A former Twitter engineer recounts company’s struggles to diversify workforce
The icon for the Twitter app shown on an iPhone. A former engineer at the social media company is speaking out on diversity issues.
A company starting to track the ethnic or racial backgrounds of job candidates to help figure out why it’s ending up with a not-so-diverse workforce might make sense – maybe there’s a point in the interview process where minorities are being systematically nixed. That made sense to Twitter engineer Leslie Miley.
But trying to guess applicants’ racial makeup based on their last names? That didn’t go over so well. Until recently, Miley was only the black engineer in a leadership position at Twitter. Now, there are none.
Having just left the company, Miley wrote a lengthy critique of Twitter’s struggles to make its development teams resemble the diversity of its 320 million users. The name-guessing suggestion by one of Miley’s bosses was one of his key frustrations. TechCrunch has more.
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