How about adding other parts of the company like HR/Sales/Marketing/etc etc to their data?
Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
51–60 of 246 posts
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
This strikes me as centralized planning for jobs. It seems like the best way to go about this is focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake. Making assumptions about the outcome of those hiring decisions independent of the actual applicants seems neither fair nor good for business.
If your organization's demographics don't match the demographics of the broader population of qualified candidates, there's a good chance it's because you're biased (intentionally or not) in your recruiting or evaluation. In that sense, "focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake" are pretty much exactly what diversity efforts are about.
> If your organization's demographics don't match the demographics of the broader population of qualified candidates
This hasn't been demonstrated.
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#53"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable." Why is it unacceptable? Just by virtue of the number of different kinds of people -- race, gender, etc there's no way to have 'one of each' for every position for maximum diversity. This sort of thing is so creepy because it treats people like collectible figures ("Oh yeah? Well I added a black transgendered person to our…
I kinda have the same thinking. Saying that "we have no Black/African-American (...)" seems way more racist that don't saying anything at all. People should get hired according their skills, not race/gender/etc. If a company is focused in hiring non-white males, aren't white males in disadvantage on recruitment processes?
I think not talking about race is more damaging than talking about race in many contexts. I also think that a decrease in institutional privilege (white male, in this case) is not discriminatory.
I also don't think "quotas" are a good solution, e.g., "Hire one more Mexican woman and we're good!" But acknowledging some statistical realities and taking a close look at what got you there isn't a bad thing.
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#54This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand the importance giving to these things associated to racism and sexism. The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to…
The United States has a unique history with race relations, and we still haven't figured this stuff out. I think part of it is geopolitical, and related to the histories of various ethnic groups in America, which is very different from the histories both in Europe and in South America. If it were in fact the case that nobody cared what color your skin was in America, nobody would care about consciously ending that caring, either.
Remember that Europe and I think South America managed to relatively-peacefully get rid of slavery in the early- to mid-1800s (in those countries that had slavery at all). The US had an extremely fractious war about it, because half the country's economy did not work unless you exploited people's lives for free, and that part of the country morally justified it to themselves by saying that some races were more like animals than humans.
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#55"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable." Why is it unacceptable? Just by virtue of the number of different kinds of people -- race, gender, etc there's no way to have 'one of each' for every position for maximum diversity. This sort of thing is so creepy because it treats people like collectible figures ("Oh yeah? Well I added a black transgendered person to our…
It's awkward that all these statistics seem to focus on the output of system without any regard to the input. There's a passing comment about "improve recruiting" but there's no details presented as to who is actually applying.
The hiring process/system is very complicated an difficult to reason about in an objective manner, mostly because it's humans dealing with humans, compounding our human-y traits, non-objectiveness being a hallmark.
I don't see how I'm supposed to take seriously an initiative at attempting to uncover/rectify biases of a system with only the output taken into account. It just seems silly.
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#56"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable."
It is only unacceptable if people with the skills to be in management positions didn't get a promotion because of a non-relevant personal attribute.
Otherwise, it is acceptable and in the best long term interests of the company.
I acknowledge that America has equality of opportunity problems. There are strong and just historical reasons why the government has carried the torch on this issue. However, I think its time to let the market work. Companies that place talent above non-relevant personal attributes are at a competitive advantage as they are drawing from a larger talent pool. Letting that market run on a long enough time line means that companies who discriminate will grow weaker, as well they should.
Github has come out and said "we're going to make sure that we meet target quotas for people of X, Y and Z non-relevant personal attributes." I think that's bad business and not the equality we need to be going for.
If you have the skill set, drive and integrity to be a strong contributor to a team, I want to work with you and make wealth with you. If you don't, I don't want to work with you - go get educated, build skills and try again or if I'm wrong about you, prove it by out competing me. This is equality of opportunity and of ideas. What Github is doing isn't, nor does it get us closer to what the idea of America promises us all.
I think that providing the resources to build skills to those whose parents didn't or couldn't provide them is a great idea.
I think shaking up our education system (because the numbers show that investing doesn't produce better results) is a great idea.
I want to be fellow citizens with educated, driven people who are so in part because society ensured it'd happen.
Lets not go too far or go in the wrong direction.
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kinda have the same thinking. Saying that "we have no Black/African-American (...)" seems way more racist that don't saying anything at all. People should get hired according their skills, not race/gender/etc. If a company is focused in hiring non-white males, aren't white males in disadvantage on recruitment processes?
Agreed. These types of reports make it seem like Github cares only about skin color which to me is racist.
This viewpoint genuinely baffles me. You can only manage what you measure, and the process of monitoring a metric isn't the same thing as caring about the metric. I monitor free disk space on all my servers, but it doesn't mean I care primarily about buying more disks. In fact I don't care because I've monitored it and have determined we're okay there. However, as a result of data, if my servers were regularly running out of disk space, then I should start caring.
If these reports determined that there was no evidence of something to be fixed (either the statistics were consistent with the statistics of qualified potential employees, or there were a good reason for them not to be consistent), I would expect GitHub not to care. And yes, if they continued to care about shifting the numbers further past that point, then you could accuse them of caring only about skin color when it's unjustified. But why should a technical company not measure metrics and gather data?
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#58"There are no Black/African-American GitHubbers in management positions, which is unacceptable." Why is it unacceptable? Just by virtue of the number of different kinds of people -- race, gender, etc there's no way to have 'one of each' for every position for maximum diversity. This sort of thing is so creepy because it treats people like collectible figures ("Oh yeah? Well I added a black transgendered person to our…
Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US, indicating a probable bias in their hiring, retention or promotion pipelines that they're announcing they find concerning. You're making it about individuals, not GitHub. They're comparing statistics.
> Because the percentage of black GitHubbers in management positions is far below e.g. the percentage of e.g. black people with CS degrees in the US
Where's the data for this? Often people talk about these things as assumptions, but I've never seen credible data. Can you share a source?
Furthermore, even the comparison that you mentioned is not accurate. It should start from a funnel like: "the number of qualified black applicants to GitHub with CS degrees", or something along those lines. GitHub can't hire people that don't apply.
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#59This blog post reads to me like the Pokemon motto "Gotta Catch 'Em All". Being non-american (I'm from a South American country) it is hard for me to understand the importance giving to these things associated to racism and sexism. The United States is the only place I have seen where people invest a considerable amount of time and resources just to put people from minor groups or specific genders in pedestals just to…
Companies want to be in a possition where if a talented candidate is african american, female, gay, transgender, ect. that they wouldn't turn down the offer simply because they didn't feel comfortable working there/there is another company that is more diverse that makes this kind of person more comfortable there.
The talent war is so competitive that companies are doing everything they can to keep up, including diversity blog posts.
Re: Diversity and Inclusion at GitHub
#60It's like a law of nature... your organisation grows, its culture becomes braindead.
There should be more Basecamps around. I don't know what their equality policy is, but they sure have very little tolerance to bullshit - and don't mind letting you know!