, if the environment is such that "x" are discouraged from participation then it needs fixing. But it should be easy for the diversity team to go identify such an issue and tell the organizers to fix that rather than saying "meet quota or no event".

For hiring, it's fine to look at numbers and identify a skew pattern and to look into why it may exist and how to counter, but just asking for percentage alone is not helpful.

Indeed, I was just reading about a local software shop that managed to increase its rate of hiring female engineers to over 40% without any quota system. One of the simple tricks they use is to ensure there's always a woman involved in the job advertising/interviewing/hiring process. Note that most companies are lucky if they can reach 20% for female engineer hires (and certainly from experience, it's rare to get even 25% of applicants be female, which is at least partly an issue of implicit biases in the education system).

That’s an insightful idea.

There’s no question of unconscious and unintentional bias that goes on, even with the best of intentions.

Forcing a quota system cannot be the right answer, however.

Arguably that is a quota system for the selection of those involved that make up the hiring team.

Ah things like this are going to make European Americans deeply resent minorities in the tech space. If he was going to do it he shouldn't have mentioned it this way.

> “Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities,” Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson wrote in a memo to employees. “So we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.”

> Lawson did not provide any details about how the company would ensure that the layoffs did not cut deeper into certain groups of its 7,800 worldwide employees. But the move appears to be one of the first high-profile cases of a major tech company taking into consideration — at least publicly — the ways that job cuts might disproportionally affect certain workers.

> According to a study of 800 companies conducted by the American Sociological Review in 2014, companies that conducted “neutral” layoffs erased most or all of the progress they had made in diversity. Companies that relied on a “last hired, first fired” approach to layoffs for example, lost nearly 19% of their share of white women in management and 14% of their share of Asian men, according to report which was published in the Harvard Business Review.

All things being equal, they should just use a lottery system. But that's only if all things are equal. first and foremost should be job performance / salary weighed against necessity of people in a given position.

Trying to force a social context in a business scenario is asking for trouble, IMHO.

Right, things are already not equal which is why last hire and lotteries don't work.

People also say that this is grounds for a lawsuit, but I think it will heavily depend on methodology. If they said "well you won't be laid off because you're asian" that's one thing... but if they said "layoffs traditionally favor white people, so we're going to anonymize our selection to avoid bias" then that's an entirely different story.

https://archive.ph/uEwfl

The article doesn't explain what it means for layoffs to be "anti-racist". That doesn't even make sense.

Layoffs are supposed to be about cutting expenses, and have nothing to do with anyone's skin color. The very mentioning of race in the context of layoffs is itself racist.

People are freaking out over this, and it's a pretty bonkers thing to say. I have a competing hypothesis though. A lot of orgs mistakenly think they have a big diversity attrition problem because minorities and women leave at greater rates. However, in practice, minorities and women leave at approximately the same rates as everyone normalized to levels in the org. It's just that low level people leave more frequently and the bulk of minorities are in low level positions, whereas the top half looks like a a bowl of milk.

I think they did an analysis on who would get laid off, noticed minorities were vastly over-represented vs the whole population, and are trying to hedge here with some PR.

I have no evidence for this.

Having survived numerous rounds of layoffs at a Fortune 500 (>40k people) they are opening themselves up to lawsuits with any commentary about how they are doing this.

They should make cuts diagonally across the organization and maintain diversity ratios as best they can, keeping top performers. Layoffs are a huge de-motivator and ignoring individual performance is going to have a detrimental effect on those left behind.

> A company spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of how it conducted layoffs through an anti-racist/anti-oppression lens.

Well I don't think there's much to discuss then... it could mean literally anything.

Well not anything. Clearly race is used to some extent in how they determine layoffs, which by itself should be illegal. Exactly which formulas they use doesn't really matter since anti-racist by definition means the layoffs are done through a racial lens.

The comments on this post do not pass the vibe check. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a company taking extra care during a layoff to make sure that under-represented minorities are not the hardest hit by it. Throwing around the word "woke" and acting like this is oppression against white people is just performative nonsense.

Yeah honestly this community is incredibly disappointing at times. This is barebones basic stuff to try to make America a little more equitable as a society. In response we get a gnashing of teeth about how anti-racism measures are actually racist… it’s like I’m reading trash comments from a right-wing rag instead of a website to discuss advances in technology.

Sure do layoffs based on anything else than performance, role and fit for organisation. This makes no sense.

"ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.” This sounds pretty racist to me. Why didn't he just say "carried out while maintaining present diversity"?

Prior discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837802

Reply on news.ycombinator.com