Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

Now, I'm biased toward capability. I think progress is made almost entirely by people who possess both talent and will to power. But that's innate, and evenly distributed across racial and gender lines. So differences in outcomes are, broadly, due to privilege (specifically, resources). If someone has access to education and support, they'll do better than someone who does not, all other things being equal. Racist and sexist results are because of our failure as a society, not racial or gender inadequacy.

But anyway, about role models. For an ambitious child, the limits of "success" are the limits of what they see. That's what they see in their parents and their parents' friends, their neighborhood, etc. Their role models. If the most successful people you see growing up are doctors and lawyers and engineers, you imagine your own success as being a doctor or lawyer or engineer. If the most successful people you see are drug dealers and slumlords... well.

There are very few black engineers in this country. They're underrepresented. Because of this, smart and ambitious young black kids don't get "engineer" as a role model. They may have never met an adult who makes software or hardware for a living. So they have no frame of reference, no concept that this is "success". It's a big problem.

This means I get to throw out your entire point, right? /s

>That's a lot of concentration of power.

Depends if you are talking race or sex. For sex, you just need to look at areas like the Duluth model of domestic violence or the disparity in sentencing favoring women even when adjusted for the same crime to see that this doesn't do a thing for the average male.

Compared this to how the rich, regardless of race or gender, have an unfair advantage within the legal system to see that sex/gender doesn't matter much.

But software development is not just about CS theory. You're selling a product to people, and thus you introduce the human factor. If say, Facebook one day realizes they need to appeal to female users more to promote growth, does it not make sense that having female team members would be useful? That if Apple sees China as a growth market having Chinese team members will help them better target that userbase?

Obviously, there is no binary tree that is more friendly to the Chinese market, or black, or gay markets etc. But you can definitely change the UI, or messaging, or features that better speak to a specific culture. When architecting a feature in Facebook, a hispanic engineer could suggest a family-focused feature since she knows that family is very important in her culture. That's not to say a white male team of devs couldn't do a great job of satisfying a Hispanic user, but that a more diverse team might do an even better job.

That's a very business-centric take on the issue. Another, more noble side to it is that there's very likely a lot of people from underrepresented minorities who could be high quality software devs but because of their socio-economic status they were discouraged from pursing that career. A more diverse workforce, won't lead to quick results, but it helps.

Personally, at the current time, I see too many problems with quotas for them to be useful. Namely is the perception problem, where people (including the one hired) will think that their race/gender/etc. had more to do with them getting hired than their skill, causing all sorts of problems. At the same time, I do see merit in fighting against known biases and issues that push out minorities.

I dislike both the over PC nature that leads to Donglegate and the bro-culture that leads to common inappropriate comments and behavior.