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

#51

Post by brohoolio » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 5:40 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,…

Affirmatibe action means that you take action to diversify your applicant pool. It's back from when you couldn't just apply online.

Not that you hire anyone based on race / etc. you still hire the best candidate.

I forget that the words affirmative action mean something different to a younger generation who mostly have encountered a weird perversion of the original meaning in higher education.

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

#52

Post by HillRat » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 5:40 AM UTC

woodman wrote: post #42

HillRat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stati…

I was referring to the Integrated Task Force study (which the Corps has yet to release in toto). Though I don't want to litigate the women-in-combat issue here, I'll note that plenty of female Marines (and soldiers) have over the past decade and a half of war operated effectively as light infantry in high OPTEMPO environments; the enemy doesn't care if you're an officer leading an infantry platoon or a logistics convoy. That doesn't means that combat MOSes should become open as a rule, but I'd like to see an analysis of the field effectiveness of units in combat as well as training.

Pregnancy is a stickier issue, and for the Corps is more problematic because they historically have had much higher undeployable numbers than the other services. Unplanned pregnancies are lower than the civilian population for officers and senior noncoms, but are roughly average for junior enlisted when adjusted for socioeconomic factors. Military policies forbidding any access to abortion procedures on-base also makes it harder to terminate unplanned pregnancies and, often when deployed overseas, impossible, which could account for some of the statistical correlation you cite. Actually, if you happen to dig up a citation to that study, I'd love to read it!

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

#53

Post by statgeek8 » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 5:43 AM UTC

According to the figures in this[1] article, whites are technically under-represented at Twitter relative to their percentage of the general population, yet both it and the NPR article take for granted that there is a lack of ethnic diversity at Twitter and other tech companies, despite non-whites collectively being over-represented at them.

While certain minorities (blacks, Hispanics) are indeed under-represented at tech companies like Twitter, others (Asians) are over-represented, and to such a degree that whites actually end up under-represented. Yet a careless reader could easily be misled by these and other articles into believing that whites are crowding out minorities, which is demonstrably not the case.

I doubt this deception is accidental.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...

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

#54

Post by wpietri » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 5:44 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…

This is one of those "econ 101 in a vacuum" scenarios that I find entirely tiresome. Look at this graph:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

I'm pretty sure that capitalism wasn't invented in 1970. Was the market totally malfunctioning before 1970, when women were excluded from a variety of professions? Or was there possibly, maybe, potentially some sort of relevant factor outside the banal bounds of commerce?

There are more things, Horatio, etc, etc.

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

#55

Post by tzs » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 5:44 AM UTC

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.…

> 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.

If the description in the article is accurate, the document said they recruit from particular schools, not that they restricted hiring of new graduates to people from those schools. Is anything publicly known about what they do when someone from a school they do not recruit from sends them a resumé?

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

#56

Post by nitrogen » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 5:46 AM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #49

Technophilis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I object to the racism and sexism in the sentiment, but it is a sort of privilege to have access to computers and time to create personal projects on them. But, it's still a good predictor for job success, so unless it results in discrimination against protected groups, it should still matter for hiring.

On the flip side, even if personal projects don't matter for hiring, everyone interested in the industry should be pursuing personal projects, even if it takes buying garbage computers (as I did as a kid) and repairing them to get a learning platform. Personal projects and open source are more accessible than people might think.

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

#57

Post by wpietri » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 5:52 AM UTC

netheril96 wrote: post #49

Technophilis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems like a cartoonish summary, or maybe they're just a cartoonish person. But I think there's some truth in there.

It's undeniable that open source is mainly white dudes. There are plenty of women who will tell you that they don't feel welcome in open source, and so don't participate or have stopped participating. So if you use open source participation as a hiring filter, it will have a bias.

Personal projects are a sign of having time and money. That is also correlated with being a single white guy. Parents, and particularly single parents mostly just laugh when you talk about free time. Making humans from scratch is their personal project.

That's not to say that these aren't good things to look for. I look for them myself. But if you use them as a filter (as opposed to one of many positive signals), then you definitely are biasing your hiring to middle- and upper-class white males.

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

#58

Post by statgeek8 » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 6:01 AM UTC

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…

Asians, according to this article[1], represent 29% of Twitter's workforce overall and 34% of its technical workforce, despite being only 4% of the US population, while whites are significantly under-represented at 59% and 58% of their overall and technical workforce. Twitter's candidate pool is plenty diverse already.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...

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

#59

Post by epmatsw » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 6:06 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #50

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…

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 o…

Realistically, I think this policy probably makes sense at a company the size and visibility of Twitter. They probably get enough applicants from the schools listed to fill their needs. I worked at a company of comparable size, and they actually stopped giving referral bonuses because it stopped being useful to pay people bonuses when they had 100+ people apply for every available position.

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

#60

Post by sulam » Sun, Nov 08, 2015, 6:10 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.…

You're making an assumption here, which is that diversity does not provide value in and of itself. Yet there is ample research that shows that more diverse teams are more creative in problem solving and have better outcomes with tasks that require such creativity. Therefore, picking someone who can't whiteboard quite as well as another guy, but clearly has the skills necessary to do the job and adds diversity, is potentially a net win for the company.