Institutional as well as executives with controlling shares were against these proposals. They announced their opposition a while ago in one of their investor comms.
This 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.
If 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!
s|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.
I 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.
There 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?
>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.
Excellent point. That's not the diversity they're looking for though, ie. they want diversity they agree with. I'm sure there'd be an employee revolt in fact.
I don't think certain races/genders/etc. are innately better at programming; however, wouldn't the quoted statement still be true as long as there is inequality higher up the pipeline? E.g. minorities have less access to college prep, therefore less minorities have the opportunity to become the best, therefore hiring the best results disproportionately hiring non-minorities?
1. It depends on what you measure as "best". What level are you hiring for? Do you expect a good learner, or a uni-educated person?
2. It depends on whether you already included or ignored communities which are statistically disadvantaged. But if you openly say that hiring for diversity (as in inclusiveness, not equal numbers) leads to worse hires, do you think the best people from minorities will want to work for you? That would be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is absolutely true. It's also something that has never existed. "Black-sounding" names on job applications get fewer calls for interviews, women of childbearing age are hired less frequently because of fears that they may choose to prioritize children over their job, etc.
Additionally, this ignores the number of people who would be able to advance further if not for the systemic issues holding them back, e.g. rampant sexual harassment, men talking over women, and politicization of human rights (especially trans rights). A push for increased diversity may lead to a temporary drop in average skills (though I find this exceptionally unlikely), while leading to a large increase in the long term by breaking down the issues holding back minority (in tech) populations from achieving their potential.
> This is absolutely true. It's also something that has never existed. "Black-sounding" names on job applications get fewer calls for interviews, women of childbearing age are hired less frequently because of fears that they may choose to prioritize children over their job, etc.
Actually, double blind hiring processes have been tried. They largely reproduced the existing demographics, and so were ultimately scrapped for not producing enough diversity.
What'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.
Larry + 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.
If 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.
I 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.
My 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.
How 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?
I 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.
> 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.
I'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
Arguably Apple not focusing on women's health for the longest time could have also been mitigated by more female product people as well.
I 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.
It'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.
These are interesting evidence, but they don’t explore the question of why. The idea that mere color of skin would be causal to performance in anything other than hide-and-seek is kind of anaethema, right?
I’m certain that there is a legitimate reason for the effect, but people are right to be skepical without any exploration of the cause. Are diverse teams more likely to disagree? Do they exhibit complementary recall of facts? Different modes of creativity?
I think a more complete explanation of causality would result in a much more concerted effort to increase diversity and a lot less resistance. As it is, it feels like the diversity ‘lobby’ is actually trying to create controversy instead of proving value.
It's sociology, they can't tell you the reason why because they don't know. Instead they rely on people wanting it to be true, so they build a "common sense" argument that lacks evidence.
When these people push for diversity they often mean "have every skin tone represented in your team photos". While this feels nice and would certainly repel any accusations of not being "diverse enough" it is the wrong kind of diversity. Now here is my "common sense" argument:
What people actually want is a diversity of opinions. This you can imagine having a positive effect on performance as each member of a team would have a slightly different take on things that may allow the group to discover a better solution. This would explain why the diversity of skin tone type approach somewhat works, as different races usually have different experiences, which usually means more diversity of thought when compared to a completely homogeneous group.
The obvious drawback to diversity of thought is that it's harder to quantify and optimize for. Anyone can look at a team photo and tell if a race is over/underrepresented because we have evolved incredibly advanced pattern recognition abilities. You can't easily tell what someone's opinions are without talking to them for a little while. Management already has trouble hiring qualified candidates since they don't know what qualified candidates look like, so adding diverse thinking to the list of criteria just exacerbates the hiring problem. Plus if you actually could select thought diverse candidates you run the risk of not including all races, opening yourself up to accusations of bias that can be devastating in today's politically charged climate.
Social science can't accurately model single humans well, let alone groups of humans as they attempt to solve problems. Even my analysis that we really ought to be concerned with diversity of thought is based on intuition rather than experimentation. It's a hard problem domain, and the solutions may not be intuitive.
The reason that social science can't model (aka overfit) many phenomena, is that it involves strictly nonlinear data where cultures and humans are involved.
Do some reading. Educate yourself. You may change your vantage.
>The reason that social science can't model (aka overfit) many phenomena, is that it involves strictly nonlinear data where cultures and humans are involved.
Right, they currently can't accurately model the phenomena and thus their models have little to no predictive power. We are in agreement then. Also, it seems to me that social sciences tend to produce models that are underfit rather than overfit.
So why then do we accept conclusions from scientists who have weak models with little predictive power? This is what my comment above was talking about.
>This is pure, uneducated rubbish.
It's definitely not uneducated and I don't think it's entirely rubbish either.
Uneducated as in it is painfully clear you have never read anything by any sociologists.
Have you tried doing linear algebra on nonlinear phenomena?
The examples of successful sociological science are too numerous to name, and your laziness isn't going to result in someone Googling the easily found work for you.
BUT diversity as "diversity of background" is never tested against diversity as "diversity of races" on those group performance studies. I think it should, because i'm pretty sure that if your "culture" is the same as your coworkers (same neighborhood, same school, same type of family, faith etc...); skin differences, except if you are subject to negative stereotyping in the field you're working on, should amount to almost nothing.
We build to our biases, and groups of people integrate their own collective bias into all their decisions. It would be difficult to argue otherwise, I think.
My wife always gives the example of car airbags and crash test dummies: carmakers in the 1960s successfully resisted including female-sized crash test dummies. In fact, female-sized dummies were apparently not legally required until around 2012 [1]. How many women (and children or short men!) were injured or even died because a group of male automobile executives deemed male-sized dummies to be sufficient as a universal standard?
Equality 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).
I’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.
You’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.
Google 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?
Outcome 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.
Increased diversity is an outcome. Seeking equal/"better"/"more representative" numbers (percentage-wise) is not an equality-of-opportunity situation; it's about outcomes regardless of how they came about.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's moral or immoral, just that seeking "increased diversity" is factually seeking to affect an outcome, not an input/opportunity.
I 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.
Most 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).
Only two very special types of racial minorities are over-represented - Indians and east asians(specifically Chinese) are overrepresented relative to their US population.
These groups are generally forgotten about or elided when talking about how Google or US tech has a diversity problem - there is just a diversity problem with blacks, latinos, and women, and my hunch is that it has nothing to do with tech being racist or sexist and has everything to do with either larger structural issues in the US, or people choosing through free will to not enter the field.
Then you haven't read enough on the matter. All STEM fields have a problem, but other STEM fields pale in comparison to tech's racism/sexism.
As a hunch, yes I used to be of that opinion as well. I thought it was nonsense. Sorry that I don't have the data handy to back it up, but seriously (not being snide) if you care enough to matter you can research it.
I have researched it and have come to the exact opposite conclusion. I don't know what data you are referring to, but I hope you aren't just taking low representation to directly imply racism.
Seeing as most of Google's technical workforce is in CA, specifically the Bay Area, it would make more sense to compare to compare to the population surrounding HQ rather than the US as a whole.
On the other hand, I'd say most of the population surrounding the Google HQ are there because they got employed by Google or another tech company, not the other way around. The pool of candidates for these companies is global (restricted to the quotas the visas allow).
That isn’t true historically, it definitely wasn’t true in the late 19th century when Asian immigration to the bay area started, nor after the Vietnam war. The Bay Area has attracted Asians way before google or even tech existed there.
Well of course. I was just counterpointing to my parent, that comparing Google employee demographics to the demographics of the area around HQ doesn't really tell us anything.
Good call. According to: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm it looks like 52% are White (42.4% White and Non-Hispanic), 23% are Asian, and 6% as African American. So this would suggest that the difference between Google and the Bay Area is still significant but not as much as between Google and America as a whole.
You either have to go one step further and break that down by available tech talent to be recruited, with the premise being that you can't magically manifest a certain % of white/hispanic/black/asian tech employees if they're not available locally (eg if the population is 12% hispanic, but only 5% of the tech employees available locally are hispanic; that presents a very difficult recruiting scenario).
Or the argument is that a company like Google can afford to recruit nationally and relocate whatever demographics they see fit to the bay area, such that local restrictions do not apply as much to them. If the local bay area pool of tech talent is 3% black, and the national pool is 6% black, Google can afford to relocate black employees from around the US to bolster their diversity efforts locally if that's their aim.
It's best not to bring a rational numerical argument to the table in an area of contention that is owned exclusively by irrational emotional reactions about which groups in society are perceived to be the most disadvantaged. The fact is you can't really have a discussion when every party comes to the table with different feelings instead of numbers.
In American terminology, minority status depends on your "racial category", "ethnicity", and your gender, among other things.
There are six officially recognised racial categories: White, African American, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islander.
There are two official ethnicities: Hispanic and Latino Americans, and Not Hispanic and Latino. (Note: Hispanic is actually a cultural group, not an ethnicity, and in the real world the terms hispanic and latino are orthogonal. Try not to think about it too hard)
Most hispanics and latinos are officially categorised as white. That means that whenever you see the term "white" you'll need to do some further digging to see if that means the official "white term (including most hispanics), or if it's a short hand for "white, non-hispanic and latino". The 77% you cite as "white" includes latinos; the number you probably are looking for is 61%. The 56% in google's numbers seems to exclude latino's, so the comparison is probably 56% to 61%. (Probably!)
Also note that if your goal is equity for all groups, it doesn't make much sense to average minorities together. The Hispanic and latino group (including both whites and non-whites) makes up 18% of the US population, but the apparent matching group at Google makes up 4% of their employee base. Conversely, Asians make up about 5% of the US population, but apparently around 35% of Google's employee base using the closest equivalent measure. Clearly Google shouldn't get a pass for discriminating against hispanics (if that is indeed what they're doing) purely because they discriminate in favour of Asians (if that is indeed what they're doing).
> Doesn't that mean that racial minorities are actually overrepresented at Google?
Some (well, one) are. Others are not. Non-hispanic white's are broadly in line with the major population share.
With regard to Asian overrepresentation and Latino/Hispanic underrepresentation, I think there's a really good chance that how those respective immigrant groups came to be in the United States probably has a large role to play in this disparity. East and South Asian immigrants have to cross an ocean to get here, whereas most Latino/Hispanic immigrants could cross a land border (on foot in many cases!). The disparity in wealth required to pursue these alternate immigration paths probably significantly skews the class mixture of these groups and, thus, their representation in white collar professions.
Since world class engineers are perfectly distributed throughout the population regardless of age, sex, race, education, interest, and geography, it is a travesty that Google doesn't look like a random sample of Americans.
“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.
The 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.
History 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.
Totally 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?
This 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.
Its 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.
Just 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.
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?
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] thread-t. a "minority" in tech
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!
Someone has to say it. Down vote away.
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?
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.
By that logic we should clearly be trying to hire more conservatives into tech in California.
Especially at companies like Google where we have credible evidence that conservatives are discriminated against.
[citation needed] This is very contrary to my experience.
1. It depends on what you measure as "best". What level are you hiring for? Do you expect a good learner, or a uni-educated person?
2. It depends on whether you already included or ignored communities which are statistically disadvantaged. But if you openly say that hiring for diversity (as in inclusiveness, not equal numbers) leads to worse hires, do you think the best people from minorities will want to work for you? That would be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is absolutely true. It's also something that has never existed. "Black-sounding" names on job applications get fewer calls for interviews, women of childbearing age are hired less frequently because of fears that they may choose to prioritize children over their job, etc.
Additionally, this ignores the number of people who would be able to advance further if not for the systemic issues holding them back, e.g. rampant sexual harassment, men talking over women, and politicization of human rights (especially trans rights). A push for increased diversity may lead to a temporary drop in average skills (though I find this exceptionally unlikely), while leading to a large increase in the long term by breaking down the issues holding back minority (in tech) populations from achieving their potential.
Actually, double blind hiring processes have been tried. They largely reproduced the existing demographics, and so were ultimately scrapped for not producing enough diversity.
The headline should read "Alphabet management votes down employee backed diversity proposal".
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.
Alphabet insiders (read: Brin, Page and Schmidt, along with other executives) control the vote.
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.
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.
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.
I have seen those examples too, but I don't believe they are very effective in practice.
Arguably Apple not focusing on women's health for the longest time could have also been mitigated by more female product people as well.
Taking the example to the logical extreme I doubt the bug would have hit production if the entire development team was dark-skinned.
"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
[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/diversity-work-group-p...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriklarson/2017/09/21/new-resea...
I’m certain that there is a legitimate reason for the effect, but people are right to be skepical without any exploration of the cause. Are diverse teams more likely to disagree? Do they exhibit complementary recall of facts? Different modes of creativity?
I think a more complete explanation of causality would result in a much more concerted effort to increase diversity and a lot less resistance. As it is, it feels like the diversity ‘lobby’ is actually trying to create controversy instead of proving value.
When these people push for diversity they often mean "have every skin tone represented in your team photos". While this feels nice and would certainly repel any accusations of not being "diverse enough" it is the wrong kind of diversity. Now here is my "common sense" argument:
What people actually want is a diversity of opinions. This you can imagine having a positive effect on performance as each member of a team would have a slightly different take on things that may allow the group to discover a better solution. This would explain why the diversity of skin tone type approach somewhat works, as different races usually have different experiences, which usually means more diversity of thought when compared to a completely homogeneous group.
The obvious drawback to diversity of thought is that it's harder to quantify and optimize for. Anyone can look at a team photo and tell if a race is over/underrepresented because we have evolved incredibly advanced pattern recognition abilities. You can't easily tell what someone's opinions are without talking to them for a little while. Management already has trouble hiring qualified candidates since they don't know what qualified candidates look like, so adding diverse thinking to the list of criteria just exacerbates the hiring problem. Plus if you actually could select thought diverse candidates you run the risk of not including all races, opening yourself up to accusations of bias that can be devastating in today's politically charged climate.
Social science can't accurately model single humans well, let alone groups of humans as they attempt to solve problems. Even my analysis that we really ought to be concerned with diversity of thought is based on intuition rather than experimentation. It's a hard problem domain, and the solutions may not be intuitive.
The reason that social science can't model (aka overfit) many phenomena, is that it involves strictly nonlinear data where cultures and humans are involved.
Do some reading. Educate yourself. You may change your vantage.
Right, they currently can't accurately model the phenomena and thus their models have little to no predictive power. We are in agreement then. Also, it seems to me that social sciences tend to produce models that are underfit rather than overfit.
So why then do we accept conclusions from scientists who have weak models with little predictive power? This is what my comment above was talking about.
>This is pure, uneducated rubbish.
It's definitely not uneducated and I don't think it's entirely rubbish either.
Have you tried doing linear algebra on nonlinear phenomena?
The examples of successful sociological science are too numerous to name, and your laziness isn't going to result in someone Googling the easily found work for you.
Go do your homework, or sit down and shut up.
More importantly, they don't get into causality. Most diversity studies show correlation.
The problem is - as companies get very big and stable, they can start to worry about diversity, and have such hiring programs.
Early on, nobody has time to worry about anything but just getting the best people they can at the time, possibly in a panic.
So, looking for diversity is often a case of sampling the winners.
I'm not so cynical about diversity, but I am about the voices promoting it, who are often heavily biased.
Diversity is polarizing topic, and like with all such things ... it's hard to get good data points.
This one is funny/sad: https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-da...
More history: https://priceonomics.com/how-photography-was-optimized-for-w...
Not a product, but musicians and gender: https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
We build to our biases, and groups of people integrate their own collective bias into all their decisions. It would be difficult to argue otherwise, I think.
[1] http://leevinsel.com/blog/2013/12/30/why-carmakers-always-in...
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.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's moral or immoral, just that seeking "increased diversity" is factually seeking to affect an outcome, not an input/opportunity.
In particular, though, the only over-represented group is asians: 35% vs 5%.
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.
These groups are generally forgotten about or elided when talking about how Google or US tech has a diversity problem - there is just a diversity problem with blacks, latinos, and women, and my hunch is that it has nothing to do with tech being racist or sexist and has everything to do with either larger structural issues in the US, or people choosing through free will to not enter the field.
As a hunch, yes I used to be of that opinion as well. I thought it was nonsense. Sorry that I don't have the data handy to back it up, but seriously (not being snide) if you care enough to matter you can research it.
You either have to go one step further and break that down by available tech talent to be recruited, with the premise being that you can't magically manifest a certain % of white/hispanic/black/asian tech employees if they're not available locally (eg if the population is 12% hispanic, but only 5% of the tech employees available locally are hispanic; that presents a very difficult recruiting scenario).
Or the argument is that a company like Google can afford to recruit nationally and relocate whatever demographics they see fit to the bay area, such that local restrictions do not apply as much to them. If the local bay area pool of tech talent is 3% black, and the national pool is 6% black, Google can afford to relocate black employees from around the US to bolster their diversity efforts locally if that's their aim.
Though Asians are only 5% of US, they are maybe 1/3 of Tech degrees, which is consistent with Google hiring.
Similarly for women.
Very roughly, Google seems to be selecting in a fairly unbiased fashion from the candidate pool.
Where the issue gets more sticky is at upper levels of management, which are fairly male dominated.
There are six officially recognised racial categories: White, African American, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Other Pacific Islander.
There are two official ethnicities: Hispanic and Latino Americans, and Not Hispanic and Latino. (Note: Hispanic is actually a cultural group, not an ethnicity, and in the real world the terms hispanic and latino are orthogonal. Try not to think about it too hard)
Most hispanics and latinos are officially categorised as white. That means that whenever you see the term "white" you'll need to do some further digging to see if that means the official "white term (including most hispanics), or if it's a short hand for "white, non-hispanic and latino". The 77% you cite as "white" includes latinos; the number you probably are looking for is 61%. The 56% in google's numbers seems to exclude latino's, so the comparison is probably 56% to 61%. (Probably!)
Also note that if your goal is equity for all groups, it doesn't make much sense to average minorities together. The Hispanic and latino group (including both whites and non-whites) makes up 18% of the US population, but the apparent matching group at Google makes up 4% of their employee base. Conversely, Asians make up about 5% of the US population, but apparently around 35% of Google's employee base using the closest equivalent measure. Clearly Google shouldn't get a pass for discriminating against hispanics (if that is indeed what they're doing) purely because they discriminate in favour of Asians (if that is indeed what they're doing).
> Doesn't that mean that racial minorities are actually overrepresented at Google?
Some (well, one) are. Others are not. Non-hispanic white's are broadly in line with the major population share.
With regard to Asian overrepresentation and Latino/Hispanic underrepresentation, I think there's a really good chance that how those respective immigrant groups came to be in the United States probably has a large role to play in this disparity. East and South Asian immigrants have to cross an ocean to get here, whereas most Latino/Hispanic immigrants could cross a land border (on foot in many cases!). The disparity in wealth required to pursue these alternate immigration paths probably significantly skews the class mixture of these groups and, thus, their representation in white collar professions.
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.
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.
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.
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?
It’s really time other geographical places, in other countries, become good competitors.
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.
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?
will watch this one with interest.