> Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on
marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an
Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.
Kill two bird with one stone, fire white/asian to rebalance your "diversity" metrics. I just don't understand how people can be onboard with this.
Or you know, you could put down your I'm offended hat for a second and read it as:
"We ensured we didn't fire just blacks, browns, and pregnant women. Because sometimes that does happen -- where a downsize disproportionately targets a minority group."
But what happens if they do fire based on need and performance and that group leans for heavily towards a minority class? How do they know it’s not some other influence (presumably races aren’t perfectly evenly distributed across the company).
And if they find such an imbalance do they just pick random majority class people and fire them instead?
Indeed. Anti-racist is not code for anti-white, despite 4chan and Elon Musk and the alt-right constantly beating that drum. Twilio is doing the right thing and making sure they aren’t blithely doing a racism like HBOMax did recently: https://www.thedailybeast.com/laid-off-hbo-max-execs-reveal-...
It can happen for tons of reasons. Some coincidental, some were initially benevolent.
Imagine a company with an office in Atlanta, that hires a disproportionately large number of black employees relative to the rest of the company due to the proximity to more diverse engineering talent. Then they close the whole Atlanta office and lay everyone off.
Or
Imagine a minority tech influencer that does a great job of recruiting underrepresented people to the part of the company they work for.
Or
"We're staffing up our test engineering group, and we're making a new junior test engineer program that targets career switchers." => "Hey, we're getting especially good employees from underrepresented groups in this career switching program, let's double down the advertising to these groups." => "Times are tough, engineers can test their own code. Let's axe the whole entire test engineer group."
I'm sure you can come up with your own examples also.
I'm not immediately against Twilio's actions here (though the messaging is pretty bad), but not one of these examples strikes me as a bad thing beyond layoffs being bad in general.
Deciding whether or not to close an entire office should probably not take into account the racial makeup of that office. You either have the funds to keep it open if you don't, because if you now keep the office you have all these other expenses and end up having to lay off even more people.
If someone doesn't meet the bar to survive a layoff saying "oh but they help us hire people with green skin, keep them on!" is pretty blatantly saying "you're not good enough to do your job, but you're a good enough token to keep your job." It's offensive and discriminatory.
Recently hired, early-career/less-skilled, and QA/test are always let go first before mid-career and seniors who aren't at the top of their pay band. If you're at the point of double-digit percentage layoffs, the testing group is a pretty attractive target.
I think the issue I have is that I have no problem whatsoever with examining your hiring (and firing) practices to try to eliminate implicit or unintentional biases against any group - disadvantaged, underrepresented, or not. What I have a problem with is saying "here is a completely legitimate, bias-free business decision that is in the best interest of the company (e.g. closing the Atlanta office for cost savings). But it hurts this minority group, so we're not going to do it, which puts the business on less solid ground and has a larger net negative impact."
If bias results in you disproportionately impacting one group over another, you should fix it. If business does, it's more racist to try to "fix" it by taking everyone's demographics into account.
What? I can't invert my mind enough to understand this phrasing.
There doesn't have to be an admission. It could be overt and conscious, or it could be subconscious (e.g. associating minorities with having less competence without even realizing it).
Policies with no racial component often disproportionately target a minority group when metrics or properties that are purportedly race-neutral are, in fact, biased. Basing firing decisions on these qualities (arrest record, credit history, where they attended college) doesn't have racist intent, but it likely to have racist outcomes.
Absolutely a shocking thing to say. But the implementation details are sparse. Even if this is something like "ABC skin color gets a larger separation package", that's functionally equivalent to "XYZ people get a smaller one because they don't need it, due to the inherent benefits of their skin color."
At the end of the day, skin color should not factor into WHO gets laid off, or HOW they are laid off.
Assuming positive intent, when you say "At the end of the day, skin color should not factor into WHO gets laid off, or HOW they are laid off." Maybe Twitter is just agreeing, and they're reviewing the layoffs to make sure particularly skin colors and other groups are not overrepresented, all else being equal. There is a lot of opportunity for conscious and unconscious bias when someone is looking at their team or organization for who has to be let go.
Neutrality is not the principle of antiracism. I cannot assume positive intent, because anti racism explicitly excludes merely ensuring post-hoc that discrimination did not occur.
Anti-racist policies, are by definition (per Ibram X Kendi), not neutral. A neutral policy that does not intentionally benefit minority racial groups, is classified as racist under Kendi.
Edit: Further more, per DiAngelo, investigations should not see IF racism took place, but HOW. Neutrality is not an option. And per Kendi again:
> The only remedy to racist discrimination, is antiracist discrimination.
> The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.
> The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
How ANYONE ever took these principles seriously is beyond me.
Absolutely. The case is going to be labeled as 'racist' despite of doing exactly the opposite. Asian community in USA is waking up to this reality and it is causing strain in the society.
I can't imagine what I would feel like if my company said something like this and I was a white guy. I guess I would be really sad, offended and discriminated.
I've seen hispanics from Mexico that look like Henry the 8th. Theoretically I'm assuming that they'll be singled out by this cult too. Being a latino won't help.
Not sure why this is downvoted, it's true. Latin origin is an ethnicity, it's not a race. Most people in South American are of latin origin. Many of them are black.
To be clear, I am 100% onboard with diversity and inclusion, I do believe in giving a fair chance to under-represented groups and I'd be happy to report discrimination in my organization to HR so that we can all build a more positive work environment for my coworkers.
But this is something else, instead of saying "we will fire the bottom 11% of performers in the team" or "we fire the bottom 11% based on seniority", they come outright and say that when choosing between two "similar" employees they will fire the least "diverse" person. It's madness.
> they come outright and say that when choosing between two "similar" employees they will fire the least "diverse" person.
They don't come outright and say that. They come outright and say something that could mean that, but could also mean "when choosing between two "similar" employees, we ensured we didn't always fire the most "diverse" person."
When faced with multiple possible interpretations, you're treating the one you find offensive as the only possibility. It's not. It might be the case, but there's no way to know from the text.
A white guy laid off in that instance would probably feel relieved. To elaborate, white men already reference diversity metrics to rationalize why they were not hired so naturally they would do the same when laid off.
On the face of it, it doesn't make much sense that your ethnicity should affect the truth value of your statement. Being a certain ethnicity can make you more likely to have the requisite experience for certain perspectives, but it can't actually alter the reality of an argument.
Even if you make a generalization about your own ethnicity, it's still a generalization that's not particularly helpful. If an argument is considered inappropriate because it targets a different ethnicity and is also an unhelpful generalization, it does not suddenly become helpful when retargeted to the speakers' own group.
This is not how I understood the phrasing. Layoffs can include a mix of randomization, removal of non-critical areas or groups, and quantitative low performers (reviews). The initial output of the layoffs may have skewed in one direction incorrectly representing marginalized communities or maybe not. Twilio says they would attempt remove a bias to baseline.
Removing bias is an objectively good thing. "You fired too many ________ people, and not enough ________ people" is not attempting to remove bias, it's attempting to hit a quota, virtue signal, or just being outright racist.
Without seeing internal company data (that a lot of the execs probably don't even have as it's across several teams), it's impossible to say for sure which one Twilio did, but "anti-racist" is going to be a dog whistle for a lot of people who will assume it is the latter.
How would you even begin to prove something like that? No exec would be dumb enough to send an email that says "we see that the bottom 11% in your organization is mostly marginalized groups, we can't let you fire them". It will be a wink-wink nudge-nudge during a 1-1 meeting.
"As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on
marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an
Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens."
Any one who isn't asleep at the wheel is well aware that corporate/institutional newspeak terms like "Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" means anti white and asian.
IANAL, but, it'd be tough for sure. You'd need to compare who was fired to who wasn't and contextualize with metrics that made it clear it wasn't coincidence.
The legal process itself opens the door to proving it. You sue them, and if you survive a motion to dismiss among probably some others, you’ll get to go into discovery.
If the decision to fire is based on the demographic makeup rather than the individual's performance, it would still be discrimination (in a purely ethical sense)
Wouldn't actually anti-oppressive lens be that the lowest paid would get highest compensation for being fired or being kept and the highest paid would be kicked out and given least? After all money is the only true metric of oppression in capitalist free market society.
I find there’s a leap there from “we are trying to make our firings not racist or oppressive” to “they are firing all the whites and Asians”. It’s clear that you think is true, but I don’t see it as clear-cut. Can you back that claim with anything solid?
> how people can be onboard with this?
I think people are not and you might be jumping to conclusions from the previously mentioned leap.
The debate then has to do with whether ethnicity is the most salient feature of individuals and whether equitability should focus on it as the main criteria.
> If the layoffs are NOT based off of performance, as the CEO says:
Performance motivated layoffs are where a company decides they're going to do a reduction solely to cull underperformers (like what IBM has done historically with their "up or out" yearly staff reductions).
When it comes to a economically forced reduction, management is 100% going to first cut the underperformers or those whose roles are no longer needed due to a change in business direction.
There are a lot of comments quickly taking issue with and interpreting the phrase “anti-racist” as being actively racist.
If you give Jeff he benefit of the doubt here, you can read this to say they’re going to think about whether layoff choices are made with implicit bias and/or racism and be thoughtful about that.
It’s possible that the non-benefit of the doubt interpretation is valid, but I don’t see evidence of that here.
HN is a place where debate is welcomed, but drive-by comments accusing them of going out of their way to lay off white and Asian employees when there is no indication that’s what they’re doing is not helpful to the discourse.
Sorry, not giving a virtue-signaling billionaire the 'benefit of the doubt' - he explicitly says that race was taken into account when deciding who to fire and who not to - that is de-facto a racist statement.
You don't fix racism by being racist.
If jobs need to be eliminated, they should be eliminated by making decisions about which departments/projects/initiatives are no longer needed, which people are no longer performing well, or which area's are not profitable etc.
As soon as you say, we took into account peoples race when deciding who should be fired, it is racist, period.
This is a tired debate that won’t be resolved here, but here’s the other perspective anyway:
Suppose you work for a company and your boss is from Country X and you are not. Your boss hired several other people from Country X and regularly socializes with them more than others in the office.
When layoffs come, your boss instinctively advocates for the people he is closest to, which happens to be people who look like him and speak the same native language. “That’s not fair!” you say. “I’m a higher performer than them. This is just favoritism.” Your boss says that he did not take race into account in his decision.
Your company agrees with you and tells your boss that his favoritism is unacceptable. There are now processes in place to flag this kind of situation. Your boss grumbles “well I didn’t take anybody’s race into account before, and now I have to. This is racism!”
Except they do take race into account. Have you never been on a hiring committee for a tech company? There's a just-barely-legal imperative to prioritize all nonwhite/nonasian and nonmale candidates. In some corporations, this goes as far as mandating that an equal number of nonwhite/nonasian candidates as white/asian candidates make it to the final interview round.
What makes you trust someone who says they aren't taking race into account when that same person okayed having objective racial biases baked into the hiring process?
Humans have a known exploit called "lying". It's well-documented being abused in the wild and there are no patches. Keep that in mind whenever someone is telling you something that is in direct contradiction with their actions.
> What makes you trust someone who says they aren't taking race into account when that same person okayed having objective racial biases baked into the hiring process?
To continue the analogy:
Your company is growing again and your boss continues to hire a bunch of people from Country X. HR contacts your boss and tells him that he can’t just keep interviewing/hiring people from his country. Your boss responds that he is hiring the most qualified applicants.
After several months of your boss hiring people from Country X, leadership steps in and says that he must interview people from other countries. He starts interviewing to a wider group of applicants, but funnily enough, he persists in mostly hiring people from Country X. He swears that he is not biased and is only picking the very best candidates.
Leadership steps in again and says “Look, you need to start hiring other people. I don’t care how impartial you claim to be. There is talent all around the world, and narrowly hiring from Country X is becoming a liability to the company. We would like to see at least Y% of your new hires need to come from places other than Country X.”
Your boss contacts the media and files a lawsuit. After all, the company is explicitly, actively discriminating against applicants from Country X, right?
Yes, so long as the boss can prove that the hires from country X were superior to the alternatives for their respective roles. The most competent people deserve the jobs the most, period.
This is hilarious in the context of white-collar work, considering that women absolutely dominate college degree issuance, and have for quite some time now.
Still, there is a shocking shortage of women in highly technical engineering roles. I'm a board member of a local college's Women In Tech group, and have donated a few thousand dollars of my personal money to the group. There are just not as many women as men who are interested.
Philosophical issues aside, the Supreme Court is sort of ok with “fixing racism by being racist” if it’s done to compensate for historically being racist.
Many countries do this and it's not controvertial. The UK Equality Act says that given two candidates of equal ability, it's legal to pick the candiadate from an underrepresented background purely because of that.
Totally agree. Saying they are ensuring that their layoffs didn’t disproportionately impact minorities and pregnant women doesn’t mean disproportionately fire white men.
I think it'd be better for them to re-market this principle as "bias-free" or something more generic. Calling it "anti-racist/anti-oppression" is, fair-or-not, going to invite this reaction from outsiders.
Im from Twilio, It's out of context on the email to outsiders, It's just a thing thats everywhere in our wording to be an anti-bias/anti-racist company. It's part of the Twilio values/corporate template.
It's not something written for this email in particular.
> Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on
marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an
Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.
No, it's just to make sure everyone is included, and to be vocal about racist behaviour and biases. There is a lot of engagement for those around this in the company.
Virtue signaling is all about saying you did the nice thing without showing you did the nice thing.
If a company really did the nice thing then it should be visible and they wouldn't have to tell everyone about it. It's that aspect of virtue signaling language that rubs people the wrong way.
Virtue signalling is normally seen as putting on a façade around a virtue, for example Disney claiming to promote LGBT but only doing so in the US not in nations where doing so would hurt the bottom line
in this context "Anti-Racism" has become movement of actual racism, so when companies us the term "Anti-racist" is perceived by a lot of people (correctly) be anti-white/asian racism, as the main actor(s) in the movement openly claim that is the purpose
This just _isn't_ anti-white racism though. In this case, Twilio are doing the right thing by making sure those groups who are usually disproportionally hit by layoffs _aren't._
That's literally the definition of being anti-racist.
I think this is insightful. It’s more reflective of the current moment of DEIJ hyperactivity than anything else. And there is a good reason it is happening, even if it is unsettling sometimes.
I want to point out a population pyramid that explains a lot of the importance of DEIJ right now. It’s because there’s a big demographic transition happening in the US, and older managers and executives are not going to have the same demographics as the younger people with less tenure. The face of corporate America is literally changing and will continue to over the next few decades.
What can it possibly mean except when given the choice, they chose people to layoff based on their skin color - so in other words, in trying to show they are not racist, they made firing decisions based on race, not based on seniority or performance.
That's an absurd interpretation. They almost certainly mean that they're going to make sure to examine who's being let go for evidence of bias. If layoffs usually hit underrepresented groups harder, then the less racist thing to do is to make sure you aren't disproportionately firing, say, all your Black employees. That doesn't mean they're looking to fire more white people.
What if reality happens to be 'racist?' What if there naturally happens to be a gender / race to performance correlation at their company at this time? Do you think they will perform their review and stand behind their 'racist' findings? Or do you think they will give more benefit of the doubt to certain people until their layoff gender / race distribution more closely matches their idealized a priori distribution? I think that's the debate here.
If someone manages to prove the racists are right then that will be a very weird world to live in and I have no idea how to speculate about it. I’d expect it’s about as likely as someone proving god exists, but I’ve seen overwhelming evidence that people are racist and that that racism permeates society.
Sometimes the underperformers in a company just happen to skew a particular race. Publicly announcing such a layoff demographic would naturally allow for accusations of racism. That is what I am calling reality being racist. The summary facts of the situation can be called racist and it can be very difficult to defend that accusation without sharing huge amounts of internal data. So companies don't simply stay away from racism, they stay away from decisions that could be called racist. The difference between these two strategies is the problem. Touting anti-racism makes the problem worse, because it widens the gap between the two strategies by weaponizing accusations of racism for any action that remotely allows them. "This company tried to win brownie points by claiming it is not racist but look at this clearly racist thing they did."
Honestly I have some trouble following your comment. While not conceding your assertion about underperformers naturally skewing to a particular race, I'd like to point out that a company saying they're going to view things through an anti-racist lens likely means as little as checking to see if there's a disparity in who is being let go, and, if there is, double checking to make sure they're not choosing who to let go in a biased manner.
It can also mean they're making sure minorities aren't overly represented among layoffs, or something completely different; not so wise of them to signal virtue while not elaborating on what they mean.
"As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on
marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an
Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens."
Im from Twilio, It's out of context on the email to outsiders, It's just a thing thats everywhere in our wording to be an anti-bias/anti-racist company. It's part of the Twilio values/corporate template.
It's not something written for this email in particular.
I've seen you copy/paste thus statement a couple of times in this forum. Can you explain the context if possible, so it makes sense to "outsiders"? We like to learn here.
Ive copy pasted it twice, It's a thing, a value - "Be anti racist", we have support groups and communities and regular engagement built on this principal. This was an internal email , although they should have know that this goes out, even then I don't think they would anticipated it.
It absolutely does not mean they skewed the results or targeted to keep their diversity intact.
what hes saying is we made sure there was no bias , that's all. Although it might read like something else, anyone from twilio would understand as it's a common phrasing.
>>even then I don't think they would anticipated it.
It is in their 8-K filing to the SEC, how could it not be anticipated that would be public?
>Although it might read like something else
because the way you are using "Anti-Racism" is not the same as what the wider public know to be the "Anti-Racism" popularized by Ibram Kendi which is much more than just "not racist" or not biased as you claim here
That's good to know - It's strange to me that they don't see how this language could be seen the wrong way on a layoff email. It's not a leap to read this in a discriminatory way.
exactly - arbitration clauses are not going to help with obvious race-based discriminatory statements from the president being used to pick who should be fired.
I guess non-racist layoffs would mean not disproportionately laying off minority groups. So anti-racist layoffs would mean disproportionately laying off majority groups? So then it would be anti-racist in the sense of rolling back historical racist impacts.
In reality it's probably just empty talk since they know they'd get sued for actually doing anything beyond making promises.
> I guess non-racist layoffs would mean not disproportionately laying off minority groups. So anti-racist layoffs would mean disproportionately laying off majority groups?
No, it almost certainly just means trying not to disproportionately lay off minority groups. You don't have to swing ist the neutral point and to immediately discriminate against the other side, you just need to stop discriminating.
I don't know why so many commenters assume that the only options are to be racist towards non-whites or to be racist against whites. There is a middle ground of just trying to not be racist at all. I imagine you could even come up with a term for it which would really clarify what the thing we're fighting against is, because otherwise people might think that it's trying to push whites down rather than stop pushing other people down. Maybe "anti-racist" would work.
To be clear, I was just trying to figure out what an nonsense phrase like "anti-racist layoffs" could mean.
> Maybe "anti-racist" would work
Clearly not, because it's an easily and frequently misunderstood term.
Anyway, the problem with anti-racism isn't terminology. It's an individualized solution to a structural problem, and so is doomed to fail just like conscious capitalism et. al.
> Clearly not, because it's an easily and frequently misunderstood term.
To be clear, that second paragraph was mostly me being frustrated with the fact that a term which seems like it's so straightforward in its meaning is such a source of confusion and outrage for so many people. It's baffling to me that someone would assume "anti-racist layoff" meant "we're going to decide who to fire based on their race". At the very least that's clearly much more of a legal nightmare, and would be an extremely bizarre thing for a company to say out loud.
Over the years some of my clients got trapped into being Twilio customers through acquisitions.
Without exception every engagement with this company has been a disaster. I have gone to great lengths to get all my clients away from toxic Twilio because I view dealing with them as an unacceptable risk due to incompetence.
Maybe they should focus on retaining the COMPETENT staff whoever they are beause they really seem to have a problem supporting their own products and services.
The 11% layoff is making me sad because Twilio seems to be offering such a cool service. An API to put together your own automated phone service in your programming language of choosing, covering many countries around the world.
Man, does this letter give a long laundry list of justifications:
> including, among other things:
> adverse changes in general economic or market conditions, including labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, a downturn, recession and inflation;
> changes in the market for communications;
> the impact of COVID-19 on the Company and its customers and partners;
> the Company’s ability to adapt its products to meet evolving market and customer demands and rapid technological change;
> the Company’s ability to comply with modified or new industry standards, laws and regulations applying to its business;
> the Company’s ability to generate sufficient revenues to achieve or sustain profitability;
> general economic conditions, including a downturn or recession and rising inflation, that may adversely affect a prospective customer’s ability or willingness to adopt our products, delay a prospective customer’s adoption decision, reduce the revenue that we generate from the use of our products or affect customer retention;
> retention of customer data platforms like the Company’s by organizations in times of macroeconomic uncertainty;
> the Company’s ability to effectively manage its growth and increase gross margins;
> the Company’s ability to compete effectively in an intensely competitive market;
> the Company’s ability to attract and retain qualified employees;
> the technical reliability of the Company’s products and platform;
> the Company’s ability to successfully integrate its acquisitions and risks that the anticipated benefits of such acquisitions and partnerships and investments may not be fully realized or may take longer to realize than expected;
> the Company’s ability to close the transactions associated with such partnerships and investments; the impact of recent and future privacy changes on certain third party platforms on the Company and its customers;
> and the Company’s ability to manage changes in network service provider fees that it pays in connection with the delivery of communications on its platform and the impact of those fees on gross margin.
>"so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs -- while a business necessity today -- were carried out through a Racist/Racially-Oppression lens."
Fixed that for you.. And oh boy would I not want to be one of this companies lawyers in the coming months and no doubt years! Yikes
Kill two bird with one stone, fire white/asian to rebalance your "diversity" metrics. I just don't understand how people can be onboard with this.