Trump’s administration will be making it harder to get H-1B visas starting in April – Recode

2017/03/08 Leave a comment

Great opportunity for Canada:

United States Immigration and Customs Services has announced that, starting in April, it will no longer offer its 15-day “premium processing” program for applicants of H-1B visas.

H-1B visas allow employers to temporarily hire non-U.S. born workers to take highly skilled positions at U.S. companies. These visas are frequently used at large technology companies to bring top engineering talent to their U.S. offices. The U.S. only allows 85,000 people per year to enter the country on H-1B visas.

The announcement means that new H-1B visa applications could take months to process. With premium processing, U.S. immigration services offered a 15-day expedited service for a $1,225 filing fee, but come April that will no longer be an option.

“I’ve seen these applications take anywhere from 8-12 months,” said Tahmina Watson, a Seattle-based immigration lawyer, in an interview. “Even though the advertised processing time is four months, I’ve never seen anything take four months.”

This will not only affect new workers coming to the country on the H-1B program, but those who already hold an H-1B visa and are changing jobs within the country too, says Watson, like if an engineer who had an H-1B visa with Microsoft is taking a new position at Google, for example.

The suspension of the premium processing may last up to six months, according to the USICS website.

USICS says that it’s suspending premium processing in order to catch up on “long-pending petitions” — which the agency says has been difficult because of the large number of H-1B applications and requests for premium processing it receives.

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and many other tech companies condemned Trump’s immigration and refugee ban that was issued by executive order in January, which blocked people from seven primarily Muslim countries from entering the U.S.

Dozens of companies, mostly in technology, signed onto a brief that claimed the ban inflicted “substantial harm on U.S. companies.”

Although that executive order was suspended after review from a panel of federal judges, Trump says his administration is working on a new version of the immigration ban.

Source: Trump’s administration will be making it harder to get H-1B visas starting in April – Recode

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2 federal tribunals make high-speed internet access a job condition

2016/12/23 1 Comment

Understandable requirement even though some will protest:

Two tribunals have begun making home access to high-speed internet a prerequisite for dozens of well-paid federal government appointments, despite the fact it could disqualify many Canadians living in rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed internet isn’t available.

The Social Security Tribunal and the Veterans Review and Appeal Board have both recently added high-speed internet access to the list of criteria for those seeking the lucrative appointments, which come with salaries ranging from $108,200 to $127,200 for full-time positions, and between $540 and $635 a day for part-time positions.

“You must work from your home office in Canada and have access to high-speed internet,” say the conditions of employment for the Social Security Tribunal, which resolves disputes involving employment insurance, the Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security.

Candidates expected to work in urban centres

The requirement appears to have been added in recent months. A similar notice of openings for the tribunal in June 2015 said candidates might have to work from home but did not require high-speed internet access.

The Social Security Tribunal has dozens of full-time and part-time members, including several vacancies at the moment.

On Wednesday, the CRTC ruled that access to high-speed internet should be a basic service across Canada. It said two million Canadian households lack access to proper internet service.

The Veterans Review and Appeal Board, which resolves disputes over disability benefits decisions made by Veterans Affairs Canada, also has this requirement.

Spokeswoman Alexandra Shaw said successful candidates for the board are expected to work in one of six urban centres across Canada and to work from home because the board’s only administrative offices are in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

“Members need high-speed internet to maintain a reliable connection to the secure systems that give them timely access to veterans’ documents in order to prepare for hearings and produce decisions,” she wrote. “The board provides members with cellphones with additional hotspot connectivity.”

Source: 2 federal tribunals make high-speed internet access a job condition – Politics – CBC News

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Diversity in tech too often means ‘hiring white women.’ We need to move beyond that. – Recode

2016/12/22 Leave a comment

Good discussion of the broader dimensions of diversity by Audrey Blanche of Atlassian:

Maybe it’s all the recent data about the sad state of equitable pay and glass ceilings. Or the millions of women leaning in without a sea change in senior-level representation. Or the waves of thinly disguised to blatant sexism that surfaced during the recent presidential election. Or the fact many of us are women ourselves.

More likely, it’s a combination of many things that contribute to the workplace diversity zeitgeist being focused primarily on achieving gender parity.

The problem is when diversity programs focus on “women” as a whole, they often fall into the trap of prioritizing the majority: White women. This is an issue I know intimately well, having been tasked with designing diversity programs for leading tech companies that go beyond “just (white) women.”

Take me, for instance. I’m not only female but also Latina and queer, both of which color my experience and the obstacles I’ve faced in the workplace. To make progress for all women, we need to acknowledge that women are also black, senior, immigrants, LGBT and so forth — and often many other things at once. Each of these identities faces unique biases and challenges that must be accounted for if we want to get closer to true gender parity. After all, a company dominated by men hiring women from similar racial and socioeconomic backgrounds is not diversity in a meaningful sense, it’s one small step away from homogeneity. Fighting for all women is even more important now, with outright discriminationincreasing rapidly after the election.

Mind you, fighting for all women is not as easy as it may sound. Even Pinterest, which is one of the leading companies on diversity issues, recently updated its goals for what it could feasibly accomplish in a single year. However, it’s even more important for us to do so now with outright discrimination increasing rapidly after the election.

In designing company wide programs at Atlassian, I focus on expanding initiatives to address three crucial areas alongside gender: Race, age and geography.

Race

When I joined Atlassian as the company’s first Global Head of Diversity & Inclusion, it was clear to me that leadership understood the importance of diversity and was invested in creating and maintaining it. But the biggest question was how and where to start. Race quickly jumped to the top of the list for a simple reason: People of color — and specifically women of color — often have more difficulty entering and staying in the technology industry than their white counterparts.

To address this first piece of the puzzle, we partnered with Galvanize to create a high-touch scholarship program specifically for black, Latina and Indigenous women. Because tech workers are significantly more likely to be white or Asian, women of color are less likely to have close friends or family who have worked in technology, smaller professional networks and more difficulty accessing their first jobs. Our program is designed to address each of these specific challenges: Each recipient is paired with a current Atlassian employee who acts as their mentor and personal cheerleader (to get through those moments of doubt) and are invited to our company events to grow their network. They also work with a member of our recruiting team for feedback on their resume and to explore internship opportunities at Atlassian. Our first recipient is already working with our HipChat team in Austin, Texas.

Age

Ageism is the elephant in the room in many industries. Older workers are often seen as out of touch or less capable, despite often being highly qualified for the roles they apply for. Some 64 percent of older workers have experienced ageism in the workplace. In industries like technology, the average age of a worker is often well below 30, fostering an environment where anything but “young and hungry” (read: able to stay at the office until 10 pm) is seen as abnormal and a disruption to workplace culture. Age discrimination is notoriously worse for women too, thanks to a culture where a woman’s worth is intrinsically tied to her physical appearance.

One of the first steps to combat ageism is to actually track the age of your workforce, something many companies have been hesitant to do. At Atlassian, we included age in our annual diversity report as a way of holding ourselves publicly accountable. It’s also critical to consider how to market company culture and the work environment (and how you live up to that branding). For Atlassian, this means ensuring that our Careers page doesn’t solely focus on perks like ping-pong and beer on tap. Instead, we promote benefits like comprehensive health coverage, flexible work policies and even backup childcare offerings. This helps us attract candidates at multiple stages of life and sets them up to be successful once they join us.

Geography

Diversity programs are often built from a local viewpoint, but what diversity means may vary drastically based on where you are in the nation or world. For example, while the conversation in the United States is often centered around gender and race, those concepts don’t always resonate in the same way beyond U.S. borders. In Atlassian’s Sydney headquarters, women’s cultural backgrounds and Indigenous identities are more salient. In Manila, womens’ religious identities are a key driver of the diversity discussion. In Europe, issues of national origin and immigrant status are more resonant.

As businesses become more global, diversity programs must be globally cohesive but locally relevant, and take into account the unique makeup of talent in each location and how (and with whom) people conduct their work. For example, while developing Atlassian’s unconscious bias training, I quickly realized that some nuances wouldn’t translate for certain offices. Talk to people who live in the Philippines about unconscious biases against black people created by a history of oppression and slavery, and you’ll have a hard time helping them understand how these biases can affect their teams, for example. I quickly changed our approach, moving to develop versions specific to each region in which we operate to make the content relevant and actionable for every Atlassian.

While we teach the same core concepts in each location, we now vary the terminology (tailored to local English), the research we cite (biasing toward research conducted locally), and even the level of activity versus lecture for participants (based on local feedback and customs). Because there are different types of unconscious biases often held against women from different backgrounds, customizing our training materials by geography meant that we could address those biases more effectively and benefit all women across the organization.

Diversity is one of the most important issues in modern business, and it’s more important that we fight harder for it than ever. Working to increase the representation of a group that makes up 51 percent of the world population seems like the logical first step to maximize impact. But to get closer to achieving true gender equality, we need to start by taking into account the multiple components that make up women’s identities. Only then will we be able to build better, more inclusive programs that benefit everyone and accomplish our goal of building companies made up of truly diverse teams.

Source: Diversity in tech too often means ‘hiring white women.’ We need to move beyond that. – Recode

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Hell is Silicon Valley people who won’t grow up – Recode

2016/12/22 Leave a comment

Kara Swisher on the Silicon Valley mentality and denial of some of the negative effects of technology:

Did Silicon Valley, which has reaped the rewards of this system by amassing startlingly enormous piles of wealth, imagine that all this would not eventually have to be paid for by someone?

Or as Trump’s main digital guru, investor Peter Thiel, has written: “In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.”

As most regular readers know, Thiel is not someone I agree with often, given his disturbingly cavalier attitude toward a lot of values and standards I think are inviolate. (Don’t sue a publisher out of business secretly for personal reasons and then brag that you love journalism. Check!)

But in this, Thiel is correct: The results of tech have been and will continue to be devastating to too many in the general populace. So it would be nice if Silicon Valley could take that sentiment to heart as the days and years that stretch ahead look ever more serious and more fraught by all the technologies that have been created over the last two decades.

And, more to the point, things that technology is creating now are certain to result in even more unrest as they intensify. The questions that need to be asked are many and include:

What happens to all the many jobs that will be impacted by self-driving technologies, given so much of our population makes its living driving and transporting? While it may be for the best in terms of energy savings and the ending of needless human-caused accidents, is anyone developing in this arena thinking about its repercussions on existing jobs or scoping out what new jobs can be created?

It’s the same thing with a slate of on-demand or home-rental tech, the impact of which are too often shrugged off as “negative externalities,” which is a great euphemism for terrible things. Something can be both promising and also devastating at the same time, so try hard to take both things in.

What about acceleration of robotic technologies in factories and through the system from restaurants to retailers to banks to healthcare and more? While it is entirely clear these changes have a myriad of advantages, who in Silicon Valley is thinking about the job loss and what to do about this? (A salient point made to me in my Recode Decode podcast this week by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who noted, “people who worry about Mexicans [taking away their jobs], should worry about robots.”)

And, of course, who is assessing what will happen with leaps in artificial intelligence and the potential for replacement of many service jobs. from legal work to accounting to, yes, journalism? Will, as Elon Musk told me in an interview, humanity become mere “house cats” of the technologies? (Even if the food is good and the litter is fresh, do we want to become house cats?)

I am not heartened that anyone in the high echelons of tech is thinking about any of this in a consistent and systematic way, largely from the reaction so far.

Calls for California to secede from the U.S. — fyi, we’ll need a lot more firepower than what comes from servers to do that — come only because figuring out what’s next is really hard.

Murmurs that Silicon Valley companies might place a token manufacturing facility in the U.S. to shut Trump up seems not really profound enough to make a true difference.

Memos and quotes saying techies will not create appalling things like Muslim registries are great, but do not address what they will do in cooperation with an administration bent on destroying many, many more core values of this industry.

And tramping up to Trump Tower en masse to talk about a variety of the expected topics while saying nothing in order to get things for the present seems very short-sighted indeed. (Kudos for Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg for bringing up women and minorities, but only Alphabet’s Larry Page had a truly unusual idea about changing the electrical grid — more on that soon.)

It all reminds me of the vision that tech continues to reflect about itself as a place of fresh ideas and newness at all times. To my mind, which I often say — hat tip to investor Pejman Nozad — Silicon Valley is still a place of big minds chasing small ideas.

It’s often referred to as a Peter Pan mentality, in which its denizens are trying to remain forever young in a land of perpetual boyhood, making things like photo apps and social media and new ways to play old video games.

Personally, I think there is a far more sinister comparison to another fairy tale, that of Pinocchio’s transformation into a jackass on Pleasure Island. It’s a place where boys are indulged with endless fun until it becomes clear that there is actually a price for all that indulgence.

It also reminds me of another thing Sartre wrote: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”

Well, Silicon Valley, it’s finally time to pay up and admit that you are not forever young. More importantly, you need to stop acting like you aren’t powerful or that you don’t have huge businesses and, most of all, that you just can’t fix big problems because it’s super-duper hard. You’ve been part of creating this mess and you should absolutely be part of fixing it.

Source: Hell is Silicon Valley people who won’t grow up – Recode

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As Trumplethinskin lets down his hair for tech, shame on Silicon Valley for climbing the Tower in silence – Recode

2016/12/14 Leave a comment

Quite an amazing take-down by Kara Swisher:

When I call these top leaders — of course, it has to be off the record — I get a running dialogue in dulcet tones about needing to cooperate and needing to engage and needing to be seen as willing to work together. Also that Trump means very little of what he says out loud — which I will now officially dub the Peter Thiel take-it-seriously-not-literally defense. And they assure me that they will say what they really think behind closed doors where no one can hear it but each other.

This, even though it will be a certainty that Trump will tweet the whole thing with his doubtlessly warped take of the proceedings. My only hope is that often-erupting Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — who is also now attending — will also erupt when he realizes the farce he has agreed to be part of.

Or maybe I don’t get it because I am of the old school that when something smells fishy, there is probably a dead fish somewhere to be found. But to my ear, it’s a symphony of compromise, where only now and then a sour note sounds from someone who breaks from the platitudes they are spewing.

Like one tech leader who suddenly stopped mid-sentence about how to really make deals, Kara, because the truth just had to be out. “Trump is just awful, isn’t he? It makes me sick to my stomach,” the leader agonized, as a real thinking person would. “What are we going to do?”

Well, to start, realize again that you have the smarts and invention and the innovative spirit to do whatever you like. Realize you have untold money and power and influence and massive platforms to do what you think is right. Realize that you are inventing the frigging future.

Instead, you’re opting to sit in that gilded room at Trump Tower to be told fake news is a matter of opinion and that smart people aren’t so smart and that you need to sit still and do what they say and take that giant pile of repatriated income with a smile.

Or you can say no — loudly and in public. You can resist the forces that are against immigrants, because it is immigrants who built America and immigrants who most definitely built tech. You can defend science that says climate change is a big threat and that tech can be a part of fixing it. You can insist we invest in critical technologies that point the way to things like new digital health inventions and transportation revolutions. You can do what made Silicon Valley great again and again.

When I could get no really substantive on-the-record statements from the tech leaders, I pinged investor Chris Sacca, because I knew he would not let me down.

“It’s funny, in every tech deal I’ve ever done, the photo op comes after you’ve signed the papers,” he said. “If Trump publicly commits to embrace science, stops threatening censorship of the internet, rejects fake news and denounces hate against our diverse employees, only then it would make sense for tech leaders to visit Trump Tower.”

He added: “Short of that, they are being used to legitimize a fascist.”

The fascist line is vintage Sacca, who always likes to kick up a shitstorm. But thank god someone is willing to do it, because that is what I thought Silicon Valley was all about.

Not any longer, it seems. Welcome to the brave new world, which is neither brave nor new. But it’s now the world we live in, in which it’s Trump who is the disrupter and tech the disrupted.

Source: As Trumplethinskin lets down his hair for tech, shame on Silicon Valley for climbing the Tower in silence – Recode

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Apple’s executive ranks are still overwhelmingly white and male – Recode

2016/11/23 Leave a comment

The latest diversity reports from Apple and Microsoft:

Even tech companies with a commitment to boosting the diversity of their workforce are finding gains hard to come by.

A case in point is Apple.

The iPhone maker released new data Monday night showing that the company’s highest ranks remain even more white and male than the company as a whole.

Just 20 of Apple’s top 107 executives are women, according to a government filing, while only five are from underrepresented minority groups (defined as black, Hispanic/Latino, Native American or Hawaiian/Pacific Islander). Another 14 executives are Asian, while the remaining 88 are white.

Those numbers are roughly unchanged from a year ago.

In the next layer of management, women made up 27 percent of the workforce. More than 65 percent of those managers and mid-level executives are white, 23 percent are Asian, with just 11 percent from underrepresented minority groups and 1 percent who define themselves as multiracial. As with the executive ranks, those numbers are little different than they were in 2015.

The data is included in a form known as the EEO-1, which companies must file with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Even while publicly sharing the data, Apple has said that the EEOC data doesn’t reflect how the company itself breaks down its workforce, and is not the way it measures its diversity progress.

In August, Apple released its last public numbers, noting that 32 percent of its workforce was female and 22 percent of employees were from underrepresented minorities. The numbers, which represented slight increases from 2015, reflect global hiring for women, and only the U.S. with regard to underrepresented minorities.
Apple HR executive Denise Young Smith, speaking with Recode's Ina FriedApple

In terms of new hires, Apple’s figures were higher than its workforce as a whole, with 37 percent being women and 27 percent being from underrepresented minorities. (The data used for both the EEOC and Apple’s companywide diversity report covers the same time period.)

But if Apple’s gains are small, at least it’s moving in the right direction.

Microsoft, by contrast, released figures last week showing that the overall number of women at the company dropped in 2016 for the second year in a row. Microsoft blamed layoffs in its phone unit for the decline. The total number of black and Latino employees at Microsoft did go up compared to last year, but just barely.

And at least Microsoft and Apple continue to share their data. While many tech companies started sharing diversity reports several years ago, many have yet to offer updates this year, and fewer still have shared this year’s EEO-1 filing.

The EEOC, meanwhile, has used aggregate data to highlight that whites, men and Asians are overrepresented in high-tech jobs, while women, blacks and Latinos are less present in the high-tech industry than in the workforce as a whole.

While Apple is ahead of many peers in its percentage of women, and a leader in terms of employing underrepresented minorities, it has not been immune to criticism. Earlier this year, reports from Mic and Gizmodo raised allegations that some corners of Apple were home to a significantly sexist culture.

In an exclusive interview with Recode, Apple HR chief Denise Young Smith said the incidents described in the articles didn’t reflect the Apple she knows, but that the company did investigate, adding that “commensurate actions have been taken.” Such actions can range from an informal conversation to dismissal, and Apple didn’t disclose what actions it took.

Source: Apple’s executive ranks are still overwhelmingly white and male – Recode

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Apple says it has investigated recent allegations of sexism on campus and ‘actions have been taken’ – Recode

2016/09/19 Leave a comment

Parts of interview with Apple HR head on sexism and diversity challenges at Apple and in tech more generally:

Young Smith said Apple is committed to diversity in its many forms, noting it is an issue long important to Apple and one that CEO Tim Cook has made a priority.

Without a wide range of perspectives, she said “we cannot continue to be the great innovator we constantly strive to be.”

Cook himself came out rather famously in a column he wrote and has since been vocal with regards to LGBTQ issues, including the need for a national employment non-discrimination act.

But even companies like Apple and Intel, which have been more vocal advocates on the need for diversity, remain largely white and male. Women only make up 32 percent of Apple’s workforce, for example. That’s up two percentage points from two years ago and roughly on par with Google and Facebook, but still far short of having a truly representative workforce.

This has consequences — in hiring and recruitment as well as when it comes to creating an inclusive culture. Most of Apple’s engineering teams are dominated by men and it is not uncommon for women in tech to experience sexism in different forms.

In another incident described in the Mic article, a female employee recalled hearing one male co-worker tell another that he sounded like he was on his “man period.”

Asked how she would respond if she heard such talk, Young Smith noted that people tend not to say such things around her, but added that if she did hear that kind of talk, she hoped she would have the courage to call “time out.” Other employees, she said, might prefer to address things afterward, but Young Smith said she wants a company where people do call one another out.

“I don’t think people are too shy about doing it,” Young Smith said, “but I am also very cognizant that we are still 70/30 in our very hard-core engineering team. We have to be cognizant that someone may not feel that their voice is heard or valued.”

Deciding just what to do to change that is trickier, Young Smith said.

The company is looking at ways to improve the training it gives its managers as well as some of the courses in Apple University, but Young Smith said she is skeptical of top-down corporate lectures.

Nor does she see creating a giant diversity team as the answer. Rather, she said she wants 140,000 people who all feel it is their personal responsibility to make Apple more inclusive.

As for the articles, Young Smith said she is most concerned that Apple employees, especially women and people of color, will now feel like they can’t safely speak up if they experience discrimination.

“The unfortunate consequence of this is that we may have lost the trust of others,” she said.

Young Smith is particularly concerned about preserving the women-at-Apple mailing list that was the source of the emails leaked to Mic. The list has more than 1,000 participants and is an important place for people to talk about their experiences, good and bad, Young Smith said.

“We cannot risk losing that,” she said. “We have to have a safe place for people to do that.”

At the same time, Young Smith says the company may need to also find new places for people to share their concerns. “I think we need to constantly reevaluate the tools we have and think about what could be more effective.”

As we talked on Friday, Young Smith said she was finalizing an email she planned to send to the group talking about the issues raised in the articles and her personal commitment to making sure women at Apple are supported.

“As a woman (and a) leader, I think I have an even greater responsibility that I am listening to all the women, all the people of color, who may not feel as heard,” she said.

Addressing the impact of the articles, in addition to the specific incidents described, quickly became a top priority this week, not just for Young Smith, but also for Cook.

“In the midst of all this, he was deep down with all of us to understand what has transpired and what can we learn,” Young Smith said. And that came in a week where Cook was taking part in a board meeting and overseeing a major product launch.

“I think what that says is this is every bit as important as our products,” Young Smith said.

 Source: Apple says it has investigated recent allegations of sexism on campus and ‘actions have been taken’ – Recode

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Farhad’s and Mike’s Week in Tech: Betting on … Diverse Work Forces – The New York Times

2016/08/15 Leave a comment

More on lack of diversity in tech, this time with respect to Snapchat and its obliviousness to diversity:

Farhad: Finally, Snapchat put out a racist picture filter — again. This week the photo-messaging app unveiled a feature that lets you turn your face into that of an anime character. At least, that was what it said it intended. What it ended up with was “yellowface” — a filter that turns your face into a crude racial caricature of Asian people. This is bad enough on its own, but it’s made worse by the fact that it isn’t the first time this happened. Snapchat released a blackface filter in April.

The company has taken the filter down, but what’s the deal? Should we read something more into the fact that the company has recently put out two obviously overtly racist products?

Mike: So it’s pretty mind-boggling that both of these things got through the organization and into the app. It brings up a few questions.

What do the ranks of the organization look like in order to make something like this O.K. in the eyes of at least a number of people in the company? Questions of diversity obviously spring to mind — which Snapchat has never really addressed or divulged numbers on publicly — and I imagine a more diverse staff might have at least caused some people to question their choices in putting these filters out.

If there were indeed people inside of Snapchat that found these filters objectionable — and I certainly hope there were — what does the organization structure look like and how does it function in a way that allows these decisions to go unchecked and ultimately carried out? Are those people who would object able to make their voices heard internally? And if not, why not?

I doubt we’ll get a ton of transparency from Snapchat on the issue, since they’re quite a secretive company anyway.

Farhad: katie zhu, a Chinese-American engineer and product manager who works at Medium (and who prefers that her name be rendered in lowercase), published a really insightful post on this incident. She urged people to delete Snapchat.

 “They’ve repeatedly demonstrated their blasé attitude towards issues of diversity, inclusion and representation,” she wrote.

She pointed out that Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s chief executive, was unwilling to disclose how diverse his company is during an interview at the Code Conference last year. Spiegel also seemed uncomfortable with the notion that the tech industry has had a particular problem hiring a diverse work force (which seems obvious according to the numbers).

“I think I’m saying that diversity is a challenge everywhere, including tech — and that’s kind of that,” Spiegel told the interviewer, Walt Mossberg. When Mossberg pressed him, Spiegel still seemed hesitant. “There are so many things that feed into diversity and inequality that unpacking them on the stage is probably not the best use of time,” he said.

Mike: I was at that conference. It was super awkward.

Farhad: Snapchat says it recently hired a recruiter to focus on hiring underrepresented minorities, so perhaps Spiegel’s view has changed.

To me, these two incidents do underscore the importance of a diverse work force: Tech companies are usually small groups of homogeneous people who are trying to make products that satisfy the entire planet. At the very least, a diverse work force can help guard against them making choices that offend large swaths of their potential userbase. Even more than that, a diverse work force can help them come up with new ideas that may not have occurred to 20-something Stanford bros.

Mike: That’s why I applaud companies that make it a goal of theirs to strive for diversity at the outset, something that, unless you’ve really made it a point to think about these issues, an entrepreneur may not have even thought of. Perhaps it is also on the venture capitalists and mentors to remind young entrepreneurs that aiming for diversity is, in fact, a strength, and something to be considered when growing the company.

One would hope this doesn’t happen again, but this is tech: anything goes, however terrible.

Source: Farhad’s and Mike’s Week in Tech: Betting on Jet and Diverse Work Forces – The New York Times

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Latest Apple diversity report claims US pay equity, modest changes in gender and race

2016/08/05 Leave a comment

Latest numbers:

As of June, the company was 68 percent male and 32 percent female, Apple said on its website. That’s a shift of a single percentage point in favor of women.

In the U.S., the company was 56 percent white, 19 percent Asian, 12 percent Hispanic, 9 percent black, and 2 percent multiracial, another 1 percent being gathered into an “other” category. Notably the company actually increased the percentage of white employees 2 points, although Asian and Hispanic numbers were up 1 point apiece.

Less than 1 percent of American staff were undeclared, something Apple credits to “stronger internal processes and employees properly identifying themselves.” Most of the people who were previously undeclared turned out to be white, possibly explaining the above demographic shift.

On the pay equity front Apple claims that it has achieved total equity in the U.S. as of August, but is still working on the problem worldwide — this includes scrutinizing salaries, bonuses, and stock grants. There are no statistics on the company’s pay gaps elsewhere.

Like other tech companies Apple has sometimes come under criticism for being predominantly white and male in the U.S. In the past several years, though, the company has tried to adjust its hiring practices at all tiers. Its VP of Worldwide Human Resources, Denise Young Smith, is a black woman, and its retail head is former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts.

Source: Latest Apple diversity report claims US pay equity, modest changes in gender & race

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Canadian tech firms want shorter visa wait times for foreign talent

2016/07/28 Leave a comment

Another file to watch in terms of how the government makes any changes to Express Entry and the requirement for labour market impact assessments (LMIAs):

Canada’s emerging tech sector is stepping up pressure on the federal government to speed up the immigration process so firms can more readily recruit top foreign talent.

The Council of Canadian Innovators – a lobby group that represents about 50 fast-growing Canadian tech firms – met last Friday with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains at the Toronto headquarters of Wattpad, an online publishing-platform firm.

The group pressed its case for shortening visa approval times for in-demand foreign tech programming and executive talent to as little as three weeks from what is now a drawn-out, bureaucratic process typically lasting six months to a year.

“CCI is advocating a made-for-Canada fast-track visa program for tech, ideally in a less than two-month time frame to keep Canada’s technology scale-ups competitive with other countries” that have such programs, including Britain, Australia and Ireland, CCI executive director Benjamin Bergen said. The CCI is set to deliver a similar message to Immigration Minister John McCallum during two round tables in September.

Several of the roughly three dozen attendees said they were pleased with the reception from Mr. Bains. “I have not seen this much note taking in a meeting with a federal cabinet minister listening to CEOs before, so that was quite encouraging,” said J. Paul Haynes, CEO of digital-security firm eSentire Inc., based in Cambridge, Ont.

“It was a very constructive and meaningful dialogue,” Wattpad CEO Allen Lau said. “I’m very positive that our voice will be heard and the government would be able to understand the challenges we are facing.”

In an e-mailed statement, Mr. Bains called the conversation “very candid and thoughtful.” He discussed immigration and other concerns raised by the group, including their difficulties in getting government contracts, “in depth with the goal of how we can best work together to address them.” In an interview with The Globe and Mail last week, Mr. Bains indicated that changes to immigration policy favouring domestic tech employers were coming. “To make Canada a global centre for innovation, immigration will be key,” he said.

Mr. McCallum’s department is reviewing what is known as the “express entry” system, which has been plagued with delays. Under current rules, employers must show, when seeking to hire a foreign worker, that they have first made every effort to fill the job with Canadians. Many tech employers say this is a waste of time, money and effort when those they are looking to hire come from a very small pool of experienced global talent.

“We are acutely concerned about our ability to attract the best and the brightest around the world,” Mr. McCallum said recently. “Those are the people we want to attract.”

Source: Canadian tech firms want shorter visa wait times for foreign talent – The Globe and Mail

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