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Apple’s diversity chief out after outcry
- cgore 9y agoI'm a white guy. I'm a software engineer. I'm totally cool with hiring people who aren't white guys (assuming they can do the job.) It seems that Denise Young Smith understands that, but there's a weird fringe of the extreme left that only sees headcounts by color and gender, and only sees me as "a white guy", and only sees others as "an <enthnicity> <gender>", and it's sad that a black woman got fired for being reasonable instead of having a specific and idiotic political agenda.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoThe left, outside of Silicon Valley, sees you as the enemy, the instigator of racism, sexism, and any other isms they can apply. They want you replaced with people of color and women as fast as possible. Inside of Silicon Valley, you're seen as this benevolent majority, surely appreciative of diversity, eager to break up the white privilege, and promote justice for those left behind....someday, but not today. There's tremendous hypocrisy on the left both in and out of Silicon Valley.
- omegaworks 9y ago>They want you replaced with people of color and women as fast as possible. Stop spreading this white supremacist garbage. There is no "conspiracy to replace white people."
- sctb 9y agoYou can keep your moniker, but we ban accounts that use Hacker News primarily for ideological and political battle—regardless of which ideology. Please change this now. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- whichdan 9y ago"people who aren't white guys (assuming they can do the job.)" This sort of language is problematic and harmful in that it implies that "white guys" (not even white people, just men) by default can always "do the job," and that anyone outside of that group must be judged to some sort of different standard. It makes it challenging to talk about diversity when statements start off with racist and sexist undertones.
- fosk 9y agoOh come on, you know what he meant. This is getting to a point that even genuinely talking about it, and rightly so, risks backfiring at you because there’s always somebody willing to make 10 extra mental steps to find it offensive.
- ksk 9y agoIts really frustrating that peoples innocent statements are purposely twisted like this to suit personal agendas.
- whichdan 9y agoThey could have easily omitted the "assuming they can do the job" part without affecting the statement. There's a reason that it was added.
- tga 9y agoExactly, and the reason is the implied risk of unchecked "diversity" leading to hiring underqualified people just for the sake of boosting quotas.
- ksk 9y agoYour statements are needlessly accusatory, and increase rather than decrease friction. You could have said something like "Hey, I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but some people might read this into your statement. Do you see that too? What do you think?"
- jasode 9y agoTo use the fired Apple employees idea that diversity is multidimensional, you might have the following situations: Group 1: 1) white man (Democrat Stanford grad) 2) white woman (Democrat Stanford grad) 3) black man (Democrat Stanford grad) Group 2: 1) white man (Democrat Stanford grad) 2) white man (Libertarian Kansas kid self-taught) 3) white man (South Africa bootcamp grad) Depending on what's important, Group 2 would be seen as "more diverse and representative" even though the skin color is all the same. In that case, diversity of thought is valued more than diversity of skin color. If that was the idea that Denise Young Smith was trying to get across, that nuance got lost in the backlash.
- napa15 9y agoI honestly dont think anybody didnt understand what she meant, it's quite obvious. It's just that people are openly racist nowadays, looking only at skin color.
- omegaworks 9y ago* Why assume Group 2 has, or can produce, higher-valued thoughts? * Why are there only three seats at the table? Diversity and inclusion is about analyzing and addressing systemic assumptions and the arbitrary, exclusionary constraints we put on ourselves as an industry. Contrived hypothetical scenarios fail to frame the real problem because those contrived scenarios are exactly what good policies push back against.
- dictum 9y agoI don't see where the parent comment implies Group 2 is expected to produce "higher-valued" thoughts. Neither more diversity of thought between members of a group OR a single leaning, shared by all members of a group imply higher value.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- omegaworks 9y ago
- LordKano 9y agoI'm a black guy in tech. I have never had a problem in the industry solely because of my race. I have had personality conflicts that may have been exacerbated because of culture differences but it was the personality conflicts that were the root. Now, even I am being painted as "Not diverse enough" for the contingent of which you speak. Recently, I read this and it sums up where it's all heading next. https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-the-white-people-of-black-people-1814157214 https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-...
- bertomartin 9y agoI guess we all have different experiences
- dmschulman 9y agoapt point
- rocmcd 9y agoThanks for the link. That was an eye-opening read.
- rurban 9y agoInsanity prevails. Why Apple, why?
- creaghpatr 9y ago>Denise Young Smith, who was named vice president of diversity and inclusion in May, made controversial comments last month during a One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Colombia. >“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said. >“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.” >Her comments appeared to defend Apple’s overwhelmingly white and male leadership at a time when the company’s makeup is markedly uneven. Wow what a shit show, even if she believes this nuanced, thoughtful view of diversity, she should have realized that she was hired for one reason only: racial extortion. Now apple can go out and hire the shakedown artist they deserve.
- whatyoucantsay 9y agoSaying she was hired for racial extortion just isn't reasonable. There are horrible human beings who spend their days raising twitter mobs for personal gain, but there are also serious inequities. Many of them go back all the way to the colonial era. Ms. Smith may well have spent a career working to improve them.
- whatyoucantsay 9y agoThe far left often misses how multi-dimensional concepts like diversity or privilege are but how can a team without minorities be diverse? By definition, it would be composed only of people who were in the majority on every dimension! Her comment was almost certainly false, though public humiliation and firing after a 20 year career is a bit of an excess. Why not discuss the matter and ask for a gracious apology?
- dragonwriter 9y ago> The far left often misses how multi-dimensional concepts like diversity or privilege are I think you are confusing the shallow tribal identity groups with weak ideological consciousness on the left with the far left; the complex multidimensional nature of diversity and privilege is pretty much the core of intersectionality, which is a pretty key concept for the left, especially (much of) the far left. Or you're talking about the narrowly economic faction of the far left that sees non-class identity largely as a distraction from class issues, with diversity as a non-issue, and all privilege and discrimination boiling down to class warfare. But even they don't really miss multidimensionality, they just see the multidimensionality as a multipronged distraction.
- whatyoucantsay 9y agoI am referring to the way many on the far left speak of intersectionality as a number of diversity or victimhood points to be tallied. The truth is, like many multivariate functions, more complex. Here is an example. Being male is not a privilege for a young black man being stopped by a police officer in the United States. On the contrary, it greatly increases the odds he will soon be unjustly killed. Similarly, being Jewish may well be a privilege for a wealthy London banker, but is just as easily a death sentence for anyone, including an elite, in Lebanon over the past 25 years.
- BearGoesChirp 9y agoMost intersectionality can be seen as simplistic statistical modeling that has flaws (such as male not being a benefit whenever the legal system is involved). I don't actually think the theory is wrong, but I do think the current models are way too simple and more often than not picked not for their correctness but their usefulness in achieving political goals.
- creaghpatr 9y agoMore on her comments: https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/?a=2 https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j... >Denise Young Smith, who was named vice president of diversity and inclusion in May, made controversial comments last month during a One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Colombia. >“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said. >“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.” >Her comments appeared to defend Apple’s overwhelmingly white and male leadership at a time when the company’s makeup is markedly uneven. Wow what a shit show, even if she believes this nuanced, thoughtful view of diversity, she should have realized that she was hired for one reason only: racial extortion. Now apple can go out and hire the shakedown artist they deserve.
- coryl 9y agoRacial extortion...interesting term, haven't heard that one before.
- Overtonwindow 9y agoJesse Jackson? Al Sharpton? That's their bread and butter.
- coryl 9y agoI suppose as the saying goes, one man's civil rights activist is another man's racial extortionist.
- lovich 9y agoWhatever your views on diversity are, I think we can all agree that the subject is so politically charged right now that this job is going to be like the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nachosgalore 9y agoThe entire "diversity" push is artificial and wrong. I've worked for places that said, "We need to hire x number of women, blacks, and homosexuals." Most people in the meetings were like "yeah, whatever..." Every time I've worked for some douche bag management team that pulled something like this, it went pear shaped. Hiring people because they are women, black, or homosexual does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to bring in talent. IT is, by nature, a meritocracy. I don't want to work for anyone or any place that does not exist as a meritocracy. People should be judged by the value of their contributions, not by any other criteria. Before anyone gets started, even if a potential candidate was perfect and was a woman, black (or other), or homosexual compared to a typical American/Canadian IT worker (white male or Asian male/female), I would hire the best fit for the culture at hand. Most IT shops are politically incorrect lairs of gaming lore, cursing, off-colour humour and odd banter, and it needs to stay this way. I dislike forced political correctness and so do most IT people.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bertomartin 9y ago"IT is, by nature, a meritocracy" <- Nice JOKE. I've worked at a number of big IT firms in NYC and they all throw around the meritocracy myth. But the reality of the situation is that your position is determined, to a high degree, on your relationship with higher ups, and that relationship is to large extent determined by shared backgrounds and whether you're a 'cool' person to be around. Even in the interview process, your answers are looked at differently based on who you are - this is all biased guys, let's not kid ourselves here. Sure, I'm not providing hard evidence, but this is what I've seen being on both side of the hiring fence.
- minimaxir 9y agoThe article title is misleading as it implies causality. Per TechCrunch (https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/apple-vp-of-diversity-and-inclusion-denise-young-smith-is-leaving/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/16/apple-vp-of-diversity-and-...): > Young Smith had been talking with Apple CEO Tim Cook about the next phase of her career and life since about a year ago, according to a source. Over the last few months, Apple has been searching for a successor to replace Young Smith. It’s not quite clear, however, when exactly Young Smith decided she would leave Apple. But based on that timeline, it seems as though Young Smith made up her mind before those comments in Bogotá, Colombia for which she later apologized.
- danso 9y agoObviously it is wrong to assert causality without proof, but why is it wrong to imply causality if no other official explanation is offered? TechCrunch refers to an anonymous source who, for all we know, could be Tim Cook or any other Apple official wanting to reduce the embarrassment for the company and for Denise Smith, who had been at the company for 20 years and in the job for 6 months. Yes, journalists are too quick to argue causality when there is only correlation. IMO, the burden more on the TC reporter to explain why she accepts her anonymous source's claim, which implies Apple was incompetent enough to hire someone for a highly publicized position who had planed to quit 2-3 months after getting the job, as opposed to being pushed out for not being wanted in the position, even if she had never made those controversial comments. Harder to swallow is that if this really were the case, then why is an anonymous source pushing this angle. Why would Apple try to hide the innocuous explanation for Smith's departure?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lovich 9y agoWhatever your views on diversity are, I think we can all agree that the subject is so politically charged right now that this job is going to be like the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- tscs37 9y agoCuriously, I think the DADA is probably a safer job consider you survive most of a year on average.
- tomtompl 9y agoIt almost seems like all those diversity preachers are the biggest racists scums.
- exabrial 9y agoThe more stuff I see like this, the more I'm convinced the only way to actually help diversity along is a free market solution. Instead of demanding quotas, just have the data available publically. The reasons are many, but the biggest is that I feel that hiring people that are bad at their job but have some physical characteristic, will make the problem much worse in the long run by "proving the biased people right" about their biases.
- yedava 9y agoPeople can learn on the job and can become not 'bad', right? Or is it the case that some set of people have some innate quality that makes them always be bad at a job?
- tscs37 9y agoSome people don't understand computers at all. Teaching them to engineer software, for example, can be a long and expensive undertaking. Which these people might not be interested in since they are good in other things. I think it's not good to simply assume that you can insert any random person in a job and they'll "just become not bad" at it. And this is not restricted to any nationality, gender, etc, either, you can take any two random humans and they'll (with high probability) like and perform at a job at different levels, irrelevant of the amount of learning performed (respective to the learning level atleast) It's not some innate quality, it's just how people all over the globe are made: different.
- danso 9y ago> Some people don't understand computers at all. "Some people", as in, anecdotally? Or some groups of people? I don't think any diversity initiative calls for random people to be inserted into jobs.
- tscs37 9y agoNot anecdottaly, provably. >Or some groups of people? I've deliberately not singled out any specific group of people but there is some evidence from Sociology and Biology studies that certain genetic or social groups of people will not have as much interest or understanding of computers. Of course the social groups can "fix" this much easier, provided they have a desire to do so. But again, not mentioning any specific groups specifically because it is not necessary. You can get the same results by replacing "computer skills" with any other skill or job and repeat to get the same results. >I don't think any diversity initiative calls for random people to be inserted into jobs. The assertion of the comment I responded to was that "People can learn on the job and can become not 'bad'" and asking if maybe there is something that makes some people bad at computers naturally, to which I responded as you have seen.
- vixen99 9y agoApple: "We deeply believe that diversity drives innovation”. The company is certainly innovative but it's predominantly (2017) white and male but on the other hand Apple don't say what % diversity is needed to do this driving. Don't they just choose employees on merit irrespective of any other consideration? They'd be dumb if they didn't. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-releases-2017-diversity-report-showing-little-progress-2017-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-releases-2017-diversity...
- jabretti 9y agoHonestly, that "diversity drives innovation" is a total goddamn lie. Hiring the best people available drives innovation. Diversity itself has never been shown to be of any value. If you look at some of the most innovative places in history, they weren't particularly diverse. It doesn't seem to have held them back. Renaissance Florence wasn't especially diverse, it was a bunch of Florentines sitting around doing Florentine things. Victorian London wasn't all that diverse, either, but they were innovating at an astounding rate. Bell Labs in the 1960s was mostly nerdy white dudes with pocket protectors, and they were massively innovative -- because what drives innovation is thoughts like "What if we laid down amorphous silicon dioxide directly onto the wafer and annealed it to reduce electron traps?" rather than thoughts like "omg, I just saw a person with a different colour skin, my mind is totally blown".
- alphabettsy 9y agoYou threw your argument out the window with this; "omg, I just saw a person with a different colour skin, my mind is totally blown”. People from different social and cultural backgrounds can bring different experiences and skill sets. There are many, many examples of this throughout history. It would seem many of the diversity programs are in some ways meant to address past racism in this country. That may be a whole different topic.
- Johnny555 9y agoI thought skin color didn't matter and it's what inside that matters? So skin color is the most important factor when determining diversity?
- hashberry 9y agoYes, skin color does matter, read up on Critical Race Theory. To be colorblind is to be racist because it ignores the disadvantages one can't see due to one's own privilege. The theory states that inequality is due to racism and anyone who is part of the dominant race not only benefits from racism but unconsciously perpetuates it. This is why everyone is so sensitive, because this is what is taught in the humanities in college. "Everything is racist, everything is sexist, etc."
- jamesrom 9y agoSerious question, if everyone was colourblind, what disadvantages would there be?
- danso 9y agoWhich diversity policies have you read that skin color is "the most important factor"? Certainly that's not the case at Apple.
- rdtsc 9y ago> they “were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it.” Indeed, diversity is about filling a quota on visible traits like genders, shade of skin color and so on. > “More importantly, I want to assure you Apple’s view and our dedication to diversity has not changed.” Well it's good to know what Apple's view of diversity is. Sometimes it can be ambiguous and one might actually believe them when they say "We deeply believe that diversity drives innovation". But this cleared it up. Yeah they don't really believe it drives innovation. If they did every manager in the chain and team member would go out of their way to hire "diverse" people because it would directly improve the product and the bottom line, but they don't believe that as institution. Neither does Google or other big tech company. They wouldn't need a "diversity president" if they did. Diverse candidates would find their way to their new positions pretty easily, helped by stock options, good salaries and so on. Look how efficiently these companies seek and find leaders in various technologies or project or areas of interest. What they believe is avoiding bad PR. They don't want to be criticized by some tech gossip blog about not being "diverse" and deep down they know how that tech blog measure "diversity". Also tangentially related, notice how many times age is included in "diversity" spectrum? Somehow hiring people of various ages is not seen as improving diversity because well, it's not about gender or skin color, so gossip tech blogs won't notice and still criticize them. In light of that, it makes complete sense that Denise had to apologize. But it was a very useful move as well simply because it made the true values more transparent. Given everything else, at least it's good to have more transparency and clarity.
- interfixus 9y agoThis surrealist diversity fascism is getting scarier day by day. And poses, in full dystopian ironic splendor, the greatest imaginable threat to real human diversity.
- mcbruiser4 9y agoclearly logic and rationality have no place in today's political thinking, especially when it comes to so-called diversity.
- burntrelish1273 9y agoI don't buy "Apple is a SJW shop" hysteria automagically. If it were the case, that would be depressing because win-lose, collective-punishment identity politics is corrosive, victim-bully fascist ideology masquerading as egalitarian enlightenment. Such behaviors wouldn't add value and encourage talent to stay. Smith seemed to have the right ideas but perhaps couldn't implement them and/or had political troubles. Maybe she said other things that were inconsistent. Only Apple management and her have a better idea of what transpired.
- TYPE_FASTER 9y agoIt's always the vocal fringe that's covered and published by the media. When I was at college during the nineties, the college paper and the news coverage of the school was usually about some political fracas involving one to ten people. The other 15k+ people were trying to pass their classes, partying, or both.
- Simulacra 9y agoI am a woman, and I work for a software company. We essentially hire by resume only, and we pay a service to scrub resumes and cover letters of anything that might reveal gender, race, or ethnicity. The outside firm does all of our interviews, whiteboards, etc. and only at the very end does the hiring manager get to meet the prospective employee, and say yes or no. To my knowledge, we've rarely said no, and we let the qualifications speak for themselves. This has lead to an office of about 45% women, and 40% minority. I think this is very good diversity.
- gnicholas 9y agoWhy is there a need to scrub resumes if they're doing all the interviews/whiteboards/etc? Also, you mention an office of 45% women and 40% minority. Is the split the same for your technical team?