4 ms·

I dislike how affirmative action has a bad reputation. Affirmative action is not about lowering standards. It's about having a diversified candidate pool. Sound

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.
    - brazzledazzle 11y ago
      Sony has a massive number of employees on every continent.
  - mc32 11y ago
    We'll have to see. China, Japan, Korea and India have world leading companies, world beating companies. They compare very well to more diverse countries like Mexico, Brazil, etc. [Japan and Korea are rather small compared to Brazil and Mexico] This is separate from the question of providing fair and gainful employment for everyone --I think that's a goal as a society we should strive for _even if_ it puts us at a disadvantage. My question was more geared toward questioning the received wisdom. One obvious advantage for companies operating in a homogenous society is they don't face the challenges in hiring a diverse workforce.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      This is separate from the question of providing fair and gainful employment for everyone --I think that's a goal as a society we should strive for _even if_ it puts us at a disadvantage. My question was more geared toward questioning the received wisdom. I'm curious, what do you think of the opposing goal of eliminating the need for all employment through automation?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
HillRat 11y ago
There are plenty of studies correlating racial and gender diversity with better corporate financial performance, particularly in companies that score high in innovation-seeking behaviors. Whether diversity enables innovation or innovation enables diversity is an open question, but in either case it is statistically striking that diversity-valuing cultures are also performant cultures. Many controlled studies also show that diverse groups are more likely to be better problem-solvers and perform better on tests measuring ethical integrity -- in fact, the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit for combat actually reinforced those findings for gender-mixed combat units. Whether Twitter needs black engineers to secure its higher-than-average black userbase is, I think, at best dubious (as Gibson tells us, users find their own use for things), but it might want to reconsider its stance as Wall Street begins side-eying its valuation. Meanwhile, as Brian Brackeen of Kairos put it, the unicorns' failure means startups have a lot of potential talent to grab....
- woodman 11y ago
  > ...the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit... I'm not sure which study you are talking about, because the USMC has been fighting it for several decades - and conducted many studies to back their position. I wrote a paper on the subject many years ago, it is a very complicated issue - lots of very obvious and undeniable cons, with a few potential pros. One of the funnier cons that I remember was the statistical analysis of female service members' pregnancy rates prior to deployment. For some reason, as soon as deployment time comes up - a great many females find themselves impregnated and unable to go overseas... Apparently the problem is so bad that many commanders don't include females in the total organization count for predeployment planning. Also, the USMC is pretty much the only branch that would benefit from the potential pros - pushing problem-solving and ethics further down the chain of command. I'm guessing that they've done the math and decided that it would still be a net negative.
  - HillRat 11y ago
    I was referring to the Integrated Task Force study (which the Corps has yet to release in toto). Though I don't want to litigate the women-in-combat issue here, I'll note that plenty of female Marines (and soldiers) have over the past decade and a half of war operated effectively as light infantry in high OPTEMPO environments; the enemy doesn't care if you're an officer leading an infantry platoon or a logistics convoy. That doesn't means that combat MOSes should become open as a rule, but I'd like to see an analysis of the field effectiveness of units in combat as well as training. Pregnancy is a stickier issue, and for the Corps is more problematic because they historically have had much higher undeployable numbers than the other services. Unplanned pregnancies are lower than the civilian population for officers and senior noncoms, but are roughly average for junior enlisted when adjusted for socioeconomic factors. Military policies forbidding any access to abortion procedures on-base also makes it harder to terminate unplanned pregnancies and, often when deployed overseas, impossible, which could account for some of the statistical correlation you cite. Actually, if you happen to dig up a citation to that study, I'd love to read it!
xienze 11y ago
Well unfortunately the implementation of AA is frequently to lower admission standards. This is extremely commonplace at universities. Then there's the flip side -- too many qualified candidates of a particular race (see, Asians in California universities) and said candidates are turned away. Is it any wonder AA gets a bad rap?
federererer 11y ago
On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards. If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit. But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent, and/or experience necessary for the job. The person was hired not based on merit, but based on some other, unrelated factor. Hiring based on something other than merit automatically means that standards were lowered, or at best they were merely ignored.
- geofft 11y ago
  I don't understand this argument, unless you are making an assumption that a company has infinite open positions. If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit. So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic, and there's a company policy that encourages me to extend five offers to that one-third, I'm still keeping my standards right where they've always been. In fact, it is precisely because there are more than enough candidates with technical merit that we have other measures like "culture fit".
  - federererer 11y ago
    Are you saying that among those 30 qualified candidates, they're all at exactly the same level of skill/talent/experience, or are otherwise completely interchangeable? I find that hard to believe, at least for any realistic scenario. Even if all of those candidates exceed the minimum level of merit required for the job, it's very likely that some will still have more or better skill/talent/experience than the others. There will still be an ordering based purely on merit. Ignoring this ordering when choosing the 10 successful candidates would be a case of ignoring merit, which would indicate a lowering of standards.
    - sulam 11y ago
woodman 11y ago
I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of everymen, then you wouldn't need to compel companies to act - through law or otherwise.
- geofft 11y ago
  The market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.
  - Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
    >The market is remarkably inefficient. Then why aren't you exploiting this?
    - geofft 11y ago
      Because I don't have the startup costs to start a successful Twitter-competitor sitting in my pocket?
      - woodman 11y ago
        You're doing it wrong, that isn't how you displace a market leader - you invent a new market. The barrier to entry isn't that high in tech, unless your pocket contains a fist full of lint and buttons - you do have enough capital.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
statgeek8 11y ago
Asians, according to this article[1], represent 29% of Twitter's workforce overall and 34% of its technical workforce, despite being only 4% of the US population, while whites are significantly under-represented at 59% and 58% of their overall and technical workforce. Twitter's candidate pool is plenty diverse already. [1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-stats-women-race-tech http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...

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.
  - brazzledazzle 11y ago
    Sony has a massive number of employees on every continent.
- mc32 11y ago
  We'll have to see. China, Japan, Korea and India have world leading companies, world beating companies. They compare very well to more diverse countries like Mexico, Brazil, etc. [Japan and Korea are rather small compared to Brazil and Mexico] This is separate from the question of providing fair and gainful employment for everyone --I think that's a goal as a society we should strive for _even if_ it puts us at a disadvantage. My question was more geared toward questioning the received wisdom. One obvious advantage for companies operating in a homogenous society is they don't face the challenges in hiring a diverse workforce.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    This is separate from the question of providing fair and gainful employment for everyone --I think that's a goal as a society we should strive for _even if_ it puts us at a disadvantage. My question was more geared toward questioning the received wisdom. I'm curious, what do you think of the opposing goal of eliminating the need for all employment through automation?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

HillRat 11y ago

There are plenty of studies correlating racial and gender diversity with better corporate financial performance, particularly in companies that score high in innovation-seeking behaviors. Whether diversity enables innovation or innovation enables diversity is an open question, but in either case it is statistically striking that diversity-valuing cultures are also performant cultures. Many controlled studies also show that diverse groups are more likely to be better problem-solvers and perform better on tests measuring ethical integrity -- in fact, the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit for combat actually reinforced those findings for gender-mixed combat units. Whether Twitter needs black engineers to secure its higher-than-average black userbase is, I think, at best dubious (as Gibson tells us, users find their own use for things), but it might want to reconsider its stance as Wall Street begins side-eying its valuation. Meanwhile, as Brian Brackeen of Kairos put it, the unicorns' failure means startups have a lot of potential talent to grab....

woodman 11y ago
> ...the USMC study purporting to prove women are unfit... I'm not sure which study you are talking about, because the USMC has been fighting it for several decades - and conducted many studies to back their position. I wrote a paper on the subject many years ago, it is a very complicated issue - lots of very obvious and undeniable cons, with a few potential pros. One of the funnier cons that I remember was the statistical analysis of female service members' pregnancy rates prior to deployment. For some reason, as soon as deployment time comes up - a great many females find themselves impregnated and unable to go overseas... Apparently the problem is so bad that many commanders don't include females in the total organization count for predeployment planning. Also, the USMC is pretty much the only branch that would benefit from the potential pros - pushing problem-solving and ethics further down the chain of command. I'm guessing that they've done the math and decided that it would still be a net negative.
- HillRat 11y ago
  I was referring to the Integrated Task Force study (which the Corps has yet to release in toto). Though I don't want to litigate the women-in-combat issue here, I'll note that plenty of female Marines (and soldiers) have over the past decade and a half of war operated effectively as light infantry in high OPTEMPO environments; the enemy doesn't care if you're an officer leading an infantry platoon or a logistics convoy. That doesn't means that combat MOSes should become open as a rule, but I'd like to see an analysis of the field effectiveness of units in combat as well as training. Pregnancy is a stickier issue, and for the Corps is more problematic because they historically have had much higher undeployable numbers than the other services. Unplanned pregnancies are lower than the civilian population for officers and senior noncoms, but are roughly average for junior enlisted when adjusted for socioeconomic factors. Military policies forbidding any access to abortion procedures on-base also makes it harder to terminate unplanned pregnancies and, often when deployed overseas, impossible, which could account for some of the statistical correlation you cite. Actually, if you happen to dig up a citation to that study, I'd love to read it!

xienze 11y ago

Well unfortunately the implementation of AA is frequently to lower admission standards. This is extremely commonplace at universities. Then there's the flip side -- too many qualified candidates of a particular race (see, Asians in California universities) and said candidates are turned away. Is it any wonder AA gets a bad rap?

federererer 11y ago

On the contrary, affirmative action is inherently about lowering standards. If somebody from a disadvantaged group is hired based on having sufficient skill, talent and/or experience for a given job, then affirmative action was not involved. The person was hired based on merit. But if affirmative action is used to justify the hiring of somebody, it inherently means that they did not have the sufficient skill, talent, and/or experience necessary for the job. The person was hired not based on merit, but based on some other, unrelated factor. Hiring based on something other than merit automatically means that standards were lowered, or at best they were merely ignored.

geofft 11y ago
I don't understand this argument, unless you are making an assumption that a company has infinite open positions. If I'm trying to staff a 10-person team, and I find 30 qualified candidates who are willing to take the job, there is zero sense in which I'm lowering standards to look at factors other than merit once I have already looked at merit. So if one-third of those candidates are from some minority demographic, and there's a company policy that encourages me to extend five offers to that one-third, I'm still keeping my standards right where they've always been. In fact, it is precisely because there are more than enough candidates with technical merit that we have other measures like "culture fit".
- federererer 11y ago
  Are you saying that among those 30 qualified candidates, they're all at exactly the same level of skill/talent/experience, or are otherwise completely interchangeable? I find that hard to believe, at least for any realistic scenario. Even if all of those candidates exceed the minimum level of merit required for the job, it's very likely that some will still have more or better skill/talent/experience than the others. There will still be an ordering based purely on merit. Ignoring this ordering when choosing the 10 successful candidates would be a case of ignoring merit, which would indicate a lowering of standards.
  - sulam 11y ago

woodman 11y ago

I know that there have been several vocal proponents of affirmative action in tech, but it always seems to me that the justifications are presented as self evident truths - with a strong smell of moral superiority. I say let the market decide, because the magic words: "Affirmative action", "diversified", "represents our community"... don't pay the bills. If it were such an advantage to have such a work force of everymen, then you wouldn't need to compel companies to act - through law or otherwise.

geofft 11y ago
The market is remarkably inefficient. In particular, given the startup costs of making a new company, the network effects required to get users, the more different network effects required to get employees, the connections required to get venture capital, etc., it should be completely unsurprising that it's easier for a company to get started and get traction if it plays to the biases of the surrounding society.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
  >The market is remarkably inefficient. Then why aren't you exploiting this?
  - geofft 11y ago
    Because I don't have the startup costs to start a successful Twitter-competitor sitting in my pocket?
    - woodman 11y ago
      You're doing it wrong, that isn't how you displace a market leader - you invent a new market. The barrier to entry isn't that high in tech, unless your pocket contains a fist full of lint and buttons - you do have enough capital.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]

statgeek8 11y ago

Asians, according to this article[1], represent 29% of Twitter's workforce overall and 34% of its technical workforce, despite being only 4% of the US population, while whites are significantly under-represented at 59% and 58% of their overall and technical workforce. Twitter's candidate pool is plenty diverse already. [1] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-stats-women-race-tech http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/07/twitter-diversity-st...