
Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems - dyeje
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/11/06/454949422/a-q-a-with-lesley-miley-the-black-twitter-engineer-who-left-over-diversity-probl?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202606
======
geofft
> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to
> recruit from. This document was penned by Alex Roetter, the Senior VP of
> engineering. He had his other directors contribute to it, modify it and
> refine it. It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical schools like
> that. Never listed any state schools. Never listed any HBCUs. It listed
> certain companies and excluded certain companies. It excluded certain
> titles. So if you're a software engineer in tests [an engineering role] at
> Microsoft, that's not a "real" software engineer. And some of the best
> engineers I know are software engineers who test for Microsoft!

Leaving aside all ethical questions, it is baffling and sad to see how un-
scientific an approach to hiring and staffing we take. This is about pride and
self-image; there's zero reason to believe that restricting your hiring to
certain universities, certain previous roles, etc. gets you a more effective
engineering team. (And I say this as an MIT graduate in software engineering
proper.) If anything, being willing to hire from more universities and more
career paths gets you different forms of experience, avoiding an engineering
monoculture, for less money and time than it takes to participate in the top-
university recruiting extravagance or hire away those engineers already in
demand.

One of the particularly unfortunate things about the current software industry
is that it makes these sorts of policies non-testable. Companies are supposed
to compete, but a number of factors, from the wildly inconsistent availability
of venture funding, to network effects, to personal connections between
founders and people already established in the industry, means the market is
remarkably inefficient at determining how productive a company actually was.
The fact that Twitter did as well as it did conveys zero information about how
much better it could have done. There are so many obvious technical things
they screwed up (developer relations, notably) and succeeded _despite_ those
failures; it's equally likely that they succeeded _despite_ many of their non-
technical decisions instead of _because_ of them.

~~~
asdfologist
I disagree.

All companies have only a finite amount of time/money to spend on hiring, so
they're often forced to use crude heuristics to filter out resumes, especially
in companies that get a huge number of applicants every year, like Twitter.
Maybe it's just me, but based on my experience, filtering candidates (as a
first pass) based on school or previous role does yield many false positives
and negatives, but it still works pretty damn well compared to other equally
fast/cheap filtering methods.

~~~
wpietri
I can get why managers think the important thing is to save managerial time.
But as somebody who has just gotten done with a round of hiring developers, I
believe this is a false economy.

If I can hire just one good developer, I'll have added thousands of hours of
effort. If I can find one who settles in, it could be tens of thousands of
hours. If I choose especially well, I'll get somebody who acts as a multiplier
on those around them. If I choose poorly, I could get somebody who's net
negative, making messes and driving away good people.

Given what's at stake, I can spend what seems like ridiculously large amounts
of time on hiring and still come out ahead. Maybe if we were drowning in good
people, I could still take the risk of tossing good people in the trash. But
demand for developers is incredibly high.

Actually, I take it back. HN, y'all should definitely choose people only with
top-3 CS degrees. Because then while you're all fighting over a small number
of Stanford job hoppers with crazy demands, I can keep hiring the less obvious
candidates, ones who are happy to stay for years.

~~~
epmatsw
Realistically, I think this policy probably makes sense at a company the size
and visibility of Twitter. They probably get enough applicants from the
schools listed to fill their needs. I worked at a company of comparable size,
and they actually stopped giving referral bonuses because it stopped being
useful to pay people bonuses when they had 100+ people apply for every
available position.

~~~
wpietri
I suppose. But it's based upon a couple of theories that I disagree with: a)
the people you need are the ones who apply unprompted, and b) it's ok if you
throw out your best potential hires.

My experience is that large companies mostly end up being seas of mediocrity,
and I think lazy hiring is a big cause of that. I think one of the drivers of
it is companies seeing programmers as fungible resources, so hiring becomes
less about getting the best possible people carefully fitted to teams and more
about getting adequate people with low managerial effort.

------
brohoolio
I dislike how affirmative action has a bad reputation. Affirmative action is
not about lowering standards. It's about having a diversified candidate pool.
Sounds like Twitter wasn't willing to invest the effort to have a diversified
pool.

It definitely pays off in the long run, but it takes some effort in the short
run. My company sponsors some student groups and encourages engineers to be
active in recruiting outside of their circles. It's paid off as we've moved
from a monoculture to a company with a workforce that represents our
community.

~~~
federererer
On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards.

If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient
skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was
not involved. The person was hired based on merit.

But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it
inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent, and/or
experience necessary for the job. The person was hired not based on merit, but
based on some other, unrelated factor.

Hiring based on something other than merit automatically means that standards
were lowered, or at best they were merely ignored.

~~~
brohoolio
Affirmatibe action means that you take action to diversify your applicant
pool. It's back from when you couldn't just apply online.

Not that you hire anyone based on race / etc. you still hire the best
candidate.

I forget that the words affirmative action mean something different to a
younger generation who mostly have encountered a weird perversion of the
original meaning in higher education.

~~~
Pyxl101
> Affirmative action means that you take action to diversify your applicant
> pool.

Wikipedia describes it differently:

"Affirmative action or positive discrimination is the policy of favoring
members of a disadvantaged group [...]. The nature of affirmative action
policies varies from region to region. Some [...] use a quota system, whereby
a certain percentage of jobs or school vacancies must be reserved for members
of a certain group."

Wouldn't using a quota system be lowering the bar?

Using your definition, if I recruit in California, and I expand to begin
recruiting in Oregon, then I have diversified my applicant pool. Have I
successfully employed affirmative action?

~~~
Glide
Well, I went to a magnet school that routinely has the discussion around
diversity and affirmative action year after year. Certain parts of the county
had far more representation than the poorer parts. They diversified by making
sure they picked more people from around the county. It did not improve
numbers of disadvantaged groups, however.

------
jwise0
Twitter's response seems pretty untrue. Specifically, they say:

"Beyond just disclosing our workforce representation statistics, we have also
publicly disclosed our representation goals for women and underrepresented
minorities for 2016, making us the largest tech company to put hard numbers
around its diversity commitment."

Are they unaware of Intel's diversity initiative? Intel has set hard goals for
2020, and is continuing to track metrics yearly [1].

To claim that one is tracking the state of the art, and simultaneously be so
unaware of what the state of the art actually is, is a sign that an
organization is languishing, regardless of what the subject is. In this case,
the subject is diversity, and the organization seems to still be Twitter.

There are ways to avoid these kinds of issues: if you run an organization that
you want to build a diverse workforce in, I recommend that you hire a
diversity consultant. (I believe that Clef, for example, did approximately
this, and got staggeringly good results.)

[1]
[http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel...](http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel_Diversity_in_Technology_backgrounder.pdf)

~~~
statgeek8
The state of the art in diversity appears to be blaming whites for the under-
representation of certain minorities groups (blacks, Hispanics), even when
that under-representation is actually due to the over-representation of other
minority groups (Asians):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527668)

How will a diversity consultant (whatever that is) help with this? Recommend
Anti-Asian quotas, like the kind elite universities in the US already employ?

------
Futurebot
Recruiting from a limited set of schools is widespread:

[https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-
recruitin...](https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruiting-
on-only-a-few-campuses)

Which leads to the practice turning into a self-reinforcing cycle:

[http://www.economist.com/node/21640316](http://www.economist.com/node/21640316)

It's a symptom rather than a cause.

------
latkin
> There's a document at Twitter that lists the schools that Twitter wants to
> recruit from. ... It listed Cal, Stanford, CMU, Waterloo, MIT, typical
> schools like that.

> Never listed any state schools.

Err... Cal?

~~~
falsestprophet
And Waterloo. This guy is really not paying attention.

~~~
brazzledazzle
Is Waterloo known for a large number of black students? Honest question.

------
statgeek8
According to the figures in this[1] article, whites are technically _under-
represented_ at Twitter relative to their percentage of the general
population, yet both it and the NPR article take for granted that there is a
lack of ethnic diversity at Twitter and other tech companies, despite non-
whites collectively being over-represented at them.

While certain minorities (blacks, Hispanics) are indeed under-represented at
tech companies like Twitter, others (Asians) are over-represented, and to such
a degree that whites actually end up under-represented. Yet a careless reader
could easily be misled by these and other articles into believing that whites
are crowding out minorities, which is demonstrably not the case.

I doubt this deception is accidental.

[1] [http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-
st...](http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-stats-women-
race-tech)

~~~
Pyxl101
Another question is: are black software engineers under-represented at
Twitter? Not blacks, but black software engineers. There may be more or fewer
black software engineers per capita among blacks compared to other races. For
example, if more or fewer blacks graduate college per capita among blacks,
then we would likely expect to find more or fewer black software engineers per
capita.

------
mc32
He has every right to push forward what he thinks is the right thing.
Absolutely, and so does everyone else who wants to bring whomever they want to
give advantage to.

I should be able to lobby for my friends and my circle and he should be able
to lobby for his friends and his circle.

And no doubt that their workforce does not mirror society at large. But I
think this ignores the percentages of people graduating in different fields.
Yes, Twitter could suck up more than its percentage, but if there is a limited
pool of candidates of group X, then other companies will necessarily be under
the average.

One thing I don't get is what the demographics of the user base has to do with
anything? If I buy a Nikon camera or Lenovo computer, should I believe they
need to hire more Americans, or even Americans of my ethnicity?

That said, I think one measure of bias base-line one could use would be to get
the percentages of minorities represented in minority owned and run (tech)
businesses and assess the percentage of minorities in those businesses who do
not represent the owner or top management.

So look at he percentage of non Black minorities in black owned or run
businesses or the percentages of minorities other than Korean or Russian, etc.
in businesses run or owned by minorities. This could provide a base-line to
work with. To gauge if only majority run or owned businesses are biased or all
businesses are biased, or just some and understand why that happens.

However, blindly promoting that businesses (or tech in this case) all more or
less show a workforce diversity proportional to the population at large, is
likely ignoring other inssues influencing those trends.

~~~
geofft
> One thing I don't get is what the demographics of the user base has to do
> with anything? If I buy a Nikon camera or Lenovo computer, should I believe
> they need to hire more Americans, or even Americans of my ethnicity?

Twitter's product design has much more of an editorial influence on what
happens with the product than Lenovo's or Nikon's. A closer analogy might be a
local newspaper: I absolutely would feel uncomfortable if the entire staff of
my newspaper were outsiders to my community, choosing which articles to run
and how to lay them out and how to seek writers, even if the writers
themselves were people who lived in my community.

But since you brought up cameras, it is worth noting that the answer is yes.
HP had an incident a few years ago where its webcams' face-tracking feature
just could not track black people. (Competitors, like Dell, were fine.) If
they had a nontrivial number of black people writing and testing these cameras
in-house, they would probably have noticed this well before their customers
did.

Google, a few weeks ago, had an incident where it literally auto-tagged photos
of black people as "Gorillas." Again, presumably what happened is that the
dogfood users were much more likely to train the algorithm with pictures of
gorillas than with pictures of black people.

Twitter, like most consumer-facing software, has its product design influenced
by its own developers. If everyone at the company uses Twitter, it's natural
to prioritize features based on what they themselves use. (And it's because of
this that consumer-facing software is generally plain better than enterprise
software; the developers and PMs and testers care more.) Given how much of
Twitter's userbase is people using it for protests, from Tahrir Square to
#blacklivesmatter, and given how much "Black Twitter" is a thing, it only
makes sense to make sure that at least some of their employees in decision-
making positions care personally about these use cases of Twitter.

~~~
mc32
I do recall the HP camera fiasco. That was proof of some of the deficiencies
attributable to lack of diversity.

However, that does not speak to the company doing better or worse over all due
to this lack of diversity, unless we presume that lack of diversity is by and
large negative and diversity is by and large positive.

