A former Twitter employee has called out Alex Roetter who is a lead engineer at Twitter over diversity issues. He was offended that Roetter suggested they use job applicants’ names to determine their ethnicity. Roetter planned on using this information to determine why some minorities weren't hired as much.
Leslie Miley, a former engineer, and the one who singled Rotter out said:
“What I also found disconcerting is this otherwise highly sophisticated thinker could posit that an issue this complex could be addressed by name analysis,”
Roetter responded by saying he did a poor job at communicating his ideas.
“I realize that we have blind spots, myself included. One of mine is that I have a tendency to default to engineering-driven, quantitative solutions. The issues Leslie raise require so much more than that.”
Recently, Twitter has been under a lot of pressure to add more diversity amongst it's staff and this story is not helping their case. However, to fix this problem, Twitter says they have been using things like “inclusion training” and resource groups for minority employees. Hopefully these training techniques work well for Twitter and it can create an enviroment where all of it's employees feel comfortable.
Source: Alex Roetter (Medium)
Via: Recode
