It's bizarre that a company seems to be struggling to administer diversity of staff, without being certain of its own medium-term success.
There's no point in having your quota of "people of colour", as the article puts it, if the business model is unsustainable and leads to people being fired anyway.
Why not focus on creating a successful company first, and then worry about things that carry an administrative and management overhead.
It goes to what kind of company and site you want to have. If all you have is 20-something tech bros then that's the kind of company and site you will have.
If you want to appeal beyond that, you may want to broaden your culture.
Sometimes the founding cultural DNA is too strong, or attempts to change the culture fall short for a variety of reasons.
No, but if your monoculture of tech-bros has not had to deal with half the internet shit that women and people of color do (Or have, for various reasons, not been deeply impacted by it,) then what you're going to get is a community where women and people of color are driven away.
I've never been stalked on the internet. I've never received threatening phone calls. I've never been personally harassed, or physically threatened. If by some happenstance, one or two people did any of the above, I'd probably laugh it off.
A company full of people like me is unlikely to consider those use cases as seriously as they should.
Luckily a company full of people like you will also need to have experienced marketing and legal staff, who will know that it would be unwise to laugh off such user issues. Your marketing team doesn't need to be diverse to know this.
Having a successful company that appeals to a broad range of users is related to having a diverse staff.
Reddit has serious problems with blatant racism, sexism, and harassment on many of the larger subreddits. Until they start taking these issues seriously, they will have a hard time expanding their user base to include more women and minorities.
I hear that sentiment echoed a lot, but is their any hard evidence proving that a diverse staff increases the value significantly to the diverse demographics they themselves represent? WhatsApp is incredibly popular in South America and Africa, were their a proportionate number of South Americans and Africans on the WhatsApp team of ~18 people? Genuine question because I hear this preached like the bible whenever diversity in tech comes up.
Yeah, it's made-up bullshit which sounds like it makes sense. Enforced diversity is only a thing in the past few years, so you only have to think of....almost any mass-market product from before then to know it's untrue.
It's funny to me that someone can say "having a diverse userbase is related to having a diverse workforce" with a straight face, while half the shit in their/everyone's home is Chinese and Japanese.
The article seems to clumsily imply that the firing/resignation of a handful of employees is evidence of some conspiracy at reddit, yet people resign and get fired for all kinds of different reasons.
The tone of the piece makes me feel like it wouldn't even have been written if the employees who left had been 'tech bros'
> There's no point in having your quota of "people of colour", as the article puts it, if the business model is unsustainable and leads to people being fired anyway.
Your assumption is that people of color have nothing to bring to the table; that white people are better suited to helping create sustainable business models. The label I would use for this belief in the absence of reliable evidence is "white supremacy", although I understand that's a difficult word for many to swallow. You can call it "mild white supremacy" or "subconscious white supremacy" if that's a little more palatable. I don't intend it as a slur, although I know it will feel that way to some. I am using the term because I believe it is the most accurate term for describing the belief.
> Your assumption is that people of color have nothing to bring to the table
I didn't say, or even imply, this. I said that it makes no sense to put significant management and administrative resources, within a failing company, into something which will not help the company succeed. I'd say the exact same thing if we were talking about a company full of Japanese people in Japan, or black people in Kenya, or whatever.
If they find it difficult to hire and retain women (which the article states), then they can put that to the side while they ensure that their company does not die.
There's no point in having your quota of "people of colour", as the article puts it, if the business model is unsustainable and leads to people being fired anyway.
Why not focus on creating a successful company first, and then worry about things that carry an administrative and management overhead.