
Slack got four of its black female engineers to accept a startup award - frandroid
http://www.theroot.com/blogs/the_grapevine/2016/02/watch_the_fastest_rising_startup_told_4_of_its_black_female_engineers_to.html
======
obeid
Actual scientific studies proved that more diverse teams do better in problem-
solving.

Listen to Reply All episode #52 for more info
[https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-
bar/](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/52-raising-the-bar/)

~~~
itsdrewmiller
Also specifically wrt programming projects:
[https://bvasiles.github.io/papers/chi15.pdf](https://bvasiles.github.io/papers/chi15.pdf)

~~~
xiaoma
Thanks for sharing that.

------
pmilot
That is a great move no matter how you look at it. I applaud the Slack team
for this!

The very fact that this is newsworthy says a lot about the lack of diversity
in our industry. As a society we should try to find more ways to encourage
women and minorities of all sorts to get into this industry.

~~~
hsod
I agree with you that this is great but

> The very fact that this is newsworthy says a lot about the lack of diversity
> in our industry.

I don't like this logic. The news media has their own agenda, we shouldn't use
"what they choose to write about" as a barometer.

~~~
warfangle
> The news media has their own agenda, we shouldn't use "what they choose to
> write about" as a barometer.

I don't like this logic. It presumes that there's some dark cabal of web
journalists conspiring to change the world.

Unfortunately their agenda is typically, 'will we get advertising revenue from
our target demographic by publishing this?'

Nothing more sinister than that.

And given this was published to, uh, a _news site for and about POC_ and not a
tech news site.... (take a look at the domain, maybe?) what nefarious agenda
could they POSSIBLY be running? Maybe one that promotes POC, and responds
positively to a company that celebrates its diversity?

~~~
psycr
Frankly, this is wilfully ignorant. To suggest that the production of media is
devoid of political or ideological interest beyond ad dollars is, I think,
stretching the boundary of believability to a breaking point.

~~~
warfangle
Well, sure. It's pretty impossible to be completely unbiased.

But the parent of my comment couched the phrase as if there's some dark cabal
pushing some evil agenda. It reeked of a cis-gendered cis-sexual white male
privilege soaked persecution complex.

~~~
psycr
You lost me with your jargon, not sure what your point is there.

Regardless, being _biased_ is most definitely _not_ the substance of any
interesting critique of media. Rather, it's trivially obvious that the
production of media is intricately related to ideological beliefs and
political agendas - precisely because media is the primary tool of mass
persuasion. Look no further than the long, storied history of newspaper
barons.

Fundamentally, media functions as a legitimation strategy for normative
beliefs; a structure for the normalization of acceptable opinion.

------
heisnotanalien
Diversity is so in right now. This is the just another way for white high-
status individuals to show that's they're not just rich BUT also MORALLY
better than you.

I can just see the execs at Slack, sitting back in their chair in some posh SF
restaurant, recounting to their friends how they got four BLACK WOMEN to
accept an award for them.

~~~
tptacek
You're arguing that stories about racial and gender diversity overshadow some
larger story about class divisions in Silicon Valley. Fine. I agree that there
are real issues of class in tech startups.

But I'm left wondering: stipulate that class is an issue, would you prefer to
see _less_ racial and gender diversity?

~~~
heisnotanalien
Honestly I'm not very well versed in this space to have a real opinion. On a
personal level, I judge people by their abilities rather than their race or
gender though I fully appreciate that there are difficulties with this.

It does seem to me that class isn't talked about though. Sorry but a middle-
class Ivy league black woman is not of a lower status than a white working-
class male.

------
beatpanda
I don't use slack, I don't even like the idea of slack, but boy, are they
killing it when it comes to trying to make the tech industry a better place.
They also gave their employees MLK day off. Excellent work all around.

This is especially important given that only 3% of San Francisco's black
population remains in the city, as economic pressure, along with intentional
malfeasance on the part of the city government, has pushed most of them out
over the last few decades.

It's neat that lots of high paying jobs are available in the Bay Area, but it
won't really mean anything until the people who suffered through the hard
times here are able to take part in the good times instead of being forced out
of the way of progress.

So, thanks slack, it's a hard time to live in this part of the world right now
but it seems like you all are really making an effort.

------
hnamazon123
I'm an male Ashkenazi Jew. I don't look stereotypically Jewish so I don't
claim to fully be able to relate to these women and their experiences but if
the startup I work for now asked me to accept an award on its behalf because
I'm a Jew, I would feel incredibly patronized and would start looking for
other work.

~~~
fleeting_wind
Would you feel differently if all young Jewish boys didn't know they could go
into a tech field because there were no Jews or men in tech?

~~~
hnamazon123
That's actually a really interesting angle.

I didn't start programming when I was 10 because there are Jews in tech. I
never associated my race or ethnicity with any sort of permission to do
anything. The thought never crossed my mind. I didn't grow up in a racialized
community even though, yes, I was one of few Jews in the town I grew up in.

I appreciate this question because it gives further evidence that identity
politics is detrimental to minorities and society at large.

------
ondrae
You all are tripping. You've decided that those women were being patronized?
Thats where you start from, your own bias?

[https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/697237904662204416](https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/697237904662204416)

------
minimaxir
Backstage interview with the Slack engineers:
[http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/slack-wins-for-fastest-
risi...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/09/slack-wins-for-fastest-rising-
startup/)

------
EmitErwin
Nice.

Side question: Is slack really successful? I thought they were overvalued at
2.5 billion - 3 billion.

~~~
molecule
_> Side question: Is slack really successful? I thought they were overvalued
at 2.5 billion - 3 billion._

Either way, those two things are far from mutually exclusive.

------
vonklaus
> "Tech companies, what's your excuse for your lack of diversity? We're
> diverse and successful. Now what?"

Well minorities, as that descriptor might point out are _minorities relative
to the population_. So there are less of them.

Also, less of the "underrepresented" classes of people are underrepresented
because they didn't formally or informally study engineering.

I think it is pretty good that Slack did this. The cynical part of me of
course sees it as a political stunt, but on balance it does serve a purpose.
It does stand out as such an irregularity that 4 black women would receive an
award for technology and engineering that it is actully very unexpected. While
there are obvious reasons that these demographics are not regular recipients,
it is still fairly disappointing that such a display is as shocking as it was.

I understand issues like this need visability, but many times the author comes
to the conclusion (as does on of the speakers it seems) that we should just
hire more minorities/women/lgbt etc.? Like from fucking where? There aren't X
demographic in tech because there isn't X Demographic in tech. You can't move
a finite number of something around and change a percentage. Obvious.

We have a shitty pipeline and we are working on fixing it. I think an alright
job has been done, but no one will know how effective it was for 4-10 years as
the people going through these programs grow and develop as people and
engineers and become successful. I look forward to that. Affirmative action is
rediculously stupid. Creating a fair playing feild, especially at the training
level (school, society, norms, etc) is paramount to a strong society and it
isn't just diversity for diversities sake.

edit: I want to share an anecdote, which is indicative of why I think this
way.

Several years ago I went to a code bootcamp. I became close with another
student who was one of the top guys in our class of ~40. He went to some
shitty online MBA program IIRC but he had worked his ass off and paid for it
himself as well as this bootcamp which was >10k at the time. He might of got
like $500 off for being black.

Another student was also a minority. I know she received scholarship and
significant tuition reduction. She also had a lot of trouble with the work,
and I do not think she prepared as well as she could have. She took offense to
a lot of the jokes and things and complained. I think some jokes were crass,
not sure if it was racial but maybe some sexual harassment type stuff. Not
physical, just general bro-type humor. A few other students also complained
and we had a 2 hour talk about race and sexual harassment.

My buddy said some pretty funny stuff during that and we cleared it up. It was
pretty evident though that:

* He was obviously aware he was a minority

* Didn't want to be treated differently and had grown up with people doing that his whole life (positively and mostly negatively)

* On balance, he was pissed off he had to waste 2 hours not coding and working talking about this bullshit.

He worked his fucking ass off, was the guy many people turned to for help and
he was putting himself entirely through the program (quite a risk considering
he had just left a good paying job and had a kid and another on the way).

He was later hired at a fairly prominent tech company as an engineer. He had
to learn a new skillset quickly as they used a different stack than he was
accustomed to.

It isn't fair to him to say he got where he was because he was black.
Complaining and asking for people to accomadate you is not as successful of a
strategy as outworking everyone. If you have been the victim of something that
violates the law, that is quite different. If you see someone say "slut" or
"bitch" in hipchat or whatever, I would try to ignore it and get to a point in
your career where you can set the culture if you disagree with it.

~~~
colmvp
God that statement made me roll my eyes. It felt so condescending.

Let's totally forget you know, us Asians (people of color and a visible
minority in the West) who contribute to tech companies at a high rate and who
also have had to overcome racism, stereotypes, and artificial ceilings. Oh
wait, we don't count when it comes to determining what contributes to
diversity! Somewhere in the 20th and 21st century, our skin colour turned
white and we're no different than white people.

~~~
smt88
I'm South Asian. Asians certainly do deal with racism, but the stereotypes and
artificial ceilings doesn't sound right to me. Where do you feel that any non-
Muslim Asian minority is dealing with those things today?

The fact is that being black is the US is very different from being anything
else. Black people were slaves from the 1500s to the 1800s, and the US
government was actively discriminating against black people (and preventing
them from building family wealth) as recently as the 1960s. That simply isn't
true for Asians.

I recently met someone who went to Stanford and was arguing that black people
are genetically less intelligent than white people, even though the entire
concept of race has no objective reality. I guarantee you don't have to deal
with anything like that. I could think of a million other examples.

~~~
cookiecaper
>the entire concept of race has no objective reality

Come off it. Race _is_ an objective reality. Aside from the visually obvious
large difference(s) in pigmentation of the skin, there are other hard
biological differentiators, like facial shape, the frequency of certain
diseases, and many others.

Taking the anti-racism movement into hard, blatant denialism is beyond
ridiculous and will only create more people like the friend you're trying to
avoid. When there's no one in the middle to temper and explain inconvenient
objective realities, people feel like their only option is to go to the
extreme that seems to align with their experiences. That hardening of
extremity is really bad for everyone.

~~~
smt88
_There is no scientific definition of race._ People do differ genetically and
sometimes those differences can be found in certain ancestral groups, but
there is no scientific way to draw hard lines between those groups.

What is someone who is 1/4 African, 1/4 European, and 1/2 Vietnamese? What
does their "race" tell you about them?

Even if you could do a genetic test of every single person who, say, applied
for a job or a college, you _still_ wouldn't be able to determine their race
with any certainty most of the time.

Race is just not an objective definition, and if you knew anything about US
history, you'd know that. Most of the landmark civil rights cases were about
proving that you can't identify race by appearance, behavior, or even
ancestry, since so many blacks had mixed ancestry.

------
logfromblammo
As an introvert, for whom standing up in front of a crowd to receive an award
and maybe even _give a speech_ would be the purest and most excruciating of
torments, my first thought was "Sure, go ahead and give them the scut work,
you racist, sexist jerks."

But then I remembered that other people actually _like_ doing that sort of
thing.

Aside from that, I'm pretty antipathic toward identity politics. It's a lot
like attaching a long lever to your own head that lets other people control
where it points, which is often just a way to ensure you are _not_ looking at
something genuinely concerning that is in a different direction. For instance,
I heard on NPR's ATC a few days ago a segment on how feminists are pressuring
women to support Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination _because she is
a woman_. But that doesn't tell me jack squat about whether she shares or
supports my values. It was just a bunch of people grabbing an identity
politics lever and yanking on it.

So gestures like this make me nervous. It makes me feel as though _someone_ is
trying to manipulate my emotions for their own gain, except I cannot fathom
how anyone could possibly gain from it.

------
exstudent2
As a minority, I have to admit that this new fad of "diversity" feels really,
really wrong. I want to be judged by my contributions, not my race. I don't
want to tell anyone (including white males) that they should take a step back
so others can stand in the spotlight. If you're passionate about what you do
and you're good at it, that's all that should matter.

I also find all this focus on "PoC" to be infantilizing, patronizing and
objectifying. I'm a human not a pawn in the game of political correctness. I'm
also confident enough in my skills that I don't want or need anyone making
exceptions for me.

~~~
toephu2
Why is this guy being downvoted? Why should companies hire based off skin
colour and not skill?

~~~
minikites
Even with equal skills, minorities are still discriminated against:

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

>The results show significant discrimination against African-American names:
White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews.

~~~
chc
It's a shame that study appears to have been comparing "weird" black names
like Lakisha with "normal" white names like Greg. I'd be interested to see a
study that uses "weird" white names like Track or Jairyd or Zaiden for
comparison, because I suspect those would also suffer compared to Greg. (Even
if an anti-"weird" name bias is all that's at work, this would still probably
disproportionately affect black people, unfortunately. I'm just wondering
about the causation.)

------
revelation
Let me just be the devil's advocate here and suggest that (minority) engineers
might not enjoy being asked to do public duties unrelated to their actual job
in order to give their company an image of being progressive and diverse.

~~~
chris_wot
Or it could be that Slack are _actually_ progressive and have a diverse
workforce and these developers were very happy to accept an award on behalf of
their company due to working in a place that they love working for.

------
draw_down
Cool. I hope they get equity too, not just award-show glory.

------
warfangle
This headline is editorializing (compared with the link) and kind of throwing
the discussion off base, isn't it?

~~~
dang
I'm not sure it is, since both the title and the story highlight the same
detail. What do you suggest as a better title?

------
imartin2k
Watching this video actually gave me goosebumps.

------
eanzenberg
That's cool.

Now if only they could stop the slack client for OSX from crashing everytime
on load with a spinning wheel of death and taking the rest of the system with
it (only a force-quit will kill it) then that would be even cooler.

~~~
allendoerfer
I have chosen Hipchat, solely based on the fact that I can sometimes type
faster than Slack's web interface can update, causing typos. All the feel-good
stuff inside the interface that wants to make me love it, just makes this
worse for me, because now I am thinking "You have had time to add that?! Make
it fast first! It is a text-based chat, goddammit!!!11"

Though Slack's mobile client is better.

------
jsf666
Could someone explain me how more blacks make the product or company better.
Why this isn't also directed to other races/minorites (Asians maybe)? We
really should stop treating minorites like some special snowflake with this
racism and sexism towards whites and men

~~~
wavefunction
Asians aren't really a minority in the tech industry. Hispanics, african
americans, women and other demographic groups are still underrepresented
relative to the general population.

~~~
jsf666
>underrepresented The tech sector (or the industry/science/etc. sectors)
aren't the senate or whatever that they need to "represent" anyone. They
should hire based on skill/merit and try to produce the best product that they
can. Please stop pushing these crazy leftist agendas everywhere

~~~
wavefunction
>Please stop pushing these crazy leftist agendas everywhere

This is simple math. Personally, after reading this bit of your post, I am
starting to believe your posts deserve to be downvoted. I do pity you though.

~~~
jsf666
Whites are a minority race when you take the world thus we should reduce the
number of non-whites to combat this underrepresentation inside the human
species. This is simple math. I also pity you for living in some delusion of
botched equality

