Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

If you (try to) eliminate race from hiring, you don't lower the bar. You raise it, because suddenly there's a group of so-so engineers who now can't get a job just because they're white.

If that feels uncomfortable, replace "white" with "MIT student". Or any other in-group.

If you almost exclusively hire from a single group, at some point just being part of that group makes it easier for you to get a job.

As far as I can tell, nobody is asking for hiring quotas based on profile. What people are asking for is an equal chance.

For pretty much any group that's not white/asian male, tech has an issue. The percentage of the minority group in the general demographic is higher than the percentage of people in that group graduating. The percentage of graduates is higher than the percentage of people hired. The percentage of people hired is higher than the percentage of people promoted.

All this diversity thing is asking for is that we take a look why the percentages are decreasing.

E.g. for black people: They're 12% of the general work force. 4.5% of CS bachelors are black. 2% of SV tech employees are black. 1% of Fortune-500 CEOs are black.

There's constant attrition going on, while the number of the main demographic increases as you go up the ladder. (This general relationships hold for other minorities as well, but I don't have numbers handy right now)

That's what diversity asks for - stop the steady attrition of anybody who's not in the majority group.

Women didn't have power because they were oppressed by men for centuries. Black people don't have "as good an education" because they've been systematically abandoned by the most powerful parts of society for centuries.

You could spend 100 million on a program just in my city alone to try to give disadvantaged kids tech lessons. You know what would happen?

Nothing, because you haven't addressed the fact that they have to sell dope, hustle or work multiple jobs just to put food on their family's table; that they're watching their baby sibling while mom and dad go out to score junk; that their friends need them to join the local gang to protect their neighborhood; that they don't have access to transportation to get to the classes; that the rest of the city needs money and will steal from the education fund as it always does, because why try to teach the kids when they're not going to learn anyway; and of course, because their parents gave up on their future a long time ago and give zero shit about trying to help them make something of themselves.

But ok, lets say I'm a typical software engineer, building a CRUD app used by banks to set up a new customer with an HSA. What's my unique non-Indian perspective on that?

I can understand how there might be a useful purpose for token diversity on the UX teams for some consumer products. That's an exceedingly small part of the tech world.

What it really boils down to is this: "As a beneficiary of privilege, it makes me uncomfortable when people point out that racism and sexism exist. I can't say they're factually wrong, so I'll talk about the tone instead. If they would just stop being so uppity and find a way to solve the problems of racism and sexism that do not make white men uncomfortable or take any action, everything would be fine. But they haven't, and it's their fault."

Does that seem like a "concrete, non-racist criticism" to you? Sorry if I can't magically remove race as a factor in the tone argument, but reality interferes. The tone argument is made almost exclusively by whites. You can call it "racist", but you can't change the fact. Calling it racist is a cop-out, a convenient dismissal of a valid and problematic point.