Apple’s diversity chief out after outcry

The article title is misleading as it implies causality. Per TechCrunch (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;apple-vp-of-diversity-and-inclusion-denise-young-smith-is-leaving&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;16&#x2F;apple-vp-of-diversity-and-...</a>):<p>&gt; Young Smith had been talking with Apple CEO Tim Cook about the next phase of her career and life since about a year ago, according to a source. Over the last few months, Apple has been searching for a successor to replace Young Smith. It’s not quite clear, however, when exactly Young Smith decided she would leave Apple. But based on that timeline, it seems as though Young Smith made up her mind before those comments in Bogotá, Colombia for which she later apologized.

&gt; they “were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it.”<p>Indeed, diversity is about filling a quota on visible traits like genders, shade of skin color and so on.<p>&gt; “More importantly, I want to assure you Apple’s view and our dedication to diversity has not changed.”<p>Well it&#x27;s good to know what Apple&#x27;s view of diversity is.<p>Sometimes it can be ambiguous and one might actually believe them when they say &quot;We deeply believe that diversity drives innovation&quot;. But this cleared it up. Yeah they don&#x27;t really believe it drives innovation. If they did every manager in the chain and team member would go out of their way to hire &quot;diverse&quot; people because it would directly improve the product and the bottom line, but they don&#x27;t believe that as institution.<p>Neither does Google or other big tech company. They wouldn&#x27;t need a &quot;diversity president&quot; if they did. Diverse candidates would find their way to their new positions pretty easily, helped by stock options, good salaries and so on. Look how efficiently these companies seek and find leaders in various technologies or project or areas of interest.<p>What they believe is avoiding bad PR. They don&#x27;t want to be criticized by some tech gossip blog about not being &quot;diverse&quot; and deep down they know how that tech blog measure &quot;diversity&quot;.<p>Also tangentially related, notice how many times age is included in &quot;diversity&quot; spectrum? Somehow hiring people of various ages is not seen as improving diversity because well, it&#x27;s not about gender or skin color, so gossip tech blogs won&#x27;t notice and still criticize them.<p>In light of that, it makes complete sense that Denise had to apologize. But it was a very useful move as well simply because it made the true values more transparent. Given everything else, at least it&#x27;s good to have more transparency and clarity.

Whatever your views on diversity are, I think we can all agree that the subject is so politically charged right now that this job is going to be like the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts

I&#x27;m a white guy. I&#x27;m a software engineer. I&#x27;m totally cool with hiring people who aren&#x27;t white guys (assuming they can do the job.) It seems that Denise Young Smith understands that, but there&#x27;s a weird fringe of the extreme left that only sees headcounts by color and gender, and only sees me as &quot;a white guy&quot;, and only sees others as &quot;an &lt;enthnicity&gt; &lt;gender&gt;&quot;, and it&#x27;s sad that a black woman got fired for being reasonable instead of having a specific and idiotic political agenda.

The more stuff I see like this, the more I&#x27;m convinced the only way to actually help diversity along is a free market solution. Instead of demanding quotas, just have the data available publically.<p>The reasons are many, but the biggest is that I feel that hiring people that are bad at their job but have some physical characteristic, will make the problem much worse in the long run by &quot;proving the biased people right&quot; about their biases.

This surrealist diversity fascism is getting scarier day by day. And poses, in full dystopian ironic splendor, the greatest imaginable threat to real human diversity.

I thought skin color didn&#x27;t matter and it&#x27;s what inside that matters? So skin color <i>is</i> the most important factor when determining diversity?

I don&#x27;t buy &quot;Apple is a SJW shop&quot; hysteria automagically. If it were the case, that would be depressing because win-lose, collective-punishment identity politics is corrosive, victim-bully fascist ideology masquerading as egalitarian enlightenment. Such behaviors wouldn&#x27;t add value and encourage talent to stay. Smith seemed to have the right ideas but perhaps couldn&#x27;t implement them and&#x2F;or had political troubles. Maybe she said other things that were inconsistent. Only Apple management and her have a better idea of what transpired.

I am a woman, and I work for a software company. We essentially hire by resume only, and we pay a service to scrub resumes and cover letters of anything that might reveal gender, race, or ethnicity. The outside firm does all of our interviews, whiteboards, etc. and only at the very end does the hiring manager get to meet the prospective employee, and say yes or no. To my knowledge, we&#x27;ve rarely said no, and we let the qualifications speak for themselves. This has lead to an office of about 45% women, and 40% minority. I think this is very good diversity.

Apple: &quot;We deeply believe that diversity drives innovation”.<p>The company is certainly innovative but it&#x27;s predominantly (2017) white and male but on the other hand Apple don&#x27;t say what % diversity is needed to do this driving. Don&#x27;t they just choose employees on merit irrespective of any other consideration? They&#x27;d be dumb if they didn&#x27;t.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;apple-releases-2017-diversity-report-showing-little-progress-2017-11" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;apple-releases-2017-diversity...</a>

Insanity prevails. Why Apple, why?

It almost seems like all those diversity preachers are the biggest racists scums.

More on her comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months&#x2F;?a=2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;17&#x2F;apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...</a><p>&gt;Denise Young Smith, who was named vice president of diversity and inclusion in May, made controversial comments last month during a One Young World Summit in Bogotá, Colombia.<p>&gt;“There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation,” the inaugural diversity chief said.<p>&gt;“Diversity is the human experience,” she said, according to Quartz. “I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”<p>&gt;Her comments appeared to defend Apple’s overwhelmingly white and male leadership at a time when the company’s makeup is markedly uneven.<p>Wow what a shit show, even if she believes this nuanced, thoughtful view of diversity, she should have realized that she was hired for one reason only: racial extortion. Now apple can go out and hire the shakedown artist they deserve.

The far left often misses how multi-dimensional concepts like diversity or privilege are but how can a team without minorities be diverse? By definition, it would be composed only of people who were in the majority on every dimension!<p>Her comment was almost certainly false, though public humiliation and firing after a 20 year career is a bit of an excess. Why not discuss the matter and ask for a gracious apology?