Getting to work on diversity at Google

It's not about having somebody you look up to all the time, but just knowing you're not alone. It might not sound like a big deal, but believe me, when you're the only woman on a 20-person team, it gets lonely.

But I'd argue that you're correct in your judgment of famous role models, specifically. What's needed is not the few famous ones, but knowledge that an average person of your minority can succeed. That others like you have travelled the path before. And famous people really don't evoke "just like me" images for most people :)

Sidenote: please let's not have tutorials that are "targeted at doing things that tend to be more popular with certain demographics". The intent is good, but it inevitably leads to pinkwashing. As it turns out, women are, like men, pretty diverse in their interests. I would assume that's true for other minorities, too.

As for tools & self-learning: That's orthogonal to having representation/role models. We should neglect neither. Nor traditional learning, and many other tools to ensure success.

This is the part that's kind of weird to me. Wouldn't this only be true of people with too much emphasis on superficial characteristics? I grant that there are many people like this, but we usually get a lot more info about people than just gender, race, etc. If a potential CS student reads about Zuckerberg and Page and Gates and just thinks "White Male" instead of "person who loves tinkering and breaking things down and creating, just like me" etc etc, isn't that an issue with their predilection for stereotyping? It's like someone staying out of jazz (or the NBA) because they look at its history and think "it's all black people, there's no place for me there" instead of "it's all creative and brilliant musicians (or talented athletes), I would love to be a part of that".

I get that this might be a problem that's not easily solvable so we should explore other avenues as well, but it's bizarre to me that we seem to be embracing that sort of reduction of human beings into a single physical characteristic, instead of identifying it as a big part of the problem.

Professional football is by far the most respected profession here. Top of the food chain. Of course, most teenagers recognize they aren't going to make the high school team, let alone make it into the professional realm. If you do make the team, well, try as hard as you can. And of course, most people still don't make it, there's just not enough demand for pro football players. But it's still a huge thing that people aspire to. If you do make it, everyone is going to speak of you with awe. There's a couple guys who grew up near where I did and every single person who knew them or knew of them (anyone you meet will eventually bring them up in conversation) speaks of them with total reverence - they _made it_.

Unless your parents are wealthy and/or well-educated, most people don't have a "career" as such in mind - just jobs. Football stands out - especially since the perception is that the only other professional careers boil down to things like "doctor" or "lawyer" which (so the thinking goes) require highly exceptional intelligence beyond the ken of most people, and anyway, they aren't nearly as glorious or high-paying. So it's all about aspiration - and in some places, pro sports is at the top, even if you or I think it constitutes a terrible or unrealistic career choice.

Now, in my experience, that aspiration is strongly correlated not so much with race but with your family's educational history, professions, and income. "Rich" kids (parents with income > 60k) grow up in an environment where they really understand there are other opportunities out there. They're more likely not just to go to college, but grow up believing that college is an inevitability and part of life. A ton of kids never even get that far. I think that's the kind of kid he's talking about.

So? Some things takes lots of time to do right.

> In the meantime, how do you think Google is going to improve their minority percentages in the absence of qualified minorities?

I don't think Google has said anything which indicates that they plan to "improve their minority percentages in the absence of qualified minorities."

No, I don't. The discussion is about Google's current state, and Google current plans to deal with diversity given that current state. A change in circumstances (and Google going from "hire every qualified person we can get our hands on" to "stop hiring anyone" would be a radical change in circumstances) would be an occasion for a different discussion.

> Are you really that naive to think Google will continue to expand indefinitely?

I think that Google's concerns about and options for approaching diversity would be different if Google was funding or task constrained rather than employee-pool- constrained, and that the proper focus of discussion is the real world that exists, not some speculative future that may or may not exist in the lifetime of anyone discussing it.

> They absolutely will hit a point when they can't just leave the number of new hires uncapped.

Its almost certain that sometime before the end of human civilization that that will happen for Google, but the time to discuss whether diversity should remain a concern and what steps are appropriate to address that concern in a funding-constrained firm will be appropriate with respect to Google when that occurs. However, it isn't the case now, so its just a distraction from the issue today.

Especially since I'm sure that -- as much as Google would hope to avoid that circumstance as long as possible -- Google would also prefer to acheive an acceptable demographic profile in its workforce before it becomes constrained in that way (and, insofar as there are business as well as humanitarian reasons for its diversity concerns, sees acheiving a good diversity profile as part of a strategy to continue growing in a way that does not result in them becoming resource- rather than employee-constrained.)