
Twitter’s head of diversity is leaving and its chief HR officer has already left - artsandsci
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/07/twitters-head-of-diversity-is-leaving-and-its-chief-hr-officer-has-already-left/
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hueving
If your company has a head of diversity, your company is bloated and this
person isn't going to fix diversity. I view these strictly as PR positions
because I have yet to see anything useful come out of them.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
I've yet to see anything come out of the PR-driven "diversity" push anyway.
Call me back when those above the age of 55 can get jobs in Silicon Valley.

~~~
matwood
The fact you picked 55 instead of 30 says changes have already occurred in the
right direction. Hopefully it continues.

~~~
lazugod
That's likely just their age. Doesn't make it evidence of any change.

------
ProfessorLayton
I'm sure a lot of the departures are just those leaving the sinking Twitter
ship, but this person leaving so soon doesn't bode well for either party.

Diversity-as-an-initiative once a company has grown to a large size is
seemingly a futile exercise as evidenced by these diversity reports, year
after year.

If companies are actually serious about diversity, they need to make it part
of the company's culture from the beginning, before all the typical tech
hiring inertia takes place.

~~~
linkregister
Late change is better than no change at all.

~~~
ihsw
Actually this pandering to diversity fanatics is a pointless endeavour -- all
this ingratiating just wastes people's time while normalizing racism.

We used to teach kids to be colorblind but now we're teaching them to see
nothing but color. It's a sad state of affairs.

~~~
gumby
In an ideal world you would be correct and I hope nobody would disagree with
your ideal desire (well, I know some do).

The reality, however, is still far from there. The point of diversity programs
is not to accentuate the differences (although it can have that as a second
order side effect), but simply to increase the rate at which these barriers
break down. There are plenty of studies that show that people who are around
others who are "different" (whatever the dimension: body shape/color,
religion, political views, etc) in general stop being bothered by the
differences. So it's in everybody's interest to try to get more of that. And
in the long term it's good for business, even if it may or may not be in the
short term -- but why should't corporations invest in the long term?

~~~
ihsw
It's not in everybody's best interests to change some people's minds and
"steer society" in a different direction by breaking down barriers. The
blowback from trying to make people stop being bothered by differences is real
and there are countless examples of it around the world and throughout
history.

"Live and let live" is more than just a banal platitude, it's a rule that's
useful in keeping society functioning. Throwing radically different folks
together and telling them to accept each-other is a fool's errand.

~~~
gumby
> Throwing radically different folks together and telling them to accept each-
> other is a fool's errand.

Fortunately the facts are against you. Whether it's Boston bussing (I lived
through it) or the unremarkableness of women in business, military or
government, or removing restrictions on marriage, acceptance demonstrably
comes via contact.

There's still a long way to go but things have improved a lot. Just for me: I
was born in a country with statutory restrictions on people of different
"races". When I came to the US for the first time my parents drove north from
Washington DC because had we looked for a hotel in VA my parents would have
had to stay in different ones. That's inconceivable now.

And frankly we all have better things (from wifi to medicines to books plays
and movies) because more people than before have the opportunity to
participate. Shoving some of them down hurts everyone.

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throwaway420
Wait, there's actually a position called "Head of Diversity"?

~~~
sp332
Well discrimination is illegal, and the the Department of Labor will sue you
if your numbers are bad like Google's.
[https://www.fastcompany.com/3066914/innovation-
agents/google...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3066914/innovation-
agents/google-and-tech-struggle-to-hack-bias-and-diversity) Google spent a
quarter-Billion dollars trying to improve diversity for apparently no gains.
It's an important thing to get right, and after a company grows to a certain
point it takes a lot of effort to change.

~~~
mistermann
Honest not antagonistic question, why is it important to get right?

~~~
anigbrowl
It's both more effective and a remediation of past discrimination. Bear in
mind this is only an obligation insofar as companies wit to contract with
governmental entities.

~~~
ihsw
Remedying past discrimination is not any company's responsibility, not by a
long shot.

~~~
anigbrowl
Have you tried reading comments all the way to the end before replying? I
wrote two sentences in the post above, and the second one addressed that very
objection.

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frogfuzion
I think I would thoroughly enjoy job shadowing this person. I'm very curious
as to what their day to day activities would be!

~~~
yardie
Probably reaching out to minority college programs, graduates, and
professional organizations. If your black, woman engineer, for example, you
aren't necessarily reaching out to your old boys network for prospective jobs.

I'm assume you assume they sit in their chair all day and spin around in
circles.

~~~
frogfuzion
Harsh. No. I just had no idea and would be honestly curious. Just as I would
be of any other job I never knew existed!

~~~
yardie
My apologies. I thought you were being facetious. Loads of posters on HN are
when if it doesn't conform to their own world view.

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ryanjodonnell
Twitter engineer here.

Our engineering culture is actually pretty great - diversity is something we
strive for and have made great improvements at, but definitely not at the
expense of hiring talented people.

Check out this article published yesterday from a relatively new manager to
hear what it's like on the inside: [https://medium.com/@kathleencodes/the-
surprising-things-ive-...](https://medium.com/@kathleencodes/the-surprising-
things-ive-learned-about-twitter-engineering-culture-925929113be4#.ofg77x4hd)

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tabeth
I've sat in interviews for most positions (at where I work, anyway). The only
one that requires actually knowing who the person is (gender wise, race wise,
etc) is sales. Even in that case, it's only because of preexisting prejudice.

These companies will figure out sooner or later that anonymous interviewing is
the only solution. Those who benefit from the status quo will protest,
"rightly so". Those who don't won't be around to complain, and so a kind of
survivorship bias persists.

~~~
ohfunkyeah
I think you give up way more with anonymous hiring than you would ever get in
return. How do you gauge verbal and non-verbal communication skills? Do they
mesh well with the team. Once you drop the in-person interaction you lose more
than just the ability to discriminate.

~~~
mahyarm
Two stage interviewing? A majority of the interview being anonymous, and then
a portion being non-anonymous.

With that you can measure the effects of whatever attribute tag you want
depending on the interview type.

Ex:

1\. Anonymous Interview

2\. Feedback Given

3\. 'Culture' Interview

4\. Feedback Given

5\. Attributes Recorded & Decision Made

~~~
ohfunkyeah
I don't have any issue with this process beyond the use of 'majority'...Maybe
I'm just skeptical, but I don't see how the majority of any interview could be
non-interactive... Now maybe you think it can be anonymous and interactive but
that's rarely true in the way you would want it to be. If it's chat we might
over-focus on whether their writing is English as a second language, same for
voice. Anything less than that is non-interactive, anything more than that is
not anonymous in any way.

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cup
Probably because both the head of diversity and HR rep know how toxic twitter
is and have given up on any kind of reform. Any person thats a minority and
basically not a white guy has to run the gamut when it comes to twitter. The
comments here are a testament to that.

Calling a company with a head of diversity bloated for instance is telling of
your politics.

~~~
throwaway420
> Calling a company with a head of diversity bloated for instance is telling
> of your politics.

So is it offensive to subscribe to MLK's general idea of judging people not on
the color of their skin, but on the content of their character?

~~~
tstactplsignore
No offense but MLK did not agree with you, would not agree with you, and
taking some words that are easy to white-wash out of the context of his true
political philosophy is insulting.

[1]
[http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/04/martin_luther...](http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2014/04/martin_luther_king_jr_explicit.html)

~~~
ihsw
The spirit of MLK's teachings is that we should look beyond color, not remedy
discrimination of the past by tilting the scales in favor of colored people.

~~~
dragonwriter
> The spirit of MLK's teachings is that we should look beyond color, not
> remedy discrimination of the past by tilting the scales in favor of colored
> people.

Actually, tilting the scales in favor of previously-discriminated-against
groups (including, but not limited to, "colored people") until such time as
the resulting disadvantage from that discrimination was remedied is exactly
and concretely what King advocated, for example, when calling, in _Why We Can
't Wait_, for a "Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged" parallel to the "GI
Bill" (then known as the "GI Bill of Rights") for veterans.

The right wing has taken to presenting, on the basis of a single line in the
"I have a dream" speech, an utter fabrication about King's philosophy that
conflicts with what King himself wrote and said on the specific issues for
which they deployy the fabrication as an argument.

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minikites
Many of these comments seem to indicate that lots of people are threatened by
diversity, that maybe their privilege is ending and they might start getting
treated as equals.

And to those commenters who think current hiring practices are fair:

Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment
on Labor Market Discrimination

"We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring
something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results
suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor
market."

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873](http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873)

~~~
tubehouse
Almost everyone agrees with the idea of hiring based on merit instead of
prejudice. But I very often see diversity advocates attacking the idea of
merit-based hiring. For example, making fun of people that use the word
"meritocracy" has become a popular meme. Personally I'm not sure how to
account for this discrepancy.

~~~
anigbrowl
Perhaps because 'meritocracy' is sometimes advanced as an excuse for ignoring
other factors, without the proponent investing the effort to actually use
double-blind method for selecting among applicants to avoid the possibility of
bias among hiring managers.

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rm_-rf_slash
Expecting employers to "fix" diversity imbalances is like rolling up to
Anthony Bourdain in a garbage truck and telling him to do his best with
dinner.

The problems with social inequality go waaay back. They go back to single-
parent homes. They go back to childhood environments of violence and drug use.
They go back to inequalities in access to food, water, shelter, K12 education,
the internet, name it.

We Americans live in an outrageously unfair society that we are largely
complicit in by not doing anything to change it beyond writing comments on the
internet and wanting it to just happen already.

So if you leave it up to the employer to have a "diverse" workforce, diversity
is already dead.

