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    Jer'Maine MontielSam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:54pm

    “diversity is important, but we can’t lower the bar.”

    This is so fucking unsurprising that I’m trying my hardest to not be mad at it but here I am writing this comment.

    People seem to have this really twisted view of “hiring for diversity;” like with all their logic about how candidates would be hired by skill and knowledge base and culture fit and how many people they know at the com— oh wait no, forget about that last one — but actually going out to hire more diverse candidates means we’re just gonna grab some browns in the nearest unemployment line and give them a job. Like what the actual fuck man? It’s downright insulting that they don’t think they can find people worth the job and are gonna have to settle: there are black/brown engineers out there. One of ‘em is typing this paragraph.

    Fuck Silicon Valley.

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      theBatmanLivesJer'Maine Montiel
      11/04/15 4:59pm

      And yet you will still buy and use their shit. Funny how that works.

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      Jer'Maine MontieltheBatmanLives
      11/04/15 5:00pm

      lol. If I stopped using any and everything that had no vested interest in Black and brown people, I'd be living in a box.

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    JohannesClimacusSam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:48pm

    It’s not just Twitter. It’s this whole town. When I moved here there was still a Jazz club on Union St. that had a predominantly middle class black clientele. Now the whole still has been homoginized by money and feels like the Lilly white wealthy suburb I moved to SF to escape. (Though infairness, there are also many wealthy Asians here who model their persona on affluent suburban white people) And the tech bros are even more insufferable than the finance dudes with whom I grew up. Sigh.

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      waykwikJohannesClimacus
      11/04/15 4:57pm

      When I moved here

      That’s the problem. Don’t you see? The more people moving to places like San Francisco, the more a city’s original culture gets destroyed. Alexandra Pelosi made an interesting doc about it. I mean, also, you hung out on Union Street. If I recall, isn’t that as white as it gets in that city? People like you lamenting “the old days of [insert “hip” city here],” are the same people who made it shitty.

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      gaytalitywaykwik
      11/04/15 5:16pm

      This is happening in Portland. Hoards of sentient handlebar moustaches in plaid move into historically diverse neighborhoods and put on this bullshit mummery over how bad gentrification is getting.

      White folks forget that they’re white folks.

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    Graby SauceSam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:55pm

    I don’t know why these companies make diversity such a difficult hurdle. If they really are committed to diversity, they should try to cultivate and recruit talent. Support organizations like Black Girls Code. Make games and campaigns geared toward black teenagers who like gaming or are otherwise interested in tech. Offer internships to HBCU college students and recruit for employees at HBCUs and organizations like National Association of Black Engineers.

    Is it really that hard?

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      whomhoundGraby Sauce
      11/04/15 4:59pm

      If you’re a closet racist, then yeah, it’s pretty “hard” to do all that stuff.

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      Meander061Graby Sauce
      11/04/15 5:01pm

      Is it really that hard?

      It’s really hard IF YOU REFUSE TO UNDERSTAND WHY. And they literally believe that every minute spent on “diveristy” is time/money that can be spent on something more “important”.

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    Citizen-KangSam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:54pm

    “...and who took too long to finish their degree”

    Holy Jebus! Talk about privilege. Did daddy and mommy give them full-rides through college or do they not realize that some exceptionally gifted students take longer to graduate because they need a slightly lighter class load to fit in 20-30 hours per work to pay for tuition? That was true in my day when I was at UCLA and my day wasn’t exactly yesterday. Most of the people I went to school with had to work part-time to afford to go to school and that was a public school. Today, with the skyrocketing cost of education, it’s probably even more true than ever. “Time to graduation” is an incredibly dumb metric to judge a candidate.

    “...he suggested I create a tool to analyze candidates last names to classify their ethnicity.”

    I won’t even get into how stupid this statement is. Seriously, Twitter “engineers” aren’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer if they consider that to be a winning strategy.

    Twitter, your stupid is showing.

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      thenewcapCitizen-Kang
      11/04/15 5:04pm

      Right. People are coming from different backgrounds. Some have their own bills to pay and wish to accrue less debt. Some are coming straight out of the military and are transitioning to civilian life. Some have families to raise. And on the real, shit just happens to people. Sometimes a wife or husband or son dies. Sometimes someone gets hospitalized.

      I’m less worried about how long someone was in college than I am interested in their internships, field experience, and, company fit.

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      LokezombieCitizen-Kang
      11/04/15 5:32pm

      I ran up against this on Gawker today. I’m a 25 year old still in college. And people are like saying that I have a problem. Yeah, maybe I do. I never had anyone to support me. I had to go to work full time to take care of the fam the day i graduated high school. I didn’t have any avenues, no one telling me I could go to school and get scholarships or financial aid. I didn’t get any information about college as a high school student. And now I’m trying to put myself through school after I helped stabalize my family, and people all the time tell me I have a problem. And I’m still working. Yeah I’m 25 and I work in a place that employs 17 year olds. Maybe I’m a loser. But I’m trying to better myself. It’s all good though. Until I can get a more respectable job, I will have to console myself with the fact that though my adversity may be a disadvantage to my professional career, at least I’m a “better person” for it. Whatever that is worth.

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    Huh?Sam Biddle
    11/04/15 5:01pm

    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.

    This just makes me laugh.

    I worked 40 hours a week while finishing my first two years of my undergrad degree when I took a break for an internship in Silicon Valley.

    I was eventually hired and spent the next 6 years working, learning, and partying my ass off in the awesome gay bars in The City.

    I left to finish my degree and continued working 40 hours a week to support myself. I would always ask the WASPs if they were working their way through school as well and the reply was always “yes!”.

    So who’s paying your rent?

    My parents.

    Where did you get your car?

    Parents.

    Who’s paying tuition?

    Parents.

    Books?

    Parents.

    Apparently working their way through school meant earning happy hour and clothes cash.

    So maybe that’s why it takes us people of color longer to finish school and another reason why it’s important to have diversity in the workplace.

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      feralandroidHuh?
      11/04/15 5:47pm

      Interesting. The vast majority of people I know would have replaced “parents” with “student loans” regardless of race. In fact, I know very few people whose higher education was paid out of pocket by someone.

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      acornHuh?
      11/04/15 6:43pm

      I mean, yes, working or sometimes shit happens. I took longer because a TA in my department raped me and that pretty much derailed things for me. But other people can have any number of things like illness or death in the family, etc, that might have affected how long it took them to complete their degree. If you think about it, these are actually the type of people you’d think companies would want to hire. People that are hard workers and are persistent. Jesus christ, what a stupid and pointless metric.

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    nastymcphiltySam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:57pm

    To me what is most risible is the idea that Twitter can’t “lower the bar”. Please. You’re a CRUD app. You’re RSS for humans. You don’t need the best coders. You just need coders. Oh, is concurrent programming scary? There’s MIT open course ware for that. HFT firms - yeah they need the best coders. Twitter?... not so much. Geez.

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      Brocephalusnastymcphilty
      11/04/15 5:02pm

      Right? Twitter is legitimately the least complicated thing in the entire world. It’s text on a screen.

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      Sam Biddlenastymcphilty
      11/04/15 5:24pm

      Changing the stars to hearts was a feat of computer engineering

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    Bitch PuddingSam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:56pm

    Presuming that these are the twitter offices, the ways in which this wall art “does not get it” are pretty close to infinite.

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      Sia's Oversized WigBitch Pudding
      11/04/15 5:46pm
      GIF
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      BurnedAtTheSteakBitch Pudding
      11/04/15 6:36pm

      That photo makes me think Twitter believes hashtag activism actually works. Which is sad is so many ways.

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    Arctic16Sam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:47pm

    Trolls are already out in force in these comments. Good god, don’t you people have anything better to do? Their response time to this posting is commendable, though.

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      Vanguard KnightArctic16
      11/04/15 4:53pm

      It makes me quite sad, actually.
      Its pretty clear how the atrocities of the past occurred, and it gives me no faith that we will avoid repeating them in the 21st century.

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    Orlandu7Sam Biddle
    11/04/15 4:49pm

    While this is exactly the kind of utterly tone-deaf corporate culture I’d expect out of Silicon Valley, I should point out with that last quote that analyzing ethnicity through last names is a very widely-done and rather successful practice among political data analysts. Plenty of models exist for that that do a good job of it. If this guy wants to put down other “highly sophisticated thinkers”, he probably shouldn’t be issuing sweeping denunciations of the one helpful idea he received in all this under the logic that his sample size of last names he personally owns doesn’t contain one that “sounds black”. Hiring bias based on how names sound is prevalent and plenty of research has been done on it.

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      MaggiejeanerOrlandu7
      11/04/15 5:16pm

      For African Americans though, the last name search would fail more than it would succeed. Our ancestors regularly took their last names from their white slave owners. My last name is of Welsh origin—-I’m a black girl with an ancestral history of slavery in Mississippi and Tennessee. What is an example of a black last name? Jefferson? Jackson? Huxtable?

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      RishaBreeOrlandu7
      11/04/15 5:51pm

      Seriously? Now I’m thinking much less of political data analysts. My real name is Risha Bree Jorgensen. My (full, biological) brother probably would not like his real name to show up in a random blog, but his names are German, Gnostic, and Egyptian. Six names, from several different cultures, covering a vast swath of the world and a multitude of colors. Care to guess my ethnicity? Would you put money on it?

      And what last names “sound black” in fucking America? A country where a huge percentage of the PoC took their last names from the people who used to own their ancestors? The concept of picking out probable Indians by looking for the name “Patel” at least has some basis in reality, though there would be a fuckton of false positives and negatives. The whole idea of applying analysis like that to last names and hoping to pick out white versus black is moronic, because it’s the exact same list of names.

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    The Original SunshineSam Biddle
    11/04/15 9:00pm

    “Not having internships at the right companies”. They do know that all of the internships at the right companies go to Ivy League rich white kids, right? My kid works in finance and it’s obvious that she “didn’t have the right internship”, whereas a lot of richer, whiter people her age did have the right internship and have much better positions in the company.

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      windchillThe Original Sunshine
      11/05/15 1:05am

      They’ll never admit that. It’s very, very important for them to believe that they got where they are on merit. Admitting that well-connected, affluent people (a group that skews heavily white) have a much high change of getting into the ‘best’ part of the pipeline might mean acknowleding that they, themselves, are privileged. And you will pry a Silicon Valley techbro’s belief in his own meritocratic exceptionalism out of his cold, dead fingers.

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      The Original Sunshinewindchill
      11/05/15 10:48am

      True. And I just want to clarify that my kid has a great job but that it’s very obvious that she is in a different place than those who got the good internships.

      I’m wtf’ing over the other response to my post. People like that are beyond my comprehension.

      Nobody is asking for a handout for crying out loud. The real point is that the good internships go to a certain class of people and that getting the good internships give you a serious leg up on your career. That’s a plain old solid fact.

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