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Alphabet shareholders reject diversity proposal backed by employees
- bananatron 8y agoVery interesting precedent for tech companies where the employees traditionally have a lot of influence over policy like this.
- mc32 8y agoInstitutional as well as executives with controlling shares were against these proposals. They announced their opposition a while ago in one of their investor comms.
- minitel 8y agoThis wasn't something that all employees wanted. Tying pay to diversity initiatives creates a terrible perverse incentive that leaves all parties worse off than how they started. -t. a "minority" in tech
- pm90 8y agohmmm would have helped if they had detailed exactly what some of those proposals actually did. This is bad reporting.
- gameswithgo 8y agoYeah I read this article and have zero idea what is going on.
- Kenji 8y agoIf you hire the best, you don't get diversity. In tech companies, you get a company full of men, often white or Asian men because those are the people who put in the work and acquire the skills necessary to do good work because they are deeply interested in the subject matter. Optimising for diversity is at odds with having a company that performs well. It makes you hire people who are not a fit for their position, but they are hired to satisfy some kind of ultimate balance between the sexes and races. A true meritocracy is blind to race and sex, all it cares about is if someone is good at their job, and if that's 80% males then be it so, and if that's 80% females then be it so!
- foolrush 8y agoOh fuck off. Someone has to say it. Down vote away.
- minitel 8y agos|he didn't say that only White and Asian men were capable of working in tech. Only that those groups tended to be most interested in computers. There is nothing wrong with pointing that out. If we use majoring in computer science as a proxy for "interest in computers" the data certainly backs up this claim.
- mattnewton 8y agoI don’t disagree but here’s your downvote anyways, since this doesn’t help dispell gp’s views/comments, just says that it isn’t polite to talk about it.
- throwa_way_ 8y agoOkay but Google doesn't actually want to hire the best -- everybody knows that. So your point is not relevant.
- didgeoridoo 8y agoThere is good evidence that diverse teams lead to improved creativity, at the cost of added conflict because of fewer shared assumptions. In a technology company, where it's critical to maximize creativity and question assumptions, and where conflict can be navigated with good communication practices and professional management, can you understand why diversity may be a net-positive tool in building great teams and great products?
- gameswithgo 8y ago>There is good evidence that diverse teams lead to improved creativity, at the cost of added conflict because of fewer shared assumptions. What kind of diversity? In what problem domains? Is it better to hire a woman from MIT to join a bunch of men from MIT, or to hire a man from a Chinese university. Which is the real diversity? Of course you could go all out and hire the Chinese woman. In either case how much are you willing to adjust hiring standards in order to achieve the diversity? I don't imagine anyone has quantified this kind of thing. So everyone would just be guessing.
- nimish 8y agoBurying the important info that Alphabet's major shareholders are its founders and senior executives. The headline should read "Alphabet management votes down employee backed diversity proposal".
- sonnyblarney 8y agoWhat's also kind of buried is that the 'employees' are a small fraction of Google's staff and do not represent the overall staff at company, as the headline kind of implies. Imagine if the proposal were put to company-wide referendum and quashed? I suggest that a policy representing the 'balance of views' would look something rather different than something proposed by a group of highly motivated 'slightly activist' employees.
- lainga 8y agoPer the article, "several hundred employees", out of a 2017 Alphabet headcount of 80,110.
- asdsa5325 8y agoIncorrect. Alphabet's major shareholders are institutions. Institutions own 69.4% of Alphabet.
- nostrademons 8y agoLarry + Sergey + Eric have majority voting control, though. Each class B share (which they hold) counts for 10 class A shares and an infinite number of class C shares when it comes to corporate governance.
- nimish 8y agoThose are mostly non-voting shares, making them minor shareholders even though they have the most numeric shares. Alphabet insiders (read: Brin, Page and Schmidt, along with other executives) control the vote.
- lowry 8y agoShould we read "backed by some employees"?
- friedman23 8y agoIf I were to ever run my own business I would never allow these stupid non business related discussions to proliferate. I still can't believe they dropped the Pentagon contract.
- timbuckley 8y agoDo you consider ethics business related?
- Fomite 8y agoIf you're a public company, you really don't get to make this call.
- webkike 8y agoA business and the world around it are not divorced entities
- jl2718 8y agoI seriously doubt they dropped it because of a protest. They set up shop in Beijing to do the same work for China. More likely, the Pentagon got outbid.
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoMy understanding is that most diversity proposals do not have evidence showing that they work to increase diversity (other than affirmative action type policies). I would love to be proven wrong on this. I'm not criticizing the goal of increasing diversity. I think it's important to provide the same opportunities to people regardless of background, but we should judge policies by their effectiveness rather than their intentions.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoHow do you define diversity? What are you even measuring? Am I diverse because I’m left handed or does it have to be about skin colour, gender and sexual preferences?
- jeffreyrogers 8y agoI think I see where you're going with this, and it's not really a discussion I'm interested in getting involved with because any time I've seen a discussion about whether and what diversity matters it devolves into the two sides talking past each other. On the one side you have people arguing that personality traits are unevenly distributed through the population so pursuing diversity is not worthwhile since the existing state of things already reflects people's ability to do the required work. On the other hand you have people arguing that systemic oppression prevents minority groups from being represented in proportion to their abilities. Whichever side is right is largely irrelevant to the point I was making, which is that even if you care about diversity, there aren't really effective ways to increase it besides affirmative action style policies. I might be wrong about this, but I have not seen evidence of other diversity policies that are actually effective.
- Eridrus 8y ago> there aren't really effective ways to increase it besides affirmative action style policies I think it depends on how broadly you define "affirmative action style policies", i.e. if you say that encompasses anything that helps one group more than others, then sure, but if your comment is more about quotas/preferential selection I think there are plenty of policies that exist. Assuming you do mean the latter, some examples I have seen implemented include: more flexible work environments, interview coaching for diverse candidates, outreach to diverse groups to ensure that they actually apply at the rates that they exist in the pipeline.
- theatraine 8y agoI'm curious if anyone has examples where diversity led to better product creation, or counterexamples where companies were hurt by since the designers overlooked certain groups. One notable example was Google photos racist blunder: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33347866 Arguably Apple not focusing on women's health for the longest time could have also been mitigated by more female product people as well.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoI strongly, strongly doubt that having more dark skinned people on their staff would have prevented their "Google photos racist blunder". I remember a similar complaint that Google must not have any black people on staff because Maps was pronouncing "Malcolm X Boulevard" as "Malcom 10 Boulevard". To which I would respond that I have a hard time believing people who make those complaints have any understanding of how software development works or how bugs are introduced.
- theatraine 8y agoIt's hard to say if it would have helped. My rationale would be that the engineers commonly dogfood their own products and do ad-hoc testing so a black engineer may have been able to catch the bug before it hits production. Taking the example to the logical extreme I doubt the bug would have hit production if the entire development team was dark-skinned.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoNo it wouldn’t have made it to production if the training dataset had more dark skinned people and lots of gorillas in it.
- trjordan 8y agoTry Googling "diversity performance teams." "Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter" - HBR [1] "Diversity and Work Group Performance" - Stanford [2] "New Research: Diversity + Inclusion = Better Decision Making At Work" - Forbes [3] There's a drumbeat of this stuff, both old and new, that comes out constantly. [1] https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter [2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-performance https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-p... [3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-research-diversity-inclusion-better-decision-making-at-work/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-resea...
- emerged 8y agoEquality of outcome is an ideological rather than rational stance and is losing its foothold on account of rationally justified kickback. Both because it necessitates active, purposeful discrimination to enforce and because the result is less value to shareholders (at least on account of the cost to enforce).
- ShabbosGoy 8y agoI’m slightly more pessimistic. I think the shareholders want to make salary discussion as opaque as possible, so they can continue to screw their employees.
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoYou’ve created a strawman by assuming that equality of outcome is the goal of this proposal. A drive for increased diversity doesn’t necessarily mean equality of outcome, I think even hard line activists know that this is an unachievable goal with diminishing returns.
- oh_sigh 8y agoGoogle is already committed to matching the distribution of genders in the job market by 2020. What would a proposal that goes even further than that look like, where women and some minorities are over-represented at Google relative to the job market? Can that be anything other than equality of outcome?
- albertgoeswoof 8y agoOutcome equality would imply matching up all jobs to employees that fit diversity characteristics to some agreed ratio based on population of working age people within a given area. How you set those two variable sets is arbitrary and subjective depending on your own prejudices and diversity preferences. E.g. Distribution of genders is probably the easiest one as it’s binary (almost) and even throughout all cohorts. But choosing the ratio to target is subjective.
- Borealid 8y ago
- harimau777 8y agoSort of a side issue, but something I've never understood: According to http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/ http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States, 56% of Google employees are white compared to 77% of the US population. Doesn't that mean that racial minorities are actually overrepresented at Google? Or am I understanding the statistics wrong?
- trjordan 8y agoWhite Americans includes hispanic and non-hispanic. In particular, though, the only over-represented group is asians: 35% vs 5%.
- rubicon33 8y agoReally? Every form I've ever seen has had a separate check box for "Latino / Hispanic"...
- adventured 8y agoIt's not uncommon. The 77% figure quoted in the top comment includes Hispanics ("White Hispanics"). The White non-Hispanic population is 62%.
- harimau777 8y agoI think often there's an option for race and then a separate option for Latino/Non-Latino. I would guess that most Latino people would probably be White and Latino, although its not something I'm super knowledgeable about.
- Lazare 8y agoMost people in the "Hispanic or Latino" group would also be in the "White" group, although there are not insignificant numbers of black or asian hispanics. Also keep in mind that in official US usage that term basically means "someone from a Spanish cultural background OR a Latin American country". Although some agencies specifically exclude countries from Latin America without a Spanish or Portuguese culture. So a white guy whose grandparents immigrated from Spain counts (the grandparents spoke Spanish), and a Quechua from Bolivia who recently immigrated and only speaks Runasimi counts (Bolivia has a Spanish culture), and a black guy from Guyana might count. The OMB says no (Guyana was colonised by the British), but the Census says yes (it's in South America, so close enough). The system makes very little sense.
- jl2718 8y ago“a gender pay gap and lack of diversity could make it difficult for the company to hire and retain workers” The solution to a constrained maximization is never greater than the unconstrained solution. So how does adding a diversity constraint make it easier to hire? I often wonder about the supposed rigor of the hiring process. Google is being eaten from the inside. Will not last.
- adventured 8y agoThe extreme difficulty and extraordinary financial cost of challenging their search product, guarantees it will in fact last. It can't be replaced until or unless there's a direct hit / directly competing technology inflection that involves search that they miss (for example, had they missed mobile and not acquired & developed Android, that could have been an opening). It's that way for the exact same reason Microsoft being a mess to varying degrees for 10-15 years didn't wreck the company because the Windows + Office duopoly perpetually printed vast profit. Even when they screwed up the products at times. The tolerance level of insanity, chaos, idiocy, whatever, that can occur within Google before it's threatening to their existence, is far beyond where they're at now. The search engine has no meaningful competitive threats currently, they can coast for at least a decade on the search product as it is now. Financially, they have net tangible assets that make them look more like Berkshire Hathaway than a tech company. Their net tangible assets are greater than Apple's, because they're basically debt free ($140b in net tangibles, $102b in cash). Microsoft's net tangibles are $28b by comparison. With Google's balance sheet and the search monopoly, they can spin in circles juggling mistake after mistake, with a rotting culture, for many years and have nothing to seriously worry about.
- pandaman 8y agoHistory shows us that the ability to survive chaos and general incompetency is orthogonal to the ability to withstand deliberate and focused sabotage. For the former you just need to be big, heavy and slow so the chaotic movements decay and extinguish each other. And Google is, as you noticed, very well suited for that. The latter, however, requires active counter-actions IMHO. Being big and slow is not going to protect you from the "fifth column". It's not like Google has 0 competition - Baidu, Yandex, even Bing, all can easily take its place in search when/if an opportunity opens.
- 8x8x8 8y agoTotally right. Why do we need to now consider the race, sexual frustrations, gender identification issues, and bedroom proclivities of a candidate when deciding to hire or fire a candidate? It turns out that there are more whites and asians in STEM because of tiger-moms and other cultural norms like the focus on doing well in school vs. sports, TV watching, and sitting around. Disagree and get all-emotional but those are the facts. I've never once felt the need to stack rank candidates by skin color or gender or ethnic origin until I worked for a morally bankrupt startup with a "People Operations" team led by a short-haired feminist on a crusade against "unconscious bias". How about we put the race & LGBTQ cards away for a day and go back to the "old school" way of hiring qualified candidates. After all, is that not how Google was created in the first place? Or should have Eric Schmidt been skipped over for someone darker?
- bsaul 8y agoThis kind of issues is so typical of SV... When i think at the average salary at Google, the fact that they’ve lived as a company out of the same product for more than 15 years, and still do, and that their biggest concern isn’t to survive or gain marketshare, but rather PR issues... i feel like looking at those reality TV shows , seeing the lives or insanely privileged people that really don’t know what to make of their time, while the rest of us strive just to have a decent life. It’s really time other geographical places, in other countries, become good competitors.
- pm90 8y agoIts all just your perception. In those 15 years they have made the following contributions (and this is just a select few): Golang, MapReduce, Kubernetes, Containers (well, C Groups), GMail, Android, Chrome. Not to mention all the amazing open source contributions and god knows what else they do in secret.
- kyle_v 8y agoJust to name a few more: translate, drive, adsense, images, earth, maps, glass, cloud platform, chrome TV, sketchup. Yes they are primarily a search engine, but they are heavily diversified, not to mention one company being responsible for basically the entire consumer internet is insane.
- bsaul 8y agoI was talking about their source of income. I think adwords / adsense still accounts for the the absolute majority of it.
- Jerry2 8y agoThis story got censored pretty quick. It was on the front page, now it's on 2nd (soon 3rd) page. Why was it censored, admins?
- dogruck 8y agoMy how times change. Years ago, when Google was young, their recruiters contacted me. Their pitch: We only hire the best of the best. We’re focused on top students, from the top schools. The interviews are hard, and most people fail. Today, it seems Google’s pitch is: Okay, we need to top-off this demographic bucket, and you’re in that bucket. Will you help us even-out this demographic pie chart?
- Simulacra 8y agoThe whims and desires of a wealthy, privileged employee base, meets head on with the cold realities of the stock market.
- senectus1 8y agowell that's an interesting line to draw in the sand. will watch this one with interest.
- middleOFNowhere 8y agothe left's circular firing squad hath commenced!!!!
- middleOFNowhere 8y agowatching the left eat itself alive is certainly entertaining. well I guess they can retreat to the crying closet for respite.