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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

#61

Post by wpietri »

geofft wrote: post #40
federererer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intervi…

I definitely agree on there not being a total ordering. Part of it for me is the mix of strengths thing. But I noticed two other factors:

One is just the small amount of information gleaned. Last time I hired, I ended up spending ~5 hours with each candidate who made it all the way through. But that's 0.1% of how much time I hope to spend with them, and it's them attempting to put their best foot forward. Any score I might give them would have big error bars.

The other is the extent to which ranking candidates is personal and nearly arbitrary. This time we did blinded reviews of code and it amazed me to see how often each reviewer valued different things. We would eventually converge with discussion, but I don't have a lot of faith that the parallel-universe versions of ourselves would be particularly consistent. And that's without reviewers even knowing the identities of the code writers.

The whole "lowered standards" thing strikes me as built upon a fantasy of clarity that is nothing like my actual experience of hiring.

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

#62

Post by Pyxl101 »

brohoolio wrote: post #51
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,…

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.

> Affirmative action means that you take action to diversify your applicant pool.

Wikipedia describes it differently:

"Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group [...]. The nature of affirmative action policies varies from region to region. Some [...] use a quota system, whereby a certain percentage of jobs or school vacancies must be reserved for members of a certain group."

Wouldn't using a quota system be lowering the bar?

Using your definition, if I recruit in California, and I expand to begin recruiting in Oregon, then I have diversified my applicant pool. Have I successfully employed affirmative action?

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

#63

Post by geomark »

tzs wrote: post #55
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…

This is an important point. I was a hiring manager at a large company. Resources for recruiting activities were not unlimited so choices had to be made. Top schools that helped facilitate the recruiting process were always on the list. We hired from everywhere if the applicant was good. But a lot of good schools were not very organized or proactive in promoting recruiting by employers.

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

#64

Post by statgeek8 »

jwise0 wrote: post #33

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 c…

The state of the art in diversity appears to be blaming whites for the under-representation of certain minorities groups (blacks, Hispanics), even when that under-representation is actually due to the over-representation of other minority groups (Asians): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527668

How will a diversity consultant (whatever that is) help with this? Recommend Anti-Asian quotas, like the kind elite universities in the US already employ?

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

#65

Post by wpietri »

epmatsw wrote: post #59
wpietri wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose. But it's based upon a couple of theories that I disagree with: a) the people you need are the ones who apply unprompted, and b) it's ok if you throw out your best potential hires.

My experience is that large companies mostly end up being seas of mediocrity, and I think lazy hiring is a big cause of that. I think one of the drivers of it is companies seeing programmers as fungible resources, so hiring becomes less about getting the best possible people carefully fitted to teams and more about getting adequate people with low managerial effort.

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

#66

Post by jklinger410 »

statgeek8 wrote: post #53

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…

IIRC the employee in question was also going to be laid off anyway.

Also it kind of undermines a meritocracy when you require gender and race parity IMO.

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

#67

Post by nitrogen »

mc32 wrote: post #34
threeseed wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

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.

I'm curious, what do you think of the opposing goal of eliminating the need for all employment through automation?

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

#68

Post by brazzledazzle »

xienze wrote: post #16
threeseed wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sony has a massive number of employees on every continent.

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

#69

Post by brazzledazzle »

falsestprophet wrote: post #24
latkin wrote: post #13

> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to recruit from. ... It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like that. > Never listed any state schools. Err... Cal?

And Waterloo. This guy is really not paying attention.

Is Waterloo known for a large number of black students? Honest question.

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

#70

Post by brazzledazzle »

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.

Didn't Google drop their degree requirement entirely?
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