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A note to our employees

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Re: A note to our employees

#371

Post by [deleted] »

mebreuer wrote: post #125
prepend wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Equity is the goal.” I don’t think this is a good goal. Unless you mean equity of opportunity. Equity of outcome is a ridiculously foolish goal in that outcomes will vary substantially and trying to have equity at the end on arbitrary human factors with easy to measure biases (gender, race, etc). So the goal is not 45/45/10 for gender distribution for all roles. As that is obviously impossible as roles change and th…

With a high enough sample size, shouldn't equity of outcome reflect equity of opportunity?

[deleted]

Re: A note to our employees

#372

Post by morgtheborg »

shard972 wrote: post #331
williamaadams wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for Microsoft, and the back of my employee badge says: Our Mission; Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. To me, this implies that our engineering organizations, and entire company, need to have an appropriate amount of empathy across a broad spectrum of geographies, cultures, experiences, perspectives, and the like. You only get that by having a diversity of talent, and mo…

So what would be the benefits in DNA diversity at all? If you can get a diverse views of perspectives, why bring in the DNA diversity which is going to lead to conflicts as people won't be able to talk as effectively as people who are more homogeneous?

> would be the benefits in DNA diversity at all

I would argue there's often correlation between these types of diversity

Re: A note to our employees

#373

Post by morgtheborg »

Aqua wrote: post #112
thoughtexplorer wrote: post #4

Serious question: Does the Chief Diversity Officer include diversity of ideas and experience? Or is it just skin deep like it sounds? Edit: Lots of up and down votes. Why is this question so controversial? I'd like to see an argument as to why it's an invalid or flawed question.

To me the notion of a need for diversity in a workplace is absurd. Seriously, whats the point? There are and always have been professions dominated by men and those dominated by women. From the perspective of an employer, gender, skin colour or political views should be completely irrelevant when it comes to making a hire/no hire decision. By introducing rules that aim to achieve a 50/50 distribution of e.g. each gen…

I generally agree with you. Certainly 50%/50% is insane when the pipeline itself isn't giving you that percentage of qualified candidates based on objective measurements.

However, as other have mentioned, there are already biases to hire people "like you" and offsetting those biases is valuable. Often, I'd argue "culture fit" is an umbrella term used to keep people who are different out.

Re: A note to our employees

#374

Post by afandian »

roenxi wrote: post #320
afandian wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very narrow view of "the workplace". I used to work for a large well respected software company. On Fridays, after work, there was a subsidized bar where we could have a beer or two and discuss work or non-work things in a more relaxed atmosphere. Would you ban that? If I go to a conference and we have an official conference social meet-up should I be prohibited from consuming alcohol? I have my own straw…

> You have a very narrow view of "the workplace". On the contrary, I have a very broad view of the workplace. Yes to all your questions. I don't work in tech, and there are no subsidised bars or alcohol at conferences. We got subsidised gym memberships and tea at the conferences I'm used to. If you want to drink, your money, your time, after work. If you want to get tipsy with colleagues in your own time, it is not i…

Both of my examples were after work. So we're not talking about being at your desk answering support tickets and calculating bridge loading equations.

My point about taking a narrow view is that "the workplace" is not only at-your-desk time. Its geographic-but-after-hours, related but off-site social events.

On a related note, a lot of the discussions around software project codes of conduct are based on the fact that software projects fundamentally are human endeavours. It's not just about the code you churn out. If you want to employ humans you have to let them be human. That means some degree of socializing. If you want to employ machines you have to maintain them too.

My coffee counterexample was to illustrate that your approach seems to be binary, zero tolerance. With humans involved, I think it's just not that simple.

Re: A note to our employees

#375

Post by fierro »

tptacek wrote: post #299
dragonwriter wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that you simply take whatever inference you've drawn and respond to that? I rather explicitly did that in my first response, where I both set out what I inferred you were really concerned about and responded (in a speculative manner) directly to that inferred concern. EDIT: to be absolutely clear— Inference: “What you probably don't understand is really why is the penalty not immediate termination, or termination a…

I mean, yes, I guess "I don't know" is a fine answer. It's fine that you don't want to engage, but weird that you want to litigate what the question itself is. But, OK.

this is a fantastic HN comment chain, I hope everyone has been able to thoroughly enjoy this gem

Re: A note to our employees

#377

Post by repolfx »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #353
shard972 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what would be the benefits in DNA diversity at all? If you can get a diverse views of perspectives, why bring in the DNA diversity which is going to lead to conflicts as people won't be able to talk as effectively as people who are more homogeneous?

> So what would be the benefits in DNA diversity at all? Well, this is a pretty contrived example, but IIRC a major company (HP?) made facial-recognition software that couldn't handle people with dark skin. If there had been people like that on the dev or testing team, perhaps it would have been noticed earlier.

That story is apocryphal. The software in question simply struggled with low contrast images like a dark face in a dark room, which isn't due to racism or employees forgetting that black people exist: it's an inherently hard image recognition problem.

Re: A note to our employees

#378

Post by dragonwriter »

tptacek wrote: post #299
dragonwriter wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that you simply take whatever inference you've drawn and respond to that? I rather explicitly did that in my first response, where I both set out what I inferred you were really concerned about and responded (in a speculative manner) directly to that inferred concern. EDIT: to be absolutely clear— Inference: “What you probably don't understand is really why is the penalty not immediate termination, or termination a…

I mean, yes, I guess "I don't know" is a fine answer. It's fine that you don't want to engage, but weird that you want to litigate what the question itself is. But, OK.

> I mean, yes, I guess "I don't know" is a fine answer

Maybe, but that wasn't my answer, except insofar as any answer that lacks complete certainty can be looked at as a form of “I don't know”.

The answer was, phrased an alternative way, “Most places take steps on delinquency in mandated training short of termination, often with varying potential to feed into performance assessments, with termination only as a (largely theoretical, because in practice it roughly never reaches that far) ultimate penalty; Google seems likely to be formalizing at least the immediate consequence of failure, not limiting the maximum consequence of persistent failure; other than the explicitness and implied automation, nothing particularly unusually seems to be going on here.)”

Re: A note to our employees

#379

Post by bryondowd »

Aqua wrote: post #112
thoughtexplorer wrote: post #4

Serious question: Does the Chief Diversity Officer include diversity of ideas and experience? Or is it just skin deep like it sounds? Edit: Lots of up and down votes. Why is this question so controversial? I'd like to see an argument as to why it's an invalid or flawed question.

To me the notion of a need for diversity in a workplace is absurd. Seriously, whats the point? There are and always have been professions dominated by men and those dominated by women. From the perspective of an employer, gender, skin colour or political views should be completely irrelevant when it comes to making a hire/no hire decision. By introducing rules that aim to achieve a 50/50 distribution of e.g. each gen…

I think the idea is to counter one artificial construct with another. It's been shown that otherwise identical resumes are less likely to be selected when the name is clearly female or minority rather than a common white male name. That would indicate a hiring bias that has nothing to do with ability. Since it's virtually impossible to fix that bias, a common solution is to introduce an opposite bias. Not perfect, but I've never seen a better solution posited. "Just have better hiring managers/practices" doesn't seem to scale.

Re: A note to our employees

#380

Post by skrebbel »

tapanjk wrote: post #315
zaroth wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to ban anything you want at work. And the people who work there will select for if they want to be a part of it by becoming or remaining employees. (There are, of course, things that are illegal to ban) I personally want to work somewhere who values me as a responsible human being, and expects me to behave like one. The more a workplace feels like they have to micromanage their employees like children, the…

> The more a workplace feels like they have to micromanage their employees like children, the more I would expect their workplace to be filled with people who act like children. This is exactly what I always thought until I ended up working at a place that did not ban anything. I had no idea how far some will take this freedom, until I saw it, and then I thought: Wish this place banned a few things.

Sounds like they should've banned a few people, not a few things.
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