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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

#71

Post by Pyxl101 »

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…

Another question is: are black software engineers under-represented at Twitter? Not blacks, but black software engineers. There may be more or fewer black software engineers per capita among blacks compared to other races. For example, if more or fewer blacks graduate college per capita among blacks, then we would likely expect to find more or fewer black software engineers per capita.

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

#72

Post by woodman »

HillRat wrote: post #52
woodman wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 conv…

Sorry, I've dug through a couple of boxes (like I said, several years ago) and can't find it. I'm pretty sure the pregnancy issue was also covered in a RAND paper, but there were some interesting complications with that specific paper: the study was only included in an early draft... pretty politically charged issue. If you want to look for it, I believe it was written in the mid to late 90s and the final draft was prepared for something going on in Congress.

> ...but I'd like to see an analysis of the field effectiveness of units in combat as well as training.

That would only be an effective analysis if a long term trial were to be conducted, 10 years might be enough. The context of this conversation is kind of funny, because the USMC's success is rooted solidly in homogeneity - the long term impact is the real point of concern.

> ...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...

Not really. I can't really say it without sounding like an asshole, so I won't try :) The infantry experience is very different, and comprised of much more than simply being in a non-permissive environment - not comparable.

> ...the enemy doesn't care if you're an officer leading an infantry platoon or a logistics convoy.

Oh yes they do, it would be totally insane to conduct an attack on an infantry platoon in the same way you would attack a logistics convoy. In 2006 my unit took over a formerly national guard AO, they got direct fire pretty regularly - and so did we for the first few days. After the locals figured out that we weren't national guard, we experienced no more direct fire - just IEDs and mortars. I don't think it is a stretch to say that females would likely be treated differently by the enemy.

> Unplanned pregnancies...

I guess I was too subtle, I wasn't talking about unplanned pregnancy. This sort of behavior is not limited to females of course, I once saw a guy shoot himself in the foot, but the pattern of predeployment medical issues is much clearer with the females.

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

#73

Post by Pyxl101 »

sulam wrote: post #60
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.…

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 pot…

> 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.

Could you point to some of this research? I'd be interested to learn more about research that has been done.

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

#74

Post by Pyxl101 »

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…

> 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.

Could you point to some of this research? I'd be interested to learn more about research that has been done.

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

#75

Post by woodman »

wpietri wrote: post #54
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…

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 bana…

You could just as easily use your own argument to say that the inclusion of women in a variety of professions demonstrates the validity of "econ 101 in a vacuum". This is a different issue though, less to do with market efficiency than social pressure.

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

#77

Post by lololomg »

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.

> you take action to diversify your applicant pool.

Wait I don't understand - how exactly do you do that without letting race influence your hiring decisions?

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

#78

Post by foldr »

woodman wrote: post #75
wpietri wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bana…

You could just as easily use your own argument to say that the inclusion of women in a variety of professions demonstrates the validity of "econ 101 in a vacuum". This is a different issue though, less to do with market efficiency than social pressure.

We don't have lots of women doctors now because it suddenly became more profitable to hire them in the past couple of decades. Market forces aren't going to magically make hiring practices less discriminatory. We need to make an actual effort.

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

#79

Post by wpietri »

woodman wrote: post #75
wpietri wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bana…

You could just as easily use your own argument to say that the inclusion of women in a variety of professions demonstrates the validity of "econ 101 in a vacuum". This is a different issue though, less to do with market efficiency than social pressure.

You could only use my argument that way if you had some justification for what happened in 1970, and why the market failed to sort things out for millennia. My claim is that what happened was "vocal proponents [...] with a strong smell of moral superiority" made it happen in basically the same way that women finally got the vote. That is to say, market efficiency is a relatively weak and gradual force, not something that proves that all current social structures are perfectly optimal.

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

#80

Post by mgkimsal »

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.

how would you even measure that without the causal effects of "we only hired people from these schools" not being an interfering factor?

my own personal experience (from > 20 years in professional workforce) is that there's generally very little correlation between work performance and academic pedigree. For entry level positions, I've seen a bit, but after, say, 5-8 years, people are generally either really good at what they're doing, and are getting better, or they're struggling. I've not seen any correlation between the strugglers/non-strugglers and where they went to school, or indeed, to some extent, what they studied.

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