Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
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Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#2Nigga nigga nigga
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#3> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to recruit from. This document was penned by Alex Roetter, the Senior VP of engineering. He had his other directors contribute to it, modify it and refine it. It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. Never listed any state schools. Never listed any HBCUs. It listed certain companies and excluded certain companies. It excluded certain titles. So if you're a software engineer in tests [an engineering role] at Microsoft, that's not a "real" software engineer. And some of the best engineers I know are software engineers who test for Microsoft!
Leaving aside all ethical questions, it is baffling and sad to see how un-scientific an approach to hiring and staffing we take. This is about pride and self-image; there's zero reason to believe that restricting your hiring to certain universities, certain previous roles, etc. gets you a more effective engineering team. (And I say this as an MIT graduate in software engineering proper.) If anything, being willing to hire from more universities and more career paths gets you different forms of experience, avoiding an engineering monoculture, for less money and time than it takes to participate in the top-university recruiting extravagance or hire away those engineers already in demand.
One of the particularly unfortunate things about the current software industry is that it makes these sorts of policies non-testable. Companies are supposed to compete, but a number of factors, from the wildly inconsistent availability of venture funding, to network effects, to personal connections between founders and people already established in the industry, means the market is remarkably inefficient at determining how productive a company actually was. The fact that Twitter did as well as it did conveys zero information about how much better it could have done. There are so many obvious technical things they screwed up (developer relations, notably) and succeeded despite those failures; it's equally likely that they succeeded despite many of their non-technical decisions instead of because of them.
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#4He has every right to push forward what he thinks is the right thing. Absolutely, and so does everyone else who wants to bring whomever they want to give advantage to.
I should be able to lobby for my friends and my circle and he should be able to lobby for his friends and his circle.
And no doubt that their workforce does not mirror society at large. But I think this ignores the percentages of people graduating in different fields. Yes, Twitter could suck up more than its percentage, but if there is a limited pool of candidates of group X, then other companies will necessarily be under the average.
One thing I don't get is what the demographics of the user base has to do with anything? If I buy a Nikon camera or Lenovo computer, should I believe they need to hire more Americans, or even Americans of my ethnicity?
That said, I think one measure of bias base-line one could use would be to get the percentages of minorities represented in minority owned and run (tech) businesses and assess the percentage of minorities in those businesses who do not represent the owner or top management.
So look at he percentage of non Black minorities in black owned or run businesses or the percentages of minorities other than Korean or Russian, etc. in businesses run or owned by minorities. This could provide a base-line to work with. To gauge if only majority run or owned businesses are biased or all businesses are biased, or just some and understand why that happens.
However, blindly promoting that businesses (or tech in this case) all more or less show a workforce diversity proportional to the population at large, is likely ignoring other inssues influencing those trends.
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#5> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to recruit from. This document was penned by Alex Roetter, the Senior VP of engineering. He had his other directors contribute to it, modify it and refine it. It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. Never listed any state schools. Never listed any HBCUs. It listed certain companies and excluded certain companies.…
The concentration of talent in other schools are lower, so finding the few talents are harder. Hiring costs, and bad hirings cost a lot, so it may be cost effective not to spend a lot hiring from less-than-stellar schools.
Of course this is just a hypothesis. No hard data to back it up.
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#6> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to recruit from. This document was penned by Alex Roetter, the Senior VP of engineering. He had his other directors contribute to it, modify it and refine it. It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. Never listed any state schools. Never listed any HBCUs. It listed certain companies and excluded certain companies.…
The college list is interesting especially considering the emphasis many startups (Y-Combinator included) place on hiring hackers, self-taught engineers, etc.
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#7I dislike how affirmative action has a bad reputation. Affirmative action is not about lowering standards. It's about having a diversified candidate pool. Sounds like Twitter wasn't willing to invest the effort to have a diversified pool.
It definitely pays off in the long run, but it takes some effort in the short run. My company sponsors some student groups and encourages engineers to be active in recruiting outside of their circles. It's paid off as we've moved from a monoculture to a company with a workforce that represents our community.
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#8> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to recruit from. This document was penned by Alex Roetter, the Senior VP of engineering. He had his other directors contribute to it, modify it and refine it. It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. Never listed any state schools. Never listed any HBCUs. It listed certain companies and excluded certain companies.…
The concentration of talent in other schools are lower, so finding the few talents are harder. Hiring costs, and bad hirings cost a lot, so it may be cost effective not to spend a lot hiring from less-than-stellar schools. Of course this is just a hypothesis. No hard data to back it up.
3/4 of our engineers aren't from top tier schools.
Several of our best never even graduated.
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#9I dislike how affirmative action has a bad reputation. Affirmative action is not about lowering standards. It's about having a diversified candidate pool. Sounds like Twitter wasn't willing to invest the effort to have a diversified pool. It definitely pays off in the long run, but it takes some effort in the short run. My company sponsors some student groups and encourages engineers to be active in recruiting outsid…
I definitely prefer a multicultural circle of friends --it's interesting, as they say.
But... does it provide a competitive advantage? Are industries in places like China, India, Japan and Korea at a disadvantage compared to the US because they are more or less monocultural?
Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems
#10> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to recruit from. This document was penned by Alex Roetter, the Senior VP of engineering. He had his other directors contribute to it, modify it and refine it. It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. Never listed any state schools. Never listed any HBCUs. It listed certain companies and excluded certain companies.…
I disagree.
All companies have only a finite amount of time/money to spend on hiring, so they're often forced to use crude heuristics to filter out resumes, especially in companies that get a huge number of applicants every year, like Twitter. Maybe it's just me, but based on my experience, filtering candidates (as a first pass) based on school or previous role does yield many false positives and negatives, but it still works pretty damn well compared to other equally fast/cheap filtering methods.