5 ms·

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

sp332 10y 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-and-tech-struggle-to-hack-bias-and-diversity 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 10y ago
  Honest not antagonistic question, why is it important to get right?
  - sp332 10y ago
    You'll miss out on less talent. Your teams will be better at problem-solving if they have diverse backgrounds and outlooks (not just genetic "heritage" but that can be a half-decent proxy). You're not going to contribute to racism, sexism etc in society at large which might be driving groups apart culturally or denying certain opportunities to certain groups of people. And the DoL won't sue you :)
    - FT_intern 10y ago
      > You'll miss out on less talent. This is assuming that the diverse candidates who actually have talent aren't being hired. That's the argument you need to be making > Your teams will be better at problem-solving if they have diverse backgrounds and outlooks If you want teams that are better at problem-solving, why don't you directly judge applicants based on their problem-solving abilities in a team environment instead of using diversity as a proxy for problem solving ability (which has not been proven at all)?
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Because then your employees can make it into the all-important business stock photos, and be PowerPoint stars forever.~ If companies cared about real diversity rather than the illusion of diversity, they would blind their own interview process to any factors not directly related to job duties. A truly diverse company can potentially produce a wider variety of creative options, as a lesser overlap in skills and experiences produces greater coverage of a problem space with the same number of people investigating it. It isn't just about age, sex, color, or religion. It's about the cities lived in, the neighbors barely tolerated, the pets kept, the hobbies enjoyed, the music listened to, the crazy acquaintance stories, the routes taken on the daily commute, and quite a lot of other things selected against when seeking out "culture fit". Otherwise, "head of diversity" sounds like a nice, cushy sinecure, with a gratuitously large budget to waste. Diversity is the responsibility of the entire personnel/HR department, and can't be meaningfully delegated to one figurehead.
    - sp332 10y ago
      If companies cared about real diversity rather than the illusion of diversity, they would blind their own interview process to any factors not directly related to job duties. That would be good for cases when you need someone who can jump in immediately, and you have their job requirements nailed down ahead of time. But sometimes you need to gauge a person's potential for growth into a position. And as FT_intern pointed out, often you want to know how the person will do with a particular team. That's really hard to do in a blind test.
      - logfromblammo 10y ago
        Essentially saying that the biases of individual teams trump the diversity goals of the entire company? Blind testing is not so difficult that it isn't worth doing. Last week, the spouse and I did a blind taste test of nine different beers. We got someone else to pour them into numbered cups and rated the contents of the cups without pre-existing biases. You just have to interview in such a way that no one can see the candidates' labels. Would it really be that awful to use a telepresence robot with text-to-speech in an interview? That would allow the candidate to see and hear everybody else, but no one would know anything about them other than what they typed in a chat box.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    It's both more effective and a remediation of past discrimination. Bear in mind this is only an obligation insofar as companies wit to contract with governmental entities.
    - ihsw 10y ago
      Remedying past discrimination is not any company's responsibility, not by a long shot.
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        Have you tried reading comments all the way to the end before replying? I wrote two sentences in the post above, and the second one addressed that very objection.
    - sp332 10y ago
      There are laws that prohibit discrimination even for private companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_in_the_United_States#Federal_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_...
- gozur88 10y ago
  That's because Google is a federal contractor. Companies are not required to provide this data to DoL otherwise.
  - sp332 10y ago
    That's true, it goes a lot further for government contractors. They are even required to implement affirmative action plans if their numbers are too far off. But you can still be sued or criminally charged for specific acts of discrimination even if you're not a government contractor.
    - gozur88 10y ago
      That's true, but if the company has a non-discrimination policy, communicates it, and enforces it, those kinds of suits are difficult to win. Managing that policy isn't normally a separate position.
- FT_intern 10y 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.
  - sp332 10y ago
    It's probably not a pipeline problem. https://www.cnet.com/news/when-tech-firms-judge-on-skills-alone-women-land-more-job-interviews/ https://www.cnet.com/news/when-tech-firms-judge-on-skills-al... Anyway, tech companies spend a lot of money and effort trying to reshape the pipeline to direct talent their way. https://blog.twitter.com/2015/we-re-committing-to-a-more-diverse-twitter https://blog.twitter.com/2015/we-re-committing-to-a-more-div... For schools, I'm not sure where to find that data, but I did see that Berkeley's "diversity" class had a higher completion rate and higher average GPA than the other students taking the same course. https://eecs.berkeley.edu/cs-scholars https://eecs.berkeley.edu/cs-scholars This demonstrates that a quarter billion dollars could effectively address any pipeline problem, if there is one. Edit: These numbers vary wildly for other companies in the same location, so I'm not sure a comparison with them proves anything. https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San-Francisco-Bay-Area-CA https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San-Fran...
burger_moon 10y ago
I believe github also has one. I remember a lot of controversy around some diversity person at GitHub anyways.
t13214 10y 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 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-discrimination-lawsuit-idUSKCN11W2DA 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.
- anigbrowl 10y 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.
  - FT_intern 10y ago
    The problem is that individual companies are held responsible for the general population instead of the qualified population. It isn't the company's job to make sure that the general population is educated. It is enough that well known/top companies have demographics that are similar to the undergrad CS demographics of Berkeley/Stanford/MIT/etc., whether or not those demographics are reflective of the general population
    - linkregister 10y ago
      In the public eye, your statement is correct. In terms of EEOC investigation and litigation, on the other hand, the qualified applicant pool is the criteria.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
chuckcode 10y 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-ever-head-of-diversity/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/pinterest-hires-its-first-...
- ihsw 10y 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).
- forgetsusername 10y 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?
  - chuckcode 10y ago
    Pinterest's policy is to hire people on what they can do, not who they are. Hire the best person for the position not a specific gender or other trait. My understanding is that Candice's role is to help ensure that we're avoiding biases in the our hiring process, trying to ensure that that we have a diverse pool of candidates to begin with and work on longer term programs that help to generate well qualified diverse candidates. I wouldn't believe anyone who says they know how to make the tech industry population similar to the overall US population distribution but I think it is still good to have people thinking about it and working on it.

sp332 10y 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-and-tech-struggle-to-hack-bias-and-diversity 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 10y ago
Honest not antagonistic question, why is it important to get right?
- sp332 10y ago
  You'll miss out on less talent. Your teams will be better at problem-solving if they have diverse backgrounds and outlooks (not just genetic "heritage" but that can be a half-decent proxy). You're not going to contribute to racism, sexism etc in society at large which might be driving groups apart culturally or denying certain opportunities to certain groups of people. And the DoL won't sue you :)
  - FT_intern 10y ago
    > You'll miss out on less talent. This is assuming that the diverse candidates who actually have talent aren't being hired. That's the argument you need to be making > Your teams will be better at problem-solving if they have diverse backgrounds and outlooks If you want teams that are better at problem-solving, why don't you directly judge applicants based on their problem-solving abilities in a team environment instead of using diversity as a proxy for problem solving ability (which has not been proven at all)?
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Because then your employees can make it into the all-important business stock photos, and be PowerPoint stars forever.~ If companies cared about real diversity rather than the illusion of diversity, they would blind their own interview process to any factors not directly related to job duties. A truly diverse company can potentially produce a wider variety of creative options, as a lesser overlap in skills and experiences produces greater coverage of a problem space with the same number of people investigating it. It isn't just about age, sex, color, or religion. It's about the cities lived in, the neighbors barely tolerated, the pets kept, the hobbies enjoyed, the music listened to, the crazy acquaintance stories, the routes taken on the daily commute, and quite a lot of other things selected against when seeking out "culture fit". Otherwise, "head of diversity" sounds like a nice, cushy sinecure, with a gratuitously large budget to waste. Diversity is the responsibility of the entire personnel/HR department, and can't be meaningfully delegated to one figurehead.
  - sp332 10y ago
    If companies cared about real diversity rather than the illusion of diversity, they would blind their own interview process to any factors not directly related to job duties. That would be good for cases when you need someone who can jump in immediately, and you have their job requirements nailed down ahead of time. But sometimes you need to gauge a person's potential for growth into a position. And as FT_intern pointed out, often you want to know how the person will do with a particular team. That's really hard to do in a blind test.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      Essentially saying that the biases of individual teams trump the diversity goals of the entire company? Blind testing is not so difficult that it isn't worth doing. Last week, the spouse and I did a blind taste test of nine different beers. We got someone else to pour them into numbered cups and rated the contents of the cups without pre-existing biases. You just have to interview in such a way that no one can see the candidates' labels. Would it really be that awful to use a telepresence robot with text-to-speech in an interview? That would allow the candidate to see and hear everybody else, but no one would know anything about them other than what they typed in a chat box.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  It's both more effective and a remediation of past discrimination. Bear in mind this is only an obligation insofar as companies wit to contract with governmental entities.
  - ihsw 10y ago
    Remedying past discrimination is not any company's responsibility, not by a long shot.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      Have you tried reading comments all the way to the end before replying? I wrote two sentences in the post above, and the second one addressed that very objection.
  - sp332 10y ago
    There are laws that prohibit discrimination even for private companies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_in_the_United_States#Federal_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_discrimination_law_...
gozur88 10y ago
That's because Google is a federal contractor. Companies are not required to provide this data to DoL otherwise.
- sp332 10y ago
  That's true, it goes a lot further for government contractors. They are even required to implement affirmative action plans if their numbers are too far off. But you can still be sued or criminally charged for specific acts of discrimination even if you're not a government contractor.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    That's true, but if the company has a non-discrimination policy, communicates it, and enforces it, those kinds of suits are difficult to win. Managing that policy isn't normally a separate position.
FT_intern 10y 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.
- sp332 10y ago
  It's probably not a pipeline problem. https://www.cnet.com/news/when-tech-firms-judge-on-skills-alone-women-land-more-job-interviews/ https://www.cnet.com/news/when-tech-firms-judge-on-skills-al... Anyway, tech companies spend a lot of money and effort trying to reshape the pipeline to direct talent their way. https://blog.twitter.com/2015/we-re-committing-to-a-more-diverse-twitter https://blog.twitter.com/2015/we-re-committing-to-a-more-div... For schools, I'm not sure where to find that data, but I did see that Berkeley's "diversity" class had a higher completion rate and higher average GPA than the other students taking the same course. https://eecs.berkeley.edu/cs-scholars https://eecs.berkeley.edu/cs-scholars This demonstrates that a quarter billion dollars could effectively address any pipeline problem, if there is one. Edit: These numbers vary wildly for other companies in the same location, so I'm not sure a comparison with them proves anything. https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San-Francisco-Bay-Area-CA https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San-Fran...

burger_moon 10y ago

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

t13214 10y 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 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-discrimination-lawsuit-idUSKCN11W2DA 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.

anigbrowl 10y 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.
- FT_intern 10y ago
  The problem is that individual companies are held responsible for the general population instead of the qualified population. It isn't the company's job to make sure that the general population is educated. It is enough that well known/top companies have demographics that are similar to the undergrad CS demographics of Berkeley/Stanford/MIT/etc., whether or not those demographics are reflective of the general population
  - linkregister 10y ago
    In the public eye, your statement is correct. In terms of EEOC investigation and litigation, on the other hand, the qualified applicant pool is the criteria.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

chuckcode 10y 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-ever-head-of-diversity/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/pinterest-hires-its-first-...

ihsw 10y 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).
forgetsusername 10y 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?
- chuckcode 10y ago
  Pinterest's policy is to hire people on what they can do, not who they are. Hire the best person for the position not a specific gender or other trait. My understanding is that Candice's role is to help ensure that we're avoiding biases in the our hiring process, trying to ensure that that we have a diverse pool of candidates to begin with and work on longer term programs that help to generate well qualified diverse candidates. I wouldn't believe anyone who says they know how to make the tech industry population similar to the overall US population distribution but I think it is still good to have people thinking about it and working on it.