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Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

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Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#401

Post by Rebelgecko »

sp332 wrote: post #367
aetherson wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affirmative action in hiring for jobs in the US is illegal. University admissions are different, but it is straightforwardly illegal to say, "I'm hiring a software engineer, I have two candidates, I prefer the one who is black because of his race."

Affirmative action is required for government contractors. https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/affirmativeact Even to the extent of training someone in the right category so you can hire them.

I don't think that link is using the term the same way you are. It's more focused on making sure there's a wide recruiting funnel and having boring mandatory diversity trainings. Not taking race into consideration for hiring/firing decisions.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#402

Post by NeverFade »

jgil wrote: post #396
NeverFade wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absolutely illegal. It violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which: > outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 Yes, that's the same act that makes it illegal to discriminate against racial minorities, women, religions, etc. Discrimination based on race is illegal, pure and simple. Hiding it under nice names like "aff…

Affirmative action is not illegal. If you take action to prevent adverse impact to any protected class, that is not discrimination. If a company hires only white men and rejects every Asian candidate they have ever interviewed, or only fires Asian employees, what is your proposed remedy? Status quo? Check out the section Discrimination v. Affirmative Action [1] and a sample of significant discrimination case outcomes…

A company (Twilio) is executing a mass layoff, and is implying that it will protect certain racial minorities from this layoff. Doing this, they are necessarily discriminating against any employee who does not belong to these racial groups.

If you have employees A and B, both earning $100k/year, and your declining financials require you to save $100k/year, you must fire A or B. If you decide to fire A because s/he is white, even if it was just one factor, then you just fired a worker for their race, and violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

If you manage to implement a policy that benefits a protected class (such as a particular race or sex) without depriving a different protected class, it would not be illegal. This is not the case we are discussing here, of racial considerations affecting hiring or termination decisions.

Regarding the links you posted: It's no secret that the current administration is in favor of racist discrimination. They support Harvard's racist discrimination against Asians:

https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-12-08/bid...

The law remains the law, and racist discrimination remains just as objectionable, even if the current administration supports it. I personally hope that any employee who was subject to racist discrimination will seek justice in court.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#403

Post by yojo »

choko wrote: post #383
yojo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have any. But I can’t recall ever seeing or hearing of a white businessman in a suit getting ordered to the ground without cause. It is fully possible this was random chance. It’s an anecdote, not statistics. But if you want to look at statistics, there are plenty of studies. From the first hit on Google for police stops: a black person in North Carolina is 95% more likely to get pulled over than a white pers…

I'm not claiming that there aren't some people in positions of authority that don't make prejudiced assumptions. What I'm saying is that you can't assume every time something like this happens it's due to race. Statistics without context are often misleading. I read the article and it's hardly objective. I would prefer to see the dataset as well as other demographics and details of who was stopped, the kind of cars t…

It is hard to think of any rational to stop a well-dressed person engaging in no shady behavior and immediately escalate to “lie face-down with your hands over your head.”

There are other news reports of similar incidents with black men. If race is not a factor, we would expect to see many more white than black men wrongly treated in this way, as they are a larger share of the population. I’m not aware of similar reports for white men, but would be interested to see them.

Re traffic stops: The idea that you can’t see the race of a driver while driving behind them is ludicrous. Next time you’re on the highway look in the rear view mirror of the car in front of you. You can see the person’s face.

If they’re actually stopping and searching people on some heuristic that just happens to be correlated with race, they should stop - it’s a bad heuristic. They’re searching black drivers at double the rate of whites, but finding contraband at a lower rate.

Clearly something they’re doing is broken, and it manifests as an undo burden on black drivers.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#404

Post by NeverFade »

ForHackernews wrote: post #376
NeverFade wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong. There is one judgement that upholds a form of affirmative action in very narrow circumstances (education) and only in very limited form, and even that is challenged in SCOTUS and likely to be overturned: https://www.wgbh.org/news/education/2021/07/22/as-supreme-co... Racist discrimination is an ugly thing, even when you call it pretty names like "affirmative action". If Affirmative Action was universal…

Men actually do benefit from soft affirmative action in college admissions because of this disparity. You can look this up for yourself, but here's one source[0]. Men are admitted at a higher rate, with worse grades and test scores, by selective universities that want to make sure they have a "balanced" class of undergraduates. [0] https://www.ivywise.com/ivywise-knowledgebase/resources/arti...

Yes, as mentioned above, there is (unfortunately) a controversial ruling (Grutter v. Bollinger) that allows for a form of discrimination in college admissions specifically. This is wrong and should stop. It's an example of SCOTUS judges allowing their political views to to override a clear interpretation of the law.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#405

Post by Spivak »

NeverFade wrote: post #402
jgil wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affirmative action is not illegal. If you take action to prevent adverse impact to any protected class, that is not discrimination. If a company hires only white men and rejects every Asian candidate they have ever interviewed, or only fires Asian employees, what is your proposed remedy? Status quo? Check out the section Discrimination v. Affirmative Action [1] and a sample of significant discrimination case outcomes…

A company (Twilio) is executing a mass layoff, and is implying that it will protect certain racial minorities from this layoff. Doing this, they are necessarily discriminating against any employee who does not belong to these racial groups. If you have employees A and B, both earning $100k/year, and your declining financials require you to save $100k/year, you must fire A or B. If you decide to fire A because s/he is…

Change the framing from “white person was fired” to “black person was retained” and you’re suddenly back into affirmative action territory and the case whether it’s a civil rights violation becomes iffy.

You don’t actually have to avoid depriving a protected class of anything by relative omission. Otherwise affirmative action and diversity programs would be illegal, and until the courts change their mind they’re currently allowed. If you allow your reasoning to be unconstrained there is no way to provide any benefit whatsoever in any form to particular races because that would be necessarily be depriving that benefit to the compliment.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#406

Post by kareemsabri »

noelsusman wrote: post #319
Ensorceled wrote: post #168

This line seems to be referenced a lot in these comments: > Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens. Sounds like they are taking steps to make sure whoever was chosen for layoffs were not chosen for racist reasons. But so man…

HN is full of reactionaries who are easily triggered by any sort of diversity-related language and seem to lose their ability to think critically. Everyone complaining about that line is making a whole lot of assumptions about what it actually means. FWIW I would be interested to know what the CEO actually meant by that. My assumption is it's more lip service than anything else.

I don't think it's reactionary to oppose choosing who to fire based on their race.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#407

Post by propogandist »

gnicholas wrote: post #25

To what extent do companies announce layoffs (that they were preparing to do already) on the heels of other companies announcing layoffs? That way it becomes less memorable that 'Company X laid off 11% of their employees' and instead people remember that 'a few companies laid off some people last week'. Perhaps this is too difficult to tweak the timing on, particularly at public companies. But at the very least, I'm…

Twilio won’t fall out of the news cycle like the the rest because of their CEO’s “anti-racist” comments.

It’ll, ideally, become a class action lawsuit, which should keep this story in the news for a long time, providing cover for other companies to do layoffs

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#408

Post by NeverFade »

Spivak wrote: post #405
NeverFade wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company (Twilio) is executing a mass layoff, and is implying that it will protect certain racial minorities from this layoff. Doing this, they are necessarily discriminating against any employee who does not belong to these racial groups. If you have employees A and B, both earning $100k/year, and your declining financials require you to save $100k/year, you must fire A or B. If you decide to fire A because s/he is…

Change the framing from “white person was fired” to “black person was retained” and you’re suddenly back into affirmative action territory and the case whether it’s a civil rights violation becomes iffy. You don’t actually have to avoid depriving a protected class of anything by relative omission. Otherwise affirmative action and diversity programs would be illegal, and until the courts change their mind they’re curr…

> Change the framing from “white person was fired” to “black person was retained” and you’re suddenly back into affirmative action

Change the framing from "a victim was robbed of $1,000" to "a poor person gained $1,000" and the clear crime of armed robbery becomes a positive event!

Fortunately, playing these types of games with language doesn't change the facts, or else there would be no justice; you can always "change the framing" to make any crime sound positive, by emphasizing its positive impacts and ignoring the adverse impacts.

As a matter of law, the SCOTUS unfortunately let their political views override a clear reading of the law in one case (Grutter v. Bollinger), and allowed a very limited form of affirmative action in a very specific context.

Discrimination based on race or sex in hiring and firing is still very much illegal. It's not hard to see why it's both immoral and destructive if we allow it in our society.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#409

Post by NeverFade »

Manuel_D wrote: post #399
pyuser583 wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in SF during the same time period, at a small startup. There would have extreme fury at the idea of hiring/firing based on anything but ability. Again, this was a small company. Every person mattered. Every talented hire advanced the company, and every talented departure put us at risk. Even now at the big company I work for, the small team sizes mean each dev either contributes or drains. We even have an in…

By contrast, I was at two successful unicorns. They were both large (1,000 and 2-3,000 employees). We had the luxury of having significantly more applicants than headcount. I think the mentality is more that the product is already successful, and we have a responsibility to ensure that that oppressed people don't miss out on that success. The irony is that most "oppressed" people hired at the companies we very well o…

> So in the end, it was a bunch of privileged white people patting themselves on the back for hiring privileged Latin and Black people.

While whites and Asians born into poverty, who struggled all their lives against overwhelming odds, were deprived of these opportunities due to the color of the skin they were born in.

This is ugly, ugly stuff.

Re: Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce

#410

Post by roflyear »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #375
roflyear wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bro, Apple makes like $2m or something per employee. They can hire a ton of developers to do whatever at like $300-400k/yr. It's win-win. They have talent, they keep talent from other people. Apple is at the extreme, but the logic applies. There are massive budgets, so what do you do? You hire. Startups do this, too. Give an engineering team $20m (or $200m....) and they will hire a lot of people. They aren't just goi…

Funny. You could kill a company with too much money because they hired people they now need to spend time to manage. Instead if doing the thing.

I've seen it happen first hand.
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