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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

#41

Post by geofft »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #37
geofft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because I don't have the startup costs to start a successful Twitter-competitor sitting in my pocket?

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

#42

Post by woodman »

HillRat wrote: post #18
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 sho…

> ...the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit...

I'm not sure which study you are talking about, because the USMC has been fighting it for several decades - and conducted many studies to back their position. I wrote a paper on the subject many years ago, it is a very complicated issue - lots of very obvious and undeniable cons, with a few potential pros. One of the funnier cons that I remember was the statistical analysis of female service members' pregnancy rates prior to deployment. For some reason, as soon as deployment time comes up - a great many females find themselves impregnated and unable to go overseas... Apparently the problem is so bad that many commanders don't include females in the total organization count for predeployment planning. Also, the USMC is pretty much the only branch that would benefit from the potential pros - pushing problem-solving and ethics further down the chain of command. I'm guessing that they've done the math and decided that it would still be a net negative.

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

#43

Post by mrdrozdov »

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…

> other equally fast/cheap filtering methods

Like what?

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

#44

Post by asdfologist »

ryandrake wrote: post #38
asdfologist wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So you're implying that there's no correlation between academic pedigree and work performance. Maybe that's true, but not what my personal experience would suggest, at least in the realm of software engineering. I'd be happy to change my stance if there's data to the contrary.

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

#45

Post by woodman »

geofft wrote: post #41
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The market is remarkably inefficient. Then why aren't you exploiting this?

Because I don't have the startup costs to start a successful Twitter-competitor sitting in my pocket?

You're doing it wrong, that isn't how you displace a market leader - you invent a new market. The barrier to entry isn't that high in tech, unless your pocket contains a fist full of lint and buttons - you do have enough capital.

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

#47

Post by falsestprophet »

asdfologist wrote: post #44
ryandrake wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So you're implying that there's no correlation between academic pedigree and work performance. Maybe that's true, but not what my personal experience would suggest, at least in the realm of software engineering. I'd be happy to change my stance if there's data to the contrary.

Google has studied this.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman...

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

#48

Post by smt88 »

Technophilis wrote: post #30
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.

There are relatively easy and cost effective ways to filter candidates from the supposedly less-than-stellar schools. Personal projects, open source projects contributions and programming contests are a good way to easily gauge candidates for a software engineering position.

> programming contests

Programming contests aren't anything like actually working at a software company. If you select for the wrong skills, you'll lose lots of good people.

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

#49

Post by netheril96 »

Technophilis wrote: post #30
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.

There are relatively easy and cost effective ways to filter candidates from the supposedly less-than-stellar schools. Personal projects, open source projects contributions and programming contests are a good way to easily gauge candidates for a software engineering position.

I once encounter someone on reddit who says he purposefully ignore personal projects and open source projects contributions when making hiring decisions, because he thinks it is a white male privilege.

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

#50

Post by wpietri »

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…

I can get why managers think the important thing is to save managerial time. But as somebody who has just gotten done with a round of hiring developers, I believe this is a false economy.

If I can hire just one good developer, I'll have added thousands of hours of effort. If I can find one who settles in, it could be tens of thousands of hours. If I choose especially well, I'll get somebody who acts as a multiplier on those around them. If I choose poorly, I could get somebody who's net negative, making messes and driving away good people.

Given what's at stake, I can spend what seems like ridiculously large amounts of time on hiring and still come out ahead. Maybe if we were drowning in good people, I could still take the risk of tossing good people in the trash. But demand for developers is incredibly high.

Actually, I take it back. HN, y'all should definitely choose people only with top-3 CS degrees. Because then while you're all fighting over a small number of Stanford job hoppers with crazy demands, I can keep hiring the less obvious candidates, ones who are happy to stay for years.

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