Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by geofft » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:25 AM UTC

federererer wrote: post #25

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…

On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards. If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit. But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent,…

I don't understand this argument, unless you are making an assumption that a company has infinite open positions.

If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit. So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic, and there's a company policy that encourages me to extend five offers to that one-third, I'm still keeping my standards right where they've always been.

In fact, it is precisely because there are more than enough candidates with technical merit that we have other measures like "culture fit".

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

#32

Post by geofft » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

woodman wrote: post #27

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 know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of every…

The market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.

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

#33

Post by jwise0 » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:29 AM UTC

Twitter's response seems pretty untrue. Specifically, they say:

"Beyond just disclosing our workforce representation statistics, we have also publicly disclosed our representation goals for women and underrepresented minorities for 2016, making us the largest tech company to put hard numbers around its diversity commitment."

Are they unaware of Intel's diversity initiative? Intel has set hard goals for 2020, and is continuing to track metrics yearly [1].

To claim that one is tracking the state of the art, and simultaneously be so unaware of what the state of the art actually is, is a sign that an organization is languishing, regardless of what the subject is. In this case, the subject is diversity, and the organization seems to still be Twitter.

There are ways to avoid these kinds of issues: if you run an organization that you want to build a diverse workforce in, I recommend that you hire a diversity consultant. (I believe that Clef, for example, did approximately this, and got staggeringly good results.)

[1] http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel...

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

#34

Post by mc32 » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:33 AM UTC

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.

We'll have to see. China, Japan, Korea and India have world leading companies, world beating companies. They compare very well to more diverse countries like Mexico, Brazil, etc. [Japan and Korea are rather small compared to Brazil and Mexico]

This is separate from the question of providing fair and gainful employment for everyone --I think that's a goal as a society we should strive for _even if_ it puts us at a disadvantage. My question was more geared toward questioning the received wisdom.

One obvious advantage for companies operating in a homogenous society is they don't face the challenges in hiring a diverse workforce.

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

#35

Post by federererer » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:34 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #31

federererer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards. If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit. But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent,…

I don't understand this argument, unless you are making an assumption that a company has infinite open positions. If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit . So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic,…

Are you saying that among those 30 qualified candidates, they're all at exactly the same level of skill/talent/experience, or are otherwise completely interchangeable?

I find that hard to believe, at least for any realistic scenario.

Even if all of those candidates exceed the minimum level of merit required for the job, it's very likely that some will still have more or better skill/talent/experience than the others. There will still be an ordering based purely on merit.

Ignoring this ordering when choosing the 10 successful candidates would be a case of ignoring merit, which would indicate a lowering of standards.

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

#36

Post by mc32 » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:38 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #28

mc32 wrote: post #4

He 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 d…

> 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? Twitter's product design has much more of an editorial influence on what happens with the product than Lenovo's or Nikon's. A closer analogy might be a local newspaper: I absolutely would feel uncomf…

I do recall the HP camera fiasco. That was proof of some of the deficiencies attributable to lack of diversity.

However, that does not speak to the company doing better or worse over all due to this lack of diversity, unless we presume that lack of diversity is by and large negative and diversity is by and large positive.

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

#37

Post by Moshe_Silnorin » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:39 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #32

woodman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of every…

The market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.

>The market is remarkably inefficient.

Then why aren't you exploiting this?

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

#38

Post by ryandrake » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:43 AM UTC

asdfologist wrote: post #10

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.…

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 st…

A couple of things:

1. Limiting your hiring to a tiny set of schools makes about as much sense as only interviewing candidates with names that start with A-F or candidates that come from California. You're just going to end up with a smaller list, not a better list.

2. I thought there was this dire "shortage of engineers", at least that's taken as a given on HN. Why the need for an arbitrary filter?

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

#39

Post by paulddraper » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:44 AM UTC

geofft wrote: post #32

woodman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of every…

The market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.

Yep. Just like if you found out that probability didn't work, go to Vagas and exploit it.

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

#40

Post by geofft » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 4:45 AM UTC

federererer wrote: post #35

geofft wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this argument, unless you are making an assumption that a company has infinite open positions. If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit . So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic,…

Are you saying that among those 30 qualified candidates, they're all at exactly the same level of skill/talent/experience, or are otherwise completely interchangeable? I find that hard to believe, at least for any realistic scenario. Even if all of those candidates exceed the minimum level of merit required for the job, it's very likely that some will still have more or better skill/talent/experience than the others.…

In practice, there just isn't a total ordering among candidates like that. You'll find some who are better at some things than others, but you need a mix of strengths for the team anyway.

And I'm not aware of any company that actually manages to rank all candidates by their exact position relative to other candidates. Interviewers tend to get to say just "hire" / "no-hire", not all candidates talk to the same interviewers, etc.; that loss of information isn't, in practice considered an unacceptable lowering of standards.

So, given that standards have already been lowered in the real world from this ideal, affirmative action is certainly not lowering them any more.