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Q&A with the Black Twitter Engineer Who Left Over Diversity Problems

73 points by dyeje 11y ago

stopmoron 11y ago
Nigga nigga nigga
geofft 11y ago
> 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.
- netheril96 11y ago
  The concentration of talent in other schools are lower, so finding the few talents are harder. Hiring costs, and bad hirings cost a lot, so it may be cost effective not to spend a lot hiring from less-than-stellar schools. Of course this is just a hypothesis. No hard data to back it up.
  - brohoolio 11y ago
    3/4 of our engineers aren't from top tier schools. Several of our best never even graduated.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    Engineering is actually more like an art than a science. It requires creativity, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and a strategic mindset. People who are purely book smart generally don't excel in these areas. I think targeting top schools alone is a pretty misguided strategy.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - striking 11y ago
      Engineering != computer science, at least not all the time. What you're thinking of is pretty different than engineering which is essentially applied math.
  - Technophilis 11y ago
    There are relatively easy and cost effective ways to filter candidates from the supposedly less-than-stellar schools. Personal projects, open source projects contributions and programming contests are a good way to easily gauge candidates for a software engineering position.
    - smt88 11y ago
      > programming contests Programming contests aren't anything like actually working at a software company. If you select for the wrong skills, you'll lose lots of good people.
mc32 11y ago
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 11y ago
  > 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.
brohoolio 11y ago
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.
- mc32 11y ago
  I definitely prefer a multicultural circle of friends --it's interesting, as they say. But... does it provide a competitive advantage? Are industries in places like China, India, Japan and Korea at a disadvantage compared to the US because they are more or less monocultural?
  - threeseed 11y ago
    Yes they are at a disadvantage at providing services that cater to the entire world. Which is why Chinese and Japanese sites for example have struggled to extend beyond their own borders.
    - xienze 11y ago
      Well as far as sites go, I think the biggest disadvantage is not focusing on English first rather than the local language. But then there's companies like Nintendo and Sony that are globally successful in spite of their lack of diversity.
      - striking 11y ago
        > Nintendo Most of Nintendo's failings in the past can actually be traced to where they refused to innovate simply because they followed the Japanese business culture too strictly (where, if your boss tells you to do something, you do it. Otherwise, you don't. And so on). If they had a diversity of ideas, they would likely not be in so much trouble right now. I am not defending AA, the racial/gender/whichever thing; I'm not talking about that right now. This is simply about the diversity of ideas.
latkin 11y ago
> 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?
- santaclaus 11y ago
  Waterloo is also public...
- falsestprophet 11y ago
  And Waterloo. This guy is really not paying attention.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    Is Waterloo known for a large number of black students? Honest question.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Futurebot 11y ago
Recruiting from a limited set of schools is widespread: https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruiting-on-only-a-few-campuses https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin... 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.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jwise0 11y ago
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_Diversity_in_Technology_backgrounder.pdf http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel...
- statgeek8 11y ago
  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?
statgeek8 11y ago
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-stats-women-race-tech http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...
- jklinger410 11y ago
  IIRC the employee in question was also going to be laid off anyway. Also it kind of undermines a meritocracy when you require gender and race parity IMO.
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  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.

73 points by dyeje 11y ago

Nigga nigga nigga

> 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.

netheril96 11y ago
The concentration of talent in other schools are lower, so finding the few talents are harder. Hiring costs, and bad hirings cost a lot, so it may be cost effective not to spend a lot hiring from less-than-stellar schools. Of course this is just a hypothesis. No hard data to back it up.
- brohoolio 11y ago
  3/4 of our engineers aren't from top tier schools. Several of our best never even graduated.
- threeseed 11y ago
  Engineering is actually more like an art than a science. It requires creativity, problem solving ability, lateral thinking and a strategic mindset. People who are purely book smart generally don't excel in these areas. I think targeting top schools alone is a pretty misguided strategy.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - striking 11y ago
    Engineering != computer science, at least not all the time. What you're thinking of is pretty different than engineering which is essentially applied math.
- Technophilis 11y ago
  There are relatively easy and cost effective ways to filter candidates from the supposedly less-than-stellar schools. Personal projects, open source projects contributions and programming contests are a good way to easily gauge candidates for a software engineering position.
  - smt88 11y ago
    > programming contests Programming contests aren't anything like actually working at a software company. If you select for the wrong skills, you'll lose lots of good people.

mc32 11y ago

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 11y ago
> 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.

brohoolio 11y ago

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.

mc32 11y ago
I definitely prefer a multicultural circle of friends --it's interesting, as they say. But... does it provide a competitive advantage? Are industries in places like China, India, Japan and Korea at a disadvantage compared to the US because they are more or less monocultural?
- threeseed 11y ago
  Yes they are at a disadvantage at providing services that cater to the entire world. Which is why Chinese and Japanese sites for example have struggled to extend beyond their own borders.
  - xienze 11y ago
    Well as far as sites go, I think the biggest disadvantage is not focusing on English first rather than the local language. But then there's companies like Nintendo and Sony that are globally successful in spite of their lack of diversity.
    - striking 11y ago
      > Nintendo Most of Nintendo's failings in the past can actually be traced to where they refused to innovate simply because they followed the Japanese business culture too strictly (where, if your boss tells you to do something, you do it. Otherwise, you don't. And so on). If they had a diversity of ideas, they would likely not be in so much trouble right now. I am not defending AA, the racial/gender/whichever thing; I'm not talking about that right now. This is simply about the diversity of ideas.

latkin 11y ago

> 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?

santaclaus 11y ago
Waterloo is also public...
falsestprophet 11y ago
And Waterloo. This guy is really not paying attention.
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  Is Waterloo known for a large number of black students? Honest question.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Futurebot 11y ago

Recruiting from a limited set of schools is widespread: https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruiting-on-only-a-few-campuses https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin... 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.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jwise0 11y ago

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_Diversity_in_Technology_backgrounder.pdf http://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/diversity/pdfs/Intel...

statgeek8 11y ago
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?

statgeek8 11y ago

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-stats-women-race-tech http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...

jklinger410 11y ago
IIRC the employee in question was also going to be laid off anyway. Also it kind of undermines a meritocracy when you require gender and race parity IMO.
Pyxl101 11y ago
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.