3 ms·

"We have a team of Rust community leaders to pair you with. This group isn’t particularly diverse; this is where the Rust community is right now. " That's wher

"We have a team of Rust community leaders to pair you with. This group isn’t particularly diverse; this is where the Rust community is right now. " That's where it's been since the beginning. All the politics, Coraline's Code of Conduct, moderation, talk of "inclusiveness," and so on with "social justice" advocates in or leading some teams. You'd think the teams themselves would be diverse as heck with the community following. Yet, those in control from the beginning up to now are mostly young, white males on almost every team in the pictures. https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/team.html Reminds me a bit of the Huffington Post pic on Twitter showing a bunch of mostly white women running a company whose writers talk lots about how companies should be inclusive and/or diverse without actually practicing it. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington_post_tweet_fail/ https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/4kn6ms/huffington... Both showed structural racism, sexism, and age discrimination exist at the management (esp hiring) level. No surprise that the resulting community wasn't diverse enough in practice when those leading it weren't. One tends to follow the other. There's a bootstrapping requirement of sorts where having internal diversity helps ensure it in the areas they act on (eg communities). It's not there... probably intentionally as some other organizations actively sought out different kinds of people in hiring with either quotas or blind auditions. I could see specific positions in language or compiler teams getting white males or something narrow due to prevalence among top teams in CompSci. However, many jobs on this list don't take a genius so much as someone willing to learn and work. More typical kind of work that both majority and minority talent exists and can handle. Like in the tweeted reply to Huffington, I suggest the Rust team can begin improving diversity by looking to see if there's a handful of black people in their geographical area or working remotely if allowed that are capable of writing code, writing docs, talking to people online about the language, doing CI, moderating away mean posts, and other things I see in team descriptions. I swear I've seen and met such people doing such jobs in the past in person and online. If they're in Mountain View with Mozilla, Wikipedia tells me that area is over 50% non-white with lots of Latinos and Asians. A lot of women live out there, too. If I'm wrong about the structural discrimination, then none of them can code, write, admin, or assist people and/or they're not in the pipeline somehow with hiring having no way to look for them. Outside the small amount on the Rust team already that are minority members. Call me skeptical that the talent for average work didn't exist or was too hard to find.

steveklabnik 9y ago
To be clear, your last paragraph (EDIT: now removed) weirdly conflates Rust with Mozilla; only one person on Rust teams live in Mountain View, many (most?) people on the teams are not Mozilla employees, and this isn't about Mozilla hiring people. Your observation about the current makeup is in fact what we would like to change, and your suggestion to reach out to people is what this post is intended to do.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  The first bit is useful information. It means you had a ton of minority talent to draw on instead of one location and company. The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much. That was the point of the critique. I'll throw out some suggestions, though, instead of just critiquing as my own principles are about helping a project that's doing important good work. Regardless of diversity issues, I still congratulate you people on that and hope you continue to improve across the board. :) There's two easy ones that you can do on the team side and maybe in some form on the community side. You and the others are simply more knowledgeable at working with communities so I leave it to you to find what applies. Here they are: 1. Supply side. Talk to people doing these bootcamps, conferences, and so on focusing on minorities in general or specific minority groups. They probably know people in the demographic who can code well. Send people there to talk about Rust like you seem to do in general at conferences and such. Also, invite all in these groups to send in references or Githubs relevant to specific jobs. Give them resources to learn it. Get those that want to get a job or place in the community to get on the forums for help learning and/or submitting code/docs. Encourage, but don't require, them to do it blind under an alias with no info on race/age/gender. Without biases limiting them and with increasing supply, the percentage of minority talent should increase naturally. 2. Quota side. Do something like that plus ads for talent in general. Get a supply of people from many backgrounds with some way to evaluate whether they are capable of performing the role. They all "earned" their place rather than just token hires since each seems to be a decent or good hire. The "best" of all programmers is pretty subjective concept with strong possibility of bias anyway. Then, do quotas for the hiring slots with those brought in chosen randomly with right spread or best rated of each group. A lot of the local businesses out here are, despite the South's racial issues, quote diverse even up to a layer or two of management by just (a) hiring anyone who might be able to do the job, (b) giving them some training/coaching, and (c) keeping those that perform well. Works wonders but I mention other things first since there's few jobs to go around at high cost on your end. Have fun with those. EDIT: Fix two deficiencies at top I saw.

steveklabnik 9y ago

To be clear, your last paragraph (EDIT: now removed) weirdly conflates Rust with Mozilla; only one person on Rust teams live in Mountain View, many (most?) people on the teams are not Mozilla employees, and this isn't about Mozilla hiring people. Your observation about the current makeup is in fact what we would like to change, and your suggestion to reach out to people is what this post is intended to do.

nickpsecurity 9y ago
The first bit is useful information. It means you had a ton of minority talent to draw on instead of one location and company. The second means you all talked about this stuff since the beginning without actually doing it or not many on team cared as much. That was the point of the critique. I'll throw out some suggestions, though, instead of just critiquing as my own principles are about helping a project that's doing important good work. Regardless of diversity issues, I still congratulate you people on that and hope you continue to improve across the board. :) There's two easy ones that you can do on the team side and maybe in some form on the community side. You and the others are simply more knowledgeable at working with communities so I leave it to you to find what applies. Here they are: 1. Supply side. Talk to people doing these bootcamps, conferences, and so on focusing on minorities in general or specific minority groups. They probably know people in the demographic who can code well. Send people there to talk about Rust like you seem to do in general at conferences and such. Also, invite all in these groups to send in references or Githubs relevant to specific jobs. Give them resources to learn it. Get those that want to get a job or place in the community to get on the forums for help learning and/or submitting code/docs. Encourage, but don't require, them to do it blind under an alias with no info on race/age/gender. Without biases limiting them and with increasing supply, the percentage of minority talent should increase naturally. 2. Quota side. Do something like that plus ads for talent in general. Get a supply of people from many backgrounds with some way to evaluate whether they are capable of performing the role. They all "earned" their place rather than just token hires since each seems to be a decent or good hire. The "best" of all programmers is pretty subjective concept with strong possibility of bias anyway. Then, do quotas for the hiring slots with those brought in chosen randomly with right spread or best rated of each group. A lot of the local businesses out here are, despite the South's racial issues, quote diverse even up to a layer or two of management by just (a) hiring anyone who might be able to do the job, (b) giving them some training/coaching, and (c) keeping those that perform well. Works wonders but I mention other things first since there's few jobs to go around at high cost on your end. Have fun with those. EDIT: Fix two deficiencies at top I saw.