5 ms·

"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if you

by fipple 8y ago

"Diversity" is just overrated completely, as a concept. The highest-performing company in America, Apple, has close to zero race or gender diversity, and if you peel back one layer, it has very little diversity of thought" as well. Why? Because the company was built to execute Steve Jobs' ideas. The more that any given executive could run an emulator of Steve Jobs' brain, the less of Jobs' time he required. "Ideas are cheap, execution is everything" we have all heard. Well, if you don't need a lot of ideas, but you need a streamlined execution organization, diversity is a huge weakness! For every fun example of "Oh, only a tattoo wearer would recognize that this product wouldn't work for people with tattoos! Diversity would have halped!" there are the Silicon Valley giants, achieving ridiculous financial results with highly non-diverse teams.

batiudrami 8y ago
It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good because it is designed such that, as best we can, everyone has equal opportunities. While, as a white man the fact that I may have been overlooked in graduate programs because many engineering firms have quotas sucks, but it is one small impediment in a world which was built for me to succeed more easily than others. Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.
- chii 8y ago
  > diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.
  - TheCoelacanth 8y ago
    Financial performance does not indicate that the company's actions are ethical. To the contrary, it is often the opposite because one of the prime motivators for unethical behavior is the promise of financial gain.
- ramblerman 8y ago
  > affirmative action is the best we have I think the problem with affirmative action in the gender space is that there is some evidence to suggest that a purely unbiased world would not be one where every industry had a perfect 50/50 split. So when you approach the problem from the 'outcome' end, it's hard to know what outcome you should be aiming for.
- belorn 8y ago
  If affirmative action is the best tool, why not make it into a general rule or law. At minimum why doesn't the government who love to talk about diversity implement it as a generally policy for their own hiring? A simple "if a government job title has less than X% compared to existing proportion of the population, then any new hiring must apply affirmative action to correct it". One of the biggest problem with affirmative action is that it is always used in a discriminating way. If one were to sort the worst gender or race segregated profession guess how proportional affirmative action is being applied? A while back I took a list of the top 20 gender segregated profession here in Sweden and most of them were government employed, and there is no policy in regard to hiring procedures to address that. No one is even suggesting affirmative action to address the worst professions with 99%/1% and higher gender segregation. To give some context for Sweden, 90% of the employed people work in a profession that is considered gender segregated. That is to say if you take a random employed woman or man there is a 90% chance that they work somewhere where the ratio is worse than 60/40. If affirmative action was only used to address gender segregation then 9 out of 10 new hiring should be using it.
  - qqengineer 8y ago
    It is law bro - just it's only law for federal contractors or subcontractors with more than 50 people and at a certain revenue level that haven't met the 4/5ths rule. #doyourresearch is becoming a common theme in this thread...
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
I have never understood the point of view that diversity is unnecessary. Quite apart from the most diverse places I've worked having been by far the most enjoyable across my career. You say Apple has almost none, yet is doing great. So what? Lots of things that were or are shit have done well. Even things that are now illegal. Do you like discrimination? Every company the size of Apple should have people of all backgrounds, ages, sex, race. For every room full of twenty somethings designing a "great" product achieving ridiculous financial results there will be a dozen features or possibilities missed to invisibly cater better for more groups (potential customers). Perhaps they need to use it in subtly different ways, or have different goals that needs an option or overlay not seen by the room full of bros. Perhaps when you hit 50 and your eyesight isn't quite so sharp so you need reading specs before you reach for the phone you realise Apple's much vaunted, industry leading, accessibility is shit. A few 40 year olds on all the teams might have noticed that and come up with better ideas and solutions than the current dross. As to diversity being a drawback in execution, what utter twaddle.
- xtrapolate 8y ago
  > "Do you like discrimination?" I'd argue "diversity quotas" are the very archetype of discrimination.
throwappppp 8y ago
Diversity is advertised too much those days, but in reality, it barely matters. The advocates need to further explain why it is good for the team and such. Since many companies, including my own, implementing the diversity initiative by lowering the bar for the diversity candidates, even those that are being turned down at earliest stage, still interestingly, being rescued later. However, even people take issues about the candidate in question, they are afraid to voice any opinions, because the fear of being labeled as bigots. As ironic as it gets, during the group meeting, that the said candidate apparently doesn't have any deliverable for 6 months, still being praised with great efforts and hard works, while others in the team are pressured to take over what is supposedly to be done by the candidate. I don't think this put the diversity initiative into good lights. It only further convinces people that it is more to the vanity of higher management other than productivity/benefits of the team/company itself.
- ikeyany 8y ago
  You work at a company where minorities get praised for not having any deliverable in 6 months? Which company? If this does happen at your company, there's no need to use a throwaway account.
  - throwappppp 8y ago
    The rule of thumb is not disclosing any identifiable info on the internet. :P The company is a big one, a named one, but with some age on it. As absurd as it sounds, the candidate is hired for a hotly sought after position, that supposedly requires production ready coding skills AND battle tested machine learning skills. Yet the candidate comes with no knowledge of Python or Linux.
    - dubdub55 8y ago
      Occam's razor. You're leaving some critical information out. No one gets hired for a competitive ML role without basic backend knowledge, let alone "python or linux".
matthewmacleod 8y ago
This is an obvious false correlation. You have no evidence that Apple would not be even more successful were the engineering team more diverse.
- xtrapolate 8y ago
  > "This is an obvious false correlation. You have no evidence that Apple would not be even more successful were the engineering team more diverse." This argument goes both ways. We also don't have concrete evidence proving that "diversifying the engineering team" will necessarily result in success.

by fipple 8y ago

batiudrami 8y ago

It makes me sad that you think diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. Diversity is good because it is designed such that, as best we can, everyone has equal opportunities. While, as a white man the fact that I may have been overlooked in graduate programs because many engineering firms have quotas sucks, but it is one small impediment in a world which was built for me to succeed more easily than others. Frankly, while it has its flaws, affirmative action is the best we have. A truly blind hiring process is very uncommon (I have never heard of it before this article), and everyone knows that the best way to get a job is through a friend, reinforcing the culture which already exists at a company.

chii 8y ago
> diversity is overrated because there are corporations who get "great financial results" without it. in a competitive market, the company that performs well would be the one that's diverse, if the theory is to be believed. I have not yet seen much evidence for or against though.
- TheCoelacanth 8y ago
  Financial performance does not indicate that the company's actions are ethical. To the contrary, it is often the opposite because one of the prime motivators for unethical behavior is the promise of financial gain.
ramblerman 8y ago
> affirmative action is the best we have I think the problem with affirmative action in the gender space is that there is some evidence to suggest that a purely unbiased world would not be one where every industry had a perfect 50/50 split. So when you approach the problem from the 'outcome' end, it's hard to know what outcome you should be aiming for.
belorn 8y ago
If affirmative action is the best tool, why not make it into a general rule or law. At minimum why doesn't the government who love to talk about diversity implement it as a generally policy for their own hiring? A simple "if a government job title has less than X% compared to existing proportion of the population, then any new hiring must apply affirmative action to correct it". One of the biggest problem with affirmative action is that it is always used in a discriminating way. If one were to sort the worst gender or race segregated profession guess how proportional affirmative action is being applied? A while back I took a list of the top 20 gender segregated profession here in Sweden and most of them were government employed, and there is no policy in regard to hiring procedures to address that. No one is even suggesting affirmative action to address the worst professions with 99%/1% and higher gender segregation. To give some context for Sweden, 90% of the employed people work in a profession that is considered gender segregated. That is to say if you take a random employed woman or man there is a 90% chance that they work somewhere where the ratio is worse than 60/40. If affirmative action was only used to address gender segregation then 9 out of 10 new hiring should be using it.
- qqengineer 8y ago
  It is law bro - just it's only law for federal contractors or subcontractors with more than 50 people and at a certain revenue level that haven't met the 4/5ths rule. #doyourresearch is becoming a common theme in this thread...

NeedMoreTea 8y ago

I have never understood the point of view that diversity is unnecessary. Quite apart from the most diverse places I've worked having been by far the most enjoyable across my career. You say Apple has almost none, yet is doing great. So what? Lots of things that were or are shit have done well. Even things that are now illegal. Do you like discrimination? Every company the size of Apple should have people of all backgrounds, ages, sex, race. For every room full of twenty somethings designing a "great" product achieving ridiculous financial results there will be a dozen features or possibilities missed to invisibly cater better for more groups (potential customers). Perhaps they need to use it in subtly different ways, or have different goals that needs an option or overlay not seen by the room full of bros. Perhaps when you hit 50 and your eyesight isn't quite so sharp so you need reading specs before you reach for the phone you realise Apple's much vaunted, industry leading, accessibility is shit. A few 40 year olds on all the teams might have noticed that and come up with better ideas and solutions than the current dross. As to diversity being a drawback in execution, what utter twaddle.

xtrapolate 8y ago
> "Do you like discrimination?" I'd argue "diversity quotas" are the very archetype of discrimination.

throwappppp 8y ago

Diversity is advertised too much those days, but in reality, it barely matters. The advocates need to further explain why it is good for the team and such. Since many companies, including my own, implementing the diversity initiative by lowering the bar for the diversity candidates, even those that are being turned down at earliest stage, still interestingly, being rescued later. However, even people take issues about the candidate in question, they are afraid to voice any opinions, because the fear of being labeled as bigots. As ironic as it gets, during the group meeting, that the said candidate apparently doesn't have any deliverable for 6 months, still being praised with great efforts and hard works, while others in the team are pressured to take over what is supposedly to be done by the candidate. I don't think this put the diversity initiative into good lights. It only further convinces people that it is more to the vanity of higher management other than productivity/benefits of the team/company itself.

ikeyany 8y ago
You work at a company where minorities get praised for not having any deliverable in 6 months? Which company? If this does happen at your company, there's no need to use a throwaway account.
- throwappppp 8y ago
  The rule of thumb is not disclosing any identifiable info on the internet. :P The company is a big one, a named one, but with some age on it. As absurd as it sounds, the candidate is hired for a hotly sought after position, that supposedly requires production ready coding skills AND battle tested machine learning skills. Yet the candidate comes with no knowledge of Python or Linux.
  - dubdub55 8y ago
    Occam's razor. You're leaving some critical information out. No one gets hired for a competitive ML role without basic backend knowledge, let alone "python or linux".

matthewmacleod 8y ago

This is an obvious false correlation. You have no evidence that Apple would not be even more successful were the engineering team more diverse.

xtrapolate 8y ago
> "This is an obvious false correlation. You have no evidence that Apple would not be even more successful were the engineering team more diverse." This argument goes both ways. We also don't have concrete evidence proving that "diversifying the engineering team" will necessarily result in success.