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Twitter's only black engineer in leadership quits
- Mithaldu 11y agoHN 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*F9MLGQLTU2HZD4In6oNvlw.png 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 with its 1% falls far below. I'm sorry for my mistake. My original post below for context for the replies made to it, but which is otherwise useless. ------------------------------ It's alway a little confusing when people bring up diversity reports that aren't normalized to an appropiate comparison metric. (Possibly local demographics, or any number of more in-depth metrics. I also earlier suggested applicant demographics, but justizin pointed out those are not feasible.) Also see: https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ To bring it into contrast with the article, he says: "<5% make up engineering and product management combined." According to this census report: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty.... Race - Black or African American 48,870 6.1% The twitter numbers are thus a little below average, but not necessarily unexpected given where Twitter's headquarter is located. Edit: According to this, Twitter has roughly 30% asians: https://blog.twitter.com/2014/building-a-twitter-we-can-be-proud-of https://blog.twitter.com/2014/building-a-twitter-we-can-be-p... Which seems to fit the census as well: Race - Asian 267,915 33.3% Another Edit: To clarify, i am not saying that there is no problem. I'm merely saying that in order to solve a problem, one must both set appropiate goals, as well as correctly identify the root cause. Both of these can only be done usefully by applying statics correctly.
- Kinnard 11y agoThat's a solid point. I don't know that that data is so accessible to anyone outside of a given companies HR department.
- justizin 11y agoYou don't have to normalize the number fucking zero, but since a substantial amount of new hires at tech companies are imported, local demographics are impacted by hiring practices more than the inverse. Applicant demographics was, if you would fucking READ THE ARTICLE before saying some ignorant shit, exactly what the conflict was over. The VP Eng wanted to identify demographics based on last name, ignoring completely that the name of the person he was actually talking to failed that test, and that this individual ran demographic name recognition software against the engineering team at twitter with a successful recognition rate of 0%. Don't be a fuckhead. Be willing to accept this is a major fucking problem. IT IS.
- dang 11y agoThis comment breaks the HN guidelines. Everyone posting here needs to be civil, regardless of how wrong or unfair someone else's comment may be. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
- larrys 11y agoNoting he was flagged 36 days ago. At what threshold does someone gets banned? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10297957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10297957
- guelo 11y agoMost bay area tech workers have moved here after getting a job so the local census doesn't mean much.
- andreasklinger 11y agoIt's even actually reenforcing itself based on the bias
- ksenzee 11y agoDoes Twitter hire only from the local area? If they have a relocation program, the local demographics are a lot less relevant.
- Mithaldu 11y agoVery 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.
- Zikes 11y agoWithout fully correct statistics, how can anyone objectively say that there is a problem in the first place?
- giaour 11y agoThere 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.
- Mithaldu 11y agoPossible. 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.
- mazerackham 11y agoTwitter definitely has a relocation program. And in general, engineers move to the Bay Area in order to work at companies like Twitter.
- Impossible 11y agoYour 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.
- Mithaldu 11y agoThey only break down if you assume i'm saying there is no problem. ;)
- dalke 11y agoBased 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.
- Mithaldu 11y agoI 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.
- serge2k 11y agoAlameda county right across the bridge is 12.6% black or african american, and Oakland in particular is 28%. Of course I think all this bears little relevance to a company that recruits candidates from pretty much anywhere.
- dang 11y agoAlso https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506093.
- imglorp 11y ago> in 2013, 4.5% of CS graduates from the top 25 schools were African-American, and 6.5% were Hispanic/Latino. That's a problem. Hiring corps not only need to screen more applicants in order to find more applicants above their quality bar, but they also need to engage the community to get more kids interested in their fields and encouraged through school. It's the long view, the generation long kind. Public corp cost accounting idiotry will not support investment like that, so it's up to the private corps.
- protomyth 11y agoFix the demographics and STEM interest in elementary and pre-K, then we might get a more diverse tech field. Until people start looking at the start of the problem, fixes at the end are limited.
- MBCook 11y agoYou're right there are problems earlier, but things can still be improved now while the rest of the pipe is fixed.
- protomyth 11y agoImproved, 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.
- josegonzalez 11y agoWhy 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.
- Kiro 11y agoI don't understand. Sure, the name idea wasn't perfect but the VP had good intentions. Is this really that upsetting?
- ksenzee 11y agoI imagine it was upsetting because it showed the depth and breadth of the VP's ignorance. How many times have you wanted to leave a job because you just couldn't deal with the stupidity any longer? It's no fun to be a domain expert who's constantly surrounded by people who know nothing about your area of expertise.
- notahacker 11y agoYeah, I'd agree with the OP's reasoning about why the idea wasn't very good, but if that mistaken attempt to help is grounds for quitting, they're going to really struggle at a corporation that's less interested in identity politics.
- mikestew 11y agoAs ksenzee alludes to in a parallel reply, it could be (to use an American cliche) the straw that broke the camel's back, coming on the heels of a whole host of stupid decisions. I've been there, where no single decision or behavior is enough to quit over, but enough of those add up and one starts looking for the door.
- notahacker 11y agoSure, it's also possible that said VP arrogantly insisted his idea was a panacea and/or vetoed the OP's other ideas to help. We weren't in the meeting. But I can only go by the arguments the poster who was in the meeting made, and he seemed insistent that Dorsey is sincere about diversity, and decided to focus on why the "tech visionary" VP's idea was notionally sensible but had practical limitations rather than lambast their general attitude. And it's not an idea that ranks particularly high on an ignorance scale, or particularly shocking that a "tech visionary" not expected to have any particular expertise in the area of diversity might gravitate towards a tech solution. Ironically, it sounds like precisely the sort of misguided suggestion a VP is likely to propose after reading articles about name-based studies of hiring biases and being shocked by their findings them rather than the sort of idea that gets proposed out of ignorance or dismissive attitudes towards diverse hiring policies. Certainly sounds like a better response than "go and talk to HR about it. After finishing your work, obviously" that he might find all too common a response elsewhere... Normally when we're discussing quitting over straws that broke the camel's back it's allegations of subtle workplace bullying rather than not thinking an engineer's idea would work...
- jonesb6 11y agoAnyone else get the strong feeling that articles like this are a detriment to equal rights movements? If you're misrepresenting facts and statistics people will eventually catch on and simply not trust you anymore, skewering any ability you have to raise awareness and make a difference..
- beat 11y agoYeah. A lot of white men get that sense.
- spacehome 11y agoThat's an ad hominem attack of the exact kind that (I'm guessing) jonesb6 would argue against. If you have some concrete non-racist criticism of jonesb6's post let's hear it. Ideas should be judged on their own merits not the skin color of the originator ... much like Twitter VPs.
- civilian 11y agoWasn't Beat agreeing with Jonesb6? Did you forget a /sarcasm tag?
- beat 11y agoNo, I most certainly was not. It was sarcastic, but not in agreement.
- beat 11y agoIs it ad hominem if it's true? "articles like this are detrimental to equal rights movements" (phrased as a question, not as a statement, but that's a cheap rhetorical trick) is a position taken almost exclusively by the beneficiaries of racial and gender privilege. And jonesb6 did not address the substance of the article, but rather the tone. What it really boils down to is this: "As a beneficiary of privilege, it makes me uncomfortable when people point out that racism and sexism exist. I can't say they're factually wrong, so I'll talk about the tone instead. If they would just stop being so uppity and find a way to solve the problems of racism and sexism that do not make white men uncomfortable or take any action, everything would be fine. But they haven't, and it's their fault." Does that seem like a "concrete, non-racist criticism" to you? Sorry if I can't magically remove race as a factor in the tone argument, but reality interferes. The tone argument is made almost exclusively by whites. You can call it "racist", but you can't change the fact. Calling it racist is a cop-out, a convenient dismissal of a valid and problematic point.
- theuttick 11y agoThe 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.
- jbob2000 11y agoYes. 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.
- MBCook 11y agoAt one point the author talks about the issue that the majority of Twitter hires come from just a handful of schools. I assume he (or she, don't remember the name) is looking for any kind of diversity, although their experience (and the chart posted) clearly talk about ethnic diversity, which may be what they have the most direct experience with.
- MBCook 11y agoReally? Less than 5% of staff are non-white and you're arguing he needs to explain what "diversity" is? Come on. At under 5% basically ANYTHING ELSE is diversity. Also, he does touch on this in the article. He says that Twitter relies heavily on a few schools for hiring so even if they get 'diverse' candidates from those schools they've still had a very similar experience compared to people from geographically diverse schools. That alone would add one form of diversity. He said he's seen this resulting in group think, and I can believe that. But really? You want people to define diversity in this situation? That seems like a 'no true scotsman' setup to me.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoThis 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.
- volaski 11y agoBecause the real world doesn't revolve around newtonian physics. It's quantum physics.
- mazerackham 11y agoYou honestly think it's "worth questioning how a black person would think differently"? Different experiences yield different points of view yield different ideas
- dreamdu5t 11y agoRemoving barriers to particular ethnicities in hiring? Great. Making it clear in marketing and outreach that all ethnicities are welcomed and encouraged? Great. Establishing a quota of X % of employees should be a certain race? Uh... okay. Should asians be turned down from a job because they've hit the asian quota and need more blacks? I didn't realize companies practiced affirmative action like this.
- mazerackham 11y agoI'm Chinese, and I don't appreciate your attempt at pitting Asians against Blacks.
- spacehome 11y agoI'm pretty sure it's a reductio ad absurdum argument.
- dreamdu5t 11y agoIt was... but check it: If you established targets based on population percentages (or user ethnicity percentages), and (AFAIK) Asians are typically over-represented by population in tech and blacks under-represented, does that mean if they have qualified Asian candidates they turn them down so it doesn't harm their target numbers? Or is that illegal so they focus on reducing Asians early in the pipeline? I really don't understand how this racial hiring quota stuff works...
- spacehome 11y agoI think it's pretty clear. Except in the dramatically unlikely case that the racial quotas are precisely tuned to have no effect at all, then having racial quotas necessarily means that more qualified applicants of one race are rejected in favor of less qualified applicants of another race, explicitly because of their race. If you're in a jurisdiction in which this is illegal (such as the U.S.) then racial quotas or preferences are illegal. Why no one else seems to realize this is illegal (as well as immoral) is beyond me. Edit: Downvotes are nice, but refutations are better.
- serge2k 11y ago> There were also the Hiring Committee meetings that became contentious when I advocated for diverse candidates. Candidates who were dinged for not being fast enough to solve problems, not having internships at ‘strong’ companies and who took too long to finish their degree. Only after hours of lobbying would they be hired. Needless to say, the majority of them performed well. Why is it needless to say that?
- MBCook 11y agoThey wouldn't be useful anecdotes if they weren't?
- mentat 11y agoBecause the interviewing process is fundamentally broken most places and that the listed items were irrelevant to actual productivity.
- dcole2929 11y agoBecause they have been proven time and time again to have very little affect on the quality of an engineer. Simply put these are often poor indicators of success even among like candidates. When you're specifically talking minority or low income candidates, which unfortunately often go hand in hand it doesn't make sense to think that any of these factors speak to a candidates suitability for a given role.
- volaski 11y agoWhat is wrong with the statement "We won't lower the bar"? Some people criticize that that statement is racist, but they aren't thinking about the context. When people ask companies to do something about diversity, they're normally asking to carve out more quota for certain minority group, just like how universities carve out certain portion of their student quota for people who donate large amount of money to get in. I guess it works for universities, but a company like Twitter which desperately needs focused group of talented employees, why would/should they do this? It's stupid that someone saying what's right gets taken out of context and is criticized by all the idiots on the internet. Also, isn't asking for this kind of treatment racist/sexist/whatever in itself? I am appalled by this idea as much as I am appalled by the idea of universities accepting students from rich families via donation.
- MBCook 11y agoThe only problem I see with a statement like 'we won't lower the bar' is you might accidentally set the bar at a very difficult to achieve level. If it's based on the number of startups you've worked at or which ivy league school you went to etc. then candidates who are technically just a qualified (or could learn to be in very short order) may get passed. Unintentional sampling bias, I guess.
- serge2k 11y agoTheir bar factors in things like going to a top school, which (according to the article) means you now have a much less diverse recruiting pool.
- peterwwillis 11y ago> What is wrong with the statement "We won't lower the bar"? 1. Assuming hiring a more diverse workforce would lower the bar. The statement precludes that a more diverse workforce would implicitly lower the bar. This makes no sense. Increased diversity means increasing the many ways one can look at a problem, which improves problem solving and improves creativity. If the very first thing this guy thinks about is that hiring more women or black people would lower the bar, that's fucked up. 2. Assuming non-diverse workforce would not lower the bar. If you hire shitty people, you lower the bar. There's plenty of white male tech workers who could lower the bar; keeping your workforce from being more diverse does not guarantee you won't hire a bar-lowering white male. So at the very least it's inaccurate and misleading, and at the worst it is classist, racist, and sexist. > Some people criticize that that statement is racist, but they aren't thinking about the context. People who haven't had the advantages of white males have a harder time getting the same job, so an attempt is made to 'level the playing field' for someone who probably has exactly the same job competency but not the same socioeconomic advantages. That's the actual context. > When people ask companies to do something about diversity, they're normally asking to carve out more quota for certain minority group, just like how universities carve out certain portion of their student quota for people who donate large amount of money to get in. It is illegal in the United States for any employer, university, or other entity to have a quota for a certain race. Furthermore you're also assuming that donations preclude acceptance, which it doesn't inherently. The fact that the kid's parents could afford to pay for the best education up to that point gets them farther than the money alone.
- jarfil 11y agoI think this article reads a lot like "we need equal rights, so give us special treatment because we're different". All that lobbying for people who did not meet the technical criteria, that getting upset at the idea of someone not noticing his differentiating blackness. He might have a point in the part about how many minorities are using the service, but I don't see how the tech department should be concerned at all with that. Community relations, marketing, sure. Not tech.
- giaour 11y agoThe author mentioned unfair, non-technical criteria being applied to candidates, with the effect being that talented minority engineers were being filtered out of the hiring pipeline.
- mazerackham 11y agoTech builds the product that these people use. It makes sense for a representation of those users to be building the product.
- jarfil 11y agoIt makes sense to have a representative oversee the guidelines for building the product, I don't see how it matters who actually gets to build it.
- steven2012 11y agoI'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 number of qualified candidates is so small, is not the right way to solve the problem. The only way you will hit higher-than-normal diversity numbers is to reduce hiring standards, which is wrong. The real way to solve it is at the bottom of the funnel, at the elementary, middle and high school levels. By getting more children of all races involved and interested in tech is the only way we truly increase diversity. And that is on us, those of us that have experience in tech. My goal is to try to volunteer to teach young children in economically disadvantaged areas about technology. Of course, I have no idea how to start doing this, and would love suggestions or pointers.
- peterwwillis 11y agoThis is exactly the same as saying that the reason women had little power in America before 1920 was because they couldn't vote. Which is true, but completely overlooks why women didn't have the right to vote. Women didn't have power because they were oppressed by men for centuries. Black people don't have "as good an education" because they've been systematically abandoned by the most powerful parts of society for centuries. You could spend 100 million on a program just in my city alone to try to give disadvantaged kids tech lessons. You know what would happen? Nothing, because you haven't addressed the fact that they have to sell dope, hustle or work multiple jobs just to put food on their family's table; that they're watching their baby sibling while mom and dad go out to score junk; that their friends need them to join the local gang to protect their neighborhood; that they don't have access to transportation to get to the classes; that the rest of the city needs money and will steal from the education fund as it always does, because why try to teach the kids when they're not going to learn anyway; and of course, because their parents gave up on their future a long time ago and give zero shit about trying to help them make something of themselves.
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- such_a_casual 11y ago"As we continued the discussion, he suggested I create a tool to analyze candidates last names to classify their ethnicity." Tisk. Tisk. It's been well documented that these tools are used to weed out ethnicities.
- yuhong 11y agoAs a side note, I dislike anti-discrimination laws. For example, the statistical way of proving discrimination probably only works well for certain kinds of jobs like unskilled labor. Limiting these laws to these kinds of jobs by default would probably be a good compromise.
- zaidf 11y agoHe is offended that he wasn't invited at various events involving African American leaders. I have black friends who would be offended if they were specifically invited to these events because they were African American. This sums up my issue with this piece: at best, not all his wishes are necessarily shared by other people of color; at worst, some of the things he wants could actually be construed as racist("Just because I'm black doesn't mean I'm interested in Jesse Jackson" my friend often says.)
- vacri 11y agoThe complaint wasn't that black employees weren't individually invited, but that the resource group for black employees wasn't notified.
- vacri 11y agoI find the numbers a little weird. While 'black' and 'hispanic' are underrepresented in the graphs, 'asian' is heavily overrepresented (in yahoo's case, it's triple the percentage), and 'asian' isn't a single ethnicity. Not only are south asians not east asians or west asians (culturally or physically), but Chinese aren't Koreans, who aren't Vietnamese, who aren't Filipino and so forth (these are the groups in the BLS report). The author seems to be using 'diversity' to mean 'proportion of black faces', rather than diversity across the board.
- msvan 11y agoI see many people here being skeptical about the arguments for diversity, and asking what the utility is for Twitter. But part of the question is about the utility for minorities as well. This debate is really about minorities being shut out of yet another high-paying industry because they [didn't have a computer growing up/couldn't get in to some brand-name college/didn't have a supportive childhood environment/other systemic inequalities]. By the time the white kid and the black kid get to the bar, the game is already rigged in favor of the white kid. So maybe the bar is right, in that it selects the most high-performing asset to execute the requisite keystrokes in a cost-effective manner. But maybe the world we should strive for is not one where people spend their lives in anxiety honing their resumes, getting into the right schools, the right clubs, getting the right internships, and having the right connections through daddy. God forbid there are any complications in your life along the way, or if you were born in a place which set you up for failure from the get-go. I think one great thing about tech is that you can learn it, if you're intelligent and you get shit done. Maybe all you need is somebody to give you a shot to set you off on a trajectory toward the moon.
- sktrdie 11y agoThe free-market shapes it to be this way. A company as big as Twitter is simply a result of such system. In fact the free market is the opposite of racist/sexist/whatever... it strives entirely on performing the best it can - ironically, even at the cost of the worker's mental health - thereby not giving a shit about who it hires as long as they can perform at the maximum capacity.
- gotchange 11y agoI share the same perspective too. Capital should be blind to all these qualitative descriptors like race, biological gender, age etc. Successful capitalists are always looking to maximize the return on their investment and they don't subscribe to these inconsequential notions, all what they care for is making money for them. If you're a Martian and are capable of doubling their profits every two years or so, they would be all over you and discard any prejudices toward you. Money $$$ talks after all esp with the capitalists.
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- gotchange 11y agoIt really strikes me that Twitter allows such a high degree of politicization in the workplace given the adverse nature and the risks it entails if left unchecked. Office politics sucks enough already, we don't want to bring another element to the workplace to make matters worse for everyone. I don't want to see the office turned into political front lines where parties form and people take sides especially in challenging and turbulent times when the political discussions heat up and get very nasty. Also, I'd like to point that this fellow engineer comes across as bit pushy with his agenda (It's very obvious that has one). He's treating Twitter as a political organization where he's using his position as a conduit to further his goals as an activist advocating for change which is in my opinion very troubling and unhealthy for any business. Also, it is worrisome that he didn't perform his duties as a diversity officer[?] efficiently as it seems to me that he was only concerned about his own people, African Americans. (What about other francophone Africans? Foreigners? People of other ethnicities and regions like MENA ..etc?) He didn't seem impartial to me at all and all what he cared about was lobbying for his own group only and this is not really commendable. You don't join a company and start lobbying for certain outside groups like that and expect a smooth sailing. If you're turning the company into a political battle field, you should be ready to face the consequences of your actions. This brings to another equally important point which is the apparent feud or problem with the VP of Engineering regarding recruitment decisions. This activist engineer was very ambitious and at the same time shortsighted in his plans to make political gains in the organization and not expect opponents to show resistance or experience friction throughout the process. He clearly wanted to influence the decision making process if not tow and subordinate the whole department to his department which in my opinion is very naive thing of him to do and clearly revealed his motives that what he's after is more power in the organization and not reaching a more egalitarian system or environment. It was all a power play for from the get go and he wasn't very good at it because you don't expect to encroach on someone's turf and not face a backlash or pushback. Even the most level-headed and good tempered person would turn territorial in these situations of adversity and things get ugly that could lead to tensions and strenuous relations between department within the organization. Finally, his quitting and cop out sealed it for me as to my assessment of his account because no activist worth his salt would bail out and leave the cause he's fighting for like this. Change doesn't happen overnight and you gotta invest heavily and believe truly in your cause to start seeing progress. So, maybe he's more suited to work inside a political organization that's aligned well with his worldview and affiliation where they favor more chip on the shoulder type but he's certainly not a good material or asset and to have on your pro team or in your business.
- jusben1369 11y agoI thought it was a fascinating argument that 1) Twitter is struggling to gain new users and 2) Twitter is staffed by male caucasians and asians so no wonder it's struggling to gain new users.
- NetWarNinja 11y agoOk so sorry but this fing bullshit has got to stop. WTF is this BlackLives matter all about? The message was lost when the town was burned down and the entire campaign was started on a thug who robbed the local convenience store for some mini cigars to roll some blunts. Did he have to die? we don't have any video evidence and his homeboy who saw the whole thing isn't going to speak up for fear of being an Uncle Tom / sell out. Black people in tech? I have worked with and even seen star employees who were black who are in tech. In fact just about the entire IT Dept. where I work is Black. They are senior level IT techs making close to 6 figures. To see the Hashtag posted at twitter #Ferguson is just pure idiocy and some guilt ridden conscience to be down with the cause, whatever that is. You have to be the change, sorry stop with the bullshit. I make 6 figures and I am a high school push out. I am that change. I changed my attitude, I changed my way of thinking and the way I interact with people and hell I even rush across the street when I have the right of way when a car needs to make a turn. yeah you know what I mean. Leadership begins when you take that opportunity to step up and I have seen and experienced plenty of examples.
- jbdigriz 11y agoThis article is laden with obvious self serving undertones that completely overshadow any genuinely good intentions the author states. It starts with the overly dramatic, click-batey title and continues through to the very end, with multiple flaws and contradictions presented outright suggesting the author is high on his own agenda and has long since abandoned measured rational for populist rhetoric. Did anyone read his job proposal? This guy is trying to get himself some phony new role of "Diversity Engineering Manager" - an obnoxiously contrived title one would expect from "non-technical engineering management" types yet bearing a description exactly like of that of a position which has long existed in the corporate space: Human Resources. For me, the immediate reaction is to ask: precisely what form of Engineering expertise does he actually possess. I ask this not only because I've had a front row seat to the Invasion of the Middle Managers flocking to the darling tech industry as it has soared, but also from his exchanges with his senior management. He seems to agree on the merit of analyzing their hiring process from an ethnocentric perspective - but arrogantly dismisses the proposed method, makes a half hearted attempt at using some open source webpage to appease his manager and yet provides no alternative whatsoever - what kind of truly talented engineering leader proceeds this way? Perhaps a social engineer? He expresses a strong desire to effect meaningful positive change in the under-representation of minorities in tech, yet when he is in precisely the sort of senior position to do so, he quits because...why? Because he needs some phony manager title he made up to effect change?? If so, that's most certainly only the half of it as birds of this feather constantly check their compensation statements together... He feels enthusiastic about the return of Jack Dorsey and apparently even had direct engagement and affirmation of the desire to improve diversity but because he is not earmarked as the sole owner of diversity, that means the entire company is afflicted with "unconscious, implicit racism" and in complete denial of the obvious cure that exists in the form of "Diversity ENGINEERING Manager"?? Not only is this a hopelessly arrogant perspective, it's actually quite evil. This guy is trying to bully his mediocre existence into a position of power and is willing to use any form of inflammatory rhetoric to do so. While I'm sure his groundbreaking ideas of perceived racism surveys and hiring at coding camps may have marginal effect on the under-representation of minorities at Twitter, I'm all but certain his statistics of minority representation as college grads and at other firms are way off - and serve as a warning sign that experimenter bias will always hinder his ability to reach truth in anything. This guy is a parasitic cancer with a self serving agenda and any firm thinking of hiring him should consider what form his potential retribution will be if they don't meet his absurd demands. What's most ironic is that people like this are never self starters - their attribution of everything to external factors out of their control can only ever exist as a parasitic cog in the corporate wheel where they can draw abundant sustenance in exchange for providing marginal productive value, if any at all (and most likely negative value when you think of it). Ultimately, the fact that he can't just take his ball and go home but must instead shit all over the game means that he'll either have to learn to open his mind, or find a new gig.