Twitter’s head of diversity is leaving and its chief HR officer has already left

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/07/twitters-head-of-diversity-is-leaving-and-its-chief-hr-officer-has-already-left/

by artsandsci • 9 years ago

44 73 9 years ago

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

sp3326• 9 years ago

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... 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• 9 years ago

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

gozur882• 9 years ago

That's because Google is a federal contractor. Companies are not required to provide this data to DoL otherwise.

FT_intern3• 9 years ago

That's one interpretation.

The other, more probable interpretation is that it is a pipeline problem. Try comparing their demographics with Bay Area, top school and CS demographics.

burger_moon• 9 years ago

I believe github also has one. I remember a lot of controversy around some diversity person at GitHub anyways.

t13214• 9 years ago

Well, these things are really complicated. You can't have too many asian people because you'll get sued for that:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1522O6

But you don't want too few asian people because you'll get sued for that:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-tech-discriminati...

It's kind of a Goldilocks thing. And you need a c-suite executive to make sure you're playing the game just right.

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

It's not a 'Goldilocks thing'. It's very easy to measure the degree to which a large company's hires is loosely reflective of demographics in the general population. The reason to that is that many companies want to get big orders from federal and state government, which organizations have imposed such requirements upon their suppliers as a systematic solution to rectifying the discriminatory policies of the past.

I can see you're an intelligent person and have some knowledge of this issue, which leads me to think you already understand the basis of diversity policies very well and are simply choosing to mischaracterize it.

chuckcode2• 9 years ago

Pinterest has a Head of Diversity [1]. Her name is Candice and she's great. I can see how people are sensitive to diversity issues as humanity has a long history of various forms of discrimination. Let's try to be data driven here though and see if we can take some lessons from other fields that have had success with issues of diversity. For example, it sure seems like medicine has really moved the needle on the percent of doctors that are women over the last 10-30 years. I'm sure there are some lessons in there that we could use to help our diversity in software and engineering as well.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/pinterest-hires-its-first-...

ihsw5• 9 years ago

How do we really know race and gender are discriminating factors? Do we look at anything else or are we just making zero effort to do more than just confirm our biases?

We might as well take into account their financial background too, for example whether their parents grew up poor. It's about as relevant as someone's race, gender, and sexual orientation when it comes to hiring decisions.

Unless it's actually all about scoring useless PR points, or, more sinisterly, cowing to the demands of progressive extremists that threaten violence and negative media exposure. If that's what it's about then we can safely assume race, gender, and sexual orientation are irrelevant when it comes to hiring practices, and instead we can just hire random people that seem remotely qualified (which is what we have already been doing before this madness began).

forgetsusername4• 9 years ago

Pinterest has a Head of Diversity [1]. Her name is Candice and she's great.

I think the question is: What does the role actually do? The cynic in me says it exists to signal that your company cares about diversity. Okay, but after the hiring decision is made, based on whatever criteria make the company properly diverse, what happens? Does this person act as a recruiter for underrepresented people?

hueving3• 9 years ago

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.

vkou• 9 years ago

Is this because you don't believe that employees have a problem with monocultures? Or because the initiatives they undertake don't address the problem?

HarryHirsch• 9 years ago

Company culture is set by the leadership, if leadership is in the way any effort by the diversity guy is futile. I have never encountered a single one that wasn't a figurehead and several that were a nuisance.

hueving3• 9 years ago

They definitely don't fix the problem. As the sibling comment points out, diversity is a result of tons of factors - office locations, industry sector, compensation packages, pto, work life balance culture; and, most importantly, the diversity of the candidate supply itself (you're delusional if you expect a large deviation from graduation ratios).

It's sort of similar to hiring a "head of profit". Profit, like diversity, is the outcome of the entire company's operations.

matt_wulfeck2• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

_m8fo4• 9 years ago

Ring Ring...

Hello?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12454634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9497721

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412284

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9086689

---

As for whether or not it's easier or harder than being young, who knows. Isn't being younger an advantage in getting almost any job?

mahyarm2• 9 years ago

I've noticed that being over 55 makes getting a new job harder for most industries!

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

Is this conclusion the result of any kind of systematic analysis or just a momentary gut check?

hueving3• 9 years ago

I would be happy even if someone had anecdotes of success stories where these people fundamentally altered the culture of the companies to make them diverse. I have yet to see one success story that isn't some PR piece about the percentage of female engineers going from 15 to 18% (a.k.a they hired two).

frogfuzion2• 9 years ago

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

yardie2• 9 years ago

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.

frogfuzion2• 9 years ago

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!

cup• 9 years ago

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.

throwaway4203• 9 years ago

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?

tstactplsignore2• 9 years ago

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...

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

The grandparent poster suggested that your comment indicates a degree of political bias. You tried to pivot to a definitional argument about whether something was offensive or not.

If your mode of argument depends on putting words in other people's mouths, you're not a very effective debater.

forgetsusername4• 9 years ago

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

Calling a company with a head of diversity-- and that loses tons of money-- bloated, is sensible business acumen. Unless you blame earnings woes on diversity issues.

minikites• 9 years ago

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

forgetsusername4• 9 years ago

Many of these comments seem to indicate that lots of people are threatened by diversity

Because the position of "VP of diversity and inclusion" sounds ridiculous?

These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

This surprises precisely no one. What does it have to do with the article?

tubehouse• 9 years ago

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.

anigbrowl7• 9 years ago

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.

rm_-rf_slash• 9 years ago

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.

ryanjodonnell• 9 years ago

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-...

_m8fo4• 9 years ago

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.

ohfunkyeah3• 9 years ago

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.

_m8fo4• 9 years ago

I fail to see what any of that has to do with knowing who the person is. You might be right, though. As I mentioned, those benefiting from these things will obviously protest it.

mahyarm2• 9 years ago

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

ProfessorLayton• 9 years ago

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.

linkregister3• 9 years ago

Late change is better than no change at all.

ihsw5• 9 years ago

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.

Twitter’s head of diversity is leaving and its chief HR officer has already left

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