4 ms·

Because everyone else at Tumblr more or less young, male, single, caucasian, straight, European ancestry. The Office manager was female, one of the HR reps was

Because everyone else at Tumblr more or less young, male, single, caucasian, straight, European ancestry. The Office manager was female, one of the HR reps was African American, head of security had kids, PHP developers were always blowing through so occasionally someone diverse would slip in there, but in large LGBTQ was the only category where there was diversity and they hired a lot from that category. If you were LGBTQ and had a cat it was more or less impossible to not be hired. All this would come up occasionally in the Friday company meetings and David would always promise to do better but the demographics never shifted much. One of the Unix admins was allergic to dogs if that counts towards diversity.

foldr 6y ago
I wasn't always a software engineer, and in my previous career (academic linguist) there were lots of gay men. This wasn't because linguistics departments were making a concerted effort to hire gay men. Nor are linguistics departments in the USA particularly diverse in other respects (e.g. race). In general, it's a mistake to conclude that any 'diverse' people you see around must have been hired according to some special diversity criterion. There are probably lots of contributing factors – tumblr's large LGBTQ user base being an obvious candidate. It's not super helpful to LGBTQ folks to spread unfounded rumors that large numbers of us are just in our jobs because we're LGBTQ. Unless you've got some really strong evidence, I'd have to say that your remarks on that point were somewhat misjudged. I understand that you mostly wanted to tell a colorful story, but at the same time, it's annoying to see these ideas spread, even in a somewhat flippant context.
- throwawayyy1986 6y ago
  As another LGBTQ person, I find your post petulant. He had an interesting story. He's not promoting whatever "harmful" stereotype you're supposing.

foldr 6y ago

I wasn't always a software engineer, and in my previous career (academic linguist) there were lots of gay men. This wasn't because linguistics departments were making a concerted effort to hire gay men. Nor are linguistics departments in the USA particularly diverse in other respects (e.g. race). In general, it's a mistake to conclude that any 'diverse' people you see around must have been hired according to some special diversity criterion. There are probably lots of contributing factors – tumblr's large LGBTQ user base being an obvious candidate. It's not super helpful to LGBTQ folks to spread unfounded rumors that large numbers of us are just in our jobs because we're LGBTQ. Unless you've got some really strong evidence, I'd have to say that your remarks on that point were somewhat misjudged. I understand that you mostly wanted to tell a colorful story, but at the same time, it's annoying to see these ideas spread, even in a somewhat flippant context.

throwawayyy1986 6y ago
As another LGBTQ person, I find your post petulant. He had an interesting story. He's not promoting whatever "harmful" stereotype you're supposing.