Open Letter To Tech Companies: Please Raise Your Bar

Hiring for diversity doesn’t “lower the bar”; it raises it.

To the hiring managers and senior employees at Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Reddit, and any other company that has mistakenly (and outrageously) called hiring for diversity “lowering the bar”:

I use and love many of your products every day. I’ve lauded the transformative impact tech companies have had on our society when it’s positive, and criticized it when not — not because I dislike tech (or these companies), but because I hold it in high regard and wish to see it get better.

Tech has many talented people behind its products, but ours is a notoriously homogeneous field (still). That looks bad, sure, but more important is that homogeneity produces less innovative, less creative, subpar work: for all the many billions of dollars behind your products, they still suffer from many easily avoidable problems.

Diversity leading to better products is not a belief; it’s scientific fact, proven ad nauseum by science, experiments, numerous studies, and real-world examples. Better products, happier customers, more revenues & profits.

Improving the interview process

When you skew your evaluation criteria towards not understanding or caring about social concepts, such as the complex racial and/or gender political challenges that some people face, then white and Asian men — who are least likely to suffer those challenges personally — are more likely to ace those evaluations.

But, I hear you say, “those are not relevant topics or skills to the job!”

Allow me to explain why they are more relevant than exact code or design competency.

First of all, you’re making products for people. Your baseline should be workers who possess a firm grasp of social concepts, because it makes them better able to create products for people.

Secondly, the quality of someone’s code or the aesthetic strength of their pixels is useful to a degree, but if you only look at such skills you’re really saying you just want to hire a cog in a machine that does your bidding—not an innovative and creative problem-solver. Instead, you ought to ask candidates the hard, challenging questions that determine who they are as a person. How strong is their character under pressure? How factually informed is their opinion about difficult topics? How well do they understand actual systems-thinking (like Patriarchy)? Can they effectively articulate how and why their knowing what Black Lives Matter means makes them a better designer or engineer?

If a candidate thinks the two are unrelated, pass. If you think the two are unrelated, read on. I’ll use that last example to illustrate this:

Someone who not only understands, but can effectively communicate and explain that Black Lives Matter is a movement to call for the acknowledgement of black people’s pain and suffering under societal structures, both historically and presently, is demonstrating to you the following important professional skills they possess:

1. Ability to think critically and overcome their biases and assumptions about legacy systems;
2. Ability to understand difficult problems and frame them in ways that help address them;
3. Ability to think outside of the box;
4. Ability to communicate difficult ideas and concepts to others effectively;
5. Ability to understand how complex systems interplay and affect one another;
6. Ability to balance solutions against many different factors that push and pull against one another, and may conflict;
7. Ability to envision products, methods, or solutions that improve people’s lives without causing harmful side-effects;
8. Ability to speak with conviction and sell people on innovative new ideas, even controversial ones;
9. Ability to see and acknowledge shortcomings in the status quo, opening up opportunities for potential gain and benefit;
10. Ability to navigate uncomfortable situations or discussions.

That is a list of 10 skills you may find on a given job listing for a programmer, designer, manager, or otherwise. But instead of relying solely on a comparatively trivial technical test to assess candidates on these skills, you’re using something that matters, something that lets them prove their mastery of these skills.

This does not mean you should replace your assessment of necessary competency in the applicable skills for the job. Your programmer still needs to know Ruby or JavaScript (etc.), your designer still needs to know Sketch or Photoshop and prototyping tools, your manager still needs to direct and motivate people without an iron fist. But such technical skills are more easily taught to an employee than complicated systems thinking and understanding. (Trust me.)

The candidate you truly want is someone who understands and can solve the real problem you are actually facing. That problem isn’t sufficient mastery in Photoshop; it’s understanding the interplay of product features vs. user needs vs. business goals vs. user experience vs. performance constraints vs. engineering resources vs. scheduling and deadlines. The skill you need filled isn’t “designing interfaces”, it’s “designing interfaces that balance the complex concerns people deal with, which may well feel as if they are mutually exclusive.”

“Candidates from different backgrounds may sometimes lack technical polish, but they more than make up for it with soft skills — the biggest skills gap in tech.”

Diverse candidates are scrappier

The “we look for diversity of thought” argument is a cop-out, a simplification of the issues that serves as a shield to ward off criticism over a company’s lack of diverse employees.

Diversity of thought is not what you should want, anyway: that argument explicitly opens the door to include racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic and ableist views. Those are terrible traits to welcome into your organization. Not because people with such views are bad — they can be educated out of them — but because they make poor employees that produce subpar work and cause tension in your company. James Damore was fired not for his views (despite his own claims of “truth”, which were easily disproven); no, he was fired because he created a completely untenable situation for himself and caused company-wide tension and conflict. Good workers don’t cause unnecessary problems and conflicts in your company.

What you should be looking for to make your teams better is diversity of backgrounds and life experiences. Hire people across every privilege spectrum, because that is what actually gets you diverse perspectives and understandings of people’s needs. “Diversity of thought” does not guarantee that; we’ve heard that line from countless big tech companies and their products routinely fail to accommodate the needs of people that are different from their largely homogeneous teams.

Candidates who come from different backgrounds, who have different life experiences, may sometimes lack polish in technical skills, but they more than make up for it with their abundance in soft skills — which is the biggest skills gap in tech. All you need to do is invest in them (which you probably did with the CEO’s lazy nephew, too).

Plus, more diverse candidates are scrappier, and have more grit. They’ve been forced to overcome a lot more difficulties to get where they are, and yet they didn’t give up. They persevered against greater odds. Leverage that grit and perseverance in your workforce, rather than your competitors’. A lot of technical skills can be brought up to par in a focused semester of training, but it can take years to become fluent in critical soft skills.

Raise that bar

So please, stop lowering the bar to favor the people who have enjoyed the most privilege and been forced the least to think critically about how our society functions, or how the products they make affect people’s lives. The technology industry is a field of systems thinking and multidimensional products with intersectional political implications at every turn. Hire for it! Hire people who better understand the hard parts, and teach them the easy parts as needed.

There are fantastic free resources available to help you hire more women in tech, and become good places for people of color to work at. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to add some Art to your STEM culture and to quit using elite school hiring quotas.

You’re working to make the world better for people; now put it in action!

And stop calling diversity efforts “lowering” the bar—it’s insulting as hell.

This article was contributed to by Alysa Cisneros.

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