The Other Side of Diversity (medium.com)

Obviously I can't read the author's mind but my interpretation was not that she was bothered by not having other black women around her so much as she was by the consequences of that lack of diversity. She felt left out and passed over at times. She felt like she had to constantly defend her opinions, her self.

I don't think diversity in the work place is something that is an absolute must but I think in cases where that lack creates a hostile work place for some employees there is absolutely an issue. If you're co-workers are making racist comments/assumptions about you and your manager's solution is to ship you off to another office, there is absolutely a problem.

These may be true, but it misses the point: personal dignity is a worthwhile goal in and of itself.

I get that spinning it as a "this is scientifically better and has capitalistic/rationalistic superior outcomes" may be necessary to appeal to the self-described rationalists in our industry for whom "because people feel like shit in this environment" doesn't even register. But it does feel wrong.

We've all been in situations that are uncomfortable, that's not news. But imagine a time when you suddenly realized you were the only white person in the room, or the only man in the room. That feeling of, "wait... am I not supposed to be here?"

I agree that we ought not to even notice, and I especially agree that we (all humans) shouldn't care. But in real life people do notice, and it's hard not to after someone points it out to you :/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness_%28race%29_in_...

Also you just argued she has not been a person thus far and that her problems were her fault. Congrats on that.

Diversity doesn't mean 'we let anybody wear a polo shirt and come along to our beer socials'.

I am tired of the "sticking out" feeling, real or imaginary. So, I started a Meetup group for black engineers. Sometimes, it's really nice to just relax and feel comfortable. No worries about someone attributing my behavior to being black, or judging all black people by something that I've said or done.

Right now, I am hoping to rally folks to come to Philadelphia in 2 weeks for a black hackathon. It's a great way to network and teach. Check out http://www.mbkhack.com/ for more info. If you're in NYC and interested, we will have a pre-meeting before we go. The link is in my profile.

I honestly wonder if people in this day and age care about the color of your skin. Isn't that from like the 60's?

I hopped from computer engineering, to electrical engineering, to get a bachelors in Art. I worked cross discipline between Art and CS, to publish academically. I got my masters in CS. I was accepted as a PhD student in CS, but at that point, I was so isolated that I essentially collapsed from stress, overvaluing my work, and undervaluing my health.

I work as a software developer now, in the interim of 'not really knowing what to do with my life', being that I've seen so many facets of where I can go, what I can do, and once again, haven't got the faintest clue aside from a small amount of intuition to guide me in what to do. That, and an obsession with everything related to technology, and enough technical/logical/mathematical books to build a house with.

I don't know so much if it's that my surroundings changed that tempered my feelings, introspections, and feelings of isolation, or the experiences I've been through. I'd say it's easy, but it isn't. I'd say it's hard, but it isn't. I just sort of imagine everyone in life goes through something similar once in a while, even if on the surface, it looks totally different.

EX: Current team has 2 black females one from the US the other from Africa, 2 Indian females from India, 1 Indian male from India, 2 white males born in the US, 2 Asian males one born in the US another born outside. Team lead is american born Asian. We are managed by a black female, who's boss is a white female, who's boss is a black male.

However, in my experience rather than have more people fit in you end up with everyone feeling like they don't fit in for a long period of time.

PS: Ok, there is the default 'can speak English clearly' group. But culture goes beyond language.

Every time there's a team member from some under-represented group, there is a tendency to think of it as living in some kind of "diverse workplace" stock photo instead of just getting stuff done.

This. I never fit in anywhere, not because of color, gender or anything substantial really. I am just crazy stubborn and have a weird set of interests and world views. It never was a problem for me because I didn't even consider adapting. It was always an active and conscious choice to choose my own persona freely.

I think the world would be a better place if everyone had a self-confidence boost. In our big organized world everybody feels so small and tends to treat himself poorly, which leads to them treating others poorly who then again feel smaller.

Brutal and disgusting.

Clearly.

Problem is, in my experience...

1.) No one wants to get involved.

2.) It's easier to be accommodating of assholes when they're directing their behavior at someone who isn't "one of you" on some level or another.

3.) It's easier to be accommodating of an asshole who also happens to be a "great engineer", "would do anything for a friend" or has their childish nonsense rationalized as "lacking people skills".

I'd wager someone, likely many people in that situation knew exactly what was going on yet did nothing for one or more of the above reasons.

As a group we just need to recognize that those people among us, our friends and coworkers who are shitty to the loner on the team or rude to the cleaning lady, but wonderful to their peers - they're assholes and deserve to be held to account for it.

I do not feel oppressed or not belonging though.

I'm not sure that you're appreciating the amount of energy that takes, year after year, and the level of hypervigilance and anxiety that entails, for an indefinite duration. That's largely what the blog is talking about, to me.

All of that energy expended just because of what you are. This is before you tackle the problem that everyone has to go through - asserting who you are.

Seem to get by ok.

I can't help but wonder if, assuming this is what makes everybody most comfortable (being surrounded by people like them, rather than being surrounded by diversity), the quest for diversity might simply result in cultural balkanization within companies as cultural/racial/gender/social groups coalesce (thanks to that preference)

That very thing already happens at my employer, with regards to age. The company has a diverse selection of age, and the result is fairly strong social siloing by age.

It appears to me that some people are just not good at making friends (myself included), and it doesn't surprise me that the IT industry has an abundance of people with that difficulty.

I don't think that the problem is so much of a lack of diversity, as it is a lack of awareness of group dynamics. It's far too simpleminded to just wish that diversity will solve our social problems. It could help, but it could just as well create a situation that makes things worse.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/

The same unconscious behaviors that make power so seductive and corrupting are the same unconscious processes that causes us to "outgroup" people who are different. Resisting such group psychology is at about the same level of difficulty as overcoming our cravings for sugar.

I could liken our current culture's level of (in)competence with group psychology with the culture's general level of cluelessness when first confronted with distilled alcohols or when dealing with trespassing laws after the advent of airplanes. After 1000's of years where levels of individual power and affluence were constrained by geography and group membership, we have been thrown with exponentially increasing velocity into an era where personal mobility and communications power are creating opportunities for people of different groups to interact. We've gone from mostly stratified to our current highly dynamic state of society in just a few hundred years. Yet we're still largely using "mental furnishings" from our jingoistic and stratified past -- to the point where a lot of dialogue concerning issues of ethnicity, culture, gender, and minority status consists of hostility, distrust, and more typical "mindless jingoism" produced by those same group psychologies.

What's more, I'm not entirely sure that the culture as a whole is capable of dealing with the kind of meta-level thinking it would take to become competently aware of our own group psychology.

Twenty or thirty years later, I started to realize: Maybe it was just because I was a nerd. I was small, short, socially awkward, geeky - the usual. It didn't take people rejecting me for me to feel like an outcast.

But the article said there were also racist and sexist jokes. That's an additional source of feeling isolated that the white males (me included) don't have to put up with - and which nobody should have to put up with, ever.

  > I don't see how any company can claim to be building any
  > component of our future when its environment can scarcely
  > represent some semblance of actual society. 

As long as you are actively seeking diversity you won't have diversity. The true diversity comes when it no longer matters.

The Black experience in America is different. Being brought to America under the auspice of slavery has created a perverse assimilation issue for American Black folks.

Indians have come to the US for work, education, better lives, etc. That sets a wholly different tone.

Solve for x.

I mean we all fail, again and again, but that doesn't mean most of us don't want to be "basically good", or are incapable of being "basically good" at each moment.

Even though you don't feel you fit in in the US, do you ever feel relief at just not getting attention for being different?

I'll admit there is a small part of me that gets slightly irritated every time we go through a hiring cycle and everyone who shows up for the interviews is Mandarin speaking Chinese-- because it cant be that only Chinese people are applying for these jobs; the odds don't favor it.

That said, I love my job, I get along with everyone at work, and actually feel like its a great opportunity to learn about another culture up close without having to travel across the world like the parent poster.

I guess the point is anyone (white, black, asian, etc.) can be culturally isolated in any country or company. Some people have an easier time assimilating, and other still don't ever feel the need to assimilate.

It makes me wonder if there is something unique about "white" culture that causes "others" to feel more isolated than when the reverse scenario is true. I've never worked for a man, and have never worked for a white guy, yet I'm a white guy myself. Beyond the slight irritation i mentioned above about hiring, its never bother me a bit.

(Also, how would you characterize 'expected you' as being different from a 'professional you' that we all live with the pressure of in the work world?)

If you're a white male who is honest with himself, you'll understand that being a white male carries with it a set of privileges.

Just consider: a white child is significantly more likely to go to a school with experienced teachers than a black child, more likely to take honors classes in high school, more likely to get into a good university, and when they graduate, are more likely to get job offers based on nothing more than their white male name[1].

Let's not fool ourselves: humans are not the coldly rational actors we like to think. Ignore the fact that I've already got a leg up on networking because my (white male) peers work the jobs I want to work. When it's time for me to go in for an interview for a software engineering position the odds are overwhelmingly high that every person who interviews me, from the team interview up to senior management, will look a lot like me. That goes a long way in me getting the job - our monkey brains are pretty well wired to look at someone that looks like ourself and think "yeah, he's a competent, trustworthy individual!"

So yeah, I don't think anyone's actually hired in the cold cost/benefit analysis you talk about. There's lots of chances for significant bias to creep in. In reality, if people were hired solely based on the criteria you talk about, and race/gender/... were not considered, I bet we'd see more diverse workforces than we have now.

If someone can figure out how to set up a blinded interview that would be interesting.

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf

I wonder how good people really are at measuring the latter. In some jobs such as sales, you can get a pretty good approximation - although it's still hard to measure which sales persons build lasting accounts vs. which ones overpromise and then dump the cost of unmet expectations onto technical support or account maintenance people. (Edit: obviously you can measure it in a lot of repetitive type jobs like facotry works etc., but that doesn't seem appropriate for this context.)

It's even trickier in environments like technology. Twitter's a huge company, but how do you measure the productivity of their employees? The stock price is down on what it IPOed for, user acquisition growth has slowed and the firm has never made a profit, so should we conclude that the average Twitter employee has negative productivity? Obviously not, that would be a highly misleading generalization - but it's no more foolish than some of the generalizations I've seen offered to justify executive compensation or equity allocation at some companies.

Economically we'd like to maximize the return on capital invested in hiring someone, but if we don't have a way to measure that objectively then 'performance' can end up as just a bullshit story to rationalize essentially arbitrary management hiring decisions of the staff who fall within 1 or 2 standard deviations of the norm (excluding the infrequent brilliant or burnout employees).

If performance is actually better with a diverse team then preferring diversity in the hiring process is based on cost/benefit.

> whether they earned it or not

Businesses don't care if you "earned it" they care about cost/performance. My parents are both quite intelligent and up until high school I learned more from them than I did from school. If I had less awesome parents I would have a significantly harder time finding a job. It's not fair, but it does not demoralize me.

I think this is a fair question. If diversity is weighted non-zero for hiring, it means some other factor's weight in the hiring decision was reduced. Maybe that's a completely fine trade-off, but it does exist.

That is a major part of the problem. The solution isn't to start prioritizing "diversity" when hiring folks, the solution is to avoid hiring just within your narrow comfort zone of people who are like you. And that includes people with different life experiences, educational backgrounds, etc. as well as people with different cultural backgrounds and ethnicities. Mostly that's just a matter of becoming a better, less biased, more objective interviewer.

Another factor is acceptance and prejudice. Keep your own prejudices in check and police other folks. When you see or hear of instances of people being insensitive or of excluding someone based on their cultural or other differences, act on it, and help fix it. If you want women to be part of your team, then maybe don't consider having a meeting at a strip club. You'd think that sort of thing is a no brainer, but especially in the SV world full of man children who have discovered there are no rules other than the ones they impose on themselves, it can be a bit of a problem.