181–190 of 717 posts
When minorities get hired just because companies want to show they are doing their part, doesn't it make sense people hired because of their skin color have harder times to get promotions?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will get downvoted because HN reflects SV groupthink, but you are absolutely correct. This is a well-studied phenomenon analogous to the Peter principle, and has been observed in workplaces (as you described) and schools (black students who get in to meet an arbitrary target struggle more and have a worse college experience). We are doing these people a disservice. Even in the most “socially forward thinking” com…
Please don't bother replying to something you know will be flagged, as now we have no context for your comments.
“Most people of color working in tech know that there’s a diversity problem,” Interesting. Are Asians or Indians not “people” or “of color” in this worldview?
Please note this is not a slight against women, immigrants, or anyone else. They obviously have valid discrimination claims. But if you work in a community where less than 1% of African-American students are scoring at grade level in mathematics, and your company claims it is "diverse" yet hires no local African-Americans, there is still a serious problem in your community that should be addressed. (It's OK if you don't care, as long as you don't pretend otherwise). So please do not conflate hiring "people of color" with hiring any specific group.
* By "African-American" here I mean descendants of slaves who lived in the USA, and are thus severely disadvantaged because of it, having actual wealth stolen without any legal means available for recovery. I do understand that "African-American" is commonly used to mean any black U.S. resident.
> ... an “all star” culture, with mostly young white and Asian men. Up until yesterday I was very confused at how a tech company could be accused of racism while simultaneously having a (presumably) vast over-representation of Asians who - to the surprise of some - are a minority. I have since learned [0] that there are literally a large group of people who have redefined "racism" to "unequal distribution of privileg…
So you're the one redefining the meaning of the word.
When minorities get hired just because companies want to show they are doing their part, doesn't it make sense people hired because of their skin color have harder times to get promotions?
You will get downvoted because HN reflects SV groupthink, but you are absolutely correct. This is a well-studied phenomenon analogous to the Peter principle, and has been observed in workplaces (as you described) and schools (black students who get in to meet an arbitrary target struggle more and have a worse college experience). We are doing these people a disservice. Even in the most “socially forward thinking” com…
Chinese or Russian historians in the distant future, rustling through the bones of our fallen civilization, will disagree on many things. Marking the rise of the nerd as the beginning of the end won't be one of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, let's accept what you say as fact and ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee in that department which wasn't made for any of the Black employees you are referencing. Let's also ignore the weirdness of 40% of the company's Black employees being on a single seemingly small team. That still leaves 7 other employees in other departments who left the company in a 6 month window due to feeling…
> ignore that an exception was made for the single White employee Let's not ignore that this exception is being positioned as being based on skin color (racist motives), not job role, tenure, exceeding expectations, caregiving responsibilities, or any other plausible reason for an exception. That's a laughable, yet dangerous take. Incredibly inflammatory and accusatory. Either Coinbase is an incredibly racist and bla…
And at a certain point the motive for these decisions doesn't even matter. If an overwhelming majority of Black employees feel they are being discriminated against at work, that is a huge failing for a company whether there is active discrimination happening or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can go two ways: 1. Coinbase has real problems of discrimination 2. Coinbase is being targeted at a smearing campaign, for not playing ball with the ideology of de-jure of some circles. It is kinda like a repeat of 2003: "if you are not with us (for the Iraqi war), then you are with the terrorist" mantra of conservative circles to justify their war. The truth, is probably somewhere in between. Also, NYT has become…
If there were important details that were omitted, Coinbase had the opportunity to surface them in their widely-publicized pre-emptive rebuttal. Also, the "if you're not with us, you're with them" mantra rests on the assumption that supporting the status quo means furthering terrorism/racism/whatever. In 2003 that was provably false given that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda and no evidence of Saddam's su…