Ducks in a Row: How Facebook Stepped in the Poo
by Miki Saxon
Facebook really stuck its foot deep in the doo doo pile when it claimed its racial diversity numbers, which are even worse than its gender diversity stats, are the result of a lack of qualified candidates.
What is really going on is the very real human desire to hire “people like me,” but using “cultural fit” as an excuse for their bias.
In a post shared widely on social media, the computer science student and iOS developer took Facebook and its Silicon Valley peers to task for focusing on whether potential employees are a “culture fit” — an ambiguous gauge often used to defend discrimination.
But that, of course, depends on what is meant by culture.
Culture is a reflection of the founder’s/company’s actual values — values equaling stuff such as how customers are treated and whether politics will rule over merit.
Culture is not a function of perks — or it shouldn’t be.
“Most of tech recruiting is currently not built to look for great talent,” wrote Thomas in her post.
“I’m not interested in ping-pong, beer, or whatever other gimmick used to attract new grads. The fact that I don’t like those things shouldn’t mean I’m not a ‘culture fit’. I don’t want to work in tech to fool around, I want to create amazing things and learn from other smart people. That is the culture fit you should be looking for.”
You wouldn’t necessarily expect tech, with its penchant for data-based decisions, to cherry-pick the stats, but Facebook is an amalgamate of human beings and their biases, so it’s not that surprising.
Then, of course, there’s the data — which you’d think a company like Facebook, reliant as it is on algorithms, would’ve parsed before blaming education for its diversity ills. There simply isn’t a pipeline problem as long as there are twice as many black and Hispanic computer science graduates as there are actual hires from these minority groups.
So, once again, the old programming saying ‘garbage in/garbage out’ proves true.
A perfect summing up of Facebook’s, and tech-in-general’s, “no pipeline” excuse.
Flickr image credit: gorfor
