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However, it avoids a perception problem which may be far worse: the hypothetical perception that the people drawing up the layoffs were racist and that they dis
by LeifCarrotson 4y ago
However, it avoids a perception problem which may be far worse: the hypothetical perception that the people drawing up the layoffs were racist and that they disproportionately affected minorities. They wrote "Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused.." on making sure they did not.
If they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random, there's a chance that someone later would say "Twilio employees are 35% female, 33% Asian, 9% Latino, and 6% Black, but the laid-off employees were 11% Latino! Racism!" and turn a mob against them. Once the media/Twitter/mob believe that Twilio HR and Twilio executives are racist, those execs might try to defend themselves by saying: "We weighted based on performance reviews, added a bit of statistical noise, and then did a random selection. We believe those performance reviews to be objective and free of racial bias. We didn't even realize that Latinos were slightly over-represented in the layoffs until you mentioned it, but it looks to be merely statistical chance. We actually fired slightly more white people and more men than the statistics would suggest, we're not bigots."
...Do you think that would work?
It's far easier to defend against the accusation of being overly woke than it is to defend against the accusation of being racist, so while you'd rather be neither, it's better to overtly and publicly fail in the safer direction.
- crackercrews 4y ago> If they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random This is a false dichotomy. They could have done layoffs based on the company's needs and the performance of the employees. That isn't random. Your big picture point amounts to a heckler's veto. The more you cater to the heckler, the more powerful the heckler becomes.
- kbelder 4y ago>it avoids a perception problem which may be far worse: the hypothetical perception that the people drawing up the layoffs were racist No, it kind of cemented that perception.
- coredog64 4y agoThe EEOC will have something to say if your layoff disproportionate effects a protected group. The right thing here is for management to keep their mouth shut and point people to the EEOC if they believe this layoff was disproportionate.
- code_biologist 4y agoThe issue is that the layoff will disproportionately affect protected groups. Engineering is disproportionately male, east asian, south asian, and white. Companies with explicit diversity targets make up for this by compensating in other company orgs (HR, marketing, sales, admin) making them disproportionately female, black, and hispanic. This means when you keep good engineers but lay off HR, marketing, sales, and admin employees, the layoffs look really bad in terms of affected protected groups.
- crackercrews 4y agoBingo. This is the double-edged sword of heavy affirmative action in hiring. If things get tough and you have to make cuts to save the company, the people who you should let go are disproportionately from affirmative action groups.
- ForHackernews 4y agoObviously the answer is to fire the expensive engineers (keep a skeleton crew for maintenance and bugfixes) and keep the sales & marketing folks. If 20 years working in engineering has taught me anything it's that sales and marketing is where the real money is made.
- pyuser583 4y agoFrom what I’ve seen sales works off commission. For the company, this is a curse in good times, and a blessing in bad times.
- drc500free 4y ago> f they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random, there's a chance that someone later would say "Twilio employees are 35% female, 33% Asian, 9% Latino, and 6% Black, but the laid-off employees were 11% Latino! Racism!" It's not a chance, it's a guarantee. Every layoff gets lawsuits claiming discrimination and has so for decades. Which is why virtually every company does this analysis as a normal part of executing a layoff... and has done so for decades.