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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

#21
post #2

HN moderators: It would probably be best if you buried my post. I idiotically misread the chart posted in the post. I originally thought the chart under ( https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*F9MLGQLTU2HZD4In6o... ) wasn't normalized to anything; but upon rereading i found that the top row is the comparison row and represents the percentages of working force age us citizens in the tech industry, which Twitter wi…

Your numbers break down for the Hispanic\Latino population according to your own sources. The 2010 census says San Francisco has a 15.1% Hispanic population and Twitter has 3% Hispanic employees.

They only break down if you assume i'm saying there is no problem. ;)

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#22
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Twitter hire only from the local area? If they have a relocation program, the local demographics are a lot less relevant.

Very fair point, and a little hard to tackle. I have no solid answer either as to how to get fully correct statistics that actually help in evaluating just how bad the situation is, and where to start working on it. But, as you point out: One must take into account many factors in detail in order to get anything related to reality.

There are also many factors that have no bearing on a given matter. Bringing up local statistics in this instance can be interpreted as deliberate equivocation, which could explain some of the strong reactions to your comment.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#23
post #13
post #2

HN moderators: It would probably be best if you buried my post. I idiotically misread the chart posted in the post. I originally thought the chart under ( https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*F9MLGQLTU2HZD4In6o... ) wasn't normalized to anything; but upon rereading i found that the top row is the comparison row and represents the percentages of working force age us citizens in the tech industry, which Twitter wi…

Most bay area tech workers have moved here after getting a job so the local census doesn't mean much.

It's even actually reenforcing itself based on the bias

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#24
The one thing that he never explains is exactly what "diversity" he is looking for at Twitter. It seems that the only thing that matters to him is the color of the person's skin. In other words, an African-American MIT CS grad that grew up in Iowa is somehow going to come at problems differently than a white guy from the same town and school and with the same background. I wouldn't really call that diversity, that's just racism in that one man's view on a technical matter is somehow different because of his race.

What they should look to do is recruit people who got to programming or designing through paths other than MIT or Stanford. Hire the guy that was a painter and then started building website UIs when he saw how those skills transferred. Hire the guy that graduated from the small state school and spent all of his free time web programming. That - at least to me - is the kind of diversity that comes at problems from various angles.

The VP idea with names was stupid, but if I walked away from a job every time one guy had a stupid idea i'd be locked in a closet somewhere howling at the world's stupidity.

My 2 cents. I got to get back in my closet.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#25
post #2

HN moderators: It would probably be best if you buried my post. I idiotically misread the chart posted in the post. I originally thought the chart under ( https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*F9MLGQLTU2HZD4In6o... ) wasn't normalized to anything; but upon rereading i found that the top row is the comparison row and represents the percentages of working force age us citizens in the tech industry, which Twitter wi…

Based on my own cursory observations of the population flux in the Bay Area, I believe your analysis and thus conclusion is based on a false premise.

That analysis assumes that the hiring base is predominately drawn from local people. Speaking anecdotally, I know many people who graduated from college and headed to the Bay Area to look for a job. I myself moved to Mountain View for a job, then later moved away.

A more complete analysis along the lines you took would look at where people in engineering and product management were, say, 1 or 5 years previous. That are would likely better characterize the relevant population statistics.

As an obviously contrived example, suppose people in engineering and product management are only in the Bay Area for 4 years, burn out, and leave, and suppose the companies offer free relocation from anywhere in the US. Then it doesn't make sense to look at the local demographics.

As a more real-world case, consider a place like Los Alamos National Labs, which has a large number of people from around the world working there, with a relatively high turnover rate partially due to interns, post-docs, and visiting professors. Los Alamos county was carved out for the lab, so the demographics of the county reflect the lab, but most of the people working at the lab are not from Los Alamos.

I do not have access to these sorts of numbers, merely pointing out how it's not easy to interpret the numbers you gave, or the certainty of your conclusion that it's a "not unexpected" result. I suspect the uncertainty is actually very high, and a shot-in-the-dark/back-of-the-envelope estimate isn't likely to be useful.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very fair point, and a little hard to tackle. I have no solid answer either as to how to get fully correct statistics that actually help in evaluating just how bad the situation is, and where to start working on it. But, as you point out: One must take into account many factors in detail in order to get anything related to reality.

There are also many factors that have no bearing on a given matter. Bringing up local statistics in this instance can be interpreted as deliberate equivocation, which could explain some of the strong reactions to your comment.

Possible.

Personally i was thinking along the lines of: Maybe the real problem is whichever property of the area they are headquartered in prevents higher amounts of black people from living there. Which may, among others, turn out to be: Companies there are biased against black people, so they're relocated less often. However without looking at the situation closely, any conclusions drawn are premature.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#27
post #8

I don't understand. Sure, the name idea wasn't perfect but the VP had good intentions. Is this really that upsetting?

I think it was really because of frustration that this VP was so willfully ignorant about the issue; the author talks about how they kept focusing on the hiring pipeline even after the data clearly showed that the problem is that diverse candidates are never even entering the pipeline.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#28
post #25
post #2

HN moderators: It would probably be best if you buried my post. I idiotically misread the chart posted in the post. I originally thought the chart under ( https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*F9MLGQLTU2HZD4In6o... ) wasn't normalized to anything; but upon rereading i found that the top row is the comparison row and represents the percentages of working force age us citizens in the tech industry, which Twitter wi…

Based on my own cursory observations of the population flux in the Bay Area, I believe your analysis and thus conclusion is based on a false premise. That analysis assumes that the hiring base is predominately drawn from local people. Speaking anecdotally, I know many people who graduated from college and headed to the Bay Area to look for a job. I myself moved to Mountain View for a job, then later moved away. A mor…

I did express the thought of "normalized to an appropiate" metric badly. I don't know what that metric is, and don't presume to know. Local demographics were just one example to me. I'll correct the post.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#29
This guy sort of sort of undermines the standard case for diversity:

"Twitter as a platform has empowered underserved and underrepresented people. It has fomented social movements and..."

Sounds like twitter is killing it for people of all ethnic groups. It's as if a bunch of White/Asian dudes can actually design algorithms that work for everyone. So, um, why do we need a non-Asian engineer?

It's also worth questioning how a black person would think differently from the (apparently highly effective) white/Asian workforce. I've seen very few meaningful examples of this and I've never experienced it (I'm usually the only person of my race). My current job is mostly Punjabi's, no techies of my ethnic group, and my unique perspective is "lets all be Bayesian cause Frequentism is ass backwards" and "stop the multiple fucking comparisons!"

A naughty question: suppose I'm wrong, and black people actually do think differently. Given that whites/Asians seem to be doing such a great job, why do we think that "different" is actually better or even useful? In statistics terms, given two different functions f and g which are estimators for some truth t, it's unlikely that |f(x)-t(x)| = |g(x)-t(x)|. One of them is probably better.

Re: Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits

#30

The one thing that he never explains is exactly what "diversity" he is looking for at Twitter. It seems that the only thing that matters to him is the color of the person's skin. In other words, an African-American MIT CS grad that grew up in Iowa is somehow going to come at problems differently than a white guy from the same town and school and with the same background. I wouldn't really call that diversity, that's…

Yes. This. My company makes a point to hire out-of-field engineers. I'm a self-taught developer with a philosophy degree. My coworker has a degree in astrophysics. We have a linguist, a theater major, some people with diplomas, and a "dropout". Shooting for Diversity with a capital D is misguided.
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