The Big Lie: Tech Companies and Diversity Hiring
In the past week or so I’ve had three instances to reflect on how three major tech companies talk about diversity hiring and their actions. One pattern that continues to repeat itself is that companies say a lot about how much diversity is important to them and wanting to hire more underrepresented minorities but then can’t get out of the rut of their ingrained hiring practices.
Microsoft
When I was in college back in the 1990s, I used to attend Clark Atlanta University which was what is called a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) or colloquially “black college”. I picked up quite early on that getting good internships was key to landing a good job on graduation. I also quickly learned that hiring managers for “good internships” don’t come to black colleges looking for interns regardless of how good the students are.
So I transferred to Georgia Tech, got that Microsoft internship 15 years ago and I’m still at the company today.
Recently the kid brother of a high school friend asked that I recommend him for an internship. I looked into it and it seems even after all these years the best way to get into Microsoft’s internship program is if your school is on the list of schools the company formally recruits from.
My friend’s kid brother polished his resume, we submitted it and he never heard from Microsoft. However after he polished his resume, he heard from Apple recruiting who were out scouring the Web for internship candidates. He interviewed with them and is now spending his summer in Cupertino.
Blacks at Apple: (8% of overall workforce, 7% of tech workforce).
Blacks at Microsoft: (3.5% of overall workforce, 2.3% of tech workforce).
One of the smartest people I went to college with, Nick Black, just posted an amazing article on his experiences at Google when it came to the company attracting and hiring black engineers.
The entire post is worth reading. He writes
Google talks endlessly about diversity, and spends millions of dollars on the cause. My NYC office lends its prodigiously expensive square feet to Black Girls Code. We attempt to hook the recruiting pipeline up to HBCUs. We tweet about social justice and blog about the very real problem of racial inequality in America. Noble endeavors, all. It’s too bad that they’re not taking place where black people actually, you know, live.
In one of the most reasonably-priced major cities of America, a ten-minute walk from one of the world’s top ten engineering schools, Google has an office. It’s one floor. There are no mass outings to the Fox Theatre, let alone Broadway. Food is served from 1200 to 1330, though mainly gone by 1300. Let it be noted that this food includes traditional African-American fare, something I’ve seen in other Google offices only during special events celebrating our self-congratulating focus on diversity. There are more black people in this office than I’ve seen in our NYC building, unless one counts custodial staff. There are three engineers, one of whom is black. That doesn’t seem like many, except that I know precisely one black engineer on my entire ninth floor of Google NYC.
There were once dozens of SWEs and SREs in this office, humming along, cranking out GWT, nerd shit etc. Google decided to close Atlanta engineering, and they mainly went as a group to Square. A recent diversity-themed TGIF explicitly mentioned the importance of recruiting Atlanta; it’s too bad we won’t go all the way and actually hire ATLiens.
…
At Google, I’ll be encouraged to take annual Bias-Busting training, gathering with other privileged honkeys to encourage one another’s virtuous respect of black coworkers we don’t have.
This is where I’ll talk about the Big Lie from the title of my post. That lie is that there is some sort of pipeline problem preventing tech companies from hiring more black people. The reality is that tech companies shape the ethnic make up of their employees based on what schools & cities they choose to hire from and where they locate engineering offices.
Blacks at Google: (2% of overall workforce, 1% of tech workforce)
In a startling coincidence, almost immediately after reading Nick’s I ended up on Twitter where I found a tweet by Charity Majors who used be a hiring manager at Facebook.
The attitudes Charity criticizes aren’t unique to Facebook. Leslie Miley wrote similarly about his experiences at Twitter with statements that could be considered identical in content to what Charity wrote above
There were also the Hiring Committee meetings that became contentious when I advocated for diverse candidates. Candidates who were dinged for not being fast enough to solve problems, not having internships at ‘strong’ companies and who took too long to finish their degree. Only after hours of lobbying would they be hired. Needless to say, the majority of them performed well.
Personally, a particularly low moment was having my question about what specific steps Twitter engineering was taking to increase diversity answered by the Sr. VP of Eng at the quarterly Engineering Leadership meeting. When he responded with “diversity is important, but we can’t lower the bar.” I then realized I was the only African-American in Eng leadership.
It is thus unsurprising when you learn that
Blacks at Facebook: (2% of overall workforce, 1% of tech workforce)
Blacks at Twitter: (2% of overall workforce, 1% of tech workforce)
One of the open secrets of working in technology is that technical interviews are completely worthless as a predictor for whether someone is a good hire or not. Sort of like how going on dinner dates with someone is a terrible predictor as to whether this is who you want to spend the rest of your life raising children, doing taxes and arguing about laundry with. 😊
A VP of human resources at Google covered the difficulty in validating the quality of their interview process in a New York Times interview excerpted below
Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert
It’s amazing to think that Google found zero relationship between an interviewer saying “Hire” and whether the candidate was actually a good hire or not. So when tech companies talk about “lowering the bar” by hiring minorities they are actually just saying they don’t want to hire minorities since no one in tech actually has a bar that works very well in determining good versus bad hires regardless of ethnicity or gender.
Diversity Training: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes
One of the things I found most interesting in reading a bunch of the material linked above is the seemingly inverse correlation between mandatory diversity training and actually hiring black people in engineering positions.
It turns out this has been well researched and was covered recently in the Harvard Business Review on Why Diversity Programs Fail which states
Do people who undergo training usually shed their biases? Researchers have been examining that question since before World War II, in nearly a thousand studies. It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500.
Many firms see adverse effects. One reason is that three-quarters use negative messages in their training. By headlining the legal case for diversity and trotting out stories of huge settlements, they issue an implied threat: “Discriminate, and the company will pay the price.” We understand the temptation — that’s how we got your attention in the first paragraph — but threats, or “negative incentives,” don’t win converts.
Another reason is that about three-quarters of firms with training still follow the dated advice of the late diversity guru R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. “If diversity management is strategic to the organization,” he used to say, diversity training must be mandatory, and management has to make it clear that “if you can’t deal with that, then we have to ask you to leave.” But five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance — and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.
One of the things I noticed from the quotes from various employees of tech companies above is how these companies feel they are extremely open minded & tolerant as they take their mandatory diversity training but when the rubber meets the road about hiring more diverse candidates it turns into a discussion of “lowering the bar”. I think the mandatory diversity training has the effect of perpetuating two negative attitudes
- It encourages thinking that “you’ve done your part” since you’ve been taken training on diversity
- It creates resentment towards minorities because you are forced to take take this training that treats them like charity cases which in turn encourages the “lowering the bar” mentality.
In Conclusion
The low relative numbers of black engineers at many tech companies is a reflection of how these companies approach recruitment and hiring. If 7% of Apple’s tech employees are black and it is literally the most valuable company in the world and Slack can have 8.9% of its engineering staff be black then break records by being the fastest enterprise startup to hit a $1 billion valuation, it’s a farce for other tech companies to imply that hiring more than 1% black engineers can’t be done without lowering their standards.
I am personally tired of reading these annual diversity reports where the same tech companies post the same shitty stats and then make the same lame excuses about why the hire so few black people. I find it insulting. Please stop.
Thanks for reading.
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