[HN Gopher] Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce
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Twilio to lay off 11% of workforce
Author : melvinmelih
Score : 282 points
Date : 2022-09-14 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Back in my time, we called "treating people differently, based on
| their race" racism.
| taeric wrote:
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Why would they hit minorities harder? What does race have to
| do with that?
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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".
| phillipcarter wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| 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."
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents. It's
| against the site guidelines and your comment was a big step in
| that direction.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32838754.
| forgingahead 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.
| nervlord wrote:
| yojo wrote:
| 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.
| choko wrote:
| 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.
| sophacles wrote:
| 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.
| choko wrote:
| 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.
| sophacles wrote:
| I wonder what would happen if you replied to the post I
| wrote rather than the one you imagined?
| choko wrote:
| 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.
| sophacles wrote:
| 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.
| yojo wrote:
| 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]
|
| 1: https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2020/06/racial_disparities_tr
| affi...
| choko wrote:
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > None of my white bosses have ever had interaction with law
| enforcement
|
| You must be very good friends with your bosses to know this.
| People I work with have no idea what interactions I've had
| with the police.
| yojo wrote:
| 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.
|
| Stopped for cause? Yeah, maybe not.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| Coincidentally, back then everyone in an important role was
| white, so one didn't even really have to think about race!
| rglover wrote:
| > "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens"
|
| People have lost their damn minds. This is _actual
| institutionalized racism_.
|
| I wouldn't work for these people in a million years, but I really
| do wonder how I'd fit into their shallow models (I'm mixed race
| b/w).
| testfoobar wrote:
| Well, where exactly are you on the RGB scale? This a strict 8
| bit operation. If you expect HDR level fidelity here, just move
| along.
| rglover wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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!
| ubertaco wrote:
| 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).
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| If you dont mind sharing, what company did you accept?
| datalopers wrote:
| Not nearly enough. Should have been 30%.
| christkv wrote:
| It seems a lot of the layoffs are from over-hiring in 2020-21 ?
| avelis wrote:
| over-hiring or not trimming due to the pandemic.
| mooreds wrote:
| Here's the statement on the Twilio blog:
| https://www.twilio.com/blog/a-message-from-twilio-ceo-jeff-l...
| tonymet wrote:
| 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).
| BonoboIO wrote:
| 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.
|
| How can that fly.
| tonymet wrote:
| 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.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Sheesh. That's a pretty large chunk... ~865 people.
| abledon wrote:
| curious what % are software devs compared to sales/hr etc..
| kernel-dump wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| And it will be just fine
| anonym29 wrote:
| Anyone else read the letter from the CEO where they claim that
| the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-
| Oppression lens"?
|
| That's verbatim from the actual PDF, in case anyone was curious
| (https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001447669/5c6aa73...)
| Page 6, under the heading "How did we decide which roles would be
| impacted".
|
| I wonder what race they deliberately targeted for these layoffs,
| with language like that. Oh well, I guess we'll never know.
| pentae wrote:
| 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.
| howinteresting wrote:
| CRT is a (fantastic) model of how to understand the evolution
| of law over time. The "critical" comes from critical studies,
| which has a general theme of understanding how language
| affects reality--the law is all about words and their
| interpretation, so it's a good fit. It has nothing to do with
| hating white people (in fact, one of the core ideas in CRT is
| interest convergence).
| skyyler wrote:
| csa wrote:
| You refer to the original/early version of CRT.
|
| In the 90s and beyond, CRT has expanded substantially in
| scope. It has also changed focus in terms of how it is
| utilized.
| skyyler wrote:
| 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.
|
| When did that change?
| claudiawerner wrote:
| 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.
| skyyler wrote:
| 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.
| csa wrote:
| The Wikipedia page is not bad.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory
|
| 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.
|
| Here is an article by Ladson-Billings:
|
| https://www.loyola.edu/-/media/join-us/karson-
| institute/docu...
|
| Short summary of how CRT is perceived these days:
|
| https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-
| states/2022/07/...
|
| This is a decent short article that explains how crt is
| being attacked in ways that are not "core" crt:
|
| https://theconversation.com/critical-race-theory-what-it-
| is-...
|
| 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).
| anonym29 wrote:
| 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.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Do you have evidence that it's in any way a significant
| number? (There's plenty of evidence of racial animus on
| the part of white conservatives in the US.)
| thedorkknight wrote:
| 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
| bl_valance wrote:
| wow, you would think saying that would be against some
| discrimination law but they'll probably get away with it.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| 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.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Do you have any data or references to support your argument?
| I'm open to considering your hypothesis, but right now, it's
| merely an assertion.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| > better, more fair
|
| 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.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| > it's not better, it's not fair
|
| It's also probably not true in the first place. Which is
| the point of my post.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Does it matter if it's not true?
|
| 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.
| the_doctah wrote:
| 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.
| hudsonjr wrote:
| This does fit with layoffs I've went through. Decide who to
| lay off first, and then the framing is done later.
|
| My guess is the sex/race/etc metrics of the layoff "looked
| OK" by coincidence, and someone wrongly thought it was a good
| idea to call out
| fullshark wrote:
| 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?
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| zwkrt wrote:
| 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.
| anonym29 wrote:
| 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?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Please enumerate all the races first and the criteria to
| distinguish each race from the other. It will be important
| for your statistical analysis.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Let's just use hexadecimal RGB values for skin color.
| bombcar wrote:
| No need. You can use whatever Twilio defines because they
| obviously must have defined something to be able to state
| they acted anti-racist.
|
| (The reality of the whole thing is so obvious that they
| paid some contractor to say they're antiracist without
| actually _changing_ anything they did.)
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| spamizbad wrote:
| That's not good enough. They could just lie. You need a
| formal audit conducted by a third party. Anything else is
| unacceptable.
| christkv wrote:
| That's what discovery is for in a court of law. Hopefully
| we all get to read the findings.
| fullshark wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| trention wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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).
| trention wrote:
| Affirmative action in college admissions and hiring has
| been a thing at least since the early 90s.
| csa wrote:
| > Affirmative action in college admissions and hiring has
| been a thing at least since the early 90s.
|
| 1969 iirc for college admissions and federal government
| contracts (and maybe federal government hiring).
|
| Interestingly, the 90s are when some states, like
| California in 1996 (prop 209), _banned_ affirmative
| action in admissions.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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?
| trention wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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?
| trention wrote:
| >What did the white child do to deserve this?
|
| Ah, the fallacy that everything you receive from your
| ancestors is undeserved. Will we be doing race-based
| asset appropriation tomorrow, comrade?
|
| I think I'm not interested in discussing this with
| someone holding such a position which I consider
| completely deluded.
| peter422 wrote:
| So it is your belief the United States government never
| forcibly limited the types of assets somebody could own
| based on their race and sex?
|
| Otherwise your conclusion makes little sense.
|
| And obviously you have to stop debating, your belief
| system is based on willful ignorance.
| quesera wrote:
| > the fallacy that everything you receive from your
| ancestors is undeserved
|
| Is there an intelligent argument that some infants are
| more deserving than others?
| trention wrote:
| More deserving of what? The argument is that
| wealth/social capital/whatever accumulated by your
| ancestors rightfully belongs and can be transferred to
| you.
| peter422 wrote:
| Hypothetically speaking, what if your parents stole that
| money from somebody else in a provable way?
|
| Does it still rightfully belong to you?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > multiple decades now
|
| About half a century, in fact. There aren't many people
| still alive who can remember a time what it wasn't.
| fche wrote:
| > And of course that white person had innumerable
| advantages their entire life
|
| such as being overtly and illegally dispreferred for
| college admissions, scholarships, hiring, promotion, and
| preferred for being fired
|
| such privilege much wow
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| catiopatio wrote:
| [deleted]
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| And ignoring it altogether is better?
|
| 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.
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| yibg wrote:
| How do you know this? You think this is true for every
| white person? If so that IS racist.
| djbebs wrote:
| Thanks for proving his point.
| the_doctah wrote:
| This is the definition of prejudice.
| peter422 wrote:
| If you willfully disregard any context about the
| situation and historical context then I'd agree with you.
| zwkrt wrote:
| > 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.
| anonym29 wrote:
| "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.
| weakfish wrote:
| You say yourself we have no idea what it means but make a
| proposition on the meaning - why is your guess any more
| valid?
| fullshark wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| the_doctah wrote:
| >Oh well, I guess we'll never know.
|
| Until the discovery phase
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| el_nahual wrote:
| 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).
| mhb wrote:
| 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?
| testfoobar wrote:
| What is the race field in their HR database and what range of
| values does it possess? What is the sorting algorithm?
| bena wrote:
| 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?"
| peter422 wrote:
| fche wrote:
| yes, so very hilarious that a ceo muses about making firing
| decisions based on race
|
| just so funny
|
| ha ha ha ha
| anonym29 wrote:
| 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| >I wonder what race they deliberately targeted for these
| layoffs, with language like that.
|
| What if, the meaning of "anti-racist" layoffs, is to fire all
| races equally?
| wickedsickeune wrote:
| That's still racist!! The only way for it not being racist is
| not having anything to do with race at all!
| anonym29 wrote:
| +1. Race shouldn't be brought up in (or factored into)
| layoffs.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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.
| jejeyyy77 wrote:
| You can probably derive this data based on who they laid off.
| fche wrote:
| w t f
| anonym29 wrote:
| This doesn't actually come as a surprise to you, does it?
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| Throwing people out on the street is tough, but at least we
| destroy people's livelihoods ~progressively~.
|
| All CEOs are bastards.
| pc86 wrote:
| > Throwing people out on the street is tough, but at least we
| destroy people's livelihoods ~progressively~.
|
| > All CEOs are bastards.
|
| Imagine turning a perfectly valid criticism into some weird
| anti-capitalist thing?
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| 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?
| weakfish wrote:
| It's true though
| pc86 wrote:
| 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:?
|
| What's the third option?
| mod wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [0] https://www.bizjournals.com/albany/news/2019/04/11/nu
| mber-of... [1]
| https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes111011.htm
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| mod wrote:
| > 1. We shouldn't have CEOs, in which case most
| businesses today wouldn't exist.
|
| I was just responding to this. Sounds like you agree we'd
| have "most" of the 30M businesses left.
| solveit wrote:
| > Is it really impossible to imagine another structure
| that doesn't involve a CEO or chief?
|
| It's quite difficult to imagine one that works for most
| large companies, at the very least. Name a couple if it's
| so easy.
| mod wrote:
| 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.
| _wolfie_ wrote:
| 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.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I suppose the EEOC could subpoena emails relating to selection.
| crackercrews wrote:
| Perhaps the next administration might. The current one is
| more likely to offer a pat on the back.
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| strix_varius wrote:
| Christ you're right, would have been brilliant.
| enumjorge wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] Twilio cutting 11% - Letter from CEO [pdf]:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837250
| overtonwhy wrote:
| Bunch of new accounts commenting doing it too.
| white_dragon88 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| 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.
| wil421 wrote:
| 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.
| Kye wrote:
| No one is erasing lesbians or women.
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| They were explicitly "anti-racist" which is just racism
| done differently.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| No it's just regular old racism.
| weatherlite wrote:
| But we are all fine with racist hiring...
| mod wrote:
| I don't think that's a true statement.
| anonym29 wrote:
| 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.
| etchalon wrote:
| Believing race should account for zero percent of a
| hiring decision is what any decent person should believe.
|
| Acknowledging it has, and does, and that it is more often
| than not to the detriment of minority groups is what any
| informed person should recognize.
| prottog wrote:
| 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.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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).
| taurath wrote:
| Edit: HN is intensely conservative
| replygirl wrote:
| 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
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I'm an actual right-wing conservative and no, most people
| on HN are definitely not conservatives. Lots of
| libertarians, but not many conservatives.
| replygirl wrote:
| what conservative code words?
| taurath wrote:
| "Woke culture gone wild"
| replygirl wrote:
| woke came out of aave and was more widely popularized in
| 2014 via blm
|
| edit: parent edited from "woke" to "woke culture gone
| wild" after i posted this
| AareyBaba wrote:
| aave: (likely) African-American Vernacular English.
| taurath wrote:
| It's literally in the platform of the Republican Party to
| "fight woke culture"
| derac wrote:
| 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.
| replygirl wrote:
| it's also in the platform of many leftists. woke culture
| debases woke politics and gives cover to neoliberals'
| authoritarian, anti-worker policy
| taurath wrote:
| And that's the problem in this comment pool to call out,
| clearly.
| replygirl wrote:
| i was adding some color to help you understand why "woke
| culture" isn't the dog whistle you think it is
|
| edit: friend, why do you keep editing your comments to
| make them have a different overall meaning after i reply?
| derac wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| anonym29 wrote:
| [deleted]
| saos wrote:
| Another company carelessly overhiring. OR maybe using opportunity
| to do some trimming?
|
| edit: Where does one check hiring metrics for company before
| accepting contract?
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| > Where does one check hiring metrics for company before
| accepting contract?
|
| LinkedIn company pages have those stats for Premium members.
|
| Twilio is showing -- what do you know -- 13% headcount growth
| over the last 6 months and a median tenure of 1.3 years.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Nasdaq shows their employment growth at 290% over the last 30
| months. Absolutely wild.
| duxup wrote:
| What even causes "over hiring"?
|
| People just building their resume for things like "managed a
| department of 200 people" ?
|
| Otherwise over hiring sounds like a pain in the ass to deal
| with.
| naravara wrote:
| 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.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| 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.
| romeros wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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".
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| jjulius wrote:
| >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.
| roflyear wrote:
| 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...
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Funny. You could kill a company with too much money
| because they hired people they now need to spend time to
| manage. Instead if doing the thing.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Hiring people so that your competition can't is a business
| tactic, not a smart one going into a recession, but worked
| for decades for FAANG
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| 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.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Twilio is down 50% from their pre covid price. Ouch
| noirbot wrote:
| 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.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| 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.
|
| Even more happy with that decision now.
| trention wrote:
| 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.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| In tech, Indians and East Asians are also not considered a
| minority.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| +1. I bet Indians and East Asians were bucketed with white
| people.
| csa wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| They may not realize it, but they will quietly lose business
| over time to folks who are not fans of the style of this
| layoff.
| rocket_surgeron wrote:
| >Twilio had 7,867 employees as of Dec. 31, 2021.
|
| 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?
|
| Are they all in marketing or customer support?
|
| It is incomprehensible.
| hudsonjr wrote:
| 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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Twilio recentky acquired Segment and Sendgrid.
|
| There is overhead per customer in each of their segments for
| compliance, revenue retention, contract growth, and support.
|
| From a technical standpoint, engineers are required for each of
| these aspects as well.
|
| Then there is overhead for employees, in terms of managers,
| human resources, and it.
| peckrob wrote:
| 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?
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| rsync wrote:
| "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_.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Silicon Valley was a documentary.
| foobiekr wrote:
| I wrote about what drives this previously:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32171468
| cpursley wrote:
| Seems like a good time to switch to Mailersend. They just
| introduces SMS:
|
| https://www.mailersend.com/blog/introducing-transactional-sm...
|
| I'm very happy with their support and email product.
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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.
|
| You can find more.
| noelsusman wrote:
| 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.
| dilap wrote:
| 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.
|
| What do you think?
|
| (Link to anti-racist information:
| https://www.nlc.org/article/2020/07/21/what-does-it-mean-
| to-...)
| vdnkh wrote:
| 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.
| monocularvision wrote:
| I love seeing people defend this statement by basically
| saying "it actually meant nothing"... as if that is a really
| strong defense.
| jballer wrote:
| "We avoided firing people who aren't white" vs "we preferred
| firing people who are white."
|
| This school of thought purports to agree that harmful impact
| supersedes good intent.
|
| They just refuse to recognize the individual as the ultimate
| minority.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Or, more charitably, "We avoided laying off racial/oppressed
| minorities for racist/bigoted reasons"
| Antrikshy wrote:
| That should be a given. Why even bring it up?
|
| It's like saying "I'm not racist" before doing something
| unrelated.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > That should be a given. Why even bring it up?
|
| 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.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| quantum_solanum wrote:
| I really need to make a HN bingo board one of these days,
| though it'll have to be like 12x12 or it'll be way too easy.
| whymauri wrote:
| 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.
| mattalex wrote:
| > 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.
| mdcds wrote:
| 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."
| whymauri wrote:
| Kendi is one person with one interpretation and doesn't work
| for nor represent the policies of Twilio, a completely
| separate institution.
|
| I read the statement the same as the GP comment.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| 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"
| mdcds wrote:
| oh, that's interesting. I'm not from Twilio, but Dr.
| Kendi has spoken at our company as well.
| DeWilde wrote:
| > Sounds like they are taking steps to make sure whoever was
| chosen for layoffs were not chosen for racist reasons.
|
| Doing so is illegal and makes little sense to put it in a
| public announcement. Might as well state that they don't intend
| to murder anyone.
| geodel wrote:
| It seems to be _profitability_ is next generation technology like
| Web 4.0 or something. We will be hearing a lot in coming years.
| pc86 wrote:
| It used to be profitability was a core component of running a
| business.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It still is, hence the security and rewards of working at
| businesses like Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, etc. and the same
| for shareholders/owners too.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > 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.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| Oh no, imagine having to provide value to the world instead of
| being in the business of selling a dollar for 95c. So hard ;*(
| time_to_smile wrote:
| 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.
| dangus wrote:
| 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| >you're one missed funding round away from getting kicked to
| the curb
|
| Isn't that always the case?
| sulam wrote:
| 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.
| bearjaws wrote:
| How much did Twilio grow from 2020-2022?
|
| Over 200%: from 2,800 staff to 8,510 ...
|
| 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.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| How the **CK are these companies training and onboarding and
| managing all these new hires in such short a time frames?
| porker wrote:
| By hiring additional 'resources' to train and onboard and
| manage all these new hires
|
| It's *CKing crazy. Reminds me of government
| ucm_edge wrote:
| 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.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I thought you couldn't lay someone off for performance
| reasons.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.)
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| 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.
| eagleinparadise wrote:
| I work in finance and every finance employer requires
| some sort of pre-req or onsite test during a serious
| 1st/2nd round interview.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _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.
| pierrefermat1 wrote:
| I think this has been true regardless of the economy climate,
| but actually the climate has just resulted in more companies
| missing that funding round.
| pastor_bob wrote:
| Mostly in "Go-To-Market". Same as Patreon
|
| I don't even know what that is, but sounds like a money pit.
| realityking wrote:
| Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success are the "Go-To-Market"
| team.
| geodel wrote:
| 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.
| telman17 wrote:
| Another term for Sales I believe.
| sulam wrote:
| That's correct.
| [deleted]
| calrueb wrote:
| 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).
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Shareholders are looking at the next quarter, not the next
| decade. The entire system is optimized for extremely short-term
| gains.
| guywithabike wrote:
| TWLO is down 80% from its 52 week high, even after today's 10%
| rise. Do you really believe that this is the "slightest sign of
| trouble"?
| zo1 wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > and maybe move the conversation forward
|
| What does this actually mean, in the context of "when we fired
| people, we considered their race"?
| [deleted]
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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.
| the_doctah wrote:
| Why are you trying to make it sound like most layoffs are
| race-based?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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.
| John23832 wrote:
| (I am a black man)
|
| 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".
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| A Minnesota public school district created a plan to prioritize
| laying off white teachers.
| https://nypost.com/2022/08/17/minneapolis-schools-defend-pla...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| And in doing so, they almost perfectly matched what a school
| district did back in 1985 and got wrecked by SCOTUS over:
| https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/476/267.html
|
| A bold move, especially since the court looks even less
| favorably on affirmative action than it did 40 years ago.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| 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.
| kache_ wrote:
| https://imgur.com/a/FZRAMhf
| valboa wrote:
| LegitShady wrote:
| >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.
| John23832 wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > 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.
| John23832 wrote:
| 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.
| zo1 wrote:
| "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.
|
| We're not falling for it
| John23832 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Whoosah.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| To me (someone from a former socialist country), both
| hiring and firing, based on race, seems very very racist.
|
| Replace all the groups with "white men", and if it seems
| racist then, well, it's also racist when it's any other
| group except "white men".
| peter422 wrote:
| Serious question: Are you aware of the historical context
| of the United States as it concerns race?
|
| Without looking anything up tell me what you know about
| it.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Are you talking about slavery? Since i'm a slav, I'd
| know, considering the similarity of the words is not a
| coincidence.
|
| But since neither I nor any of the employees there were
| ever a slave, I have no idea why a histy so old has to be
| taken in consideration.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| peter422 wrote:
| Thank you, this is very well written.
|
| 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!
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Thank you, this is very well written.
|
| 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.
| John23832 wrote:
| 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".
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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.
| LegitShady wrote:
| 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'.
| peter422 wrote:
| 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.
| yibg wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > If you don't like it, take it up with people making those
| decisions.
|
| Take it up with your lawyers. I can't believe they admitted
| it in an official filing. It's like they're begging to be
| sued.
| djbebs wrote:
| Racial discrimination is perfectly legal (and sometimes
| mandated) as long as the group harmed is the right one.
| SllX wrote:
| Not under American Federal law.
| weatherlite wrote:
| Why is diversity hiring fine then? Can't see the
| difference
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| SllX wrote:
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| At least in the United States, this is not true. Please
| do not spread inflammatory disinformation:
| https://www.eeoc.gov/racecolor-discrimination
| crackercrews wrote:
| From your link:
|
| > 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.
| aetherson wrote:
| 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."
| crackercrews wrote:
| Companies sure don't seem to be following that law in
| hiring.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| sp332 wrote:
| Affirmative action is _required_ for government
| contractors.
| https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/affirmativeact
| Even to the extent of training someone in the right
| category so you can hire them.
| stagger87 wrote:
| "Allowed"
| sopooneo wrote:
| 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.
| donretag wrote:
| 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?
| flatiron wrote:
| 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
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "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.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| Mindblowing ... they think they do something good, but they
| make it worse for everybody.
| peanuty1 wrote:
| I work at a Bay Area tech company with over 10k employees and
| we are asked to log our ethnic and gender identity in
| Workday.
| slt2021 wrote:
| your race is saved in HR system once you apply for the job
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Latino gives +1 point while Asian in tech gives -0.90 not
| quite the -1 for white but pretty close. Good news is you
| come out net positive.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| 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?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| > 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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.
| lr1970 wrote:
| 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?
| crackercrews wrote:
| Isn't affirmative action in hiring legal? Seems like this
| is just the same thing but for layoffs.
| NeverFade wrote:
| It is absolutely illegal. It violates the Civil Rights
| Act of 1964, which:
|
| > outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion,
| sex, and national origin.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
|
| Yes, that's the same act that makes it illegal to
| discriminate _against_ racial minorities, women,
| religions, etc.
|
| Discrimination based on race is illegal, pure and simple.
| Hiding it under nice names like "affirmative action" does
| not change this fact.
| exolymph wrote:
| De jure illegal, sure, but we all know it's de facto
| required for institutions of a certain size. Laws are
| only as good as the enforcement.
| fche wrote:
| praying for an appropriate opinion from the SCOTUS on the
| asians/harvard case
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| 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).
| NeverFade wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.wgbh.org/news/education/2021/07/22/as-
| supreme-co...
|
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.ivywise.com/ivywise-
| knowledgebase/resources/arti...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| It depends on the university, engineering-oriented
| schools admit women at higher rates (over 2x in the case
| of MIT and Harvey Mudd): https://money.com/colleges-
| women-higher-acceptance-rate/
| vondur wrote:
| 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.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| 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.
| NeverFade wrote:
| 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.
|
| The policy itself is racist and illegal.
| abduhl wrote:
| 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.
| dominotw wrote:
| > but does not change who we fire during a layoff
|
| what does 'carried out through a lens' mean. Through
| means it was put through that lens?
| alttab wrote:
| 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.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| 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.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| 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.
| coredog64 wrote:
| 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.
| code_biologist wrote:
| 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.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| > If they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people
| at random
|
| This is a false dichotomy. They could have done layoffs
| based on the company's needs and the performance of the
| employees. That isn't random.
|
| Your big picture point amounts to a heckler's veto. The
| more you cater to the heckler, the more powerful the
| heckler becomes.
| pirate787 wrote:
| I'm going to vote against corporate racism by closing my
| Twilio account.
| kbelder wrote:
| >it avoids a perception problem which may be far worse: the
| hypothetical perception that the people drawing up the
| layoffs were racist
|
| No, it kind of cemented that perception.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| > It seems like this policy has two negative impacts on
| minorities and only one on white people.
|
| Yeah, but the minorities who kept their jobs even it out to 1
| point for whites and 1 point for minorities.
|
| Cause that's who this shit works, as a zero-sum game.
| jrs235 wrote:
| 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.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| >some white people who were affected will believe it was
| because of their race
|
| But is it actually true? Did they fire white people at a
| higher rate?
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| "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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| The opposite of anti-racist isn't racist.
|
| You are assuming the decision makers have subconscious
| racist biases. And you are assuming those biases favor
| white people, men, etc.
|
| In the world I live in there is a good chance that each
| of these is false. The fact that they made this statement
| indicates as much.
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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.)
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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.
| wizofaus wrote:
| 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:
|
| http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/2014/03/20...
| crackercrews wrote:
| Can you share a section reference? Looks like it's 90
| pages long.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Chapter 4 (pp. 44-) is a good place to start,
| particularly "UNCOVERING BIAS BY USING FICTITIOUS
| RESUMES" (p. 47).
| shrewduser wrote:
| true or not, those statements would create that perception.
| Ir0nMan wrote:
| Unless they lied in their statement, yes.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Everyone who was laid off here has strong grounds to sue for
| racial discrimination. White people and non-white people
| alike.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| It also makes the company a political lightning rod, making
| whatever their business situation is worse. Irresponsible
| move by a CEO.
| blockwriter wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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).
| the_doctah wrote:
| 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.
| slt2021 wrote:
| 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.
| crackercrews wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| the_doctah wrote:
| My employer has specifically called out ESG investments
| as one of the reasons they have gone super woke.
| karmasimida wrote:
| The CEO pretty confirmed race is a factor, it is not believe,
| he said it.
|
| Would this be legal even?
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| (White male, minority religion)
|
| I read this just as "we were careful not to have our layoff
| unfairly impact minorities", not "we unfairly fired non-
| minorities".
|
| Unfortunately, reading the comments here, it sounds like most
| people assumed the latter, which I found quite sad.
| seer-zig wrote:
| coding123 wrote:
| 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.
| silent_cal wrote:
| 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.
| enumjorge wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32837250
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] - https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-
| prefere...
| choko wrote:
| 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.
| enumjorge wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/world/americas/mexico-
| wom...
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| 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
| zackees wrote:
| muffinman26 wrote:
| 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.
| grapehut wrote:
| 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.
| randomdata wrote:
| 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.
| notch656a wrote:
| > if the same privilege is not extended during layoffs it
| will unfairly impact them.
|
| By unfairly you mean fairly.
| grapehut wrote:
| 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.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >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.
|
| Making "improving company diversity" a terminal goal is a
| problem in and of itself.
| abduhl wrote:
| 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.
| prottog wrote:
| Imagine that in 2022 we would be told that we're hired or fired
| on the basis of race! Unbelievable.
| vkou wrote:
| weatherlite wrote:
| And a white man in the wrong neighborhood isn't viewed with
| suspicion?
| mod wrote:
| Yes, but by a different set of people. Not the
| authorities.
| [deleted]
| CSMastermind wrote:
| There's a difference between certain segments of society
| being racist and making racism your official company
| policy.
| vkou wrote:
| 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.
| prottog wrote:
| 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.
| yesiamyourdad wrote:
| 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.
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| While you are busy worrying about being woke there is a
| competitor getting ready to kick your ass.
| immigrantheart wrote:
| These virtue signaling needs to stop.
| jballer wrote:
| Maybe they're just trying to get more people to walk out
| voluntarily
| callalex wrote:
| 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.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 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.
| locusofself wrote:
| I left a company just over two years ago that was aq
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