
Measuring What Matters: Diversity at Uber - Aqua_Geek
https://newsroom.uber.com/diversity-report/
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nscalf
Does anyone else find the trend to push diversity into everything disturbing?
The incentives around programs like these seem misaligned. No company
discusses why there are clear gender divides in jobs, i.e. more women in
nursing, more men in tech. Or the reason minority groups fall into the career
breakdowns they do. Why are we trying to do anything other than giving all
people the opportunity to do whatever they want?

Growing up, I had a small group (3 white males) of extremely close friends,
they all grew up to be good people. Going into college, that group grew into 6
people, the 3 new additions were a mix of gender and ethnicity. You know what
noticeably changed? Some of the people I spent most of my time with were now
female or a different ethnicity. Everyone had a different background, everyone
had different experiences. Everyone contributed differently. But everything
wasn't suddenly remarkably better because there was diversity.

Diversity doesn't inherently make you better. Hire good people. You want
credit for diversity? Work on making sure people who come from poor homes have
access to learn difficult topics (STEM fields) without having to deal with the
stress of paying for school, housing, food, having a part time job to makes
ends meet, getting into massive debt, etc. and work on figuring out why these
groups aren't likely to go into tech---why aren't they getting their degrees
in tech fields? Until then, I'm going to argue the quotas for diversity that
seem to be prevalent in tech are disturbing.

I didn't write this initially, but I know it say's they're donating $3 million
a year towards select groups. While that's good, I still find forcing
inorganic diversity (meaning the amount of people of an ethnicity in the field
being way lower than the ratio you're trying to hire) to be a counter
intuitive, random PR shot in the dark approach to trying to be better.

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test001only
Pushing for diversity and making sure people from poor homes have access to
learn difficult topics are mutually exclusive. Your quote on figuring out "why
these groups aren't likely to go into tech" needs to be applied to people who
are underrepresented in the tech field. Example : Why are women
underrepresented in tech? Is it because they are feeling unwelcome here? Are
we as a society unconsciously typecasting women and men into different job
profile? What if a man wants to be nurse? I think pushing for diversity in
this respect is required.

~~~
nscalf
I feel like that's chasing symptoms though. If you push a bunch of women into
tech and women aren't treated well in tech, you haven't solved the problem of
women being treated poorly in tech, instead you've made more people be treated
poorly.

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evangelista
I used to be a huge supporter of diversity initiatives in tech. That has
changed.

Over the years, I noticed more and more that diversity as a topic in high tech
had morphed from something positive into a witch hunt against white men and
against people who were generally friendly towards the idea of diversity yet
did not practice sufficient rigor in enforcing a very specific idea of
diversity at their events.

A great example is Nodevember kicking out Douglas Crockford because he made a
couple relatively non-offensive jokes using secret accusations against him.
Another great example is the ongoing attempts by social justice warriors to
force the Drupal community to discriminate against a relatively harmless
follower of the Gorean movement for his private life.

Still other examples include unsubstantiated accusations of sexual harassment
at OSCON by an anonymous blog. I have been to OSCON and saw absolutely nothing
like what was being complained about in that blog post. Yet another example is
the continuing efforts to pressure the organizers of Lambda Conf to ban people
who privately have non-politically correct views.

Instead of diversity being a "positive thing," it became "if you don't do
diversity, if you don't invite 50% female speakers, if you don't have a code
of conduct...you are racist."

I also noticed Meetup organizers and conference organizers coming under
continuous direct public shaming pressure by screaming mobs online when they
didn't have a precisely calibrated gender balance amongst speakers despite a
numerical discrepancy in submitted talks. On top of that, I frequently see
female engineers now actually _complaining_ about being asked to talk about
diversity at conferences too frequently because they are in a minority who are
able to fill these gaps.

Finally, and most boring, diversity-related content has creeped into many
Meetups, conferences and other events to the point where formerly content-
filled events are now 30% diversity-related content by weight. Instead of
interesting information about Python, we get 7 talks about how Python
programmers can be more diverse and what it is like being a female Python
programmer.

I find these changes disturbing. I find conduct codes to be sinister and a
form of creeping control by the Left to attempt to extend safe spaces into
industry and other places they don't belong.

We have a code of conduct in the United States, it is called the law. The
constitution is the code of conduct we need to be concerned with now.

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DarkKomunalec
Proportion of whites in the US: 63.7% (down from 87.7% in 1970)

Proportion of whites at Uber: 49.8%

Ars Technica: "Uber's labor force—in particular its tech staff—is
overwhelmingly male and largely white." (
[https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/new-diversity-
repor...](https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/new-diversity-report-
shows-85-of-ubers-tech-workforce-is-male/) )

So whites are under-represented at Uber, even a minority, yet we're told
that's still too many. Will they be happy when there's only 40% of them? Or
10%?

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sudosteph
I wonder how different racial diversity numbers would be at these big tech
companies if they had decided to open their HQ in Atlanta instead of San
Francisco. I imagine the number of black employees would be much higher.

Now, I'm aware that African Americans are only one under-represented minority
in tech, but they're still an important one. Latest numbers show that
educated, middle-class black Americans are choosing to move to southern cities
(especially Atlanta) at high rates. Some of them are moving for job
opportunities, to be closer to family, to afford a higher standard of living,
to escape winter weather in the North, or just because they like the city and
culture there.

I work at a place with large office in ATL, and we've had a positive
experience hiring very talented people from many different backgrounds. The
ATL office is far more diverse than west coast offices and every bit as good
at their jobs.

I think it's time to acknowledge that trying to "import" diversity into SV is
not a real strategy for making tech more diverse. It's not fair to expect
minorities to exchange their preferred community for a predominantly white one
(with a far higher cost of living) just to have a chance of cashing in some
sweet startup equity.

I wonder how diversity numbers at tech companies doing all-remote (like
Zapier) compare to SV-centric tech companies.

~~~
nscalf
I don't think this has anything to do with diversity, and I don't know of any
way this could be measured, but I'd love to see the difference in the level of
passion for the average engineer hired in SF vs ATL. I moved across the
country to SF to work in tech because this is perceived to be the land of
opportunity for tech. I'd imagine a lot of people passionate about what they
do come here, and if you're less passionate you may be less willing to do that
move. But that's total speculation, and I don't think diversity has anything
to do with that. Just something your comment made me think of.

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mrkgnao
The colorscheme on the "US Race and Ethnicity" ... ring? ... chart seems
purposefully difficult to decipher. On a phone, the colors seem to blend into
each other.

