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Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

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Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#171

Post by steven2012 »

rrrx3 wrote: post #161
cpncrunch wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article itself says that only 4.5% of CS graduates from the top universities are black, so if you're only hiring graduates of those universities then you're never going to have a diverse workforce.

Exactly. There are numerous HBCUs that have very well structured CS programs. I'd be willing to put money on the fact that those graduates don't even get a second look. Valley people are too preoccupied with the optics of having a BIG SCHOOL NAME to actually care if an employee without the school name can do the job just as well or better.

This is generally false in Silicon Valley, both currently and in the past. The only company that made having a big school name important was Google, and even then it's only a factor. The vast majority of Silicon Valley companies don't care where you come from, or even if you graduated from college. All they care about is if you're smart and if you can contribute quickly.

Half my current team at a well-known company doesn't even have CS degrees. The youngest one never went to college, but he's one of the smartest members of our team. I was recently hired, and I'm in my 40s and there's another guy who's older than me. My boss was a high school teacher, and he was one of the instrumental programmers in the entire company for the last several years.

Over the last several years, I've been intimately involved in hiring, and I can tell you straight up that no one looks at schools, and anyone who has half a chance at passing a phone screen will get a call. People might get more excited if they have a good name on the resume, but we called everyone that seems like a decent candidate.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#172

Post by meric »

sokoloff wrote: post #156
cmsj wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Lower hiring standards" is a myopic fallacy. You don't hire Jeff the amazing coder who likes to punch people in the face. Discounting the value of culture is a huge mistake. Humans work best when they are not treated as replaceable units of quantified productivity. Diverse cultures can attack problems with a broader perspective than homogenous cultures.

It's still not clear what you would have a hiring manager do today . I usually have several positions open at any given time; I don't even recall the last black applicant we've seen. I have talented co-workers of many different races (specifically including black), but even without visiting our office, you could guess the percentage breakdown and you wouldn't be far off. I can't hire applicants that don't exist and I…

We hired some remote engineers from South Africa through stack overflow. Now we have a permanent office in Cape Town. Give that a go maybe. A lot more bang for the buck comparatively than hiring remote engineers from the U.S., and the programmers there (shouldn't even be surprise) are as good as from any country including the U.S.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#173

Post by RodericDay »

steven2012 wrote: post #65

I've been working for over 20 years in tech at 10+ different companies around the Valley, and I can count on 1 hand the number of direct coworkers that were black, and on 2 hands the number of coworkers that I indirectly worked with that were black. I don't believe this is due to any sort of racism, but rather due to the education system in general. Trying to solve the diversity issue at the hiring end, when the numb…

> The real way to solve it is at the bottom of the funnel, at the elementary, middle and high school levels.

The way I see it, the biggest beneficiaries of "affirmative action" aren't the people getting jobs because of diversity policies. It's younger, impressionable kids who get to benefit from role models in their likeness.

"Forced diversity" may be the best hack possible to foster persistent diversity down the line, and fix vicious cycles.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#174

Post by nzoschke »

sokoloff wrote: post #156
cmsj wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Lower hiring standards" is a myopic fallacy. You don't hire Jeff the amazing coder who likes to punch people in the face. Discounting the value of culture is a huge mistake. Humans work best when they are not treated as replaceable units of quantified productivity. Diverse cultures can attack problems with a broader perspective than homogenous cultures.

It's still not clear what you would have a hiring manager do today . I usually have several positions open at any given time; I don't even recall the last black applicant we've seen. I have talented co-workers of many different races (specifically including black), but even without visiting our office, you could guess the percentage breakdown and you wouldn't be far off. I can't hire applicants that don't exist and I…

You can shift your notions of "qualified".

You can hire junior engineers and mentor and train them to be successful.

Then you can proactively advertise your positions to programs and organizations that have more minority participation.

Of course this takes more work for you, the hiring manager, in sourcing and on boarding. But there should be a burden on every hiring manager to correct the systemic diversity problems.

A success will be extremely impactful for the individuals you hire and for the overall health of the team.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#175

Post by nzoschke »

meric wrote: post #172
sokoloff wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still not clear what you would have a hiring manager do today . I usually have several positions open at any given time; I don't even recall the last black applicant we've seen. I have talented co-workers of many different races (specifically including black), but even without visiting our office, you could guess the percentage breakdown and you wouldn't be far off. I can't hire applicants that don't exist and I…

We hired some remote engineers from South Africa through stack overflow. Now we have a permanent office in Cape Town. Give that a go maybe. A lot more bang for the buck comparatively than hiring remote engineers from the U.S., and the programmers there (shouldn't even be surprise) are as good as from any country including the U.S.

Awesome.

I can think of a ton of reasons a hiring manager would say "I can't do that." Not about race, but about remote and time zones.

So kudos to you for trying something that opened you up to far more candidates, finding them, making them successful, and sharing this example for others to learn from.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#176

Post by nzoschke »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #52
mazerackham wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You honestly think it's "worth questioning how a black person would think differently"? Different experiences yield different points of view yield different ideas

Ok, so what's the black perspective on eliminating the fail whale? What's the black idea about how to filter my feed? Lets be concrete here, rather than appealing to vague platitudes.

Consider how the perspective of a director, in charge of a large team of engineers, can effect the entire engineering culture.

If this director has a more human and compassionate perspective, she might help push back on all feature requests to give her team ample time to fix the fail whale during the day because she sees how unfair and stressful it is that they are getting paged at night.

This is hyperbole, but another director with a more analytical bent he might push his staff to work more hours, work harder and smarter, to rewrite the problematic systems.

Perspective of leadership is extremely important.

But this applies to all teams that work collaboratively on solving problems.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#177

Post by josegonzalez »

protomyth wrote: post #66
MBCook wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right there are problems earlier, but things can still be improved now while the rest of the pipe is fixed.

Improved, maybe, but the fundamental problem is at the beginning. If we had a need for concert violinists, encouraging college students to take up violin is pretty late in the game. We need a technical prodigies and the people who can start late are few and far between.

Why is that? Just a personal observation, but I only actually started to understand programming my junior year of college and would find myself to be pretty technically proficient, and I know plenty of terrific developers who started of programming after a career in something completely unrelated (selling phones, painting, vet school).

Yeah it's hard to start learning how to program and become efficient at it, but there is no reason that we can't attack the issue at later stages in the pipeline.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#178

Post by [deleted] »

steven2012 wrote: post #171
rrrx3 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There are numerous HBCUs that have very well structured CS programs. I'd be willing to put money on the fact that those graduates don't even get a second look. Valley people are too preoccupied with the optics of having a BIG SCHOOL NAME to actually care if an employee without the school name can do the job just as well or better.

This is generally false in Silicon Valley, both currently and in the past. The only company that made having a big school name important was Google, and even then it's only a factor. The vast majority of Silicon Valley companies don't care where you come from, or even if you graduated from college. All they care about is if you're smart and if you can contribute quickly. Half my current team at a well-known company d…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#179

Post by [deleted] »

beat wrote: post #114
muuh-gnu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These experiences will have shaped the two men differently. You are implying that those negative experiences are a product of racism and not of simple statistics. Maybe, only maybe, people _dont have_ as many problems with white guys wandering down a dark street wearing a hoodie as they have with black guys wandering down a dark street wearing a hoodie, so they dont call the cops on the former and call the cops on…

There's a basic fork in logic. Blacks are observably, measurably treated worse than whites by police and courts. There can only be two causes for this: 1. The system is unjust due to institutional racism. 2. Blacks are inherently more violent and criminal than whites. You seem to be arguing the latter.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#180

Post by [deleted] »

beat wrote: post #124
spacehome wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, this is a much better criticism because this comment actually allows for the the conversation to move forward. For what it's worth (i.e. not much) I didn't get the same sense from jonesb6's comment that you did. It would have been nice if jonesb6 went into a little more detail about the supposed misrepresentations, but talking about misrepresentations of facts and statistics (should they actually exist) is a far…

Yeah, I can agree on the ad hominem part. But for the rest, the complaining about misrepresentations felt like rationalization to support the tone argument (much like making it a question rather than a statement). It's a very common pattern. My bluntness was a vent of frustration with that style of argument. If he'd wanted to make a substantial criticism, he'd have pointed to specific examples of misleading or incorr…

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