Leslie Miley, who says he’s the only African-American in engineering leadership at Twitter, has resigned due to the tech company’s lack of diversity.
Advertisement
He isn’t the first employee to speak out about Twitter’s internal culture. A saddened Miley writes that “with my departure, Twitter no longer has any managers, directors, or VP’s of color in engineering or product management”. Leslie Miley, a former engineer, singled out Roetter for suggesting the company use job applicants’ names to determine their ethnicity as a way to track why certain minority groups aren’t hired more regularly at the company.
“Each of these moments caused me to rethink what role I was playing at Twitter and in tech and how I could participate in dismantling what I describe as the diversity problem in tech”, said Miley, who worked at Twitter for almost three years. To that, Reotter said that one of his “blind spots…is that I have a tendency to default to engineering-driven, quantitative solutions”.
“People are like, ‘Well, you need to give Twitter recommendations.’ I can’t recommend Twitter do anything”.
Twitter’s workforce consists of 1% African-Americans, 3% Hispanics and 13% women, according to its latest diversity report.
Moreover, he sees CEO Jack Dorsey’s return as a good step. If the tech workforce wants to embrace diversity, there should be a few variance with where it searches for those to reflect that diversity.
Twitter already has an appallingly low number and percentage of African Americans and Latinos working at the company, around 60 total in the workforce and zero in your boardroom and c-suite leadership.
“It is my belief that Jack understands the use case of Twitter better than anyone else, understands how diversity can be additive to growth, and is committed to making that happen”, Miley said. Here’s what Miley wrote in response in the comments on Roetter’s post: “Thank you for this well thought out post”.
Multiple times throughout his tenure at Twitter, he was on the receiving end of comments and actions that didn’t live up to the diversity rhetoric the company publicly promotes. For instance, in an engineering leadership meeting, a Twitter diversity recruiter demonstrated a narrow view of what it means to hire diverse talent. “We are becoming intolerant with these numbers; there’s a big gap between their talk and their implementation”, Jackson said. Erica Baker, an engineer at Slack, refers to this as “Colorless Diversity,” in which efforts, funding, and initiatives are poured into empowering white women, while other underrepresented groups are ignored. When he responded with “diversity is important, but we can’t lower the bar”, Miley realized he was the sole Black employee in an engineering leadership position. “Needless to say, the majority of them performed well”, he writes. Roetter also reiterated Twitter’s commitment to hiring candidates from Hispanic-Serving Institutions and Historically Black Colleges.
That assertion is offensive, and the idea that companies would have to “lower the bar”, in order to improve diversity or that there aren’t enough qualified candidates in the pipeline is factually false.
Diversity issue nowadays is just like the growth problem that cripples the company and threatens its survival. “Because she is in front of you despite the obstacles that have been put in front of her”.
Advertisement
Miley believes that Dorsey can help make Twitter a more diverse companybecause he has met with Blackbird, an employee resource group for Twitter’s black employees. He used Shaft, a popular African-American lead in a major film, as an avatar, but was reproached by colleagues for having an icon that was “intimidating” and “unprofessional”, even though fellow Googlers used images like race auto driving and pitbull dogs.
