Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#11

Post by threeseed »

netheril96 wrote: post #5
geofft wrote: post #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.…

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.

Engineering is actually more like an art than a science. It requires creativity, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and a strategic mindset. People who are purely book smart generally don't excel in these areas.

I think targeting top schools alone is a pretty misguided strategy.

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#12

Post by threeseed »

mc32 wrote: post #9
brohoolio wrote: post #7

I 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?

Yes they are at a disadvantage at providing services that cater to the entire world.

Which is why Chinese and Japanese sites for example have struggled to extend beyond their own borders.

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#15

Post by [deleted] »

brohoolio wrote: post #7

I 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…

[deleted]

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#16

Post by xienze »

threeseed wrote: post #12
mc32 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes they are at a disadvantage at providing services that cater to the entire world. Which is why Chinese and Japanese sites for example have struggled to extend beyond their own borders.

Well as far as sites go, I think the biggest disadvantage is not focusing on English first rather than the local language.

But then there's companies like Nintendo and Sony that are globally successful in spite of their lack of diversity.

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#17

Post by Futurebot »

Recruiting from a limited set of schools is widespread:

https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin...

Which leads to the practice turning into a self-reinforcing cycle:

http://www.economist.com/node/21640316

It's a symptom rather than a cause.

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#18

Post by HillRat »

brohoolio wrote: post #7

I 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…

There are plenty of studies correlating racial and gender diversity with better corporate financial performance, particularly in companies that score high in innovation-seeking behaviors. Whether diversity enables innovation or innovation enables diversity is an open question, but in either case it is statistically striking that diversity-valuing cultures are also performant cultures. Many controlled studies also show that diverse groups are more likely to be better problem-solvers and perform better on tests measuring ethical integrity -- in fact, the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit for combat actually reinforced those findings for gender-mixed combat units.

Whether Twitter needs black engineers to secure its higher-than-average black userbase is, I think, at best dubious (as Gibson tells us, users find their own use for things), but it might want to reconsider its stance as Wall Street begins side-eying its valuation. Meanwhile, as Brian Brackeen of Kairos put it, the unicorns' failure means startups have a lot of potential talent to grab....

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#19

Post by [deleted] »

threeseed wrote: post #11
netheril96 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engineering is actually more like an art than a science. It requires creativity, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and a strategic mindset. People who are purely book smart generally don't excel in these areas. I think targeting top schools alone is a pretty misguided strategy.

[deleted]

Re: Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

#20

Post by santaclaus »

geofft wrote: post #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 listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. Never listed any state schools.

Berkeley is a state school. Also, Waterloo is a Canadian public...

Edit: Pulling up the US news rankings, 4 of the top 10 are public state schools. So a (pretty horrible) recruitment policy that only hits the top 10 schools from a mostly arbitrary ranking system will still get 40% public state schools.

Post reply on HN