I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping.
If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are.
That then makes it harder for the minorities you claim to be "helping" to stay in the room anywhere else because of bad will generated by some company that wanted the headlines to include their diversity push.
Edit: In summation, do not conflate your layoffs with your "diversity".
This creates three problems. The first is that some white people who were affected will believe it was because of their race. The second is that minorities who were not affected may be assumed to have been kept because of their minority status.
But the most harmful is for minorities who were laid off. That signals that they were really subpar, even more than the average laid off person.
It seems like this policy has two negative impacts on minorities and only one on white people. Some would say that's a disparate effect on minorities, and the policy is therefore racist. /s
edit: these are just the perception problems. There's also the fact that it is possibly illegal and unethical.
But is it plain illegal. For employment purposes Race is a protected class (at least in USA) and racial discrimination while hiring or firing violates federal law. How would they get away with this?
I'm pretty sure if you are white and laid off, you will have a pretty strong case for a lawsuit. I can't believe someone in legal wouldn't warn the leadership that putting out a press release stating this was a good idea.
This is San Francisco. When I worked there (2015-2020), most of my co-workers openly endorsed hiring bias against demographics that aren't considered "diverse". I'd be highly skeptical that a jury would side with a plaintiff alleging anti-white discrimination, no matter how solid the proof. If a community widely thinks activity that is de jure illegal should be allowed then it becomes de facto permitted because even if a company engages in this behavior and gets sued they won't be held liable.
I worked in SF during the same time period, at a small startup. There would have extreme fury at the idea of hiring/firing based on anything but ability.
Again, this was a small company. Every person mattered. Every talented hire advanced the company, and every talented departure put us at risk.
Even now at the big company I work for, the small team sizes mean each dev either contributes or drains. We even have an informal budget of how much we expect contributors go drain/gain (junior devs can drain for a while, senior devs make up for it, etc).
The sort of “anti-racist” methodology suggests a mindset I don’t quite get.
Every company I know of has an extemee backlog. Product isn’t getting shipped because there aren’t enough devs.
Are people seriously saying it’s ok their company doesn’t ship as much product if it benefits historically oppressed devs?
By contrast, I was at two successful unicorns. They were both large (1,000 and 2-3,000 employees). We had the luxury of having significantly more applicants than headcount. I think the mentality is more that the product is already successful, and we have a responsibility to ensure that that oppressed people don't miss out on that success.
The irony is that most "oppressed" people hired at the companies we very well off. I'm Latin myself (a fact I don't advertise in my workplace precisely because of this discrimination) and I had a very privileged upbringing. Same with another Trinidadian engineer I spoke with. So in the end, it was a bunch of privileged white people patting themselves on the back for hiring privileged Latin and Black people.
> So in the end, it was a bunch of privileged white people patting themselves on the back for hiring privileged Latin and Black people.
While whites and Asians born into poverty, who struggled all their lives against overwhelming odds, were deprived of these opportunities due to the color of the skin they were born in.
It’s beyond ugly and the irony will be that progressives who are so concerned with how history will judge them will be judged harshly by these positions.
That's why the key point for me isn't that it's illegal (though it is): it's immoral, even if it was legal.
Discrimination against blacks in the South was legal. Plenty of people defended racism on these grounds back then: "it's legal, the courts have approved it, and therefore it must be right."
These are not the people progressives are celebrating today. In fact, they'll cancel you for being at all similar to these people. Yet they are just like them.
I think of this as the Left having lost its way (in its own sort-of marxist terms). It's overly obsessed with identity and forgets the much more important discriminant of class. A cynical analysis is that the upper classes are using this as a successful divide and conquer tactic...
It’s a communist tactic to sow division in society by raising tension along identity lines like race, etc. Of course schools usually cover this part of history as “McCarthyist nonsense.”
Legal probably approved the word "lens". And if this ends up in court they will say that "lens" means that we are aware of the impact layoffs have on our society, but does not change who we fire during a layoff, meaning even if we didn't do this through a lens the person suing would have still been let go.
If the layoff was done through the lens of racist consideration, and minority races were given preference, then the odds of a white or Asian person getting fired were higher.
That's already illegal. Even if you can somehow prove in court that "white worker X" would still be fired had he been black (already a dicey and likely impossible feat), just the fact that the employer already admitted that this worker was under more risk for getting fired due to his race, a-priory creates a cause of action against the employer.
If I say "I give preference to hiring men over women", and a woman is rejected and then sues, trying to show that I would not have hired her even if she was a man is arguing from a losing position.
As an aside, the Latin words you wanted are a priori, but you're right that race is a protected category and putting out a statement saying "we made firing decisions based on a protected category" is a bad idea for that reason.
Then the laid off employees should organize as a class action so that "this specific person would have been let go" is no longer an acceptable defense and the question can be focused on whether using a "lens" to fire people based on race is illegal. If they argue that the lens means something else or that they didn't use the lens then Twilio has potentially just filed a materially false statement with the SEC.
a lens translates things to a different view. so they either justified it somehow, or it changed the outcome. not a hair I'd want to be splitting in court.
Exactly my point. White Male CEOs are afraid of an article in a major newspaper showing them being rich next to a picture of a poor minority that they just fired. So they put a PR spin on the firings.
It's so vague and weasel-wordy - if it's genuinely 'anti-racist' then (why mention it‽ and) it doesn't disproportionately affect white people, or anyone (race-based).
I agree the implication seems very much like an intended 'affirmative'/'positive' action role-selection policy though. (I think such things are stupid - whether hiring/firing/anything - and bad for everybody, but I am white, so I try to keep that a 'lightly held' opinion.)
In the UK the law is similar to your description, but large companies also have to publish stats, and the implication seems pretty much like quotas are good/the law, it's hard to imagine anyone/entity being found guilty of (as-written) illegal discrimination on the 'positive' side that tilts you more towards balance, IMO. (IANAL.)
I don’t think this is right. Affirmative action has been upheld by the courts, and is currently in practice at some private employers (and is mandated for government contractors).
You are wrong. There is one judgement that upholds a form of affirmative action in very narrow circumstances (education) and only in very limited form, and even that is challenged in SCOTUS and likely to be overturned:
Racist discrimination is an ugly thing, even when you call it pretty names like "affirmative action".
If Affirmative Action was universally legal, than nothing would prevent racist/sexist discrimination as long as you have a nice-sounding excuse for it, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be rendered vacant.
Women outnumber men 1.3:1 in college admissions, so Affirmative Action would let me openly discriminate in favor of men in hiring and promotion, as they are evidently a disadvantaged population compared to women.
Men actually do benefit from soft affirmative action in college admissions because of this disparity.
You can look this up for yourself, but here's one source[0]. Men are admitted at a higher rate, with worse grades and test scores, by selective universities that want to make sure they have a "balanced" class of undergraduates.
Yes, as mentioned above, there is (unfortunately) a controversial ruling (Grutter v. Bollinger) that allows for a form of discrimination in college admissions specifically. This is wrong and should stop. It's an example of SCOTUS judges allowing their political views to to override a clear interpretation of the law.
Affirmative action is not illegal. If you take action to prevent adverse impact to any protected class, that is not discrimination. If a company hires only white men and rejects every Asian candidate they have ever interviewed, or only fires Asian employees, what is your proposed remedy? Status quo?
Check out the section Discrimination v. Affirmative Action [1] and a sample of significant discrimination case outcomes.[3]
A company (Twilio) is executing a mass layoff, and is implying that it will protect certain racial minorities from this layoff. Doing this, they are necessarily discriminating against any employee who does not belong to these racial groups.
If you have employees A and B, both earning $100k/year, and your declining financials require you to save $100k/year, you must fire A or B. If you decide to fire A because s/he is white, even if it was just one factor, then you just fired a worker for their race, and violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
If you manage to implement a policy that benefits a protected class (such as a particular race or sex) without depriving a different protected class, it would not be illegal. This is not the case we are discussing here, of racial considerations affecting hiring or termination decisions.
Regarding the links you posted: It's no secret that the current administration is in favor of racist discrimination. They support Harvard's racist discrimination against Asians:
The law remains the law, and racist discrimination remains just as objectionable, even if the current administration supports it. I personally hope that any employee who was subject to racist discrimination will seek justice in court.
Change the framing from “white person was fired” to “black person was retained” and you’re suddenly back into affirmative action territory and the case whether it’s a civil rights violation becomes iffy.
You don’t actually have to avoid depriving a protected class of anything by relative omission. Otherwise affirmative action and diversity programs would be illegal, and until the courts change their mind they’re currently allowed. If you allow your reasoning to be unconstrained there is no way to provide any benefit whatsoever in any form to particular races because that would be necessarily be depriving that benefit to the compliment.
> Change the framing from “white person was fired” to “black person was retained” and you’re suddenly back into affirmative action
Change the framing from "a victim was robbed of $1,000" to "a poor person gained $1,000" and the clear crime of armed robbery becomes a positive event!
Fortunately, playing these types of games with language doesn't change the facts, or else there would be no justice; you can always "change the framing" to make any crime sound positive, by emphasizing its positive impacts and ignoring the adverse impacts.
As a matter of law, the SCOTUS unfortunately let their political views override a clear reading of the law in one case (Grutter v. Bollinger), and allowed a very limited form of affirmative action in a very specific context.
Discrimination based on race or sex in hiring and firing is still very much illegal. It's not hard to see why it's both immoral and destructive if we allow it in our society.
Your example doesn’t work because you’re just pointing out some positive aspect, it doesn’t make it not robbery. In my case the difference between firing a white person and retaining a black person changes the nature of the act as it’s viewed by the law. What is in the mind of the person carrying out an act that affects different races disproportionately matters. And if we’re we following precedent this would probably be allowed as another narrow case.
So I don’t disagree with your overall point but I also don’t think anyone is going to win a lawsuit over this without a huge case that makes it to scotus because the practice of diversity hires is common and currently tolerated. And “we looked at all our employees and chose who to retain” is isomorphic to regular affirmative action.
> I don’t disagree with your overall point but I also don’t think anyone is going to win a lawsuit over this without a huge case that makes it to scotus because the practice of diversity hires is common and currently tolerated.
According to this pessimistic viewpoint, there was no point in the civil rights movement of the 1960s that led the to revolutionary Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Black people would look around, and realize that discrimination against them is "common and currently tolerated", especially in the South, and just throw their hands in despair and live with it.
Fortunately, they didn't. And if even a single Twilio employee was fired for his race, I hope he doesn't, either. Not just for his sake, but for our sake as a society.
I don't want to live in a society where people are judged and treated according to the color of their skin.
No it isn’t, in fact private companies are encouraged (and in some cases required) to have an affirmative action policy in place.
The thing you think affirmative action means “hiring less qualified employees because of their race” is illegal. You can’t base your hiring decision on someone’s protected characteristics but you are totally free to base other things on that.
Here are some anti-* takes that are totally legal.
* Someone you’re interviewing is Latino that has only worked on small projects or small features and when asked about it they expressed that they always asked to be given bigger projects but was always turned down. You get the feeling that this was likely due to his race and so you don’t hold it against him.
* You’re interviewing a trans woman who recently quit her job while not having anything lined up. She describes the last few months as suddenly having her workload increase, her code reviews getting more critical, and her pto being denied that never had before. By your estimation it seems like she was quiet fired because of her gender alignment and so you don’t consider it a red flag.
* You have the unfortunate task of needing to drastically cut payroll expenses and finance says it will be around 20% of the workforce. You talk to your senior staff and managers to recommend low performing candidates and collect metrics like cards worked and performance reviews. You’re reviewing a woman selected for termination and notice that she seems to be closing more cards than some of her male teammates which is odd, and when you dig into the PRs they’re fine, she’s seemingly not taking on easier work, and from the comments her teammates seem to love her. So you ask the manager’s manager and find out that she’s very much a girls
girl and usually passes on the “boyish” team building activities that always get voted on like doing a work fantasy league and fishing. You think it’s pretty clear what’s going on and pick someone else from that team.
> You get the feeling that this was likely due to his race and so you don’t hold it against him.
What would cause someone to get this feeling? Does a candidate just have to indicate that he wanted bigger projects but didn't get them? Seems like the exact same thing that would happen to someone who was not ready for bigger projects.
Would you do the same thing for a dev with a strong southern accent who worked at a company with mostly left leaning employees?
> Would you do the same thing for a dev with a strong southern accent...
Abso-fucking-lutely. In fact I've actually done something similar, when you work in the somewhat affluent urban blue specs on the political map you will find genuinely talented engineers, usually self-taught too, who grew up in a small town/village and just don't have the usual pedigree of a CS degree from a random college and tech internships. I felt so bad for this one guy we hired, dude was and still is a fucking wizard at networking -- he literally runs his own ISP now as a side hustle but in the interview he didn't even have to say it, it was clear from how defensive he was saying stuff like "I know you would be taking a chance on me", "I would be fine with a probationary period" that he was getting rejected other places. So we had to interview him differently to set him up to show off what he was good at because random whiteboard algo problems wasn't it.
So it's not exactly textbook discrimination, but it is recognizing the systematic disadvantages this guy had as a result of who he is.
They're betting that a lawsuit would be so wildly unpopular that people would rather leave the money (and the principle) behind than face social exile.
Imagine being a minority applying for a job after being laid off from twilio... Like you said this is awful as hiring managers will assume they must really suck. Horrible. Horrible. It would have been fine for twilio to do the layoff the way they did but they should have just kept their mouth quiet about it instead of virtue signaling. They have done more harm than good.
However, it avoids a perception problem which may be far worse: the hypothetical perception that the people drawing up the layoffs were racist and that they disproportionately affected minorities. They wrote "Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused.." on making sure they did not.
If they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random, there's a chance that someone later would say "Twilio employees are 35% female, 33% Asian, 9% Latino, and 6% Black, but the laid-off employees were 11% Latino! Racism!" and turn a mob against them. Once the media/Twitter/mob believe that Twilio HR and Twilio executives are racist, those execs might try to defend themselves by saying: "We weighted based on performance reviews, added a bit of statistical noise, and then did a random selection. We believe those performance reviews to be objective and free of racial bias. We didn't even realize that Latinos were slightly over-represented in the layoffs until you mentioned it, but it looks to be merely statistical chance. We actually fired slightly more white people and more men than the statistics would suggest, we're not bigots."
...Do you think that would work?
It's far easier to defend against the accusation of being overly woke than it is to defend against the accusation of being racist, so while you'd rather be neither, it's better to overtly and publicly fail in the safer direction.
The EEOC will have something to say if your layoff disproportionate effects a protected group. The right thing here is for management to keep their mouth shut and point people to the EEOC if they believe this layoff was disproportionate.
The issue is that the layoff will disproportionately affect protected groups. Engineering is disproportionately male, east asian, south asian, and white. Companies with explicit diversity targets make up for this by compensating in other company orgs (HR, marketing, sales, admin) making them disproportionately female, black, and hispanic.
This means when you keep good engineers but lay off HR, marketing, sales, and admin employees, the layoffs look really bad in terms of affected protected groups.
Bingo. This is the double-edged sword of heavy affirmative action in hiring. If things get tough and you have to make cuts to save the company, the people who you should let go are disproportionately from affirmative action groups.
Obviously the answer is to fire the expensive engineers (keep a skeleton crew for maintenance and bugfixes) and keep the sales & marketing folks. If 20 years working in engineering has taught me anything it's that sales and marketing is where the real money is made.
> f they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random, there's a chance that someone later would say "Twilio employees are 35% female, 33% Asian, 9% Latino, and 6% Black, but the laid-off employees were 11% Latino! Racism!"
It's not a chance, it's a guarantee. Every layoff gets lawsuits claiming discrimination and has so for decades. Which is why virtually every company does this analysis as a normal part of executing a layoff... and has done so for decades.
Is the first problem not the immediate implication of laying people off through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens? You have to assume that the lens selected not exclusively on merit, but also on factors like race, gender, orientation, or creed, in some measure, or in at least one instance. Otherwise, the lens could be said the exist, ever vigilant in its purpose, and yet was not required in this particular batch of layoffs, thank God. The belief that individuals were affected due to their race, orientation, gender, or religion, may be far more pervasive due to the framing than is actually warranted; that I concede.
They say anti-racist but they really just mean racist. They are taking race into account when making staffing decisions. It's as illegal as the extra "side pot" of raise money my company has for diverse employees.
Companies care about diversity numbers when they have a lot of cheap funding.
When funding is tough, pure capitalism takes over woke values and it is up to whether your monetary value to the company>your monetary cost to the company.
There are lots of studies claiming that diversity makes companies more successful. But all that I've seen are correlational studies. And those are equally explained by the idea you mentioned. When companies are flush, they spend money on affirmative action. Therefore companies that have heavy affirmative action tend to be more successful.
All the 3 are immediate implications of that statement.
The belief that individuals were affected due to their race, etc will almost certainly be pervasive because the upper management claimed that it's what happened. And that will be despite the fact that upper management is almost certainly not competent enough to decide on the competence of the people they are laying off (they never are).
They apparently laid off white people at a higher rate than they would have. Otherwise the statement about using an anti-racist lens would be incredibly misleading.
"Than they would have" if what though? They just allowed subconscious racist biases to affect their decision making?
It's not like we lack evidence that this does in fact happen.
If an "anti-racist lens" means anything other than "processes to help avoid the effect of subconscious racial bias" I'd agree it's a problem.
There are actual studies showing 95-99% of us have subconscious racist biases.
And so what which races they favour? I'd call it a massive fail for any "anti-racist lens" if, say, only whites were fired.
(You also mention "men" - subconscious sexist biases are just as universal. For highly skilled roles unfortunately they very much typically favour men.)
The field of subconscious biases suffers from several fatal defects. The scores people get on subconscious bias tests vary wildly over time, even short periods of time. This is a fundamental flaw and should be the end of the inquiry. If we can't measure the thing, we can't draw any conclusions about it.
Also, there has never been a linkage drawn between scores on subconscious bias tests and real world actions. Are racists probably "subconsciously biased"? Sure. But the reverse has never been shown.
Actually we can and do measure it and such linkages have been demonstrated. There are probably more succinct references, but here was one of the first I found:
Another study found that anonymizing resumes actually hurt minority candidates. [1] This is because the companies were trying hard to help people with minority sounding names and no longer could.
Anonymizing seems like an appropriate way to handle layoffs as well. It may be hard to do because some managers know the people involved. But they could force all decisions to be justified and externally reviewed by others who don't know the demographics.
No one would have had a problem if they described a rigorous process of anonymizing the layoff decisions. It swings the pendulum too far to go full on anti-racist. Others point out it's also illegal.
"Anti-racist" to me simply means "against racism; actively ensuring racism doesn't occur". Maybe it means something different in the US.
The idea of a company trying hard to "help people with minority sounding names" sounds pretty absurd to me.
As a Latino, I too am growing tired of the way some leadership and HR departments in tech callously, carelessly push and promote these diversity initiatives in a way that creates resentment. Combating racial bias is a sensitive topic. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that. And yet companies continue to make statements like this without the tact it deserves.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really were trying to fight inequity in the system. Instead of saying something like "Historically layoffs in tech have disproportionately affected minorities, pregnant women, and older employees. Here's a link to a study showing that data. With these layoffs we ensured that no group was affected unfairly", they just throw out the term anti-racist, and let the audience draw their own conclusions.
Because at the end of the day, making sure their layoffs don't unfairly target X or Y disadvantaged group--or really any group--is just doing the right thing. Why brag about the fact that your HR policies are not systemically flawed? It's as if you came home to your partner and proudly stated that on your drive back home you did NOT run over any elders or toddlers with your car. You're expected to do that. If anything taking credit makes people wonder.
In this case, it comes across as virtue signaling by Twilio's leadership. The same desire to curry favor when laying off people that makes CEOs tell their employees how hard the decision was for him or her. Trying to pat yourself in the back while announcing layoffs seems wildly tone-deaf to me. And at the expense of the groups they're allegedly trying to protect.
Curious how you feel about the term LatinX that all tech companies are embracing? Reason I ask is I have a few really good friends who are Hispanic(Nicaraguan, Dominican, Mexican) and they all despise that term. I don't know why its used and it seems strange as its been forced on us the past few years with no consulting or buy-in from any of the Hispanic employees at these companies. Even outside polls found that a huge majority (96%) of Hispanic people dislike this term but its still being used.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind LatinX, my main issue with it is that it's mostly a distraction. I can't speak for women, but I imagine their top worries are things like the amount of violence against women [1] (at least in Mexico where my family is originally from), unequal pay, how much the burden of having children rests on their shoulders and limits their careers, etc. You know, stuff that has a significant impact on their lives. Spanish defaulting to male form of words is an archaic reflection of how male-centered the culture is, but it's not the wheel that needs greasing. Trying to change the language to make it less male-focused is both awkward and also seems like a consolation prize that moves the needle for women exactly zero amount. It creates an illusion of progress, while not solving any of the big problems.
The people that tend toward terms like Latinx treat non-white folks like children, constantly getting offended on their behalf and denying them agency. It's ironic that many "anti-racists" act in a racist manner.
Most of the people I've heard self-identify as LatinX are queer Hispanic people who grew up in an English-speaking country (ie. second-generation immigrants).
Their primary language is English, so any difficulty pronouncing LatinX in Spanish doesn't matter as much to them. They're not necessarily looking to solve the gendered nature of Spanish overall, and may not even speak it fluently. Also, similar early English terms for gender-equality/non-binary identities were equally difficult to pronounce (the title Mx., neo-pronouns like xie/zer).
I'm curious how the data would look split by gender/country of origin/LGBTQ+ or not.
I’m Spanish and have friends all over Latin America. we often laugh about the term. Some people in the US decided to put a rich variety of cultures and historical backgrounds in the same bag.
Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico… all have fascinating cultures and histories on their own. All erased and stereotyped by a bland externally imposed term like Latinx that is not even pronounceable in Spanish. It feels like the colonialism that some are supposedly trying to fight against.
It's believers in the cause (either genuinely or performatively) trying to rise above one another in moral status. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it backfires as it did with Twitch: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56251452
I find the whole Latino/Latinx switch attempt especially shortsighted, because it is commonly just used as a catch-all term for "person from Central/South America".
But, there are millions of native people from those places who don't view themselves as Latino, and, if anything, see the Latins as invaders/colonizers/oppressors. For example, if you're a K’iche’ speaker from Guatemala, you may not even speak Spanish, and you probably don't self identify as "Latino".
> they just throw out the term anti-racist, and let the audience draw their own conclusions.
It's pretty clear what antiracist means:
> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
Yes, the difference is that responsibility is diffused in the former and nobody can be held accountable for it, despite a similar outcome.
And there are plenty of institutions (law enforcement in particular, but there are many others) that actively behave in a racist manner. Again, since there's no policy, nobody in practice can be held accountable for it.
So no, nobody should be surprised that racism is alive and well in 2022. It thrives in the intersection of personal bigotry and the wide open space of discretionary power exercised by figures of authority.
One cannot logically conclude from a "racist" outcome, however that is defined, that the inputs to that outcome are also racist, because the intervening interactions are so complex and uncontrollable (that is, it is a chaotic system) that the outcome that emerges is almost always not what anybody intended. That is, the activities of institutions with no "actively racist" policies may very well result in "racist" outcomes. I believe we are in agreement here.
Where we disagree is on the thesis that you can control for the outcome of such a chaotic system, especially using something as flawed as the postmodern "anti-racist" movement that is in vogue. Many eggs have already been and will continue to be broken in service of the anti-racist omelette, and we will all be the worse off for it.
I don't get why they had to make that public statement in the first place. They could have kept that to themselves and complete the layoff just fine without the inflammatory statements, while still practicing whatever fashionable principles they choose. Is this a way to signal piety to the tech community in the hopes that more people aligned with those politics will apply there in the future?
I think your religious metaphor is exactly on point and it makes perfect sense if you take it seriously. Why do Christian companies talk about God when they make business decisions? They're not implementing some complex sociopolitical strategy, they just think God is important so they like to spread His message whenever they get the opportunity. It's the same phenomenon.
> Why do Christian companies talk about God when they make business decisions? They're not implementing some complex sociopolitical strategy, they just think God is important so they like to spread His message whenever they get the opportunity. It's the same phenomenon.
I find that equally obnoxious. If I wanted to hear about "God", I'll go to a local church/fellowship/insert whichever place of worship for any religion...not from a soul-less business.
I think hardly anything should be conflated with diversity tbh. About 5 years ago nothing was really attributed to diversity, except maybe in some remote areas. The new push to call everything anti-racist is making everyone very racist. It's a very weird moment.
>If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are.
I mean, this isn't a question. They're saying it outright. When picking who to layoff, race was a factor. If you don't like it, take it up with people making those decisions.
It isn’t. The law is race neutral on this; and hiring/firing discrimination on the basis of race, against any race, is a good way to open yourself up to lawsuits. It’s up to HR departments and ultimately their bosses if they want to play with fire or not.
In large part because the argument has been, from Judges like Justice Ginsberg, that you aren't taking away anything from anyone by offering "marginalized people" special privilege. Which is an awful rationale since seats at a university or at a job via affirmative action are in fact using a limited resource, but the argument has some semblance of logic in that the position is virtual until it is filled. In this case, you are literally taking a thing away from people based on their race and there's no possible argument when the CEO states it in plain text.
> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
This makes it sound like affirmative action is illegal. But it is currently allowed and many companies brag about doing it.
What Twilio is doing is basically the same. It's like affirmative action for layoffs.
I agree that GP was wrong to say that discrimination is mandated, which it is not.
Affirmative action in hiring for jobs in the US is illegal. University admissions are different, but it is straightforwardly illegal to say, "I'm hiring a software engineer, I have two candidates, I prefer the one who is black because of his race."
I don't think that link is using the term the same way you are. It's more focused on making sure there's a wide recruiting funnel and having boring mandatory diversity trainings. Not taking race into consideration for hiring/firing decisions.
Consider: It is illegal but very difficult and expensive to prove in court. Not even your average software dev could easily eat the legal fees required, and therefore they are incentivized to shut up and look for another job.
It is still a question. There could people who are clearly not performing and then are let go that just so happen to not be a part of the "protected group". People are not being let go because of who they are, it's just a part of the calculus. It may not be the significant factor.
> People are not being let go because of who they are
This is a common tactic from progressive in that they flat out deny the reality that everyone else see. They just say "it doesn't happen" when the CEO in a letter that was filed stated they specifically did this.
Dude, I don't know why you're trying to paint me as something when I'm the OP of the thread that has taken umbrage with the layoffs. First, go outside and breathe.
Second, the statement clearly says that it is a part of the calculus. Nobody is fired because they are white or black or whatever. The statement is just that it is taken into consideration (which is something that I have issue with).
Please (and I mean this in the most considerate way because you're on the internet just randomly labeling people) touch grass.
"Part of the calculus" is just a euphemism indicating that race was a criteria that was possibly the reason someone was layed off. Let's be honest shall we instead of trying to play mental gymnastics.
Imagine if the response to the Civil rights movement was "its okay stop complaining, race is just part of the calculus we use to determine who gets to go on the front of the bus, no one is forced to sit in the back because of race, it's just part of the calculus". No one would fall for that lame excuse to cover discrimination.
First, you're responding negatively to me about something that I ORIGINALLY said that I didn't like. So I'm not sure where the energy is coming from, but that's fine.
Secondly, busing does not compare to at will employment? The analogy also ignores the power dynamic behind racism (and all -isms), but that's a longer discussion than I'm willing to have here.
Lastly, I'm not sure who the "we" was there... but whoever the in-group that you're associate with is, I would suggest they look more at the socioeconomic conditions that we are all living through that lead us to these conversations filled with baseless accusations and labeling rather than making minorities the targets of your fears of replacement.
I cannot think of another reasonable interpretation of what the CEO said than "we considered race/class/some other attribute as part of a person's performance and suitability for continued employment at the company". If two people were otherwise equal int heir performance, but one was black, and the other white, I woudl expect that to be the determining feature.
I don't have any insight into what they are actually doing.
They said it was a factor. Twilio I'm sure had said they've been trying to diversify their workforce for years and you didn't care (which is the same thing, just through hiring instead of firing).
It is you parachuting in to be offended that is the disingenuous thing here.
The US Civil Rights Movement's hard-won successes in the 1960s were essentially the beginning of something resembling equality-before-the-law for black folks in the US, and it's still well within living memory.
Mind, I'm also not particularly comfortable with racist hiring practices, no matter who's being targeted. Just pointing out that widespread de jure inequality based on race, plus various extremely-racist practices that were carried out and weren't illegal (as distinct from the law calling for racial discrimination explicitly, which was also still a thing then) were major factors in the US until not that long ago, including, crucially, housing and financial discrimination that left black people behind in the post-WWII economic boom—the short version is that they were flat-out banned from many of the best up-and-coming neighborhoods, and if they could find a good neighborhood that'd let them buy a house, they'd have, all else being equal, a much harder time securing a loan than a white person. This had measurable and pronounced effects on poverty rates and general financial well-being for them and their families, decades later.
And even the US Civil War wasn't that long ago. There were still a handful of former slaves alive in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was going on, IIRC. The US Civil War was the early and mid 1860s, about 100 years earlier—there were no combatants left alive by the 1960s ("fun fact": a few married-later-in-life widows of soldiers were still alive and receiving Civil War pensions, though!) but there were surely at least a few born-into-slavery-in-1865 slaves still alive 95-100 years later. The war freed them from slavery but they spent basically their whole lives under regimes of legally endorsed racial discrimination, with the tide only turning as the last of them died.
I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I mean just look at Ahmaud Arbery, whose 3 white male murderers were initially not arrested or charged with a clearly obvious murder. In 2020!
Thanks! Was trying to keep it concise and tight enough to be both informative and interesting to someone who's not American, while still hitting the "highlights", especially the relative recency of outright racist laws and of how recently private and public racial discrimination was legal (if not always required by law) and normal.
> I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
... which is why I didn't even try to cover these instances of what I guess could be grouped together as something like "civil strife", which actions were or are explicitly outside the law, not simply not-illegal, but have been or are often tolerated or overlooked, but you're absolutely right to bring them up.
In the case of the Civil Rights Movement it wasn't only (though, to be clear, it was mostly) black people being killed by racists, often with no consequences for the perpetrators—several white participants in civil rights marches and rallies were also targeted and murdered. Often Quakers or (IIRC?) Catholics, participating in part due to their religious convictions—the whole "social justice" angle held greater sway in US Catholicism then than it does now, I gather, which was also evident in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. These killings weren't legal, of course, and I expect they'd have been quite unpopular if you'd polled the whole US population, but such actions had enough support locally, including among public officials, that many of the killers escaped justice anyway, so long as the killings were in the name of preserving white supremacy, even if that meant killing some white people, too.
A read over a Wikipedia timeline of 1960s US history is pretty wild—the entire decade was batshit crazy, not to put too fine a point on it.
The person you are responding to didn't mention slavery, and knowing the etymology of a word doesn't mean that you know how the phenomenon may have historical echoes.
The etymological relationship between "slav" and "slavery" (which is a contested relation at best) doesn't answer the question about your depth in American race relations?
The answer also shows a lack of knowledge about anything other than the headline "slavery".
serious question - instead of debating the issue, why do you quiz them on their personal knowledge of history? If you'd like to make a point, make it. but demanding they justify their knowledge of history isn't a point in your favor, it rather appears you're incapable of providing a logical argument so will ad hominem their knowledge of history instead.
Who are you to quiz random people on the internet on historical context, and what does that have to do with the legality of hiring or firing based on race?
It seems to me like you're trying to justify institutionalized systematic racism on the basis of 'historical context'.
Race is a social construct that only has any relevance in it's historical context. If somebody is not aware of the relevant context as it relates to the US (they specifically said they were not from the US) then of course it would be very difficult to understand the point of the policies.
Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
>Race is a social construct that only has any relevance in it's historical context
race plays a role in college admissions, and now in this layoff, and maybe hiring at the same company. so clearly it has relevance today in its current context.
>it would be very difficult to understand the point of the policies.
which policies? making hiring and firing decisions based on race is illegal in the USA.
>Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
You didn't make any arguments at all, you just started quizzing them on their knowledge.
Again, it just seems like you're trying to legitimize systemic institutional racism on the basis of 'historical context' of a 'social construct'.
race "the social construct" is still closely related to genetic history. Pretending there is no relationship isn't very useful. In making your response, assume I am a scientists who knows facts.
I’m sorry, but present racism is not absolved by last racism. There is no “historical context” that excuses a society from promoting race based discrimination. Period.
The historical context makes it all even more unfavorable towards Americans as a group. They come out as fundamentally incapable of not being racist or xenophobic. They are only able to fight discrimination with discrimination, and „antiracism” is racism because no matter what sign you put to it, you’re moving along that bloody axis, and it’s being on that axis at all that is the problem, and that you are incapable of derailing yourself from it. It’s just what you do.
But I bet you’ll say that I don’t make sense and that I don’t understand anything, and that history this and context that. So be it. Proves my point, in a way. Dragonslayers turning into the dragons they’ve slain and all that.
And what do you imagine the effect of that "factor" would be?
Taking offense to unfair firing practices also doesn't mean one doesn't take offense to unfair hiring practices. But the topic at hand is layoff, not hiring.
The argument seems to be "a little discrimination is okay". So, I guess the question would be, what is an acceptable coefficient for the race variable, for it to be okay?
"Part of the calculus" implies there is a specific point at which racial discrimination stepwise goes from bad to not-bad, and I'm curious what that weighting value is.
Obviously if I institute a total no-blacks policy, that's a problem. But what if I only mark down black people, say, 20%? Are EEOC investigators going to rubber-stamp my racist employment decisions then?
Perhaps when you do layoffs naively, you can accidentally adversely affect certain groups. For example, if your policy was last in - first out, you would likely be letting go a disproportional number of young workers.
I can't say wether anything like that was the case, nor would I counter the experience of responders here saying that they as minorities find actions like Twillio's harmful. Nor do I comment on whether the messaging was done well. Only that the situation can have nuance.
I agree with you but it's nothing new. The same thing happens all the time during hiring and college admission decisions. I think the unintended consequence of all such programs will be resentment and mistrust.
"I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping."
How do they know who is what race though? If I am 50% latino / 50% asian what does that mean? Do you get to pick? Or do they test my skin color? Do they have forms to fill out what race you are? Do they do genetic testing? Depressing racism is back.
Soon after George Floyd, my manager came under immense pressure from HR to inquire me about my race. I declined to comment. So they decided to mark me as a minority based on my ethnic name. It still bothers me to this day that my race is so outright asked in the office to used to determine my employability, recognition, bonuses, and promotion. It was a turning point in my career. I thought to myself, "wow, here we are. I didn't think we'd get here, but I now work for a racist company and society at large."
When I refused to log my race in our HR system they said they would use “perceived race” to report my race to the government. I specifically asked them to not guess my race and they said tough luck they are doing it anyway. It’s outrageous.
Making an assumption, so far I have only read the CNBC article.
Many of the recent tech layoffs included entire departments not entirely related to the operation of the business, the core product. For example: recruiting departments. When entire diversity departments were terminated, many considered the move racist. Perhaps Twilio found themselves in this scenario?
i think everyone's point is taking race into account in any shape or form is illegal, so not firing black people but still needing to fire 11% means in turn you are firing more non-black people to fill the gap, meaning those people were fired based on race and not performance, which IANAL is illegal
The problem is not just the letter of the law, it's the culture that would even create such a policy in the first place. The law can help some, assuming SCOTUS knocks this down, but it doesn't address the root cause. The people who came up with this will still be in positions of power.
Every layoff I've seen is analyzed for a disparate impact against protected classes. This is straightforward defense against a discrimination lawsuit, where the demographics of the layed off population and the retained population will be compared as exhibit 1.
I suspect this is just Twilio trying to get social justice credit for standard HR practices.
When one looks at the industry as a whole, one might conclude that the aim is to turn the working class against each other. It's almost as if the thing corporate America is most afraid of is a unified workforce.
The issue is that it becomes necessary as marginalized candidates are given preferences during the hiring phase. So if the same privilege is not extended during layoffs it will unfairly impact them.
It is brutally unfair to hire by one standard and then suddenly hold them to a higher one. And fairness aside, if you do not look through an anti-racist/anti-oppression lens you would destroy years of work of improving company diversity.
Does this imply that you think that minority candidates that were hired were not as qualified as non-minority candidates? That's the only way I can parse your statement that these affirmative action hires were hired by one standard and then held to a higher standard when fired.
To be marginalized is to be cheaper. All else equal, the cheaper worker will be given preference during hiring. So long as the worker remains cheaper, all else equal, the cheaper worker will also be given preference during layoffs. If the worker works their way up into a position that they are no longer cheaper, they won't be given preference, but they also aren't marginalized anymore so you would't expect preference.
They should clarify that race, gender, etc. was not a factor in their decision making process. Although then it would be hard to make sense of their statement.
Reading the post in context, I think it seems like they were trying to say that they went out of their way to ensure race was not a factor in the layoff decision process, but it does come across… as not a great look.
It reminds me a bit of the “asbestos free” xkcd comic. Like, I’m sure there are some companies still who would try to first fire the black folk or the Indian folk or whatever. But… is there really a big tech firm where that’s a possibility? I kinda doubt it.
That’s the creepiest thing to me - employers tracking your race seems … strange. And if they’re not tracking it it’s even worse because that means they’re deciding your race for you!
True. My race is listed on Workday. And that was determined by HR after I declined to declare what I am. They just decided to look at me, my name, and choose what they thought most suiting.
Depends on the time of year. During the winter I trend toward toasted marshmallow but during the summer with ample sun I'm somewhere between Obama and Denzel.
Sounds like you may have Seasonal Privilege Disorder - a strange, recently observed, condition where privilege waxes and wanes.
But seriously since we're talking about skin color, all kidding aside, (and you're probably already aware of this) skin cancer rates vary dramatically by race:
i think this is really a problem of the CEO living in a bubble (hard to imagine i know) and not running that by legal. I think the CEO really stepped in it with that statement. I can hear the clanging of all the attack lawyers coming out of their cages.
This line seems to be referenced a lot in these comments:
> Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.
Sounds like they are taking steps to make sure whoever was chosen for layoffs were not chosen for racist reasons.
But so many comments are making the leap to they are targeting white people for layoffs and claiming this layoff is racist against white people.
For example this comment:
> People have lost their damn minds. This is actual institutionalized racism.
and this:
> I consider myself very ‘liberal’ per American standards (pro abortion, pro lgbt rights, pro racial diversity and acceptance), and this to me screams of woke culture gone wild. Looks like anything can be weaponised.
> Sounds like they are taking steps to make sure whoever was chosen for layoffs were not chosen for racist reasons.
that would have been illegal either way. Really there are two options here: Either they did something questionable and want to deflect (like being racist against white people. I'm not saying this is the case but it is a possibility), or they want to get a pat on the back for not breaking the law.
It's one of those sentences that immediately puts your mind to why it was placed in there: "[..] so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out without clubbing any seals."
Why would one say that? Why does one explicitly mention this? To what gain?
Either you want brownie-points for something that should be a given, or you want to get ahead of something.
See what Dr. Kendi is advocating for and his "anti-racist" ideas. I think it will make sense to you why some people write things like "People have lost their damn minds. This is actual institutionalized racism."
Given that Kendi has spoken at Twilio and they Reference him in several of the DEI Annual reports it should be assumed that Twilio shares Kendi's view of "Anti-Racism"
Why not say "we ensured our layoffs were not affected by racist or gendered bias."? Why exclude non-minorities from the policy of non-discrimination?
Imagine a company writes, "We avoided laying off Latino men for racist or bigoted reasons." But not Latino women? But not African Americans? What is the message behind limiting this assurance of non-discrimination to a particular group?
I agree that people interpreting this as Twilio announcing that it explicitly discriminated against non-oppressed groups are reading way too deep into it. But it was a pretty dumb thing to put in a layoff note.
It should be; but I think it's naive or disingenuous to imply that hiring/layoff decisions are usually fair and unbiased, especially in multiple departments in a large organization.
I'm tempted to build a filter that automatically ignores any comment on HN with the word 'woke.' It is, legitimately, the most annoying culture war I have seen on any forum.
There is good reason to believe that white people will be the primary targets of this layoff. I work for an employer in the Bay Area and the messaging echos many others in the region. We have been subjected to lectures and presentations for the past two years telling us that white people are a problem in society. That white people are privileged, are biased, and are oppressors. Management openly suggests to us through broadcasts that we should read the books, "How to be an anti-racist" and "White fragility". Leaders in the organization have these quasi-struggle sessions where they publicly confess their white privilege via broadcast. Management also openly states that race will be a factor in bonuses and promotions to help uplift minorities. They proudly state in their marketing that they will increase hiring of colored people and give charitable donations to black organizations.
Given this pattern of messaging, how else can someone conclude that white people are not the primary targets of a layoff of a San Francisco based company? Especially when the statement contains, "layoffs were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens".
HN is full of reactionaries who are easily triggered by any sort of diversity-related language and seem to lose their ability to think critically. Everyone complaining about that line is making a whole lot of assumptions about what it actually means.
FWIW I would be interested to know what the CEO actually meant by that. My assumption is it's more lip service than anything else.
I agree the statement is ambiguous. However, it does seem to be hinting at something.
What do you think "layoffs were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" means?
Like, what concrete actions do you think they took to justify that statement?
Do you think it's purely window-dressing? That they did absolutely nothing different, and just included the statement?
I don't know if it's an authoritative source, but here's one of the top Google results for "what is anti-racisim":
"Anti-racism is also a system – a system in which we create policies, practices, and procedures to promote racial equity."
and
"Anti-racist policy creates systems that center the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color"
and
"We refer to ‘racism’ as an interpersonal display of prejudice toward Black, Indigenous, and People of Color."
Given the above understanding of the term "anti-racist", if I were a betting man, I'd bet that the racial makeup of the laid off employees is not an even sampling of the racial makeup of the company.
> I'd bet that the racial makeup of the laid off employees is not an even sampling of the racial makeup of the company.
I would bet that your average "blind" layoff is not an even sampling of the racial makeup of the company. If they did anything at all here it was probably taking some sort of active role in preventing that outcome.
This, and HN in aggregate is pretty right wing, so anything "woke" is bound to trigger a lot of people. I suppose there's always been a libertarian bend here in line tech workers in general, but ever since Trump (and especially Trump's loss), topics vaguely supporting progressive ideas are home to tons of comments airing right-wing grievances.
> The cloud communications software builder has been striving for profitability in 2023, and the restructuring plan aims to improve operating margins, create a better selling capacity and reduce operating costs.
If you look at all the layoffs we had this year, the vast majority are by companies that are VC funded and unprofitable. It would be a scary time to work for a VC backed company, because you're one missed funding round away from getting kicked to the curb, and VC's seem to be clutching the funds in this economy.
While you’re not directly stating that Twilio is VC-funded, that implication can easily be drawn by the adjacency in these two statements. Twilio was VC funded, but they’re a public company now and have been for some time. These layoffs have nothing to do with missing a funding round.
This means this 11% reduction leaves them at... 292% growth since 2020, while its not amazing news, this is a small reduction given the growth they've had.
These layoffs were inevitable IMO, everyone doubled their team (or more!) and then asked where the money was going to come from.
That is why we see layoffs like these. You just layoff the people that didn’t successfully self onboard and/or are unqualified but slipped through your screening.
This is almost all of it. Anyone (even incompetent managers) can identify productive employees after working with them for a few months/year. And all the interview processes in the world aren't entirely effective in finding them before.
So if you're flush with cash just wildly overhire and then let go those you couldn't find a place for. And that won't even necessarily be all the "bad hires" because most people can do some job well, you just need to transfer them to it. (Otherwise you have to admit that there are people not fit for working at all, and they must starve in the street or something.)
Really dehumanizing hiring practices. I recently interviewed with Twilio and they wanted me to do an online coding challenge before I even got to speak to a hiring manager to know if I wanted the job. Same thing Amazon does.
Companies that do this are waving a big red parachute in your face.
The real problem in my mind is that it's difficult for employees to judge whether a company is making disciplined hires in the first place.
The ballpark method I've been using has been to ask for the ARR and divide that number by the employee count. I don't know that this is a real business indicator, but it seems to me that the closer that number is to a workable salary, the better.
Maybe all tech startups are all using VC funds, but they're not all created equal in terms of management quality. There are a handful of startups that boast never holding a formal layoff.
Startups are by definition young companies growing extremely fast. Never having had formal layoffs for young companies experiencing high growth should not be something particularly surprising.
Sounds more like you're one missed funding round away from having a 10% chance of being kicked to the curb, where "kicked to the curb" often means a fairly generous severance that covers more than the period you're likely to remain unemployed (12 weeks in this case). While I'm sure there are some legitimately bad outcomes, it seems like the median outcome is keeping your job, and the median outcome for those who don't is a several month paid vacation.
Next you are going to tell me that a company is going to need to make a product going forward and can’t just expect to be supplied with literally endless free money forever.
You can't just broadly look at all companies for patterns in layoffs. It's important to divide startups from IPO'd companies.
A common pattern for all of these is the inability to generate profit, but this is business-as-usual for a startup. Even in normal times it's okay for startups to lose money.
Startups typically perform layoffs because they are running out of runway and need to extend the life of the company. Their entire reason for existing is the liquidity event that is either acquisition or IPO, and it is essential for investors that they survive long enough to see such an event.
For publicly traded companies, which we've seen a lot of layoffs in recently (which in the last 30 days includes: Twilio, Rent the Runway, Uber, Shopify, Snap, Wayfair, New Relic). The common theme for almost all of this is negative net earnings and B2C. This is what makes Twilio interesting, they're the first B2B IPO with major layoffs.
One thing that I keep hearing at my IPO'd startup is that "we won't have layoffs since we have a long runway", but runway matters way less for IPO'd companies. The key aim for IPO'd companies is to please your investors, and if you're shares keep taking a hit because interest rates go up and your net earnings remains steeply negative, then layoffs are coming.
If this continues it will start to impact profitable companies, but not before doing much more damage to the non-profitable ones. This feels like a slow motion re-enactment of the dot com burst.
>It would be a scary time to work for a VC backed company, because you're one missed funding round away from getting kicked to the curb, and VC's seem to be clutching the funds in this economy.
VC-backed companies that aren't profitable are risky places to work for anyways. At least in these layoffs, the whole company doesn't go bust.
But if you work at a VC-backed company, and you don't feel essential, then maybe keep your resume updated.
> As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on
marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an
Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.
Just wanted to add some additional context from the PDF you linked.
The civil rights act of 1964 should make racially-based decisions in workforce hiring/firing illegal, but here we are, nearly 60 years later.
I consider myself very ‘liberal’ per American standards (pro abortion, pro lgbt rights, pro racial diversity and acceptance), and this to me screams of woke culture gone wild. Looks like anything can be weaponised.
Same here. I'm pretty liberal on a number of issues, but this kind of language is extremely off-putting to me. If it means that the layoffs were explicitly racist, that is disgusting.
I am fine with hiring that enforces equality of opportunity (where nobody is denied an opportunity because of their race).
I am NOT fine with hiring that enforces equality of outcome (where some people, who would otherwise be considered unqualified, are granted an opportunity because of their race).
Race should account for ZERO percent of a hiring decision.
The fundamental misconception of today's "anti-racist" movement is that every unequal outcome is the direct result of past or present racism, without stopping to examine the validity of that assumption.
A great many eggs have been and will continue to be broken in service of equality of outcome, and we will all be worse off for it.
Who the hell is the "we" you're talking about here? I've been opposed to considering race in hiring (and college admissions, etc.) since I was old enough to understand it (which was in elementary school).
Agreed. I don't consider myself to have moved politically right at all, but progressives are moving drastically left. Stuff like this, and the modern gender politics that is resulting in the erasure of women and lesbians in particular, has resulted in me no longer referring to myself as a leftist.
The Republicans left me a while ago. This kinda stuff is way too left for me and I fear the Democrats are going to do the same. I’d say I’m a moderate who votes Democratic. Both sides are going too far left and right.
I always enjoyed that attempt at a definition that led to people pointing out it made women out of chairs and horses. Some of them do manage to be ideologically consistent and exclude vast swathes of cis women from womanhood just to get at trans women, but most just fall back on "but science!" even as actual scientists point out science doesn't support anti-trans ideology.
"Actual scientists point out science doesn't support anti-trans ideology" -- unfortunately, "actual science" is defined by who speaks for it and what is permitted to be published and any criticism of the sexualization or surgical/therapeutic treatment of vulnerable minors is automatically "transphobia". Right now, we are in a very dark place with powerful lobbies dictating things unimaginable in prior eras and which would and should be illegal in a sane society/world.
There are appropriate, consistent definitions for what a woman is. The fact that there are somewhat vague boundary cases is true of any definition of real world things and not an indictment of its utility.
As others have already mentioned, you can keep considering yourself liberal in your living room. But if you go out on social media with these views, it could be construed as a rabid racist persona.
It's not your place to tell other people what you think they actually believe. Woke/wokism is common parlance. As an atypical lefty soc dem, I also have a strong distaste for wokeoids and don't feel like I need to cowtow to everything everyone says on "my side".
edit: I'm stunned that you are unaware of how fractured the left is politically. If you consider it for a moment, the left is definitionally fractured. We want change, but what change? There are a million answers and many people think they have the perfect full solution in their head.
Many lefties, myself included, see identity politics as a means to divide the working class and ignore class issues. It isn't only that, there are real idpol issues. However, fixing the class issues is how we will achieve better outcomes for all, including underprivileged minorities, but also poor white people. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
it's a tale as old as time: "centrist" liberal goes online to argue with the right, discovers they're arguing with the left, covers their tracks with the delete button and an accusation of horseshoe theory
They have been pushing "anti-racism" hard, which sounds nice on the surface but when you dig into critical race theory where its coming from it's a dog whistle for hating white people, basically. Now I know this is super trendy right now but I don't want to get emails from your organization about how woke and bigoted you are. Just sell me the damn SaaS tool we signed up for and keep your politics to yourself. We moved all our business away.
To imply there is absolutely no overlap between the group of people espousing CRT and the group of people who believe the world would be a better place if every white person spontaneously died is to be willfully ignorant of an unfortunate reality.
We should be taking the opportunity to disavow the latter on behalf of the good intentions of the former.
Do you have any actual data on how many people "believe the world would be a better place if every white person spontaneously died"? I don't mean this to be combative but without some actual survey data or something proving their significance, it seems like this is one of those "it feels true to me" things
This guy seems to be making a splash with his book about white people disappearing. With the general idea seeming to be the world would be better off. He’s reviewed favorably in many newspapers.
Could you recommend some texts responsible for the change in scope?
My understanding of CRT is that race is entirely a social construction, and that the laws and attitudes surrounding race are primarily informed by this social construction and not anything with real biological basis.
That's not really a good understanding - it may seem pedantic, but legal theorists and sociologists have very little to say about the 'real biological basis' of race; it's simply not within their purview. However, it may be used as an assumption or presupposition or not considered at all.
You mentioned 'and that the laws and attitudes surrounding race are primarily informed by this social construction' which correctly describes CRT, but it doesn't have anything to do with the biology (or lack thereof) of race.
I appreciate the feedback... Can you recommend any texts on CRT? My view is that of a layperson, I've never interacted with scholarly theory beyond reading shitposts about Hegel on telegram.
But this is actually an interesting topic to me and I'd love to learn more.
Note that Ladson-Billings & Tate (1995) was the widespread introduction of CRT into the field of education, which I think is the bit of CRT that is creating a lot of the fuss these days.
In general, you can search for “critical race theory in $FIELD” and find out how the ideas have expanded beyond law.
In my personal experience, here is what I have seen and experienced that has gone far beyond what core CRT is about:
1. CRT and postmodernism in academia often go hand-in-hand. In a gross over-simplification, this means that everything is socially constructed and there is no absolute truth. These ideas have merit and a place in academic research, but the reductio ad absurdum cases (some listed below) are not a really good look for a solid theory.
2. There are groups of people who call themselves liberals who cry “that’s racist” at what seems like every opportunity they can. When you engage them on the topic, they will sometimes begrudgingly acknowledge that they are referring to structural racism (which is not a difficult case to make). When asked what they would like me (or people like me) to do about something that I cannot control (being white), they don’t really have an answer other than “don’t be racist”, which isn’t what structural racism is about. These folks completely debase a very valid argument by invoking it in (imho) inappropriate ways, seemingly just for the sake of protesting or getting under the skin of moderates and conservatives. They don’t seem to realize that their actions are sometimes (often?) alienating the types of folks whose support that they need/want (i.e., open-minded moderates who do not want to be overtly and loudly labeled as racists due to structural racism).
3. In academic work (my first career), anything that is CRT-related becomes almost unassailable in review. The academic rigor in most CRT topics is laughable because, as designed, any rigor is considered oppression of some sort. The sad thing is that there is a small amount of really well done research that gets thrown in with the less good stuff, but it is all fairly tainted due to overall lack of rigor.
3a. Note that CRT topics and researchers are embraced at universities and some journals because it makes it much easier for them to reach diversity targets and publication targets (getting published in some sort of a CRT-themed journal is super easy, much like getting published in some sort of a tech-themed journal is super easy).
4. I have seen white people told in elite university classrooms that they should only be validating what non-white people are saying in the classroom discussions. This is despite the professor openly encouraging exchanging a diversity of views.
5. I have seen half-white people openly denounce the white half of their heritage because… reasons? In one specific case, an Asian American female who looks very Asian denounced her “white privilege” when probably 90% or more of her privilege came from her Asian side (her Asian side is well known in the community and is relatively wealthy, while her white side contributed mostly hard-to-see genetic privilege). In another case, a half white half Puerto Rican male who looks very white and has a white name aggressively denounced his white side and did academic research about the Puerto Rican struggle against the white man — as though he had any idea what it was like. His personal narrative research (popular in CRT) revealed that he had issues with his white father, and that was pretty much the source of all of his rage. Of course, based on CRT tenets, his research that was more about father-son and/or familial relationships became about racism writ large (unreasonably and inappropriately imho, even though the topic is very worthy of study). There are many, many cases like these.
6. For academics who are white, straight, males in the US, it is extremely difficult to get tenure in non-STEM departments/fields at high tier universities unless you go all in with CRT and post-modernism. Even then, it is tough. On the one hand, I appreciate that there is a wider range of views and life experiences that are represented in these fields. On the other hand, I am sad that a large swath of the US pool of potential academics is almost a priori excluded from becoming researchers in these fields. Note that I had tenure, so this didn’t effect me personally, but I have seen the impact on others (mostly in terms of opting out of an academic career).
Note that I have some personal opinions that jibe with the data but aren’t really popular (which is one reason I left academia):
- Every society has one or more privileged groups. This will be forever true.
- The vast majority of privilege is determined by socio-economic status (SES). In the US, the numbers that seem to keep popping up are that about 5-10% of differences in most measures can be accounted for by race, and most/all of the rest is SES. Note that the one/main area that this may not hold true is in criminal prosecution in the US (not a legal scholar, so I’m not sure).
- Changing SES is very difficult across generations, and I think I t’s a topic worthy of study. I think affirmative action in the US has made some useful progress in this area, but not in the ways that are typically cited. Incremental changes in SES are something that are measurable and achievable. Most attempted at large-scale change in SES have failed and will fail, imho, largely because it’s easy to change the E part of SES, but it’s much harder to change the S part (the much more salient part, imho).
Clearly a Civil Rights violation. I hope everyone impacted that isn't "marginalized" sues them for millions of dollars.
We either have equality codified as Civil Rights law and respect that or we don't have it all and we are free to associate with people we want to in every respect. But you need to pick one.
The ideal person to sue would be a "marginalized" person who was laid off, since the "anti racist" bs could impact this person twice: it means they got laid off even when the bar was higher for people of color, which will disproportionately affect them in their next job search (and feelings, etc).
Anyone who actually believes that, I've got an array of bridges to sell you. People doing layoffs will say anything they can to make the fact that they just laid people off seem better, more fair, whatever. This is just the latest attempt at that. It looks as ridiculous as every other attempt throughout history.
Pretty easy to come up with ways this could work that are not ridiculous. Let's say you come up with a list of people to lay off. Let's say someone slices that list by demographics. Let's say someone compares that demographic distribution with the overall demographic distribution of the company and is embarrassed by what they see.
Then the CEO revisits, and changes the decisions or overrules an underling on a few cases about who to lay off to make things less embarrassing.
I don't know that that's what happened here, but is that really so unthinkable for a woke tech company in 2022 to do? For a company clearly concerned with how it's publicly perceived on this front?
Imagine being a white guy, just laid off... it's not better, it's not fair, it seems like pure racism (even if you'd get fired anyways), and in a normal country, would be a basis for a discrimination lawsuit.
Your post is pure speculation and just kind of excuses this behavior. We should be asking why this corporate entity feels the need to casually dip into racism to virtue signal about the perceived positives of this layoff.
You sue for being let go due to racism, show the document, where they say exactly that, and they have to prove that they didn't take race in consideration after saying (in their own document) that they did.
For how much Republicans hate woke politics, I'm surprised Trump didn't have the EEOC look into hiring practices of tech companies. I'm not sure what would come of it (though I suspect there are illegal practices in order to hit diversity targets), but the announcement would have been a political win because Republican's don't trust big tech, don't trust coastal liberals, and don't like that this might be taking place.
Unfortunately that’s not what happens a lot of times. When managers are asked to cut people, in homogeneous teams, if there are people who are different based on some criteria are often the ones who are cut. Not saying any particular race or gender does it, but that’s what happens. And that is what is being avoided here.
It's just so weird, though. If you honestly have that opinion, that means one of two things is true.
1. We shouldn't have CEOs, in which case most businesses today wouldn't exist. Using Apple as an example, it never would have released the products it did - not to say Steve or Tim are soldering iPhone components, that's clearly not what I mean. But you can't honestly believe that Jobs didn't play some role in directing Apple early on and instilling a certain culture (for better or worse). Maybe you think that employee-owned co-ops would produce things of higher value for lower cost, but that hasn't really been the cast so far in human history. Employee-owned companies exist and none of them are producing world-class products, and most of them still have CEOs.
2. You think we should have CEOs, maybe because they're a necessary evil or something, but you still want to bitch about it online, in which case ... :shrug:?
> 1. We shouldn't have CEOs, in which case most businesses today wouldn't exist.
There's over 30 million businesses in the US [0], and 200,000 CEOs.
Is it really impossible to imagine another structure that doesn't involve a CEO or chief?
I don't personally think it'll change anything (nor do I have any hatred for CEOs), we'll just hate whoever made the decision. It's just easier when it's one human-with-out-of-fashion-attributes who makes a lot of money.
So of the 29,800,000 other businesses "without a CEO," how many of them still have one person making the majority of the decisions? I'd venture to say 80-90% of them. And how many of the largest, most economically successful companies have no CEO? Zero.
They're saying that even though small business owners may not technically be CEO, they are the business owner which is just another title for CEO. lol. You're being too technical. Their point is sound.
I think it's the best strategy, but it's not hard to imagine another one. If CEOs were outlawed tomorrow, we would still have large companies. They would adapt with a new structure.
I think not having so wide gap in salary between employees and C-level people would be a good start. I'm not saying people higher on the ladder should not be getting more money (I'm still undecided on what my opinion on this as general rule is), but the wage gap between C-level and regular employees is... unhealthy. And it's growing.
I'm an anti-capitalist, so that's just how it goes :)
I believe democracy is a pretty good way of doing things. It's a pretty mainstream boring opinion to think democracy is good. I just want to see democracy applied to workplace.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should just copy what we do in civil governments over to corporations. The United States' government at all levels is pretty anemic in being democratic, imo, and not a model to be envied. But there are other models for groups of people to collectively work together where they share decision making power and share in the fruits of their labor. There's stuff like worker-owner cooperatives, sociocracy, and open source software, for example. These different models for building things exist despite being within a capitalist society. I believe that under a different economic model, or even just powerful policy changes, people could be empowered in other ways to work together to create things for society.
And looking at your other post, it's true, I don't think Apple could exist as it does today in any society besides a capitalist society. That's not so bad, though, is it?
I really couldn't say because I can see how that language can be used to defend whatever decision you want to make.
Whether you fire star-bellied sneetches or non-star-bellied sneetches, you can just blame the algorithm. "Yes, the star-bellied sneetches were disproportionately affected and while that is tragic, we did carry it through a lens, so you know, we're good, right?"
In addition to wishing that he could use "affected" instead of "impacted", I'm curious how the lens works. Is there a database with the races or colors of all their employees? And what query do you use to implement the lens?
If this was an ordinary layoff announcement that made no mention of race, then we would have no idea whether it did or didn't have a tangible impact.
The fact that the CEO decided to deliberately mention race and acknowledged that layoffs were performed through a racial lens? That's a pretty good indicator to me that a racial lens was used.
It feels like you're trying to flamebait rather than have a discussion about this. I encourage people to read comments on the other related thread [1] that seems to have disappeared from the front page for some reason.
Crucify me for being woke, but I feel like getting upset at this statement is overblown. There is no way that there was a 'white people quota' or anything like that (which would not be 'anti racist'). Charitably, 'anti-racist' just means not turning a blind eye to the real and/or perceived racial outcomes of your decisions. If most of your QA testers are Vietnamese and you cut your whole QA department, it can come off as racist even if on paper you were just focusing on QA.
In practice it probably just means some EA looked over the layoffs and made sure the optics wouldn't be horrible. I see this as more of a blow-hard CYA statement that they made sure there is no potential for a class action lawsuit. Putting it in the press release as a bullet point is pretty silly to me though.
We have no idea what it means and you can rationalize it all you like. Quota or not they likely fired a white person instead of a another person because of their skin color. Or it’s just cheap talk and means nothing, those are the only two options.
> Quota or not they likely fired a white person instead of a another person because of their skin color.
Again, that would be racist. 'Anti-racist' is more likely that they made sure the white (or Indian, or whatever) manager didn't just fire all his non-white (or non-Indian, or whatever) reports, without good reason.
Getting hurt over people trying to be racially equitable ignores the fact that the default is racial inequity. 11% of the staff had to be fired, why not make sure it is done more fairly/randomly than racially? Because the latter is the default (or at least sadly common) whether you like it or not.
"Trying to be racially equitable" is a loaded, political term. They don't appear to be "trying to", they appear to be actively enforcing racial equity.
Equality of opportunity (equality) is good. Equality of outcome (equity) is only possible if you deliberately handicap the most competent and most productive people of the group, because humans are differently abled.
I am not mad that the NBA hires a massively disproportionately large number of African Americans, for instance, because small differences in average height (African Americans are taller, on average, than Caucasian Americans) result in much larger discrepancies at the extremes. If you're playing a game where you need extreme height, you'd expect an overrepresentation of African Americans relative to whites.
If you're playing a game that benefits players with a different extreme stat that Asian Americans score better in, on average, than Caucasian Americans, you'd expect the highest levels of that game to have an overrepresentation of Asian Americans relative to Caucasian Americans there too.
And the result is good. Watching a bunch of pudgy, (comparatively) short Caucasian Americans playing basketball interests me a lot less than a bunch of 6'6"+ African Americans who are objectively superior at the sport playing.
I'd rather listen to music made by the world's best band than by the world's most racially equitable band.
I'd rather get surgery at the world's best hospital than the world's most racially equitable hospital.
This is why we have social hierarchies stratified by competence, rather than by racial equity.
We should never be denying anyone the opportunity to try their best at something just because of their skin color, but we shouldn't expect perfect equality of outcome on that front either.
Note this also applies to gender. I'm a fat, heavy person, if I'm in a burning building, I want my firefighter to be able to carry 300 pounds. I'd make an educated guess that there are a lot more men than women who can carry 300 pounds.
I read a study a while ago that said women are 77% less likely to die in a car accident. By that same logic (and personal anecdote), I much prefer female drivers to male drivers when I am a passenger.
That's not to say there aren't women who can carry me, or that there aren't men who drive responsibly, but equity in either of these fields would probably lead to more deaths, because different types of people, on average, are better at different things, and an economy which encourages everyone to do what they are best at brings out the best in all of us.
An economy in which the most competent are artificially handicapped and the least competent are artificially boosted is worse for everyone.
We don't know the implementation details (e.g. quota v not) but the net impact of an "anti-racist" process to ID layoff candidates v. a race-blind best-for-company process is either laying off white people due to their skin color or it's toothless BS.
> And of course that white person had innumerable advantages their entire life
This is the problem. You don't know this, and you can't tell this just from the color of someone's skin.
A white man can grow up in a trailer park with a drunk, abusive father. A black woman can grow up in a loving, upper middle class family in the suburbs.
Skin color is only a fractional indication of someone's experience.
A person can both have advantages in society and yet have specific situations in their life that are much more impactful.
You could have used the same arguments in 1860... Not all black people were enslaved, some were quite prosperous in fact! Therefore there was no benefit to being white.
And thus the exact problem. It's okay to observe that a whole class of people enjoy a privilege. Where it goes off the rails is when you use that knowledge to discriminate against individuals in an attempt to correct the historical injustice.
And thus we perpetuate the injustice indefinitely!
Your essential argument seems to be that once an injustice is over one generation old, it is as if it never happened, no matter if the after effects continue to cascade into modern day.
You cannot just magically pretend an individual is not part of a society.
What's the proposed solution? Put a finger on the scale against the privileged group? By how much? for how long? Lumping any race together and treating it as the same is a problem in my view.
There actually is an equitable solution there: help all of the poor equally. To the extent any identifiable group has been historically disadvantaged, this solution will balance things out by disproportionately helping those groups.
I really don't know why it's not more popular as a way to make society more fair, or why group-based interventions are seen as necessary despite the existence of a simple and stable way of leveling the playing field and keeping it closer to level over time, instead of constantly debating how much we have to tip it in which direction(s) and for how long.
Of course, there's still the problem that things will probably never be perfectly fair no matter what we do and that grievance can always be used as a reason for people to push for rules that favor their groups over others.
I agree, and this is more of what many other developed countries are doing with things like cheap or free education, social safety nets, wealth transfer etc. But the US seems to be allergic to all of those.
I don't have a magical solution, but I also am not going to flip out everytime a private company chooses to give some type of minor preferential treatment to historically underprivileged groups to attempt to balance out systemic inequities.
I can't say with complete confidence one way or the other if Twilio's policy is right or wrong but I can say with confidence a lot of the critiques are both in bad faith and lack any real attempt in understanding the rationale behind the policies.
If there is an unfairness in obtaining opportunity, either lack of education opportunity or whatever, that seems like the right thing to address. Not at the end of the process and then trying to tilt things.
That reminds me of what happens when we see a house on fire: We let it burn to the ground (don't want to upset the status quo of the house on fire), then say we'll make a few small tweaks to the building codes to prevent any house fires in the future.
A major problem should be tackled in all of the areas where there is injustice. The beginning, the end and the middle.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying (in my opinion), there are other areas more worthy of investment that for whatever reason the populous aren't behind. How about we provide easier and cheaper access to education? More after school programs, child care, social safety nets etc so that disadvantaged groups don't stay disadvantaged.
Given that affirmative action has been a thing in both hiring and college admissions for multiple decades now, that's of course incorrect. Those "innumerable advantages" in today's USA overwhelmingly go to (immigrant) minorities.
I'm so glad I live in a country in continental Europe where this shit is unconstitutional and any company that even tried to hint at doing this is going to get sued to oblivion.
The people being laid off likely grew up in America 25-40 years ago. Modern policies are not relevant to the people I'm talking about (though obviously still a very interesting and important discussion).
Oh I misread your original post, sorry about that.
So your belief is that affirmative action in college admissions is the defining factor in race inequality, even though the vast majority of the structural disadvantages happen much younger?
Remember that this is the American society that upon integration decided over and over again they'd rather fill public pools with cement than have them shared between white and black children.
You don't believe those same barriers carried over to housing and schools? You just ignore the data and massive, persistent wealth gaps?
No, there are zero barriers "in front" of minorities in the states, only advantages. There is no institutional discrimination against minorities, only against the now-majority, soon-to-be minority.
If we look at a 1 year old black child, and a 1 year old while child, the average household wealth of the white child is around 10x higher.
What did the white child do to deserve this? How much better could they possibly be at drooling and crawling to have so much more wealth available to them?
So I guess your belief is that household wealth has no impact on children?
More deserving of what? The argument is that wealth/social capital/whatever accumulated by your ancestors rightfully belongs and can be transferred to you.
I'll believe this was actually racially blind when Twilio releases a count of each race that was laid off, and the sum of each race for employees in the company prior to the layoff. It's very simple for everyone to verify whether there was racial targeting outside the statistically probable bounds of random selection from the parent group.
I have no problem with people being woke as long as we're both working towards a provable shared reality with data rather than rhetoric.
Humans lie. Sufficient amounts of data analyzed by a suficient number of people do not.
Assuming it was possible to look at the data I call for above, would you be opposed to the public dissemination and analysis of it?
Hell if you wanted to go full Machiavelli, you might say that's in there to distract from the layoffs themselves - seems to work in this thread for instance.
Every single layoff story stupefies me. Confuses. Flabbergasts.
What are these companies doing with so many people? What are they doing? Like, what are their day-to-day tasks?
My employer has more people but we build nuclear reactors and spacecraft. Our revenue per employee is nearly double Twilio's and is low for a "tech" firm due to the extremely high capital costs and labor-intensive nature of our work.
Nearly 8,000 people (surely, 8,000 with contractors) to build an SMS and VOIP marketing spam, sorry, ahem, communications, platform?
I am glad I'm not the only person who has had this thought, and I think it every time I see how many people some of these random tech companies employ. Those are the kinds of employee numbers I would expect from a much larger company than Twilio.
For reference, in the past I worked for an immensely profitable eCommerce business and I don't think our entire engineering department ever reached more than 40 people at its absolute largest.
I know all those employees aren't engineers, and I've been around long enough to know that what we see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg. But if we assume even 25% of them are engineers directly working on the product, that is still nearly 2,000 people. That must be a huge iceberg.
So what on Earth are all those people doing? I am not being sarcastic or obtuse, I am genuinely curious because the only organization that I have ever worked for that was that size or larger was the US government. Is it administrative/managerial bloat? Are there a bunch of different pivot projects going on? What does Twilio have going on that needs nearly 8,000 employees?
When I worked at a VC-backed firm, headcount was a bragging point and seemed to be a metric they were concerned about in the opposite direction you’d expect— that is, if I was a business owner, I’d be concerned about having too much headcount. They were always busy seemingly trying to maximize headcount. I never understood it.
"What are these companies doing with so many people? What are they doing? Like, what are their day-to-day tasks?"
I don't know but I will say that I had the time of my life at the Signal 2018 conference where they rented out Bill Graham Arena and booked OK GO to play ... open bar and an arena full of indoor food trucks ...
... and earlier that day Tony Hawk was doing a halfpipe demo ... related to Twilio somehow ... ?
Hard to say where their business is going but it has all worked out very well for me.
Based on my experience bloat causes more bloat. People get hired to work on fringe projects/products, those people cause work for other staff that are already at 100% capacity on higher priority work, so additional staff are hired.
Many people are trying to rationalize the "anti-racist lens" remark as a simple post-hoc analysis to make sure there wasn't racial bias. (This seems plausible, and I don't think many people would have an issue with that, in theory.)
However, if this is what the CEO did, then he did not use an anti-racist lens -- merely a "not-racist" lens.
Kendi is explicit in his book, "How to be an Anti-Racist", that there is no neutrality. You simply cannot say "the layoff is not racist". You can either have the layoff be racist, or antiracist, there is no middle ground.
DiAngelo agrees in her assessment. She says that people should not ask, "Did racism occur", but rather, "How did racism occur?" When looking at the roster of layoffs, one must come to the conclusion that racism occurred, no matter how unbiased the results appear.
How does Kendi say anti racism rectifies past prejudice? Present prejudice. How to rectify present prejudice? With future prejudice.
If the CEO actually used an anti-racist lens in the layoff decisions, then by definition, he used prejudice based on race.
What's to stop everyone from declaring themselves hispanic or black when they are hired? First off, it's probably true to some degree (we're all mixed). Secondly, it's a self selected category. Third, your employer cannot question your selection.
Given that it's basically all downside to declare yourself white or asian, I'm expecting almost everyone to start electing black or hispanic in the coming months.
For those who cry it's unfair – there's presently no justice or transparency in how these "anti racist" aka affirmative action policies are being implemented. It's a black box, private committee selecting person A or person B , based on some criteria: likely a self-selected category or worse a stereotypical naming pattern. (and if you don't believe me, look into university admissions processes).
You can be anything you want, look at Elizabeth Warren.
She pretended to be a Native American for more than 30 years. Trump called her Pocahontas and she challenged trump with a dna test. This test is kind of bogus but it proved that she is like 1/1024 Native American.
Of course she should have stopped that as a tenured professional / politician, but it's perfectly understandable she did that as a young applicant based on her family lore.
It goes to show these policies are clumsy and absurd. They will only make matters so much worse.
Is it reasonable to ask someone to make an election that will result in them not getting or getting fired prematurely ? We're talking about food on the table here.
> but it's perfectly understandable she did that as a young applicant based on her family lore.
To be clear, she contributed as a Cherokee Indian on a cookbook called Pow Wow Chow, and sumbitted at least one completely plagiarized recipe… as an adult.
As to why Cherokee matters, the Cherokee have a well maintained registry. You do not claim to be Cherokee if you are not. She doesn’t care and never had anything in her youth to bring her up Cherokee. She’s a liar through and through.
So, a company explicitly states that when push comes to shove, if you are white, you move to the front of the firing queue.
Remind me again, why would a white person (especially man) not put them on the back of the queue when deciding where to apply for a job?
Despite not living in the states (and in a country where this sh*t is illegal), I think I will make it my policy to never work for a (parent) company that has a diversity policy from now on.
They were overhiring. I talked to their recruiter last year. They had pretty aggressive hiring goals. Same story with Zillow, Upstart, Facebook and a bunch of companies. All of their stocks tanked by more than 50% since then.
Why would a business even have a "hiring goal?" Shouldn't you have business goals, and then look at those business goals and determine if hiring will contribute to them? Having an isolated "hiring goal" seems as pointless as having a "printer buying goal".
>Why would a business even have a "hiring goal?" Shouldn't you have business goals, and then look at those business goals and determine if hiring will contribute to them?
Sure! So, you've got your business goal(s), and within those goals you have sub-goals that achieve the main goals. One of your primary goals requires additional headcount, which then necessitates that one of your sub-goals is... wait for it... a hiring goal.
Bro, Apple makes like $2m or something per employee. They can hire a ton of developers to do whatever at like $300-400k/yr. It's win-win. They have talent, they keep talent from other people.
Apple is at the extreme, but the logic applies. There are massive budgets, so what do you do? You hire.
Startups do this, too. Give an engineering team $20m (or $200m....) and they will hire a lot of people. They aren't just going to sit on the money...
Goals can change. Especially when your stock price gets cut in half and a recession is imminent.
Even in the world of StableCo annual budgets, by the time the budget is approved, I guarantee it reflects a number of goals that have been recently axed. Or, in times of growth, there’s other goals that have come up and claimed some resources that technically were earmarked for something else. Budgets and goals are fluid.
Also hiring goals are useful for measuring activities. They have an HR/talent acquisition team and that team needs goals. How would you frame those goals if not hiring? And , unfortunately, printer purchases is a real business goal if your the guy responsible for purchasing printers.
Surely only works for the biggest companies. You would need to hire
millions of people to drain the global pool of developers. Maybe thousands to drain the best ones intersect US working rights.
I don't know about Twilio specifically but Covid is the biggest reason for most of the current layoff rounds.
Kind of the opposite of the beginning of the pandemic, when companies with in-person employees were laying off staff and moving to work-from-home and online companies like Zoom, Shopify, Teledoc, Twilio began booming. But now many of those brand new customers are returning to their old ways.
These internet companies "over hired" in the sense that they got a massive unexpected influx new demand they needed to scale out for, and no clue how long this would last. Will it fade out next month or be a decade long pandemic?
Many companies also expected higher customer retention after covid than they're actually keeping. If you look at trendlines for online shopping, work from home, etc related industries covid caused an instant jump in their growth equivalent to about 5 years on the trend line. Rather than staying "in the future", demand is declining back towards a trend line that otherwise ignores covid.
Investors in high-growth companies like to see rapidly expanding headcounts.
And when you're growing fast there's a real impetus to fill seats FAST and there's not much discipline around making sure you're hiring well. So you end up having to collect more people than you need because not all of them are well suited to their roles and you've got a lot of new projects that everyone isn't fully spun up on so there's always a surprising proportion of people who are being spun up or wound down on random projects all the time without directly committing any code. Companies that grow like this tend to end up with a lot of dead weight and bad business processes that spontaneously appear to shift that dead weight around to where they don't drag things down.
That seems strongly bad-faith as an assumption. I'd assume they hired people for what seemed like good reasons at the time, but things have changed and now they need to have less payroll.
Any hiring or new initiative looks "careless" if it didn't work out, but it could have just been a calculated risk that didn't pay off, especially given how chaotic the last few years have been.
Dodged a bit of a bullet, I think; they were one of my top 2 choices in my last job hunt a few months ago, and ultimately I got a better feeling about the other choice. I've been loving the job I _did_ take, and don't regret my decision (especially now).
To what extent do companies announce layoffs (that they were preparing to do already) on the heels of other companies announcing layoffs? That way it becomes less memorable that 'Company X laid off 11% of their employees' and instead people remember that 'a few companies laid off some people last week'.
Perhaps this is too difficult to tweak the timing on, particularly at public companies. But at the very least, I'm sure some of the Twilio execs were glad to hear about Patreon's layoff yesterday.
The layoffs take time to plan and get rolling, but the macro causes are often similar.
Once they start you may have a bit of PR adjusting things but I daresay this announcement was planned weeks in advance. I could see a company deciding to lay off a bit less to make their percentage look a tiny bit better but other than that, probably not.
Now some companies may have "perpetual layoff plans" where every manager has to identify X people he'd lay off if needed, even if they never use it, then I could see someone taking advantage of it.
Twilio won’t fall out of the news cycle like the the rest because of their CEO’s “anti-racist” comments.
It’ll, ideally, become a class action lawsuit, which should keep this story in the news for a long time, providing cover for other companies to do layoffs
I recently had a preliminary phone screen with their HR and I told them to pound sand when they wanted me to do a coding challenge before even talking to the hiring manager to know if I wanted the job.
Well. Job cuts are a serious problem right now. A report from CouponBirds shows that the US unemployment rate rose to 3.7 percent in August of 2022, the highest since February and above market expectations of 3.5 percent. The number of unemployed people increased by 344 thousand to 6.014 million, while employment levels went up by 442 thousand to 158.732 million. And according to the survey, the District of Columbia had the highest unemployment rate in August at 5.2 percent, followed by Alaska and New Mexico, both at 4.5. Minnesota had the lowest unemployment rate, at 1.8 percent.
Not in this case, anyone who has worked at Twilio for any amount of time would not be surprised by this language. It has been prevalent as a core part of management’s communications since the pre-IPO days.
Yup IMO this is the most interesting question. While admittedly I haven’t been closely following the layoffs taking place this week; those I have read about talk primarily about downsizing non-engineering headcount.
A. [Don’t worry, we only fired whites!] is the an absolutely awful thing to do, and a worse pat yuorself on the back for. Racists. The term “anti racist” is a dog whistle that means racists for everyone, but justified for some.
B. I appreciate they made their idiocy public. I will make sure to 100 percent shut down any possibility of my company using their services. We’re still using Expensify which does upset me, cut from the same cloth as Twillio but they were more sneaky about it, will cut them asap.
Why do these companies blow their load and lay people off at the slightest sign of trouble? Layoffs should be a last resort because of the pain that they cause.
So I'm a big dummy, but I STILL don't understand how current stock price affects companies. They've already raised their money. How does the stock going down make them lose money other than lowering their chance at another seed round?
the stock price is a trailing indicator of the company’s health. in the case of headcount, you hire based on growth rate, to sustain and even further that growth. it works until it doesn’t. then you fire.
it’s no skin off the company’s back, so it is the correct strategy. when CEOs (the world over) say they overhired AND that it was a mistake, it’s a pitiful political lie. also a mandatory strategy. you can’t say, “employees are cogs. we planned this shit. this was plan A.”. you wouldn’t be able to hire again when you find your stride.
>"so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs -- while a business necessity today -- were carried out through a Racist/Racially-Oppression lens."
Fixed that for you.. And oh boy would I not want to be one of this companies lawyers in the coming months and no doubt years! Yikes
Go-To-Market or often referred to as GTM is a common term used within the B2B SAAS space. The term is thrown around quite a bit if you work in that sector. Like others said, it is primarily concerned with all things revenue (obtaining and retaining).
Well its true for me also. When I go to market and end up spending money on useless junk. These people go to market and probably try to sell something similar.
This is not going to be a pretty thread. Hopefully we can keep this civil and maybe move the conversation forward, as this could be a big tipping point in the landscape wrt DEI.
Or, "when we fired people, we tried NOT to consider their race" ... the idea that a layoff would, by default, be fair and not a racist or bigoted decision is a very privileged world view.
I guess this is probably true. In every group I've worked for, it was obvious who the high and low performing people were. In the two companies I was at, with layoffs, there weren't really any surprises. Not surprisingly, this has remained a strong motivator for my work effort: if you're complacent or incompetent, you're the first to go.
I'm not. Why are you assuming they are all fair and equitable?
There is more than enough racism and other bigotry in North America to make the assumption that the layoffs across all departments would be fair and equitable a suspect assumption.
If real evidence emerges/has emerged that race played a role in which people were laid off then there must be lawsuits. Otherwise, it will keep happening.
People are treated unequally because of their race everyday. My wife’s former boss (CEO of an education non-profit) was a black man. He was walking in downtown Paulo Alto, wearing a suit, on a way to a business meeting.
A cop stopped him at gunpoint and had him lie face-down on the ground and frisked him. Eventually, finding nothing, he let him go. “Mistaken identity.”
This is the kind of shit black people have to live with. None of my white bosses have ever had interaction with law enforcement - other than the time a cop helped one find his keys to his BMW after he’d accidentally tossed them in the bushes.
Our country is getting better. Most people don’t want to be racist. But this stuff still happens in the modern era. Acknowledging the problem and taking reasonable steps to try and improve it is not racist.
Now, as the GP pointed out, this particular incidence probably did more harm than good/looks like a PR stunt.
If any of my bosses had been ordered to the ground by the police without cause, they definitely would have told me. It’s a crazy story that sounds almost unbelievable. If you’re white, anyway.
What evidence do you have that it was because your boss was black? X happened and the target was black doesn't mean X happened BECAUSE the target was black. Did the cop use any sort of racial insult? I can share all kinds of negative interactions I've had and other white friends and family members have had with police for reasons unknown - including with black officers.
I don’t have any. But I can’t recall ever seeing or hearing of a white businessman in a suit getting ordered to the ground without cause.
It is fully possible this was random chance. It’s an anecdote, not statistics. But if you want to look at statistics, there are plenty of studies. From the first hit on Google for police stops: a black person in North Carolina is 95% more likely to get pulled over than a white person, over twice as likely to be searched, but less likely to be in possession of contraband or get a ticket.[1]
I'm not claiming that there aren't some people in positions of authority that don't make prejudiced assumptions. What I'm saying is that you can't assume every time something like this happens it's due to race.
Statistics without context are often misleading. I read the article and it's hardly objective. I would prefer to see the dataset as well as other demographics and details of who was stopped, the kind of cars they drove and other such detail. Often, people don't analyze very deeply and start with preconceived notions, especially around race. In addition, how many of these cops actually saw the driver before making the stop - especially highway stops.
It is hard to think of any rational to stop a well-dressed person engaging in no shady behavior and immediately escalate to “lie face-down with your hands over your head.”
There are other news reports of similar incidents with black men. If race is not a factor, we would expect to see many more white than black men wrongly treated in this way, as they are a larger share of the population. I’m not aware of similar reports for white men, but would be interested to see them.
Re traffic stops: The idea that you can’t see the race of a driver while driving behind them is ludicrous. Next time you’re on the highway look in the rear view mirror of the car in front of you. You can see the person’s face.
If they’re actually stopping and searching people on some heuristic that just happens to be correlated with race, they should stop - it’s a bad heuristic. They’re searching black drivers at double the rate of whites, but finding contraband at a lower rate.
Clearly something they’re doing is broken, and it manifests as an undo burden on black drivers.
I used to think like you - Wheres the evidence? They don't have a swastika tatooed on their face and didn't call you a slur, how can you know they were racist?
But here's the thing, not all racism is overt. There's more subtle ways it plays out too - patterns of behavior and the like.
When I was in my early 20s I worked at a bar owned by a black man, and I'm a white man. His role was basically manager, and I was basically assistant manager - and in the small bar world that meant we both were jacks of all trades. We did janitorial work and bookeeping and serving and really all the jobs of a bar. Depending on what each of us was doing that day, we could be dressed down and dirty, or dressed up and looking like a million bucks. Some days i would look basically homeless and he would look like a well of guy, and some days it would be the opposite. Some days we'd both look the same in that respect.
Over time I noticed a pattern - independent of what task we were doing or how we were dressed, I would be approached by people wanting to do business first. Distributors, musical acts, promoters, maintenance workers, and even cops would approach me for manager intereactions more often than they would approach the owner. No matter what the outward appearances were, I was the first person approached 2/3-3/4 of the time.
Any one of those instances could easily be rationalized away - Oh the well dressed guy was approached as manager, or they didn't want to bother the manager to begin with so they approached the worker first, or they approached who they saw first, or ..., or...
But after a couple years of this, there really was only one pattern that was consistent: they approached the white guy first more often than anything else. Most of the people who came in to do business never said or did anything overtly racist. I suspect most of them wouldn't consider themselves racist and they likely have black friends and think the concept of racism is irrational. Yet the fact remains - in a 50-50 situation, the white guy was selected as likely to be the boss a lot more than 50% of the time.
Yes this wasn't real science and theres a multi-variable statistical analysis that would be needed and all that jazz, but it was enough for me to become aware of the pattern - as i said any one of those situations can be rationalized away, but the fact that each situation needed a different rationalization and the racial bias explanation was much more consistent throughout was enough for me to believe that maybe there's more to racism than wearing a hood.
Relating this back to the cop story above - sure you can rationalize this one incident however you want. But over time, pay attention - you'll find disproportionately more stories about such cases of 'mistaken identity' being applied to minorities than white folks in the US. This is what people are talking about with institutional racism or societal racism, the fact that it's assumed that a person is a criminal or a boss or whatever based on thier race (not the race of the assumer, that in and of itself is a racist notion - "oh the black cop assumed the black person was a criminal disproves racism because all black people are a single group and represent a single viewpoint").
Try it on yourself - walk into a high end or middle class establishment where most of the people are a different race than you and pay attention to your comfort level. Compare it to your comfort level in a similar establishment where most of the people are the same race. When you meet a person, pay attention to how surprised you are that they have some role, or some power level and if that matches what you expected first looking at them. Racial bias comes in part from how our society is set up wrt race - you probably aren't racist, but I bet you have racial biases anyway. I do - most people do, a lot of it is taught long before any experiences. The best we can do is acknowledge to ourselves the times we made stupid assumptions that had no merit, and update our priors - this can be upsetting sometimes, I know I would love to say I got where I am on my own, but my observed reality is: there's a lot of racism in the world, and I'm in the "easy mode" group.
More white people own businesses and there are more white people in the USA. It was likely an innocent assumption where no offense is intended. Not everything is as sinister as "anti-racists" claim. I refuse to subscribe to their conspiracy-based hidden racism theories.
I'm "glad" you were able to claim your "white privilege". Coming from a low class background, I was not afforded such and have had to struggle to get where I am. However, according to your own definition, you are now guilty of the racism you decry. You assume because you took advantage of "white privilege" every white person had the same. Not all white people are well connected or come from money. The percentage might be higher but that means zero to those of us that did not have an easy go like you.
But hey, do whatever you need to do to assuage your guilt. I have no such burden and I resent people like you for trying to lay one at my feet. It seems like most of your response is based on projection.
I wonder what would happen if you weren't so condescending. Your opening statement was "I used to think like you" as if you have evolved and are somehow morally superior. I see no evidence of this assumed superiority. You made a ton of assumptions in your post and it was mostly about your own white guilt since you are on "easy mode" as you put it. You sound like you have some unresolved issues and I encourage you to get help.
My bad, I assumed that some amount of thought went into your response - I was clearly wrong, apologies.
Under that assumption I (again, the whole "you thought about your reaction" thing was a bad assumption on my part, sorry) related my own past thinking and how it changed. There was no moral superiority there, just my story about how my thinking changed and what I have observed. You seem to be reading a lot more into it than I wrote.
Yes, quite an interesting magic trick that has been performed by people from certain political persuasions about how they now make everything about race, yet claim while patting us minorities on the head about how "they're not racist". It's barking mad.
I agree with this in the abstract. I think it's just, uhh, a little weird to pair this kind of message with a "we're removing tons of jobs that people relied on" kind of message.
I agree that this was poor messaging. If they had instead worded it in a "we are making active efforts to make sure we are not disproportionately hitting any demographic", that would have been better. Would ultimately be the same message, of course, but the idea is to find ways to battle default behaviors/prejudices, not just to be "anti-racist."
This is not always the case. Didn't some company just shutter their German office? Probably that hit whites harder.
But it's plausible that layoffs would hit certain groups harder right now. If your company had a big affirmative action push after the summer of 2020, you might have a bunch of junior minority employees. Perhaps they would be let go sooner than more senior employees or employees who not hired via an affirmative action program.
If they shut down their german office, the people working there will get fired. If they're firing junior (developers,...), they're firing junior developers.. probably starting with least performing ones or whatever metric they use for firings. Using race as any metric is in my eyes totally racist. This is also true for hiring and "affirmative action".
In large, because minorities are likely under represented in management. And it is well established that, if there are not minorities in the selecting process, than you can expect them to be selected more for stuff like this. Even if, objectively, they are no worse than the majority.
So, again, the wording is poor. And if they are just choosing who to let go based on race, that is bad. However, it makes sense to take an active oversight to make sure you don't have white managers, for example, just letting go all of their black reports. (And the reverse is also true. Though, again, likely not as prevalent. Not because minority people can't have prejudices; but because they are likely underrepresented in the roles. )
I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping.
If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are.
That then makes it harder for the minorities you claim to be "helping" to stay in the room anywhere else because of bad will generated by some company that wanted the headlines to include their diversity push.
Edit: In summation, do not conflate your layoffs with your "diversity".