3 ms·

> This statement is meaningless without knowing how many black employees were eligible or applied. I would like to know the denominator as well. It’s hard to r

> This statement is meaningless without knowing how many black employees were eligible or applied. I would like to know the denominator as well. It’s hard to really mean anything without the number of L8s in total, how many L8s were hired, etc It’s actually odd that the press release doesn’t include this info. I expect that it’s hard to get and they have to sue to get it, or the numbers aren’t in their favor so weren’t reported. Race is really hard to “eyeball” since it’s not necessarily clear. For example, I was working on a team studying this and we surveyed a group of a few hundred people and asked what a fair distribution by race should be. It was interesting that many people overestimated how much their race should be represented, overestimated how much of the population their race makes up, and underestimated their race within coworkers. It kind of makes sense as not many people know even basic demographic data. It made communicating with data hard because when sharing that 25% of positions were held by African Americans and 20% of leadership, the most common feedback was that these percentages needed to go up to match population distribution. Which is odd because AA is like 12-15% of population. So even with these numerator and denominator numbers it’s hard to understand what’s ok. Hopefully the lawsuit will result in an investigation and if there is discrimination, to have it corrected.

bradhe 6y ago
Man I'd love to see the data from the outcome of that study you mention. That seems really interesting. Reminds me of that anecdote about something like 80% of engineers consider themselves to be exceptional compared to their peers.
- prepend 6y ago
  This was our internal data and internal questionnaires in a group of about 1000 with 200 responses. I wish there was more research in this area. I’ve found a hard time with HR type data as it’s all either too general or so specific it’s never published or shared. I’ve wondered about programmer efficiency for decades now and wish there was some objective way to measure. I’ve never been part of a programmer labor lawsuit but I wonder how that would go as it’s really common for people with similar titles to make very different pay and it’s usually based on completely subjective measures of impact. But my basic understanding of this stuff from business school is that the onus is on the employee to prove a pattern and just “my boss subjectively pays me less” is perfectly legal. The cases I know of are ones like WalMart’s sex discrimination case [0] that was eventually won (or lost if you’re Walmart) based on the ease of measuring gender (compared to race) and the size of the organization. I think part of the issue is measuring race and ethnicity is hard. Many people’s race and ethnicity aren’t necessarily widely known so informal methods of looking at the company prof pics isn’t definitive. It’s also hard because race is self-selecting so if someone responds to a survey there’s not really anything that can be done to qualify responses unless they are specifically claiming tribal nation status. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes

bradhe 6y ago

Man I'd love to see the data from the outcome of that study you mention. That seems really interesting. Reminds me of that anecdote about something like 80% of engineers consider themselves to be exceptional compared to their peers.

prepend 6y ago
This was our internal data and internal questionnaires in a group of about 1000 with 200 responses. I wish there was more research in this area. I’ve found a hard time with HR type data as it’s all either too general or so specific it’s never published or shared. I’ve wondered about programmer efficiency for decades now and wish there was some objective way to measure. I’ve never been part of a programmer labor lawsuit but I wonder how that would go as it’s really common for people with similar titles to make very different pay and it’s usually based on completely subjective measures of impact. But my basic understanding of this stuff from business school is that the onus is on the employee to prove a pattern and just “my boss subjectively pays me less” is perfectly legal. The cases I know of are ones like WalMart’s sex discrimination case [0] that was eventually won (or lost if you’re Walmart) based on the ease of measuring gender (compared to race) and the size of the organization. I think part of the issue is measuring race and ethnicity is hard. Many people’s race and ethnicity aren’t necessarily widely known so informal methods of looking at the company prof pics isn’t definitive. It’s also hard because race is self-selecting so if someone responds to a survey there’s not really anything that can be done to qualify responses unless they are specifically claiming tribal nation status. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart_Stores,_Inc._v._Dukes