I just watched a fun interview with some of the folks from Heroku. The interviewer at one point casually gendered all Heroku users as “he”. These things stick out to me these days. It makes me think about how it must feel to be a woman and constantly be reminded that few people imagine anyone like you when they think of developers. Which got me thinking a little about gender and race and tech startups.
Now I want to say… I like Heroku. Heroku, The Technology is an amazing piece of architecture. I think it’s a gift to developers, and I think Adam and the other folks who work there are good people. I’m using it for SproutRobot. I know Adam is committed to Free Software, and he was super nice to respond to an email I once sent him about Heroku and F/OSS.
But there’s something that sketches me out a little about Heroku, The Company, and it’s the same thing that sketches me out about AppJet, The Company, and most of the tech startups I see.
It’s pretty much all white dudes.
Now, I haven’t seen Heroku do anything as blatantly sexist as making the only woman on your About page be a sexy mannequin whose lack of development and business skills you mock. But the Heroku founders are all white men, and the only other employee I’ve seen photos of is a white man. It seems uncontroversial for me to say that they’re hiring people for specific attributes that are predominantly found only in white men… if they weren’t, they’d be more diverse*.
Which makes me wonder: what human attributes and skills and ideas are their organization lacking? What kinds of knowledge and experience are they completely blind to because whoever is making the hiring choices thinks that these specific white dude attributes are the Most Important Attributes For Our Organization To Have?
And truthfully, I don’t know the answer. I’m sure their company will succeed. Like I said, the Heroku folks are brilliant, good people, who are doing great work. Lots of companies have made fistfulls of money employing the “let’s look for attributes that predominantly only white dudes have” methodology. But what is lost?
The thing is, it’s hard to know. As white males, we have come to see certain things as “relevant” and “important”, and those values are partly formed by our whiteness and our maleness. Certainly there are values that extend across color and gender lines, but there are plenty of things that women and people of color are more likely to find important than I would.
And this is the hard part. These values that vary across color and gender lines, and I have a hard time seeing and understanding them precisely because they vary across color and gender lines. The things I undervalue because I am white and male are necessarily invisible to me because I undervalue them.
This is why I’m reticent to rely completely on my personal values to do hiring. My values are skewed because of who I am.
So my only choice is to put a premium on diversity. To put trust in people and say “I don’t fully understand all of the value in this person, or everything they can contribute to this organization, but I am going to choose them over someone whose value I can see more clearly because I know there is invisible value in diversity.”
I just have this hunch that what will come out of that will be totally freaking rad. We’ll see, I guess.
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* I wish this would go without saying, but I know I have to say it or people will get Very Upset: obviously they’re not doing this on purpose. They didn’t sit down and think “what qualities can we look for that only white dudes will have.” They just decided that Ruby prowess, or scaling experience, and the ability to speak in a language they understand… that these are what matters to them. The fact that these are predominantly attributes of white men is a consequence of that decision that I’m sure they didn’t choose deliberately. In a lot of ways, we’ve moved beyond what I think most people would call “deliberate” racism and sexism (although even the deliberate stuff is still sadly common). Instead, what most of us are faced with is a more insidious, despite-our-best-intentions kind of racism and sexism. Whether that kind of stuff is “deliberate”, and whether it’s ethically bankrupt is a very abstract, philosophical question that is, generally speaking, an inappropriate diversion for most discussions about specific race- and gender-related phenomena. We’re biased. It hurts people. Let’s focus on fixing it, not on discussing endlessly whether it makes us bad people.
